Better we should put a web site and share the info with each other. We don't need a LEA in this until it is time to get subpoenas, and this can be done at a local level.
Where is the Constitutional grant of power to the Feds which allows the FBI to exist?
So, the cop slips a disk of random numbers into your desk. You can't decode it.
You a) get to stay in jail forever. b) Get inventive and decrypt it into an innocuous love letter.
So, this law will be modified to force the key from individuals, not just the contents.
The US version was worse: LEAs could decrypt it and not need to provide the key. That is, they could make up any contents they wanted.
The fatal flaw with all of these stupid laws is that the penalty for using or not revealing the encryption must be worse than that for any crime which may be hidden by the encruption. Therefore, the death penalty must be the consequence for using encyrption if the laws are to work.
I believe our generation will have to learn all over again that gov is inherently tyrannical.
The same "editorial independence" has been promised to each and every media entity in each and every successive purchase/takeover in the last 30 years.
Perhaps all of the promises have been honored in every detail.
Perhaps the media has become dissociated from reality and transformed into pablum entirely for other reasons.
Fortunately for us, the cost of starting another SlashDot is much less than starting another Time.
Minor engineering problems -- ideas are unfeasible
on
The High Frontier
·
· Score: 1
1) Solar flares and other radiation storms
Radiation storms strong enough to kill unprotected people happen frequently. Every few years, we on earth at sea level get an extra chest X-ray from one. They are not predictable, have fast onset. Solar flares are more predictable, but require lots of mass between living tissue and the sun.
2) It takes.9G to prevent humans from having physiological problems. Steel is not strong enough to provide this in a rotating cylinder, even assuming people can adjust to the coriolis forces.
I want to see us go into space, but all the simple stories like O'Neill's are just silly.
Complex systems cannot be optimal in every respect: designers get to make choices of what kind of problems will exist.
The US Constitution, as intended, was a deliberate choice of social problems rather than government tyranny. That is, the gov had nothing to do with poverty, education,... but can't infringe on freedom.
Socialism chooses to 'solve' social problems. The implicit choice is tyranny. The laws which are intended to work 'for the good of society' are easily mis-directed for political ends.
No socialist society has remained dynamic and functional. All have degenerated socially and economically.
We in the US aren't ready to give up our socialist ways, and so we will continue to have Wacos and these small scale tyrannies. People in electronics are just the latest targets. Gun dealers have been subject to this kind of stupidity for a long time. Murders have occured with the last couple of years on raids like this.
First, you can be very sure the Monsanto scientists looked at LOTS of possible effects.
Second, you can be absolutely sure Monsanto nor anyone/everyone else CANNOT look at all possible effects. - Nonlinear equations --> chaos + computational complexity guarantees this.
So, given that we can't predict the future because of the 'prediction horizon' imposed by chaos + computational complexity, do we stop all progress?
They couldn't, in fact, consider effects 7 generations into the future 200 years ago either, and that was a much simpler age.
Sorry, the world is an uncertain place, and global rules about what to do or not to do just make things worse. No regulation, with feedback from the market (including the legal system if you screw up and hurt people), beats regulation by gov any day of the week.
Europe has lots of problems with unemployment, etc because of its excessive caution/regulation.
The future is not predictable in any detail. We have to live with this, and no doubt many of us will die from one freak un-intended effect or another of some technology or another. Generally, many more of us are living much better lives as a result of other effects, intended and un-intended.
Every plant contains pesticides, being the end-result of millions of years of a continuing evolutionary arms race between eaters and eaten.
Every plant we eat has been selected to be maximally offensive to some eaters (bugs) and minimally offensive/maximally tasty to others (cows,... people).
I don't see much problem until they transfer potential allergens into foods. A single peanut gene in potatos, and they will have so many law-suites... They know this, and so I have some confidence that tort law will keep them intelligent.
