If you visit SF, also visit Berkeley, around Telegraph. People's park is not usable by anyone but the homeless anymore, which is a real pity. Oakland has a rather serious problem as well.
There are a few factors which I believe increase the numbers of homeless: good weather (at least you won't freeze to death), and Regan shut down the big state mental institutions (they were supposed to be replaced with smaller institutions, closer to population centers; they never were). Good mental health care, in particular, might help these people quite a lot. In Berkeley, especially, there are also quite a few teenagers who have run away from home. A certain amount of appopriate social work might help those people as well. (They often escaped from homes in which a variety of abuse takes place.)
It may be part of the required Economics curriculum for the state of CA. I certainly studied it, along with how the stock market works, how to fill out simple tax forms, and the evil of DeBeers.
I read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", and found it a long, annoying lecture on how he's smarter than everyone else, and gets all the women. It was rather grating. He's done and thought interesting things, but to me he comes across as an annoying, annoying man.
I used linear algebra in robotics and AI, as well as in spectral analysis of graphs. There's a whole world of math beyond that, in discrete math, which/is/ quite a bit more related to CS. Combinatorics overlaps quite a bit with graph theory, which is a bit part of CS theory, and the basis for a large number of practical algorithms. Algebra/number theory is quite useful to me as a cryptographer, though it might not be completely useful to everyone.
It's really hard to go wrong taking too much math, and very easy to go wrong taking too little. Math will let you learn good, rigorous critical thinking skills, and give you a good understanding of what you're doing and why. It's hard to make intellegent choices about hacking without knowing the why and the wherefore to make good ones.
I took a graduate-level databases class last spring. One of the things the professor said was that "it takes a PhD to properly tune a database". She was right. What makes databases act like they do is not trivial.
When you throw distribution into the mix, they're even more complex. What the `right' thing is to do when network latency comes into the picture is quite an interesting problem. Without throwing away ACID properties, there are quite a few possibilities.
> Also, we've already kept people in space for long periods of time (or at least as long as long as a trip to Mars would hopefully take)
The longest stay in space seems to be 14 months (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/374456.stm), which is not quite enough for most trips. In addition, I seem to remember that people were pretty screwed up afterward. We need to either: a) figure out how to keep people up there that long and have them be useful in.38g on the other end or b) build a good rotating space station.
It's my guess that we'll end up with option (b), just because of the bone decalcification effects, neglecting the cardiac, psychological, muscluar, and other physiological effects. I'm not aware of any sufficiently detailed research on the subject, however.
> "all your inventions (past,present,shower) are belong to us"
This one is especially fun when you're a researcher, moving between institutions. No, really, I don't have the ability to sign over joint work with other people to you by coming to work for you for a few months. Anything I work on with other people stays that way.
Of course, they did fix it, but I boggle that they even bother to leave it in there when they're a research LAB. They hire researchers. Researchers, especially temporary ones, can't or won't deal with that sort of thing. (Really, you can't have my thesis.)
Silly stuff on this level, I'm sure it's worse when they'd actually try to enforce something so stupid.
>Microsoft takes PII very seriously, and increasingly so. As an employee there, I had to take multiple courses on it, and the grunts took it very seriously.
No one really has a good definition of PII yet, frankly, so it's not really possible for them to eliminate it as yet without taking out a LOT of other information. What constitutes an anonymized database -- especially a USEFUL anonymized database -- is not at all clear. It's an active area of research, and not at all well explored.
My point is that people have given out this kind of information in the past with the very best of intentions, not knowing what can be done with the data. We/still/ don't know what can be done with the data, so anyone is still capable of releasing "bad" information without realizing it. This has nothing to do with Microsoft, per se.
>Notice they aren't releasing any information (like your name, etc.) that would explicitly identify the person to the advertisers.
There is some rather interesting research on this. Gender, age, and location is enough to identify most people, since, really, there are a limited number of people in each cartesian-type category. Note that this is different from aggregate data, which may be less personally identifiable, depending on how it's done.
