No, it's worse than that. Look at the second amendment debate. Does the "Right of the People to bear arms" mean to have a military or to carry private weapons? Does "The People" refer to the body of people, and thus the state--the spirit that the people own the state, thus the military is of the people--or to individual persons? It doesn't say the right of "individual persons," but that doesn't mean you're not meant to interpret "People" that way. It goes even so far as to argue over the semantic use of a comma, which may be intended as a semi-colon instead (more specific functional clause separation).
And when we're done arguing about what the written law actually says, we can argue more subtle things. I can't take a sword into any shop anywhere, but I'm legally within my rights to carry? If I can't carry my weapons into any private place I go, I can't carry them anywhere, and thus my legal rights are stripped. Does the law thus hold the failure of a private business to at least supply a weapons check as a gross infringement of my right to carry a weapon? Or is the effective nullification of a law by societal behavior allowed?
Perhaps we need a new law regulating private enterprise such that public places--as in non-membership clubs--are required to allow weapons carry or supply weapons check. This would protect our rights. Of course, then we can go on haggling over the exact wording of THAT law, and its subtle implications...
Laws are hard not just because there's too many of 'em, but because--even if you write them out clearly--people will interpret them in a variety of ways. Even if it's absolutely certain today, in 10 years the language drift may render the law's intent and interpretation questionable.
This is separate from the issue that the laws cannot possibly cover every criminal action and would be ineffective if written to absolutely NOT cover any non-criminal action. The lawmakers cannot predict the future; they can write laws however they like, even achieve a bill that's logical and sane and doesn't criminalize anything anyone's ever done that hasn't been established as wrong and criminal, and yet still find in a few short hours someone who is now violating the new law yet presents a situation in which the lawmakers hadn't intended to mark such behavior as a crime.
And you want a computer to deal with all this? Even honest men can't deal with this shit!
It's the "fear" part, not the "ration" part. He was indicating that, rather than being paranoid and frightened, they had a policy in place based on simplistic interpretation of their moralistic views. They can be homophobic, hysterical, or militant; but they can also simply be following stricture.
You'll find the same in churches, really: some ministers are insane and flame and condemn homosexuals; others actually preach that it goes against their holy texts, and that such behavior shouldn't be engaged in, but offer their moral support to those that bring such issues forward to them (i.e. they insist it's 'wrong', but also insist that having those tendencies don't make you a bad person--they tend to press that homosexuals should remain chaste, though).
Belief systems are strange. They make more obvious sense when you want to burn the evil people at the stake; they make much less sense when you actually try to enforce your beliefs without inflicting harm--could you imagine employers barring all homosexuals like the US Military did? "Just policy" becomes "Removing your ability to live," and to some people the decision would become extremely complex: the 'sin' or 'amoral fault' or whatnot of homosexuality stands in opposition to the sin of condemning a man whose sins are between him and God (somewhere in there didn't we say you're not supposed to pass judgment?). It's easy to abstract away the consequences of your actions, much harder to hold firmly to your beliefs of what behavior shouldn't be supported while not violating other beliefs of not harming other people.
Dangerous. Very dangerous. Rattlesnakes are relatively harmless--that's what the rattle is, it's a signal to let them alone--but you have to realize they don't like to be pestered. Copperhead, if you get close without notice, it'll immediately nail you with a small venom injection to make you leave; rattlesnake will just make a bunch of noise, then leave. If you move at the rattlesnake, it will defend itself. Why would you intentionally capture one?
It would, in fact, make a decent dystopian story. We use human judges because sometimes we have to realize that the facts of the case sit very well with the law and we should clearly execute these fuckers; but the spirit of the case is ridiculous, the law is being twisted cautiously, and new precedent needs setting. An absolute system would condemn everyone in this country to jail time.
Very few. I go and put Linux on the misbehaving machine and it works. This went as far as OCZ Agility 3 SSD flat out not working, but you boot the Maintenance CD--a fucking Linux Live CD--and flash the firmware to fix it up... a hardware issue, ok. But wait, the maintenance CD boots... oh, ont off the flash drive, that's different.
I never booted the maintenance CD.
I installed Ubuntu on the SSD. Booted it. Downloaded the maintenance tool, ran it from Ubuntu running on the SSD to update the firmware. Continued using Ubuntu, then cold booted later to re-initialize the drive's firmware.
