squeakynick

One-time-pads are wonderful. XOR is wonderful too; it's reciprocity is incredibly useful for so many things.

Eyes, however, can't do XOR functions with pixels :)

If you have a computing device, sure XOR is the way to go.

To answer your question, Visual Cryptography allows your eyes to perform the vanilla-OR and decode without the use of any other tools.

Years ago, for fun, I wrote a Bejeweled Blitz player. As with others here, the fun was about the challenge, not about 'beating' the game.

http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/march2009/index.html

For appropriate reasons, I know the 'ghost' ban thresholds are secret (otherwise it would be incredibly easy for script kiddies to simply game).

However, the hacker in me is almost curious enough to see how far I could "poke the lion with a stick". If I had more time, creating a few dozen accounts ... etc

Then I think about how I would engineer such a system and try and keep it as automated as possible. I'm sure its well written enough to threshold on some dynamic curve based on incoming traffic.

And, whilst variety is the spice of life and all that, if you are a prolific (and popular) poster, should people care if you self promote. If each of your posts is a winner, generates great readership figures and 'likes' and spikes conversation, why not allow this? So, I'd want to deviate down a score based on popularity. Then there is frequency of posting, and comment karma ...

At the end of the day whenever there is a threshold, there will be edge cases where people are the wrong side of judgment line. Banning is a digital thing, and reputation is analog. I'm glad that hn seems to have a response appeal system.

Shadow QR codes http://boingboing.net/2012/05/23/shadow-qr-codes-that-only-w...

Any path that is not straight could have been reached sooner by going on the straight line connecting: The shortest distance between two opposite corners on a rectangle is the diagonal line between them. Any curve you draw connecting them is longer. Any curved path you run gets you to the same point later than you could have got to it at if you went directly there. Outside of the circle of safety, it has to be a straight path.

A spiral is also not going to work outside the circle of safety, as the monster has a higher angular velocity; he moves around the shore faster than your projection to the shore.

The 'exact' answer for the angle you need to row (alpha) is Sin(alpha)=KCos(Phi).

Yes, the 'exact' answer is the tangent. If you want the relationship between K and Phi, then:

K = Cos(Phi) + SQR( (pi+phi)^2 - sin^2(phi))

The derivation of both of these is contained in the article.

How can I help convince you?

- I hope you agree that, until you breach the circle of safety, it does not matter what the strategy, as you have control to adjust relative positions to anywhere? So, it's all about how to get from the edge of the circle of safety to the shore.

- I hope you can agree that the path from the circle of safety to the shore is a straight one? After all, if you elected for a curved path you would be wasting time. (Any curved path you took between point A and B is inefficient as it would be longer than the straight line connecting the two points. If it is longer, it would take more time. This is bad!)

- So now, we know we need to connect a line from the circle to the shore. We are starting with the monster as far away from us as possible, and we then select where we draw the line.

- In the article I show that the line can be anywhere in a 90 degree sector (it's pretty obvious that outside of these 90 degrees is not too).

- With these constraints, I use trigonometry and calculus to find the maximum.

I'll be happy to re-clarify things in more detail if you let me know which of these arguments is "a little too wavy".

The calculus is used to determine the maximum ratio of speeds.

The monster is a smart monster. He knows that, once you leave the safe circle, he has a higher angular velocity. So, as soon as you pass that threshold, he will start to run around the lake. It does not matter which direction he initially takes, but once moving is committed to that direction (if he were to reverse direction, he would end up, in the future at the same point he was once at, but at a later time, and you would be nearer your goal; he's too smart to let that happen). Once you are outside the safety circle, he will run, and not stop running in that direction.

Hmmm, they ask for your email address, but there is no privacy policy on the site. What are they going to do with your email address? Use it, spam it, sell it to others?

Also, no loop-back check on email. What's to stop you signing up a dozen other people to this free service? It would be polite to bounce a "confirmation" email back first before sending.

+1 on the earlier comment about samples, and indication of notification format.

If you like this kind of stuff, here is an analysis of Chutes and Ladders http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/november12011/index.html

And another about Candyland http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december12011/index.html

Anyone for Battleship? http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december32011/index.html

Or Hangman? http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html

Or Darts? http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/january12012/index.html

It's a hobby of mine to analyze these kind of games. Suggestions for other games to look at welcome.

How handsomely? Will anyone step up and say? If this is happening, what is the going rate? If you were offered, but did not accept, what value would have changed your mind? (Everyone has a price) Are there really people out there that turned down half a million, a million, five million dollars? Are there smaller companies who would turn down 250K or 100k?

