If the Quake3 installer is anything like the one for Tremulous (which it should be, since Tremulous is based on the Quake3 game engine), then all you have to do is download the binary (a.run file), mark it as executable (either with chmod or through the GUI), and run it (command-line or double-click). The only extra step vs. Windows is setting the execute bit, and I think the underlying reason for that step (to avoid spyware/viruses) is sufficiently useful to justify leaving it in.
If you want to install it into the system directories you need admin priviledges, of course; Windows has the same requirement. However, I had no trouble installing the program into my home directory (it even autodetected the non-admin state and chose a reasonable directory to install into). I have no idea why they recommended setting LD_ASSUME_KERNEL; I know what it does, but Tremulous installed fine without it, and Quake3 should also, since the underlying binary is essentially equivalent.
The reason you transmit the pad instead of the actual data is that the properties of the system don't prevent evesdropping, they only make it detectable. If you transmitted the actual data over the "secure" stream, someone could still intercept it. You'd know that they intercepted it, but by then it would be too late to do anything about it. However, if you transmit the pad over the secure stream you can know which bits were intercepted prior to encrypting the data and can remove those bits from the pad.
NOTE: I see someone already posted something similar after I started posting, but I think this version is a bit easier to understand for someone who isn't used to quantum cryptography.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
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· Score: 1
Obviously, songwriters can't get an immediate return . ..
Why is this "obvious"? There are a number of ways that a songwriter could get an immediate return, the simplest of which is to estimate the total value of the song over time and sell it to one or more individuals or groups in need of new material at a fair market price. Depending on the type of song, this could include performers, creators of higher-level works like games or movies, music distributors[1], etc. The song could only be sold once, not in perpetuity, but the price would reflect the total worth of the song to the buyer(s)[2]. It would be the songwriter's job, of course, to ensure that (on average) the investment in creating the song is not greater than the song's worth, just as it is now.
[1] Even without copyright, there would still be a market for distribution of music in various formats for private use. The primary source of income would be the distribution itself, of course, but the distributors would need to commission new material from time to time to stay in business.
[2] The sale price need not be a constant value. The songwriter could negotiate for a percentage of sales, for example, or stock options, or some other form of variable compensation. The one thing the songwriter could not do would be to collect a usage fee (royalty) from non-buyers once the song is made public, so he/she/they should take care to set the sale price accordingly.
Actually, true philanthropy doesn't happen much more often in the open-source world than it does anywhere else. What you're getting from an open-source project isn't a service, it's an incidental benefit resulting from the service the project's developer(s) provide to themselves. Example: I want a program to do X (whatever X might be), which you also happen to want. I have the necessary time and skill to develop such a program for my own use, and do so. Since I made the program open-source, you also benefit, with no extra effort on my part. Ultimately, though, I'm not developing the software for you, I'm developing it for my own use.
Trade requires that both parties agree to the exchange. If one party compels the other to comply (as in the case of taxes), then the term "trade" does not apply, even if the coerced party receives something in return.
Think of it this way: Without any prior, voluntary agreement, I go over to your house and do something for you while you're gone (mow your lawn, or wash your car, for example). You may think I did a terrible job of it, or you might think I did a great job. Either way, how much do you owe me for my work? Whatever price I happen to ask for? Of course not. An amount equal to my costs (assuming you can determine what my costs were)? No, because you have no control over those costs; I may have spent more than you would be willing to pay. The right answer is absolutely nothing. You never agreed to pay me, and as a result I cannot legally require payment. The work performed is irrelevant in this case, as is your benefit (or lack thereof). There is no contract between us, express or implied, that would give me any right to your property, and there the matter ends. Similarly, there is no contract (express or implied) that gives any member of the goverment any right to my property. They perform their services without any voluntary contract, and then employ theft to recover their costs. If they did not do so, they would by definition be members of private organizations and not the government. The simple fact that governments can legally employ coercion prevents them from engaging in free trade in the first place, since they can always use force to get what they want.
P.S. In case anyone from the IRS is reading this: I am not a so-called "tax evader." I believe taxes are theft, and therefore wrong, but it's a case of spending some money to protect the rest -- as would be the case with any other thief.
You're right, I would agree that "leaching" is bad etiquitte in any society. It's a symbol of low status to take something (even a willing donation) without giving something of similar value in return. I would also say, however, that the "general assumption" that the artists are making is not in line with reality, and they shouldn't be able to beat their customers (or non-customers, for that matter) into the ground with the lawsuit club to make up for that. Doing so certainly isn't going to win them any friends, and it's doubtful whether it will net them any paying customers. On the other hand, if they stopped relying on copyright laws to guarantee them a captive market they might just find a viable, non-coercive business model and win back some of their former customers in the process.
If the average person was not in support of speed limits, then I would consider it oppression of the government to force such limits on its citizens. However, most citizens do support speed limits, as much as they might personally prefer to be exempt from them. On the other hand, most people (as far as I can tell) are not in support of strong copyright laws, whether for themselves or for society in general.
I'm not trying to claim that "sending other people's work around is free speach". To begin with, you can't send "work" around; what's actually being transferred is a recording of the sensory information created by that work. The term "work" refers to the labor, not the final product; in other words, the "work" is the design, implementation, performance, etc., not the recording thereof, and that is what an artist/author/songwriter/etc. should be paid for as a consequence of a prior contract and not because they somehow "deserve" to be compensated for effort they expended without any promise of payment, in contrast to every other line of work where either payment or a contract is required in advance. Similarly, the term "property" (and the rights associated with the same) only applies to (and only make sense for) scarce resources, a criteria which digital representations of sensory information fail to meet.
By all means, let authors/etc. demand payment for their work like any other entrepreneur. However, if they choose to produce their product (which is new media, not copies) without any prior promise of payment, then society owes them nothing. It may be polite to offer a donation to someone who produces something you like, but the producer doesn't have any inherent right to anything that isn't already promised to them in a contract.
