Reverse engineering is legal since it was a consumer product release for general distribution, not a special prototype board released specifically to an individual under an NDA.
... in some countries.
Reverse engineering is allowed in SOME countries, for the purpose of creating something that is compatible.
I wouldn't be suprised if the sperm need gravity to know which way is up.
And I wouldn't be surprised to find that sperm doesn't give a damn. Suppose there are 20 "forks" in the road, and half of the sperm gets it wrong on every fork. Then about 1 in a million would make it to the "right spot". So you're left with what is it? 100 to 1000 live sperm to fertilize one egg?
If a 90% solution already exists from thousands of man-hours, is the lucky sot who comes along and spends five hours implementing the final feature they need deserving of the entire reward?
This is what CoSource is all about: You can pay someone to go that last mile.
The trick is that anyone is free to remark: "But this is already implemented ".
So, a developer who submits a proposal pricing for the whole work, will get under-bid by someone who knows that 90% is already done....
CoSource officially launched this week. Before was only a "Beta".
I more or less followed CoSource more closely than you followed SourceXchange. I was afraid they were going to do the same as you described for SourceXchange. However, they started out with a "testing" period, where they said projects and proposals wouldn't be honoured. They ended up carrying over the test-projects over to the live test, as the quality of the project proposals was so high.
A bunch of projects are already finished, and the project mentioned in the article is pretty close. (I'll have to pay!)
And about Incentives not working, with Cosource, you as a "consumer" can tell the developpers where your priorities are. That means that small (or large) amounts of money will change hands for a change or the list of priorities.
In the case of the CMYK project, I just don't have the time right now, and Andrew does.
after a while, their brains had corrected and the world appeared rightside-up.
The experiment also showed that this was done at a "low" level: The subjects had "trained" in town and when they were confident again to walk around and such, they were also able to ride a bike for instance.
The subjects were also able to go downhill skiing with the contraption on. Once they were used to the device, they didn't need any more training to do specific tasks with the inverted image.
People who are given an array of needles on their skin somewhere, that is fed with data from a video camera are quick to be able to "see" through this device. The human mind is VERY much able to process randomly connected nerve impulses to a visual image.
I was a freshman in college. Talking to fellow freshmen, the subject wandered to computer security. So I said that breaking security would be easy: Just install a login-trojan. Of 1600 students, most were not computer literate. Many would fall for it.
My friend then challanged me by saying: "YOU can't write a trojan. You're not good enough".
So I proved it to him. HE then goes to the computer center and tries to run it over there, trying to trick the computer center guys. HE gets caught red-handed. (*)
I never ever ran the program. I KNOW that a random "foreign language" or even a "physics" student will fall for it. I also suspect that it is a bit harder to fool the sysops at the Computer Centre.
So they told me and my friend not to use the program. I had never used it. Two weeks later, they "still" found the source in my homedir, and got mad at me for this. (extra restrictions on my account)
A few weeks later I found that the intial passwords that they assigned to ME was just a juggle of a few letters of my account name. If you did the juggle on another name, you had a 20% chance of hitting the assigned password.
2000 accounts. 400 used, 1600 never used. 320 free accounts....
Later I found that they had the file with the assigned intial passwords online. World readable. (in a non-readable directory). Bingo. 1600 accounts. Never used them though. Just to verify that what I'd found was indeed the material that I THOUGHT I had found.
Roger.
(*) Pretty obvious: You had to stay "logged in" to be able to run a program. The system printed "xxx logged out" when you logged out. So the trojan sent the "wedge terminal" code before logging out, but they had different terminals at the CC.
The next step, obtaining an actual image of a planet, will probably have to wait for the next generation of space observatories that will come into operation in about 10 years' time.
Hey, we can do the math how large that telescope is going to be. I don't know the formula, but we have all the numbers.
We'd like about 100 pixels across the planet, but will settle for 20. Jupiter sized planet which is 11 times earth. So the diameter is about 1.3*10^8m . So pixel size comes to 6.5*10^6m.
The distance to that planet is 50*3*10^8*3600*24*365=4.7*10^17 . So each pixel represents an angle of 1.4 * 10^-11 (in radians).
Now from this and the wavelenght of the light we can calculate the minimum size of the telescope. I don't know the formula anymore, so I'll probably miss out on a few factors of 2 and PI.
But lambda (wavelength of the light, 500nm)divided by the arc becomes 36km. So, my estimate is that this telescope that can take pictures of this planet is at least 36km (22 miles) in size.
