i've been hearing about how ip4 will run out in the next 5 years for the last TEN years.
Well, it would have run out a lot faster, had it not been for CIDR, which allowed addresses to be allocated more efficiently. However that -- like proposals to re-allocate unused space in some of the old corporate A-blocks -- slowed the bleeding but doesn't really do anything about the real problem.
That's really just not true. With IPv6, you can get a lot more anonymity than you have now with IPv4. v6 has all sorts of special provisions for randomly assigning addresses, letting you reset them when you want, so that you can appear to be a new user in the middle of a browsing session. That's tough to do with IPv4; even if you try a DHCP release-and-renew from your ISP, generally they won't issue you a new address until the other one has expired.
IPv6 doesn't force you to give up any privacy, and there's no 'user serialization' unless you buy into it voluntarily.
You can still run a server -- just configure your ISP's server as the "smart host". There is no shame in that.
Unfortunately it's still a problem with the ISPs who don't let you send out email through their servers unless the Reply-To address is within their domain. I haven't run into this recently, so maybe it's only a feature of the very low-end dialup ghetto, but I definitely ran into it once or twice.
This is a serious issue, if it occurs together with the blocking of outgoing connections on Port 25, because it effectively locks you into ISP-supplied email addresses (or webmail, which still isn't a replacement for desktop mail clients).
Just another thing that can be chalked up to the Windows monoculture 'o crap, though it's borne by everyone.
I agree. (Though I expect you'll be down-modded for saying it, but sometimes that's just the way things go.)
There have been a few times when I've thought that Fox was pandering to the Right, but frankly it's a whole lot less often than when I've been watching CNN and seen some pretty clear Leftist bias.
I also think it's possible that Fox was perceived as being more "biased" back when they first got started, and were trying to aggressively differentiate themselves from CNN and the big three. However, I also think that was probably the height of the liberal bias on mainstream news, too. The whole reason Fox got popular was because of the discontent many people felt about the level of bias on the existing networks at the time; Fox responded to the demand for 'less-Left' news and did well. If the big networks had really been reporting unbiased news at the time, Fox never would have been able to grab marketshare as quickly as they did.
That Fox is probably more conservative than ABC or NBC is no contest, but I don't Fox is inherently any more biased. That is, I'm not sure that Fox is any further from the imaginary 'point of unbiasedness' than the other networks are.
If you want actual Right-wing bias, talk radio is the place to go; that's where the real pandering/propaganda is. (Although, not all of conservative talk-radio is that bad, and there are some folks on there who I think are up-front about their opinions and make interesting points.)
Ultimately, it may be an academic point; I'm not sure that "unbiased" is anything except the majority's median viewpoint at any given time. Both Fox, CNN, and the other networks are shooting for it, but I think that they probably have different ideas of where it is.
Do third-world children really have a choice? Many do not have a roof over their head and those who do live in horrid squalor with no toilets, electricity, running water or even floors. Their machines will get dirty just from exposure to these environments.
I'm not sure those are the children that the OLPC/Classmate are really being aimed for. Looking at the governments that are purchasing them, while they do have some poor areas, they're not exactly sub-Saharan Africa; I'm not sure that kids who lack electricity or a roof at home are probably going to be the first ones to get their hands on one. I suspect they're going to go to poor urban students, whose conditions are probably pretty deplorable by U.S. standards, but they're not dirt farmers either.
I'm pretty sure that the population of a lot of Third World countries supports this; they have fairly sizable chunks of the population living in crowded cities. The utilities may be old and unreliable, but it's not a shack-in-the-woods situation.
The thing is, the constitution is clear on this. The states don't have a right to charge taxes on stuff shipped across state lines. Why are we even having this discussion?
You are correct -- the states can't charge tax on goods shipped across their borders. I.e., they can't have a "California import tariff," as if they were a separate nation from the rest of the country, or something.
However, the Court has allowed states to charge tax on goods used or consumed in their state. This is how sales tax works: they don't charge the tax when the widgets cross the border from the neighboring state -- that would be illegal due to the Constitution -- but they charge the tax on the sale when it occurs in the state, or on the use of the item if you bought it elsewhere and are using it in the state. (Most people don't realize this, but if you buy something via mail order and use it in a state that charges sales tax, you're legally obligated to pay the same tax rate on it, only as a "use tax" instead of a "sales tax." All states that have sales taxes also have use taxes.)
That's how they get around the unconstitutionality. If it seems like hair-splitting, I'd probably agree with you, and there's a chance that if states really started getting obnoxious with their tax structures, to the point where it was interfering with commerce between states, then the USSC could step in and basically say that they have de facto violated the Constitution by creating barriers to trade... but I wouldn't hold your breath.
As a rich country you have no choice but to become employment agency for the poor of the world. It is simply economics: you have money and will not clean your own toilet (or do your own garden, or clean your own house, or whatever). People from poor countries will do it for you. You may decide not to hire illegal workers, economics is working against you and most people with money will take advantage of the cheap labour. That is a fact, not a delussional statement.
I disagree completely; your assumption that Americans (or other First Worlders) will not 'clean their own toilet' is completely false. Lots of Americans are willing to work as janitors, gardeners, house-cleaners, and everything else. There are Americans willing to stand waist-deep in pig shit, for the right amount of pay. However, they're not going to do it for $5.50 an hour; they're going to demand pay that's commensurate with the job being performed. This is completely fair, and how the labor market ought to operate; people who claim that 'Amercians won't do x,' where x is some unsavory job, really mean "Americans won't do x for minimum wage," which is probably true. But there's no real reason why that job should be done for minimum wage. In reality, people who clean toilets should be paid pretty well, because it's a, well, shitty job.
I agree, however, that you need to keep outsourcing in mind when designing an immigration policy; however the majority of the jobs currently done by illegal workers are service-sector jobs that can't be easily outsourced. (Frankly, all the jobs in the U.S. today are ones that can't be easily outsourced, because all the ones that can be, already have been.) Trying to prevent outsourcing by bringing cheap labor here, is a losing game; the goods still end up costing the same amount to be manufactured (you can't import workers and then pay them less than they would earn back home), and although they probably contribute to the economy somewhat, there are ample studies that suggest that large numbers of poor workers are actually a net drain on the local economy. They certainly are on the government, because they consume more services than they pay in taxes. And that's without even getting into the social problems that a huge recently-immigrated working class causes, particularly if the economy goes south and their jobs disappear, or if there aren't enough jobs for their children. (Cf. France.) "Insourcing" through immigration just trades a short-term benefit for a long-term problem.
