The Sliver Buttel is so full of technical BS it addled my brains, which by the way, if they were half as reliable as this link would like to claim, my programs would be error free already, wouldn't they? What makes my brain so reliable: I use a computer in any situation where I have to multiply two numbers where the product contains more than three digits worth of algorithmic complexity.
Does anyone esle find it incredible that this reviewer complains that the cranky old coot author doesn't bother to provide justifications where he really doesn't have anything compelling to add?
Knowing when to shut up is one of best indicators that someone cares enough about their subject matter that they don't feel the need to "fill air" as if other people can't supply their own experience.
I heartily condone the approach: here's what I think, take it or leave it.
I'm an old coot myself, and I've learned that it's generally a waste of time to write toward an audience that won't think for itself. If you boss won't think, a poster of convenient sound bites won't solve any problem that matters.
That's not a stupid question at all. If Firefox had a setting (that I knew about) to disable all animation effects by default, I'd enable that feature immediately. More than 90% of animated content out there is crap or worse than crap. 100% of animated effects reduce my reading speed and comprehension. I've asked other people about this, and I seem to suffer this effect more than most people, to the extent that I often set my Firefox font size for inch tall letters so that the majority of the text spills below the aggravating imagery. Sometimes if I can't get the animation away from the text I'm readin, I actually hold one hand over the screen to block out the offending flicker. The few people I know who find this similarly annoying tend to be the exceptional readers. One of my close friends claims he sees every word on the printed page (for book reading) simultaneously, and he moves his eyes back and forth mostly for the purpose of getting the words into proper order for mental comprehension. But he usually knows what the author will claim before he gets there, because he knows what words are coming at the bottom of the page.
For me, there is no "experience" involved in visiting a web page. I go there to suck out the content. I had a jazz musician friend in Montreal who said that he didn't much care if an LP had a gouge the size of the grand canyon, if the performance had "wit" he didn't even hear the clicks and pops. I feel the same way about text. All I'm there to do is discover whether the author has a moment of wit or substance.
What I've learned about reading, serious reading where the aim is not to hear your own thoughts expressed by another person (or believe such), but to encounter thoughts that clash and spark and scrape the paint, to accomplish this the reader must open an expressway of comprehension that bypasses the internal thought police, the slow border crossings with open trunks and snuffling dogs. It seems to me that people who read at the pace of their own internal mind police do not experience the same distress I feel about the visual flickers of animated content: it's only slowing their visual processing down to the same speed their emotional filters were functioning in the first place.
My reading style is that I'm a kind of ambulance chaser: I want the content to strike the rock bottom content of my soul in massive wreckage, trailing ambulances, autopsies, coroner's reports, and sprawling cemeteries full of petty self justifications, RIP.
This never used to happen in the Canadian coverage, and it sickens me to see it happen now. But then you realize that there are weird non-linearities behind the scenes in what the IOC mandates, and in the cost structure, which has never been a strong point of Canadian television.
The entire Olympic movement sickens me. It's a bunch of ugly and corrupt old men and women to profit from the mechandising of beautiful young bodies with strict dress codes and turf boundaries.
Price range? Temperature range? Storage lifetime? Erase speed? Write speed? Write cycle (wear) lifetime? Bit error rate? Power consumption? Radiation decay?
Let's suppose this thing requires JFFS for wear leveling purposes. Mount time at this capacity range: approximately one year.
We have someone in our office here, who goes by the wholy inappropriate title "VP of Research and Development" who is *constantly* finding new technologies we should exploit, based on N-k impressive paramters.
In any case, if these ucards pan out, ucard over carrier pigeon would probably put Iridium out of business once and for all. Now if someone could breed a homesick Albatross we could stop laying all this expensive fiber optic cable as well.
Good grief, people. The size of the password space determines the ratio of the time it takes to check the *entire* password space vs checking only the correct password (normal logon).
The *absolute* time taken to crack the password space is therefore a function of how long it takes to check a *single* password. This can be any length of time the password validation system wishes to implement (relative to a fixed processing resource).
There's no reason at all why passwords need to evolve to greater lengths as computers become faster. However, this inflation happens by default if the authentication system does not compensate by implementing constant time password validation as systems become faster.
A modern computer can validate a password in one microsecond that would have taken one millisecond back in the VAX days. This is one case where increased speed is not, in fact, a good thing.
I also had problems with the tone of the author. The killer point for me was how he lambasted SQL without pointing to *any* relational query language which had, in his opinion, been done right. If no one has ever invented such a thing, maybe the Unicorn has no clothes.
In the phase diagram, this is refered to as the triple point, the point where the three phase boundaries meet. Meaningful and easily comprehended.
The original meaning of "supercritical" was "oh my god, I can write grant applications on this discovery for the rest of my career". In the humanities camp the angel of narcisistic relevance is pronounced "postmodern", as if the arrow of time was in need of a gentle directional prod to regain its bearings: "oh yes, past toward future, now I remember". It offends me at some deep level to see a glaze factor six term like "supercritical" bandied about in relation to mental stimulants.
Returning to Joe, there are hundreds of alkaloids in coffee, and I highly doubt that the pschyo-active effects of coffee end with caffeine.
There are certain mental effects (flattening) I get from decaf just as much as regular coffee. What I don't get from decaf is the pleasant buzz.
Whether a decaf processed coffee or a low caffeine cultivated source is preferable depends heavily on the fate (and desirability) of all these other alkaloids.
If the coffee has less caffeine (e.g. half as much), you can drink a lot more--if it still tasted good, I probably would. But then my body doesn't need all the extra acid either, so it's probably a wash.
What we really need is to discover a variety of green tea with a coffee flavour gene.
This does nothing more than redefine an existing problem. It's still a communication channel between two participants, whether the bits are conveyed inside the IP packets, or as attributes of the IP header.
The "genius" of this approach seems to lie in the fact that the closed machine makes no response whatsoever until a valid doorknock sequence is received, which renders the system more clandistine from a very narrow point of view.
One of the reasons why ssh security negotiation is two sided is to eliminate replay attacks. The doorknock concept is going to have a problem with this.
I find it interesting to imagine that the doorknock sequence is defined as a function of the IP address of the requesting system. This would eliminate a replay attack by an adversary who can snoop traffic, originate traffic under its own identity, but not actively impersonate.
That was a great post. Wow, it would be cool to hang out on a forum where that kind of post was typical, rather than exceptional. Cool for us dorks, in any case.
I don't agree that 99% of logins are accurate. Perhaps 99% of logins are plausible. While I don't believe that *everyone* falsifies logins, I've made my own best effort to pick up the slack, and I know plenty of people who aren't slashdorks who put their correct address on their VISA card application with some reluctance.
