As a long-time CS professor, let me add this: The entire purpose of a university education is to advance your understanding about whatever topic you are studying. To develop mental models. The purpose of a test is to see what you understand, and I want as little as humanly possible between your brain and what you produce for the exam. For the vast majority of students, that means brain to paper, with no distractions in between. My exams never have a lot of writing -- they do tend to have more problems to solve than many students like to solve in one sitting, but they are designed to get to core concepts with as few distractions as possible. I have had many students over the years that struggled with some disability or other that made paper exams difficult (whether dysgraphia or even a blind student in one situation), and so we have accommodations for students.
But again, the entire purpose is to see what you understand. I don't want to see how well you can use a tool, or how fast you can google things, or whether you can do some task like a trained monkey. Do you understand (and can you explain) why a red-black tree is balanced? Do you understand the balancing operation well enough so that you can write down a basic rebalancing operation on paper? Can you analyze the balance property to justify why the tree is O(log n) depth? If you have a clear picture in your mind, and if you really *understand* red-black trees, you should be able to do those things.
I see people speculating above about the government using this to break crypto, but that's really not a huge concern. If people use good keys that require brute force searching, even the smallest AES key size would take over a billion millenia to break at 10^18 ops/second (even assuming you could test a key on one "op"). And for people who use bad keys, you don't need exascale computing to break them.
So what could the FBI use something like this for? What about analysis of massive public and not-so-public data, like data mining Internet postings, email/phone records,... Better not post something with the wrong combination of words, or someone might come knocking on your door.
So for a little over $12,000 you get a 19 week crash course. And people will find this reasonable?
We have a local company that does something similar, for around $10k. And yet, any local resident can go to the local community college and do a programming (or web development) certificate program that covers essentially the same thing for under $900. The Community College consists of four 3 credit hour classes that are designed to be taken in a single 16 week semester. So 12 hours per week of class time, 2-3 times that in outside class work, for a total of 36-48 hours per week. And it covers the same stuff as the private "training camp".
Seriously, does anyone think the "training camp" is a good deal? Why would you pay 10 times more for what is essentially a slick sales pitch?
I wonder if the Republicans realize how much they have shot themselves in the foot (and elsewhere)? Apparently someone didn't tell them the story of the little boy who cried wolf.
When House members try to turn every little thing into some great crime, then things that ARE serious get ignored as "oh that's just those batshit crazy teapartiers again..."
There are things that this administration has done that are clearly wrong and require a strong response. Clapper lying is one of them. Holder's intransigence on Fast and Furious is another.
But when the crazy wing of the House (hard to call it a "wing" now since it seems to be taking over) can only say "no" to getting any actual legislation/work done, and goes nuts about fabricated bullshit - Benghazi! IRS scandal! - they lose all credibility. And what we need right now are people in Congress with some credibility.
If its not doable how then did NSA supposed to have done it? Its not like they came up with the key at random then invented this algorithm to fit it, the fact that there is a backdoor key is a quirk of the mathematics.
It's basically public-key crypto: you can create a keypair and publish the public key - that's essentially what this is, where the point Q in the Dual_CD_DRBG spec is really just a public key. There's a private key as well - it's far to expensive to compute it from the public key (basically 2^128 time), but they didn't have to do that since they generated the private key first.
And it's really not a "quirk of the mathematics" - it's really pretty straightforward if you understand elliptic curves, and it has been well-known how to do this since 2007 or earlier. I think a lot of academic cryptographers didn't really worry about it when Shumow and Ferguson pointed out the potential backdoor, because it's really a pretty crappy technique anyway - academic cryptographers, who quite frankly often don't know what is used in practice, assumed no one would use this. Then it turns out that RSA used it as the default tehnique in BSAFE. Oops.
That's only partially true. NSA provided two changes to the original IBM Lucifer cipher: different S-Boxes (which made it more secure), and shorter keys (which made it less secure). The evidence is that they strengthened it enough to keep it just out of reach of everyone else who might attack it, while keeping it vulnerable enough for them. All the evidence shows that they're probably doing the same thing right now by putting in backdoors that only they can exploit (and there are some subtle ways to do this). Or at least that the THINK only they cna exploit - and that's the biggest danger, no matter how smart the folks at NSA are.
When you're making adjustments, use someone from the FBI's most wanted list as your model. That's the way to ensure that you have interesting experiences in your life!
