something that's a little weird to me: as far as i know, and i don't know too much about this topic, all the.com domains are sold by some company, and all.org domains by some other, and.net by another... it seems like they're not well designed for companies/organizations/...net's? do you know anything on this topic?
i'm kind of wondering whether the whole tld thing is even necessary -- let people register domain names to contain whatever letters or dots they want, and rather than have the absurdly excessively busy.com nameservers, have servers do things by hash. this would result in dns getting distributed nicely.
quantum mechanics is very zen. as described in the model, you can't really think of electrons (or particles in general) as having position -- they don't. they have probabilities of being somewhere....and then you take the fourier transform of it and demonstrate the uncertainty principle, it's really cool. kind of trippy actually.
i'm a college student who took an introductory class on quantum computing with a really cool professor.
his security setup is pretty transparent; it doesn't compare well to the air conditioner. what he suggests doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to set up, and once it's set up you act pretty much as you would normally. a non-paranoid person would wonder why the setup is there, but could use it roughly as easily as you would any other setup.
actually, a lot of scientists/engineers/whatevers put effort towards projects that they don't think would be good, simply because it is interesting. if we could get P=NP it would mean that _just about all_ encryption (not just assymetric) is nullified to brute force attacks. i'd hate for that to happen but that doesn't stop me (and zillions of others much smarter than i am) from at thinking about the math. it's a very different example, but it's analogous enough to demonstrate the point.
this is true. it would be difficult and require some serious coding to implement what i suggested beyond simply allowing people to view replays. i'm trying to find a middle ground between allowing a more open system while stopping cheaters. if we only want to stop cheaters, then yes, a closed system would help. it is tougher to make a cheat that doesn't modify the system. however, there are ways to do it -- for example, bots in mmorpgs. personally, part of the blame lies in the fact that the game is so simple it's automatable, but a very creative coder could build something that simply analyzes video and controls the mouse/keyboard in the case of some simplistic games. in other games, having a calculating program gives a huge edge (i can imagine something being implemented for a game like gunbound).
essentially, in order to have a system which requires a human player, we need to check that there's a human player.
another thing which might be kind of neat would be to have multiple interfaces to a game's protocol... but i'm getting off topic and haven't thought that part out as much anyway.
i dunno; if i were to design a game with multiplayer like this, especially with rankings, i'd make sure that the xbox logs player input. on request, the program should allow others (probably just moderators, but maybe other players too) to view the logs (you'd want to exclude non-competitive and/or personal input, like chat, when logging), and if a moderator finds that someone has either resulted in a game state that is not reachable from the input that the player did, it is obviously hacked, and one can also view what the player did to check for whether there was, say, and aimbot involved, and if so derank the player.
ok, i know i'm getting off topic with this, but anyway, yeah there are a lot of problems with legal documents. a big problem, i think, is that they can get away with vagueness by expecting the judges to iron out the details -- which i think it a terrible idea. they should instead try to make laws more logically correct. lojban would probably help with a lot of things; i imagine it would simply be much easier to do this in it.
it might also be interesting to try using a libraries-of-code approach to legal documents, so they don't have to be so long explaining everything, and an appropriate change to the definitions could be made so long as the documents that depend on it are decently written:
#include "murder.h"//definitions of various kinds of murder:)
a judge's job is much too complicated as it is right now, and contracts are _way_ too complicated.
making a fully distributed search engine would be really cool; with seti or folding they have central servers that distribute tasks. what would be cooler would be to have individuals run nodes that have no real central leader. with search engines now, things are run from a central organization. this would be mutually beneficial cooperation between people. something to think about, maybe.
i'm kind of curious how much data would need to be stored; we can organize it such that we use distributed hash tables and have the daemons store data depending on how close some data's key is to the node's id. if the data to be stored is less than, say, ten times the amount of space the participants are willing to cache we'd be fine. it could be a somewhat probabilistic thing; each node should try to figure out what sorts of other nodes have similar id's and if someone logs off then others will have to try to compensate by caching additional copies of what he was caching (since hopefully others will already have copies).