Also, your allegations of racism and other general name-calling aren't convincing. (Actually, it's not even factually correct; I never mentioned "race" at all. You seem to be assuming it exists when it does not... a little over-defensive, actually.) I have been to many of the countries where the majority of the illegal workers in the U.S. (my part of it anyway) come from. Conditions there are, by First World standards anyway, pretty deplorable on the mean. So I don't think it's particularly a stretch to understand that when people immigrate to the U.S., their expectations on arriving, for things like housing, are somewhat lower. Does this mean that they don't want a nice house? Certainly not -- and I never said that. But they're willing to compromise, because if you're coming from a coffee plantation in El Salvador, a whole lot of living situations that Americans would scoff at look pretty decent by comparison. I don't think that's even a particularly controversial statement, and it's not as though it's without historical parallels. (Recent immigrants have almost always been willing to accept lower standards of living than people who've established themselves here; e.g. Hell's Kitchen.)
But the point is that if you have a continuous influx of people moving in from very low-cost areas, and a labor market that only has a limited number of jobs at any one time, the people who are willing to make the most sa
The hard part is getting people to accept a card without the corroborating data, like chip-and-pin, signature, D.O.B etc etc.
Seriously? I've never been asked for anything when using a credit card, besides its expiration date, and occasionally the billing address (what they're interested in is the billing ZIP code, generally). Signature checks are bogus -- in most stores, you could draw a picture of the goatse.cx guy and the clerk wouldn't ever say anything, and of course there's no signature on the Internet. No U.S. banks that I'm aware of use PIN codes on credit cards, and I've never heard of any company using a customer's DOB for purchase-authentication. (I think customers would probably dislike and reject it.)
If you have the card number and expiration date, you have enough, usually, to make small purchases. If you have the billing address (or sometimes just the ZIP), you have enough to make large purchases -- up until it's big enough to get red-flagged for human review (Amex is pretty aggressive at this).
As other people have noted, the hard part about credit card fraud is receiving the goods -- that's where people normally get busted, because it requires more diligence than most fraudsters have to maintain a continual chain of fresh drop-offs without repeating.
Current immigration crisis resulted from our borders being closed to the skilled people while open to the low-skill illiterate border-crossers. Hence, we have a surplus of cheap dirtfarmers placing a huge strain on our teachers, doctors, policemen. If you let high-skilled people immigrate proportionately to the low-skilled Mexicans (at least one doctor, teacher, policeman, scientist per 100 immigrants, for example), it will all even out.
I agree with you in part, in that there is a certain proportion that needs to be maintained, but the idea that we can 'solve' the current problem by simply allowing more high-skilled immigration (not sure if that's what you were suggesting or not) won't work -- it assumes that there is some infinite number of jobs in the U.S., and there's clearly not true. If you just try to fix the proportionality problem by allowing lots and lots of high-skilled immigration, eventually you'll end up with the whole country looking like post-dot-bomb Silicon Valley, where you've got people with PhDs delivering pizza, because that's the only work they can get.
You need proportionality, and not just have unskilled immigration without skilled people that are going to pay the taxes that will fund all the services that low-skilled workers consume, but you can't just increase the numerator on that fraction until it lines up -- there's only a certain number of high-skilled jobs available, too.
While the size of the economic "pie" isn't necessarily fixed and constant, it's not infinite either at any given time. It's entirely possible to flood a market with too much labor, which will result in wages crashing... and that means foreclosures, increased debt, and eventually, social unrest. The amount of available labor needs to be carefully balanced against demand, in order to keep unemployment low and inflation controlled.
I think you're missing the point slightly about working conditions -- I didn't mean to imply that those workers necessarily "want" to live in Third World conditions, but the fact that someone has just moved from a very poor, low-cost area, and is used to living without a lot of amenities that we take for granted here, means that when there's a job shortage, they're going to be a lot more willing to take a pay cut, then someone who's established here, and has a mortgage and car payments and the rest. In a labor market with more restrictive immigration rules, the job market is allowed to tighten, and workers have leverage to increase their wages.
As long as you are continuously allowing new immigrants in from low-cost areas, they're always going to be able to underbid anyone who's established themselves here, and that undermines the very social fabric we're trying to construct. You could theoretically alleviate the wage deflation by rigorously enforcing a high minimum wage, but then I think you just run into problems like France -- you end up with immigrants still coming in, far in excess of the available jobs, so that you end up with high unemployment and all the social problems that entails. The solution is to balance immigration closely against only those needs that are clearly and desperately not being met domestically.
Just as a followup, I apparently quite underestimated the cost of a Slingbox -- for some reason I had this idea they were about $75 or so, when they're really about $125. That would buy you at least one, probably two, PVR-150s if you shopped around for them on sale. If you could write off the cost of the spare computer to run it on (i.e., you have a few sitting around, as I suspect many/.ers do) then you could probably beat the Slingbox in price, although unless you have a spare ultra-low-power system, eventually your cost advantage is going to get eaten up in electricity consumption.
The closest thing you can get to a Slingbox that will work well with MythTV is a box called the HDHomeRun, $170, which does ATSC OTA and QAM Cable HDTV, letting you record it on a suitably-powerful MythTV box.
Yes, you can do it with MythTV and MythWeb; the MythTV box records your TV, Tivo-style, and transcodes it to MPEG-4, which you can then stream to a viewer anywhere you have a sufficiently fast connection.
Setting up MythTV is a bit of a bear, though. (Okay, that's putting it lightly... it's probably best summed up as a sort of Old-Testament-style religious experience, and that's on a good day.) Pre-rolled distros like Knoppmyth or Mythdora make it a little easier, but it's still a weekend activity and is happiest if you can dedicate a box to it. And unfortunately, a single decent TV tuner (hardware MPEG-2) will probably set you back almost as much as a Slingbox.
But from what I understand, the Slingbox is place-shifting only, while a MythTV machine will let you both place- and time-shift, as well as format shift onto DVD-R.
The Slingbox would actually make a great video input device for a MythTV system, if it weren't all DRMed to heck and back.
Why not allow them to enter the labor market with the same rights as the American workers? This way they would not underbid the Native Americans and everybody wins.
Because then you're basically guaranteeing a labor surplus.
If there are 10 guys standing around, all trying to get hired for one job, then that job isn't going to pay very much. As soon as the guy who gets hired asks for a raise, or anything else, he'll just be fired and quickly replaced.
In a tighter job market, where there are fewer potential employees standing around looking for work, then the workers (individually or collectively, although personally I think collective bargaining can quickly become a scam as well) are in a much better negotiating position and can get paid more.
That's just basic supply and demand; what you're proposing would basically make the 'supply' of labor near-infinite. That's not what we want; we need a balance between the two, one that gets as close to full employment within the U.S. as possible, without driving inflation out of control. That's the goal -- not to act as some sort of employment agency for the rest of the world.