What I would give out freely is my GPS coordinate, to single degree precision, which is sufficient to place me within a mild climate of the Pacific Northwest: bring on the ads for lattes, gortex jackets, and hiking boots.
What I find distressing about the cold math of that post is the extent to which advertising has become an unchallenged assumption of American society. Newspapers will change, but ads must go on.
Why don't we simplify the process? For $5000 cash I'll volunteer to stick my head into a souped up MRI machine, have all my emotional associations reprogrammed by powerful American corporate interests, spend the rest of my life buying overpriced products with marginal performance (but I'll feel *sooo* good about it due to the emotional reprogramming I'll never notice), and be able to sit in front of the television for an hour and watch an hour worth of programming (no more ads for me, because these were inserted medically, on a one-shot basis). If every 30 seconds I spend in the MRI having my emotions rewired saves me from watching the same ad for Gap Khakis 300 times, I'll count the time well spent, even if my emotional reprogramming forces me to wear Gap Khakis until I'm incontinent.
If advertising wasn't possible, if some immunity sprung up in the human genetic condition to thwart the imprinting of emotional desires through the images and sounds of desirability, then the media industry would have to be based entirely on paid content. I could live with that. It would lead to better content. For instance, $100 million dollar that have be sprayed on Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan could have been spent instead on writing some scripts worth producing (a chorus of Sopranos on every channel).
I'm looking forward to the day when a typical home PC can animate virtual supermodels on demand to model any aspect of daily living. Say for instance I like Tsarist stout (I do), I could on my home PC create sequences of virtual supermodels having virtual supermodel fun while cavorting around with thick mugs of Tsarist stout of a brand of my own choosing. Amazing! I could reprogram my own emotions to feel cool about drinking the beer I actually like! Wouldn't that be amazing... to feel cool and *like* the beer you are drinking at the same time?
No, wait, it wouldn't work. The point is, when I spend $10,000 too much for a carbon spewing SUV, part of what I'm paying for is the secure knowledge that my friends and neighbours have all been exposed to hours worth of emotional conditioning to regard me as being as cool as my wheels. Without advertising, we wouldn't know what the products around us symbolize, and we might have difficulty figuring out which of our neighbours is rich, cool, or sexy. Damn, it can be so difficult figuring out who is sexy and who isn't without the massively socialized product cues. I guess we'll have to keep advertising after all.
PNG's greatest misfeature is that it does not support animation.
That's an awesome misfeature. Every time I see an image animate, I activate the Firefox ad-blocker. I even have graphics7.nytimes.com disabled, so I can't read the first letter of any NY Times story.
For me, the purpose of reading an article is to read the article. Every blipping thing on the screen that flickers and flashes merely serves to slow down my assimilation and comprehension of the content.
If I were going to contribute my own feature to Firefox, it would be an automatic image manipulation where for any image where it detects animation, it freezes the image to a single frame, and then reduces the colour palette to a washed out colour scheme least likely to attrack visual attention that isn't focussed there deliberately.
The image can spring to life and animate normally only when I hover my mouse over it.
It only takes one trip to Reno to realize that flashing lights aren't designed to help people think.
That must be the worst post in this entire thread. AC posting with a terrible subject line who launches into lumperhood as his thesis paragraph.
I've associated with maybe a dozen people in the three to four sigma bracket, some of whom managed to fit in, some of whom didn't. Every misfit I've known has melted his snowflake in his own unique fashion. There's more diversity in failure than success.
And what is this "pay your dues" crap? Check out this lecture on
hedonic rationalization By Daniel Gilbert.
Life is cruel, everyone pays their dues eventually, one way or another, but I'd hardly recommend going through life looking for opportunities to drop your pants and bend over. There's an awful lot that goes on at universities that's institutional, bureaucratic, cynical, and worthless. Heck, "Shawshank Redemption" works quite well as documentary about the undergraduate experience.
This is maybe a cryptic sentiment, but I think the secret is to find something in life you care enough about that when the lumps comes (they always do) you feel like you deserved them, but there you are in the muck and you have to find a way to crawl out again. There's a common statement about satisfaction, that it measures not what you accomplished, but what you sacrificed to get there. Before you can make a meaningful sacrifice, you have to live enough to decide what you believe, which is very hard to do if you fall for the "we all have to suffer, everyone get in line" Camenbert.
Megaloomania--I think I've seen that term before in the small print on the Zoloft packaging. That's where you sit and comtemplate what happened to your sex drive, and whether you wouldn't be better off as a continent pervert flipping burgers at 1:00am.
I once read it purported that a truism of the aircraft design industry is that you never design an engine and an airframe in tandem if you can possibly avoid it: design a new engine for an existing airframe, or design a new airframe for an existing engine. Designing a new engine for a new airframe at the same time is a recipe for disaster.
AFAIC every article I skimmed from this thread has fallen for the same the bait: asking "how hard is it to design a jet engine for the first time" in isolation of having a proven airframe on which to afix that engine.
When the ATT crowd first wrote Unix, they didn't have a large body of proven userland code against which to validate their concepts and implementation strategy.
I would imagine that Linus had access to a considerable amount of solid userland source code written within according to Unix conventions. In particular, if he was using gcc, he most likely had access to the source code for glibc, which most likely--if you were to view it from the right perspective--can tell you a lot about the required kernel semantics governing process creation.
Glibc has less to say about virtual memory semantics. Around the time of the 386/33 I became very interested in the i386 page table model and eventually that lead to some interesting experimentation under the DOS4G 32-bit DOS extender (which came bundled with the Watcom C compiler). I had to read the Intel documentation carefully, and conduct careful experiments to prove my understanding, but I didn't regard mastering the page table semantics of the i386 architecture as an earth shattering accomplishment. Despite the i386 VM model not being generally regarded in favorable terms (eg. executable stack segments), it was a solid realization of what a modern Unix-style kernel requires as a memory management foundation.
I think if you were to examine the kernel closely, for each major design issue that would have troubled those involved in the early implementations, there were "airframes" in the environment that embodied the wisdom that had been aquired over several decades that weren't the original ATT source kernel sources, or sources derived from those influences.
The difference with the GNU/Hurd is that Stallman wanted to design an *innovative* kernel. Linus accomplished more because he more in tune with following the path of least resistance.
I also found it interesting that Linux was declared a form of leprosy. This is a mistaken attribution. Leprosy was invented by RMS long before Linus joined the party.
The two main flaws I find in this argument are the overemphasis and misunderstanding of attribution, and the failure to acknowledge that an awe inspiring accomplishment of one generation becomes a toy for the next. Innovation lies in recognizing when the time is ripe to challenge conventions.
