You forgot to consider future advances in technology. If you assume that Moore's law stands, every two years computing speed doubles, and today we can consider 10e6 keys per second. In about 416 years, a computer can be built that can consider 2^256 keys in one year.
Such a computer could be built much sooner depending on advances in mathematics or quantum computing.
Throughout history, many "unbreakable" encryption schemes have been invented. Eventually, they are all broken.
They placed a rigid chain of carbon atoms, just tens of atoms long, in a vacuum chamber and streamed 425 volts through the sample.
I'm used to reading stuff like this in the main stream press. However, I would expect an article from insidescience.org wouldn't use such a nonsensical phrase. It's kind of like saying they streamed 425 pounds per square inch of water through a pipe.
IMHO, Eve Online is much more commerce oriented than Second Life. The makers, CCP, support a pseudo mechanism for real to virtual currency excahnge. A player can use real money to buy a game card, then sell the game code to another player for virutal money. So, there is market established exchange rate.
CCP actually encourages all manner of double dealing, back stabbing, and fraud. Fruad is part of the game. The game's history is littered with scams where large groups of players will loose months of work because another trusted player rips them off. Unlike many other games, the game masters never intervene in these cases.
So, I wonder what would happen if two parties enter into an agreement. Party A actually expects B to perform. B knows he's going to scam A and sees it as "just part of the game." Then, A sues B. Would the "it's just a game" defense work? What if A says, "In this case I really expected A to perform. Srsly!"
I have to obey is my home state legislature, since I operate completely and wholly within the state.
Will you configure your access point to block any packets that might cross state lines? The giant loop hole in our constitution, The Commerce Clause, has successfully been used in far more tenuous circumstances to justify laws that encroach on state's rights.
I love Haskell. I really, really do. However, I think Haskell is a bad choice for a beginning programming language. Since it is strictly typed and uses type inference, a mistake in one part of a program can produce an error in code far from the original mistake.
When I was learning Haskell, I spent ridiculous amounts of time fixing some very frustrating type errors. I've been programming for over 20 years; someone who is starting would likely become discouraged.
This sounds like a nice way to take the load off of the central servers. I don't think it will replace them or make them unnecessary.
From a technical standpoint, with Git, there's nothing about the central server that is unique. Instead, it's a social convention. Everyone knows where to get the code. Linus discusses this here. http://lwn.net/Articles/246381/
Perhaps, my imagination is failing; but, I don't think this will change. Most people want to go to a well known trusted place to at least get a secure hash of the code they are downloading.
For instance, the Debian distro is available via bit torrent. No sane person, downloads the latest Debian.torrent posted by 1337_KeRNeL_haxor on the pirate bay. They get it from debian.com or some other trusted site.
Also, we really need those central servers. Without them you'll constantly run into distribution problems. Just imagine having to post a message like,"Will someone PLEASE seed the repository. I need to grab the latest kernel."
I noticed your post and looked into ImageJ. It appears that ImageJ does most image analysis via plug-in. There are hundreds of plug-ins listed on their site. Converting a picture of several dials into a single number is no trivial task. Are there particular plug-ins that would be useful for this task?
You should look into Hough transforms. It could be very useful for determining the orientation of the dials on the meter. A word of warning, writing image recognition code is not for the faint of heart. It's as much art as it is science. All image processing code I've ever seen is completely illegible. If you think there's a remote change you will change it later, comment it well.
Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and the creation of an egalitarian society.
To me, it sounds like copyright has no place in socialism. I'd imagine a socialist would argue that government should pay artists to produce works. Then, the government would have the right to copy and sell these works. Granting monopolies is antitheses to socialistic philosophy.
Are there any socialists on Slashdot who care to comment?
If you are paid $5000 then donate the money back, the donation cancels out the extra $5000 income that shows up on your W2 or 1099. It's a zero sum.
If you work for free you don't have the deduction but you don't have the extra income. So, there's really no diiference.
You can't write off volunteer time. That would be double dipping. The good news is you don't have to pay taxes on the money you didn't earn while working on your book.
