-1 Failed Attempt at Sounding Insightful. Quantum cryptography schemes are guaranteed to inform both Alice and Bob if their communication is intercepted. That's the entire point, and what has everyone so excited about quantum cryptography in the first place. Secrecy in the sense of undecryptability isn't the point of quantum cryptography (as data isn't even *encrypted* in the classical sense), just certainty that there are no eavesdroppers. Your post just suggests that you haven't actually read anything about quantum cryptography, you've just heard something about one-time pads and thought this would be a good time to misapply your knowledge.
Quantum cryptography isn't a cipher. It's a method of transmitting data, which does one specific thing, which is guarantee that you'll be able to tell if people have attempted to eavesdrop. It's not a complete cryptosystem; it's not meant to be. It's meant to be just one component of cryptosystems, and in doing what it does, it's provably secure in the sense that secure is being used here.
(Incidentally, mathematical proofs aren't like scientific proofs; it *is* possible to prove with absolute certainty in mathematics.)
How many of those are edible, and how many are tasty? The wild banana has genetic variation aplenty, but it's also disgusting.
Re:I hope this guy isn't getting paid
on
China's Cyber-Militia
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The sentence is as clear as it can be, and splitting it up would only serve to add padding and dilute the information content. I realise catering to short attention spans is the in thing to do right now, but come on.
Efficiency by itself is not a sensible or desirable goal for a society. Despotism is much more efficient than democracy, and Nazi Germany was run much more efficiently than, say, Sweden. There are too many short-sighted selfish idiots in the world to make volunteer-based libertarian utopias work (and of course, many of them are libertarian precisely because of the benefits it bring them and them alone). Unless the more fortunate are coerced to help out the less fortunate, the less fortunate will suffer, to the detriment of all of society.
It's true the US government could do with some serious housekeeping, but the fundamental idea behind taxation is sound, and the alternatives not nearly as desirable as you think.
Some perspective: all of NASA gets about half of a percent of the US federal budget. Said federal budget is $2.7 trillion in 2008, while Phoenix and MRO combined barely break a billion, and both are invaluable in terms of knowledge we get from them (have already gotten and are still getting from the MRO mission, and expect to get from Phoenix).
And a final bit of perspective: the $5 million Fermilab gets from this private donor is less than what half an hour of Iraq is costing the US.
My comment was made in the assumption that the value of scientific research is self-evident to the kind of people Slashdot attracts, and that I wouldn't have to state the obvious. If you can't see the value in the sort of thing that's raised the average life expectancy of Americans to 78 years (up from about 40 years at the beginning of the 20th century), or the economic benefits of side-effects of general research (rather than targeted research) like, say, the Internet, I'm not going to hold your hand and explain it to you.
Some perspective for you, though: $5 million is less than what the Iraq war costs the US in half an hour, and the American public overwhelmingly wants to end that, while it's not clear at all where they stand on science funding. If you want to pretend the budget cuts to scientific research are a result of the will of the American people, I suggest you get your head of your ass.
The fact that your government cut science funding so badly a private donor needed to step in to prevent the closing of the last particle physics lab in the US when the US was once considered world leader in particle physics research is what's so great about the US? The fact that US taxpayers are so ignorant they can't see the value of research in particle physics when it apparently costs less than a sixtieth of a penny per person to keep it up is what's so great about the US?
Or is it just people desperately looking for reasons to cling to their unjustified sense of self-satisfaction at being American what's so great about the US?
A lot of governments give incentives for installing solar cells on your roof, and a lot of people *are* getting them installed as a result, so yes, there is a market, and a pretty big one at that. The fact that the US is lagging behind doesn't make that disappear.
That's why the Netherlands &c. have so many issues with broken homes due to cannabis addiction? Sophistry with hypotheticals is cute, but don't forget there have been and still are plenty of societies that don't outlaw use of cannabis, and the evidence suggests that it's a much, much less harmful drug than alcohol, and arguably even plain coffee.
Try to compare that to prices of the high-quality (formerly known as) Thinkpad line by Lenovo. You'll find it is not much cheaper, if at all.
