That is the whole point, really. No system is foolproof, so you just have to make it hard enough that the attacker decides that the reward isn't worth the cost. End of story.
Even then, some idiot might keep banging his head against it until he gets lucky.
There were problems with more than just storage - after WWII was over, nearly all the nuclear physicists and engineers who had built these bombs (BY HAND) left to return to universities. This left the US nuclear stockpile at a surprising level: ZERO. We literally had no reserve and no capacity to build any more - the huge fear was that the Russians would find out about this and invade western Europe before we could build any more bombs.
The Manhattan project gets all the press for producing the first bombs, but far more important for long term stability was the engineering / manufacturability effort that came later. Notably, the next generation of bombs did not use polonium detonators, due to the short half-life.
Seriously, does it surprise anyone that law enforcement wants a more "secure" and hence traceable, internet? The Law is moving in on this frontier; some of the residents demand it, and cops always want more power.
Heinlein wrote about this decades ago - "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." Great read, and extremely relevant.
While you are right about research cost ($10,000,000) vs production cost ($4.99), your point about adding cores is not well made.
Yes, you can just copy and paste the individual core design, but heat dissipation, core interconnect, and off-chip bandwidth will kill you if all you do is simply "paste another one on." These problems are easy to get around for few-core chips, say 2-4, but once you go farther than that, it takes real design innovation to stay afloat. Thermals require dynamic core underclocking, work distribution (keep hard working threads on widely separated cores), and split power planes. Core interconnect uses things that sound an awful lot like Ethernet, including routers with routing tables! Off chip bandwidth requirements bring in huge caches and dual buses.
Look at the huge deal AMD made of its "native quad core" design vs. Intel's quad core chip. Sure, it didn't end up giving them a huge performance advantage, but this is the way things are going for many-core chips, and AMD does have a head start on production.
In addition to radio receivers, this same form of noise affects optical astronomy as well. The CCDs used as sensors in optical microscopes are mostly refrigerated as well, sometimes down to 0.3 kelvin, to get around this noise. When you need to count single photons, noise can kill you - and there is no beating Johnson noise. Your only hope is a refrigerator.
You are referring to linear cryptanalysis, developed publicly more than 10 years after the NSA submitted its "suggestion" to the DES standard committee. At that time (not so much now), the NSA was the world's largest employer of Ph.D. mathematicians.
Also note: the NSA can secretly patent things with the USPTO. If anyone else tries to patent the same idea, the NSA patent becomes public and THEN enters its 17 year patent period, giving the NSA an even further head start!
It's just like Comcast internet access - the packets come from far away and get blocked at the last mile. Damn you Comcast, for ruining my cometwatching!
Ah, everything old is new again! This is basically core memory scaled way down to nanometer size. The operating principle is a bit different (the magnet moves instead of flipping orientation), but conceptually this is the same. Still, it's a great idea. Physicists have been working with tiny magnets and magnetic domains in wires for a while now, so it's nice to see an actual application of this.
Guess I'll have to upgrade my porn collection to fill a 100TB drive...
There is a lot of interest in graphene these days among physicists - if you're interested, Google "massless Dirac fermion" for more info, or check pretty much any recent issue of Science or Nature.
The electrical engineers however, have said "meh." Graphene is a decent electrical conductor if you dope it with something - not as good as copper, but decent. It does have great thermal conductivity, though. The big problem with graphene is that you can't really make it in big sheets or long wires. The "tape" method is a great hack - simply stick the tape onto a chunk of graphite, then peel it off and stick it on a substrate (glass or silicon), then peel it off again. Odds are, now you have a sheet of graphene stuck to your substrate, somewhere. Bad news: the biggest piece you're likely to find will be 1-10 micrometers long, and you'll need an electron microscope to find it. This is great for investigating the electrical or thermal properties of graphene, but as for manufacturing, forget it.
As for graphene transistors, those are out too. Transistors should have a very high resistance when "off," and graphene doesn't. The maximum resistance a sheet of graphene can have is about 6 kiloOhms for a square sheet. Fundamentally, graphene is a semiconductor like silicon or germanium, but its band gap is zero, which basically means it can never be "off."
Don't throw the justice tag around so lightly! Why would putting Jack Thompson in jail be just? How would it help undo the damage he has done? It is perhaps ironic that his use of the legal system has come back to bite him, but it is in no way just.
Really, the justice system is grossly misnamed. A sincere public apology followed by twenty years of advocating on the side of the games industry AGAINST such bullshit would probably be just, but that will never happen.