it's true that this is very different from seti or folding at home, but it's probably not going to be terrible. if we use a 'pure' distributed hash table implementation, latency would be an issue ( log(n) expected time to get to what you want), but we could have nodes that specialize in knowing where other nodes are to decrease the height of a search tree.
the main danger of having it be distributed would likely be malicious influences on the indices, since there's no one controller of all the data (unlike current search engines)
i've always been curious as to how these search algorithms work; i've been thinking that it might be possible for a globally distributed search network running in the background on people's computers to replace google. then again, i don't really know anything about searching other than the google dance pagerank thing (which seems quite parallelizable).
this would be open source / free software and we could, you know, make sure it stays in the background and doesn't use too much space or bandwidth or processor power. just a thought.
well, considering they seem to have simply decided to patent password authentication (they mention it's sha-1), it might indeed be hard to crack the transaction that's mentioned in the patent. the patent itself should in no way have been granted; it's pretty obvious.
of course, it's impossible to implement fully what they describe if you actually own the equipment. it seems all you need to do is figure out what the codes are, and we can probably test the ram and/or the cryptography chip for that.
i'm not sure how well a dictator would take to having an educated and/or freely speaking populace. the stereotypical dictator would _not_ want olpc's in the country, unless the internet was also controlled. i'm sure there's the possibility of a benevolent dictator, but i don't know how often that happens...
I might describe myself as an intellectual property, abolitionist (i think copyrights and patents should be abolished), but i'd like to point out that a lot of people really are not on the extremes. a lot of people on/. seem to be interested in some kind of fair-er copyright (something like 10 years or so, depending on who you ask). just wanted to point out that even though there are extremists, most people aren't.
the problem here is that the new coalition, BCD, is now a party and if it wishes to remain in power, it shall stay that way; it would then be a two party system then. democracy like this seems to lend itself to systems of fewer parties, and if there are many issues we care about the chance of having one of a few (even four) parties matching closely with our beliefs is small.
the unfortunate thing about representative democracy is that it often prefers a sub-optimal solution, and it would (at least in the US) be better for everyone to vote for one candidate that is not the worst (for example, i might align better with some less represented party, but would vote for the lesser evil of the two big ones if there's no reasonable chance that the others might win). so advocating people to vote for a variety of parties that are not his might not get him out of office if he can maintain his party's voter base. or at least not as efficiently as if many people voted for a coalition party. sorry, just me complaining about how it seems votes for what i actually believe in can matter so little...
well, the problem with law in america and pretty much elsewhere is that free speech as defined by law is definitely not as free as i'd like it to be. we have various laws that restrict speech or expression or something (all intellectual property laws do), but is considered by lawmakers and judges to not restrict 'free speech'. we and they simply have different definitions of this.
digital signatures -- even if you can't tell who is sending some packet, and in the internet protocol we use as well as ipv6 a router can easily change a field, you know who originated the information, because of cryptography. the key thing is that we can have anonymity when we want, and can prove who we are if we want. banks typically require some sort of authentication already (even if it's as insecure as a social security number), and adding anonymity to the underlying protocol would not change that.
it is the unfortunate situation that we do need "permission" to write a program. in order to conform to the law, we can not have fully functional turing machines for home computers. i do not think this is a good thing. i like my turing machine very much, and i do not want them to take it away, whether that's in terms of legality (the current situation) or in terms of literally having a device that is not a turing machine in some way (trusted computing could do this).
law does not seem to respect math -- they will need to control the NAND gate, really.
