Yeah, that's probably a big part of it, but I don't think that's a complete explanation. Given that these repressive laws exist, of course people whose careers depend on enforcing them will have a strong incentive to be obtuse, but that can't explain why they exist in the first place. Drug prohibition is a particularly good example; it's hard to get rid of because now enforcing it is a multi-billion dollar industry, but it wasn't at first, and it seems unlikely that that was the primary motivation of the people who originally pushed it through decades ago. Also, I don't think I would agree that willingness to ruin an innocent girl's life with a criminal prosecution solely to advance one's career really counts as non-malicious.
Isn't the whole law to keep children from being exploited? What if they do it by their own
Yeah, right. The purpose is to reassure sexually repressed old men who are afraid that kids today are getting more action than they were at that age, and appease Puritans who can't stand the thought of anyone ever actually enjoying anything.
Now I'm remembering that community college chemistry class I took when I was 15. The teacher described dropping a flake of metallic sodium into a flask of water. "With sodium, it'll skip around on the surface and make sparks. With potassium, it'll make bigger sparks and flames. With rubidium, it'll blow the water out of the flask. With cesium, it'll shatter the flask." We didn't get a complete set of demonstrations, though.
It would seem to me that anonymity is not a requirement for free speech, online or otherwise.
It most certainly is. Imposing any conditions at all on speech makes it unfree, and imposing conditions such as identifying posters on one's message board which are specifically designed to make it easier for the State to suppress speech is a very serious infringement on free speech.
What's to stop the internet-equivalent of standing up and shouting "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater?
What would that be, exactly? If we go by the original context of that stupid cliche, then presumably you mean disagreeing with the government.
Visiting most online discussions is like watching the monkeys at the zoo, and the risk of being hit with a lump of flying feces is just as high.
If you don't like it, don't participate. There isn't anyone forcing you, so kindly refrain from forcing anyone else not to.
"Freedom of Speech" means you can say whatever you want, however, it doesn't mean that you are exempt from the repercussions of what you say. You still must take personal responsibility for the freedom you take.
That's just stupid. It amounts to claiming that only prior restraint counts as censorship. By your 'logic', if the State were to pass a law prohibiting you from criticizing it on pain of death, it'd be just fine as long as they didn't stop you from saying it in advance. After all, you have to take personal responsibility for what you say.
If you are one of those who believes that "Freedom of Speech" should be absolute, think about these situations:... [standard-issue excuses for fascism]
Frankly, yes, I do think all of those examples should be protected, and I'm saying that as one of those lesbian abominations your would-be politician wants exterminated. Unless you wish to claim that basilisks are real, bits never harmed anyone.
It creates tidal forces on matter in its path. The matter would be stretched in one direction, and squeezed in the perpendicular direction, depending on the polarization of the radiation. For the radiation created by the earth's orbit around the sun at a distance of one light-year, that amounts to being stretched or squeezed by about 1 part in 10^26 (see the calculation here). For the hypothetical gigawatt beam of graviational radiation I mentioned, if it had a cross section of 1 meter, it would come to something like 0.01 percent by my back-of-the-envelope calculation - around seven or eight times as much as the tidal forces due to Earth's gravity.
Gravitational radiation would make a *terrible* weapon. It couples so weakly (to normal, non-superconducting matter, at least) that a gigawatt beam of it could be passing through your body right now and you wouldn't feel a thing. If you could effeciently detect *and transmit* it, though, it might be interesting as a wireless communications technology. Nothing naturally occuring would block it and there would be scarcely any background noise at high frequencies.
It would help his credibility if he would at least learn how to spell 'holistic'. Well, it would still be complete bullshit, but maybe he would find a slightly larger pool of suckers to send PayPal donations to his 'foundation'.
That's almost true, but it's important to remember that it's curved 4-dimensional space-time, not curved 3-dimensional space. If objects just followed geodesics of curved 3-space (the point where the object leaves one cell isn't in line with the points where the object left the previous cells.), then they would follow the same path, just at different speeds, regardless of their velocity. In 4-space objects with different velocities are moving in different directions, and so can move on different paths.
