Am I imagining this?

A long time ago, before beta was even a twinkle in some dreadlocked UXtard's eye, you could reply to a comment or follow an external link and when you came back you were at the very place you left from, rather than the top of the accursed page?

And recently, for just a few days, you could again. And now you can't again?

The basis of technology is fire. Without that you can't even start smelting metals.

How would you, as a shaggy dolphin with a bone though your nose, make a fire underwater?

I was ignorantly

You don't say.

assuming that they'd do everything they could to insure the accomplishment of the mission

Unlikely. There's not enough statistical data to calculate a premium.

Chelsey Clinton

Is she a fan of Leslea Garret?

Why isn't there a "-1, oh the humanity!" mod?

if they replied with something like "Since Android One decided not to sell in physical stores during its launch, we as part of modern trade, have decided not to stock Android One either" we'd know their motivation.

If they spoke like you write we'd be none the wiser.

frist loony sist eleventyone.

However, smaller retailer and mom-n-pop shops have decided to show their displeasure at having being left out of the launch by deciding not to stock Android One.

Cutting the jolly nose off to be spiting one's face, old boy, what?

They lock themselves away in a darkened office working on the currently interesting single problem until it is kinda-sorta-mebbe solved. They then chuck it over the wall to the poor bastards in support.

FTFY

There are lots of pressing problems.

Cyphers, as opposed to codes, have well-defined functions (be it an algorithm or a lookup table) which map the input to the output. The same functions are applied in the same way across the entire input. Unless the functions are such that the output is truly indistinguishable from a random oracle (or, indeed, any other Oracle product), information is exposed, both information about the message and information about the method for producing the cyphertext. Since randomness can tell you nothing, by definition, the amount of information exposed cannot exceed the the information limit proposed by Shannon for a channel whose bandwidth is equal to the non-randomness of the output.

(A channel is a channel is a channel. The rules don't care.)

So, obviously you want to know how to get at the greatest amount of the unencrypted data that's encoded in the non-randomness, and how do you actually then extract the contents?

In other words, is there a general purpose function that can do basic, naive cryptanalysis? And what, exactly, can such a function achieve given a channel of N bits and a message of M bits?

In other words, how much non-randomness can a cypher have before you definitely know there's enough information leakage in some arbitrary cypher for the most naive cryptanalysis possible (excluding brute-force, since that's not analytical and isn't naive since you have to know the cypher) to be able to break the cypher in finite time? (Even if that's longer than the universe is expected to last.)

Is there some function which can take the information leakage rate and the type and complexity of the cypher to produce a half-life of that class of cyphers, where you can expect half of a random selection of cyphers (out of all cyphers with the same characteristics) to be broken at around that estimated half-life point?

If you can do that, then you know how complex you can make your cypher for a competition page, and how simple you can afford it when building a TrueCrypt replacement.

Damn. I was hoping he was going to say that the solution was written down but the piece of acid-free archival paper had been cut into segments, placed in acid-free envelopes, in turn placed in argon-filled boxes, which in turn were buried at secret locations, with the GPS coordinates for each segment written in encrypted format in the will.

That would be the Cybermen, although they tend to do those three simultaneously.

See also our Microsoft Borg icon.