Slashdot Mirror
something that's a little weird to me: as far as i know, and i don't know too much about this topic, all the .com domains are sold by some company, and all .org domains by some other, and .net by another... it seems like they're not well designed for companies/organizations/...net's? do you know anything on this topic?
i'm kind of wondering whether the whole tld thing is even necessary -- let people register domain names to contain whatever letters or dots they want, and rather than have the absurdly excessively busy .com nameservers, have servers do things by hash. this would result in dns getting distributed nicely.
quantum mechanics is very zen. as described in the model, you can't really think of electrons (or particles in general) as having position -- they don't. they have probabilities of being somewhere. ...and then you take the fourier transform of it and demonstrate the uncertainty principle, it's really cool. kind of trippy actually.
i'm a college student who took an introductory class on quantum computing with a really cool professor.
his security setup is pretty transparent; it doesn't compare well to the air conditioner. what he suggests doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to set up, and once it's set up you act pretty much as you would normally. a non-paranoid person would wonder why the setup is there, but could use it roughly as easily as you would any other setup.
actually, a lot of scientists/engineers/whatevers put effort towards projects that they don't think would be good, simply because it is interesting. if we could get P=NP it would mean that _just about all_ encryption (not just assymetric) is nullified to brute force attacks. i'd hate for that to happen but that doesn't stop me (and zillions of others much smarter than i am) from at thinking about the math. it's a very different example, but it's analogous enough to demonstrate the point.
this is true. it would be difficult and require some serious coding to implement what i suggested beyond simply allowing people to view replays. i'm trying to find a middle ground between allowing a more open system while stopping cheaters. if we only want to stop cheaters, then yes, a closed system would help. it is tougher to make a cheat that doesn't modify the system. however, there are ways to do it -- for example, bots in mmorpgs. personally, part of the blame lies in the fact that the game is so simple it's automatable, but a very creative coder could build something that simply analyzes video and controls the mouse/keyboard in the case of some simplistic games. in other games, having a calculating program gives a huge edge (i can imagine something being implemented for a game like gunbound).
essentially, in order to have a system which requires a human player, we need to check that there's a human player.
another thing which might be kind of neat would be to have multiple interfaces to a game's protocol... but i'm getting off topic and haven't thought that part out as much anyway.
i dunno; if i were to design a game with multiplayer like this, especially with rankings, i'd make sure that the xbox logs player input. on request, the program should allow others (probably just moderators, but maybe other players too) to view the logs (you'd want to exclude non-competitive and/or personal input, like chat, when logging), and if a moderator finds that someone has either resulted in a game state that is not reachable from the input that the player did, it is obviously hacked, and one can also view what the player did to check for whether there was, say, and aimbot involved, and if so derank the player.
who said anything about masturbating? we mount and umount all the time :)
dance dance revolution / stepmania
ok, i know i'm getting off topic with this, but anyway, yeah there are a lot of problems with legal documents. a big problem, i think, is that they can get away with vagueness by expecting the judges to iron out the details -- which i think it a terrible idea. they should instead try to make laws more logically correct. lojban would probably help with a lot of things; i imagine it would simply be much easier to do this in it.
//definitions of various kinds of murder :)
it might also be interesting to try using a libraries-of-code approach to legal documents, so they don't have to be so long explaining everything, and an appropriate change to the definitions could be made so long as the documents that depend on it are decently written:
#include "murder.h"
a judge's job is much too complicated as it is right now, and contracts are _way_ too complicated.
lojban is the logical choice. it does seem to be western oriented though, much like esperanto.
it would make legal documents much better at least. ( "everyone should have the right to have bear arms on their wall!" )
making a fully distributed search engine would be really cool; with seti or folding they have central servers that distribute tasks. what would be cooler would be to have individuals run nodes that have no real central leader. with search engines now, things are run from a central organization. this would be mutually beneficial cooperation between people. something to think about, maybe.