That is, unless the gov steps in with regulations. Usually, a company can't be sued if they are following gov regs. Since regulators always end up slaves of regulatees, Ralph Nader has killed more people than GM ever could alone.
Medicine is the most controlled section of the economy.
In hundreds of experiments in history, various forms of socialism have uniformly failed.
This is inevitable -- computational complexity and chaos are natural laws and 'prediction horizons' which work against planning. The larger the scale of the plan, the more likely it is to fail.
The educational system has been bureaucratized, legalized, unionized, federalized, politicized, reformed from outside 3 times in my memory, and still manages to do worse every year.
This system was fine for early industrial revolution purposes -- produce a uniform, low-level product.
It is hopeless for an information/technology era where we need people with lots of idiosyncratic backgrounds probing many small areas of knowledge and performing syntheses.
The ultimate small class and small batch size is one -- tutoring is the future.
The net will make this easy -- with video, my kid can have an Calcutta high school math genius tutoring him in math, a Beijing high school history genius tutoring him in the impact of the Cultural Revolution (inMandarin),...
Abolish the educational system. Give poor people a chance to get out of the morass which has held minorities back for the last 50 years.
Perhaps you can explain Australia's death and armed-robberry rates have gone UP in the year since Australia abolished guns.
Meanwhile, in the US, Clinton/Reno sold 2 million guns per year for a couple of years with their anti-gun legislation, and our crime-rate has been falling the whole time?
Guns are designed to put a bullet into a targeted point at high speed. Electric nail drivers are designed to put a nail into a targeted point at high speed. So, guns are designed to kill while hammers and electric nail drivers are not? Pretty weak logic -- mere assertion. Lew Glendenning
All totalitarian govs do this, for the good reason it gives them infinite leverage on individuals. Terrified groups are easier to control than individuals.
Nobody should accept a proposed system of ethics which is impossible for them to live by. I have zip control over the use of the programs I write. We know our products are being used by pornographers, for instance. Two steps away in the distribution chain.
Brain dead question -- computer ethics isn't any different than any other ethics: honesty, positive-sum-game (all the info needed for the other person to make a good decision, with feedback to know they understood it), no intentional harm.
More than that, nobody can be responsible for in a chaotic world.
US gov is increasingly run as a protection racket -- legislation and legal actions are primarily ways of increasing revenue to political parties, revenue and power of gov depts, etc. (Helps that our current President and associates are all serious criminals.)
I don't like Gates and think MS software sucks.
But we are all going to hate the future built on these actions by the inJustice Dept.
In the world of drugs (give FDA regulation), no AIDS cure could be used without patents. No drug company would pursue the $500M regulatory process without the ability to recovery their costs. Penicillin, I believe, was greatly delayed in actual use because Fleming didn't patent it. Lots of natural substances are not widely used for this reason, while drug companies spend millions to find patentable substitutes. Tryptophan and 5HTP, for example, are at least as good as Prozac. The FDA banned tryptophan. So, bitch about the FDA, but not about the patent on an AIDS cure. Lew
Microsoft has a strategy of complete integration of all of its products:
Visual Basic in all apps Explorer in all apps Object transfer between all apps Driver-level compatibility for all OSs ... stuff I can't think of at the moment
This will produce N x O x P x... complexity, which will kill the company. Windows 2000 is at least 2 years late, every version is buggier than the last.
Sales are dropping off (I suspect) as people DON'T upgrade because of complexity and bugs and lateness. (Business people -- check the growth of upgrade business vs new system sales to see if this is true.)
So, MS will be forced to split itself to get out of this crazy strategy.
Jane's article has a statist slant -- one gov against another or individuals against a gov.
Suppose I just want to make a lot of $ with little work. There are lots of ways to profit from advance knowledge of all sorts of damage to infrastructure, civilian factories,...
No need to reiterate the possibilities, but any engineer worth their salt looks with distain upon such feeble attempts as the World Trade Center bombing,... Not much damage for a hell of a lot of effort and risk (easy to do better in all dimensions simultaneously), no real damage to the US as an institution or economy, no profit to finance anything else.
