I used to be in PAUSD, at Gunn actually, and helped run the whole system. It started out fairly decent when I got there, with some sort of reasonable security (and the grades not accesible to students), but a certain physics teacher (who I beleive has been demoted since I left) who was supposed to be running this decided it would be a good idea to try to add random new stuff, and not more of the same unix boxen. It became a bit of a mess, since he also pissed off the people who were running the network and acting as tech support for the teachers and he didn't know how to do so himself.
Parents actually have done good stuff for the school, but in a lot of cases this is either a) money or b) help cabling. I suppose it's part of the problem to separate the parents with clue and will out and get them to help.
>Additionally, once you get up really high (~32000, maybe 36000), they start seprating by 2000 or 3000 ft.
not anymore -- RVLS (reduced vertical level? seperation) is required already at least in the europe and over the atlantic, and will be required in the US rther soon. with RVLS, planes are separated by 1000 feet on flight level. however, they can drift by as much as 100', and turbulance can be disruptive at as much as 600'. you don't really want to mess with drifting.
note that RVLS requires both equipment (new altimiters and so on) and training, including recurrency every (few?) years.
no, I don't really fly, but this is at least mostly accurate:P
It's certainly not as if we can't have both. I'm a geek, I'm a crypo geek, I'm a dance geek, I take things apart, I cook, I build thing, I sew, I bike , I read -- I'm human.
Sometimes I wear skirts (though I only wear heels for ballroom dance -- I'm 5'9"). They can be comfortable, and it's nice to be put-together, it doesn't really take much effort at all. Note that this comes from someone who used to wear all black because it always matched.
There's no contradiction here, and that I like my clothes not to clash says absolutely nothing about the staus of my screwdriver knowledge or skill. I am who I am, as well. I'm a geek, I'm a woman, but most importantly I'm a person.
>It's amazing how many people don't make their password a random string. I just use the same randomly generated string, "LEAHOT", for every password and have no problems remembering it because I use it all the time.
>What is to criticize with this book? It is a free book where he endorses no commercial products but instead relays his own experience losing weight.
Well, he suggests doing some things, as well. Suggesting that clubbing your lover with a baseball bat for several hours a day will help you lose weight might be offered as free advice, but I don't see anything wrong with offering a critism in that situation!
I actually read the book, and there was a very interesting few sentences, something like this: "on this smoothed average chart, your weight should always be going down. now some people have told me this doesn't work for women, but I don't see why it shouldn't." Now, of course all women are different, but I at least see an immediately obvious reason, one that is even more prevalent when you have more fat -- and these are presumably the women who would be trying to lose weight. One could get into some trouble trying to diet more when one is retaining water, and less when one is not. It's at the very least not a helpful pattern to get into.
It's more than that -- the sorts of meat that people on the Atkins diet tend to eat are the fairly cheap kinds. The animals are not treated well, which I persnally find distasteful (and they supposedly don't taste as good either, though I can't speak to that).
Get humanely-slaughtered, humanely-raised meat to eat, and I won't complain. Yes, it's more than possible in most areas of the US, at least. I'm in/Pittsburgh/, and I can find it, and it's pretty midwestern around here. Eating a lot of meat is terrible for the environment, though, so I'd reccomend a low meat or vegetarian diet. It's not at all hard to keep balanced, there are wonderful recipies out there, it's a very good option for virtually everyone. Some of my non-vegetarian friends bitched and whined until I fed them some of my cooking, and now they're more than happy with vegetarian fare.
While I'm ranting, I'd like to point out that walking everywhere and other fun things like dance (good way to meet people! women tend to find men who can dance sexy!) are great ways to feel better and get your metabolism working a bit. Combine that with a good balanced diet (and yes, this is easy to do if you cook, and possible if you don't) and you'll be doing well, health-wise. The point of this isn't just to look good naked, as useful as that is;)
Err... it's not the crypto algorithm, per se, but the implementation. If you look at the paper, certain compiler options can partially mask it, but what you really want is blinding, or if you're really hard-core, you might want to use the techniques in a paper from STOC/FOCS that I believe is called "Secure CryptoComputing for NC1".