Whatever the reasons, throughout the many years since Java hit the scene (I go back to the dawn of time in OO), Java has managed to work on perhaps 10% of the many dozens of highly varied Unix-type boxes that I have owned or worked on. This contrasts with 100% of those boxes running C/C++, Perl, Python, Tcl, Lua, etc etc. All modern languages seem to work pretty much everywhere, with one exception -- Java. This is very wierd, for a language which is supposed to run anywhere.
I agree with you, for the most part. However, I've thought about this particular point a bit and I think I might be able to shed some light on it.
Most programming languages are themselves written in C (or C++ in a few cases). Java, Perl, Python, and Tcl all fit this model. Thus, none of these languages can be ported to a platform until there is a working C compiler for the platform; as far as the basic functionality of the language is concerned, no other language is more portable than C for that reason. Furthermore, most of these languages (with the notable exception of Java) rely on the POSIX standards for the OS interface on most platforms. Porting them to another platform is trivial if that platform is POSIX-compliant. Thus, most of these language run on most UNIX platforms automatically. (Windows support is more difficult, but that's only one extra platform.)
Java, on the other hand, has its own "virtual machine" specification, separate from the POSIX standards, and in some places in conflict with them. Furthermore, the JIT features require that a complete machine-language optimizing compiler be created for each hardware architecture. Thus, the effort of porting the Java JIT runtime to a new platform, even a POSIX-compliant one, is greater than the effort of porting the C compiler itself. Add to that the cost of building new, optimized, low-level implementations of the system libraries and you have the perfect recipe for a porting nightmare. In short, on UNIX platforms, Java will never be as portable as C (or any POSIX/C interpreted language).
I think the GP was serious. I certainly am. Any government that forces laws (any laws) onto its population against the general consensus is, by definition, oppressive. Perhaps it's not quite at the same level as some of the more extreme dictatorships out there, but it's oppression none the less.
The real problem is, there are no limits on how much gasoline, electricity, or natural gas one person is allowed to use. Supplies are being wastefully depleted and turned into greenhouse gasses, and people are blaming the average consumer.
Of course there's a limit on individual usage: there is a limited quantity of such supplies in the world, and no individual or group can use more than they can afford. Even the rich do not possess an unlimited quantity of exchangeable goods (including money); if they did the goods themselves would be worthless. What they do have they generally earned through one or more generations of hard work and various wise investments, which inevitably resulted in benefits for many others; to artificially limit the value of what they received in exchange through rationing would undermine the entire economy, and would probably throw us back into the Dark Ages of moneyless barter, since money itself would be meaningless as a medium of exchange.
I do blame the "average consumers", who don't understand economics and who make little or no effort at investing in the future, because their behavior is what created the gap between the rich and the poor in this country in the first place. Rationing would only treat the symptom, the result of their lack of foresight. To treat the problem will require better (and more widespread) education in economics and a stronger focus on the future.
It's like having some large corporation lower 100,000 sub-management employee wages by $5 an hour instead of laying off one CEO who is making $500k per year.
In an average "large corporation", the damage to the company would be far greater than the $500k/yr. that they'd save be laying off the CEO (you know, the person running the company...). He makes that much money for a reason: it's not easy to find someone both willing and able to competently manage a large company. The shareholders (board of directors) aren't being wasteful in hiring a $500k/yr. manager; they're paying the going price for a relatively rare skill, without which the company would be bankrupt in short order. Just like rationing, laying off a competent CEO would be a purely short-term solution with disastrous long-term consequences.
There's just as much trouble ensuring that you gave your "secure" public key to the right recipient at there is ensuring that you've just added the correct public key to the local database. With the public-key system you can at least check that the key they gave you matches the one in someone else's database; you can't do that with a random key you just generated. Furthermore, the truly paranoid can get the bank's public key from the bank in person; there's no need to rely on the security of their web site. The remote-access issues are the same for either system, and can be solved by using a secure (signed) communications channel to transfer the public keys from home to work or visa-versa. If the keys are actually secret (your system) you'd need to encrypt the channel as well, of course. It is assumed that you trust the system you're using the keys on, whether that system is at home or at work.
I agree that we need to move forward. The thing is, there isn't really an incentive for the average person to change yet. Most consumers see identity theft as a rare inconvenience, not a present danger. The tools needed to end ID theft have existed since the beginning, but banks shield their customers from the effects of identity theft, while simultaneously pushing most of the costs back onto the retailers by refusing to honor the fraudulent payments. As a result there is little incentive amongst either consumers or banks to fix the system.
1) Filtering software already supports whitelists. Implementing a whitelist for DNS entries would be no more difficult than implementing the same list as a DNS hierarchy. Transparent web proxies, whether local or at the ISP level, would affect all HTTP-based applications; no application support is required.
2) Why should the government be involved in setting the standard in the first place? A private company would be just as responsible for managing their whitelist -- more so, in fact, since a private company is subject to lawsuits for breaches of contract. Furthermore, everyone has different standards for what is deemed "suitable for kids"; whose definition do we use? Whitelists would allow parents to choose the whitelist that the parent deems appropriate.
3) Filtering would probably be implemented at the ISP level (no point in everyone running their own filter), so update aren't really an issue. The accuracy of the whitelist is a function of the contract between the parent and the ISP or whitelist service. Historically, private companies have always been more up-to-date than government services in any event. Content providers would still be responsible for submitting their sites to the whitelist services, even if the whitelists are in private hands.
4) Whitelists would be just as easy to divide into age groups.
5) They'll just find some other (worse) way to oppress us. That's what governments do, after all.
Why should there be a DNS entry for this at all? Simple whitelisting is a function of every piece of filtering software available today. There's no need to resort to DNS changes just to whitelist certain sites for kids. Parents (or ISPs) would simply install some suitable filtering software and a whitelist that matches their own preferences, just like they can right now.
