My question: Why would any merchant IN THEIR RIGHT MIND want to deal with Bitcoin? With the insane USD-to-Bitcoin exchange-rate gyrations happening lately, why would any serious retailer even bother, when the value of Bitcoin vs. USD could change by 50% or more in just a few hours?
Currently, the internal IPs of my computers do not depend on which ISP I am connected to.
Actually IPv6 interfaces can, nay MUST, allow multiple address assignments. So in an all IPv6 world, each of your computers will have an ISP-dependent (publically routable) address, as you say. But, they will each ALSO have a locally assigned, non-routable ("site-local") address that you can use as an unchanging address on your LAN.
Plus, with IPv6 router solicitation/advertisement and/or DHCPv6, even the case of updating machines with new ISP-dependent addresses is not the onerous task you make it out to be.
Using MSE ISP can no longer simply shape based on protocol. Bittorrent uses a random port which makes shaping based on port equally ineffective.
Unfortunately, ISP's have other options for shaping. Bittorrent traffic is quite distinctive and is detectable to a fairly high degree of accuracy just by analyzing the traffic pattern. Encrypting the packets does not (and cannot) obscure the traffic pattern.
I find it really difficult to correlate expressiveness and verbosity in any simple way.
The original question asked was: Why is verbosity bad? My answer was to define verbosity as the inverse of expressiveness, with the implicit assumption that greater expressiveness is better. I think that you intuitively also make this assumption when you speak positively of the "compactness" (expressiveness?) of shell scripts when applied to suitable tasks.
Let's say you are given two scripts that accomplish exactly the same task. One script has 10 LOC, and the other has 100 LOC (ignoring all comments, whitespace, etc). Which script would you say is more verbose? And which would you say is more expressive?
For a given task, one language is more expressive than another language if the former takes fewer LOC to accomplish the task than the latter. If we take LOC to be a reasonable approximation for verbosity, then verbosity and expressiveness have an inverse relationship.
I don't know Objective-C, but since C is just a few steps up from assembler, I can accept that Objective-C is probably more expressive than C, since nearly every language is. Thus, I cannot agree with you that Objective-C is more verbose than C. You and I must be using different definitions of "verbosity".
... that means binary compatibility must stop being broken from OS update to OS update.
It's simply the arrogance of Linux developers that have crippled Linux adoption.
IMHO, this is the biggest barrier that keeps commercial development out of Linux. Basically, the Linux philosophy assumes that all applications are open source, so it doesn't matter if the ABI changes with every point release of the kernel, since the distros can just recompile all their binaries when packaging. This philosophy is incompatible with the commercial software method of distributing apps as binary blobs.
You raise some good questions. I don't think I explicitly advocated for or against inheritance of property, although I believe that in a free society, a person should be allowed to give away their possessions to whomever they choose, before or after death.
But let's try to stay on topic. A property owner is entitled to earn as much or as little from his ownership as the market will bear. If there were a sensible way to define property in the digital sense, then the same would apply to digital property owners. Unfortunately, because copies of digital works can be created at virtually no cost (unlike real property), normal physical markets cannot be applied to them, lest we come to the inevitable conclusion that, by the laws of supply and demand, the price for a digital work will tend rapidly to zero. Who is going to pay for an item that is (potentially) infinitely abundant?
Since you and I both see intrinsic value in many digital works (I like to watch TV and movies as much as the next guy), I think we can agree that such works cannot be treated the same as physical goods. So far, attempts to monetize digital works have mostly revolved around turning them into physical objects (CDs, DVDs), or using encryption to enforce the creator's will over every copy created, or both. These avenues of monetization are forever destined to fail in a free society, because people in such a society are free to communicate with each other, and that includes digital files.
So where does that leave the digital creator who wants to earn a living from his works? I believe that trying to turn digital works into widgets that can be bought and sold is the wrong way to go. Unfortunately, I don't have a satisfactory counter scheme that is fair to all involved, so I'll just leave it at that.
Explain to me why there is one rule for property and another for creative works.
One obvious reason is that they are different kinds of things. A piece of physical property, like a house, cannot be given to someone else without depriving the creator of it. A creative work, rendered in digital form, can be copied and distributed to others without depriving the creator of it.
Another difference is that physical property can only be sold once, while digital works can be sold any number of times. For these reasons, it is clear that physical property is fundamentally different from digital property, and therefore need to be treated differently.
Some people create digital works as a way to make a living. Does society owe them a living? How much money is a creator entitled to earn from a digital work? What is a fair price for a digital work? Is there a fair way to determine pricing?
Spent 40 bucks on a 2gb ram upgrade, chucked on an nLited winXp. Now I've got a little utility machine that's/REALLY/ tiny and cute, and didn't cost the earth.
How much did the XP license cost?
Because there is not enough computing power available in the entire known universe to do it in a useful amount of time.