Computer science in the 1970s was in much the same shape as athletic instruction. A friend of mine recently asked his father how he trained for the 400 yard dash. He replied, "My coach told me 'run faster!'" These days junior track athletes challenge professional standards from not that long ago, and it isn't entirely roids.
I was also amused because I remember very clearly in the early eighties the myth circulating about Bill Gates (when he was worth millions not billions) about how he had programmed BASIC on some kind of simulator at Harvard and when he plugged his BASIC EPROM chip into the S100 era hodgepodge, it worked the first time. Gates was heralded as the geeky 21 year old who build a billion dollar empire on IBM's home turf. Could it be done in the mind of any rational human being? Absolutely not.
I think what needs to be granted is that the art of software is 90% hindsight, and that the truest form of attribution is to make slight the contributions of those who troiled before, who did the same to their precursors, too.
I think there is no greater validation of the traditions Unix represents than the fact that a 21 year old
Now we just need an accronym for SENILE that conveys an even worse scenario. Michael Jackson reengineered himself, and look where that went. He's the kind of person who can afford the anti-aging technology when it arrives. Anyone want to speculate on Michael's appearance on his 300'th birthday? Anyone? Hint: his complexion be so far into the ultraviolet the guests will need welder's masks. Bonus: there won't be children any more, just adults engineered to look like children. Oh, it'll be great, for sure.
How can any sane person think this line of research is a good thing for the world at large? It boggles my mind.
The point was that this WON'T do a worse job than the real teachers have been doing. Teachers are under a lot of pressure and generally are lucky if any of the essays submitted have content worth grading. Generally, 90% of the grade assigned by a teacher is determined by three factors: spellings with vowels, sentences with verbs, and paragraphs with topics. If this system doesn't reward content, then maybe we should reconsider the incumbent system.
Sigh. One of the best sources of flamebait is being right for the wrong reasons.
Surely C++ must rate as the least well understand language of all time. The horrors of C++ are almost entirely syntactic, beginning with the decision to maintain compatibility with the C language type declaration syntax and then adding several layers of abstraction complexity (most notably namespaces and templates).
There are only two areas where I fear C++ for program correctness. The first is making a syntactic brain fart leading to an incorrect operator resolution or some such. These can be tedious to ferret out, but most of these battles are fought with the compiler long before a defect makes it into the production codebase.
My second source of fear concerns interactions of exception unwinding across mixtures of object oriented and generic components. I see this as the only case where managed memory provides a significant advantage: where your program must incorporate exception handling. If you can't manage your memory correctly in the absence of the exception handling mechanism, I really don't believe you can code anything else in your application correctly either. I think exceptions are mostly a salvation for poor code structure. If all your code constructs are properly guarded, you don't need an error return path. Once a statement fails to achieve a precondition for the code that follows, the code path that follows will become a very efficient "do nothing" exercise until control is returned to a higher layer by the normal return path, whereupon the higher layer of control can perform tests about whether the objectives were achieved or not and take appropriate measures. I think the stupidest optimization in all of programming is cutting a "quick up" error return path that skips the normal path of program execution so that the normal path of execution can play fast and loose with guard predicates.
The four languages I use regularly are C, C++, PHP, and Perl. Perl is the language I'm least fond of maintaining. Too many semantic edge cases that offer no compelling advantage to motivate remembering the quirk. C++ has many strange cases, but for C++ I can remember the vast majority of these well enough, because I've stopped to think about how they evolved from taking the C language as a starting point.
I happen to love PHP for the property of being the most forgettable of all languages. I forget everything I know about PHP after every program I write, and it never slows me down the next time I sit down to write another PHP program. The managed memory model of PHP appeals to me in a way that Java doesn't, because as an inherently session-oriented programming model, PHP has a good excuse for behaving this way.
I have a love/hate relationship with both C and C++. I write one program at a high level of abstraction in C++ and then when I return to C it feels like a breath of fresh air to live for a while in an abstraction free zone, until the first time I need to write a correctness safe string manipulation more complicated than a single sprintf, and then I scream in despair.
The part of my brain that writes correct code writes correct code equally easily in all of these languages, with Perl 5 slightly in the rear.
If I really really really want correct code I would always use C++. The genericity facilities of C++ create an entire dimension of correctness calculas with no analog in most other programming languages. The template type mechanism in C++ is a pure functional programming language just as hard core as Haskell, but because C++ is a multi-paradigm language, in C++ you only have to pull out the functional programming hammer for the slice of your problem where nothing less will do.
What I won't dispute is that C++ is a hard language to master to the level of proficiency where it becomes correctness friendly. It demands a certain degree of meticulous typing skills (not typing = for ==). It demands an unflagging determination to master the sometim
I had the same problem trying to get network printers working under Fedora-core. Unlike ESR I wasn't confused by the glitzy graphics into thinking it would be a cake in the park. I went straight into google, wallowed around in Unix printer filth for a long time, and never did get it working.
Unlike ESR, I don't see anything wrong with creating a glitzy skeleton around the printer configuration tools, as long as the programmers involved *intend* to continue improving the GUI and its intuitiveness.
On the other hand, in my own work it's been a decade since the last time I presented a screen to a user that didn't say "Here is good magic, but it requires X and Y in order to function properly."
By no means is this restricted to technical people. In every aspect of business, learning to set out assumptions ahead of decision making is a lifelong process.
The problem with technology is that technology is mute. The user can't suddenly cock a cranky expression and demand "what assumptions are creating this goose chase?"
ESR is trying to have his cake and eat it too. The declaration of assumptions is already more information than most people want. It's human nature for people to think that any information they don't know they need yet is too much information, too soon.
It is not possible to lie without knowing it. A lie is a knowingly untruthful statement made with the intent of deceiving.
I hope your computer skills are more up to date than your humanities. It's hard to make a living with an abacus these days. First of all, Wittgenstein thoroughly demolished the broad validity of this kind of assertion, but since Wittgenstein is subtle, let's not go there. Far less subtle is JL Austin's insight into the nature of performatives. Darl is clearly engaged in a performative action.
The structure of American capitalism is such that the CEO of an enterprise is legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. If an executive has a performative action available that optimizes shareholder return, he is legally obligated to undertake that performative action. Which then brings us to the thoroughly screwed up notions of jurisprudence upon which this entire mess rests. This is further complicated as the court does not warrant its ability to decide logical propositions competently. The decision procedure of the court is to determine the balance of credibility of an assortment of expert witnesses with a broad mandate to construe the facts however it pleases the party by whom they are engaged.