The people at the data privacy lab have gone through and identified people in "non-personally identifiable" information released by several sources. Part of the problem is that you can put these sources of data together with high confidence and both narrow down individual people and gather a LOT of information about them. I'm sure they have some papers up if you're interested:
>I love California, but if you're honestly staring down the barrel of a $25K salary, get the hell out now.
Not everyone realistically has that option. I grew up in the bay area (though I'm not living there now), and I have a lot of friends who did as well. They have roots in that area, and have family responsibilities. In some cases they're faced with a choice between placing sick relatives in a (rather grim) state institution or staying, which is a very difficult choice.
Certainly they take responsibility for that choice, but there are other factors at work for many people.
>Why can't women do the same? Why can't they just stop complaining, STFU, and do their work just as men do? Why do they always need special treatment, special privileges, and special protection?
I haven't seen men recieve some of the treatment that I have. I won't go into it here, but there are certainly some very idiotic men around who are very unprofessional. This certainly hasn't stopped me from doing my work, and it hasn't stopped me from being good at it. I still don't think it's acceptable to treat anyone in that manner, especially in a professional situation. I'm not asking for special treatment. I'm asking that people judge my competence on its merits. I'm also asking that people act more professionally in professional situations.
I don't see what shutting up is going to do for this situtation. It's not productive for anyone to have this sort of crap flying around, so it's in everyone's interests to change it.
>With a straight razor, you really have no consumables for the rest of your life
It's a nice idea, but I think I'd be somewhat nervous about taking one of those things to my knees (and especially near the arteries at the back of my knees!).
>Still, as previous news stories here have shown us, married, old staff are not as innovative or useful as young hopefuls, so perhaps this plan isn't so bad on Google's part after all.
Google is trying to hire PhDs like crazy. These people are not the youngest people around, but they're smart, articulate, self-directed, and self-motivated. I think they're banking on the same things that make people succeed at a PhD being the same things that make people inventive and productive.
I bought a used volvo, which has been a very good option for me. Used is really the way to go, in many cases. (Thought it seems to be a lot less of a good deal here in Salt Land.) My major problem with it has been that I take the bus instead of driving, so I tend to kill the battery through disuse.
>I don't believe I know of anyone that has a car even close to that old.
I know someone who drives a VW Beetle. An original one. It just kept working, so the family kept driving it. My friend just got rid of a 1981 Volvo for a Prius. I have another friend who gave his mid-1970s BMW to his younger sister about a year ago. There are many, many 1970s Cadillacs driving around. In fact, there are just tons of cars a lot older than that driving around. Personally, I'd like some airbags (and I've been trying to convince my fiance to get a car with some and some antilock breaks when he graduates), which is probably a major reason for people trying to get out of the older cars.
But my goodness, where the heck do you live that that's the OLDEST car you've seen?
Lea
Re:Prison.
on
SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 2, Informative
Hi Tom.
As you weren't at crypto last year, you missed a bit of a brouhaha where people were considering moving the conference (which is ALWAYS at UCSB) outside of the US. The proximate motivation for this was that there was a grad student who had a paper, and was supposed to present it. When she found out, she got the next embassy appointment to get a visa, which was three weeks before the conference. She went, and they freaked out about the "crypto" thing, and said they'd have to send her work back for review to see if she was a terrorist or some such. They gave her a new appointment a week after the conference. Less than useful, eh?
The visa people need to remove their heads from their posteriors about published work; it's hard to threaten the US by talking about something published in a very prominent conference at that conference. (Someone's going to do it!)
Lea
Re:Not a problem (yet)
on
SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 1
Hey, when the MD5 crack came out after crypto last year, I pointed out that this was likely going to happen soon, as Eli Biham and Rafi Chen got some rather nice results from a reduced-round version.