And on a more practical level, people who have just stepped off the proverbial boat from a poor country are always going to expect less in terms of pay and standards of living. Particularly if they aren't planning on actually living here, and are either saving up to go home and live like a king, or sending their money home while living in a hovel themselves (not uncommon; it's unbelievable how many people you can pack into a one-bedroom apartment if you try, I've seen it), they'll always be able to underbid a domestic worker who wants to have a typical American lifestyle (own a house, car, major appliances, etc.).
In essence, if you do what you propose, and just open the floodgates, you'll have lots of people coming in and working, who aren't really interested in the typical American lifestyle, which is pretty expensive. Since I think we want to promote that type of lifestyle -- not necessarily blatant consumerism, but a culture of ownership and individual self-sufficiency, where it's not ridiculous for a person to aspire to own a house, car, etc. -- we flat-out can't do that. To put it perfectly bluntly: if you allow a lot of people who are comfortable (or at least used to) living in Third World conditions into the labor market, we're going to reduce the working class here in the U.S. to Third World conditions, in order to compete. I don't think that's a good thing.
As for patent length in pharmaceuticals, it takes 10 years and 80 million dollars to get a drug from inception through the FDA approval process, so a 5 or 10 year patent length is simply too short. The clock starts ticking when the patent is filed, not when the drug is approved. There has to be some ability for the companies to get a return on their investment otherwise there will be no new drugs.
Since the major source of delays in the pharmaceutical industry seem directly tied to the FDA approval process, maybe the solution is to somehow tie the patent process and the FDA approval together; e.g., if you file a patent application and then file for FDA approval, the patent clock can "stop ticking" until the FDA makes a decision one way or the other. Basically, make the time that the drug spends in the approval process not count towards the patent's span, or only have the clock start ticking once approval goes through (just issue them on a provisional basis to drugs not-yet-approved).
Or maybe more directly -- you could just say that no company can use research done by another company in order to get its own drug approved, for ten years. That way, a generic drug maker can't just wait for some company to spend the billions pushing a drug to market, and then ride the coattails of the approval and start making generics; they'd have to get it approved based on completely independent research, as if it was a new and totally different drug, or wait a few years in order to be able to use the first company's research and approvals.
I've never heard that story, but I have seen a video clip of Davis doing that. Basically put on a set of the armor, took a little snubby.38, held it out at arm's length, and shot himself in the sternum.
Looked pretty unpleasant -- he immediately fell down, and it took a few seconds before it was clear that he had not, in fact, been shot -- but damned impressive.
I'm not convinced that any sort of software algorithm should be patentable, but if we are going to allow patents on some narrowly-defined "implementations," which might involve software at some point in them (but not being wholly comprised of software), I think it's pretty clear that the term of the patents needs to be substantially reduced.
The term of our patents was set in an era when sending a message from one city to another took days, or if it was separated by an ocean, weeks (potentially months). The flow of information moved at a completely different pace. Ten years then would have been a very brief time in which to bring a product to market. In today's world, I think it would be about 12-18 months: just enough to give the patentee a slight advantage over the rest of the marketplace, but not enough for them to amass an arsenal of patents with which to destroy all competition.
Now, perhaps there's something to be said for somewhat longer patents on pharmaceuticals, because of the long government-mandated review process that they have to go through, before they can become profitable (and which mandate disclosure of the ingredients, meaning that keeping it a trade secret isn't an option). However, I think this should clearly be the exception rather than the rule.
A patent length of a year -- five or at most ten for pharmaceuticals -- non-renewable, would do wonders towards improving competition and the production of new ideas in the technology sector. (While we're at it, lets have a 20-year copyright span, too.) Unfortunately I think by the time the major players come around to realizing that the system is hurting more than it's helping, the U.S. will be increasingly irrelevant.
I think part of the problem you're describing is attributable to the unions here in the 'States. In fact I think a substantial part of the economic drivers for illegal immigration can be laid more or less at their doorstep, because of their high costs (above and beyond what legitimate U.S. workers would do the job for in a non-union labor market scenario).
I'm not arguing that companies should be locked into exorbitant union rates, but they should have to pay whatever the labor market demands for the job, when the labor market is comprised only of people who are legally eligible to work in this country.
As you point out, people from Mexico, El Salvador, and other places "down south" have lower costs of living (at home) and expect lower standards of living (while they're here). So they're always going to be cheaper. Which is precisely why if we want to retain our standards of living here in the U.S., and not push the lower classes here in America into the same sort of conditions that are common in Mexico, we don't want people from down there competing in our labor market. Our costs are higher, because our standard of living -- even at th bottom of the socioeconomic ladder -- is higher. If, as a society, we want to retain that (and I think we do), then we need to realize that we can't allow workers from low-cost areas to enter the labor market and compete with domestic workers.
Would this push up costs versus using illegals? Certainly. But I don't think it would push it up quite to the level of the union workers in the U.S. currently. There's three distinct categories of workers here: there's non-union illegal workers from low-cost areas (cheapest), non-union domestic workers (somewhere in the middle), and unionized domestic workers (most expensive). I'm proposing that we eliminate the first category -- since by law it shouldn't exist anyway -- but that doesn't say anything about the latter two. It would be up to the demands of the market whether unions were tenable in various areas. (Tighter job market, unions become more powerful; loose market, less so.)
I've got a better way of doing it -- just make it clear that anything that's broadcast over the public's RF spectrum, goes into the public domain. Forever. Period.
If you want to retain control of your content, you can't blow it all over the place. You need to keep it on your own network, and only distribute it to people who have entered into agreements with you, saying that they'll respect your IP. Transmit it to people who don't want it or haven't entered into agreements with you, and they can do what they want with it.
The result would be that the die-hard RIAA intellectual-propertists would only be available through some sort of leased-line/cable-TV type system in your house; and in the short run we'd probably end up listening to a lot of NPR and Voice Of America while driving to work in the morning, but I think ultimately the demand for music and entertainment via radio waves is so great that people would produce it anyway, according to business models that don't depend on perpetual ownership of the broadcasts.
I don't expect much of an AC, but really.
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A Mighty Number Falls
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· Score: 3, Informative
Um, AES is elliptic curve? News to me...
For christsakes, at least read the list; I linked to it. And I did say only the public key algorithms, so AES isn't even relevant.
NSA Suite B:
* Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with keys sizes of 128 and 256 bits -- symmetric encryption * Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256 and SHA-384) -- message digest * Elliptic-Curve Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (ECMQV) -- key agreement * Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) -- key agreement * Elliptic-Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) -- digital signatures
What I said: "...all the PK [public key] systems are based on elliptic curves, and not prime factorization, for the trapdoor function."
Of the algorithms in Suite B, AES and SHA aren't public-key algorithms; they're a symmetric block cipher and a hash function. The three relevant PK algorithms are ECMQV, ECDH, and ECDSA, and all of those are specifically noted as being "elliptic curve" variants, rather than the more common RSA-style prime-factorization-based algorithms.
