Did you, in your rush to post, actually bother to check the stated goals of vortex2 before claiming to know what they were? From their front page:
The basic questions driving VORTEX2 are simple to ask, but hard to answer:
- How, when, and why do tornadoes form? Why some are violent and long lasting while others are weak and short lived?
- What is the structure of tornadoes? How strong are the winds near the ground? How exactly do they do damage?
- How can we learn to forecast tornadoes better?
Current warnings have an only 13 minute average lead time and a 70% false alarm rate.
Can we make warnings more accurate?
Can we warn 30, 45, 60 minutes ahead?
I know its hard to know something, but having the first google result- the project's home page- directly contradict you is pretty damned bad.
You know, I'll bet those guys with their fancy PhD's don't even know that research is redundant! Isn't that silly- guess all that 'book learning' ain't good fer nuthin' after all haw haw! Prolly out there, thinkin' they're gonna save some lives! Pshaw! Icebike knows better, an' that's a FACT!
This is a long post, and I hope to pursue this conversation in earnest, so please don't take offense if I paraphrase you, and don't hesitate to correct me if you think I'm mischaracterizing you.
Problem 1, as I see it, shouldn't come down to trust- it should come down to capability. Pairing based cryptography (full disclosure: my research area) and fully homomorphic cryptosystems provide mechanisms for blind tabluation under the assumption that you can control the keys. I'd imagine that in an online setting that would work out poorly, but I don't see why it would be so hard to provide such a key with a voter registration card.
Problem 2 is again addressed by PBC. There are cryptosystems (my implementation here , under KSW.py) that provide mechanisms to encrypt arbitrary polynomials for evaluation, which means that you can evaluate the basic set operations secretly under cryptographic hardness assumptions, and there has been a lot of work on how to adapt that to voting machines for exactly this reason.
There has also been a very interesting push for what's called differential privacy, which would be very interesting in this context.
Problem 3 is again solved- anyone with a public key could verify the results. The question, of course, is whether the machines themselves are bad, and unless people bring their own voting machines (actually not a bad idea, if the machine could be made cheaply) I see no way to avoid that.
The Mebane test used does not compare good elections to bad elections, but rather an arbitrary set of measurements whose logarithms are uniformly distributed vs known tampered data. Significance at 10% is very significant for an election as closely monitored as first world elections are- in the original paper Mebane only got 5% in an election that was subject to extreme voter intimidation. Combining that with the enormous deviation between absentee/provisional ballots and election day results, I suspect that Nate Silver is on firm ground here when he says that something smells.
How is it impossible to build a voting machine again? I have quite a bit of experience with secure systems, and while I grant you
that extant voting machine makers need to be dragged out and shot, I don't see any evidence to conclude what you do.
Nitpicking, but homomorphic encryption gets used all the time- both RSA and ElGamal have a multiplicative homomorphic property, and blind signing (an application of that property) is fairly common. It's fully homomorphic cryptosystems which aren't currently used in practice, and I can assure you that interest in it is quickly moving from pure-theory labs into the more practical research communities. It would not at all surprise me to see the first real applications in the next five years, although you're right that large-scale deployment is still probably many years off.
I think the OPs estimate is inaccurate, but I would point out that WalMart does undercut by hundreds of dollars on computers- they just do it by selling windows machines instead of macs.
Analogies are why we can't have nice things. This gives a data provider the ability to make an innocently and legally undertaken action illegal after the action has been completed. I would suggest that we not extend powers we deny the government to AT&T.
call away; doesn't change the fact that it happened. My ex-girlfriend probably still has the pile of those giant koosh ball things that he won for her, although I think I'd be more comfortable with you not being aware of that.
Amen. TFA implies- though it doesn't directly state- that this took root privs to install in the first place, at which point I don't need to remotely enable the malware- I've already got the ability to do whatever the hell I want.
There's two problems with this: first, the difficulty of implementing it- porting an existing system can basically be ruled out by the use of Bionic and the tight performance constraints- and secondly there's the problem where the phone's only defense is to power cycle constantly, which is just as bad as having malware on it in the first place. Neither of these is impossible to overcome, but its hard enough that I decided not to pursue it something like a year ago, and I'm something of a project masochist.
