Yes, it is vague. But many things in law is. That it's hard to pin a definite line to a sentence in law lends no support to the idea that the sentence is meaningless. It's just as hard to pin a definite line to what "indecent" means, but the courts still do every day.
One of the primary jobs of the supreme court is to draw these lines. In this case they where asked three things:
If congress stretches copyright by 10 years every 9 years, making copyright in practice infinite, how often can they do this before they're in violation of the constitution ? (answer: not-sure-but-more-than-7-times)
Second question: If something was written before I was born, yet will remain in copyright for significantly longer than I'm likely to live; doesn't that make it *effectively* not "limited", on a human time-scale ? What -is- the limit to "for limited times" ? Answer: For limited times in the constitution has no practical consequence, the court sees no principal problem with claiming that a 999999999999 year copyright is "for limited times"
Third question: The constitution also contains the PURPOSE of copyright: "To promoted the progress of science and the useful arts" -- but retroactively extending copyright doesn't plausibly do that, and thus is unconstitutional. Also, in economic terms "for the next 70 years" is already 98% of the value of forever (at 5% deprecation), so it seems implausible that a lot of works WOULD get created at 100+ but NOT at 70. Does *anyone* believe that scientific or creative output would drop significantly if copyright was only 70 years ? Answer: Would you quit asking questions that makes us uncomfortable ? We're going to ignore this question entirely.
Like I said: disapointing. Makes a COMPLETE mockery of the constitution.
Indeed. One of the most disapointing recent decisions. In essence, the court said that the term "for limited times" in practice means nothing whatsoever. Because it means that there must BE some limit, but it doesn't need to be a practical limit. a 100 year copyright on computer-software is in practice aproximately infinite. And the court sees no principal problem with a 999999999 year copyright. That's "limited", right ?
But the bible is out of copyright, so it's in the public domain.
Just because parts of it makes some claim, doesn't make it true. Just because current DVDs will, in 3 centuries, still say "copyrighted", doesn't mean they are.
That's not gonna cut it. Not for "sex", for "intercourse" perhaps, but I'm not sure there's much of a pattern to detect, other than random movement, from oral sex, for example.
Because we all know women cynically and methodically go for the high-paying jobs leaving men to do the qualified-but-underpaid ones ?
Seriously, this theory totally fails to match the terrain. Nurses and Engineers both (in my jurisdiction, I know it varies) have a 3.5 year education (on top of the same basis), yet engineers on the average earn around $15K/year more. Which of the two are female-dominated, and which is male-dominated ?
ECC isn't going to cut it, though that is needed TOO. The issue is that even with ECC, there may be parts of the stream that just aren't recoverable, there's several reasons you could loose several MINUTES worth of stream, no reasonable amount of ECC is going to be able to reconstruct that.
ECC combined with some sort of recovery-point every minute or something, might do it though, that way, if you -do- lose the datastream for an extended period and regain it, you can recover at the next recovery-point.
However, it does need to be encryption that works over a noisy channel, with possible gaps in the datastream. Your typical block-cipher using chaining thus doesn't qualify. (If you wonder why, try encrypting a one-megabyte file, then change a few characters randomly in the first half of the file, then decrypt it)
It's still not a hard problem mind you, just slightly more so than "grab AES, set it to CBC-mode"
True. And -that- is feasible. I was just commenting on the claim that you can exhaustively search all 12-character alphanum strings in a trivial amount of time. you cannot.
Doubt it. there's 26 letters and 10 digits, in addition to that . is very common in email-adresses. Thus you get 37 possibilities for each position. 37 to the 12th power is 6582952005840035281 hashes to run, and even if you do 10^9 Hz (i.e. one giga-hash-a-second, which would require on the order of a few hundred cores), you'd still need 208 years to do that many hashes -- then you need to look up each of them in gravatar, and analyze the result for a hit-or-miss.
"every alphanumeric email-address under 12 characters" is infact much too large a keyspace to reasonably cover overnight with a "very simple script".
It's not a large enough keyspace to be cryptographically secure, but it's large enough to not be trivially exhaustible.
I apologize, I should've been more spesific. I'm not overly enthusiastic about the bills currently suggested. I -do- think there's some aspects of them that are steps forward, but only moderately so, and other parts are braindead, so overall it's a tossup, compared to the current system.
