In an ideal world, the electorate can deal with the immoral government, and the government can deal with the immoral company by making their actions illegal (if indeed it's the will of the people to crack down on immoral activity).
I'm not arguing that they should be punished for being immoral, but long term, they probably *should* expect the law to stop treating them so favourably.
Agree, but governments should really do these kinds of tax law fixes in a way that creates tremendous expenses for companies that have been gaming the system.
Otherwise they'll just keep finding another loophole.
It might even make sense to make tax code changes ex post facto for some period of time. That would create tremendous risks for anybody taking advantage of loopholes, and thus companies would just be boring and use traditional accounting.
Any taxes paid by corporations are directly and immediately passed on to their customers anyway so what the hell is the difference?
You could argue the same thing of any tax. Sales taxes raise costs of living, which means workers won't live in the area unless employers pay more, which means their costs go up, which means prices go up, which raises the cost of living. Income taxes get passed on to employers (since they have to pay more so that people are still willing to work for them), that gets passed on to customers, and so on.
And yet, taxes still work and have worked for centuries. There might be a loop, but as long as people can keep a reasonable return on their work, they'll work. It isn't like the taxes add up to 150%.
That's not true. Companies charge what the market can bear, and if they had lower taxes, they'd mostly just reap higher margins. Do you really think Apples prices would significantly rise if their tax burden went up? That's certainly not true of all markets.
Of course they'd raise their prices when their tax burden goes up and they'll cry foul "B-B-B-but it's the ebil gubbermint thats making us raise our prices" before doing another line of coke off a high end escort's arse with rolled up $100 note that is then used to light a cigar.
That depends greatly on the specifics, but it generally isn't true. Companies can't just substantially change prices without losing money. It may be more profitable to leave the prices alone and just make less money per sale, than to raise prices and watch the volume drop.
You'd be amazed how much effort it takes to jump through all those hoops. I've seen ERP systems with fairly complex configurations to keep track of all the shell games.
When the transaction is A pays B, B ships product to A, the systems are pretty easy to build/maintain. When the transaction involves money and physical goods going through completely different paths it gets really messy staying on top of it all.
Companies do it because it still pays off, but as with most of the finance sector this stuff is just a drain on the economy. If we could get rid of it all we'd be much better off as a society.
People close tabs and browsers for a reason. Because they're fucking *done* with the page. If you want something running, you leave it running.
Maybe they just want to have a chance at being able to read the page titles in the tab list, which is impossible when you have 47 tabs open?
I don't get the problem with opt-in push notifications any more than I get the problem with opt-in desktop notifications. They allow browser applications to do stuff that non-browser applications are used for all the time.
even on smartphones the first thing people ask me is to help them shut of the annoying notifications that all apps love to spam them with
You'll need to enable these for them to work, unlike on phones where they tend to be enabled by default. However, on android you can completely suppress the ability of an application to display notifications from its settings page.
As someone mostly in the "I dun get it" crowd, I'll say the problem for me is that I feel like while I can use it, I don't have a great deal of understanding as to what it's actually doing outside of the basics. I feel like I'm following a bunch of recipes that I know work.
Git is one of those tools which you have to grok to really be effective with. The data model in the tool is not intuitive, but it works really well in practice. Once you understand how it actually works, then the rest falls into place.
Now, something git really suffers from is inconsistency in its command-line tools. Specifying a branch name varies in syntax from tool to tool, and there are a million other cases like this. So, even if you understand what you need git to do, it can take a lot of digging to figure out the right way to do it.
Not to start a flamewar, but I find systemd to be in a similar boat. It has what amounts to a class inheritance aspect to it with units, and targets are often poorly understood. There are tons of "instead of this type that" guides out there, but I think that if you want to effectively use systemd you have to grok its data model.
[Turing machines] don't figure out what they'd do and then do the opposite, unless you just invert the programming.
Again, there is nothing that the Turing machine would ever need to figure out... it simply needs to just blindly do the opposite of whatever some black box says is supposed to happen...
A Turing machine is a mathematical construction. You're trying to use the halting problem as a rationale for the universe being non-deterministic. However, the halting problem only applies to Turing machines. A Turing machine can't contain a black box, because that isn't part of the definition of a Turing machine.
It is a bit like proving that there are a countable number of integers and then trying to say that there must be a countable number of irrational numbers by just redefining the meaning of "integer." You're playing word games, but that doesn't prove anything.
To be honest, I'm not really sure how you could prove anything about the universe using an argument purely from discrete mathematics, unless it is a proof that there is no such thing as determinism at all (which certainly would be an interesting claim for a mathematician to make). Math is a world all its own, and while it can be used to describe the physical world, it has an existence apart from it in a sense.
It just means that you can't write down the state of the entire universe using only the matter present inside of it.
Except that's generally understood to be what materialistic determinism *IS*... so I'm not sure if you meant to or not, but you've really just sort of agreed with me there.
