There are definitely many who simply can't get ahead. AFAIKT, it's the great majority of them. Unfortunately, that's not newsworthy, so it doesn't get written up. What gets written up is the 1 in 100,000 who scams the system up to a middle class level of living.
I also agree that often poor people go for "shiney!". This is often because they don't have any hope of any real value, but sometimes it's just short-sightedness.
If you have no hope of getting ahead anyway, then borrowing will put you behind some time in the future, when you may not even be alive. (Many really poor people don't expect to live very long.) And at least for a short period of time you can have SOME measure of,,, (it's here I get stuck. I don't understand their reasoning either. I think it's the admiration of their peers, but I'm not sure.)
FWIW, I've never known anyone who really fell for this loan scam, but I've known several who fell for the analogous credit card scam. (20%/month is just unconsciousable usury. There's no excuse for allowing that to be legal.) And I *do* consider that to be a strictly analogous scam.
You may not be rich, but you have clearly never been poor.
I, also, buy with cash, even (especially?) products as expensive as cars. But I have known many people for whom that was not an option. Not even on the used market. (I, personally, prefer to buy a car that's about three years old from a representative of the manufacturer. They often buy cars from people who are trading in on a new car. And they also want to keep the brand name in good repute.) But I've known many people who couldn't scrape together enough cash to purchase even an old used are.
Your question of "why people don't just get cheaper cars" is strictly analogous to Marie Antonette's "Let them eat cake." (though to understand this you do need to know that the cake referred to was dough that was caked to the sides of the baking oven during the baking process). For many people that is not an option. (There are, of course, the others. And, yes, foolish people exist. Just about everyon is in one area or another.)
No. The only possible (not probable) long term solution is technical...but the technical method involved is AI. And yes wit will be centralized, fur the reasons you gave.
What *could* happen is that an AI could take charge of handling communications. But it couldn't start there, it would probably need to start with handling business records (perhaps at AT&T) and branch out from there to handling users calls. Your information would not be secure from the AI, but the AI would, as it was designed to handle business records, be designed to protect them. You'd get end-to-end encryption that was transparent to the user. And nothing that could damage the corporation if revealed in court would be retrievable.
As I said, I don't think of this as probable, but it is *A* solution. Perhaps the existence of one solution implies that other solutions exist.
I've read the Quran. I've also read the Bible. The Quran isn't much worse. Both have their vile spots.
(And how should that word be spelled. I've always spelled it Koran. "qu" should be pronounced about like "cw", since that's the french spelling of Old English words: "cwen" vs. "queen". I suspect that the better spelling would be something like "Q'ran", but perhaps it depends on which country you are transliterating from.)
That's true, but it's not at all clear that just because it works for a simplified, idealistic object it will actually work for any plausibly existing scenario. It might, but...
I don't know enough math (or astrophysics) to analyze her arguments, but for now I'm going to classify them as "interesting" rather than "probable". Sort of like I did the other black hole replacement theory that I'm remembering as "Magnetar", but actually must be something else, because that refers to something much more observable. It was in the Scientific American a year or two ago, but a quick google didn't find it.
There's no way I'm going to move all at once. None. For a time I'll run both systems in parallel. (Yes, I would *also* first run the BSD system isolated from my other work...but that's not a real test, that just makes sure that it won't break something.)
My current system uses ext4 on a large partition, so any system I contemplate switching to must be able to read and write file to a large ext4 partition without problems. If everything works, then I'll consider moving over to a replacement system, and THEN I could consider switching to a different partition format.
N.B.: I don't have a lot of spare hardware. Or space to set any more up. Or, for that matter, budget.
That might be why the BSD folk don't use it, but that rather lets BSD out for my use. I need to share an existing large partition with a Linux install, because I'm not going to switch entirely to BSD without first trying it to see if it fits my use case. I didn't even do that when switching from MSWind to Linux back in 99.
The problem I have with the BSDs is that they can't handle large ext4 partitions...which is where I have all my data. I'd considered switching to them (in a dual boot mode) but that limitation made it out of the question.
