The woman who got the $70,000 forgiven now owes about half that amount to the IRS, plus late penalties, fees, and interest.
It depends on how you look at it. If she can prove that she never spent the money in the first place, she doesn't have to pay income tax on it.
She just has to prove that "She spent VISAs money, not hers", or the casino's.
Suppose someone at Mastercard misreads a salesslip and charges MY creditcard $70000. Mastercard charges me. After two months they figure things out and cancel my debt, do I suddenly have $70000 in extra income? Nah!
Suppose she'd gone and bought a Ferrari for $70000. If now she has that Ferrari, then it is pretty clear that she has had that amount or the Ferrari as income. Since in reality she now has nothing, she can claim not having had any income.
Suppose she won. Could the 'gambling establishment' refuse to give her the winnings on the grounds that she used an illegal loan?
The way to WIN on gambling $70.000 is by doing at most a few bets. If you place 7000 $10 bets, the chances are pretty slim(*) that you will "win".
(*) slim as in happens once in the lifetime of the universe if someone tries the experiment every second.
Here in the netherlands, the odds on some bets are acutally fair. Betting red/black on the roulette table gives you a 50/50 bet. Betting a number gives you 1/37 chance * 36 payback, so you lose on every bet. The red/black rules are such that you get exactly 1/2 * 2 return.
The reason the casino can still make a profit is that people have credit limits. Either in "money in wallet" or on their credit card. That means that you can bet until you're broke. There is a 100% chance that you can "bet till you're broke". If you start with $100 there is a 50/50 chance that you'll end up with $200 before going broke. Many, MANY gamblers will continue "because they are on a winning streak". That means that the stakes for the casino just doubled for the casino ("Yeah right"), but the person still has a good chance of going home broke.
If you really want to make money against the casino, you should go to the casino with $100 in your pocket and leave (or at least stop betting) when you're $10 ahead. There is about a 90/10 chance that you'll leave the casino with more money than you started out with. But the 10% chance is that you'll have lost $100, and the 90% chance is that you'd have won $10.
p.s. Someone do the math to see how long this tunnel would have to be to accelerate an object from rest to 7mps at 1G, 2G and 5G's.
Ah. It's not all that hard. Lets do this metric.
7 Miles per second is 11 km/s. That's about 1.5 times what is required for low earth orbit.
Acellerate at 6G: (11km/s) / (6G * (m/s)/G) = 183s.
In 183 seconds you travel 0.5 * a * t^2 = 0.5 * 60 * 183^2 = 1004670, 100km. 60 miles.
The power requirement to maintain 6G at top speed means you need 0.6 MegaWatt per kg of spaceship. Lauch a 100kg spaceship, and you need 60MW (= 10 trains).
The problem is that if you launch from the surface and intend to coast from there, you'll be in an orbit which will cross the launchpoint on every orbit.... You'll need to (significantly!) correct the course once you're a few hundred miles up.
Oh, travelling at Mach 11 at sealevel is not recommended. heat buildup is too much. I think that with special materials the limit is about Mach 7.
FYI, I've held one of those 340Mb drives in my hands. They are indeed VERY small. Ideal disks for putting into your digital camera. around 170 pictures jpeg-ed to 2Mb per picture at 3600x2400. (Not that you can buy that kind of resolution yet).
As far as I know, they were imidiately announced as a 170Mb and a 340Mb version. The latter simply has two heads while the first only has one.
Firstly, it doesn't address just what is supposed to be "broken" in 12 microseconds. I'm not sure that one would be able to decrypt a message of meaningful size with the private key in that period of time.
Nobody uses RSA to encode the message. Everybody uses RSA to encode a standard "symmetric" key. That decodes the actual message.
The RSA challanges aren't even encoded messages. Just bunch of large numbers, that are a multiple of two primes. If you can factor those, you know you can crack RSA.
Speaking of which, I have a 10Mb subsection of/dev/urandom in a file called test.file. Its name reflects what it is for: It is a test file for urandom.
I recommend that all of you do the same. If you do happen to have something that you want to keep secret, you encode it, and overwrite the first part of the 10Mb file with the encrypted info.