Either that physical size, or some coupled telescopes. As far as I know, they are already working on getting this to work. But mirror accuracies will probably have to be phenomenal. Like in less than the size of an atom.
I'm sinning myself too, but it's late out here....
Many people talking about splitting up Microsoft seem to forget the mainpoint about this.
The main point is that Microsoft (operating systems division) is trying to maintain their monopoly. They didn't mind fighting the browser war for this. If they'd just let Java happen, by now everybody would've been running Java word processors on any platform they'd like on their PC, not neccesarily MS Windows.
That's what Microsoft succesfully prevented in the browser wars. It is about cost-of-entry into the PC operating systems market.
This is just one of the "bad" things that microsoft did to keep their market share. A ruling in this case should prevent MANY of those "bad" things from happening again. Splitting microsoft up doesn't help enough, IMHO.
Second, public key cryptography works with relatively large blocks of data at a time.
Don't think I'm picking on you. You're just the so-many-eth that makes this mistake, and I think I should set this straight.
If you need a stream cypher, you can just take the past data, and shove it into the encryption routine. The random bytes you then get, you just feed in an XOR with the data. As much as you need. And once you exhaust one your "blob" of encryption, you use the encrypted data, or the plaintext as the source for another encryption round.
People get a "bad feeling" with XOR, as it feels unsafe (probably because if you just xor with the password, it actually IS unsafe....). But that's not true. If the "key" I XOR with has "random" ones and zeros, all bits have had a 50/50 chance of having been flipped, So wether there is a 0 or a 1, you really can't say wether it was flipped or not and wether the original might have been a 0 or a 1.
So, an algorithm like RSA spewing 1000 to 2000 bits at you at a time, doesn't really matter. What matters is that RSA or other public key crypto is orders of magnitude slower than a symmetric. (as everybody else is saying...)
So, for example, during a TCP handshake you use RSA to exchange a 2048 byte key. Then use your favorite symmetric cypher (3DES, IDEA, whatever) with this shared key to encrypt the stream
2048 byte? Don't you mean 2048 bit?
Many stream encryptions that I know of, need 64-128 bits ok keyspace, and that's quite enough. And RSA would naturally give between 500 and 2000 bits of data per "run" of the algorithm. So for 2000 bytes, you'd need to run RSA 8 times in a row, giving MUCH more bits than you really need.
I have a file called "test.file" in my homedir. It is 10Mb out of/dev/random:
dd if=/dev/random of=test.file bs=1k count=10240
I can honestly maintain that this is random binary data. However if I do have something to hide, I'll put it in there.
I recommend that everyone creates a 10Mb "test.file", just to test the Linux random number generator....
When any one of us gets forced to give up the key to that file (wether there is stuff in there or not), just shout for help on slashdot, and you'll quickly have a few bunch of people who've had a "test.file" on their harddisk just like you, proving that they are just testfiles.....
2) The size and periodicity of the wobble allowed the researchers to _predict_ the size, and period of the planet's orbit.
The physical size was determined from the dip. The mass was determined from the period in the wobble.
3) The existence of the planet was _confirmed_ by finding a photometric dimming of light from the star, consistent with transit of a gas giant planet, at exactly the time and periodicity _predicted_ by the spectography.
Periodicity? They sighted the dimming effect once, and Sunday the second one was supposed to happen. What did happen, was that the measurement was spoiled by clouds. Three days till the next possible measurement. So? Just wait it out? Good science. "OH, Observatory shuts down for the winter, no more measurements till next spring."
This sounds to me as if they are rushing ahead with publishing the things without allowing enough time to evaluate correctly what they are seeing. Maybe a bird flew over the observatory during the measurement around the right time.
The graph of the wobble looks like a perfect sine, extrapolated from the 6 shown dots. That's highly inaccurate. Sure you can fit a sine to any number of random dots. Jot down a number of random points between -30 and +60 and tell the computer to find a fitting sine. I'm sure it will find one. Now try the following: randomly pick 6 x-values between 0 and 250. Calculate 50 * sin (x_i). Now add 6 random values, say between -2 and +2, to the calculated "measurements", and tell the computer to find the sine wave. I expect you'll find wildly different values from the amplitude 50 (100 top-top), and the period 2PI.
The gif shows 6 points, but has a heading saying something about 2000 points. I'm not sure what to make of that. 2000 measurements is WAY too labor-intensive. I don't believe they made 2000 spectra.
Speaking as a working scientist, I think it is also a very nice demonstration of how how science works in the real world, too often misunderstood even by the techies on slashdot.