Integrated strategy is required 8).
(BTW: Our very own FBI did the WTC bombing via its agent provacateur, Emad Salem. Read the NYT for 19 Oct, 1993, I believe. Salem taped his FBI handlers, and the transcripts were put into the trial records. The FBI's payments of $1M to Salem paid for the bomb,... Salem proposed substituting inert powder for the ammonium nitrate, FBI nixed it. Salem kept them informed of all plans, including when they were to set the bomb off. Salem was on the scene when the bomb went off. Bomb went off with full afore-knowledge of the FBI.)
Gov terrorism aside, it is pretty scary to think about such efforts getting loose -- some SciFi postulates corporate-scale wars.
We are, as a civilization, balanced on a high needle of technology. Doesn't take much of a jolt to kick it over and plunge us back to, at least, a lot lower standard of living.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if they appear to be doing good.
Better we should put a web site and share the info with each other. We don't need a LEA in this until it is time to get subpoenas, and this can be done at a local level.
Where is the Constitutional grant of power to the Feds which allows the FBI to exist?
lew
Organized charities are filled with socialists, who work to undermine the social and economic structure within which I make my living.
Should I ever get rich, I will never give a cent to any foundation, charity, university,
I do charity on a personal basis. More work, but at least the mistakes are mine.
Oh, yes. Almost forgot the obligatory "Katz is an idiot" statemet.
So, the cop slips a disk of random numbers into your desk. You can't decode it.
You a) get to stay in jail forever. b) Get inventive and decrypt it into an innocuous love letter.
So, this law will be modified to force the key from individuals, not just the contents.
The US version was worse: LEAs could decrypt it and not need to provide the key. That is, they could make up any contents they wanted.
The fatal flaw with all of these stupid laws is that the penalty for using or not revealing the encryption must be worse than that for any crime which may be hidden by the encruption. Therefore, the death penalty must be the consequence for using encyrption if the laws are to work.
I believe our generation will have to learn all over again that gov is inherently tyrannical.
Lew
Lew
The same "editorial independence" has been promised to each and every media entity in each and every successive purchase/takeover in the last 30 years.
Perhaps all of the promises have been honored in every detail.
Perhaps the media has become dissociated from reality and transformed into pablum entirely for other reasons.
Fortunately for us, the cost of starting another SlashDot is much less than starting another Time.
1) Solar flares and other radiation storms
.9G to prevent humans from having physiological problems. Steel is not strong enough to provide this in a rotating cylinder, even assuming people can adjust to the coriolis forces.
Radiation storms strong enough to kill unprotected people happen frequently. Every few years, we on earth at sea level get an extra chest X-ray from one. They are not predictable, have fast onset. Solar flares are more predictable, but require lots of mass between living tissue and the sun.
2) It takes
I want to see us go into space, but all the simple stories like O'Neill's are just silly.
Lew
Complex systems cannot be optimal in every respect: designers get to make choices of what kind of problems will exist.
The US Constitution, as intended, was a deliberate choice of social problems rather than government tyranny. That is, the gov had nothing to do with poverty, education,
Socialism chooses to 'solve' social problems. The implicit choice is tyranny. The laws which are intended to work 'for the good of society' are easily mis-directed for political ends.
No socialist society has remained dynamic and functional. All have degenerated socially and economically.
We in the US aren't ready to give up our socialist ways, and so we will continue to have Wacos and these small scale tyrannies. People in electronics are just the latest targets. Gun dealers have been subject to this kind of stupidity for a long time. Murders have occured with the last couple of years on raids like this.
Lew
First, you can be very sure the Monsanto scientists looked at LOTS of possible effects.
Second, you can be absolutely sure Monsanto nor anyone/everyone else CANNOT look at all possible effects. - Nonlinear equations --> chaos + computational complexity guarantees this.