Imagine your time is worth $50.00 / hr. You could donate 100 hours of time by working for 100 hours for $5000. Then, you could donate the money back to the charity and deduct the $5000. Or, you could work for free for 100 hours and forgo the deduction. Both scenarios would put you in the same place tax wise.
On the otherhand, if you worked for free and took a deduction, you would essentially be taking the deduction twice. The IRS doesn't take kindly to this.
He specifically wanted to avoid TeX becoming a full fledged programming language and I believe he expected other front ends to produce TeX commands but was eventually convinced to add some programming features to TeX.
It's hard for me to imagine that Knuth was eventually convinced to add some programming features. Much of TeX is written in TeX. The programming features go to the core of the design. It hardly seems like he wanted to avoid these features but was eventually convinced to add them to Tex.
Do you have a source that backs up your assertion the Knuth wanted to avoid making Tex a programming language?
I think you need to reread TFA. Especially, pay attention to the bill. There's a whole list of conditions where you'd need a license to investigate non criminal activity. Section (a)(1)(B) is particularly broad.
If a company hires you to write an SQL query to identify all customer who purchased one of their widgets, it could be considered an investigation.
The opinion statement from the Texas Private Security Bureau is even more vague.
We understand the term "computer forensics" to refer to the analysis of computer-based data, particularly hidden, temporary, deleted, protected or encrypted files, for the purpose of discovering information related (generally) to the causes of events or the conduct of persons.
Hell, I do this stuff every day at work.
You might think that terms, "hidden, temporary, deleted, protected, or encrypted." are the key. However, later the opinion says:
On the other hand, if the company simply collects and processes electronic data (whether in the form of hidden, deleted, encrypted files, or otherwise), and provides it to the client in a form that can then be reviewed and analyzed for content by others (such as by an attorney or an investigator), then no regulated service has been provided.
In my reading the only distinction I can see is in "computer forensics" you analyze data, but in "data acquisition" you can collect and process data. Honestly, I have no idea what the difference is.
The key distinction is intent. If you analyzing data to use in court or justify a firing, you need a license. If you analyze data for your company's next ad campaign you don't need a license. Unfortunately, the bill does not deal with intent at all. So, any data analysis by a non PI could be technically in violation of this law.
Interestingly Enrico Fermi did use the same argument while setting on the first nuclear reactor during the Manhattan project around 1940 (that some cosmic rays are anyway much more energetic and bombarding the Earth since ages). Many nuclear physicists of that era died of causes that can be attributed to radiation exposure.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi
Because the effects of radiation on biology was not well understood at that time, people were frequently exposed to doses that would not be permitted today.
Some may see Mr. Fermi's comment as an example of why we should be skeptical of the "low energy compared to cosmic rays" argument.
Companies that assign addresses for Web sites appear to be cutting corners on security more when they assign names in certain domains than in others, . . .
Of all ".hk" sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors . . .
A little more than 5 percent of the sites under the ".com" domain -- the world's most popular -- were identified as dangerous.
If I recall, when I registered my.com domain name, the only thing I had to verify is that I'm human, via captcha. I can't imagine how they could be less secure for other domains. Perhaps, they do away with the captcha?
I doubt this has anything to do with registrars' verification procedures. If I made a wild a55ed guess to explain this, I'd say many of the.com sites are larger and have better security. Sites on other TLDs are smaller, less secure, and have been hacked.
I wonder if the author's explanation of cutting corners was merely a WAG. Unless I missed something, the author did not provide a citation for this explanation.
What Lori Drew did was awful. But, her prosecution is scary. Based on the posts I've seen, it's obvious slashdotters are not RTFA'ing but arguing the points in the article anyway. In a nutshell, Ms. Drew faces jail time for violating myspace's TOS.
The prosecutions argument boils down to:
1. Ms. Drew provided false identifying information to myspace.
2. Therefore, she violated their TOS.
3. Since she violated the TOS she did not have authorized access to their computers.
4. By accessing their computers without authorization, she violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
I seriously doubt there is anyone on slashdot who has never violated a TOS.
