but as with many complaints about GIMP it is an issue of window handling, which comes down to window management, which, because GIMP was designed to run on X, is the responsibility of the window manager, not GIMP.
That's no valid as either an excuse or an explanation. The authors of The Gimp knew how X11 WMs worked 10 years ago, and they know they haven't changed too much in the meantime.
So if I go into business and start selling hydrogen cars, it's not my fault or responsibility that customers have noplace to refuel.
I use the "maximise to available area" feature in the window manager I use to maximise the image window to be as large as possible without overlapping any of the palettes.
So you can't have any windows from other applications onscreen at all. Not a great solution. And what do you do when you'd like to minimize The Gimp and look at something else? Minimize 6 different palettes individually?
Both those problems can be worked-around by assigning a desktop space that's for The Gimp only- but the existence of workarounds doesn't absolve the designer.
The complaint seems to be that GIMP doesn't have an MDI interface, and that that is fundamentally bad.
Not quite. "MDI" stands for "Multiple Document Interface", but a major problem that many people have with The GIMP is that even when they're working on just a single document, there are still two separate windows out there. The separate and unattachable button palette can be either awkward or confusing for many users. (Especially in that it makes application behavior quite dependent on the WM)
Windex82 never said it did. Note her scare quotes around "emulation".
rather than drawing it in software with occasional help from your hardware(as would be emulation).
That sentence demonstrates that you don't know the definition of "emulation". If you'd like to learn it, you could either check a dictionary, or read about other emulation projects such as UltraHLE (Ask yourself if that one does all its drawing in software)
Re:8 bit propritary code ... hm ...
on
Archon to be Revived
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
That leaves core game logic, which is probably copyrighted.
Right on the front page, they brag: "Improved computer AI". That's a change. And once you make one change to the gameplay experience (aside from just prettier graphics and sound), there is no reason to keep on with the old code.
The only possible explanation to keep the original code in there is if it produced very subtle effects that old-time players could remember with instinctive muscle-memory.
That explanation just doesn't stand up to scrutiny: the game logic of Archon is hardly any more complex than that of Tetris. It would certainly be less work to re-implement it from the basic design than to deal with creating an 8-bit execution environment on a 32-bit PC.
You're making a common first-year programmer's mistake.
You're making the common blockhead's mistake of not responding to what someone wrote, and instead imagining that someone had written a mistake to which you have prepared a clever rejoinder. This technique is sometimes called "strawmanning", although in this specific situation it's really just simplistic offtopicism and missingpointitosis.
How do you prove that your software doesn't have any bugs?
Outside of very restrictive academic domains, I don't. Of course, if you'd paid any attention to what I already wrote, you wouldn't be asking such a pointless question.
Now, given that, how much money is it worth to "ensure" you don't have any exploitable code in your software?
I never wrote the word "ensure", so you have no basis to "quote" me saying it.
Close to 1 year ago, I conducted an extensive test of clipboard compatibility between the major Free Software desktop applications. (OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE Office, Abiword, Gnumeric, and The Gimp). Scores were dismal, especially for The Gimp, which usually appeared to be using a clipboard system completely disjoint from the other applications.
Quick retests conducted today, using the newer 2.0 GIMP series, show tremendous improvement.
Today, The GIMP is capable of accepting graphics pasted from Kword, OpenOffice.org, or Abiword. And material copied from it can be pasted into Kword or Abiword.
The GIMP's new recognition of X11 clipboard protocols is a major step forward. (There is no excuse that it took so long, though)
Is getting the GIMP's UI to standardize on "NOT SUCKING"
In case anyone is skeptical, I'll just point out two minor ways that The GIMP's UI sucks:
The "Open File" dialog box has no text-input field. That's right, there's no place for you to type in the file you want. A knowledgable person could pop up a separate mini-window to type in a filename (which will then be lacking a scrollable list of files & folders), or do a type-ahead search, but neither of those options justifies removing the simple text field. Taking out that field was doubly bad: once for the actual functionality lost, and again for the fact that it's very different from every other Open File dialog out there, which will confuse users.
