I am pretty sure there is a mathematical definition of democracy...

Democracy=Sum of everyone's opinion/Population/Size of government

SCO is proof that such baseless litigation is not only resistant to findings of fact, but also to common sense, dignity and morality.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/11/05/144211/sco-zombie-creaks-into-motion-again

As we have seen of late, courts are becoming less tolerant of this form of abuse of the judicial system

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/11/02/158211/us-marshals-ordered-to-seize-righthaven-property

My hope is that a few more notable cases like this will make the cost-benefit of copyright litigation increasingly less attractive to the trolls

The only thing I find spooky is the anthropomorphisation of mathematical formula.

The first account you are outing has comments entirely consistent with a pubescent teenager fanboy:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2515218&cid=37989436

How did you arrive at the conclusion that these guys are shills apart from them disagreeing with your own views?

I am not an American and am not sympathetic to either Democrat or Republican ideologies. I wish to ask the American people on both sides of the economic debate for a reality check.

a) Do you think it possible that one of the largest and most complicated economies in the world can be turned around from the verge of collapse in under four years in a globally uncertain economic climate by a president from either political party?

b) Do you think the president should be held accountable for your economic recovery given that your own constitution vests the responsibility and authority for your economy with a separate house of government that the president has no authority or control over apart from a limited right to veto legislation?

c) Do you think that the problems with your economy can be solved by either political ideology given that both parties have spent and taxed at strikingly similar rates since the 1940s?

I have some questions to help me decide if Scott is coining a newer and darker style of satire or succumbing to some form of dissonance: You suggest creating a new branch of government with the sole purpose of educating voters. I appreciate the satire in your article, but do you really think that giving the government more scope and authority will resolve the misgivings people have about their government? If yes, then do you think an officially sanctioned and funded government media wing will lead to selfless and unbiased expression of the facts to the voting public? If yes then do you think that transparent, open and unbiased government communications will continue in perpetuity; even if such discourse contradicts the ideologies, reasoning and actions of the government itself? If yes then why do you suggest that such a government PR agency, guided only by the greater good of the public to provide transparent, open and unbiased knowledge to the voting public need engage in glitzy Apple-style marketing? Surely this egalitarian, unmandated house of government would be more akin to national public radio rather than an iTuneseque media engine?

If this analogy were scaled correctly, the bullet would be smaller than a bb pellet and the head would be denser than steel, meaning the analogy is also sensationalist.

Even if the analogy was valid, if you knew that the chance of a bullet hitting you was so low that a calculator with a precision of 1000 decimal places would still show it as zero. would you still be terrified? If the answer is 'yes' then the sensationalism is working.

Indeed. Apathy, ignorance and laziness are the greatest of all foe.

Not at all, you questions are poignant and well-framed.

Yes, going too far beyond current standards is expensive. As you imply, when computational overhead is considered (particularly in terms of server hardware) the cost of supporting increased key lengths is significant. For ciphers that are embedded in hardware devices there is further pressure to reduce footprint and fabrication costs as well as motivation to build in some amount of redundancy. Economic pressure therefore acts to resist the urge to overstep the Moore curve too greatly.

Cryptoprocessors exist right now but they require specialist software, are expensive to fabricate and are costly or impractical to upgrade. Even if these problems were mitigated by mass production, Moore's law dictates that they will be rapidly outmoded by cheaper and faster generic chips of the near future. As such, custom hardware will only ever be economically viable for those wanting "military grade" security who also have a pentagon-grade budget to spend on it.

The hidden gotcha is that information security is not all about cryptography. In fact, ciphers like AES and RSA with currently approved key sizes are the most secure part of our information security infrastructure. Rather than trying to break ciphers, black hats are expert at finding the weakest part of a system and attacking that instead; such as finding out where a system stores its cryptographic keys; how to intercept secrets before they've been encrypted or after they've been decrypted; and even more rudimentary things that remain the most successful infiltration strategies to date: Password dictionaries, key-loggers and human factor attacks such as bold-faced asking people for their password.

Black hats are successful because people make bad choices when they design their security systems, when they write their policies, when they monitor and review their systems, when they train their staff and when they respond to incidents. Cryptography has advanced significantly since the days of Enigma but unfortunately human nature hasn't changed much at all.

I am a cryptographic security researcher. I will give some background on this before answering your specific questions. Information security is subject to the same pressures as other forms of conflict. Such pressures are otherwise known as an "escalation", "arms race" or even as "evolution". Cryptography is one such armament in the information security arsenal; and while cryptography is subject to constant pressure of Moore's Law as you quite rightly assert; more cataclysmic changes can occur through leaps in either or both knowledge or capability. I can think of no better example of these notions than the Enigma machine; first developed in the early 1900's but made extensive use of by Germany during the second world war.

The first countermeasure used against Enigma was reverse-engineering. This lead to identification of weaknesses that whittled down the key size from a massive 380 bits to only just 76 bits. A one in 75,557,863,725,914,323,419,136 chance of randomly guessing (brute forcing) the correct key was still well beyond the resources of brute force at the time. This lead to the construction of the Bombe machine (a precursor to the computer) that could perform rapid searches through the keyspace for given known plaintexts and keys. Enigma was eventually broken through a combination of reverse-engineering, improvements in cryptanalytic techniques, improvements to computational power leading to faster brute force and the exploitation of systemic and human factor weaknesses. As a result, countermeasures to such attacks were developed such as the foundational principles of modern cryptography, developed by Claude Shannon in 1948.

I am guessing that the speed of innovation is partly driven by necessity. There will be periods of relatively steady improvements on both sides of the fence like there has been over recent years; then like with Enigma, there will be periods where there are giant leaps forward in technology and knowledge. There most assuredly is a "bit race" and it will continue so long as there is conflict.

Giant leaps of technology aside, our industry generally accepts conclusions made about minimum key-length for each cipher by NIST : http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-131A/sp800-131A.pdf. In short:

For AES, 128 bits is the minimum acceptable key size with no timeframe on when 256 bits will be required (everyone assumes this will occur around 2015)
For RSA, 1024 bit keys are the minimum acceptable key size until 2013 when the minimum will be increased to 2048 bit

Just like mechanical computers in the time of Enigma, current silicon-based computers are quickly reaching practical limits and Moore's law is starting to show signs of fatigue. But if it were to be built, a quantum supercomputer could be so powerful as to render all current key sizes useless. But even the fastest quantum computer will have a speed limit; and so should every newer and faster generation of computer; because all such things are constrained by the Universe's ultimate speed limit. So long as it takes longer to break a cipher without knowing the key than it does to transmit encrypted information using knowing the key, there will always be secrecy in numbers.

The statement would read better as "The laws of physics in our corner of the universe seem to be finely tuned to support life [as we know it, Captain]."

Just enough to get away from the Blight... Poor old Relay, I have never empathized with network hardware so much. By the way, I'm using a banged-up IP connection from the slow zone, so this post may take millions of years to reach anyone.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca?type=NEO&hmax=all&sort=date&sdir=ASC&tlim=recent_future&dmax=5LD&max_rows=0&action=Display+Table&show=1

The N-sigma for 2005 YU55 is 31,700, which means that the maximum error is 31,700 times smaller than the distance between the Earth and the object at its nearest point or an error so small as to be insignificant.

The author should have written "settled" instead of "dismissed". All around this is a badly summarized article verging on "Troll" status. Surprised it got through? Nope.