The buffer only has to remember a knock if (a) it decrypts properly and (b) it isn't already in there.
The real problem is delayed-intercept attacks. Somebody could intercept your knock and prevent the computer from seeing it, so it doesn't go into the buffer. You wonder why it doesn't work. You try again with a different random sequence and everything works. Later, the attackers use the intercepted knock to get in.
You have to change your key every once in a while. Every time you do, you can also delete your buffer of remembered random data. You could automate this; generate keys from a master key and use synchronized clocks.
VMWare just chopped $100 off the price of VMWare Workstation. You can now buy version 4.5 for $199 (boxed) or $189 (download).
At the lower price, Im considering buying it myself. (I would buy only one copy for only one host OS.) Maybe theyre feeling the heat from allthatopensourcecompetition.
Actually, the program that generates the proof might be much shorter and easier to verify than the proof it generates.
Running it on lots of different hardware, and getting the same result, should provide some confidence that there were no errors in the hardware which affected the computation.
It would also be possible to re-run the proof on special, simplified hardware, which is easier to verify.
What you are saying is that we have a science of men and not of laws. I think not. The laws still work, we just have to dig a little bit more to find them.
No, here's what you need. You take a microwave transmitter and blast a second or so of bits at the moon. Wait three or four seconds, it echoes back. Receive it. Correct the errors (you did use error-correcting code, didn't you?), then send it to the moon again. And when it echoes back transmit it again. And so forth. First trick: you can correct and retransmit simultaneously with the reception. So you can have more data in flight than you have memory for on Earth. Second trick: you'll note that the power you get back is far less than what you sent out. But you can still retain the data. You have to act as a repeater, but that's all.
You could do this with mirrors, but the mirrors will probably be too close together to store very much. Still, a laser, and a nearly 90 degree angle, and the light will zig-zag a lot, and you might have a few hundred feet before you need a repeater. Damned dusty mirrors! Damned non-transparent air!
Third trick: with the moon, you now have a sort of bubble memory, but it's over 100,000 miles long. You could do the same trick with 100,000 miles of fiber-optic cable. But if you could slow down the speed of light you could use shorter cable (or store more in the same cable without having to drive the frequency and the bit rate really high). Also, you could shorten the period, which means your data is available sooner.
If you can really slow down light to a few cm per second, then you can store a lot of stuff. But you will need power for the repeating.
(What would be better is to make windows out of this stuff. You could look out the window and see what was happening outside yesterday. But imagine the solar power applications if you made the glass twelve hours thick instead of twenty-four. Sunlight would shine in during the daytime, and come pouring out at night!)
Actually in Applied Cryptography Bruce Schneier mentioned a way to play poker securely over the internet (so that no one can cheat). He complained that it took something like eight hours on a 486 to shuffle the cards, but Im sure it would be faster now. It seems like some enterprising Open Source programmer could implement this secure poker protocol. But I doubt that the online gambling sites have done so.
You could probably heat up a helium superfluid or a Bose-Einstein condensate with liquid oxygen: compared to their normal temperatures, the liquid oxygen probably is pretty warm.
Discourage tourism? Hell, if I had a plane and knew how to fly it, I'd be tempted to fly down there and bring him some damn fuel. What if I did, and seven or eight other bright pilots got the same idea?
I can't think of a better way to cause "tourism" than to encourage a good Samaritan act like that...
Oh, YES!!! I still remember the speed-up poke (POKE 65495,0, or on the CoCo 3, POKE 65497,0) and the undocumented get-key routine at EXEC 44539. There was also the pop-the-speaker routine at EXEC 43345. I think I found that last one in Rainbow.
I learned assembly programming on the good old CoCo and tried writing my own music synthesis algorithms. Of course I was still in junior high when I was doing that, and I wasn't very good at doing the algorithms.
I do remember that you'd have to set the analog MUX select lines from assembly language with this code sequence: LDA $FF01, ANDA #$F7, STA $FF01, LDA $FF03, ANDA #$F7, STA $FF03, LDA $FF23, ORA #8, STA $FF23. Then write your samples to $FF20. As fast as you can. The sampling rate is however fast you can write.