Again, you're playing word games. Determinism requires that the universe has some state, and some set of rules that determines what its next state will be (which is a really rough way of putting it when time isn't discrete and is relative, but I don't think we're arguing about that). If you're arguing that determinism means something else, then we're just talking past each other.
I have no idea whether the universe is deterministic.
For someone who is professing to have no idea, you seem to be abnormally determined to convince me that my conclusions are invalid... perhaps you should try to figure out why you believe what you do.... or if you don't know what you believe, I might suggest you should stop trying to point out what you think may be wrong with another person's ideas just because you don't happen to agree with their conclusions, because otherwise you just come across as somebody who wants to disagree for the sake of being disagreeable, and not somebody who has actually made any real attempt to rationally think through their beliefs.
Honestly, the only reason I'm continuing this discussion is because I thought you might have an interesting argument for determinism based on the halting problem, which was your original point. I wasn't sure if you were just having trouble communicating your ideas, or if they were not established in rigor.
I don't really care whether I convince you. I don't intend to be disagreeable for its own sake. I'm just skeptical. If you're going to assert that the universe is non-deterministic that is a really bold statement, and I'm not going to simply accept it at face value.
The only stand I'm taking is that I don't believe anybody has shown conclusively whether the universe is deterministic or not. I'm open to arguments one way or the other. I'm fine with thought experiments and hand-waving arguments, but I'm not going to accept them as some kind of conclusive proof.
It doesn't have to "figure out" anything... if the sufficient state to predict the future exists, then you could at least theoretically use some alleged "magical" black box to say whatever a future state is going to be based on the universe's current state, and just have the deterministic turing machine query that.
The problem with such an approach is that your machine is part of the universe, and therefore must modify it as part of performing its evaluation of the future state of the universe. The machine must also be larger than the universe to do this, since it needs to maintain in its memory the entire current state of the universe and some number of future states to perform the calculation.
Such a machine cannot exist. The fact that it can't exist doesn't mean the universe isn't deterministic. It just means that you can't write down the state of the entire universe using only the matter present inside of it.
You can't build a machine that perfectly models itself for the same reason that you can't build a box that can fit itself inside unmodified.
And Turing machines execute the instructions they're told to execute. They don't figure out what they'd do and then do the opposite, unless you just invert the programming. A hand-waving argument about doing such a thing doesn't prove anything about the universe.
In fact, the *only* real reasons that I know of to rigidly hold onto the notion that the universe is deterministic are...
I have no idea whether the universe is deterministic. I'm just pointing out that neither does anybody else.
But if the instruction table says to move left when an alleged so-called analysis of the future says it will move right
What does that even mean? The instruction table says that if the condition is A, move left, if the condition is B, move left, if the condition is C, move right, and so on. A Turing machine operates entirely in the now (just like any other conventional computer). It doesn't have to guess what it might do - it just looks at the current state, looks it up in a table, and does what it says.
If you're saying that it should try to figure out what it will do 10 steps in the future, then that is basically the halting problem and it is not possible. Nor is it necessary for its behavior to be deterministic. The only thing determinism requires is that given a current state there is only one correct immediate future state. That is exactly what a Turing machine is - a mathematical construct that is perfectly deterministic.
Ahhh AT&T, doesn't want to be classified as Common Carrier unless it helps them get out of a lawsuit on jurisdictional grounds.
Actually, they still don't wan to be. They argued to another court that the FCC didn't have the right to make them a common carrier.
I think their goal was to get this case dismissed since they're a common carrier, and then get the controls of being a common carrier tossed since they aren't one.
The behavior of a halting machine is completely deterministic
Really? What happens if you ask it to tell you if a function will terminate when the function does the opposite of whatever the halting machine says the function will do?
Turing machines only support a few instructions. It can move left, move right, stay in the same place, change state, and write something in the current position.
There is no instruction called "terminate when the function does the opposite of whatever the halting machine says the function will do." I don't even know what that means. Turing machines don't say anything - they just execute instructions.
The behavior of a Turing machine is completely deterministic. If the instruction table says to move left given the current conditions, it will move left.
The halting problem requires a deterministic system, it does not require that the universe itself to be deterministic. The universe encompasses everything that ever was, is, or will be... including all deterministic systems.
I'll accept that definition of the universe, but recognizing that "all deterministic systems" might be an empty set.
My main point is that in a deterministic universe you should be able to contrive a deterministic thought experiment which will always be able to correctly predict the outcome of the experiment, but if you design the experiment so that its output is always the opposite of whatever was predicted, then it becomes evident that there can never be sufficient information at the beginning of the experiment to predict its conclusion, and if the current state of the universe is not sufficient to predict a future state, then the universe is not deterministic.
You're basically trying a proof by contradiction here, I believe. However, your wording is really loose.
First, what do you mean by "predict the outcome of the experiment?" What experiment?