The whole point of the.xxx domain was to act as a blacklist, and numerous posters have pointed out the failings of blacklists in this regard. Whitelists (like ".kids"), on the other hand, are trivial by comparison, and we don't need extra laws or TLDs to implement them.
In order to avoid spoofed financial identities, the best would be for all clients of financial institutions to have a financial public key they only give out to banks and such. That way even if you get an email from Ch4s3 B4nK, with a valid looking certificate, you aren't fooled into thinking you have done business with them. Because only the real Chase Bank would have your financial public key.
I think you're missing the point of having a public encryption key: it's supposed to be, you know, public. In other words, you assume that everyone has access to it. Treating it as a private key defeats the whole point of public-key encryption. Your system would require every user to have a separate public key for every financial institution, unless you're willing to risk allowing all of them to be compromised by a single security breach. In other words, N users and M banks would require N * M secret keys. Ordinary public-key systems, however, would only require one public/private key pair for each individual (N + M key pairs).
What you need here is a local database of trusted public keys, one of which would be the one for Chase Bank (added from their (SSL) web site when you set up the account, for example). When you get an e-mail from "Ch4s3 B4nK", it will have a perfectly valid public key, but that key will not be trusted for authentication purposes because it isn't in the database (it will only ensure that the message was not altered during transit). This is exactly the way that GPG's "web of trust" system works, and it wouldn't be all that difficult (technically speaking) to make SSL certificates work the same way. All it needs is better integration with the various e-mail clients and web browsers.
Surely landlords are parasites too. The landlord gets the profit, for what? For owning the land? Is this fair? A capitalist will say "Yes[.] He made the investment in the land and is simply profitting [sic] from his good planning.["] A socialist will say "No[.] He's not contributing to society. Why is it right that he should be able to benefit so much more than the people actually doing the work[?"]
Landlords do contribute to society. The service provided by the landlord (through either sale or rent[1], and apart from any labor provided on the land itself) is primarily in allocating the land to the best possible uses; i.e., the uses that will earn the greatest profit as a result of voluntary exchanges with other members of society -- the uses that provide the greatest (perceived) benefit to society as a whole. Just as the use of the land is a contribution, so is the landlord's function of optimizing the use to which the land is put. Even in a socialist economy the function of the landlord must still exist, because someone has to allocate the land for various uses; the only difference is that the position is assumed by the government and those who control it rather than arbitrary members of society.
[1] Disregarding the effects of uncertainty, the total revenue to the landowner is the same whether the land is sold or rented, and is equal to the present value of the land's contribution to the production of the future final product. The choice of renting out or selling the land, or retaining it, helps to mitigate the uncertainty.
[A]ny binary attachments get rencoded [sic] into base 64 which can cause them to grow up to 4x in size when going over the wire.
Base-64 encoding stores six bits in each byte of output text, with 60 characters per line. Thus, a base-64-encoded block of x bytes of binary data will be encoded as approximately
((8 * x) / 6) * (1 + 2/60)
bytes of base-64 data, rounded up to the nearest byte. The expansion factor is thus approximately 1.3778 (37.78% increase), much less than the 4x expansion you indicated.
Incidently, I still agree that SMTP make a lousy file-transfer protocol. There's nothing wrong with the interface itself -- as many have pointed out, people find it natural to attach files to outgoing e-mail. However, the SMTP protocol was never designed for lengthy file transfers, and lacks support for error-correction, resumed downloads, etc. The servers which implement it were likewise optimized for relatively small messages, and most e-mail clients come configured by default to attempt to download the entire message queue at once; while reasonable for 16kB e-mails, this behavior is unacceptable when the first message in the queue is a few gigabytes long.
The requirements for e-mail are not all that different from those of instant messaging, which also supports file transfers. However, the IM protocols were designed with file transfers in mind, and care is taken to avoid routing large transfers through the central instant messaging servers. Instead, the IM network provides only the negotiation services; the actual transfer takes place directly between the sender and the receiver. All that a distributed IM protocol like XMPP (Jabber) would require to supplant e-mail would be integration with e-mail clients as a transport protocol. XMPP already provides for delayed delivery of messages when offline, and an asynchronous file-transfer proxy could easily be provided for individuals without always-on Internet access. In return, we could do away with the limitations of SMTP, and the artificial barrier between IM and e-mail, once and for all.
The reason that you would want your browser to run as an unpriviledged user (less priviledged than an ordinary user, anyway) is that, as things are now, an exploitable bug in your browser can allow an attacker to mess with everything in your home directory -- in other words, everything of any consequence whatsoever to you. The programs you have installed can be replaced. The documents and configuration settings in your home directory, on the other hande, are irreplacible. The UNIX model does, at least, prevent ordinary users from modifying system files; anything less would be unsuitable for a multi-user operating system. However, it does nothing to protect an individual user's data from malware running under that user's account. What IE7 does -- dropping permissions, working through a broker service -- is what every application ought to do, and what every application will be forced to do eventually. It is nothing more or less than the natural extension of the fundamental principle of process separation to include filesystem data in addition to process state and virtual memory.
I realize you probably didn't check this very closely, but if you put "someuser ALL=(root) NOEXEC:vi" in/etc/sudoers, you might as well just give them full root access:
[someuser@localhost]$ sudo vi/etc/sudoers
Password: [....] some time later...
[someuser@localhost]$ sudo -s
Password: [....]
[root@localhost]# rm -rf/
Any program which can be used to write arbitrary data to arbitrary files can be used to escalate priviledges in a similar fashion. A surprising number of program fit this description. Sudo may slow down a casual attacker (Is there such a thing?), but don't depend on it to stop any serious security breaches.
I hope that you weren't implying that LynxOS-178 was "written by the public" -- the summary and the article were both indicated that LynxOS is a proprietary RTOS capable of running binaries compiled for Linux. Despite the name (LynuxWorks), the system is not derived from Linux in any way.
