Obscurity is the whole point of modern security. What do you think a passphrase is, if not controlled and assured obscurity (assured provided the algorithm is good, you don't write the passphrase down and your opponent doesn't have enough CPU time that is). While it's true that you shouldn't rely on arbitrary, non-assured, probably ill-defined obscurity I'd rather have it than not, so long as I have proper obscurity (encryption) as well. As for whether, in terms of physical location, you're better off with a well-known but relatively secure location like this vault or a hole at some quasirandom point in the desert, that probably depends on the sort of opponents you're up against, the nature of the data you're seeking to protect and the personnel you have on your side. I think either would probably suffice for your mp3 collection;-)
Why would you think that recent technology is any more reliable than older stuff? Faster, sure, but I wouldn't have said more reliable. Remember old '30s cars that you still see driving around sometimes? There's very little on them that can't be fixed with gaffer tape and a hammer, and they go for ever. Compare that with recent cars, which fall to bits after a few years. Or: compare old, low-capacity hard-drives with today's monsters. I have a 30MB SCSI-1 hard drive that lay in a drawer for 10 years and worked perfectly the first time I tried it, and in fact held my log partition for a while: these days you're lucky to get a hard-drive warranty that lasts more than a year. Faster, smaller ICs? More prone to cosmic rays. Etcetera.
Not that I'm slating the scientists, frankly I'm gutted for them - I worked with one of them on some Jupiter research.
Ignore him, he's posting the same garbage all over; he's either a troll or the worst kind of "I want it yesterday but I'm damned if I see why I should lift a finger to contribute anything except a good bitch" ingrate.
Possibly, but it's echoed by millions of whingeing fools who should either get the patches themselves (google://con kolivas kernel patch) or use 2.6, or if they don't have the skill to do either they should pipe down and wait till their drool-proof distribution of choice puts out a release with a 2.6 kernel.
It doesn't matter because not only is linux in the right, but it's so utterly apparent to everyone (SCO included) it's funny. I don't buy the theory that SCO has some masterplan they're waiting to pull on us anymore; they've discredited themselves so much already it's hard to see how the 'masterplan' would fit with the disparate versions of things they've already come out with. The greek comments? These 68 lines of header files? The 250,000 lines of shared code? Ho hum. They're not just barking up the wrong tree, they're miaowing in the wrong fscking forest.
Face it, people who have the desire or will to get hold of the material could already get hold of the theoretical description, with or without this post; they can probably even get hold of the actual R&D and geometry descriptions through a half-decent spying program. Controls on the actual materials (plutonium, uranium and various specialised refining and assembly components) are what will stop bombs being made. Besides which, as other people have said, there are enough warheads kicking around Asia that it's probably easier to buy one than to make one - small nuclear devices that could be fired by infantry from Bowie recoilless rifles were made, and presumably the Russians made similar: they were certainly rumoured to have suitcase nukes, possibly even tiny pure fusion bombs. Not only do the Russians seem to find their inventory difficult to keep stock of, but towards the end of the cold war they seem to have been heavily researching devices that would make ideal terrorist weapons. Never mind all the contentious red mercury pure fusion speculation, it's definitely theoretically possible to make a conventional Teller-Ulam thermonuke within a 20x40x60cm container.
Okay, I'm embarrassed now. I didn't spot the change of thread or the title of the post I was replying to. I hereby place myself in the slashdot stocks for a week. You'll find a limitless supply of rotten tomatoes to your left.
What, Galadriel? I suppose she's a bit flirty, what with giving away locks of her hair and all... Um... Goldberry? Ha. She didn't even make the films! Er... Rosie? Ho hum. Maybe Eowyn. Well, she has a crush but it seems to me to be pretty unrequited and directed towards only one male character. Arwen? Nah, seems to me she has eyes only for Aragorn. If anything I'd say LoTR females are unrealistically monogamous, rather than unrealistically flirty. There are a few love scenes but they're pretty low-key and not particularly offensive in the way you suggest. If you're looking for instant outrage I'd suggest starting with pretty much any other recent Hollywood film; there are plenty far more badly behaved, shallow, degrading, ill-written female parts out there than those in LoTR. I suppose I've been trolled but given this has been given +4, Insightful rather than -1, Troll I felt someone ought to respond.
As for those who reckon it's all Hitler-loving nonsense, try comparing it to der Ring des Nibelungen, which was pre-Hitler. Okay, Hitler liked Wagner. What about the ancient Norse sagas, then? There are still plenty of similarities and the Jews didn't even have much contact with the Norse. You can make SCO-style[0] Nazi comparisons out of anything, it doesn't mean they're valid.
