Most of the threads here seem to fall under the assumption that the PICS rating system will be similar to the MPAA system. I admit I to have assumed this but are we really sure this will happen?
Maybe, although I really don't expect it, they will come up with non-perjoritive labels, a sort of content identification. The problem with labels on movies and so forth is that they made a judgement about who was suitable to see the movie.
NC-17 says dirty and unworthwhile "a satirical account of the crusifiction involving homosexuality", while many people may not like it, is perfectly reasonable.
If the system merely has categories Sex, violence, religious stuff , etc... then non-personal censorship won't be an issue. AOL might be able to block all sites deemed NC-17 (i.e. deemed dirty) but couldn't decide to block sites over a certain sex content or so forth because many sites which weren't smut but discussed sex openly would be banned.
Yes, the possibility of "volountary" ratings for the internet is a scary thought but there are real steps we can take to stop our opinions from being censored.
The wonderful thing about rating systems like this is that they only censor through stigmatization. No NC-17 movies are displayed because the stigmatization of the label has convinced nearly everyone involved that they aren't worth the trouble. But now suppose someone succeded in getting all the major blockbusters this year labeled NC-17. The demand to see such movies would break down theaters censorship. The censorship only reigns as long as the majority is convinced of the unworth of the censored material.
So what do we do on the internet? We make sure good cites get the WORST rating. Sure if it is only raunchy porn cites which are the equivalent of NC-17 maybe AOL will start blocking them. Instead we need to make sure slashdot.org, linux.org, eff.org and every major site we can convince to our cause to be rated terrible.
With such a move we have forced AOL's hand. They can get away with blocking all sorts of minor porn sites (segment the populance and then only take away a small groups freedoms) but their would be to big an impact if they barred slashdot and eff. If this requires putting naughty pictures in some backpage (or the front page for all I care) then so be it.
Second their needs to be some sort of common legal defense to suits from angry parents. This would appear to be a role which could be filled by the eff if they are given support.
No, It all depends on how the privacy is removed. Consider the fact that many people lead veyr open non-secretive lives. Certainly we must admit that it is possible to get along without huge numbers of secrets.
Usually if government or some organization removes privacy it is for the purpose of policing inappropriate private response but there is no reason that lack of privacy can't do the opposite.
Homosexuals coming out of the closet and declaring themselves are divesting themselves of the privacy of their sexual inclinations and by doing so INCREASE the acceptance of alternitive viewpoints.
It is the small targeted privacy invasions which are the problems. It is when one group's privacy is violated while the oppresors privacy and the shady doings they have remain hidden which causes problems
Yes a large subsidy would certainly do this. What is feared is the death of a thousand cuts. Who will object each time a small government subsidy to a group is opened. As long as it is small enough people who aren't beneficaries don't vote even though if you add up all of these programs it is a terrible waste.
A similar issue already happens in washington. Special interests can sway issues to their advantage by concentrating great pressure on a single issue. By hinging a block of voters or money on one small issue they force the senator to vote with them. The majority may oppose the idea but as there vote won't swing on the issue the senator is best served by going with the special interest.
Even if we implemented this system on God's own, presumably unhackable, system (which we all know runs linux) with infinite bandwidth it would be a terribly bad idea.
Consider the fact that we need some way to identify citizens. Sure we can register private pgp keys but their is no reason that these keys could not be stolen at the user end (think virus that hacks into individuals computers to steal their key). Any system, no matter what, which requires verification without personal knowledge causes these problems.
These problems are present in conventional voting and as we know stuffing the ballot box is certainly possible, certainly postal ballots can be forged. However, manual voting has a fixed effort associated with stuffing the ballot box. Sure in a tight election maybe someone can stuff 1000 votes but it is an organizational impossibility to stuff 10 million votes without leaving huge obvious trail.
Voting done by computer allows easy repetition of the same action by one individual without thousands of staffers. What keeps voitng safe is not security measures but the difficulty of voting itself if we take away this difficulty we allow widespread easy cheating attempts.
>Increasing voter turnout is not always a good >thing. In the ideal democracy, those who care >about a subject vote, and those who don't, >don't.
The problem with solution is that the will of the concentrated minor tends to overwhelm the will of the majority. For isntance those who want to give money to redheads with green pants will care greatly about the issue while the masses, whom the issue affects little, will not care as much. Hence the government slowly turns into a system which benifits organized minority interests and your rights are only protected if you belong to such a group rather than a place fair for all.