Speaking as a techie on slashdot, I think this is a nice demonstration of "release early and often" which applies to open source, and not science.
Publishing in a peer-reviewed magazine, means that the reviewers had the chance of asking all kinds of nasty questions, and they were able to ask for supporting documentation, for example the raw data.
If you publish on the internet, you can make the raw data available, so that those interested can verify the data on their own.
The defeat of the algorithms, which were weak because they were designed to meet U.S. and Japanese export controls, makes it possible to build an open-source DVD player that the DVD Forum can't disable, he said.
The problem is that the public (including authors writing about this) don't understand the difference between 40 bits and 16 bits.
The encryption was weakened to 40 bits for us export restrictions, which, if a decryption operation takes a second, requires 35 thousand years to crack. Ok, so the decryption takes only a millisecond, you can brute-force it in 35 years on one computer, or in about a month on 350 computers. But that's still serious deterrent to casual copying.
This is a combination of problems: The code was weak "inside" so that with a known-plaintext, you can crack the key in 2^16 operations. Takes about a tenth of a second. Now, if the export laws hadn't been there, they might have used a 128bit key, and that's enough that leaking 24 bits is not a problem. Even if the algorithm leaks 60% of the bits, having 75 bits left is strong enough to thwart copy attempts.
So, it's the combination that's dangerous: 40 bits is enough, but in combination with an algorithm that can now execute in under a second, or with an algorithm that leaks keybits, it is NOT enough.
Factor into this the superb health care, education, transport infrastructure and the fact that Switzerland is simply the most beautiful place on the planet and I'd work there for free...
Well, where does the money come from to buy ski-passes?
But seriously, Switzerland is one of the countries that is quite serious about not letting just about anybody into the country "for good".
Fine if you come skiing, fine if you come and deliver some (big) machine and need to fine-tune it for a week. Not fine if you want to come and just work for a Swiss company, and see how long you can stay.
(NOTE: I may be off track here, as well designed IRQ sharing might not be a bad thing).
PCI IRQ sharing is fine.
However, you should realize that a manufacturer can have made the mistake of creating a device where the driver cannot easily determine whether this device caused the interrupt. As the device interrupts only say a hundred times per second, that's not considered a problem.
Now you add a second card on that IRQ where that second card interrupts thousands of times per second, and you have a problem.
Yes, I was VERY impressed by the accuracy of the judge's ruling.
One thing though: "at all times in the last x years microsofts marketshare was above 90%" is technically incompatible with "when in 9x OS/2's marketshare was over 10%".
(I didn't go back to the original ruling to find exact quotes for this, so treat with care... )
The $15K model is needed for writing the standard 18 GB DVD-ROM disks.
I'm not sure wether you'll be able to do double sided/double density even on the $15k models. I would expect you to be limited to single layer when writing....
As people are used to algorithms that can do one encryption in about a microsecond, brute-forcing 40 bits becomes feasable. However, if your algorithm is inherently slow, and takes for example one second (on a current computer) to perform, then it would take about 34k years to break.
Now if computers continue to get faster at 1000 times every 20 years, that 40bit key to that encryption algorithm can be cracked by 34 computers in one year, 20 years from now.
That's "reasonable security".
One or two bits is rediculous. 40 bits isn't that bad, but it depends on the algorithm. Try a 40bit RSA key. That can be broken in seconds.
40 bits DES Is "tricky", and we can design an encryption that is pretty strong with 40 bits. There is nothing inherently wrong with 40 bits.
I was writing my masters thesis in LaTeX. Found out about formulae and found them pretty neat. Concluded that this was better than everything I had ever seen, except perhaps the first-year-calculus book.
Enter: the book. Took the book off the shelf, and checked it against what TeX produces. Hmm. Turns out TeX produces WILDLY better formated formulae than what the calculus book had. hehe.
Slashdot Mirror
Reverse engineering is legal since it was a consumer product release for general distribution, not a special prototype board released specifically to an individual under an NDA.
... in some countries.
Reverse engineering is allowed in SOME countries, for the purpose of creating something that is compatible.
I wouldn't be suprised if the sperm need gravity to know which way is up.
And I wouldn't be surprised to find that sperm doesn't give a damn. Suppose there are 20 "forks" in the road, and half of the sperm gets it wrong on every fork. Then about 1 in a million would make it to the "right spot". So you're left with what is it? 100 to 1000 live sperm to fertilize one egg?
