I've spent hundreds of hours over the last couple of years participating in essay-reading projects for national educational testing companies based in Iowa City, IA (and elsewhere), have developed a healthy regard and admiration for neural networks implemented in wetware (collaborating human test raters), and have to say I'm skeptical of claims that software can interpret anything important or consequential in the essays I've personally had before my eyes. In particular, I doubt the ability of software to recognize genius, especially genius buried under a thick layer of ESL ("English as a second language") errors or social disadvantage. I doubt the ability of software to recognize anything but a small core of mediocre constructs and pedestrian insights, and feel rather strongly that its use is a serious violation of civil rights.
Apparently, it's a guvmint acronym of some kind, or maybe it just plays one on tv, but what does it stand for? Federal Out of Software Experience? Friends of Software Excellently written by Bill? Frankly Overrated Software Engineers?
Uhhh... Time travel is impossible because there's no such thing as "time," just like losing weight by burning phlogiston is impossible. There's no arrow of time because there's no time, either. All this "time" stuff is just an eleven-dimensional way of saying consciousness is both wave-like and particle-like.
I love it when math tells you proton decay is more likely than DHS cracking your password, then you use a bonehead phrase like sihtsseug (etc ad nauseam). The problem is the concept of passwords, per se, inclusive of pass phrases. What's really needed is a simple-to-use turnkey system that stores or generates your megabit secret key for you. Plug it in, and your data is readable. Remove it, and your data is incomprehensible. Step on it, and your data is irretrievable. These algorithms are trivial to implement, but apparently only IBM takes the concept seriously enough to implement it in stuff you can buy.
One of the advantages of Rijndael as the AES cipher (when such was still undecided) was ideological neutrality, unlike American, British, Japanese or Israeli ciphers. At least, no one seriously believed Belgium was out to destabilize world hegemonies. It probably behooves contenders for a "hardware replacement" for AES to demonstrate a similar lack of pups in the brouha.
Not sure I'd call that action serpentine. Real serpents use the classic tetrapod evolution, or else a kind of peristaltic slip and glide inside skin. The robot version looks like something that would have died suddenly during the Cambrian.
By the same token, "German guess guy" is Heisenberg, "Italian nuke guy" is Fermi and "Slashdot condescension guy" is whoever bespoke "Indian math guy," referring to Ramanujan. Mathematics, made of pure thought, advances meteorically faster than the dull material world, let alone the moral, spiritual or (shall we call a spade a spade?) ethological world of semi-sentient apes and slash dotters. Ramanujan lived in a future virtually all of us cannot even imagine, and his name is revered, not because we understand him, but because he thought the future beautiful.
Stop by the locked-down Nintendo DS demos at WalMart someday and try to decipher the touchscreen under all the scratches. If the Sony PSP does nothing else, it should wake Nintendo up from deep, Sleeping Beauty-esque conceptual lethargy. The Game Boy Advance at WalMart closeout prices is a better bargain than either, once you factor in gamebase. The next Game Boy might actually be a clipboard sized thin profile gadget backward compatible to Game Cube dvdiform discs. Wouldn't it be a gas if Nintendo's tricorder could also play the PSP's repertoire?
Ubuntu is a Debian "wisdom distro" -- i.e., an attempt to pre-select features for an idealized (or dumbed down) user. Ironically, I do appreciate the attempt made on my behalf, but my first and foremost desideratum is the ability to install to, then boot from, external media, e.g., a partition on a Firewire drive like SmartDisk's CrossFire. Since Ubuntu can boot from CD -- heck, since Mac OS X can boot from a SmartDisk, for that matter! -- I know what I'm asking is feasible. But it's just not an option for home users. I suspect the real reason is, nobody at Debian has the time to make it happen, but there will be a population explosion in Linux User Kingdom just as soon as installing to and booting from iPod (to name one pointlessly expensive external hd) becomes possible.
Nothing doesn't die like software, which is why ommatidiae and retinae use the same gene and have for 300 million years. Apologies to Admiral Hopper, but COBOL's not even in the running.
Have you noticed how people have started saying Apple has great hardware? I was going to put Debian on my iBook this weekend, but this thread has coldcocked that idea. A shame too because the PPC iso's downloaded, checksummed and burned perfectly. But I need a real desktop, I need OpenOffice.org and I need a Linux bootable from (and installable to) my Firewire drives (not my IDE internal drive). Maybe my path to Nirvana is to stop applying OS X updates and wait for the corporate open source money oozers (COSMO) to fund a rational distro. The last time I looked (admittedly it's bit awhile), even YDL was recognizing my trackpad, but wishing it would go away.