Thus if an object was following a subjectively straight path from on cell to the next, seen from the "outside" the path will be curved, because the cells have non-cubic shapes.
You shouldn't talk about curved paths as seen from the outside. There is no outside. Space-time isn't a 4-dimensional space with a curved embedding in some flat higher-dimensional space; you can construct ways to embed any curved manifold, but there isn't one unique way and there won't be any way to see the embedding from the actual physics going on inside the 4-space. You should think of a 4-dimensional space with intrinsic curvature, which you can observe solely with measurements made inside the space. For example, if you look at the volume of a sphere centered on a point P as a function of its radius, you will find that in the limit as the radius approaches 0, the volume is smaller than (4/3)*pi*r^3 if the curvature scalar is positive at that point, or larger if the curvature scalar is negative. You can (in principle) measure all the components of the full curvature tensor using similar but more complex limiting processes.
Now I want to write a cypherpunk-themed MMORPG, and set up something like this as cover for connecting an cryptographically anonymous digital cash system to the real-world banking infrastructure.
You're thinking of SRAM, which doesn't need a refresh cycle, but which does lose its contents without power. SMRAM is an alternate address space on 386SL and newer Intel processors; when the processor executes code in System Management Mode (accessed by triggering a System Management Interrupt in hardware), it asserts a special signal and the hardware makes all memory references go to SMRAM instead of the normal memory. This rootkit works by exploiting a caching bug to write into SMRAM when not in SMM.
Do they bounce out of bed at the crack of dawn and show up in the office all bright and sunny with plenty of time to spare for some horrid 9 AM meeting or something? Oh, wait, that's light-addicted humans.
No he didn't, stop being a paranoid melodramatic whiner.
I will when you stop being a boot-licking fascist enabler. Yes, I know being ordered around and punished by authoritative people in uniforms can be really hot, but kindly keep your submission fetish in the bedroom.
People like you are holding things up.
Holding what up, exactly? Are you going to make the trains run on time?
You could easily develop this system based on a mesh that doesn't maintain specific legacy information.
Yeah, right. It doesn't even need to know any identifying information about vehicles to map them to their owners. You see a vehicle move from point A to point B, you assume it was the same one you last saw at point A. Now you have a complete history of each vehicle's movements even without them transmitting any individually identifying information. Next, look and see where each vehicle spends the largest amount of time parked. This will be the owner's residence.
Not that anyone would actually have to go that much trouble. Just because it's possible to build a system like this in ways that might make it slightly difficult to abuse doesn't mean it actually would be built that way. Do you honestly believe that the same people who are eager to keep on installing traffic cameras are going to go out of their way to design a system that respects people's privacy?
You could also draft laws then ensure a court order is needed to get any information.
Yeah, because the cops have never, ever gotten a judge to rubber-stamp a court order, or just gone ahead and broken down someone's door in the middle of the night without one. Not to mention all the victimless 'crimes' they could use to justify oppressing people even if all the procedures were carefully followed.
The answer to our traffic woes is probably not flying cars, but rather something like self-driving cars on defined tracks. Most of our traffic problems are caused by people following too closely and overreacting to developments ahead of them (braking harder than necessary, etc), not to mention the general scourge of distracted driving. If the whole process of freeway merging, maintaining safe distance, responding to stimuli outside the vehicle, etc, was handled by an unemotional computer (perhaps interfacing with a central traffic planning computer in more congested areas), things should smooth out.
Congratulations. You have just handed the government the ability to monitor and control the movements of everyone, everywhere. Now aren't you proud of yourself?
Sorry, but that just isn't true. I own a pair of HD-650s; I can afford them, but it isn't a trivial expense for me and I generally don't take them out of my apartment, so I hardly bought them to show off. I also have HD-280s, which I do tend to carry around with me and use at the office; a nice set of closed-ear headphones is pretty much a necessity for me to focus in a cube farm environment. Sorry, but $30 headphones generally sound like crap, and the free ones on airplanes sound like extra-super-crap and pinch the ears painfully. Just because you don't give a damn about sound quality doesn't mean that no one else does either and everyone who uses decent headphones does so just to show off their vast wealth.