Actually, a friend of mine was thinking about getting a MacBook Pro a while ago while I was thinking about getting a Thinkpad, so we did exactly that. The MacBook Pro cost $2,500, while the equivalent Thinkpad (running Linux) cost about $1,200.
I know Thinkpads have a reputation for being expensive, but they've got nothing on Apple computers.
And if you happen to not be using Windows, you can kiss nearly all of those features goodbye. There's a dearth of good, open source encryption software. Some of the tools we have right now are very good at what they do, but there are still niches to be filled.
Whenever someone talks about standing up to whatever injustice in some way, someone always comes along to point out the people they're standing up to won't like that. No shit, Sherlock. That's sort of the point.
If nobody ever stands up to this kind of bullshit, even in these kinds of small ways, it's only going to get worse and we're *all* going to spend a lot more time in tiny cold waiting rooms whenever we try to get anything done.
"Most people don't care enough to go out of their way to find a vendor who will still sell them an XP machine" is hardly the same thing as "Vista is popular". Fact remains that a significant number of vendors only carry Vista anymore and won't install XP on customers' machines even if they buy it separately (this is true for all stores in my city, at least), and that's pretty much the only reason Vista is seeing these adoption rates.
Only on Slashdot. If you look at adoption rates, you'll see Vista is doing just fine. It's already 10% of the market (as told by website logs), and growing. That means Vista has gone from nothing, to the number 2 most popular OS in a year and a half. If Linux or the next release of OS X had managed that feat, they wouldn't be called "losing."
People keep saying that, but really, how much of that is due to monopoly abuse on the part of Microsoft by strong-arming vendors into no longer carrying XP, or at least hiding the fact that they do? Every single person I know who uses Vista only uses it because the place they got their new computer at wouldn't give them Windows XP.
XP sucked mostly by mistake, so it was fixable. Vista sucks by design, so even if the bugs get worked out it will still be a worse OS. Claiming Slashdot has an irrational hatred of Microsoft is very facile and for some reason seems to be a rather popular thing to do nowadays (there's generally at least three comments to that effect on every MS-related article), but have you ever stopped to think that maybe people have a real *reason* for their dislike?
Slashdot Mirror
-1 Failed Attempt at Sounding Insightful.
Quantum cryptography schemes are guaranteed to inform both Alice and Bob if their communication is intercepted. That's the entire point, and what has everyone so excited about quantum cryptography in the first place. Secrecy in the sense of undecryptability isn't the point of quantum cryptography (as data isn't even *encrypted* in the classical sense), just certainty that there are no eavesdroppers.
Your post just suggests that you haven't actually read anything about quantum cryptography, you've just heard something about one-time pads and thought this would be a good time to misapply your knowledge.
Quantum cryptography isn't a cipher. It's a method of transmitting data, which does one specific thing, which is guarantee that you'll be able to tell if people have attempted to eavesdrop.
It's not a complete cryptosystem; it's not meant to be. It's meant to be just one component of cryptosystems, and in doing what it does, it's provably secure in the sense that secure is being used here.
(Incidentally, mathematical proofs aren't like scientific proofs; it *is* possible to prove with absolute certainty in mathematics.)
One word: http://cairnarvon.rotahall.org/pics/wildbanana.jpg
There's a reason modern bananas have been bred to be seedless.
How many of those are edible, and how many are tasty? The wild banana has genetic variation aplenty, but it's also disgusting.
The sentence is as clear as it can be, and splitting it up would only serve to add padding and dilute the information content. I realise catering to short attention spans is the in thing to do right now, but come on.
Despite the FUD a lot of ISPs seem to be spreading around, net neutrality still doesn't have anything to do with QoS.
I like how you self-censored "piss" in a song about how bad censoring obscenity is.
Efficiency by itself is not a sensible or desirable goal for a society. Despotism is much more efficient than democracy, and Nazi Germany was run much more efficiently than, say, Sweden.
There are too many short-sighted selfish idiots in the world to make volunteer-based libertarian utopias work (and of course, many of them are libertarian precisely because of the benefits it bring them and them alone). Unless the more fortunate are coerced to help out the less fortunate, the less fortunate will suffer, to the detriment of all of society.
It's true the US government could do with some serious housekeeping, but the fundamental idea behind taxation is sound, and the alternatives not nearly as desirable as you think.