The ability to utter legalese tends not to be the same as legal protection or legal sanction. It's possible that GPL, by exposing source code to public view, exposes authors to de facto publication, placing their efforts squarely in the public domain. I realize GPL doesn't say this! My point is that GPL may be moot, void and irrelevant, depending on what happens before constructionist judges the first time GPL is challenged. My guess is, attempts to enforce GPL may be thrown out of court as meritless pious fiction.
Blogging is vastly preferable to the standard disgruntled employee syndrome, usually euphemized as "going postal" or "changing all the passwords", especially since most bloggers are optimists and expect positive change to come of their efforts. However, from the company's point of view, slander is treason, just as it was in Elizabeth I's day, and a short stay on the company rack (followed by an eternity on the blacklist) is the best that can be expected, human nature being what it is. Enlightened company despots will, however, encourage blogging for the same reason that parliamentarian oligarchies encourage the apparent freedom of speech; viz., it's cheap intelligence, and an agile administrator can best prepare for the storms that loom, not the storms that gather.
I was once asked to port a Windows project to Macintosh using MFC. Of course, WMF featured large, and I was not allowed to use tools that might work, drop WMF from the spec, or the like. Another guy was brought in to replace me. TMALSS, we brainstormed a solution that found a point of connection between the Windows and Mac graphic environments, and three weeks later shipped a marvelously crippled, slow, utterly useless, graphics intense product that met management's spec and cost more to package and put on shelves than it ever earned. My cohort quit and found another job at a company that tanked a year later. I left shortly afterward, and within a few weeks, every Windows programmer forced to write Mac code in that shop was gone, gone, gone. Software geeks are idiots for not unionizing, but Open Source is the next best answer to Mr. Bill's KBE. Yeah, you're a fool, especially if you have kids. Suck butt, loser, you're playing a losers game. But you've still got your soul. That's good. That's very, very good.
Computers are like Hawkeye's criteria for a good nurse (rent the movie, not the tv episodes). At the end of the day, did you log out and turn it off? Or are you still fussing with updates, cables, reboots, manuals, nubbin tweaking? There's power users, and users with power. Uda prisoner uv Zenda?
Posthumously awarded, of course. In reply to your second point, gosh no, I'm not confusing Terminator 3 with the TLOR, I'm saying the TLOR are so abysmally ignorant of human nature and A.I. potential that I loved it when Terminator 3 came out, a perhaps unintentional parody of Asimov's delusions of relevance so good on so many satisfying levels. Hope that clears that up for you.
I'm not entirely sure who Cory Doctorow is, but I approve of anything that forces Isaac Asimov to dab on facial egg for those asinine "Three Laws of Robotics," up to and including Terminator 3.
PGP has had big passwords for years, with a little sliding "security" scale to indicate how worthy your nonense is. There's a lot of prior art, IOW. It does seem a bit naive to suppose seven English words (more or less) are uncrackable, though. There are a number of ways to eliminate pass phrases altogether, such as CTC encryption using AES and a USB flash card full of random junk.
I remember seeing an NSA honeypot a couple of years ago that suggested GPS signals are deliberately skewed in combat situations. It would be interesting to know if Al Jazeera's GPS receivers work like Fox News'.
Given the history of U.S.-German relations in the last 90 years (or 48 months), it seems oddly shortsighted to rely exclusively on U.S. aids to navigation along Fatherland beachfront.
Nonsense. You can scale your cipher by, e.g., using two or three copies of Mersenne Twister (each initialised using the "strong cipher" internal table -- a different secret for each instance), then taking the product of output streams to generate tokens for AES running in CTC mode. This method is preferred, because the assumption is that ALL asymmetric ciphers can be reduced to degenerate cases, and because mixing in another token builder as needed scales security without compromising performance.
Oh, let me see.... 60 hours a week without overtime, 401K, medical, dental, prescription eyeware, PC and peripherals, cubical space next to a window, subscription to compiler updates and libraries, paid vacation, unemployment insurance... Sounds fair to me.
The security of OTP depends on the length of the encrypted plaintext, so if you encrypt 4k of data, the number of possible plaintexts is 2^4192 - 1 (or is that plus?). Heat death of the universe. Even if you get three or four potential Million Monkey Manuscripts out of the process, there's no way to know if that's "the" message. The only practical way to crack OTP is with a rubber hose (see Doonesbury this week.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've spent hundreds of hours over the last couple of years participating in essay-reading projects for national educational testing companies based in Iowa City, IA (and elsewhere), have developed a healthy regard and admiration for neural networks implemented in wetware (collaborating human test raters), and have to say I'm skeptical of claims that software can interpret anything important or consequential in the essays I've personally had before my eyes. In particular, I doubt the ability of software to recognize genius, especially genius buried under a thick layer of ESL ("English as a second language") errors or social disadvantage. I doubt the ability of software to recognize anything but a small core of mediocre constructs and pedestrian insights, and feel rather strongly that its use is a serious violation of civil rights.
