Slashdot forums: Diverting ethical questions into off-topic anti-religion screeds since 1997.

More to the point, your perspective is limited. There are many, many conceptions of morality and ethics that don't devolve into "because God said so" or "because the majority says so."

New feature in Ceiling Cat: Incognito mode?

I know! And "Area51" is like the only dictionary-like password within the constraints you describe, so I can crack the system in a single guess! And I'm practically guaranteed to get classified information with that kind of password!

A meet-in-the-middle attack still works on 3DES, but it can only strip off one layer of DES. Thus, 3DES has 112 bits of security (56*2).

Quoting from the grandparent:

I have no idea whether that "second round backwards" thing is true, but this has nothing to do with why 3DES is vulnerable to meet-in-the-middle attacks. Meet-in-the-middle attacks work on any plaintext that's encrypted multiple times with the same cipher but different keys. If you encrypted with AES-128 twice, that ciphertext would also be vulnerable to a meet-in-the-middle attack. (Though the space cost would be see high that such an attack would be even more impossible than an AES-128 bruteforce already is.)

Exactly. Moreover, it's misleading to call all those activities "unlawful." Just because you do something that gives someone a legal remedy against you, doesn't make it wrong. Sometimes, it's actually a good thing when a party breaches a legal obligation. For example, see efficient breach theory.

Mind you, I don't think breach of copyright is analogous to an efficient breach, because infringement usually means the rights-holder gets no compensation. It's a complicated question.

At any rate, "illegal" doesn't have an inherent meaning. There are only breaches of obligations, and consequences ensuing from those breaches.

Not actually true. If you have a password alphabet of size k, then the possibility space in an n-character password is k times greater than the possibility space for an (n-1)-character password, k*k times greater than for an (n-2)-character password, etc. Brute-forcing all the possible passwords of length 1 to (n-1) is a trivial amount of work compared to brute-forcing all the passwords of length n.

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If you're brute-forcing a password, knowing the length doesn't "greatly ease" your guessing - it spares you some insignificant preliminary work. What it does help you do is spot passwords that are weak enough to brute-force, but an enforced minimum password length will prevent this from happening. Basically, there's a reason that the Unix-style login isn't more widely used.

Yeah, but don't forget that the Deltas make a difference.

Also, I hear they like to walk all over the Epsilons. But in fairness, the Epsilons are very small.

"Welcome, graduates. You are no longer the future."

(Thanks, Simpsons.)

That doesn't really work today, though. Two problems:

First, Michelangello and Bach lived in an age where wealth was heavily concentrated in the nobility and the clergy, two groups who were very interested in commissioning artistic works. Nobody has that kind of wealth nowadays; Gates and the Waltons aren't nearly as wealthy, proportionately, as the wealthiest people back then.

Second, that only works for certain types of works. Do you know any billionaires who would commission new video games, comic books, or Hollywood blockbusters?

Intellectual property creates artificial scarcity, yes, but it also creates a viable market for information. The ability to control licensing means that rights-holders can force their audience to pay for the value of their content. This gives content producers a strong incentive to create value for their audience.

It's possible that a no-copyright commission-based model could work, if audiences/readers/players/etc felt obligated to tip the content producers generously for producing a work. But it's not nearly as simple as you suggest. I'm not totally convinced that it would be better than a copyright system. Certain works would be under-produced - especially high-budget works and works that people might enjoy, but feel ashamed to sponsor. Also, the amount of money going into content-production would almost certainly be less than now - most likely, what people are forced to pay under copyright is often more than what they would pay without compulsion.

The most serious complaint seems to be that "significant content for L4D1 was promised," and L4D2 means that L4D won't get the promised content. Does anybody know where these promises are coming from? I don't remember reading anything about that. If this is just some fans griping because TF2 got significant post-release content and L4D didn't, I don't really see the problem. TF2 launched with three or four maps; L4D had 20.

And L4D2 is a mod because it uses the same engine? By that logic, wasn't Half Life a Quake 2 mod?

N-Gage. Virtual Boy. Phantom.

How I mine for mods!?! Help Plz!!

Benchmarks?

How heavily were the original images compressed? Selective Gaussian blur tends to remove compression artifacts, smooth gradients, and keep edges intact. I wonder if Acquine was responding badly to artifacts in your source images.