Under the wide and heavy VAX
Dig my grave and let me relax
Long have I lived, and many my hacks
And I lay me down with a will.
These be the words that tell the way:
"Here he lies who piped 64K,
Brought down the machine for nearly a day,
And Rogue playing to an awful standstill.
I am still at a loss to understand why posting a message on a web site (with the exception of group communication) is more beneficial than sending an email.
Portability. You can read the message from any network-connected computer.
The invasion of Iraq was designed to benefit a few individuals and corporations at the expense of everyone else.
Nope. The invasion was designed to spread liberty and democracy, as shown by the administration's statements before and during the invasion, by their utter shock at the widespread looting when they disbanded the Iraqi army, and by their continuing surprise at the armed resistance they met.
Amusingly, things would have been better if Iraq had been a Halliburton sock puppet. Texas oil men do not take kindly to pipelines and power plants being blown up, nor to commerce being disrupted.
The situation varies widely from area to area, but is nowhere better for the general population than prior to 2003.
Nowhere? I suspect the Kurds, marsh Arabs, Iraqi Olympic team, and a whole slew of others would disagree. Things are not really that bad, they're just getting their Wild West phase of development compressed into a few years.
The problem today is that there are so many simple-minded "progressives" who are incapable of even TRYING to see the other side of an issue.
Your talking point is MUCH more applicable to simple-minded conservatives who are incapable of even trying to see that their "side" of the issue is morally bankrupt, and are almost directly responsible for the steady slide of this country's government into fascism.
You're both mostly right. In U.S. politics today, all too many so-called progressives AND so-called conservatives are totalitarian statists. The difference is that the "progressives" want a single central committee to hold absolute national power, while the "conservatives" want an oligarchy.
I know it's difficult for someone like you to understand, but most "progressives" really DO try and look at all sides of an issue - but once they've decided that certain sides are not supportable, by either moral or factual analysis, then there's no logical point in giving those sides any continuing credibility.
That is a lucid description of the current American left. Once they decide something is not good ("supportable"), they kick the whole thing to the curb. It does not matter if there are complicated psychological, economic, and logistical issues that are difficult to analyze and almost impossible to identify except in retrospect. These are the people who put a poison (methy tertiary-butyl ether) with a half-life of many years into California groundwater on a vast scale, in exchange for minor reduction of atmospheric toxins with a half-life of weeks. Snap judgements, boundless idealism, and inflexible thinking simply don't make for effective public service.
You have also, incidentally, given a damn good description of the Bush 43 administration, who by historical standards are fringe radical hyper-leftists. No conservative would invade a barbarian land, with a woefully underfunded and understaffed army, and expect instant civilization.
Only conservatives keep frequently bringing up the same old talking points, long after those arguments have been discredited,...
Because to a mainstream politician, "discredited" means "I do not like it and I have a slick 12 page white paper that says it is wrong."
... with the sole purpose of winning their case by being more buttheaded than their opponents.
Because calm persistence is good at demolishing "fake but true" discreditations, and also for getting screaming toddlers in adult bodies to show their true colors.
If AMD was comparing one architecture to another, they MUST do so based on identical core clock to memory clock ratios.
So what are the ratios in question, ZDNet? <pull string> "Math is hard."
Then the ZDNet jerkoff has the gall to complain that AMD didn't use the latest SPEC.org numbers. Well, duh. RUNNING benchmarks means just that: running them. You get the actual machines you want to compare, scrupulously make all the software as identical as possible, and let 'em rip. You DO NOT just grab random numbers generated by random software off a random website, no matter how impressive the numbers claim to be.
The article mentions more detailed research involving rats. I suppose I've one question - does this actually remove memories (as in cause them to no longer be able to be recalled) or does it "smooth the landing", by which I mean disassociate the memories from the intense anguish/pain that they cause.
The human study used a drug** that seems to quench overactive aversive fear conditioning, without mucking about much with verbal and other memories.
The rat study used a drug that appears to prevent new memories from being formed while the drug is working. It does not erase memories, though. It is a real hammer-and-tongs drug that blasts important signaling pathways, so it probably will never see general psychiatric use in humans--the side effects are likely to be too nasty or fatal.
