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• Bellinghman commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  Really? How would the twin that went perceive the twin that stayed on Earth to have aged more slowly, assuming the latter sent a message via interstellar laser? Let's assume that they both agree to send a birthday greeting every year, and that the twin that leaves sets out on the initial birthday, at half the speed of light (as perceived by the stay-at-home). The first signal takes no time at all. A year later, the travelling twin sends out the message. But it's got half a light year to cover, so the stay-at-home sees it arrive 6 months after...
• Bill Arnold commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  There is/was an international encryption standard where the NSA representatives were very insistent that certain constants were best, and got them specified; Wait, are you talking about the S-box design in the Data Encryption Standard? The main weakness with that standard was that the NSA forced the key to 56 bits. ("Nice cipher, the key is too big"). The S-Box design was done with knowledge (reinvention, perhaps) of and hardening against a cryptanalytic technique that wasn't published in the open literature until the 1990s. "The Data Encryption Standard (DES) and its strength against attacks" (D. Coppersmith, 1994) I haven't found...
• Heteromeles commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  Apropos of nothing, but if you want to read a door-stop of papers by people employed as scientists and engineers studying space propulsion and starflight, see if you can find a copy of MG Millis and EW Davis Davis (2009) Frontiers of Propulsion Science. You can find analyses of warp flight, relativity and FTL, and all the other groovy stuff we blew a few hundred entries talking about. With graphs and equations, if those are your preferred languages I'm reading a university copy obtained through interlibrary loan....
• Allen Thomson commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  Moving on from DES to AES-256, it continues to perplex me that NSA has approved it for 1) general use and 2) use at the top secret level in the US government. Maybe it's a NOBUS thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS If so, it seems to me that NOBUS is a synonym for HUBRIS, which brings on NEMESIS....
• Elderly Cynic commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  I may be misremembering, and confusing the (later) weak key issue with NSA's insistence on an inadequate key length. I heard what I posted from IT security experts (i.e. not conspiracy theorists, but possibly paranoid)....