And outside the voting booth sits Joey "The Pounder" with his baseball bat. You come out, he takes your little card and goes and checks on that plaintext website that you voted the way he said you should.
If you didn't, his baseball bat comes to pay your car.. and possibly you.. an unfriendly visit.
A correctly used one-time pad can not be reverse engineered, because, if used correctly, it's creation is done in a completely true random format. Since true randomness by definition cannot be engineered, only found, then it is impossible to reverse engineer it.
Now, to do two way communication, you'd need only two pads of sufficient size, one for encoding on each end. You would of course need a duplicate of each side's pad on the other side for decoding and passing these pads is indeed the main weakness.
However, you can, as you say, hand it to them. The reason you might not be telling them the information to be encoded face to face is because you don't have that information yet. The beauty of one-time pads is that they never expire. Someone might find some way to factor primes instantly via quantum computing, and your one-time pad would not be affected.
I suppose if an interceptor somehow found the source of randomness that you used, and somehow managed to find records as to what time-period/portion of it you used, they could then use that information to crack your one-time pad, essentially by recreating it.
But in essence, a correctly created/used one time pad can be very useful, especially with high-density storage media like DVDs where you could store gigabytes of numbers for your OTP creation.
Private charity doesn't work either. If it did, we wouldn't have the homeless, the Red Cross would never have a blood shortage, and the food banks would always have enough for those who need it.
To say that without government private charities would pick up the slack is to have a completely naive and unrealistic view of the way people actually behave. Would you pay money to put some kids who you neither know nor know the parents of through school if you didn't have to? Not up to you? Up to their families you say? Well, that's all fine and dandy until their families can't or won't put them through either.. which leaves us back with the original problem. The ones who suffer are not necessarily the families who didn't put the kids through school, it's those who have to pay for the increased policing, or who have their lives ruined or ended as a result of criminal activities.
As for the prosititution bit, I have to admit, I set up that one simply because I knew libertarians wouldn't be able to resist biting on that point and miss the actual issue. Now that you've proven me right, try substituting the "theft and home invasion" bit for prostitution, and leave the rest the same. The question still stands.
With respect to the pollution issue, how do you punish people for events that do not show results until many years after? When a company sets up a front company to bury nuclear waste on their own land and the groundwater contamination doesn't show up until well after the front is dead and gone, who suffers?
Now is the EPA effective? That's a separate argument from the issue of should there be regulation protecting people from actions that may seem non-damaging to begin with but turn out to be damaging later.. which was the entire point of this post.
The examples aren't straw-men, as they go to the core of the libertarian problem, embodied by the last question which you conveniently failed to address.
Which is cheaper? Prevention or cure?
The libertarian philosophy is based on the misguided (in my opinion) beliefs that private society is capable of prevention with no governmental direction, and that what it can not prevent can always be cured through the courts.
Entitlement programs that make it so kids have the skills/abilities to get decent employment, or policing programs to catch those kids that didn't get those skills and so are looking for any way they can to survive -- which may involve home invasion and violence?
Which is cheaper? Paying taxes so the single mom is able to feed her kid, or paying taxes to arrest, try, sentence, and punish the same mom who started prostituting herself to do the same.. and now having the state take on her child as a ward as well?
Which is cheaper? Paying an agency such as the EPA to investigate and stop environmental contamination, or paying to clean it up later -- well after the company doing it has gone out of business?
Your friend can legally lend you his original CD. You can legally copy it. Your friend can legally copy his CD. You friend can *not* legally give you his copy. You *cannot* legally copy from his copy, if you get hold of it somehow.
Now, to apply this to the internet and MP3s: Your friend can legally lend you his original CD. You can legally rip it to MP3 Your friend can also legally rip his CD to MP3 Your friend cannot legally give you his MP3 You cannot legally copy his MP3 if you get hold of it somehow.
Ergo, you cannot download legally, as that is copying his MP3.
So, uhh.. given that the whole point of electronic voting is to make voting and specifically the counting process easier and quicker, what does this help?