The idea of being locked out of a platform that's pretty good but could be
so much better is incredibly frustrating to people with the desire and
capability to make it their idea of better. Slashdot has a high percentage
of such people. Note that Slashdot is also poorly representative of the
population in general.
Your point about associated costs is well taken, but I think you may have missed my intent, probably on account of my not being terribly articulate. Allow me to attempt an explanation.
The conceptual framework that the OP is advancing asserts that consumers do not consider cost of production as part of their purchasing decisions. The burden is on him to present evidence of that, and he did so with the above analogy. For that analogy to be valid, the comparison between books and ebooks as markets must be valid. To prove his point that baseline costs don't matter to the consumer, however, imposes an additional restriction: that these two things only differ significantly in that one way. My counterargument was therefore intended to be two-pronged: firstly, that if that is the only significant difference between these two things, then his argument is factually incorrect and must be rejected. Secondarily, I argue that if there are significant differences between the two, then he has provided no proof to sustain his assertion, and it must be rejected in favor of the null assertion.
market forces have no control over initial prices, only what the price will trend towards. Companies could base their initial price on anything at all- greed being a significant factor.
Uh, who said anything about "initial" prices?
Ebooks as a mass medium are still clearly in their infancy. The wide range of pricing models, distribution mechanisms, and presentation mediums argues strongly that ebook publishers and retailers have a great deal of uncertainty about what the market will eventually consider a good price for ebooks. Because no such consensus has been reached, I think its fair to call this the initial pricing stage. If you have an alternative terminology I'm open to it.
That has no relevancy to the current discussion. And even if it did, why don't companies charge $1,000 / game, and be REALLY greedy? By your logic, market forces don't matter and people would just pay it.
I've just constructed an argument BASED on market forces for why you're wrong. Add a logic- or perhaps reading comprehension- course to the lineup of economics you seem to have missed. Math would probably be helpful as well- with an emphasis on minimization and maximization.
If the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives are the only driving factors, then I conclude that people are unwilling to pay equal amounts for a product that has no associated baseline costs and a product whose cost is dominated by those factors.
I didn't say that were the "only" factors. Obviously, they are not the only factors. People (at this point, at least) prefer paper. Paper and electronic formats are in competition with each other, hence the reason one is cheaper than the other, because people don't perceive them as equivalent.
Either the other factors are substantial or they are not. If they are substantial, then your earlier comparison was invalid and you were threadshitting (again). If they are not substantial, then my argument holds and your assertion about baseline costs was, er, baseless.
In either event, you haven't given any evidence to support your highly dubious claim that greed has nothing to do with pricing.
I agree. Even those who- like me- consider an ebook to be a superior product to a physical book are seldom happy to pay as much for one as for a hardcopy. It seems obvious to me that today's consumers of digital media demand that in addition to getting great content, they not get screwed on its pricing and availability structures- ie, that the publishers have been greedy, that consumers have not tolerated it, and that the market has accordingly spoken.
And this is why we need mandatory economics education for every student.
Price is not based on "greed", price is based on supply and demand.
You may wish to avail yourself of that economics course- market forces have no control over initial prices, only what the price will trend towards.
Companies could base their initial price on anything at all- greed being a significant factor.
Companies charge what you are willing to pay, which is influenced by the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives.
That's why electronic books are not significantly cheaper than paper books. The price of the paper and distribution is only a baseline lowest cost, it has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay.
And that would be relevant if they had equivalent sales. As things stand, it actually argues against your point: ebook sales in the US last year
come to about $13 million dollars out of a (roughly) $23 billion dollar a year industry, according to the AAP. If the quality of the product and the
price of the alternatives are the only driving factors, then I conclude that people are unwilling to pay equal amounts for a product that has no
associated baseline costs and a product whose cost is dominated by those factors.
Sure - if the first order criteria is going to a private cloud from a public
cloud.
For a lot of companies, it is- and for a lot of startups, the ability to scale from 0 to 1 million users without getting screwed on either end sounds like a pretty good deal. I'm not claiming that this is going to make them Microsoft (or even Google) level profits- but they have a much lower outlay. They can survive in a smaller, more profitable niche.
