in the long run we may have been better off devoting a lot more resources to figuring out ways to search massively in parallel.
But in some cases, these are legitimately quite difficult problems. Remember you're searching a many-dimensional space (R^n for n large) for the point that maximizes some function. The hassle is when evaluating the function is itself an expensive thing. Every tuple might represent a costly experiment.
For instance, suppose you're designing airplane wings. You've come up with a generalized wing design that has twelve parameters. You want the 12-tuple that gives the best wing. In the days before computers, you would have run experiments in a wind tunnel. But with a peak-Cold-War black budget, you couldn't have made 10^12 wing prototypes and tested them all. Nowadays we can skip the wind tunnel and simulate the aerodynamics of a wing on a computer, but it's still a non-trivial effort. If each 12-tuple involves one CPU-hour, those 10^12 experiments will still take 114 years on your million-processor parallel computer.
Evolution is a partial search algorithm for the genome that, within its environment, reproduces the most rapidly. Every individual genome is an experiment that involves the entire lifespan of at least one organism. If you're talking about giant Sequioa trees with multi-century lifespans, that's a slow process no matter what you do.
Throwing a lot of computation at these kinds of things is a good idea. I laud John Koza's effort in that direction. But even if we use the masses of Jupiter and Saturn to build networked petahertz nanocomputers, there will still be interesting problems for which exhaustive search remains infeasible.
People oversimplify Adam Smith. He specifically
recognized a conflict of interest between vendors and customers. The customer wants lots of competition between vendors, the vendor wants none. The customer wants every vendor to publish as much information as possible about his products, but vendors prefer to gloss over the comparative weaknesses of their own products.
In Kenneth Arrow's book "The Armchair Economist", he proposes that when capitalism fails to solve a problem that it apparently should, it's because a
market is "missing". For instance to promote clean air, we should make somebody the "owner" of the atmosphere, and he or she should sell rights to
pollute (presumably at very high prices). This sort of thing has been done with pollution and has had some good effect, where a state or municipal government acted as the atmosphere's owner.
So what needs to happen is somebody (probably some government) needs to be designated as the owner of some resource that gets sold at a high price in such a way that efficient allocation lines up with hardware remaining open. Maybe the thing that gets sold is the right to damage the intellectual commons by limiting the openness of hardware.
So as resource constraints decrease (or perhaps with quantum or biological computing), exhaustive search will become more practical?
It's a Moore's Law thing. Some computations that were infeasible ten years ago are feasible today, but not all, and the range of which ones have become feasible is larger for the NSA than it is for your high school computer club. Sometimes you can design your hardware or software to exploit unique patterns in the problem domain, like the EFF DES cracker from a few years back.
They got a lot of mileage by designing problem-specific chips that wouldn't have been available with general-purpose processors.
GAs are one approach among many for searching a space of possible solutions for what will hopefully be a global optimum. The space is typically a set of N-tuples of integers (though it could be reals) where N is often large. A fitness function maps N-tuples to some sort of real-valued figure of merit.
In biological evolution, the figure of merit is approximately reproductive success. Evolution works by favoring genes that get themselves copied a lot.
Exhaustive search would be the obvious way to find a true global maximum in this sort of problem, but often the cost-per-tuple of evaluating the fitness function is non-trivial. In cryptographic key searches, the fitness function is a Dirac impulse which is one at the correct key and zero everywhere else, so near-misses don't help you to find the global maximum. (This isn't strictly true; many crypto algorithms have classes of weak keys, but that's a diversion for another time.)
Another partial search algorithm, aside from GAs, is simulated annealing. Yet another is the backpropogation algorithm used to find good sets of weights for neural nets.
As the crypto example illustrates, these partial search algorithms rely on gradients of the fitness function, where near-misses have higher fitnesses than wild-ass misses. One of the things one does when using a GA as a design tool is therefore to try to select fitness functions with gently sloping gradients throughout the space of solution tuples.
Encrypt the information with a 128-bit symmetric key and any strong
cipher (3DES, Twofish, Rijndael, what have you). Post the encrypted
version somewhere on Usenet so that it gets picked up by Google, or
whoever is doing the DejaNews thing when you want the info released.
Also post enough instructions so that anybody who has the key can
perform the decryption. Now your only problem is timed release of the
128-bit key, that is, a key escrow problem.
