Tolkien also published an essay on Beowulf entitled "The Monsters and the Critics", which I have not read, but have heard is excellent and was the cause of an academic reappraisal of Beowulf.
Yes, I found it in an old book sitting in a box at home a few years back, it was quite good. I had just read Beowulf for a class and figured that Tolkien might give me some insight for any papers I had to write about it.;)
On a nit picky note about your otherwise informative posting, the "255 per second" in the article you quote should actually have been "2 to the power of 55"
Oops. I was just going off what the original post said. I thought it was weird that they were says 255 keys/second - I mean, a 100 Mhz Pentium could do that!
US Government classified information? What the heck are they using for classified info crypto?
Short answer: Stuff designed and vetted by the NSA.
Also note that 149 trillion years is an upper bound on the strength, and 255 keys/second is pretty damned slow. Brute force is essentially infinitely parrelizable; consider a room with 1,000,000 FCPGAs or ASICs each cracking 100,000 keys/second. That's still about 53914487622781590403 years for a brute force (on average), but you catch my drift, I hope.
The algorithm itself also has to be strong. It would not take much effort to design a block cipher with similar parameters (block size, key lengths, etc), that was trivially breakable. Rijndael is not trivially breakable, but it may (in fact, almost certainly does) have undiscovered weaknesses.
Longer answer:
There are a few major reasons the AES was not simply handed to us, fully formed from the head of the NSA.
One is that they probably don't want to give people any "hints" about design techniques. We've learned a hell of a lot from trying to attack DES, and people have probably re-invented a good portion of the techniques the NSA had at the time. Getting the specifications to a block cipher designed with the NSA's latest design and analysis techniques would probably advance the state of the art by at least 5 years.
Slightly off the topic: Some people at IBM claim DES was invented entirely at IBM, NSA had nothing to do with the design, and so on and so forth. I don't believe this is the case, but whatever. If you believe it is true, S/NSA/NSA+IBM in the above.
Also, people were worried that the NSA would try to put a backdoor in it, or at least, people were worried that other people would worry that the NSA would try to backdoor it. So they wanted people in the academic community to come up with something for them. But obviously the NSA can't trust something like that, at least without a few years of "in house" analysis.
Now the minimal recommended key size is 400 bits longer, amd most of us use keys 900 bits longer.
Actually, 400 + 100 == 500 bits, and a 512 bit RSA modulus was factored, um, either last year or the year before, I can't remember which. It took about 6 months with an array of about 400 Pentium IIs and Alphas, and one very big Cray, to do some precomputation and the final big set of matrix operations. IIRC, it used a modified version of the Number Field Sieve, which involved a good deal more precomputation, which for larger keys saves more time than it hurts.
Many new specifications (for example, OpenPGP) specify an absolute minimum of 768 bits.
* SGI/IRIX is flawless, they never have security proble... oh, nevermind [oreillynet.com]
Are you insane, a troll, or do you simply know nothing about Unix? IRIX is by far the most insecure Unix out there (that's still being maintained, anyway, I guess 4.2 BSD might be less secure). It's not meant for network servers, it's meant for graphics workstations and rendering machines.
...and the books were quite clear that there was water on Arrakis at one point. It's a major plot point, really.
Yes, I know. And there were big caverns of it underwater, hoarded by the Fremen. And later, under the rule of the God Emperor, Arrakis has water on the ground yet again.
But I don't think any of those things would help you out much out in the middle of the deserts there.
Why has no one asked why the poster feels the need for a still-suit? I believe even the harshest desert conditions on Earth don't really require one...
Agreed there, but it does have some potentially useful applications. For example, military activity in a large desert; if you don't need to send in water, you spend less on transport, it's easier to carry everything, etc. Also I imagine there are some potential applications in space, though since the system is closed it should be fairly easy to recycle everything without waste anyway.
But I agree, the situation that inspired the still suit (a planet almost entirely devoid of free water) exists nowhere on earth. Any place resembling such (Sahara is the only one that comes close that I can think of), basically nobody lives in anyway, so it's kind of a moot point.
This isn't really that huge of a deal--idolizing a person because they aren't actually real.
Japan-related but not Japan-specific: I and quite a few people I know are really into various anime characters. Yeah, it's fairly geek-oriented, I suppose, but it's not an exclusive club. And certainly they're not photo-realistic (but with good voice actors, animation, and writers, they can seem quite real, in a human sense).