But cost, reliability, features, operations (and likely others) will all
be factors here. All the public cloud providers will compete with Canonical by
saying
"Dont go private! We can provid you with cloud services more effecitcly,
just as securetly, at better scale, and for less costs than you can do it
yourselves!".
They may not always be right - but that is how they will complete.
IME, this is not how this argument goes. Everybody knows that AWS is going to beat you in scale over a short period of time, but a long-term dependency on them is unhealthy for a larger company. This puts growing companies in quite the bind- rewrite your core business to avoid vendor lock-in or hinge your company's survival on a third party? Canonical is providing a third way here, and I suspect that serving this small market well will be a big test for whether the RHEL model works for them.
Moreover, Microsoft will complete directly with Canonical here.
I don't see this. Microsoft doesn't treat the cloud like a core component of its business model, and certainly provides no direct analog to AWS, which this is more squarely targeted at.
Going head to head with Microsoft in an established market is often (not always)
very difficult to do profitably. Weve made it very clear that we are going for
the brass ring with both cloud services and cloud products.
Again, I'm not sold on the idea that this represents a broadside at big M- Ubuntu will keep doing what it does best, Canonical will expand into a market that has nothing to do with desktop software, and Microsoft will continue to chuckle and make billions.
Im not at all suggesting they will fail - bit it will be a tough slog for
them - they will continue to set fire to money the whole road to profitability
(if they ever get there). Its intersting that Canonical chose this
space to compete profitably. The ROI seems very low here...
-Foredecker
Again, IMO this looks like a small expansion into an underserved market that is being gussied up to look like a big new initiative. I would bet that this will succeed, earn them some cash, and be mostly forgotten two years from now.
They actually don't compete with Amazon here- Ubuntu's cloud software is AWS compatible, and provides a pretty natural migration path for companies looking at moving from public to private clouds as they scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you, in your rush to post, actually bother to check the stated goals of vortex2 before claiming to know what they were? From their front page:
The basic questions driving VORTEX2 are simple to ask, but hard to answer:
- How, when, and why do tornadoes form? Why some are violent and long lasting while others are weak and short lived?
- What is the structure of tornadoes? How strong are the winds near the ground? How exactly do they do damage?
- How can we learn to forecast tornadoes better?
Current warnings have an only 13 minute average lead time and a 70% false alarm rate.
Can we make warnings more accurate?
Can we warn 30, 45, 60 minutes ahead?
I know its hard to know something, but having the first google result- the project's home page- directly contradict you is pretty damned bad.
You know, I'll bet those guys with their fancy PhD's don't even know that research is redundant! Isn't that silly- guess all that 'book learning' ain't good fer nuthin' after all haw haw! Prolly out there, thinkin' they're gonna save some lives! Pshaw! Icebike knows better, an' that's a FACT!
...and that data will be used to predict the behavior of future tornadoes, no? AKA saving lives?
Since when did firemen? Would you support this behavior in pyromaniacs?
This is a long post, and I hope to pursue this conversation in earnest, so please don't take offense if I paraphrase you, and don't hesitate to correct me if you think I'm mischaracterizing you.
Problem 1, as I see it, shouldn't come down to trust- it should come down to capability. Pairing based cryptography (full disclosure: my research area) and fully homomorphic cryptosystems provide mechanisms for blind tabluation under the assumption that you can control the keys. I'd imagine that in an online setting that would work out poorly, but I don't see why it would be so hard to provide such a key with a voter registration card.
Problem 2 is again addressed by PBC. There are cryptosystems (my implementation here , under KSW.py) that provide mechanisms to encrypt arbitrary polynomials for evaluation, which means that you can evaluate the basic set operations secretly under cryptographic hardness assumptions, and there has been a lot of work on how to adapt that to voting machines for exactly this reason. There has also been a very interesting push for what's called differential privacy, which would be very interesting in this context.
Problem 3 is again solved- anyone with a public key could verify the results. The question, of course, is whether the machines themselves are bad, and unless people bring their own voting machines (actually not a bad idea, if the machine could be made cheaply) I see no way to avoid that.