What I meant was the -general- idea of universal healthcare. There's ways to do that that AREN'T braindead, and those should be perused. The main problem is that many of them are politically impossible in USA, because to Americans, they reek of socialism, and that makes them unpalatable, even if they demonstrably offer better care for less cash.
That doesn't follow. Plenty of things are rights, but you may nevertheless lose them under certain circumstances. You have a right to freedom, but you forfeit it if you break the law in a serious manner.
Similarily, in most countries you -do- have the right to get electricity installed, typically for a standard price. Whoever runs the net in your area are typically NOT free to say: "sorry, but your house is a little too far from the neighbour, so it'd be a loss for us to install it at that price, we won't."
Yes, you can lose the right; if you fail to pay for the electricity you consume, the power can be cut. In most jurisdictions though, even this is something the electricity-company can only do under certain fairly strict rules. (no "3 days late -- you're OFF mister!")
The curious thing is though, that the terrain fails to match your map. Usually, the terrain is right.
Fact is, US healthcare is more expensive than healthcare just about anywhere else on the planet, including countries where doctors-salaries are higher than they are in the USA. Fact is, despite this you score badly, not only on longevity, but also on stuff like 5-year survival-rate of various cancers, risk of dying in labour, etc.
Demonstrably, mind you, not according to some theory. You -actually- end up paying more, and getting less.
Yes, I realize this doesn't match your map, so thus, "can't be". But as I said, when the terrain and the map don't match, usually, the terrain is correct.
Questions of jurisdiction apply though. If you are 18 year old, and sitting in a location where the age of consent is 15-16 (i.e. most of the world), and talks to a girl who is 17, but lives somewhere where age of consent is 18.
Are you comitting an offense if you say anything that -might- cause her to lower her inhibitions towards you ? That's so broad it could include potentially any friendly statement, frankly.
It's a witch-hunt. The *goal* is worthwhile, EVERYONE agrees it's a good thing to lock away adults who abuse children.
But is that really the rigth term for a 18 year old who's flirting with a 17-year old ? Is that an "adult taking advantage of a child", I think not, it's more like: "perfectly normal teenager-behaviour".
True, and it's actually one of the most scary things about trends in current laws.
In -principle- our elected represenatives, representing the people, decide what is allowed, and what is not. They're accountable to the people (in principle !!!), and if the people don't like how new law is written, can be swapped at the next election. This is how it -should- work.
Increasingly though, we've got laws which EVERYONE is breaking (not literally everyone, but let's just say a solid majority in large groups of people), but where only a tiny fraction is ever investigated or punished for it.
This gives the police a power they're not supposed to have: The power to go up to any random member of that group, and arbitrarily decide to punish him/her. All they have to do is decide to investigate, since basically everyone is guilty anyway, the result will very likely be some evidence found, and a conviction.
If the punishment for such crimes is grossly out of proportion to the severity of the crime, this adds insult to injury.
Copyright law is a good example. We had a class in university (I studied computer-science) on laws relevant to IT, and one such example was copyright-law. The professor asked anyone in the class (~75 students) who could honestly say they've NOT broken copyright-law in the last month to raise their hand; something like 5 hands went up.
CS-students aren't typical, offcourse, I'd nevertheless guess that a majority of students have broken copyright-law recently, even students in less techie departments.
Yes. And that's a consequence of how "work-time" is defined in the law here: Time where you're available to the employer, is work-time. That means, if he can demand that you do something -now- then that means you're at work -now-.
If you're -actually- free to say "no thanks" or simply not pick up the phone, then you dont need to be compensated, but then you're not "on-call" either.
If you're -required- to pick up the phone, you're on-call, and you're paid atleast 20% of your normal hourly wage. (when nothing happens, I mean, when something actually happens, you offcourse get full pay)
The insanity is in assuming that if a unknown person knows the name and birthday of a certain individual and his mother, then that is proof positive that he IS that person. By that logic, I am a dozen different people. It's just nonsense, pure and simple. Allowing a new line of credit to be opened on such skimpy information is grossly incompetent, and should result in the automatic assumption that the organization doing so is responsible for any and all losses resulting from their neglience.
If I want to open a new account here, I need either a digital signature (yes, one that uses two-factor authenthication to ensure I'm me), or I need to physically go to the post to pick up the card -- the post will then demand I present an actually valid ID before they give it to me. (a service they charge for, and call "verified recipient")
"Which is fine, but Newton's models aren't "correct to a LARGER degree than the best representation that can exist", either, otherwise, they never would have been replaced with more complicated models"
You claim. But notice that I said for low speeds and distances. Newtons models are indeed good enough that even today in engineering, nobody uses anything else if you're talking distances which are on this planet, and speeds which are less than about 1% of c, this covers most of science and engineering even today.
