Got a spare planet?
Wow, I just had a hell of a busy weekend! Friday night was dinner-and-a-movie with the Whole Sick Crew1: Chevy's totally inauthenic Mexican followed by Pirates of the Caribbean. We were subjected to a group of very bad pirate wannabes before the film doing some sort of bizarre advertainment thing. I could not tell what they were selling but it was not rum, sodomy, or the lash. We also got a teaser for the Transformers (!) movie coming next summer; apparently a part of the mythos I was unfamiliar with includes Mars. Saturday was Wine And Chocolate at Chez Jurph (for the women) and manly pizza and beer for the menfolk. Mad props to the very manly menfolk! Regrets on not finding karaoke bar with acceptable song selection; country doesn't cut it. Sunday was role-playing down at Brian's in NoVa. I managed to go from Woodbridge VA to my place in Baltimore in just under 1.5 hours, which I think is a pretty respectable run considering that we also dropped Noah2 off in downtown College Park on the way. Also, I saw a license plate from ONTARIO that said JANITOR. Those words are only one letter away from being anagrams. Given that only 18 US states have seven or fewer characters in their names, I bet it's pretty rare to see a word on a license plate that is a near-anagram of its state name. I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.
Oh, and from BoingBoing, a neat article outlining a few facts about cryptography. It includes a great analogy for how strong 128 bits of encryption are:
Imagine a computer that is the size of a grain of sand that can test keys against some encrypted data. Also imagine that it can test a key in the amount of time it takes light to cross it. Then consider a cluster of these computers, so many that if you covered the earth with them, they would cover the whole planet to the height of 1 meter. The cluster of computers would crack a 128-bit key on average in 1,000 years. If you want to brute-force a key, it literally takes a planet-ful of computers. And of course, there are always 256-bit keys, if you worry about the possibility that government has a spare planet that they want to devote to key-cracking.
1. Apologies to DFW and but so anyhow my crew isn't really all that specifically sick anymore than they are specifically "my" crew inasmuch as any one member of a crew can claim ownership over a collective of individuals.
2. Humorous typo alert: if you mistakenly type "Noah" as "Naoh", it's not just a mistake - it's a lye!
Oh, and from BoingBoing, a neat article outlining a few facts about cryptography. It includes a great analogy for how strong 128 bits of encryption are:
Imagine a computer that is the size of a grain of sand that can test keys against some encrypted data. Also imagine that it can test a key in the amount of time it takes light to cross it. Then consider a cluster of these computers, so many that if you covered the earth with them, they would cover the whole planet to the height of 1 meter. The cluster of computers would crack a 128-bit key on average in 1,000 years. If you want to brute-force a key, it literally takes a planet-ful of computers. And of course, there are always 256-bit keys, if you worry about the possibility that government has a spare planet that they want to devote to key-cracking.
1. Apologies to DFW and but so anyhow my crew isn't really all that specifically sick anymore than they are specifically "my" crew inasmuch as any one member of a crew can claim ownership over a collective of individuals.
2. Humorous typo alert: if you mistakenly type "Noah" as "Naoh", it's not just a mistake - it's a lye!