Think about it. For a 2048-bit key, there are 2^2048 distinct keys. A back-of-the-envelope calculation estimates the universe contains about 10^80 (or roughly 2^266) atoms. Assuming you could somehow turn each and every atom in the observable universe into a computer, each node in your universe-sized Beowulf cluster would be assigned to test about 2^2048/2^266 = 2^1782 distinct keys. Then, if each node in your universe-sized Beowulf cluster tests 2^30 (about 1 billion) keys per second, it would take each node 2^1782/2^30 = 2^1752 seconds to complete its search. Fortunately, on average, one of your nodes will find the correct key after searching only half of its assigned keyspace, so we can expect the overall search to complete in half that time, or 2^1781 seconds. There are roughly 2^25 seconds in a year, so that's 2^1756 years.
Now compare 2^1756 years to the current estimated age of the universe (roughly 2^34 years), and it should be clear how utterly futile a brute-force search is.
The idea is called hashcash, which should help your googling. It's a very old idea, predating the current situation where spammers now have more computational power than anyone else can imagine and would laugh such a scheme away while everyone ELSE got penalized.
I think hashcash (http://www.hashcash.org/) bears more serious consideration. If hashcash were part of the SMTP protocol (i.e. a missing or invalid hashcash header would result in an email being silently dropped), life would be a lot more expensive for spammers. And by expensive, I mean computationally expensive, which translates directly into the monetary kind of expensive. By making spam much more expensive to send, there would be a lot fewer @$$holes trying to make a living at it.
Yes, I am aware of bot farms and the huge pools of computational power supposedly in the hands of the spammers. But consider this. Right now, it takes almost no compute power to blast out emails at the top upload speed of a typical residential high speed internet connection, which means that a zombie can do its work largely undetected by its owner. Imagine instead if every outgoing email required a couple seconds of hard cranking by the CPU. Suddenly, using a bot to send spams that have a chance of reaching human eyeballs has become a lot slower, a lot more detectable, and thus a lot less lucrative.
Obviously, SMTP is not going to change any time soon, but if the adoption of hashcash (or some similar computational "payment" filtering system) reached critical mass, I believe the effect on spammers would be devastating. Sure, running a legitimate email mailing list would become more expensive as well, but really, delivering identical copies of information to multiple recipients is something much better suited to HTTP and RSS.
The Many Worlds hypothesis lets me easily mesh an omniscient creator with a universe that has free will.
So does your god care about all the parallel outcomes equally, or only the "real" one? Furthermore, how does a multiple-parallel universe god answer prayers when every possible outcome "happens" in some part of "his" creation?
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My question: Why would any merchant IN THEIR RIGHT MIND want to deal with Bitcoin? With the insane USD-to-Bitcoin exchange-rate gyrations happening lately, why would any serious retailer even bother, when the value of Bitcoin vs. USD could change by 50% or more in just a few hours?
Currently, the internal IPs of my computers do not depend on which ISP I am connected to.
Actually IPv6 interfaces can, nay MUST, allow multiple address assignments. So in an all IPv6 world, each of your computers will have an ISP-dependent (publically routable) address, as you say. But, they will each ALSO have a locally assigned, non-routable ("site-local") address that you can use as an unchanging address on your LAN.
Plus, with IPv6 router solicitation/advertisement and/or DHCPv6, even the case of updating machines with new ISP-dependent addresses is not the onerous task you make it out to be.
This is what DHCP is for.
Using MSE ISP can no longer simply shape based on protocol. Bittorrent uses a random port which makes shaping based on port equally ineffective.
Unfortunately, ISP's have other options for shaping. Bittorrent traffic is quite distinctive and is detectable to a fairly high degree of accuracy just by analyzing the traffic pattern. Encrypting the packets does not (and cannot) obscure the traffic pattern.
I find it really difficult to correlate expressiveness and verbosity in any simple way.
The original question asked was: Why is verbosity bad? My answer was to define verbosity as the inverse of expressiveness, with the implicit assumption that greater expressiveness is better. I think that you intuitively also make this assumption when you speak positively of the "compactness" (expressiveness?) of shell scripts when applied to suitable tasks.
Let's say you are given two scripts that accomplish exactly the same task. One script has 10 LOC, and the other has 100 LOC (ignoring all comments, whitespace, etc). Which script would you say is more verbose? And which would you say is more expressive?
Mod parent up. Very well put.
For a given task, one language is more expressive than another language if the former takes fewer LOC to accomplish the task than the latter. If we take LOC to be a reasonable approximation for verbosity, then verbosity and expressiveness have an inverse relationship.
I don't know Objective-C, but since C is just a few steps up from assembler, I can accept that Objective-C is probably more expressive than C, since nearly every language is. Thus, I cannot agree with you that Objective-C is more verbose than C. You and I must be using different definitions of "verbosity".
Verbosity = ( 1 / Expressiveness )
... that means binary compatibility must stop being broken from OS update to OS update.