[0] (a) "Look! Linux and SCO both have a file called errno.h, Linux must have copied SCO"
(b) "Look! Nazi literature[1] and Tolkien used some of the same motifs. Tolkien must be a Nazi!"
See the similarity? Yet most slashdotters can easily identify the fallacy in (a).
[1] Not to mention every other hero saga of the last 2000 years.
Only 16-bit? I had no idea CSS was so weak - surely even if Xing's decryption key hadn't been available in plaintext it would have been feasible to brute force the scheme, 16 bits is only 65536 combinations. How did the MPAA ever think this would provide serious protection?
Even if this particular article hasn't previously been available you could always visit nuclearweaponarchive.org to find out the principles behind a Teller-Ulam bomb (and much else, besides). It won't give you the non-deducible R&D results, but neither does this article (in fact, even the Progressive argues that these should not be publically divulged).
Yeah. Your neighbour is probably just itching to do something with the 3kg of weapons-grade plutonium that he doubtless has kicking around in his back yard, not to mention his ample supplies of tritium and carefully shaped high explosive. Telling ordinary people how a bomb is made presents negligible threat; it's impractical for them to make one themselves but does give insight into the most significant arms race of the last century. As for other nations and terrorist groups, they have spies to obtain such information for them, and it's still very difficult to obtain the relevant amounts of bomb-grade material.
I'm completely new to meddling with graphics card, so apologies if this is a silly question: when programs utilising the GPU for arbitrary calculations are running does the screen go weird, or is there a way of stopping the output being displayed? A screenfull of junk might not matter to a scientist leaving their computer to crunch numbers for a few months but it wouldn't be good for a general-purpose program.
...and IF you do there's always debian with 12.000+ packages;):-) I wasn't going to mention it, you know how much the trolls round here hate Debian 'zealots', but I know what you mean. Most things are just an apt-get away!
It's certainly worth exploring - perhaps in the not-too-distant future we'll be able to mine 3He from the moon (3He fusion doesn't produce neutrons), it'd be nice to have a ready-made fusion program to use the fuel with when it comes. I guess it works the other way round too, so maybe the combined goal of a fusion reactor burning lunar 3He will be enough to inspire research in fusion and spaceflight.
The radiation released from the reactants would be negligible. The core itself would be highly radioactive due to neutron emission, but a cracked core could be contained comparatively easily. (The nuclear reaction itself wouldn't continue as it needs to be maintained by laser beams (or whatever this reactor uses) which would turn off veery quickly.)
How do you reach that conclusion exactly? Other than not supporting a war without a second resolution I haven't noticed the French supporting much terrorism. You never hear people in Camp X-Ray breaking down and saying "okay, I give in. M. Chirac made me do it." France does have a large muslim population due to its old (fairly disastrous) colonial association with Algeria but, as many people have pointed out, muslim != terrorist. I'm sure France is making every effort to root out any terrorists that may be hiding there. There is far more evidence for active terrorist cells in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Birmingham than France. That doesn't make Germany an untrustworthy country, either.
There isn't an excuse for poor acting, really - leastways not when studios can spend millions to ensure they get the most talented actors in the world and thousands on film to shoot many takes. I think the problem is (a) studios would often hire someone well known rather than a good actor - Hulk Hogan movies, anyone? and (b) there's no real penalty for genuinely talented actors who get lazy and turn in a shoddy performance.
There still isn't an excuse for poor CGI - WETA may well have got it right through skill and craftsmanship but they still got it right - there's nothing to prevent movie companies getting their CGI from WETA. Unlike actors where, to some extent, one particular actor's face may fit what the director has in mind, with CGI firms the images can be whatever they want so there really is no excuse for not using the best, especially in a movie that relies on CGI so heavily.
Thanks - I see the difference now. But does the fact that a lower court made this ruling mean that Verizon can appeal the matter of constitutionality to the Supreme Court (in other words, this might not be over yet)?
Amen, brother. I've lost count of the times people complain that X distribution doesn't have features Y and Z when there are plenty of distributions W, V, U,.... that are fine in this regard. Not every distro has to do everything for everyone, actually it's probably better that they don't. Unless you really do use 8000 different bits of software there's a distro somewhere that will make you happy. And if you do use that many packages, there's always freshmeat:-P
Slashdot Mirror
Obscurity is the whole point of modern security. What do you think a passphrase is, if not controlled and assured obscurity (assured provided the algorithm is good, you don't write the passphrase down and your opponent doesn't have enough CPU time that is). While it's true that you shouldn't rely on arbitrary, non-assured, probably ill-defined obscurity I'd rather have it than not, so long as I have proper obscurity (encryption) as well. As for whether, in terms of physical location, you're better off with a well-known but relatively secure location like this vault or a hole at some quasirandom point in the desert, that probably depends on the sort of opponents you're up against, the nature of the data you're seeking to protect and the personnel you have on your side. I think either would probably suffice for your mp3 collection ;-)
If you're storing data against that kind of catastrophe it would be advisable leave them unpowered so that the Faraday cage isn't breached.