Suppose you do nothing illegal then why do you care about people seeing your mail? Because you fear social stigma for your belifs or your habits etc.. Nonconformity could be dangerous, if your boss finds out you are a pervert he might fire you.
The ironic thing about this is that EVERYONE wants their mail private. EVERYONE is afraid of social stigmatization. Now I am saying privacy is a bad idea but if we didn't have privacy people would be forced to become that much more accepting of alternative ideas. I mean imagine that everyone's dirty secrets were out in the open pretty soon no one would care.
Utopian world I know where you can openly send your mail as long as it isn't illegal.
Required government ratings of movies carry implied value judgements about the contents of the movie. I may object to women wearing pink but only those who object to nudity get the government warning.
By choosing certain categories to rate a movie on the government forces the morality of the masses on me and my children. For instance, in the current situation, suppose I feel that some NC-17 movie has very important issues that I want my under 17-year old kid to see I cannot do so in the theater because I am being told seeing that much sex, a very natural act which the 17year old has probably already done, I will harm my child so I cannot show him this movie.
It is analagous to the government rating all democratic pamphlets G and republican pamphlets R. Sure they don't stop you from reading the republicans but the idea has already been damaged because their ideas are somehow less clean now
All the advances in satelite communications and visualization really do raise the possibilty of a space arms race, perhaps with china. While such an arms race might be tense it could be one of the most beneficial things to happen to the development of space.
Unfortunatly it appears the only way the US government can be induced to give adequate research funding is if they see a necessery milatary purpose. Perhaps these type of satelite events will give it to them.
P.S. You know it is just a matter of time b4 someone puts up the redmond cam. Or plots the location of CmdrTaco on the US map with aid of tehse satelites. The obsesives of the world will love it.
This isn't an issue confined entierly to this story. Sometimes when their are hundreds of comments on a story you want to browse only the comments which have been moderated up. You don't care if it was by an AC or not.
Similarly suppose you want to cut out all the flamebait setting your threshold to zero just won't cut it b/c if a registered user gets moderated down he's still at zero while setting it at one cuts out alot of worthwhile AC comments.
A good solution, when Rob has time, would be to make the AC gets -1 option in the preferences just like the small post option. Then when picking questions for this posts they could just not use the -1 for AC option
The use of the gausian curve is based on the assumption that the random variable we are considering is actually gereated as an average of many many independent random variables. It has been shown for all 'reasonable' independent random variables in the limit their average will be a gausian distribution. This is straightforwad mathematics no arguing with this.
As such from a mathematical point of view this has nothing to do with replacing the gausian curve...it is still clearly the most 'natural' mathematical curve. However, what I understand the authors to be claiming is that certain types of real world events are not actually gaussian and are described better by this model. This shouldn't be that surprising as often the 'extreme' cases are not caused by a mere sum of the independent random variables mentioned earlier.
For instance intelligence might be regarded as the influence of a great deal of small random variables (how some genes got arranged upbring etc..) but the truly tale end cases such as mental retardation do not occur because all of these factors go bad, (someone who is retarded is the result of some genetic defect usually not a combination of bad upbringing poor nutrition etc..). This is probably not the kind of thing the distribution describes but it shows that the gaussian really never has been the end all and be all.
So while this is undoubtly a very interesting subbject it really isn't that exciting. Ohh and the claim that the greater incidence of natural disasters disproves the gaussian was really BS, while they may not be gaussian this doesn't appear to be a large enough sample size to make such definitive claims
So let me get this straight. ISP's are not required to do anything and all users have to do is tell the government they aren't looking at bad things?
Mom: Johnny are you looking at porn in their? Johnny: No mom.
ha ha ha ha....This raises government stupidity to a new level. Everyone who wants to look at porn continues to look at porn and everyone who doesn't want to look at porn gets to pretened no one else is.
This seems like a helpful addition to the driver design process but it kinda bursts my bubble about open source development.
I always thought it would be viable that open source development of the 'non-sexy' features which are often claimed will kill open source would be funded by the device manufacturers. These manufacturers gain nothing by keeping their drivers and code proprietary and before this specification lost potential buyers.
These companies (maybe even places like apple) would release upgrades/enhancments to open-source projects to encourage users to buy their hardware ("You can now run linux on a sun buy sun" or "Buy sun with linux now supporting feature Y"). The nature of the GPL would requie these developments be GPLed as well making everyone better off (people get better software, hardware makers get people to buy hardware, programers get paid to code open source).
