Guest marbledust Posted July 29, 2004 Report Share Posted July 29, 2004 I'm glad that somebody agrees with me about the scariness of being dependent on eyeglasses for survival. I agree, my own persciption is -11. Your "police state" comment just struck me as very odd. :smokin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Jixe Posted July 30, 2004 Report Share Posted July 30, 2004 -11.0, -8.0, wow. I have a -0.75/-2.50 reading and I can't stand it. I went from -2.25 to -2.50 in my right eye, in just 3 months. For those of you interested, take a look at Wavefront technology in conjunction with Intralase flap cutting. Instead of using a blade to cut the flap open, I believe they use the intralase laser to cut a much more precisie flap which helps establish ideal correction (and helps the eyes heal better). The wavefront scans the eye in a much more comprehensive way than traditional LASIK does. Specifically, correction you get is based on the refreaction of your whole eyeball, NOT just what you perceive. The above procedure is considered the Mercedes-Benz of eye correction technology and accordingly, it carries a real hefty price-tag. Either way, I don't think anyone should skimp on their eyes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ploughboy Posted August 3, 2004 Report Share Posted August 3, 2004 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Physio, They're the start and end of a pgp signature of course, created with secure hash algorithm 1 by GnuPG v1.2.3 on a 32-bit windows machine (beggars, choosers, etc). Ok, nobody likes a smart-alec, so I'll give you a better answer as to what they are, and why they're in my message. I'm glossing over a lot of the finer points, but there are lots of web resources out there if you happen to be curious. 1) What? Ok, so from a computer's point of view any message you type isn't written in english letters. It's all numbers, little 1's and 0's deep inside some circuit board somewhere. Since the message is just numbers, the computer can do math on it. With a program called GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) I combine my message with another number, called my own, personal, super-secret "private key". Using some funky math that I honestly don't understand fully, GnuPG uses the two numbers to create the digital signature that you were asking about. The digital signature is just another number, and the gibberish at the bottom of my message is how the number is represented using ascii text. Meaningless to a human, but potentially useful to a computer. A message will give a unique signature when signed with my private key, and the same message will give a different signature if signed with somebody else's private key. With me so far? The cool thing (at least, I think it's cool) is that there is a second number related to my secret key called my "public key". As the name suggests, it's not secret. In fact, you can obtain it from the keyserver at pgp.mit.edu, just look for key ID ADDB0B6C. GnuPG can take my public key, combine it with the signature on a message and determine whether or not the signature was generated from the message using my private key. It's important to note that this can be done *without* knowing my private key. This provides a way of verifying whether or not the message was written by me. 2) Why? Well, first 'cuz I'm a geek. I'm so geeky that other geeks think I'm weird ;-) Second, 'cuz I can. It's a way of demonstrating that yes, I wrote the messages posted under my user name. I don't think anybody's actually out there verifying the signatures on my posts, but they could if they wanted to. If by chance some maroon happened to score my ezboard password and started writing messages saying "Ha-ha, premeds suck and accountants rule!" with spoofed pgp signatures, it would be trivial to demonstrate that those messages weren't written by me (since the signatures wouldn't correspond to the text of the message). The odds of this actually happening are vanishingly small, but hey I think it's a good practice. Did I mention I'm weird? Third, 'cuz strong crypto is a good thing and this is my way of encouraging more people to use it (for email at least. Using gpg signatures on message boards is a little bit weird if I do say so myself). My signed message led to your question, which let me use this as a quick teachable moment. Thanks! Further resources: gnupg.org, part 7 of the cryptography faq at faqs.org, anything by Bruce Schneier... Cheers, pb -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (MingW32) iD8DBQFBECzm/HNgbK3bC2wRAj+WAJ9K6W7+xEMKTXoUjHkBMyyLVFGU1ACfbQxJ FPHOpp2lgq/K6+vj/CdvsfU= =n4rv -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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