The usual problem with key escrow is that you want to make it
possible-but-difficult to obtain your key, but impossible to do so
secretly. You do this by making up N-1 random numbers and XORing them
all with your key to produce an Nth number. Burn the copy of the key
and distribute the N numbers to N different left-wing civil liberties
organizations and newspapers. Nobody can get your key secretly unless
they can sneak all the pieces out of all the different organizations.
The same thing could be done for time-release key escrow: use N
organizations that all agree to your schedule for releasing the key.
The use of many organizations mitigates the risk of premature
disclosure by any single organization. The problem is that no
organization is entirely immune to espionage, and neither is any
combination of organizations.
So hide some pieces of your key using engineering solutions.
Build timer-driven gadgets that hide underground, or at the bottoms
of lakes, and announce themselves after three years. Find places
like Stonehenge or the Pyramids, where a sunbeam enters a cave only on one day of
the year, and build something clever in the cave.
An interesting service (but one for which I cannot figure out a
revenue model) would be to generate public/private key pairs for
various dates. Publish the public keys and corresponding dates
immediately, and publish private keys on the dates in question.
Eventually the service would end up getting used to protect some
information that was really valuable, and then the service provider
would be subject to rubber-hose cryptanalysis, so this isn't a great
career choice.
What makes me curious is what platforms they'll support Apache on . ..
Another question is what is MS Apache going to look like? It would be a remarkable coup for them if they could crowd out the free software version. Then they'd have their cake and eat it too.
A yet-to-be-named member of the World Wrestling Federation, representing Western Industrial Civilization, will deliver the ultimate smackdown on Mother Nature at Madison Square Garden on July 4th, 2050. The WWF has chosen to conceal the identity of the Mystery Civilization Wrestler to deny Mother Nature the unfair advantage of studying his moves for the next 48 years. Or maybe "her" moves.
The WWF retains the right to choose from any of the wrestlers it will have in 2050. Some may be horrific and terrifying results of human cloning and tissue engineering experiments. Others may be the wrestlers you enjoy today, cryogenically preserved in giant buckets of ice water to deliver their maximal smackdown power in the distant future.
Who will deliver the smackdown is a mystery, and won't be revealed until July 4th 2050. What we do know is that Mother Nature is going down and she ain't coming back up. Triumph will be complete and eternal. Tickets available at Ticketron and local ticketing agencies. Mastercard, Visa and Discover accepted. All ticket sales are final and non-transferrable. Ensure your grandchildrens' participation in this historic event today!
This is one of the big problems. People have been coming up with switching devices for a while now. It's been done with rotaxane , it's been done with nanotubes. As you point out, the really tricky problem is specific wiring.
Some programmable logic technologies handle wiring with a uniform sea of logic gates connected by fuses, and you create a particular logic circuit by selectively blowing fuses. The HP/UCLA rotaxane work involves essentially the same idea, using molecular switches at the intersections of a 2D grid of molecular wires. In addition to some discussion here on Slashdot, there is more at Nanodot, and a fairly extended discussion on sci.nanotech.
Solving the problem of routing specific wires to specific gates, and doing it in a way that's reliably manufacturable in mole quantities, will pretty much relegate today's foundries to niche markets. But that's probably a long way off, numerous problems to solve to get there. Interesting times ahead.
You have just described life. Rather than reinventing the wheel, why not improve existing life processes.
Ralph's agenda is long term. We'll get there eventually, but before we do, we'll spend a lot of time puttering around with simple bacteria. Tom Knight is already starting that effort, which he calls microbial engineering. This is very cool, commendable work.
But there are limitations. You can make cells do logic operations, but they do them very slowly. Each cell has a very limited number of usable state variables. As long as we are starting with life, we are stuck with the limitations of cells. Cells can easily be programmed to make proteins, which don't have very desirable material properties, but to make more interesting stuff like tooth enamel or spider silk you need much more cleverness.
What's nice about cells is that they are inexpensive replicators that work today. What's bad about them is that humans never got a vote on the basic design, simplicity was never a design goal, programming them is hard, and the range of things they can be programmed to do is limited.
Ultimately we want a human-designed replicator that comes with a manual, is easy to program, and can do lots of different things.
I looked at this thing (the mirror, anyway) and as far as I can tell, it's just a big FTP directory where people drop off MSWord and Powerpoint files. My impression is that these people have had these presentations around for years, and probably drag them out whenever a particular sort of discussion comes up.
Scarcity of good ideas and good intentions is not the problem. What is rare is implementation. It's nice that people want to do good, but many do-gooders have a very limited capacity for managing a project to completion.