The Mebane test used does not compare good elections to bad elections, but rather an arbitrary set of measurements whose logarithms are uniformly distributed vs known tampered data. Significance at 10% is very significant for an election as closely monitored as first world elections are- in the original paper Mebane only got 5% in an election that was subject to extreme voter intimidation. Combining that with the enormous deviation between absentee/provisional ballots and election day results, I suspect that Nate Silver is on firm ground here when he says that something smells.
How is it impossible to build a voting machine again? I have quite a bit of experience with secure systems, and while I grant you that extant voting machine makers need to be dragged out and shot, I don't see any evidence to conclude what you do.
Nitpicking, but homomorphic encryption gets used all the time- both RSA and ElGamal have a multiplicative homomorphic property, and blind signing (an application of that property) is fairly common. It's fully homomorphic cryptosystems which aren't currently used in practice, and I can assure you that interest in it is quickly moving from pure-theory labs into the more practical research communities. It would not at all surprise me to see the first real applications in the next five years, although you're right that large-scale deployment is still probably many years off.
That's great. I'm confused about what it has to do with what I said, though.
I think the OPs estimate is inaccurate, but I would point out that WalMart does undercut by hundreds of dollars on computers- they just do it by selling windows machines instead of macs.
Analogies are why we can't have nice things. This gives a data provider the ability to make an innocently and legally undertaken action illegal after the action has been completed. I would suggest that we not extend powers we deny the government to AT&T.
call away; doesn't change the fact that it happened. My ex-girlfriend probably still has the pile of those giant koosh ball things that he won for her, although I think I'd be more comfortable with you not being aware of that.
Its funny though, I had a friend who could literally take those claw machines for everything in them. Was a great girl-getting ploy.
Amen. TFA implies- though it doesn't directly state- that this took root privs to install in the first place, at which point I don't need to remotely enable the malware- I've already got the ability to do whatever the hell I want.
There's two problems with this: first, the difficulty of implementing it- porting an existing system can basically be ruled out by the use of Bionic and the tight performance constraints- and secondly there's the problem where the phone's only defense is to power cycle constantly, which is just as bad as having malware on it in the first place. Neither of these is impossible to overcome, but its hard enough that I decided not to pursue it something like a year ago, and I'm something of a project masochist.
Hint: people who like the *old* government are called conservatives. People who don't like government at all are called anarchists.
Pick one, and stop giving the other a bad name.
My God, who charges you that?
So, I take it that the author of this article is happy just using EDGE, right? Since that's only distinguished from 3G by its speed?
I really don't understand the hate
The idea of being locked out of a platform that's pretty good but could be so much better is incredibly frustrating to people with the desire and capability to make it their idea of better. Slashdot has a high percentage of such people. Note that Slashdot is also poorly representative of the population in general.
Your point about associated costs is well taken, but I think you may have missed my intent, probably on account of my not being terribly articulate. Allow me to attempt an explanation.
The conceptual framework that the OP is advancing asserts that consumers do not consider cost of production as part of their purchasing decisions. The burden is on him to present evidence of that, and he did so with the above analogy. For that analogy to be valid, the comparison between books and ebooks as markets must be valid. To prove his point that baseline costs don't matter to the consumer, however, imposes an additional restriction: that these two things only differ significantly in that one way. My counterargument was therefore intended to be two-pronged: firstly, that if that is the only significant difference between these two things, then his argument is factually incorrect and must be rejected. Secondarily, I argue that if there are significant differences between the two, then he has provided no proof to sustain his assertion, and it must be rejected in favor of the null assertion.
market forces have no control over initial prices, only what the price will trend towards. Companies could base their initial price on anything at all- greed being a significant factor.
Uh, who said anything about "initial" prices?
Ebooks as a mass medium are still clearly in their infancy. The wide range of pricing models, distribution mechanisms, and presentation mediums argues strongly that ebook publishers and retailers have a great deal of uncertainty about what the market will eventually consider a good price for ebooks. Because no such consensus has been reached, I think its fair to call this the initial pricing stage. If you have an alternative terminology I'm open to it.
That has no relevancy to the current discussion. And even if it did, why don't companies charge $1,000 / game, and be REALLY greedy? By your logic, market forces don't matter and people would just pay it.