See? Sometimes reading/. comments can be educational.:)
Go watch Babylon 5 (it's all out on DVD now, even). They had DeLenn look very non-female originally (actually, I seem to remember they were going to have a male voice and her acting, but that REALLY threw people off). They also have tried to have a lot of different phyisical characteristics, including some races that were added through CG.
>RSA was broken. The attack was choosen plaintext, and used several observed weaknesses in the padding scheme and RSA.
Plain vanilla RSA has certainly been broken, but I believe it's been patched back together again. There are also a large number of other interesting cryptosystems to choose from. My personal favorite is Paillier.
I'm not up on more than the general outlines of authentication systems, but there have been some rather interesting papers out lately on authentication with weak passwords.
>The additional values of "d" that your code finds are congruent to the original d, mod phi. This necessarily means that they are larger than (p-1)(q-1)
It depends on what sort of a subgroup you're using. If you're using safe primes, (n=pq, p = 2p'+1, q = 2q' + 1), then, iirc, your largest subgroup is the quadratic residues, which is 1/4 of the total group in size. (Z_n^* It is certainly/not/ a cyclic group, but a subgroup of size 1/2 the total group may exist.) In that case, you do in fact have multiple decryption exponents which are congruent modulo p'q' (or 2p'q') instead of 4p'q'= \phi(n). the totient function gives the size of the group, but if it is not cyclic, the size of the cyclic subgroups is smaller, and you can have multiple values of d smaller than \phi(n).
>Finding your "extra" d's is reducable to the problem of finding the original d, only harder because the numbers are bigger.
that is exactly what I said, except it's rather difficult to categorically state that it's "harder". I can prove that they are poly-time equivalent. they're also poly-time equivalent to factoring.
I'm not attacking RSA. I was pointing out that the poster to whom I was replying was wrong -- that there are multiple equivalent decryption exponents does not signifigantly impact RSAs security, as finding any of these is derministic polynomial-time equivalent to factoring.
> Its sort of like the theories that RSA is hard to break because its keys are a result of large primes. That only holds true if the the public key to private key ratio is 1:1 and it isn't yet I have never seen such a claim published in a paper.
The real theorem goes something like this: we assume RSA is hard to break, therefore RSA is hard to break. (No, I'm not kidding.) If factoring the product of large primes is not hard, then RSA is not hard to break; it is sufficient but not necessary. BTW, finding Euler's totient function $\phi$ of the public key $n=pq$ is deterministic polynomial time equivalent to factoring. Note also that finding a multiple of $\phi(n)$ is equivalent to finding $\phi(b)$.
I'm not sure what you mean about "the public key to private key ratio is 1:1". For any given number $n$ there is a unique prime factorization. You can use any multiple of $\phi(n)$ as a secret key instead, if you wish, and each of these gives an equivalent decryption exponent. However, even with multiple decryption exponents, there are only a polynomial number of them, while there are an exponential number of possible exponents. This is hard to guess. Not only are they hard to guess: if you find such an exponent, you can in deterministic polynomial time factor $n$ using that information.
The upshot of this is that you shouldn't be worrying about that. It is in fact equivalent to factoring, though the RSA cryptosystem is not. If you're confused by this, feel free to ask. (Use an informative subject line, please.)
Personally, I'd be much, much more worried about security holes stemming from implementation than from those in a well-tested cryptosystem. I'm not saying we won't break them -- I'm saying that it's very hard, and there are lower hanging fruit.
>statistical analysis of the sort of data that is created by the source (camera, scanner, etc) makes it *trivial* to detect that stuff is being hidden.
There is in fact Real Stego, made by real cryptographers, with real security guarentees (based on standard assumptions or in a information-theoretic model). It is, however, true that you'll have to have a certain amount of entropy in your channel to move data. If you're interested in lower bounds for that, I can refer you to a paper.
BTW, in some places, encryption is not legal, or will bring unwanted attention. In these cases, you really want steganographic security.
>I dare say, writing directly in HTML is much easier in many cases (and a lot more portable:-).