PK algorithms which use elliptic curves use an entirely different set of mathematical functions as the basis for their 'trapdoor' or 'puzzle' (the function that's easy to compute but difficult to run backwards) from RSA. They're based on a variation of the discrete logarithm problem. (From what I understand, the purest form of the discrete logarithm problem isn't reversible at all -- you can run it in one direction, but from the output you can't figure out all of the input parameters were with certainty -- so specific variations of the general problem are used, of which elliptic curves are one.)
Given the popularity of RSA, I think its absence from the list is notable at the very least, and it's furthermore interesting that the NSA seems to really like elliptic curve systems as a basis for PK crypto. At least according to Wikipedia, nobody has ever published a proof of the mathematical hardness of elliptic curve systems...maybe they're even better than is currently realized. (Although, the real tinfoil hat response is, 'maybe they're really flawed somehow, and that's why the NSA wants you to use them!' However, I think this is doubtful for any number of reasons.)
The other problem is Americans. No matter how bad off people are, they will not go out in the mid-day sun and pick cotton or build houses for the pennies illegal people will do it for.
I think it's that last part that really needs to be emphasized. There are a lot of people running around -- usually politicians, but I've seen some newspaper editorials where it was said -- claiming that illegals do work that "Americans won't do." This is false.
Anyone who doesn't believe it's false, can just turn on the Discovery Channel the next time they're running that "Dirty Jobs" program. There are people who do pretty unbelievable stuff for a living; shoveling garbage, standing waist-deep in feces, working ridiculous hours in uncomfortable conditions, dodging machinery that could crush or tear you in half if you're not quick. But they don't do it for cheap. There's a reason why sanitation workers in NYC get paid more than cops -- otherwise, there wouldn't be any sanitation workers.
There isn't anything that somebody in this country won't do, for the right compensation. All illegal workers do is allow big companies to get away with paying workers less than they ought to get, for dangerous/uncomfortable/unsafe/unsavory jobs. Ultimately, this hurts all legitimate workers, across the board: low-skilled workers are impacted the most, because it directly depresses their wages, but higher-skilled workers are hurt, too, because of the increased labor pool being pushed up from below, and also the increased tax burden (which is shouldered mostly by high-skilled, high-income workers) of supporting a surplus of low-skilled workers and their attendant medical/educational/social costs.
Re:NSA computing power vs. EPFL+UofB+NTT?
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A Mighty Number Falls
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't think there are any good estimates of the computing power of the NSA. I suspect everything, up to and including their power bill, is classified; you'd just be getting somebody's conjecture.
I'm not even sure that it's really raw 'computing power' that you'd want to try and assess, anyway; I was thinking about something like a novel way of factoring general numbers very quickly, something that could be implemented in specialized hardware. That doesn't seem too outside the NSA's traditional forte -- they have some good mathematicians and probably have relationships with hardware companies that would let them source a lot of (odd) stuff without anyone noticing.
I do think it's interesting to note that of the algorithms listed as part of the NSA's "Suite B" Good-Housekeeping-seal-of-approval list, all the PK systems are based on elliptic curves, and not prime factorization, for the trapdoor function.
Until you actually do some sort of decryption, it's all just wankin--er, theory. You need to actually simulate the mechanics of decryption once in a while, to demonstrate that the approaches are practical in the real world, and see how hard they are, how long they take, etc.
Now, admittedly, this really wasn't even decryption, this is a proof of an implementation of a concept which is related to ones which might be useful in actual practice (and are probably even harder). But actually accomplishing this provides a benchmark; it gives a gauge of what level of effort is required in order to do something, so that we can have an idea of where our actual capacity stands, relative to our theoretical understanding.
Operational as opposed to cryptographic security.
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A Mighty Number Falls
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· Score: 1
All you're doing in creating a "proprietary language" is combining the cipher and the key. Under normal circumstances, this is considered a very, very bad idea.
E.g., with the Navajo language, anyone who knows the language can decode any message sent using that system. It's not particularly secure. It was operationally successful for a lot of reasons that don't really have anything to do with the superiority of Navajo as a cryptosystem (i.e. they never captured any of the code-talkers). The reason why the code-talkers were useful has less to do with security than with speed: most other cipher systems worked by typing a message into a machine -- impractical in the field. But if one of the code-talkers had been captured, then the whole system would have been blown, since there's no easy way to change the "key."
In contrast, something like the Enigma machine used a key that's discrete from the apparatus. You take your machine, and configure the patch-cables in a certain way, and set the wheels up right, and encode your message. The receiver sets their machine up identically (based on a codebook which gives a different configuration for each message or day) and decrypts it. That's a much better system -- in theory -- because even if the enemy has the machine, they'd still be stuck without the key. It failed mostly because the German operators were human, and therefore lazy, and tended to not follow protocol a lot and reused the keys. (And the keyspace wasn't that large and could be brute-forced, which is what the British did with the very early computers.)
The apparent superiority of a natural-language "cryptosystem" like Navajo to electro-mechanical ones like Enigma is mostly because of the tendency of operators to become overconfident in mechanical ciphers. While a person speaking in a foreign language is conceptually easy to grasp ('hey, we'd better not let them capture him'), it's not as easy to understand why it's desperately important to not reuse Enigma keys, or to re-transmit the same message over and over using different keys, etc.
All modern cryptography (well, almost all, anyway) revolves around the idea of separating the key from the algorithm, and basing the security of the system only on the key. That is to say, even if your enemy captures the cipher machine and the text of the enciphered message, they shouldn't have any advantage in figuring it out versus just having the message. The advantage to this is that you can change keys easily, so you can change them often, and give your adversary less time to analyze each algorithm+key combination before you switch to the next one.
Also, a one-time-pad is really just a symmetric cipher where the plaintext and the key are the same length; it is the exact opposite of a 'proprietary language' like you describe (where the 'key' is knowledge of the language itself -- arguably long, but definitely finite).
I hate to be the guy who pulls out the tinfoil, but why not.
A few weeks ago I was reading Steven Levy's Crypto (not a bad book, although a little out-of-date now, but it brings back the dot-com nostalgia), in which he spends a lot of time describing the NSA's objections to strong civilian crypto in the U.S. in the 80s and early 90s. They went from absolutely opposing civilian crypto (particularly public-key stuff) tooth and nail, to suddenly just throwing in the towel. While I'm sure that much of that was just political pragmatism -- with the Cold War over, they were having a harder and harder time maintaining their objections in the face of 'progress' (in the form of a lot of pressure on Congress from business and the tech sector) -- but I can't help but wondering if they didn't figure something out that made them withdraw their objections to bigger key sizes.
Particularly since it's now known that some people on the government side knew about public-key crypto before it became public (the early-70s GCHQ paper, and I find it hard to believe that at its peak during the Cold War, someone at the NSA didn't find the same thing), they've had a long time to work on the problem -- though it's possible that they just totally squandered whatever lead they had, and are now at the same point that the unclassified world is, that just seems unlikely to me.
