There's a couple of things that XML does that may actually damage standardization of file formats:
1) It's really easy to create a new file format. You don't really have to think about it- just come up with some descriptive tags and voila, a whole new format.
2) It's really easy to parse the structure of an xml document. There's not really an incentive to to come up with a standard library for parsing an xml schema because it's so easy to role your own.
3) Few vendors are going to want to work together to define a file format for a type of application. This isn't even necessarily as evil as Microsoft trying to control a standard. Developers by their very nature are going to have different ideas about how a document should be structured- that plus the much larger design time required for a file format which applies to a broad group of features will almost ensure that in the near future no one will be using a common standard. I like XML a lot, but I think it's foolish to think that it's going to help standardize file formats. If we wanted to do that it's really not any harder to do using a binary standard.
However, the Second Amendment is one of those freedoms and the ACLU chooses to ignore or "interpret" it in a such a way that it becomes meaningless.
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
I don't know about you, but my reading of the second amendment leads me to believe that it is possible to interpret in more than one way. You seem to feel that any controls on guns are in violation of the second amendment. My reading of the second amendment leads me to believe that it is less about and individual's right to own a gun, and more about the right of citizens of this country to participate in an armed militia, ie the police.
The amendment in question is definitely vague enough to support both premises, leaving it up to the courts to determine where in the spectrum the law should apply. It is interesting to note that to my knowledge a court has never struck down a law controlling or regulating arms as unconstitutional.
Phase is just another quantum attribute, so it should be possible to measure phase without disturbing the quantum entaglement- of course other attributes will be affected. Having said that, it's probably much more difficult to preserve phase than other attributes like momentum or position.
A workaround for the cryptography angle would probably be to measure multiple attributes at the sender and receiver side. This would make it much more difficult for a man in the middle attack to succeed, as it's probably only possible to preserve a symmetric pair of quantum attributes.
Take a look at QUANTUM DÈJÁ VU. It's the first example of a quantum nondemolition experiment conducted at the Ecole Normale in Paris. Basically, by being very careful how they took the measurement of the photon, they could ensure that particular properties, including the ones observed where not interfered with. Some of the quantum state would of course be disturbed, but not all of it. While this couldn't currently be used to eavesdrop on a quantum encryption link, it could form the basis for an attack.
Re:Harm to a person's financial well-being
on
Sim Plague
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· Score: 1
Fortunately in real life the animal -> human disease transmission vector is not so reliable. Probably the only reason that someone's not doing that;)
I'm using one of motorola's new timeports with web access, and the limiting factor in functionality is not bandwidth. I'd like to use the phone for really only two things- scheduling flights and checking status, and doing email. Flights are pretty easy, but actually responding to an email can be a nightmare. Rather than concentrate on these extra features, I would love to see a reasonably compact phone with a full keyboard. RIM can do it on a pager sized device- why can't I have a startac with equivalent usability?
There are three basic types of geometry: Euclidean which has triangles whose angles sum to 180 degrees, saddle shaped whose triange angles sum to less than 180 degrees, and spherical whose triangle angles sum to greater than 180 degrees. Saying that the universe has a 'saddle shape' means that the spacetime geometry has a negative curvature. This is not something that you can really see directly in the universe, much like an ant on a sphere has only indirect methods of determining that he is on a finite unbounded 2-space.
I've seen this done with previous releases, but it's not exactly simple, unless the vendor releases an updated rom. If you're not in that lucky category, you can create a new image using the windows ce platform builder sdk and burn it to an eprom. Not sure if platform builder is for general release however. They were handing it out at devcon last year, but obviously that wasn't for 3.0...
I don't think that very many people would argue that security through obscurity does not increase the difficulty of attacking a system. The part of the analysis where people disagree is how much more difficult is it to break into an undocumented system?
I actually agree with your facetious remark about longer key lengths working because of laziness- the only difference here is that as you add bits to a key the difficulty of cracking it increases exponentially. Once you obscure and algorithm, you can't really add more obscurity to it. Either you know what it does, or you have to figure it out. I would also argue that adding obscurity to a system only increases the difficulty in cracking by a linear amount. Of course, I don't have any numbers to back that statement, so please set your flames to stun.
Re:Why you should boycott this movie
on
Battlefield Earth
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· Score: 1
There is a definite difference between Scientology and religion, or at least the IRS thinks so. I believe that the IRS revoked their tax exempt status, declaring that they were a for-profit corporation. For a country like the US with such strong legal protections for religious organizations, this is a very serious action.
By the way, I'm sure Jews would be ecstatic if throughout history the extent of their persecution was people making fun of them on the internet and boycotting their movies. Can't remember the last time a pogrom was lead against scientologists.
