Yo dawg, I heard you like pointers so I put an array of pointers to pointers in your pointers so you can dereference while you're dereferencing.

Nope, absolutely incorrect. That's what makes one-time pads different. When the key length is the same as the plaintext length, it is possible have perfect security. Look up unicity distance.

But your brute force attack will yield every single possible plaintext (with the same length as the original plaintext). Which is the real one?

For example, if the ciphertext is BWIJAA, your brute force attack will get ATTACK for one key, and GOHOME for another. (And every other 6 character string.)

But a neuron is worth a lot more than a byte - it's more like a node. At least mine are - don't know about yours.

(But point taken about "infinite complexity".)

You forgot the apostrophe there, chief. Don't make me sick Bob on you. Oh, too late: http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

Maybe this is a stupid question, but why didn't you just go ahead and say it?

So how's anarchy working out for you?

I don't know ... seems to work pretty well for the diamond industry.

Umm ... Are you aware that the reason it's cold at the poles has nothing to do with the earth's magnetic field, but rather the weaker intensity of sunlight at high latitudes? Were you sick on that day in third grade?

The last geomagnetic reversal took place 780,000 years ago. So, bzzt, no.

Please turn in your geek card on the way out.

There's one thing that's worse than too little data: Too much data that may or may not be relevant to your task.

It's bad to have no data. But that can be remedied. Having more data than you can process, worse, data where you cannot discriminate between wheat and chaff is pretty much useless. And that's basically what we have now. They were busy collecting data left and right, not asking whether that data could be relevant. Now they're stuck with a buttload of data that may or may not be relevant.

The best solution? Toss it and start over. And this time, collect only what's relevant.

I think it's really simple, for example even though I consider my bank account balance private there's probably quite a few people at the bank that at least theoretically could look at it. If I use Google apps to write a letter I consider private, it's in much the same situation. And yet, most letters I write are significantly less important or private than my bank accounts. "I can't put my letters on Google, or people would see what I write" is a bit like "I can't put my money in the bank, or people would see how much money I have". Many companies live that way too having outsourced all their basic IT, for the most part this works fine. I can see how Google doesn't provide total anonymity or privacy yet good enough for many people and those remaining people it isn't possible for Google to serve.

If you want total privacy and anonymity, you can't rely on anyone else. You have to do it all on your own computer, use anonymous networks, connect directly with your peers and not over backbones like email or facebook or skype, in short it's a whole different game. And if you're really paranoid about it, you probably want to encrypt and physically secure and make tempest-proof and screened software and... the list really goes on and on, and it doesn't stop until your computer is as secure as the deepest vault at the Pentagon. Google apps isn't the place for Top Secret documents and if that's your standard then neither it is for you.

It's all a matter of using it with reason. If you're using a google web app to edit pictures before putting them on your facebook or myspace or photo sharing site, what have you lost? Nothing. You were going to put them online at the mercy of a company and their privacy policy anyway. Which may or may not be a good idea in the first place, but at least it's fairly consistent.

I'm trying to picture what a "breading gown" is. I guess some kind of smock or dress that you wear while dipping food in batter before frying it.

I don't know what bacteria would be doing with them though.

Wrong. Dead wrong.
Reason 1: Rainbow tables only work when the cryptosystem doesn't use salt (or uses it incorrectly). These days everyone uses salt. It's not a big secret.
Reason 2: Even if salt wasn't used, Rainbow tables aren't feasible against long passwords. Rainbow tables are essentially just saving the results of one attack and using them on subsequent attacks. If the password in question is long enough, even the "one attack" (table precomputations) will never get to that password.

So, educate yourself. Rainbows tables are not some kind of magic crypto attack. They are very limited in scope. These days pretty much all they're good for is Windows passwords and old 40-bit MS Office documents. Definitely not PGP.

I'd have thought that would be counterproductive ...

Not to mention TEMPEST (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST)

ORLY? What about hardware key stroke loggers? They do exist you know.