Then you say that you "should be able to contrive" an "experiment" that can predict the outcome of the "experiment," but that it will have the "output" that is the opposite of whatever was predicted. What does this statement even mean, since it appears self-contradictory, like saying let the set A contain the number 5 and not contain the number 5. I can't tell whether your conclusions follow from your premise as your premise seems confusing at best.
It seems like you're trying to do something like this: Let f(x) = x + 3. So, f(5) = 8. So let's redefine f(x) = x + 3 if x5, and it equals 9 if x=5. You haven't made a contradiction, you've just swapped one deterministic function out with another.
You also brought up the halting problem, and it isn't obvious to me how that relates. The halting problem has nothing to do with determinism, just predictability. The behavior of a halting machine is completely deterministic - it has a finitely definable starting state, and given that starting state will always end up executing the same series of steps. However, it is unpredictable in the sense that you can't tell what the result will be with certainty without actually running through all the steps to get there.
A universe being nondeterministic does not mean it is impossible to construct smaller entirely deterministic systems within that framework... "if A then B" can be entirely determistic, even if the universe which runs it is not, if no aspects of the universe's non-determinism impact the execution of the statement.
Sure, I'll buy that. However, in practice if the universe contains elements that are non-deterministic, it seems extremely likely that the physical construction of a computer would not be entirely free of those elements.
>>registrars between you and the root can spoof you. Not good. It would be much better to require two (or more) cert chains at the same time that won't cooperate. For example, take a cert from USA, North Korea, and India. You could only be spoofed if theese 3 CAs or their intermediary cooperate.
Sure, but how do you specify which three have to collaborate for any particular domain, and who do you have to trust to have made that certification?
I'm not sure what kind of fix you have in mind, but I suspect it boils down to "America is more trustworthy when it comes to internet surveillance than Hong Kong". Except we know that's not true. So it seems intractable.
Simple, stick the certs in the DNSSEC records. Then only registrars between you and the root can spoof you. If you don't trust the USA, then pick a registrar in a country you do trust, and now the USA can't spoof your records.
If you want convenience you'll always have to trust somebody, but with the DNSSEC proposal only a few companies could spoof any particular website (with the list being different for each website). The Chinese government couldn't spoof nsa.gov, and the NSA couldn't spoof government.cn.
The root still involves some challenges, but that is high-profile and doesn't need to change much, so there are a lot of options there which won't scale up to the entire DNS tree.
You might not be able to predict what the machine does in the infinite future
You don't even need to predict infinitely far ahead... for example:
if this program's else clause will execute, then take branch A, else take branch B.
Regardless of what information you allegedly have about the program's future state will be incorrect, so it is trivially provable that no amount of information can be sufficient to even predict the future in a simple closed experiment such as this, and if even a single experiment can be designed where the result is not predictable, the universe cannot be deterministic.
The machine is still deterministic. You can predict with 100% certainty that if the condition on the evaluation is true, it will do A, and if not it will do B. You can even determine what the condition will be by running all the steps of the program until you get to that statement. That is determinism.
The only way you could have a "computer" that wasn't deterministic would be if its operation were influenced by randomness (true randomness - not algorithmic pseudo-randomness). Such a device would not be a Turing Machine.
In fact, whether it is possible to really build a finite Turing Machine depends on whether the universe is actually deterministic. Any computer exists in the physical world, and is subject to things like cosmic rays that can impact logic decisions apart from the content of memory, or for that matter change the content of memory apart from the program design, etc. So, if the cosmic rays are non-deterministic then it is not possible to build true a finite Turing Machine. (By "finite" I mean a machine with only limited tape length - a true Turing machine requires limitless memory.)
The existence of the Halting Problem disproves determinism.
The existence of the Halting Problem REQUIRES determinism. The Halting machine itself is deterministic. Given the current state of the machine, you can perfectly predict the next step of the machine. You just can't predict whether it will ever finish running without walking through the steps until it stops (assuming it does, and you'll never know if you ran it long enough).
Determinism is more about knowledge of the current state and the rules the game operates by.
Is it not already illegal to call out a SWAT team for spurious reasons? It's dangerous for the object of the prank and it means the SWAT team is unavailable for real call outs.
Sure, but look at the list of charges in the summary. The guy could have gotten somebody shot, but the charges are all about computer crimes and whatever, probably because those were the most serious laws that they could get him for breaking.
Living in that kind of denial only leads to providing a shitty upbringing. You can't believe that about your child unless you're not just completely in denial, and also completely disconnected from their life.
That isn't always true. The NSA reads every text message and email sent on the planet and even they can't keep track of who all the bad guys are.
Maybe their kids just acted normally all the time, and they were a complete jerk when they weren't home/etc. Short of spying on them, there might not be any way to tell.
Secure boot ensures that only the software I want on the device is actually present on the device, precluding the ability of a rootkit/etc to be intruding on it (unless that rootkit is housed in the firmware, which I'll grant is a problem). I would prefer if Chromebooks allowed the use of secure boot with a different set of keys - I believe you're stuck with it either on with Google's keys or off.