Oh, and shut off the serial printer, or it will spill out trash when you play sound, because the least significant bit of $FF20 is the printer port. (Software-controlled timing, too, in case you really want to print. I remember books with appropriate frequency-delay counts, you'd have to POKE them somewhere to set the baud rate.)
I still have my CoCo, and my CM-8 monitor, too -- but the floppy disks sat in storage for years, and when I tried to read them again, they had self-erased. I miss OS-9, I had OS-9 level 2, and the disks for that self-erased, too. I was even able to find a 720K floppy drive (80 tracks, double-sided, worked with DSDD disks) at a computer show; OS-9 supported that, and I thought it was really cool.
(Such drives were made obsolete by 3.5 inch floppies, which unfortunately had 512-byte sectors, I think, and that made them much harder to use on the CoCo, because programs on the CoCo assumed 256-byte sectors.)
I miss all those Basic programs I once wrote, but a few years ago I brought out the old CoCo once again and wrote a small BASIC program and it was so slow. I've been spoiled by an 800 MHz Pentium 3.
The thing I miss most about those days is that printers would actually include books with their control codes and you could write programs that used those codes.
'256-bit GPU' is just a marketing term, that has nothing to do with the amount of memory it can address or the number of bits of precision of the arithmetic...
Actually, what they mean by this is that the GPU can grab 256 bits in one bus cycle.
GPUs also use SIMD, which probably means that you can add 16 16-bit integers to 16 more 16-bit integers with signed saturation, or something like that, in the GPU.
You're right that the GPU can't address 2^256 bytes of memory and it doesn't use 256-bit integers or floats. But '256-bit GPU' is more than just a marketing term.
Since so many graphics modes are 32 bits per pixel now (and even more if you include a depth buffer, stencil buffer, etc.), you're probably talking about 8 pixels per bus cycle. This is of great advantage for GPUs.
I would like to roll my own VoIP. I would like an adaptor that allows me to connect an ordinary phone to my network. This adaptor would give the phone an IP address, and you could send commands from Linux to make the phone ring, and if it's off-hook to send and receive digital audio, decode touch-tones, etc.
Then I would like another adaptor that allows me to connect the phone line to my network. This would give the phone line another IP address, and you could send commands from Linux to pick up the phone, dial out, and send and receive digital audio.
Seems like these adaptors would only require a few bucks worth of DSP hardware.
Seems like you could write dozens of Linux applications that way. The simplest would just route packets between the phone and the phone line, but imagine: if you had multiple phones you could have in-house room-to-room calls like an office. If you had multiple phone lines you could route incoming calls to different phones, you could pick up your phone and dial a couple digits into the Linux box to indicate which line you want to receive incoming calls from. Bulding your own digital answering machine or IVR system would be a snap. Combined with a DSL or cable-modem connection, you could call people over the Internet bypassing the local phone line entirely (possibly even with SSL encryption) or you could sell long distance service (for calls inbound from the Internet that are local to you). Hey, it would only take a few lines of code.
It would also put a lot of companies, which sell multi-thousand dollar devices to do the same kinds of things, devices which are thoroughly proprietary and considerably less programmable... out of business.
The government, also, will never allow it. If they want to wiretap there is no longer an easy way to do it.
No, no, no! The sun's mass is one solar mass, or 2*10^30 kg, according to this page.
But its weight is a different matter entirely. Weight is a force, which means it should be measured in Newtons. Weight also requires the influence of a gravitational field. Since the Sun is in orbit around the center of the galaxy, and in free fall, it is weightless.
(Well, actually, the Earth ''does'' pull on the sun some, so we can calculate its "weight" in the Earth's gravitational field independently of its "weight" in other gravitational fields... this is from memory, so it may not be completely accurate...
About two years ago there was a debate about this. Can't remember the details of that debate. Maybe it was when those "mebibytes" were introduced. I still say now what I said then.