I believe you can even take tex and convert it over to HTML, if you wanted. Anything (basically, "really weird symbols or equations") that can't be rendered reasonably in html will be made into images. Images aren't ideal, but seem to be the best option, under the circumstances. You could thus argue that writing in LaTeX is both more portable and easier than writing in HTML for many things.
>The limitations of word are not so much due to the model (what you see is *only* what you get) than the implementation.
I've personally never seen a good wysiwyg equation editor. I've used several, and the pain and suffering I went through made me swear off everything but LaTeX. I personally don't see how you could use as many symbols as LaTeX gives you access to in a quick way, using a GUI. On top of that, MS Office has implementation problems. If I wanted my mathematical symbols to turn into freaking FLOWERS and LEAVES and STARS, I would have put them in that way.
(And by the way, I use TexShop. It's a little slower than using a makefile for final production, but you can script it if you really care. Usually I need to run BibTex once a week, at most, so it's not an issue.)
>After a few months, they got lazy as 'nobody will crack this' attitude crept in.
IIRC, they continued to change the priming characters (at the start of the message -- they act somewhat as an index into the machine), but quite a few people started using swear words. If you have enough people using the same charachters, you get the message depth that allows you to find patterns
A similar security breach happened with WEP. Into a part of the algorithm where one feeds a random value (a nonce), the engineers fed a 0 (a naught). It's my pet theory that they misunderstood "nonce".
Disclaimer: I've never downloaded anything of this sort, but your arguments seem a little weak.
>Then why not distribute just text files and not video? There are numerous softwares available to display synchronized text files with a separate video file or during DVD playback.
How can I load this software into my DVD player? It sounds very useful.
> Since at that point, you can just order it from Amazon Japan and such.
What are you supposed to do with those DVDs, precisely? Are they region coded?
Slashdot Mirror
If you visit SF, also visit Berkeley, around Telegraph. People's park is not usable by anyone but the homeless anymore, which is a real pity. Oakland has a rather serious problem as well.
There are a few factors which I believe increase the numbers of homeless: good weather (at least you won't freeze to death), and Regan shut down the big state mental institutions (they were supposed to be replaced with smaller institutions, closer to population centers; they never were). Good mental health care, in particular, might help these people quite a lot. In Berkeley, especially, there are also quite a few teenagers who have run away from home. A certain amount of appopriate social work might help those people as well. (They often escaped from homes in which a variety of abuse takes place.)
Lea
It may be part of the required Economics curriculum for the state of CA. I certainly studied it, along with how the stock market works, how to fill out simple tax forms, and the evil of DeBeers.
Lea
I read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", and found it a long, annoying lecture on how he's smarter than everyone else, and gets all the women. It was rather grating. He's done and thought interesting things, but to me he comes across as an annoying, annoying man.
And yes, I am in fact a geek.
Lea
I used linear algebra in robotics and AI, as well as in spectral analysis of graphs. There's a whole world of math beyond that, in discrete math, which /is/ quite a bit more related to CS. Combinatorics overlaps quite a bit with graph theory, which is a bit part of CS theory, and the basis for a large number of practical algorithms. Algebra/number theory is quite useful to me as a cryptographer, though it might not be completely useful to everyone.
It's really hard to go wrong taking too much math, and very easy to go wrong taking too little. Math will let you learn good, rigorous critical thinking skills, and give you a good understanding of what you're doing and why. It's hard to make intellegent choices about hacking without knowing the why and the wherefore to make good ones.
Lea
I took a graduate-level databases class last spring. One of the things the professor said was that "it takes a PhD to properly tune a database". She was right. What makes databases act like they do is not trivial.
When you throw distribution into the mix, they're even more complex. What the `right' thing is to do when network latency comes into the picture is quite an interesting problem. Without throwing away ACID properties, there are quite a few possibilities.