Start wars? In 1996 British petroleum basically bought the Colombian army to protect the construction of a pipeline that they were building to the caribbean coast. Some of the things that they did to people protesting their activities were very frightening. Would you like to know more?
Admittedly, the referenced link is a little inflammatory, but the facts are basically correct. So yes, corporations don't have wars-- in the sense that the US had a police action in vietnam.
The prosecution in the US is going after web sites that link/host the decss code. The investigation in Norway is proceeding under their IP laws. <extreme_example_for_shock_value> Not that I agree with the DMCA, but the argument you're putting forth is the legal equivalent of, "I manufactured the Nuclear Bomb in [insert small 3rd world country], why isn't it legal in the US?" </extreme_example_for_shock_value>
Virii is the correct latin declination, but the standard english plural of virus is viruses. I don't have an oed in front of me, but dictionary.com has a definition.
It seems to me that the tact that most Internet users would like to take towards privacy online is anonymity/obscurity. I can see a whole bunch of parallels between online privacy and a "secret" cryptography algorithm- both rely on the tenet security through obscurity. Whatever laws are passed or user actions are taken, companies are going to do their best to collect this information. I think we've all seen how well this has worked for the crypto folks. (deCSS anybody?)
Rather than privacy laws/regulations being passed for the internet, I'd much rather see actions that would protect people from discrimination no matter what their online viewing habits are.
Well, jsut quickly looking up add-on cards at compusa, the cheapest USB card that I could find was $39.99, while the cheapest ethernet card that I could find was $14.99. Granted, since more computers come with usb than ethernet, there's probably higher volume of pci ethernet cards than usb ones, but that's a pretty significant price difference. USB
Interesting question: Is USB really cheaper than Ethernet? I imagine that there are huge economies of scale going for ethernet right now, and while USB is building, I don't see it hitting the same numbers as ethernet. Anyone know off hand the cost of a usb asic v. an ethernet asic?
Not meaing to go completely off topic, but I will anyway. This is one of the reasons that I think that there will always be a place for commercial software. There's lots of stuff that is just boring, complicated, and generally a pain to program- ie stuff that no one is going to do for fun, like getting gdb to wade through the STL symbols output by gcc and display them intelligently. Dollar signs have a way of overcoming these little shortcomings.
I can think of a number of cases where this would make code run 2x as fast. Pretty much any time where you would want to move data around in memory you could now do it in 128 bit chunks, rather than 64 (or, heaven forbid 64). Memmove/Memcpy would be much faster...
To my admittedly limited understanding I don't think that this is a major issue. Paleontologists take plaster castings of the dinosaur bones to study, and rarely work with the real thing. I don't think that there is that much that you need to do with the bones themselves, besides radiocarbon dating, and how many times do you really need to do that to be sure that you're right? The greater loss here is that the bones, instead of being displayed in a museum and possibly sparking a child's interest in science, are going to be a conversation piece at a holidy party for the super rich.
Slashdot Mirror
1) It's really easy to create a new file format. You don't really have to think about it- just come up with some descriptive tags and voila, a whole new format.
2) It's really easy to parse the structure of an xml document. There's not really an incentive to to come up with a standard library for parsing an xml schema because it's so easy to role your own.
3) Few vendors are going to want to work together to define a file format for a type of application. This isn't even necessarily as evil as Microsoft trying to control a standard. Developers by their very nature are going to have different ideas about how a document should be structured- that plus the much larger design time required for a file format which applies to a broad group of features will almost ensure that in the near future no one will be using a common standard. I like XML a lot, but I think it's foolish to think that it's going to help standardize file formats. If we wanted to do that it's really not any harder to do using a binary standard.
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
I don't know about you, but my reading of the second amendment leads me to believe that it is possible to interpret in more than one way. You seem to feel that any controls on guns are in violation of the second amendment. My reading of the second amendment leads me to believe that it is less about and individual's right to own a gun, and more about the right of citizens of this country to participate in an armed militia, ie the police.
The amendment in question is definitely vague enough to support both premises, leaving it up to the courts to determine where in the spectrum the law should apply. It is interesting to note that to my knowledge a court has never struck down a law controlling or regulating arms as unconstitutional.
A workaround for the cryptography angle would probably be to measure multiple attributes at the sender and receiver side. This would make it much more difficult for a man in the middle attack to succeed, as it's probably only possible to preserve a symmetric pair of quantum attributes.
Take a look at QUANTUM DÈJÁ VU. It's the first example of a quantum nondemolition experiment conducted at the Ecole Normale in Paris. Basically, by being very careful how they took the measurement of the photon, they could ensure that particular properties, including the ones observed where not interfered with. Some of the quantum state would of course be disturbed, but not all of it. While this couldn't currently be used to eavesdrop on a quantum encryption link, it could form the basis for an attack.
