PDAs as dedicated devices are disappearing, as they're squeezed out by cell phones and "smart phones" on the low-end and sub-notebooks and notebooks on the high end.
I'll believe it when HP stops selling them. If that does happen, it will be because there's so little demand it's not a worthwhile market, so by definition not many people would be affected by it. And if they end up adding cell phone capability to their whole line because it's too cheap not to do it, well everybody wins. They keep making PDAs, and those who want PDA-phones are happy too.
Just because one market is taking off, doesn't mean the other is gone. Despite the/. bellyaching, it is perfectly possible to get a standalone PDA, and just as possible to get a phone that works extremely well as just a phone. Yes, it will probably be able to play games, but if that bothers you... don't play games. It's not as though the possibility of using an application drains the battery.
Sorry, I know you weren't complaining about phones, it's just a common/. rant that bothers me.
Why can't you just plug your monitor and keyboard into your all-in-one?
That's what I'm looking forward to, except for the plug part. Now mind, this is all 20-plus-years-from-now dreaming stuff, so don't rip me a new one because we're not even close to it. I know. What I want is a nice big monitor etc, and when I sit down at my desk my "phone" automatically wirelessly connects to it, and becomes the computer I'm using. This device will be powerful enough to run all the stuff I need. In addition, there could be a small desktop computer that sits there all the time in case I sit down in my PJs and don't have my phone with me. In that case the desktop is used, but if I have my phone it uses that. They would synchronize files without me noticing, using rules I set up. Computing power and storage will be so cheap that the computer is included free with the monitor, rather than the other way around. You only need to spend any real money if you need a display or additional hardware such as GPS, removable storage, and other awesome features we haven't even thought of yet.
I once tried to get a windows mobile phone and they said that you must pay for 2 years for data + voice to get it at the deal price.
You're complaining that you have to sign a contract in order to get a huge discount on your phone? If you don't like the terms of the contract, don't sign it. Pay full retail, or buy a different phone. I don't like that BMWs are so expensive, but I don't begrudge them the right to set their prices. Sorry, had to get a car analogy in there.
Sure. I haven't done primary research on economics or politics myself, so my knowledge of them is based on others' writings.
Democracy (pure or representative democracy) can be separated from capitalism in theory, but in practice it does not happen... in practice democracy became wide spread only after the industrial revolution and the introduction of capitalism.
What an interesting conjunction, too. I'm reading The Worldly Philosophers on a recommendation from a/.er, but it really isn't saying much about politics. I would be interested in a book that talks about the relationship between the two in different societies.
Economy is always closely tied with politics in practice;)
Of course, but that does not make them the same thing. As I said, there are currently socialist democracies. Just one more wrench among many is that there isn't any pure capitalism, and probably not any pure communism either, so every economy is shades of gray. One interesting question is whether the economy and the politics tend to fall along the same point in the spectrum. I tend to think not. The US economy isn't showing more signs of socialism now than it has in the recent past IMO, yet politically we're swinging towards centralized state power and away from civil liberties. I'll be considered a troll if I use the f word.:-) Do the more socialist-leaning European countries tend to be more leftist politically as well? That isn't my impression, but I don't really know.
Communism is an economic system; democracy is a political system. Comparing the two is like comparing apples and freight elevators. The communism that people generally think of first is that of the Soviet Union, which was an oligarchy. If you want to compare and contrast communism with what's happening in the US, talk about capitalism, not democracy. You could have a capitalist dictatorship, or a communist democracy. We see some pretty strongly socialist democracies in Europe, and what's the difference between the two if not just degree? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way - is there a qualitative difference? I don't know of one, but I haven't really looked.
limiting change submissions to the original sponsors of the bill
This would encourage bills with hundreds of sponsors. You would have to combine this rule with a rule limiting the number of sponsors.
Can't vote until 7 days have passed after the last change.
IF they were unable to find a way to inject spam (hundreds of meaningless amendments to every bill) then this might be effective - IF it were combined with the aforementioned law that every member has to read and understand every bill, subject to criminal penalties. Members would be unable to claim they didn't know what was in the bill, because they would expose themselves to prosecution. You would have to stop the amendment spam at the same time though, otherwise we would have to acknowledge that nobody could have time to read all the bills in just seven days. And if you extend the period to 30 days (without addressing the spam), then the number of spam amendments would just go up into the thousands - the classic spam arms race.