Lea
> Also, we've already kept people in space for long periods of time (or at least as long as long as a trip to Mars would hopefully take)
.38g on the other end or b) build a good rotating space station.
The longest stay in space seems to be 14 months (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/374456.stm), which is not quite enough for most trips. In addition, I seem to remember that people were pretty screwed up afterward. We need to either: a) figure out how to keep people up there that long and have them be useful in
It's my guess that we'll end up with option (b), just because of the bone decalcification effects, neglecting the cardiac, psychological, muscluar, and other physiological effects. I'm not aware of any sufficiently detailed research on the subject, however.
Lea
> "all your inventions (past,present,shower) are belong to us"
This one is especially fun when you're a researcher, moving between institutions. No, really, I don't have the ability to sign over joint work with other people to you by coming to work for you for a few months. Anything I work on with other people stays that way.
Of course, they did fix it, but I boggle that they even bother to leave it in there when they're a research LAB. They hire researchers. Researchers, especially temporary ones, can't or won't deal with that sort of thing. (Really, you can't have my thesis.)
Silly stuff on this level, I'm sure it's worse when they'd actually try to enforce something so stupid.
Lea
>Microsoft takes PII very seriously, and increasingly so. As an employee there, I had to take multiple courses on it, and the grunts took it very seriously.
/still/ don't know what can be done with the data, so anyone is still capable of releasing "bad" information without realizing it. This has nothing to do with Microsoft, per se.
No one really has a good definition of PII yet, frankly, so it's not really possible for them to eliminate it as yet without taking out a LOT of other information. What constitutes an anonymized database -- especially a USEFUL anonymized database -- is not at all clear. It's an active area of research, and not at all well explored.
My point is that people have given out this kind of information in the past with the very best of intentions, not knowing what can be done with the data. We
Lea
>Notice they aren't releasing any information (like your name, etc.) that would explicitly identify the person to the advertisers.
There is some rather interesting research on this. Gender, age, and location is enough to identify most people, since, really, there are a limited number of people in each cartesian-type category. Note that this is different from aggregate data, which may be less personally identifiable, depending on how it's done.
The people at the data privacy lab have gone through and identified people in "non-personally identifiable" information released by several sources. Part of the problem is that you can put these sources of data together with high confidence and both narrow down individual people and gather a LOT of information about them. I'm sure they have some papers up if you're interested:
http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/
Lea
>I love California, but if you're honestly staring down the barrel of a $25K salary, get the hell out now.
Not everyone realistically has that option. I grew up in the bay area (though I'm not living there now), and I have a lot of friends who did as well. They have roots in that area, and have family responsibilities. In some cases they're faced with a choice between placing sick relatives in a (rather grim) state institution or staying, which is a very difficult choice.
Certainly they take responsibility for that choice, but there are other factors at work for many people.
Lea
>Why can't women do the same? Why can't they just stop complaining, STFU, and do their work just as men do? Why do they always need special treatment, special privileges, and special protection?
I haven't seen men recieve some of the treatment that I have. I won't go into it here, but there are certainly some very idiotic men around who are very unprofessional. This certainly hasn't stopped me from doing my work, and it hasn't stopped me from being good at it. I still don't think it's acceptable to treat anyone in that manner, especially in a professional situation. I'm not asking for special treatment. I'm asking that people judge my competence on its merits. I'm also asking that people act more professionally in professional situations.
I don't see what shutting up is going to do for this situtation. It's not productive for anyone to have this sort of crap flying around, so it's in everyone's interests to change it.
Lea
>With a straight razor, you really have no consumables for the rest of your life
It's a nice idea, but I think I'd be somewhat nervous about taking one of those things to my knees (and especially near the arteries at the back of my knees!).
Lea
>Still, as previous news stories here have shown us, married, old staff are not as innovative or useful as young hopefuls, so perhaps this plan isn't so bad on Google's part after all.
