Not quite magic. It'd be either insane compute-power, or it'd be new math. We don't actually have any proof that there's no easier way to crack AES than brute-forcing for all possible keys. We've been unable to find better ways, but that's not proof there exist no better way.
The safety-mechanism just needs to be reliable enough that the BENEFITS from additional safety outweigh the DRAWBACK of reduced reliability.
Since the benefits of some of these mechanisms are clearly nonzero, the drawbacks can also be nonzero - as long as overall the change is an improvement.
It's a joke assertion that the average person should be able to read and understand 3500 words of dense legalese in 10 minutes too - infact I claim that *nobody* can do that, not even a crack lawyer with eulas as a speciality.
A qualified person might, in an hour or so, feel *reasonably* sure what the EULA says. An average person could likely spend a day analysing the text, and stil miss substantial points.
Re:My attempt to define a wealth number
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
The problem is that capital gains aren't considered income until you sell.
Thus you can have a situation where someone has a net-worth of $100M one year, and $110M the next year - despite reporting "no income", that's patently absurd and one of the main problems with the current tax-system.
Borrowing against something does not make you richer or poorer. A guy owning an asset at $1M is exactly as rich as a guy owning an asset at $1M plus $500K that he borrowed with the asset as security, and a $500K loan. (both guy have a net-worth of $1M)
Taxing people based on short-term fluctuations and the randomness of what the stock-price happens to be on the last day of the year is probably overdoing it, and as others have pointed out, ripe for manipulation. But there's other, more moderate suggestions.
For example there could be a time-limit on capital gains, say 3 years. Any gains you had 3 years ago, and still hold, are taxed as income. Example:
y0 $10M, no tax. y1 $11M, no tax. y2 13M, no tax. y4 12M.
At year 4, you'd be treated as if you'd bought the stock 3 years before, in y1 at $11M. The first million gained is taxed as income.
This isolates you from short-term fluctuations, but still avoids the problem where today you can earn humongous amounts every year for your entire life, and not ONCE have to report ANY of it as income.
I think if you earned the money 3 years+ ago, and you still have it, it's fair to tax what you earned as income.
The most common reason for needing a restore, is accidental deletion. With modern backup-systems using online disc, the user can in this case simple open his backup-client, find the file, and click "restore" - time elapsed 2 minutes, help needed, none.
Tape means talking to IT, and wait for hours, at significant personnel-cost. Unless there's a fancy automatic tape-switching-robot kind of deal, but if there is, the price is no longer $30/TB.
Yes you need off-site-backup in addition, and it's acceptable for that one, to have higher latency, so perhaps tape is okay for that.
Make local backup to disc, and use cloud-based backup as the off-site-storage.
This was you easily get near-zero-administration. You get quick restores for the more common scenarios (server died, user accidentally deleted something important, disc crashed).
Yes you get slow restores for the uncommon cases (those where both the primary storage, and the on-site-backup are fubared) this happens if, for example, a fire destroys the building or thieves steal everything that looks electronic and expensive - but in these scenarios it's going to take some time to get back on the air anyway, aslong as you ain't got atleast two physically disjoint datacenters.
If you ain't got huge amounts of data, this is cheap. If you *do* have huge amounts of data, it can get expensive and inacceptibly slow, in that case you might need a different solution. We've got around a terabyte in the cloud (it automatically de-duplicates, so the same file is only ever stored once), and this costs us $750/year which is cheap enough to be a no-brainer. (it'd be different if we needed to backup hundreds of terabytes though)
We've got a 100Mbit link, so restores happen reasonably fast, but a complete restore from nothing of everything, would still take time.
It's both - offcourse you will not generally do stuff that you personally hold to be wrong - but you'll also do less stuff that you're likely to be punished for, even if you personally find it okay.
And to have copyright actually enforcable, would required a totalitarian police-state, and even then it'd be tricky to discover violations of the "hand a copy on a usb-stick to your cousin" variety.
Requiring a totalitarian police-state to be practical, is a pretty strong argument against a law - there's few things important enough that it'd be worth that price, and copyright sure as hell isn't.
It depends where you are - in Norway (and many other european countries) the government guarantees for private bank-balances up to a certain limit (about $200K here in Norway).