Tanenbaum has always been the kind of person with good technical insights, but no sense whatsoever about what makes something successful as a product or "in the real world." I have a lot of sympathy for that, because I'm like that as well. I'm a researcher - I write papers, they have good technical insights and contributions, they definitely impact the science of the field, and I hope that along the line they can affect practice - but I know there's a world of difference between what I do and making a product. Tanenbaum doesn't seem to get that.
And as far as the Java bit, yeah a LOT of people had that idea. It long predates what Tanenbaum did, back to o-code in the 1960's and p-code in the early 1970's (with the most popular version, remarkably similar to the Java/JVM model being UCSD's Pascal/pSystem). Those didn't take off like Java either - because there's a huge difference between having a good technical idea and having a successful product. Some is timing, some is "cool factor", some is marketing and sheer determination and drive. But superior technology, or having the first idea technically, has very little to do with it. See the success of MS-DOS or Windows for further examples...:-)
Re:Where the Hell is panel decoupled from shell?
on
GNOME 3.2 Released
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· Score: 1
OK, so lots of comments coming down from this, but is there an answer? Is there a panel available for Gnome 3.2? I have a list of about 3 things that went so far into unusability as far as my workflow went that I kept all my systems at Fedora 14 after some initial tests of F15 with Gnome 3. One of those was the ability to have an always-visible panel with a list of active windows. Seriously, that's not too much to ask, right? I don't even require that it be on by default, just something that I could add or an option I could turn on. And no, the backward compatibility mode (or whatever they call it) is not sufficient.
I won't pile on to the "that's not computer science" comments (but learning how to use Word really doesn't have anything at all to do with computer science).
At this level, the focus should be on basic principles and how to think logically. My suggestion is to look at the new AP course that's being developed on "CS Principles". The materials they're developing to define this course (at http://csprinciples.org/) aren't very useful for a homeschooler now, but there have been 5 pilots of this material at universities, and those course are available in their entirety online. My personal favorite is the course at Berkeley - it's called the "Beauty and Joy of Computing", and is available here: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs10/sp11/
I have an LG blu ray player that does netflix streaming as well as a couple of streaming pay-per-view places (vudu and cinemanow). It does pandora and some other things (like a low res verison of youtube - why can't they get HD when it's available???), AND plays from DLNA local network shares. And, of course, is a blu ray player. It sells for right around $150 on Amazon now. Why would anyone by a Boxee box for $50 more? That said, I've actually been holding off on a new TV purchase to see what the new Sonys with Google TV built in will be like. Having web-connected services without an extra box would be awesome, especially if they truly push Android as an open platform and have lots of innovative apps. That's one thing my LG definitely can't do - they push new services through firmware updates, but it's services that they want to push. I'd much rather see a thriving and open marketplace.
Can anyone with experience with both OpenOffice and KOffice comment on MS-Word compatibility? I've been having headaches with this lately - I have a large document starting from a large MS-Word template, where I've been working on "my parts" in OpenOffice (under Linux) with the thought of doing a cut-and-paste back into the master document. I need to do the cut-and-paste using Word in Windows to make sure there aren't any problems, so saved my work in.DOC format in OpenOffice and went to find a Windows machine (actually, it wasn't that simple - normally I'd do this with my VMWare Windows install, but the master document is apparently so complex that it wouldn't actually open under VMWare - maybe a memory issue?). On the windows machine, my oo-saved.doc file wouldn't open - apparently oo saved a bad.doc file... So now I run back to my office, save in.odt format, run back to the windows machine and install openoffice (browse the web for a while waiting.... la, la, la....), transfer the file. Now I can have my part open in open office, the master document open in word, and can cut and paste between the two.
Did it work? Yes. Was it a pain? Definitely yes. So my question is: would this have been any easier using KOffice?
Don't know if you're still following this discussion Peter, but even in the past "making money" should not have been a primary incentive for writing a textbook.
I remember at DCC about 15 years ago Alistair Moffat did a little session on "why you should write a textbook" or something like that - I remember asking him "isn't it obvious?" but apparently it isn't obvious to a lot of people.
Frankly, the reasons for writing a textbook should be (either in the past or now) primarily to get your name out there as someone who understands the field at a level beyond what people who can't write a comprehensive book can do. There are big career benefits to this, and frankly much more valuable than any royalties you'd receive. In compression in particular, think about how valuable it makes you as an expert witness to be able to be "the person who wrote this widely read book on data compression". Hell, I've only written chapters in edited volumes on compression, and I've made some good consulting money off that.