**Propranolol, already well studied in humans for other purposes.
I'd be broadly in favour of option 2, but not too happy about option 1.
Option 1 has its place. Not many people want memories of having their skin scrubbed away with a wire brush without anesthesia (severe burn treatment) or being nearly poisoned to death (cancer treatment). (Interestingly, the drug tested on rats might be an anticancer drug, so impaired memory formation might turn out to be a godsend.)
We already have therapeutic techniques which allow for the effective treatment of PTSD, and more recently a bump in the effectiveness and practicality of exposure therapies.
Requiring the person to spend hundreds of dollars and take dozens of hours off work.
This drug basically serves no meaningful purpose beyond the lining of the pharmaceutical corporations pocket books.
A 10 day course of propranolol has a full retail price of $4. And most of that is the overhead of having a pharmacist count out the pills.
Using drugs whether legally prescribed medications or illicit drugs is not something which promotes self awareness,...
We're not talking about stopping awareness, we're talking about stopping excessive amygdala-based aversive fear conditioning, which is an involuntary, unconscious process.
... nor does it teach an individual how to cope with sudden resurgences of symptoms and ways of avoiding similar problems in the future.
The goal is to reduce resurgences, not paper them over with coping training. And regarding future avoidance, just how often are you planning on repeatedly raping or burning the same person?
Most psychiatric medications have a purpose and proper formal testing, but they as of now have yet to prove that any of the medications do anything other than just cover over the existing problems. There is no actual evidence which demonstrates that the medications are actually doing anything related to the initial dysfunction.
RTFA. The study described demonstrated lasting psychiatric changes, of a character reasonably believed to be improvements, in humans. Incidentally, propranolol has been around for decades and has a long history of benefits for several acute and chronic neuropsychiatric conditions.
... there simply isn't enough legal wireless bandwidth to go around.
Exactly, which is why I specified a phased-array system, like the ones Vivato makes. Phased-array systems use multiple antennas and mathematical tricks to transmit/receive narrow beams of radio waves. (Each antenna gets a programmable signal delay. Pick the delays right and you can make a flat antenna act like the dish antenna of your choice.) The neat thing is that radio waves don't interact with each other, so you can run many beams on a single antenna array. The number of beams is limited by how many antennas and math chips you can afford, which greatly multiplies the data throughput. The systems would also use small dish antennas for the fixed building customers, meaning the customers don't see each other or other base stations, and nearly eliminating interference with omnidirectional wireless systems on the same frequency.
If we really want decent internet connections, we need to have neutral connections...
It would work, and goddamn fucking well. We'd have a new era of blazing fast networks, rapidly improving because of intense capitalistic competition. It would be just like the Alexander Graham Bell era of cowboy telecommunications: whoever can deliver charging whatever the market will bear. Why, within a few years, it will have worked so well that people will forget there was ever a problem, and take the new status quo for granted.
And then the professional administrators will take over the regulatory agency. Just like the post-Bell Great Wars era of telecommunications. They'll have inherited the three-ring binders that tell how to do things, figured out years before by people who actually knew what the hell they were doing, so the system will keep working, a little creakily but not bad enough that the people who could fix it care enough to.
And then the professional administration layer will be captured by the industry that is being regulated. Just like the AT&T era of telecommunications. Gradual consolidation and mission drift will mean the industry becomes dominated by a giant near-monopoly, at both the government and market levels. It will end up running for the benefit of the people running it.
And then a social crusader or a revolution will smash the near-monopoly into bits and pieces. A new era of cowboy whatever will start, bringing cheaper and better whatever to the grateful capitalistic masses.
And so on and so forth.
You see, human enterprise has cycles just like wild things do. Riotous growth, consolidation, stasis, fire and chaos, ash. The wheel turns. People like you come up with these oh-so-clever little plans for perfecting an enterprise, but what you usually end up doing is yanking the wheel around to the stasis phase.