It is just random bits. Nobody can prove anything else.
Let's hope that processor's microcode does not become field upgradable or Intel will start releasing processors that have bugs (not show-stoppers, but minor flaws)
Intel IS shipping processors with field upgradable microcode. Since the Pentium Pro, every processor has upgradeable microcode.
There is an instruction that says: Here is a new microcode for you. The stuff is encrypted. It verifies an unspecified checksum (i.e. Intel only is allowed to give you new microcode), and then loads the new microcode.
I have a stepping 2 Pentium Pro. I think I could software upgrade it to rev 3 or if it exists 4 or 5....
The reason Qwest requires Win9x is to simplify support. NT is very different to configure for dial-up than 9x is, and don't even talk about Linux or Mac
The other reason is that they want to make it easy for their customers to sign up. So they make this do-it-all CD, which happens to only work on 95/98. That's the moment they ship the thing.
What they should realize is that giving a dial-in-number, username, password, DNS IP and a few others, will suffice for many other-os-users.
My cable-modem stops transmitting data after an hour of uploading. Two months after reporting that, the helpdesk comes back with click this, click that for me to check my MTU and stuff. Brilliant!
Even this article talks about using encryption to safegaurd against piracy. Since when can encryption safegaurd against piracy? Encryption can keep a secret between to parties that WANT to keep it, the nature of piracy is that one of the parties wants to spread the information.
Right. So what if we have the "record-company" as one party, and "the hardware-mp3-player" as the other.
If you embed a private-PGP-key into every player, you can make digital pirating almost impossible: you can only play the purchased MP3s on the one targetted MP3player.
Now if that key is in the flash on a CPU in the device, which is programmed "not to give out the key", it can be pretty hard (i.e. not possible for people without an Electronic force microscope) to read out the key.
This "security" creates some "hassle". Suppose I have two of those mp3players. Now I'd like to be able to play my paid-for albums on both. Problem.
Maybe they encode it with one "generic" key. That however breaks down as soon as someone somewhere manages to find that key. Pretty weak. But it has been done before....
Of course, you can still digitize the earphone output....
As far as I know, in the midst of the "space-race" the russians had a man-and-wife up in their space-station (correctly timed & all!) to try and have the "first baby conceived in space".
They tried all sorts of stuff, but making love in 0G was too much trouble, and they never even got close to meeting the objective of a conceived baby, if you catch my drift.....
Let's assume they didn't want to do anything bad. Let's assume they will release their final product under a suitable license.
Then instead of starting to jump up and down about a possible violation to the letter, just wait for the final release. If you feel strongly about it, feel free to write them a letter saying that you're not happy with what they are doing.
If you feel that my "assumptions" are not right, feel free to write them a letter that you're not happy with what they are doing.
If a "violation" would result in a court case within a day, you all would probably be in prison. Have you never ever illegally copied a program? Are you happy that the copyright owners didn't immediately sue your ass off?
Theoretically you might be able to get a two-fold increase in speed. In practise however, the complexity of only doing stuff when the input is valid together with the added number of wires (You need to convey "0" "1" and "not there yet" -> at least two wires) leads to slower circuits.
They tried this at philips back in about '90. Didn't work.
Everybody is telling you (correctly) that bandwidth matters a lot.
Many people are telling you that dynamic content matters a lot too. This is less valid for your application. Slashdot has lots of dynamic content. Everybody can customize his settings, and needs a different page.
If you have a piece of artwork, which is photographed by a webcam, you could go get a snapshot for every "client". Don't do this. It will bog down tremendously. Just have a program make a picture every 10 - 60 seconds. Then you have almost completely static content, and you can serve LOTS of pages using a fairly conservative setup.
> If in the future, people are required to give a > handle or an email address to post > "anonymously", their identity could be > compromised, since/. would have an email > address that might be possible to use to track > down the person.
More importantly, you always (already) give out your IP address. With the proper court orders, the ISP will tell the authorities, who you are. (except possibly when you're browsing from a university terminal room).
