When scarcity goes away, you have an infinite commons. In domains that have infinite commons, you don't need an economic system at all. (But bits are not food, so you still need an economic system in the overall domain until you invent nanotechnology and an infinite source of free energy.)
Only a little. It's all about keeping the people you don't want to eavesdrop away from the endpoints, which has always been necessary as long as there have been people to spy on. Issues like writing your password on a sticky note are secondary: if the bad guys can get the sticky note on your monitor, they can bug your keyboard, too.
Yeah, but it's nice to reduce the problem to endpoint security, because (a) you're always going to need endpoint security (so it's nice to be able to focus on it exclusively) and (b) endpoint security problems haven't changed fundamentally in the past few million years or so: you keep bad people away from the endpoint and, if necessary, induce sufficiently people to work for you with sufficient motivation that they are sufficiently hard to bribe or threaten.
So third-world AIDS victims are a viable market for high-priced maintenance drugs? Color me surprised.
Me, I'd prefer that my tax dollars fund the basic research here. Having virulent, incurable STDs in the world diminishes my quality of life and denies me the carefree promiscuity that was accessible to my parents' generation, and that's just wrong.
Humans do not see in three dimensions; they see in two dimensions from two different angles. While you do need to be able to control pixels anywhere in the bubble, at any given time you only need to display a single 2D surface, so bandwidth is not the issue. The bubble could accept ordinary OpenGL commands, just ignoring the perspective matrix.
Reverse engineering is easier if you have source
on
Freeing the Specs?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I haven't encountered a video card in years that didn't have a solid free 2D driver in XFree86. If you're working on one of those l33t non-Unix free OSes, you can probably get all the information you need from the X driver and (for those that have it) the Linux framebuffer driver.
The world of 3D is different, of course. nVidia cards, for example, still have binary-only 3D drivers as far as I recall. In those cases, as a practical matter, you might start by wrapping the binary-only drivers in a Linux emulation layer.
"{CPU,chipset,whatever...}": the set of hardware that together enforces the rules. The "Fritz" chip does the validation, but the CPU and possibly other things are involved; it's not clear from the documentation I've had access to. If the entire extent of the CPU's involvement is that it has a unique ID, that doesn't change anything; it's unlikely that you'll be able to buy a Fritzless motherboard and handle the CPU in isolation.
The {CPU,chipset,whatever} will refuse to load an kernel that is not signed with a "trusted" key (which you, the user, certainly will not have). The kernel, in turn, must limit the capabilities of un-signed programs (or just refuse to run them) in order to get signed in the first place. No compiling your own kernel, no running your own software, just an appliance that you pay for the privilege of continuing to use. Get it now?
The asymmetry of power between employer and employee makes free contract impossible for the employee in that relationship.
I don't think this is uniformly true. I've definitely turned down potential employers because of things they wanted me to do (and didn't want to pay me enough for me to consider doing), like a urine test for drugs. It's a supply and demand thing: sometimes you're interesting to other people, sometimes you're not.
The question of what to do about this is a little fuzzy. I tend to think that using force to fix it is only OK in (at most) the case of an actual malignant monopoly that is actively trying to screw somebody out of a living; in the rest of the cases, I'd be willing to donate to a fund to take care of the poor losers (because I might be unlucky enough to be in their position some day), but I wouldn't consider it reasonable to use force to compel others to help (i.e., taxes).
The line between enough statistics for usable market research and enough to pick out an individual can be fine, especially when the books in question are "suspicious" books, only likely to be picked out by people with an interest in a particular topic.
Yes. You'll notice that I was talking about "libertarian philosophy", not "my philosophy". I mostly agree with the libertarian principle: that it is wrong to initiate the use of force against others, and that use of force includes both physical harm and misappropriation of property. There are some areas, though, where the LP falls short in my view:
Scarse un-owned resources. Property rights aren't meaningful unless ownership is clearly established, so how do you deal with something like the air, which (under current property law) nobody owns? When is it OK to shit in a stream that passes through your property, and why? As long as un-owned resources are "infinite" (like the ocean was to humans of a thousand years ago), this is not much of a problem, but as they become scarse, the problem looms.
Go/Monopoly. If a group of people asserts property rights to all the land around your property or all the means of production in a sufficiently large area around you, by deciding not to do business with you, they are giving you the choice of starving to death or violating their property rights.
Inductive basis of property ownership. If you trade something you legitimately own for something someone else legitimately owns, or if you make something new out of things you legitimately own, it is clear that you own the new thing. This is the induction step in proving that any given piece of property is legitimately owned. The problem is, the base step always starts with property that was originally either stolen by force or initially unowned. (I'm talking about ethics, so the fact that the government typically assigned legal ownership of the property to somebody at some point is irrelevant.)