Why would you think that recent technology is any more reliable than older stuff? Faster, sure, but I wouldn't have said more reliable. Remember old '30s cars that you still see driving around sometimes? There's very little on them that can't be fixed with gaffer tape and a hammer, and they go for ever. Compare that with recent cars, which fall to bits after a few years. Or: compare old, low-capacity hard-drives with today's monsters. I have a 30MB SCSI-1 hard drive that lay in a drawer for 10 years and worked perfectly the first time I tried it, and in fact held my log partition for a while: these days you're lucky to get a hard-drive warranty that lasts more than a year. Faster, smaller ICs? More prone to cosmic rays. Etcetera.
Not that I'm slating the scientists, frankly I'm gutted for them - I worked with one of them on some Jupiter research.
Ignore him, he's posting the same garbage all over; he's either a troll or the worst kind of "I want it yesterday but I'm damned if I see why I should lift a finger to contribute anything except a good bitch" ingrate.
Possibly, but it's echoed by millions of whingeing fools who should either get the patches themselves (google://con kolivas kernel patch) or use 2.6, or if they don't have the skill to do either they should pipe down and wait till their drool-proof distribution of choice puts out a release with a 2.6 kernel.
It doesn't matter because not only is linux in the right, but it's so utterly apparent to everyone (SCO included) it's funny. I don't buy the theory that SCO has some masterplan they're waiting to pull on us anymore; they've discredited themselves so much already it's hard to see how the 'masterplan' would fit with the disparate versions of things they've already come out with. The greek comments? These 68 lines of header files? The 250,000 lines of shared code? Ho hum. They're not just barking up the wrong tree, they're miaowing in the wrong fscking forest.
Face it, people who have the desire or will to get hold of the material could already get hold of the theoretical description, with or without this post; they can probably even get hold of the actual R&D and geometry descriptions through a half-decent spying program. Controls on the actual materials (plutonium, uranium and various specialised refining and assembly components) are what will stop bombs being made. Besides which, as other people have said, there are enough warheads kicking around Asia that it's probably easier to buy one than to make one - small nuclear devices that could be fired by infantry from Bowie recoilless rifles were made, and presumably the Russians made similar: they were certainly rumoured to have suitcase nukes, possibly even tiny pure fusion bombs. Not only do the Russians seem to find their inventory difficult to keep stock of, but towards the end of the cold war they seem to have been heavily researching devices that would make ideal terrorist weapons.
Never mind all the contentious red mercury pure fusion speculation, it's definitely theoretically possible to make a conventional Teller-Ulam thermonuke within a 20x40x60cm container.
Okay, I'm embarrassed now. I didn't spot the change of thread or the title of the post I was replying to. I hereby place myself in the slashdot stocks for a week. You'll find a limitless supply of rotten tomatoes to your left.
What, Galadriel? I suppose she's a bit flirty, what with giving away locks of her hair and all... Um... Goldberry? Ha. She didn't even make the films! Er... Rosie? Ho hum. Maybe Eowyn. Well, she has a crush but it seems to me to be pretty unrequited and directed towards only one male character. Arwen? Nah, seems to me she has eyes only for Aragorn. If anything I'd say LoTR females are unrealistically monogamous, rather than unrealistically flirty. There are a few love scenes but they're pretty low-key and not particularly offensive in the way you suggest. If you're looking for instant outrage I'd suggest starting with pretty much any other recent Hollywood film; there are plenty far more badly behaved, shallow, degrading, ill-written female parts out there than those in LoTR. I suppose I've been trolled but given this has been given +4, Insightful rather than -1, Troll I felt someone ought to respond.
As for those who reckon it's all Hitler-loving nonsense, try comparing it to der Ring des Nibelungen, which was pre-Hitler. Okay, Hitler liked Wagner. What about the ancient Norse sagas, then? There are still plenty of similarities and the Jews didn't even have much contact with the Norse. You can make SCO-style[0] Nazi comparisons out of anything, it doesn't mean they're valid.