Well, if you revert the government to prior to the income tax amendent, you have the feds taxing the states, and the states taxing the citizenry. There are actually quite a few good arguments for this. The income tax amendment may have been a bad idea. But it's sure not straightforwards, and would require a large number of other changes in government.
One of the advantages is it would increase the power of the states relative to the federal government. I feel that the federal system has become quite imbalanced as the feds absorbed more and more powers. Another possibility is to return to the state governments appointing the senators. There were many reasons why that was deemed a poor practice, but it did help balance the power of the states against the feds.
Both of these changes would cause drastic changes in the government. I don't know whether they woud be good or not. Fast transportation and communication has acted to make a larger governmental unit seem reasonable, but it is also less responsive to the will of the citizens.
A flat tax is inappropriate, but an linear tax (tax = rate * income - base) is probably reasonable. or even a quadratic tax (tax = rate1 * income^2 + rate2 * income - base).
For various reasons I prefer the simpler linear tax with a fairly large base, so that people living on minimum wage would actually get a small amount back. The tricky part is defining income...it's got to include ALL sources of income, including long term capital gain, but you don't want to discourage investments. However, that should be done OUTSIDE THE TAX SYSTEM. Keep the tax system as simple as possible.
I have a trouble with the word "they". I grant that certain individuals violated laws and should be prosecuted. I deny that an organization is a self-willed entity. (I also don't believe that corporations are people.)
So. People at the IRS violated laws is a reasonable statement. The IRS violated the law is nonsensical. (Note also that the second form also turns some particular laws into a general generic "the law". Another piece of fallacious reasoning...and an increasingly common usage.)
Depends entierly on the atheist. Some start from a Buddhist background. In fact, so ARE Buddhists. (My main problem with Buddhism is that all the arguments are phrased in terms of inevitable reincarnation of something...Buddha was a bit opaque about just what, so I'm not certain that I can't believe it, but I'm sure not certain that I can.)
My personal problem has to do with the nature of the evidence, and the unreliability of even disinterested eye-witness testimony. The only gods I'm certain of are those that I've encountered (I *think* they're the same things that others have called gods), and they appear to be mental phenomena. (I'd say psychic, but that term has been so misused that it would be even more likely to be misunderstood.) They appear to be sub-linguistic mental phenomena that are probably the same things that Jung called archetypes. The roots from which all mental functioning is buit. These features seem to be shared by many (all?) people, though it's hard to be sure, and some of them even seem to be shared with other mammals. (Well, dogs to be specific. I don't understand cats well enough to comment about them, and the evidence is quite weak even for dogs...being more along the lies of "consistent with the theory" than "experimental proof", but then that's true even for other people.)
Also, your attribution of certain beliefs as originating with Christianity is highly suspect. Many Christian practices and beliefs came from Mithraism. Others from Judism. And Others from Hellenistic Greek philosophy. Just how much originated with Christianity is extremely dubious if, in fact, anything did except a bit of clever phrasing and some political tactics. Certainly the equality of people before the gods was neither unique with Christianity, nor universally held by Christians. (See, for one example, "The Divine Right of Kings". It was also held in many times and [Christian] places that the more powerful were more loved by god. The Puritans, e.g, made it explicit. "Material success the the manifest sign of divine favor." That's not an exact qoute, as far as I know, but it could be.)
But given that this appears to be a long-standing and profitable business prractice, what effect would you expect giving them a negative rating to have?
Please justify that statement. It seems to me that in a truly free market you would even be free to murder the competition. That's the way it works in the closest thing to a free market that exists....the black market.
Didn't the summary say this behavior had been legitimized by the courts?
But perhaps another court would decide differently. Perhaps you could take them to small claims court...but how would you get them to pay up if you won?
That's, to me, a new example of the problems with systemd.
So far the only one that's sounded serious is the "won't fix" reply to a report of logfile corruption. But there have been a humongous number of complaints about different small problems.
To me systemd sounds like a bad idea. I don't really know. The problem appears that it's going to be hard to avoid, and with so many small problems, it's quite likely that there are some serious one.