There's a difference between real damages and measurable damages. For example, we can't tell for sure what "caused" the cancer in a given person. You can't assign blame in an accounting manner: ok, [E]xxon pays $2.[00,] Reynolds pays $1.50, etc.
Duly noted. I should have said "provable", not "measurable". The intent was not to require a known monetary value, but rather to require a definite link between the "benefactor" and the "external cost".
Your point about "criticizing one or the other" doesn't follow. The whole point of an externality is that one person should be getting "criticized" (paying an additional cost). Instead, everyone else is. If you regulate away the externality, you eliminate both the cost to society (via a reduction in consumption of the good to the optimal level) and the undeserved benefit is eliminated directly. In the situation you mention, there is merely a disequillibrium, which is a different, self-correcting, problem.
As I understand the term, "externalities" consist of both externalized costs and externalized benefits. The former would be exemplified by the pollution case, where the "bad" factory is externalizing the cost of the pollution onto the other residents of that area. The latter is typically represented by the case of a residential area in which all the residents benefit from the work and expense of one member in improving his/her own property. The problem of external benefits is, of course, both commonplace (as it results from every trade) and rather easy to correct through purely private means; the industrious resident need only make the improvements conditional on the financial support of the benefactors. The problem of externalize costs, however, requires additional analysis.
Let us assume, for the moment, that the externality in question does not involve any demonstrable harm, since it would otherwise be a property right violation and not an externality. For some reason (aesthetic, perhaps) some group of individuals would simply prefer that the "undeserving benefactor" be forced to manufacture his product in a different way, at a higher cost. This is meant to increase the utility of the individuals in question; it must also have the effect of reducing the income of the various factors of production (land and labor), thus decreasing the utility of the factors' owners, as well as the utility of the manufacturer's customers, who must make due with a decrease in the supply of the product. The rest of society also experiences a decrease in utility as a result of the reduction in trade. As a result, the net effect of penalizing the manufacturer is that one group of individuals (and not necessarily the larger group) has received a benefit at the expense of a different group. As there was no demonstrable harm from the manufacturer's actions to begin with, and it is impossible to calculate whether the action resulted in a net utility or a net disutility for the individuals involved[1], I fail to see just how such a penalty could possibly be justified.
[1] There is no way to measure the relative utility of one person's preference for a manufactured product relative to another person's preference for whatever aescetic property provoked the complaint. The only way to establish such a relative measurement would be for the originators of the complaint to either purchase the factory from the manufacturer, or enter into a contract with said manufacturer to provide compensation in exchange for a change in the manufacturing process. Either mechanism would eliminate the externality entirely.
You're right, I don't believe that so-called externalities should be given special consideration. That is a result, not of ignorance of modern economic theory, but rather the fact that the theory of externalities is itself internally inconsistent. To begin with, no additional correction is needed in cases where real, measurable harm results, because such cases are no different than any other violation of property rights; the typical example of pollution comes to mind. Furthermore, in any given situation, either one person is criticized for failing to exert additional effort to help his neighbor, or the latter is criticized for failing to contribute in proportion to the benefit received. You cannot have both. If the former "imbalance" is corrected, then the latter will exist, and visa-versa. Lastly, every single trade creates an external benefit for the rest of society. Do you really intend to compensate both parties involved in every trade throughout the economy? Even if you could do so, the best result that could be hoped for would be the maintainance of the status quo. There could be no net benefit from such a subsidy.
Free markets, by your definition, also fail to optimize utility.
How so? The optimization of utility is generally considered a result of the free market system, not part of its definition. I see nothing in that definition which is inconsistent with the optimization of utility. Additionally, the definition I gave is essentially the same as the one used by economist Murray N. Rothbard in Man, Economy, and State, and he certainly appears to claim that adherence to those rules tends to result in the maximization of utility.
Like most other economic systems, the free market does depend on the concept that individuals will attempt to maximize their own utility. Utility is defined by the individual's own choices; any action that the individual expects to lead to a net disutility (with respect to the best known alternative) would not be performed, provided that all actions are voluntary rather than coerced. Therefore, the principle of rational self-interest is a correllary, not an independent rule.
That's not a bad idea, but (IMHO) the term "libertarian" (like "anarchy") has too many possible definitions for this purpose. Some people use it as a synonym for "anarchism", others (like the Libertarian Party) place it closer to the minarchist philosophy. Perhaps the term "voluntaryism" would serve? As far as I know it only has the one meaning: "Voluntaryism is the doctrine that relations among people should be by mutual consent, or not at all."[1] The term was chosen specifically to fit the general idea behind "anarchism" without implying chaos as well.
States do not define terms; people do. You hardly need a state to give meaning to the word "property." In a free market, the definition of "property" is logically derived from the rules I listed. The derivation itself is fairly involved and somewhat off-topic, so I chose not to include it in the original comment[1]. Some basic attributes of property are that it must be scarce[2], it must be owned (controlled) by one or more individuals, and that it can be acquired either through voluntary exchange, as a voluntary gift, or by investing labor in previously unowned resources (a.k.a. "homesteading"). These have all been considered aspects of property under common law even in the absence of state regulation, and this is the only definition consistent with the definition of the free market.
Currency is nothing more than a specific kind of property generally agreed upon (by individuals, not governments) as a common medium of indirect exchange. Like property, currency does not depend on the state for its existance, and has existed, and continues to exist, in areas where no state holds jurisduction.[3]
[1] If you're really interested in the derivation, see Man, Economy, and State by economist Murray N. Rothbard. [2] There would be no conflict over non-scarce resources, and thus no need for ownership. [3] For a review of the history of indirect exchange, including currency, see chapter 3 of Man, Economy, and State.
just as a nation requires regulation to allow its population to live freely
You state this as a given, but I disagree. Why should a "nation" (however you happen to define it) require "regulation"? Who chooses the "regulations", and how do these "regulations" allow the population to live freely? For that matter, how are you defining "freely"? You certainly aren't using the definition I would choose. What makes your definition of "free" any better than mine?
