Please point to *ANY* law which prohibits the recreation of somebody else's work when the use is strictly personal.
You will note that patent violations only actually ever occur after the intent to distribute copies is present.
Because, to be frank.... if the use is genuinely personal, then absolutely nobody else, let alone the patent holder, is going to even have the faintest idea that it was ever copied in the first place, let alone know who they should be seeking compensation from.
Even if a product is patented, there is absolute *NO* prohibition that the patent holder can leverage which prevents anyone from building an implementation of that patent for their own private purposes.... One is merely prohibited by patent law from distributing such a self-manufactured product to anyone else.
In a nutshell, personal use objects cannot and do not infringe on patents (they may infringe on other things, however... for example, if there are legal safety regulations which must be satisfied with the product, then a self-made product might still be illegal to use even for personal use because it has not been so certified, and they may not necessarily be under any obligation to certify such copies).
Letters or vowels not being the same is not important in rhyming.
The words "way" and "sleigh", for example, rhyme with each other perfectly... in spite of having absolutely no common letters.
I did not (and would not) say that door-hinge and orange is a perfect rhyme, however... only that is very good. Specifically, their rhyming parts differ in a single phoneme, where "hinge" uses the short 'i' sound, orange uses the schwa (upside-down e) sound in its second syllable, so while it's not perfect, a rhyme that is still pretty good is created. While not all phonemes are interchangeable in this way to qualify as a very good rhyme, these two happen to be. (the schwa is actually interchangeable with more phonemes when it comes to rhyming than any other single phoneme that is used in English words, to the best of my knowledge). An example of another fairly good rhyme for orange would be syringe (this is not as actually as good as door-hinge, because it differs from orange in two phonemes that would be required for a rhyme to occur... the 'i' sound compared to the schwa in the second syllable, and the long schwa sound in the first syllable of syringe to the vowel phoneme in the first syllable of orange (which doesn't have a specific name, as far as I know, but it's similar to a long "o" sound). In spite of this, the word is still quite passable as a rhyme, but not as good as door-hinge because it differs in an additional required phoneme.
In the end, rhyming is really far from a true or false issue... there are degrees of it. The similarity between the closing phonemes of each syllable should be identified before conclusively deciding that words can or cannot reasonably be considered to rhyme.
About 3 years ago, our government held a nationwide public consultation on copyright reform. The response was tremendous (greater response than any other similar consultation in our country's history, in fact), and with only a handful of exceptions, there was a very pronounced unifying voice among the responses, which was to *NOT* offer legal protections to digital locks in a similar manner to the US's DMCA.
But...meet Bill C-32 (for those of you unfamiliar with it, it's a lot like the DMCA, but doesn't have exceptions for things like fair dealing or personal use, both of which are explicitly listed in the bill as not being applicable when digital locks are present), which finally passed just this year. After being tabled and retabled, the conservatives finally managed to push it through on account of the majority government they were finally able to acquire after the last election, and the fact that enough of their electorate are ignorant enough about the implications of the law that there probably won't ever be any consequences for ignoring what people said that they wanted.
I've been programming in C for nearly 30 years... when I saw his counter-example, I still had to pause for just a second to think about it. Yes, I see what he did, and I've even used that pattern myself in software that I've written. There are quite legitimate reasons to use that form that are applicable to system programming, so I don't object to it over the conditional form (I actually even prefer it, in many cases), but a simple one-line comment which clarifies the intent would definitely be preferred.
The only assumption that you should be making about people who might have to maintain your code in the future, unless this is a personal project that nobody else is ever going to see, is that they are not going to be thinking exactly like you. Just because the maintainer of the code might be expected to have a certain level of competence doesn't mean that he or she will be familiar with every single idiom that you use. Clarity is paramount.
Consonant-based phonemes at the beginning of any syllable are typically ignored with respect to rhyming. The only consonant-based phonemes that must sound identical in order to rhyme are those which occur at the end of a syllable. Unless you are pronouncing door-hinge such that you are either introducing some additional sound after the 'r' in the first syllable and before the 'h' sound in the second syllable, or else are not pronouncing orange as a two syllable word, then yes... they rhyme. Quite well.