If you should succeed, start planning the anti-trust lawsuit before the network neutrality laws go into effect.
Fire is right out of the question for obvious reasons...
Why can't our clever cephalopods put their smelters above water?
You really need to get out of the ocean to become a tool user...
Not if you use rocks, which incidentally were the first tools used on land, and which are are even now used by semi-aquatic nonhumans. You can progress beyond that using glasses, crystals, and composites.
Since the telcos and cable companies are no longer required to share their lines, Google (or whoever) would have to dig up every street and yard in the United States to offer a competing service.
How 1890s of you. They'll simply deploy a wireless comm module, run power and fiber to it, and be in service. The module will consist of a big-ass industrial computer, an Akami-style accelerator, perhaps a local Google Apps cache, two or more redundant refrigeration modules, and a fold-up phased array antenna (with clip on facades to meet local zoning ordinances). Every bit of this technology is already available off the shelf--it would not take much to integrate it into a slick, efficient package.
Furthermore, there is currently no wireless technology that can provide competitive bandwidth on a large scale.
<boggle> This discussion is not about current hardware competing in the current market. It is about what will happen if a cartel starts providing awful service at a ridiculous price, in the face of substantial market pull.
It's going to be a duopoly for the foreseeable future and free market economics don't apply.
Duopoly? Here in a small city in Oklahoma I have my choice of cable, ILEC, CLEC, satellite, and WiFi.
Oh, I'm well aware what certain lawyers and politicians want. No doubt in 2008 or 2009 they will want you to have a federal license to sell your house--gotta protect folks from signing loans without even looking at the repayment schedule, doncha know.
Well, the overgrowth of regulation cannot continue much longer. I just hope the revolution is bloodless.
To "protect" the public, a heavily regulated and monitored system is set up whereby marketing for new ventures can only be done to high net worth or high income people.
Um, no. That is unconstitutional. The U.S. constitution's equal protection clause clearly prohibits regulatory discrimination on any basis whatever, although the courts have found that the regulatory penumbra extends to restricting activity only on the basis of criminal conviction or pertinent test of ability. Some random activity can no more be restricted to only rich people than the vote can.
We are talking about eavesdropping: passive observation of the wire without much affecting it. A man in the middle attack cuts the wire and injects chosen signals into both of the new ends.
detecting... the operation of a switch (in any other way) is inconsequential as all it tells you is that the state has changed
Bob's switch has two positions. One position means "Bob is transmitting binary 1", while the other position means "Bob is transmitting binary 0". The position of the switch is the secret data.
All conventional switches inject charge when they are switched rapidly, the charge is readily detectable on the wire as a voltage pulse, and the sign of the pulse (positive or negative) indicates the new state of the switch. The effect is a real PITA when designing data acquisition systems. This implies that either (1) charge injection must be limited to painfully--probably unachievably--low levels, or switching must be slow which strongly limits the data rate. Moreover, if slow switching is used, Alice and Bob must match their switching rates closely otherwise the operation of their switches is distinguishable.
The resistors do not have to be "perfectly" matched.
They have to be close. The whole point of this scheme is that the intermediate noise level is ambiguous to someone eavesdropping at a single point. It means either Alice is using the low resistance and Bob is using the high resistance, or vice versa. For that ambiguity to exist, Alice and Bob must have the same standards for high and low resistance. (And the resistors must have the same temperature and construction.)
Where did you get your statement that 1e-7 is not good enough for security work? Is it just a gut feeling, or did you actually run a calculation?
It is an educated guess by someone who has much experience in separating signals and noise. It simply does not take much averaging to distinguish between two signals that differ by one part in 10**7. That is a far cry from conventional ciphers, for which turning the entire mass of the universe into code breakers would not be sufficient.
Since the protocol has fatal flaws as described in other comments, it would be pointless to characterize this shortcoming in detail.
The problem here is that Kish is an electrical engineer, rather than a physicist.