Dude you're missing the point or you're just one of those "free market" shills that like to use and abuse the term for their own advantage without understanding what it means.
Oh, I see. Anyone who disagrees with your deluded pet definition of "free" must be either criminally ignorant or outright malicious. I hope you'll forgive me for failing to take this statement seriously. However, on the off change that you were serious:
All systems generally classified as "free market" systems have two basic rules: (1) all voluntary interactions, and only voluntary interaction, are legitimate ("free association", "no coercion"), and (2) individuals have absolute rights over themselves and their property ("free will", "property rights"). All such systems are all "free", as in "free will" -- lacking coercion -- and "markets", implying a recognition of the individual property rights necessary for a market to function. By definition no free market system can legitimize involuntary regulation, because that would conflict with both of those fundamental rules; it would not longer be free.
Promote a regulated market if you will, but don't expect me to call it "free".
Slashdot Mirror
If the Quake3 installer is anything like the one for Tremulous (which it should be, since Tremulous is based on the Quake3 game engine), then all you have to do is download the binary (a .run file), mark it as executable (either with chmod or through the GUI), and run it (command-line or double-click). The only extra step vs. Windows is setting the execute bit, and I think the underlying reason for that step (to avoid spyware/viruses) is sufficiently useful to justify leaving it in.
If you want to install it into the system directories you need admin priviledges, of course; Windows has the same requirement. However, I had no trouble installing the program into my home directory (it even autodetected the non-admin state and chose a reasonable directory to install into). I have no idea why they recommended setting LD_ASSUME_KERNEL; I know what it does, but Tremulous installed fine without it, and Quake3 should also, since the underlying binary is essentially equivalent.
The reason you transmit the pad instead of the actual data is that the properties of the system don't prevent evesdropping, they only make it detectable. If you transmitted the actual data over the "secure" stream, someone could still intercept it. You'd know that they intercepted it, but by then it would be too late to do anything about it. However, if you transmit the pad over the secure stream you can know which bits were intercepted prior to encrypting the data and can remove those bits from the pad. NOTE: I see someone already posted something similar after I started posting, but I think this version is a bit easier to understand for someone who isn't used to quantum cryptography.
Why is this "obvious"? There are a number of ways that a songwriter could get an immediate return, the simplest of which is to estimate the total value of the song over time and sell it to one or more individuals or groups in need of new material at a fair market price. Depending on the type of song, this could include performers, creators of higher-level works like games or movies, music distributors[1], etc. The song could only be sold once, not in perpetuity, but the price would reflect the total worth of the song to the buyer(s)[2]. It would be the songwriter's job, of course, to ensure that (on average) the investment in creating the song is not greater than the song's worth, just as it is now.
[1] Even without copyright, there would still be a market for distribution of music in various formats for private use. The primary source of income would be the distribution itself, of course, but the distributors would need to commission new material from time to time to stay in business.
[2] The sale price need not be a constant value. The songwriter could negotiate for a percentage of sales, for example, or stock options, or some other form of variable compensation. The one thing the songwriter could not do would be to collect a usage fee (royalty) from non-buyers once the song is made public, so he/she/they should take care to set the sale price accordingly.
Actually, true philanthropy doesn't happen much more often in the open-source world than it does anywhere else. What you're getting from an open-source project isn't a service, it's an incidental benefit resulting from the service the project's developer(s) provide to themselves. Example: I want a program to do X (whatever X might be), which you also happen to want. I have the necessary time and skill to develop such a program for my own use, and do so. Since I made the program open-source, you also benefit, with no extra effort on my part. Ultimately, though, I'm not developing the software for you, I'm developing it for my own use.
Trade requires that both parties agree to the exchange. If one party compels the other to comply (as in the case of taxes), then the term "trade" does not apply, even if the coerced party receives something in return.
Think of it this way: Without any prior, voluntary agreement, I go over to your house and do something for you while you're gone (mow your lawn, or wash your car, for example). You may think I did a terrible job of it, or you might think I did a great job. Either way, how much do you owe me for my work? Whatever price I happen to ask for? Of course not. An amount equal to my costs (assuming you can determine what my costs were)? No, because you have no control over those costs; I may have spent more than you would be willing to pay. The right answer is absolutely nothing. You never agreed to pay me, and as a result I cannot legally require payment. The work performed is irrelevant in this case, as is your benefit (or lack thereof). There is no contract between us, express or implied, that would give me any right to your property, and there the matter ends. Similarly, there is no contract (express or implied) that gives any member of the goverment any right to my property. They perform their services without any voluntary contract, and then employ theft to recover their costs. If they did not do so, they would by definition be members of private organizations and not the government. The simple fact that governments can legally employ coercion prevents them from engaging in free trade in the first place, since they can always use force to get what they want.
P.S. In case anyone from the IRS is reading this: I am not a so-called "tax evader." I believe taxes are theft, and therefore wrong, but it's a case of spending some money to protect the rest -- as would be the case with any other thief.
You're right, I would agree that "leaching" is bad etiquitte in any society. It's a symbol of low status to take something (even a willing donation) without giving something of similar value in return. I would also say, however, that the "general assumption" that the artists are making is not in line with reality, and they shouldn't be able to beat their customers (or non-customers, for that matter) into the ground with the lawsuit club to make up for that. Doing so certainly isn't going to win them any friends, and it's doubtful whether it will net them any paying customers. On the other hand, if they stopped relying on copyright laws to guarantee them a captive market they might just find a viable, non-coercive business model and win back some of their former customers in the process.