Now one of the curious things about the obligation of an executive to maximize shareholder value is that it is circumscribed by the competence of the executive. I've not yet seen it argued that a CEO is obligated to step down once he concludes that a different CEO candidate exists who could return value more effectively.
Darl is only obligated to maximize shareholder value within the range of management talents he possesses. From what I've seen, I doubt Darl would have to lie to himself to conclude that his performative actions against IBM have a snowball's hope in hell greater chance of returning shareholder value than anything he might have done within his available talents to extract value from SCO as on ongoing business concern.
As far as the court is concerned, any claim the court might possibly award is a valid pursuit, and to a certain extent, not only is such a claim valid, the pursuit of such a claim can under some conditions be viewed as compelled by the legal obligations of one stakeholder toward another. It would require tremendous powers to argue deceit if Darl is following a compulsory decision procedure fully understood by all parties with ability to sway the outcome.
Class dismissed. We can all return now to our safe and tidy boolean-valued Java universe.
Coding theory has many results based on sphere packing, computational chemistry deals with this kind of vast configuration space, and stochasitic algorithms often depend on properties of randomized configuration spaces. In other words, everyone return to their zsh and PHP scripts, nothing to see here but some real computer science.
To those who remain this result ought to be unsurprising: the non-spherical M&Ms have a larger configuration space, because orientation (and not just position) of the M&M also matters.
I'm rather unimpressed by this about face. I thought the original artical back in 1999 was way off base.
The author seems to have taken the Shipping News to heart.
"imminent storm threatens village" But what if there's no storm? "village saved from deadly storm"
Only it's worse, because the deadly storm was entirely manufactured by a combination of personal insecurity, unrealistic expections, and a "complain until some one else fixes it" mentality.
It was obvious to me that the Mozilla developers were going to have to pay the price for a few years to get their house in order before their hard work became obvious from the external perspective.
Developers are supposed to know better than to run around complaining "the sky is falling" while the people involved are wrestling with really difficult structural problems. What's amazing is that the people involved stayed involved, while having to read this kind of crap in the first place.
It always saps my strength when management runs around saying "nothing is happening fast enough" when I've just spent a month of long hours excavating down to the bedrock.
Just what is this guy taking credit for?
"falling sky threatens village" But what if sky doesn't fall? "village saved from deadly sky"
No way. This list consists of people driving their stakes in the lawless frontier. Stroustrup was a cultural innovator: the first person who took seriously the proposition of hybridizing conceptual elegance with grungy reality. Whereas Perl was biased more toward grunge, and Ruby was biased more toward elegance, C++ gives them both an equally bad treatment.
Stroustrup might belong on a list of cultural forefathers of the computing era, a list which would also include Thompson and Richie. Note that I would not include Grace Hopper, Ken Iverson, or John Backus on this list because none of these languages were driven by cultural effects, although one could make a case for Grace Hopper.
Larry Wall would be included on my list, and Edsgar Dijkstra, because they both had strong opinions about the cultural effects of programming practice. Knuth took a stab at it with literate programming, but he doesn't make my cut, it was too much shaped around his own unique mind. The internet protocol and the www were inherently cultural, so there would be nominations from both camps.
I have one acid test I use to determine whether a language was strongly driven by culture, or whether culture was grafted on as an afterthought.
Does the language allow constructs to get you out of places where you never should have arrived in the first place? The real world is full of those situations, usually because of a mishmash of influences from different sources. The anti-cultural languages are the ones which create proscriptions on the grounds that "no sane program would ever require that construct". The cultural languages are the ones that allow a feature on the basis that "if you get yourself into a mess of this nature, this construct might be your bridge of salvation while you survive to fight another day". Good cultural languages provide plenty of affordances to mitigate the unspeakable. Bad cultural languages slap you on the wrist "you should never have wound up here in the first place".
Which is where I think the majority of languages conceived in university settings have failed. In universities, they seem to lack a deep unstanding of just how big a mess the real world can dump on your lap, where everyone involved was trying to make the best of a bad situation, and plenty of people involved were well aware of what should and shouldn't be done, but they wound up in bad place regardless.
One could argue that Visual Basic was a cultural language, but granting an award for VB would be like adding the first person who ever sent a spam to the hackers hall of fame.
Lest we forget: spam was a stellar hack. It exploited technical and cultural weaknesses within a system and its establishment to turn the system against itself. Hackers have a curious trait of not being too impressed by getting a dose of their own medicine, or admitting that it happened either.
I have yet to see the "web of trust" deliver on its promises.
I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and my own thinking lead to most of the same conclusions as this escrow model.
There is a far better use of RSA to leverage this proposal. The beautiful property of RSA is that key generation takes more compute cycles that verification, and this ratio increases as the size of the keys increase.
The mail recipient would specify the size of the escrow key required, depending of various factors. For a least trusted sender, it might ask for a giant RSA key that could take up to minutes to generate. A good example of a worst case sender would be a consumer broadband modem infected by spam robot.
The client "seizes the escrow" by publically repudiating the expensive key.
Repudiations would be handled the same way. The agent repudiating the key would have to put up an escrow to the repudiation server. Abuse of the repudiation server would be unwound by repudiating the repudiation.
None of these events have zero cost. The beauty of this is that the size of the escrows demanded can scale with the amount of abuse detected, so until the system reaches an equilibrium point between the overhead of generating the escrows and an acceptable level of bad mail seepage.
Furthermore, the repudiation chain can require that each repudiation become more expensive than the last. There are some especially aggravating spamholes where I would be more than happy to compute a repudiation key all night long.
Also, the mechanism can incorporate a role for precomputed keys and on-demand keys, where the key must be produced as a function of a seed provided by the recipient at the time of delivery. Long precomputed keys could be signed by less expensive on-demand keys. There is a lot of flexibility in how these primitives can be combined.
I don't have time to flesh this out, but someone sufficiently motivated should make an effort to examine the use the RSA key generation as an escrow mechanism within the ecomonic model this paper presents.
Now I know why init scripts are one of the major dark areas remaining in my understanding of BSD and Linux: the entire subject area is flamebait.
I think there's a conceptual problem here. Whether a topic is flamebait or not does not stem from the topic, but the audience for the topic.
If my wife asks me "why are you angry?" and I respond "that's flamebait" does that reflect badly on me or my wife?
Probably more to the point, the reason this topic is flamebait is that init scripts are one of the great embarrassments of the BSD/Linux universe. It strikes me that the most passionate arguments occur around the most embarrassing features. In order to hide our embarrassment, we profess love.
Personally, I haven't seen an init script yet that if made human wouldn't show up at a Trek convention dressed as Wesley Crusher.
