The stated purpose of the mandatory conversion was to get better service to outlying rural areas. Of course this was a total joke. It is the outlying rural areas that got much worse service as a result of the conversion. In my area three stations converted and three did not. When I still had the tv, I had to get up and swap cables to change channels. A neighbor tells me that with a fancy outdoor antenna he can still get PBS (which converted) but I've never been able to get it.
The first hit from Google(Artificial Scarcity) is a Wikipedia entry called, "Artificial Scarcity". They say:
Artificial scarcity describes the scarcity of items even though the technology and production capacity exists to create an abundance. The term is aptly applied to non-rival resources, i.e. those that do not diminish due to one person's use, although there are other resources which could be categorized as artificially scarce. The most common causes are monopoly pricing structures, such as those enabled by intellectual property rights or by high fixed costs in a particular marketplace. The inefficiency associated with artificial scarcity is formally known as a deadweight loss.
It seems that you are assuming very few people will pay to support authors when they can get the works of those authors for free. People can already get books for free from public libraries yet that hasn't squashed the sales of books.
Perhaps you and your friends will refuse to pay for a book you found inspiring. I gladly pay to support the authors of books I love. Therefore there may be a real scarcity of authors who cater to greedy individuals who have an extremely narrow and childish world view but there will be an abundance of authors who inspire their readers to pay back for what they received.
I think the ruling makes sense, you just disagree with it. Of course, sharing a file is not identical to lending a book. If they were identical then there wouldn't have been a trial or a ruling.
The judges realized sharing a file was not identical to lending a book. File sharing is rather new to the courts and the judges needed to figure out the legality of this new "file sharing" activity. The US courts have sided with the corporations and have deemed that file sharing is just like making and distributing counterfeit physical books and cds.
But sharing a file is not the same things as printing and selling copies of a book. If we apply your logic to the rulings in the US courts then we would have to conclude that those rulings don't make sense either.
The truth is that file sharing falls in between lending and counterfeiting. IMO, it is the US rulings that make no sense. The reason is that with file sharing, the recurring cost for producing digital information that people want is actually negative. For example, if a particular torrent file is popular then there will be a lot of seeders for it. The US courts are trying to hobble the miracle of zero or negative recurring costs while the Spanish court's decision unleashes the incredible efficiency of distribution via file sharing.
You asked how can someone make money writing a book. The answer is easy, I (and many others) pay for web sites and books and music that I like even if I am not required to. I see it as my votes for things I like. I want to keep the things I like going so I gladly contribute. I agree that legalizing file sharing might have a drastic effect on publishing industries. These industries, for the most part, have devolved to transforming scarcity into profit. Once scarcity is no longer an issue, their scarcity based business models will either transform or die. While this may be painful for workers and investors who stick with the outmoded model past its expiration date, for society as a whole it is a good thing. Authors who inspire readers enough to donate money or pay in order to keep the author rolling will survive. Many authors will thrive. Less inspiring authors won't do as well but since it costs only about $200 to self-publish a book, the barrier for entry, even for lousy authors is very low.
In general, the creation of artificial scarcity and artificial inefficiency make society as a whole less wealthy while they make a few individuals more wealthy. This is morally indefensible.
For any device to extract energy from the wind, the wind must be passing over or through the device.
I don't think that is true the way you think it is true. For example, I could build a giant kite or balloon that left to itself would travel exactly with a steady wind. I could then connect a little strand of monofilament from a spool on the ground to the balloon and get energy from the spool unwinding. If you consider the balloon to be "the device" then the power it is generating is not dependent on its relative velocity to the air around it, but rather to its relative velocity to the earth.
I believe it works the same way with this vehicle. If you re-read my original post, you will notice that I said:
... the simplest frame of reference is the one where the ground is standing still...
In this frame of reference, energy is available due to the difference in speed between the air and the earth, regardless of the speed of the vehicle. You switched the frame of reference to one where the air is standing still. Fair enough, the simple laws of physics are valid in that frame as well (assuming the wind is steady, otherwise the laws get more complicated to compensate for acceleration of our frame of reference).