I think there should be "short megabytes" and "long megabytes", and the same for gigabytes. Like this:
One short ton is 2,000 pounds and one long ton is 2,240 pounds.
One short kilobyte is 1,000 bytes and one long megabyte is 1,024 bytes.
One short megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes and one long megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes.
One short gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes and one long gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes.
One short terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes and one long terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
And so forth...
Then all we need is to get hard drive manufacturers and OS vendors to state whether they are using short or long tons, er, gigabytes.
As to abbreviations, take Donald Knuth's suggestion. Use the capital letter twice to suggest binaryness. 1 MMB = one long megabyte; 1 GGB = one long gigabyte. I like this much better than the now-standardized MiB men-in-black abbreviation for long megabytes (which are still not called long megabytes in the standard, they are called mebibytes, which sounds silly and no one uses it).
If you add up molecular weights and use the gas laws (PV=nRT), youll find that water vapor -- which is what clouds are made of, until they rain out -- is lighter than air.
The gas laws tell you basically that when P and T and R are constants, as they are in any small region of the atmosphere, the volume is proportional to the number of moles of gas that you have. I don't know how many cubic meters of gas make up a mole, up in the clouds, but I know it's a constant, and... a mole of N2 (nitrogen gas, which makes up 60% of the air) weighs 28 grams, and a mole of O2 (oxygen) weighs 32 grams, and a mole of CO2 (carbon dioxide) weighs 44 grams. But a mole of H20 weighs in at only 18 grams. So, water is lighter than air.
This is why barometric pressure decreases when clouds are overhead.
This is an intermediate one that isnt widely used.
I dont think it matters too much; few businesses have as many as 64,000 computers, so the 192.168 is big enough. But the 10 makes it easy to do interesting things with the other numbers, like making the first number the department number, etc.
Wouldn't it be better to allow freedom AND protect citizen's rights? Isn't that why we have a goverment? To allow individuals to cooperate together, to get a better deal than alone, and protect those of us from each other's freedoms (kinda like an umpire?)
People don't need to be protected from each other's freedoms, but they do need to have their own freedoms protected. That's why government is necessary. I suppose I should have paused to distinguish freedom (which to me is synonymous with individual rights -- life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness) from anarchy (which tends to disintegrate into might-makes-right).
The PTSP idea is a good one and would probably work. But there's no need for any competition authorities; the police would probably be sufficient, enforcing laws against fraud and extortion and stuff.
What deregulation? It hasn't happened yet. People itch to blame those greedy businessmen for screwing things up, but the fact is that most businessmen are only playing the game. The government sets the game's rules.
Competition is now considered the sole purpose of capitalism. I'll give you that competition is one of the healthy attributes of capitalism, but its purpose? The government forces businessmen to compete. It's like gladiatorial combat. Businessmen can't do anything to help "the system" because that would benefit all businesses, that's co-operation, and you can't have that, it violates anti-trust laws. Also, if you're a businessman with an idea to improve the whole system, how can you get all businessmen on board? First it's just you, then it's you and one other business, then at some point you've got a majority, and legally, that's the same as a monopoly! If you're in business you have to compete. That means you can't be allowed to share your ideas or bring other businessmen on board.
What if your only competitor goes bankrupt? Then that makes you a monopoly. But the government will presume that you must have been a monopoly all along. Of course! Never mind that they were incompetent and you were competent, the government sees competence as "economic power" which you must have used to "put them out of business." So you were a monopoly, and must be punished -- for being productive and successful, if your competitor was not. Not that you would have been permitted to help them, of course! That's co-operation! That's a monopoly! No, you have to match their incompetence so they can compete with you. That's the only safe thing to do!
The government loves this, because it alone is exempt from the antitrust laws, and so it alone can propose and implement anything that improves the entire system. So it gets bigger.