I would hope that anyone who has seriously contemplated writing textbooks would realize and understand this - the side benefits of publishing a textbook are far greater than anything you get off of the obvious (and usually small) income stream. Rules are probably different for intro-level books (CS1/CS2 level - Nell Dale probably makes a decent amount of royalty income), but that's a very competitive market, and not one a data compression book is going to play in.
First off, you say "don't fall into the trap of using Java as your core language... only know how to program in a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses"
That's just completely wrong. Java is THE most used language in industry. Here's a completely unscientific method of finding out, but I did a search on monster.com for "x developer", where "x" was java, c++, c#, c, and objective-c. Here's the results:
Java: 4035 jobs C++: 2022 jobs C#: 2966 jobs C: 1457 jobs Objective-C: 31 jobs
Given that C# is pretty indistinguishable from Java as far as programming language (not libraries) goes, by learning Java you get not just the first most popular language (Java), but the second as well (C#).
Then: "you might consider teaching them Objective-C" - so yea, you get less than 1% of the job market of java.
That said, I think "job market" is a poor argument to make here. No one (I hope) is going to go out and get a software development job out of high school. For developers, you want them to start thinking like a programmer (Java is great for that, by the way) so they can get into more advanced courses in college easier.
The conjecture doesn't affect whether the answers are correct - that's easy enough to verify (even, despite several follow-ups, if the algorithm claims values/factors are prime - even before it was shown that primality testing is in P, there were known ways to prove a value was prime, showing that PRIMES is in NP).
However, it does affect the running time analysis. There are several algorithms that have a run-time analysis that says something like "Assuming the Riemann Hypothesis, the running time is...."
So while correctness isn't an issue, the fact that there are no worst-case instances that will take far longer than expected is an important thing to know.
I'll have to test that out with Wine 1.0, but that was definitely not the case with the fairly recent version (0.9.56 - from February of this year) that I had been using. Office 2003 had some pretty serious problems, so I fell back to using Office 2000 under wine (which DOES work very well).
I think you should read up on Kyoto - it WAS signed by the US (by the Clinton/Gore administration to be specific). But it was never ratified by the Senate, so the U.S. as a country is not a participant.
So maybe you'd have a point if you'd say that he should have pushed harder for ratification, but your statement that "The USA didn't sign it" is just wrong....
It's funny how different people see different things when they see the word "liberal". From your post, it looks like you use the fairly recent association of "liberal" with "big government". When I see "liberal" I think of the traditional meaning - the root is the same as "liberty", and liberals of the classical kind (I condider myself one) are generally more in favor of individuality and individual responsibility (exactly what you associated with conservative).
Your conclusion that urbanized people have a "greater comfort level with shifting responsibility/authority to the government" is another thing that doesn't jibe with my experience. Urban areas do tend to be more liberal - and in any major city there is much, MUCH more diversity and individuality than in rural (or suburban) settings. I would argue that people in cities are *less* likely to be comfortable with the idea of shifting authority to government.
Just look at the current political situation - on which side of the political spectrum is this administration, which has done more to grab government authority than almost any other administration in history? Can you imagine a liberal president saying he/she has the right to lock someone up indefinitely just because they say so? Can you think of anything that is more "government authority" than that level of autocratic control over someone's personal liberty?
On codecs, I've seen both CS and EE types work on these. What differs is the approach.
It's rare that I've seen a CS person appreciate the underlying component analysis that a Fourier transform represents, and what it means in real, physical terms.
It's also rare that a EE understands what makes the FFT fast (nlogn vs n^2 algorithm), and how that represents a fundamental computing paradigm (divide-and-conquer) that's useful in many other situations.
In the best of all possible worlds, the EEs would concentrate on the physical aspects of things and make clean mathematical models, and CS people would take the clean mathematical models and apply what they know about the fundamentals of computation in order to solve the problem. Maybe a computer engineer would have enough of both skill sets, but I doubt that somewhat - computer engineers here don't even have to take the advanced data structures course, much less algorithms, so when it comes to designing efficient computational techniques they're at a definite disadvantage.
The bottom line is that by hitting the wrong web page, a malicious web page provider could do ANYTHING on your system that you can.
OK, specific example: Can you delete your files? (Documents, spreadsheets, pictures,...) Then hit the wrong web page, and *poof* there go your files.