[0] (a) "Look! Linux and SCO both have a file called errno.h, Linux must have copied SCO"
(b) "Look! Nazi literature[1] and Tolkien used some of the same motifs. Tolkien must be a Nazi!"
See the similarity? Yet most slashdotters can easily identify the fallacy in (a).
[1] Not to mention every other hero saga of the last 2000 years.
I have read the PDF. What I'm puzzled about is why slashdot considers it news today.
Only 16-bit? I had no idea CSS was so weak - surely even if Xing's decryption key hadn't been available in plaintext it would have been feasible to brute force the scheme, 16 bits is only 65536 combinations. How did the MPAA ever think this would provide serious protection?
Myth
Even if this particular article hasn't previously been available you could always visit nuclearweaponarchive.org to find out the principles behind a Teller-Ulam bomb (and much else, besides). It won't give you the non-deducible R&D results, but neither does this article (in fact, even the Progressive argues that these should not be publically divulged).
Yeah. Your neighbour is probably just itching to do something with the 3kg of weapons-grade plutonium that he doubtless has kicking around in his back yard, not to mention his ample supplies of tritium and carefully shaped high explosive.
Telling ordinary people how a bomb is made presents negligible threat; it's impractical for them to make one themselves but does give insight into the most significant arms race of the last century. As for other nations and terrorist groups, they have spies to obtain such information for them, and it's still very difficult to obtain the relevant amounts of bomb-grade material.
What gets me is why they bothered using CGI for the trolls when they could have just rounded up a few from slashdot.
I'm completely new to meddling with graphics card, so apologies if this is a silly question: when programs utilising the GPU for arbitrary calculations are running does the screen go weird, or is there a way of stopping the output being displayed? A screenfull of junk might not matter to a scientist leaving their computer to crunch numbers for a few months but it wouldn't be good for a general-purpose program.
...and IF you do there's always debian with 12.000+ packages ;) :-) I wasn't going to mention it, you know how much the trolls round here hate Debian 'zealots', but I know what you mean. Most things are just an apt-get away!
It's certainly worth exploring - perhaps in the not-too-distant future we'll be able to mine 3He from the moon (3He fusion doesn't produce neutrons), it'd be nice to have a ready-made fusion program to use the fuel with when it comes. I guess it works the other way round too, so maybe the combined goal of a fusion reactor burning lunar 3He will be enough to inspire research in fusion and spaceflight.
What about Australia? I believe central Oz is about the most geologically stable place on the planet, plus there is practically zero population.
The radiation released from the reactants would be negligible. The core itself would be highly radioactive due to neutron emission, but a cracked core could be contained comparatively easily. (The nuclear reaction itself wouldn't continue as it needs to be maintained by laser beams (or whatever this reactor uses) which would turn off veery quickly.)
How do you reach that conclusion exactly? Other than not supporting a war without a second resolution I haven't noticed the French supporting much terrorism. You never hear people in Camp X-Ray breaking down and saying "okay, I give in. M. Chirac made me do it."
France does have a large muslim population due to its old (fairly disastrous) colonial association with Algeria but, as many people have pointed out, muslim != terrorist. I'm sure France is making every effort to root out any terrorists that may be hiding there.
There is far more evidence for active terrorist cells in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Birmingham than France. That doesn't make Germany an untrustworthy country, either.
Yes - anyone know a free online welsh->english autotranslator?
There isn't an excuse for poor acting, really - leastways not when studios can spend millions to ensure they get the most talented actors in the world and thousands on film to shoot many takes. I think the problem is (a) studios would often hire someone well known rather than a good actor - Hulk Hogan movies, anyone? and (b) there's no real penalty for genuinely talented actors who get lazy and turn in a shoddy performance.
There still isn't an excuse for poor CGI - WETA may well have got it right through skill and craftsmanship but they still got it right - there's nothing to prevent movie companies getting their CGI from WETA.
Unlike actors where, to some extent, one particular actor's face may fit what the director has in mind, with CGI firms the images can be whatever they want so there really is no excuse for not using the best, especially in a movie that relies on CGI so heavily.
Thanks - I see the difference now. But does the fact that a lower court made this ruling mean that Verizon can appeal the matter of constitutionality to the Supreme Court (in other words, this might not be over yet)?
Amen, brother. I've lost count of the times people complain that X distribution doesn't have features Y and Z when there are plenty of distributions W, V, U,.... that are fine in this regard. Not every distro has to do everything for everyone, actually it's probably better that they don't. Unless you really do use 8000 different bits of software there's a distro somewhere that will make you happy. And if you do use that many packages, there's always freshmeat :-P