I could also go into the Save File dialog, and now that's wrong. Basically, it has the reverse problem: you can type in filenames, but can't see a list of what's already there. (Files or directories)
And of course, those two specific problems (recently introduced in version 2.x) were on top of the longstanding GIMP interface complaint: the inability to dock toolbars onto the edge of the image window makes the overall interface too dependent on the WM.
Firstly, they wouldn't be recognizeable as zip files because they'd been randomly rearranged, after being encrypted, after being zipped.
Right, and that's exactly the problem. If they dont' appear to
I'm proposing is that this zipped then encrypted then swizzled data would then be steganography-ied by (say) putting its bits into the low bits of a picture.
That goes back to a more subtle issue of detectability of steganography. What ediron2 said is that if the investigators are familiar with the manner in which the source images were produced (like a bias or repetitive pattern in the scanner collecting the pictures), then noticing a disturbance in that pattern will give them a clue as to steganography's presence.
I personally feel that's a little farfetched, as it implies both flawed hardware, and the investigator having serious insight into those flaws- but regardless, the fact that the hidden data is unbiased itself (random) doesn't hinder their utilization of this technique: "Hey, there's supposed to be a distinctive sawtooth pattern in the chromaticity FFT, but some kind of random noise is blurring it out! Arrest that guy". Implausible, I think, but no less so.
then said download may not have been anonymous, and the distributor of said program may be about to experience much pain, BUT once the program is downloaded, subsequent posts of data are, well, anonymous.
No. Anonymizing programs don't work that way. They work according to a "they can't arrest ALL of us" theory. A person logging at your ISP can see that you're sending out encrypted messages to an anoymizing service, which might be either an individual proxy server, or a randomly-selected other user executing the anonymizing program. The anonymizing concept only works so long as many other non-suspected people are also anonymizing. (That is, it only works in the same kind of situation where ubiquitous cryptography renders stegaongraphy irrelevant). Both (non-stegan obfuscated) cryptography and anonymizer programs will not work under a regime that decides to outlaw their operation.
As a righteous, God-fearing Christian nation, the United States of America cannot allow patents to abide on her fair soil.
The heathen Japanese may do as they like, but right-thinking Americans know that all things were invented first by the Intelligent Design of the Almighty. Honor thy father and thy mother, and no sinful man shall lay claim to that which belongs to his Creator. Do not commit the sin of pride an imagine that you have seen what God could not. Amen.
Therefore, it should not be possible to "taint" work with IP,
This article is about patents, not copyright, so the concept of "tainting" just doesn't apply.
If an engineer who's never seen your copyrighted program accidently reproduces it in his own lab, and he can prove to have never viewed your implementation before (which is easiest if you haven't published yet), then he's freely allowed to keep using and selling his own version.
But if it were a patent instead, then the fact that he's non-tainted avails him nothing. Even if he invented it independently- even if he invented it FIRST- his company cannot utilize a method you've patented without licensing it from you.
This is a problem with the patent system, for two reasons:
You missed the third reason, which trumps the other two:
3. A patent should not be granted unless doing so promotes the progress of science or the useful arts.
That concept is codified as supreme law in the USA, but is a good idea for all nations. It's easy to argue that patents on user interface ideas can almost never benefit progress.
After all, patents are meant as an enticement for inventors to disclose their inventions to the world, instead of hiding it in the basement using it themselves. The revenue potential from a UI enhancement that's displayed in a customer-facing product is thousands or millions of times greater than if it were kept secret. Therefore, the inventor needed no incentive to disclose the idea, so the fact that it was patentable didn't promote progress in any way.
I believe that there are whole categories of inventions, including most software and business methods, that cannot be realistically exploited without public disclosure, and which thus deserve no patent coverage.
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
Easy answers: Simulation, between little to none. Testing: exactly none.
After all, when humans go about releases gases that effect THIS entire planet, they hardly ever simulate the results beforehand. And, redundant experimental planets being somewhat pricey to acquire, they never test the changes beforehand either.
Role-Playing consists of having engaging stories, typically filled with engaging characters and well thought out plots.
Um no, you're talking about "character playing". "Roles" are not characters, and "role playing" was a well-defined psychological term well before Gary Gygax went into business.
A "role" is a fairly empty description of only the more superficial aspects of a character- RPGs where people are defined by their job (fighter, wizard, thief) are quite truely "role playing".