Essentially what you're trying to do is mask the difference in the timings, unless you're using a theoretically interesting technique.
Certainly, and I have seen them used, but there isn't such a creature on an iBook keyboard, at least not the white ones. I'm typing this right now, and like the OP, I've been staring at it, trying to figure out what the submitter could have meant!
>Any calculation that can be done on a general purpose PC in a reasonable amount of time can be done in a fraction of the time on specialized hardware.
While this is true, unless you have a large vector-rpocessing machine, the proposal for memory-limited functions as "postage" should foil you. It's actually quite interesting, as it has only a factor of 4 (I believe) difference in time between the fastest PCs and other machines and PDAs, which is quite impressive.
The idea is to make spamming less economically viable, not impossible.
I've seen source in some systems papers, but yeah, that's a better idea.
Still, it's a different skillset, and it's a bit odd to assume that cryptographers code, or code well. I certainly know some who do, but many don't like to or simply can't.
>But I wonder if some of those suggestions decrease the strength of encryption?
Most modern cryptography is based on a variety of problems which are believed -- NOT known -- to be hard in certain contexts. Factoring, RSA, CDH, DDH, bilinear maps over CDH/DDH gap groups, braid factoring, CVP, etc. There are people who believe that factoring (and thus RSA) may be poly-time solvable, and thus cryptosystems based on it may be insecure. Cryptosystems based on different hard problems are important for that reason. It's a hedge bet.
There are also interesting things which come "for free" with certain types of hard problems, which may be very expensive to add on to more common cryptosystems. These properties, for example committment, are used in protocols like Deniable Ring Authentication. This sort of thing follows your suggestion of "a variety of rules", but it's really not possible to list every single cryptosystem in existance and how well it fits in. The authors simply say "(E,D) is a cryptosystem with the following properties", and leave anyone who wants to use it to find the best such cryptosystem, as it may change over time. (They usually do provide a trivial example or a reference, though)
Of course, if one-way functions don't exist, we'll all be back to information-theoretically secure stuff, and some of these problems will go away:P
>crypto is very much an applied field, so the theorists should include example source in their papers.
Er.. security is an applied field. Crypto is applied non-applied mathematics, basically. I don't/do/ code, generally, and very rarely C or C++, which you seem to be implying should be used. The people who are interested in one are not always interested in the other. Coming from the math side of it, I'm sometimes tempted to say "learn some math and read the proofs before you implement". Not always practical, sure, but just as valid as expecting me to know about networking this'n'that.
There's also not generally room in a paper for source. Rigorous proofs and definitions can take up a LOT of room. (Everyone who's read the 5x page HILL paper, or one of Dan Boneh's 3x page papers, raise your hand if you want to see source at the end of it.)
>For example, last night a friend mentioned that his group of friends was sometimes referred to as the "Grey Council." Apparently this is a Deep Space 9 reference, so I had to ask, "what means this 'Grey Council?'"
It's Babylon 5, which is actually excellent.
I don't watch TV either, generally, but it has made excellent background noise for sewing/knitting. (On certain channels -- Iron Chef is very funny, for example) Now that I've gotten the David Sederis box set, I'm back off my DVD's for a while.
>If you watch TV in moderation then I would argue that you're abrogating your scope of right and wrong, just moderately.
I don't think this follows at all, given that one FILTERS what they're watching, and doesn't just plop down in front of whatever's on. Oh, and PBS is not likely as influenced by advertisers as you seem to imply. To put it mildly.
Television can be enertainment. It is also not one's only source of information, generally. Radio. Newspapers. Magazines. Online. It all adds up. It's simply necessary, unfortunately, to be very aware of the particular biases of the producer, no matter the media.
I don't see this as being a copyright violation. What are they copying? It's not a public showing either. In the US, I belive the implicit right to privicy covers this one.