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i've been hearing about how ip4 will run out in the next 5 years for the last TEN years.
Well, it would have run out a lot faster, had it not been for CIDR, which allowed addresses to be allocated more efficiently. However that -- like proposals to re-allocate unused space in some of the old corporate A-blocks -- slowed the bleeding but doesn't really do anything about the real problem.
Y2K was a bug which was easily solved.
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You have an interesting concept of "easy"
That's really just not true. With IPv6, you can get a lot more anonymity than you have now with IPv4. v6 has all sorts of special provisions for randomly assigning addresses, letting you reset them when you want, so that you can appear to be a new user in the middle of a browsing session. That's tough to do with IPv4; even if you try a DHCP release-and-renew from your ISP, generally they won't issue you a new address until the other one has expired.
IPv6 doesn't force you to give up any privacy, and there's no 'user serialization' unless you buy into it voluntarily.
You can still run a server -- just configure your ISP's server as the "smart host". There is no shame in that.
Unfortunately it's still a problem with the ISPs who don't let you send out email through their servers unless the Reply-To address is within their domain. I haven't run into this recently, so maybe it's only a feature of the very low-end dialup ghetto, but I definitely ran into it once or twice.
This is a serious issue, if it occurs together with the blocking of outgoing connections on Port 25, because it effectively locks you into ISP-supplied email addresses (or webmail, which still isn't a replacement for desktop mail clients).
Just another thing that can be chalked up to the Windows monoculture 'o crap, though it's borne by everyone.
I agree. (Though I expect you'll be down-modded for saying it, but sometimes that's just the way things go.)
There have been a few times when I've thought that Fox was pandering to the Right, but frankly it's a whole lot less often than when I've been watching CNN and seen some pretty clear Leftist bias.
I also think it's possible that Fox was perceived as being more "biased" back when they first got started, and were trying to aggressively differentiate themselves from CNN and the big three. However, I also think that was probably the height of the liberal bias on mainstream news, too. The whole reason Fox got popular was because of the discontent many people felt about the level of bias on the existing networks at the time; Fox responded to the demand for 'less-Left' news and did well. If the big networks had really been reporting unbiased news at the time, Fox never would have been able to grab marketshare as quickly as they did.
That Fox is probably more conservative than ABC or NBC is no contest, but I don't Fox is inherently any more biased. That is, I'm not sure that Fox is any further from the imaginary 'point of unbiasedness' than the other networks are.
If you want actual Right-wing bias, talk radio is the place to go; that's where the real pandering/propaganda is. (Although, not all of conservative talk-radio is that bad, and there are some folks on there who I think are up-front about their opinions and make interesting points.)
Ultimately, it may be an academic point; I'm not sure that "unbiased" is anything except the majority's median viewpoint at any given time. Both Fox, CNN, and the other networks are shooting for it, but I think that they probably have different ideas of where it is.
Do third-world children really have a choice? Many do not have a roof over their head and those who do live in horrid squalor with no toilets, electricity, running water or even floors. Their machines will get dirty just from exposure to these environments.
I'm not sure those are the children that the OLPC/Classmate are really being aimed for. Looking at the governments that are purchasing them, while they do have some poor areas, they're not exactly sub-Saharan Africa; I'm not sure that kids who lack electricity or a roof at home are probably going to be the first ones to get their hands on one. I suspect they're going to go to poor urban students, whose conditions are probably pretty deplorable by U.S. standards, but they're not dirt farmers either.
I'm pretty sure that the population of a lot of Third World countries supports this; they have fairly sizable chunks of the population living in crowded cities. The utilities may be old and unreliable, but it's not a shack-in-the-woods situation.
The thing is, the constitution is clear on this. The states don't have a right to charge taxes on stuff shipped across state lines. Why are we even having this discussion?
... but I wouldn't hold your breath.
You are correct -- the states can't charge tax on goods shipped across their borders. I.e., they can't have a "California import tariff," as if they were a separate nation from the rest of the country, or something.
However, the Court has allowed states to charge tax on goods used or consumed in their state. This is how sales tax works: they don't charge the tax when the widgets cross the border from the neighboring state -- that would be illegal due to the Constitution -- but they charge the tax on the sale when it occurs in the state, or on the use of the item if you bought it elsewhere and are using it in the state. (Most people don't realize this, but if you buy something via mail order and use it in a state that charges sales tax, you're legally obligated to pay the same tax rate on it, only as a "use tax" instead of a "sales tax." All states that have sales taxes also have use taxes.)
That's how they get around the unconstitutionality. If it seems like hair-splitting, I'd probably agree with you, and there's a chance that if states really started getting obnoxious with their tax structures, to the point where it was interfering with commerce between states, then the USSC could step in and basically say that they have de facto violated the Constitution by creating barriers to trade
As a rich country you have no choice but to become employment agency for the poor of the world. It is simply economics: you have money and will not clean your own toilet (or do your own garden, or clean your own house, or whatever). People from poor countries will do it for you. You may decide not to hire illegal workers, economics is working against you and most people with money will take advantage of the cheap labour. That is a fact, not a delussional statement.
... a little over-defensive, actually.) I have been to many of the countries where the majority of the illegal workers in the U.S. (my part of it anyway) come from. Conditions there are, by First World standards anyway, pretty deplorable on the mean. So I don't think it's particularly a stretch to understand that when people immigrate to the U.S., their expectations on arriving, for things like housing, are somewhat lower. Does this mean that they don't want a nice house? Certainly not -- and I never said that. But they're willing to compromise, because if you're coming from a coffee plantation in El Salvador, a whole lot of living situations that Americans would scoff at look pretty decent by comparison. I don't think that's even a particularly controversial statement, and it's not as though it's without historical parallels. (Recent immigrants have almost always been willing to accept lower standards of living than people who've established themselves here; e.g. Hell's Kitchen.)
I disagree completely; your assumption that Americans (or other First Worlders) will not 'clean their own toilet' is completely false. Lots of Americans are willing to work as janitors, gardeners, house-cleaners, and everything else. There are Americans willing to stand waist-deep in pig shit, for the right amount of pay. However, they're not going to do it for $5.50 an hour; they're going to demand pay that's commensurate with the job being performed. This is completely fair, and how the labor market ought to operate; people who claim that 'Amercians won't do x,' where x is some unsavory job, really mean "Americans won't do x for minimum wage," which is probably true. But there's no real reason why that job should be done for minimum wage. In reality, people who clean toilets should be paid pretty well, because it's a, well, shitty job.