I've always thought that there were too little moderator points. If the whole system would change to using deci-points overnight nothing would change would it? Well it would give me the ability to read at 1.5, and it would give a moderator the chance to "dose" things a bit more. Now it either goes up a full point or down. If you allow moderators to give 1 to 10 deci-points to a comment, there is going to be a difference between a 1.5 and a 2.4 comment....
> With the way SGI is embracing Linux, I doubt it.
With the way SGI is embracing MESA, I doubt it.
Over a year ago, they were saying that they were doing everything to get MESA be openGL compliant. The only thing they were refusing him was official OpenGL approval. That last issue might be eroding nowadays.
> At least their encryption isn't just XOR-based.:)
Well, in fact many REAL (&safe) encryption algorithms are run in the xor-with-the-plaintext mode. As long as the bitstream that you XOR with is sufficiently unpredictable, that is perfectly safe.
You're thinking about xor-with-a-fixed-string or somethink like that. That's stupid.
You're bashing on XOR for no good reason. Leave XOR out of it....;-)
> Wasn't IBM's big mistake putting the 384K ROM > space at the top of real memory, instead of the > bottom? My understanding is that IBM did it this > way only because that's how Apple did it (top > 16K of the ]['s 64K.)
No. Placement of the ROM is a processor issue. After reset goes inactive, your processor starts executing at a certain "easy" address. Like 0 (Z80), 0xffff:0? (8086) or 0x7ffe (Transputer).
So, on x86, you have to put your ROM near the end of the memory. If I remember correctly, even modern x86 processors start in 8086 mode near the 1Mb mark.
> So Red Hat is worth 5.6 billion. Anyone have > an idea how this money will be spent?
Most of this is still all "virtual" money. Bob Young holds stock that would be worth $500M if he would be able to sell them all at the current wall-street price.
Red Hat grossed about $84M through the IPO. That's the money they can spend.
Bob Young and the others who have stock will do with their money when/if they sell their stock is purely a private matter for those involved. Red Hat has no say in that.
> I'd take objection to his calling the use of > NP-complete problems
Right.
> From what I recall, what we're depending on > in reality is the fact that NP-complete > problems are harder than any other known > problems, and provide an upper bound on the > hardness of problems.
No. Lower bound.
It has been proven that all NP complete problems are just as hard as any other NP complete problem. That means that if anyone finds a way to solve an NP complete problem in P time, ALL of them have been solved in P time.
Also, the fact that all of them are fundamentally equivalent means that we've been looking at these problems with thousands of people from hundreds of viewpoints for tens of years (3 decades now). That makes the chances of us missing an obvious solution pretty slim.
> We don't know that > NP-complete problems are neccesarily hard to > solve, but we do know that any other problems > are easier to solve.
No. It still hasn't been proven that P != NP. So we'd all celebrate at a big geek-party when someone proves that P == NP, but that would invalidate your statement. It could still happen. It's just quite unlikely.
If one day someone proves P != NP, then your statement suddenly becomes valid.
> Even if someone invents a > linear-time method of solving an NP-complete > problem they're still harder than any other > problems, the upper bound just moved down a lot.
No. Not at all. For example sorting is proven to be N log(N). That means that anybody who claims that he can do better is lying. (figure out how to do the spagetti sort with a computer in linear time as is claimed and you're a hero).
If someone finds a linear solution to any NP problem, most other NP problems will suddenly also be solvable in linear time. That's better than N log (N).
Slashdot Mirror
As in Coherent OS/32? If so, then they were successful enough to have been
used by the TAB (betting agency) here in NZ.
If I remember correctly, the TAB in Australia (*) uses Linux nowadays.... (Article in LinuxJournal.)
-- Roger.
(*) Could very well be NZ too: For me it's all "down under".
The woman who got the $70,000 forgiven now owes about half that amount to the IRS,
plus late penalties, fees, and interest.
It depends on how you look at it. If she can prove that she never spent the money in the first place, she doesn't have to pay income tax on it.
She just has to prove that "She spent VISAs money, not hers", or the casino's.
Suppose someone at Mastercard misreads a salesslip and charges MY creditcard $70000. Mastercard charges me. After two months they figure things out and cancel my debt, do I suddenly have $70000 in extra income? Nah!
