Obligatory summary of "global warming" research status: there is compelling evidence that the planet is warmer than our geological records indicate it should be, and compelling evidence that the carbon dioxide level is higher than it has ever been in our records (but in both cases, the evidence is merely compelling, not proof - our records aren't that good).
Grr. Stupid people (not you) don't believe global warming is real because a bunch of smart guys (like you) keep stating misleading summaries like that. Wikipedia.org has lots more stuff, and you just implied that none of it was compelling. Of course, if you're a typical American fundamentalist Christian, like 38% of us, you can't believe any of the data going back more than a few thousand years because it contradicts literal interpretation of the Bible. Here's just two points you left out:
- Over 750,000 years, mean temperature and CO2 levels correlated extremely closely
- Mountain glaciers have melted away an average of 13 meters of thickness since 1960
Then there's the mountain of evidence that bit by bit isn't compelling, but together is damning evidence. If your not a "believer" in the literal truth of the Bible or Neoconservative views, it might be worth your time reading the wikipedia article:
Even the scientists Bush tried to intimidate into debunking global warming are convinced:
"On May 2, 2006, the Federal Climate Change Science Program commissioned by the Bush administration in 2002 released the first of 21 assessments which concluded that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system (due to changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols, and stratospheric ozone) [6]. The study said that observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, though it did not state what percentage of climate change may be anthropogenic in nature."
Of course, this is a pointless waste of my time. A true believer in anything can never change his mind. If the Earth dies do to global warming, all those fundamentalist neoconservative Christians will blame it all on everyone else for lack of faith. True believers never accept responsibility for their mistakes. Iraq, for example, is somebody else's fault.
I laughed! If I had mod points, you'd be +1 funny.
Microsoft is insecure for good marketing reasons. If your machine slows down with all that malware, you'll be tempted to upgrade to a new computer with a fresh install of Vista. It's an unspoken pact between Microsoft and Intel.
It's scary how many/.-ers seem to hold opinions like the grand-parent of this post.
Then again, many (probably most) of us are American, and we are the guys who:
- Believe that evolution is "junk science" - Don't believe in global warming - Are proud to be "Ditto Heads" - Fell prey fear during the Salem Witch Trials, the McCarthy Era, and now Neoconservatism
If you need public support for a scientifically proven wrong point of view, simply back the majority of us who think science is bunk. Join the Religious Right, Big Tobacco, Exxonmobil, and the Neoconservatives in taking advantage of (and promoting) our ignorance.
How can anyone have an opinion on something if they don't know what it is?
Ha! Good thing I wasn't drinking milk, or it would have come out of my nose! That's a funny question to ask on slashdot.
P.S. No one would EVER acuse me of having ill-informed opinions;-)
I think (as the parent suggested) that the casinos will be forced to change the game. They've already had to change Black Jack. Few places still use single-decks.
I haven't figured out why, but there are few crimes I consider less serious than ripping off a casino. I personally feel the world would be better off without them, so if they fail as businesses, I don't care. It bothers me that they make their money on other people's gambling weaknesses. It would bother me less if they didn't allow people to lose their life savings.
No, that wont work. The shoe computer simply tries to guess which half of the wheel the ball will land on, and the mass of the ball isn't one of it's assumptions. It basically just times the ball, finds out how quickly it's slowing down, and does a simple projection.
An old boss of mine did something similar a few years later, in the early 80's. He built a card counting machine in a cigarette pack, and sent him signals through 2 LEDs hidden in his watch band, which were burried in small tubes angled at his face, so only he could see them.
He made about $10K with the machine, then stopped using it. The money he made wasn't justifying the risk he felt he was taking. He worried he would be killed if caught.
So, he still has the cigarette pack, and made his money honestly, founding a successful company in Silicon Valley, and taking it public.
Worrying about exporting this stuff to China is dumb. We already export:
- Cash. We invest more in China than the rest of the world combined. - Jobs. Our loss is their gain. - Internet filtering, courtesy Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. - Chip manufacturing technology (indirectly through Taiwan)
SMIC, China's largest semiconductor manufacturer (built on US technology) is listed on the Nasdaq. For some stupid reason, politicians in Washington don't think the Chinese are capable of building advanced computers, routers, or weapons. There's a perception of US superiority, due to good old Yankee Know-How. Give me a break.
