Government's primary purpose should be to eliminate externalities.
If you're not familiar with the term, an externality is an economic concept which is a cost not paid by the one who creates it.
Pollution is the classic example of an externality. If I create pollution, that creates a cost which is borne by everybody near me, but I pay only a tiny fraction of that cost. It's easy to get into a situation where creating that pollution is a net loss, but it's a net gain for me, so market forces fail to guide me into the correct course of action.
The cost of using gasoline is far higher than just what is paid to the gas station. The pollution created is a huge cost, and unless taxes are used to push that cost onto the user, people don't have the proper incentives to use gasoline correctly.
Government should tax gasoline at a level which makes its cost to the purchaser equal to its overall cost. I don't know what amount that would be, but this is a certain case of molding behavior which is something they very much should be doing.
I'm all for personal freedom. I think that you should be able to do whatever you want to your own body and that you should keep way more of what you earn than you currently do. But at the same time, you should not be allowed to damage other people by polluting just because our legal system dates from a time before air pollution was a big deal.
You say all that and then don't even tell us which candidate you're talking about? It does no good to advocate for a certain candidate if you don't tell people which one you're advocating. And it does me no good no read what you say if I have no idea who you're talking about.
I would not be so sure of this. As usual, The Simpsons got it right:
I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks!
Often people become wealthy due to both earning more and spending less. A lot of people I know who are just barely scraping by still buy nicer food and eat out quite a bit more than I do.
Now, I'm not making anywhere near $250,000/year, and maybe it changes a bit when you reach that level. Certainly it would be a rational choice to consider that spending twice as much money on food will make their lives better while having an almost ignorable impact on cash flow. But a lot of moderately rich people are also very frugal, so they may simply keep being cheap.
The postscript example is a dead link. It does have a pair of apps with the same MD5 sum, one of which is a "hello world" program and the other of which pretends to erase your hard drive. It also has a library for creating such programs on your own.
As far as I know, it's not yet practical to create a brand new file unrelated to an existing one which collides with that existing file's hash. So I can't create a file that hashes the same as your file, I can only create a pair of files that hash the same. However, this is only a matter of time.
MD5 is dead for cryptographic purposes, and the time to stop using it for that is yesterday.
Well I don't know, why is this prohibition in the constitution?
Generally it's considered that "cruel punishment" is a subset from just plain old "punishment", where the punishment is particularly designed to create suffering rather than to simply right wrongs or restrict the criminal. Therefore prison by itself is not considered cruel, but burning alive is.
False. MD5 has the property that if you can find two bytestreams that collide, appending identical data to the end will continue to produce two different files that collide. Furthermore, the collision-finders are able to take an arbitrary prefix, and then append random data to that prefix until a collision is found.
What does this mean? It means you can take a file with a blob of random data in the middle, then generate two files with identical hashes but different random blobs of data in the middle.
This, in turn, allows you to do things like create applications, postscript files, HTML files, and other things which hash identically but act or display completely differently. (You embed both behaviors in the file, then switch depending on the contents of the random data. A close examination will turn up the "bad" side, lying inactive, but simply opening the file will make it appear that all is well.)
It's certainly not as good as being able to match an arbitrary hash, but MD5 collisions are entirely practical to take advantage of today.
At this point, MD5 should be considered to be a checksum, not a validator. MD5 is still very good at detecting random noise injected into a data stream but it should no longer be considered to have any real utility for detecting malicious changes.
I could hack into your computer and plant pictures. Then you would have the pictures on your computer. Are you then guilty? Is that situation cut and dry?
It seems to me that most people, on this site and elsewhere, don't really believe in evidence, due process, or innocent until proven guilty. They think that suspects are guilty, period. The rest of the stuff is just a formality meant to please the judges. According to this attitude, if the crime is heinous enough and the publicly-available evidence damning enough, the trial becomes redundant and pointless.
This attitude, quite frankly, scares the everliving shit out of me. Everyone deserves a fair trial, and that means properly obtained evidence. You can't simply throw this out because you think a particular crime is really extra special bad.
Your attitude scares me. Nobody should be flayed and burned at all, much less where they stand.
Everybody deserves a trial. And everybody who is found guilty at a trial deserves punishment which is not cruel or unusual.
At the risk of Godwinning the thread, they didn't flay or burn the top Nazi leadership. They gave them trials, then hanged or imprisoned them. These people were responsible for far worse crimes than "taking advantage" of a single five-year-old child, but we didn't think that their punishment should exceed the law.
I'm not offended. I am a bit annoyed that people are starting to talk about "iPhones" instead of "cell phones" for no other reason than that iPhones happen to be popular at the moment. But it's hardly surprising.