A question in my mind is "What problem does it fix?" The only answer I've heard is that you can boot faster. This doesn't impress me, as I rarely boot my computer, and when I do I often want many of the steps to happen slowly enough that I can tell what is going on.
My suspicion is that systemd is a very bad direction to go. I'm remembering that mono was also sponsered by Red Hat. And even if I grant the best of intentions, big chunks of code tend to break more often and be harder to fix.
My interpretation is fully deterministic in the same sense that their was. Probabilistic is meant in the "sum over histories" sense that multiple histories yield the same present, so you can't reasonably pick just one and say "That's what came earlier", but you instead have a spread of probabilities of linkage. I interpret that probability as the strength (weight) of the link. From each past the probabilities to all the futures it links to sum to 1. Similarly from each present the probabilities of all the pasts it links to sum to 1.
The difference between out models is that EWG, at least in the presentation that I read, only considered forwards (toward the future) links. I see no reason to believe that this is a correct interpretation. (I'm not sure about chronology, but I believe the EWG model was created prior to Feynman's Sum over Histories approach being derived. This difference is probably the result of that.)
Baloo, at least, needs to be sufficiently visible that you can turn it off. It eats up an incredible amount of CPU time to, for me, no benefit. KWallet has it's points, but it's not THAT great. In my use case sticky-notes would be quite reasonable for passwords. Just don't make them accessible over the net (i.e., to other programs running on the same machine). I'm not worried about shoulder surfers. As for Akonadi...I had no idea what it was until I just now looked at the web page, and I still don't know if it is of *ANY* value to me. But if it doesn't take up CPU time when I'm not using it, I guess it doesn't do much harm.
OTOH, I find Gnome3 unusable. Gnome2 was decent...I preferred it to KDE4, but then I preferred KDE3 to Gnome2. xfce would be a good system, but when I tried it, it got confused about which window was on top of which (more specifically, windows tended to get stuck under the menubar at the top of the screen). It's usable, but with several misfeatures, so currently I'm using KDE4. I'm also wondering about razorQT, but I don't want my window manager to be flakey, and the last I heard razorQT was in very late alpha. I've also heard about LXQT recently. Don't know what it's status is, but it isn't in the system repository, and this makes me dubious.
There were (and are) people who like MSWind. Agreed.
MSWind became dominant because the people who made the purchasing decisions trusted IBM. Not because people who used the computers liked it. Most of them didn't. Now most of them do, because they've become habituated, and the thought of putting in that much effort again terrifies them.
If you want to pick a company that became dominant because people liked it, pick Apple. I, personally, don't use or want to use Apple, but those who do use it like it. (When I used it, I liked it...but they made a change in the EULA that I found unacceptable. Now I no longer know it, though I don't actively dislike it the way I do MSWind.)
IIUC, this is not a survey of the *level* of sexual assault, but of the rate. And if the sample questions quoted above are typical, then I'm surprised that it isn't higher.
OTOH, the questions that were listed above (in the discussion about poorly worded questions) don't distinguish between a bit of uncomfortable humor and forcible rape. One presumes that actual criminal activity is rare, but this isn't evidence of that.
That said, in groups that are predominantly male and relatively isolated from external contact, one might expect that undesireably agressive sexual behavior would be relatively common. The real question to me is how moderate is the degree of undesireably agressive sexual behavior. (The rate would be interested *IF* coupled with the degree.)
I believe that there are theoretical designs for computers (using reversible computation) that can compute without using any energy in computation. What I'm not sure about is that there's anyway to retrieve the results of the computation. (I've also got no idea of the speed of the computation. It might depend on random motions for all I can remember.)
Whatever, that's merely a theoretical quibble about your point. But then your point itself was a theoretical quibble.
The real weakness of 256 bit keys is poor implementation (of something). And you can't know that everything is properly implemented.
