You're confusing management with leadership, as so many people do. Managers figure out what everyone is good at and organize who's going to do what. Leaders figure out what to do and convince everyone else it's worth doing. And good leaders damn well lead by example, at least until they convince everyone they can.
Agreed. Leadership is undervalued in our society. The problem is, we seem to greatly overvalue managers (often shitty managers) who have successfully conflated management with leadership. Management is a medium level skill not unlike accounting. Leadership ability is rare, valuable and hard to acquire.
Even the security researcher quoted by the article gives a practical breakthrough in finding discrete logarithms in the next few years a low probability. The development of quantum computers might be a more immediate threat to RSA. On the other hand, a mathematical breakthrough would likely be implementable by any kid with a computer and some time. More importantly, a breakthrough like that in number theory would likely teach us something deep. So I'm hoping it happens, but I'm not holding my breath.
DES, the data encryption standard, is insecure because it's limited to a key of 56 bits. The technique DES is based on is (so far as we know) currently secure. Triple DES is a hack to get around the problems with using a short key.
There are a few better-than-brute-force attacks against DES but they're all impractical for one reason or another. It's possible the NSA knows one that works.
If you really want to kill most of the battle group, just drop a bunch of smaller nukes with appropriate spacing. Even if you don't actually sink most of the ships, the EMP and blasts should damage lots of the delicate bits like the radars those fancy AEGIS cruisers use. I bet an underwater nuke has some strongly negative effects on a sub's sonar receivers at quite a distance too. Now your mopping up is much easier. Bonus if you can catch the carrier group going through some restricted water, which was a favourite WWII tactic.
On the other hand, if you kill the carrier, who really cares about the cruisers and destroyers? On the gripping hand, if you've started dropping nukes on things, who really cares about carriers?
I have. I don't mind it that much, although it's not as good as a keyboard.
You're misunderstanding though. I specifically said "some kind of finger tracker that was good enough to recognise finger movements." Not finger placement, finger movement. A decent typist certainly doesn't feel his way to each key. He uses "those little nubs" to make sure his hands stay in the right place on a physical keyboard, then his brain knows how far to move his fingers to hit the right keys. The requirement to have your hands stay in the right place is purely a limitation imposed by physical keys or trackers that look for position instead of relative motion. A motion-based keyboard would be perfectly happy even if your hands drifted all over the place.
The thing you linked to from Think Geek relies on position, not motion.
The discrete logarithm problem isn't technically the same as prime number factoring, but approaches that work on one tend to inspire approaches that work on the other. A breakthrough algorithm for one is likely to lead to a breakthrough algorithm for the other.
You misunderstand the difference between throwing hardware at a problem and coming up with a more efficient algorithm.
RSA doesn't specify a key length. I can use a key that's 64 bits long (used originally but insecure today) or 1 megabit long (secure against known classical algorithms for the age of the universe no matter how much hardware you throw at it). As hardware gets better I can encrypt things using longer keys, in the same amount of time. It takes you MUCH MORE time to decrypt that, even with the better hardware. So long as you keep increasing key length as hardware gets faster, the encryption actually gets BETTER with better hardware.
The article is talking about a breakthrough in mathematics that could make solving discrete algorithms much faster. If it made it anywhere near as fast as exponentiation then it wouldn't take me much longer to decrypt your message than it took you to encrypt it, regardless of key length.
DES is insecure because it uses fixed length keys, that became practical to brute force. RSA doesn't have that problem. The situations are entirely different, and the potential breaking of RSA is much more interesting, and much more of an accomplishment.
The story is talking about the possibility of a mathematical breakthrough that would make solving the discrete logarithm problem (and possibly the integer factorisation problem) much, much easier. RSA relies on it being much easier to raise something to an integer power than to find a discrete logarithm (inverse operations). If you figure out how to make the two operations of similar difficulty then any encryption scheme based on them is hopelessly broken for any key size.
Deprecated - I don't think that word means what you think it means. RSA can't be deprecated when there isn't a replacement. Elliptic curve cryptography has only really become a realistic replacement fairly recently, and nobody outside of government rushed to give Blackberry lots of money to use it because there wasn't a compelling reason to do so. Governments DID, which suggests to the conspiracy theorist that they might know of such a reason.