In your frame of reference, energy is still available due to the different velocity of the earth and the air, regardless of the velocity of the vehicle. In this frame of reference the vehicle is an efficient device for slowing down the earth (relative to the air). Let's back go to the kite/balloon example. A giant kite or sail or balloon in your frame reference is almost standing still, yet we can use it to extract power from the rapidly moving earth.
In your frame of reference, when the vehicle is stationary (with respect to the air) is is moving with respect to the earth and we can use that motion to extract power.
I think your line of reasoning is similar to the following. Since we know from the 2nd law of thermodynamics that heat always flows from hotter to colder it is therefore impossible to build a device that can make itself cooler than every part of the environment that directly surrounds it. Yet heat pumps and refrigerators and air conditions do work.
In fact, if you have two heat reservoirs available at different temperatures, T-1 and T-2. I can build a device that extracts energy from the temperature differential and use that to run a refrigerator that gets to a temperature below both T-1 and T-2. As I mentioned before, I think this is analogous to what the vehicle does. It takes advantage of the difference in speed between the earth (V-1) and the air (V-2) to propel itself to a speed greater than either V-1 or V-2.
Finally, here is a very mechanical analogy. Suppose we were in a spacious gap between two ponderous metal plates moving with a fixed velocity relative to each other. Doesn't it seem possible to extract energy from their difference in speed to propel ourselves faster than either plate? I think this is exactly what the vehicle is doing with the air and the earth.
For me (IAAP), I immediately think about energy conservation. Where can the energy come from to propel the vehicle? IMO, the simplest frame of reference is the one where the ground is standing still (you can quote me on this point). In this frame, the total energy is the kinetic energy of the vehicle (1/2 m v^2) and the kinetic energy of the air (same formula).
The vehicle can go faster than the wind if it can remove enough kinetic energy from the wind and transfer it to kinetic energy of the vehicle. The tricky part (of course) is to do this when the vehicle is already going faster than the wind. Think of it as a device to slow the wind down as efficiently as possible. In some ways it is analogous to a heat pump which can heat up your house more efficiently than a normal resistive heater because it uses electricity to further cool the outside even when the outside is already colder than the house. The vehicle uses the big propeller and the gearing connected to the wheels to further slow down the wind, even when the wind is moving slower than the vehicle.
As long as the energy it gains by slowing down the wind is greater than the energy of all the losses, the vehicle can accelerate. It's confusing because they use the spinning of the wheels to power the propeller. Common sense tells us that it is impossible to gain enough energy from the wheels to accelerate the vehicle faster than the wind. But if common sense was always correct, there would be no need for science.
I had been using kde since 1.x. Like many other long-time kde users, I can't stand kde-4.x so I've been looking for a kde-3.5 replacement. The best replacement, by far, that I could find was the ancient (but still maintained) Enlightenment e16. It's taken a little while to learn and configure but I'm actually happier with e16 than I was with kde-3.5. After a day or two of tinkering I made it my default desktop and never felt the urge to go back to kde-3.5.
The default configuration for e16 is bland as bland can be, with tiny fonts to boot. Get version 1.0.2 (or later). Download some themes from http://themes.effx.us/e16 . Copy/usr/share/e16/config/fonts*.cfg to ~/.e16/ and edit that (those) file(s) to increase the font sizes. Copy/usr/share/e16/bindings.cfg to ~/.e16/ and edit that file to make the key/mouse bindings more like what you are used to. Copy wallpapers to ~/.e16/backgrounds/ or make that directory a symlink to a directory that already contains your wallpapers.
Learn to use eesh which is used in e16 like dcop is used in kde-3. Read the fine documentation and play with the settings. Install a lightweight panel to replace kicker. Enjoy.
The creators of that kit don't use any kind of redundancy with-in the box because their custom software stack handles replication (kind of like Google FS / Hadoop FS)
Bzzzt. Wrong. But thanks for playing.
The creators of that kit use RAID-6 so there are two parity disks for every four data disks. That way they can lose two drives out of a set of six and still not lose any data. This covers the case when a second drives crashes before (or while) you are replacing the first drive that crashed. Sure, there is redundancy on top of this, but ISTM those pods are probably pretty reliable. They need the reliability because they have so many of them.
says it all. If you want us to believe your claims that the both PJ and the Register article are biased and blinded, you should cover up your own anti-FOSS biases better first.