You've actually made a good point... atomicity is actually a *VERY* good reason to not use the conditional form, but not every application requires that. It's certainly not generally going to be the case that atomicity is a requirement, and often when it is, it would might be more practical to use an explicit mutex on your data to ensure nothing else touches it while you're using it. Even when mutexes are not practical (and I know that can very easily be the case), however, and atomicity is still required, I don't believe that readability should *EVER* be compromised.
A one-line comment next to the statement, much to the effect of
*lastptr = entry->next;// set whatever pointed to this entry to skip past this entry
Would definitely be adequate. Experienced programmers familiar with the pattern may not need the comment, but it's concise enough that it will not slow them down anywhere nearly as much as an uncommented equivalent line would slow down a programmer who is not as intimately familiar with the pattern.... I would see such delays a lot less a matter of how comfortable they might be with pointers than it is a matter of what kinds of code they might have been previously exposed to.
Yeah... it might be perfectly readable to a lot of people with loads of experience in C and pointer manuplation... but ultimately, it's still a level of obfuscation that to be perfectly honest, strikes me more like somebody wanting to show off their "cool hacker skillz" than it does any sort of performance benefit. At my old job, that kind of code wouldn't make it past a source code review unless it had a comment indicating why that choice was made (I remember one new guy even got fired during my time there because he kept doing that sort of stuff and not supplying comments to explain his rationale. Although in his case it was always some unusual bit-twiddling hacks, and not a pointer issue. He received at least two official warnings from our technical lead within his probation period, and within two weeks or so of the last one that I knew of, he was gone)
I believe that his pointer example is more a matter of personal style. I can easily see how doing away with the conditions will make for more efficient code, but in many cases, the preference he cites might also make the code a little more obfuscated. However, even that's nothing that a single-line comment wouldn't fix, making sure that whoever is reading the code fully realizes the intent behind it. I think perfectly valid arguments can be made for doing it either way.
Personally, I would classify this as a type of pointer design pattern that is ideal with linked list data structures, but I would not suggest that a person who doesn't regularly use every clever design pattern for pointers at every opportunity is necessarily less knowledgeable than one who does. In many cases, in fact, a person in the latter category may even be arguably guilty of simply trying to show off, rather than actually get whatever needed doing done.
First of all, criminal negligence cannot ever even apply unless an actual crime (something which is specifically against the law) has actually happened. The whole point of such a classification is that there aren't really any laws prohibiting it, because you can't exhaustively cover every single case. You can, however, still ascertain in a courtroom, after the fact, whether or not it would have been reasonable to expect somebody to have done something which would have prevented the crime from occurring, or the perpetrator of the crime escaping justice (operative word there being reasonable). Again, however, this would be something for a jury to decide. If you believe that deliberately deciding to be ignorant of things that could actually be in your own best interests (since not keeping track of who is using your equipment would prevent you from holding the user of it accountable to you for any wear and tear that occurs as a consequence of their use) is reasonable... if it should ever come down to you facing such an issue, then you're more than welcome to try and use that defense in a courtroom and see if it flies.
I remember reading in a scientific journal somewhere that a conservative estimate of human brain capacity would be on the order of multiple exabytes. But how could you ever hope to fill that up by the time you were twenty? (insert oblig porn joke here). Seriously, though, even if you used up a gigabyte of that much storage EVERY SINGLE SECOND that you lived, you would still have enough to remember well over a thousand years of experiences.
Can I see us expanding our brains using computers someday? Sure.... but not in capacity.... more like ability, and speed.
You're probably correct, actually. As the generation that used it most dies off, imperial usage will doubtless only continue to diminish.
My main point, however, is that although the transition was gradual, the most painful part of the transition actually passed quite quickly (and it wasn't even *that* painful). There were really only a handful of (relatively isolated) communities that had any noteworthy difficulty in converting to metric, but these incidents did not cause any sort of national upheaval or confusion that rocked the nation, as some Americans seem to think would happen to their country if they ever tried to convert. (I'm uncertain how to interpret such a self-evaluation in light of the fact that a nation such as Canada, which to my understanding has a larger cultural similarity to the USA than any other nation on the globe, has successfully made the switchover without such national crisis, since the most obvious conclusions don't reflect overly positively them).
No... not always. And there's a also a distinct trend towards thinking in metric that is a function of age.