As a EE, I call bullshit!;-)
The problem is that his experience is narrow, which makes his abilities brittle. Cross-correlation of multiple receivers is the bread and butter of engineers designing CDMA receivers, passive sonars and radars, and phased-array systems. This cryptosystem is the kind of scheme that if you walked into a radar guy's lab and asked him for a solution, he would just point to a box without saying anything.
As an engineer, he's used to throwing away unimportant details. The problem (which is a common problem among otherwise competent engineers who try to design cryptosystems) is that those "unimportant" details are exactly what an attacker is going to use to break your system.
Information security is just plain hard. Last week I caught myself writing a password comparison loop that aborted at the first mismatched byte. That flaw is how I cracked my first cryptosystem half a lifetime ago, yet I still actually typed "break" into an editor.
The first rule of information security is: If you think you are smart enough, then you are not.
As Bruce Schneier pointed out this technique if it works is no worse than quantum cryptography...
This technique is worse. Quantum cryptography** lets you know the extent to which your shared key has been decloaked, providing a rational basis for reusing chunks of the (expensive) one-time pad.
**A bad name. It really ought to be called quantum exposure detection.
Only the party at an enpoint would know what resistor THEY have put in, allowing them to deduce the resistor used at the other end.
But how do they put in those resistors? With switches. Switches that inject charge onto the output wire when their state changes. Switches with their own resistance and temperature coefficient of resistance. And that is detectable.
High high high
Medium high low
Medium low high
Low low low
Alas, real resistors cannot be perfectly matched; the real wire state table has 16 rows. I estimate that if you pull out all the stops, you might be able to match them to one part in 10e-7 (0.1 parts per million), which is not sufficient for security work.
Doesn't this mean that the universe may be much older than we can currently detect in that there may be a lot more of it out there beyond our current event horizon which drops off at about 13.7 billion years? Maybe it is 20 or 30 billion years old but we can only detect it to the 13.7 billion year line.
Since we can see this edge, and we can furthermore measure the expansion rate of the universe (via white dwarfs, stellar clusters, etc), we in fact have pretty solid bounds on the age of the universe.
No! The CMB only tells us what was happening after photons decoupled from charged particles. Even if we had efficient neutrino spectrometers, we would only be able to trace expansion back to neutrinos decoupling from the quark plasma. What happened before that would still be wide open.
And it might well have been exceedingly strange by modern standards. If you extrapolate expansion backwards from the quark plasma, general relativity says that the geometry of space becomes a foam. Does such a foam undergo sudden changes between many phases as it "cools"? Is the fantastic complexity of the space foam equivalent to a flatter space with a larger number of dimensions? Does the foam form meta-stable crystals that only rarely suffer a thermal dislocation, which expands to form a universe like ours at the site of the dislodged bubble, in the process cooling the surrounding foam so that subsequent universe births become less likely? Did the arrow of causality have more than two choices before our universe condensed?
We don't even have the math to analyze lightly-whipped space, let alone a full fledged foam with 256-element tensors that vary sharply on the Planck scale. Making pronouncements about how that state evolved is unwarranted. Even using words like "evolved" is unwarranted when time may have been all loopy.
"[Programs written in both languages will] not resemble each other in anything more than keywords and a few simple control structures."
And that is not derivative? If a language incorporates keywords and syntax from a predecessor, it is by definition a derivative. C++ template metaprogramming has a rather different appearance than equivalent BCPL code, yet the former is a derivative of the latter.
"Do yourself a favor next time and don't assume ignorance. There might be a point there."
My argument is only that Visual Basic is not BASIC. It traded on the name to attract developers, not because it was a true derivative.
Let me relieve your ignorance of the continuous gradual evolution of BASIC derivatives at Microsoft. The VB line of descent is thus:
Dartmouth BASIC, the original line-numbers BASIC created by professors.
The original Gates/Allen BASIC, a Dartmouth BASIC derivative targeted to computers with tiny RAMs.
Microsoft/IBM ROM BASIC, a slightly-expanded BASIC for the original IBM PC and PC jr, somewhat extended to make better use of the decent hardware and whopping 64 kiB of RAM.
IBM/Microsoft BASICA, which built upon ROM BASIC and added DOS disk file support.