Some perspective: all of NASA gets about half of a percent of the US federal budget.
Said federal budget is $2.7 trillion in 2008, while Phoenix and MRO combined barely break a billion, and both are invaluable in terms of knowledge we get from them (have already gotten and are still getting from the MRO mission, and expect to get from Phoenix).
And a final bit of perspective: the $5 million Fermilab gets from this private donor is less than what half an hour of Iraq is costing the US.
My comment was made in the assumption that the value of scientific research is self-evident to the kind of people Slashdot attracts, and that I wouldn't have to state the obvious.
If you can't see the value in the sort of thing that's raised the average life expectancy of Americans to 78 years (up from about 40 years at the beginning of the 20th century), or the economic benefits of side-effects of general research (rather than targeted research) like, say, the Internet, I'm not going to hold your hand and explain it to you.
Some perspective for you, though: $5 million is less than what the Iraq war costs the US in half an hour, and the American public overwhelmingly wants to end that, while it's not clear at all where they stand on science funding.
If you want to pretend the budget cuts to scientific research are a result of the will of the American people, I suggest you get your head of your ass.
The fact that your government cut science funding so badly a private donor needed to step in to prevent the closing of the last particle physics lab in the US when the US was once considered world leader in particle physics research is what's so great about the US?
The fact that US taxpayers are so ignorant they can't see the value of research in particle physics when it apparently costs less than a sixtieth of a penny per person to keep it up is what's so great about the US?
Or is it just people desperately looking for reasons to cling to their unjustified sense of self-satisfaction at being American what's so great about the US?
Compared to Iraq, the Mars missions are pretty much free (and incalculably more useful). They don't even make a dent in the annual federal budget.
This may come as a shock, but you can do both at the same time.
A lot of governments give incentives for installing solar cells on your roof, and a lot of people *are* getting them installed as a result, so yes, there is a market, and a pretty big one at that. The fact that the US is lagging behind doesn't make that disappear.
That's why the Netherlands &c. have so many issues with broken homes due to cannabis addiction?
Sophistry with hypotheticals is cute, but don't forget there have been and still are plenty of societies that don't outlaw use of cannabis, and the evidence suggests that it's a much, much less harmful drug than alcohol, and arguably even plain coffee.
Actually, a friend of mine was thinking about getting a MacBook Pro a while ago while I was thinking about getting a Thinkpad, so we did exactly that. The MacBook Pro cost $2,500, while the equivalent Thinkpad (running Linux) cost about $1,200.
I know Thinkpads have a reputation for being expensive, but they've got nothing on Apple computers.
And if you happen to not be using Windows, you can kiss nearly all of those features goodbye.
There's a dearth of good, open source encryption software. Some of the tools we have right now are very good at what they do, but there are still niches to be filled.
Whenever someone talks about standing up to whatever injustice in some way, someone always comes along to point out the people they're standing up to won't like that.
No shit, Sherlock. That's sort of the point.
If nobody ever stands up to this kind of bullshit, even in these kinds of small ways, it's only going to get worse and we're *all* going to spend a lot more time in tiny cold waiting rooms whenever we try to get anything done.
You've never talked to Apple fanboys, have you?
I'd watch that.
I'm sure the family you leave behind in said poverty would love you for it, too. Nobody grows up in a vacuum.
"Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik"? That's not how recursive acronyms are supposed to work.
Are you insinuating Christians secretly know their own religion is bullshit?
"Most people don't care enough to go out of their way to find a vendor who will still sell them an XP machine" is hardly the same thing as "Vista is popular". Fact remains that a significant number of vendors only carry Vista anymore and won't install XP on customers' machines even if they buy it separately (this is true for all stores in my city, at least), and that's pretty much the only reason Vista is seeing these adoption rates.
XP sucked mostly by mistake, so it was fixable. Vista sucks by design, so even if the bugs get worked out it will still be a worse OS.
Claiming Slashdot has an irrational hatred of Microsoft is very facile and for some reason seems to be a rather popular thing to do nowadays (there's generally at least three comments to that effect on every MS-related article), but have you ever stopped to think that maybe people have a real *reason* for their dislike?