Ever read it? Very little to do with the movie, other than name and vague plot reuse.
Being fiction, it's highly unlikely to have anything of strategic significance, but it does speak on essential differences between enlisted, NCOs, and commissioned officers. It also speaks to the balance between privilege and responsiblity, and military and civilian. Heinlein was a naval officer, so had at least some experience.
Yet every time the book comes up in connection with the movie, someone shouts, "Facist!" I'm not sure why, but then I read the book back in high school, over 30 years ago.
I know and understand, though I didn't mention sending fake work back to SETI, etc. As I said, my idea is probably impractical.
I'd rather contribute to solving global warming by participating in distributed weather modeling than contribute to global warming by burning electrons calculating hashcash postage. Maybe if we could just eradicate spam, then the expense of hashcash would be more than offset by saving energy now spent on wasted bandwidth.
That's one thing about RPOW and hashcash that strikes me just a little off. All of this 'work' that we're paying with is just useless busy-work. It's worthless calculation, they're just measuring our willingness to waste our computer's time in order to send them an email.
How about if:
They team up with SETI@home, folding@home, and the like. When you turn in a work unit, they have a secure arrangement with some sort of postage stamp server, and you get sent the stamp. This only makes sense with a central stamp server, because I'm trying to make the stamps 'cheap' to make, and use the compute effort for something useful.
My suggestion is flawed, probably fatally, especially compared to basic server-less hashcash. I'm just motivated by a wish for that compute time to do something useful.
The RPOW website is really easier to understand if you first read the hashcash website it point to. So let's talk first about hashcash, since RPOW is mostly an extension.
With hashcash, I take a datestamp, the recipient's address, and some garbage characters, and put them in an X-hashcash header as part of the email. The garbage characters have been precalculated to give some number of '0's at the front of an SHA1 hash of the header. It's computationally expensive to force those '0's, the more '0's, the higher the expense. (The hashcash site mentioned 4 hours to produce 32 '0's on his system.) But it's cheap to verify that those '0's are there in the hash of the header. That's what makes the system work.
There is no challenge-response in hashcash. You publish a 'price', some number of hashcash '0's, to receive email. If the email is in you whitelist (and presumably has a good SPF) call it good. Call other mail without an X-hashcash header spam. You can then validate the X-hashcash headers on your system. Valid headers are stored, and since they contain a datestamp in cleartext, you can purge them after some interval. Note that you only store valid headers, and only for a limited time, so the database doesn't grow forever.
Hashcash requires no central server or database.
RPOW works off of hashcash. You make a hashcash 'stamp' and trade it in for a RPOW token. Since the RPOW lets that original computational effort be reused, it lets you up the 'price'. ie - require more '0's in the hash.
I haven't read the documentation thoroughly, but I suspect that RPOW is validated at the server, not by challenge/response. But remember that each RPOW ticket is used only once, and once shown secure, there wouldn't be a lot of attempts at spoofing. So the traffic volume (and server requirements) should remain reasonable. In other words, the server traffic would be related to the level of legitimate email, not the level of spam. Oh, when you check the RPOW with the server, it hands back a new RPOW that you can use to send email. As far as I can tell, there is no theoretical (only practical) lifetime limit to the tokens.
I'm less enthusiastic about RPOW than hashcash, simply because of the central server requirement. I also wonder/fear about the feasibility of building an SHA1 engine out of FPGAs that could precalculate stamps faster than any regular PC, and then distribute them to spambots for mailing.
It's worth linking through to the hashcash site, too. It's fast to validate tokens, and you only store valid ones. That keeps the size within reason. Don't know how RPOW handles it, but the date is part of the hashcash token, and you can set the expiry as part of the validation, also trimming your database.
I think that the grandparent meant that any exploitation of solar energy is historical, incidental, and non-technological. In other words, if plants hadn't had photosynthesis for something approaching a billion years, we'd consider getting oxygen that way a long-shot, and look for a way to extract it from oil. (insert irony emoticon here)
The point being that solar energy efforts get a pittance of money compared to oil exploration. In the past, that has probably been justified. But within the last 10-20 years there have been numerous technological breakthroughs that could really make a difference, and deserve better funding.