Weeel....sort of. Depends on what you mean. I looked at a lot of (well, several) computers before the Apple ][ was released. They were all interesting, but not quite interesting enough. Then the Apple ][+ was released with a Pascal card, and I bought it. A lot of other people made about the same choice at about the same time. That was when the PC bacame notable. A few years later IBM released the IBM PC with no significant advantage over the current Apple product...but that was when it boomed.
This is sort of like Apple releasing the Apple ][. Not the ][+. OTOH, Dremel is a much bigger name now than Apple was then. Perhaps that will be a big enough kick...but my expectation is that there will turn out to be the need for much fine-tuning of the design. Then Dremel will release a greatly improved model. And then someone who's the darling of a business segment will release a different, probably incompatible, model with some useful differences, and many user drawbacks...but it will sell into businesses, and Dremel will be edged out of the market...though not completely, and they may continue to dominate among home users and certain niche segments. But THAT will be the boom.
Makerbot, etc. is just like the S-100 computers that predated Apple.
N.B.: This is all reasoning from analogy, and therefore not to be trusted. But it's still a good guess.
You're assuming that the universe is deterministic, or at least that the past is. I don't believe that to be correct. I believe the past to be as probabilistic as the future. Granted, it's probably that every backwards simulation will end up at the big bang, but in between now and then it's an uncollapsed wave function.
OTOH, I also believe in the Everett-Graham-Wheeler interpretation of quantum mechanics...but not in quite the same way that they did, as I'm considering branching to be essentially symmetric between the past and the future, so that not only does the present lead to multiple futures, but there are multiple presents connected to multiple pasts in a probabilistically branching net in both directions. Each present has multiple pasts, and each past has multiple presents (futures?). In a connected lattice that (perhaps) teminates in one single instant in the past where all the lattice links join (called the big bang) and less probably terminates in on single instant in the future where all lattice links join (called the big crunch). The big crunch, however, doesn't seem to be extremely plausible at the moment, given current knowledge and theories. And neither join is required by the theory.
FWIW, as far as I can tell this model is consistent with everything known about physics, but I'm neither a cosmologist nor a quantum mechanic.
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There are definitely many who simply can't get ahead. AFAIKT, it's the great majority of them. Unfortunately, that's not newsworthy, so it doesn't get written up. What gets written up is the 1 in 100,000 who scams the system up to a middle class level of living.
I also agree that often poor people go for "shiney!". This is often because they don't have any hope of any real value, but sometimes it's just short-sightedness.
If you have no hope of getting ahead anyway, then borrowing will put you behind some time in the future, when you may not even be alive. (Many really poor people don't expect to live very long.) And at least for a short period of time you can have SOME measure of ,,, (it's here I get stuck. I don't understand their reasoning either. I think it's the admiration of their peers, but I'm not sure.)
FWIW, I've never known anyone who really fell for this loan scam, but I've known several who fell for the analogous credit card scam. (20%/month is just unconsciousable usury. There's no excuse for allowing that to be legal.) And I *do* consider that to be a strictly analogous scam.
You may not be rich, but you have clearly never been poor.
I, also, buy with cash, even (especially?) products as expensive as cars. But I have known many people for whom that was not an option. Not even on the used market. (I, personally, prefer to buy a car that's about three years old from a representative of the manufacturer. They often buy cars from people who are trading in on a new car. And they also want to keep the brand name in good repute.) But I've known many people who couldn't scrape together enough cash to purchase even an old used are.
Your question of "why people don't just get cheaper cars" is strictly analogous to Marie Antonette's "Let them eat cake." (though to understand this you do need to know that the cake referred to was dough that was caked to the sides of the baking oven during the baking process). For many people that is not an option. (There are, of course, the others. And, yes, foolish people exist. Just about everyon is in one area or another.)
No. The only possible (not probable) long term solution is technical...but the technical method involved is AI. And yes wit will be centralized, fur the reasons you gave.
What *could* happen is that an AI could take charge of handling communications. But it couldn't start there, it would probably need to start with handling business records (perhaps at AT&T) and branch out from there to handling users calls. Your information would not be secure from the AI, but the AI would, as it was designed to handle business records, be designed to protect them. You'd get end-to-end encryption that was transparent to the user. And nothing that could damage the corporation if revealed in court would be retrievable.
