Switzerland is kind of a hybrid, since the president is elected by the legislature (parliamentary) but can't be removed through a vote of no confidence once elected (presidential). It's up to you whether it should count, but if it does, then every country with a greater HDI than the US is parliamentary.
North Korea works like a corporate intranet on steroids. There's an outwards facing internet presence (the ~15000 addresses) and then there's a national intranet. The two components are, for the most part, airgapped. If you're on the intranet side and want access to the internet, there are two options:
- If you're very well off or part of the elite, you use a separate computer.
- If you're not, but you're well enough off that you have intranet access, you can request material from the internet (usually research articles or whatever). This will be processed through the censors and copied over to the intranet side if it's found harmless.
So the point of the thing is that just because there are only ~15000 addresses, that doesn't mean that the intranet side is particularly limited. It runs on (at least) the whole 10.* space as the NK Tech article shows.
This isn't a new idea. Kantorovich (one of the inventors of linear programming) considered this venue of economic optimization himself, but the technology of the day wasn't up to the task and the bureaucracy didn't want to be displaced either. Some of his suggestions inspired the reforms that later got implemented by Kosygin, but the Soviet economy was rather distorted by subsidies at that point, so a lot of those reforms got rolled back.
There was also the fear that linear programming, with its shadow prices, would covertly smuggle capitalism into communism. See also Red Plenty for a half-fictionalized account of Kantorovich's attempts (or the Crooked Timber post, In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You).
Beyond that, there's Towards a New Socialism which is an idea/plan of how to run a socialist centrally planned society with modern technology. It uses sparse linear programming for the plan construction part and is based on sortition for government to diminish the inevitable corruption that comes with concentrating economic power like any CPE does. Would it work? Who knows? It may be interesting in the utopian sense anyway.
Tangentially related (speaking of scientific communism/socialism), there's also Project Cybersyn, the project to use cybernetics to run socialist Chile. That wasn't based on linear programming, though. If linear programming is the neat route, Cybersyn would be the scruffy route. Again, who knows whether it would have worked; if Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is anything to go by, a considerable part of the problem was that of bureaucracy and what the people were used to. Managers didn't use the system because it felt cumbersome to do so, etc.
With properly constructed software, the inexperienced PC owner shouldn't have to. Consider cell phone OSes that ask you if you want some given app to access location data, etc. There's little reason for a web browser to access anything but the profile and its download directory. A picture viewer doesn't need to write to disk, and so on. That approach makes enumeration much less important because the system already assumes the worst (default deny instead of default permit).
In practice, until software is programmed more defensively, PC owners will have to get that experience. Hopefully indirectly. What the article says is that antivirus might be worse than nothing at all even on the way there.
There are two problems. First, there's a very real risk of begging the question by conditioning on the universe you're in. Suppose, say, our universe was completely analog (no quantum mechanics) down to the point where it'd be possible do mathematical operations on arbitrary precision reals in constant time. Then it might very well be so that our simulations would inherit that property, i.e. we wouldn't expect that a simulation would be quantized either. Thus the argument that "we see quantization in our universe, which is a feature of our simulations, therefore our universe may be simulated" may reduce to "given that our universe is quantized, our simulations are quantized as well, but if our universe had been non-quantized, our simulations would also have been non-quantized". If so, then whether or not our universe is quantized tells us nothing about whether it is a simulation. All it does is give us some belief that, if we indeed are in a simulation, the "parent" universe will likely also be quantized.
Second, if this universe is a simulation, it can be tinkered with in any manner. Metaphorically speaking, if God is omnipotent, he can make himself invisible to any test if he wants to, up to and including rewriting our memories or restoring from a backup.
If the simulation is imperfect then we can start from that hypothesis and, in essence, look for the pixels and rounding errors in our reality, and eventually break out of this little honeypot into the rest of the network (or force the hand of whoever's running the experiment).
But determining whether you've broken out of a little honeypot or whether what you thought you were breaking out of is just a feature of the universe is a philosophical question, not a scientific one.
Suppose you find a galactic Konami code that lets you into seemingly another universe with a whole different set of rules. Have you "hacked reality", or have you just found a way to make a gate into hyperspace? Science itself can't tell you, because science just tells you what is. Or another example: suppose we find out that the EM-drive works and makes it possible to build a reactionless spaceship. Have we now exploited a bug in the fabric of reality, or is it just the consequence of an ordinary law of physics we didn't know of yet?
We now have game AI that's really good at tactics but not so good at strategy (chess AIs), and we have game AI that's really good at strategy but not so good at tactics (AlphaGo with its failure to spot tesuji). The next step would be to make game AI that's good at both. See e.g. On Adversarial Search Spaces and Sampling-Based Planning. The next step after that? I'd say incorporating the kind of strategic capabilities AlphaGo shows to make AIs for very large incomplete information games.