I'm one of those in the middle - I have nmap and Nessus installed on my laptop. I use it to do security scanning at home and for friends.
Nor do I have any problem with target shooting or hunting. (as long as you eat what you kill) I'm a little queasy about people who own a gun for home protection, but only because the (admittedly anecdotal) evidence I've heard indicates that those people can be more dangerous to themselves and innocents than to criminals. By the way, I neither hunt nor shoot now, but I did get the rifle and shotgun merit badge, decades ago.
But your inner ear doesn't measure anything relative to the moving tile. It measures your acceleration relative to inertial space. Velocity is relative, acceleration isn't.
I didn't say that at all. My position on gun control is somewhere between gun control advocates and the NRA - somewhere in the middle.
Same for nmap. I happen to have nmap and Nessus installed on my laptop, specifically for security scanning for home and friends.
I don't believe in banning tools just because they might be dangerous - I believe in granting them heightened respect. A gun and nmap are both powerful and dangerous tools, and their good or evil lie with the intent of the wielder. To pretend nmap is just a garden-variety tool is unwise, IMHO.
One sentence, and this IS the Microsoft dilemma: How can you make your products ubiquitous, yet not a commodity, and keep that up over the long term?
That's really what Microsoft is striving to do. As the old quote goes, "a computer on every desk, running Microsoft products," with the hidden implication, "and only Microsoft products." Yet things that are on every desk are commodities. If I look on my desk, I see papers, two mice, two keyboards, speakers, a CRT, a stapler, a phone, a calculator, etc. ALL of those things are commodities. The CRT is connected to a computer running a non-commodity OS, but that's because it's a non-commodity engineering workstation.
The big drive of the PC is that it's a commodity. That's why the price is so low, because of commoditization. Everything in it is a commodity, except the CPU and the OS. Even the CPU has many commodity-like traits about it, at least as long as there is SOME competition in that marketplace.
How many other things in life ACT like commodity without commodity pricing?
Unfortunately, rather than Microsoft realizing that they're in an unstable situation and girding their loins to exist in a more sensible software landscape, others are trying to mimic their business model.
It would be reasonable for whitehouse.org to try and claim 1st ammendment rights as political free speech. At whitehouse.com they can only claim free speech, without the political. Though oddly enough, the Falwell case resembles whitehouse.gov vs whitehouse.org more than it does whitehouse.gov vs whitehouse.com. The (former) domain owner was making a political/social comment by using the name.
Pretty easy to do when most of the US news media is 0wn3d. Unfortunately, today's media, at least broadcast media, is at the forefront of corporatism, and they Stick Together. (Try searching/. for Ted Turner, if your memory is short. I don't even have to get into coverage and non-coverage of the political season.)
Forget "relieving us of work." Back when technology was glowingly thoought to "relieve us of work" we forgot that doing so would also "relieve us of a paycheck." Even though one can accept that you'll need to improve your skills, learn new things, etc, the assumption that there'll be even more new higher-skill jobs doesn't play true.
At the executive level, you implement technology to improve profitability. Eliminating low-level jobs, only to require more high-level jobs doesn't make economic sense, unless it increases your volume/revenue even more.
In other words, today's market is largely demand-limited, and in such a market supply-side economics just plain fail.
thinks that somewhere, big multinationals are tired of subscribing fees to scientific journals, and want to reduce that cost. The cynic in my doubts that this has much of anything with doing the Right Thing, and more to do with money.
I find it really sad that my second thought about my government's actions would be so.
Tuesday night my son and I put XP-Pro on the computer he'll be taking off to college. The install went well, and it was good to see it support the hardware out of the box. I think we may have needed the nForce2 CD, but that was it. The Radeon 8500LE was properly recognized, installed, and configured.
The next day he installed Elite Force 2, but it wouldn't run, he said it reported 'something about opengl'. We have a Quake3 Linux, and used it's pak file, installing the point release for Windows. This time I watched it complain about opengl, or lack thereof.