This guarantee is offcourse only worth as much as the government is credit-worthy, but if you're in a non-euro-country (such as Norway) where the government has the power to simply print money, it's a pretty safe bet they'll give you the money. (besides, our particular government has zero debt, and infact a substantial crisis-buffer - around $100K/capita)
But offcourse, there's no guarantee that inflation won't reduce the -value- of that money.
And while on the order of 0.2 kids/year end up dead as a result of wandering off from childcare, 20% of all deaths are caused by insufficient physical activity.
Agree with your general point - that it's silly to haul out the linguistic heavy guns for the purpose of shooting sparrows.
I do think something can become a crisis, without getting worse though.
Lacking adequate internet-connection isn't really a crisis - but it is a problem that becomes larger as the Internet grows in importance. If you where without broadband a decade ago, and you're still without broadband, then that particular problem is growing - despite your connectivity being the same it always was.
You don't - that was my point, I listed it as awesome for the young and independent. I guess particularily for those who like to travel.
When you've got no kids, there are no daycare to schedule. Scheduling work may or may not be tricky, if you have a independent work where meetings and suchlike aren't occupying a large fraction of your time, being available for meeting every tuesday, wednesday and thursday might be sufficient (it was for me)
I'd feel better about it if you quantified anything. There ain't many companies around who do -not- claim to pay fair wages, but there's widely differing opinions about what is "fair".
Your "pricing" page says nothing about prices, and you "fair wages" page says absolutely nothing about wages. Without a firm public commitment, it's impossible for prospective customers to judge your estimate of fair.
"datings" sites are dumb anyway. Almost by definition, they'll be filled with those who're desperate, which tends to mean those who's single for a reason.
That said, you seem to be underestimating women. Women are actually in the majority in most universities these days, and most of the women there can read at a level substantially above junior high, for example.
If I summarise your desires as knows a mouse must be plugged in, can read at college/university level, not obese - then I'd actually think that more than a quarter of all women of suitable age would qualify.
My advice would be to stop doing any of the "we're here for dating" things, including online dating-sites. And instead spend some time online or offline in settings that include women that are potential candidates for romance. Don't put "girlfriend" as the goal, instead do it because it's *fun* getting to know people and doing stuff together, and if things develop from there, so much the better.
This is true. And I suspect the same thing is behind the reported "success" of messages including such words as "perhaps", "possibly", "sorry", and other words that on a first glance might seem to be insecure.
Thing is, there's this focus on being "confident", but that's entirely a facade, unless it's backed by real competence. And in real life, it's those lacking real competence but in essence just bluffing, who's most reluctant to admit shortcomings.
It's the *knowledgeable* teacher that has no fear of saying: "I honestly don't know, but let's find out together!". It's the skilled skier who knows his shit, who doesn't find it threathening to freely fess up to -not- having experience with (say) carving-skiis.
Personally, I think the focus on confidence is stupid. Because without substance, that means nothing. On the other hand, deliberately having a date or two on your "home ground", doing something where you're -actually- skilled and/or knowledgeable, is probably a good idea.
I've taken quite a few dates into the mountains. It's always been a success. But the key word is *competent* not *confident*. (allthough the latter tends to come naturally when you know something well, it's just a side-effect)
I don't know anyone who'd like to *completely* eradicate copyright. But I know many, myself included, who thinks that what was supposed to be a balance, has swung much too far in one direction.
Copyright is absurdly long. There should be exceptions for works who are no longer available ("abandonware") and fair use should be substantially expanded - for example there should be zero question that making a small number of copies for your own personal use is allowed.
Also, no legal protection whatsoever should be given to products that employ any kind of DRM - if the DRM works, they don't need it, and if the DRM doesn't work, then why is it there ?
We live in a world where sub-second rendering-times for webpages is the norm, and sub 250ms is common on high-profile well-optimised sites. (for those of us with bandwith)
In this world, it's ridicolous that doing something like clicking a category in the playstation-store, that contains perhaps 30 articles, can take 5 or 10 seconds to display. It feels like being on a modem -- even when you're actually on a 100Mbps link.
It's super for those who're young and independent, agreed. One size doesn't fit all, 4 long days REALLY suck if you've got kids of your own, for example.
4 day weeks where the day off alternates between friday and monday rock even harder -- that way every second weekend is 4 days long. Enabling you to take a weekend-trip that feels almost like a vacation.
2 days, or even 3, off is -slightly- to short for many kinds of getaways.