These games are typically the older ones programmed mainly for DOS or early windows environs.
Very oddly, it now happens that games which are written for X-Box and ported to desktop Windows XP often ask you to describe your hardware on first run. Apparently, because it came from a platform where there was no hardware variability, the game inherently couldn't cope with autodetection on it's own...
No, the CD is real, the data still isn't any more real than before.
The data on the CD (or the MP3) is intrinsically valuable on its own. No matter how you reformat it, the very content of the information will be interesting and attractive to some people.
The "virtual goods" that MMORPG-traders farm is something else... the data itself has no particular value of embodied creativity or effort. It may just be a number signifying 50 million platinum pieces. The value comes from the fact that those variables reside on a particular computer used to run a popular game server. Burned on a CD, those few bytes would have no important to anyone unless you could convince Blizzard to import them into the game.
(Compare copyrightable artistic works with uncopyrightable simple facts. Compare also agaisnt state currencies which are only valuable because people consider them of value)
If the algorithms in your code shown are not covered by the patents than bobs your uncle.
Right, but there's no need to see the code to tell if it's infringing the patent or not. For many software patents, including this one, an observation of external behavior is all that's required to verify infringement.
That's because the patent actually covers WHAT is done, and not only HOW. Theoretically, patents shouldn't be allowed to apply that broadly, but today, they do.
So why do we expect better from software that's been written by people?
Because it's actually possible to do better. Software can be improved; it can even be perfected*.
When a locked bike is stolen, the victim will buy a new bike, and try a little harder to protect it. Maybe she'll get a bigger lock, maybe she'll lock it in more busy places or for shorter times. But those are small, marginal improvements that do nothing fundamentally to fix the security.
But what will the admins do after their train-station WiFi was infringed? They will install a fixed system that's not just 25% or 50% stronger, but that completely elimiates that particular exploitable flaw. It'll be a change of not just quantity, but quality. They will not be vulnerable to the same form of attack again.
Conclusion: We expect more of software because those higher expectations can be met. Real-world security holes are due to unalterable laws of physics- most software security holes are due to designer oversight. We can do better, as long as we remember the possibilities.
* Someone my contradict me and say that nothing's perfect, or that even software which is perfect within it's abstract computing world is vulnerable to physical laws regarding hardware failure or operator error. So what I mean by "perfected software" in this sense is when all designer-caused flaws have been elminated. We're not there yet, so we should keep trying.
It's real simple arithmetic. Read that web page and show me where its arithmetic is wrong.
Done. The web page is wrong because it assumes that only the Japanese need to bother about logistics. It lists in detail how the Japanese couldn't have brought in enough men/supplies to defeat the large American defense force there, while completely ignoring the possibility of a simple siege.
The page, while correct, is irrelevant to my suggestion of a naval siege, because it only demonstrates that the Empire couldn't have completed a rapid invasion in force. If one assumes, as that web page does, that a catastrophic loss at Midway had devastated the US Navy, then the eventual defeat of Hawaii would've been only a matter of time. Non-self-sufficient islands can never withstand naval superiority.
Such a scenario is quite similar to what would've happened if the Bismark had survived it's maiden voyage: effective blockade of England rendering it combat incapable after a few years. (By "effective", I mean not that every ship is intercepted, but enough shipping is lost to make continuance untenable)
How is that result different from the garbage produced by trying to decrypt information from a picture that in fact has no hidden message?
I already specifically answered that, so I shouldn't expect that repeating the answer again will help. Nevertheless:
The difference is that there is a plausible explanation for why the police can't find a hidden message in the picture: because the suspect isn't hiding any messages- he just likes to trade pictures of flowers and kittens. What possible excuse could a suspect use to to explain why he repeatedly transmits invalid zip files? "Well, officer, I like to transmit corrupted files to... uh... test my bandwidth, yeah, that's what it's for". Talk like that will get you thrown in the pit.
but I meant "decipher by breaking the code", not "figure out what's there using George Bush methods".