Another thing I don't see here is an incentive to cooperate. Most contributors will assume that their own aproach to cholera or low-income housing is The Right Way. If they cooperate with other people, they risk having to work on some other approach, and losing their proper recognition as The Prophet of The Right Way.
I realize that corporations are treated by the law as individuals in many ways. But should corporations be afforded the full range of rights and protections that we grant to U.S. citizens? Corporations already operate with ridiculous advantages over the average citizen, mostly relating to the fact that they have millions or billions of dollars at their disposal.
The reason corporations were invented was to shield corporate officers from personal liability. I'm not sure even that justification makes sense. But even if the reasonableness of liability shielding is granted, why should corporations enjoy privileges like the First Amendment? Those rights should be for people, not for legally contrived abstractions.
These RIAA schmucks aren't just trying to control music. They are trying to lock down all computer hardware and software, and bring an end to innovation everywhere. The landscape of the intellectual commons is already dismal enough -- only big corporations can derive any significant benefit from patents, and more stuff is patented every day.
Gateway could said, "We're big enough to play the cross-licensing game, we can afford to sit idle and watch this go by". In a world with a few too many greedy bullies, this is a welcome act of rebellion.
Downloading MP3s is lovely, but the real prize is the right to think and innovate. I thank Gateway for speaking out in support of that right.
This topic has interested me for a while. There's a pretty closely related field called computational economics, with papers and conferences and the whole bit.
CS nerds might be in a good position to end the recession. We know how to do big simulations and distributed computing and how to mine for data to feed a simulation. We know how to run several simulations in parallel, each representing a different course of economic intervention.
The economy is driven primarily by human actions and decisions. In principle, humans could all agree that recessions are bad, and each tweak our behavior to end the damn thing. Given how much suffering the economy can cause, it seems ridiculous to leave it entirely to chance.
It may turn out that benign interventions are impossible because of conflicts of interest (an individual's own interests dictate behavior that prolongs the recession or injures society, what the economics folks call a tragedy of the commons). But it might at least merit investigation.
My own small effort in this direction appears in my sig.
in my own cost/benefit analysis, the money I spend on their boxes is well worth it. I'm not making a 'donation', I'm consciously investing in my own future.
This is a very powerful idea, and really gets to the root of the gratis/libre distinction. People are often initially attracted to free software because they don't have to pay for it. But the real prize, the one your grandkids will thank you for, is the intellectual commons and the long-term effect it can have on the world.
It's easy to forget this stuff when everybody is out of work . When everybody got regular paychecks it was no big deal to drop some bucks on somebody doing something interesting. But the screwed-up economy is just a circumstance, and a transient one at that. It doesn't really deserve the deciding vote about which human activities are most worthwhile.
industry is frequently shortsighted and cannot spend the research
time developing new techniques... the more academia knows what sort of
problems people are trying to solve in the real world, the better
they'll able to focus their research on methods that have nearer term
results.
It might be a good thing if game developers could fund academic work.
No single game developer could afford to fund a project to solve any
particular problem, but financial mechanisms have been described
(12) to allow game
developers to jointly fund research to produce results sharable by the
entire industry.
The software completion bond idea has not yet been attempted AFAIK.
Certainly it has no well-known success stories. Maybe this would be a
good place to try it.
Agreed that patenting ideas is a bad thing. Sometimes the proper form of protest against such a thing is a reductio-ad-absurdum test case. One could write a patent application describing ideas as specifically as possible: "patterns of neuronal activity representative of concepts and relationships" or something like that, point out that these are novel and useful (at least sometimes), allowing this person to claim the entire process of having an idea or thinking in general.
What one would hope is that the USPTO would look at that, see the absurdity, look back on some of their past decisions, and resolve to be less foolish in the future.
<SlashdotJadedMode>
What would actually happen is that they'd issue the patent, and the next week we'd all be paying license fees for the privilege of thinking.
</SlashdotJadedMode>
There's no machine I've ever heard of nor seen that could generate a truely random number
It's true that no computational algorithm can generate truly random numbers, without input from some random physical process. The real test would be whether you could look at the history of numbers generated and predict the next number. This would mean inferring the state bits of the algorithm and deducing its inputs, if any. Cryptographic hashes are algorithms specifically designed to make that difficult.
In physics, you don't get real randomness without quantum effects, but statistical processes can give you highly unpredictable numbers, unless you're prepared to do faster-than-real-time molecular dynamics on 10^23 particles.