I mean, after you've gone through all of this rigamarole, what it seems you're left with at the end is a bunch of receipts that still need to be counted by hand?
The 5 headshots required, or the unified ammo system?
I'm sorry, I figure if the player is good enough run directly toward an enemy at top speed and manage to pull off a pistol shot to the head without the alarm being raised, they deserve some kind of reward for that. Conserving their other ammo seems like a good one to me.
If everyone ignored them, Senator Orrin Hatch would happily cough up the Bill of Rights and half of the Constitution for them to use as toilet paper, provided they gave him better royalties on his non-selling album and higher campaign contributions.
As it is, it's only because we pay attention that they don't attempt even more outrageous power grabs.
They may not be elected, but when they can get laws passed that favor them over the good of Americans in general, they have power.
Some potential pitfalls that I can think of off the top of my head (which means you probably have already as well, but hey..)
Discovery and Invention, unless they're very carefully handled, strike me as a great way to either penalize late joining characters or artifically advance their power curve.
Once a lot of things have been discovered or invented already, it will either be more difficult for new players to come up with truly new discoveries or inventions, or if they don't actually need truly new ones, then it becomes a lot easier for them to make these triplette ratings, as somebody is bound to post the methods in some sort of out of game communication.
And it goes similarly with power. As things get discovered/invented, they get communicated. Since knowledge tends to equate to power, you'll also see a fast rise on that triplette as well.
End result seems to be that new players will advance fairly quickly to at least a median value on the triplette scale. Of course as they do this, the median value will increase, etc.
Now, maybe this is intentional, as a way to prevent the newbies from feeling like cannon fodder in comparison to the rest of the group, but it would also reduce the play-time to get to higher levels of magical skill, which leads to power inflation problems, etc.
Kazaa can be used for distributing content that you don't want to have a single point of failure.
http: and ftp: can't, for obvious reasons. Neither can bittorrent because of the central role of the tracker.
So, say you're looking to disseminate information about... oh I don't know.. Diebold rigging election machines, or perhaps a video of the President performing a ritual human sacrifice or some other such sensitive material.
Now, since in these cases you might be worried about jack-booted thugs breaking down your door and putting a round through your hard-drive and/or skull, you need some way to not only get the file out there, but be sure that the file can continue to get out there even if you're no longer connected.
Let's take another look at that shall we, specifically, your #2 definition that you so kindly point out:
trump: get the better of [syn: oudo, outflank, best, scoop]
Now, let's substitute the meaning for the word in the sentence.
Seems the right to get the service you pay for gets the better of, outdoes, outflanks, bests, and scoops the 'right' of the FBI to spy on you, using your own vehicle's systems!
Now, since the court ruled that the FBI doing so was not proper because it interefered with the service being provided, the sentence seems to be fully accurate.
Unless you have some alternative reading I'm not aware of.
No.. none of them has really taken off because for the most part, people don't even KNOW about them.
Apple did major advertising for iTunes/iPod.. and got a lot of reporting about it as well.
Rhapsody/Pressplay/Emusic, whatever? Maybe a mention in the technical pages, if you happened to look there on the right day.
Now.. on Windows? First time someone opens an MP3 on their new system, it's going to pop up WMP, which will most definitely be set to have a front page of MS's music service, and handy "shop now!" buttons sprinkled throughout.
Of course, you're right in one aspect.. if it sucks bad enough.
However, I tend to think that for joe public, you won't reach "bad enough" until it means "doesn't play on my computer when I want it to."
All MS really has to do is make sure that their service doesn't put an expiry date on songs requiring more fees, and allow you to re-order them any way you like on your playlist.
Most people really don't want to share their music. They don't have anything against it, but if they're not allowed to, they probably won't break their backs trying.
For your kids, the rule is this:
Keep yourself private. Nobody needs to know what school you go to, what you wear, where you live, where you shop, or anything like that. If your kids ask why not, you can give'em this link: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/sexsla ve010814.html
For you, the rule is this:
Talk with your kids. Have an interest in what they're doing. Ask them what they've been looking into, what they liked, what they didn't. Ask them to show you some of it if they will. Help them find sites that might have more stuff that they like, ask them for help finding things you might like. Basically, be involved.