However, since the people who could change the rules are the same people who benefit from the rules being the way they are now... well this is all an interesting but pointless discussion.:-(
And finally, if somebody tries to game the system by submitting 50 last minute changes everytime, you just vote no. Then you say, "I move to take a vote on changeset 1492, the last branch that has been stable for more than 90 minutes, and the only one that we have all been able to read."
It relies on Congress members to be honest and do the right thing. Any such system is doomed. They will continue to scratch each others' backs and put in pork. It's not currently a secret that they don't read the legislation, and there doesn't seem to be any outrage about it. I haven't heard about anybody in Arlen Specter's office being fired for slipping in a provision to the Patriot Act at the behest of the Justice Department, despite the fact that it's known who did it (without Specter's knowledge, no less). If nobody cares now*, why would they start caring if it was all in a source control system?
If MS loses so much business to Google that the MS reseller industry is significantly impacted, Google will have to hire a LOT of people. Maybe you'll be one of the ones they hire, maybe you'll be one of the ones that has to find a different job, and maybe you'll be one of the MS people who sticks around. If Google can do things more efficiently than MS (what a shocker that would be) then there will be a net loss of IT jobs. But arguing against improved efficiency in order to increase demand for labor is a very short-sighted economic position. In other words, you could lose a job, but the industry and economy as a whole will be just fine, and maybe even better off. And - sorry to say it - there's no reason we should care more about you (or me) than we do about everybody.
First of all, not matter what, you need to secure your desktops.
But if the documents are never stored on the desktops, a security failure on a desktop doesn't expose your documents.
Second, the documents themselves would be stored on a file server.
Exactly. It should be possible to more reliably secure a file server, right? I'm not a security expert, but it seems that way to me. You don't need to have somebody sitting at it, so you can do things that might not work for a workstation. Plus you could (possibly) choose a more secure OS than the Windows that your desktops (may) require.
Oh, definitely. It's hard to think of anything that can kill everyone or nearly everyone on the planet in the next few billion years other than nuclear weapons and asteroid/comet impacts, and there are better ways of dealing with both of those than offworld colonization. Really long-term, should we last so long, we'll have to part ways with the sun, either with or without this planet we live on. But by then we should have figured out ways of doing it.
maybe the hard part is not having computing capacity, or, in other words, why software would make a computer "inteligent" supposing you had x100000 the processing power we have now?
I think for this to come to pass, we'll be bypassing this assumption that the computers in question will be just like the ones we have now, but much much faster. What's more likely is that we'll have a completely different kind of computer. A neural net perhaps, or something that hasn't been imagined yet. Maybe it will physically grow on its own. Maybe we'll even question whether it's a computer, or a biological artificial brain, or whether there's a difference between those things. My point is, there won't be any comparison between the two kinds of computer, not because one is so much faster than the other, but because they work in totally different ways, so there's no way to quantify the differences. This new kind of computer could have the ability to develop consciousness on its own, simply by being exposed to new things and learning from them, just like biological brains do. The software doesn't make the computer intelligent or conscious by itself, it just lays the groundwork for the computer to be able to learn and develop. That's how we could have an intelligent, even self-aware computer, without anybody ever having written software or built hardware that explicitly makes it so, and without anyone necessarily understanding what consciousness is. Nobody has yet found anything special about our brains that implies that no artificial structure could achieve the same thing we have.
To produce an intelligent being we'll provably need to understand how consciousness operates.
If I understand you correctly, I don't agree with that one. I don't know of any rule of nature that indicates it's impossible to make something without knowing why it works. Besides the problem of defining "intelligent being", it could be possible to build something that learns, and discover that a consciousness emerges in it. Nobody invented the mind that lives there now, and nobody necessarily understands how it works. Put another way, unless you believe in intelligent design, then each of us is an intelligent being created by a process that has no knowledge of how consciousness operates. I don't see why the same thing couldn't happen when the process is an inventor rather than nature.
Other than (maybe) the last one, don't all of those considerations apply to any data representation? For example, it's not OK to have buffer overruns and parsing problems if you're using some non-XML format.