Apparently, it's a guvmint acronym of some kind, or maybe it just plays one on tv, but what does it stand for? Federal Out of Software Experience? Friends of Software Excellently written by Bill? Frankly Overrated Software Engineers?
Uhhh... Time travel is impossible because there's no such thing as "time," just like losing weight by burning phlogiston is impossible. There's no arrow of time because there's no time, either. All this "time" stuff is just an eleven-dimensional way of saying consciousness is both wave-like and particle-like.
I love it when math tells you proton decay is more likely than DHS cracking your password, then you use a bonehead phrase like sihtsseug (etc ad nauseam). The problem is the concept of passwords, per se, inclusive of pass phrases. What's really needed is a simple-to-use turnkey system that stores or generates your megabit secret key for you. Plug it in, and your data is readable. Remove it, and your data is incomprehensible. Step on it, and your data is irretrievable. These algorithms are trivial to implement, but apparently only IBM takes the concept seriously enough to implement it in stuff you can buy.
One of the advantages of Rijndael as the AES cipher (when such was still undecided) was ideological neutrality, unlike American, British, Japanese or Israeli ciphers. At least, no one seriously believed Belgium was out to destabilize world hegemonies. It probably behooves contenders for a "hardware replacement" for AES to demonstrate a similar lack of pups in the brouha.
Not sure I'd call that action serpentine. Real serpents use the classic tetrapod evolution, or else a kind of peristaltic slip and glide inside skin. The robot version looks like something that would have died suddenly during the Cambrian.
By the same token, "German guess guy" is Heisenberg, "Italian nuke guy" is Fermi and "Slashdot condescension guy" is whoever bespoke "Indian math guy," referring to Ramanujan. Mathematics, made of pure thought, advances meteorically faster than the dull material world, let alone the moral, spiritual or (shall we call a spade a spade?) ethological world of semi-sentient apes and slash dotters. Ramanujan lived in a future virtually all of us cannot even imagine, and his name is revered, not because we understand him, but because he thought the future beautiful.
Stop by the locked-down Nintendo DS demos at WalMart someday and try to decipher the touchscreen under all the scratches. If the Sony PSP does nothing else, it should wake Nintendo up from deep, Sleeping Beauty-esque conceptual lethargy. The Game Boy Advance at WalMart closeout prices is a better bargain than either, once you factor in gamebase. The next Game Boy might actually be a clipboard sized thin profile gadget backward compatible to Game Cube dvdiform discs. Wouldn't it be a gas if Nintendo's tricorder could also play the PSP's repertoire?
Ubuntu is a Debian "wisdom distro" -- i.e., an attempt to pre-select features for an idealized (or dumbed down) user. Ironically, I do appreciate the attempt made on my behalf, but my first and foremost desideratum is the ability to install to, then boot from, external media , e.g., a partition on a Firewire drive like SmartDisk's CrossFire. Since Ubuntu can boot from CD -- heck, since Mac OS X can boot from a SmartDisk, for that matter! -- I know what I'm asking is feasible. But it's just not an option for home users. I suspect the real reason is, nobody at Debian has the time to make it happen, but there will be a population explosion in Linux User Kingdom just as soon as installing to and booting from iPod (to name one pointlessly expensive external hd) becomes possible.
Nothing doesn't die like software, which is why ommatidiae and retinae use the same gene and have for 300 million years. Apologies to Admiral Hopper, but COBOL's not even in the running.
Have you noticed how people have started saying Apple has great hardware? I was going to put Debian on my iBook this weekend, but this thread has coldcocked that idea. A shame too because the PPC iso's downloaded, checksummed and burned perfectly. But I need a real desktop, I need OpenOffice.org and I need a Linux bootable from (and installable to) my Firewire drives (not my IDE internal drive). Maybe my path to Nirvana is to stop applying OS X updates and wait for the corporate open source money oozers (COSMO) to fund a rational distro. The last time I looked (admittedly it's bit awhile), even YDL was recognizing my trackpad, but wishing it would go away.