My kids right now think in metric for almost everything. They have no intuitive notion of imperial distances such as yards or miles. They know the terms, but can't relate to them directly because they aren't regularly exposed to them. And for what it's worth, they talk about height in centimeters, not feet and inches (which my generation still does all the time). About the only time imperial ever comes up in conversation with them is when they are talking about weight, although they are comfortable with kilograms, it's usually not the unit that they seem to prefer to use in that context. However,I expect that my grandchildren (one of whom has just started school this fall) will probably end up thinking in kilograms and not pounds at all, and will be entirely of a metric mindset.
There are, believe it or not, times when you are much more concerned with keeping data from being eavesdropped on far more than you are concerned with who you're sending it to because, presumably, the identity of the recipient has already been confirmed to your satisfaction by some other process.
For example.... two people are communicating via ordinary radio. They exchange some discourse, and then determine that they must secure their communications with encryption to discuss more confidential matters. One party initiates a secure communication signal on the channel, and once the handshaking protocol is finished, they can engage in a completely encrypted communication on a channel that anyone could potentially eavesdrop on, but nobody would be able to comprehend the conversation, even if they had been eavesdropping from the beginning because of the nature of the protocol.
Canada managed to do the conversion... so it's not impossible. I was in grade 2 when the switchover started, in 1971, and I distinctly remember the school textbooks being one of the very first things to change. I won't try to argue that there wasn't any confusion during metric's introduction here, but from my understanding, it wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as a lot of people speculated it might be. Its adoption was in Canada was actually quite gradual, and if I remember correctly, the overall transition period lasted somewhere around a decade, completing just before I graduated high school.
I'd never get used to trying to figure out how to dress if it was 20C out
You might be surprised. When you're exposed to a particular system on an almost constant basis, you'll eventually get to a point that your brain will think in that system, unless you are actively trying to resist change.
I remember that my parents sometimes struggled with metric when it was introduced in Canada, but in the end, they still managed to get by. In fact, over time, both of them appeared to eventually acquire an intuitive way to convert between the systems. Although their conversion was not truly numerically accurate, it gave them enough of a mental picture of what they needed to know, in ways that they could relate to. I remember when my family was visiting them last summer, and I mentioned to them that the temperature the next day was supposed to be 30 degrees according to the weather report, my dad immediately commented about that being about 85 degrees, which is close enough in Fahrenheit that you wouldn't have a problem knowing how to dress for that weather, even if you only ever previously thought in imperial.
You don't need any previously shared secret to exchange data on an encryted communication path.
For example.... both A and B can independently choose their own commutative key pairs (such as RSA) for a communication. The intent is for these keys to be disposable, so they do not need to be kept in any long term storage, nor does either party need to inform the other of either of its keys. The keys must be commutative in that they could be applied in any order, and one half of each pair will decrypt whatever was encrypted by the other half.
A can randomly chooses something to be the starting point of a one-time hash for an upcoming secure communication, encrypts this data with one of its keys, and sends it. Since it is encrypted by one of the keys that A picked, and nobody else without physical access to A has any way to predict what keys it would have picked, this transmission from A to B is completely undecipherable by an eavesdropper. B then further encrypts the data with own of its own keys, and sends it back to A, so the data is different, but still encrypted. A now applies its second key to the new data stream and sends that back to B. It's worth noting that although both of A's keys have been applied, which would by themselves produce unencrypted data, one of B's keys has played a role in the value it now has, and so it will still be encrypted. It's worth noting that an eavesdropper who has been recording the conversation to this point may have enough data now to *potentially* start trying to decrypt the upcoming conversation, but the challenge of doing so with key pairs like RSA is NP-hard, and if the keys selected are wide enough, it will be completely impractical to do so... and even then, it still won't be generally achievable in real time (with a notable exception made for quantum computers, but nobody has yet demonstrated a completely scalable implementation of one that could eventually be applied to wide key encryption technologies). Finally, B decrypts the data on its own end, and can see the data that A had originally encrypted. A and B can now engage in a secure conversation using the secret data string that A selected.
Of course, this is highly vulnerable to MitM attacks, but for unrouted communications such as point-to-point radio, you can't readily act as an MitM, since any communication you pick up with your own antenna will also be continuing on past you and be picked up by the intended recipient before you would be able to try to forge any data and send it on. You would have to try to block the entire signal, which isn't going to be practical for broadcast radio signals. And if you were to try to do this anyways, you would create interference in the communication, and this would be instantly detectable by the listening party.