The very first thing I thought of was CD copy protection schemes. Many of them install "drivers" that disallow copying and such. Once these are ported to Vista, and they will be, will these be open to feedback? Who wants to bet that Microsoft will roll over and allow some drivers to be "immutable"?
This could be one of the greatest things ever, or another huge disappointment.
They still haven't fixed my favorite "feature", the 30 second network timeout when using windows networking. I avoid "My Network Places" like the plague, because anytime you click on it you've lost 30 seconds of your life while Windows sits there and catches packets. Why can I download something at 1Mbs and still play a game, but Windows can't packet-capture and move the mouse at the same time?
I would pay to upgrade if they fixed this, but it seems they never will...
Steven Colbert is the new Don Adams, who was the new George Burns. Each has a unique twist on their straight man routine, but if you watch old George Burns stand up comedy routines you can see a clear link. Combine that with Adams' "Get Smart" style and mix in a bit of politics, and you get Steven Colbert!
Rather than trying to make an end run around Amdahl's law, why not duplicate the processor paths?
Say you have a single threaded application with lots of branches and little instruction level parallelism (ILP). Rather than trying to predict the branches or worry about read-before write errors, just clone the processor state and run BOTH branches simultaneously! If you have a core (or three) just lying around while you run a single threaded app, use it. No need for prediction at all, and no penalty for mispredicting a branch. Just dump the state of the cores that missed, clone the "correct" path to all available cores, and keep going. Assuming core-to-core cloning is fast and there is no ILP that could be taken advantage of by the other cores, why waste them?
Tell me I'm not the first person to think of this, 'cause it's too obvious.
The Halting problem, and Turing's proof of its unsolvability, only says that there is no general solution to determine whether or not a given program will halt. It is still possible to prove that a particular program or a particular class of programs will indeed halt.
Turing's "proof" of the halting problem was basically constructing a program which could not be proven to halt, nothing more. That doesn't rule out proving that MS Windows will halt, which as anyone who has ever used it can see, is a trivial problem.
Slashdot Mirror
And right here we have a typo, and I'm the spelling Nazi! It's the perfect thread.
Now we just need someone to come along and Godwin it...
That is the whole point, really. No system is foolproof, so you just have to make it hard enough that the attacker decides that the reward isn't worth the cost. End of story.
Even then, some idiot might keep banging his head against it until he gets lucky.
Only on /. would a link to a game about penises avoiding vaginas be modded "+5, Informative"
You are doing it WRONG! (Unless you a gay.)
There were problems with more than just storage - after WWII was over, nearly all the nuclear physicists and engineers who had built these bombs (BY HAND) left to return to universities. This left the US nuclear stockpile at a surprising level: ZERO. We literally had no reserve and no capacity to build any more - the huge fear was that the Russians would find out about this and invade western Europe before we could build any more bombs.
The Manhattan project gets all the press for producing the first bombs, but far more important for long term stability was the engineering / manufacturability effort that came later. Notably, the next generation of bombs did not use polonium detonators, due to the short half-life.
I thought malapropism was the American whey? Or possibly priapism?
So that you can sleep the whole way.
It's good to know they can still read xkcd...
Seriously, does it surprise anyone that law enforcement wants a more "secure" and hence traceable, internet? The Law is moving in on this frontier; some of the residents demand it, and cops always want more power.
Heinlein wrote about this decades ago - "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." Great read, and extremely relevant.
While you are right about research cost ($10,000,000) vs production cost ($4.99), your point about adding cores is not well made.
Yes, you can just copy and paste the individual core design, but heat dissipation, core interconnect, and off-chip bandwidth will kill you if all you do is simply "paste another one on." These problems are easy to get around for few-core chips, say 2-4, but once you go farther than that, it takes real design innovation to stay afloat. Thermals require dynamic core underclocking, work distribution (keep hard working threads on widely separated cores), and split power planes. Core interconnect uses things that sound an awful lot like Ethernet, including routers with routing tables! Off chip bandwidth requirements bring in huge caches and dual buses.
Look at the huge deal AMD made of its "native quad core" design vs. Intel's quad core chip. Sure, it didn't end up giving them a huge performance advantage, but this is the way things are going for many-core chips, and AMD does have a head start on production.
In addition to radio receivers, this same form of noise affects optical astronomy as well. The CCDs used as sensors in optical microscopes are mostly refrigerated as well, sometimes down to 0.3 kelvin, to get around this noise. When you need to count single photons, noise can kill you - and there is no beating Johnson noise. Your only hope is a refrigerator.
It's all about the millikelvins, baby.