When you say transparent encryption, what do you mean?
I mean that the user data on the drive is encrypted using a strong key (ie not just a hash of a simple-to-remember password). Having the password to log in is necessary to decrypt the data, but not sufficient. If you were to obtain an encrypted image of the drive and the owner's password, you would not be able to decrypt the image without physical possession of the actual computer. If the computer were re-provisioned since you obtained the image and password, then you wouldn't be able to decrypt the backup at all, since the TPM would be re-initialized.
All of this works without any user intervention or configuration.
What reprovisioning are you doing on a chrome book? Most OS's have automated updates.
If I mess something up (such as playing around with stuff in chroots or whatever) I can just wipe the thing back to factory condition in about 15min, log in, and all by settings are restored despite not having made any effort to maintain my own backups. The whole point of using the cloud is that you don't store anything of value on the local machine - just cached state for offline use/etc.
I go a restaurant and there are parents with children. And the kids stare at their phone the entire time, never looking at or talking to anyone around them...It seems very abnormal and unhealthy.
I don't really have a problem with that per se.
I think the real issue is that kids are spending an even larger percentage of their time interacting with their peers and not with adults. I don't think that is healthy. If they were on their phones interacting with adults I think they'd be fine.
I think kids do need to spend time socializing with others their own age, but I think that they'd be better off spending more time with adults. After all, the goal is to get them to be more like adults and less like children. Now, that shouldn't be about being dependent on adults, but rather about interacting with them.
When we pointed this out years ago, the Microsoft trolls told us to stop being silly, because it was optional and Microsoft would never, ever think of changing that. Why, the very idea!
I'm a fan of UEFI. I don't use any PCs with UEFI that run Windows. Being a fan of UEFI doesn't make you a Microsoft troll.
I'm a fan of RSA too, even though it is used to enable all kinds of lousy anti-consumer nonsense.
The problem isn't UEFI. The problem is vendors who lock down the keys or don't give users a way to turn it off. I'd actually go a step further and ban pre-loading computers with keys at all - just let the user generate their own, and make all the OS/firmware/whatever vendors come up with easy ways to let users install their OSes and firmware updates and all that while still having keys that only the user can sign with.
SecureBoot is a reasonable thing. It's when it's under the control of Microsoft, rather than the owner of the hardware, that it becomes a problem.
Make sure the OS is composed of files that are cryptographically signed and entirely legit? Fine.
Define "legit" as being "only those things signed with Microsoft keys"? Not so fine.
Yup.
Sometimes I think that there ought to be a law that if an OS comes pre-installed with any asymmetric keys, the owner of the PC must be provided with a copy of any related keys. So, if you put a key that verifies firmware updates, then the owner gets the private key needed to sign firmware updates.
By all means tailor each key to each install so that knowledge of it doesn't compromise other PCs. By all means provide those keys on separate media so that malware can't use them to bypass security.
This would solve a lot of problems though. In addition to giving people control over their own hardware and defeating stuff like trusted computing / DRM, it would also force a huge change in how CAs operate, since they couldn't have their keys pre-installed. A CA would actually have to compete to demonstrate its trustworthiness to anybody it wants to get to install its key, and users wouldn't have laundry lists of keys from companies they've never heard of installed on their systems.
So anything that won't work on a Chromebook is out? Well, then you are already a Google fanboy and should keep using your beloved cloud. The whole point is to stay AWAY from the cloud and being tracked. You can't do that if you elect to use a fucking tracking device anyway.
There is no reason that a Chromebook needs Google to run. If there were an FOSS alternative to the services google provides (including authentications/etc) you could just as easily build chromiumos to use those, and self-host those services. I'd certainly being doing that if it were available.
It isn't like I profit from Google having my personal data. They just provide a better level of service than the alternatives. That is more an indictment of the state of FOSS than anything else - the level of service Google provides is not actually all that high. If somebody managed to hack into my Google account I'd be stuck re-creating everything from backups/etc which are a pain to maintain, because it is almost impossible to get customer service from Google.
Oh, and as far as being tracked goes - they'll be doing that whether you use the cloud or not.:)
I've looked at them a few times and that anyone buys them can only be attributed to ignorance.
I already own one and am thinking about buying another. Given a standard laptop I could build my own, but it would be a royal PITA and missing most of the features I care about (secure boot, transparent encryption, trivial re-provisioning, automated updates, etc). I'll probably run a distro in a chroot on the side as well, though I try not to use them too much since those are a pain to re-provision and the whole point of something like a chromebook is to not need to be running backups/etc.
It is a bit arrogant to say that anybody who buys one must be ignorant. They simply have different values than you do.
I know what I'm doing, thanks.