Though the Radeon 8500LE was detected, drivers installed, and configured, somehow OpenGL was missing. I didn't know ATI made Radeon drivers without OpenGL.
We went to ATITech, got the released (not beta, or special in any way) drivers, removed the old drivers, rebooted and installed the new ones.
Now Quake3 works just fine, maybe he's tried Elite Force 2, by now. The conspiracy theorist in me says, "Hmmmmmmmm."
My son leaves for college in a few weeks. I bowed to the inevitable and helped him put XP-Pro on this week, and was hoping to get SP2 on before he leaves.
McWorld is well-phrased. I hadn't put my arguments into those words, though I had been thinking that currently the US isn't doing too good a job of being the Champion of Civilizaton. For that matter, the rest of Western Civilization is acting rather badly with regards to excessive economic control, too.
The irony of it all... The folks that wave the flag, trumpet freedom, and thump their Bibles, by their words and actions, appear to stand for restriction of personal rights, except for gun ownership and the ability to make money. The pinpoint focus of the highest irony is that such emphasis on the ability to make money seems to me to be a lot like Worship of Mammon. Not that I'm against Greed, a proper amount of it is good motivation. But too much of *anything* is bad, and Greed is no exception. IMHO as a nation we're *far* out of balance, in this respect.
I almost remembered something fuzzy about an oz of gold not being like a regular oz, but figured it wouldn't be so far off as to destroy my argument. I guess I should have put in a disclaimer.
Value is also a function of location, location, location. I suspect that for instance, easily obtained water in space is worth more than gold on Earth. Or to put that in different terms, by the time you factor in launch costs from Earth, water is worth its weight in gold.
Just checked, gold is $391/oz, or $6256/lb, according to a quick google search. Launch cost is $5000/lb LEO to $18,000 GEO, same source.
So water on-orbit is roughly worth its weight in gold. The higher you go, the more valuable it gets.
Science Fiction anticipates...
on
Lawyers In Space...
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Someone else mentioned "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and there are a few other references worth mentioning. One is even fact, not fiction.
Claiming bodies in space. Claiming space, itself. (sans bodies)
First, a relevant boot was (ISTR) "Inherit the Stars" by Po?l, (Poul Anderson for Frederick Pohl) about the crew of the first (generation-style) starship trying to write a history for their future children, to understand their roots. The rest of the book was a series of vignettes in that frame. Many had legal ramificatons, one in particular was appropriate.
It was about Earth, the Asteroid Republic, and the inhabitants of Vesta. The folks on Vesta felt like members of the Asteroid Republic, and acted that way. But technically, the (leading?) Trojans belonged to Earth, and Vesta was part of that group. So Earth wanted to 'enforce it's rights' and the Vestans weren't happy.
*SPOILER* They got Earth to see how much easier it would be to ship raw materials off Vesta if it was outside the Trojan's gravity well. So they built a mass engine to change the asteroid's orbit, slightly. As soon as the orbit changed, they were no longer in the Trojans, so no longer part of Earth. Their application to join the Asteroid Republic had already been prepared and submitted, and was quickly granted.
This particular asteroid, being part of the Trojans, was defined by its orbit. Change the orbit, change the asteroid, effectively.
To a more real case - Arthur C. Clarke.
He figured out the concept of geosynchronous orbit. In these days, he could/would have patented it. Perhaps in past/future days he would have claimed it, and tried to rent it out.
IMHO, some form of property rights are necessary in order to move into space. It does no good to do the hard work of improving a place, or even access to that particular space, only to have someone else jump in, claiming 'no property rights in space!' Reward for effort and investment is deserved. Mere gatekeepers are not. Sounds like IP Law.
I have little confidence in Space Property Rights being developed with any more sanity that IP Law.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever read it? Very little to do with the movie, other than name and vague plot reuse.
Being fiction, it's highly unlikely to have anything of strategic significance, but it does speak on essential differences between enlisted, NCOs, and commissioned officers. It also speaks to the balance between privilege and responsiblity, and military and civilian. Heinlein was a naval officer, so had at least some experience.
Yet every time the book comes up in connection with the movie, someone shouts, "Facist!" I'm not sure why, but then I read the book back in high school, over 30 years ago.