GW-BASIC, which replaced ROM BASIC entirely and added exciting raster graphics functions, including limited support for scaled windows.
QuickBASIC, Microsoft's first BASIC with a true compiler, which improved the flow control syntax so that line numbers were optional and indention could be used for formatting. This was the first Microsoft BASIC that lent itself to decent structured programming. (Followed later by the arguably-regrettable interpreted QuickBASIC variant that shipped with DOS for several years.)
Visual Basic, an even more extended compiled basic, notably adding support for modern GUIs and large modularized projects.
Social niceities are no way to run a nation, but it's nice to live in a society where people are civil, just because.
No it isn't. A society like that is unstable, destroyed by the first not-nice person who comes along. What you want is a society whose people are intelligent, vengeful, and forgiving--it's nearly as nice once it reaches equilibrium, but much stabler.
Americans say "is this law constitutional? Is this what the founding fathers intended?", other nations say "Do we want this law? Does this law support our way of life?"
I suspect that's observation bias. Court disputes involving individuals are more photogenic than legislative proposals involving coalitions. And what do you find in famous court cases? Crusaders trying to give strong medicine to the public for its own good, which raises the usual questions about how far they're allowed to go.
A random fluctuation in internal traffic levels seems equally unlikely.
Look up "Poisson distribution". At low packet rates, large rate fluctuations by random chance are the rule. You also have to consider events that can trigger a common packet rate spike, such as a a non-critical subnet being power cycled. Combine this with a device that has an overflowable packet buffer and you have a recipe for inevitable failure.
A true network storm is unlikely - the term exists, but describes an astronomically rare situation.... A network storm is when capacity is exceeded in a way that is self-perpetuating.
At work we recently had a cheap router near the edge that decided to start echoing broadcast packets. ARP traffic was not pretty, and DHCP got so confused that the Windows clients went all plug-n-play and started making up their own addresses. The core routers automatically detected the repeated packets and decided to go into cycle-breaking mode: automatic rolling network bisection. Unfortunately they had the smarts to find cycles on their own ports but not echoes from a misbehaving device, so that actually made the network more confusing. Eventually IS had to manually bisect the network until the talky node could be found.
In other words, this is a gross programming error that the coders and managers are desperately trying to blame on something - anything - other than their own ineptness.
It's an honest description of the final event that resulted in the system failure.
Thanks. I've thought long and hard on how to make a government that is free, agile, and durable. It's a hard task, and clearly describing the causes and effects is the hardest part. I think it's going to eventually explode Bill Whittle style in a series of political essays.
Slashdot Mirror
Under the wide and heavy VAX
Dig my grave and let me relax
Long have I lived, and many my hacks
And I lay me down with a will.
These be the words that tell the way:
"Here he lies who piped 64K,
Brought down the machine for nearly a day,
And Rogue playing to an awful standstill.
Portability. You can read the message from any network-connected computer.
And what about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984?
The Hotmail computers run Windows -- surely that counts as computer abuse!
Nope. The invasion was designed to spread liberty and democracy, as shown by the administration's statements before and during the invasion, by their utter shock at the widespread looting when they disbanded the Iraqi army, and by their continuing surprise at the armed resistance they met.
Amusingly, things would have been better if Iraq had been a Halliburton sock puppet. Texas oil men do not take kindly to pipelines and power plants being blown up, nor to commerce being disrupted.
Nowhere? I suspect the Kurds, marsh Arabs, Iraqi Olympic team, and a whole slew of others would disagree. Things are not really that bad, they're just getting their Wild West phase of development compressed into a few years.
You're both mostly right. In U.S. politics today, all too many so-called progressives AND so-called conservatives are totalitarian statists. The difference is that the "progressives" want a single central committee to hold absolute national power, while the "conservatives" want an oligarchy.
That is a lucid description of the current American left. Once they decide something is not good ("supportable"), they kick the whole thing to the curb. It does not matter if there are complicated psychological, economic, and logistical issues that are difficult to analyze and almost impossible to identify except in retrospect. These are the people who put a poison (methy tertiary-butyl ether) with a half-life of many years into California groundwater on a vast scale, in exchange for minor reduction of atmospheric toxins with a half-life of weeks. Snap judgements, boundless idealism, and inflexible thinking simply don't make for effective public service.