Sometimes the people in government are competent and produce real improvements; Soviet Russia produced Sputnik. Sometimes, too, businessmen who are entrusted to solve the problem are corrupt and merely enrich themselves at others' expense, without producing any wealth. However, if the government solution isn't the best solution, you're stuck with it. If businessmen are allowed -- but not forced -- to compete, then many ideas will be presented, the best idea will rise to the top (above the scams), and then it will dominate until a better idea comes along. This doesn't happen very much in government; most politicians have no way to know which ideas have value and which are pie in the sky, so of course it comes down to who knows who. (Even the competent politicians can fall into personality conflicts, a better idea might never be implemented if it comes from a political opponent, for example.)
People don't understand this. People keep switching back and forth between a forced monopoly (government-run, of course) and forced competition (which people erroneously call "capitalism").
This is why the California power crisis happened -- because the California government passed hundreds of pages of "de-regulations" which were designed to force competition. No business was allowed to accumulate too much of anything, even if doing so would have allowed it to do great good -- because the presumption was that it would rip people off instead. What could the businessmen have done? If you ran Enron, what would you have done? What options would have been open to you? What, if anything, would have been legal and profitable?
Forced competition and a forced monopoly are two sides of the same coin: force. The only solution is freedom. The freedom to compete, or cooperate, as you see fit, to present your best ideas to the public for sale and let them take it or leave it. But not the freedom to stop anyone else from doing the same. That's capitalism. That would be deregulation.
Let companies compete -- or co-operate, at their own discretion -- to build power plants and power lines, to run power lines all the way to homes. Then let's see if deregulation fails. But until that happens, you don't really have deregulation, and you don't really have capitalism.
There's a simple solution to that. Make it so the option pays if either (a) the attack actually happens, or (b) it almost happens but is stopped by police, military, etc. That way, if the terrorists get caught, you still get paid. Win-win for everybody.
Slashdot Mirror
I got this one from Richard Lederer. It uses each letter exactly once. It cant be beaten.
The buffer only has to remember a knock if (a) it decrypts properly and (b) it isn't already in there.
The real problem is delayed-intercept attacks. Somebody could intercept your knock and prevent the computer from seeing it, so it doesn't go into the buffer. You wonder why it doesn't work. You try again with a different random sequence and everything works. Later, the attackers use the intercepted knock to get in.
You have to change your key every once in a while. Every time you do, you can also delete your buffer of remembered random data. You could automate this; generate keys from a master key and use synchronized clocks.
VMWare just chopped $100 off the price of VMWare Workstation. You can now buy version 4.5 for $199 (boxed) or $189 (download).
At the lower price, Im considering buying it myself. (I would buy only one copy for only one host OS.) Maybe theyre feeling the heat from all that open source competition.
Actually, the program that generates the proof might be much shorter and easier to verify than the proof it generates.
Running it on lots of different hardware, and getting the same result, should provide some confidence that there were no errors in the hardware which affected the computation.
It would also be possible to re-run the proof on special, simplified hardware, which is easier to verify.
What you are saying is that we have a science of men and not of laws. I think not. The laws still work, we just have to dig a little bit more to find them.
No, here's what you need. You take a microwave transmitter and blast a second or so of bits at the moon. Wait three or four seconds, it echoes back. Receive it. Correct the errors (you did use error-correcting code, didn't you?), then send it to the moon again. And when it echoes back transmit it again. And so forth. First trick: you can correct and retransmit simultaneously with the reception. So you can have more data in flight than you have memory for on Earth. Second trick: you'll note that the power you get back is far less than what you sent out. But you can still retain the data. You have to act as a repeater, but that's all.
You could do this with mirrors, but the mirrors will probably be too close together to store very much. Still, a laser, and a nearly 90 degree angle, and the light will zig-zag a lot, and you might have a few hundred feet before you need a repeater. Damned dusty mirrors! Damned non-transparent air!
Third trick: with the moon, you now have a sort of bubble memory, but it's over 100,000 miles long. You could do the same trick with 100,000 miles of fiber-optic cable. But if you could slow down the speed of light you could use shorter cable (or store more in the same cable without having to drive the frequency and the bit rate really high). Also, you could shorten the period, which means your data is available sooner.