As I said, I don't think of this as probable, but it is *A* solution. Perhaps the existence of one solution implies that other solutions exist.
I've read the Quran. I've also read the Bible. The Quran isn't much worse. Both have their vile spots.
(And how should that word be spelled. I've always spelled it Koran. "qu" should be pronounced about like "cw", since that's the french spelling of Old English words: "cwen" vs. "queen". I suspect that the better spelling would be something like "Q'ran", but perhaps it depends on which country you are transliterating from.)
I trust that was a joke...the science is NEVER settled.
That's true, but it's not at all clear that just because it works for a simplified, idealistic object it will actually work for any plausibly existing scenario. It might, but ...
I don't know enough math (or astrophysics) to analyze her arguments, but for now I'm going to classify them as "interesting" rather than "probable". Sort of like I did the other black hole replacement theory that I'm remembering as "Magnetar", but actually must be something else, because that refers to something much more observable. It was in the Scientific American a year or two ago, but a quick google didn't find it.
There's no way I'm going to move all at once. None. For a time I'll run both systems in parallel. (Yes, I would *also* first run the BSD system isolated from my other work...but that's not a real test, that just makes sure that it won't break something.)
My current system uses ext4 on a large partition, so any system I contemplate switching to must be able to read and write file to a large ext4 partition without problems. If everything works, then I'll consider moving over to a replacement system, and THEN I could consider switching to a different partition format.
N.B.: I don't have a lot of spare hardware. Or space to set any more up. Or, for that matter, budget.
That might be why the BSD folk don't use it, but that rather lets BSD out for my use. I need to share an existing large partition with a Linux install, because I'm not going to switch entirely to BSD without first trying it to see if it fits my use case. I didn't even do that when switching from MSWind to Linux back in 99.
The problem I have with the BSDs is that they can't handle large ext4 partitions...which is where I have all my data. I'd considered switching to them (in a dual boot mode) but that limitation made it out of the question.
Well, if you revert the government to prior to the income tax amendent, you have the feds taxing the states, and the states taxing the citizenry. There are actually quite a few good arguments for this. The income tax amendment may have been a bad idea. But it's sure not straightforwards, and would require a large number of other changes in government.
One of the advantages is it would increase the power of the states relative to the federal government. I feel that the federal system has become quite imbalanced as the feds absorbed more and more powers. Another possibility is to return to the state governments appointing the senators. There were many reasons why that was deemed a poor practice, but it did help balance the power of the states against the feds.
Both of these changes would cause drastic changes in the government. I don't know whether they woud be good or not. Fast transportation and communication has acted to make a larger governmental unit seem reasonable, but it is also less responsive to the will of the citizens.
A flat tax is inappropriate, but an linear tax (tax = rate * income - base) is probably reasonable. or even a quadratic tax (tax = rate1 * income^2 + rate2 * income - base).
For various reasons I prefer the simpler linear tax with a fairly large base, so that people living on minimum wage would actually get a small amount back. The tricky part is defining income...it's got to include ALL sources of income, including long term capital gain, but you don't want to discourage investments. However, that should be done OUTSIDE THE TAX SYSTEM. Keep the tax system as simple as possible.
I have a trouble with the word "they". I grant that certain individuals violated laws and should be prosecuted. I deny that an organization is a self-willed entity. (I also don't believe that corporations are people.)
So. People at the IRS violated laws is a reasonable statement. The IRS violated the law is nonsensical. (Note also that the second form also turns some particular laws into a general generic "the law". Another piece of fallacious reasoning...and an increasingly common usage.)
Depends entierly on the atheist. Some start from a Buddhist background. In fact, so ARE Buddhists. (My main problem with Buddhism is that all the arguments are phrased in terms of inevitable reincarnation of something...Buddha was a bit opaque about just what, so I'm not certain that I can't believe it, but I'm sure not certain that I can.)
