The only thing worse then dependence on foreign oil is dependence on foreign food.
They're the same thing. The USA's agriculture is totally dependent on foreign oil. Their farmers simply cannot work without supplies from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or Russia.
Look at the Palestines. Which as a whole are on international welfare - incredible population growth!
That proves my point. The food and water resources available to a "Palestinian" are 20% of what an individual Israeli gets. Yet the Israelis have children 40% less frequently.
OK, I don't think someone knows there American history very well.
On the contrary- you simply don't know what "third world country" means. Just because the USA wasn't an internationally-dominant superpower until 1945 doesn't mean that previously it was "third world"!
From it's inception in 1776, the USA was at worst a second-tier nation. Although it lacked the military power to challenge France or Portugal, they weren't considered a backwards, impoverished tribal nation waiting for the hand of Christendom to guide them into imperial servitude.
Feeding poor people only causes them to have more children
It's counterintutive, but that's completely backwards.
The wealthier and better-fed a people are, the fewer children they have. Japan is on the leading edge of this, but the USA is following along. Starving Ugandans, on the other hand, have 3-7 children regularly; or as many as they can manage.
Personally, I think we're in for some radical changes in our understanding of the universe in the next 50 years.
You're wrong. It's easy to make that mistake... just assume a linear trajectory of knowledge. Since we today know more than we did 500 years ago, it means that 500 years later we'll know a whole lot more.
But that's actually false. Looking at the real curve of knowledge growth, it's completely flattened out. This is especially apparent if you measure time in man-years instead of pure years. There hasn't been a substantial discovery in 80 years.
How can we do this with a government that is not committed to science (Shutting down a space program)
The space shuttle program has never been a contributor to science. Shutting it down will only help scientific research, as long as just 10% of the saved money goes to actual good projects.
I'd like to go with your EM theory of communication,
The progress of science has gradually reduced the number of entities/objects/forces required to explain all existence. If you don't think electromagnetism is appropriate, then there are exactly two other choices: gravity or "strong" (atomic cohesion bonds, aka physical matter).
Of the 3 fundamental forces, EM seems the best way to communicate.
So, how can I tell if what I've picked is subject to bias or not? Please spell out how! That's all I'm asking.
How do you know that you're not completely insane, and everything you see around you is a delusion?
Questions of that form cannot be answered, but it doesn't matter. If you're right you're right, and if you're wrong, you have no way of ever knowing. If our knowledge of physics is so far off as to be missing something so important it could be used for communication (quantum telepathy waves?), then there's no hope for us.
No. It's not the same. Holes in DES or AES arise only because of human error in creating the cipher. (And if you wanted better security, you'd be using Diffie-Hellman anyhow). They are not expected, anticipated, or unavoidable.
But in a hypothetical future with quantum computing, breaking the encryption doesn't rely on discovering a flaw, just going through the work. Fundamentally so much easier.
unless there is a way to get a standard card to listen to all traffic on a given channel
Yep. Lots of normal cards can do this easily. The rare cards that can't are considered "crippled". A few cards can collect more than 1 channel at once.
but I am basing my limited knowledge off of Digital Fortress by Dan Brown
If you want to actually learn something about codes from an adventure novel, try Cryptonomicon. (Warning- 1000 pages)
The premise for Digital Fortress was completely backwards from reality. It suggested that today the NSA can break any code, and that chaos would result if a breakthrough changed that. But actually, any competent code is unbreakable already, even to the biggest government supercomputer- and if that changed, we'd see a good bit of rioting in the streets.
then oowriter 1.1.2 (and not the previous versions) is too, because it achieves a similar level of compatibility
That's just not true. I can understand that you might think so, if you haven't tested enough documents, but it is simply false.
I have just re-verified this with OO 1.1.2. If you can't make a 1 page DOC that's legible in winword but scrambled in OO, then you're just not trying very hard. (Hint: Use some tables, images, and outlines. Or version control, but that makes it too easy)
AC: A solution which would solve the legal aspects and avoid accidental use of the network would be:
Neither of your solutions work. They don't solve a person walking in through the library, reading the WEP key, and then going back outside. Or never going inside at all, but merely clicking through the NoCatAuth AUP and then disregarding it.
A society where the government actually owns every common resource (and can consequently do whatever it pleases with them) is called a tyranny, dictatorship, totalitarianism or something similar.