But yes, I believe 100% that the only reason that article got written was to bring in money one way or another. Why do you run that site otherwise? It's to make people aware of your product and enhance your reputation, so that you can sell more books and bring in more money. I suppose it's possible that you run it as a charity, but that strikes me as really unlikely, and doesn't fit the evidence.
Are you now pretending you didn't imply that the only reason we published this article was for, and I quote you directly, "ad hits"?
Those links on the side advertising iPhone: The Missing Manual ($24.99), Building Internet Firewalls ($49.95) and Essential System Administration ($54.95) are all advertisements, even if they're for your own product and are therefore "free".
Yeah, I was thinking of forums. You're right that on other sites it will do less damage. (It will still push everything below it down a great distance, which hurts.) In my experience forums are by far the worst hotlink abusers but your experience, of course, may vary.
Not sure why everybody assumes I think that the people who build voting machines should be forbidden from participating in the political process. A much simpler and more foolproof solution to the dilemma I pose is to simply not use voting machines in the first place.
Please don't insult my intelligence. You sell books, and there are a bunch of book recommendations right in the sidebar. Increased traffic benefits you monetarily. It doesn't have to be in the form of getting a fraction of a cent per hit from Google for that to be the case.
Actually, the idea for the article came from a conference call where we kept getting interference, and it was because two participants had their shiny new iPhones in the room. We've all heard this type of interference before, but never as much as with the iPhone. James decided to talk to the FCC and Apple and whoever else would discuss things in a way that an interested layman could understand.
Except that it's not presented as "this is what every GSM phone does", it is presented as "this is what iPhones [the hottest new cell phone out there which everybody is abuzz about, come see us talk about it] do".
I'm not criticizing terribly much, here, but it's pretty obviously capitalizing on the iPhone's current popularity rather than simply being a straight informative article.
If you're building the machines then you can set them up to misreport the results and nobody is the wiser. Systems can be built to defeat this, but why would such a person build one?
Something people are strangely unaware of is that 1984 was not intended to show what would happen if the Communists won. Rather, it was intended to show what would happen if the West continued to sacrifice everything in order to fight Communism. In other words, the so-called "Free World" would become like the enemy they meant to fight.
Kind of like what's happening now!
(And an aside: in 1948 prosperity was long from an all-time high in the West. Europe was still in the midst of recovering from the unimaginably devastating effects of WWII. Even the UK, which escaped with relatively little damage from the war, was in dire economic straits afterwards because they had to essentially mortgage the entire country to pay for everything. Things were much better in the US, of course, since at the end of the war the US had literally 50% of the production capacity of the entire world, but that prosperity was not mirrored to the rest of the West for quite some time.)
You're an interesting study in self contradiction. First you state that the US was unable to respond with sufficient force after 9/11. Then you state that the US showed "an extreme level of restraint" when dealing with terrorists. Well, which is it? You can't have both!
Wandering off the topic, but I've heard of someone who was ticketed for jaywalking. Not only was he ticketed for jaywalking, but he was ticketed for crossing against the light in order to assist the victim of a car accident. The policeman who wrote the ticket was the one who had arrived on the scene of the accident. If that's not the sure indicator of a total asshole, I don't know what is. (This story is coming to you third-hand, so take it with a grain of salt.)
I guess this has some relevance. If a law is only partially enforced then it is much more abusive than either one which is completely enforced or one which is never enforced. For example, it wouldn't be too big a leap to suppose that people will get prosecuted for leaking information, but only if it hurts whatever side is in power.
The US has no national identity system and therefore no way to automatically determine if you're a citizen, much less track where you are all the time. It's legal (I think) and within the realm of practicality to live completely off the radar as far as the government is concerned. Obviously you're going to need to interact with the government in order to legally drive a car, buy a house, or other such things, but you don't have to do them. And someone who lives off the radar in other respects should still be allowed to vote, and he is as long as he can prove his residency and citizenship somehow.
It happens sometimes. Certainly you shouldn't have been modded down.
Just so you have the full picture, there are two separate GSM providers in the US and, I think, three CDMA providers. All of them have been around for quite a while. I'm quite sure that this article is just a lame attempt to mooch off the iPhone's popularity for ad hits, not any legitimate surprise or concern on the part of the O'Reilly writers.
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Government's primary purpose should be to eliminate externalities.
If you're not familiar with the term, an externality is an economic concept which is a cost not paid by the one who creates it.
Pollution is the classic example of an externality. If I create pollution, that creates a cost which is borne by everybody near me, but I pay only a tiny fraction of that cost. It's easy to get into a situation where creating that pollution is a net loss, but it's a net gain for me, so market forces fail to guide me into the correct course of action.