It is unusable in the sense that many applications no longer work on it in there newest version.
Oh, well that sucks. I'd gotten the impression that things tend to work between versions of OS X, but I guess that's not always the case. Thanks for the clarification.
The other problem I have with the Macs is the fast upgrade cycle. OS 10.3 is becoming un-usable and is not so old.
Becoming unusable? What do you mean? It doesn't support newer hardware or software? What's the problem with a fast upgrade cycle? Can't you just choose to upgrade on a slower cycle - like skip every other upgrade? I'm not trying to defend Apple; my questions would apply if you said the same thing about Microsoft - except that I would call you a dirty liar if you said MS had a fast upgrade cycle;-).
There are companies that sell random number generation hardware. Are you saying they're flawed or something?
Short answer - yes.
I've never heard this before - do you have any references, or will a google search turn them up?
There are things called laws against such conduct with very severe penalties. I'd have to be a total idiot to do such a thing.
Doesn't really matter, I'm not going to believe "I know of a counterexample, but I'm not going to tell you" regardless of how good your reason for not telling me is.
There is a reference out there that talks about OTP and gets very close to what I would like to tell you towards the bottom here - http://www.vectorsite.net/ttcode_04.html where he talks about OTP.
He sums up what I've been saying right at the beginning: "The First World War also led to the development of a cipher, the "one-time pad", that was provably impossible to crack by analytic methods. However, this cipher also had drawbacks that made it too clumsy for most practical use at the time." And later, "One of the significant achievements in cryptography in the First World War was a cipher that was, and remains, uncrackable even in principle. As is typical of black magic, it had a significant catch." And again, "While the one-time pad cipher clearly looks difficult to crack, what is not so obvious is that it is completely impossible to crack by any cryptanalytic method." I did not see any mention of an instance of properly-implemented OTP being cryptographically cracked - only the Russian diplomatic encryption, which was done incorrectly. On the other hand, you didn't reiterate this claim, so maybe you've abandoned it.
The name of the game is to crack it by any means available.
In practice it is very difficult to get a truly random generator.
Why is that? There are companies that sell random number generation hardware. Are you saying they're flawed or something?
Sure I am. It has been done before. I can't give away the store here for obvious reasons (i.e. mention even a single case), that is why I mentioned the National Cryptographic Museum.
You'd have to kill me if you told me. Feel free to trot that out, but I hope you don't expect me to take your word for it.
Guesses are often very useful in practice.
Sure. If you redefine "decrypt" or "break" as "guess about" then it becomes really easy.
The worst thing you can do is be arrogent and think it is unbreakable.
Using a system without knowing its limitations would be very foolish, yes.
The initial offering was 3yr deal + $500 upfront to get the Iphone. So the $500 is after a 3yr subsidy by cingular.
Apple has stated that there will be no subsidy on the iPhone. The $500 price is strictly a retail price, with no discounting by Cingular (this does not mean they will sell you the phone without a contract). I think this is to avoid discounted iPhones competing with non-discounted video iPods. Plus I thought it was a 2 year contract, not 3.
Unfortunately, this philosophy has the risk of being abused by management who try and pigeonhole you into solving hard problems all the time ('we thought you were happy') and giving the interesting work to their mates.
I thought the hard problems were the interesting work. Then again I'm not a games developer, so maybe it's different there.
In 1960 life was very different. His dad wouldn't be "grounding him" he'd have taken him to the wood shed and corrected his attitude. You only have to be course corrected a few times at an early age.
You only have to be course corrected a few times. If this kid really is a sociopath (we can't tell for sure) then it would not be possible to correct his attitude, because the problem isn't attitude, it's much deeper. I think that's what the parent is trying to say. His dad taking him out to the wood shed could have resulted in the dad getting beaten to death with a hammer the next day. This story doesn't sound to me like someone who just needed more discipline early in life. But again, we couldn't make any kind of diagnosis from this information even if we were qualified - all we can do is talk about different possibilities.
You'd only do it if you have a genuine case and have suffered genuine loss
First off, let me just say I'm not trying to start a fight, I really want to understand how it works and what the reasons are. So... just because I have a genuine case and have suffered genuine loss doesn't mean I'm certain to win, right? Is it acknowledged that this system discourages people from filing legitimate but non-slam-dunk lawsuits? It seems like that would be the effect - even if you have a strong case, you may not want to sue unless you're really really sure you'll win.