Oooops, yes, a typo. I'll correct it later. :)

Thanks for kind comments.

Guilty, but I make up for it in another article on JPEG :) http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/november32012/index.html

Paradoxically, yes?

Explanation with graphs and pictures http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/march12012/index.html

Ooops, yes, sorry. You pasted the correct link.

Thanks for everyone for pointing out their typo. I posted them a note, and its looks like they corrected it.

Now the world knows :)

Thank you very much for this information. I was wondering.

But that's not quite the same thing. In your example, you can't play game B independantly :)

The author didn't create the problem, he just wrote about it :)

Please do cite sources; It's what adds weight to your comments and differentiates them from speculation.

Yes ETAOIN SHRDLU CMFWYP VBGKQJ XZ is an accurate distribution of letters in common English text BUT this is a distribution of letters in written English. As it turns out, however, written English is full of very common little glue words, like THE, OF, AND, A, TO, IN, IS, YOU, THAT, IT ...

One third of all printed English material is made up of the top 25 words, and the most common 100 words account for almost half. Domain names are not typically sentences, and are often just one or two words. Instead the frequency of occurence of letters in distinct words should be used. For all distinct words in the English dictionary, this distribution is a little different: ESIARN TOLCDU PMGHBY FVKWZX QJ

Already "T" is much further down the list.

Interestingly, this distibution varies by length of word. By the time we get to words of length 13, for instance the order has changed to IENTS ... (So already the letter "I" is the most common letter for longer words without any influence of Apple).

You can read about a full analysis of the distribution of letters and see a complete table of letter frequency against word length here: http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html

There may be "thousands of companies" that have added an "I" to their compnay name (though it would help your arugment if you quote sources). But even so, this is dwarfed by the 102 million names. Even tens of thousands of new "I" companies is a fraction of a percent change against this denominator.

There are millions of companies/organisations that have domain names, and not all are tech related.

I'm happy to continue debating and will gladly run any queries you suggest using the entire domain name database and the English language database to generate numbers.

Tough Crowd, Tough Crowd :)

The graphs aren't misleading (IMHO), they show the distribution of lengths. However you slice it, if you have to type the domain name, you have to push that number of keys. It's far more important to know that, than the ratio of the length normalized by the possible combinations of characters at that length. (I did try looking at that as well, but the graphs were almost meaningless - even at log scales, the increase in the number of combinations of characters dwarfs the number of names, and after you get more than 10 characters, the percentages drop to so small that comparing is meaningless).

"a lot of experts disagree with you on the importance of having a .com domain name". Well, yes they can! So go with the wisdom of the masses. It's a free market, and as a company you can select your own domain suffix. Yet most go for .COM, because well, right or wrong, that's what people expect. (I will agree that, in the end, it's not as important because, if you read my article I state that many now find web sites through typing keywords in search engines, and the exact domain is not important), but, Ask youself the question though: if you are company XYZZY, and there is a XYZZY.COM domain there, and it's not yours would you be just as happy with XYZZY.NET and not worry about it (Listening to those experts?) I think not, you want to preserve your brand, and avoid confussion, and make it as easy as possible for the masses to find your site (the non-experts who make up the majority of your consumers). It's the tastes of the fish, not the tastes of the fisherman after all :)

This article was written for fun. The couplet/triplet was generated out of interest and to see common combinations of letters. I find it fascinating, and I'll be happy to explain some business utility of it if you want to send me a personal email.

I'm not trying to sell my services as an expert domain name seller; it's not what I do. I make a living as someone who mines data and helps find 'inconsequential minutia' in data to leverage (when dealing with hundreds of millions of users, moving the needle just fraction of a percent can make a difference to a bottom line).

But anyway, the article was created as a trivia/fun article. I'm sorry you don't find it interesting/relevant. (Though again, wisdom of the crowd: since someone posted it here this morning, my inbox/twitter has been alive with comments/retweets about how fun and interesting an article it is - to date, it's been one of the most promiscious articles I've written)

Cool!

The "i" does make a difference, sure, but not as big an influence as you might think. You can only put the "i" infront of so many words, and if you look at the initial letter charts, it's not massively dominant there.

Far more important, for instance are the substrings like "FREE" (which can apply to all things, not just computer related) and this has a couple of "E"s, or anything that has the "%ING%" substrings (which is a very common letter combination in the English language)

If you sign a legal agreement with Verisign and have a legitimate need, they will grant access. Good Luck.

I'll not agree or disagree :)

I simply processed the file provided by the good folks at Verisign, and used however they classified things.