It's been long recommended you don't use short keys with RSA (which were used in the past for speed) but the algorithm itself is secure (as far as we know), no matter how much hardware you throw at it. This story is about the possibility of a mathematical advance (note, the possibility, it hasn't happened yet) that could make the RSA algorithm itself insecure, for any key length.
A breakthrough in solving the discrete logarithm problem would be a big deal. It could also very well lead to breakthroughs in integer factorisation.
Bah, you and your silly click click. Clearly you've never experienced the joy of pressing a key and hearing a chunk of steel slam into another chunk of steel with a bit of paper between.
Having experienced both these things and a lot of what's followed, I prefer the chicklet style keyboards with short travel and low resistance. My ideal keyboard would probably be some kind of finger tracker that was good enough to recognise finger movements as I tapped lightly on my desk.
The US hasn't really gotten a great reputation for following treaty obligations in the last while, from the Geneva Convention down to things like trade in lumber and catching ugly fish.
They're pretty adamant about other countries following treaties though.
If a real war where nukes were acceptable started, pretty much anyone could design a nuclear torpedo that would take out most of a carrier group. You can't trick it because it doesn't need to actually hit a ship, just get to the right area. Ditto for cruise missiles, although there you have a chance to intercept it far enough away. By the time you're using CIWS against a nuclear missile, you're screwed. Probably nobody would bother though. In a nuclear war carriers are pretty much irrelevant. All naval vessels except subs are pretty much irrelevant.
Carrier groups are useful in limited conventional war, where political factors make nukes unacceptable.
The cord that has audio connectors on the other end doesn't. Just because you've never plugged anything but a USB cable into your iPhone doesn't mean nobody else has.
There aren't a fixed number of customers, hey? You'd make a good economist....
Your quote from Wikipedia is inapplicable. First, it says *many* situations are not zero sum. Second, the only close to applicable part is talking about both parties in a transaction thinking they've come out ahead. We're not talking about a two party trade, we're talking about a customer deciding to buy one product over another due to advertising. Presumably the customer and the winning producer will both feel good (although the customer may not if he feels he's been mislead by the advertising) but the losing producer won't.
In most circumstances, and certainly when you consider the economy as a whole, a customer's decision to buy product A will mean him deciding NOT to buy product B, which may or may not be a direct competitor to A, simply because most people have a finite amount of money. I'm going to buy some beer. If I buy beer A, I won't be buying beer B. If I decide to go to the movies I might not buy beer A OR B. Or maybe I decide to blow all my discretionary cash and go to the movies AND buy beer... but then I won't be buying something else tomorrow.
Advertising doesn't produce anything. It doesn't add wealth to the system, so advertising is a zero sum game. If I convince customers to buy my product, it's at the expense of something else they would have bought. The exception is when the advertising actually informs customers about a product they want to buy but didn't know existed. A basic level of informative advertising CAN add value by adding information and making the economy more efficient. But most advertising seems to be convincing, not informative.
"What would that ball game cost if all advertising was eliminated from inside the stadium? Could the fans afford it? Could the team afford to fly to their next game, or would they all be taking the train?"
The ball game might cost more, but all those products would cost less. Personally, I'm not really interested in subsidizing people who want to watch baseball with my purchases.
I doubt it. As someone else said, advertising is (at least ultimately) a zero-sum game. An individual company might sell more by advertising, except that their competitors ALSO advertise. You end up with an arms race of advertising, but the customers are still only going to buy so much beer.
Complain, and keep track of products that are advertised obnoxiously and never buy them.
I remember shaking my head a while ago when flying in the US and hearing the crew make credit card sales pitches. Last time I was there they had stopped doing that. Somebody must have figured out it was a stupid idea.
The reason advertising is so prevalent is because somebody thinks it works.
Um, no. Alternative medicine that works is called "medicine." There are lots of examples of drugs or treatments that are based on plants, animals and other alternative medicine favourites, but when they're purified, researched and tested they become real medicine.
A lot of money has been spent testing alternative medicines. They don't work in any clinically relevant way. With one exception - ginger relieves nausea.
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It seems to be perfectly politically correct to say men are boring. It is sexist, however.
You're confusing management with leadership, as so many people do. Managers figure out what everyone is good at and organize who's going to do what. Leaders figure out what to do and convince everyone else it's worth doing. And good leaders damn well lead by example, at least until they convince everyone they can.