I never claimed that you didn't. You've found something that apparently meets your own requirements. Unfortunately, it doesn't meet mine. Most of your post has basically suggested that I must be an idiot for having the requirements that I do. You're entitled to your opinion, but you'd be amazed about how little I care about what it is in this case.:)
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In an ideal world, the electorate can deal with the immoral government, and the government can deal with the immoral company by making their actions illegal (if indeed it's the will of the people to crack down on immoral activity).
I'm not arguing that they should be punished for being immoral, but long term, they probably *should* expect the law to stop treating them so favourably.
Agree, but governments should really do these kinds of tax law fixes in a way that creates tremendous expenses for companies that have been gaming the system.
Otherwise they'll just keep finding another loophole.
It might even make sense to make tax code changes ex post facto for some period of time. That would create tremendous risks for anybody taking advantage of loopholes, and thus companies would just be boring and use traditional accounting.
Any taxes paid by corporations are directly and immediately passed on to their customers anyway so what the hell is the difference?
You could argue the same thing of any tax. Sales taxes raise costs of living, which means workers won't live in the area unless employers pay more, which means their costs go up, which means prices go up, which raises the cost of living. Income taxes get passed on to employers (since they have to pay more so that people are still willing to work for them), that gets passed on to customers, and so on.
And yet, taxes still work and have worked for centuries. There might be a loop, but as long as people can keep a reasonable return on their work, they'll work. It isn't like the taxes add up to 150%.
That's not true. Companies charge what the market can bear, and if they had lower taxes, they'd mostly just reap higher margins. Do you really think Apples prices would significantly rise if their tax burden went up? That's certainly not true of all markets.
Of course they'd raise their prices when their tax burden goes up and they'll cry foul "B-B-B-but it's the ebil gubbermint thats making us raise our prices" before doing another line of coke off a high end escort's arse with rolled up $100 note that is then used to light a cigar.
That depends greatly on the specifics, but it generally isn't true. Companies can't just substantially change prices without losing money. It may be more profitable to leave the prices alone and just make less money per sale, than to raise prices and watch the volume drop.
You'd be amazed how much effort it takes to jump through all those hoops. I've seen ERP systems with fairly complex configurations to keep track of all the shell games.
When the transaction is A pays B, B ships product to A, the systems are pretty easy to build/maintain. When the transaction involves money and physical goods going through completely different paths it gets really messy staying on top of it all.
Companies do it because it still pays off, but as with most of the finance sector this stuff is just a drain on the economy. If we could get rid of it all we'd be much better off as a society.
People close tabs and browsers for a reason. Because they're fucking *done* with the page. If you want something running, you leave it running.
Maybe they just want to have a chance at being able to read the page titles in the tab list, which is impossible when you have 47 tabs open?
I don't get the problem with opt-in push notifications any more than I get the problem with opt-in desktop notifications. They allow browser applications to do stuff that non-browser applications are used for all the time.
even on smartphones the first thing people ask me is to help them shut of the annoying notifications that all apps love to spam them with
You'll need to enable these for them to work, unlike on phones where they tend to be enabled by default. However, on android you can completely suppress the ability of an application to display notifications from its settings page.
As someone mostly in the "I dun get it" crowd, I'll say the problem for me is that I feel like while I can use it, I don't have a great deal of understanding as to what it's actually doing outside of the basics. I feel like I'm following a bunch of recipes that I know work.
Git is one of those tools which you have to grok to really be effective with. The data model in the tool is not intuitive, but it works really well in practice. Once you understand how it actually works, then the rest falls into place.
Now, something git really suffers from is inconsistency in its command-line tools. Specifying a branch name varies in syntax from tool to tool, and there are a million other cases like this. So, even if you understand what you need git to do, it can take a lot of digging to figure out the right way to do it.
Not to start a flamewar, but I find systemd to be in a similar boat. It has what amounts to a class inheritance aspect to it with units, and targets are often poorly understood. There are tons of "instead of this type that" guides out there, but I think that if you want to effectively use systemd you have to grok its data model.
Again, there is nothing that the Turing machine would ever need to figure out... it simply needs to just blindly do the opposite of whatever some black box says is supposed to happen...
A Turing machine is a mathematical construction. You're trying to use the halting problem as a rationale for the universe being non-deterministic. However, the halting problem only applies to Turing machines. A Turing machine can't contain a black box, because that isn't part of the definition of a Turing machine.
It is a bit like proving that there are a countable number of integers and then trying to say that there must be a countable number of irrational numbers by just redefining the meaning of "integer." You're playing word games, but that doesn't prove anything.
To be honest, I'm not really sure how you could prove anything about the universe using an argument purely from discrete mathematics, unless it is a proof that there is no such thing as determinism at all (which certainly would be an interesting claim for a mathematician to make). Math is a world all its own, and while it can be used to describe the physical world, it has an existence apart from it in a sense.
Except that's generally understood to be what materialistic determinism *IS*... so I'm not sure if you meant to or not, but you've really just sort of agreed with me there.