Newtons models where replaced because for a FEW problems, the ones where the speeds involved are huge, or the distances are (or both), they yield wildly inaccurate results. If you use Newton to predict the halflife of some isotope travelling at 0.9999c, you get an answer that's off by several orders of magnitude, i.e. completely useless.
Like I said; mathemathically, Newton is always wrong, but less so for lower speeds and distances, which means that for many real situations, Newton delivers an answer that is indistinguishable from perfect, even in theory. (for example because the error introduced is less than the size of an atom, the measurement-inexactness due to Heisenberg, or the randomness introduced by quantum physics)
I argue, that this means, for those classes of problems (i.e. MOST of the problems humanity work on today), Newton isn't merely a useful aproximation, it is -correct-. As I said, it comes down to if you're a mathemathician, a physician or an engineer, though.
Mathemathically, sure, Newton and Einstein disagree, even when the speeds and distances involved are very low.
But in the real world, we've got stuff like quantum-mechanics and size of atoms to deal with, which sets not only practical, but -theorethical- limits to the accuracy of a measurement or item.
If the value you use for pi has around 100 digits, it means that the circumference of an object, is accurate to within less than the size of a single molecule, even if the object you are making is the size of the visible universe. Is this number still "wrong" in a meaningful sense ? Given that physical items consist of atoms, is not an object accurate in size to the nearest atom RIGHT-sized ?
Similarily, if a given speed and distance is such that the position predicted by Newton is accurate to such a degree that you couldn't even in theory, measure the position more accurately (Heisenberg), is Newton then still "wrong" for that calculation ?
Yes, as long as you deal with pure maths, Newton is always wrong, just less so for lower speeds and shorter distances. But if you're dealing with real objects, which have real limits (not just practical limits, but fundamental ones), I would argue that any calculation that is correct to a LARGER degree than the best representation that can exist, is *correct*.
Put differerntly, if using pi with 17 digits tells you the circumference of a ball should be [large-number].1 atoms, whereas using 18 digits tells you it should be [large-number].14 I would argue that the pi-value with 17 digits isn't, for this calculation, just an aproximation; it's *correct*.
And that is precisely what I suggested in these cases you make a bid -- for the minimum functionality specified in the request.
Then *AFTER* you get the deal, you try to get even more business by pointing out additional functionality the buyer may want. That's just common sense.
I'm renovating my bathroom now, and the company I'm dealing with did -precisely- this; and it makes perfect sense. They delivered a offer including only those things I spesifically requested, which was competitive. Then they told me: What you requested will cost $X, but if you like, you can get extra spots for $y/piece, a fancier door for $z, or maybe you want a energy-saving glass in the windows ? If so, that's an additional $w"
Pretty basic. Shocking if major government-contractors haven't understood what my local handimen -have-.
Possibly, but atleast then they KNEW about it, as in, it was no longer a oversight, but a conscious choice: "Do you want backup with that ? No, thank you."
Not at all. Random distribution will tend to get you a return similar to that of the indexes.
Which makes sense: If there was a -known- way of doing worse than the indexes, all you'd need to do to beat the indexes, would be to do the oposite of this known way.
It does however take a bit of cash, it's hard to get a reasonable distribution on different geographical areas and investment-classes if your total invested is much smaller than say $50K or so.
That's not actually true. First, money that is -invested- is generally used to buy something of value, typically something like land, commodities or fractions of companies (i.e. stock)
Second, wise investment means diversification. Certainly, some of the things you buy, will become worthless, but that's acceptable if you invest in a wide selection of different things.
A diversified portfolio only becomes worth zero if EVERY one of the items invested in, simultaneously drop to zero value.
I can't see that happening other than either if a global despotic government nationalizes all value, or if humanity stop being physical.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is vague. But many things in law is. That it's hard to pin a definite line to a sentence in law lends no support to the idea that the sentence is meaningless. It's just as hard to pin a definite line to what "indecent" means, but the courts still do every day.