Not just the hot girls either (though there is a long list of anime girls I find pretty niz), but the cool heros like Spike Spiegel, Goku, and about N others. I know people who try to emulate these character's habits (not to a totally weird extreme, just little things).
A little side note that won't make sense unless you've seen Cowboy Bebop: I was walking to a diner with two friends of mine, and walking the other direction was a woman walking a Welsh Corgi. In unison, we yelled in happiness: "Ein!"
Unless that woman was an anime fan, she's probably wondering why people will say that when she's walking her dog around. But Ein, an animated dog (who is just that, a (mostly) regular dog), is a well known celebrity to us, to the point where we will note upon "lookalikes" (it's also happend with Faye Valentine, though I didn't see the woman in question).
Right on. I usually play Pikachu (I *LOVE* that party hat it gets in a team battle), and my housemate plays Kirby in our two-on-two (us vs game) battles. I must admit I'm jealous of the brick and the ability to steal the Falcon Punch, though.:)
If you dont own (but want) a DVD player then you can probably justify the extra cost for a xbox or ps2.
Yeah, I suppose. However:
I (well, a housemate) has a DVD player, though she is moving out in May. But we're good until then.
and
I would rather buy the DVDized Gamecube than a PS2 or an Xbox, because the DVD playing Gamecube looks really cool to me <g>, and anyway, while there are certain games that I would like to play on PS2 and Xbox (GTA3, GT3, MGS2), the only games where I will think "WOW! I really want to buy this game right now! $#^#@^&#$% Me like!! @%^!%^&" are on the Gamecube, enough so that I would rather buy a regular GC and a DVD player if Panasonic doesn't produce the DVD playing GC in some reasonable timeframe.
When Super Smash Brothers comes out, that'll probably change:)
Not a better group game ever.
It's kind of sad, but I and a housemate have played SSB on N64 probably about an hour a day (average) over the last year and a half.
Since neither of us have much interest in Luigi's Mansion or Rouge Leader (the N64 one was just too damn hard!), we're waiting for Zelda, Pikmin, and SSB. Maybe even a little bit of a price drop too, though as a poor-as-hell student I find the $100 reduction in price in the GC compared Xbox or PS2 quite compelling, though I wouldn't buy any of them if not for those certain Nintendo games.
Probably the day we buy the GC will coincide quite closely with the release date for Smash Brothers.
Totally offtopic: what are the favorite characters to play in your dorm?
OK, I should probably just assume this is a joke, given the last one, but I still have to say it: "Why would I want my gamecube to boot Linux?" I'm going to buy a gamecube to play games to keep my mind off Linux and other work-related type things.
I really really hope nobody is using any game platforms to design nukes.:)
One other thing... wasn't Oregon the state that at some point had all of their DOL/DMV info available on the Internet, free-for-all?
Yes indeed. In fact we used it to find out who owned some vehicles that were abandoned on our property once. They took it down fairly quickly, it was only up for a few weeks, I think.
Personally, I hope more things like this happen, it might keep the number of people moving in down a little bit, which would be nice.:)
1) Users are complaining because it's too slow
AND
2) You actually have nothing better to spend it on; unless you are very lucky, this one is not true.
AND
3) Software tweaking isn't doing any good.
OTOH, tweaking the kernel and such is always fun. Here are a few ideas:
1) Recompile the latest 'stable' kernel optimized for your machine. 2.4.2 -> 2.4.12 produces a huge increase in I/O performance on my machine, for example. You may find out something similiar.
2) Related thing: BIOS updates and tweaking can sometimes go a long way.
3) Upgrade the machine to the latest distro; a nice thing about Unix is things usually get faster, not slower.
4) Figure out what is using your CPU time. For example, given you're running SPOP, I suspect a lot of that time is used for SSL. So recompile OpenSSL with better optimizations (the normal OpenSSL RPMs are always underpowered; asm is disabled, no -march flags, etc), and you should see a magical increase in performance.
5) Assuming this makes your system faster, celebrate by spending some of the money you would have used to upgrade on beer.
No, you don't. I've been helping run the contest systems at JHU for the last three years (including one last night), and PC^2 is an absolute nightmare. The people who wrote it simply do not understand how to write software that works.