Again, you're playing word games. Determinism requires that the universe has some state, and some set of rules that determines what its next state will be (which is a really rough way of putting it when time isn't discrete and is relative, but I don't think we're arguing about that). If you're arguing that determinism means something else, then we're just talking past each other.
For someone who is professing to have no idea, you seem to be abnormally determined to convince me that my conclusions are invalid... perhaps you should try to figure out why you believe what you do.... or if you don't know what you believe, I might suggest you should stop trying to point out what you think may be wrong with another person's ideas just because you don't happen to agree with their conclusions, because otherwise you just come across as somebody who wants to disagree for the sake of being disagreeable, and not somebody who has actually made any real attempt to rationally think through their beliefs.
Honestly, the only reason I'm continuing this discussion is because I thought you might have an interesting argument for determinism based on the halting problem, which was your original point. I wasn't sure if you were just having trouble communicating your ideas, or if they were not established in rigor.
I don't really care whether I convince you. I don't intend to be disagreeable for its own sake. I'm just skeptical. If you're going to assert that the universe is non-deterministic that is a really bold statement, and I'm not going to simply accept it at face value.
The only stand I'm taking is that I don't believe anybody has shown conclusively whether the universe is deterministic or not. I'm open to arguments one way or the other. I'm fine with thought experiments and hand-waving arguments, but I'm not going to accept them as some kind of conclusive proof.
It doesn't have to "figure out" anything... if the sufficient state to predict the future exists, then you could at least theoretically use some alleged "magical" black box to say whatever a future state is going to be based on the universe's current state, and just have the deterministic turing machine query that.
The problem with such an approach is that your machine is part of the universe, and therefore must modify it as part of performing its evaluation of the future state of the universe. The machine must also be larger than the universe to do this, since it needs to maintain in its memory the entire current state of the universe and some number of future states to perform the calculation.
Such a machine cannot exist. The fact that it can't exist doesn't mean the universe isn't deterministic. It just means that you can't write down the state of the entire universe using only the matter present inside of it.
You can't build a machine that perfectly models itself for the same reason that you can't build a box that can fit itself inside unmodified.
And Turing machines execute the instructions they're told to execute. They don't figure out what they'd do and then do the opposite, unless you just invert the programming. A hand-waving argument about doing such a thing doesn't prove anything about the universe.
In fact, the *only* real reasons that I know of to rigidly hold onto the notion that the universe is deterministic are...
I have no idea whether the universe is deterministic. I'm just pointing out that neither does anybody else.
But if the instruction table says to move left when an alleged so-called analysis of the future says it will move right
What does that even mean? The instruction table says that if the condition is A, move left, if the condition is B, move left, if the condition is C, move right, and so on. A Turing machine operates entirely in the now (just like any other conventional computer). It doesn't have to guess what it might do - it just looks at the current state, looks it up in a table, and does what it says.
If you're saying that it should try to figure out what it will do 10 steps in the future, then that is basically the halting problem and it is not possible. Nor is it necessary for its behavior to be deterministic. The only thing determinism requires is that given a current state there is only one correct immediate future state. That is exactly what a Turing machine is - a mathematical construct that is perfectly deterministic.
Ahhh AT&T, doesn't want to be classified as Common Carrier unless it helps them get out of a lawsuit on jurisdictional grounds.
Actually, they still don't wan to be. They argued to another court that the FCC didn't have the right to make them a common carrier.
I think their goal was to get this case dismissed since they're a common carrier, and then get the controls of being a common carrier tossed since they aren't one.
Really? What happens if you ask it to tell you if a function will terminate when the function does the opposite of whatever the halting machine says the function will do?
Turing machines only support a few instructions. It can move left, move right, stay in the same place, change state, and write something in the current position.
There is no instruction called "terminate when the function does the opposite of whatever the halting machine says the function will do." I don't even know what that means. Turing machines don't say anything - they just execute instructions.
The behavior of a Turing machine is completely deterministic. If the instruction table says to move left given the current conditions, it will move left.
The halting problem requires a deterministic system, it does not require that the universe itself to be deterministic. The universe encompasses everything that ever was, is, or will be... including all deterministic systems.
I'll accept that definition of the universe, but recognizing that "all deterministic systems" might be an empty set.
My main point is that in a deterministic universe you should be able to contrive a deterministic thought experiment which will always be able to correctly predict the outcome of the experiment, but if you design the experiment so that its output is always the opposite of whatever was predicted, then it becomes evident that there can never be sufficient information at the beginning of the experiment to predict its conclusion, and if the current state of the universe is not sufficient to predict a future state, then the universe is not deterministic.
You're basically trying a proof by contradiction here, I believe. However, your wording is really loose.
First, what do you mean by "predict the outcome of the experiment?" What experiment?
Then you say that you "should be able to contrive" an "experiment" that can predict the outcome of the "experiment," but that it will have the "output" that is the opposite of whatever was predicted. What does this statement even mean, since it appears self-contradictory, like saying let the set A contain the number 5 and not contain the number 5. I can't tell whether your conclusions follow from your premise as your premise seems confusing at best.