If roles were reversed, and everybody used a Mac, would the EU be telling Apple that they should unbundle Quicktime with their os due to monopolistic practices??
RIAA labels will stop producing music in CD format.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. And for the rest of our lives.
Of course, first they'll need to get market penetration with the new format. Easiest way to do that is simply allow the new format to be competitively priced with the real costs of production. If you had the choice of a CD for 14.99 and a Music Wafer for 2.99, wouldn't you be tempted to get a Wafer Player?
Especially since you can USB the wafer player into your computer, new stereo, or whatever else you happen to have with a USB connection and speakers (assuming it doesn't have it's own wafer player). If it has a screen as well, it'll show you the video if you want.
Once enough of the market had those, they could scale back on CD production, thus making it so that everybody else who hasn't switched already has reason to.
Once you've switched over to wafers, the reasoning to re-purchase your music in that format becomes stronger. Even if it's at only 2.99/wafer, that's an extra $2.99 that they wouldn't have seen before.
Slashdot Mirror
Pfah. System Shock came out in 1994, beating Metal Gear Solid by 4 years or so.
Take enough hypos and your vision starts to go wonky -- weird curves, color reversals, etc.
Neat effect. They didn't use it a lot though.. you had to go just apeshit on the hypos to get it going.
Each question has separate ballot boxes.
Ballots are typically in a different color for each different question.
So the blue ballot goes into the blue box, the black ballot goes into the black box, etc.
And outside the voting booth sits Joey "The Pounder" with his baseball bat. You come out, he takes your little card and goes and checks on that plaintext website that you voted the way he said you should.
If you didn't, his baseball bat comes to pay your car.. and possibly you.. an unfriendly visit.
A correctly used one-time pad can not be reverse engineered, because, if used correctly, it's creation is done in a completely true random format. Since true randomness by definition cannot be engineered, only found, then it is impossible to reverse engineer it.
Now, to do two way communication, you'd need only two pads of sufficient size, one for encoding on each end. You would of course need a duplicate of each side's pad on the other side for decoding and passing these pads is indeed the main weakness.
However, you can, as you say, hand it to them. The reason you might not be telling them the information to be encoded face to face is because you don't have that information yet. The beauty of one-time pads is that they never expire. Someone might find some way to factor primes instantly via quantum computing, and your one-time pad would not be affected.
I suppose if an interceptor somehow found the source of randomness that you used, and somehow managed to find records as to what time-period/portion of it you used, they could then use that information to crack your one-time pad, essentially by recreating it.
But in essence, a correctly created/used one time pad can be very useful, especially with high-density storage media like DVDs where you could store gigabytes of numbers for your OTP creation.
I think the only way to do this is to require that the software be completely open source, with the code posted on the internet for anyone to audit.
False security.
Okay, so you know the code on the internet is good.
Do you know that that's what's being used in your voting machine?
Private charity doesn't work either. If it did, we wouldn't have the homeless, the Red Cross would never have a blood shortage, and the food banks would always have enough for those who need it.
To say that without government private charities would pick up the slack is to have a completely naive and unrealistic view of the way people actually behave. Would you pay money to put some kids who you neither know nor know the parents of through school if you didn't have to? Not up to you? Up to their families you say? Well, that's all fine and dandy until their families can't or won't put them through either.. which leaves us back with the original problem. The ones who suffer are not necessarily the families who didn't put the kids through school, it's those who have to pay for the increased policing, or who have their lives ruined or ended as a result of criminal activities.
As for the prosititution bit, I have to admit, I set up that one simply because I knew libertarians wouldn't be able to resist biting on that point and miss the actual issue. Now that you've proven me right, try substituting the "theft and home invasion" bit for prostitution, and leave the rest the same. The question still stands.
With respect to the pollution issue, how do you punish people for events that do not show results until many years after? When a company sets up a front company to bury nuclear waste on their own land and the groundwater contamination doesn't show up until well after the front is dead and gone, who suffers?