Slashdot Mirror
The Sliver Buttel is so full of technical BS it addled my brains, which by the way, if they were half as reliable as this link would like to claim, my programs would be error free already, wouldn't they? What makes my brain so reliable: I use a computer in any situation where I have to multiply two numbers where the product contains more than three digits worth of algorithmic complexity.
Does anyone esle find it incredible that this reviewer complains that the cranky old coot author doesn't bother to provide justifications where he really doesn't have anything compelling to add?
Knowing when to shut up is one of best indicators that someone cares enough about their subject matter that they don't feel the need to "fill air" as if other people can't supply their own experience.
I heartily condone the approach: here's what I think, take it or leave it.
I'm an old coot myself, and I've learned that it's generally a waste of time to write toward an audience that won't think for itself. If you boss won't think, a poster of convenient sound bites won't solve any problem that matters.
That's not a stupid question at all. If Firefox had a setting (that I knew about) to disable all animation effects by default, I'd enable that feature immediately. More than 90% of animated content out there is crap or worse than crap. 100% of animated effects reduce my reading speed and comprehension. I've asked other people about this, and I seem to suffer this effect more than most people, to the extent that I often set my Firefox font size for inch tall letters so that the majority of the text spills below the aggravating imagery. Sometimes if I can't get the animation away from the text I'm readin, I actually hold one hand over the screen to block out the offending flicker. The few people I know who find this similarly annoying tend to be the exceptional readers. One of my close friends claims he sees every word on the printed page (for book reading) simultaneously, and he moves his eyes back and forth mostly for the purpose of getting the words into proper order for mental comprehension. But he usually knows what the author will claim before he gets there, because he knows what words are coming at the bottom of the page.
For me, there is no "experience" involved in visiting a web page. I go there to suck out the content. I had a jazz musician friend in Montreal who said that he didn't much care if an LP had a gouge the size of the grand canyon, if the performance had "wit" he didn't even hear the clicks and pops. I feel the same way about text. All I'm there to do is discover whether the author has a moment of wit or substance.
What I've learned about reading, serious reading where the aim is not to hear your own thoughts expressed by another person (or believe such), but to encounter thoughts that clash and spark and scrape the paint, to accomplish this the reader must open an expressway of comprehension that bypasses the internal thought police, the slow border crossings with open trunks and snuffling dogs. It seems to me that people who read at the pace of their own internal mind police do not experience the same distress I feel about the visual flickers of animated content: it's only slowing their visual processing down to the same speed their emotional filters were functioning in the first place.
My reading style is that I'm a kind of ambulance chaser: I want the content to strike the rock bottom content of my soul in massive wreckage, trailing ambulances, autopsies, coroner's reports, and sprawling cemeteries full of petty self justifications, RIP.
APNG I can live without.
This never used to happen in the Canadian coverage, and it sickens me to see it happen now. But then you realize that there are weird non-linearities behind the scenes in what the IOC mandates, and in the cost structure, which has never been a strong point of Canadian television.
The entire Olympic movement sickens me. It's a bunch of ugly and corrupt old men and women to profit from the mechandising of beautiful young bodies with strict dress codes and turf boundaries.
The whole thing has become a giant pimpathon.
Price range?
Temperature range?
Storage lifetime?
Erase speed?
Write speed?
Write cycle (wear) lifetime?
Bit error rate?
Power consumption?
Radiation decay?
Let's suppose this thing requires JFFS for wear leveling purposes. Mount time at this capacity range: approximately one year.
We have someone in our office here, who goes by the wholy inappropriate title "VP of Research and Development" who is *constantly* finding new technologies we should exploit, based on N-k impressive paramters.
In any case, if these ucards pan out, ucard over carrier pigeon would probably put Iridium out of business once and for all. Now if someone could breed a homesick Albatross we could stop laying all this expensive fiber optic cable as well.
Good grief, people. The size of the password space determines the ratio of the time it takes to check the *entire* password space vs checking only the correct password (normal logon).
The *absolute* time taken to crack the password space is therefore a function of how long it takes to check a *single* password. This can be any length of time the password validation system wishes to implement (relative to a fixed processing resource).
There's no reason at all why passwords need to evolve to greater lengths as computers become faster. However, this inflation happens by default if the authentication system does not compensate by implementing constant time password validation as systems become faster.
A modern computer can validate a password in one microsecond that would have taken one millisecond back in the VAX days. This is one case where increased speed is not, in fact, a good thing.
I also had problems with the tone of the author. The killer point for me was how he lambasted SQL without pointing to *any* relational query language which had, in his opinion, been done right. If no one has ever invented such a thing, maybe the Unicorn has no clothes.
This buzz's for you.
In the phase diagram, this is refered to as the triple point, the point where the three phase boundaries meet. Meaningful and easily comprehended.
The original meaning of "supercritical" was "oh my god, I can write grant applications on this discovery for the rest of my career". In the humanities camp the angel of narcisistic relevance is pronounced "postmodern", as if the arrow of time was in need of a gentle directional prod to regain its bearings: "oh yes, past toward future, now I remember". It offends me at some deep level to see a glaze factor six term like "supercritical" bandied about in relation to mental stimulants.
Returning to Joe, there are hundreds of alkaloids in coffee, and I highly doubt that the pschyo-active effects of coffee end with caffeine.
There are certain mental effects (flattening) I get from decaf just as much as regular coffee. What I don't get from decaf is the pleasant buzz.
Whether a decaf processed coffee or a low caffeine cultivated source is preferable depends heavily on the fate (and desirability) of all these other alkaloids.
If the coffee has less caffeine (e.g. half as much), you can drink a lot more--if it still tasted good, I probably would. But then my body doesn't need all the extra acid either, so it's probably a wash.
What we really need is to discover a variety of green tea with a coffee flavour gene.
This does nothing more than redefine an existing problem. It's still a communication channel between two participants, whether the bits are conveyed inside the IP packets, or as attributes of the IP header.
The "genius" of this approach seems to lie in the fact that the closed machine makes no response whatsoever until a valid doorknock sequence is received, which renders the system more clandistine from a very narrow point of view.
One of the reasons why ssh security negotiation is two sided is to eliminate replay attacks. The doorknock concept is going to have a problem with this.
I find it interesting to imagine that the doorknock sequence is defined as a function of the IP address of the requesting system. This would eliminate a replay attack by an adversary who can snoop traffic, originate traffic under its own identity, but not actively impersonate.
That was a great post. Wow, it would be cool to hang out on a forum where that kind of post was typical, rather than exceptional. Cool for us dorks, in any case.