I know and understand, though I didn't mention sending fake work back to SETI, etc. As I said, my idea is probably impractical.
I'd rather contribute to solving global warming by participating in distributed weather modeling than contribute to global warming by burning electrons calculating hashcash postage. Maybe if we could just eradicate spam, then the expense of hashcash would be more than offset by saving energy now spent on wasted bandwidth.
That's one thing about RPOW and hashcash that strikes me just a little off. All of this 'work' that we're paying with is just useless busy-work. It's worthless calculation, they're just measuring our willingness to waste our computer's time in order to send them an email.
How about if:
They team up with SETI@home, folding@home, and the like. When you turn in a work unit, they have a secure arrangement with some sort of postage stamp server, and you get sent the stamp. This only makes sense with a central stamp server, because I'm trying to make the stamps 'cheap' to make, and use the compute effort for something useful.
My suggestion is flawed, probably fatally, especially compared to basic server-less hashcash. I'm just motivated by a wish for that compute time to do something useful.
The RPOW website is really easier to understand if you first read the hashcash website it point to. So let's talk first about hashcash, since RPOW is mostly an extension.
With hashcash, I take a datestamp, the recipient's address, and some garbage characters, and put them in an X-hashcash header as part of the email. The garbage characters have been precalculated to give some number of '0's at the front of an SHA1 hash of the header. It's computationally expensive to force those '0's, the more '0's, the higher the expense. (The hashcash site mentioned 4 hours to produce 32 '0's on his system.) But it's cheap to verify that those '0's are there in the hash of the header. That's what makes the system work.
There is no challenge-response in hashcash. You publish a 'price', some number of hashcash '0's, to receive email. If the email is in you whitelist (and presumably has a good SPF) call it good. Call other mail without an X-hashcash header spam. You can then validate the X-hashcash headers on your system. Valid headers are stored, and since they contain a datestamp in cleartext, you can purge them after some interval. Note that you only store valid headers, and only for a limited time, so the database doesn't grow forever.
Hashcash requires no central server or database.
RPOW works off of hashcash. You make a hashcash 'stamp' and trade it in for a RPOW token. Since the RPOW lets that original computational effort be reused, it lets you up the 'price'. ie - require more '0's in the hash.
I haven't read the documentation thoroughly, but I suspect that RPOW is validated at the server, not by challenge/response. But remember that each RPOW ticket is used only once, and once shown secure, there wouldn't be a lot of attempts at spoofing. So the traffic volume (and server requirements) should remain reasonable. In other words, the server traffic would be related to the level of legitimate email, not the level of spam. Oh, when you check the RPOW with the server, it hands back a new RPOW that you can use to send email. As far as I can tell, there is no theoretical (only practical) lifetime limit to the tokens.
I'm less enthusiastic about RPOW than hashcash, simply because of the central server requirement. I also wonder/fear about the feasibility of building an SHA1 engine out of FPGAs that could precalculate stamps faster than any regular PC, and then distribute them to spambots for mailing.
It's worth linking through to the hashcash site, too. It's fast to validate tokens, and you only store valid ones. That keeps the size within reason. Don't know how RPOW handles it, but the date is part of the hashcash token, and you can set the expiry as part of the validation, also trimming your database.
I think that the grandparent meant that any exploitation of solar energy is historical, incidental, and non-technological. In other words, if plants hadn't had photosynthesis for something approaching a billion years, we'd consider getting oxygen that way a long-shot, and look for a way to extract it from oil. (insert irony emoticon here)
The point being that solar energy efforts get a pittance of money compared to oil exploration. In the past, that has probably been justified. But within the last 10-20 years there have been numerous technological breakthroughs that could really make a difference, and deserve better funding.
I'm one of those in the middle - I have nmap and Nessus installed on my laptop. I use it to do security scanning at home and for friends.
Nor do I have any problem with target shooting or hunting. (as long as you eat what you kill) I'm a little queasy about people who own a gun for home protection, but only because the (admittedly anecdotal) evidence I've heard indicates that those people can be more dangerous to themselves and innocents than to criminals. By the way, I neither hunt nor shoot now, but I did get the rifle and shotgun merit badge, decades ago.