I'm sorry I can't be more confrontational about it; I'm genuinely interested in good answers to these questions, so I'm likely to do a bad job of providing a typical Slashdot throwaway remark about them.
Libertarians do not oppose only government oppression; they oppose all oppression by force. If an employer makes something a condition of employment, they're just setting the conditions under which they want to do business with you, not oppressing you. To a libertarian, it would be oppression to force them to employ you despite your not meeting their conditions, just as it would be to force you to work for them.
The books are not canonical.
I get the impression from Brin's writing that he is clued enough about SW fandom to exclude the books because of that, rather than because he isn't aware of them.
No, I don't. That's really my point: I care about fish at most only for aesthetic reasons and for their secondary effects on the ecosystem, whatever those happen to be.
I suspect that large-scale power generation can produce more power for less pollution, since they don't have the space and dynamic load constraints that cars and household engines have.
As for hydro, I don't really give a damn if a particular fish can spawn. I'm a bad greeny: I care a lot about things that poison me or screw up the ecosystem in ways that endanger my food supply, but not much about anything else.
I do not believe that is true. Regardless of your encryption method, you can't prevent man-in-the-middle attacks without information that has been securely shared in advance. That's one of the reasons for key-signing parties.
- Yes, OTP is still perfectly secure, but its still perfectly useless, as w/ OTP you just shift the security to two other areas; truely random pad generation, and secure distribution of the pads.
So? Both of those problems exist for every other crypto algorithm, too. OTP just makes them the only problems. (Well, "endpoint security" is the other problem you don't mention.)
If you read my comment that started this thread, you'll notice that I'm talking about stuff I'm willing to share with a certain limited set of people, but not the world. I already use encrypted email or WebDAV over HTTPS for that sort of thing; I'm just frustrated that Apple's k3wl new tool won't fit into that world when it would have been easy to make it, and when they promised to do so.
That's ridiculous. If you're using a calendar to its full potential, it's at least as personal as a diary: it has your medical appointments, your dates, your hopes for the future. If I want to share information about myself, I will do so, and I do; but when I don't want to share something, I don't want to send it unencrypted over a global network (and, as often as not in my case, a local wireless network). Privacy is not just for finances, you know.
Apple promised WebDAV over SSL in Jaguar, but didn't deliver as far as I can tell. I'm stuck dragging stuff back and forth to Goliath instead of being able to edit it directly in Emacs, and I can't use my secure WebDAV server to share my iCal with only my friends rather than everybody. This is terrifically irritating.
Slashdot Mirror
When scarcity goes away, you have an infinite commons. In domains that have infinite commons, you don't need an economic system at all. (But bits are not food, so you still need an economic system in the overall domain until you invent nanotechnology and an infinite source of free energy.)
I suspect you're thinking of "rubber hose" cryptanalysis anyway.
Only a little. It's all about keeping the people you don't want to eavesdrop away from the endpoints, which has always been necessary as long as there have been people to spy on. Issues like writing your password on a sticky note are secondary: if the bad guys can get the sticky note on your monitor, they can bug your keyboard, too.
Yeah, but it's nice to reduce the problem to endpoint security, because (a) you're always going to need endpoint security (so it's nice to be able to focus on it exclusively) and (b) endpoint security problems haven't changed fundamentally in the past few million years or so: you keep bad people away from the endpoint and, if necessary, induce sufficiently people to work for you with sufficient motivation that they are sufficiently hard to bribe or threaten.
So third-world AIDS victims are a viable market for high-priced maintenance drugs? Color me surprised.
Me, I'd prefer that my tax dollars fund the basic research here. Having virulent, incurable STDs in the world diminishes my quality of life and denies me the carefree promiscuity that was accessible to my parents' generation, and that's just wrong.
Humans do not see in three dimensions; they see in two dimensions from two different angles. While you do need to be able to control pixels anywhere in the bubble, at any given time you only need to display a single 2D surface, so bandwidth is not the issue. The bubble could accept ordinary OpenGL commands, just ignoring the perspective matrix.
I haven't encountered a video card in years that didn't have a solid free 2D driver in XFree86. If you're working on one of those l33t non-Unix free OSes, you can probably get all the information you need from the X driver and (for those that have it) the Linux framebuffer driver.
The world of 3D is different, of course. nVidia cards, for example, still have binary-only 3D drivers as far as I recall. In those cases, as a practical matter, you might start by wrapping the binary-only drivers in a Linux emulation layer.