Take a look at the
IBM: Mainframe emulator part of a conspiracy
Newspick over on Groklaw.
Florian Mueller is an obvious Microsoft shill. TurboHercules is funded by Microsoft and this whole thing reeks to high heaven of a Microsoft scheme to game the legal system in order to attack its competitors. They simply recycled the Psystar scam against Apple and used it to attack IBM. We still haven't quite seen the end of SCO's attacks on Linux (SCO got
$100 million from Microsoft).
As PJ said:
[Microsoft] should put more energy into creating good products. Then they wouldn't have to resort to such tactics.
... the enemy [does this]... the enemy [does that]... the enemy [does this other thing]...
No military has ever tried to fight a counterinsurgency of this scope with this many restrictions on how we behave in combat,...
I don't consider people my enemy just because they are fighting to oust foreign invaders from their homeland. The repeated use of the word "enemy" is used to de-humanize the people who get killed defending their country from foreign invaders.
Be that as it may, the root of the problem is that the foreign invaders are unable to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.
I disagree that the defenders of their homelands are trying to get the invaders to follow the Geneva Conventions. They are making their best effort to kick the invaders out of their country by putting them in a no-win situation. If the invaders obey the Geneva Conventions then they are unable to eradicate the combatants but when the invaders start killing innocent civilians then they create more combatants among the friends and loved ones of the innocent people they killed.
The situation is highly asymmetrical. The invaders stick out like a sore thumb while the defenders are often indistinguishable from the civilians. We can see this asymmetry as an insurmountable problem or we can see it as the key to the solution.
There is no way for the foreign invaders to "win". One approach is to continue the brutality and war crimes until the local population is cowed into submission and then install a puppet dictatorship. Another approach is to back-off on the brutality and war crimes which will keep the invasion + resistance going on indefinitely. The third approach is to declare victory and go home.
I suggest you get a copy of Richard Courant's
What is Mathematics?. It covers a wide range of topics so you can pick and choose what you want to learn about. You don't have to read it from cover to cover like most text books. IMO the key thing is that it makes math interesting. Math is like sex in that if it isn't fun then you are probably not doing it right.
Also, don't feel bad about having trouble with college calculus. IMO people seldom learn calculus in college when it is taught by the math department. This is because most mathematicians aren't interested in calculus. You are best off either learning it in high school or, if possible, learning it from the physics department. Many physicists use calculus day in and day out (especially grad students) so they are really into it.
Reminds me of when I was developing on SBC-80 systems based on the Intel 8080 back in the '70's. I was doing everything in machine code, typing it in on a teletype and using a simple monitor program from Intel. I had a big program, maybe Basic or some other simple "high level" language that I loaded via paper tape. I needed to move the program to another place in memory. So I copied the program using the monitor (program) and then wrote my own little program to change all the addresses in the code to match the new location.
Unfortunately I mistakenly ran my relocator on the original code not the copy and I didn't catch the error right away. Funny thing was that both copies of the code, call them A and B, now worked. Every jump or call in A would jump or call to the correct location in the B code and every jump or call in the B code would go to the correct location in the A code.
When I was writing my own code I would write it out in assembly on graph paper and then manually convert the assembly mnemonics into hex that I would eventually type in via the teletype. I had to calculate all the addresses manually. I learned to leave a little space between the subroutines. That way if I had to add a few bytes of code during debugging, I wouldn't have to recalculate all the addresses again because most of the code wouldn't have to move.
If I pig out over the holidays and then say "expect my waistline to increase" I'm not implying that my waistline had ever decreased. I leave converting this to a car analogy as an exercise for the reader.
Who's representing the US in the ACTA negotiations. If it's just the usual **AA people, then good luck getting this past The Senate.
Uh, the **AA people own the Senate. They have also infiltrated the Department of Justice. And now that the Supreme Court has ruled it is unconstitutional to limit corporate campaign funding (via advertisements) expect corporate ownership of all branches of government to increase.