The government should probably concede defeat to the free market on this one. In the 60s, when students were climbing under desks during air raids, the EBS seemed like a good idea. After 9/11 we know the free market handles civilian emergency communications better.
This frees the government to focus specifically on NON-civilian communication issues: military communications, and where do we put Dick Cheney this week? That's an appropriate thing for the government to be working on then.
Of course they'd lose polling points if they just ignored civilian emergency communication, even though doing so would probably leave us civilians better off. We're left with the possibility that some day, the government might lock down CNN et al. in response to an emergency, and as a result we suffer avoidable civilian losses. That'll suck.
A big deal is being made these days about how funding for terrorists comes largely from the profits of illegal drug sales in the U.S. That sounds pretty credible; opium is supposed to be the biggest export for Afghanistan.
Prohibition in the 1920s taught us the reason those profits are so large: because we've kept the drugs illegal. The "War on Drugs" created an environment in which drug dealers could get rich, and likewise their suppliers. Competition was outlawed so there was no free-market rein on prices.
In some sense, the War-on-Drugs crowd financed the Sept. 11th attacks. Of course, back then the Afghanis were fighting the Soviets, so they were our good buddies anyway.
I hadn't heard much in the media connecting the "War on Drugs" to the "War on Terrorism" but when I think about it, the connection seems pretty tight.
Do you thing [the homogenization of American
culture in the 50s and 60s] is A Good Thing?
I didn't say that. We don't need to
homogenize world culture for this thing to work.
What gets homogenized is understanding of
other cultures. Each person stays within the
dialects and habits of his or her own culture, but
sometimes learns a little bit about others.
Maybe if there had been something like this for
America in the 50s and 60s, a Texas/Maine
translator say, we wouldn't have ended up with
our cultural homogeneity today. Though really,
neither folks from Maine nor Texas have made many
concessions to cultural homogenization.
The real evil of American cultural homogenization,
such as it is, is the influence of big corporations. They'd benefit by commoditized
cultural understanding, but individuals would
benefit even more. So I don't see this as a call
to arms for the Dark Side.
Configure the translator as a web service with a fairly-obvious SOAP API. Do everything in Unicode. Allow a wide range of both input and output languages. Make plenty of clones of the server, sprinkled all over the planet. Start in tourist spots and big cities, and let them trickle out to other places.
In the 1950s and 60s, TV commoditized and homogenized American speech patterns and culture. This will commoditize understanding between cultures, but nobody has to give up their native language. Ideas and commerce will flow more easily. It'll be a good thing.
"Hurd" is much easier to pronounce than "GhNU slash Linux" is.
That's "GhNU Hurd" to you, buddy.
Setting up the right financial infrastructure
on
How to Save PGP
·
· Score: 2
It would be good if there were some general mechanism for the public
to purchase pieces of software, and place them either in the public
domain or under an open source license of some sort. Since I'd be a
beneficiary in many cases, I should (and sometimes would) be willing
to cough up some cash to contribute to the purchase.
But what I really want to do, at least initially, is to promise a
payment, which becomes payable when enough other people have promised
that the software's current owner agrees to the deal. Inevitably trust
issues come up: I might welch on my promise. Or to make things more
complicated, I might promise and pay only on the condition of
anonymity.
How to do all this? One way would be to place the money in escrow for
a limited time, and if the deal doesn't come together by then, I get
my money back. The people trying to organize the deal would give
themselves a time limit and encourage donors to set their escrow
timers for that time limit. A reputable bank or insurance company (or
maybe a casino?) could act as the escrow agent.
There's a guy named Ronnie Horesh with a very cool idea called social policy bonds,
intended to bring market forces to bear on social issues. Government
auctions off bonds, which mature when some measurable social goal
occurs, and are then redeemable for larger amounts. He once commented
that a social policy bond is like a bet. The government hedges its
position (that, say, literacy is good) by begging that literacy won't
go up. When literacy does go up, the government has to pay up.
In the same way, if I believe that PGP should go into the public
domain, I may hedge that belief by betting Network Associates that
they won't do that. They can easily win that bet by releasing PGP,
when they decide that winning all those bets is more important than
retaining PGP as closed-source software.
Slashdot Mirror
But in some cases, these are legitimately quite difficult problems. Remember you're searching a many-dimensional space (R^n for n large) for the point that maximizes some function. The hassle is when evaluating the function is itself an expensive thing. Every tuple might represent a costly experiment.