For example, we were trying to log into the admin account. Then the PC^2 client crashed. However, PC^2 does not understand the idea of atomicity; the main server at Virginia Tech got wedged in a bad state that meant that that it had to be restarted, meaning every server in the mid-Atlantic region had to be restarted. Unfortunately, the VTech guys didn't believe that it was their problem, so we ended up having to start about 3 hours late.
to get together with some people, buy a box, and colo it. Depending on what you want to use it for, of course. I know a group (~10 people) doing this, and it comes out fairly cheap, I think something like $50 or $75 a month for 10 gigs / month or something like that. Nothing too high-end, but reasonable for people just wanting to host their various sites (Plug: like bitflood).
Or colo off a DSL or cable line, I know other people doing that.
$1000 a month for a personal net connection seems really crazy, at least to me. The thing is, DSL/cable is super-cheap for fast downloading, and colo'ing is great for reasonably cheap server apps. I don't see where something like a T1 comes in, unless you want experience working on such a system and are willing to pony up big bucks for it. In which case, well, more power to ya, I guess.
very true - but this sexy Yahoo article only 1.5 months before the release date -> featuring a crisp, shiny image with working readout panel makes it feel a lot less like vaporware than the May IGN article.
Actually, there were nice, clear, crisp photos out around (at least) July, because I remember talking about it with someone here on slashdot, and they pointed me at photos then.
Some grad student from China came here with a 6 gig IDE disk with all his data on it. I though it was kind of weird myself, but I guess it worked out OK...
Though drives will often die if left to their own devices [ie, off] (we say they get lonely and kill themselves). Which would really suck if that was your backup, wouldn't it?
Most slashdotters are advocates about retaining their privacy and personal information. Yet when it comes to other peoples privacy, ie Anonymous Cowards, it's just unacceptable.
What? Why? Did Taco mention something about being able to find out who ACs are from their posts? [checks back] Nope, he didn't.
Those same people want the Anonymous Cowards modded down.
And this affects their privacy... how? Anyway, it's an option. As always, you are free to view at -1 anytime.
Maybe someone posting as an Anonymous Coward has no choice. If they need to post something negative about the company they work at or an opinion they don't want people to know is theirs, then they have to post anonymously.
OK, that's great. So what does this example have to do with anything at all? They have every right to say something on slashdot (modulo Taco + co's rights to remove anything they don't happen to like from here - it is their boxen after all), but that doesn't mean anyone has to listen to them.
Anyway, how hard is it to create a new user account "CorporateLeak999" and post from there?
BTW, I would presume you have a problem with ACs currently posting at 0, and people with high karma having the ability to post at +2, right?
One book that I would really recommend is Design Patterns (to just about anyone doing program design, really). It's excellent. The Gang of Four (as the authors are usually refered to because nobody can ever remember all their names:P) did one or two other books on a simliar line ("More Design Patterns", I think?).
Since you didn't say what kind of language you're going to use, and you mention the only stuff there is C and Matlab, I'll throw out some languages suggestions as well:
It kind of depends on the experiences of the people you're teaching. If they already know C, C++, or Java, maybe doing the course in C++ or Java is the way to go. However, they may have too many preconcieved notions in those languages (like old C programmers moving to C++, and basically still writing C, ignoring the OO stuff when they can) to be effective object oriented programmers in those languages without some other experience.
So you may want to look into something like Python. I can't think of any other major OO scripting languages (Perl doesn't really count too much), and ML/O'Caml/Lisp/Scheme aren't really OO langauges in that sense.
Oh, maybe Smalltalk would work I don't know of any free implementations, hopefully there is in fact at least one good one. Objective-C is C plus Smalltalk-style OO and as it's built into GCC, it would be available for everyone, so that might be another option. Since it's much less complicated than C++ (I like C++ but even I think it's a huge language), it would be relatively easy to learn in short order.
and even *if* it were this would have NO effect on software written places other than the USA...
Except, of course, that it would be illegal to download Linux inside the United States. I think it would, probably, be still legal to use. Living in the US, I don't like it too much.
The other problem is that, more likely than not, you wouldn't be able to use this DRM hardware with Linux, because Linux would not be able to interface with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Tolkien also published an essay on Beowulf entitled "The Monsters and the Critics", which I have not read, but have heard is excellent and was the cause of an academic reappraisal of Beowulf.
;)
Yes, I found it in an old book sitting in a box at home a few years back, it was quite good. I had just read Beowulf for a class and figured that Tolkien might give me some insight for any papers I had to write about it.
They even suggest that Gandalf was an "Angel" more than a "wizard"
IIRC the Silmarillion stated that he was actually some sort of god or similar "higher power".
I don't usually read much theology, so I think that this idea did come from a real JRRT source.