With a specification such as the UDI things get a little more hairy. A hardware manufacturer can employ coders to write a binary only enhancment to linux (say hardware driver) and gains the same advertising/usership upgrade as if he had coded the driver in opensource. In addition he forces his competitor to spend resources redoing all the work when his competitor wants to do something similar.
In this case everyone loses. It costs hardware manufacturers more money (they can't use similar code already out there on the net). People lose having proprietary hardware. And more programers are "wasted" repeating the work of others when they could be gainfully employed doing new work.
This is not to say the UDI is bad just wanted to raise some questions about the effect of this, and hardware companies in general, on the future of opensource development
Why has the post "But when is child porn not child porn" been down-moderated!?!? It was a reasonably well written post bringing up an interesting issue it didn't even contain anything abusive.
I always thought moderation on slashdot was supposed to kill "me too" or "first post" type posts and elevate paticularly good points not suppress interesting posts
This seems a common thread in censorship debates. *Everyone* even the censors agrees that censorship is wrong but, the objection goes, we should censor with the truly eggregious(sp?) offender. Right now that eggregious offender (for those with a more lazie fare approach) is child porn.
But by saying it is okay to censor something, even as bad as child porn, we have allowed an infrastructure to be built which lets us watch people and prosecute them for their communications. Just as in the classic slippery slope argument once anyone who looks at child porn goes in jail who will object when they push the line up to 'anal sex with an under 21 year old.' Each step is allowed because who wants to be identified with the small percent who watches 18 year olds get ass fucked?
Secondly while child porn is a bad thing such a massive invasion of our rights to communicate should, like any law, only be enacted if it prevents the violations of others rights? Does the child porn law really do this or only make us feel good about a subject we would rather not think about?
Does the fact that it is illegal to distribute child porn mean that more porn is made b/c the distribution is so difficult? Does the fact that he can't download any child porn off the net to jerk off to mean that your neighbor will molest your boy looking for his high?
Maybe if we only banned commercialization of child porn images less children would be molested. If they themselves weren't going to be thrown in jail we might have more informants on who is doing that actual abusing.
It is possible that the child porn laws and restrictions are a good thing despite their danger to our freedoms (worth the risk). However, the knee-jerk reaction to censor the material without even stoping to think about it is one of the worst reactions imaginable.
A) Does anyone have any other source for this claim? Is this what it claims or just hype?
B) If it is true that we could easily move a head this well and given the fact that we can clean blood using dialysis machines, oxygenate it and maybe even add nutrients how much more difficult would it be to keep a head on artificial life support?
I believe both of these technologies may still be usefull. The problem with just giving each computer a unique IP is that this will play havoc with subnetting and routing.
Imagine you take your laptop to another university (or even across campus) and want to plug it in the library. As you are now on a differnt subnet you can't keep your same IP and hence you need DHCP and DDNS. To do otherwise would cause significat router probalems as the packets meant for machine X were sent halfway around the world in the wrong direction b/c that is where the machine was last.
The problem with your argument is that there are some types of research companies just won't do. No company will try to discover the laws which govern electrons or strange matter because their is no economic advantage here. Any significant applications will be so far down the line that patents would expire and it is doubtful that you could patent a law of nature.
Hence any research done in fundamental physics by a company is dollar for dollar research done for their competitors. Hence EVERY company would freeload and no research would be done. Even IBM once doing far more basic research than almost every other company has realized it isn't paying off and is requiring their vaunted scientists to become engineers and make useful products.
Only the government through mandatory taxation can resolve the defection problem. Hence fundamental physics is something which MUST be government funded.
A miocrosoft employee once pointed out that all the free software people ever do is copy existing implementations they never innovate.
Unfortunatly this seems to be right in a good deal of cases. What we really should be trying to do is construct an open video compresion codec that has similar quality to sorenson...as we should to with mp3 and all sorts of other formats.
Free software succeded with bzip2 bringing free and superior conresion to linux surely we have people bright enough to do the same thing with video and audio.
Fortunately the part about one-way algorithms is very important. It is absurd even with astounding advances in computing power to do a brute force search of 160 bits. Thus the question becomes how secure is your hash function.
Secure hash functions are a VERY important topic but the fact that you only have 160 bits is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the threads here seem to fall under the assumption that the PICS rating system will be similar to the MPAA system. I admit I to have assumed this but are we really sure this will happen?
Maybe, although I really don't expect it, they will come up with non-perjoritive labels, a sort of content identification. The problem with labels on movies and so forth is that they made a judgement about who was suitable to see the movie.