Now is the EPA effective? That's a separate argument from the issue of should there be regulation protecting people from actions that may seem non-damaging to begin with but turn out to be damaging later.. which was the entire point of this post.
The examples aren't straw-men, as they go to the core of the libertarian problem, embodied by the last question which you conveniently failed to address.
Which is cheaper?
Prevention or cure?
The libertarian philosophy is based on the misguided (in my opinion) beliefs that private society is capable of prevention with no governmental direction, and that what it can not prevent can always be cured through the courts.
Entitlement programs that make it so kids have the skills/abilities to get decent employment, or policing programs to catch those kids that didn't get those skills and so are looking for any way they can to survive -- which may involve home invasion and violence?
Which is cheaper?
Paying taxes so the single mom is able to feed her kid, or paying taxes to arrest, try, sentence, and punish the same mom who started prostituting herself to do the same.. and now having the state take on her child as a ward as well?
Which is cheaper?
Paying an agency such as the EPA to investigate and stop environmental contamination, or paying to clean it up later -- well after the company doing it has gone out of business?
Which is cheaper?
Prevention or cure?
Your friend can legally lend you his original CD.
You can legally copy it.
Your friend can legally copy his CD.
You friend can *not* legally give you his copy.
You *cannot* legally copy from his copy, if you get hold of it somehow.
Now, to apply this to the internet and MP3s:
Your friend can legally lend you his original CD.
You can legally rip it to MP3
Your friend can also legally rip his CD to MP3
Your friend cannot legally give you his MP3
You cannot legally copy his MP3 if you get hold of it somehow.
Ergo, you cannot download legally, as that is copying his MP3.
How do you get Quite better than Natural Selection from since its run by a full fledged company rather than a small group of unpaid modders?
Why, going by that logic, one would have to conclude the Dai-Katana beats the hell out of CounterStrike.
So, uhh.. given that the whole point of electronic voting is to make voting and specifically the counting process easier and quicker, what does this help?
I mean, after you've gone through all of this rigamarole, what it seems you're left with at the end is a bunch of receipts that still need to be counted by hand?
Which problem is he addressing here?
The 5 headshots required, or the unified ammo system?
I'm sorry, I figure if the player is good enough run directly toward an enemy at top speed and manage to pull off a pistol shot to the head without the alarm being raised, they deserve some kind of reward for that. Conserving their other ammo seems like a good one to me.
..try joining us in the Diebold Election Era.
Volunteer to work for somebody who runs against Orrin in the next election.
If everyone ignored them, Senator Orrin Hatch would happily cough up the Bill of Rights and half of the Constitution for them to use as toilet paper, provided they gave him better royalties on his non-selling album and higher campaign contributions.
As it is, it's only because we pay attention that they don't attempt even more outrageous power grabs.
They may not be elected, but when they can get laws passed that favor them over the good of Americans in general, they have power.
It is very simple not become a guest of Gitmo, do not conspire with terrorist organizations that threaten to cause mass casualties.
You forgot the rest:
"Or be an innocent bystander that the government beleives is a terrorist conspirator."
Of course, that last one is a little out of an individual's hands.
(No, I don't know that there are any innocent bystanders in there, but without the notion of a fair trial, I don't know that there aren't either.)
Next question?
Sounds interesting.
Some potential pitfalls that I can think of off the top of my head (which means you probably have already as well, but hey..)
Discovery and Invention, unless they're very carefully handled, strike me as a great way to either penalize late joining characters or artifically advance their power curve.
Once a lot of things have been discovered or invented already, it will either be more difficult for new players to come up with truly new discoveries or inventions, or if they don't actually need truly new ones, then it becomes a lot easier for them to make these triplette ratings, as somebody is bound to post the methods in some sort of out of game communication.
And it goes similarly with power. As things get discovered/invented, they get communicated. Since knowledge tends to equate to power, you'll also see a fast rise on that triplette as well.