I don't agree that 99% of logins are accurate. Perhaps 99% of logins are plausible. While I don't believe that *everyone* falsifies logins, I've made my own best effort to pick up the slack, and I know plenty of people who aren't slashdorks who put their correct address on their VISA card application with some reluctance.
What I would give out freely is my GPS coordinate, to single degree precision, which is sufficient to place me within a mild climate of the Pacific Northwest: bring on the ads for lattes, gortex jackets, and hiking boots.
What I find distressing about the cold math of that post is the extent to which advertising has become an unchallenged assumption of American society. Newspapers will change, but ads must go on.
Why don't we simplify the process? For $5000 cash I'll volunteer to stick my head into a souped up MRI machine, have all my emotional associations reprogrammed by powerful American corporate interests, spend the rest of my life buying overpriced products with marginal performance (but I'll feel *sooo* good about it due to the emotional reprogramming I'll never notice), and be able to sit in front of the television for an hour and watch an hour worth of programming (no more ads for me, because these were inserted medically, on a one-shot basis). If every 30 seconds I spend in the MRI having my emotions rewired saves me from watching the same ad for Gap Khakis 300 times, I'll count the time well spent, even if my emotional reprogramming forces me to wear Gap Khakis until I'm incontinent.
If advertising wasn't possible, if some immunity sprung up in the human genetic condition to thwart the imprinting of emotional desires through the images and sounds of desirability, then the media industry would have to be based entirely on paid content. I could live with that. It would lead to better content. For instance, $100 million dollar that have be sprayed on Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan could have been spent instead on writing some scripts worth producing (a chorus of Sopranos on every channel).
I'm looking forward to the day when a typical home PC can animate virtual supermodels on demand to model any aspect of daily living. Say for instance I like Tsarist stout (I do), I could on my home PC create sequences of virtual supermodels having virtual supermodel fun while cavorting around with thick mugs of Tsarist stout of a brand of my own choosing. Amazing! I could reprogram my own emotions to feel cool about drinking the beer I actually like!
Wouldn't that be amazing
No, wait, it wouldn't work. The point is, when I spend $10,000 too much for a carbon spewing SUV, part of what I'm paying for is the secure knowledge that my friends and neighbours have all been exposed to hours worth of emotional conditioning to regard me as being as cool as my wheels. Without advertising, we wouldn't know what the products around us symbolize, and we might have difficulty figuring out which of our neighbours is rich, cool, or sexy. Damn, it can be so difficult figuring out who is sexy and who isn't without the massively socialized product cues. I guess we'll have to keep advertising after all.
That's an awesome misfeature. Every time I see an image animate, I activate the Firefox ad-blocker. I even have graphics7.nytimes.com disabled, so I can't read the first letter of any NY Times story.
For me, the purpose of reading an article is to read the article. Every blipping thing on the screen that flickers and flashes merely serves to slow down my assimilation and comprehension of the content.
If I were going to contribute my own feature to Firefox, it would be an automatic image manipulation where for any image where it detects animation, it freezes the image to a single frame, and then reduces the colour palette to a washed out colour scheme least likely to attrack visual attention that isn't focussed there deliberately.
The image can spring to life and animate normally only when I hover my mouse over it.
It only takes one trip to Reno to realize that flashing lights aren't designed to help people think.
That must be the worst post in this entire thread. AC posting with a terrible subject line who launches into lumperhood as his thesis paragraph. I've associated with maybe a dozen people in the three to four sigma bracket, some of whom managed to fit in, some of whom didn't. Every misfit I've known has melted his snowflake in his own unique fashion. There's more diversity in failure than success. And what is this "pay your dues" crap? Check out this lecture on hedonic rationalization By Daniel Gilbert. Life is cruel, everyone pays their dues eventually, one way or another, but I'd hardly recommend going through life looking for opportunities to drop your pants and bend over. There's an awful lot that goes on at universities that's institutional, bureaucratic, cynical, and worthless. Heck, "Shawshank Redemption" works quite well as documentary about the undergraduate experience. This is maybe a cryptic sentiment, but I think the secret is to find something in life you care enough about that when the lumps comes (they always do) you feel like you deserved them, but there you are in the muck and you have to find a way to crawl out again. There's a common statement about satisfaction, that it measures not what you accomplished, but what you sacrificed to get there. Before you can make a meaningful sacrifice, you have to live enough to decide what you believe, which is very hard to do if you fall for the "we all have to suffer, everyone get in line" Camenbert.
Megaloomania--I think I've seen that term before in the small print on the Zoloft packaging. That's where you sit and comtemplate what happened to your sex drive, and whether you wouldn't be better off as a continent pervert flipping burgers at 1:00am.
I once read it purported that a truism of the aircraft design industry is that you never design an engine and an airframe in tandem if you can possibly avoid it: design a new engine for an existing airframe, or design a new airframe for an existing engine. Designing a new engine for a new airframe at the same time is a recipe for disaster.
AFAIC every article I skimmed from this thread has fallen for the same the bait: asking "how hard is it to design a jet engine for the first time" in isolation of having a proven airframe on which to afix that engine.
When the ATT crowd first wrote Unix, they didn't have a large body of proven userland code against which to validate their concepts and implementation strategy.
I would imagine that Linus had access to a considerable amount of solid userland source code written within according to Unix conventions. In particular, if he was using gcc, he most likely had access to the source code for glibc, which most likely--if you were to view it from the right perspective--can tell you a lot about the required kernel semantics governing process creation.
Glibc has less to say about virtual memory semantics. Around the time of the 386/33 I became very interested in the i386 page table model and eventually that lead to some interesting experimentation under the DOS4G 32-bit DOS extender (which came bundled with the Watcom C compiler). I had to read the Intel documentation carefully, and conduct careful experiments to prove my understanding, but I didn't regard mastering the page table semantics of the i386 architecture as an earth shattering accomplishment. Despite the i386 VM model not being generally regarded in favorable terms (eg. executable stack segments), it was a solid realization of what a modern Unix-style kernel requires as a memory management foundation.
I think if you were to examine the kernel closely, for each major design issue that would have troubled those involved in the early implementations, there were "airframes" in the environment that embodied the wisdom that had been aquired over several decades that weren't the original ATT source kernel sources, or sources derived from those influences.
The difference with the GNU/Hurd is that Stallman wanted to design an *innovative* kernel. Linus accomplished more because he more in tune with following the path of least resistance.
I also found it interesting that Linux was declared a form of leprosy. This is a mistaken attribution. Leprosy was invented by RMS long before Linus joined the party.
The two main flaws I find in this argument are the overemphasis and misunderstanding of attribution, and the failure to acknowledge that an awe inspiring accomplishment of one generation becomes a toy for the next. Innovation lies in recognizing when the time is ripe to challenge conventions.