If the average person was not in support of speed limits, then I would consider it oppression of the government to force such limits on its citizens. However, most citizens do support speed limits, as much as they might personally prefer to be exempt from them. On the other hand, most people (as far as I can tell) are not in support of strong copyright laws, whether for themselves or for society in general.
I'm not trying to claim that "sending other people's work around is free speach". To begin with, you can't send "work" around; what's actually being transferred is a recording of the sensory information created by that work. The term "work" refers to the labor, not the final product; in other words, the "work" is the design, implementation, performance, etc., not the recording thereof, and that is what an artist/author/songwriter/etc. should be paid for as a consequence of a prior contract and not because they somehow "deserve" to be compensated for effort they expended without any promise of payment, in contrast to every other line of work where either payment or a contract is required in advance. Similarly, the term "property" (and the rights associated with the same) only applies to (and only make sense for) scarce resources, a criteria which digital representations of sensory information fail to meet.
By all means, let authors/etc. demand payment for their work like any other entrepreneur. However, if they choose to produce their product (which is new media, not copies) without any prior promise of payment, then society owes them nothing. It may be polite to offer a donation to someone who produces something you like, but the producer doesn't have any inherent right to anything that isn't already promised to them in a contract.
I agree with you, for the most part. However, I've thought about this particular point a bit and I think I might be able to shed some light on it.
Most programming languages are themselves written in C (or C++ in a few cases). Java, Perl, Python, and Tcl all fit this model. Thus, none of these languages can be ported to a platform until there is a working C compiler for the platform; as far as the basic functionality of the language is concerned, no other language is more portable than C for that reason. Furthermore, most of these languages (with the notable exception of Java) rely on the POSIX standards for the OS interface on most platforms. Porting them to another platform is trivial if that platform is POSIX-compliant. Thus, most of these language run on most UNIX platforms automatically. (Windows support is more difficult, but that's only one extra platform.)
Java, on the other hand, has its own "virtual machine" specification, separate from the POSIX standards, and in some places in conflict with them. Furthermore, the JIT features require that a complete machine-language optimizing compiler be created for each hardware architecture. Thus, the effort of porting the Java JIT runtime to a new platform, even a POSIX-compliant one, is greater than the effort of porting the C compiler itself. Add to that the cost of building new, optimized, low-level implementations of the system libraries and you have the perfect recipe for a porting nightmare. In short, on UNIX platforms, Java will never be as portable as C (or any POSIX/C interpreted language).
I think the GP was serious. I certainly am. Any government that forces laws (any laws) onto its population against the general consensus is, by definition, oppressive. Perhaps it's not quite at the same level as some of the more extreme dictatorships out there, but it's oppression none the less.
Of course there's a limit on individual usage: there is a limited quantity of such supplies in the world, and no individual or group can use more than they can afford. Even the rich do not possess an unlimited quantity of exchangeable goods (including money); if they did the goods themselves would be worthless. What they do have they generally earned through one or more generations of hard work and various wise investments, which inevitably resulted in benefits for many others; to artificially limit the value of what they received in exchange through rationing would undermine the entire economy, and would probably throw us back into the Dark Ages of moneyless barter, since money itself would be meaningless as a medium of exchange.
I do blame the "average consumers", who don't understand economics and who make little or no effort at investing in the future, because their behavior is what created the gap between the rich and the poor in this country in the first place. Rationing would only treat the symptom, the result of their lack of foresight. To treat the problem will require better (and more widespread) education in economics and a stronger focus on the future.
In an average "large corporation", the damage to the company would be far greater than the $500k/yr. that they'd save be laying off the CEO (you know, the person running the company...). He makes that much money for a reason: it's not easy to find someone both willing and able to competently manage a large company. The shareholders (board of directors) aren't being wasteful in hiring a $500k/yr. manager; they're paying the going price for a relatively rare skill, without which the company would be bankrupt in short order. Just like rationing, laying off a competent CEO would be a purely short-term solution with disastrous long-term consequences.
There's just as much trouble ensuring that you gave your "secure" public key to the right recipient at there is ensuring that you've just added the correct public key to the local database. With the public-key system you can at least check that the key they gave you matches the one in someone else's database; you can't do that with a random key you just generated. Furthermore, the truly paranoid can get the bank's public key from the bank in person; there's no need to rely on the security of their web site. The remote-access issues are the same for either system, and can be solved by using a secure (signed) communications channel to transfer the public keys from home to work or visa-versa. If the keys are actually secret (your system) you'd need to encrypt the channel as well, of course. It is assumed that you trust the system you're using the keys on, whether that system is at home or at work.
I agree that we need to move forward. The thing is, there isn't really an incentive for the average person to change yet. Most consumers see identity theft as a rare inconvenience, not a present danger. The tools needed to end ID theft have existed since the beginning, but banks shield their customers from the effects of identity theft, while simultaneously pushing most of the costs back onto the retailers by refusing to honor the fraudulent payments. As a result there is little incentive amongst either consumers or banks to fix the system.
1) Filtering software already supports whitelists. Implementing a whitelist for DNS entries would be no more difficult than implementing the same list as a DNS hierarchy. Transparent web proxies, whether local or at the ISP level, would affect all HTTP-based applications; no application support is required.
2) Why should the government be involved in setting the standard in the first place? A private company would be just as responsible for managing their whitelist -- more so, in fact, since a private company is subject to lawsuits for breaches of contract. Furthermore, everyone has different standards for what is deemed "suitable for kids"; whose definition do we use? Whitelists would allow parents to choose the whitelist that the parent deems appropriate.
3) Filtering would probably be implemented at the ISP level (no point in everyone running their own filter), so update aren't really an issue. The accuracy of the whitelist is a function of the contract between the parent and the ISP or whitelist service. Historically, private companies have always been more up-to-date than government services in any event. Content providers would still be responsible for submitting their sites to the whitelist services, even if the whitelists are in private hands.