NC-17 says dirty and unworthwhile
"a satirical account of the crusifiction involving homosexuality", while many people may not like it, is perfectly reasonable.
If the system merely has categories Sex, violence, religious stuff , etc... then non-personal censorship won't be an issue. AOL might be able to block all sites deemed NC-17 (i.e. deemed dirty) but couldn't decide to block sites over a certain sex content or so forth because many sites which weren't smut but discussed sex openly would be banned.
Yes, the possibility of "volountary" ratings for the internet is a scary thought but there are real steps we can take to stop our opinions from being censored.
The wonderful thing about rating systems like this is that they only censor through stigmatization. No NC-17 movies are displayed because the stigmatization of the label has convinced nearly everyone involved that they aren't worth the trouble. But now suppose someone succeded in getting all the major blockbusters this year labeled NC-17. The demand to see such movies would break down theaters censorship. The censorship only reigns as long as the majority is convinced of the unworth of the censored material.
So what do we do on the internet? We make sure good cites get the WORST rating. Sure if it is only raunchy porn cites which are the equivalent of NC-17 maybe AOL will start blocking them. Instead we need to make sure slashdot.org, linux.org, eff.org and every major site we can convince to our cause to be rated terrible.
With such a move we have forced AOL's hand. They can get away with blocking all sorts of minor porn sites (segment the populance and then only take away a small groups freedoms) but their would be to big an impact if they barred slashdot and eff. If this requires putting naughty pictures in some backpage (or the front page for all I care) then so be it.
Second their needs to be some sort of common legal defense to suits from angry parents. This would appear to be a role which could be filled by the eff if they are given support.
So what was the difficulty in allowing Linux to use 4G? I understand their was some issue with flushing certain buffers so was this a x86 only issue?
How is it that FreeBSD handles more RAM? Do they merely take a performance hit or do they have better kernel architecture?
As long as they don't "punch out" of an event horizon again I will be happy.
At least give some technobable explanation not "if we hit it really hard then we will break out"
No, It all depends on how the privacy is removed. Consider the fact that many people lead veyr open non-secretive lives. Certainly we must admit that it is possible to get along without huge numbers of secrets.
Usually if government or some organization removes privacy it is for the purpose of policing inappropriate private response but there is no reason that lack of privacy can't do the opposite.
Homosexuals coming out of the closet and declaring themselves are divesting themselves of the privacy of their sexual inclinations and by doing so INCREASE the acceptance of alternitive viewpoints.
It is the small targeted privacy invasions which are the problems. It is when one group's privacy is violated while the oppresors privacy and the shady doings they have remain hidden which causes problems
Yes a large subsidy would certainly do this. What is feared is the death of a thousand cuts. Who will object each time a small government subsidy to a group is opened. As long as it is small enough people who aren't beneficaries don't vote even though if you add up all of these programs it is a terrible waste.
A similar issue already happens in washington. Special interests can sway issues to their advantage by concentrating great pressure on a single issue. By hinging a block of voters or money on one small issue they force the senator to vote with them. The majority may oppose the idea but as there vote won't swing on the issue the senator is best served by going with the special interest.
Even if we implemented this system on God's own, presumably unhackable, system (which we all know runs linux) with infinite bandwidth it would be a terribly bad idea.
Consider the fact that we need some way to identify citizens. Sure we can register private pgp keys but their is no reason that these keys could not be stolen at the user end (think virus that hacks into individuals computers to steal their key). Any system, no matter what, which requires verification without personal knowledge causes these problems.
These problems are present in conventional voting and as we know stuffing the ballot box is certainly possible, certainly postal ballots can be forged. However, manual voting has a fixed effort associated with stuffing the ballot box. Sure in a tight election maybe someone can stuff 1000 votes but it is an organizational impossibility to stuff 10 million votes without leaving huge obvious trail.
Voting done by computer allows easy repetition of the same action by one individual without thousands of staffers. What keeps voitng safe is not security measures but the difficulty of voting itself if we take away this difficulty we allow widespread easy cheating attempts.
>Increasing voter turnout is not always a good >thing. In the ideal democracy, those who care >about a subject vote, and those who don't,
>don't.
The problem with solution is that the will of the concentrated minor tends to overwhelm the will of the majority. For isntance those who want to give money to redheads with green pants will care greatly about the issue while the masses, whom the issue affects little, will not care as much. Hence the government slowly turns into a system which benifits organized minority interests and your rights are only protected if you belong to such a group rather than a place fair for all.