Computer science in the 1970s was in much the same shape as athletic instruction. A friend of mine recently asked his father how he trained for the 400 yard dash. He replied, "My coach told me 'run faster!'" These days junior track athletes challenge professional standards from not that long ago, and it isn't entirely roids.
I was also amused because I remember very clearly in the early eighties the myth circulating about Bill Gates (when he was worth millions not billions) about how he had programmed BASIC on some kind of simulator at Harvard and when he plugged his BASIC EPROM chip into the S100 era hodgepodge, it worked the first time. Gates was heralded as the geeky 21 year old who build a billion dollar empire on IBM's home turf. Could it be done in the mind of any rational human being? Absolutely not.
I think what needs to be granted is that the art of software is 90% hindsight, and that the truest form of attribution is to make slight the contributions of those who troiled before, who did the same to their precursors, too.
I think there is no greater validation of the traditions Unix represents than the fact that a 21 year old
MAD = mutually assurred destruction
Now we just need an accronym for SENILE that conveys an even worse scenario. Michael Jackson reengineered himself, and look where that went. He's the kind of person who can afford the anti-aging technology when it arrives. Anyone want to speculate on Michael's appearance on his 300'th birthday? Anyone? Hint: his complexion be so far into the ultraviolet the guests will need welder's masks. Bonus: there won't be children any more, just adults engineered to look like children. Oh, it'll be great, for sure.
How can any sane person think this line of research is a good thing for the world at large? It boggles my mind.
The point was that this WON'T do a worse job than the real teachers have been doing. Teachers are under a lot of pressure and generally are lucky if any of the essays submitted have content worth grading. Generally, 90% of the grade assigned by a teacher is determined by three factors: spellings with vowels, sentences with verbs, and paragraphs with topics. If this system doesn't reward content, then maybe we should reconsider the incumbent system.
Sigh. One of the best sources of flamebait is being right for the wrong reasons.
Surely C++ must rate as the least well understand language of all time. The horrors of C++ are almost entirely syntactic, beginning with the decision to maintain compatibility with the C language type declaration syntax and then adding several layers of abstraction complexity (most notably namespaces and templates).
There are only two areas where I fear C++ for program correctness. The first is making a syntactic brain fart leading to an incorrect operator resolution or some such. These can be tedious to ferret out, but most of these battles are fought with the compiler long before a defect makes it into the production codebase.
My second source of fear concerns interactions of exception unwinding across mixtures of object oriented and generic components. I see this as the only case where managed memory provides a significant advantage: where your program must incorporate exception handling. If you can't manage your memory correctly in the absence of the exception handling mechanism, I really don't believe you can code anything else in your application correctly either. I think exceptions are mostly a salvation for poor code structure. If all your code constructs are properly guarded, you don't need an error return path. Once a statement fails to achieve a precondition for the code that follows, the code path that follows will become a very efficient "do nothing" exercise until control is returned to a higher layer by the normal return path, whereupon the higher layer of control can perform tests about whether the objectives were achieved or not and take appropriate measures. I think the stupidest optimization in all of programming is cutting a "quick up" error return path that skips the normal path of program execution so that the normal path of execution can play fast and loose with guard predicates.
The four languages I use regularly are C, C++, PHP, and Perl. Perl is the language I'm least fond of maintaining. Too many semantic edge cases that offer no compelling advantage to motivate remembering the quirk. C++ has many strange cases, but for C++ I can remember the vast majority of these well enough, because I've stopped to think about how they evolved from taking the C language as a starting point.
I happen to love PHP for the property of being the most forgettable of all languages. I forget everything I know about PHP after every program I write, and it never slows me down the next time I sit down to write another PHP program. The managed memory model of PHP appeals to me in a way that Java doesn't, because as an inherently session-oriented programming model, PHP has a good excuse for behaving this way.
I have a love/hate relationship with both C and C++. I write one program at a high level of abstraction in C++ and then when I return to C it feels like a breath of fresh air to live for a while in an abstraction free zone, until the first time I need to write a correctness safe string manipulation more complicated than a single sprintf, and then I scream in despair.
The part of my brain that writes correct code writes correct code equally easily in all of these languages, with Perl 5 slightly in the rear.
If I really really really want correct code I would always use C++. The genericity facilities of C++ create an entire dimension of correctness calculas with no analog in most other programming languages. The template type mechanism in C++ is a pure functional programming language just as hard core as Haskell, but because C++ is a multi-paradigm language, in C++ you only have to pull out the functional programming hammer for the slice of your problem where nothing less will do.
What I won't dispute is that C++ is a hard language to master to the level of proficiency where it becomes correctness friendly. It demands a certain degree of meticulous typing skills (not typing = for ==). It demands an unflagging determination to master the sometim
I had the same problem trying to get network printers working under Fedora-core. Unlike ESR I wasn't confused by the glitzy graphics into thinking it would be a cake in the park. I went straight into google, wallowed around in Unix printer filth for a long time, and never did get it working.
Unlike ESR, I don't see anything wrong with creating a glitzy skeleton around the printer configuration tools, as long as the programmers involved *intend* to continue improving the GUI and its intuitiveness.
On the other hand, in my own work it's been a decade since the last time I presented a screen to a user that didn't say "Here is good magic, but it requires X and Y in order to function properly."
By no means is this restricted to technical people. In every aspect of business, learning to set out assumptions ahead of decision making is a lifelong process.
The problem with technology is that technology is mute. The user can't suddenly cock a cranky expression and demand "what assumptions are creating this goose chase?"
ESR is trying to have his cake and eat it too. The declaration of assumptions is already more information than most people want. It's human nature for people to think that any information they don't know they need yet is too much information, too soon.
It is not possible to lie without knowing it. A lie is a knowingly untruthful statement made with the intent of deceiving.
I hope your computer skills are more up to date than your humanities. It's hard to make a living with an abacus these days. First of all, Wittgenstein thoroughly demolished the broad validity of this kind of assertion, but since Wittgenstein is subtle, let's not go there. Far less subtle is JL Austin's insight into the nature of performatives. Darl is clearly engaged in a performative action.
The structure of American capitalism is such that the CEO of an enterprise is legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. If an executive has a performative action available that optimizes shareholder return, he is legally obligated to undertake that performative action. Which then brings us to the thoroughly screwed up notions of jurisprudence upon which this entire mess rests. This is further complicated as the court does not warrant its ability to decide logical propositions competently. The decision procedure of the court is to determine the balance of credibility of an assortment of expert witnesses with a broad mandate to construe the facts however it pleases the party by whom they are engaged.