One of the primary jobs of the supreme court is to draw these lines. In this case they where asked three things:
If congress stretches copyright by 10 years every 9 years, making copyright in practice infinite, how often can they do this before they're in violation of the constitution ? (answer: not-sure-but-more-than-7-times)
Second question: If something was written before I was born, yet will remain in copyright for significantly longer than I'm likely to live; doesn't that make it *effectively* not "limited", on a human time-scale ? What -is- the limit to "for limited times" ? Answer: For limited times in the constitution has no practical consequence, the court sees no principal problem with claiming that a 999999999999 year copyright is "for limited times"
Third question: The constitution also contains the PURPOSE of copyright: "To promoted the progress of science and the useful arts" -- but retroactively extending copyright doesn't plausibly do that, and thus is unconstitutional. Also, in economic terms "for the next 70 years" is already 98% of the value of forever (at 5% deprecation), so it seems implausible that a lot of works WOULD get created at 100+ but NOT at 70. Does *anyone* believe that scientific or creative output would drop significantly if copyright was only 70 years ? Answer: Would you quit asking questions that makes us uncomfortable ? We're going to ignore this question entirely.
Like I said: disapointing. Makes a COMPLETE mockery of the constitution.
Answer: Disagree, just because.
Indeed. One of the most disapointing recent decisions. In essence, the court said that the term "for limited times" in practice means nothing whatsoever. Because it means that there must BE some limit, but it doesn't need to be a practical limit. a 100 year copyright on computer-software is in practice aproximately infinite. And the court sees no principal problem with a 999999999 year copyright. That's "limited", right ?
Way to make a mockery of the constitution !!!
But the bible is out of copyright, so it's in the public domain. Just because parts of it makes some claim, doesn't make it true. Just because current DVDs will, in 3 centuries, still say "copyrighted", doesn't mean they are.
That's not gonna cut it. Not for "sex", for "intercourse" perhaps, but I'm not sure there's much of a pattern to detect, other than random movement, from oral sex, for example.
Why ? Seriously, why would I set such an ad-blocker to any other setting than: block everything.
Ads aren't there for my benefit, they're there for someone elses. They're actually harmful to me.
Because we all know women cynically and methodically go for the high-paying jobs leaving men to do the qualified-but-underpaid ones ?
Seriously, this theory totally fails to match the terrain. Nurses and Engineers both (in my jurisdiction, I know it varies) have a 3.5 year education (on top of the same basis), yet engineers on the average earn around $15K/year more. Which of the two are female-dominated, and which is male-dominated ?
ECC isn't going to cut it, though that is needed TOO. The issue is that even with ECC, there may be parts of the stream that just aren't recoverable, there's several reasons you could loose several MINUTES worth of stream, no reasonable amount of ECC is going to be able to reconstruct that.
ECC combined with some sort of recovery-point every minute or something, might do it though, that way, if you -do- lose the datastream for an extended period and regain it, you can recover at the next recovery-point.
Sure. Like I said: still not a hard problem, and one long solved.
It should've been encrypted, for sure. Agreed.
However, it does need to be encryption that works over a noisy channel, with possible gaps in the datastream. Your typical block-cipher using chaining thus doesn't qualify. (If you wonder why, try encrypting a one-megabyte file, then change a few characters randomly in the first half of the file, then decrypt it)
It's still not a hard problem mind you, just slightly more so than "grab AES, set it to CBC-mode"
True. And -that- is feasible. I was just commenting on the claim that you can exhaustively search all 12-character alphanum strings in a trivial amount of time. you cannot.
Doubt it. there's 26 letters and 10 digits, in addition to that . is very common in email-adresses. Thus you get 37 possibilities for each position. 37 to the 12th power is 6582952005840035281 hashes to run, and even if you do 10^9 Hz (i.e. one giga-hash-a-second, which would require on the order of a few hundred cores), you'd still need 208 years to do that many hashes -- then you need to look up each of them in gravatar, and analyze the result for a hit-or-miss.
"every alphanumeric email-address under 12 characters" is infact much too large a keyspace to reasonably cover overnight with a "very simple script".
It's not a large enough keyspace to be cryptographically secure, but it's large enough to not be trivially exhaustible.
I apologize, I should've been more spesific. I'm not overly enthusiastic about the bills currently suggested. I -do- think there's some aspects of them that are steps forward, but only moderately so, and other parts are braindead, so overall it's a tossup, compared to the current system.
What I meant was the -general- idea of universal healthcare. There's ways to do that that AREN'T braindead, and those should be perused. The main problem is that many of them are politically impossible in USA, because to Americans, they reek of socialism, and that makes them unpalatable, even if they demonstrably offer better care for less cash.