We also have a system called "legal aid" where you can appoint your own solicitor (attorney in the US) and the state will pay your legal fees if it can be shown that you cannot afford to pay yourself.
So would that include the legal fees of my opponent if I lose? Because I guess that would solve it, but could (not would but could) introduce the possibility of poor people suing more because they have nothing to lose.
If we break it you would simply claim it wasn't implemented correctly.
Since that's the only way to break them, I'd have to agree.:-)
The whole point to encryption is to use a key that is shorter than the message.
I'd be interested to read any references you can supply indicating that that is the "whole point" of encryption. I have never heard this before. My understanding is the whole point of encryption is to restrict information to those it's intended for.
Point in fact, when one time pads have been used in the past, they ended up being used more than once (and often many more times than once) making your example breakable, even trivial.
Thus, "not used correctly", thus this is a strawman argument. If used correctly, the encryption is unbreakable. If used incorrectly, the encryption is breakable, perhaps much more easily than other methods (I don't know).
One time pads are simply not that handy nor random.
I never said they were handy, I said they were unbreakable. And what is inherently non-random about them?
If you go into this field you may turn out to be a first rate cryptologist.
Thanks, but I doubt it. I don't think my math skills are that good.
Another point to drive this home - don't you think that if one time pads were that unbreakeable and viable they would use that (more in business, government, etc) rather than spending billions to develop the science required for quantum crypt?
I said it was unbreakable, I never said it was viable. OTP is very difficult to use correctly and almost never worthwhile or a good idea. However, quantum key exchange could make it more practical for certain narrowly-defined cases.
USB key drives are dirt cheap and hold a lot, surely we could make a bunch of them with one time pads. I wouldn't bet much on it being secure. At least secure for very long.
I wouldn't either, for the aforementioned reasons. Somebody is almost certain to mess it up sooner or later, probably sooner. But until somebody messes up, I guarantee nobody will break the encryption.
It is right until it isn't.
It isn't. After everything you've said, you haven't mentioned one time when a properly implemented OTP system has had its encryption broken. That is because if all the rules are followed, there is simply no way to break the encryption - it is not even possible in theory. It does not matter how much computing power you have, it does not matter how much time you have, and it does not matter what algorithms you have access to. It simply cannot be done. Since a cryptographic attack on such a system is useless, one must attack it another way, which is certainly possible to do.
Are you still going to tell me it's possible to break the encryption of a correct OTP system?
Slashdot Mirror
- HP
- Palm
- Garmin
Just because one market is taking off, doesn't mean the other is gone. Despite theSorry, I know you weren't complaining about phones, it's just a common
However, since the people who could change the rules are the same people who benefit from the rules being the way they are now... well this is all an interesting but pointless discussion.
* or not enough people, or not the right people
If MS loses so much business to Google that the MS reseller industry is significantly impacted, Google will have to hire a LOT of people. Maybe you'll be one of the ones they hire, maybe you'll be one of the ones that has to find a different job, and maybe you'll be one of the MS people who sticks around. If Google can do things more efficiently than MS (what a shocker that would be) then there will be a net loss of IT jobs. But arguing against improved efficiency in order to increase demand for labor is a very short-sighted economic position. In other words, you could lose a job, but the industry and economy as a whole will be just fine, and maybe even better off. And - sorry to say it - there's no reason we should care more about you (or me) than we do about everybody.
Oh, definitely. It's hard to think of anything that can kill everyone or nearly everyone on the planet in the next few billion years other than nuclear weapons and asteroid/comet impacts, and there are better ways of dealing with both of those than offworld colonization. Really long-term, should we last so long, we'll have to part ways with the sun, either with or without this planet we live on. But by then we should have figured out ways of doing it.
You're right, that sounds *really* hard. So.... we shouldn't try?
Other than (maybe) the last one, don't all of those considerations apply to any data representation? For example, it's not OK to have buffer overruns and parsing problems if you're using some non-XML format.
Are you still going to tell me it's possible to break the encryption of a correct OTP system?