On a nit picky note about your otherwise informative posting, the "255 per second" in the article you quote should actually have been "2 to the power of 55"
Oops. I was just going off what the original post said. I thought it was weird that they were says 255 keys/second - I mean, a 100 Mhz Pentium could do that!
US Government classified information? What the heck are they using for classified info crypto?
Short answer: Stuff designed and vetted by the NSA.
Also note that 149 trillion years is an upper bound on the strength, and 255 keys/second is pretty damned slow. Brute force is essentially infinitely parrelizable; consider a room with 1,000,000 FCPGAs or ASICs each cracking 100,000 keys/second. That's still about 53914487622781590403 years for a brute force (on average), but you catch my drift, I hope.
The algorithm itself also has to be strong. It would not take much effort to design a block cipher with similar parameters (block size, key lengths, etc), that was trivially breakable. Rijndael is not trivially breakable, but it may (in fact, almost certainly does) have undiscovered weaknesses.
Longer answer:
There are a few major reasons the AES was not simply handed to us, fully formed from the head of the NSA.
One is that they probably don't want to give people any "hints" about design techniques. We've learned a hell of a lot from trying to attack DES, and people have probably re-invented a good portion of the techniques the NSA had at the time. Getting the specifications to a block cipher designed with the NSA's latest design and analysis techniques would probably advance the state of the art by at least 5 years.
Slightly off the topic: Some people at IBM claim DES was invented entirely at IBM, NSA had nothing to do with the design, and so on and so forth. I don't believe this is the case, but whatever. If you believe it is true, S/NSA/NSA+IBM in the above.
Also, people were worried that the NSA would try to put a backdoor in it, or at least, people were worried that other people would worry that the NSA would try to backdoor it. So they wanted people in the academic community to come up with something for them. But obviously the NSA can't trust something like that, at least without a few years of "in house" analysis.
Now the minimal recommended key size is 400 bits longer, amd most of us use keys 900 bits longer.
Actually, 400 + 100 == 500 bits, and a 512 bit RSA modulus was factored, um, either last year or the year before, I can't remember which. It took about 6 months with an array of about 400 Pentium IIs and Alphas, and one very big Cray, to do some precomputation and the final big set of matrix operations. IIRC, it used a modified version of the Number Field Sieve, which involved a good deal more precomputation, which for larger keys saves more time than it hurts.
Many new specifications (for example, OpenPGP) specify an absolute minimum of 768 bits.
* SGI/IRIX is flawless, they never have security proble... oh, nevermind [oreillynet.com]
Are you insane, a troll, or do you simply know nothing about Unix? IRIX is by far the most insecure Unix out there (that's still being maintained, anyway, I guess 4.2 BSD might be less secure). It's not meant for network servers, it's meant for graphics workstations and rendering machines.
...and the books were quite clear that there was water on Arrakis at one point. It's a major plot point, really.
Yes, I know. And there were big caverns of it underwater, hoarded by the Fremen. And later, under the rule of the God Emperor, Arrakis has water on the ground yet again.
But I don't think any of those things would help you out much out in the middle of the deserts there.
Why has no one asked why the poster feels the need for a still-suit? I believe even the harshest desert conditions on Earth don't really require one...
Agreed there, but it does have some potentially useful applications. For example, military activity in a large desert; if you don't need to send in water, you spend less on transport, it's easier to carry everything, etc. Also I imagine there are some potential applications in space, though since the system is closed it should be fairly easy to recycle everything without waste anyway.
But I agree, the situation that inspired the still suit (a planet almost entirely devoid of free water) exists nowhere on earth. Any place resembling such (Sahara is the only one that comes close that I can think of), basically nobody lives in anyway, so it's kind of a moot point.
Stick with light cotton and layers in the desert. Black rubber, while quite stylish, is simply not workable.
I seem to recall that the still suits were actually a milky white (though they were black in the movie).
Anyway, I don't cotton will help you if there is basically no water at all, ever, as it was on Arrakis.
Yes, it was a joke. The moderation was:
Offtopic=1, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Total=4
Yeah, I have Show Scores turned off so I can never tell. I should probably have just turned them back on to see before responding...
This isn't really that huge of a deal--idolizing a person because they aren't actually real.
Japan-related but not Japan-specific: I and quite a few people I know are really into various anime characters. Yeah, it's fairly geek-oriented, I suppose, but it's not an exclusive club. And certainly they're not photo-realistic (but with good voice actors, animation, and writers, they can seem quite real, in a human sense).