For instance, suppose you're designing airplane wings. You've come up with a generalized wing design that has twelve parameters. You want the 12-tuple that gives the best wing. In the days before computers, you would have run experiments in a wind tunnel. But with a peak-Cold-War black budget, you couldn't have made 10^12 wing prototypes and tested them all. Nowadays we can skip the wind tunnel and simulate the aerodynamics of a wing on a computer, but it's still a non-trivial effort. If each 12-tuple involves one CPU-hour, those 10^12 experiments will still take 114 years on your million-processor parallel computer.
Evolution is a partial search algorithm for the genome that, within its environment, reproduces the most rapidly. Every individual genome is an experiment that involves the entire lifespan of at least one organism. If you're talking about giant Sequioa trees with multi-century lifespans, that's a slow process no matter what you do.
Throwing a lot of computation at these kinds of things is a good idea. I laud John Koza's effort in that direction. But even if we use the masses of Jupiter and Saturn to build networked petahertz nanocomputers, there will still be interesting problems for which exhaustive search remains infeasible.
In Kenneth Arrow's book "The Armchair Economist", he proposes that when capitalism fails to solve a problem that it apparently should, it's because a market is "missing". For instance to promote clean air, we should make somebody the "owner" of the atmosphere, and he or she should sell rights to pollute (presumably at very high prices). This sort of thing has been done with pollution and has had some good effect, where a state or municipal government acted as the atmosphere's owner.
So what needs to happen is somebody (probably some government) needs to be designated as the owner of some resource that gets sold at a high price in such a way that efficient allocation lines up with hardware remaining open. Maybe the thing that gets sold is the right to damage the intellectual commons by limiting the openness of hardware.
It's a Moore's Law thing. Some computations that were infeasible ten years ago are feasible today, but not all, and the range of which ones have become feasible is larger for the NSA than it is for your high school computer club. Sometimes you can design your hardware or software to exploit unique patterns in the problem domain, like the EFF DES cracker from a few years back. They got a lot of mileage by designing problem-specific chips that wouldn't have been available with general-purpose processors.
In biological evolution, the figure of merit is approximately reproductive success. Evolution works by favoring genes that get themselves copied a lot.
Exhaustive search would be the obvious way to find a true global maximum in this sort of problem, but often the cost-per-tuple of evaluating the fitness function is non-trivial. In cryptographic key searches, the fitness function is a Dirac impulse which is one at the correct key and zero everywhere else, so near-misses don't help you to find the global maximum. (This isn't strictly true; many crypto algorithms have classes of weak keys, but that's a diversion for another time.)
Another partial search algorithm, aside from GAs, is simulated annealing. Yet another is the backpropogation algorithm used to find good sets of weights for neural nets.
As the crypto example illustrates, these partial search algorithms rely on gradients of the fitness function, where near-misses have higher fitnesses than wild-ass misses. One of the things one does when using a GA as a design tool is therefore to try to select fitness functions with gently sloping gradients throughout the space of solution tuples.
I'm out of mod points. Good thinking here, deserves notice.
The usual problem with key escrow is that you want to make it possible-but-difficult to obtain your key, but impossible to do so secretly. You do this by making up N-1 random numbers and XORing them all with your key to produce an Nth number. Burn the copy of the key and distribute the N numbers to N different left-wing civil liberties organizations and newspapers. Nobody can get your key secretly unless they can sneak all the pieces out of all the different organizations.
The same thing could be done for time-release key escrow: use N organizations that all agree to your schedule for releasing the key. The use of many organizations mitigates the risk of premature disclosure by any single organization. The problem is that no organization is entirely immune to espionage, and neither is any combination of organizations.
So hide some pieces of your key using engineering solutions. Build timer-driven gadgets that hide underground, or at the bottoms of lakes, and announce themselves after three years. Find places like Stonehenge or the Pyramids, where a sunbeam enters a cave only on one day of the year, and build something clever in the cave.
An interesting service (but one for which I cannot figure out a revenue model) would be to generate public/private key pairs for various dates. Publish the public keys and corresponding dates immediately, and publish private keys on the dates in question. Eventually the service would end up getting used to protect some information that was really valuable, and then the service provider would be subject to rubber-hose cryptanalysis, so this isn't a great career choice.
Another question is what is MS Apache going to look like? It would be a remarkable coup for them if they could crowd out the free software version. Then they'd have their cake and eat it too.