Yeah, it is nice. I've had a T1 line at home ever since I got fed up with a previous ISP blocking outgoing port 22 (!), and decided I'd rather pay for business-class service than put up with stuff like that any longer. I'll take my 1.5Mbps that I actually get consistently and with a 99.99% availability SLA and my own/27 over some cable company offering 8Mbps oversubscribed by a factor of fifty with weird blocks and caps and throttling any day.
We never went anywhere. I still read Applied Cryptography from time to time. I also:
Run a private XMPP server for me and my girlfriend which only accepts SSL connections.
Operate a tor exit.
Attach a PGP signature to every e-mail I send.
Still think anonymous digital cash schemes are a really cool idea.
The problem is mostly that there are so few other people who seem to care. I send a digital signature on every e-mail, but as far as I know no one ever verifies it. I've sent and received maybe two *encrypted* messages in my life. I talk to my girlfriend through a private XMPP server, because she's a huge nerd just like me, but pretty much every other IM conversation I have goes out over the wire in plaintext and passes through some faceless corporation's servers. Anonymous digital cash is full of awesome, and I keep meaning to write a implementation of it one of these days, but there just don't seem to enough of us anarchistic crypto nerds around thinking that to make it economically viable. Of all the cool cryptographic tricks I've read about, the only one that seems to have gotten to the point of a practical, usable system is tor.
I think part of that is that a lot of the existing cool ideas have had flawed implementations that impede practical use. I think PGP's web of trust is seriously flawed, for example. Most of the time the only thing about a key that I care about is whether the person that knows the private key is also the legitimate owner of the associated e-mail address, but in order to sign someone's key, I also need to assent to whole list of other, harder to verify statements about that key. It should have had people sign separate statements relating the key to some other form of identity rather than the key itself, so I could say "The person who knows the private key corresponding to public key ID 20344213 also has the e-mail address blah@blah.com" without also having to say, for every other bit of identity attached to their public key, "The person who knows the private key corresponding to public key ID 20344213 also has the legal name Blah X. Blahson" or even "The photograph attached to public key ID 20344213 is a photograph of the person who knows the corresponding private key".
Somehow, I think if that issue went away, we wouldn't magically see everyone in the world suddenly using PGP, though. Fundamentally, the problem is that 99% of the people just don't give a damn about privacy. Out of the remaining 1%, most either still don't care enough to bother with cryptography, or don't understand how it works and are convinced the NSA has a secret backdoor in everything or something. Look at every Slashdot article about electronic voting. Everyone complains that, as actually implemented, it fundamentally depends on trusting the voting machines, and there is every reason to believe that they can't be trusted. Okay, that's pretty much true, but then the proposed solution is always "leave a paper trail", but that just requires you to trust a handful of corruptible humans instead of a machine. Maybe that's better, but it's not much better. No one ever mentions those all those lovely cryptographic voting protocols from Applied Cryptography, that, if implemented properly, could let you vote from your own machine using an open-source client speaking a standard protocol, and not have to trust *anyone*. Well, I guess for the mindless masses understanding cryptography like that is so far over their heads that they might as well just be blindly trusting the protocol designers, but I would have hoped for better from Slashdot geeks.
It got to me to thinking. What is the Federation really? At least as written by Gene Roddenberry it seems to border on communism. Even DS9 continued this trend to a certain point -- mentioning "transporter credits" in one episode. Apparently the government doles out ration coupons to control how often the citizenry can move about. Where's the individual freedom and liberty?