Does your ISP prohibit running servers, but you setup an FTP, HTTP, or vent server anyway? That could mean prison time. Have you ever given false identifying information to a web site so you could avoid SPAM? If so, go to jail. Do you even read TOS? If not, you might be a criminal but don't know it.
People are righly outraged by what Ms. Drew did. But, making it a crime to violate a TOS to satisfy that outrage is a mistake.
People need to read about relativity of simultaneity before trying to be smart asses and making laymen comments about events at large distances.
As long as a frame of reference is specified, it is possible to say that two events were simultaneous even if they were separated by some distance. However, if the frame of reference is not specified it is impossible to say whether or not the events are simultaneous. The events may be simultaneous in one particular frame of reference, but may not be simultaneous in a different frame of reference.
When the article said the Super Nova occurred 28,000 light years away, it is reasonable to assume the writer meant that it is 28,000 light years away from Earth, relative a frame of reference in which Earth is stationary. It is absurd to presume the author than choose a different frame of reference when he said it occurred 140 years ago.
Of course there exist frames of reference in which the super nova occurred 140 years ago. Interestingly, Earth is moving close to the speed of light in those frames of reference.
A loose analogy would be explaining to a judge that although you were clocked at 100 mph relative to the highway patrolman parked on the side of the road, there exist frames of reference in which you were only traveling 55 mph. We all understand which frame of reference is applicable.
"As I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?"
I hope the students can see through that lame analogy. The analogy isn't about Wikepedia. It's about whether you'd trust someone who has trained and worked in a field over someone how has merely read a few articles about the subject.
To paraphrase:
'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who reads peer reviewed articles about neurosurgery from highly respected journals.
It doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference to me where the student gets his information. I want the surgeon!
By placing software under the GPL, the author is specifying explicit terms under which the software can be copied and distributed. If Cittio has included GPL software into another program, distributes this program, and does not include an offer to provide the source code, then Cittio is illegally violating these terms.
The problem is, how would you know it was god and not some advanced life form? Ancient humans with smaller brains would consider us or our mysterious technology 'gods'. My cat has a smaller brain than I. I'm pretty sure he considers me his intellectual equal.
Even if you come up with a clever test that would pierce the illusion, one would have to assume whoever maintains the illusion would simply fix it so that didn't work a second time. Nothing would be repeatable.
Personally, I think it would be way cool to create a simulation that developed life, intelligent life, self aware life, and then life that was aware of the simulation. I wouldn't try to prevent that.
I wonder why you assume the creator would be intent on maintaining some sort of illusion. Another possiblity, the creator is interested in some other out come of the simulation. Intelligent life, you, me,... we're all just a side effect!
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to consider future advances in technology. If you assume that Moore's law stands, every two years computing speed doubles, and today we can consider 10e6 keys per second. In about 416 years, a computer can be built that can consider 2^256 keys in one year.
Such a computer could be built much sooner depending on advances in mathematics or quantum computing.
Throughout history, many "unbreakable" encryption schemes have been invented. Eventually, they are all broken.
They placed a rigid chain of carbon atoms, just tens of atoms long, in a vacuum chamber and streamed 425 volts through the sample.
I'm used to reading stuff like this in the main stream press. However, I would expect an article from insidescience.org wouldn't use such a nonsensical phrase. It's kind of like saying they streamed 425 pounds per square inch of water through a pipe.
CCP actually encourages all manner of double dealing, back stabbing, and fraud. Fruad is part of the game. The game's history is littered with scams where large groups of players will loose months of work because another trusted player rips them off. Unlike many other games, the game masters never intervene in these cases.
So, I wonder what would happen if two parties enter into an agreement. Party A actually expects B to perform. B knows he's going to scam A and sees it as "just part of the game." Then, A sues B. Would the "it's just a game" defense work? What if A says, "In this case I really expected A to perform. Srsly!"
I have to obey is my home state legislature, since I operate completely and wholly within the state.