It can often be the case that the actual content of the data is more important than who it is going to... presumably, if the data should go to the wrong party, it will lack sufficient context to be useful to anyone but whom it was intended for.
I think you missed my point. The post to which I responded appeared to advocate that merely because something does not cause any actual harm to any person ought to apparently be sufficient reason for the activity to not be criminal.
Counterfeiting causes absolutely no physical harm to anybody. However, it is most definitely a very serious crime. That the counterfeiter may have borrowed the printing press from somebody else is irrelevant.
But for what it's worth, if you are trying to draw this closer to the idea of having an unsecured wifi, it's worth noting that lending a very high fidelity printing press to somebody who then proceeded to use it to counterfeit money *COULD* very easily make the lender guilty of criminal negligence if they had deliberately made a decision to allow anybody to freely use their press without bothering to keep records of who they lent it to. The negligence wouldn't be in the lending itself, however, the negligence in such a case would be in the not keeping track of who was using it, making it impossible for you to assist the police if they should trace the committing of a crime to your property. It might be up to a jury to decide whether you should be held criminally liable for that negligence, however.
That there aren't enough license plates to uniquely identify every person the planet is WHOLLY irrelevant to whether or not there are enough to uniquely identify cars (there are).
A license plate alone cannot identify who may be driving the car... at best only who might be the registered owner of it.
Uh.... if somebody takes the money, then they've *already* done something illegal. Full stop, right there. They took something that didn't belong to them. Let's say the money didn't actually belong to you, but was your responsibility. You wouldn't be guilty of stealing that money, but you'd still be held accountable for the part you played in the fact that any was missing. Whether the money is, in turn, used for any illegal activities is entirely irrelevant to the analogy I was making.
No... you can make communication on an otherwise completely open channel 100% eavesdrop-proof (to the extent that the discrete logarithm problem is not solvable for in a large domain of numbers in real-time).
And wireless point to point is not remotely difficult.... all you need is a transmitter and antenna that are strong and large enough to reach any reachable destination. CB can even be point-to-point quite easily.
Radio can be point-to-point. You can't exactly intercept an airborne signal and try to relay it without building a shield large enough to fully encompass the sender. Something that they would readily be aware of.
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Please point to *ANY* law which prohibits the recreation of somebody else's work when the use is strictly personal.
You will note that patent violations only actually ever occur after the intent to distribute copies is present.
Because, to be frank.... if the use is genuinely personal, then absolutely nobody else, let alone the patent holder, is going to even have the faintest idea that it was ever copied in the first place, let alone know who they should be seeking compensation from.
Even if a product is patented, there is absolute *NO* prohibition that the patent holder can leverage which prevents anyone from building an implementation of that patent for their own private purposes.... One is merely prohibited by patent law from distributing such a self-manufactured product to anyone else.
In a nutshell, personal use objects cannot and do not infringe on patents (they may infringe on other things, however... for example, if there are legal safety regulations which must be satisfied with the product, then a self-made product might still be illegal to use even for personal use because it has not been so certified, and they may not necessarily be under any obligation to certify such copies).
Letters or vowels not being the same is not important in rhyming.
The words "way" and "sleigh", for example, rhyme with each other perfectly... in spite of having absolutely no common letters.
I did not (and would not) say that door-hinge and orange is a perfect rhyme, however... only that is very good. Specifically, their rhyming parts differ in a single phoneme, where "hinge" uses the short 'i' sound, orange uses the schwa (upside-down e) sound in its second syllable, so while it's not perfect, a rhyme that is still pretty good is created. While not all phonemes are interchangeable in this way to qualify as a very good rhyme, these two happen to be. (the schwa is actually interchangeable with more phonemes when it comes to rhyming than any other single phoneme that is used in English words, to the best of my knowledge). An example of another fairly good rhyme for orange would be syringe (this is not as actually as good as door-hinge, because it differs from orange in two phonemes that would be required for a rhyme to occur... the 'i' sound compared to the schwa in the second syllable, and the long schwa sound in the first syllable of syringe to the vowel phoneme in the first syllable of orange (which doesn't have a specific name, as far as I know, but it's similar to a long "o" sound). In spite of this, the word is still quite passable as a rhyme, but not as good as door-hinge because it differs in an additional required phoneme.