But if you were thinking about people deciphering the code, then you weren't looking at the kind of problem steganography is meant to solve. That's what I tried to explain by pointing out the different classes of notional opposition used in each discipline. The cryptographer's enemy is sneaky and smart, and can read/modify your mail, telephone, and internet signals. But the stegnographer's enemy is brutish and strong, and aside from reading (not editing) your transmissions, will also be bursting into your home for unannounced searches.
If you're truely believe your physical security is unassailble, and no tough men with guns could ever scare you by banging at the door at 3:00 AM, then you don't need stegaongraphy. But for everyone who fears the government, the mob, or some other boogyman, there may be a need for stego.
If I *anonymously* post a stego picture with unbreakable encryption, then breaking into my house is not an option, even if they figure out the picture is a stego.
If the government has the power to abduct citizens for lengthy torture, they also can enforce access logging at the ISP level, so you weren't actually anonymous when you posted. (And no, you can't use any kind of mass-anonymizing proxy system, because just distributing or executing such an application is enough reason to get dragged off in the night)
In fact, if you did have a way to make (and read) that posting anonymously, then concealing it with steganography was pointless. You may as well have left a blatant encrypted message with "Attention Fellow Terrorists" in the header.
Even if they had their entire intact naval force, they could not have maintained a blockade that far from home waters
Now you're going off on all kinds of digressions. All I wanted to do is point out that your specific claim that the Japanese couldn't invade Hawaii because it would be difficult for them to feed the native civilians was flat-out ludicrous.
You said "Japan would have to take up the slack in feeding the locals". That is completely wrong, and that's all I was saying.
I'd like to know what you mean by a single ship accomplishing this.
I call it an "aircraft carrier". Uncontested air superiority over a region means that any hostile ship visiting a port swiftly becomes nothing more than a navigational hazard.
Slashdot Mirror
but as with many complaints about GIMP it is an issue of window handling, which comes down to window management, which, because GIMP was designed to run on X, is the responsibility of the window manager, not GIMP.
That's no valid as either an excuse or an explanation. The authors of The Gimp knew how X11 WMs worked 10 years ago, and they know they haven't changed too much in the meantime.
So if I go into business and start selling hydrogen cars, it's not my fault or responsibility that customers have noplace to refuel.
I use the "maximise to available area" feature in the window manager I use to maximise the image window to be as large as possible without overlapping any of the palettes.
So you can't have any windows from other applications onscreen at all. Not a great solution. And what do you do when you'd like to minimize The Gimp and look at something else? Minimize 6 different palettes individually?
Both those problems can be worked-around by assigning a desktop space that's for The Gimp only- but the existence of workarounds doesn't absolve the designer.
The complaint seems to be that GIMP doesn't have an MDI interface, and that that is fundamentally bad.
Not quite. "MDI" stands for "Multiple Document Interface", but a major problem that many people have with The GIMP is that even when they're working on just a single document, there are still two separate windows out there. The separate and unattachable button palette can be either awkward or confusing for many users. (Especially in that it makes application behavior quite dependent on the WM)
Proper GUI design, at it's core, is really a matter of widget selection and placement.
Proper creative writing, at it's core, is really a matter of word selection and placement.
Proper bio-engineering, at it's core, is really a matter of molecule selection and placement.
Why, THANK YOU for that tremendous insight!
It doesn't emulate.
Windex82 never said it did. Note her scare quotes around "emulation".
rather than drawing it in software with occasional help from your hardware(as would be emulation).
That sentence demonstrates that you don't know the definition of "emulation". If you'd like to learn it, you could either check a dictionary, or read about other emulation projects such as UltraHLE (Ask yourself if that one does all its drawing in software)
That leaves core game logic, which is probably copyrighted.
Right on the front page, they brag: "Improved computer AI". That's a change. And once you make one change to the gameplay experience (aside from just prettier graphics and sound), there is no reason to keep on with the old code.
The only possible explanation to keep the original code in there is if it produced very subtle effects that old-time players could remember with instinctive muscle-memory.
That explanation just doesn't stand up to scrutiny: the game logic of Archon is hardly any more complex than that of Tetris. It would certainly be less work to re-implement it from the basic design than to deal with creating an 8-bit execution environment on a 32-bit PC.
You're making a common first-year programmer's mistake.