I know of someone who puts all their digital camera pictures on their laptop for storage - the irreplacable family photos type of pictures - and there is no backup. Bye-bye family history....
Part of that is correct and part isn't. It depends on the type of media and the level of classification, but the DoD specs do say that you can sanitize a hard disk ("rigid disk" in their terminology) containing classified data by overwriting. You cannot do this for top secret data, but you can for secret and down.
Here's the exact wording of what you have to do, from the DoD guidelines: "Overwrite all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character and veryify. THIS METHOD IS NOT APPROVED FOR SANITIZING MEDIA THAT CONTAINS TOP SECRET INFORMATION." (If you want to see the original, from a.mil site, check this out: http://www.dss.mil/files/pdf/clearing_and_sanitiza tion_matrix.pdf)
Incidentally, with hard disks being so cheap these days, I wouldn't do this - I'd toast that disk if it contained any classified info.
Wow - you know of a facility where people have access to top secret data and allow in cameras where people can do things "like take photographs of the screen"? Stunning.
Dealing with classified data is taken very seriously by the government, and they take a layered approach. (1) Do what you can to make sure the people are trustworthy (security clearances and background checks); (2) completely control what technology they have access to when dealing with classified data; (3) for the devices that you do give them access to, limit what those devices can do in accordance to the security policy. Trusted computing hits point 3. Not allowing cameras hits point 2. To ignore points 2 and 3 and say it all depends on the trust in people, so you just need to consider point 1 is not even remotely a solution in the classified arena.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. However, I'd clarify that by saying there are very few people outside of the involved industries that know a lot about trusted computing, but part of that is the uncommunicative way that this was developed rather than a lack of talent outside those companies (and the TCG). There are certainly people inside these companies, and well over a dozen, who know more about this than I do. On the other hand, there are only a handful of academics who have really jumped into this and understand it - partially that's because the only real information is in several hundred pages of very dry (and poorly explained) specifications, and in one pretty bad book. I've read the specs, and I've got to say that it wasn't a lot of fun - I've been thinking about writing a book to explain this more clearly, but don't think I have the time for that kind of project right now...
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As a long-time CS professor, let me add this: The entire purpose of a university education is to advance your understanding about whatever topic you are studying. To develop mental models. The purpose of a test is to see what you understand, and I want as little as humanly possible between your brain and what you produce for the exam. For the vast majority of students, that means brain to paper, with no distractions in between. My exams never have a lot of writing -- they do tend to have more problems to solve than many students like to solve in one sitting, but they are designed to get to core concepts with as few distractions as possible. I have had many students over the years that struggled with some disability or other that made paper exams difficult (whether dysgraphia or even a blind student in one situation), and so we have accommodations for students.
But again, the entire purpose is to see what you understand. I don't want to see how well you can use a tool, or how fast you can google things, or whether you can do some task like a trained monkey. Do you understand (and can you explain) why a red-black tree is balanced? Do you understand the balancing operation well enough so that you can write down a basic rebalancing operation on paper? Can you analyze the balance property to justify why the tree is O(log n) depth? If you have a clear picture in your mind, and if you really *understand* red-black trees, you should be able to do those things.
I see people speculating above about the government using this to break crypto, but that's really not a huge concern. If people use good keys that require brute force searching, even the smallest AES key size would take over a billion millenia to break at 10^18 ops/second (even assuming you could test a key on one "op"). And for people who use bad keys, you don't need exascale computing to break them.
So what could the FBI use something like this for? What about analysis of massive public and not-so-public data, like data mining Internet postings, email/phone records, ... Better not post something with the wrong combination of words, or someone might come knocking on your door.
So for a little over $12,000 you get a 19 week crash course. And people will find this reasonable?
We have a local company that does something similar, for around $10k. And yet, any local resident can go to the local community college and do a programming (or web development) certificate program that covers essentially the same thing for under $900. The Community College consists of four 3 credit hour classes that are designed to be taken in a single 16 week semester. So 12 hours per week of class time, 2-3 times that in outside class work, for a total of 36-48 hours per week. And it covers the same stuff as the private "training camp".
Seriously, does anyone think the "training camp" is a good deal? Why would you pay 10 times more for what is essentially a slick sales pitch?
I wonder if the Republicans realize how much they have shot themselves in the foot (and elsewhere)? Apparently someone didn't tell them the story of the little boy who cried wolf.