The cost of using gasoline is far higher than just what is paid to the gas station. The pollution created is a huge cost, and unless taxes are used to push that cost onto the user, people don't have the proper incentives to use gasoline correctly.
Government should tax gasoline at a level which makes its cost to the purchaser equal to its overall cost. I don't know what amount that would be, but this is a certain case of molding behavior which is something they very much should be doing.
I'm all for personal freedom. I think that you should be able to do whatever you want to your own body and that you should keep way more of what you earn than you currently do. But at the same time, you should not be allowed to damage other people by polluting just because our legal system dates from a time before air pollution was a big deal.
You say all that and then don't even tell us which candidate you're talking about? It does no good to advocate for a certain candidate if you don't tell people which one you're advocating. And it does me no good no read what you say if I have no idea who you're talking about.
I would not be so sure of this. As usual, The Simpsons got it right:
I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks!
Often people become wealthy due to both earning more and spending less. A lot of people I know who are just barely scraping by still buy nicer food and eat out quite a bit more than I do.
Now, I'm not making anywhere near $250,000/year, and maybe it changes a bit when you reach that level. Certainly it would be a rational choice to consider that spending twice as much money on food will make their lives better while having an almost ignorable impact on cash flow. But a lot of moderately rich people are also very frugal, so they may simply keep being cheap.
Here's a link to some examples.
The postscript example is a dead link. It does have a pair of apps with the same MD5 sum, one of which is a "hello world" program and the other of which pretends to erase your hard drive. It also has a library for creating such programs on your own.
As far as I know, it's not yet practical to create a brand new file unrelated to an existing one which collides with that existing file's hash. So I can't create a file that hashes the same as your file, I can only create a pair of files that hash the same. However, this is only a matter of time.
MD5 is dead for cryptographic purposes, and the time to stop using it for that is yesterday.
Well I don't know, why is this prohibition in the constitution?
Generally it's considered that "cruel punishment" is a subset from just plain old "punishment", where the punishment is particularly designed to create suffering rather than to simply right wrongs or restrict the criminal. Therefore prison by itself is not considered cruel, but burning alive is.
False. MD5 has the property that if you can find two bytestreams that collide, appending identical data to the end will continue to produce two different files that collide. Furthermore, the collision-finders are able to take an arbitrary prefix, and then append random data to that prefix until a collision is found.
What does this mean? It means you can take a file with a blob of random data in the middle, then generate two files with identical hashes but different random blobs of data in the middle.
This, in turn, allows you to do things like create applications, postscript files, HTML files, and other things which hash identically but act or display completely differently. (You embed both behaviors in the file, then switch depending on the contents of the random data. A close examination will turn up the "bad" side, lying inactive, but simply opening the file will make it appear that all is well.)
It's certainly not as good as being able to match an arbitrary hash, but MD5 collisions are entirely practical to take advantage of today.
At this point, MD5 should be considered to be a checksum, not a validator. MD5 is still very good at detecting random noise injected into a data stream but it should no longer be considered to have any real utility for detecting malicious changes.
I could hack into your computer and plant pictures. Then you would have the pictures on your computer. Are you then guilty? Is that situation cut and dry?
It seems to me that most people, on this site and elsewhere, don't really believe in evidence, due process, or innocent until proven guilty. They think that suspects are guilty, period. The rest of the stuff is just a formality meant to please the judges. According to this attitude, if the crime is heinous enough and the publicly-available evidence damning enough, the trial becomes redundant and pointless.
This attitude, quite frankly, scares the everliving shit out of me. Everyone deserves a fair trial, and that means properly obtained evidence. You can't simply throw this out because you think a particular crime is really extra special bad.
Your attitude scares me. Nobody should be flayed and burned at all, much less where they stand.
Everybody deserves a trial. And everybody who is found guilty at a trial deserves punishment which is not cruel or unusual.
At the risk of Godwinning the thread, they didn't flay or burn the top Nazi leadership. They gave them trials, then hanged or imprisoned them. These people were responsible for far worse crimes than "taking advantage" of a single five-year-old child, but we didn't think that their punishment should exceed the law.
I'm not offended. I am a bit annoyed that people are starting to talk about "iPhones" instead of "cell phones" for no other reason than that iPhones happen to be popular at the moment. But it's hardly surprising.
But yes, I believe 100% that the only reason that article got written was to bring in money one way or another. Why do you run that site otherwise? It's to make people aware of your product and enhance your reputation, so that you can sell more books and bring in more money. I suppose it's possible that you run it as a charity, but that strikes me as really unlikely, and doesn't fit the evidence.