Wrong. To be totalitarian, the government must own private resources as well. Technically, anarchies and Objectivist-Libertarian states fit your definition of "tryanny" (insofar as no common resources exist, therefore the government owns 100% of them)!
The reason is that "public" in this case means "owned by all", and while you are indeed one of the owners of the park, such actions from your part would interfere with all the other owners.
Yes... connect the dots.
Just as the government can regulate the public's use of a park on the public's behalf, so can it regulate the use of a library. It has that right.
Whether or not the library staff have the authority to set these rules is a separate question from whether those rules actually help or hinder it's public-serving mission.
This does not apply to the Wi-Fi example because you are allowed to use the Wi-Fi network, and it won't matter to others whether you do it from outside or inside.
If it matters or not is a technical/legal question. There are many potential reasons why outside WiFi could be more disruptive to other users than if you're inside where the librarian can glance at your screen. It is up to the government (in the form of the library committee) to evaluate those questions and, in light of the answer, set rules to best cope with the situation.
Id games which have been open sourced famously have this problem as well.
Uh, Half-Life was never opensourced, and Counterstrike certainly had that problem!
Arguing that open-source makes online cheating easier is basically a red herring. It does reduce the technical skills to produce a client-side cheat, but that doesn't matter much, because the majority of cheaters are just running patches written by someone else anyhow.
The only approach that proprietary shooting games have today isn't really satisfactory either. They contract to Evenbalance to produce new cheat-detection code faster than the cheaters can keep up.
Licenses like the GPL interfere with that technique, but are not totally incompatible with it.
For the record, Half-Life was derived from Quake 1, not 2.
Wrong. Half-Life was based on the Quake2 engine, even though the developers had already made substantial mods to a Quake1 baseline prior to Q2's release.
You can verify this yourself by scanning an original install of Half-Life for function names from quake2 code, such as this file.
anyone has a right to ask anything from anyone else with some very few exceptions (such as asking for sex from children)
No. There are very many exceptions. I've counted more than 5000- just as big as your national legal code.
Asking for underage sex is no different from requesting the commision of any other crime. It's still illegal whether you ask or not, and is no different from murder or theft in that regard.
Bottom line, if the library, or anyone else, wants to restrict access to a wifi network, it is possible to do so without spending a lot of money.
No. There is no real easy technical solution.
Assume a facilty wants to allow public WiFi use, but only to people inside it's building. They can try a hardware solution, adjusting antennas so the exterior walls block signals, but that'll be difficult to get exactly right. They can try a software solution, and require people to check in/out and be assigned passcodes upon entering/exiting the building. But that creates a significant overhead in staffing to enforce revoking of keys when somebody leaves, and libraries can't afford such waste.
The best option is actually to give up, and accept that people outside the building will get access- and then check signal strength to make sure nobody else's private residential property is being serviced.
Look at the commercial hot-spots. You connect, are sent to a pay/sign on page, pay/login, then you are connected.
None of those services try to restrict you from using it after you leave the facility. If you paid the fee, they're happy if you keep using it all the way down the street. If you lived next door, they'd love for you to make them your only ISP.
A library isn't like that. Some libraries, apparently, only want to give access when you're still in the building.
Not analogous. Leaving your door open is passive, but running an "open" access point is active. I send a request, and the neighbor's router responds to it. If he didn't want it to respond, then... he shouldn't have had it respond.
If one accidently gives away something of value, he has no recourse. The transaction is over, and he's lost.
I was always taught that any time you use something that doesn't belong to you, you must first ask permission.
The 802.11b protocol provides a standardized, automatable way to ask for that permission. If you don't want your router to grant permission to every random stranger, it's easy enough to set a WEP security code.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, what sort of idiot would think that we'd make energy by splitting up water and then recombining it?
George W Bush?
The only thing worse then dependence on foreign oil is dependence on foreign food.
They're the same thing. The USA's agriculture is totally dependent on foreign oil. Their farmers simply cannot work without supplies from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or Russia.
Losing oil will wipe out the population too.
Look at the Palestines. Which as a whole are on international welfare - incredible population growth!
That proves my point. The food and water resources available to a "Palestinian" are 20% of what an individual Israeli gets. Yet the Israelis have children 40% less frequently.
The fact of WW2 is that the US paid more in money but less in blood than any other major combatant.
If the USA hadn't helped, the UK and USSR would've been defeated.
If the UK and USSR had surrendered early, the USA would've still won by 1948. That would be when the atomic bombs fall on Berlin.