Furthermore the Germans were hampered by having driven many top physicists out of the country with their anti-Semitic policies, and also by drafting other boffins into the army to fight as ordinary soldiers.
The study shows that people who get most of their news from Fox News are about as poorly informed as people who get their news from blogs and you don't see that as devastating indictment of Fox New?
Blogs are almost by definition sources of opinion, not news. There is a big difference between the two. If they called it "Fox Televised Blogs" or "Fox Biased Opinions" then I would feel that they were being fair (in their title) but unbalanced. What is most irksome is that they are calling it news when it is actually opinions and propaganda.
I don't see how the context you provide makes it "not nearly as bad". The bottom of the pile is people who get no (non-local) news at all. The next rung up is people who get one-sided versions from blogs and Fox News and then above that is people who get their news from quasi-legitimate news sources.
At least Fox is rather blatant about being totally corporate controlled. The other so-called news sources, NYT, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, etc. are also corporate controlled but they are just a bit more subtle about it. I haven't looked at the study but I don't consider anyone who gets their news solely from American mainstream media to be well informed.
Judges note, among other things, that record labels didn't dramatically lower their prices for online music as compared to physical CDs despite the fact that they "experienced dramatic cost reductions in producing" it.
Nuclear power in the United States is publicly funded but privately profited from. One form of this massive public funding is free insurance coverage for what should be a normal cost of doing business. The rationale for this policy is that the insurance premiums would be so massive, they would make the nuclear energy industry unprofitable.
There is similar public funding combined with private profit in the fossil fuel industries. For decades, the only energy segment that missed out on massive publicly funded private windfalls has been development of clean, renewable alternative energies sources.
If there has been any "dunderheadedness" in our national energy policy, it has been the near universal bipartisan sacrifice of the public good and public resources to support private profits.
IMO the one thing our current econo-political system is best at doing is creating small concentrations of vast ill-gotten gains.
how would you break an encrypted file if it is doubly encrypted, even if you knew both algorithms involved. How do you solve the problem of recognizing if you'd actually decrypted with the first key, so that you can start working with the second key?? Haven't you increased the key-space to an exponent of itself (in practical terms), and therefore created something vastly more secure?
If both algorithms are known and susceptable to brute force then when you combine them you are still susceptable to a known plaintext attack where you decrypt the encrypted message with alogorithm B and encrypt the known plaintext with algorithm A and then look for a match. This increases your storage requirements but only doubles the amount of "CPU" needed.
IMO (IANAC) using one alogorithm with a doubled key size 2 * N will be much more secure then encrypting twice using two algorithms with keysize N.
It does seem to me that one of the problems with decrypting "stuff" is that you need to have some idea what the "answer" will look like.
This is a very good point. The book
Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II explains in great detail how various Axis codes were broken by the Allies. Knowing what the "answer" looked like was essential for much of the codebreaking. In fact, Turing's masterful technique to use machines to automatically decrypt messages encrypted by the more advanced German Enigma machines relied on knowing exactly a portion of the plaintext of one of the messages. Once one message was cracked this way they were usually able to rather quickly decrypt all the other messages that used the same key that day.
Much of the WW-II vintage decryption was based on exploiting patterns in the plaintext (such as letter or word frequency) that left a trace in the encrypted messages. It is amazing how extremely subtle patterns were detected and then exploited. IMO, most of WW-II codebreaking was based on these subtle patterns. The other part of the codebreaking involved stealing the keys (codebooks, etc.) from the enemy.
As you suggest, if there is no pattern in the plaintext then breaking the encryption is much harder and often impossible.
I've got a $20 12 mW 523 nm laser pointer on my dining room table (for some
stargazing when the weather clears). In 8 seconds it will emit
about 0.1 Joules which will be about 2.5 * 10E17 photons. If the
man in the center has a similar $20 laser, he will illuminate a
circle with a 600 million mile circumference and there will be 4 * 10E8 photons per mile, or 6 * 10E8 photons per km,
or 600 photons per mm.