Why we allow US companies to censor web sites in China, I have no clue.
I've just watched the first video. I really like my sig, or I'd change it to: Axis of Evil: Neoconservative FUD
Hey, David Schroeder. I challenge you to watch at least the first video. I'd like to know your reaction. Note that I'm only interested in friendly debate. I can see your posts are intelligent.
In short, what you're saying is more or less the neoconervative party
line, that we've all been fed. The problem is, much of it is
misleading, much wrong. Much of it was invented by campaign
specialists specifically to win votes. You have to use your
judgment to figure out which is which. Remember to question
everything, especially if it was said by a politician or anyone in his
employ.
Here are the common neoconservative views I feel you've
accurately stated that I personally believe fall into this
category.
Iraq is about changing
the Middle East into a free democratic region.
Bush said so before the war. It's a noble idea.
Unfortunately, it's massively misinformed. Plenty of Middle
East experts were calling this idea nonsense before the war.
One of Bush's worst qualities: not listening. I
don't want to go into details of Iraq... to depressing, too pointless.
However, after we're gone, we wont be leaving behind
a happy stable democracy that encompasses Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, one
that inspires the rest of the states there. We'll leave
behind two or three typical Middle Eastern states, and a radicalized
nuclear armed Iran (unless Israel takes out their nukes), and stronger
terrorists than ever in history.
I'd just like to point out: The neoconservatives were wrong.
Admit it. Get over it. Learn from it.
This continued denial is tiring, but I realize it will last
until 2009, when we can finally do something about it, at which point
the true neoconservatives will blame the rest of us for not finishing
the mission. Neoconservatism is like many religions.
Believers have true faith, unshakable in the face of reality.
How can the EU continue
the cause when it has shown time and again that its not willing to do
anything about the radicalism right on its collective doorstep?
Easy. Admit Turkey.
It's so convenient to
believe that the US is what's wrong with the
world, and that the middle east would just want to live in peace, with
no militant radicals wanting to export their beliefs. It's convenient
to believe in moral relativism, where someone like Bush == bin Laden,
just on different sides (or the same side) of a coin.
Who are you talking about? I've never met a
person who believes that. America is in the Middle East
trying to make the world a better place. Most of us
(including me) here in the US think this is the best place to live and
the best country in the world. "Moral relativism" is neoconservative FUD. We're all US backers.
The problem is Bush. His failures cause major problems
throughout the world, including increased terrorism, arming of radical
states with WMD, and trashing human rights and freedom. Don't
confuse criticism of Bush and many of his beliefs with criticism of the
US.
I'd say an Islamic fundamentalist superstate is pretty harmful.
Of course. Who would disagree with that? However, our policies towards Iran were working, and they had a "liberal" government, less hostile to the West. Thanks to
Junior, Iran is now perhaps the greatest threat to the world.
That whole "Axis of Evil" thing was crying stupidity.
What about China? Remember that they're Communist?
Policies in place since Nixon are working: bring them into
the world community, accept them, and let them change on their own,
inspired by our example. If Junior had been responsible for forming relations with China, we'd be in the middle of WWIII.
Neoconservatives *really
believe, quite literally*, in free markets and
free peoples and in freedom being the most desirable default state.
So do the vast majority of the rest of us.
But anyone who thinks
the US is a police state or teetering on the
brink of a "fascist theocracy" (???), after just a faint few years no
less, is quite frankly, deluded.
I am more paranoid about protecting my
freedoms than most. The whole "price of freedom" and all.
We exported freedom during Bush Seniors term, and continued it through Clinton's term. The Berlin Wall fell during Bush Senior, and we ended the Cold War. Bloodless revolutions for freedom and democracy happened throughout the world.
This happened not because we rattled our sabers and conquered the oppressors. It happened because we made a shining example of what democracy can be, and because we convinced the world of our sincerity for a united world in peace. We earned the world's respect, and that made all the difference.
Bush Junior has destroyed all that. Now the world arms itself to defend against us. We are no longer trusted. We no longer exemplify freedom, democracy, and human rights. Hopefully the EU can continue the cause while we figure out how to fix our broken democracy.