It seems like you're trying to do something like this: Let f(x) = x + 3. So, f(5) = 8. So let's redefine f(x) = x + 3 if x5, and it equals 9 if x=5. You haven't made a contradiction, you've just swapped one deterministic function out with another.
You also brought up the halting problem, and it isn't obvious to me how that relates. The halting problem has nothing to do with determinism, just predictability. The behavior of a halting machine is completely deterministic - it has a finitely definable starting state, and given that starting state will always end up executing the same series of steps. However, it is unpredictable in the sense that you can't tell what the result will be with certainty without actually running through all the steps to get there.
A universe being nondeterministic does not mean it is impossible to construct smaller entirely deterministic systems within that framework... "if A then B" can be entirely determistic, even if the universe which runs it is not, if no aspects of the universe's non-determinism impact the execution of the statement.
Sure, I'll buy that. However, in practice if the universe contains elements that are non-deterministic, it seems extremely likely that the physical construction of a computer would not be entirely free of those elements.
>>registrars between you and the root can spoof you.
Not good.
It would be much better to require two (or more) cert chains at the same time that won't cooperate.
For example, take a cert from USA, North Korea, and India. You could only be spoofed if theese 3 CAs or their intermediary cooperate.
Sure, but how do you specify which three have to collaborate for any particular domain, and who do you have to trust to have made that certification?
I'm not sure what kind of fix you have in mind, but I suspect it boils down to "America is more trustworthy when it comes to internet surveillance than Hong Kong". Except we know that's not true. So it seems intractable.
Simple, stick the certs in the DNSSEC records. Then only registrars between you and the root can spoof you. If you don't trust the USA, then pick a registrar in a country you do trust, and now the USA can't spoof your records.
If you want convenience you'll always have to trust somebody, but with the DNSSEC proposal only a few companies could spoof any particular website (with the list being different for each website). The Chinese government couldn't spoof nsa.gov, and the NSA couldn't spoof government.cn.
The root still involves some challenges, but that is high-profile and doesn't need to change much, so there are a lot of options there which won't scale up to the entire DNS tree.
You don't even need to predict infinitely far ahead... for example:
if this program's else clause will execute, then take branch A, else take branch B.
Regardless of what information you allegedly have about the program's future state will be incorrect, so it is trivially provable that no amount of information can be sufficient to even predict the future in a simple closed experiment such as this, and if even a single experiment can be designed where the result is not predictable, the universe cannot be deterministic.
The machine is still deterministic. You can predict with 100% certainty that if the condition on the evaluation is true, it will do A, and if not it will do B. You can even determine what the condition will be by running all the steps of the program until you get to that statement. That is determinism.
The only way you could have a "computer" that wasn't deterministic would be if its operation were influenced by randomness (true randomness - not algorithmic pseudo-randomness). Such a device would not be a Turing Machine.
In fact, whether it is possible to really build a finite Turing Machine depends on whether the universe is actually deterministic. Any computer exists in the physical world, and is subject to things like cosmic rays that can impact logic decisions apart from the content of memory, or for that matter change the content of memory apart from the program design, etc. So, if the cosmic rays are non-deterministic then it is not possible to build true a finite Turing Machine. (By "finite" I mean a machine with only limited tape length - a true Turing machine requires limitless memory.)
The existence of the Halting Problem disproves determinism.
The existence of the Halting Problem REQUIRES determinism. The Halting machine itself is deterministic. Given the current state of the machine, you can perfectly predict the next step of the machine. You just can't predict whether it will ever finish running without walking through the steps until it stops (assuming it does, and you'll never know if you ran it long enough).
Determinism is more about knowledge of the current state and the rules the game operates by.
Is it not already illegal to call out a SWAT team for spurious reasons? It's dangerous for the object of the prank and it means the SWAT team is unavailable for real call outs.
Sure, but look at the list of charges in the summary. The guy could have gotten somebody shot, but the charges are all about computer crimes and whatever, probably because those were the most serious laws that they could get him for breaking.
Living in that kind of denial only leads to providing a shitty upbringing. You can't believe that about your child unless you're not just completely in denial, and also completely disconnected from their life.
That isn't always true. The NSA reads every text message and email sent on the planet and even they can't keep track of who all the bad guys are.
Maybe their kids just acted normally all the time, and they were a complete jerk when they weren't home/etc. Short of spying on them, there might not be any way to tell.
Explain to me the utility of Secure Boot?
Secure boot ensures that only the software I want on the device is actually present on the device, precluding the ability of a rootkit/etc to be intruding on it (unless that rootkit is housed in the firmware, which I'll grant is a problem). I would prefer if Chromebooks allowed the use of secure boot with a different set of keys - I believe you're stuck with it either on with Google's keys or off.
When you say transparent encryption, what do you mean?