You have also, incidentally, given a damn good description of the Bush 43 administration, who by historical standards are fringe radical hyper-leftists. No conservative would invade a barbarian land, with a woefully underfunded and understaffed army, and expect instant civilization.
Because to a mainstream politician, "discredited" means "I do not like it and I have a slick 12 page white paper that says it is wrong."
Because calm persistence is good at demolishing "fake but true" discreditations, and also for getting screaming toddlers in adult bodies to show their true colors.
If AMD was comparing one architecture to another, they MUST do so based on identical core clock to memory clock ratios.
So what are the ratios in question, ZDNet? <pull string> "Math is hard."
Then the ZDNet jerkoff has the gall to complain that AMD didn't use the latest SPEC.org numbers. Well, duh. RUNNING benchmarks means just that: running them. You get the actual machines you want to compare, scrupulously make all the software as identical as possible, and let 'em rip. You DO NOT just grab random numbers generated by random software off a random website, no matter how impressive the numbers claim to be.
The human study used a drug** that seems to quench overactive aversive fear conditioning, without mucking about much with verbal and other memories.
The rat study used a drug that appears to prevent new memories from being formed while the drug is working. It does not erase memories, though. It is a real hammer-and-tongs drug that blasts important signaling pathways, so it probably will never see general psychiatric use in humans--the side effects are likely to be too nasty or fatal.
**Propranolol, already well studied in humans for other purposes.
Option 1 has its place. Not many people want memories of having their skin scrubbed away with a wire brush without anesthesia (severe burn treatment) or being nearly poisoned to death (cancer treatment). (Interestingly, the drug tested on rats might be an anticancer drug, so impaired memory formation might turn out to be a godsend.)
Requiring the person to spend hundreds of dollars and take dozens of hours off work.
A 10 day course of propranolol has a full retail price of $4. And most of that is the overhead of having a pharmacist count out the pills.
We're not talking about stopping awareness, we're talking about stopping excessive amygdala-based aversive fear conditioning, which is an involuntary, unconscious process.
The goal is to reduce resurgences, not paper them over with coping training. And regarding future avoidance, just how often are you planning on repeatedly raping or burning the same person?
RTFA. The study described demonstrated lasting psychiatric changes, of a character reasonably believed to be improvements, in humans. Incidentally, propranolol has been around for decades and has a long history of benefits for several acute and chronic neuropsychiatric conditions.
... uh, put down the knife, baby. It was therapeutic, I swear!
Exactly, which is why I specified a phased-array system, like the ones Vivato makes. Phased-array systems use multiple antennas and mathematical tricks to transmit/receive narrow beams of radio waves. (Each antenna gets a programmable signal delay. Pick the delays right and you can make a flat antenna act like the dish antenna of your choice.) The neat thing is that radio waves don't interact with each other, so you can run many beams on a single antenna array. The number of beams is limited by how many antennas and math chips you can afford, which greatly multiplies the data throughput. The systems would also use small dish antennas for the fixed building customers, meaning the customers don't see each other or other base stations, and nearly eliminating interference with omnidirectional wireless systems on the same frequency.
It would work, and goddamn fucking well. We'd have a new era of blazing fast networks, rapidly improving because of intense capitalistic competition. It would be just like the Alexander Graham Bell era of cowboy telecommunications: whoever can deliver charging whatever the market will bear. Why, within a few years, it will have worked so well that people will forget there was ever a problem, and take the new status quo for granted.
And then the professional administrators will take over the regulatory agency. Just like the post-Bell Great Wars era of telecommunications. They'll have inherited the three-ring binders that tell how to do things, figured out years before by people who actually knew what the hell they were doing, so the system will keep working, a little creakily but not bad enough that the people who could fix it care enough to.