Suppose she'd gone and bought a Ferrari for $70000. If now she has that Ferrari, then it is pretty clear that she has had that amount or the Ferrari as income. Since in reality she now has nothing, she can claim not having had any income.
Roger.
Suppose she won. Could the 'gambling establishment' refuse to give her the winnings on
the grounds that she used an illegal loan?
The way to WIN on gambling $70.000 is by doing at most a few bets. If you place 7000 $10 bets, the chances are pretty slim(*) that you will "win".
(*) slim as in happens once in the lifetime of the universe if someone tries the experiment every second.
Here in the netherlands, the odds on some bets are acutally fair. Betting red/black on the roulette table gives you a 50/50 bet. Betting a number gives you 1/37 chance * 36 payback, so you lose
on every bet. The red/black rules are such that you get exactly 1/2 * 2 return.
The reason the casino can still make a profit is that people have credit limits. Either in "money in wallet" or on their credit card. That means that you can bet until you're broke. There is a 100% chance that you can "bet till you're broke". If you start with $100 there is a 50/50 chance that you'll end up with $200 before going broke. Many, MANY gamblers will continue "because they are on a winning streak". That means that the stakes for the casino just doubled for the casino ("Yeah right"), but the person still has a good chance of going home broke.
If you really want to make money against the casino, you should go to the casino with $100 in your pocket and leave (or at least stop betting) when you're $10 ahead. There is about a 90/10 chance that you'll leave the casino with more money than you started out with. But the 10% chance is that you'll have lost $100, and the 90% chance is that you'd have won $10.
Roger.
p.s. Someone do the math to see how long this tunnel would have to be to accelerate
an object from rest to 7mps at 1G, 2G and 5G's.
Ah. It's not all that hard. Lets do this metric.
7 Miles per second is 11 km/s. That's about 1.5 times what is required for low earth orbit.
Acellerate at 6G: (11km/s) / (6G * (m/s)/G) = 183s.
In 183 seconds you travel 0.5 * a * t^2 = 0.5 * 60 * 183^2 = 1004670, 100km. 60 miles.
The power requirement to maintain 6G at top speed means you need 0.6 MegaWatt per kg of spaceship. Lauch a 100kg spaceship, and you need 60MW (= 10 trains).
The problem is that if you launch from the surface and intend to coast from there, you'll be in an orbit which will cross the launchpoint on every orbit.... You'll need to (significantly!) correct the course once you're a few hundred miles up.
Oh, travelling at Mach 11 at sealevel is not recommended. heat buildup is too much. I think that with special materials the limit is about Mach 7.
Roger.
FYI, I've held one of those 340Mb drives in my hands. They are indeed VERY small. Ideal disks for putting into your digital camera. around 170 pictures jpeg-ed to 2Mb per picture at 3600x2400. (Not that you can buy that kind of resolution yet).
As far as I know, they were imidiately announced as a 170Mb and a 340Mb version. The latter simply has two heads while the first only has one.
Roger.
Firstly, it doesn't address just what is supposed to be "broken" in 12 microseconds. I'm not sure that one would be able to decrypt a message of meaningful size with the private key in that period of time.
Nobody uses RSA to encode the message. Everybody uses RSA to encode a standard "symmetric" key. That decodes the actual message.
The RSA challanges aren't even encoded messages. Just bunch of large numbers, that are a multiple of two primes. If you can factor those, you know you can crack RSA.
Roger.
Speaking of which, I have a 10Mb subsection of /dev/urandom in a file called test.file. Its name reflects what it is for: It is a test file for urandom.
I recommend that all of you do the same. If you do happen to have something that you want to keep secret, you encode it, and overwrite the first part of the 10Mb file with the encrypted info.
It is just random bits. Nobody can prove anything else.
Roger.
Let's hope that processor's microcode does not become field upgradable or Intel will start releasing processors that have bugs (not show-stoppers, but minor flaws)
Intel IS shipping processors with field upgradable microcode. Since the Pentium Pro, every processor has upgradeable microcode.