>You're watching R-rated movies with your kids and you all are uncomfortable with the language? Here's a tip: watch G-rated movies. That's what the rating system is for. Here's another tip: don't let your kids watch anything but G-rated movies if you don't want them hearing bad language. It works in my household.
There are some exceptions to this. Schindler's list is a very good movie. Stand by me, as well, in a different way. Watching movies for the ideas, trying to help your children understand aspects of the world through the work of filmakers.
Perhaps you don't want your children to see the naked people in Schindler's list (though I personally think it's a bit silly), but you want to educate them about the Holocaust. I don't see a problem with doing this in the privacy of your home.
> More A's given to mediocre students at schools like Duke means that above-average students at schools like Mudd have a harder time of it in terms of grad school, etc.
grad schools are generally aware of how hard relative programs are, and what it really takes to get an A at pretty much any given school.
it's certainly not perfect, but from what I've seen of admissions, there's some sort of unerstanding of the process there -- everyone doing the admissions came from this same process, after all, and remembers all the ins and outs.
> I regularly got a 40% which turned out to be the highest grade in the class and received an A after the curve.
In an abstract algebra class I got a D- on an exam. It was the third-highest grade in the class. That's exactly three of us who didn't flunk. If Berkeley didn't get so pissed when profs flunk then entire class, I know a few who would be happy to.
However, schools vary as well as professors. I find it most informative to determine the average grade, since most classes are curved either up or down (as to whether that's an ethical practice, that's a different conversation). Berkeley EECS curved to about a B-/C+. That used to be a C. Other schools are worse.
It's kindofa pity, and somewhat counteracted by having people who know the reputation of the school. Grad school admissions, for example, weight a B+ from Berkeley differently from one from Stanford, one from MIT, or one from Harvey Mudd. I think it's the industry people who are involved in the hiring process that are putting a skew into the pressures, as well as parents -- have to get something for that investment, after all!
I don't use P2P, but I almost entirely listen to music that is more than 28 years old. The classical recordings are usually less than that, but there are many jazz recordings from the 20's and on that are still under copyright, still expensive, and some are very hard to get a hold of.
I'm sure there are others around in a similar situation. However, I don't support the reduction in copyright terms because music, movies, radio shows, and books that I like would be released into the public domain, but for other reasons.
Yet another "generalizing the slashdot crowd is pretty futile" comment...
What does a degree show? That you can put up with 4 years of BS instead of a few months in the case of a certification. It's not like I learned anything at my degree--I just spent 4 years and thousands of dollars to get a piece of paper that no-one's ever asked to see anyway. A degree means you were protected from the real world for 4 more years while you spent weekends partying and making out with girls. I'm not saying that's a bad way to spend 4 years, but is it any real factor on which to base a hiring decision?
Sayeth me:
I don't know where you went, but a) the school will influence the difficulty of your coursework and b) what you get out of school, like pretty much anything else, will depend heaviliy on what you put into it.
There's BS everywhere, nearly. It creeps between people, but it doesn't mean that's all that was there.
I didn't get my degree becasue someone might want to "see it", but becasue I wanted to learn. Granted, I needed it to get into grad school, but I didn't just stumble through, I worked, and I got a lot out of it. I know quite a few other people who had the same experience, so I'm not alone in this. I also didn't spend my weekends partying and making out with girls. Guys, maybe.
This isn't necessarily the best thing to base a hiring decision on, but it's really hard to have interviews with all of the 5000 people applying for each spot...
Slashdot Mirror
I used to be in PAUSD, at Gunn actually, and helped run the whole system. It started out fairly decent when I got there, with some sort of reasonable security (and the grades not accesible to students), but a certain physics teacher (who I beleive has been demoted since I left) who was supposed to be running this decided it would be a good idea to try to add random new stuff, and not more of the same unix boxen. It became a bit of a mess, since he also pissed off the people who were running the network and acting as tech support for the teachers and he didn't know how to do so himself.