In the end, rhyming is really far from a true or false issue... there are degrees of it. The similarity between the closing phonemes of each syllable should be identified before conclusively deciding that words can or cannot reasonably be considered to rhyme.
About 3 years ago, our government held a nationwide public consultation on copyright reform. The response was tremendous (greater response than any other similar consultation in our country's history, in fact), and with only a handful of exceptions, there was a very pronounced unifying voice among the responses, which was to *NOT* offer legal protections to digital locks in a similar manner to the US's DMCA.
But...meet Bill C-32 (for those of you unfamiliar with it, it's a lot like the DMCA, but doesn't have exceptions for things like fair dealing or personal use, both of which are explicitly listed in the bill as not being applicable when digital locks are present), which finally passed just this year. After being tabled and retabled, the conservatives finally managed to push it through on account of the majority government they were finally able to acquire after the last election, and the fact that enough of their electorate are ignorant enough about the implications of the law that there probably won't ever be any consequences for ignoring what people said that they wanted.
I've been programming in C for nearly 30 years... when I saw his counter-example, I still had to pause for just a second to think about it. Yes, I see what he did, and I've even used that pattern myself in software that I've written. There are quite legitimate reasons to use that form that are applicable to system programming, so I don't object to it over the conditional form (I actually even prefer it, in many cases), but a simple one-line comment which clarifies the intent would definitely be preferred.
The only assumption that you should be making about people who might have to maintain your code in the future, unless this is a personal project that nobody else is ever going to see, is that they are not going to be thinking exactly like you. Just because the maintainer of the code might be expected to have a certain level of competence doesn't mean that he or she will be familiar with every single idiom that you use. Clarity is paramount.
Consonant-based phonemes at the beginning of any syllable are typically ignored with respect to rhyming. The only consonant-based phonemes that must sound identical in order to rhyme are those which occur at the end of a syllable. Unless you are pronouncing door-hinge such that you are either introducing some additional sound after the 'r' in the first syllable and before the 'h' sound in the second syllable, or else are not pronouncing orange as a two syllable word, then yes... they rhyme. Quite well.
Where was an official statement from Google made to this effect?
You've actually made a good point... atomicity is actually a *VERY* good reason to not use the conditional form, but not every application requires that. It's certainly not generally going to be the case that atomicity is a requirement, and often when it is, it would might be more practical to use an explicit mutex on your data to ensure nothing else touches it while you're using it. Even when mutexes are not practical (and I know that can very easily be the case), however, and atomicity is still required, I don't believe that readability should *EVER* be compromised.
A one-line comment next to the statement, much to the effect of
Would definitely be adequate. Experienced programmers familiar with the pattern may not need the comment, but it's concise enough that it will not slow them down anywhere nearly as much as an uncommented equivalent line would slow down a programmer who is not as intimately familiar with the pattern.... I would see such delays a lot less a matter of how comfortable they might be with pointers than it is a matter of what kinds of code they might have been previously exposed to.
Yeah... it might be perfectly readable to a lot of people with loads of experience in C and pointer manuplation... but ultimately, it's still a level of obfuscation that to be perfectly honest, strikes me more like somebody wanting to show off their "cool hacker skillz" than it does any sort of performance benefit. At my old job, that kind of code wouldn't make it past a source code review unless it had a comment indicating why that choice was made (I remember one new guy even got fired during my time there because he kept doing that sort of stuff and not supplying comments to explain his rationale. Although in his case it was always some unusual bit-twiddling hacks, and not a pointer issue. He received at least two official warnings from our technical lead within his probation period, and within two weeks or so of the last one that I knew of, he was gone)
Unless you pronounce door-hinge and orange very differently from most people, I'd suggest that yes... they do.
I believe that his pointer example is more a matter of personal style. I can easily see how doing away with the conditions will make for more efficient code, but in many cases, the preference he cites might also make the code a little more obfuscated. However, even that's nothing that a single-line comment wouldn't fix, making sure that whoever is reading the code fully realizes the intent behind it. I think perfectly valid arguments can be made for doing it either way.
Personally, I would classify this as a type of pointer design pattern that is ideal with linked list data structures, but I would not suggest that a person who doesn't regularly use every clever design pattern for pointers at every opportunity is necessarily less knowledgeable than one who does. In many cases, in fact, a person in the latter category may even be arguably guilty of simply trying to show off, rather than actually get whatever needed doing done.