4) Whitelists would be just as easy to divide into age groups.
5) They'll just find some other (worse) way to oppress us. That's what governments do, after all.
Why should there be a DNS entry for this at all? Simple whitelisting is a function of every piece of filtering software available today. There's no need to resort to DNS changes just to whitelist certain sites for kids. Parents (or ISPs) would simply install some suitable filtering software and a whitelist that matches their own preferences, just like they can right now.
.xxx domain was to act as a blacklist, and numerous posters have pointed out the failings of blacklists in this regard. Whitelists (like ".kids"), on the other hand, are trivial by comparison, and we don't need extra laws or TLDs to implement them.
The whole point of the
I think you're missing the point of having a public encryption key: it's supposed to be, you know, public. In other words, you assume that everyone has access to it. Treating it as a private key defeats the whole point of public-key encryption. Your system would require every user to have a separate public key for every financial institution, unless you're willing to risk allowing all of them to be compromised by a single security breach. In other words, N users and M banks would require N * M secret keys. Ordinary public-key systems, however, would only require one public/private key pair for each individual (N + M key pairs).
What you need here is a local database of trusted public keys, one of which would be the one for Chase Bank (added from their (SSL) web site when you set up the account, for example). When you get an e-mail from "Ch4s3 B4nK", it will have a perfectly valid public key, but that key will not be trusted for authentication purposes because it isn't in the database (it will only ensure that the message was not altered during transit). This is exactly the way that GPG's "web of trust" system works, and it wouldn't be all that difficult (technically speaking) to make SSL certificates work the same way. All it needs is better integration with the various e-mail clients and web browsers.
Landlords do contribute to society. The service provided by the landlord (through either sale or rent[1], and apart from any labor provided on the land itself) is primarily in allocating the land to the best possible uses; i.e., the uses that will earn the greatest profit as a result of voluntary exchanges with other members of society -- the uses that provide the greatest (perceived) benefit to society as a whole. Just as the use of the land is a contribution, so is the landlord's function of optimizing the use to which the land is put. Even in a socialist economy the function of the landlord must still exist, because someone has to allocate the land for various uses; the only difference is that the position is assumed by the government and those who control it rather than arbitrary members of society.
[1] Disregarding the effects of uncertainty, the total revenue to the landowner is the same whether the land is sold or rented, and is equal to the present value of the land's contribution to the production of the future final product. The choice of renting out or selling the land, or retaining it, helps to mitigate the uncertainty.
Base-64 encoding stores six bits in each byte of output text, with 60 characters per line. Thus, a base-64-encoded block of x bytes of binary data will be encoded as approximately
bytes of base-64 data, rounded up to the nearest byte. The expansion factor is thus approximately 1.3778 (37.78% increase), much less than the 4x expansion you indicated.Incidently, I still agree that SMTP make a lousy file-transfer protocol. There's nothing wrong with the interface itself -- as many have pointed out, people find it natural to attach files to outgoing e-mail. However, the SMTP protocol was never designed for lengthy file transfers, and lacks support for error-correction, resumed downloads, etc. The servers which implement it were likewise optimized for relatively small messages, and most e-mail clients come configured by default to attempt to download the entire message queue at once; while reasonable for 16kB e-mails, this behavior is unacceptable when the first message in the queue is a few gigabytes long.
The requirements for e-mail are not all that different from those of instant messaging, which also supports file transfers. However, the IM protocols were designed with file transfers in mind, and care is taken to avoid routing large transfers through the central instant messaging servers. Instead, the IM network provides only the negotiation services; the actual transfer takes place directly between the sender and the receiver. All that a distributed IM protocol like XMPP (Jabber) would require to supplant e-mail would be integration with e-mail clients as a transport protocol. XMPP already provides for delayed delivery of messages when offline, and an asynchronous file-transfer proxy could easily be provided for individuals without always-on Internet access. In return, we could do away with the limitations of SMTP, and the artificial barrier between IM and e-mail, once and for all.
The reason that you would want your browser to run as an unpriviledged user (less priviledged than an ordinary user, anyway) is that, as things are now, an exploitable bug in your browser can allow an attacker to mess with everything in your home directory -- in other words, everything of any consequence whatsoever to you. The programs you have installed can be replaced. The documents and configuration settings in your home directory, on the other hande, are irreplacible. The UNIX model does, at least, prevent ordinary users from modifying system files; anything less would be unsuitable for a multi-user operating system. However, it does nothing to protect an individual user's data from malware running under that user's account. What IE7 does -- dropping permissions, working through a broker service -- is what every application ought to do, and what every application will be forced to do eventually. It is nothing more or less than the natural extension of the fundamental principle of process separation to include filesystem data in addition to process state and virtual memory.
I realize you probably didn't check this very closely, but if you put "someuser ALL=(root) NOEXEC:vi" in /etc/sudoers, you might as well just give them full root access:
[someuser@localhost]$ sudo vi /etc/sudoers /
Password: [....]
some time later...
[someuser@localhost]$ sudo -s
Password: [....]
[root@localhost]# rm -rf
Any program which can be used to write arbitrary data to arbitrary files can be used to escalate priviledges in a similar fashion. A surprising number of program fit this description. Sudo may slow down a casual attacker (Is there such a thing?), but don't depend on it to stop any serious security breaches.
I hope that you weren't implying that LynxOS-178 was "written by the public" -- the summary and the article were both indicated that LynxOS is a proprietary RTOS capable of running binaries compiled for Linux. Despite the name (LynuxWorks), the system is not derived from Linux in any way.
Duly noted. I should have said "provable", not "measurable". The intent was not to require a known monetary value, but rather to require a definite link between the "benefactor" and the "external cost".
