Isn't bits generally used for data transfer, rather than storage, which is generally bytes?
And this gets modded as Insightful???? A thousand monkeys randomly typing on keybord could not possibly write 'Hamlet', but they could well moderate posts on/.!
IANAEAA (Economist At All), but methinks that market economy is not a zero-sum game when you take the economy as a whole -- that is, all US citizens. If you pick one class (IT workers), it may well be that they gain as much as they lose, or -- the horror! -- they lose more than they gain. To all people in the IT business weeping over their jobs moving to India: did you weep as much, when your shiny new piece of software made some office worker's job totally unnecessary?
Funny you start noticing the problem when it hurts you. Many Polish companies, which were sold to foreign (also American) companies, had R&D units, outdated and underfunded. Instead of revitalising them, many investors closed them and used R&D from abroad. They had the right to do so, and perhaps good reason, but that was free market and capitalism seen from the wrong end of the gun. We also had skewed conditions: worse equipment, old technology. Why didn't anybody protect us from the onslaught American technology? Because it's the free market. It has upsides (global dominance of American IT industry, full shelves in Poland) and downsides (outsourcing IT jobs in the US, unemployed miners and textile workers in Poland). You can't take one without the other.
If, like Bill Gates, you keep your fortune in paper, then you are not taxed at all.
As long as Microsoft shares are not legal tender in the USA, he can't buy anything with them. His wealth is, as you wrote, in paper, not on bank account. Were MS to go bankrupt, Gates would lose every cent of his 'paper fortune'. So taxing share when they are sold is, in general, a sound idea.
Why? When you go with the friends to lunch, do you make the wealthies guy pay more? People who make 6-digit earnings pay 6-digit tax. People who make 5-digit earnings pay 5-digit tax (approximately). Even with a flat tax rate, the wealthier pay more than the poor. Isn't it enough?
That said, other alternatives for opensource publishing (for long / technical documents mostly) include LyX, http://www.lyx.org (uses LaTeX as a back-end for typesetting) and texmacs (which is a visual hybrid of emacs and TeX)
After helping design a A0 poster in just LaTeX+some pstricks, I can say that for me, the best approach would be to mix some graphical tool to design the layout of the page (using, say, minipage environments) and then do some hacking on the LaTeX code itself. Nothing beats LaTeX when it comes to some hairy details.
BTW, while making the poster I didn't know, and still have no idea, how to make the text flow from one minipage to another. Any suggestions?
Just wait until we have cheap white diodes. They'll last for very long (that's why diodes are being installed in street lights now, to cut down on maintenance bills) and are far more efficient than traditional bulbs.
Art isn't anything that should be considered essential to the public need -- unlike food, water and clean air. As such, if someone wants their work copyrighted for the rest of eternity, this should be their right.
Actually, there is no such possibility, as copyright expires after a given period.
Besides which, scientists checking something that they are biased against anyway (either because they see no theoretical basis for the whole idea or because, if it was reproduced reliably, it would threaten their theories or jobs) aren't likely to spend any more than the minimum time and money necessary to say "well, that doesn't work, back to my tokamak".
I disagree. If I were a scientists, who'se project was threatened by some other discovery, I would take extra pain to verify this other discovery. Why? Because, firstly, I would like to know, even for myself, with the highest possible level of certainty, whether my project is doomed or not (BTW, P&F being right would not mean tokamak fusion would be dead on the spot, it would just have a competitor), and, secondly, if I didn't do the experiment right, someone else later would and publish the results, and it's always better to know such things earlier than later (and get another paper published).
Explaining it like that is likely to draw the wrong sort of attention - How long until Jack Valenti and his crew of RIAA/MPAA thugs descend on this new menace to their livelihoods?
You realize they would be messing with guys who keep antimatter paper weights in their offices?
And people willing to write/ask questions about it were sentenced for 15 years of hard labour, like this guy from Russia quite recently? He delivered proofs of the Russian (and Soviet) Navy polluting the environment.
the only reason china is building plants and the US is not, is because no one wants one in their backyard. in china they dont have much choice in what the government determines for them.
What one could be afraid of, is that Chinese government will skip security precautions and there will be no one crazy enough to blow the wistle (and never see their family again). This is a real consideration. Chernobyl propably would never have happened in a democratic country.
I shouldn't have written "A good defense", only "first kind of defense I can think of". Probably wise people know better defences. I did not, though, write that it depends on the security (e.g. secrecy) of the cipher.
Today we use the same approach: when the DES ceased to be secure, someone came up with a new cipher, AES (well, not at once). Some day, AES will cease to be secure. Then we will use other cipher... Is it really "security through obscurity"?