Slashdot Mirror
It has worked better than in the US in... Norway, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and Ireland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Switzerland is kind of a hybrid, since the president is elected by the legislature (parliamentary) but can't be removed through a vote of no confidence once elected (presidential). It's up to you whether it should count, but if it does, then every country with a greater HDI than the US is parliamentary.
North Korea works like a corporate intranet on steroids. There's an outwards facing internet presence (the ~15000 addresses) and then there's a national intranet. The two components are, for the most part, airgapped. If you're on the intranet side and want access to the internet, there are two options:
- If you're very well off or part of the elite, you use a separate computer.
- If you're not, but you're well enough off that you have intranet access, you can request material from the internet (usually research articles or whatever). This will be processed through the censors and copied over to the intranet side if it's found harmless.
So the point of the thing is that just because there are only ~15000 addresses, that doesn't mean that the intranet side is particularly limited. It runs on (at least) the whole 10.* space as the NK Tech article shows.
This isn't a new idea. Kantorovich (one of the inventors of linear programming) considered this venue of economic optimization himself, but the technology of the day wasn't up to the task and the bureaucracy didn't want to be displaced either. Some of his suggestions inspired the reforms that later got implemented by Kosygin, but the Soviet economy was rather distorted by subsidies at that point, so a lot of those reforms got rolled back.
There was also the fear that linear programming, with its shadow prices, would covertly smuggle capitalism into communism. See also Red Plenty for a half-fictionalized account of Kantorovich's attempts (or the Crooked Timber post, In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You).
Beyond that, there's Towards a New Socialism which is an idea/plan of how to run a socialist centrally planned society with modern technology. It uses sparse linear programming for the plan construction part and is based on sortition for government to diminish the inevitable corruption that comes with concentrating economic power like any CPE does. Would it work? Who knows? It may be interesting in the utopian sense anyway.
Tangentially related (speaking of scientific communism/socialism), there's also Project Cybersyn, the project to use cybernetics to run socialist Chile. That wasn't based on linear programming, though. If linear programming is the neat route, Cybersyn would be the scruffy route. Again, who knows whether it would have worked; if Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is anything to go by, a considerable part of the problem was that of bureaucracy and what the people were used to. Managers didn't use the system because it felt cumbersome to do so, etc.
So how is this better than FOBS? Sure, fractional orbital bombardment is illegal, but presumably so would this thing be.
With properly constructed software, the inexperienced PC owner shouldn't have to. Consider cell phone OSes that ask you if you want some given app to access location data, etc. There's little reason for a web browser to access anything but the profile and its download directory. A picture viewer doesn't need to write to disk, and so on. That approach makes enumeration much less important because the system already assumes the worst (default deny instead of default permit).
In practice, until software is programmed more defensively, PC owners will have to get that experience. Hopefully indirectly. What the article says is that antivirus might be worse than nothing at all even on the way there.
Enumerating badness is a lousy idea.
The difference between the Windows 10 installer and actual malware is directly proportional to the number of days left of the free offer.
Sounds like a perfect fit for Uwe Boll!
Satoshi probably knows that, and so he's not going to reveal himself. Especially not if he's American.
Go fast enough and it'll be 40 years... as far as you're concerned.
Second, if this universe is a simulation, it can be tinkered with in any manner. Metaphorically speaking, if God is omnipotent, he can make himself invisible to any test if he wants to, up to and including rewriting our memories or restoring from a backup.
But determining whether you've broken out of a little honeypot or whether what you thought you were breaking out of is just a feature of the universe is a philosophical question, not a scientific one.
Suppose you find a galactic Konami code that lets you into seemingly another universe with a whole different set of rules. Have you "hacked reality", or have you just found a way to make a gate into hyperspace? Science itself can't tell you, because science just tells you what is. Or another example: suppose we find out that the EM-drive works and makes it possible to build a reactionless spaceship. Have we now exploited a bug in the fabric of reality, or is it just the consequence of an ordinary law of physics we didn't know of yet?
Tell that to Genghis Khan.
We now have game AI that's really good at tactics but not so good at strategy (chess AIs), and we have game AI that's really good at strategy but not so good at tactics (AlphaGo with its failure to spot tesuji). The next step would be to make game AI that's good at both. See e.g. On Adversarial Search Spaces and Sampling-Based Planning. The next step after that? I'd say incorporating the kind of strategic capabilities AlphaGo shows to make AIs for very large incomplete information games.