Parents actually have done good stuff for the school, but in a lot of cases this is either a) money or b) help cabling. I suppose it's part of the problem to separate the parents with clue and will out and get them to help.
Lea
does that mean that I can be 3/4 of your lameness? this knee has really been sore lately...
Lea
>Additionally, once you get up really high (~32000, maybe 36000), they start seprating by 2000 or 3000 ft.
:P
not anymore -- RVLS (reduced vertical level? seperation) is required already at least in the europe and over the atlantic, and will be required in the US rther soon. with RVLS, planes are separated by 1000 feet on flight level. however, they can drift by as much as 100', and turbulance can be disruptive at as much as 600'. you don't really want to mess with drifting.
note that RVLS requires both equipment (new altimiters and so on) and training, including recurrency every (few?) years.
no, I don't really fly, but this is at least mostly accurate
Lea
> Wearing all black is TRUE. Satan wants you to wear black clothes.
I think you have mistyped "easy". Wearing black clothes is easy. And who is this Satan guy anyway? Does he think it's chic?
Lea
I don't really look like CowboyNeal, last I checked ;)
Lea
It's certainly not as if we can't have both. I'm a geek, I'm a crypo geek, I'm a dance geek, I take things apart, I cook, I build thing, I sew, I bike , I read -- I'm human.
Sometimes I wear skirts (though I only wear heels for ballroom dance -- I'm 5'9"). They can be comfortable, and it's nice to be put-together, it doesn't really take much effort at all. Note that this comes from someone who used to wear all black because it always matched.
There's no contradiction here, and that I like my clothes not to clash says absolutely nothing about the staus of my screwdriver knowledge or skill. I am who I am, as well. I'm a geek, I'm a woman, but most importantly I'm a person.
Lea
>It's amazing how many people don't make their password a random string. I just use the same randomly generated string, "LEAHOT", for every password and have no problems remembering it because I use it all the time.
... flattered
wow, I'm
Lea
>What is to criticize with this book? It is a free book where he endorses no commercial products but instead relays his own experience losing weight.
Well, he suggests doing some things, as well. Suggesting that clubbing your lover with a baseball bat for several hours a day will help you lose weight might be offered as free advice, but I don't see anything wrong with offering a critism in that situation!
I actually read the book, and there was a very interesting few sentences, something like this: "on this smoothed average chart, your weight should always be going down. now some people have told me this doesn't work for women, but I don't see why it shouldn't." Now, of course all women are different, but I at least see an immediately obvious reason, one that is even more prevalent when you have more fat -- and these are presumably the women who would be trying to lose weight. One could get into some trouble trying to diet more when one is retaining water, and less when one is not. It's at the very least not a helpful pattern to get into.
Lea
It's more than that -- the sorts of meat that people on the Atkins diet tend to eat are the fairly cheap kinds. The animals are not treated well, which I persnally find distasteful (and they supposedly don't taste as good either, though I can't speak to that).
/Pittsburgh/, and I can find it, and it's pretty midwestern around here. Eating a lot of meat is terrible for the environment, though, so I'd reccomend a low meat or vegetarian diet. It's not at all hard to keep balanced, there are wonderful recipies out there, it's a very good option for virtually everyone. Some of my non-vegetarian friends bitched and whined until I fed them some of my cooking, and now they're more than happy with vegetarian fare.
;)
Get humanely-slaughtered, humanely-raised meat to eat, and I won't complain. Yes, it's more than possible in most areas of the US, at least. I'm in
While I'm ranting, I'd like to point out that walking everywhere and other fun things like dance (good way to meet people! women tend to find men who can dance sexy!) are great ways to feel better and get your metabolism working a bit. Combine that with a good balanced diet (and yes, this is easy to do if you cook, and possible if you don't) and you'll be doing well, health-wise. The point of this isn't just to look good naked, as useful as that is
Lea
Running time in the TM model is complexity theory. This generally falls under the purview of CS.