My personal problem has to do with the nature of the evidence, and the unreliability of even disinterested eye-witness testimony. The only gods I'm certain of are those that I've encountered (I *think* they're the same things that others have called gods), and they appear to be mental phenomena. (I'd say psychic, but that term has been so misused that it would be even more likely to be misunderstood.) They appear to be sub-linguistic mental phenomena that are probably the same things that Jung called archetypes. The roots from which all mental functioning is buit. These features seem to be shared by many (all?) people, though it's hard to be sure, and some of them even seem to be shared with other mammals. (Well, dogs to be specific. I don't understand cats well enough to comment about them, and the evidence is quite weak even for dogs...being more along the lies of "consistent with the theory" than "experimental proof", but then that's true even for other people.)
Also, your attribution of certain beliefs as originating with Christianity is highly suspect. Many Christian practices and beliefs came from Mithraism. Others from Judism. And Others from Hellenistic Greek philosophy. Just how much originated with Christianity is extremely dubious if, in fact, anything did except a bit of clever phrasing and some political tactics. Certainly the equality of people before the gods was neither unique with Christianity, nor universally held by Christians. (See, for one example, "The Divine Right of Kings". It was also held in many times and [Christian] places that the more powerful were more loved by god. The Puritans, e.g, made it explicit. "Material success the the manifest sign of divine favor." That's not an exact qoute, as far as I know, but it could be.)
Are you sure that's a state law? My understanding was that it in the contract the store had with the credit card company.
But given that this appears to be a long-standing and profitable business prractice, what effect would you expect giving them a negative rating to have?
Please justify that statement. It seems to me that in a truly free market you would even be free to murder the competition. That's the way it works in the closest thing to a free market that exists....the black market.
Didn't the summary say this behavior had been legitimized by the courts?
But perhaps another court would decide differently. Perhaps you could take them to small claims court...but how would you get them to pay up if you won?
That's, to me, a new example of the problems with systemd.
So far the only one that's sounded serious is the "won't fix" reply to a report of logfile corruption. But there have been a humongous number of complaints about different small problems.
To me systemd sounds like a bad idea. I don't really know. The problem appears that it's going to be hard to avoid, and with so many small problems, it's quite likely that there are some serious one.
A question in my mind is "What problem does it fix?" The only answer I've heard is that you can boot faster. This doesn't impress me, as I rarely boot my computer, and when I do I often want many of the steps to happen slowly enough that I can tell what is going on.
My suspicion is that systemd is a very bad direction to go. I'm remembering that mono was also sponsered by Red Hat. And even if I grant the best of intentions, big chunks of code tend to break more often and be harder to fix.
My interpretation is fully deterministic in the same sense that their was. Probabilistic is meant in the "sum over histories" sense that multiple histories yield the same present, so you can't reasonably pick just one and say "That's what came earlier", but you instead have a spread of probabilities of linkage. I interpret that probability as the strength (weight) of the link. From each past the probabilities to all the futures it links to sum to 1. Similarly from each present the probabilities of all the pasts it links to sum to 1.
The difference between out models is that EWG, at least in the presentation that I read, only considered forwards (toward the future) links. I see no reason to believe that this is a correct interpretation. (I'm not sure about chronology, but I believe the EWG model was created prior to Feynman's Sum over Histories approach being derived. This difference is probably the result of that.)
Baloo, at least, needs to be sufficiently visible that you can turn it off. It eats up an incredible amount of CPU time to, for me, no benefit. KWallet has it's points, but it's not THAT great. In my use case sticky-notes would be quite reasonable for passwords. Just don't make them accessible over the net (i.e., to other programs running on the same machine). I'm not worried about shoulder surfers. As for Akonadi...I had no idea what it was until I just now looked at the web page, and I still don't know if it is of *ANY* value to me. But if it doesn't take up CPU time when I'm not using it, I guess it doesn't do much harm.