Google is trying to hire PhDs like crazy. These people are not the youngest people around, but they're smart, articulate, self-directed, and self-motivated. I think they're banking on the same things that make people succeed at a PhD being the same things that make people inventive and productive.
I don't think it's such a bad bet, myself.
Lea
I bought a used volvo, which has been a very good option for me. Used is really the way to go, in many cases. (Thought it seems to be a lot less of a good deal here in Salt Land.) My major problem with it has been that I take the bus instead of driving, so I tend to kill the battery through disuse.
>I don't believe I know of anyone that has a car even close to that old.
I know someone who drives a VW Beetle. An original one. It just kept working, so the family kept driving it. My friend just got rid of a 1981 Volvo for a Prius. I have another friend who gave his mid-1970s BMW to his younger sister about a year ago. There are many, many 1970s Cadillacs driving around. In fact, there are just tons of cars a lot older than that driving around. Personally, I'd like some airbags (and I've been trying to convince my fiance to get a car with some and some antilock breaks when he graduates), which is probably a major reason for people trying to get out of the older cars.
But my goodness, where the heck do you live that that's the OLDEST car you've seen?
Lea
Hi Tom.
As you weren't at crypto last year, you missed a bit of a brouhaha where people were considering moving the conference (which is ALWAYS at UCSB) outside of the US. The proximate motivation for this was that there was a grad student who had a paper, and was supposed to present it. When she found out, she got the next embassy appointment to get a visa, which was three weeks before the conference. She went, and they freaked out about the "crypto" thing, and said they'd have to send her work back for review to see if she was a terrorist or some such. They gave her a new appointment a week after the conference. Less than useful, eh?
The visa people need to remove their heads from their posteriors about published work; it's hard to threaten the US by talking about something published in a very prominent conference at that conference. (Someone's going to do it!)
Lea
Hey, when the MD5 crack came out after crypto last year, I pointed out that this was likely going to happen soon, as Eli Biham and Rafi Chen got some rather nice results from a reduced-round version.
/. comments can be educational. :)
See? Sometimes reading
Lea
Go watch Babylon 5 (it's all out on DVD now, even). They had DeLenn look very non-female originally (actually, I seem to remember they were going to have a male voice and her acting, but that REALLY threw people off). They also have tried to have a lot of different phyisical characteristics, including some races that were added through CG.
Lea
>RSA was broken. The attack was choosen plaintext, and used several observed weaknesses in the padding scheme and RSA.
Plain vanilla RSA has certainly been broken, but I believe it's been patched back together again. There are also a large number of other interesting cryptosystems to choose from. My personal favorite is Paillier.
I'm not up on more than the general outlines of authentication systems, but there have been some rather interesting papers out lately on authentication with weak passwords.
Lea
>The additional values of "d" that your code finds are congruent to the original d, mod phi. This necessarily means that they are larger than (p-1)(q-1)
/not/ a cyclic group, but a subgroup of size 1/2 the total group may exist.) In that case, you do in fact have multiple decryption exponents which are congruent modulo p'q' (or 2p'q') instead of 4p'q'= \phi(n). the totient function gives the size of the group, but if it is not cyclic, the size of the cyclic subgroups is smaller, and you can have multiple values of d smaller than \phi(n).
It depends on what sort of a subgroup you're using. If you're using safe primes, (n=pq, p = 2p'+1, q = 2q' + 1), then, iirc, your largest subgroup is the quadratic residues, which is 1/4 of the total group in size. (Z_n^* It is certainly
>Finding your "extra" d's is reducable to the problem of finding the original d, only harder because the numbers are bigger.
that is exactly what I said, except it's rather difficult to categorically state that it's "harder". I can prove that they are poly-time equivalent. they're also poly-time equivalent to factoring.
I'm not attacking RSA. I was pointing out that the poster to whom I was replying was wrong -- that there are multiple equivalent decryption exponents does not signifigantly impact RSAs security, as finding any of these is derministic polynomial-time equivalent to factoring.