You're making the common blockhead's mistake of not responding to what someone wrote, and instead imagining that someone had written a mistake to which you have prepared a clever rejoinder. This technique is sometimes called "strawmanning", although in this specific situation it's really just simplistic offtopicism and missingpointitosis.
How do you prove that your software doesn't have any bugs?
Outside of very restrictive academic domains, I don't. Of course, if you'd paid any attention to what I already wrote, you wouldn't be asking such a pointless question.
Now, given that, how much money is it worth to "ensure" you don't have any exploitable code in your software?
I never wrote the word "ensure", so you have no basis to "quote" me saying it.
Close to 1 year ago, I conducted an extensive test of clipboard compatibility between the major Free Software desktop applications. (OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE Office, Abiword, Gnumeric, and The Gimp). Scores were dismal, especially for The Gimp, which usually appeared to be using a clipboard system completely disjoint from the other applications.
Quick retests conducted today, using the newer 2.0 GIMP series, show tremendous improvement.
Today, The GIMP is capable of accepting graphics pasted from Kword, OpenOffice.org, or Abiword. And material copied from it can be pasted into Kword or Abiword.
The GIMP's new recognition of X11 clipboard protocols is a major step forward. (There is no excuse that it took so long, though)
Is getting the GIMP's UI to standardize on "NOT SUCKING"
In case anyone is skeptical, I'll just point out two minor ways that The GIMP's UI sucks:
The "Open File" dialog box has no text-input field. That's right, there's no place for you to type in the file you want. A knowledgable person could pop up a separate mini-window to type in a filename (which will then be lacking a scrollable list of files & folders), or do a type-ahead search, but neither of those options justifies removing the simple text field. Taking out that field was doubly bad: once for the actual functionality lost, and again for the fact that it's very different from every other Open File dialog out there, which will confuse users.
I could also go into the Save File dialog, and now that's wrong. Basically, it has the reverse problem: you can type in filenames, but can't see a list of what's already there. (Files or directories)
And of course, those two specific problems (recently introduced in version 2.x) were on top of the longstanding GIMP interface complaint: the inability to dock toolbars onto the edge of the image window makes the overall interface too dependent on the WM.
Firstly, they wouldn't be recognizeable as zip files because they'd been randomly rearranged, after being encrypted, after being zipped.
Right, and that's exactly the problem. If they dont' appear to
I'm proposing is that this zipped then encrypted then swizzled data would then be steganography-ied by (say) putting its bits into the low bits of a picture.
That goes back to a more subtle issue of detectability of steganography. What ediron2 said is that if the investigators are familiar with the manner in which the source images were produced (like a bias or repetitive pattern in the scanner collecting the pictures), then noticing a disturbance in that pattern will give them a clue as to steganography's presence.
I personally feel that's a little farfetched, as it implies both flawed hardware, and the investigator having serious insight into those flaws- but regardless, the fact that the hidden data is unbiased itself (random) doesn't hinder their utilization of this technique: "Hey, there's supposed to be a distinctive sawtooth pattern in the chromaticity FFT, but some kind of random noise is blurring it out! Arrest that guy". Implausible, I think, but no less so.
then said download may not have been anonymous, and the distributor of said program may be about to experience much pain, BUT once the program is downloaded, subsequent posts of data are, well, anonymous.
No. Anonymizing programs don't work that way. They work according to a "they can't arrest ALL of us" theory. A person logging at your ISP can see that you're sending out encrypted messages to an anoymizing service, which might be either an individual proxy server, or a randomly-selected other user executing the anonymizing program. The anonymizing concept only works so long as many other non-suspected people are also anonymizing. (That is, it only works in the same kind of situation where ubiquitous cryptography renders stegaongraphy irrelevant). Both (non-stegan obfuscated) cryptography and anonymizer programs will not work under a regime that decides to outlaw their operation.
Neither language enforces any kind of type checking.
It'll be enforced if you ask for it. Just say "use strict" in any perl file.
As a righteous, God-fearing Christian nation, the United States of America cannot allow patents to abide on her fair soil.
The heathen Japanese may do as they like, but right-thinking Americans know that all things were invented first by the Intelligent Design of the Almighty. Honor thy father and thy mother, and no sinful man shall lay claim to that which belongs to his Creator. Do not commit the sin of pride an imagine that you have seen what God could not. Amen.