That doesn't follow. Plenty of things are rights, but you may nevertheless lose them under certain circumstances. You have a right to freedom, but you forfeit it if you break the law in a serious manner.
Similarily, in most countries you -do- have the right to get electricity installed, typically for a standard price. Whoever runs the net in your area are typically NOT free to say: "sorry, but your house is a little too far from the neighbour, so it'd be a loss for us to install it at that price, we won't."
Yes, you can lose the right; if you fail to pay for the electricity you consume, the power can be cut. In most jurisdictions though, even this is something the electricity-company can only do under certain fairly strict rules. (no "3 days late -- you're OFF mister!")
The curious thing is though, that the terrain fails to match your map. Usually, the terrain is right.
Fact is, US healthcare is more expensive than healthcare just about anywhere else on the planet, including countries where doctors-salaries are higher than they are in the USA. Fact is, despite this you score badly, not only on longevity, but also on stuff like 5-year survival-rate of various cancers, risk of dying in labour, etc.
Demonstrably, mind you, not according to some theory. You -actually- end up paying more, and getting less.
Yes, I realize this doesn't match your map, so thus, "can't be". But as I said, when the terrain and the map don't match, usually, the terrain is correct.
Questions of jurisdiction apply though. If you are 18 year old, and sitting in a location where the age of consent is 15-16 (i.e. most of the world), and talks to a girl who is 17, but lives somewhere where age of consent is 18.
Are you comitting an offense if you say anything that -might- cause her to lower her inhibitions towards you ? That's so broad it could include potentially any friendly statement, frankly.
It's a witch-hunt. The *goal* is worthwhile, EVERYONE agrees it's a good thing to lock away adults who abuse children.
But is that really the rigth term for a 18 year old who's flirting with a 17-year old ? Is that an "adult taking advantage of a child", I think not, it's more like: "perfectly normal teenager-behaviour".
True, and it's actually one of the most scary things about trends in current laws.
In -principle- our elected represenatives, representing the people, decide what is allowed, and what is not. They're accountable to the people (in principle !!!), and if the people don't like how new law is written, can be swapped at the next election. This is how it -should- work.
Increasingly though, we've got laws which EVERYONE is breaking (not literally everyone, but let's just say a solid majority in large groups of people), but where only a tiny fraction is ever investigated or punished for it.
This gives the police a power they're not supposed to have: The power to go up to any random member of that group, and arbitrarily decide to punish him/her. All they have to do is decide to investigate, since basically everyone is guilty anyway, the result will very likely be some evidence found, and a conviction.
If the punishment for such crimes is grossly out of proportion to the severity of the crime, this adds insult to injury.
Copyright law is a good example. We had a class in university (I studied computer-science) on laws relevant to IT, and one such example was copyright-law. The professor asked anyone in the class (~75 students) who could honestly say they've NOT broken copyright-law in the last month to raise their hand; something like 5 hands went up.
CS-students aren't typical, offcourse, I'd nevertheless guess that a majority of students have broken copyright-law recently, even students in less techie departments.
Yes. And that's a consequence of how "work-time" is defined in the law here: Time where you're available to the employer, is work-time. That means, if he can demand that you do something -now- then that means you're at work -now-.
If you're -actually- free to say "no thanks" or simply not pick up the phone, then you dont need to be compensated, but then you're not "on-call" either.
If you're -required- to pick up the phone, you're on-call, and you're paid atleast 20% of your normal hourly wage. (when nothing happens, I mean, when something actually happens, you offcourse get full pay)
The insanity isn't there.
The insanity is in assuming that if a unknown person knows the name and birthday of a certain individual and his mother, then that is proof positive that he IS that person. By that logic, I am a dozen different people. It's just nonsense, pure and simple. Allowing a new line of credit to be opened on such skimpy information is grossly incompetent, and should result in the automatic assumption that the organization doing so is responsible for any and all losses resulting from their neglience.
If I want to open a new account here, I need either a digital signature (yes, one that uses two-factor authenthication to ensure I'm me), or I need to physically go to the post to pick up the card -- the post will then demand I present an actually valid ID before they give it to me. (a service they charge for, and call "verified recipient")
"Which is fine, but Newton's models aren't "correct to a LARGER degree than the best representation that can exist", either, otherwise, they never would have been replaced with more complicated models"
You claim. But notice that I said for low speeds and distances. Newtons models are indeed good enough that even today in engineering, nobody uses anything else if you're talking distances which are on this planet, and speeds which are less than about 1% of c, this covers most of science and engineering even today.