When House members try to turn every little thing into some great crime, then things that ARE serious get ignored as "oh that's just those batshit crazy teapartiers again..."
There are things that this administration has done that are clearly wrong and require a strong response. Clapper lying is one of them. Holder's intransigence on Fast and Furious is another.
But when the crazy wing of the House (hard to call it a "wing" now since it seems to be taking over) can only say "no" to getting any actual legislation/work done, and goes nuts about fabricated bullshit - Benghazi! IRS scandal! - they lose all credibility. And what we need right now are people in Congress with some credibility.
What is with this reaction of Americans to the French/Latin word "libre"?
Don't know about others, but for me it makes me think of Jack Black in tights. And that's just not pleasant.
If its not doable how then did NSA supposed to have done it? Its not like they came up with the key at random then invented this algorithm to fit it, the fact that there is a backdoor key is a quirk of the mathematics.
It's basically public-key crypto: you can create a keypair and publish the public key - that's essentially what this is, where the point Q in the Dual_CD_DRBG spec is really just a public key. There's a private key as well - it's far to expensive to compute it from the public key (basically 2^128 time), but they didn't have to do that since they generated the private key first.
And it's really not a "quirk of the mathematics" - it's really pretty straightforward if you understand elliptic curves, and it has been well-known how to do this since 2007 or earlier. I think a lot of academic cryptographers didn't really worry about it when Shumow and Ferguson pointed out the potential backdoor, because it's really a pretty crappy technique anyway - academic cryptographers, who quite frankly often don't know what is used in practice, assumed no one would use this. Then it turns out that RSA used it as the default tehnique in BSAFE. Oops.
That's only partially true. NSA provided two changes to the original IBM Lucifer cipher: different S-Boxes (which made it more secure), and shorter keys (which made it less secure). The evidence is that they strengthened it enough to keep it just out of reach of everyone else who might attack it, while keeping it vulnerable enough for them. All the evidence shows that they're probably doing the same thing right now by putting in backdoors that only they can exploit (and there are some subtle ways to do this). Or at least that the THINK only they cna exploit - and that's the biggest danger, no matter how smart the folks at NSA are.
When you're making adjustments, use someone from the FBI's most wanted list as your model. That's the way to ensure that you have interesting experiences in your life!
Tanenbaum has always been the kind of person with good technical insights, but no sense whatsoever about what makes something successful as a product or "in the real world." I have a lot of sympathy for that, because I'm like that as well. I'm a researcher - I write papers, they have good technical insights and contributions, they definitely impact the science of the field, and I hope that along the line they can affect practice - but I know there's a world of difference between what I do and making a product. Tanenbaum doesn't seem to get that.
And as far as the Java bit, yeah a LOT of people had that idea. It long predates what Tanenbaum did, back to o-code in the 1960's and p-code in the early 1970's (with the most popular version, remarkably similar to the Java/JVM model being UCSD's Pascal/pSystem). Those didn't take off like Java either - because there's a huge difference between having a good technical idea and having a successful product. Some is timing, some is "cool factor", some is marketing and sheer determination and drive. But superior technology, or having the first idea technically, has very little to do with it. See the success of MS-DOS or Windows for further examples... :-)
OK, so lots of comments coming down from this, but is there an answer? Is there a panel available for Gnome 3.2? I have a list of about 3 things that went so far into unusability as far as my workflow went that I kept all my systems at Fedora 14 after some initial tests of F15 with Gnome 3. One of those was the ability to have an always-visible panel with a list of active windows. Seriously, that's not too much to ask, right? I don't even require that it be on by default, just something that I could add or an option I could turn on. And no, the backward compatibility mode (or whatever they call it) is not sufficient.
I won't pile on to the "that's not computer science" comments (but learning how to use Word really doesn't have anything at all to do with computer science).
At this level, the focus should be on basic principles and how to think logically. My suggestion is to look at the new AP course that's being developed on "CS Principles". The materials they're developing to define this course (at http://csprinciples.org/) aren't very useful for a homeschooler now, but there have been 5 pilots of this material at universities, and those course are available in their entirety online. My personal favorite is the course at Berkeley - it's called the "Beauty and Joy of Computing", and is available here: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs10/sp11/
I have an LG blu ray player that does netflix streaming as well as a couple of streaming pay-per-view places (vudu and cinemanow). It does pandora and some other things (like a low res verison of youtube - why can't they get HD when it's available???), AND plays from DLNA local network shares. And, of course, is a blu ray player. It sells for right around $150 on Amazon now. Why would anyone by a Boxee box for $50 more?