Therefore, it should not be possible to "taint" work with IP,
This article is about patents, not copyright, so the concept of "tainting" just doesn't apply.
If an engineer who's never seen your copyrighted program accidently reproduces it in his own lab, and he can prove to have never viewed your implementation before (which is easiest if you haven't published yet), then he's freely allowed to keep using and selling his own version.
But if it were a patent instead, then the fact that he's non-tainted avails him nothing. Even if he invented it independently- even if he invented it FIRST- his company cannot utilize a method you've patented without licensing it from you.
This is a problem with the patent system, for two reasons:
You missed the third reason, which trumps the other two:
3. A patent should not be granted unless doing so promotes the progress of science or the useful arts.
That concept is codified as supreme law in the USA, but is a good idea for all nations. It's easy to argue that patents on user interface ideas can almost never benefit progress.
After all, patents are meant as an enticement for inventors to disclose their inventions to the world, instead of hiding it in the basement using it themselves. The revenue potential from a UI enhancement that's displayed in a customer-facing product is thousands or millions of times greater than if it were kept secret. Therefore, the inventor needed no incentive to disclose the idea, so the fact that it was patentable didn't promote progress in any way.
I believe that there are whole categories of inventions, including most software and business methods, that cannot be realistically exploited without public disclosure, and which thus deserve no patent coverage.
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
Easy answers: Simulation, between little to none. Testing: exactly none.
After all, when humans go about releases gases that effect THIS entire planet, they hardly ever simulate the results beforehand. And, redundant experimental planets being somewhat pricey to acquire, they never test the changes beforehand either.
Role-Playing consists of having engaging stories, typically filled with engaging characters and well thought out plots.
Um no, you're talking about "character playing". "Roles" are not characters, and "role playing" was a well-defined psychological term well before Gary Gygax went into business.
A "role" is a fairly empty description of only the more superficial aspects of a character- RPGs where people are defined by their job (fighter, wizard, thief) are quite truely "role playing".
These games are typically the older ones programmed mainly for DOS or early windows environs.
Very oddly, it now happens that games which are written for X-Box and ported to desktop Windows XP often ask you to describe your hardware on first run. Apparently, because it came from a platform where there was no hardware variability, the game inherently couldn't cope with autodetection on it's own...
No, the CD is real, the data still isn't any more real than before.
The data on the CD (or the MP3) is intrinsically valuable on its own. No matter how you reformat it, the very content of the information will be interesting and attractive to some people.
The "virtual goods" that MMORPG-traders farm is something else... the data itself has no particular value of embodied creativity or effort. It may just be a number signifying 50 million platinum pieces. The value comes from the fact that those variables reside on a particular computer used to run a popular game server. Burned on a CD, those few bytes would have no important to anyone unless you could convince Blizzard to import them into the game.
(Compare copyrightable artistic works with uncopyrightable simple facts. Compare also agaisnt state currencies which are only valuable because people consider them of value)
If the algorithms in your code shown are not covered by the patents than bobs your uncle.
Right, but there's no need to see the code to tell if it's infringing the patent or not. For many software patents, including this one, an observation of external behavior is all that's required to verify infringement.
That's because the patent actually covers WHAT is done, and not only HOW. Theoretically, patents shouldn't be allowed to apply that broadly, but today, they do.
So why do we expect better from software that's been written by people?
Because it's actually possible to do better. Software can be improved; it can even be perfected*.
When a locked bike is stolen, the victim will buy a new bike, and try a little harder to protect it. Maybe she'll get a bigger lock, maybe she'll lock it in more busy places or for shorter times. But those are small, marginal improvements that do nothing fundamentally to fix the security.
But what will the admins do after their train-station WiFi was infringed? They will install a fixed system that's not just 25% or 50% stronger, but that completely elimiates that particular exploitable flaw. It'll be a change of not just quantity, but quality. They will not be vulnerable to the same form of attack again.
Conclusion: We expect more of software because those higher expectations can be met. Real-world security holes are due to unalterable laws of physics- most software security holes are due to designer oversight. We can do better, as long as we remember the possibilities.