German is like that too, in principle. Thing is, it's a continuum, and not a binary choice. No language is 100% prescriptive - if enough people use a certain word a certain way for a long enough period, then that word *does* have that meaning, and the people publishing dictionaries are left with choosing if they want to contain the words people actually use, or not.
I think you're watching the wrong movies and listening to the wrong music, seriously. Besides, the "lies" you talk about are more like exagerations in reality.
True, it's not a *requirement* to be rich and handsome to have success in the dating-market, but equally true; it sure as hell doesn't hurt.
You're right though that this stuff don't matter. Any degree above 1 is pretty meaningless. If we've got a shared friend, especially if it's a close friend of ours, you might assign that some weight and treat me slightly differently to how you'd treat a total stranger, but anything beyond that, is meaningless.
Buying things at 5 times material price is not always insane, indeed in many cases it can be perfectly rational. 5 times is not even a particularily high factor.
But "material price" is a silly measure anyway - The fair price for $10 worth of chemicals and 10 hours of work, is not $10. It's $10 + 10 times the hourly wage of the person performing the work at a minimum. (in practice it's more, since most operations have -some- sort of overhead that needs to be covered to break even)
Even if you just buy and sell, the distribution might be worth quite a bit. A containerfull of cheap toys in a warehouse in China might cost $0.50/each - then after it's shipped, distributed and sold at retail, you might find that the items are sold for $5 each - ten times the price. Nevertheless it's perfectly possible that nobody in the chain is making insane profits.
I can't agree with the premise at all. There are plenty of big ideas currently, and people work diligently for decades to further those ideas they believe in.
How about this for a vision ? "To provide the sum total of human knowledge to every human being, in all languages, for free." That a radical enough or "big" enough idea to count ?
Ownership and control over the machines and data that make up the information-world less relevant than the same over the factories a century earlier ?
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite magic. It'd be either insane compute-power, or it'd be new math. We don't actually have any proof that there's no easier way to crack AES than brute-forcing for all possible keys. We've been unable to find better ways, but that's not proof there exist no better way.
True enough. But also true: in an average population a lot of people will be neglient atleast part of the time.
Thus any solution that starts with "people should stop being neglient" is equivalent to "people should stop being people"
It's gone down a lot more than that !
That graph shows deaths versus population. But a much larger fraction of the population has a car today, and the average car is driven further.
deaths/million miles would be sloping *much* more steeply downwards.
It doesn't need to be MORE reliable.
The safety-mechanism just needs to be reliable enough that the BENEFITS from additional safety outweigh the DRAWBACK of reduced reliability.
Since the benefits of some of these mechanisms are clearly nonzero, the drawbacks can also be nonzero - as long as overall the change is an improvement.
It's a joke assertion that the average person should be able to read and understand 3500 words of dense legalese in 10 minutes too - infact I claim that *nobody* can do that, not even a crack lawyer with eulas as a speciality.
A qualified person might, in an hour or so, feel *reasonably* sure what the EULA says. An average person could likely spend a day analysing the text, and stil miss substantial points.
The problem is that capital gains aren't considered income until you sell.
Thus you can have a situation where someone has a net-worth of $100M one year, and $110M the next year - despite reporting "no income", that's patently absurd and one of the main problems with the current tax-system.
Borrowing against something does not make you richer or poorer. A guy owning an asset at $1M is exactly as rich as a guy owning an asset at $1M plus $500K that he borrowed with the asset as security, and a $500K loan. (both guy have a net-worth of $1M)
Taxing people based on short-term fluctuations and the randomness of what the stock-price happens to be on the last day of the year is probably overdoing it, and as others have pointed out, ripe for manipulation. But there's other, more moderate suggestions.
For example there could be a time-limit on capital gains, say 3 years. Any gains you had 3 years ago, and still hold, are taxed as income. Example:
y0 $10M, no tax. y1 $11M, no tax. y2 13M, no tax. y4 12M.
At year 4, you'd be treated as if you'd bought the stock 3 years before, in y1 at $11M. The first million gained is taxed as income.
This isolates you from short-term fluctuations, but still avoids the problem where today you can earn humongous amounts every year for your entire life, and not ONCE have to report ANY of it as income.
I think if you earned the money 3 years+ ago, and you still have it, it's fair to tax what you earned as income.
The thing is though, tape *sucks*.
The most common reason for needing a restore, is accidental deletion. With modern backup-systems using online disc, the user can in this case simple open his backup-client, find the file, and click "restore" - time elapsed 2 minutes, help needed, none.
