That's a nice theory but, in practice, the majority of patents are complete nonsense. There's the obvious stuff either from patent trolls looking to lurk until they can make a quick buck off someone who is actually doing something productive. Then you have your inventors who create something neat and marketable, but whose invention doesn't really fit the definition required to get a patent (that fact doesn't stop the patent being issued of course). A good example of the latter can be found in that late-night commercial for patent services where their example is an inflatable carwash for kids. It's a neat toy, but it's all made of obvious parts. There's absolutely no contribution to human technology there. Any engineer or, for that matter, home tinkerer could sit down with the raw materials and make an equivalent "invention" based on their knowledge of what has come before. Then there are the patents granted to the quacks and loonies. Then there's the patents on unpatentable scientific discoveries granted to, for example, biotech firms who isolate a particular gene/protein/biowhatever, figure out what it's for, then write up a blanket patent or set of patents claiming all possible therapeutic uses for the discovery they can think of based on what it naturally does.

Then, there's the minority of patents that are actually for what could be considered real inventions. All well and good except that, if you actually read them or talk to anyone who writes them for a living, they're intentionally written to dance around the actual "secret sauce" of the invention. The intention is to obtain patent protection, but obfuscate the patent enough that trade secret protection is maintained as well. Anyone trying to recreate the invention from the patent will typically have more luck either re-inventing it themselves or reverse-engineering it from an extant example of the invention.

It didn't seem particularly crass. Frankly, to me it's just a mild typical opinion. Even if it had been what I consider crass, I would like to think that I wouldn't have considered it when evaluating the actual content of his post.

I don't actually do a whole lot of modding. That may make me a bad Slashcitizen. Unless I come across something that's clearly been modded unfairly, I will generally post into a discussion rather than mod. Whether I take it in good humour or not, however, I've known myself to agree, and say so, with people despite bitter words that may have passed. Suddenly changing your opinion of what you considered to be a good argument because you spotted a sig that changed your opinion of the poster seems to me to be, as you say, taking the Internet a little too seriously.

The depression I was talking about was over the apparent human tendency to split up into sides by region, language, political affiliation, devotion to particular sports teams, etc. then hate the other side and all their works and deeds regardless of what they happen to be. If someone is part of a different group, their opinions are wrong, their foibles are proof of their monstrous nature, while the same issues are forgiven in own group members. They aren't even truly capable of things like loving their children. That's how humans often seem to think, and it seems to be so automatic.

But the part that you read to begin with and gave a mod to was on-topic for the thread and generally for the whole article. Sigs, except in rare cases, aren't relevant to the discussion at hand. Basically, you're saying that you changed your opinion of whether or not what the poster wrote was relevant and useful based on his unrelated opinions. It's your right to do so, by all means, but I find it a bit funny. I have to find it funny, you see, because otherwise I look at it as a sad and accurate example of typical human nature. Then I just get depressed.

I don't think there are any fundamental laws of physics that follow your claim here. Please don't go around making up imaginary laws of physics based on bad models. Of course, it may all depend on what you mean by increasing vibration. As you say, it could increase amplitude, but it could also increase the duration of the vibration. There's also no reason to think a particular, although unusual arrangement could increase the frequency as well. In fact, the right mechanical arrangement could increase amplitude, duration and frequency. Your concern about where the energy comes from is a little silly. There's plenty of energy to be exploited from the motion of the car as it is jostled around. Just look at those watches that wind themselves. While the swing arm may not be a custom designed device, the existence of such devices shows that such a thing is not absolutely impossible.

I think that statement goes a long way towards explaining why you like the ribbon and, in fact, why MS developed the ribbon in the first place. Most of us who hate the ribbon nonsense were using the interface differently. It looks like we were in the minority, so MS decided we didn't matter and now we have the ribbon, which basically _is_ "10 rows of toolbars with cryptic icons", only now they're a little better organized.

Maybe the hardware was ok. The software on the PC end was an abomination as far as I'm concerned. Unusable style over substance and buggy is how I would describe it.

I think the point was that the opiods handle pain relief so effectively that the acetaminophen in the mix effectively does nothing except provide a health hazard.