Newtons models where replaced because for a FEW problems, the ones where the speeds involved are huge, or the distances are (or both), they yield wildly inaccurate results. If you use Newton to predict the halflife of some isotope travelling at 0.9999c, you get an answer that's off by several orders of magnitude, i.e. completely useless.
Like I said; mathemathically, Newton is always wrong, but less so for lower speeds and distances, which means that for many real situations, Newton delivers an answer that is indistinguishable from perfect, even in theory. (for example because the error introduced is less than the size of an atom, the measurement-inexactness due to Heisenberg, or the randomness introduced by quantum physics)
I argue, that this means, for those classes of problems (i.e. MOST of the problems humanity work on today), Newton isn't merely a useful aproximation, it is -correct-. As I said, it comes down to if you're a mathemathician, a physician or an engineer, though.
It depends on what criteria you use for "wrong".
Mathemathically, sure, Newton and Einstein disagree, even when the speeds and distances involved are very low.
But in the real world, we've got stuff like quantum-mechanics and size of atoms to deal with, which sets not only practical, but -theorethical- limits to the accuracy of a measurement or item.
If the value you use for pi has around 100 digits, it means that the circumference of an object, is accurate to within less than the size of a single molecule, even if the object you are making is the size of the visible universe. Is this number still "wrong" in a meaningful sense ? Given that physical items consist of atoms, is not an object accurate in size to the nearest atom RIGHT-sized ?
Similarily, if a given speed and distance is such that the position predicted by Newton is accurate to such a degree that you couldn't even in theory, measure the position more accurately (Heisenberg), is Newton then still "wrong" for that calculation ?
Yes, as long as you deal with pure maths, Newton is always wrong, just less so for lower speeds and shorter distances. But if you're dealing with real objects, which have real limits (not just practical limits, but fundamental ones), I would argue that any calculation that is correct to a LARGER degree than the best representation that can exist, is *correct*.
Put differerntly, if using pi with 17 digits tells you the circumference of a ball should be [large-number].1 atoms, whereas using 18 digits tells you it should be [large-number].14 I would argue that the pi-value with 17 digits isn't, for this calculation, just an aproximation; it's *correct*.
This is philosophy though, I guess.
Yes indeed.
And that is precisely what I suggested in these cases you make a bid -- for the minimum functionality specified in the request.
Then *AFTER* you get the deal, you try to get even more business by pointing out additional functionality the buyer may want. That's just common sense.
I'm renovating my bathroom now, and the company I'm dealing with did -precisely- this; and it makes perfect sense. They delivered a offer including only those things I spesifically requested, which was competitive. Then they told me: What you requested will cost $X, but if you like, you can get extra spots for $y/piece, a fancier door for $z, or maybe you want a energy-saving glass in the windows ? If so, that's an additional $w"
Pretty basic. Shocking if major government-contractors haven't understood what my local handimen -have-.
Possibly, but atleast then they KNEW about it, as in, it was no longer a oversight, but a conscious choice: "Do you want backup with that ? No, thank you."
True enough. But as you say, Northrop is in the business of making money, so it would've made sense for them to do the following:
* Deliver a offer for the system requested.
* Get the deal signed
* Say: We notice you've not specified any backup, do you want that additionally ?
Gives them a chance to upsell, AND potentially makes the customer happier -- a win-win.
Not at all. Random distribution will tend to get you a return similar to that of the indexes.
Which makes sense: If there was a -known- way of doing worse than the indexes, all you'd need to do to beat the indexes, would be to do the oposite of this known way.
It does however take a bit of cash, it's hard to get a reasonable distribution on different geographical areas and investment-classes if your total invested is much smaller than say $50K or so.
That's not actually true. First, money that is -invested- is generally used to buy something of value, typically something like land, commodities or fractions of companies (i.e. stock)
Second, wise investment means diversification. Certainly, some of the things you buy, will become worthless, but that's acceptable if you invest in a wide selection of different things.
A diversified portfolio only becomes worth zero if EVERY one of the items invested in, simultaneously drop to zero value.
I can't see that happening other than either if a global despotic government nationalizes all value, or if humanity stop being physical.