There is a chunk of flash in the drive electronics that can only be rewritten a certain number of times, and the region is stored in that.
"{CPU,chipset,whatever...}": the set of hardware that together enforces the rules. The "Fritz" chip does the validation, but the CPU and possibly other things are involved; it's not clear from the documentation I've had access to. If the entire extent of the CPU's involvement is that it has a unique ID, that doesn't change anything; it's unlikely that you'll be able to buy a Fritzless motherboard and handle the CPU in isolation.
RTFFAQ. (And who said the alien clones had to be super-intelligent? They'd be noticed, especially among Republicans.)
The {CPU,chipset,whatever} will refuse to load an kernel that is not signed with a "trusted" key (which you, the user, certainly will not have). The kernel, in turn, must limit the capabilities of un-signed programs (or just refuse to run them) in order to get signed in the first place. No compiling your own kernel, no running your own software, just an appliance that you pay for the privilege of continuing to use. Get it now?
I don't think this is uniformly true. I've definitely turned down potential employers because of things they wanted me to do (and didn't want to pay me enough for me to consider doing), like a urine test for drugs. It's a supply and demand thing: sometimes you're interesting to other people, sometimes you're not.
The question of what to do about this is a little fuzzy. I tend to think that using force to fix it is only OK in (at most) the case of an actual malignant monopoly that is actively trying to screw somebody out of a living; in the rest of the cases, I'd be willing to donate to a fund to take care of the poor losers (because I might be unlucky enough to be in their position some day), but I wouldn't consider it reasonable to use force to compel others to help (i.e., taxes).
The line between enough statistics for usable market research and enough to pick out an individual can be fine, especially when the books in question are "suspicious" books, only likely to be picked out by people with an interest in a particular topic.
Yes. You'll notice that I was talking about "libertarian philosophy", not "my philosophy". I mostly agree with the libertarian principle: that it is wrong to initiate the use of force against others, and that use of force includes both physical harm and misappropriation of property. There are some areas, though, where the LP falls short in my view:
I'm sorry I can't be more confrontational about it; I'm genuinely interested in good answers to these questions, so I'm likely to do a bad job of providing a typical Slashdot throwaway remark about them.
Libertarians do not oppose only government oppression; they oppose all oppression by force. If an employer makes something a condition of employment, they're just setting the conditions under which they want to do business with you, not oppressing you. To a libertarian, it would be oppression to force them to employ you despite your not meeting their conditions, just as it would be to force you to work for them.
On the other hand, when the machine you enter your passwords on is compromised, you only need to change one password...
The books are not canonical. I get the impression from Brin's writing that he is clued enough about SW fandom to exclude the books because of that, rather than because he isn't aware of them.
No, I don't. That's really my point: I care about fish at most only for aesthetic reasons and for their secondary effects on the ecosystem, whatever those happen to be.
I suspect that large-scale power generation can produce more power for less pollution, since they don't have the space and dynamic load constraints that cars and household engines have.
As for hydro, I don't really give a damn if a particular fish can spawn. I'm a bad greeny: I care a lot about things that poison me or screw up the ecosystem in ways that endanger my food supply, but not much about anything else.
I do not believe that is true. Regardless of your encryption method, you can't prevent man-in-the-middle attacks without information that has been securely shared in advance. That's one of the reasons for key-signing parties.
So? Both of those problems exist for every other crypto algorithm, too. OTP just makes them the only problems. (Well, "endpoint security" is the other problem you don't mention.)
And indeed, that is a reasonable workaround. I'm just whining because a workaround is annoying and should not be necessary.
If you read my comment that started this thread, you'll notice that I'm talking about stuff I'm willing to share with a certain limited set of people, but not the world. I already use encrypted email or WebDAV over HTTPS for that sort of thing; I'm just frustrated that Apple's k3wl new tool won't fit into that world when it would have been easy to make it, and when they promised to do so.
That's ridiculous. If you're using a calendar to its full potential, it's at least as personal as a diary: it has your medical appointments, your dates, your hopes for the future. If I want to share information about myself, I will do so, and I do; but when I don't want to share something, I don't want to send it unencrypted over a global network (and, as often as not in my case, a local wireless network). Privacy is not just for finances, you know.
Apple promised WebDAV over SSL in Jaguar, but didn't deliver as far as I can tell. I'm stuck dragging stuff back and forth to Goliath instead of being able to edit it directly in Emacs, and I can't use my secure WebDAV server to share my iCal with only my friends rather than everybody. This is terrifically irritating.