And then the professional administration layer will be captured by the industry that is being regulated. Just like the AT&T era of telecommunications. Gradual consolidation and mission drift will mean the industry becomes dominated by a giant near-monopoly, at both the government and market levels. It will end up running for the benefit of the people running it.
And then a social crusader or a revolution will smash the near-monopoly into bits and pieces. A new era of cowboy whatever will start, bringing cheaper and better whatever to the grateful capitalistic masses.
And so on and so forth.
You see, human enterprise has cycles just like wild things do. Riotous growth, consolidation, stasis, fire and chaos, ash. The wheel turns. People like you come up with these oh-so-clever little plans for perfecting an enterprise, but what you usually end up doing is yanking the wheel around to the stasis phase.
If you should succeed, start planning the anti-trust lawsuit before the network neutrality laws go into effect.
Why can't our clever cephalopods put their smelters above water?
Not if you use rocks, which incidentally were the first tools used on land, and which are are even now used by semi-aquatic nonhumans. You can progress beyond that using glasses, crystals, and composites.
How 1890s of you. They'll simply deploy a wireless comm module, run power and fiber to it, and be in service. The module will consist of a big-ass industrial computer, an Akami-style accelerator, perhaps a local Google Apps cache, two or more redundant refrigeration modules, and a fold-up phased array antenna (with clip on facades to meet local zoning ordinances). Every bit of this technology is already available off the shelf--it would not take much to integrate it into a slick, efficient package.
<boggle> This discussion is not about current hardware competing in the current market. It is about what will happen if a cartel starts providing awful service at a ridiculous price, in the face of substantial market pull.
Duopoly? Here in a small city in Oklahoma I have my choice of cable, ILEC, CLEC, satellite, and WiFi.
Oh, I'm well aware what certain lawyers and politicians want. No doubt in 2008 or 2009 they will want you to have a federal license to sell your house--gotta protect folks from signing loans without even looking at the repayment schedule, doncha know.
Well, the overgrowth of regulation cannot continue much longer. I just hope the revolution is bloodless.
Um, no. That is unconstitutional. The U.S. constitution's equal protection clause clearly prohibits regulatory discrimination on any basis whatever, although the courts have found that the regulatory penumbra extends to restricting activity only on the basis of criminal conviction or pertinent test of ability. Some random activity can no more be restricted to only rich people than the vote can.
We are talking about eavesdropping: passive observation of the wire without much affecting it. A man in the middle attack cuts the wire and injects chosen signals into both of the new ends.
Bob's switch has two positions. One position means "Bob is transmitting binary 1", while the other position means "Bob is transmitting binary 0". The position of the switch is the secret data.
All conventional switches inject charge when they are switched rapidly, the charge is readily detectable on the wire as a voltage pulse, and the sign of the pulse (positive or negative) indicates the new state of the switch. The effect is a real PITA when designing data acquisition systems. This implies that either (1) charge injection must be limited to painfully--probably unachievably--low levels, or switching must be slow which strongly limits the data rate. Moreover, if slow switching is used, Alice and Bob must match their switching rates closely otherwise the operation of their switches is distinguishable.
They have to be close. The whole point of this scheme is that the intermediate noise level is ambiguous to someone eavesdropping at a single point. It means either Alice is using the low resistance and Bob is using the high resistance, or vice versa. For that ambiguity to exist, Alice and Bob must have the same standards for high and low resistance. (And the resistors must have the same temperature and construction.)
It is an educated guess by someone who has much experience in separating signals and noise. It simply does not take much averaging to distinguish between two signals that differ by one part in 10**7. That is a far cry from conventional ciphers, for which turning the entire mass of the universe into code breakers would not be sufficient.
Since the protocol has fatal flaws as described in other comments, it would be pointless to characterize this shortcoming in detail.
As a EE, I call bullshit! ;-)
The problem is that his experience is narrow, which makes his abilities brittle. Cross-correlation of multiple receivers is the bread and butter of engineers designing CDMA receivers, passive sonars and radars, and phased-array systems. This cryptosystem is the kind of scheme that if you walked into a radar guy's lab and asked him for a solution, he would just point to a box without saying anything.