That said, I've actually been holding off on a new TV purchase to see what the new Sonys with Google TV built in will be like. Having web-connected services without an extra box would be awesome, especially if they truly push Android as an open platform and have lots of innovative apps. That's one thing my LG definitely can't do - they push new services through firmware updates, but it's services that they want to push. I'd much rather see a thriving and open marketplace.
Can anyone with experience with both OpenOffice and KOffice comment on MS-Word compatibility? I've been having headaches with this lately - I have a large document starting from a large MS-Word template, where I've been working on "my parts" in OpenOffice (under Linux) with the thought of doing a cut-and-paste back into the master document. I need to do the cut-and-paste using Word in Windows to make sure there aren't any problems, so saved my work in .DOC format in OpenOffice and went to find a Windows machine (actually, it wasn't that simple - normally I'd do this with my VMWare Windows install, but the master document is apparently so complex that it wouldn't actually open under VMWare - maybe a memory issue?). On the windows machine, my oo-saved .doc file wouldn't open - apparently oo saved a bad .doc file... So now I run back to my office, save in .odt format, run back to the windows machine and install openoffice (browse the web for a while waiting .... la, la, la....), transfer the file. Now I can have my part open in open office, the master document open in word, and can cut and paste between the two.
Did it work? Yes. Was it a pain? Definitely yes. So my question is: would this have been any easier using KOffice?
Don't know if you're still following this discussion Peter, but even in the past "making money" should not have been a primary incentive for writing a textbook.
I remember at DCC about 15 years ago Alistair Moffat did a little session on "why you should write a textbook" or something like that - I remember asking him "isn't it obvious?" but apparently it isn't obvious to a lot of people.
Frankly, the reasons for writing a textbook should be (either in the past or now) primarily to get your name out there as someone who understands the field at a level beyond what people who can't write a comprehensive book can do. There are big career benefits to this, and frankly much more valuable than any royalties you'd receive. In compression in particular, think about how valuable it makes you as an expert witness to be able to be "the person who wrote this widely read book on data compression". Hell, I've only written chapters in edited volumes on compression, and I've made some good consulting money off that.
I would hope that anyone who has seriously contemplated writing textbooks would realize and understand this - the side benefits of publishing a textbook are far greater than anything you get off of the obvious (and usually small) income stream. Rules are probably different for intro-level books (CS1/CS2 level - Nell Dale probably makes a decent amount of royalty income), but that's a very competitive market, and not one a data compression book is going to play in.
Wow - where to start....
First off, you say "don't fall into the trap of using Java as your core language ... only know how to program in a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses"
That's just completely wrong. Java is THE most used language in industry. Here's a completely unscientific method of finding out, but I did a search on monster.com for "x developer", where "x" was java, c++, c#, c, and objective-c. Here's the results:
Java: 4035 jobs
C++: 2022 jobs
C#: 2966 jobs
C: 1457 jobs
Objective-C: 31 jobs
Given that C# is pretty indistinguishable from Java as far as programming language (not libraries) goes, by learning Java you get not just the first most popular language (Java), but the second as well (C#).
Then: "you might consider teaching them Objective-C" - so yea, you get less than 1% of the job market of java.
That said, I think "job market" is a poor argument to make here. No one (I hope) is going to go out and get a software development job out of high school. For developers, you want them to start thinking like a programmer (Java is great for that, by the way) so they can get into more advanced courses in college easier.
The conjecture doesn't affect whether the answers are correct - that's easy enough to verify (even, despite several follow-ups, if the algorithm claims values/factors are prime - even before it was shown that primality testing is in P, there were known ways to prove a value was prime, showing that PRIMES is in NP).
However, it does affect the running time analysis. There are several algorithms that have a run-time analysis that says something like "Assuming the Riemann Hypothesis, the running time is ...."
So while correctness isn't an issue, the fact that there are no worst-case instances that will take far longer than expected is an important thing to know.
I'll have to test that out with Wine 1.0, but that was definitely not the case with the fairly recent version (0.9.56 - from February of this year) that I had been using. Office 2003 had some pretty serious problems, so I fell back to using Office 2000 under wine (which DOES work very well).
I think you should read up on Kyoto - it WAS signed by the US (by the Clinton/Gore administration to be specific). But it was never ratified by the Senate, so the U.S. as a country is not a participant.