I agree, however, that you need to keep outsourcing in mind when designing an immigration policy; however the majority of the jobs currently done by illegal workers are service-sector jobs that can't be easily outsourced. (Frankly, all the jobs in the U.S. today are ones that can't be easily outsourced, because all the ones that can be, already have been.) Trying to prevent outsourcing by bringing cheap labor here, is a losing game; the goods still end up costing the same amount to be manufactured (you can't import workers and then pay them less than they would earn back home), and although they probably contribute to the economy somewhat, there are ample studies that suggest that large numbers of poor workers are actually a net drain on the local economy. They certainly are on the government, because they consume more services than they pay in taxes. And that's without even getting into the social problems that a huge recently-immigrated working class causes, particularly if the economy goes south and their jobs disappear, or if there aren't enough jobs for their children. (Cf. France.) "Insourcing" through immigration just trades a short-term benefit for a long-term problem.
Also, your allegations of racism and other general name-calling aren't convincing. (Actually, it's not even factually correct; I never mentioned "race" at all. You seem to be assuming it exists when it does not
But the point is that if you have a continuous influx of people moving in from very low-cost areas, and a labor market that only has a limited number of jobs at any one time, the people who are willing to make the most sa
The hard part is getting people to accept a card without the corroborating data, like chip-and-pin, signature, D.O.B etc etc.
Seriously? I've never been asked for anything when using a credit card, besides its expiration date, and occasionally the billing address (what they're interested in is the billing ZIP code, generally). Signature checks are bogus -- in most stores, you could draw a picture of the goatse.cx guy and the clerk wouldn't ever say anything, and of course there's no signature on the Internet. No U.S. banks that I'm aware of use PIN codes on credit cards, and I've never heard of any company using a customer's DOB for purchase-authentication. (I think customers would probably dislike and reject it.)
If you have the card number and expiration date, you have enough, usually, to make small purchases. If you have the billing address (or sometimes just the ZIP), you have enough to make large purchases -- up until it's big enough to get red-flagged for human review (Amex is pretty aggressive at this).
As other people have noted, the hard part about credit card fraud is receiving the goods -- that's where people normally get busted, because it requires more diligence than most fraudsters have to maintain a continual chain of fresh drop-offs without repeating.
Current immigration crisis resulted from our borders being closed to the skilled people while open to the low-skill illiterate border-crossers. Hence, we have a surplus of cheap dirtfarmers placing a huge strain on our teachers, doctors, policemen. If you let high-skilled people immigrate proportionately to the low-skilled Mexicans (at least one doctor, teacher, policeman, scientist per 100 immigrants, for example), it will all even out.
... and that means foreclosures, increased debt, and eventually, social unrest. The amount of available labor needs to be carefully balanced against demand, in order to keep unemployment low and inflation controlled.
I agree with you in part, in that there is a certain proportion that needs to be maintained, but the idea that we can 'solve' the current problem by simply allowing more high-skilled immigration (not sure if that's what you were suggesting or not) won't work -- it assumes that there is some infinite number of jobs in the U.S., and there's clearly not true. If you just try to fix the proportionality problem by allowing lots and lots of high-skilled immigration, eventually you'll end up with the whole country looking like post-dot-bomb Silicon Valley, where you've got people with PhDs delivering pizza, because that's the only work they can get.
You need proportionality, and not just have unskilled immigration without skilled people that are going to pay the taxes that will fund all the services that low-skilled workers consume, but you can't just increase the numerator on that fraction until it lines up -- there's only a certain number of high-skilled jobs available, too.
While the size of the economic "pie" isn't necessarily fixed and constant, it's not infinite either at any given time. It's entirely possible to flood a market with too much labor, which will result in wages crashing
I think you're missing the point slightly about working conditions -- I didn't mean to imply that those workers necessarily "want" to live in Third World conditions, but the fact that someone has just moved from a very poor, low-cost area, and is used to living without a lot of amenities that we take for granted here, means that when there's a job shortage, they're going to be a lot more willing to take a pay cut, then someone who's established here, and has a mortgage and car payments and the rest. In a labor market with more restrictive immigration rules, the job market is allowed to tighten, and workers have leverage to increase their wages.
As long as you are continuously allowing new immigrants in from low-cost areas, they're always going to be able to underbid anyone who's established themselves here, and that undermines the very social fabric we're trying to construct. You could theoretically alleviate the wage deflation by rigorously enforcing a high minimum wage, but then I think you just run into problems like France -- you end up with immigrants still coming in, far in excess of the available jobs, so that you end up with high unemployment and all the social problems that entails. The solution is to balance immigration closely against only those needs that are clearly and desperately not being met domestically.
Just as a followup, I apparently quite underestimated the cost of a Slingbox -- for some reason I had this idea they were about $75 or so, when they're really about $125. That would buy you at least one, probably two, PVR-150s if you shopped around for them on sale. If you could write off the cost of the spare computer to run it on (i.e., you have a few sitting around, as I suspect many /.ers do) then you could probably beat the Slingbox in price, although unless you have a spare ultra-low-power system, eventually your cost advantage is going to get eaten up in electricity consumption.
The closest thing you can get to a Slingbox that will work well with MythTV is a box called the HDHomeRun, $170, which does ATSC OTA and QAM Cable HDTV, letting you record it on a suitably-powerful MythTV box.
Yes, you can do it with MythTV and MythWeb; the MythTV box records your TV, Tivo-style, and transcodes it to MPEG-4, which you can then stream to a viewer anywhere you have a sufficiently fast connection.
... it's probably best summed up as a sort of Old-Testament-style religious experience, and that's on a good day.) Pre-rolled distros like Knoppmyth or Mythdora make it a little easier, but it's still a weekend activity and is happiest if you can dedicate a box to it. And unfortunately, a single decent TV tuner (hardware MPEG-2) will probably set you back almost as much as a Slingbox.
Setting up MythTV is a bit of a bear, though. (Okay, that's putting it lightly
But from what I understand, the Slingbox is place-shifting only, while a MythTV machine will let you both place- and time-shift, as well as format shift onto DVD-R.
The Slingbox would actually make a great video input device for a MythTV system, if it weren't all DRMed to heck and back.
Why not allow them to enter the labor market with the same rights as the American workers? This way they would not underbid the Native Americans and everybody wins.
Because then you're basically guaranteeing a labor surplus.
If there are 10 guys standing around, all trying to get hired for one job, then that job isn't going to pay very much. As soon as the guy who gets hired asks for a raise, or anything else, he'll just be fired and quickly replaced.
In a tighter job market, where there are fewer potential employees standing around looking for work, then the workers (individually or collectively, although personally I think collective bargaining can quickly become a scam as well) are in a much better negotiating position and can get paid more.
That's just basic supply and demand; what you're proposing would basically make the 'supply' of labor near-infinite. That's not what we want; we need a balance between the two, one that gets as close to full employment within the U.S. as possible, without driving inflation out of control. That's the goal -- not to act as some sort of employment agency for the rest of the world.