So while it is true that:
there is no magic laser that reflects back the same intensity no
matter how fast it gets swept across a surface.
you would be hard pressed to find a telescope that could resolve the
photons from a puny $20 laser in this thought experiment. For example
the
Hubble Telescope has significantly less resolution at a distance of just one mile:
Hubble's keen vision (0.085 arc seconds.) is equivalent to standing
at the U.S. Capitol and seeing the date on a quarter a mile away at
the Washington monument.
The only remarkable thing needed would be the screen with a 93 million mile radius. Maybe Larry Niven could offer a suggestion.
Slashdot Mirror
The stated purpose of the mandatory conversion was to get better service to outlying rural areas. Of course this was a total joke. It is the outlying rural areas that got much worse service as a result of the conversion. In my area three stations converted and three did not. When I still had the tv, I had to get up and swap cables to change channels. A neighbor tells me that with a fancy outdoor antenna he can still get PBS (which converted) but I've never been able to get it.
Artificial scarcity describes the scarcity of items even though the technology and production capacity exists to create an abundance. The term is aptly applied to non-rival resources, i.e. those that do not diminish due to one person's use, although there are other resources which could be categorized as artificially scarce. The most common causes are monopoly pricing structures, such as those enabled by intellectual property rights or by high fixed costs in a particular marketplace. The inefficiency associated with artificial scarcity is formally known as a deadweight loss.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
It seems that you are assuming very few people will pay to support authors when they can get the works of those authors for free. People can already get books for free from public libraries yet that hasn't squashed the sales of books.
Perhaps you and your friends will refuse to pay for a book you found inspiring. I gladly pay to support the authors of books I love. Therefore there may be a real scarcity of authors who cater to greedy individuals who have an extremely narrow and childish world view but there will be an abundance of authors who inspire their readers to pay back for what they received.
I'm not seeing any downside here.
I think the ruling makes sense, you just disagree with it. Of course, sharing a file is not identical to lending a book. If they were identical then there wouldn't have been a trial or a ruling.
The judges realized sharing a file was not identical to lending a book. File sharing is rather new to the courts and the judges needed to figure out the legality of this new "file sharing" activity. The US courts have sided with the corporations and have deemed that file sharing is just like making and distributing counterfeit physical books and cds. But sharing a file is not the same things as printing and selling copies of a book. If we apply your logic to the rulings in the US courts then we would have to conclude that those rulings don't make sense either.
The truth is that file sharing falls in between lending and counterfeiting. IMO, it is the US rulings that make no sense. The reason is that with file sharing, the recurring cost for producing digital information that people want is actually negative. For example, if a particular torrent file is popular then there will be a lot of seeders for it. The US courts are trying to hobble the miracle of zero or negative recurring costs while the Spanish court's decision unleashes the incredible efficiency of distribution via file sharing.
You asked how can someone make money writing a book. The answer is easy, I (and many others) pay for web sites and books and music that I like even if I am not required to. I see it as my votes for things I like. I want to keep the things I like going so I gladly contribute. I agree that legalizing file sharing might have a drastic effect on publishing industries. These industries, for the most part, have devolved to transforming scarcity into profit. Once scarcity is no longer an issue, their scarcity based business models will either transform or die. While this may be painful for workers and investors who stick with the outmoded model past its expiration date, for society as a whole it is a good thing. Authors who inspire readers enough to donate money or pay in order to keep the author rolling will survive. Many authors will thrive. Less inspiring authors won't do as well but since it costs only about $200 to self-publish a book, the barrier for entry, even for lousy authors is very low.
In general, the creation of artificial scarcity and artificial inefficiency make society as a whole less wealthy while they make a few individuals more wealthy. This is morally indefensible.
For any device to extract energy from the wind, the wind must be passing over or through the device.
I don't think that is true the way you think it is true. For example, I could build a giant kite or balloon that left to itself would travel exactly with a steady wind. I could then connect a little strand of monofilament from a spool on the ground to the balloon and get energy from the spool unwinding. If you consider the balloon to be "the device" then the power it is generating is not dependent on its relative velocity to the air around it, but rather to its relative velocity to the earth.