Step backwards through the encryption, to get a superposition of P1 and P2 (the unknown plaintext)
If we could do that, we wouldn't have to do anything else. We'd just take the cyphertext X2 and "step backwards". Besides, it doesn't give us any clue about the key, which is the goal of the attack.
Re:Looks Great, Less Smogging
on
Disney Goes Boom!
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
So what? The worst environmental hazard connected to fireworks are elements like barium needed to make those colorful flames. This Disney technology won't change it.
My next gun will be compressed air, and once I figure it out with PVC, I'm moving on to stainless steel to hopefully get a supersonic potato (or other projectile) gun:-)
"The right to bear arms..." --- does it say anything on potatoes?
But that description is remarkably similar to the definition of the nondeterministic turing machine
As I said, IANAQCE. Take everything I write with a grain of salt. I wouldn't be surprised if a quantum computer was similar, or equivalent, to a nondeterministic Turing machine. After all, quantum mechanics is nondeterministic.
which is basis of the NP set of problems -- it isn't that it tries every permutation in parallel, it's that it *could* do every permutation, and the right permutation takes polynomial time.
The problem is, how to know which permutation is "right"? This is the advantage of quantum computing, that you don't need to know it beforehand.
So the concern is that a quantum computer is equivalent to the nondeterministic turing machine, as a current boolean-state computer is equivalent to a deterministic turing machine, at which point the NP problems take polynomial time on such a computer.
Even polynomial time can be extremely long, if the order of the polynomial is high.
There are an infinite number of collisions for ANY hash function. We already knew that--it's a mathematical certainty. Yet somehow we're shocked and horrified when we actually find some.
Think of an analogy. We know that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Yet we don't know how to find all of them, methodically (like having a formula for the n-th prime number). This is the same. Researchers found a way to find two messages with the same hash. It's different from just knowing that such messages exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't bits generally used for data transfer, rather than storage, which is generally bytes?
/.!
And this gets modded as Insightful???? A thousand monkeys randomly typing on keybord could not possibly write 'Hamlet', but they could well moderate posts on
IANAEAA (Economist At All), but methinks that market economy is not a zero-sum game when you take the economy as a whole -- that is, all US citizens. If you pick one class (IT workers), it may well be that they gain as much as they lose, or -- the horror! -- they lose more than they gain. To all people in the IT business weeping over their jobs moving to India: did you weep as much, when your shiny new piece of software made some office worker's job totally unnecessary?
Funny you start noticing the problem when it hurts you. Many Polish companies, which were sold to foreign (also American) companies, had R&D units, outdated and underfunded. Instead of revitalising them, many investors closed them and used R&D from abroad. They had the right to do so, and perhaps good reason, but that was free market and capitalism seen from the wrong end of the gun. We also had skewed conditions: worse equipment, old technology. Why didn't anybody protect us from the onslaught American technology? Because it's the free market. It has upsides (global dominance of American IT industry, full shelves in Poland) and downsides (outsourcing IT jobs in the US, unemployed miners and textile workers in Poland). You can't take one without the other.
If, like Bill Gates, you keep your fortune in paper, then you are not taxed at all.
As long as Microsoft shares are not legal tender in the USA, he can't buy anything with them. His wealth is, as you wrote, in paper, not on bank account. Were MS to go bankrupt, Gates would lose every cent of his 'paper fortune'. So taxing share when they are sold is, in general, a sound idea.
But the top tax rate should be 60% at least
Why? When you go with the friends to lunch, do you make the wealthies guy pay more? People who make 6-digit earnings pay 6-digit tax. People who make 5-digit earnings pay 5-digit tax (approximately). Even with a flat tax rate, the wealthier pay more than the poor. Isn't it enough?
That said, other alternatives for opensource publishing (for long / technical documents mostly) include LyX, http://www.lyx.org (uses LaTeX as a back-end for typesetting) and texmacs (which is a visual hybrid of emacs and TeX)
After helping design a A0 poster in just LaTeX+some pstricks, I can say that for me, the best approach would be to mix some graphical tool to design the layout of the page (using, say, minipage environments) and then do some hacking on the LaTeX code itself. Nothing beats LaTeX when it comes to some hairy details.
BTW, while making the poster I didn't know, and still have no idea, how to make the text flow from one minipage to another. Any suggestions?
Just wait until we have cheap white diodes. They'll last for very long (that's why diodes are being installed in street lights now, to cut down on maintenance bills) and are far more efficient than traditional bulbs.