Commenting because I found your post hilarious. So, despite agreeing with the GP poster enough to upmod them, you later realized that they held political opinions that don't agree with yours, so you acted to remove the mod... and posted in the thread not only to remove the mod, but to bitterly announce your disapproval of their signature. It makes you sound just a teensy bit uptight. Especially since the sig doesn't seem to say anything except that they prefer one of the two main US political parties above the other, but hate both.

"Still" do that? You mean with a special travel license that you have to apply for, can be rejected for if you don't meet strict criteria, and that has only existed for around 2 of the last 50 years? The article you linked to talked about a trip by two wealthy, famous entertainers to Cuba. VIPs have always been able to get exceptions to just about everything, right up to and including going to prison for serious crimes. Regular people with the cash to spend can also arrange for those special licenses, but need to dot their "i"'s and cross their "t"'s by attending particular events and meeting with particular people, otherwise they can be imprisoned when they get back home. While a step in the right direction, that's not actual freedom of travel.

"start restricting freedom of movement'? Take a trip to Cuba.

What does setting a precedent have to do with it? The point was that a lawyer could act as a shill for a corporation, creating a class action suit in which the lawyer pretends to be working for the plaintiffs but is actually working for the corporation to eliminate the affected parties grounds to sue.

Fair enough. The main vulnerability of passwords will always be people. Most people will use the same password or a slight variation on it for just about everything. Heck, even I do that for groups of non-vital accounts. For most people, a phishing site can offer something in exchange for signing up, record the credentials the user enters, then try to log in any number of places and, chances are, if the same person has an account there the same credentials will work. The only real reason to debate entropy is because, usually, when you suggest using combinations of words instead of obfuscated passwords, someone will point out that a passphrase with just a few elements doesn't have as much entropy as a password with more elements. Then someone else has to point out that, since there are so many more possibilities for the individual elements, the passphrase can work out favorably, especially if it's easier to remember. I'm playing that role.

Not really. There are a quarter of a million English words in the OED. Some of them are obsolete, but that doesn't matter, it only matters that they will be memorable in a passphrase. That's enough for the 4 sextillion (ok, I rounded up by 94 quintillion or so, but we can ignore such a trifling sum) and that's ignoring all the possible forms of all these words and a heck of a lot of nouns that probably drive it north of a million possibilities per element.

Naturally, the actual words people choose for themselves will typically be from a much more limited set. Of course, the same is true of traditional passwords. Things like childs name plus numerical representation of date of birth are a pretty common way to deal with password requirements. I should have been more clear that I think where multi-word passwords work best is when they're generated by the computer for the human to remember, in which case they're typically easier to remember than an equivalently character-based password.

It actually can, unless you insist on only ever having four words in the multi-word passphrase, but allow the traditional password to be arbitrarily long. You give an example below of a 12 digit password, but realistically most people have passwords shorter than that. 72^2.906286310633014 ~= 250000, so let's just round to 3 and say that you're always going to need three times as many characters as words to beat the multi-word passphrase provided that the number of possible characters/words stays where we speculated.

The poster I replied to was opining that we should stop letting users pick their own passwords. If we do this, then the multi-word passphrase will probably be easier to remember. My preferred solution is to continue to use weak-sauce solutions like user-selected passwords and/or biometrics but to combine them with some sort of secure cryptographic device that the end user carries.

I'm thinking of a multi-function crytographic device not tied to one particular scheme. It could theoretically be built into a cell-phone, but would need to have its own dedicated, isolated hardware. The biggest challenge with integrating it with a cellphone would be the problem of securely transmitting data in the clear in an untrustworthy cell phone. All exchanges should be encrypted in some way except for some sort of basic user authentication. The device would be analagous to a physical key, but the downside to a physical key is that it can just be pickpocketed, so the device itself would need some sort of authentication be it biometric or password based or some other method. Capturing the input for that through a compromisable general purpose computing device would be a recipe for disaster. Even having an isolated second keypad or biometric sensor attached to something like a cell phone would be a risk. So, standalone hardware would be infinitely preferable.