And blood is the only true currency of war.
Oh, so China and India are both stronger militarily than the USA?
OK, I don't think someone knows there American history very well.
On the contrary- you simply don't know what "third world country" means. Just because the USA wasn't an internationally-dominant superpower until 1945 doesn't mean that previously it was "third world"!
From it's inception in 1776, the USA was at worst a second-tier nation. Although it lacked the military power to challenge France or Portugal, they weren't considered a backwards, impoverished tribal nation waiting for the hand of Christendom to guide them into imperial servitude.
Feeding poor people only causes them to have more children
It's counterintutive, but that's completely backwards.
The wealthier and better-fed a people are, the fewer children they have. Japan is on the leading edge of this, but the USA is following along. Starving Ugandans, on the other hand, have 3-7 children regularly; or as many as they can manage.
Personally, I think we're in for some radical changes in our understanding of the universe in the next 50 years.
You're wrong. It's easy to make that mistake... just assume a linear trajectory of knowledge. Since we today know more than we did 500 years ago, it means that 500 years later we'll know a whole lot more.
But that's actually false. Looking at the real curve of knowledge growth, it's completely flattened out. This is especially apparent if you measure time in man-years instead of pure years. There hasn't been a substantial discovery in 80 years.
How can we do this with a government that is not committed to science (Shutting down a space program)
The space shuttle program has never been a contributor to science. Shutting it down will only help scientific research, as long as just 10% of the saved money goes to actual good projects.
I'd like to go with your EM theory of communication,
The progress of science has gradually reduced the number of entities/objects/forces required to explain all existence. If you don't think electromagnetism is appropriate, then there are exactly two other choices: gravity or "strong" (atomic cohesion bonds, aka physical matter).
Of the 3 fundamental forces, EM seems the best way to communicate.
So, how can I tell if what I've picked is subject to bias or not? Please spell out how! That's all I'm asking.
How do you know that you're not completely insane, and everything you see around you is a delusion?
Questions of that form cannot be answered, but it doesn't matter. If you're right you're right, and if you're wrong, you have no way of ever knowing. If our knowledge of physics is so far off as to be missing something so important it could be used for communication (quantum telepathy waves?), then there's no hope for us.
This line of thinking is incredibly anachrnostic.
Your line of thinking is anachronistic. It's a relatively modern version of heliocentrism or humanist chauvanism, or even creationism.
You think that we're so special and rare that no aliens could possibly be similar to us.
stone tools -> spears -> bow and arrow -> bronze weapons -> steel weapons, finally to European society.
Yep, that's about the shape of it. Although you skipped wood tools at the beginning, and mispelled "Eurasian" at the end.
meant solar system...
I think you meant "star system". "Solar system" would be the system around "Sol"- this star only, and none other.
Today we use the same approach:
No. It's not the same. Holes in DES or AES arise only because of human error in creating the cipher. (And if you wanted better security, you'd be using Diffie-Hellman anyhow). They are not expected, anticipated, or unavoidable.
But in a hypothetical future with quantum computing, breaking the encryption doesn't rely on discovering a flaw, just going through the work. Fundamentally so much easier.
You would need special equipment, I imagine,
Nope.
unless there is a way to get a standard card to listen to all traffic on a given channel
Yep. Lots of normal cards can do this easily. The rare cards that can't are considered "crippled". A few cards can collect more than 1 channel at once.
the real prices of many consumer goods should actually drop over time
Because the "good" in question was GOLD ITSELF.
AC: It is not meant to keep the determined leech off your line technically.
If you were paying attention, you'd know that "technical" solutions were the only topic of discussion!
but I am basing my limited knowledge off of Digital Fortress by Dan Brown
If you want to actually learn something about codes from an adventure novel, try Cryptonomicon. (Warning- 1000 pages)
The premise for Digital Fortress was completely backwards from reality. It suggested that today the NSA can break any code, and that chaos would result if a breakthrough changed that. But actually, any competent code is unbreakable already, even to the biggest government supercomputer- and if that changed, we'd see a good bit of rioting in the streets.
A good defense before such attack would be to change the cipher in such a way as to make the corresponding quantum algorithm useless,
So you depend on the security (and novelty) of the cipher, rather than the key? That's called "security through obscurity", and it gets laughed at.
then oowriter 1.1.2 (and not the previous versions) is too, because it achieves a similar level of compatibility
That's just not true. I can understand that you might think so, if you haven't tested enough documents, but it is simply false.