But your inner ear doesn't measure anything relative to the moving tile. It measures your acceleration relative to inertial space. Velocity is relative, acceleration isn't.
It's a tool. Period. You're right, in that it's useful for script-kiddies. But it's also useful for security and networking.
Comparing nmap to grep is like comparing a chainsaw to a gardening trowel. In each category, both are tools, both are useful, the former is dangerous.
I didn't say that at all. My position on gun control is somewhere between gun control advocates and the NRA - somewhere in the middle.
Same for nmap. I happen to have nmap and Nessus installed on my laptop, specifically for security scanning for home and friends.
I don't believe in banning tools just because they might be dangerous - I believe in granting them heightened respect. A gun and nmap are both powerful and dangerous tools, and their good or evil lie with the intent of the wielder. To pretend nmap is just a garden-variety tool is unwise, IMHO.
Could it be because nmap IS an attack tool?
A gun in the hands of a policeman generally helps our society be a safer place. The gun in the hands of a criminal generally does the opposite.
It's simple, nmap is just like a gun. One key difference - the Geek Lobby is nowhere near as organized or influential as the NRA.
One sentence, and this IS the Microsoft dilemma: How can you make your products ubiquitous, yet not a commodity, and keep that up over the long term?
That's really what Microsoft is striving to do. As the old quote goes, "a computer on every desk, running Microsoft products," with the hidden implication, "and only Microsoft products." Yet things that are on every desk are commodities. If I look on my desk, I see papers, two mice, two keyboards, speakers, a CRT, a stapler, a phone, a calculator, etc. ALL of those things are commodities. The CRT is connected to a computer running a non-commodity OS, but that's because it's a non-commodity engineering workstation.
The big drive of the PC is that it's a commodity. That's why the price is so low, because of commoditization. Everything in it is a commodity, except the CPU and the OS. Even the CPU has many commodity-like traits about it, at least as long as there is SOME competition in that marketplace.
How many other things in life ACT like commodity without commodity pricing?
Unfortunately, rather than Microsoft realizing that they're in an unstable situation and girding their loins to exist in a more sensible software landscape, others are trying to mimic their business model.
But there's no proper horizontal acceleration. That would be the problem.
It would be reasonable for whitehouse.org to try and claim 1st ammendment rights as political free speech. At whitehouse.com they can only claim free speech, without the political. Though oddly enough, the Falwell case resembles whitehouse.gov vs whitehouse.org more than it does whitehouse.gov vs whitehouse.com. The (former) domain owner was making a political/social comment by using the name.
Someone has already mentioned the "katie.com" case, and there have been "slashdo" jokes.
But how about (nsfw) http://www.whitehouse.com/? Is this the precedent that makes it easier to take them down without looking like Big Brother?
They MUST be infringing on SCO IP, somewhere, somewow!
Pretty easy to do when most of the US news media is 0wn3d. Unfortunately, today's media, at least broadcast media, is at the forefront of corporatism, and they Stick Together. (Try searching /. for Ted Turner, if your memory is short. I don't even have to get into coverage and non-coverage of the political season.)
Forget "relieving us of work." Back when technology was glowingly thoought to "relieve us of work" we forgot that doing so would also "relieve us of a paycheck." Even though one can accept that you'll need to improve your skills, learn new things, etc, the assumption that there'll be even more new higher-skill jobs doesn't play true.
At the executive level, you implement technology to improve profitability. Eliminating low-level jobs, only to require more high-level jobs doesn't make economic sense, unless it increases your volume/revenue even more.
In other words, today's market is largely demand-limited, and in such a market supply-side economics just plain fail.
thinks that somewhere, big multinationals are tired of subscribing fees to scientific journals, and want to reduce that cost. The cynic in my doubts that this has much of anything with doing the Right Thing, and more to do with money.
I find it really sad that my second thought about my government's actions would be so.