I mean that the user data on the drive is encrypted using a strong key (ie not just a hash of a simple-to-remember password). Having the password to log in is necessary to decrypt the data, but not sufficient. If you were to obtain an encrypted image of the drive and the owner's password, you would not be able to decrypt the image without physical possession of the actual computer. If the computer were re-provisioned since you obtained the image and password, then you wouldn't be able to decrypt the backup at all, since the TPM would be re-initialized.
All of this works without any user intervention or configuration.
What reprovisioning are you doing on a chrome book? Most OS's have automated updates.
If I mess something up (such as playing around with stuff in chroots or whatever) I can just wipe the thing back to factory condition in about 15min, log in, and all by settings are restored despite not having made any effort to maintain my own backups. The whole point of using the cloud is that you don't store anything of value on the local machine - just cached state for offline use/etc.
I go a restaurant and there are parents with children. And the kids stare at their phone the entire time, never looking at or talking to anyone around them...It seems very abnormal and unhealthy.
I don't really have a problem with that per se.
I think the real issue is that kids are spending an even larger percentage of their time interacting with their peers and not with adults. I don't think that is healthy. If they were on their phones interacting with adults I think they'd be fine.
I think kids do need to spend time socializing with others their own age, but I think that they'd be better off spending more time with adults. After all, the goal is to get them to be more like adults and less like children. Now, that shouldn't be about being dependent on adults, but rather about interacting with them.
When we pointed this out years ago, the Microsoft trolls told us to stop being silly, because it was optional and Microsoft would never, ever think of changing that. Why, the very idea!
I'm a fan of UEFI. I don't use any PCs with UEFI that run Windows. Being a fan of UEFI doesn't make you a Microsoft troll.
I'm a fan of RSA too, even though it is used to enable all kinds of lousy anti-consumer nonsense.
The problem isn't UEFI. The problem is vendors who lock down the keys or don't give users a way to turn it off. I'd actually go a step further and ban pre-loading computers with keys at all - just let the user generate their own, and make all the OS/firmware/whatever vendors come up with easy ways to let users install their OSes and firmware updates and all that while still having keys that only the user can sign with.
SecureBoot is a reasonable thing. It's when it's under the control of Microsoft, rather than the owner of the hardware, that it becomes a problem.
Make sure the OS is composed of files that are cryptographically signed and entirely legit? Fine.
Define "legit" as being "only those things signed with Microsoft keys"? Not so fine.
Yup.
Sometimes I think that there ought to be a law that if an OS comes pre-installed with any asymmetric keys, the owner of the PC must be provided with a copy of any related keys. So, if you put a key that verifies firmware updates, then the owner gets the private key needed to sign firmware updates.
By all means tailor each key to each install so that knowledge of it doesn't compromise other PCs. By all means provide those keys on separate media so that malware can't use them to bypass security.
This would solve a lot of problems though. In addition to giving people control over their own hardware and defeating stuff like trusted computing / DRM, it would also force a huge change in how CAs operate, since they couldn't have their keys pre-installed. A CA would actually have to compete to demonstrate its trustworthiness to anybody it wants to get to install its key, and users wouldn't have laundry lists of keys from companies they've never heard of installed on their systems.
So anything that won't work on a Chromebook is out? Well, then you are already a Google fanboy and should keep using your beloved cloud. The whole point is to stay AWAY from the cloud and being tracked. You can't do that if you elect to use a fucking tracking device anyway.
There is no reason that a Chromebook needs Google to run. If there were an FOSS alternative to the services google provides (including authentications/etc) you could just as easily build chromiumos to use those, and self-host those services. I'd certainly being doing that if it were available.
It isn't like I profit from Google having my personal data. They just provide a better level of service than the alternatives. That is more an indictment of the state of FOSS than anything else - the level of service Google provides is not actually all that high. If somebody managed to hack into my Google account I'd be stuck re-creating everything from backups/etc which are a pain to maintain, because it is almost impossible to get customer service from Google.
Oh, and as far as being tracked goes - they'll be doing that whether you use the cloud or not. :)
I've looked at them a few times and that anyone buys them can only be attributed to ignorance.
I already own one and am thinking about buying another. Given a standard laptop I could build my own, but it would be a royal PITA and missing most of the features I care about (secure boot, transparent encryption, trivial re-provisioning, automated updates, etc). I'll probably run a distro in a chroot on the side as well, though I try not to use them too much since those are a pain to re-provision and the whole point of something like a chromebook is to not need to be running backups/etc.
It is a bit arrogant to say that anybody who buys one must be ignorant. They simply have different values than you do.
I know what I'm doing, thanks.
I never claimed that you didn't. You've found something that apparently meets your own requirements. Unfortunately, it doesn't meet mine. Most of your post has basically suggested that I must be an idiot for having the requirements that I do. You're entitled to your opinion, but you'd be amazed about how little I care about what it is in this case. :)