I kept bumming myself out reading the article by automatically going on and reading the answer to the problems.
1,584 karma · joined February 14, 2010
But yes - different methods of communication have different semantics, as Marshal McLuhan never said. But it is nice to group them, and to be able to seamlessly transfer between them. No doubt I'd love Google Chat's "This person is now offline. Click here to send a SMS" if they had any support for anywhere but the States. And I look forward to the Sense UI concept of crossing the streams coming to stock Android so I can use it myself.
The biggest thing the author won't dare admit - that he's a nice guy. That he cares about making it easier for others. I guess it's self-effacing, and I can see how others may prefer actual open honesty, but this is the way I work, and as such, this prose is like a warm bath to me.
"What are the five things most likely to break it? If somebody is trying to fix a problem and you left them a solution on page 5 of the manual they’re going to be really, really grateful. Once it’s working again they’ll buy you a beer to say thanks for all the trouble you saved them. Seriously, they will."
"For the next three years, GCHQ's brightest minds struggled to find a one-way function that satisfied Ellis's requirements, but nothing emerged. Then, in September 1973, a new mathematician joined the team. Clifford Cocks had recently graduated from Cambridge University, where he had specialised in number theory, one of the purest forms of mathematics. When he joined GCHQ he knew very little about encryption and the shadowy world of military and diplomatic communication, so he was assigned a mentor, Nick Patterson, who guided him through his first few weeks at GCHQ.
After about six weeks, Patterson told Cocks about 'a really whacky idea'. He outlined Ellis's theory for public-key cryptography, and explained that nobody had yet been able to find a mathematical function that fitted the bill. Patterson was telling Cocks because this was the most titillating cryptographic idea around, not because he expected him to try to solve it. However, as Cocks explains, later that day he set to work: 'There was nothing particular happening, and so I thought I would think about the idea. Because I had been working in number theory, it was natural to think about one-way functions, something you could do but not undo. Prime numbers and factoring was a natural candidate, and that became my starting point.' Cocks was beginning to formulate what would be known as the RSA asymmetric cipher. Rivest, Shamir and Adleman discovered their formula for public-key cryptography in 1977, but four years earlier the young Cambridge graduate was going through exactly the same thought processes. Cocks recalls: 'From start to finish, it took me no more than half an hour. I was quite pleased with myself. I thought, "Ooh, that's nice. I've been given a problem, and I've solved it." '
Cocks did not fully appreciate the significance of his discovery. He was unaware of the fact that GCHQ's brightest minds had been struggling with the problem for three years, and had no idea that he had made one of the most important cryptographic breakthroughs of the century. Cocks's naivety may have been part of the reason for his success, allowing him to attack the problem with confidence, rather than timidly prodding at it. Cocks told his mentor about his discovery, and it was Patterson who then reported it to the management. Cocks was quite diffident and very much still a rookie, whereas Patterson fully appreciated the context of the problem and was more capable of addressing the technical questions that would inevitably arise. Soon complete strangers started approaching Cocks the wonderkid, and began to congratulate him. One of the strangers was James Ellis, keen to meet the man who had turned his dream into a reality. Because Cocks still did not understand the enormity of his achievement the details of this meeting did not make a great impact on him, and so now, over two decades later, he has no memory of Ellis's reaction."
Note that it wasn't just his naivete that helped, it was also his deep knowledge of a field incidental to where the solution was thought to lie. You gotta know some shit, too.
The Russian radio chatter is ground talking to astronauts in Russian. There's also English radio chatter, too.
Also, I seem to recall this turns out to be incredibly cheap for the amount of reduction in recidivism it causes.
Last week I saw a hurricane from space. Yesterday, they were struggling to get Win2000 to connect to a LAN.
-- http://exiledonline.com/the-last-puppet-show-an-eyewitness-a...
Not that the matters. they were in Russia because they loved living there. Ames is one th record as hating the "beigeocracy" of America. Given a choice between living in Moscow, living the Hungry Duck years, flaming high and living large and publishing from America and lasting a few more years... I know what choice I'd make, and I guess history knows what choice they made.
Anyway - thank the heavens they lasted as long as they did, as alive as they did. Thanks for all the stuff that still trickles out now. It's more than we have any right to expect.
And of course, if downmod meant more "hide this sort of thing from me" than "I don't think this should be on HN", maybe you'd downmod more...
(But this starts showing the downside to such personalization - it's a lot more effort server-side, and it dilutes a single community)
http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/trying-to-get-the-bbc-to-li... is Ben Goldacre writing in to the Beeb.
He later had a response ( http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/no-movement-on-the-bbcs-biz... ):
"Many thanks for your message, and interest in the site. The issue of linking to specific research papers, rather than the journals in which they appear is something with which we have long wrestled.
Linking to the journal gives the reader the chance to look at the source of the story, understand something of the wider context and get an idea of whether the research is peer reviewed. It also gives a chance to read associated information in editorials, etc, which often may be of interest. It is also a way for us to credit the journal.
We accept that linking to the specific research paper itself is often a desirable thing to do, and it is certainly something we will try to do more of in future. However, we don't believe that it is something we can do on every occasion - for instance many papers are available on the web via subscription only, while others give only an Abstract summary. In these instances, the vast majority of our readers would not be able to read the full papers, without paying for access, even if we provided the relevant link.
In addition, we do have finite resources, and our view is that our top priority should always be to provide authoratitive, accurate and attractive reportage. We have to balance that against the desirability of providing a link on a story which is likely to be of use only to a small number of our readers.
We have sent out new guidelines to reporting staff summarising our position, and stressing that linking to individual papers is something they should consider as an option on each story."
Which he (and I) thought was a bit rubbish. So it goes.
I'm sorry, this comment isn't strictly relevant, but I don't get a chance to tell that story very often.
Embrace, extend and ...