Lea
Err... it's not the crypto algorithm, per se, but the implementation. If you look at the paper, certain compiler options can partially mask it, but what you really want is blinding, or if you're really hard-core, you might want to use the techniques in a paper from STOC/FOCS that I believe is called "Secure CryptoComputing for NC1".
Essentially what you're trying to do is mask the difference in the timings, unless you're using a theoretically interesting technique.
Lea
Out of curiosity, how do you tell under jeans? I know my khakhis show lines, but I didn't think jeans did.
Lea
Certainly, and I have seen them used, but there isn't such a creature on an iBook keyboard, at least not the white ones. I'm typing this right now, and like the OP, I've been staring at it, trying to figure out what the submitter could have meant!
Lea
>Any calculation that can be done on a general purpose PC in a reasonable amount of time can be done in a fraction of the time on specialized hardware.
While this is true, unless you have a large vector-rpocessing machine, the proposal for memory-limited functions as "postage" should foil you. It's actually quite interesting, as it has only a factor of 4 (I believe) difference in time between the fastest PCs and other machines and PDAs, which is quite impressive.
The idea is to make spamming less economically viable, not impossible.
Lea
I've seen source in some systems papers, but yeah, that's a better idea.
Still, it's a different skillset, and it's a bit odd to assume that cryptographers code, or code well. I certainly know some who do, but many don't like to or simply can't.
Lea
>But I wonder if some of those suggestions decrease the strength of encryption?
:P
Most modern cryptography is based on a variety of problems which are believed -- NOT known -- to be hard in certain contexts. Factoring, RSA, CDH, DDH, bilinear maps over CDH/DDH gap groups, braid factoring, CVP, etc. There are people who believe that factoring (and thus RSA) may be poly-time solvable, and thus cryptosystems based on it may be insecure. Cryptosystems based on different hard problems are important for that reason. It's a hedge bet.
There are also interesting things which come "for free" with certain types of hard problems, which may be very expensive to add on to more common cryptosystems. These properties, for example committment, are used in protocols like Deniable Ring Authentication. This sort of thing follows your suggestion of "a variety of rules", but it's really not possible to list every single cryptosystem in existance and how well it fits in. The authors simply say "(E,D) is a cryptosystem with the following properties", and leave anyone who wants to use it to find the best such cryptosystem, as it may change over time. (They usually do provide a trivial example or a reference, though)
Of course, if one-way functions don't exist, we'll all be back to information-theoretically secure stuff, and some of these problems will go away
Lea
>crypto is very much an applied field, so the theorists should include example source in their papers.
/do/ code, generally, and very rarely C or C++, which you seem to be implying should be used. The people who are interested in one are not always interested in the other. Coming from the math side of it, I'm sometimes tempted to say "learn some math and read the proofs before you implement". Not always practical, sure, but just as valid as expecting me to know about networking this'n'that.
Er.. security is an applied field. Crypto is applied non-applied mathematics, basically. I don't
There's also not generally room in a paper for source. Rigorous proofs and definitions can take up a LOT of room. (Everyone who's read the 5x page HILL paper, or one of Dan Boneh's 3x page papers, raise your hand if you want to see source at the end of it.)
Lea
>For example, last night a friend mentioned that his group of friends was sometimes referred to as the "Grey Council." Apparently this is a Deep Space 9 reference, so I had to ask, "what means this 'Grey Council?'"
It's Babylon 5, which is actually excellent.
I don't watch TV either, generally, but it has made excellent background noise for sewing/knitting. (On certain channels -- Iron Chef is very funny, for example) Now that I've gotten the David Sederis box set, I'm back off my DVD's for a while.
>If you watch TV in moderation then I would argue that you're abrogating your scope of right and wrong, just moderately.
I don't think this follows at all, given that one FILTERS what they're watching, and doesn't just plop down in front of whatever's on. Oh, and PBS is not likely as influenced by advertisers as you seem to imply. To put it mildly.
Television can be enertainment. It is also not one's only source of information, generally. Radio. Newspapers. Magazines. Online. It all adds up. It's simply necessary, unfortunately, to be very aware of the particular biases of the producer, no matter the media.