There is an instruction that says: Here is a new microcode for you. The stuff is encrypted. It verifies an unspecified checksum (i.e. Intel only is allowed to give you new microcode), and then loads the new microcode.
I have a stepping 2 Pentium Pro. I think I could software upgrade it to rev 3 or if it exists 4 or 5....
Roger.
What I see in your image is a 2D density image. The "new" story has 3D reconstructions. Gives a whole new dimension to the whole thing....
Roger.
The reason Qwest requires Win9x is to simplify support. NT is very different to configure for dial-up than 9x is, and don't even talk about Linux or Mac
The other reason is that they want to make it easy for their customers to sign up. So they make this do-it-all CD, which happens to only work on 95/98. That's the moment they ship the thing.
What they should realize is that giving a dial-in-number, username, password, DNS IP and a few others, will suffice for many other-os-users.
My cable-modem stops transmitting data after an hour of uploading. Two months after reporting that, the helpdesk comes back with click this, click that for me to check my MTU and stuff. Brilliant!
Roger.
Even this article talks about using encryption to safegaurd against piracy. Since when can encryption safegaurd against piracy? Encryption can keep a secret between to parties
that WANT to keep it, the nature of piracy is that one of the parties wants to spread the
information.
Right. So what if we have the "record-company" as one party, and "the hardware-mp3-player" as the other.
If you embed a private-PGP-key into every player, you can make digital pirating almost impossible: you can only play the purchased MP3s on the one targetted MP3player.
Now if that key is in the flash on a CPU in the device, which is programmed "not to give out the key", it can be pretty hard (i.e. not possible for people without an Electronic force microscope) to read out the key.
This "security" creates some "hassle". Suppose I have two of those mp3players. Now I'd like to be able to play my paid-for albums on both. Problem.
Maybe they encode it with one "generic" key. That however breaks down as soon as someone somewhere manages to find that key. Pretty weak. But it has been done before....
Of course, you can still digitize the earphone output....
Roger.
Hmm. Interesting:
./queso www.nsa.gov:8080 ./queso www.nsa.gov:80
wolff/queso-980922#
208.212.172.33:8080 * Solaris 2.x
wolff/queso-980922#
208.212.172.33:80 *- Linux-2.2.x or Freebsd.
-- Roger.
> This could also make the idea of vmware obsolete, [...]
No, not quite! Besides "emulating" the processor, you need a "monitor" to emulate all the other hardware that an OS would expect.
Roger.
> But sex in space is sure to be damn awkward.
As far as I know, in the midst of the "space-race" the russians had a man-and-wife up in their space-station (correctly timed & all!) to try and have the "first baby conceived in space".
They tried all sorts of stuff, but making love in 0G was too much trouble, and they never even got close to meeting the objective of a conceived baby, if you catch my drift.....
Roger.
Right. Before we all go beserk:
Let's assume they didn't want to do anything bad. Let's assume they will release their final product under a suitable license.
Then instead of starting to jump up and down about a possible violation to the letter, just wait for the final release. If you feel strongly about it, feel free to write them a letter saying that you're not happy with what they are doing.
If you feel that my "assumptions" are not right, feel free to write them a letter that you're not happy with what they are doing.
If a "violation" would result in a court case within a day, you all would probably be in prison. Have you never ever illegally copied a program? Are you happy that the copyright owners didn't immediately sue your ass off?
-- Roger.
I registered a domain not too long ago, and I was not surprised to see that their online credit card payment was simply encrypted using shttp.
Roger.
Theoretically you might be able to get a two-fold increase in speed. In practise however, the complexity of only doing stuff when the input is valid together with the added number of wires (You need to convey "0" "1" and "not there yet" -> at least two wires) leads to slower circuits.
They tried this at philips back in about '90. Didn't work.
Roger.
Everybody is telling you (correctly) that bandwidth matters a lot.
Many people are telling you that dynamic content matters a lot too. This is less valid for your application. Slashdot has lots of dynamic content. Everybody can customize his settings, and needs a different page.