If a 90% solution already exists from thousands of man-hours, is the lucky sot who comes along and spends five hours implementing the final feature they need deserving of the entire reward?
This is what CoSource is all about: You can pay someone to go that last mile.
The trick is that anyone is free to remark: "But this is already implemented ".
So, a developer who submits a proposal pricing for the whole work, will get under-bid by someone who knows that 90% is already done....
Roger.
Sites like CoSource should consider a process like this: .....
Well said! That's exactly how CoSource works.
Roger.
CoSource officially launched this week. Before was only a "Beta".
I more or less followed CoSource more closely than you followed SourceXchange. I was afraid they were going to do the same as you described for SourceXchange. However, they started out with a "testing" period, where they said projects and proposals wouldn't be honoured. They ended up carrying over the test-projects over to the live test, as the quality of the project proposals was so high.
A bunch of projects are already finished, and the project mentioned in the article is pretty close. (I'll have to pay!)
And about Incentives not working, with Cosource, you as a "consumer" can tell the developpers where your priorities are. That means that small (or large) amounts of money will change hands for a change or the list of priorities.
In the case of the CMYK project, I just don't have the time right now, and Andrew does.
Roger.
after a while, their brains had corrected and the world appeared rightside-up.
The experiment also showed that this was done at a "low" level: The subjects had "trained" in town and when they were confident again to walk around and such, they were also able to ride a bike for instance.
The subjects were also able to go downhill skiing with the contraption on. Once they were used to the device, they didn't need any more training to do specific tasks with the inverted image.
Roger.
Also, I thought Stevie Wonder was born blind.
Even if so, stimulating the working part of the eye-nerve will provide vision.
The problem he has translates from latin as "coloured retina". Retina is the part of the eye that translates photons into nerve-pulses.
So probably a part that is normally transparent to let the light through is now opague.
Roger.
People who are given an array of needles on their skin somewhere, that is fed with data from a video camera are quick to be able to "see" through this device. The human mind is VERY much able to process randomly connected nerve impulses to a visual image.
Roger.
I was a freshman in college. Talking to fellow freshmen, the subject wandered to computer security. So I said that breaking security would be easy: Just install a login-trojan. Of 1600 students, most were not computer literate. Many would fall for it.
My friend then challanged me by saying: "YOU can't write a trojan. You're not good enough".
So I proved it to him. HE then goes to the computer center and tries to run it over there, trying to trick the computer center guys. HE gets caught red-handed. (*)
I never ever ran the program. I KNOW that a random "foreign language" or even a "physics" student will fall for it. I also suspect that it is a bit harder to fool the sysops at the Computer Centre.
So they told me and my friend not to use the program. I had never used it. Two weeks later, they "still" found the source in my homedir, and got mad at me for this. (extra restrictions on my account)
A few weeks later I found that the intial passwords that they assigned to ME was just a juggle of a few letters of my account name. If you did the juggle on another name, you had a 20% chance of hitting the assigned password.
2000 accounts. 400 used, 1600 never used. 320 free accounts....
Later I found that they had the file with the assigned intial passwords online. World readable. (in a non-readable directory). Bingo. 1600 accounts. Never used them though. Just to verify that what I'd found was indeed the material that I THOUGHT I had found.
Roger.
(*) Pretty obvious: You had to stay "logged in" to be able to run a program. The system printed "xxx logged out" when you logged out. So the trojan sent the "wedge terminal" code before logging out, but they had different terminals at the CC.
The next step, obtaining an actual image of a planet, will probably have to wait for the next generation of space observatories that will come into operation in about 10 years' time.
Hey, we can do the math how large that telescope
is going to be. I don't know the formula, but we have all the numbers.
We'd like about 100 pixels across the planet, but
will settle for 20. Jupiter sized planet which is 11 times earth. So the diameter is about 1.3*10^8m . So pixel size comes to 6.5*10^6m.
The distance to that planet is 50*3*10^8*3600*24*365=4.7*10^17 . So each pixel represents an angle of 1.4 * 10^-11 (in radians).
Now from this and the wavelenght of the light we can calculate the minimum size of the telescope. I don't know the formula anymore, so I'll probably miss out on a few factors of 2 and PI.
But lambda (wavelength of the light, 500nm)divided by the arc becomes 36km. So, my estimate is that this telescope that can take pictures of this planet is at least 36km (22 miles) in size.
Either that physical size, or some coupled telescopes. As far as I know, they are already working on getting this to work. But mirror accuracies will probably have to be phenomenal. Like in less than the size of an atom.
Roger.