So, given that we can't predict the future because of the 'prediction horizon' imposed by chaos + computational complexity, do we stop all progress?
They couldn't, in fact, consider effects 7 generations into the future 200 years ago either, and that was a much simpler age.
Sorry, the world is an uncertain place, and global rules about what to do or not to do just make things worse. No regulation, with feedback from the market (including the legal system if you screw up and hurt people), beats regulation by gov any day of the week.
Europe has lots of problems with unemployment, etc because of its excessive caution/regulation.
The future is not predictable in any detail. We have to live with this, and no doubt many of us will die from one freak un-intended effect or another of some technology or another. Generally, many more of us are living much better lives as a result of other effects, intended and un-intended.
Uncertainty is -- Get used to it.
Lew
Every plant contains pesticides, being the end-result of millions of years of a continuing evolutionary arms race between eaters and eaten.
Every plant we eat has been selected to be maximally offensive to some eaters (bugs) and minimally offensive/maximally tasty to others (cows,
I don't see much problem until they transfer potential allergens into foods. A single peanut gene in potatos, and they will have so many law-suites
That is, unless the gov steps in with regulations. Usually, a company can't be sued if they are following gov regs. Since regulators always end up slaves of regulatees, Ralph Nader has killed more people than GM ever could alone.
Lew
Mr. Katz laments that it is no longer a Newtonian
world, perfectly predictable to the end of the universe.
God, the Angst he must suffer.
So sorry, but it never has been. The system evolves. Always has.
I can't get excited about this new wrinkle, except to be excited about being alive in the midst of a very interesting era.
Maybe I will get to live forever !!
Lew
I have been hoping for years.
Ditto Young Frankenstein,
is the real reason.
Lots of under-the-table money to the Party elite.
Lew
Pro-gov "progressives" have been very successful
at keeping the focus on the sins of corproations,
rather than those of govs.
Ditto crimes of citizens vs those of govs.
Govs have killed 140M of their own people for political reasons in the 20th century.
This doesn't count civilians and conscripted soldiers killed in wars started by their gov.
Beside these numbers, mere individual crime and
corporate outrages are insignificant.
In addition to which, the problems of most corps
are due to their purchase of gov power via bribes,
so if the gov power wasn't there to begin with
Medicine is the most controlled section of the economy.
In hundreds of experiments in history, various forms of socialism have uniformly failed.
This is inevitable -- computational complexity and chaos are natural laws and 'prediction horizons' which work against planning. The larger the scale of the plan, the more likely it is to fail.
Any CS major should understand this intuitively.
Lew
Fed gov does all, sees all, knows all, no limits to its power.
Where in the Constitution is the authorization for the FBI? Or any other fed police force, of which we have about 70?
Lew
The existing ed system works worst for the poorest.
Almost anything would be better, including nothing for those who disrupt the current system.
Abolition will unleash a lot of alternatives, something which is squeezed out by the current monopoly.
Also, recall the the US's poor are rich by Calcutta standards, and high-end PCs of last year now cost $400. $200 next year.
Lew
You assume a linear relationship between inputs and outputs.
Most people know this assumption doesn't apply to bureaucracies.
Money for education is money pissed down a rathole.
Lew
The educational system has been bureaucratized, legalized, unionized, federalized, politicized, reformed from outside 3 times in my memory, and still manages to do worse every year.
This system was fine for early industrial revolution purposes -- produce a uniform, low-level product.
It is hopeless for an information/technology era where we need people with lots of idiosyncratic backgrounds probing many small areas of knowledge and performing syntheses.
The ultimate small class and small batch size is one -- tutoring is the future.
The net will make this easy -- with video, my kid can have an Calcutta high school math genius tutoring him in math, a Beijing high school history genius tutoring him in the impact of the Cultural Revolution (inMandarin),
Abolish the educational system. Give poor people a chance to get out of the morass which has held minorities back for the last 50 years.