I believe it works the same way with this vehicle. If you re-read my original post, you will notice that I said:
In this frame of reference, energy is available due to the difference in speed between the air and the earth, regardless of the speed of the vehicle. You switched the frame of reference to one where the air is standing still. Fair enough, the simple laws of physics are valid in that frame as well (assuming the wind is steady, otherwise the laws get more complicated to compensate for acceleration of our frame of reference).
In your frame of reference, energy is still available due to the different velocity of the earth and the air, regardless of the velocity of the vehicle. In this frame of reference the vehicle is an efficient device for slowing down the earth (relative to the air). Let's back go to the kite/balloon example. A giant kite or sail or balloon in your frame reference is almost standing still, yet we can use it to extract power from the rapidly moving earth. In your frame of reference, when the vehicle is stationary (with respect to the air) is is moving with respect to the earth and we can use that motion to extract power.
I think your line of reasoning is similar to the following. Since we know from the 2nd law of thermodynamics that heat always flows from hotter to colder it is therefore impossible to build a device that can make itself cooler than every part of the environment that directly surrounds it. Yet heat pumps and refrigerators and air conditions do work.
In fact, if you have two heat reservoirs available at different temperatures, T-1 and T-2. I can build a device that extracts energy from the temperature differential and use that to run a refrigerator that gets to a temperature below both T-1 and T-2. As I mentioned before, I think this is analogous to what the vehicle does. It takes advantage of the difference in speed between the earth (V-1) and the air (V-2) to propel itself to a speed greater than either V-1 or V-2.
Finally, here is a very mechanical analogy. Suppose we were in a spacious gap between two ponderous metal plates moving with a fixed velocity relative to each other. Doesn't it seem possible to extract energy from their difference in speed to propel ourselves faster than either plate? I think this is exactly what the vehicle is doing with the air and the earth.
For me (IAAP), I immediately think about energy conservation. Where can the energy come from to propel the vehicle? IMO, the simplest frame of reference is the one where the ground is standing still (you can quote me on this point). In this frame, the total energy is the kinetic energy of the vehicle (1/2 m v^2) and the kinetic energy of the air (same formula).
The vehicle can go faster than the wind if it can remove enough kinetic energy from the wind and transfer it to kinetic energy of the vehicle. The tricky part (of course) is to do this when the vehicle is already going faster than the wind. Think of it as a device to slow the wind down as efficiently as possible. In some ways it is analogous to a heat pump which can heat up your house more efficiently than a normal resistive heater because it uses electricity to further cool the outside even when the outside is already colder than the house. The vehicle uses the big propeller and the gearing connected to the wheels to further slow down the wind, even when the wind is moving slower than the vehicle.
As long as the energy it gains by slowing down the wind is greater than the energy of all the losses, the vehicle can accelerate. It's confusing because they use the spinning of the wheels to power the propeller. Common sense tells us that it is impossible to gain enough energy from the wheels to accelerate the vehicle faster than the wind. But if common sense was always correct, there would be no need for science.
Nimoy is the only one *without* pointy ears.
I had been using kde since 1.x. Like many other long-time kde users, I can't stand kde-4.x so I've been looking for a kde-3.5 replacement. The best replacement, by far, that I could find was the ancient (but still maintained) Enlightenment e16. It's taken a little while to learn and configure but I'm actually happier with e16 than I was with kde-3.5. After a day or two of tinkering I made it my default desktop and never felt the urge to go back to kde-3.5.
/usr/share/e16/config/fonts*.cfg to ~/.e16/ and edit that (those) file(s) to increase the font sizes. Copy /usr/share/e16/bindings.cfg to ~/.e16/ and edit that file to make the key/mouse bindings more like what you are used to. Copy wallpapers to ~/.e16/backgrounds/ or make that directory a symlink to a directory that already contains your wallpapers.
Learn to use eesh which is used in e16 like dcop is used in kde-3. Read the fine documentation and play with the settings. Install a lightweight panel to replace kicker. Enjoy.
The default configuration for e16 is bland as bland can be, with tiny fonts to boot. Get version 1.0.2 (or later). Download some themes from http://themes.effx.us/e16 . Copy
Thanks for the correction.