I'm sinning myself too, but it's late out here....
Many people talking about splitting up Microsoft seem to forget the mainpoint about this.
The main point is that Microsoft (operating systems division) is trying to maintain their monopoly. They didn't mind fighting the browser war for this. If they'd just let Java happen, by now everybody would've been running Java word processors on any platform they'd like on their PC, not neccesarily MS Windows.
That's what Microsoft succesfully prevented in the browser wars. It is about cost-of-entry into the PC operating systems market.
This is just one of the "bad" things that microsoft did to keep their market share. A ruling in this case should prevent MANY of those "bad" things from happening again. Splitting microsoft up doesn't help enough, IMHO.
Roger.
Second, public key cryptography works with relatively large blocks of data at a time.
Don't think I'm picking on you. You're just the so-many-eth that makes this mistake, and I think I should set this straight.
If you need a stream cypher, you can just take the past data, and shove it into the encryption routine. The random bytes you then get, you just feed in an XOR with the data. As much as you need. And once you exhaust one your "blob" of encryption, you use the encrypted data, or the plaintext as the source for another encryption round.
People get a "bad feeling" with XOR, as it feels unsafe (probably because if you just xor with the password, it actually IS unsafe....). But that's not true. If the "key" I XOR with has "random" ones and zeros, all bits have had a 50/50 chance of having been flipped, So wether there is a 0 or a 1, you really can't say wether it was flipped or not and wether the original might have been a 0 or a 1.
So, an algorithm like RSA spewing 1000 to 2000 bits at you at a time, doesn't really matter. What matters is that RSA or other public key crypto is orders of magnitude slower than a symmetric. (as everybody else is saying...)
Roger.
So, for example, during a TCP handshake you use RSA to exchange a 2048 byte key. Then use your favorite symmetric cypher (3DES, IDEA, whatever) with this shared key to encrypt the stream
2048 byte? Don't you mean 2048 bit?
Many stream encryptions that I know of, need 64-128 bits ok keyspace, and that's quite enough. And RSA would naturally give between 500 and 2000 bits of data per "run" of the algorithm. So for 2000 bytes, you'd need to run RSA 8 times in a row, giving MUCH more bits than you really need.
Roger.
I have a file called "test.file" in my homedir. It is 10Mb out of /dev/random:
dd if=/dev/random of=test.file bs=1k count=10240
I can honestly maintain that this is random binary data. However if I do have something to hide, I'll put it in there.
I recommend that everyone creates a 10Mb "test.file", just to test the Linux random number generator....
When any one of us gets forced to give up the key to that file (wether there is stuff in there or not), just shout for help on slashdot, and you'll quickly have a few bunch of people who've had a "test.file" on their harddisk just like you, proving that they are just testfiles.....
Roger.
2) The size and periodicity of the wobble allowed the researchers to _predict_ the size, and period of the planet's orbit.
The physical size was determined from the dip. The mass was determined from the period in the wobble.
3) The existence of the planet was _confirmed_ by finding a photometric dimming of light from the star, consistent with transit of a gas giant planet, at exactly the time and periodicity _predicted_ by the spectography.
Periodicity? They sighted the dimming effect once, and Sunday the second one was supposed to happen. What did happen, was that the measurement was spoiled by clouds. Three days till the next possible measurement. So? Just wait it out? Good science. "OH, Observatory shuts down for the winter, no more measurements till next spring."
This sounds to me as if they are rushing ahead with publishing the things without allowing enough time to evaluate correctly what they are seeing. Maybe a bird flew over the observatory during the measurement around the right time.
The graph of the wobble looks like a perfect sine, extrapolated from the 6 shown dots. That's highly inaccurate. Sure you can fit a sine to any number of random dots. Jot down a number of random points between -30 and +60 and tell the computer to find a fitting sine. I'm sure it will find one. Now try the following: randomly pick 6 x-values between 0 and 250. Calculate 50 * sin (x_i). Now add 6 random values, say between -2 and +2, to the calculated "measurements", and tell the computer to find the sine wave. I expect you'll find wildly different values from the amplitude 50 (100 top-top), and the period 2PI.
The gif shows 6 points, but has a heading saying something about 2000 points. I'm not sure what to make of that. 2000 measurements is WAY too labor-intensive. I don't believe they made 2000 spectra.
Speaking as a working scientist, I think it is also a very nice demonstration of how how science works in the real world, too often misunderstood even by the techies on slashdot.
Speaking as a techie on slashdot, I think this is a nice demonstration of "release early and often" which applies to open source, and not science.