It's simply the arrogance of Linux developers that have crippled Linux adoption.
IMHO, this is the biggest barrier that keeps commercial development out of Linux. Basically, the Linux philosophy assumes that all applications are open source, so it doesn't matter if the ABI changes with every point release of the kernel, since the distros can just recompile all their binaries when packaging. This philosophy is incompatible with the commercial software method of distributing apps as binary blobs.
You raise some good questions. I don't think I explicitly advocated for or against inheritance of property, although I believe that in a free society, a person should be allowed to give away their possessions to whomever they choose, before or after death.
But let's try to stay on topic. A property owner is entitled to earn as much or as little from his ownership as the market will bear. If there were a sensible way to define property in the digital sense, then the same would apply to digital property owners. Unfortunately, because copies of digital works can be created at virtually no cost (unlike real property), normal physical markets cannot be applied to them, lest we come to the inevitable conclusion that, by the laws of supply and demand, the price for a digital work will tend rapidly to zero. Who is going to pay for an item that is (potentially) infinitely abundant?
Since you and I both see intrinsic value in many digital works (I like to watch TV and movies as much as the next guy), I think we can agree that such works cannot be treated the same as physical goods. So far, attempts to monetize digital works have mostly revolved around turning them into physical objects (CDs, DVDs), or using encryption to enforce the creator's will over every copy created, or both. These avenues of monetization are forever destined to fail in a free society, because people in such a society are free to communicate with each other, and that includes digital files.
So where does that leave the digital creator who wants to earn a living from his works? I believe that trying to turn digital works into widgets that can be bought and sold is the wrong way to go. Unfortunately, I don't have a satisfactory counter scheme that is fair to all involved, so I'll just leave it at that.
One obvious reason is that they are different kinds of things. A piece of physical property, like a house, cannot be given to someone else without depriving the creator of it. A creative work, rendered in digital form, can be copied and distributed to others without depriving the creator of it.
Another difference is that physical property can only be sold once, while digital works can be sold any number of times. For these reasons, it is clear that physical property is fundamentally different from digital property, and therefore need to be treated differently.
Some people create digital works as a way to make a living. Does society owe them a living? How much money is a creator entitled to earn from a digital work? What is a fair price for a digital work? Is there a fair way to determine pricing?
Sine the size of the file can change too, but (sin^2 + cos^2) won't.
How much did the XP license cost?
Because there is not enough computing power available in the entire known universe to do it in a useful amount of time.
Think about it. For a 2048-bit key, there are 2^2048 distinct keys. A back-of-the-envelope calculation estimates the universe contains about 10^80 (or roughly 2^266) atoms. Assuming you could somehow turn each and every atom in the observable universe into a computer, each node in your universe-sized Beowulf cluster would be assigned to test about 2^2048/2^266 = 2^1782 distinct keys. Then, if each node in your universe-sized Beowulf cluster tests 2^30 (about 1 billion) keys per second, it would take each node 2^1782/2^30 = 2^1752 seconds to complete its search. Fortunately, on average, one of your nodes will find the correct key after searching only half of its assigned keyspace, so we can expect the overall search to complete in half that time, or 2^1781 seconds. There are roughly 2^25 seconds in a year, so that's 2^1756 years.
Now compare 2^1756 years to the current estimated age of the universe (roughly 2^34 years), and it should be clear how utterly futile a brute-force search is.
I think hashcash (http://www.hashcash.org/) bears more serious consideration. If hashcash were part of the SMTP protocol (i.e. a missing or invalid hashcash header would result in an email being silently dropped), life would be a lot more expensive for spammers. And by expensive, I mean computationally expensive, which translates directly into the monetary kind of expensive. By making spam much more expensive to send, there would be a lot fewer @$$holes trying to make a living at it.
Yes, I am aware of bot farms and the huge pools of computational power supposedly in the hands of the spammers. But consider this. Right now, it takes almost no compute power to blast out emails at the top upload speed of a typical residential high speed internet connection, which means that a zombie can do its work largely undetected by its owner. Imagine instead if every outgoing email required a couple seconds of hard cranking by the CPU. Suddenly, using a bot to send spams that have a chance of reaching human eyeballs has become a lot slower, a lot more detectable, and thus a lot less lucrative.
Obviously, SMTP is not going to change any time soon, but if the adoption of hashcash (or some similar computational "payment" filtering system) reached critical mass, I believe the effect on spammers would be devastating. Sure, running a legitimate email mailing list would become more expensive as well, but really, delivering identical copies of information to multiple recipients is something much better suited to HTTP and RSS.
So does your god care about all the parallel outcomes equally, or only the "real" one? Furthermore, how does a multiple-parallel universe god answer prayers when every possible outcome "happens" in some part of "his" creation?
http://autopatcher.m2ys4u.co.uk/mystats.php/
Thanks, AC! Grab those torrents while you still can!
How many gazillion?
10 ^ (46 - log(1 gazillion))