I have just re-verified this with OO 1.1.2. If you can't make a 1 page DOC that's legible in winword but scrambled in OO, then you're just not trying very hard. (Hint: Use some tables, images, and outlines. Or version control, but that makes it too easy)
AC: A solution which would solve the legal aspects and avoid accidental use of the network would be:
Neither of your solutions work. They don't solve a person walking in through the library, reading the WEP key, and then going back outside. Or never going inside at all, but merely clicking through the NoCatAuth AUP and then disregarding it.
You are conflating "can" and "should".
A society where the government actually owns every common resource (and can consequently do whatever it pleases with them) is called a tyranny, dictatorship, totalitarianism or something similar.
Wrong. To be totalitarian, the government must own private resources as well. Technically, anarchies and Objectivist-Libertarian states fit your definition of "tryanny" (insofar as no common resources exist, therefore the government owns 100% of them)!
The reason is that "public" in this case means "owned by all", and while you are indeed one of the owners of the park, such actions from your part would interfere with all the other owners.
Yes... connect the dots.
Just as the government can regulate the public's use of a park on the public's behalf, so can it regulate the use of a library. It has that right.
Whether or not the library staff have the authority to set these rules is a separate question from whether those rules actually help or hinder it's public-serving mission.
This does not apply to the Wi-Fi example because you are allowed to use the Wi-Fi network, and it won't matter to others whether you do it from outside or inside.
If it matters or not is a technical/legal question. There are many potential reasons why outside WiFi could be more disruptive to other users than if you're inside where the librarian can glance at your screen. It is up to the government (in the form of the library committee) to evaluate those questions and, in light of the answer, set rules to best cope with the situation.
Id games which have been open sourced famously have this problem as well.
Uh, Half-Life was never opensourced, and Counterstrike certainly had that problem!
Arguing that open-source makes online cheating easier is basically a red herring. It does reduce the technical skills to produce a client-side cheat, but that doesn't matter much, because the majority of cheaters are just running patches written by someone else anyhow.
The only approach that proprietary shooting games have today isn't really satisfactory either. They contract to Evenbalance to produce new cheat-detection code faster than the cheaters can keep up.
Licenses like the GPL interfere with that technique, but are not totally incompatible with it.
For the record, Half-Life was derived from Quake 1, not 2.
Wrong. Half-Life was based on the Quake2 engine, even though the developers had already made substantial mods to a Quake1 baseline prior to Q2's release.
You can verify this yourself by scanning an original install of Half-Life for function names from quake2 code, such as this file.
anyone has a right to ask anything from anyone else with some very few exceptions (such as asking for sex from children)
No. There are very many exceptions. I've counted more than 5000- just as big as your national legal code.
Asking for underage sex is no different from requesting the commision of any other crime. It's still illegal whether you ask or not, and is no different from murder or theft in that regard.
Bottom line, if the library, or anyone else, wants to restrict access to a wifi network, it is possible to do so without spending a lot of money.
No. There is no real easy technical solution.
Assume a facilty wants to allow public WiFi use, but only to people inside it's building. They can try a hardware solution, adjusting antennas so the exterior walls block signals, but that'll be difficult to get exactly right. They can try a software solution, and require people to check in/out and be assigned passcodes upon entering/exiting the building. But that creates a significant overhead in staffing to enforce revoking of keys when somebody leaves, and libraries can't afford such waste.
The best option is actually to give up, and accept that people outside the building will get access- and then check signal strength to make sure nobody else's private residential property is being serviced.
Look at the commercial hot-spots. You connect, are sent to a pay/sign on page, pay/login, then you are connected.
None of those services try to restrict you from using it after you leave the facility. If you paid the fee, they're happy if you keep using it all the way down the street. If you lived next door, they'd love for you to make them your only ISP.
A library isn't like that. Some libraries, apparently, only want to give access when you're still in the building.
So if your neighbor leaves his door unlocked,
Not analogous. Leaving your door open is passive, but running an "open" access point is active. I send a request, and the neighbor's router responds to it. If he didn't want it to respond, then... he shouldn't have had it respond.
If one accidently gives away something of value, he has no recourse. The transaction is over, and he's lost.
I was always taught that any time you use something that doesn't belong to you, you must first ask permission.
The 802.11b protocol provides a standardized, automatable way to ask for that permission. If you don't want your router to grant permission to every random stranger, it's easy enough to set a WEP security code.