Suppose you do nothing illegal then why do you care about people seeing your mail? Because you fear social stigma for your belifs or your habits etc.. Nonconformity could be dangerous, if your boss finds out you are a pervert he might fire you.
The ironic thing about this is that EVERYONE wants their mail private. EVERYONE is afraid of social stigmatization. Now I am saying privacy is a bad idea but if we didn't have privacy people would be forced to become that much more accepting of alternative ideas. I mean imagine that everyone's dirty secrets were out in the open pretty soon no one would care.
Utopian world I know where you can openly send your mail as long as it isn't illegal.
Required government ratings of movies carry implied value judgements about the contents of the movie. I may object to women wearing pink but only those who object to nudity get the government warning.
By choosing certain categories to rate a movie on the government forces the morality of the masses on me and my children. For instance, in the current situation, suppose I feel that some NC-17 movie has very important issues that I want my under 17-year old kid to see I cannot do so in the theater because I am being told seeing that much sex, a very natural act which the 17year old has probably already done, I will harm my child so I cannot show him this movie.
It is analagous to the government rating all democratic pamphlets G and republican pamphlets R. Sure they don't stop you from reading the republicans but the idea has already been damaged because their ideas are somehow less clean now
All the advances in satelite communications and visualization really do raise the possibilty of a space arms race, perhaps with china. While such an arms race might be tense it could be one of the most beneficial things to happen to the development of space.
Unfortunatly it appears the only way the US government can be induced to give adequate research funding is if they see a necessery milatary purpose. Perhaps these type of satelite events will give it to them.
P.S. You know it is just a matter of time b4 someone puts up the redmond cam. Or plots the location of CmdrTaco on the US map with aid of tehse satelites. The obsesives of the world will love it.
This isn't an issue confined entierly to this story. Sometimes when their are hundreds of comments on a story you want to browse only the comments which have been moderated up. You don't care if it was by an AC or not.
Similarly suppose you want to cut out all the flamebait setting your threshold to zero just won't cut it b/c if a registered user gets moderated down he's still at zero while setting it at one cuts out alot of worthwhile AC comments.
A good solution, when Rob has time, would be to make the AC gets -1 option in the preferences just like the small post option. Then when picking questions for this posts they could just not use the -1 for AC option
Now only if they GPL the curve. We should all write in and request they opensource the curve before microsoft can copyright it.
The use of the gausian curve is based on the assumption that the random variable we are considering is actually gereated as an average of many many independent random variables. It has been shown for all 'reasonable' independent random variables in the limit their average will be a gausian distribution. This is straightforwad mathematics no arguing with this.
As such from a mathematical point of view this has nothing to do with replacing the gausian curve...it is still clearly the most 'natural' mathematical curve. However, what I understand the authors to be claiming is that certain types of real world events are not actually gaussian and are described better by this model. This shouldn't be that surprising as often the 'extreme' cases are not caused by a mere sum of the independent random variables mentioned earlier.
For instance intelligence might be regarded as the influence of a great deal of small random variables (how some genes got arranged upbring etc..) but the truly tale end cases such as mental retardation do not occur because all of these factors go bad, (someone who is retarded is the result of some genetic defect usually not a combination of bad upbringing poor nutrition etc..). This is probably not the kind of thing the distribution describes but it shows that the gaussian really never has been the end all and be all.
So while this is undoubtly a very interesting subbject it really isn't that exciting. Ohh and the claim that the greater incidence of natural disasters disproves the gaussian was really BS, while they may not be gaussian this doesn't appear to be a large enough sample size to make such definitive claims
So let me get this straight. ISP's are not required to do anything and all users have to do is tell the government they aren't looking at bad things?
Mom: Johnny are you looking at porn in their?
Johnny: No mom.
ha ha ha ha....This raises government stupidity to a new level. Everyone who wants to look at porn continues to look at porn and everyone who doesn't want to look at porn gets to pretened no one else is.
This seems like a helpful addition to the driver design process but it kinda bursts my bubble about open source development.
I always thought it would be viable that open source development of the 'non-sexy' features which are often claimed will kill open source would be funded by the device manufacturers. These manufacturers gain nothing by keeping their drivers and code proprietary and before this specification lost potential buyers.
These companies (maybe even places like apple) would release upgrades/enhancments to open-source projects to encourage users to buy their hardware ("You can now run linux on a sun buy sun" or "Buy sun with linux now supporting feature Y"). The nature of the GPL would requie these developments be GPLed as well making everyone better off (people get better software, hardware makers get people to buy hardware, programers get paid to code open source).
