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User: SeekerDarksteel

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Comments · 252

  1. Re:How nice of them on Feds Return Mistakenly Seized Domain · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Again, they may have been wrong in this case about copyright being infringed, but they do have that power.

    They do NOT have the power to seize property or restrict speech without proving that it is justified. Even if you argue that a domain is not 'property', they interfered with the domain owner's ability to disseminate information without cause.

  2. Re:If not the government, then who? on Bloggers Not Journalists, Federal Judge Rules · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How about we don't have special rights for special people? Everyone gets the same rights regardless of whether or not the government or someone else feels like a particular class of people shouldn't have them.

  3. Re:Climate change ceased to be a scientific issue on New Batch of Leaked Climate Emails · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The only people that think that the last batch of emails demonstrated any kind of fraud are people who have no fucking clue what the fuck the emails actually said.

    But don't let little things like facts and observable reality get in the way of your diatribe of made up facts and fabrications.

  4. Me am go too far! on Technology and Moral Panic · · Score: 5, Funny
  5. Re:Article Makes No Sense on Hackers Eavesdrop On Quantum Crypto With Lasers · · Score: 1

    Ah, ok. That's making a lot more sense. It really didn't come across in the Nature article that way to me. But I guess that's scientific reporting for ya, :P

  6. Re:Article Makes No Sense on Hackers Eavesdrop On Quantum Crypto With Lasers · · Score: 1

    Ok, I must be missing how exactly you're controlling Bob's basis then. I guess that's what your blinding trick is supposed to be doing, but my physics is too weak to understand why. (I studied QC from a computer engineer standpoint, not a physics standpoint). My impression from the Nature article was that you could force Bob to see a 0 or a 1. If that's all you could do, then Eve's interference would have been detectable since she would have passed on bad bits when Alice and Bob's bases agreed but Eve's didn't.

  7. Article Makes No Sense on Hackers Eavesdrop On Quantum Crypto With Lasers · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The article is either missing massive details or these researchers are vastly overstating the power of their technique. The entire _point_ of quantum key exchange is that if Eve intercepts the signal she cannot tell if she read a 0 or a 1 because she does not know which basis the 0 or 1 was generated in. Even IF Eve passed a 1 along every time she read a 1, when Alice and Bob go to do the basis comparison over the standard channel they will notice errors because Eve read the signal in the wrong basis and passed along an incorrect value.

    I've tried reading the actual journal paper, but unfortunately they just seem to handwave this problem away. Maybe there's a reason they can, but its sure as hell not explained as far as I can see unless they're assuming Eve has also compromised the classical channel as well as the quantum channel.

  8. Re:Horn hero on Rock Band 3 To Include MIDI Keyboard · · Score: 1
  9. Re:Sun UltraSPARC-II's anyone? on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 1

    They do. This is a known phenomenon which has been measured. But the difference between, say, Denver and NYC isn't substantial enough that you would notice a difference with your personal electronics.

  10. Re:Long Answer: No on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 1

    Yes. Yes they do receive more radiation at higher altitudes. This is a known, measurable effect. That being said, the difference between sea level and ~5000 feet is not substantial enough that you would notice with personal electronics.

  11. Re:Checksums? on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 1

    Insulating the ROM would be much more expensive than just adding error correcting codes or having multiple copies of the ROM and comparing the contents periodically. The problem is no matter what you do, it's going to add cost and complexity, so unless you can show that single event upsets are indeed causing a problem there's no reason to prevent them.

  12. Re:No. on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's a reason that our entire modern world doesn't come crashing to a halt around us every 30 seconds. If every CPU was vulnerable to bit flips from random radiation, every part of your house would be on fire and arcing electricity. Times Square would look like the bridge of the 60s enterprise under attack.

    Actually, every CPU _IS_ vulnerable to bit-flips from radiation. That part of it is not speculation. It does occur in commodity processors, and with probabilities large enough that we have ECC ram, and ECC and/or parity in caches. Some servers actually come with built in hardware fault tolerance methods, because when you run hundreds of servers non-stop for years, the probability that a particle strike screws up a register on chip is non-negligible. Now, still, the probability isn't _huge_. Definitely not high enough to be causing these specific problems, especially when the failure is always in the same manner. _That_ part of it is pretty much bullshit.

  13. Re:Why they tell you to turn off your phone... on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is one of the most common methods of error tolerance, actually, N-modular redundancy (typically either dual-modular or triple-modular). It's used in airliners and space shuttles, as well as a number of other critical applications. IBM actually sells servers (the system z series) which automatically runs two copies of everything and compares instruction results, so that failing processors can be detected and avoided.

    The proposal by the GP poster is actually much more difficult that it would seem at first glance. About the only place "checksum" style error detection is used is in memories/registers. The reason is that if I do a floating point addition, for example, the only way I know whether the addition gave me the right answer is to do the addition again and check.

  14. Re:Use it as cover! on Simulated Hack To Test US Government Response · · Score: 3, Funny

    "The internet is DOWN!!"

    Which one?

  15. Re:Is there any safe encryption? on Code-Breaking Quantum Algorithm On a Silicon Chip · · Score: 1

    Any private-key encryption, of which OTPs are an example, don't have much to worry about from quantum computing at this time. The problem is that private-key exchange is hard to do between two entities who are unknown to each other.