There is exactly one person in Washington who represents your district in the House of Representatives. If he's a Democrat, his vote does not count. If he's a Republican, his vote will be whatever Bush wants, so again, his vote does not count. Is this a working democracy?
For the first time ever, I intend to push that idiotic "Democrat" vote tab. There are lots of good Republicans I support, but their party has been subverted.
The islamofascists and neocons need eachother. The islamofascists proper simply because of neocon actions, and vise-versa. There is no quicker way to power than to find an enemy of your culture and challenge it to a fight to the death.
Give me a break. There are no idiots on/. Trolls galore, A-holes, regular geeks, and people who have the most absurd opinions. I have VERY low tolerance for actual idiots, and I'm quite sure you don't count:-)
I didn't get hooked because I wanted to hack computers. I got hooked on old games (like Colossal Caves). When I finished all the games, I decided to write one, and learned BASIC. Today, you never finish the games. They just get better and better. There's no way I would have spent all that time hacking if the games available today were around back then.
The average person's experience of computing is that it's a crap-shoot. You back-up like crazy, because you never know when you might get a blue-screen-of-death. You walk into a coffee shop, and pray your computer will connect. You accidentally open the wrong attachment, or click on the wrong button on a web site, and you've got new spy-ware or worse. Most people need a geek friend to come over just to tell them if they have a problem (and they usually do). How are average people suppose to know if there a bot recording their credit card numbers and sending them to Russian hackers? Can they trust their computers with financial information? Can they trust a computer with an active wireless connection?
Web sites record our visits. They leave cookies on our machines, and our computer records web-page visits in it's cache. They execute javascript and java applets, and show us tits when we wanted bits. We try and censor our children's access, and worry about pedophiles on myspace.com.
I think trust isn't a word most people would use in the same context as anything related to a computer. Let's face it... we've kinda got these things working, but just barely.
"Are you saying that your friends mother is a genius mathematician who published a few papers about factoring and was somehow forced to leave the field?"
Yes, but this was a long time ago. Early on, the government actively tried to control published research into factoring. There's another post on this thread that mentions this. I believe my friend's mother (and father) was a mathematics professor at Cal Tech.
"Most people doubt that it is in either P or NP-Complete which would most certainly make it NP-hard"
Not according the the gospel of truth (cough) wikipiedia.org: Because of the compelling evidence that factorization is not NP-complete, many believe such an algorithm is likely to exist. (refering to a polynomial time factorization).
"256 bit AES will (very possibly) never be cracked by an ordinary computer."
I tend to agree. It's easy to see that secret key encryption can be made very safe. Munge the data so it looks random, then munge with the secret key. Unless you've got a crappy munging algorithm, decryption will be hard. However, I still don't like the 128 bit block thing. Why not use blocks that are at least as long as the key (AES256 still uses 128 bit blocks)?
"No we're not being manipulated into using weak cryptography!"
You don't secretly work for the NSA or CIA, do you?;-)
That Iowa suit looks ridiculous. The European suits have had some merit, but this one complains generically about Microsoft being a monopoly.
"The purpose and effect of Microsoft's illegal conduct has been to deny purchasers of Microsoft operating systems and applications software at a competitive price..."
At $40 per OEM Windows license, I don't see why they're upset. Complain about Windoze because it sucks, not because it's too expensive. Complain about Microsoft because they illegally use their OS monopoly to force out all kinds of innovators. You wouldn't want to be in the anti-virus business right now, for example. This suit just seems like a bunch of damned lawyers going for the gold.
Agreed. There's no point wasting energy putting down MS for suing scam businesses. I bet their customers didn't know they were getting software illegally. I'd be pissed if I found that software I bought with a machine wasn't legit.
It's probably more productive to get fired up about stupid suits where some mom gets sued for what her daughter was downloading.
We do indeed run OS X. The machine shipped with OS X 1.0 (which sucked) on a separate CD. By default, OS 9 was installed. I converted it over right away, and had to deal with a fair amount of pain, both from the system, and from my not-so-happy wife. After a while, Apple release better versions of OS X, and Adobe released OS X native software, and these applications do indeed run very well on that old machine.
My wife still uses the machine heavily for publishing work, running lots of Adobe applications, and video editing. I've upgraded the hard-disk and add RAM, but that's it. We don't hammer it with first-person-shooter games, or heave web serving.