Fortunately in real life the animal -> human disease transmission vector is not so reliable. Probably the only reason that someone's not doing that ;)
I'm using one of motorola's new timeports with web access, and the limiting factor in functionality is not bandwidth. I'd like to use the phone for really only two things- scheduling flights and checking status, and doing email. Flights are pretty easy, but actually responding to an email can be a nightmare. Rather than concentrate on these extra features, I would love to see a reasonably compact phone with a full keyboard. RIM can do it on a pager sized device- why can't I have a startac with equivalent usability?
There are three basic types of geometry: Euclidean which has triangles whose angles sum to 180 degrees, saddle shaped whose triange angles sum to less than 180 degrees, and spherical whose triangle angles sum to greater than 180 degrees. Saying that the universe has a 'saddle shape' means that the spacetime geometry has a negative curvature. This is not something that you can really see directly in the universe, much like an ant on a sphere has only indirect methods of determining that he is on a finite unbounded 2-space.
I've seen this done with previous releases, but it's not exactly simple, unless the vendor releases an updated rom. If you're not in that lucky category, you can create a new image using the windows ce platform builder sdk and burn it to an eprom. Not sure if platform builder is for general release however. They were handing it out at devcon last year, but obviously that wasn't for 3.0...
Ever read Farenheight 451?
I actually agree with your facetious remark about longer key lengths working because of laziness- the only difference here is that as you add bits to a key the difficulty of cracking it increases exponentially. Once you obscure and algorithm, you can't really add more obscurity to it. Either you know what it does, or you have to figure it out. I would also argue that adding obscurity to a system only increases the difficulty in cracking by a linear amount. Of course, I don't have any numbers to back that statement, so please set your flames to stun.
By the way, I'm sure Jews would be ecstatic if throughout history the extent of their persecution was people making fun of them on the internet and boycotting their movies. Can't remember the last time a pogrom was lead against scientologists.
Admittedly, the referenced link is a little inflammatory, but the facts are basically correct. So yes, corporations don't have wars-- in the sense that the US had a police action in vietnam.
Think NAT and firewall- you should have them anyway.
The prosecution in the US is going after web sites that link/host the decss code.
The investigation in Norway is proceeding under their IP laws.
<extreme_example_for_shock_value>
Not that I agree with the DMCA, but the argument you're putting forth is the legal equivalent of, "I manufactured the Nuclear Bomb in [insert small 3rd world country], why isn't it legal in the US?"
</extreme_example_for_shock_value>
Virii is the correct latin declination, but the standard english plural of virus is viruses. I don't have an oed in front of me, but dictionary.com has a definition.
I was able to compile and build a version of windows ce that I used for testing on low end 486 desktops.
I think Scott McNealy said it best: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."
Rather than privacy laws/regulations being passed for the internet, I'd much rather see actions that would protect people from discrimination no matter what their online viewing habits are.
Micro-Electroporation: Improving the efficiency and Understanding of Electrical Permeabilization of Cells
Well, jsut quickly looking up add-on cards at compusa, the cheapest USB card that I could find was $39.99, while the cheapest ethernet card that I could find was $14.99. Granted, since more computers come with usb than ethernet, there's probably higher volume of pci ethernet cards than usb ones, but that's a pretty significant price difference.
USB
Ethernet
Interesting question: Is USB really cheaper than Ethernet? I imagine that there are huge economies of scale going for ethernet right now, and while USB is building, I don't see it hitting the same numbers as ethernet. Anyone know off hand the cost of a usb asic v. an ethernet asic?
Interested /.'s may want to check out Micro-Electroporation: Improving the efficiency and Understanding of Electrical Permeabilization of Cells, Which is the authors' actual paper as published in Biomedical Microdevices.
Not meaing to go completely off topic, but I will anyway. This is one of the reasons that I think that there will always be a place for commercial software. There's lots of stuff that is just boring, complicated, and generally a pain to program- ie stuff that no one is going to do for fun, like getting gdb to wade through the STL symbols output by gcc and display them intelligently. Dollar signs have a way of overcoming these little shortcomings.
Open Directory - Science: Technology: Optics: Optical Computing has a bunch of links to universities and and others pursuing these lines of investigation.
I can think of a number of cases where this would make code run 2x as fast. Pretty much any time where you would want to move data around in memory you could now do it in 128 bit chunks, rather than 64 (or, heaven forbid 64). Memmove/Memcpy would be much faster...
To my admittedly limited understanding I don't think that this is a major issue. Paleontologists take plaster castings of the dinosaur bones to study, and rarely work with the real thing. I don't think that there is that much that you need to do with the bones themselves, besides radiocarbon dating, and how many times do you really need to do that to be sure that you're right? The greater loss here is that the bones, instead of being displayed in a museum and possibly sparking a child's interest in science, are going to be a conversation piece at a holidy party for the super rich.