I've always liked the interpretation that the Federation became a totalitarian communist state at some point in the early 24th century, and produced TNG as propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's probably a big part of it, but I don't think that's a complete explanation. Given that these repressive laws exist, of course people whose careers depend on enforcing them will have a strong incentive to be obtuse, but that can't explain why they exist in the first place. Drug prohibition is a particularly good example; it's hard to get rid of because now enforcing it is a multi-billion dollar industry, but it wasn't at first, and it seems unlikely that that was the primary motivation of the people who originally pushed it through decades ago. Also, I don't think I would agree that willingness to ruin an innocent girl's life with a criminal prosecution solely to advance one's career really counts as non-malicious.
Isn't the whole law to keep children from being exploited? What if they do it by their own
Yeah, right. The purpose is to reassure sexually repressed old men who are afraid that kids today are getting more action than they were at that age, and appease Puritans who can't stand the thought of anyone ever actually enjoying anything.
Now I'm remembering that community college chemistry class I took when I was 15. The teacher described dropping a flake of metallic sodium into a flask of water. "With sodium, it'll skip around on the surface and make sparks. With potassium, it'll make bigger sparks and flames. With rubidium, it'll blow the water out of the flask. With cesium, it'll shatter the flask." We didn't get a complete set of demonstrations, though.
It would seem to me that anonymity is not a requirement for free speech, online or otherwise.
It most certainly is. Imposing any conditions at all on speech makes it unfree, and imposing conditions such as identifying posters on one's message board which are specifically designed to make it easier for the State to suppress speech is a very serious infringement on free speech.
What's to stop the internet-equivalent of standing up and shouting "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater?
What would that be, exactly? If we go by the original context of that stupid cliche, then presumably you mean disagreeing with the government.
Visiting most online discussions is like watching the monkeys at the zoo, and the risk of being hit with a lump of flying feces is just as high.
If you don't like it, don't participate. There isn't anyone forcing you, so kindly refrain from forcing anyone else not to.
"Freedom of Speech" means you can say whatever you want, however, it doesn't mean that you are exempt from the repercussions of what you say. You still must take personal responsibility for the freedom you take.
That's just stupid. It amounts to claiming that only prior restraint counts as censorship. By your 'logic', if the State were to pass a law prohibiting you from criticizing it on pain of death, it'd be just fine as long as they didn't stop you from saying it in advance. After all, you have to take personal responsibility for what you say.
If you are one of those who believes that "Freedom of Speech" should be absolute, think about these situations: ... [standard-issue excuses for fascism]
Frankly, yes, I do think all of those examples should be protected, and I'm saying that as one of those lesbian abominations your would-be politician wants exterminated. Unless you wish to claim that basilisks are real, bits never harmed anyone.
It creates tidal forces on matter in its path. The matter would be stretched in one direction, and squeezed in the perpendicular direction, depending on the polarization of the radiation. For the radiation created by the earth's orbit around the sun at a distance of one light-year, that amounts to being stretched or squeezed by about 1 part in 10^26 (see the calculation here). For the hypothetical gigawatt beam of graviational radiation I mentioned, if it had a cross section of 1 meter, it would come to something like 0.01 percent by my back-of-the-envelope calculation - around seven or eight times as much as the tidal forces due to Earth's gravity.
Well, a GE Minigun is a pretty efficient way to mass-uninstall Windows from a server farm. :)
Gravitational radiation would make a *terrible* weapon. It couples so weakly (to normal, non-superconducting matter, at least) that a gigawatt beam of it could be passing through your body right now and you wouldn't feel a thing. If you could effeciently detect *and transmit* it, though, it might be interesting as a wireless communications technology. Nothing naturally occuring would block it and there would be scarcely any background noise at high frequencies.
It would help his credibility if he would at least learn how to spell 'holistic'. Well, it would still be complete bullshit, but maybe he would find a slightly larger pool of suckers to send PayPal donations to his 'foundation'.
That's almost true, but it's important to remember that it's curved 4-dimensional space-time, not curved 3-dimensional space. If objects just followed geodesics of curved 3-space (the point where the object leaves one cell isn't in line with the points where the object left the previous cells.), then they would follow the same path, just at different speeds, regardless of their velocity. In 4-space objects with different velocities are moving in different directions, and so can move on different paths.