The ability to utter legalese tends not to be the same as legal protection or legal sanction. It's possible that GPL, by exposing source code to public view, exposes authors to de facto publication, placing their efforts squarely in the public domain. I realize GPL doesn't say this! My point is that GPL may be moot, void and irrelevant, depending on what happens before constructionist judges the first time GPL is challenged. My guess is, attempts to enforce GPL may be thrown out of court as meritless pious fiction.
How about a landfill bridge across the Bering Straits?
Blogging is vastly preferable to the standard disgruntled employee syndrome, usually euphemized as "going postal" or "changing all the passwords", especially since most bloggers are optimists and expect positive change to come of their efforts. However, from the company's point of view, slander is treason, just as it was in Elizabeth I's day, and a short stay on the company rack (followed by an eternity on the blacklist) is the best that can be expected, human nature being what it is. Enlightened company despots will, however, encourage blogging for the same reason that parliamentarian oligarchies encourage the apparent freedom of speech; viz., it's cheap intelligence, and an agile administrator can best prepare for the storms that loom, not the storms that gather.
I was once asked to port a Windows project to Macintosh using MFC. Of course, WMF featured large, and I was not allowed to use tools that might work, drop WMF from the spec, or the like. Another guy was brought in to replace me. TMALSS, we brainstormed a solution that found a point of connection between the Windows and Mac graphic environments, and three weeks later shipped a marvelously crippled, slow, utterly useless, graphics intense product that met management's spec and cost more to package and put on shelves than it ever earned. My cohort quit and found another job at a company that tanked a year later. I left shortly afterward, and within a few weeks, every Windows programmer forced to write Mac code in that shop was gone, gone, gone. Software geeks are idiots for not unionizing, but Open Source is the next best answer to Mr. Bill's KBE. Yeah, you're a fool, especially if you have kids. Suck butt, loser, you're playing a losers game. But you've still got your soul. That's good. That's very, very good.
Computers are like Hawkeye's criteria for a good nurse (rent the movie, not the tv episodes). At the end of the day, did you log out and turn it off? Or are you still fussing with updates, cables, reboots, manuals, nubbin tweaking? There's power users, and users with power. Uda prisoner uv Zenda?
"Apocalyptic porn..." Neatly put. Mother Nature, please take a note: Next time, no brains for apes.
Posthumously awarded, of course. In reply to your second point, gosh no, I'm not confusing Terminator 3 with the TLOR, I'm saying the TLOR are so abysmally ignorant of human nature and A.I. potential that I loved it when Terminator 3 came out, a perhaps unintentional parody of Asimov's delusions of relevance so good on so many satisfying levels. Hope that clears that up for you.
I'm not entirely sure who Cory Doctorow is, but I approve of anything that forces Isaac Asimov to dab on facial egg for those asinine "Three Laws of Robotics," up to and including Terminator 3.
As in, "our orbit is decaying and we're going to crash into the Sun"? Peculiar. Seriously, what's an Orbitz? Does it matter?
PGP has had big passwords for years, with a little sliding "security" scale to indicate how worthy your nonense is. There's a lot of prior art, IOW. It does seem a bit naive to suppose seven English words (more or less) are uncrackable, though. There are a number of ways to eliminate pass phrases altogether, such as CTC encryption using AES and a USB flash card full of random junk.
I remember seeing an NSA honeypot a couple of years ago that suggested GPS signals are deliberately skewed in combat situations. It would be interesting to know if Al Jazeera's GPS receivers work like Fox News'. Given the history of U.S.-German relations in the last 90 years (or 48 months), it seems oddly shortsighted to rely exclusively on U.S. aids to navigation along Fatherland beachfront.
Nonsense. You can scale your cipher by, e.g., using two or three copies of Mersenne Twister (each initialised using the "strong cipher" internal table -- a different secret for each instance), then taking the product of output streams to generate tokens for AES running in CTC mode. This method is preferred, because the assumption is that ALL asymmetric ciphers can be reduced to degenerate cases, and because mixing in another token builder as needed scales security without compromising performance.
Oh, let me see.... 60 hours a week without overtime, 401K, medical, dental, prescription eyeware, PC and peripherals, cubical space next to a window, subscription to compiler updates and libraries, paid vacation, unemployment insurance... Sounds fair to me.
The security of OTP depends on the length of the encrypted plaintext, so if you encrypt 4k of data, the number of possible plaintexts is 2^4192 - 1 (or is that plus?). Heat death of the universe. Even if you get three or four potential Million Monkey Manuscripts out of the process, there's no way to know if that's "the" message. The only practical way to crack OTP is with a rubber hose (see Doonesbury this week.)