Good point (but I wouldn't mod down as you suggested).
Forget race. There's only one species of human. Culture, on the other hand, is huge (I include religion in "culture"). Take Palestinians and Jews in Israel. Genetically very similar. Who you want to kill or make go away depends on which side of the fence/barrier you grow up on.
There may be statistically accurate statements that can be made regarding races (like "white" people are generally lighter in color than "black" people). However, the genetic differences are minuscule in comparison to cultural differences.
In regards to culture, there's all kinds of things we could say that would inflame passions here. I'll just say that I'm proud to be a GW hating fiscally conservative, socially liberal Libitarian-sympathising Unitarian American. In comparison, my race and sex are practically irrelevant.
Well... the comment is either highly offensive, or a joke and we should laugh. Anybody modding it up funny or down troll would get meta-moderated as fair by me. Anybody calling it insightful doesn't belong here.
They're not suing 73 kids with 73 copies of stollen Windows. They're taking down mass-scale producers. They claim to have seized over 32,000 fake CDs, and stopped over 70,000 "auctions". I have no idea what they mean by auctions.
If you've just got a copy of Windows on your machine you lifted from work or the net, I wouldn't worry too much. As that recent/. article said, Microsoft can actually make MORE money by allowing some piracy. It keeps kids with no cash from switching to Linux, for example. I've always felt MS has somewhat lax copying security on purpose.
I've also felt they deliver a buggy system that degrades over time all by itself on purpose. If forces you to upgrade. I've gone through several Windows machines this decade, but the Mac I bought my wife in 2000 is still kicking, and still quite useful. The difference is in the software.
Slashdot Mirror
Obligatory summary of "global warming" research status: there is compelling evidence that the planet is warmer than our geological records indicate it should be, and compelling evidence that the carbon dioxide level is higher than it has ever been in our records (but in both cases, the evidence is merely compelling, not proof - our records aren't that good).
Grr. Stupid people (not you) don't believe global warming is real because a bunch of smart guys (like you) keep stating misleading summaries like that. Wikipedia.org has lots more stuff, and you just implied that none of it was compelling. Of course, if you're a typical American fundamentalist Christian, like 38% of us, you can't believe any of the data going back more than a few thousand years because it contradicts literal interpretation of the Bible. Here's just two points you left out:
- Over 750,000 years, mean temperature and CO2 levels correlated extremely closely
- Mountain glaciers have melted away an average of 13 meters of thickness since 1960
Then there's the mountain of evidence that bit by bit isn't compelling, but together is damning evidence. If your not a "believer" in the literal truth of the Bible or Neoconservative views, it might be worth your time reading the wikipedia article:
Global Warming
Even the scientists Bush tried to intimidate into debunking global warming are convinced:
"On May 2, 2006, the Federal Climate Change Science Program commissioned by the Bush administration in 2002 released the first of 21 assessments which concluded that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system (due to changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols, and stratospheric ozone) [6]. The study said that observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, though it did not state what percentage of climate change may be anthropogenic in nature."
Of course, this is a pointless waste of my time. A true believer in anything can never change his mind. If the Earth dies do to global warming, all those fundamentalist neoconservative Christians will blame it all on everyone else for lack of faith. True believers never accept responsibility for their mistakes. Iraq, for example, is somebody else's fault.
"Belief" is the right word to use here.
I laughed! If I had mod points, you'd be +1 funny.
Microsoft is insecure for good marketing reasons. If your machine slows down with all that malware, you'll be tempted to upgrade to a new computer with a fresh install of Vista. It's an unspoken pact between Microsoft and Intel.
It's scary how many /.-ers seem to hold opinions like the grand-parent of this post.
Then again, many (probably most) of us are American, and we are the guys who:
- Believe that evolution is "junk science"
- Don't believe in global warming
- Are proud to be "Ditto Heads"
- Fell prey fear during the Salem Witch Trials, the McCarthy Era, and now Neoconservatism
If you need public support for a scientifically proven wrong point of view, simply back the majority of us who think science is bunk. Join the Religious Right, Big Tobacco, Exxonmobil, and the Neoconservatives in taking advantage of (and promoting) our ignorance.