Lea
> Its sort of like the theories that RSA is hard to break because its keys are a result of large primes. That only holds true if the the public key to private key ratio is 1:1 and it isn't yet I have never seen such a claim published in a paper.
The real theorem goes something like this: we assume RSA is hard to break, therefore RSA is hard to break. (No, I'm not kidding.) If factoring the product of large primes is not hard, then RSA is not hard to break; it is sufficient but not necessary. BTW, finding Euler's totient function $\phi$ of the public key $n=pq$ is deterministic polynomial time equivalent to factoring. Note also that finding a multiple of $\phi(n)$ is equivalent to finding $\phi(b)$.
I'm not sure what you mean about "the public key to private key ratio is 1:1". For any given number $n$ there is a unique prime factorization. You can use any multiple of $\phi(n)$ as a secret key instead, if you wish, and each of these gives an equivalent decryption exponent. However, even with multiple decryption exponents, there are only a polynomial number of them, while there are an exponential number of possible exponents. This is hard to guess. Not only are they hard to guess: if you find such an exponent, you can in deterministic polynomial time factor $n$ using that information.
The upshot of this is that you shouldn't be worrying about that. It is in fact equivalent to factoring, though the RSA cryptosystem is not. If you're confused by this, feel free to ask. (Use an informative subject line, please.)
Personally, I'd be much, much more worried about security holes stemming from implementation than from those in a well-tested cryptosystem. I'm not saying we won't break them -- I'm saying that it's very hard, and there are lower hanging fruit.
Lea
>statistical analysis of the sort of data that is created by the source (camera, scanner, etc) makes it *trivial* to detect that stuff is being hidden.
There is in fact Real Stego, made by real cryptographers, with real security guarentees (based on standard assumptions or in a information-theoretic model). It is, however, true that you'll have to have a certain amount of entropy in your channel to move data. If you're interested in lower bounds for that, I can refer you to a paper.
BTW, in some places, encryption is not legal, or will bring unwanted attention. In these cases, you really want steganographic security.
Lea
>I dare say, writing directly in HTML is much easier in many cases (and a lot more portable :-).
I believe you can even take tex and convert it over to HTML, if you wanted. Anything (basically, "really weird symbols or equations") that can't be rendered reasonably in html will be made into images. Images aren't ideal, but seem to be the best option, under the circumstances. You could thus argue that writing in LaTeX is both more portable and easier than writing in HTML for many things.
Lea
>The limitations of word are not so much due to the model (what you see is *only* what you get) than the implementation.
I've personally never seen a good wysiwyg equation editor. I've used several, and the pain and suffering I went through made me swear off everything but LaTeX. I personally don't see how you could use as many symbols as LaTeX gives you access to in a quick way, using a GUI. On top of that, MS Office has implementation problems. If I wanted my mathematical symbols to turn into freaking FLOWERS and LEAVES and STARS, I would have put them in that way.
(And by the way, I use TexShop. It's a little slower than using a makefile for final production, but you can script it if you really care. Usually I need to run BibTex once a week, at most, so it's not an issue.)
Lea
>After a few months, they got lazy as 'nobody will crack this' attitude crept in.
IIRC, they continued to change the priming characters (at the start of the message -- they act somewhat as an index into the machine), but quite a few people started using swear words. If you have enough people using the same charachters, you get the message depth that allows you to find patterns
A similar security breach happened with WEP. Into a part of the algorithm where one feeds a random value (a nonce), the engineers fed a 0 (a naught). It's my pet theory that they misunderstood "nonce".
Lea
Disclaimer: I've never downloaded anything of this sort, but your arguments seem a little weak.
>Then why not distribute just text files and not video? There are numerous softwares available to display synchronized text files with a separate video file or during DVD playback.
How can I load this software into my DVD player? It sounds very useful.
> Since at that point, you can just order it from Amazon Japan and such.
What are you supposed to do with those DVDs, precisely? Are they region coded?
Lea