And on a more practical level, people who have just stepped off the proverbial boat from a poor country are always going to expect less in terms of pay and standards of living. Particularly if they aren't planning on actually living here, and are either saving up to go home and live like a king, or sending their money home while living in a hovel themselves (not uncommon; it's unbelievable how many people you can pack into a one-bedroom apartment if you try, I've seen it), they'll always be able to underbid a domestic worker who wants to have a typical American lifestyle (own a house, car, major appliances, etc.).
In essence, if you do what you propose, and just open the floodgates, you'll have lots of people coming in and working, who aren't really interested in the typical American lifestyle, which is pretty expensive. Since I think we want to promote that type of lifestyle -- not necessarily blatant consumerism, but a culture of ownership and individual self-sufficiency, where it's not ridiculous for a person to aspire to own a house, car, etc. -- we flat-out can't do that. To put it perfectly bluntly: if you allow a lot of people who are comfortable (or at least used to) living in Third World conditions into the labor market, we're going to reduce the working class here in the U.S. to Third World conditions, in order to compete. I don't think that's a good thing.
As for patent length in pharmaceuticals, it takes 10 years and 80 million dollars to get a drug from inception through the FDA approval process, so a 5 or 10 year patent length is simply too short. The clock starts ticking when the patent is filed, not when the drug is approved. There has to be some ability for the companies to get a return on their investment otherwise there will be no new drugs.
Since the major source of delays in the pharmaceutical industry seem directly tied to the FDA approval process, maybe the solution is to somehow tie the patent process and the FDA approval together; e.g., if you file a patent application and then file for FDA approval, the patent clock can "stop ticking" until the FDA makes a decision one way or the other. Basically, make the time that the drug spends in the approval process not count towards the patent's span, or only have the clock start ticking once approval goes through (just issue them on a provisional basis to drugs not-yet-approved).
Or maybe more directly -- you could just say that no company can use research done by another company in order to get its own drug approved, for ten years. That way, a generic drug maker can't just wait for some company to spend the billions pushing a drug to market, and then ride the coattails of the approval and start making generics; they'd have to get it approved based on completely independent research, as if it was a new and totally different drug, or wait a few years in order to be able to use the first company's research and approvals.
I've never heard that story, but I have seen a video clip of Davis doing that. Basically put on a set of the armor, took a little snubby .38, held it out at arm's length, and shot himself in the sternum.
Looked pretty unpleasant -- he immediately fell down, and it took a few seconds before it was clear that he had not, in fact, been shot -- but damned impressive.
So does this mean attorneys will be able to reproduce without sex soon?
Yes, but lawyers eat their young.
I'm not convinced that any sort of software algorithm should be patentable, but if we are going to allow patents on some narrowly-defined "implementations," which might involve software at some point in them (but not being wholly comprised of software), I think it's pretty clear that the term of the patents needs to be substantially reduced.
The term of our patents was set in an era when sending a message from one city to another took days, or if it was separated by an ocean, weeks (potentially months). The flow of information moved at a completely different pace. Ten years then would have been a very brief time in which to bring a product to market. In today's world, I think it would be about 12-18 months: just enough to give the patentee a slight advantage over the rest of the marketplace, but not enough for them to amass an arsenal of patents with which to destroy all competition.
Now, perhaps there's something to be said for somewhat longer patents on pharmaceuticals, because of the long government-mandated review process that they have to go through, before they can become profitable (and which mandate disclosure of the ingredients, meaning that keeping it a trade secret isn't an option). However, I think this should clearly be the exception rather than the rule.
A patent length of a year -- five or at most ten for pharmaceuticals -- non-renewable, would do wonders towards improving competition and the production of new ideas in the technology sector. (While we're at it, lets have a 20-year copyright span, too.) Unfortunately I think by the time the major players come around to realizing that the system is hurting more than it's helping, the U.S. will be increasingly irrelevant.
I think part of the problem you're describing is attributable to the unions here in the 'States. In fact I think a substantial part of the economic drivers for illegal immigration can be laid more or less at their doorstep, because of their high costs (above and beyond what legitimate U.S. workers would do the job for in a non-union labor market scenario).
I'm not arguing that companies should be locked into exorbitant union rates, but they should have to pay whatever the labor market demands for the job, when the labor market is comprised only of people who are legally eligible to work in this country.
As you point out, people from Mexico, El Salvador, and other places "down south" have lower costs of living (at home) and expect lower standards of living (while they're here). So they're always going to be cheaper. Which is precisely why if we want to retain our standards of living here in the U.S., and not push the lower classes here in America into the same sort of conditions that are common in Mexico, we don't want people from down there competing in our labor market. Our costs are higher, because our standard of living -- even at th bottom of the socioeconomic ladder -- is higher. If, as a society, we want to retain that (and I think we do), then we need to realize that we can't allow workers from low-cost areas to enter the labor market and compete with domestic workers.
Would this push up costs versus using illegals? Certainly. But I don't think it would push it up quite to the level of the union workers in the U.S. currently. There's three distinct categories of workers here: there's non-union illegal workers from low-cost areas (cheapest), non-union domestic workers (somewhere in the middle), and unionized domestic workers (most expensive). I'm proposing that we eliminate the first category -- since by law it shouldn't exist anyway -- but that doesn't say anything about the latter two. It would be up to the demands of the market whether unions were tenable in various areas. (Tighter job market, unions become more powerful; loose market, less so.)
I've got a better way of doing it -- just make it clear that anything that's broadcast over the public's RF spectrum, goes into the public domain. Forever. Period.
If you want to retain control of your content, you can't blow it all over the place. You need to keep it on your own network, and only distribute it to people who have entered into agreements with you, saying that they'll respect your IP. Transmit it to people who don't want it or haven't entered into agreements with you, and they can do what they want with it.
The result would be that the die-hard RIAA intellectual-propertists would only be available through some sort of leased-line/cable-TV type system in your house; and in the short run we'd probably end up listening to a lot of NPR and Voice Of America while driving to work in the morning, but I think ultimately the demand for music and entertainment via radio waves is so great that people would produce it anyway, according to business models that don't depend on perpetual ownership of the broadcasts.
For christsakes, at least read the list; I linked to it. And I did say only the public key algorithms, so AES isn't even relevant.
NSA Suite B:
What I said:
"...all the PK [public key] systems are based on elliptic curves, and not prime factorization, for the trapdoor function."
Of the algorithms in Suite B, AES and SHA aren't public-key algorithms; they're a symmetric block cipher and a hash function. The three relevant PK algorithms are ECMQV, ECDH, and ECDSA, and all of those are specifically noted as being "elliptic curve" variants, rather than the more common RSA-style prime-factorization-based algorithms.