Information security is just plain hard. Last week I caught myself writing a password comparison loop that aborted at the first mismatched byte. That flaw is how I cracked my first cryptosystem half a lifetime ago, yet I still actually typed "break" into an editor.
The first rule of information security is: If you think you are smart enough, then you are not.
This technique is worse. Quantum cryptography** lets you know the extent to which your shared key has been decloaked, providing a rational basis for reusing chunks of the (expensive) one-time pad.
**A bad name. It really ought to be called quantum exposure detection.
But how do they put in those resistors? With switches. Switches that inject charge onto the output wire when their state changes. Switches with their own resistance and temperature coefficient of resistance. And that is detectable.
Alas, real resistors cannot be perfectly matched; the real wire state table has 16 rows. I estimate that if you pull out all the stops, you might be able to match them to one part in 10e-7 (0.1 parts per million), which is not sufficient for security work.
I thought the calcium balance was affected by the phosphoric acid used to make some soft drinks taste tart.
No! The CMB only tells us what was happening after photons decoupled from charged particles. Even if we had efficient neutrino spectrometers, we would only be able to trace expansion back to neutrinos decoupling from the quark plasma. What happened before that would still be wide open.
And it might well have been exceedingly strange by modern standards. If you extrapolate expansion backwards from the quark plasma, general relativity says that the geometry of space becomes a foam. Does such a foam undergo sudden changes between many phases as it "cools"? Is the fantastic complexity of the space foam equivalent to a flatter space with a larger number of dimensions? Does the foam form meta-stable crystals that only rarely suffer a thermal dislocation, which expands to form a universe like ours at the site of the dislodged bubble, in the process cooling the surrounding foam so that subsequent universe births become less likely? Did the arrow of causality have more than two choices before our universe condensed?
We don't even have the math to analyze lightly-whipped space, let alone a full fledged foam with 256-element tensors that vary sharply on the Planck scale. Making pronouncements about how that state evolved is unwarranted. Even using words like "evolved" is unwarranted when time may have been all loopy.
"[Programs written in both languages will] not resemble each other in anything more than keywords and a few simple control structures."
And that is not derivative? If a language incorporates keywords and syntax from a predecessor, it is by definition a derivative. C++ template metaprogramming has a rather different appearance than equivalent BCPL code, yet the former is a derivative of the latter.
"Do yourself a favor next time and don't assume ignorance. There might be a point there."
Indeed. I apologize for being rude.
Let me relieve your ignorance of the continuous gradual evolution of BASIC derivatives at Microsoft. The VB line of descent is thus:
No it isn't. A society like that is unstable, destroyed by the first not-nice person who comes along. What you want is a society whose people are intelligent, vengeful, and forgiving--it's nearly as nice once it reaches equilibrium, but much stabler.
I suspect that's observation bias. Court disputes involving individuals are more photogenic than legislative proposals involving coalitions. And what do you find in famous court cases? Crusaders trying to give strong medicine to the public for its own good, which raises the usual questions about how far they're allowed to go.
Look up "Poisson distribution". At low packet rates, large rate fluctuations by random chance are the rule. You also have to consider events that can trigger a common packet rate spike, such as a a non-critical subnet being power cycled. Combine this with a device that has an overflowable packet buffer and you have a recipe for inevitable failure.
At work we recently had a cheap router near the edge that decided to start echoing broadcast packets. ARP traffic was not pretty, and DHCP got so confused that the Windows clients went all plug-n-play and started making up their own addresses. The core routers automatically detected the repeated packets and decided to go into cycle-breaking mode: automatic rolling network bisection. Unfortunately they had the smarts to find cycles on their own ports but not echoes from a misbehaving device, so that actually made the network more confusing. Eventually IS had to manually bisect the network until the talky node could be found.
It's an honest description of the final event that resulted in the system failure.
Thanks. I've thought long and hard on how to make a government that is free, agile, and durable. It's a hard task, and clearly describing the causes and effects is the hardest part. I think it's going to eventually explode Bill Whittle style in a series of political essays.