The WWF retains the right to choose from any of the wrestlers it will have in 2050. Some may be horrific and terrifying results of human cloning and tissue engineering experiments. Others may be the wrestlers you enjoy today, cryogenically preserved in giant buckets of ice water to deliver their maximal smackdown power in the distant future.
Who will deliver the smackdown is a mystery, and won't be revealed until July 4th 2050. What we do know is that Mother Nature is going down and she ain't coming back up. Triumph will be complete and eternal. Tickets available at Ticketron and local ticketing agencies. Mastercard, Visa and Discover accepted. All ticket sales are final and non-transferrable. Ensure your grandchildrens' participation in this historic event today!
Some programmable logic technologies handle wiring with a uniform sea of logic gates connected by fuses, and you create a particular logic circuit by selectively blowing fuses. The HP/UCLA rotaxane work involves essentially the same idea, using molecular switches at the intersections of a 2D grid of molecular wires. In addition to some discussion here on Slashdot, there is more at Nanodot, and a fairly extended discussion on sci.nanotech.
Solving the problem of routing specific wires to specific gates, and doing it in a way that's reliably manufacturable in mole quantities, will pretty much relegate today's foundries to niche markets. But that's probably a long way off, numerous problems to solve to get there. Interesting times ahead.
Ralph's agenda is long term. We'll get there eventually, but before we do, we'll spend a lot of time puttering around with simple bacteria. Tom Knight is already starting that effort, which he calls microbial engineering. This is very cool, commendable work.
But there are limitations. You can make cells do logic operations, but they do them very slowly. Each cell has a very limited number of usable state variables. As long as we are starting with life, we are stuck with the limitations of cells. Cells can easily be programmed to make proteins, which don't have very desirable material properties, but to make more interesting stuff like tooth enamel or spider silk you need much more cleverness.
What's nice about cells is that they are inexpensive replicators that work today. What's bad about them is that humans never got a vote on the basic design, simplicity was never a design goal, programming them is hard, and the range of things they can be programmed to do is limited.
Ultimately we want a human-designed replicator that comes with a manual, is easy to program, and can do lots of different things.
Scarcity of good ideas and good intentions is not the problem. What is rare is implementation. It's nice that people want to do good, but many do-gooders have a very limited capacity for managing a project to completion.
Another thing I don't see here is an incentive to cooperate. Most contributors will assume that their own aproach to cholera or low-income housing is The Right Way. If they cooperate with other people, they risk having to work on some other approach, and losing their proper recognition as The Prophet of The Right Way.
The reason corporations were invented was to shield corporate officers from personal liability. I'm not sure even that justification makes sense. But even if the reasonableness of liability shielding is granted, why should corporations enjoy privileges like the First Amendment? Those rights should be for people, not for legally contrived abstractions.
Gateway could said, "We're big enough to play the cross-licensing game, we can afford to sit idle and watch this go by". In a world with a few too many greedy bullies, this is a welcome act of rebellion.
Downloading MP3s is lovely, but the real prize is the right to think and innovate. I thank Gateway for speaking out in support of that right.
CS nerds might be in a good position to end the recession. We know how to do big simulations and distributed computing and how to mine for data to feed a simulation. We know how to run several simulations in parallel, each representing a different course of economic intervention.
The economy is driven primarily by human actions and decisions. In principle, humans could all agree that recessions are bad, and each tweak our behavior to end the damn thing. Given how much suffering the economy can cause, it seems ridiculous to leave it entirely to chance.
It may turn out that benign interventions are impossible because of conflicts of interest (an individual's own interests dictate behavior that prolongs the recession or injures society, what the economics folks call a tragedy of the commons). But it might at least merit investigation.
My own small effort in this direction appears in my sig.
This is a very powerful idea, and really gets to the root of the gratis/libre distinction. People are often initially attracted to free software because they don't have to pay for it. But the real prize, the one your grandkids will thank you for, is the intellectual commons and the long-term effect it can have on the world.
It's easy to forget this stuff when everybody is out of work . When everybody got regular paychecks it was no big deal to drop some bucks on somebody doing something interesting. But the screwed-up economy is just a circumstance, and a transient one at that. It doesn't really deserve the deciding vote about which human activities are most worthwhile.
It might be a good thing if game developers could fund academic work. No single game developer could afford to fund a project to solve any particular problem, but financial mechanisms have been described (1 2) to allow game developers to jointly fund research to produce results sharable by the entire industry.