If you can really slow down light to a few cm per second, then you can store a lot of stuff. But you will need power for the repeating.
(What would be better is to make windows out of this stuff. You could look out the window and see what was happening outside yesterday. But imagine the solar power applications if you made the glass twelve hours thick instead of twenty-four. Sunlight would shine in during the daytime, and come pouring out at night!)
What if you don't trust the dealer?
Actually in Applied Cryptography Bruce Schneier mentioned a way to play poker securely over the internet (so that no one can cheat). He complained that it took something like eight hours on a 486 to shuffle the cards, but Im sure it would be faster now. It seems like some enterprising Open Source programmer could implement this secure poker protocol. But I doubt that the online gambling sites have done so.
You could probably heat up a helium superfluid or a Bose-Einstein condensate with liquid oxygen: compared to their normal temperatures, the liquid oxygen probably is pretty warm.
(Did I just ruin a perfectly good joke?)
That phrase will have new meaning...
Discourage tourism? Hell, if I had a plane and knew how to fly it, I'd be tempted to fly down there and bring him some damn fuel. What if I did, and seven or eight other bright pilots got the same idea?
I can't think of a better way to cause "tourism" than to encourage a good Samaritan act like that...
Doesn't the fruit itself change color as it ripens?
Oh, YES!!! I still remember the speed-up poke (POKE 65495,0, or on the CoCo 3, POKE 65497,0) and the undocumented get-key routine at EXEC 44539. There was also the pop-the-speaker routine at EXEC 43345. I think I found that last one in Rainbow.
I learned assembly programming on the good old CoCo and tried writing my own music synthesis algorithms. Of course I was still in junior high when I was doing that, and I wasn't very good at doing the algorithms.
I do remember that you'd have to set the analog MUX select lines from assembly language with this code sequence: LDA $FF01, ANDA #$F7, STA $FF01, LDA $FF03, ANDA #$F7, STA $FF03, LDA $FF23, ORA #8, STA $FF23. Then write your samples to $FF20. As fast as you can. The sampling rate is however fast you can write.
Oh, and shut off the serial printer, or it will spill out trash when you play sound, because the least significant bit of $FF20 is the printer port. (Software-controlled timing, too, in case you really want to print. I remember books with appropriate frequency-delay counts, you'd have to POKE them somewhere to set the baud rate.)
I still have my CoCo, and my CM-8 monitor, too -- but the floppy disks sat in storage for years, and when I tried to read them again, they had self-erased. I miss OS-9, I had OS-9 level 2, and the disks for that self-erased, too. I was even able to find a 720K floppy drive (80 tracks, double-sided, worked with DSDD disks) at a computer show; OS-9 supported that, and I thought it was really cool.
(Such drives were made obsolete by 3.5 inch floppies, which unfortunately had 512-byte sectors, I think, and that made them much harder to use on the CoCo, because programs on the CoCo assumed 256-byte sectors.)
I miss all those Basic programs I once wrote, but a few years ago I brought out the old CoCo once again and wrote a small BASIC program and it was so slow. I've been spoiled by an 800 MHz Pentium 3.
The thing I miss most about those days is that printers would actually include books with their control codes and you could write programs that used those codes.
Sorry, had a nostalgia moment there...
'256-bit GPU' is just a marketing term, that has nothing to do with the amount of memory it can address or the number of bits of precision of the arithmetic...
Actually, what they mean by this is that the GPU can grab 256 bits in one bus cycle.
GPUs also use SIMD, which probably means that you can add 16 16-bit integers to 16 more 16-bit integers with signed saturation, or something like that, in the GPU.
You're right that the GPU can't address 2^256 bytes of memory and it doesn't use 256-bit integers or floats. But '256-bit GPU' is more than just a marketing term.
Since so many graphics modes are 32 bits per pixel now (and even more if you include a depth buffer, stencil buffer, etc.), you're probably talking about 8 pixels per bus cycle. This is of great advantage for GPUs.
OverlyBroadIntellectualPropertyAgreements discusses exactly this sort of problem.