The creators of that kit don't use any kind of redundancy with-in the box because their custom software stack handles replication (kind of like Google FS / Hadoop FS)
Bzzzt. Wrong. But thanks for playing.
The creators of that kit use RAID-6 so there are two parity disks for every four data disks. That way they can lose two drives out of a set of six and still not lose any data. This covers the case when a second drives crashes before (or while) you are replacing the first drive that crashed. Sure, there is redundancy on top of this, but ISTM those pods are probably pretty reliable. They need the reliability because they have so many of them.
It looks like I'm finally going to be getting a life!
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
says it all. If you want us to believe your claims that the both PJ and the Register article are biased and blinded, you should cover up your own anti-FOSS biases better first.
As PJ said:
[Microsoft] should put more energy into creating good products. Then they wouldn't have to resort to such tactics.
... the enemy [does this] ... the enemy [does that] ... the enemy [does this other thing] ...
No military has ever tried to fight a counterinsurgency of this scope with this many restrictions on how we behave in combat, ...
I don't consider people my enemy just because they are fighting to oust foreign invaders from their homeland. The repeated use of the word "enemy" is used to de-humanize the people who get killed defending their country from foreign invaders.
Be that as it may, the root of the problem is that the foreign invaders are unable to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. I disagree that the defenders of their homelands are trying to get the invaders to follow the Geneva Conventions. They are making their best effort to kick the invaders out of their country by putting them in a no-win situation. If the invaders obey the Geneva Conventions then they are unable to eradicate the combatants but when the invaders start killing innocent civilians then they create more combatants among the friends and loved ones of the innocent people they killed.
The situation is highly asymmetrical. The invaders stick out like a sore thumb while the defenders are often indistinguishable from the civilians. We can see this asymmetry as an insurmountable problem or we can see it as the key to the solution.
There is no way for the foreign invaders to "win". One approach is to continue the brutality and war crimes until the local population is cowed into submission and then install a puppet dictatorship. Another approach is to back-off on the brutality and war crimes which will keep the invasion + resistance going on indefinitely. The third approach is to declare victory and go home.
I suggest you get a copy of Richard Courant's What is Mathematics?. It covers a wide range of topics so you can pick and choose what you want to learn about. You don't have to read it from cover to cover like most text books. IMO the key thing is that it makes math interesting. Math is like sex in that if it isn't fun then you are probably not doing it right.
Also, don't feel bad about having trouble with college calculus. IMO people seldom learn calculus in college when it is taught by the math department. This is because most mathematicians aren't interested in calculus. You are best off either learning it in high school or, if possible, learning it from the physics department. Many physicists use calculus day in and day out (especially grad students) so they are really into it.
Reminds me of when I was developing on SBC-80 systems based on the Intel 8080 back in the '70's. I was doing everything in machine code, typing it in on a teletype and using a simple monitor program from Intel. I had a big program, maybe Basic or some other simple "high level" language that I loaded via paper tape. I needed to move the program to another place in memory. So I copied the program using the monitor (program) and then wrote my own little program to change all the addresses in the code to match the new location.
Unfortunately I mistakenly ran my relocator on the original code not the copy and I didn't catch the error right away. Funny thing was that both copies of the code, call them A and B, now worked. Every jump or call in A would jump or call to the correct location in the B code and every jump or call in the B code would go to the correct location in the A code.
When I was writing my own code I would write it out in assembly on graph paper and then manually convert the assembly mnemonics into hex that I would eventually type in via the teletype. I had to calculate all the addresses manually. I learned to leave a little space between the subroutines. That way if I had to add a few bytes of code during debugging, I wouldn't have to recalculate all the addresses again because most of the code wouldn't have to move.
If I pig out over the holidays and then say "expect my waistline to increase" I'm not implying that my waistline had ever decreased. I leave converting this to a car analogy as an exercise for the reader.
Who's representing the US in the ACTA negotiations. If it's just the usual **AA people, then good luck getting this past The Senate.
Uh, the **AA people own the Senate. They have also infiltrated the Department of Justice. And now that the Supreme Court has ruled it is unconstitutional to limit corporate campaign funding (via advertisements) expect corporate ownership of all branches of government to increase.