How can anyone have an opinion on something if they don't know what it is? Ha! Good thing I wasn't drinking milk, or it would have come out of my nose! That's a funny question to ask on slashdot. P.S. No one would EVER acuse me of having ill-informed opinions ;-)
I agree that 'troll' is unfair. If he'd said 'off topic', I would rate it fair, though I see why you link to this topic.
/. system seems better than any other out there, but let's face it, any system that allows anybody to participate will be flawed.
The
One day, after I make my millions, that add is going to kick in... somebody in Uganda is no longer going to be poor.
David, if you're going to keep posting this neoconservative babble, you gotta check out:
e s
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmar
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
The discussion page backs this up. I don't see the need for this site. Wikipedia serves the need (for now).
I think (as the parent suggested) that the casinos will be forced to change the game. They've already had to change Black Jack. Few places still use single-decks.
I haven't figured out why, but there are few crimes I consider less serious than ripping off a casino. I personally feel the world would be better off without them, so if they fail as businesses, I don't care. It bothers me that they make their money on other people's gambling weaknesses. It would bother me less if they didn't allow people to lose their life savings.
No, that wont work. The shoe computer simply tries to guess which half of the wheel the ball will land on, and the mass of the ball isn't one of it's assumptions. It basically just times the ball, finds out how quickly it's slowing down, and does a simple projection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons
An old boss of mine did something similar a few years later, in the early 80's. He built a card counting machine in a cigarette pack, and sent him signals through 2 LEDs hidden in his watch band, which were burried in small tubes angled at his face, so only he could see them.
He made about $10K with the machine, then stopped using it. The money he made wasn't justifying the risk he felt he was taking. He worried he would be killed if caught.
So, he still has the cigarette pack, and made his money honestly, founding a successful company in Silicon Valley, and taking it public.
Worrying about exporting this stuff to China is dumb. We already export:
- Cash. We invest more in China than the rest of the world combined.
- Jobs. Our loss is their gain.
- Internet filtering, courtesy Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
- Chip manufacturing technology (indirectly through Taiwan)
SMIC, China's largest semiconductor manufacturer (built on US technology) is listed on the Nasdaq. For some stupid reason, politicians in Washington don't think the Chinese are capable of building advanced computers, routers, or weapons. There's a perception of US superiority, due to good old Yankee Know-How. Give me a break.
Why we allow US companies to censor web sites in China, I have no clue.
Oh. My. God.
I've just watched the first video. I really like my sig, or I'd change it to: Axis of Evil: Neoconservative FUD
Hey, David Schroeder. I challenge you to watch at least the first video. I'd like to know your reaction. Note that I'm only interested in friendly debate. I can see your posts are intelligent.
Hey, that's a long post :-)
In short, what you're saying is more or less the neoconervative party line, that we've all been fed. The problem is, much of it is misleading, much wrong. Much of it was invented by campaign specialists specifically to win votes. You have to use your judgment to figure out which is which. Remember to question everything, especially if it was said by a politician or anyone in his employ.
Here are the common neoconservative views I feel you've accurately stated that I personally believe fall into this category.
Iraq is about changing the Middle East into a free democratic region.
Bush said so before the war. It's a noble idea. Unfortunately, it's massively misinformed. Plenty of Middle East experts were calling this idea nonsense before the war. One of Bush's worst qualities: not listening. I don't want to go into details of Iraq... to depressing, too pointless. However, after we're gone, we wont be leaving behind a happy stable democracy that encompasses Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, one that inspires the rest of the states there. We'll leave behind two or three typical Middle Eastern states, and a radicalized nuclear armed Iran (unless Israel takes out their nukes), and stronger terrorists than ever in history.
I'd just like to point out: The neoconservatives were wrong. Admit it. Get over it. Learn from it. This continued denial is tiring, but I realize it will last until 2009, when we can finally do something about it, at which point the true neoconservatives will blame the rest of us for not finishing the mission. Neoconservatism is like many religions. Believers have true faith, unshakable in the face of reality.
How can the EU continue the cause when it has shown time and again that its not willing to do anything about the radicalism right on its collective doorstep?
Easy. Admit Turkey.