1 05245
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234547&cid=19
i'm kind of curious how much data would need to be stored; we can organize it such that we use distributed hash tables and have the daemons store data depending on how close some data's key is to the node's id. if the data to be stored is less than, say, ten times the amount of space the participants are willing to cache we'd be fine. it could be a somewhat probabilistic thing; each node should try to figure out what sorts of other nodes have similar id's and if someone logs off then others will have to try to compensate by caching additional copies of what he was caching (since hopefully others will already have copies).
it's true that this is very different from seti or folding at home, but it's probably not going to be terrible. if we use a 'pure' distributed hash table implementation, latency would be an issue ( log(n) expected time to get to what you want), but we could have nodes that specialize in knowing where other nodes are to decrease the height of a search tree.
the main danger of having it be distributed would likely be malicious influences on the indices, since there's no one controller of all the data (unlike current search engines)
i've always been curious as to how these search algorithms work; i've been thinking that it might be possible for a globally distributed search network running in the background on people's computers to replace google. then again, i don't really know anything about searching other than the google dance pagerank thing (which seems quite parallelizable).
this would be open source / free software and we could, you know, make sure it stays in the background and doesn't use too much space or bandwidth or processor power. just a thought.
well, considering they seem to have simply decided to patent password authentication (they mention it's sha-1), it might indeed be hard to crack the transaction that's mentioned in the patent. the patent itself should in no way have been granted; it's pretty obvious.
of course, it's impossible to implement fully what they describe if you actually own the equipment. it seems all you need to do is figure out what the codes are, and we can probably test the ram and/or the cryptography chip for that.
well, if we wrote it out in hex it'd have g's.
If he cares so much about readability, how come he has that awful color scheme!?!?
i'm not sure how well a dictator would take to having an educated and/or freely speaking populace. the stereotypical dictator would _not_ want olpc's in the country, unless the internet was also controlled. i'm sure there's the possibility of a benevolent dictator, but i don't know how often that happens...
I might describe myself as an intellectual property, abolitionist (i think copyrights and patents should be abolished), but i'd like to point out that a lot of people really are not on the extremes. a lot of people on /. seem to be interested in some kind of fair-er copyright (something like 10 years or so, depending on who you ask). just wanted to point out that even though there are extremists, most people aren't.
the problem here is that the new coalition, BCD, is now a party and if it wishes to remain in power, it shall stay that way; it would then be a two party system then. democracy like this seems to lend itself to systems of fewer parties, and if there are many issues we care about the chance of having one of a few (even four) parties matching closely with our beliefs is small.
the unfortunate thing about representative democracy is that it often prefers a sub-optimal solution, and it would (at least in the US) be better for everyone to vote for one candidate that is not the worst (for example, i might align better with some less represented party, but would vote for the lesser evil of the two big ones if there's no reasonable chance that the others might win). so advocating people to vote for a variety of parties that are not his might not get him out of office if he can maintain his party's voter base. or at least not as efficiently as if many people voted for a coalition party. sorry, just me complaining about how it seems votes for what i actually believe in can matter so little...
personally, i see it more as humanity vs patent laws. and i'm also very happy to see humanity win this.
well, the problem with law in america and pretty much elsewhere is that free speech as defined by law is definitely not as free as i'd like it to be. we have various laws that restrict speech or expression or something (all intellectual property laws do), but is considered by lawmakers and judges to not restrict 'free speech'. we and they simply have different definitions of this.
digital signatures -- even if you can't tell who is sending some packet, and in the internet protocol we use as well as ipv6 a router can easily change a field, you know who originated the information, because of cryptography. the key thing is that we can have anonymity when we want, and can prove who we are if we want. banks typically require some sort of authentication already (even if it's as insecure as a social security number), and adding anonymity to the underlying protocol would not change that.
it is the unfortunate situation that we do need "permission" to write a program. in order to conform to the law, we can not have fully functional turing machines for home computers. i do not think this is a good thing. i like my turing machine very much, and i do not want them to take it away, whether that's in terms of legality (the current situation) or in terms of literally having a device that is not a turing machine in some way (trusted computing could do this).
law does not seem to respect math -- they will need to control the NAND gate, really.