So maybe you'd have a point if you'd say that he should have pushed harder for ratification, but your statement that "The USA didn't sign it" is just wrong....
It's funny how different people see different things when they see the word "liberal". From your post, it looks like you use the fairly recent association of "liberal" with "big government". When I see "liberal" I think of the traditional meaning - the root is the same as "liberty", and liberals of the classical kind (I condider myself one) are generally more in favor of individuality and individual responsibility (exactly what you associated with conservative).
Your conclusion that urbanized people have a "greater comfort level with shifting responsibility/authority to the government" is another thing that doesn't jibe with my experience. Urban areas do tend to be more liberal - and in any major city there is much, MUCH more diversity and individuality than in rural (or suburban) settings. I would argue that people in cities are *less* likely to be comfortable with the idea of shifting authority to government.
Just look at the current political situation - on which side of the political spectrum is this administration, which has done more to grab government authority than almost any other administration in history? Can you imagine a liberal president saying he/she has the right to lock someone up indefinitely just because they say so? Can you think of anything that is more "government authority" than that level of autocratic control over someone's personal liberty?
On codecs, I've seen both CS and EE types work on these. What differs is the approach.
It's rare that I've seen a CS person appreciate the underlying component analysis that a Fourier transform represents, and what it means in real, physical terms.
It's also rare that a EE understands what makes the FFT fast (nlogn vs n^2 algorithm), and how that represents a fundamental computing paradigm (divide-and-conquer) that's useful in many other situations.
In the best of all possible worlds, the EEs would concentrate on the physical aspects of things and make clean mathematical models, and CS people would take the clean mathematical models and apply what they know about the fundamentals of computation in order to solve the problem. Maybe a computer engineer would have enough of both skill sets, but I doubt that somewhat - computer engineers here don't even have to take the advanced data structures course, much less algorithms, so when it comes to designing efficient computational techniques they're at a definite disadvantage.
The bottom line is that by hitting the wrong web page, a malicious web page provider could do ANYTHING on your system that you can.
...) Then hit the wrong web page, and *poof* there go your files.
OK, specific example: Can you delete your files? (Documents, spreadsheets, pictures,
I know of someone who puts all their digital camera pictures on their laptop for storage - the irreplacable family photos type of pictures - and there is no backup. Bye-bye family history....
Part of that is correct and part isn't. It depends on the type of media and the level of classification, but the DoD specs do say that you can sanitize a hard disk ("rigid disk" in their terminology) containing classified data by overwriting. You cannot do this for top secret data, but you can for secret and down.
.mil site, check this out: http://www.dss.mil/files/pdf/clearing_and_sanitiza tion_matrix.pdf)
Here's the exact wording of what you have to do, from the DoD guidelines: "Overwrite all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character and veryify. THIS METHOD IS NOT APPROVED FOR SANITIZING MEDIA THAT CONTAINS TOP SECRET INFORMATION." (If you want to see the original, from a
Incidentally, with hard disks being so cheap these days, I wouldn't do this - I'd toast that disk if it contained any classified info.
Great... a one character typo, and now I've got a mental picture of Linus in the middle of a battlefield wielding a big-ass hammer. Thanks a lot.
Wow - you know of a facility where people have access to top secret data and allow in cameras where people can do things "like take photographs of the screen"? Stunning.
Dealing with classified data is taken very seriously by the government, and they take a layered approach. (1) Do what you can to make sure the people are trustworthy (security clearances and background checks); (2) completely control what technology they have access to when dealing with classified data; (3) for the devices that you do give them access to, limit what those devices can do in accordance to the security policy. Trusted computing hits point 3. Not allowing cameras hits point 2. To ignore points 2 and 3 and say it all depends on the trust in people, so you just need to consider point 1 is not even remotely a solution in the classified arena.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. However, I'd clarify that by saying there are very few people outside of the involved industries that know a lot about trusted computing, but part of that is the uncommunicative way that this was developed rather than a lack of talent outside those companies (and the TCG). There are certainly people inside these companies, and well over a dozen, who know more about this than I do. On the other hand, there are only a handful of academics who have really jumped into this and understand it - partially that's because the only real information is in several hundred pages of very dry (and poorly explained) specifications, and in one pretty bad book. I've read the specs, and I've got to say that it wasn't a lot of fun - I've been thinking about writing a book to explain this more clearly, but don't think I have the time for that kind of project right now...