It's so convenient to believe that the US is what's wrong with the world, and that the middle east would just want to live in peace, with no militant radicals wanting to export their beliefs. It's convenient to believe in moral relativism, where someone like Bush == bin Laden, just on different sides (or the same side) of a coin.
Who are you talking about? I've never met a person who believes that. America is in the Middle East trying to make the world a better place. Most of us (including me) here in the US think this is the best place to live and the best country in the world. "Moral relativism" is neoconservative FUD. We're all US backers.
The problem is Bush. His failures cause major problems throughout the world, including increased terrorism, arming of radical states with WMD, and trashing human rights and freedom. Don't confuse criticism of Bush and many of his beliefs with criticism of the US.
I'd say an Islamic fundamentalist superstate is pretty harmful.
Of course. Who would disagree with that? However, our policies towards Iran were working, and they had a "liberal" government, less hostile to the West. Thanks to Junior, Iran is now perhaps the greatest threat to the world. That whole "Axis of Evil" thing was crying stupidity. What about China? Remember that they're Communist? Policies in place since Nixon are working: bring them into the world community, accept them, and let them change on their own, inspired by our example. If Junior had been responsible for forming relations with China, we'd be in the middle of WWIII.
Neoconservatives *really believe, quite literally*, in free markets and free peoples and in freedom being the most desirable default state.
So do the vast majority of the rest of us.
But anyone who thinks the US is a police state or teetering on the brink of a "fascist theocracy" (???), after just a faint few years no less, is quite frankly, deluded.
I am more paranoid about protecting my freedoms than most. The whole "price of freedom" and all.
We exported freedom during Bush Seniors term, and continued it through Clinton's term. The Berlin Wall fell during Bush Senior, and we ended the Cold War. Bloodless revolutions for freedom and democracy happened throughout the world.
This happened not because we rattled our sabers and conquered the oppressors. It happened because we made a shining example of what democracy can be, and because we convinced the world of our sincerity for a united world in peace. We earned the world's respect, and that made all the difference.
Bush Junior has destroyed all that. Now the world arms itself to defend against us. We are no longer trusted. We no longer exemplify freedom, democracy, and human rights. Hopefully the EU can continue the cause while we figure out how to fix our broken democracy.
There is exactly one person in Washington who represents your district in the House of Representatives. If he's a Democrat, his vote does not count. If he's a Republican, his vote will be whatever Bush wants, so again, his vote does not count. Is this a working democracy?
Yes, vote!
For the first time ever, I intend to push that idiotic "Democrat" vote tab. There are lots of good Republicans I support, but their party has been subverted.
The islamofascists and neocons need eachother. The islamofascists proper simply because of neocon actions, and vise-versa. There is no quicker way to power than to find an enemy of your culture and challenge it to a fight to the death.
Give me a break. There are no idiots on /. Trolls galore, A-holes, regular geeks, and people who have the most absurd opinions. I have VERY low tolerance for actual idiots, and I'm quite sure you don't count :-)
/. ...
Now if George Bush were posting on
Games.
I didn't get hooked because I wanted to hack computers. I got hooked on old games (like Colossal Caves). When I finished all the games, I decided to write one, and learned BASIC. Today, you never finish the games. They just get better and better. There's no way I would have spent all that time hacking if the games available today were around back then.
The average person's experience of computing is that it's a crap-shoot. You back-up like crazy, because you never know when you might get a blue-screen-of-death. You walk into a coffee shop, and pray your computer will connect. You accidentally open the wrong attachment, or click on the wrong button on a web site, and you've got new spy-ware or worse. Most people need a geek friend to come over just to tell them if they have a problem (and they usually do). How are average people suppose to know if there a bot recording their credit card numbers and sending them to Russian hackers? Can they trust their computers with financial information? Can they trust a computer with an active wireless connection?
Web sites record our visits. They leave cookies on our machines, and our computer records web-page visits in it's cache. They execute javascript and java applets, and show us tits when we wanted bits. We try and censor our children's access, and worry about pedophiles on myspace.com.
I think trust isn't a word most people would use in the same context as anything related to a computer. Let's face it... we've kinda got these things working, but just barely.
Sorry it took so long to reply.... Good points. I'll only respond to a few.
;)"
/. :-)
t -encryption-compromised
;-)
"Boy, you don't know that much about cryptography, do you
Er... no. But hey, this is
"That's complete BS. It hasn't been cracked, and it wont be for a long time."