Will you configure your access point to block any packets that might cross state lines? The giant loop hole in our constitution, The Commerce Clause, has successfully been used in far more tenuous circumstances to justify laws that encroach on state's rights.
Geez, you can substitute any two professions into this sentence and it works. For instance:
IT professionals are incredibly undereducated when it comes to teaching.
Or, my personal favoriate:
IT professionals are incredibly undereducated when it comes to the law. Although, they'll happily give you free legal advice on Slashdot.
When I was learning Haskell, I spent ridiculous amounts of time fixing some very frustrating type errors. I've been programming for over 20 years; someone who is starting would likely become discouraged.
From a technical standpoint, with Git, there's nothing about the central server that is unique. Instead, it's a social convention. Everyone knows where to get the code. Linus discusses this here. http://lwn.net/Articles/246381/
Perhaps, my imagination is failing; but, I don't think this will change. Most people want to go to a well known trusted place to at least get a secure hash of the code they are downloading.
For instance, the Debian distro is available via bit torrent. No sane person, downloads the latest Debian .torrent posted by 1337_KeRNeL_haxor on the pirate bay. They get it from debian.com or some other trusted site.
Also, we really need those central servers. Without them you'll constantly run into distribution problems. Just imagine having to post a message like,"Will someone PLEASE seed the repository. I need to grab the latest kernel."
I noticed your post and looked into ImageJ. It appears that ImageJ does most image analysis via plug-in. There are hundreds of plug-ins listed on their site. Converting a picture of several dials into a single number is no trivial task. Are there particular plug-ins that would be useful for this task?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hough_transform
Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and the creation of an egalitarian society.
To me, it sounds like copyright has no place in socialism. I'd imagine a socialist would argue that government should pay artists to produce works. Then, the government would have the right to copy and sell these works. Granting monopolies is antitheses to socialistic philosophy.
Are there any socialists on Slashdot who care to comment?
If you are paid $5000 then donate the money back, the donation cancels out the extra $5000 income that shows up on your W2 or 1099. It's a zero sum. If you work for free you don't have the deduction but you don't have the extra income. So, there's really no diiference.
You can't write off volunteer time. That would be double dipping. The good news is you don't have to pay taxes on the money you didn't earn while working on your book.
Imagine your time is worth $50.00 / hr. You could donate 100 hours of time by working for 100 hours for $5000. Then, you could donate the money back to the charity and deduct the $5000. Or, you could work for free for 100 hours and forgo the deduction. Both scenarios would put you in the same place tax wise.
On the otherhand, if you worked for free and took a deduction, you would essentially be taking the deduction twice. The IRS doesn't take kindly to this.
He specifically wanted to avoid TeX becoming a full fledged programming language and I believe he expected other front ends to produce TeX commands but was eventually convinced to add some programming features to TeX.
It's hard for me to imagine that Knuth was eventually convinced to add some programming features. Much of TeX is written in TeX. The programming features go to the core of the design. It hardly seems like he wanted to avoid these features but was eventually convinced to add them to Tex.
Do you have a source that backs up your assertion the Knuth wanted to avoid making Tex a programming language?
If a company hires you to write an SQL query to identify all customer who purchased one of their widgets, it could be considered an investigation.
The opinion statement from the Texas Private Security Bureau is even more vague.
We understand the term "computer forensics" to refer to the analysis of computer-based data, particularly hidden, temporary, deleted, protected or encrypted files, for the purpose of discovering information related (generally) to the causes of events or the conduct of persons.
Hell, I do this stuff every day at work.
You might think that terms, "hidden, temporary, deleted, protected, or encrypted." are the key. However, later the opinion says:
On the other hand, if the company simply collects and processes electronic data (whether in the form of hidden, deleted, encrypted files, or otherwise), and provides it to the client in a form that can then be reviewed and analyzed for content by others (such as by an attorney or an investigator), then no regulated service has been provided.
In my reading the only distinction I can see is in "computer forensics" you analyze data, but in "data acquisition" you can collect and process data. Honestly, I have no idea what the difference is.