  16. Re:Time issued the takedown notice on Time Denies Issuing DMCA Over Obama Joker Image · · Score: 1

    Flickr: DC stole the cookie from the cookie jar issued the takedown notice *Flickr has been kicked by DC(fuck you, i didn't touch the mother fucking cookie, bitch)

  17. Re:This may be slightly off-topic, but on Several Quantum Calculations Combined At NIST · · Score: 2, Informative

    Wow, a decent summary of quantum computing on the internet. It's so weird not having to pull out the baseball bat and perform some facial readjustment in a qc thread. Just a little added information. When we refer to qubits as being "both" 0 and 1 at the same time, it's not necessarily a 50/50 split. It is in the form (a+bi)|0> + (c + di)|1>, where |0> refers to the 0 state and |1> to the 1 state. |a+bi| = sqrt(a*a + b*b) is the probability that, if measured in the 0/1 basis, it will result in 0, and |c + di| the probability it will result in 1.

    The presence of i (the imaginary number, in case that wasn't clear), is important. Also, you can measure a qubit in any basis, not just 0/1, which is actually vital to the way some quantum algorithms work. (Notably quantum key exchange, which relies on the fact that a potential eavesdropper doesn't know what basis he should be measuring the qubit in.) A good way to imagine a single qubit is a bloch sphere. Imagine a sphere, where straight up is 0, and straight down is 1. Anything on the equator is a 50/50 superposition of 0 and 1.
    Also, to say that quantum computers are more "efficient" than classical computers isn't quite precise enough for my tastes. It's not that they're capable of doing the same things as a classical computer can, just faster. It's that they're able to do things classical computers simply cannot do due to the way superposition works. And those things allow it to solve a number of problems more efficiently.

  18. Re:Quantum Computers on New AES Attack Documented · · Score: 1

    To clarify, quantum cryptography (which _should_ be called quantum key exchange) is just a method of exchanging a private key securely. This private key can then be used on an insecure channel. It is also ridiculously overhyped, particularly by people who don't fully understand it. Current implementations require a direct fiber-optic line between Alice and Bob, and is still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, presuming that the man in the middle is able to compromise both the direct quantum line as well as the insecure channel over which the measurement orientations are exchanged and later communication is established.

  19. Re:Quantum Computers on New AES Attack Documented · · Score: 1

    How exactly does Grover's Algorithm help in this situation? With Grover's, you have an unsorted list and want to look up the position of an arbitrary element in the list. This takes O(n) sequentially, but O(sqrt(n)) with Grover's. It has absolutely nothing to do with guessing. In brute-forcing a block cipher, you have a large number of keys and you need to try each one sequentially. There's no lookup involved at all. I'm afraid I'm gonna have to call bullshit, something I need to do all too much in QC related topics.

  20. Re:PvP on Ubisoft To Shut Down Shadowbane · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Shadowbane's group v group combat was very interesting. Unfortunately it was about the only thing worthwhile about the game. The completely open nature of pvp did make running around solo or in small groups a pain in the ass, and there was massive class disparity. But there was just something about 10 v 10 group combat that no other game has seemed to get the same. One of my fondest memories of the game was when my guild was defending a mine. We had one priest, one bard, and 8 crossbow warriors. One guy would call out a target and all the crossbowmen would skewer the target. We held off three consecutive groups that way.

    The only other thing that I liked was the extremely flexible nature of character classes. A single class could have many different viable builds, each one drastically different. The same class could be a super-high defense low damage tank, a high-damage decent defense melee dps, or a decent ranged nuker. Some of the builds were in fact completely unintentional and only came about due to experimentation.

  21. Re:No laws overrridden on ARM — Heretic In the Church of Intel, Moore's Law · · Score: 2, Informative

    To be even more precise, it's not even about cost per transistor. It's saying that the amount of transistors for which a chip will be most cost-efficient will double every two years. Moore's law could be satisfied even if transistors never shrunk in size and never decreased in marginal price if we were able to double the size of chips every two years without decreases in yield. Remember, transistors is cheap, packaging and verification is expensive.

  22. Re:Multicore = failure. on Windows and Linux Not Well Prepared For Multicore Chips · · Score: 1

    The problem is that GPUs are terrible for single threaded performance, resulting in massive slowdowns for everything but those tasks which can take advantage of the parallelism.

  23. Re:Adapt on Windows and Linux Not Well Prepared For Multicore Chips · · Score: 1

    There's actually a large number of task based programming models out there. Intel's TBB, Cilk, recent versions of OpenMP, A CUDA block is effectively a task (albeit one further composed of multiple threads). There are even proposals for hardware support for task queues. The problem however, is the chicken-and-the-egg problem. We need better tools to encourage task queue parallelism, but few people want to develop those tools because there isn't a lot of support for them at the moment.

  24. Re:Ballmer -1 Troll on Ballmer Scorns Apple As a $500 Logo · · Score: 1

    4) Sane alt-tab systems 5) The use of words instead of cryptic heiroglyphics in menu shortcuts 6) The relative distance between alt-tab (most used shortcut) and force-quite (most dangerous if you accidentally press it) 7) Fancy, frilly special effects which slow down opening dialog boxes and minimizing windows significantly 8) Sane minimzation mechanisms. 9) Kernel panics that actually give you _some_ idea of why your system is crashing. Aaaaand I could go on.

  25. Re:So we've got a duopoly on WSJ Says Gov't Money Injection Won't Help Broadband · · Score: 1

    How about the thugs who gave $200B of our money away for nothing substantial in return?