As for central authorities, the device could work with multiple central authorities depending on the scheme or, in other cases, it would essentially _be_ the central authority. For example, to work with your bank, you could go into the bank and have the device connected to a secure terminal on a secure network and exchange some keys and a large block (or numerous small blocks) of random data (randomness provided either by your own device or by the presumably trustworthy bank system). All the data stored would be unreadable by higher level functions of the device and only available to lower level crypto-functions built in to the hardware. Automatically deleting the data as it's read would also probably be wise. Basically, it shouldn't be possible to access the actual keys in any way externally without an electron microscope and a lot of patience. The bank computer that issued the keys would treat its own copy of the data in a similar fashion. Ideally, the data would be stored locally with perhaps just enough keys/pad data transferred over a secure network to last a few days with the remainder transferred via armored car to the central authentication server. Then when you use the cryptographic device to perform banking operations, all communications to/from the bank servers would use stored (probably one-time) keys and one-time pads along with any additional security procedures on top of that. Man in the middle attacks might be possible if, for example, you allowed offline transactions, but if you also encrypt using hidden keys and the actual details of the transaction (vendor ID and public key, price, datetime, etc.) it should be very hard to do so.

As for authenticating with websites, generating a hidden key and storing it is at least as secure as providing a password to a website. If they're compromised, they're compromised, but at least you didn't provide them all the information they need to access all of your other accounts everywhere. If they aren't compromised, but end up compromised in the future, then the fake site they put up can't steal your credentials to the real site because you don't know them and your crypto device can't divulge them since you use any of a number of crypto schemes that require both sides to have the hidden key(s) to authenticate. If they're completely compromised so that all of your personal data is in the attackers hands... well, that's outside the scope of a device such as I'm proposing.

You could also use such a device to communicate via side-channels with central signing authorities to authenticate a party you're communicating with. Or use it to log into your work computer, etc., etc. It should be possible to make backups (not of the actual hidden keys and data which obviously should be impossible to read) of all the accounts you have stored on the device so that, in the event of loss or theft, you can rapidly notify all your accounts of your loss and begin the process of creating new crypto profiles.

Probably, but I can dream can't I?

It's not meant to be a function of the number of characters. If you have a four word phrase, each word can be any of at least a quarter of a million English words, which gives 4 sextillion possible combinations. That's not even counting all the possible nouns you could throw in there, not to mention a little random punctuation, etc.

For passwords, I think we should start having multi-factor authentication. It's the 21st century, it's high bleeding time anyone with cause to have lots of passwords had their own secure cryptography device to take with them everywhere loaded up with various kinds of cryptography with a library of write-once, read-never (but overwrite allowed when obsolete) hidden keys and volumes of one-time pad (the other copies of which are kept securely by various organizations they have to work with such as banks, employers, etc.). Then, for everything that requires a password, they enter one password on whatever they're logging in to and one password onto their personal encryption device, which is plugged into the computer/atm/security system/etc. they're accessing and authenticates with it.

If their argument was compelling, I think they must have explained it a little better than you. Based on your last line, it seems like you're describing the scientific principle of putting your hands over your ears and saying "LALALALALALALA!!!!"

Darwin is not the be all and end all on the subject of evolution. Frankly, he probably only wrote that out of a sense of obligation to Adam Sedgwick, who was one of his mentors. The Cambrian explosion isn't particularly surprising. Before it, organisms that formed fossils well weren't very common, then some adaptations crept in that conferred some distinct advantages over existing organisms in many niches, especially on land. Then you have rapid diversification as those niches fill up, and then the new organisms _become_ the environment, creating even more niches, not to mention arms races (seriously, literally arms in some cases). There's no hole in the theory of evolution in the Cambrian Explosion.

Sorry, without a better explanation here of what you mean by "information theory based Intelligent Design", it seems to me more like a plan to sabotage kids understanding of Information Theory as well as Biology. The Cambrian Explosion should certainly be taught about as well. Imaginary problems with the Cambrian explosion... Well, I suppose it could be a good critical thinking exercise. The teacher could explain the supposed "problem" and have a round table discussion for the kids to present solutions to the supposed problem.