Actually, door-hinge rhymes quite well with orange.
First of all, criminal negligence cannot ever even apply unless an actual crime (something which is specifically against the law) has actually happened. The whole point of such a classification is that there aren't really any laws prohibiting it, because you can't exhaustively cover every single case. You can, however, still ascertain in a courtroom, after the fact, whether or not it would have been reasonable to expect somebody to have done something which would have prevented the crime from occurring, or the perpetrator of the crime escaping justice (operative word there being reasonable). Again, however, this would be something for a jury to decide. If you believe that deliberately deciding to be ignorant of things that could actually be in your own best interests (since not keeping track of who is using your equipment would prevent you from holding the user of it accountable to you for any wear and tear that occurs as a consequence of their use) is reasonable... if it should ever come down to you facing such an issue, then you're more than welcome to try and use that defense in a courtroom and see if it flies.
No, I do not. I live in Canada... about a 30 minute drive from the USA border.
On what basis is he making that claim?
I remember reading in a scientific journal somewhere that a conservative estimate of human brain capacity would be on the order of multiple exabytes. But how could you ever hope to fill that up by the time you were twenty? (insert oblig porn joke here). Seriously, though, even if you used up a gigabyte of that much storage EVERY SINGLE SECOND that you lived, you would still have enough to remember well over a thousand years of experiences.
Can I see us expanding our brains using computers someday? Sure.... but not in capacity.... more like ability, and speed.
You're probably correct, actually. As the generation that used it most dies off, imperial usage will doubtless only continue to diminish.
My main point, however, is that although the transition was gradual, the most painful part of the transition actually passed quite quickly (and it wasn't even *that* painful). There were really only a handful of (relatively isolated) communities that had any noteworthy difficulty in converting to metric, but these incidents did not cause any sort of national upheaval or confusion that rocked the nation, as some Americans seem to think would happen to their country if they ever tried to convert. (I'm uncertain how to interpret such a self-evaluation in light of the fact that a nation such as Canada, which to my understanding has a larger cultural similarity to the USA than any other nation on the globe, has successfully made the switchover without such national crisis, since the most obvious conclusions don't reflect overly positively them).
No... not always. And there's a also a distinct trend towards thinking in metric that is a function of age.
My kids right now think in metric for almost everything. They have no intuitive notion of imperial distances such as yards or miles. They know the terms, but can't relate to them directly because they aren't regularly exposed to them. And for what it's worth, they talk about height in centimeters, not feet and inches (which my generation still does all the time). About the only time imperial ever comes up in conversation with them is when they are talking about weight, although they are comfortable with kilograms, it's usually not the unit that they seem to prefer to use in that context. However,I expect that my grandchildren (one of whom has just started school this fall) will probably end up thinking in kilograms and not pounds at all, and will be entirely of a metric mindset.
There are, believe it or not, times when you are much more concerned with keeping data from being eavesdropped on far more than you are concerned with who you're sending it to because, presumably, the identity of the recipient has already been confirmed to your satisfaction by some other process.
For example.... two people are communicating via ordinary radio. They exchange some discourse, and then determine that they must secure their communications with encryption to discuss more confidential matters. One party initiates a secure communication signal on the channel, and once the handshaking protocol is finished, they can engage in a completely encrypted communication on a channel that anyone could potentially eavesdrop on, but nobody would be able to comprehend the conversation, even if they had been eavesdropping from the beginning because of the nature of the protocol.
Canada managed to do the conversion... so it's not impossible. I was in grade 2 when the switchover started, in 1971, and I distinctly remember the school textbooks being one of the very first things to change. I won't try to argue that there wasn't any confusion during metric's introduction here, but from my understanding, it wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as a lot of people speculated it might be. Its adoption was in Canada was actually quite gradual, and if I remember correctly, the overall transition period lasted somewhere around a decade, completing just before I graduated high school.
You might be surprised. When you're exposed to a particular system on an almost constant basis, you'll eventually get to a point that your brain will think in that system, unless you are actively trying to resist change.
I remember that my parents sometimes struggled with metric when it was introduced in Canada, but in the end, they still managed to get by. In fact, over time, both of them appeared to eventually acquire an intuitive way to convert between the systems. Although their conversion was not truly numerically accurate, it gave them enough of a mental picture of what they needed to know, in ways that they could relate to. I remember when my family was visiting them last summer, and I mentioned to them that the temperature the next day was supposed to be 30 degrees according to the weather report, my dad immediately commented about that being about 85 degrees, which is close enough in Fahrenheit that you wouldn't have a problem knowing how to dress for that weather, even if you only ever previously thought in imperial.