I've just constructed an argument BASED on market forces for why you're wrong. Add a logic- or perhaps reading comprehension- course to the lineup of economics you seem to have missed. Math would probably be helpful as well- with an emphasis on minimization and maximization.
If the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives are the only driving factors, then I conclude that people are unwilling to pay equal amounts for a product that has no associated baseline costs and a product whose cost is dominated by those factors.
I didn't say that were the "only" factors. Obviously, they are not the only factors. People (at this point, at least) prefer paper. Paper and electronic formats are in competition with each other, hence the reason one is cheaper than the other, because people don't perceive them as equivalent.
Either the other factors are substantial or they are not. If they are substantial, then your earlier comparison was invalid and you were threadshitting (again). If they are not substantial, then my argument holds and your assertion about baseline costs was, er, baseless. In either event, you haven't given any evidence to support your highly dubious claim that greed has nothing to do with pricing.
I agree. Even those who- like me- consider an ebook to be a superior product to a physical book are seldom happy to pay as much for one as for a hardcopy. It seems obvious to me that today's consumers of digital media demand that in addition to getting great content, they not get screwed on its pricing and availability structures- ie, that the publishers have been greedy, that consumers have not tolerated it, and that the market has accordingly spoken.
And this is why we need mandatory economics education for every student.
Price is not based on "greed", price is based on supply and demand.
You may wish to avail yourself of that economics course- market forces have no control over initial prices, only what the price will trend towards. Companies could base their initial price on anything at all- greed being a significant factor.
Companies charge what you are willing to pay, which is influenced by the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives.
That's why electronic books are not significantly cheaper than paper books. The price of the paper and distribution is only a baseline lowest cost, it has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay.
And that would be relevant if they had equivalent sales. As things stand, it actually argues against your point: ebook sales in the US last year come to about $13 million dollars out of a (roughly) $23 billion dollar a year industry, according to the AAP. If the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives are the only driving factors, then I conclude that people are unwilling to pay equal amounts for a product that has no associated baseline costs and a product whose cost is dominated by those factors.
Sure - if the first order criteria is going to a private cloud from a public cloud.
For a lot of companies, it is- and for a lot of startups, the ability to scale from 0 to 1 million users without getting screwed on either end sounds like a pretty good deal. I'm not claiming that this is going to make them Microsoft (or even Google) level profits- but they have a much lower outlay. They can survive in a smaller, more profitable niche.
But cost, reliability, features, operations (and likely others) will all be factors here. All the public cloud providers will compete with Canonical by saying
They may not always be right - but that is how they will complete.
IME, this is not how this argument goes. Everybody knows that AWS is going to beat you in scale over a short period of time, but a long-term dependency on them is unhealthy for a larger company. This puts growing companies in quite the bind- rewrite your core business to avoid vendor lock-in or hinge your company's survival on a third party? Canonical is providing a third way here, and I suspect that serving this small market well will be a big test for whether the RHEL model works for them.
Moreover, Microsoft will complete directly with Canonical here.
I don't see this. Microsoft doesn't treat the cloud like a core component of its business model, and certainly provides no direct analog to AWS, which this is more squarely targeted at.
Going head to head with Microsoft in an established market is often (not always) very difficult to do profitably. Weve made it very clear that we are going for the brass ring with both cloud services and cloud products.
Again, I'm not sold on the idea that this represents a broadside at big M- Ubuntu will keep doing what it does best, Canonical will expand into a market that has nothing to do with desktop software, and Microsoft will continue to chuckle and make billions.
Im not at all suggesting they will fail - bit it will be a tough slog for them - they will continue to set fire to money the whole road to profitability (if they ever get there). Its intersting that Canonical chose this space to compete profitably. The ROI seems very low here...
-Foredecker
Again, IMO this looks like a small expansion into an underserved market that is being gussied up to look like a big new initiative. I would bet that this will succeed, earn them some cash, and be mostly forgotten two years from now.
They actually don't compete with Amazon here- Ubuntu's cloud software is AWS compatible, and provides a pretty natural migration path for companies looking at moving from public to private clouds as they scale.