You are referring to linear cryptanalysis, developed publicly more than 10 years after the NSA submitted its "suggestion" to the DES standard committee. At that time (not so much now), the NSA was the world's largest employer of Ph.D. mathematicians.
Also note: the NSA can secretly patent things with the USPTO. If anyone else tries to patent the same idea, the NSA patent becomes public and THEN enters its 17 year patent period, giving the NSA an even further head start!
It's just like Comcast internet access - the packets come from far away and get blocked at the last mile. Damn you Comcast, for ruining my cometwatching!
Ah, everything old is new again! This is basically core memory scaled way down to nanometer size. The operating principle is a bit different (the magnet moves instead of flipping orientation), but conceptually this is the same. Still, it's a great idea. Physicists have been working with tiny magnets and magnetic domains in wires for a while now, so it's nice to see an actual application of this.
Guess I'll have to upgrade my porn collection to fill a 100TB drive...
There is a lot of interest in graphene these days among physicists - if you're interested, Google "massless Dirac fermion" for more info, or check pretty much any recent issue of Science or Nature.
The electrical engineers however, have said "meh." Graphene is a decent electrical conductor if you dope it with something - not as good as copper, but decent. It does have great thermal conductivity, though. The big problem with graphene is that you can't really make it in big sheets or long wires. The "tape" method is a great hack - simply stick the tape onto a chunk of graphite, then peel it off and stick it on a substrate (glass or silicon), then peel it off again. Odds are, now you have a sheet of graphene stuck to your substrate, somewhere. Bad news: the biggest piece you're likely to find will be 1-10 micrometers long, and you'll need an electron microscope to find it. This is great for investigating the electrical or thermal properties of graphene, but as for manufacturing, forget it.
As for graphene transistors, those are out too. Transistors should have a very high resistance when "off," and graphene doesn't. The maximum resistance a sheet of graphene can have is about 6 kiloOhms for a square sheet. Fundamentally, graphene is a semiconductor like silicon or germanium, but its band gap is zero, which basically means it can never be "off."
'Drano
Don't throw the justice tag around so lightly! Why would putting Jack Thompson in jail be just? How would it help undo the damage he has done? It is perhaps ironic that his use of the legal system has come back to bite him, but it is in no way just.
Really, the justice system is grossly misnamed. A sincere public apology followed by twenty years of advocating on the side of the games industry AGAINST such bullshit would probably be just, but that will never happen.
shouldn't that be "hemantics, shemantics" ?
Me too!
The very first thing I thought of was CD copy protection schemes. Many of them install "drivers" that disallow copying and such. Once these are ported to Vista, and they will be, will these be open to feedback? Who wants to bet that Microsoft will roll over and allow some drivers to be "immutable"?
This could be one of the greatest things ever, or another huge disappointment.
We need a "-1, Ewww" moderation option. Yick!
They still haven't fixed my favorite "feature", the 30 second network timeout when using windows networking. I avoid "My Network Places" like the plague, because anytime you click on it you've lost 30 seconds of your life while Windows sits there and catches packets. Why can I download something at 1Mbs and still play a game, but Windows can't packet-capture and move the mouse at the same time?
I would pay to upgrade if they fixed this, but it seems they never will...
Steven Colbert is the new Don Adams, who was the new George Burns. Each has a unique twist on their straight man routine, but if you watch old George Burns stand up comedy routines you can see a clear link. Combine that with Adams' "Get Smart" style and mix in a bit of politics, and you get Steven Colbert!
But nowhere near as good as porn!
Rather than trying to make an end run around Amdahl's law, why not duplicate the processor paths?
Say you have a single threaded application with lots of branches and little instruction level parallelism (ILP). Rather than trying to predict the branches or worry about read-before write errors, just clone the processor state and run BOTH branches simultaneously! If you have a core (or three) just lying around while you run a single threaded app, use it. No need for prediction at all, and no penalty for mispredicting a branch. Just dump the state of the cores that missed, clone the "correct" path to all available cores, and keep going. Assuming core-to-core cloning is fast and there is no ILP that could be taken advantage of by the other cores, why waste them?
Tell me I'm not the first person to think of this, 'cause it's too obvious.
The Halting problem, and Turing's proof of its unsolvability, only says that there is no general solution to determine whether or not a given program will halt. It is still possible to prove that a particular program or a particular class of programs will indeed halt.
Turing's "proof" of the halting problem was basically constructing a program which could not be proven to halt, nothing more. That doesn't rule out proving that MS Windows will halt, which as anyone who has ever used it can see, is a trivial problem.