Agreed. Leadership is undervalued in our society. The problem is, we seem to greatly overvalue managers (often shitty managers) who have successfully conflated management with leadership. Management is a medium level skill not unlike accounting. Leadership ability is rare, valuable and hard to acquire.
Even the security researcher quoted by the article gives a practical breakthrough in finding discrete logarithms in the next few years a low probability. The development of quantum computers might be a more immediate threat to RSA. On the other hand, a mathematical breakthrough would likely be implementable by any kid with a computer and some time. More importantly, a breakthrough like that in number theory would likely teach us something deep. So I'm hoping it happens, but I'm not holding my breath.
DES, the data encryption standard, is insecure because it's limited to a key of 56 bits. The technique DES is based on is (so far as we know) currently secure. Triple DES is a hack to get around the problems with using a short key.
There are a few better-than-brute-force attacks against DES but they're all impractical for one reason or another. It's possible the NSA knows one that works.
If you really want to kill most of the battle group, just drop a bunch of smaller nukes with appropriate spacing. Even if you don't actually sink most of the ships, the EMP and blasts should damage lots of the delicate bits like the radars those fancy AEGIS cruisers use. I bet an underwater nuke has some strongly negative effects on a sub's sonar receivers at quite a distance too. Now your mopping up is much easier. Bonus if you can catch the carrier group going through some restricted water, which was a favourite WWII tactic.
On the other hand, if you kill the carrier, who really cares about the cruisers and destroyers? On the gripping hand, if you've started dropping nukes on things, who really cares about carriers?
I have. I don't mind it that much, although it's not as good as a keyboard.
You're misunderstanding though. I specifically said "some kind of finger tracker that was good enough to recognise finger movements." Not finger placement, finger movement. A decent typist certainly doesn't feel his way to each key. He uses "those little nubs" to make sure his hands stay in the right place on a physical keyboard, then his brain knows how far to move his fingers to hit the right keys. The requirement to have your hands stay in the right place is purely a limitation imposed by physical keys or trackers that look for position instead of relative motion. A motion-based keyboard would be perfectly happy even if your hands drifted all over the place.
The thing you linked to from Think Geek relies on position, not motion.
The discrete logarithm problem isn't technically the same as prime number factoring, but approaches that work on one tend to inspire approaches that work on the other. A breakthrough algorithm for one is likely to lead to a breakthrough algorithm for the other.
You misunderstand the difference between throwing hardware at a problem and coming up with a more efficient algorithm.
RSA doesn't specify a key length. I can use a key that's 64 bits long (used originally but insecure today) or 1 megabit long (secure against known classical algorithms for the age of the universe no matter how much hardware you throw at it). As hardware gets better I can encrypt things using longer keys, in the same amount of time. It takes you MUCH MORE time to decrypt that, even with the better hardware. So long as you keep increasing key length as hardware gets faster, the encryption actually gets BETTER with better hardware.
The article is talking about a breakthrough in mathematics that could make solving discrete algorithms much faster. If it made it anywhere near as fast as exponentiation then it wouldn't take me much longer to decrypt your message than it took you to encrypt it, regardless of key length.
DES is insecure because it uses fixed length keys, that became practical to brute force. RSA doesn't have that problem. The situations are entirely different, and the potential breaking of RSA is much more interesting, and much more of an accomplishment.
The story is talking about the possibility of a mathematical breakthrough that would make solving the discrete logarithm problem (and possibly the integer factorisation problem) much, much easier. RSA relies on it being much easier to raise something to an integer power than to find a discrete logarithm (inverse operations). If you figure out how to make the two operations of similar difficulty then any encryption scheme based on them is hopelessly broken for any key size.
Deprecated - I don't think that word means what you think it means. RSA can't be deprecated when there isn't a replacement. Elliptic curve cryptography has only really become a realistic replacement fairly recently, and nobody outside of government rushed to give Blackberry lots of money to use it because there wasn't a compelling reason to do so. Governments DID, which suggests to the conspiracy theorist that they might know of such a reason.
It's been long recommended you don't use short keys with RSA (which were used in the past for speed) but the algorithm itself is secure (as far as we know), no matter how much hardware you throw at it. This story is about the possibility of a mathematical advance (note, the possibility, it hasn't happened yet) that could make the RSA algorithm itself insecure, for any key length.