The "Fine Arts Waiver" described on the page is definitely something I will not work without. With some companies it's just a matter of asking for it.
Did anyone else think this story was going to say something like "the distribution of iPAQ handhelds follows Zipf's law" or something?
I wonder what it would prove if the distribution did follow Zipf's law.
I would like to roll my own VoIP. I would like an adaptor that allows me to connect an ordinary phone to my network. This adaptor would give the phone an IP address, and you could send commands from Linux to make the phone ring, and if it's off-hook to send and receive digital audio, decode touch-tones, etc.
Then I would like another adaptor that allows me to connect the phone line to my network. This would give the phone line another IP address, and you could send commands from Linux to pick up the phone, dial out, and send and receive digital audio.
Seems like these adaptors would only require a few bucks worth of DSP hardware.
Seems like you could write dozens of Linux applications that way. The simplest would just route packets between the phone and the phone line, but imagine: if you had multiple phones you could have in-house room-to-room calls like an office. If you had multiple phone lines you could route incoming calls to different phones, you could pick up your phone and dial a couple digits into the Linux box to indicate which line you want to receive incoming calls from. Bulding your own digital answering machine or IVR system would be a snap. Combined with a DSL or cable-modem connection, you could call people over the Internet bypassing the local phone line entirely (possibly even with SSL encryption) or you could sell long distance service (for calls inbound from the Internet that are local to you). Hey, it would only take a few lines of code.
It would also put a lot of companies, which sell multi-thousand dollar devices to do the same kinds of things, devices which are thoroughly proprietary and considerably less programmable... out of business.
The government, also, will never allow it. If they want to wiretap there is no longer an easy way to do it.
No, no, no! The sun's mass is one solar mass, or 2*10^30 kg, according to this page.
But its weight is a different matter entirely. Weight is a force, which means it should be measured in Newtons. Weight also requires the influence of a gravitational field. Since the Sun is in orbit around the center of the galaxy, and in free fall, it is weightless.
(Well, actually, the Earth ''does'' pull on the sun some, so we can calculate its "weight" in the Earth's gravitational field independently of its "weight" in other gravitational fields... this is from memory, so it may not be completely accurate...
All right, the sun weighs 3.6e28 Newtons. So there.
About two years ago there was a debate about this. Can't remember the details of that debate. Maybe it was when those "mebibytes" were introduced. I still say now what I said then.
I think there should be "short megabytes" and "long megabytes", and the same for gigabytes. Like this:
Then all we need is to get hard drive manufacturers and OS vendors to state whether they are using short or long tons, er, gigabytes.
As to abbreviations, take Donald Knuth's suggestion. Use the capital letter twice to suggest binaryness. 1 MMB = one long megabyte; 1 GGB = one long gigabyte. I like this much better than the now-standardized MiB men-in-black abbreviation for long megabytes (which are still not called long megabytes in the standard, they are called mebibytes, which sounds silly and no one uses it).
Who's with me?
I don't have time to play with such a thing. I'm too busy developing the neural network in my skull.
If you add up molecular weights and use the gas laws (PV=nRT), youll find that water vapor -- which is what clouds are made of, until they rain out -- is lighter than air.
The gas laws tell you basically that when P and T and R are constants, as they are in any small region of the atmosphere, the volume is proportional to the number of moles of gas that you have. I don't know how many cubic meters of gas make up a mole, up in the clouds, but I know it's a constant, and... a mole of N2 (nitrogen gas, which makes up 60% of the air) weighs 28 grams, and a mole of O2 (oxygen) weighs 32 grams, and a mole of CO2 (carbon dioxide) weighs 44 grams. But a mole of H20 weighs in at only 18 grams. So, water is lighter than air.
This is why barometric pressure decreases when clouds are overhead.
This is an intermediate one that isnt widely used.
I dont think it matters too much; few businesses have as many as 64,000 computers, so the 192.168 is big enough. But the 10 makes it easy to do interesting things with the other numbers, like making the first number the department number, etc.