With a specification such as the UDI things get a little more hairy. A hardware manufacturer can employ coders to write a binary only enhancment to linux (say hardware driver) and gains the same advertising/usership upgrade as if he had coded the driver in opensource. In addition he forces his competitor to spend resources redoing all the work when his competitor wants to do something similar.
In this case everyone loses. It costs hardware manufacturers more money (they can't use similar code already out there on the net). People lose having proprietary hardware. And more programers are "wasted" repeating the work of others when they could be gainfully employed doing new work.
This is not to say the UDI is bad just wanted to raise some questions about the effect of this, and hardware companies in general, on the future of opensource development
Why has the post "But when is child porn not child porn" been down-moderated!?!? It was a reasonably well written post bringing up an interesting issue it didn't even contain anything abusive.
I always thought moderation on slashdot was supposed to kill "me too" or "first post" type posts and elevate paticularly good points not suppress interesting posts
This seems a common thread in censorship debates. *Everyone* even the censors agrees that censorship is wrong but, the objection goes, we should censor with the truly eggregious(sp?) offender. Right now that eggregious offender (for those with a more lazie fare approach) is child porn.
But by saying it is okay to censor something, even as bad as child porn, we have allowed an infrastructure to be built which lets us watch people and prosecute them for their communications. Just as in the classic slippery slope argument once anyone who looks at child porn goes in jail who will object when they push the line up to 'anal sex with an under 21 year old.' Each step is allowed because who wants to be identified with the small percent who watches 18 year olds get ass fucked?
Secondly while child porn is a bad thing such a massive invasion of our rights to communicate should, like any law, only be enacted if it prevents the violations of others rights? Does the child porn law really do this or only make us feel good about a subject we would rather not think about?
Does the fact that it is illegal to distribute child porn mean that more porn is made b/c the distribution is so difficult? Does the fact that he can't download any child porn off the net to jerk off to mean that your neighbor will molest your boy looking for his high?
Maybe if we only banned commercialization of child porn images less children would be molested. If they themselves weren't going to be thrown in jail we might have more informants on who is doing that actual abusing.
It is possible that the child porn laws and restrictions are a good thing despite their danger to our freedoms (worth the risk). However, the knee-jerk reaction to censor the material without even stoping to think about it is one of the worst reactions imaginable.
A) Does anyone have any other source for this claim? Is this what it claims or just hype?
B) If it is true that we could easily move a head this well and given the fact that we can clean blood using dialysis machines, oxygenate it and maybe even add nutrients how much more difficult would it be to keep a head on artificial life support?
I believe both of these technologies may still be usefull. The problem with just giving each computer a unique IP is that this will play havoc with subnetting and routing.
Imagine you take your laptop to another university (or even across campus) and want to plug it in the library. As you are now on a differnt subnet you can't keep your same IP and hence you need DHCP and DDNS. To do otherwise would cause significat router probalems as the packets meant for machine X were sent halfway around the world in the wrong direction b/c that is where the machine was last.
Umm no I understood that they really never do intend to have a OS 9 b/c there alreadyh is an OS with similar name out there.
The problem with your argument is that there are some types of research companies just won't do. No company will try to discover the laws which govern electrons or strange matter because their is no economic advantage here. Any significant applications will be so far down the line that patents would expire and it is doubtful that you could patent a law of nature.
Hence any research done in fundamental physics by a company is dollar for dollar research done for their competitors. Hence EVERY company would freeload and no research would be done. Even IBM once doing far more basic research than almost every other company has realized it isn't paying off and is requiring their vaunted scientists to become engineers and make useful products.
Only the government through mandatory taxation can resolve the defection problem. Hence fundamental physics is something which MUST be government funded.
Peter
A miocrosoft employee once pointed out that all the free software people ever do is copy existing implementations they never innovate.
Unfortunatly this seems to be right in a good deal of cases. What we really should be trying to do is construct an open video compresion codec that has similar quality to sorenson...as we should to with mp3 and all sorts of other formats.
Free software succeded with bzip2 bringing free and superior conresion to linux surely we have people bright enough to do the same thing with video and audio.
But its 147K of simplifying it a little bit. The filters take about 2 minutes to explain/set up. That extra 145K must do SOMETHING!
my new opinion is that it is a security hole to send your encrypted email to the government.
Fortunately the part about one-way algorithms is very important. It is absurd even with astounding advances in computing power to do a brute force search of 160 bits. Thus the question becomes how secure is your hash function.
Secure hash functions are a VERY important topic but the fact that you only have 160 bits is irrelevant.