Lea
I don't see this as being a copyright violation. What are they copying? It's not a public showing either. In the US, I belive the implicit right to privicy covers this one.
Lea
>You're watching R-rated movies with your kids and you all are uncomfortable with the language? Here's a tip: watch G-rated movies. That's what the rating system is for. Here's another tip: don't let your kids watch anything but G-rated movies if you don't want them hearing bad language. It works in my household.
There are some exceptions to this. Schindler's list is a very good movie. Stand by me, as well, in a different way. Watching movies for the ideas, trying to help your children understand aspects of the world through the work of filmakers.
Perhaps you don't want your children to see the naked people in Schindler's list (though I personally think it's a bit silly), but you want to educate them about the Holocaust. I don't see a problem with doing this in the privacy of your home.
Lea
Hi Dima.
This wasn't actually Kahan. This was a much younger woman.
Kahan's another whole issue -- he was doing this with lower div students, she was at least doing it to math majors (and a few of us hangers-on).
Lea
> More A's given to mediocre students at schools like Duke means that above-average students at schools like Mudd have a harder time of it in terms of grad school, etc.
grad schools are generally aware of how hard relative programs are, and what it really takes to get an A at pretty much any given school.
it's certainly not perfect, but from what I've seen of admissions, there's some sort of unerstanding of the process there -- everyone doing the admissions came from this same process, after all, and remembers all the ins and outs.
Lea
> I regularly got a 40% which turned out to be the highest grade in the class and received an A after the curve.
In an abstract algebra class I got a D- on an exam. It was the third-highest grade in the class. That's exactly three of us who didn't flunk. If Berkeley didn't get so pissed when profs flunk then entire class, I know a few who would be happy to.
However, schools vary as well as professors. I find it most informative to determine the average grade, since most classes are curved either up or down (as to whether that's an ethical practice, that's a different conversation). Berkeley EECS curved to about a B-/C+. That used to be a C. Other schools are worse.
It's kindofa pity, and somewhat counteracted by having people who know the reputation of the school. Grad school admissions, for example, weight a B+ from Berkeley differently from one from Stanford, one from MIT, or one from Harvey Mudd. I think it's the industry people who are involved in the hiring process that are putting a skew into the pressures, as well as parents -- have to get something for that investment, after all!
Lea
I don't use P2P, but I almost entirely listen to music that is more than 28 years old. The classical recordings are usually less than that, but there are many jazz recordings from the 20's and on that are still under copyright, still expensive, and some are very hard to get a hold of.
I'm sure there are others around in a similar situation. However, I don't support the reduction in copyright terms because music, movies, radio shows, and books that I like would be released into the public domain, but for other reasons.
Yet another "generalizing the slashdot crowd is pretty futile" comment...
Lea
Sayeth the parent:
What does a degree show? That you can put up with 4 years of BS instead of a few months in the case of a certification. It's not like I learned anything at my degree--I just spent 4 years and thousands of dollars to get a piece of paper that no-one's ever asked to see anyway. A degree means you were protected from the real world for 4 more years while you spent weekends partying and making out with girls. I'm not saying that's a bad way to spend 4 years, but is it any real factor on which to base a hiring decision?
Sayeth me:
I don't know where you went, but a) the school will influence the difficulty of your coursework and b) what you get out of school, like pretty much anything else, will depend heaviliy on what you put into it.
There's BS everywhere, nearly. It creeps between people, but it doesn't mean that's all that was there.
I didn't get my degree becasue someone might want to "see it", but becasue I wanted to learn. Granted, I needed it to get into grad school, but I didn't just stumble through, I worked, and I got a lot out of it. I know quite a few other people who had the same experience, so I'm not alone in this. I also didn't spend my weekends partying and making out with girls. Guys, maybe.
This isn't necessarily the best thing to base a hiring decision on, but it's really hard to have interviews with all of the 5000 people applying for each spot...
Lea