Now one of the curious things about the obligation of an executive to maximize shareholder value is that it is circumscribed by the competence of the executive. I've not yet seen it argued that a CEO is obligated to step down once he concludes that a different CEO candidate exists who could return value more effectively.
Darl is only obligated to maximize shareholder value within the range of management talents he possesses. From what I've seen, I doubt Darl would have to lie to himself to conclude that his performative actions against IBM have a snowball's hope in hell greater chance of returning shareholder value than anything he might have done within his available talents to extract value from SCO as on ongoing business concern.
As far as the court is concerned, any claim the court might possibly award is a valid pursuit, and to a certain extent, not only is such a claim valid, the pursuit of such a claim can under some conditions be viewed as compelled by the legal obligations of one stakeholder toward another. It would require tremendous powers to argue deceit if Darl is following a compulsory decision procedure fully understood by all parties with ability to sway the outcome.
Class dismissed. We can all return now to our safe and tidy boolean-valued Java universe.
Coding theory has many results based on sphere packing, computational chemistry deals with this kind of vast configuration space, and stochasitic algorithms often depend on properties of randomized configuration spaces. In other words, everyone return to their zsh and PHP scripts, nothing to see here but some real computer science.
To those who remain this result ought to be unsurprising: the non-spherical M&Ms have a larger configuration space, because orientation (and not just position) of the M&M also matters.
I'm rather unimpressed by this about face. I thought the original artical back in 1999 was way off base.
The author seems to have taken the Shipping News to heart.
"imminent storm threatens village"
But what if there's no storm?
"village saved from deadly storm"
Only it's worse, because the deadly storm was entirely manufactured by a combination of personal insecurity, unrealistic expections, and a "complain until some one else fixes it" mentality.
It was obvious to me that the Mozilla developers were going to have to pay the price for a few years to get their house in order before their hard work became obvious from the external perspective.
Developers are supposed to know better than to run around complaining "the sky is falling" while the people involved are wrestling with really difficult structural problems. What's amazing is that the people involved stayed involved, while having to read this kind of crap in the first place.
It always saps my strength when management runs around saying "nothing is happening fast enough" when I've just spent a month of long hours excavating down to the bedrock.
Just what is this guy taking credit for?
"falling sky threatens village"
But what if sky doesn't fall?
"village saved from deadly sky"
It doesn't get much worse than that.
No way. This list consists of people driving their stakes in the lawless frontier. Stroustrup was a cultural innovator: the first person who took seriously the proposition of hybridizing conceptual elegance with grungy reality. Whereas Perl was biased more toward grunge, and Ruby was biased more toward elegance, C++ gives them both an equally bad treatment.
Stroustrup might belong on a list of cultural forefathers of the computing era, a list which would also include Thompson and Richie. Note that I would not include Grace Hopper, Ken Iverson, or John Backus on this list because none of these languages were driven by cultural effects, although one could make a case for Grace Hopper.
Larry Wall would be included on my list, and Edsgar Dijkstra, because they both had strong opinions about the cultural effects of programming practice. Knuth took a stab at it with literate programming, but he doesn't make my cut, it was too much shaped around his own unique mind. The internet protocol and the www were inherently cultural, so there would be nominations from both camps.
I have one acid test I use to determine whether a language was strongly driven by culture, or whether culture was grafted on as an afterthought.
Does the language allow constructs to get you out of places where you never should have arrived in the first place? The real world is full of those situations, usually because of a mishmash of influences from different sources. The anti-cultural languages are the ones which create proscriptions on the grounds that "no sane program would ever require that construct". The cultural languages are the ones that allow a feature on the basis that "if you get yourself into a mess of this nature, this construct might be your bridge of salvation while you survive to fight another day". Good cultural languages provide plenty of affordances to mitigate the unspeakable. Bad cultural languages slap you on the wrist "you should never have wound up here in the first place".
Which is where I think the majority of languages conceived in university settings have failed. In universities, they seem to lack a deep unstanding of just how big a mess the real world can dump on your lap, where everyone involved was trying to make the best of a bad situation, and plenty of people involved were well aware of what should and shouldn't be done, but they wound up in bad place regardless.
One could argue that Visual Basic was a cultural language, but granting an award for VB would be like adding the first person who ever sent a spam to the hackers hall of fame.
Lest we forget: spam was a stellar hack. It exploited technical and cultural weaknesses within a system and its establishment to turn the system against itself. Hackers have a curious trait of not being too impressed by getting a dose of their own medicine, or admitting that it happened either.
I have yet to see the "web of trust" deliver on its promises.
I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and my own thinking lead to most of the same conclusions as this escrow model.
There is a far better use of RSA to leverage this proposal. The beautiful property of RSA is that key generation takes more compute cycles that verification, and this ratio increases as the size of the keys increase.
The mail recipient would specify the size of the escrow key required, depending of various factors. For a least trusted sender, it might ask for a giant RSA key that could take up to minutes to generate. A good example of a worst case sender would be a consumer broadband modem infected by spam robot.
The client "seizes the escrow" by publically repudiating the expensive key.
Repudiations would be handled the same way. The agent repudiating the key would have to put up an escrow to the repudiation server. Abuse of the repudiation server would be unwound by repudiating the repudiation.
None of these events have zero cost. The beauty of this is that the size of the escrows demanded can scale with the amount of abuse detected, so until the system reaches an equilibrium point between the overhead of generating the escrows and an acceptable level of bad mail seepage.
Furthermore, the repudiation chain can require that each repudiation become more expensive than the last. There are some especially aggravating spamholes where I would be more than happy to compute a repudiation key all night long.
Also, the mechanism can incorporate a role for precomputed keys and on-demand keys, where the key must be produced as a function of a seed provided by the recipient at the time of delivery. Long precomputed keys could be signed by less expensive on-demand keys. There is a lot of flexibility in how these primitives can be combined.
I don't have time to flesh this out, but someone sufficiently motivated should make an effort to examine the use the RSA key generation as an escrow mechanism within the ecomonic model this paper presents.
Now I know why init scripts are one of the major dark areas remaining in my understanding of BSD and Linux: the entire subject area is flamebait.
I think there's a conceptual problem here. Whether a topic is flamebait or not does not stem from the topic, but the audience for the topic.
If my wife asks me "why are you angry?" and I respond "that's flamebait" does that reflect badly on me or my wife?
Probably more to the point, the reason this topic is flamebait is that init scripts are one of the great embarrassments of the BSD/Linux universe. It strikes me that the most passionate arguments occur around the most embarrassing features. In order to hide our embarrassment, we profess love.
Personally, I haven't seen an init script yet that if made human wouldn't show up at a Trek convention dressed as Wesley Crusher.