Are you now pretending you didn't imply that the only reason we published this article was for, and I quote you directly, "ad hits"?
Those links on the side advertising iPhone: The Missing Manual ($24.99), Building Internet Firewalls ($49.95) and Essential System Administration ($54.95) are all advertisements, even if they're for your own product and are therefore "free".
Yeah, I was thinking of forums. You're right that on other sites it will do less damage. (It will still push everything below it down a great distance, which hurts.) In my experience forums are by far the worst hotlink abusers but your experience, of course, may vary.
Not sure why everybody assumes I think that the people who build voting machines should be forbidden from participating in the political process. A much simpler and more foolproof solution to the dilemma I pose is to simply not use voting machines in the first place.
There are no paid ads in the article.
Please don't insult my intelligence. You sell books, and there are a bunch of book recommendations right in the sidebar. Increased traffic benefits you monetarily. It doesn't have to be in the form of getting a fraction of a cent per hit from Google for that to be the case.
Actually, the idea for the article came from a conference call where we kept getting interference, and it was because two participants had their shiny new iPhones in the room. We've all heard this type of interference before, but never as much as with the iPhone. James decided to talk to the FCC and Apple and whoever else would discuss things in a way that an interested layman could understand.
Except that it's not presented as "this is what every GSM phone does", it is presented as "this is what iPhones [the hottest new cell phone out there which everybody is abuzz about, come see us talk about it] do".
I'm not criticizing terribly much, here, but it's pretty obviously capitalizing on the iPhone's current popularity rather than simply being a straight informative article.
If you're building the machines then you can set them up to misreport the results and nobody is the wiser. Systems can be built to defeat this, but why would such a person build one?
Remember what site you're posting to, now.
At over 400,000 pixels per byte, I'd say pretty damned well.
Good point, forgot about that one. Of course that's federal, and voting is state/local, and never the twain shall meet....
Assuming you mean the 20000x20000 jpeg, it appears to be circulating the net as a file called "dontloadthis.jpg". Here is an example.
If you go too far left, you get Stalin. If you go too far right, you get Hitler.
Politics is not a line, it is a circle. Going to extremes in either direction gets you to the same point.
Something people are strangely unaware of is that 1984 was not intended to show what would happen if the Communists won. Rather, it was intended to show what would happen if the West continued to sacrifice everything in order to fight Communism. In other words, the so-called "Free World" would become like the enemy they meant to fight.
Kind of like what's happening now!
(And an aside: in 1948 prosperity was long from an all-time high in the West. Europe was still in the midst of recovering from the unimaginably devastating effects of WWII. Even the UK, which escaped with relatively little damage from the war, was in dire economic straits afterwards because they had to essentially mortgage the entire country to pay for everything. Things were much better in the US, of course, since at the end of the war the US had literally 50% of the production capacity of the entire world, but that prosperity was not mirrored to the rest of the West for quite some time.)
You're an interesting study in self contradiction. First you state that the US was unable to respond with sufficient force after 9/11. Then you state that the US showed "an extreme level of restraint" when dealing with terrorists. Well, which is it? You can't have both!
Wandering off the topic, but I've heard of someone who was ticketed for jaywalking. Not only was he ticketed for jaywalking, but he was ticketed for crossing against the light in order to assist the victim of a car accident. The policeman who wrote the ticket was the one who had arrived on the scene of the accident. If that's not the sure indicator of a total asshole, I don't know what is. (This story is coming to you third-hand, so take it with a grain of salt.)
I guess this has some relevance. If a law is only partially enforced then it is much more abusive than either one which is completely enforced or one which is never enforced. For example, it wouldn't be too big a leap to suppose that people will get prosecuted for leaking information, but only if it hurts whatever side is in power.
The US has no national identity system and therefore no way to automatically determine if you're a citizen, much less track where you are all the time. It's legal (I think) and within the realm of practicality to live completely off the radar as far as the government is concerned. Obviously you're going to need to interact with the government in order to legally drive a car, buy a house, or other such things, but you don't have to do them. And someone who lives off the radar in other respects should still be allowed to vote, and he is as long as he can prove his residency and citizenship somehow.
It happens sometimes. Certainly you shouldn't have been modded down.
Just so you have the full picture, there are two separate GSM providers in the US and, I think, three CDMA providers. All of them have been around for quite a while. I'm quite sure that this article is just a lame attempt to mooch off the iPhone's popularity for ad hits, not any legitimate surprise or concern on the part of the O'Reilly writers.
You assumed it was all CDMA, yet we were somehow experiencing the GSM buzz with our GSM iPhones which... don't connect to a network?
Sorry, but that's a big logic fail....