A breakthrough in solving the discrete logarithm problem would be a big deal. It could also very well lead to breakthroughs in integer factorisation.
Bah, you and your silly click click. Clearly you've never experienced the joy of pressing a key and hearing a chunk of steel slam into another chunk of steel with a bit of paper between.
Having experienced both these things and a lot of what's followed, I prefer the chicklet style keyboards with short travel and low resistance. My ideal keyboard would probably be some kind of finger tracker that was good enough to recognise finger movements as I tapped lightly on my desk.
The US hasn't really gotten a great reputation for following treaty obligations in the last while, from the Geneva Convention down to things like trade in lumber and catching ugly fish.
They're pretty adamant about other countries following treaties though.
If a real war where nukes were acceptable started, pretty much anyone could design a nuclear torpedo that would take out most of a carrier group. You can't trick it because it doesn't need to actually hit a ship, just get to the right area. Ditto for cruise missiles, although there you have a chance to intercept it far enough away. By the time you're using CIWS against a nuclear missile, you're screwed. Probably nobody would bother though. In a nuclear war carriers are pretty much irrelevant. All naval vessels except subs are pretty much irrelevant.
Carrier groups are useful in limited conventional war, where political factors make nukes unacceptable.
Yes. Web designers have all decided they're laying out magazines. It's dumb, and that capability should never have been added to HTML.
The cord that has audio connectors on the other end doesn't. Just because you've never plugged anything but a USB cable into your iPhone doesn't mean nobody else has.
There aren't a fixed number of customers, hey? You'd make a good economist....
Your quote from Wikipedia is inapplicable. First, it says *many* situations are not zero sum. Second, the only close to applicable part is talking about both parties in a transaction thinking they've come out ahead. We're not talking about a two party trade, we're talking about a customer deciding to buy one product over another due to advertising. Presumably the customer and the winning producer will both feel good (although the customer may not if he feels he's been mislead by the advertising) but the losing producer won't.
In most circumstances, and certainly when you consider the economy as a whole, a customer's decision to buy product A will mean him deciding NOT to buy product B, which may or may not be a direct competitor to A, simply because most people have a finite amount of money. I'm going to buy some beer. If I buy beer A, I won't be buying beer B. If I decide to go to the movies I might not buy beer A OR B. Or maybe I decide to blow all my discretionary cash and go to the movies AND buy beer... but then I won't be buying something else tomorrow.
Advertising doesn't produce anything. It doesn't add wealth to the system, so advertising is a zero sum game. If I convince customers to buy my product, it's at the expense of something else they would have bought. The exception is when the advertising actually informs customers about a product they want to buy but didn't know existed. A basic level of informative advertising CAN add value by adding information and making the economy more efficient. But most advertising seems to be convincing, not informative.
If you buy beer from company A then you didn't buy beer from company B. If you've got infinite beer money, please share.
Then maybe they'd go look it up on Wikipedia.
"What would that ball game cost if all advertising was eliminated from inside the stadium? Could the fans afford it?
Could the team afford to fly to their next game, or would they all be taking the train?"
The ball game might cost more, but all those products would cost less. Personally, I'm not really interested in subsidizing people who want to watch baseball with my purchases.
I doubt it. As someone else said, advertising is (at least ultimately) a zero-sum game. An individual company might sell more by advertising, except that their competitors ALSO advertise. You end up with an arms race of advertising, but the customers are still only going to buy so much beer.
Complain, and keep track of products that are advertised obnoxiously and never buy them.
I remember shaking my head a while ago when flying in the US and hearing the crew make credit card sales pitches. Last time I was there they had stopped doing that. Somebody must have figured out it was a stupid idea.
The reason advertising is so prevalent is because somebody thinks it works.
The first one, at least, was quiet compatible with "common sense" when that decision was made.
I'm not an American but...
1) do your judges not have to have the support of the actual law before they strike things down?
2) the petition is on whitehouse.gov, which is the federal executive branch. Your executive branch doesn't control your legislative branch, does it?
Um, no. Alternative medicine that works is called "medicine." There are lots of examples of drugs or treatments that are based on plants, animals and other alternative medicine favourites, but when they're purified, researched and tested they become real medicine.
A lot of money has been spent testing alternative medicines. They don't work in any clinically relevant way. With one exception - ginger relieves nausea.