Art isn't anything that should be considered essential to the public need -- unlike food, water and clean air. As such, if someone wants their work copyrighted for the rest of eternity, this should be their right.
Actually, there is no such possibility, as copyright expires after a given period.
Besides which, scientists checking something that they are biased against anyway (either because they see no theoretical basis for the whole idea or because, if it was reproduced reliably, it would threaten their theories or jobs) aren't likely to spend any more than the minimum time and money necessary to say "well, that doesn't work, back to my tokamak".
I disagree. If I were a scientists, who'se project was threatened by some other discovery, I would take extra pain to verify this other discovery. Why? Because, firstly, I would like to know, even for myself, with the highest possible level of certainty, whether my project is doomed or not (BTW, P&F being right would not mean tokamak fusion would be dead on the spot, it would just have a competitor), and, secondly, if I didn't do the experiment right, someone else later would and publish the results, and it's always better to know such things earlier than later (and get another paper published).
Explaining it like that is likely to draw the wrong sort of attention - How long until Jack Valenti and his crew of RIAA/MPAA thugs descend on this new menace to their livelihoods?
You realize they would be messing with guys who keep antimatter paper weights in their offices?
And people willing to write/ask questions about it were sentenced for 15 years of hard labour, like this guy from Russia quite recently? He delivered proofs of the Russian (and Soviet) Navy polluting the environment.
The building and surrounding area are *still* too radioactive to go near.
A large chunk of Byelaruss and Ukraine is *still* too radioactive to go near. Beat that.
the only reason china is building plants and the US is not, is because no one wants one in their backyard. in china they dont have much choice in what the government determines for them.
What one could be afraid of, is that Chinese government will skip security precautions and there will be no one crazy enough to blow the wistle (and never see their family again). This is a real consideration. Chernobyl propably would never have happened in a democratic country.
thanks! rwerp -- a/t -- gazeta -- d.o.t. pl
Of course, the Grover algorithm is O(sqrt(N)), as opposed to O(N) of a purely brute-force attack, so just double the key length and you will be safe.
Double, or raise to the power of two?
I shouldn't have written "A good defense", only "first kind of defense I can think of". Probably wise people know better defences. I did not, though, write that it depends on the security (e.g. secrecy) of the cipher.
Today we use the same approach: when the DES ceased to be secure, someone came up with a new cipher, AES (well, not at once). Some day, AES will cease to be secure. Then we will use other cipher... Is it really "security through obscurity"?
Pink Floyd. Now rewrite it 100 times: "I will not skip Pink Floyd when listing great bands of XXth century".
Step backwards through the encryption, to get a superposition of P1 and P2 (the unknown plaintext)
If we could do that, we wouldn't have to do anything else. We'd just take the cyphertext X2 and "step backwards". Besides, it doesn't give us any clue about the key, which is the goal of the attack.
So what? The worst environmental hazard connected to fireworks are elements like barium needed to make those colorful flames. This Disney technology won't change it.
My next gun will be compressed air, and once I figure it out with PVC, I'm moving on to stainless steel to hopefully get a supersonic potato (or other projectile) gun :-)
"The right to bear arms..." --- does it say anything on potatoes?
But that description is remarkably similar to the definition of the nondeterministic turing machine
As I said, IANAQCE. Take everything I write with a grain of salt. I wouldn't be surprised if a quantum computer was similar, or equivalent, to a nondeterministic Turing machine. After all, quantum mechanics is nondeterministic.
which is basis of the NP set of problems -- it isn't that it tries every permutation in parallel, it's that it *could* do every permutation, and the right permutation takes polynomial time.
The problem is, how to know which permutation is "right"? This is the advantage of quantum computing, that you don't need to know it beforehand.
So the concern is that a quantum computer is equivalent to the nondeterministic turing machine, as a current boolean-state computer is equivalent to a deterministic turing machine, at which point the NP problems take polynomial time on such a computer.
Even polynomial time can be extremely long, if the order of the polynomial is high.
There are an infinite number of collisions for ANY hash function. We already knew that--it's a mathematical certainty. Yet somehow we're shocked and horrified when we actually find some.
Think of an analogy. We know that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Yet we don't know how to find all of them, methodically (like having a formula for the n-th prime number). This is the same. Researchers found a way to find two messages with the same hash. It's different from just knowing that such messages exist.
So now defence lawyers have a new tool in their posession, right? "This is not evidence, since MD5 hash has been compromised, Your Honor".
welcome our new bluefish password hashes.
My konqueror displayed it properly at once. Time for an upgrade?