Publishing in a peer-reviewed magazine, means that the reviewers had the chance of asking all kinds of nasty questions, and they were able to ask for supporting documentation, for example the raw data.
If you publish on the internet, you can make the raw data available, so that those interested can verify the data on their own.
Roger.
... beleive with >99.99% confidence ...
...
...proven in our lifetimes.
Well, I can tell you that with higher than 99.99999% confidnece: We need einstein proven wrong first....
Roger.
Quote from the article:
The defeat of the algorithms, which were weak because they were designed to meet U.S. and Japanese export controls, makes it possible to build an open-source DVD player that the DVD Forum can't disable, he said.
The problem is that the public (including authors writing about this) don't understand the difference between 40 bits and 16 bits.
The encryption was weakened to 40 bits for us export restrictions, which, if a decryption operation takes a second, requires 35 thousand years to crack. Ok, so the decryption takes only a millisecond, you can brute-force it in 35 years on one computer, or in about a month on 350 computers. But that's still serious deterrent to casual copying.
This is a combination of problems: The code was weak "inside" so that with a known-plaintext, you can crack the key in 2^16 operations. Takes about a tenth of a second. Now, if the export laws hadn't been there, they might have used a 128bit key, and that's enough that leaking 24 bits is not a problem. Even if the algorithm leaks 60% of the bits, having 75 bits left is strong enough to thwart copy attempts.
So, it's the combination that's dangerous: 40 bits is enough, but in combination with an algorithm that can now execute in under a second, or with an algorithm that leaks keybits, it is NOT enough.
Roger.
It's a legal fact now, The Findings of fact by Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case has a good definition of "operating system".
Roger.
Factor into this the superb health care, education, transport infrastructure and the fact that Switzerland is simply the most beautiful place on the planet and I'd work there for free...
Well, where does the money come from to buy ski-passes?
But seriously, Switzerland is one of the countries that is quite serious about not letting just about anybody into the country "for good".
Fine if you come skiing, fine if you come and deliver some (big) machine and need to fine-tune it for a week. Not fine if you want to come and just work for a Swiss company, and see how long you can stay.
Roger.
(NOTE: I may be off track here, as well designed IRQ sharing might not be a bad thing).
PCI IRQ sharing is fine.
However, you should realize that a manufacturer can have made the mistake of creating a device where the driver cannot easily determine whether this device caused the interrupt. As the device interrupts only say a hundred times per second, that's not considered a problem.
Now you add a second card on that IRQ where that second card interrupts thousands of times per second, and you have a problem.
Roger.
This finding of fact may not be 100%
Yes, I was VERY impressed by the accuracy of the judge's ruling.
One thing though: "at all times in the last x years microsofts marketshare was above 90%" is technically incompatible with "when in 9x OS/2's marketshare was over 10%".
(I didn't go back to the original ruling to find exact quotes for this, so treat with care... )
Roger.
The $15K model is needed for writing the standard 18 GB DVD-ROM disks.
I'm not sure wether you'll be able to do double sided/double density even on the $15k models. I would expect you to be limited to single layer when writing....
But at least 5G/side should be possible.
Roger.
I'm not sure if it is possible to make a playble video DVD without regional encoding,
Simple answer: There is a bit field, a one in the riht position means that it is playable in that region.....
Of course the most common values are 0xff (playable everywhere) and the powers of two (playable in just one region).
Roger.
40 bits is a completely insane size
As people are used to algorithms that can do one encryption in about a microsecond, brute-forcing 40 bits becomes feasable. However, if your algorithm is inherently slow, and takes for example one second (on a current computer) to perform, then it would take about 34k years to break.
Now if computers continue to get faster at 1000 times every 20 years, that 40bit key to that encryption algorithm can be cracked by 34 computers in one year, 20 years from now.
That's "reasonable security".
One or two bits is rediculous. 40 bits isn't that bad, but it depends on the algorithm. Try a 40bit RSA key. That can be broken in seconds.
40 bits DES Is "tricky", and we can design an encryption that is pretty strong with 40 bits. There is nothing inherently wrong with 40 bits.
Roger.
About typesetting math equations:
I was writing my masters thesis in LaTeX. Found out about formulae and found them pretty neat. Concluded that this was better than everything I had ever seen, except perhaps the first-year-calculus book.
Enter: the book. Took the book off the shelf, and checked it against what TeX produces. Hmm. Turns out TeX produces WILDLY better formated formulae than what the calculus book had. hehe.
Roger.