You don't need any previously shared secret to exchange data on an encryted communication path.
For example.... both A and B can independently choose their own commutative key pairs (such as RSA) for a communication. The intent is for these keys to be disposable, so they do not need to be kept in any long term storage, nor does either party need to inform the other of either of its keys. The keys must be commutative in that they could be applied in any order, and one half of each pair will decrypt whatever was encrypted by the other half.
A can randomly chooses something to be the starting point of a one-time hash for an upcoming secure communication, encrypts this data with one of its keys, and sends it. Since it is encrypted by one of the keys that A picked, and nobody else without physical access to A has any way to predict what keys it would have picked, this transmission from A to B is completely undecipherable by an eavesdropper. B then further encrypts the data with own of its own keys, and sends it back to A, so the data is different, but still encrypted. A now applies its second key to the new data stream and sends that back to B. It's worth noting that although both of A's keys have been applied, which would by themselves produce unencrypted data, one of B's keys has played a role in the value it now has, and so it will still be encrypted. It's worth noting that an eavesdropper who has been recording the conversation to this point may have enough data now to *potentially* start trying to decrypt the upcoming conversation, but the challenge of doing so with key pairs like RSA is NP-hard, and if the keys selected are wide enough, it will be completely impractical to do so... and even then, it still won't be generally achievable in real time (with a notable exception made for quantum computers, but nobody has yet demonstrated a completely scalable implementation of one that could eventually be applied to wide key encryption technologies). Finally, B decrypts the data on its own end, and can see the data that A had originally encrypted. A and B can now engage in a secure conversation using the secret data string that A selected.
Of course, this is highly vulnerable to MitM attacks, but for unrouted communications such as point-to-point radio, you can't readily act as an MitM, since any communication you pick up with your own antenna will also be continuing on past you and be picked up by the intended recipient before you would be able to try to forge any data and send it on. You would have to try to block the entire signal, which isn't going to be practical for broadcast radio signals. And if you were to try to do this anyways, you would create interference in the communication, and this would be instantly detectable by the listening party.
It can often be the case that the actual content of the data is more important than who it is going to... presumably, if the data should go to the wrong party, it will lack sufficient context to be useful to anyone but whom it was intended for.
I think you missed my point. The post to which I responded appeared to advocate that merely because something does not cause any actual harm to any person ought to apparently be sufficient reason for the activity to not be criminal.
Counterfeiting causes absolutely no physical harm to anybody. However, it is most definitely a very serious crime. That the counterfeiter may have borrowed the printing press from somebody else is irrelevant.
But for what it's worth, if you are trying to draw this closer to the idea of having an unsecured wifi, it's worth noting that lending a very high fidelity printing press to somebody who then proceeded to use it to counterfeit money *COULD* very easily make the lender guilty of criminal negligence if they had deliberately made a decision to allow anybody to freely use their press without bothering to keep records of who they lent it to. The negligence wouldn't be in the lending itself, however, the negligence in such a case would be in the not keeping track of who was using it, making it impossible for you to assist the police if they should trace the committing of a crime to your property. It might be up to a jury to decide whether you should be held criminally liable for that negligence, however.
That there aren't enough license plates to uniquely identify every person the planet is WHOLLY irrelevant to whether or not there are enough to uniquely identify cars (there are).
A license plate alone cannot identify who may be driving the car... at best only who might be the registered owner of it.
Uh.... if somebody takes the money, then they've *already* done something illegal. Full stop, right there. They took something that didn't belong to them. Let's say the money didn't actually belong to you, but was your responsibility. You wouldn't be guilty of stealing that money, but you'd still be held accountable for the part you played in the fact that any was missing. Whether the money is, in turn, used for any illegal activities is entirely irrelevant to the analogy I was making.
And wireless point to point is not remotely difficult.... all you need is a transmitter and antenna that are strong and large enough to reach any reachable destination. CB can even be point-to-point quite easily.
Radio can be point-to-point. You can't exactly intercept an airborne signal and try to relay it without building a shield large enough to fully encompass the sender. Something that they would readily be aware of.