OTOH, I find Gnome3 unusable. Gnome2 was decent...I preferred it to KDE4, but then I preferred KDE3 to Gnome2. xfce would be a good system, but when I tried it, it got confused about which window was on top of which (more specifically, windows tended to get stuck under the menubar at the top of the screen). It's usable, but with several misfeatures, so currently I'm using KDE4. I'm also wondering about razorQT, but I don't want my window manager to be flakey, and the last I heard razorQT was in very late alpha. I've also heard about LXQT recently. Don't know what it's status is, but it isn't in the system repository, and this makes me dubious.
There were (and are) people who like MSWind. Agreed.
MSWind became dominant because the people who made the purchasing decisions trusted IBM. Not because people who used the computers liked it. Most of them didn't. Now most of them do, because they've become habituated, and the thought of putting in that much effort again terrifies them.
If you want to pick a company that became dominant because people liked it, pick Apple. I, personally, don't use or want to use Apple, but those who do use it like it. (When I used it, I liked it...but they made a change in the EULA that I found unacceptable. Now I no longer know it, though I don't actively dislike it the way I do MSWind.)
IIUC, this is not a survey of the *level* of sexual assault, but of the rate. And if the sample questions quoted above are typical, then I'm surprised that it isn't higher.
OTOH, the questions that were listed above (in the discussion about poorly worded questions) don't distinguish between a bit of uncomfortable humor and forcible rape. One presumes that actual criminal activity is rare, but this isn't evidence of that.
That said, in groups that are predominantly male and relatively isolated from external contact, one might expect that undesireably agressive sexual behavior would be relatively common. The real question to me is how moderate is the degree of undesireably agressive sexual behavior. (The rate would be interested *IF* coupled with the degree.)
I believe that there are theoretical designs for computers (using reversible computation) that can compute without using any energy in computation. What I'm not sure about is that there's anyway to retrieve the results of the computation. (I've also got no idea of the speed of the computation. It might depend on random motions for all I can remember.)
Whatever, that's merely a theoretical quibble about your point. But then your point itself was a theoretical quibble.
The real weakness of 256 bit keys is poor implementation (of something). And you can't know that everything is properly implemented.
Weeel....sort of. Depends on what you mean. I looked at a lot of (well, several) computers before the Apple ][ was released. They were all interesting, but not quite interesting enough. Then the Apple ][+ was released with a Pascal card, and I bought it. A lot of other people made about the same choice at about the same time. That was when the PC bacame notable. A few years later IBM released the IBM PC with no significant advantage over the current Apple product...but that was when it boomed.
This is sort of like Apple releasing the Apple ][. Not the ][+. OTOH, Dremel is a much bigger name now than Apple was then. Perhaps that will be a big enough kick...but my expectation is that there will turn out to be the need for much fine-tuning of the design. Then Dremel will release a greatly improved model. And then someone who's the darling of a business segment will release a different, probably incompatible, model with some useful differences, and many user drawbacks...but it will sell into businesses, and Dremel will be edged out of the market...though not completely, and they may continue to dominate among home users and certain niche segments.
But THAT will be the boom.
Makerbot, etc. is just like the S-100 computers that predated Apple.
N.B.: This is all reasoning from analogy, and therefore not to be trusted. But it's still a good guess.
You're assuming that the universe is deterministic, or at least that the past is. I don't believe that to be correct. I believe the past to be as probabilistic as the future. Granted, it's probably that every backwards simulation will end up at the big bang, but in between now and then it's an uncollapsed wave function.
OTOH, I also believe in the Everett-Graham-Wheeler interpretation of quantum mechanics...but not in quite the same way that they did, as I'm considering branching to be essentially symmetric between the past and the future, so that not only does the present lead to multiple futures, but there are multiple presents connected to multiple pasts in a probabilistically branching net in both directions. Each present has multiple pasts, and each past has multiple presents (futures?). In a connected lattice that (perhaps) teminates in one single instant in the past where all the lattice links join (called the big bang) and less probably terminates in on single instant in the future where all lattice links join (called the big crunch). The big crunch, however, doesn't seem to be extremely plausible at the moment, given current knowledge and theories. And neither join is required by the theory.
FWIW, as far as I can tell this model is consistent with everything known about physics, but I'm neither a cosmologist nor a quantum mechanic.