End result seems to be that new players will advance fairly quickly to at least a median value on the triplette scale. Of course as they do this, the median value will increase, etc.
Now, maybe this is intentional, as a way to prevent the newbies from feeling like cannon fodder in comparison to the rest of the group, but it would also reduce the play-time to get to higher levels of magical skill, which leads to power inflation problems, etc.
Still, a neat idea.
Kazaa can be used for distributing content that you don't want to have a single point of failure.
http: and ftp: can't, for obvious reasons.
Neither can bittorrent because of the central role of the tracker.
So, say you're looking to disseminate information about... oh I don't know.. Diebold rigging election machines, or perhaps a video of the President performing a ritual human sacrifice or some other such sensitive material.
Now, since in these cases you might be worried about jack-booted thugs breaking down your door and putting a round through your hard-drive and/or skull, you need some way to not only get the file out there, but be sure that the file can continue to get out there even if you're no longer connected.
P2P, and therefore Kazaa, provides this.
Let's take another look at that shall we, specifically, your #2 definition that you so kindly point out:
trump: get the better of [syn: oudo, outflank, best, scoop]
Now, let's substitute the meaning for the word in the sentence.
Seems the right to get the service you pay for gets the better of, outdoes, outflanks, bests, and scoops the 'right' of the FBI to spy on you, using your own vehicle's systems!
Now, since the court ruled that the FBI doing so was not proper because it interefered with the service being provided, the sentence seems to be fully accurate.
Unless you have some alternative reading I'm not aware of.
No.. none of them has really taken off because for the most part, people don't even KNOW about them.
Apple did major advertising for iTunes/iPod.. and got a lot of reporting about it as well.
Rhapsody/Pressplay/Emusic, whatever? Maybe a mention in the technical pages, if you happened to look there on the right day.
Now.. on Windows? First time someone opens an MP3 on their new system, it's going to pop up WMP, which will most definitely be set to have a front page of MS's music service, and handy "shop now!" buttons sprinkled throughout.
Of course, you're right in one aspect.. if it sucks bad enough.
However, I tend to think that for joe public, you won't reach "bad enough" until it means "doesn't play on my computer when I want it to."
All MS really has to do is make sure that their service doesn't put an expiry date on songs requiring more fees, and allow you to re-order them any way you like on your playlist.
Most people really don't want to share their music. They don't have anything against it, but if they're not allowed to, they probably won't break their backs trying.
Emusic
Actually, there's one more option:
MS drops it's various unprofitable activities.
It has a lot of these.. and it well knows it. Check out the latest Cringely for an interesting take on it.
For your kids, the rule is this:a ve010814.html
Keep yourself private. Nobody needs to know what school you go to, what you wear, where you live, where you shop, or anything like that. If your kids ask why not, you can give'em this link:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/sexsl
For you, the rule is this:
Talk with your kids. Have an interest in what they're doing. Ask them what they've been looking into, what they liked, what they didn't. Ask them to show you some of it if they will. Help them find sites that might have more stuff that they like, ask them for help finding things you might like. Basically, be involved.
If roles were reversed, and everybody used a Mac, would the EU be telling Apple that they should unbundle Quicktime with their os due to monopolistic practices??
Yes.
RIAA labels will stop producing music in CD format.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. And for the rest of our lives.
Of course, first they'll need to get market penetration with the new format. Easiest way to do that is simply allow the new format to be competitively priced with the real costs of production. If you had the choice of a CD for 14.99 and a Music Wafer for 2.99, wouldn't you be tempted to get a Wafer Player?
Especially since you can USB the wafer player into your computer, new stereo, or whatever else you happen to have with a USB connection and speakers (assuming it doesn't have it's own wafer player). If it has a screen as well, it'll show you the video if you want.
Once enough of the market had those, they could scale back on CD production, thus making it so that everybody else who hasn't switched already has reason to.
Once you've switched over to wafers, the reasoning to re-purchase your music in that format becomes stronger. Even if it's at only 2.99/wafer, that's an extra $2.99 that they wouldn't have seen before.