The software completion bond idea has not yet been attempted AFAIK. Certainly it has no well-known success stories. Maybe this would be a good place to try it.
What one would hope is that the USPTO would look at that, see the absurdity, look back on some of their past decisions, and resolve to be less foolish in the future. <SlashdotJadedMode> What would actually happen is that they'd issue the patent, and the next week we'd all be paying license fees for the privilege of thinking. </SlashdotJadedMode>
There's no machine I've ever heard of nor seen that could generate a truely random number
It's true that no computational algorithm can generate truly random numbers, without input from some random physical process. The real test would be whether you could look at the history of numbers generated and predict the next number. This would mean inferring the state bits of the algorithm and deducing its inputs, if any. Cryptographic hashes are algorithms specifically designed to make that difficult.
In physics, you don't get real randomness without quantum effects, but statistical processes can give you highly unpredictable numbers, unless you're prepared to do faster-than-real-time molecular dynamics on 10^23 particles.
Here's a random bit generator suitable for use with a crypto hash algorithm to make good random bits: http://willware.net:8080/hw-rng.html
Cell phones. United Flight 93. Pennsylvania. See? You watch CNN, you might learn something every now and then.
This frees the government to focus specifically on NON-civilian communication issues: military communications, and where do we put Dick Cheney this week? That's an appropriate thing for the government to be working on then.
Of course they'd lose polling points if they just ignored civilian emergency communication, even though doing so would probably leave us civilians better off. We're left with the possibility that some day, the government might lock down CNN et al. in response to an emergency, and as a result we suffer avoidable civilian losses. That'll suck.
A big deal is being made these days about how funding for terrorists comes largely from the profits of illegal drug sales in the U.S. That sounds pretty credible; opium is supposed to be the biggest export for Afghanistan.
Prohibition in the 1920s taught us the reason those profits are so large: because we've kept the drugs illegal. The "War on Drugs" created an environment in which drug dealers could get rich, and likewise their suppliers. Competition was outlawed so there was no free-market rein on prices.
In some sense, the War-on-Drugs crowd financed the Sept. 11th attacks. Of course, back then the Afghanis were fighting the Soviets, so they were our good buddies anyway.
I hadn't heard much in the media connecting the "War on Drugs" to the "War on Terrorism" but when I think about it, the connection seems pretty tight.
I didn't say that. We don't need to homogenize world culture for this thing to work. What gets homogenized is understanding of other cultures. Each person stays within the dialects and habits of his or her own culture, but sometimes learns a little bit about others.
Maybe if there had been something like this for America in the 50s and 60s, a Texas/Maine translator say, we wouldn't have ended up with our cultural homogeneity today. Though really, neither folks from Maine nor Texas have made many concessions to cultural homogenization.
The real evil of American cultural homogenization, such as it is, is the influence of big corporations. They'd benefit by commoditized cultural understanding, but individuals would benefit even more. So I don't see this as a call to arms for the Dark Side.
In the 1950s and 60s, TV commoditized and homogenized American speech patterns and culture. This will commoditize understanding between cultures, but nobody has to give up their native language. Ideas and commerce will flow more easily. It'll be a good thing.
That's "GhNU Hurd" to you, buddy.
But what I really want to do, at least initially, is to promise a payment, which becomes payable when enough other people have promised that the software's current owner agrees to the deal. Inevitably trust issues come up: I might welch on my promise. Or to make things more complicated, I might promise and pay only on the condition of anonymity.
How to do all this? One way would be to place the money in escrow for a limited time, and if the deal doesn't come together by then, I get my money back. The people trying to organize the deal would give themselves a time limit and encourage donors to set their escrow timers for that time limit. A reputable bank or insurance company (or maybe a casino?) could act as the escrow agent.
There's a guy named Ronnie Horesh with a very cool idea called social policy bonds, intended to bring market forces to bear on social issues. Government auctions off bonds, which mature when some measurable social goal occurs, and are then redeemable for larger amounts. He once commented that a social policy bond is like a bet. The government hedges its position (that, say, literacy is good) by begging that literacy won't go up. When literacy does go up, the government has to pay up.
In the same way, if I believe that PGP should go into the public domain, I may hedge that belief by betting Network Associates that they won't do that. They can easily win that bet by releasing PGP, when they decide that winning all those bets is more important than retaining PGP as closed-source software.