Not just the hot girls either (though there is a long list of anime girls I find pretty niz), but the cool heros like Spike Spiegel, Goku, and about N others. I know people who try to emulate these character's habits (not to a totally weird extreme, just little things).
A little side note that won't make sense unless you've seen Cowboy Bebop: I was walking to a diner with two friends of mine, and walking the other direction was a woman walking a Welsh Corgi. In unison, we yelled in happiness: "Ein!"
Unless that woman was an anime fan, she's probably wondering why people will say that when she's walking her dog around. But Ein, an animated dog (who is just that, a (mostly) regular dog), is a well known celebrity to us, to the point where we will note upon "lookalikes" (it's also happend with Faye Valentine, though I didn't see the woman in question).
Kirby !!!
:)
Right on. I usually play Pikachu (I *LOVE* that party hat it gets in a team battle), and my housemate plays Kirby in our two-on-two (us vs game) battles. I must admit I'm jealous of the brick and the ability to steal the Falcon Punch, though.
If you dont own (but want) a DVD player then you can probably justify the extra cost for a xbox or ps2.
Yeah, I suppose. However:
I (well, a housemate) has a DVD player, though she is moving out in May. But we're good until then.
and
I would rather buy the DVDized Gamecube than a PS2 or an Xbox, because the DVD playing Gamecube looks really cool to me <g>, and anyway, while there are certain games that I would like to play on PS2 and Xbox (GTA3, GT3, MGS2), the only games where I will think "WOW! I really want to buy this game right now! $#^#@^&#$% Me like!! @%^!%^&" are on the Gamecube, enough so that I would rather buy a regular GC and a DVD player if Panasonic doesn't produce the DVD playing GC in some reasonable timeframe.
When Super Smash Brothers comes out, that'll probably change :)
Not a better group game ever.
It's kind of sad, but I and a housemate have played SSB on N64 probably about an hour a day (average) over the last year and a half.
Since neither of us have much interest in Luigi's Mansion or Rouge Leader (the N64 one was just too damn hard!), we're waiting for Zelda, Pikmin, and SSB. Maybe even a little bit of a price drop too, though as a poor-as-hell student I find the $100 reduction in price in the GC compared Xbox or PS2 quite compelling, though I wouldn't buy any of them if not for those certain Nintendo games.
Probably the day we buy the GC will coincide quite closely with the release date for Smash Brothers.
Totally offtopic: what are the favorite characters to play in your dorm?
... can the gamecube be overclocked?
:)
... can the gamecube boot linux?
... can the gamecube design nuclear weaponry?
OK, I should probably just assume this is a joke, given the last one, but I still have to say it: "Why would I want my gamecube to boot Linux?" I'm going to buy a gamecube to play games to keep my mind off Linux and other work-related type things.
I really really hope nobody is using any game platforms to design nukes.
One other thing... wasn't Oregon the state that at some point had all of their DOL/DMV info available on the Internet, free-for-all?
:)
Yes indeed. In fact we used it to find out who owned some vehicles that were abandoned on our property once. They took it down fairly quickly, it was only up for a few weeks, I think.
Personally, I hope more things like this happen, it might keep the number of people moving in down a little bit, which would be nice.
The irony is thick here: Larry Ellison has a summer home in Oregon
No shit? Do you know where?
1) Users are complaining because it's too slow
AND
2) You actually have nothing better to spend it on; unless you are very lucky, this one is not true.
AND
3) Software tweaking isn't doing any good.
OTOH, tweaking the kernel and such is always fun. Here are a few ideas:
1) Recompile the latest 'stable' kernel optimized for your machine. 2.4.2 -> 2.4.12 produces a huge increase in I/O performance on my machine, for example. You may find out something similiar.
2) Related thing: BIOS updates and tweaking can sometimes go a long way.
3) Upgrade the machine to the latest distro; a nice thing about Unix is things usually get faster, not slower.
4) Figure out what is using your CPU time. For example, given you're running SPOP, I suspect a lot of that time is used for SSL. So recompile OpenSSL with better optimizations (the normal OpenSSL RPMs are always underpowered; asm is disabled, no -march flags, etc), and you should see a magical increase in performance.
5) Assuming this makes your system faster, celebrate by spending some of the money you would have used to upgrade on beer.
Also you may want to look into PC^2
No, you don't. I've been helping run the contest systems at JHU for the last three years (including one last night), and PC^2 is an absolute nightmare. The people who wrote it simply do not understand how to write software that works.