PK algorithms which use elliptic curves use an entirely different set of mathematical functions as the basis for their 'trapdoor' or 'puzzle' (the function that's easy to compute but difficult to run backwards) from RSA. They're based on a variation of the discrete logarithm problem. (From what I understand, the purest form of the discrete logarithm problem isn't reversible at all -- you can run it in one direction, but from the output you can't figure out all of the input parameters were with certainty -- so specific variations of the general problem are used, of which elliptic curves are one.)
Given the popularity of RSA, I think its absence from the list is notable at the very least, and it's furthermore interesting that the NSA seems to really like elliptic curve systems as a basis for PK crypto. At least according to Wikipedia, nobody has ever published a proof of the mathematical hardness of elliptic curve systems...maybe they're even better than is currently realized. (Although, the real tinfoil hat response is, 'maybe they're really flawed somehow, and that's why the NSA wants you to use them!' However, I think this is doubtful for any number of reasons.)
The other problem is Americans. No matter how bad off people are, they will not go out in the mid-day sun and pick cotton or build houses for the pennies illegal people will do it for.
I think it's that last part that really needs to be emphasized. There are a lot of people running around -- usually politicians, but I've seen some newspaper editorials where it was said -- claiming that illegals do work that "Americans won't do." This is false.
Anyone who doesn't believe it's false, can just turn on the Discovery Channel the next time they're running that "Dirty Jobs" program. There are people who do pretty unbelievable stuff for a living; shoveling garbage, standing waist-deep in feces, working ridiculous hours in uncomfortable conditions, dodging machinery that could crush or tear you in half if you're not quick. But they don't do it for cheap. There's a reason why sanitation workers in NYC get paid more than cops -- otherwise, there wouldn't be any sanitation workers.
There isn't anything that somebody in this country won't do, for the right compensation. All illegal workers do is allow big companies to get away with paying workers less than they ought to get, for dangerous/uncomfortable/unsafe/unsavory jobs. Ultimately, this hurts all legitimate workers, across the board: low-skilled workers are impacted the most, because it directly depresses their wages, but higher-skilled workers are hurt, too, because of the increased labor pool being pushed up from below, and also the increased tax burden (which is shouldered mostly by high-skilled, high-income workers) of supporting a surplus of low-skilled workers and their attendant medical/educational/social costs.
I don't think there are any good estimates of the computing power of the NSA. I suspect everything, up to and including their power bill, is classified; you'd just be getting somebody's conjecture.
I'm not even sure that it's really raw 'computing power' that you'd want to try and assess, anyway; I was thinking about something like a novel way of factoring general numbers very quickly, something that could be implemented in specialized hardware. That doesn't seem too outside the NSA's traditional forte -- they have some good mathematicians and probably have relationships with hardware companies that would let them source a lot of (odd) stuff without anyone noticing.
I do think it's interesting to note that of the algorithms listed as part of the NSA's "Suite B" Good-Housekeeping-seal-of-approval list, all the PK systems are based on elliptic curves, and not prime factorization, for the trapdoor function.
No, it's not a waste.
Until you actually do some sort of decryption, it's all just wankin--er, theory. You need to actually simulate the mechanics of decryption once in a while, to demonstrate that the approaches are practical in the real world, and see how hard they are, how long they take, etc.
Now, admittedly, this really wasn't even decryption, this is a proof of an implementation of a concept which is related to ones which might be useful in actual practice (and are probably even harder). But actually accomplishing this provides a benchmark; it gives a gauge of what level of effort is required in order to do something, so that we can have an idea of where our actual capacity stands, relative to our theoretical understanding.
All you're doing in creating a "proprietary language" is combining the cipher and the key. Under normal circumstances, this is considered a very, very bad idea.
E.g., with the Navajo language, anyone who knows the language can decode any message sent using that system. It's not particularly secure. It was operationally successful for a lot of reasons that don't really have anything to do with the superiority of Navajo as a cryptosystem (i.e. they never captured any of the code-talkers). The reason why the code-talkers were useful has less to do with security than with speed: most other cipher systems worked by typing a message into a machine -- impractical in the field. But if one of the code-talkers had been captured, then the whole system would have been blown, since there's no easy way to change the "key."
In contrast, something like the Enigma machine used a key that's discrete from the apparatus. You take your machine, and configure the patch-cables in a certain way, and set the wheels up right, and encode your message. The receiver sets their machine up identically (based on a codebook which gives a different configuration for each message or day) and decrypts it. That's a much better system -- in theory -- because even if the enemy has the machine, they'd still be stuck without the key. It failed mostly because the German operators were human, and therefore lazy, and tended to not follow protocol a lot and reused the keys. (And the keyspace wasn't that large and could be brute-forced, which is what the British did with the very early computers.)
The apparent superiority of a natural-language "cryptosystem" like Navajo to electro-mechanical ones like Enigma is mostly because of the tendency of operators to become overconfident in mechanical ciphers. While a person speaking in a foreign language is conceptually easy to grasp ('hey, we'd better not let them capture him'), it's not as easy to understand why it's desperately important to not reuse Enigma keys, or to re-transmit the same message over and over using different keys, etc.
All modern cryptography (well, almost all, anyway) revolves around the idea of separating the key from the algorithm, and basing the security of the system only on the key. That is to say, even if your enemy captures the cipher machine and the text of the enciphered message, they shouldn't have any advantage in figuring it out versus just having the message. The advantage to this is that you can change keys easily, so you can change them often, and give your adversary less time to analyze each algorithm+key combination before you switch to the next one.
Also, a one-time-pad is really just a symmetric cipher where the plaintext and the key are the same length; it is the exact opposite of a 'proprietary language' like you describe (where the 'key' is knowledge of the language itself -- arguably long, but definitely finite).
I hate to be the guy who pulls out the tinfoil, but why not.
A few weeks ago I was reading Steven Levy's Crypto (not a bad book, although a little out-of-date now, but it brings back the dot-com nostalgia), in which he spends a lot of time describing the NSA's objections to strong civilian crypto in the U.S. in the 80s and early 90s. They went from absolutely opposing civilian crypto (particularly public-key stuff) tooth and nail, to suddenly just throwing in the towel. While I'm sure that much of that was just political pragmatism -- with the Cold War over, they were having a harder and harder time maintaining their objections in the face of 'progress' (in the form of a lot of pressure on Congress from business and the tech sector) -- but I can't help but wondering if they didn't figure something out that made them withdraw their objections to bigger key sizes.
Particularly since it's now known that some people on the government side knew about public-key crypto before it became public (the early-70s GCHQ paper, and I find it hard to believe that at its peak during the Cold War, someone at the NSA didn't find the same thing), they've had a long time to work on the problem -- though it's possible that they just totally squandered whatever lead they had, and are now at the same point that the unclassified world is, that just seems unlikely to me.