Tape means talking to IT, and wait for hours, at significant personnel-cost. Unless there's a fancy automatic tape-switching-robot kind of deal, but if there is, the price is no longer $30/TB.
Yes you need off-site-backup in addition, and it's acceptable for that one, to have higher latency, so perhaps tape is okay for that.
But you can combine:
Make local backup to disc, and use cloud-based backup as the off-site-storage.
This was you easily get near-zero-administration. You get quick restores for the more common scenarios (server died, user accidentally deleted something important, disc crashed).
Yes you get slow restores for the uncommon cases (those where both the primary storage, and the on-site-backup are fubared) this happens if, for example, a fire destroys the building or thieves steal everything that looks electronic and expensive - but in these scenarios it's going to take some time to get back on the air anyway, aslong as you ain't got atleast two physically disjoint datacenters.
If you ain't got huge amounts of data, this is cheap. If you *do* have huge amounts of data, it can get expensive and inacceptibly slow, in that case you might need a different solution. We've got around a terabyte in the cloud (it automatically de-duplicates, so the same file is only ever stored once), and this costs us $750/year which is cheap enough to be a no-brainer. (it'd be different if we needed to backup hundreds of terabytes though)
We've got a 100Mbit link, so restores happen reasonably fast, but a complete restore from nothing of everything, would still take time.
It's both - offcourse you will not generally do stuff that you personally hold to be wrong - but you'll also do less stuff that you're likely to be punished for, even if you personally find it okay.
And to have copyright actually enforcable, would required a totalitarian police-state, and even then it'd be tricky to discover violations of the "hand a copy on a usb-stick to your cousin" variety.
Requiring a totalitarian police-state to be practical, is a pretty strong argument against a law - there's few things important enough that it'd be worth that price, and copyright sure as hell isn't.
It depends where you are - in Norway (and many other european countries) the government guarantees for private bank-balances up to a certain limit (about $200K here in Norway).
This guarantee is offcourse only worth as much as the government is credit-worthy, but if you're in a non-euro-country (such as Norway) where the government has the power to simply print money, it's a pretty safe bet they'll give you the money. (besides, our particular government has zero debt, and infact a substantial crisis-buffer - around $100K/capita)
But offcourse, there's no guarantee that inflation won't reduce the -value- of that money.
And while on the order of 0.2 kids/year end up dead as a result of wandering off from childcare, 20% of all deaths are caused by insufficient physical activity.
Agree with your general point - that it's silly to haul out the linguistic heavy guns for the purpose of shooting sparrows.
I do think something can become a crisis, without getting worse though.
Lacking adequate internet-connection isn't really a crisis - but it is a problem that becomes larger as the Internet grows in importance. If you where without broadband a decade ago, and you're still without broadband, then that particular problem is growing - despite your connectivity being the same it always was.
You don't - that was my point, I listed it as awesome for the young and independent. I guess particularily for those who like to travel.
When you've got no kids, there are no daycare to schedule. Scheduling work may or may not be tricky, if you have a independent work where meetings and suchlike aren't occupying a large fraction of your time, being available for meeting every tuesday, wednesday and thursday might be sufficient (it was for me)
I'd feel better about it if you quantified anything. There ain't many companies around who do -not- claim to pay fair wages, but there's widely differing opinions about what is "fair".
Your "pricing" page says nothing about prices, and you "fair wages" page says absolutely nothing about wages. Without a firm public commitment, it's impossible for prospective customers to judge your estimate of fair.
So, what is "fair" wages to you ?
"datings" sites are dumb anyway. Almost by definition, they'll be filled with those who're desperate, which tends to mean those who's single for a reason.
That said, you seem to be underestimating women. Women are actually in the majority in most universities these days, and most of the women there can read at a level substantially above junior high, for example.
If I summarise your desires as knows a mouse must be plugged in, can read at college/university level, not obese - then I'd actually think that more than a quarter of all women of suitable age would qualify.
My advice would be to stop doing any of the "we're here for dating" things, including online dating-sites. And instead spend some time online or offline in settings that include women that are potential candidates for romance. Don't put "girlfriend" as the goal, instead do it because it's *fun* getting to know people and doing stuff together, and if things develop from there, so much the better.