Furthermore the Germans were hampered by having driven many top physicists out of the country with their anti-Semitic policies, and also by drafting other boffins into the army to fight as ordinary soldiers.
The study shows that people who get most of their news from Fox News are about as poorly informed as people who get their news from blogs and you don't see that as devastating indictment of Fox New?
Blogs are almost by definition sources of opinion, not news. There is a big difference between the two. If they called it "Fox Televised Blogs" or "Fox Biased Opinions" then I would feel that they were being fair (in their title) but unbalanced. What is most irksome is that they are calling it news when it is actually opinions and propaganda.
I don't see how the context you provide makes it "not nearly as bad". The bottom of the pile is people who get no (non-local) news at all. The next rung up is people who get one-sided versions from blogs and Fox News and then above that is people who get their news from quasi-legitimate news sources.
At least Fox is rather blatant about being totally corporate controlled. The other so-called news sources, NYT, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, etc. are also corporate controlled but they are just a bit more subtle about it. I haven't looked at the study but I don't consider anyone who gets their news solely from American mainstream media to be well informed.
Judges note, among other things, that record labels didn't dramatically lower their prices for online music as compared to physical CDs despite the fact that they "experienced dramatic cost reductions in producing" it.
Nuclear power in the United States is publicly funded but privately profited from. One form of this massive public funding is free insurance coverage for what should be a normal cost of doing business. The rationale for this policy is that the insurance premiums would be so massive, they would make the nuclear energy industry unprofitable.
There is similar public funding combined with private profit in the fossil fuel industries. For decades, the only energy segment that missed out on massive publicly funded private windfalls has been development of clean, renewable alternative energies sources.
If there has been any "dunderheadedness" in our national energy policy, it has been the near universal bipartisan sacrifice of the public good and public resources to support private profits. IMO the one thing our current econo-political system is best at doing is creating small concentrations of vast ill-gotten gains.
how would you break an encrypted file if it is doubly encrypted, even if you knew both algorithms involved. How do you solve the problem of recognizing if you'd actually decrypted with the first key, so that you can start working with the second key?? Haven't you increased the key-space to an exponent of itself (in practical terms), and therefore created something vastly more secure?
If both algorithms are known and susceptable to brute force then when you combine them you are still susceptable to a known plaintext attack where you decrypt the encrypted message with alogorithm B and encrypt the known plaintext with algorithm A and then look for a match. This increases your storage requirements but only doubles the amount of "CPU" needed.
IMO (IANAC) using one alogorithm with a doubled key size 2 * N will be much more secure then encrypting twice using two algorithms with keysize N.
It does seem to me that one of the problems with decrypting "stuff" is that you need to have some idea what the "answer" will look like.
This is a very good point. The book Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II explains in great detail how various Axis codes were broken by the Allies. Knowing what the "answer" looked like was essential for much of the codebreaking. In fact, Turing's masterful technique to use machines to automatically decrypt messages encrypted by the more advanced German Enigma machines relied on knowing exactly a portion of the plaintext of one of the messages. Once one message was cracked this way they were usually able to rather quickly decrypt all the other messages that used the same key that day.
Much of the WW-II vintage decryption was based on exploiting patterns in the plaintext (such as letter or word frequency) that left a trace in the encrypted messages. It is amazing how extremely subtle patterns were detected and then exploited. IMO, most of WW-II codebreaking was based on these subtle patterns. The other part of the codebreaking involved stealing the keys (codebooks, etc.) from the enemy.
As you suggest, if there is no pattern in the plaintext then breaking the encryption is much harder and often impossible.
there is no magic laser that reflects back the same intensity no matter how fast it gets swept across a surface.
you would be hard pressed to find a telescope that could resolve the photons from a puny $20 laser in this thought experiment. For example the Hubble Telescope has significantly less resolution at a distance of just one mile:
Hubble's keen vision (0.085 arc seconds.) is equivalent to standing at the U.S. Capitol and seeing the date on a quarter a mile away at the Washington monument.
The only remarkable thing needed would be the screen with a 93 million mile radius. Maybe Larry Niven could offer a suggestion.