The key distinction is intent. If you analyzing data to use in court or justify a firing, you need a license. If you analyze data for your company's next ad campaign you don't need a license. Unfortunately, the bill does not deal with intent at all. So, any data analysis by a non PI could be technically in violation of this law.
Some may see Mr. Fermi's comment as an example of why we should be skeptical of the "low energy compared to cosmic rays" argument.
Of all ".hk" sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors . . .
A little more than 5 percent of the sites under the ".com" domain -- the world's most popular -- were identified as dangerous.
If I recall, when I registered my .com domain name, the only thing I had to verify is that I'm human, via captcha. I can't imagine how they could be less secure for other domains. Perhaps, they do away with the captcha?
I doubt this has anything to do with registrars' verification procedures. If I made a wild a55ed guess to explain this, I'd say many of the .com sites are larger and have better security. Sites on other TLDs are smaller, less secure, and have been hacked.
I wonder if the author's explanation of cutting corners was merely a WAG. Unless I missed something, the author did not provide a citation for this explanation.
You too can own your own machine. This has to be the lamest thing I've ever seen on Slashdot.
What Lori Drew did was awful. But, her prosecution is scary. Based on the posts I've seen, it's obvious slashdotters are not RTFA'ing but arguing the points in the article anyway. In a nutshell, Ms. Drew faces jail time for violating myspace's TOS.
The prosecutions argument boils down to:
1. Ms. Drew provided false identifying information to myspace.
2. Therefore, she violated their TOS.
3. Since she violated the TOS she did not have authorized access to their computers.
4. By accessing their computers without authorization, she violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
I seriously doubt there is anyone on slashdot who has never violated a TOS.
Does your ISP prohibit running servers, but you setup an FTP, HTTP, or vent server anyway? That could mean prison time. Have you ever given false identifying information to a web site so you could avoid SPAM? If so, go to jail. Do you even read TOS? If not, you might be a criminal but don't know it.
People are righly outraged by what Ms. Drew did. But, making it a crime to violate a TOS to satisfy that outrage is a mistake.
As long as a frame of reference is specified, it is possible to say that two events were simultaneous even if they were separated by some distance. However, if the frame of reference is not specified it is impossible to say whether or not the events are simultaneous. The events may be simultaneous in one particular frame of reference, but may not be simultaneous in a different frame of reference.
When the article said the Super Nova occurred 28,000 light years away, it is reasonable to assume the writer meant that it is 28,000 light years away from Earth, relative a frame of reference in which Earth is stationary. It is absurd to presume the author than choose a different frame of reference when he said it occurred 140 years ago.
Of course there exist frames of reference in which the super nova occurred 140 years ago. Interestingly, Earth is moving close to the speed of light in those frames of reference.
A loose analogy would be explaining to a judge that although you were clocked at 100 mph relative to the highway patrolman parked on the side of the road, there exist frames of reference in which you were only traveling 55 mph. We all understand which frame of reference is applicable.
I hope the students can see through that lame analogy. The analogy isn't about Wikepedia. It's about whether you'd trust someone who has trained and worked in a field over someone how has merely read a few articles about the subject.
To paraphrase:
'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who reads peer reviewed articles about neurosurgery from highly respected journals.
It doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference to me where the student gets his information. I want the surgeon!
I don't think you're familiar the GPL.
By placing software under the GPL, the author is specifying explicit terms under which the software can be copied and distributed. If Cittio has included GPL software into another program, distributes this program, and does not include an offer to provide the source code, then Cittio is illegally violating these terms.
Personally, I think it would be way cool to create a simulation that developed life, intelligent life, self aware life, and then life that was aware of the simulation. I wouldn't try to prevent that.
I wonder why you assume the creator would be intent on maintaining some sort of illusion. Another possiblity, the creator is interested in some other out come of the simulation. Intelligent life, you, me, ... we're all just a side effect!
I knew it. God/gods is/are software engineers. Welcome to the priesthood slashdotters.