This is true. And I suspect the same thing is behind the reported "success" of messages including such words as "perhaps", "possibly", "sorry", and other words that on a first glance might seem to be insecure.
Thing is, there's this focus on being "confident", but that's entirely a facade, unless it's backed by real competence. And in real life, it's those lacking real competence but in essence just bluffing, who's most reluctant to admit shortcomings.
It's the *knowledgeable* teacher that has no fear of saying: "I honestly don't know, but let's find out together!". It's the skilled skier who knows his shit, who doesn't find it threathening to freely fess up to -not- having experience with (say) carving-skiis.
Personally, I think the focus on confidence is stupid. Because without substance, that means nothing. On the other hand, deliberately having a date or two on your "home ground", doing something where you're -actually- skilled and/or knowledgeable, is probably a good idea.
I've taken quite a few dates into the mountains. It's always been a success. But the key word is *competent* not *confident*. (allthough the latter tends to come naturally when you know something well, it's just a side-effect)
Yeah. The GPL depends on Copyright.
I don't know anyone who'd like to *completely* eradicate copyright. But I know many, myself included, who thinks that what was supposed to be a balance, has swung much too far in one direction.
Copyright is absurdly long. There should be exceptions for works who are no longer available ("abandonware") and fair use should be substantially expanded - for example there should be zero question that making a small number of copies for your own personal use is allowed.
Also, no legal protection whatsoever should be given to products that employ any kind of DRM - if the DRM works, they don't need it, and if the DRM doesn't work, then why is it there ?
Indeed.
We live in a world where sub-second rendering-times for webpages is the norm, and sub 250ms is common on high-profile well-optimised sites. (for those of us with bandwith)
In this world, it's ridicolous that doing something like clicking a category in the playstation-store, that contains perhaps 30 articles, can take 5 or 10 seconds to display. It feels like being on a modem -- even when you're actually on a 100Mbps link.
It's super for those who're young and independent, agreed. One size doesn't fit all, 4 long days REALLY suck if you've got kids of your own, for example.
4 day weeks where the day off alternates between friday and monday rock even harder -- that way every second weekend is 4 days long. Enabling you to take a weekend-trip that feels almost like a vacation.
2 days, or even 3, off is -slightly- to short for many kinds of getaways.
German is like that too, in principle. Thing is, it's a continuum, and not a binary choice. No language is 100% prescriptive - if enough people use a certain word a certain way for a long enough period, then that word *does* have that meaning, and the people publishing dictionaries are left with choosing if they want to contain the words people actually use, or not.
Atleast the old has, at all times, been of the opinion that they young are rude and ill-behaved.
A white lie, is sometimes *less* rude than the truth though. What the hell am I supposed to say: "I'm sorry, but you're boring me, see you later !" ?
I think you're watching the wrong movies and listening to the wrong music, seriously. Besides, the "lies" you talk about are more like exagerations in reality.
True, it's not a *requirement* to be rich and handsome to have success in the dating-market, but equally true; it sure as hell doesn't hurt.
You're right though that this stuff don't matter. Any degree above 1 is pretty meaningless. If we've got a shared friend, especially if it's a close friend of ours, you might assign that some weight and treat me slightly differently to how you'd treat a total stranger, but anything beyond that, is meaningless.
Buying things at 5 times material price is not always insane, indeed in many cases it can be perfectly rational. 5 times is not even a particularily high factor.
But "material price" is a silly measure anyway - The fair price for $10 worth of chemicals and 10 hours of work, is not $10. It's $10 + 10 times the hourly wage of the person performing the work at a minimum. (in practice it's more, since most operations have -some- sort of overhead that needs to be covered to break even)
Even if you just buy and sell, the distribution might be worth quite a bit. A containerfull of cheap toys in a warehouse in China might cost $0.50/each - then after it's shipped, distributed and sold at retail, you might find that the items are sold for $5 each - ten times the price. Nevertheless it's perfectly possible that nobody in the chain is making insane profits.
I didn't manually escape any of them. I just typed them plain then used "extrans" as the comment-type. Works fine, though I see I forgot a " and a >
I can't agree with the premise at all. There are plenty of big ideas currently, and people work diligently for decades to further those ideas they believe in.
How about this for a vision ? "To provide the sum total of human knowledge to every human being, in all languages, for free." That a radical enough or "big" enough idea to count ?
Ownership and control over the machines and data that make up the information-world less relevant than the same over the factories a century earlier ?