* Someone my contradict me and say that nothing's perfect, or that even software which is perfect within it's abstract computing world is vulnerable to physical laws regarding hardware failure or operator error. So what I mean by "perfected software" in this sense is when all designer-caused flaws have been elminated. We're not there yet, so we should keep trying.
IF you're not copying them then your source will show that.
And even if you're not copying from them, you may still be violating their patent.
To infringe a patent you do not have to copy anything. It can be completely your own invention, without ever having heard of the other research.
It's real simple arithmetic. Read that web page and show me where its arithmetic is wrong.
Done. The web page is wrong because it assumes that only the Japanese need to bother about logistics. It lists in detail how the Japanese couldn't have brought in enough men/supplies to defeat the large American defense force there, while completely ignoring the possibility of a simple siege.
The page, while correct, is irrelevant to my suggestion of a naval siege, because it only demonstrates that the Empire couldn't have completed a rapid invasion in force. If one assumes, as that web page does, that a catastrophic loss at Midway had devastated the US Navy, then the eventual defeat of Hawaii would've been only a matter of time. Non-self-sufficient islands can never withstand naval superiority.
Such a scenario is quite similar to what would've happened if the Bismark had survived it's maiden voyage: effective blockade of England rendering it combat incapable after a few years. (By "effective", I mean not that every ship is intercepted, but enough shipping is lost to make continuance untenable)
How is that result different from the garbage produced by trying to decrypt information from a picture that in fact has no hidden message?
I already specifically answered that, so I shouldn't expect that repeating the answer again will help. Nevertheless:
The difference is that there is a plausible explanation for why the police can't find a hidden message in the picture: because the suspect isn't hiding any messages- he just likes to trade pictures of flowers and kittens. What possible excuse could a suspect use to to explain why he repeatedly transmits invalid zip files? "Well, officer, I like to transmit corrupted files to... uh... test my bandwidth, yeah, that's what it's for". Talk like that will get you thrown in the pit.
but I meant "decipher by breaking the code", not "figure out what's there using George Bush methods".
But if you were thinking about people deciphering the code, then you weren't looking at the kind of problem steganography is meant to solve. That's what I tried to explain by pointing out the different classes of notional opposition used in each discipline. The cryptographer's enemy is sneaky and smart, and can read/modify your mail, telephone, and internet signals. But the stegnographer's enemy is brutish and strong, and aside from reading (not editing) your transmissions, will also be bursting into your home for unannounced searches.
If you're truely believe your physical security is unassailble, and no tough men with guns could ever scare you by banging at the door at 3:00 AM, then you don't need stegaongraphy. But for everyone who fears the government, the mob, or some other boogyman, there may be a need for stego.
If I *anonymously* post a stego picture with unbreakable encryption, then breaking into my house is not an option, even if they figure out the picture is a stego.
If the government has the power to abduct citizens for lengthy torture, they also can enforce access logging at the ISP level, so you weren't actually anonymous when you posted. (And no, you can't use any kind of mass-anonymizing proxy system, because just distributing or executing such an application is enough reason to get dragged off in the night)
In fact, if you did have a way to make (and read) that posting anonymously, then concealing it with steganography was pointless. You may as well have left a blatant encrypted message with "Attention Fellow Terrorists" in the header.
Even if they had their entire intact naval force, they could not have maintained a blockade that far from home waters
Now you're going off on all kinds of digressions. All I wanted to do is point out that your specific claim that the Japanese couldn't invade Hawaii because it would be difficult for them to feed the native civilians was flat-out ludicrous.
You said "Japan would have to take up the slack in feeding the locals". That is completely wrong, and that's all I was saying.
I'd like to know what you mean by a single ship accomplishing this.
I call it an "aircraft carrier". Uncontested air superiority over a region means that any hostile ship visiting a port swiftly becomes nothing more than a navigational hazard.
Those of you with subscriptions to Game Dev Mag or the Gamasutra website (free for industry) can read their article on the same theme.
That author claims that a "teaching game" is an oxymoron, based on a narrow semantical interpretation: games can illustrate concepts, not teach them.
a) if you bought a car and did not put on a safety belt...would you be considered stupid if you go in an accicent?
Survey says... yes!