thomasjames

You'd think that intelligence and defense was outside of the scope of the EU or something...

Is the irony of this not lost on anyone else? In light of recent events it appears they'll be able to get the data anyway, whether or not it is sent over.

I wonder how he was able to amass thousands of documents within two months of being in his current position while still screening them for information beyond the scope of what he was trying to leak. The possibility that there is confidential information about foreign operations outside of the internet surveillance makes me lose a great deal of respect for him. I also don't trust someone who wasn't even able to manage a GED to read through thousands of intelligence documents... just putting that out there. I feel like many have been too quick to give this guy a free pass.

From Schneier in "Applied Cryptography" (1996):

"Longer key lengths are better, but only up to a point. AES will have 128-bit, 192-bit, and 256-bit key lengths. This is far longer than needed for the foreseeable future. In fact, we cannot even imagine a world where 256-bit brute force searches are possible. It requires some fundamental breakthroughs in physics and our understanding of the universe.

One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an amount of energy no less than kT, where T is the absolute temperature of the system and k is the Boltzman constant. (Stick with me; the physics lesson is almost over.)

Given that k = 1.38 × 10^−16 erg/K, and that the ambient temperature of the universe is 3.2 Kelvin, an ideal computer running at 3.2 K would consume 4.4 × 10−16 ergs every time it set or cleared a bit. To run a computer any colder than the cosmic background radiation would require extra energy to run a heat pump.

Now, the annual energy output of our sun is about 1.21 × 10^41 ergs. This is enough to power about 2.7 × 10^56 single bit changes on our ideal computer; enough state changes to put a 187-bit counter through all its values. If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2^192. Of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter.

But that's just one star, and a measly one at that. A typical supernova releases something like 1^051 ergs. (About a hundred times as much energy would be released in the form of neutrinos, but let them go for now.) If all of this energy could be channeled into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states.

These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space."

That is good because, provided there is not some enormous leap forward in number theory in the meantime, they can keep working on trying to break 256-bit key RSA encryption "indefinitely" as well thanks to a higher law by the name of thermodynamics.

In the meantime, I just used PDFtk:

pdftk preface.pdf toc.pdf ch*.pdf index.pdf cat output Aho_Ullman_1992_Foundations_of_Computer_Science.pdf

Ten TRILLION bytes...

It's okay, Nature, the word terabyte doesn't scare people and is indeed now part of common parlance...

I think the fact that we are talking about "innovation" so much is a sign of an excessive degree of self-awareness. People used to be at peace with having a specific interest and true expertise and were not thinking "okay, I'm smart so let me 'disrupt' a market and shake things up." Many were okay with simply being a useful, necessary and perhaps not-so-widely celebrated part of a larger whole. Larger wholes like NASA, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, IBM, Bell, Digital Equipment and others that gave rise to this much lauded period of innovation (the mechanics of which the author doesn't entirely seem to understand). It also goes without saying that the larger players in academia were expanding in to engineering in a much more serious way due to Cold War competition.

Sure, there were exceptions to the theory of leviathan organizations of specialists. Intel is an exception, in that it was a start up. But it was a start up founded by people with the understanding of how a larger research entity would work (two of the main founders were established engineers at Fairchild). Talking about this sort of thing in the context of modern start-up culture, to be honest, is flippant and cheeky. Maybe "idea guys", business journalists, and a lot of modern hackers in general just need to stop thinking innovation as some substance you can bottle and beating us over the heads with said bottle until the word loses all meaning. The innovators who created the sophistication of the modern transportation and energy infrastructure we now enjoy, not to mention the fundamentals of computing, were a lot humbler than the baby boomer titans of technology and probably a lot of us out there, too.

It is only for cars manufactured in such a limited time frame. This is part of what it means to be a responsible auto maker. Tesla is growing up, and this is par for the course. I seriously doubt this will have any long-term significance in terms of its stock price.

The reverse Alan Colmes of print media...

Bell Labs was one of the country's greatest resources and the model of what a corporate research facility should be. It was a decidedly domestic phenomenon, and also could work on sensitive topics freely. Its now being foreign has everything to do with it, which is why they had to spin off a small segment to continue with government contracts.

This just highlights how much it pains me that Bell Labs is now in the hands of a foreign firm like Alcatel, which has also been quick to hijack its history.

The IEEE Computer Society had a great interview with Stroustrup where he tries to outline your exact point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fJ5rZhw4Fc

Yeah, it was called the crack epidemic.

Cause Greg K-H posted it on Google+ today...

Even though a lot of infrastructure (i.e., Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Post, Deutsche Telekom) has been privatized, it is interesting how the former state monopolies are just still de facto monopolies within Germany. They also compete well internationally. I am personally looking forward to the US privatizing some more of its infrastructure and hope the results are positive. Also, I agree about German mechanical engineering... but I am biased. I work for a mechanical engineering consultancy out here. There is a very high level of professionalism among the Diplom-Ingenieur graduates from German universities. It is also nice how there are more jobs for mechanical engineering out here that aren't so tied up in the defense and aerospace industries. It's good for the soul.

A similar project using Emacs and really clever use of Python and Dragon Naturally Speaking SDK was my favorite presentation at PyCon this past year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI

As an American living and working in Germany as an engineer for the past year or so (in a large city, at that), this really shocked me actually. I thought that maybe my landlady was cheap, but it turned out there were actually virtually no better options available. It seemed kind of out of phase with the image Germany tries to project. So many other utilities and services here are really much better than their counterparts in the States. This was kind of a shock.

This is, in reality, almost just mocking everyone else in that they, the primary shareholders, do not need a salary. Never understood why we are supposed to care about this gesture or laud people for it.

They already bought the land for their massive new facility in London.

Please ask him what motivated the decision to use Comic Sans in the lecture notes. I'd have loved to read them otherwise.

This is what would be keeping be back I think. I spent too much of my day in remote shells on systems where I do not have root. This shell looks really cool, but I am afraid that I would come to depend on its features and thus lose my bashfu skills in the process.

I'm glad that this is gonna be so close to the Bluffdale, UT NSA data center. Now they wont even have to build too much of their own cable to listen in on every single packet!

I was actually thinking of going with this since it seemed to focus on the foundations of lambda calculus and is also fairly condensed. I was thinking I might try "The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia" as a follow up just cause it sounded satisfying.

Does anyone know the best book for learning Haskell? I have heard it is good for just thinking about programming in new ways and keeping your mind agile. I can really only learn a language with a good structured book with exercises at the end of each chapter. Haven't found something definitive yet, but would be open to suggestions.

So pretty much what IBM already did with Watson...

They do; they are called the E1, E2, E3... visa programs. A lot of the positions these companies are looking to fill frankly just don't require the skills or experience this program demands, because they are looking for young workers in a start-up style work environment.

After the dot-com bubble many people were not hired again. We are not even five years out from the greatest recession in many decades. Many of these people have fundamental technical skills. They might know more perl than most and not have much love for ruby hipsters, but they understand the permanent aspects of programming and related disciplines, like the logic behind it. I think a lot of this comes down to Silicon Valley's ageism problem (you know the one no one here ever talks about). There are many technical workers who people think are outdated, despite being responsible for the first P.C. and later internet revolution. For the record, I am 24, and such things do not affect me. But I think opinion here might be skewed on an age basis.

The quotas on a per country as opposed to population basis have to do with national security. No country would let a massive portion of its population potentially represents the interests of any one foreign sovereign entity. American exceptionalism only goes so far in this case. Hold the U.S. to the standards it sets for itself, but this is going to be a tricky issue to negotiate. A lot of it comes down to common sense.