Lew Glendenning
Perhaps you can explain Australia's death and armed-robberry rates have gone UP in the year since Australia abolished guns.
Meanwhile, in the US, Clinton/Reno sold 2 million guns per year for a couple of years with their anti-gun legislation, and our crime-rate has been falling the whole time?
Poor logic, no grasp of facts --> fallacy.
Lew
Guns are designed to put a bullet into a targeted point at high speed. Electric nail drivers are designed to put a nail into a targeted point at high speed. So, guns are designed to kill while hammers and electric nail drivers are not? Pretty weak logic -- mere assertion. Lew Glendenning
All totalitarian govs do this, for the good reason it gives them infinite leverage on individuals. Terrified groups are easier to control than individuals.
Nobody should accept a proposed system of ethics which is impossible for them to live by. I have zip control over the use of the programs I write. We know our products are being used by pornographers, for instance. Two steps away in the distribution chain.
Brain dead question -- computer ethics isn't any different than any other ethics: honesty, positive-sum-game (all the info needed for the other person to make a good decision, with feedback to know they understood it), no intentional harm.
More than that, nobody can be responsible for in a chaotic world.
US gov is increasingly run as a protection racket -- legislation and legal actions are primarily ways of increasing revenue to political parties, revenue and power of gov depts, etc. (Helps that our current President and associates are all serious criminals.)
I don't like Gates and think MS software sucks.
But we are all going to hate the future built on these actions by the inJustice Dept.
In the world of drugs (give FDA regulation), no AIDS cure could be used without patents. No drug company would pursue the $500M regulatory process without the ability to recovery their costs. Penicillin, I believe, was greatly delayed in actual use because Fleming didn't patent it. Lots of natural substances are not widely used for this reason, while drug companies spend millions to find patentable substitutes. Tryptophan and 5HTP, for example, are at least as good as Prozac. The FDA banned tryptophan. So, bitch about the FDA, but not about the patent on an AIDS cure. Lew
Microsoft has a strategy of complete integration of all of its products:
Visual Basic in all apps
Explorer in all apps
Object transfer between all apps
Driver-level compatibility for all OSs
This will produce N x O x P x
Sales are dropping off (I suspect) as people DON'T upgrade because of complexity and bugs and lateness. (Business people -- check the growth of upgrade business vs new system sales to see if this is true.)
So, MS will be forced to split itself to get out of this crazy strategy.
Lew
Don't annoy anyone.
Requires limited gov.
Switzerland doesn't have a terrorism problem.
Lew
Poor article in many dimensions.
...
... Not much damage for a hell of a lot of effort and risk (easy to do better in all dimensions simultaneously), no real damage to the US as an institution or economy, no profit to finance anything else.
... Salem proposed substituting inert powder for the ammonium nitrate, FBI nixed it. Salem kept them informed of all plans, including when they were to set the bomb off. Salem was on the scene when the bomb went off. Bomb went off with full afore-knowledge of the FBI.)
Jane's article has a statist slant -- one gov against another or individuals against a gov.
Suppose I just want to make a lot of $ with little work. There are lots of ways to profit from advance knowledge of all sorts of damage to infrastructure, civilian factories,
No need to reiterate the possibilities, but any engineer worth their salt looks with distain upon such feeble attempts as the World Trade Center bombing,
Integrated strategy is required 8).
(BTW: Our very own FBI did the WTC bombing via its agent provacateur, Emad Salem. Read the NYT for 19 Oct, 1993, I believe. Salem taped his FBI handlers, and the transcripts were put into the trial records. The FBI's payments of $1M to Salem paid for the bomb,
Gov terrorism aside, it is pretty scary to think about such efforts getting loose -- some SciFi postulates corporate-scale wars.
We are, as a civilization, balanced on a high needle of technology. Doesn't take much of a jolt to kick it over and plunge us back to, at least, a lot lower standard of living.
Lew Glendenning