As I understand the term, "externalities" consist of both externalized costs and externalized benefits. The former would be exemplified by the pollution case, where the "bad" factory is externalizing the cost of the pollution onto the other residents of that area. The latter is typically represented by the case of a residential area in which all the residents benefit from the work and expense of one member in improving his/her own property. The problem of external benefits is, of course, both commonplace (as it results from every trade) and rather easy to correct through purely private means; the industrious resident need only make the improvements conditional on the financial support of the benefactors. The problem of externalize costs, however, requires additional analysis.
Let us assume, for the moment, that the externality in question does not involve any demonstrable harm, since it would otherwise be a property right violation and not an externality. For some reason (aesthetic, perhaps) some group of individuals would simply prefer that the "undeserving benefactor" be forced to manufacture his product in a different way, at a higher cost. This is meant to increase the utility of the individuals in question; it must also have the effect of reducing the income of the various factors of production (land and labor), thus decreasing the utility of the factors' owners, as well as the utility of the manufacturer's customers, who must make due with a decrease in the supply of the product. The rest of society also experiences a decrease in utility as a result of the reduction in trade. As a result, the net effect of penalizing the manufacturer is that one group of individuals (and not necessarily the larger group) has received a benefit at the expense of a different group. As there was no demonstrable harm from the manufacturer's actions to begin with, and it is impossible to calculate whether the action resulted in a net utility or a net disutility for the individuals involved[1], I fail to see just how such a penalty could possibly be justified.
[1] There is no way to measure the relative utility of one person's preference for a manufactured product relative to another person's preference for whatever aescetic property provoked the complaint. The only way to establish such a relative measurement would be for the originators of the complaint to either purchase the factory from the manufacturer, or enter into a contract with said manufacturer to provide compensation in exchange for a change in the manufacturing process. Either mechanism would eliminate the externality entirely.
You're right, I don't believe that so-called externalities should be given special consideration. That is a result, not of ignorance of modern economic theory, but rather the fact that the theory of externalities is itself internally inconsistent. To begin with, no additional correction is needed in cases where real, measurable harm results, because such cases are no different than any other violation of property rights; the typical example of pollution comes to mind. Furthermore, in any given situation, either one person is criticized for failing to exert additional effort to help his neighbor, or the latter is criticized for failing to contribute in proportion to the benefit received. You cannot have both. If the former "imbalance" is corrected, then the latter will exist, and visa-versa. Lastly, every single trade creates an external benefit for the rest of society. Do you really intend to compensate both parties involved in every trade throughout the economy? Even if you could do so, the best result that could be hoped for would be the maintainance of the status quo. There could be no net benefit from such a subsidy.
See also: "Collective Goods" and "External Benefits": Two Arguments for Government Activity
How so? The optimization of utility is generally considered a result of the free market system, not part of its definition. I see nothing in that definition which is inconsistent with the optimization of utility. Additionally, the definition I gave is essentially the same as the one used by economist Murray N. Rothbard in Man, Economy, and State, and he certainly appears to claim that adherence to those rules tends to result in the maximization of utility.
Like most other economic systems, the free market does depend on the concept that individuals will attempt to maximize their own utility. Utility is defined by the individual's own choices; any action that the individual expects to lead to a net disutility (with respect to the best known alternative) would not be performed, provided that all actions are voluntary rather than coerced. Therefore, the principle of rational self-interest is a correllary, not an independent rule.
That's not a bad idea, but (IMHO) the term "libertarian" (like "anarchy") has too many possible definitions for this purpose. Some people use it as a synonym for "anarchism", others (like the Libertarian Party) place it closer to the minarchist philosophy. Perhaps the term "voluntaryism" would serve? As far as I know it only has the one meaning: "Voluntaryism is the doctrine that relations among people should be by mutual consent, or not at all."[1] The term was chosen specifically to fit the general idea behind "anarchism" without implying chaos as well.
[1] Fundamentals of Voluntaryism
States do not define terms; people do. You hardly need a state to give meaning to the word "property." In a free market, the definition of "property" is logically derived from the rules I listed. The derivation itself is fairly involved and somewhat off-topic, so I chose not to include it in the original comment[1]. Some basic attributes of property are that it must be scarce[2], it must be owned (controlled) by one or more individuals, and that it can be acquired either through voluntary exchange, as a voluntary gift, or by investing labor in previously unowned resources (a.k.a. "homesteading"). These have all been considered aspects of property under common law even in the absence of state regulation, and this is the only definition consistent with the definition of the free market.
Currency is nothing more than a specific kind of property generally agreed upon (by individuals, not governments) as a common medium of indirect exchange. Like property, currency does not depend on the state for its existance, and has existed, and continues to exist, in areas where no state holds jurisduction.[3]
[1] If you're really interested in the derivation, see Man, Economy, and State by economist Murray N. Rothbard.
[2] There would be no conflict over non-scarce resources, and thus no need for ownership.
[3] For a review of the history of indirect exchange, including currency, see chapter 3 of Man, Economy, and State.
You state this as a given, but I disagree. Why should a "nation" (however you happen to define it) require "regulation"? Who chooses the "regulations", and how do these "regulations" allow the population to live freely? For that matter, how are you defining "freely"? You certainly aren't using the definition I would choose. What makes your definition of "free" any better than mine?
Oh, I see. Anyone who disagrees with your deluded pet definition of "free" must be either criminally ignorant or outright malicious. I hope you'll forgive me for failing to take this statement seriously. However, on the off change that you were serious:
All systems generally classified as "free market" systems have two basic rules: (1) all voluntary interactions, and only voluntary interaction, are legitimate ("free association", "no coercion"), and (2) individuals have absolute rights over themselves and their property ("free will", "property rights"). All such systems are all "free", as in "free will" -- lacking coercion -- and "markets", implying a recognition of the individual property rights necessary for a market to function. By definition no free market system can legitimize involuntary regulation, because that would conflict with both of those fundamental rules; it would not longer be free.
Promote a regulated market if you will, but don't expect me to call it "free".