Tuesday night my son and I put XP-Pro on the computer he'll be taking off to college. The install went well, and it was good to see it support the hardware out of the box. I think we may have needed the nForce2 CD, but that was it. The Radeon 8500LE was properly recognized, installed, and configured.
The next day he installed Elite Force 2, but it wouldn't run, he said it reported 'something about opengl'. We have a Quake3 Linux, and used it's pak file, installing the point release for Windows. This time I watched it complain about opengl, or lack thereof.
Though the Radeon 8500LE was detected, drivers installed, and configured, somehow OpenGL was missing. I didn't know ATI made Radeon drivers without OpenGL.
We went to ATITech, got the released (not beta, or special in any way) drivers, removed the old drivers, rebooted and installed the new ones.
Now Quake3 works just fine, maybe he's tried Elite Force 2, by now. The conspiracy theorist in me says, "Hmmmmmmmm."
My son leaves for college in a few weeks. I bowed to the inevitable and helped him put XP-Pro on this week, and was hoping to get SP2 on before he leaves.
Better get going on the Linux install.
After a little time to sleep on it...
McWorld is well-phrased. I hadn't put my arguments into those words, though I had been thinking that currently the US isn't doing too good a job of being the Champion of Civilizaton. For that matter, the rest of Western Civilization is acting rather badly with regards to excessive economic control, too.
The irony of it all... The folks that wave the flag, trumpet freedom, and thump their Bibles, by their words and actions, appear to stand for restriction of personal rights, except for gun ownership and the ability to make money. The pinpoint focus of the highest irony is that such emphasis on the ability to make money seems to me to be a lot like Worship of Mammon. Not that I'm against Greed, a proper amount of it is good motivation. But too much of *anything* is bad, and Greed is no exception. IMHO as a nation we're *far* out of balance, in this respect.
I almost remembered something fuzzy about an oz of gold not being like a regular oz, but figured it wouldn't be so far off as to destroy my argument. I guess I should have put in a disclaimer.
Value is also a function of location, location, location. I suspect that for instance, easily obtained water in space is worth more than gold on Earth. Or to put that in different terms, by the time you factor in launch costs from Earth, water is worth its weight in gold.
Just checked, gold is $391/oz, or $6256/lb, according to a quick google search.
Launch cost is $5000/lb LEO to $18,000 GEO, same source.
So water on-orbit is roughly worth its weight in gold. The higher you go, the more valuable it gets.
Someone else mentioned "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and there are a few other references worth mentioning. One is even fact, not fiction.
Claiming bodies in space.
Claiming space, itself. (sans bodies)
First, a relevant boot was (ISTR) "Inherit the Stars" by Po?l, (Poul Anderson for Frederick Pohl) about the crew of the first (generation-style) starship trying to write a history for their future children, to understand their roots. The rest of the book was a series of vignettes in that frame. Many had legal ramificatons, one in particular was appropriate.
It was about Earth, the Asteroid Republic, and the inhabitants of Vesta. The folks on Vesta felt like members of the Asteroid Republic, and acted that way. But technically, the (leading?) Trojans belonged to Earth, and Vesta was part of that group. So Earth wanted to 'enforce it's rights' and the Vestans weren't happy.
*SPOILER*
They got Earth to see how much easier it would be to ship raw materials off Vesta if it was outside the Trojan's gravity well. So they built a mass engine to change the asteroid's orbit, slightly. As soon as the orbit changed, they were no longer in the Trojans, so no longer part of Earth. Their application to join the Asteroid Republic had already been prepared and submitted, and was quickly granted.
This particular asteroid, being part of the Trojans, was defined by its orbit. Change the orbit, change the asteroid, effectively.
To a more real case - Arthur C. Clarke.
He figured out the concept of geosynchronous orbit. In these days, he could/would have patented it. Perhaps in past/future days he would have claimed it, and tried to rent it out.
IMHO, some form of property rights are necessary in order to move into space. It does no good to do the hard work of improving a place, or even access to that particular space, only to have someone else jump in, claiming 'no property rights in space!' Reward for effort and investment is deserved. Mere gatekeepers are not. Sounds like IP Law.
I have little confidence in Space Property Rights being developed with any more sanity that IP Law.