No, I think you wanted to say, "And then I pulled out my fully functional light saber, and she split." You know, just like Darth Maul did.
Wouldn't it be better to allow freedom AND protect citizen's rights? Isn't that why we have a goverment? To allow individuals to cooperate together, to get a better deal than alone, and protect those of us from each other's freedoms (kinda like an umpire?)
People don't need to be protected from each other's freedoms, but they do need to have their own freedoms protected. That's why government is necessary. I suppose I should have paused to distinguish freedom (which to me is synonymous with individual rights -- life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness) from anarchy (which tends to disintegrate into might-makes-right).
The PTSP idea is a good one and would probably work. But there's no need for any competition authorities; the police would probably be sufficient, enforcing laws against fraud and extortion and stuff.
What deregulation? It hasn't happened yet. People itch to blame those greedy businessmen for screwing things up, but the fact is that most businessmen are only playing the game. The government sets the game's rules.
Competition is now considered the sole purpose of capitalism. I'll give you that competition is one of the healthy attributes of capitalism, but its purpose? The government forces businessmen to compete. It's like gladiatorial combat. Businessmen can't do anything to help "the system" because that would benefit all businesses, that's co-operation, and you can't have that, it violates anti-trust laws. Also, if you're a businessman with an idea to improve the whole system, how can you get all businessmen on board? First it's just you, then it's you and one other business, then at some point you've got a majority, and legally, that's the same as a monopoly! If you're in business you have to compete. That means you can't be allowed to share your ideas or bring other businessmen on board.
What if your only competitor goes bankrupt? Then that makes you a monopoly. But the government will presume that you must have been a monopoly all along. Of course! Never mind that they were incompetent and you were competent, the government sees competence as "economic power" which you must have used to "put them out of business." So you were a monopoly, and must be punished -- for being productive and successful, if your competitor was not. Not that you would have been permitted to help them, of course! That's co-operation! That's a monopoly! No, you have to match their incompetence so they can compete with you. That's the only safe thing to do!
The government loves this, because it alone is exempt from the antitrust laws, and so it alone can propose and implement anything that improves the entire system. So it gets bigger.
Sometimes the people in government are competent and produce real improvements; Soviet Russia produced Sputnik. Sometimes, too, businessmen who are entrusted to solve the problem are corrupt and merely enrich themselves at others' expense, without producing any wealth. However, if the government solution isn't the best solution, you're stuck with it. If businessmen are allowed -- but not forced -- to compete, then many ideas will be presented, the best idea will rise to the top (above the scams), and then it will dominate until a better idea comes along. This doesn't happen very much in government; most politicians have no way to know which ideas have value and which are pie in the sky, so of course it comes down to who knows who. (Even the competent politicians can fall into personality conflicts, a better idea might never be implemented if it comes from a political opponent, for example.)
People don't understand this. People keep switching back and forth between a forced monopoly (government-run, of course) and forced competition (which people erroneously call "capitalism").
This is why the California power crisis happened -- because the California government passed hundreds of pages of "de-regulations" which were designed to force competition. No business was allowed to accumulate too much of anything, even if doing so would have allowed it to do great good -- because the presumption was that it would rip people off instead. What could the businessmen have done? If you ran Enron, what would you have done? What options would have been open to you? What, if anything, would have been legal and profitable?
Forced competition and a forced monopoly are two sides of the same coin: force. The only solution is freedom. The freedom to compete, or cooperate, as you see fit, to present your best ideas to the public for sale and let them take it or leave it. But not the freedom to stop anyone else from doing the same. That's capitalism. That would be deregulation.
Let companies compete -- or co-operate, at their own discretion -- to build power plants and power lines, to run power lines all the way to homes. Then let's see if deregulation fails. But until that happens, you don't really have deregulation, and you don't really have capitalism.
There's a simple solution to that. Make it so the option pays if either (a) the attack actually happens, or (b) it almost happens but is stopped by police, military, etc. That way, if the terrorists get caught, you still get paid. Win-win for everybody.