One link to doubts about RSA:
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2118141/1024-bi
"Are you saying that your friends mother is a genius mathematician who published a few papers about factoring and was somehow forced to leave the field?"
Yes, but this was a long time ago. Early on, the government actively tried to control published research into factoring. There's another post on this thread that mentions this. I believe my friend's mother (and father) was a mathematics professor at Cal Tech.
"Most people doubt that it is in either P or NP-Complete which would most certainly make it NP-hard"
Not according the the gospel of truth (cough) wikipiedia.org: Because of the compelling evidence that factorization is not NP-complete, many believe such an algorithm is likely to exist. (refering to a polynomial time factorization).
"256 bit AES will (very possibly) never be cracked by an ordinary computer."
I tend to agree. It's easy to see that secret key encryption can be made very safe. Munge the data so it looks random, then munge with the secret key. Unless you've got a crappy munging algorithm, decryption will be hard. However, I still don't like the 128 bit block thing. Why not use blocks that are at least as long as the key (AES256 still uses 128 bit blocks)?
"No we're not being manipulated into using weak cryptography!"
You don't secretly work for the NSA or CIA, do you?
That Iowa suit looks ridiculous. The European suits have had some merit, but this one complains generically about Microsoft being a monopoly.
"The purpose and effect of Microsoft's illegal conduct has been to deny purchasers of Microsoft operating systems and applications software at a competitive price..."
At $40 per OEM Windows license, I don't see why they're upset. Complain about Windoze because it sucks, not because it's too expensive. Complain about Microsoft because they illegally use their OS monopoly to force out all kinds of innovators. You wouldn't want to be in the anti-virus business right now, for example. This suit just seems like a bunch of damned lawyers going for the gold.
Agreed. There's no point wasting energy putting down MS for suing scam businesses. I bet their customers didn't know they were getting software illegally. I'd be pissed if I found that software I bought with a machine wasn't legit.
It's probably more productive to get fired up about stupid suits where some mom gets sued for what her daughter was downloading.
We do indeed run OS X. The machine shipped with OS X 1.0 (which sucked) on a separate CD. By default, OS 9 was installed. I converted it over right away, and had to deal with a fair amount of pain, both from the system, and from my not-so-happy wife. After a while, Apple release better versions of OS X, and Adobe released OS X native software, and these applications do indeed run very well on that old machine.
My wife still uses the machine heavily for publishing work, running lots of Adobe applications, and video editing. I've upgraded the hard-disk and add RAM, but that's it. We don't hammer it with first-person-shooter games, or heave web serving.
Good point (but I wouldn't mod down as you suggested).
Forget race. There's only one species of human. Culture, on the other hand, is huge (I include religion in "culture"). Take Palestinians and Jews in Israel. Genetically very similar. Who you want to kill or make go away depends on which side of the fence/barrier you grow up on.
There may be statistically accurate statements that can be made regarding races (like "white" people are generally lighter in color than "black" people). However, the genetic differences are minuscule in comparison to cultural differences.
In regards to culture, there's all kinds of things we could say that would inflame passions here. I'll just say that I'm proud to be a GW hating fiscally conservative, socially liberal Libitarian-sympathising Unitarian American. In comparison, my race and sex are practically irrelevant.
Well... the comment is either highly offensive, or a joke and we should laugh. Anybody modding it up funny or down troll would get meta-moderated as fair by me. Anybody calling it insightful doesn't belong here.
They're not suing 73 kids with 73 copies of stollen Windows. They're taking down mass-scale producers. They claim to have seized over 32,000 fake CDs, and stopped over 70,000 "auctions". I have no idea what they mean by auctions.
/. article said, Microsoft can actually make MORE money by allowing some piracy. It keeps kids with no cash from switching to Linux, for example. I've always felt MS has somewhat lax copying security on purpose.
If you've just got a copy of Windows on your machine you lifted from work or the net, I wouldn't worry too much. As that recent
I've also felt they deliver a buggy system that degrades over time all by itself on purpose. If forces you to upgrade. I've gone through several Windows machines this decade, but the Mac I bought my wife in 2000 is still kicking, and still quite useful. The difference is in the software.