For example, we were trying to log into the admin account. Then the PC^2 client crashed. However, PC^2 does not understand the idea of atomicity; the main server at Virginia Tech got wedged in a bad state that meant that that it had to be restarted, meaning every server in the mid-Atlantic region had to be restarted. Unfortunately, the VTech guys didn't believe that it was their problem, so we ended up having to start about 3 hours late.
to get together with some people, buy a box, and colo it. Depending on what you want to use it for, of course. I know a group (~10 people) doing this, and it comes out fairly cheap, I think something like $50 or $75 a month for 10 gigs / month or something like that. Nothing too high-end, but reasonable for people just wanting to host their various sites (Plug: like bitflood).
Or colo off a DSL or cable line, I know other people doing that.
$1000 a month for a personal net connection seems really crazy, at least to me. The thing is, DSL/cable is super-cheap for fast downloading, and colo'ing is great for reasonably cheap server apps. I don't see where something like a T1 comes in, unless you want experience working on such a system and are willing to pony up big bucks for it. In which case, well, more power to ya, I guess.
very true - but this sexy Yahoo article only 1.5 months before the release date -> featuring a crisp, shiny image with working readout panel makes it feel a lot less like vaporware than the May IGN article.
Actually, there were nice, clear, crisp photos out around (at least) July, because I remember talking about it with someone here on slashdot, and they pointed me at photos then.
Some grad student from China came here with a 6 gig IDE disk with all his data on it. I though it was kind of weird myself, but I guess it worked out OK...
Though drives will often die if left to their own devices [ie, off] (we say they get lonely and kill themselves). Which would really suck if that was your backup, wouldn't it?
Most slashdotters are advocates about retaining their privacy and personal information. Yet when it comes to other peoples privacy, ie Anonymous Cowards, it's just unacceptable.
What? Why? Did Taco mention something about being able to find out who ACs are from their posts? [checks back] Nope, he didn't.
Those same people want the Anonymous Cowards modded down.
And this affects their privacy... how? Anyway, it's an option. As always, you are free to view at -1 anytime.
Maybe someone posting as an Anonymous Coward has no choice. If they need to post something negative about the company they work at or an opinion they don't want people to know is theirs, then they have to post anonymously.
OK, that's great. So what does this example have to do with anything at all? They have every right to say something on slashdot (modulo Taco + co's rights to remove anything they don't happen to like from here - it is their boxen after all), but that doesn't mean anyone has to listen to them.
Anyway, how hard is it to create a new user account "CorporateLeak999" and post from there?
BTW, I would presume you have a problem with ACs currently posting at 0, and people with high karma having the ability to post at +2, right?
Apple has published, through Fatbrain, Object-Oriented Programming and the Objective-C Language
Apple also has tons of documentation online, including a big fat PDF about Objective C which I have not yet had time to read.
One book that I would really recommend is Design Patterns (to just about anyone doing program design, really). It's excellent. The Gang of Four (as the authors are usually refered to because nobody can ever remember all their names :P) did one or two other books on a simliar line ("More Design Patterns", I think?).
Since you didn't say what kind of language you're going to use, and you mention the only stuff there is C and Matlab, I'll throw out some languages suggestions as well:
It kind of depends on the experiences of the people you're teaching. If they already know C, C++, or Java, maybe doing the course in C++ or Java is the way to go. However, they may have too many preconcieved notions in those languages (like old C programmers moving to C++, and basically still writing C, ignoring the OO stuff when they can) to be effective object oriented programmers in those languages without some other experience.
So you may want to look into something like Python. I can't think of any other major OO scripting languages (Perl doesn't really count too much), and ML/O'Caml/Lisp/Scheme aren't really OO langauges in that sense.
Oh, maybe Smalltalk would work I don't know of any free implementations, hopefully there is in fact at least one good one. Objective-C is C plus Smalltalk-style OO and as it's built into GCC, it would be available for everyone, so that might be another option. Since it's much less complicated than C++ (I like C++ but even I think it's a huge language), it would be relatively easy to learn in short order.
and even *if* it were this would have NO effect on software written places other than the USA...
Except, of course, that it would be illegal to download Linux inside the United States. I think it would, probably, be still legal to use. Living in the US, I don't like it too much.
The other problem is that, more likely than not, you wouldn't be able to use this DRM hardware with Linux, because Linux would not be able to interface with it.