Thus if an object was following a subjectively straight path from on cell to the next, seen from the "outside" the path will be curved, because the cells have non-cubic shapes.
You shouldn't talk about curved paths as seen from the outside. There is no outside. Space-time isn't a 4-dimensional space with a curved embedding in some flat higher-dimensional space; you can construct ways to embed any curved manifold, but there isn't one unique way and there won't be any way to see the embedding from the actual physics going on inside the 4-space. You should think of a 4-dimensional space with intrinsic curvature, which you can observe solely with measurements made inside the space. For example, if you look at the volume of a sphere centered on a point P as a function of its radius, you will find that in the limit as the radius approaches 0, the volume is smaller than (4/3)*pi*r^3 if the curvature scalar is positive at that point, or larger if the curvature scalar is negative. You can (in principle) measure all the components of the full curvature tensor using similar but more complex limiting processes.
Heh. If you think that, then this is going to blow your mind.
Since when does sitting at home playing a game *need* a justification?
Now I want to write a cypherpunk-themed MMORPG, and set up something like this as cover for connecting an cryptographically anonymous digital cash system to the real-world banking infrastructure.
So, what, it wants to merge with corporations under age 16 and gets caught with pictures of hot XXX conglomerate-on-startup acquisition action?
You're thinking of SRAM, which doesn't need a refresh cycle, but which does lose its contents without power. SMRAM is an alternate address space on 386SL and newer Intel processors; when the processor executes code in System Management Mode (accessed by triggering a System Management Interrupt in hardware), it asserts a special signal and the hardware makes all memory references go to SMRAM instead of the normal memory. This rootkit works by exploiting a caching bug to write into SMRAM when not in SMM.
Heh. I doubt it. In my experience, BDSM events tend to be just getting started by midnight.
Do they bounce out of bed at the crack of dawn and show up in the office all bright and sunny with plenty of time to spare for some horrid 9 AM meeting or something? Oh, wait, that's light-addicted humans.
Mmmm, grey and leathery. Sounds delicious.
No he didn't, stop being a paranoid melodramatic whiner.
I will when you stop being a boot-licking fascist enabler. Yes, I know being ordered around and punished by authoritative people in uniforms can be really hot, but kindly keep your submission fetish in the bedroom.
People like you are holding things up.
Holding what up, exactly? Are you going to make the trains run on time?
You could easily develop this system based on a mesh that doesn't maintain specific legacy information.
Yeah, right. It doesn't even need to know any identifying information about vehicles to map them to their owners. You see a vehicle move from point A to point B, you assume it was the same one you last saw at point A. Now you have a complete history of each vehicle's movements even without them transmitting any individually identifying information. Next, look and see where each vehicle spends the largest amount of time parked. This will be the owner's residence.
Not that anyone would actually have to go that much trouble. Just because it's possible to build a system like this in ways that might make it slightly difficult to abuse doesn't mean it actually would be built that way. Do you honestly believe that the same people who are eager to keep on installing traffic cameras are going to go out of their way to design a system that respects people's privacy?
You could also draft laws then ensure a court order is needed to get any information.
Yeah, because the cops have never, ever gotten a judge to rubber-stamp a court order, or just gone ahead and broken down someone's door in the middle of the night without one. Not to mention all the victimless 'crimes' they could use to justify oppressing people even if all the procedures were carefully followed.
The answer to our traffic woes is probably not flying cars, but rather something like self-driving cars on defined tracks. Most of our traffic problems are caused by people following too closely and overreacting to developments ahead of them (braking harder than necessary, etc), not to mention the general scourge of distracted driving. If the whole process of freeway merging, maintaining safe distance, responding to stimuli outside the vehicle, etc, was handled by an unemotional computer (perhaps interfacing with a central traffic planning computer in more congested areas), things should smooth out.
Congratulations. You have just handed the government the ability to monitor and control the movements of everyone, everywhere. Now aren't you proud of yourself?