If you have a piece of artwork, which is photographed by a webcam, you could go get a snapshot for every "client". Don't do this. It will bog down tremendously. Just have a program make a picture every 10 - 60 seconds. Then you have almost completely static content, and you can serve LOTS of pages using a fairly conservative setup.
Roger.
> If in the future, people are required to give a /. would have an email
> handle or an email address to post
> "anonymously", their identity could be
> compromised, since
> address that might be possible to use to track
> down the person.
More importantly, you always (already) give out your IP address. With the proper court orders, the ISP will tell the authorities, who you are.
(except possibly when you're browsing from a university terminal room).
Roger.
I've always thought that there were too little
moderator points. If the whole system would
change to using deci-points overnight nothing would change would it? Well it would give me the
ability to read at 1.5, and it would give
a moderator the chance to "dose" things a bit
more. Now it either goes up a full point or down. If you allow moderators to give 1 to 10 deci-points to a comment, there is going to be a difference between a 1.5 and a 2.4 comment....
Roger.
> With the way SGI is embracing Linux, I doubt it.
With the way SGI is embracing MESA, I doubt it.
Over a year ago, they were saying that they were doing everything to get MESA be openGL compliant. The only thing they were refusing him was official OpenGL approval. That last issue might be eroding nowadays.
Roger.
> At least their encryption isn't just XOR-based. :)
;-)
Well, in fact many REAL (&safe) encryption algorithms are run in the xor-with-the-plaintext mode. As long as the bitstream that you XOR with is sufficiently unpredictable, that is perfectly safe.
You're thinking about xor-with-a-fixed-string or somethink like that. That's stupid.
You're bashing on XOR for no good reason. Leave XOR out of it....
Roger.
> Wasn't IBM's big mistake putting the 384K ROM
> space at the top of real memory, instead of the
> bottom? My understanding is that IBM did it this
> way only because that's how Apple did it (top
> 16K of the ]['s 64K.)
No. Placement of the ROM is a processor issue. After reset goes inactive, your processor starts executing at a certain "easy" address. Like 0 (Z80), 0xffff:0? (8086) or 0x7ffe (Transputer).
So, on x86, you have to put your ROM near the end of the memory. If I remember correctly, even modern x86 processors start in 8086 mode near the 1Mb mark.
Roger.
> So Red Hat is worth 5.6 billion. Anyone have
> an idea how this money will be spent?
Most of this is still all "virtual" money. Bob Young holds stock that would be worth $500M if he would be able to sell them all at the current wall-street price.
Red Hat grossed about $84M through the IPO. That's the money they can spend.
Bob Young and the others who have stock will do with their money when/if they sell their stock is purely a private matter for those involved. Red Hat has no say in that.
-- Roger.
> I'd take objection to his calling the use of
> NP-complete problems
Right.
> From what I recall, what we're depending on
> in reality is the fact that NP-complete
> problems are harder than any other known
> problems, and provide an upper bound on the
> hardness of problems.
No. Lower bound.
It has been proven that all NP complete problems are just as hard as any other NP complete problem. That means that if anyone finds a way to solve an NP complete problem in P time, ALL of them have been solved in P time.
Also, the fact that all of them are fundamentally equivalent means that we've been looking at these problems with thousands of people from hundreds of viewpoints for tens of years (3 decades now). That makes the chances of us missing an obvious solution pretty slim.
> We don't know that
> NP-complete problems are neccesarily hard to
> solve, but we do know that any other problems
> are easier to solve.
No. It still hasn't been proven that P != NP. So we'd all celebrate at a big geek-party when someone proves that P == NP, but that would invalidate your statement. It could still happen. It's just quite unlikely.
If one day someone proves P != NP, then your statement suddenly becomes valid.
> Even if someone invents a
> linear-time method of solving an NP-complete
> problem they're still harder than any other
> problems, the upper bound just moved down a lot.
No. Not at all. For example sorting is proven to be N log(N). That means that anybody who claims that he can do better is lying. (figure out how to do the spagetti sort with a computer in linear time as is claimed and you're a hero).
If someone finds a linear solution to any NP problem, most other NP problems will suddenly also be solvable in linear time. That's better than N log (N).
Best regards,
Roger Wolff.