Sorry, but that just isn't true. I own a pair of HD-650s; I can afford them, but it isn't a trivial expense for me and I generally don't take them out of my apartment, so I hardly bought them to show off. I also have HD-280s, which I do tend to carry around with me and use at the office; a nice set of closed-ear headphones is pretty much a necessity for me to focus in a cube farm environment. Sorry, but $30 headphones generally sound like crap, and the free ones on airplanes sound like extra-super-crap and pinch the ears painfully. Just because you don't give a damn about sound quality doesn't mean that no one else does either and everyone who uses decent headphones does so just to show off their vast wealth.
Yeah, it is nice. I've had a T1 line at home ever since I got fed up with a previous ISP blocking outgoing port 22 (!), and decided I'd rather pay for business-class service than put up with stuff like that any longer. I'll take my 1.5Mbps that I actually get consistently and with a 99.99% availability SLA and my own /27 over some cable company offering 8Mbps oversubscribed by a factor of fifty with weird blocks and caps and throttling any day.
So helping Chinese people get around the Great Firewall should get you investigated by a bunch of Gestapo wannabes? That's idiotic.
We never went anywhere. I still read Applied Cryptography from time to time. I also:
The problem is mostly that there are so few other people who seem to care. I send a digital signature on every e-mail, but as far as I know no one ever verifies it. I've sent and received maybe two *encrypted* messages in my life. I talk to my girlfriend through a private XMPP server, because she's a huge nerd just like me, but pretty much every other IM conversation I have goes out over the wire in plaintext and passes through some faceless corporation's servers. Anonymous digital cash is full of awesome, and I keep meaning to write a implementation of it one of these days, but there just don't seem to enough of us anarchistic crypto nerds around thinking that to make it economically viable. Of all the cool cryptographic tricks I've read about, the only one that seems to have gotten to the point of a practical, usable system is tor.
I think part of that is that a lot of the existing cool ideas have had flawed implementations that impede practical use. I think PGP's web of trust is seriously flawed, for example. Most of the time the only thing about a key that I care about is whether the person that knows the private key is also the legitimate owner of the associated e-mail address, but in order to sign someone's key, I also need to assent to whole list of other, harder to verify statements about that key. It should have had people sign separate statements relating the key to some other form of identity rather than the key itself, so I could say "The person who knows the private key corresponding to public key ID 20344213 also has the e-mail address blah@blah.com" without also having to say, for every other bit of identity attached to their public key, "The person who knows the private key corresponding to public key ID 20344213 also has the legal name Blah X. Blahson" or even "The photograph attached to public key ID 20344213 is a photograph of the person who knows the corresponding private key".
Somehow, I think if that issue went away, we wouldn't magically see everyone in the world suddenly using PGP, though. Fundamentally, the problem is that 99% of the people just don't give a damn about privacy. Out of the remaining 1%, most either still don't care enough to bother with cryptography, or don't understand how it works and are convinced the NSA has a secret backdoor in everything or something. Look at every Slashdot article about electronic voting. Everyone complains that, as actually implemented, it fundamentally depends on trusting the voting machines, and there is every reason to believe that they can't be trusted. Okay, that's pretty much true, but then the proposed solution is always "leave a paper trail", but that just requires you to trust a handful of corruptible humans instead of a machine. Maybe that's better, but it's not much better. No one ever mentions those all those lovely cryptographic voting protocols from Applied Cryptography, that, if implemented properly, could let you vote from your own machine using an open-source client speaking a standard protocol, and not have to trust *anyone*. Well, I guess for the mindless masses understanding cryptography like that is so far over their heads that they might as well just be blindly trusting the protocol designers, but I would have hoped for better from Slashdot geeks.
It got to me to thinking. What is the Federation really? At least as written by Gene Roddenberry it seems to border on communism. Even DS9 continued this trend to a certain point -- mentioning "transporter credits" in one episode. Apparently the government doles out ration coupons to control how often the citizenry can move about. Where's the individual freedom and liberty?
I've always liked the interpretation that the Federation became a totalitarian communist state at some point in the early 24th century, and produced TNG as propaganda.