This is how life has always been for me. Hell once I had a BIOS that had invalid ACPI tables, so I fixed them (a Web site explained the bug, and showed which values to change, and had a dump of the table; I followed the instructions) and put a copy into a Linux driver (their instructions were to patch the latest BIOS image and reflash--fuck that). I had it do a check for the hardware, verify the table, and if it found the damaged table it would load the hard-coded correction. It worked! The HP laptop's brightness controls were suddenly functional, fuck yeah!
My hardware was obscure, and the problem was obscure. Linux often has specific fixes for well-known corner cases in badly designed hardware; but more significantly, Linux has a lot of generalizations. A LOT. If a hard drive ceases to respond properly, Linux will send it a reset (shut the drive off, flush cache, bring it back up, re-issue read/write commands). Linux sanity checks some graphics hardware behavior. Linux sanity checks memory buffers. Linux recognizes a wide range of erroneous conditions and calmly takes the hardware into a known good state by some means (up to and including shutting it off and turning it back on), then proceeds as normal. Sure it's not Minix, but it doesn't panic() whenever the wind blows.
Windows, upon encountering something unexpected, either bluescreens or ignores it and crashes trying to make use of very invalid data. Graphics card sent something funky? Telll it to play with framebuffer anyway. What do you mean it just randomly DMA'd a bunch of random areas of RAM and stomped all over them, then entered an internal error state and crashed?
This will be hilarious if HP or Dell or Toshiba loses Microsoft OEM support, has to pay $100 instead of $20 per license, and thus can't compete as well anymore. "Oh, you think so? Ubuntu's looking good these days..." Too bad they'd feed us that Unity crap instead of Gnome-Shell though.
No, the Vulcan High Council has proven time and again to be a self-serving political caucus that lives by what is "right and moral." Mind melding? Scary cultist shit. Time travel? Not logical, not possible.
the premise behind patents is that it promotes the progress of science and useful arts by encouraging businesses to reveal trade secrets. We don't want inventors taking their ideas to the grave; we want them rushing out to tell the world. There's vultures waiting to steal all their ideas, though, so we give them legal right to decide who's allowed to play that way for a little while in exchange for telling us how they do it. Then in 14 years we can build on their ideas, or at least use them everywhere, advancing technology in general.
SSDs also have OCZ and Crucial leveraging MLC and SandForce's controllers to deliver optimized and boosted performance and extended life for reduced cost. SandForce SF-2200 chipsets compress data as it goes out to the chips, reducing write volume and thus giving fractional write amplification. This improves performance and reduces storage wear, improving product lifetime--hence the use of MLC. Of course already compressed data doesn't have those benefits, hence why OCZ's Vertex line has better write speeds--they use synchronous chips that write as fast as they read (Agility drives use much cheaper chips that read faster than they write, so for compressible data they're FAST but for non-compressible data they're slow), and use compression just to extend drive lifetime.
With all the manufacturers making good use of SandForce's better chips, and SandForce's strategic pricing (read: they're relatively cheap because they want to be a major consumer and enterprise supplier of SSD controllers, which would make them richer than charging a fistful of cash per chip), a lot of inexpensive SSDs have shown up. Essentially Intel tried to hold prices high, and SandForce stepped up and decided to help the whole market undercut them in order to gain market dominance (Intel uses SF chips in 2 models; they previously used Intel proprietary controllers, and have also used Marvell controllers).
That's called "competition," son. It's what big businesses try to prevent with patents, lock-in, vertical integration (so you can't undercut their prices ever), supply chain control (so you can't get the raw materials to make a competing product without buying from them), etc.
why? I read The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant when I was in middle school, around 12 years old. The Way of Kings doesn't demand as high of a reading level, I think.
Shallan has a Shardblade? What? Are you inferring this from the specifics of the damage to her father and his soulcaster (the great detail it's described in does highlight specifics that would indicate a shardblade; and she does confess to have murdered him), or did she whip it out somewhere?
No one ever argued that you need embryonic stem cells to produce medical advances. What people argue is that we don't really know the properties of embryonic stem cells, and there may be medical advances we can make with those that we cannot make adult stem cells.
Cute, but you're wrong.
What people argue is "Stem cells." The difference is ignored so that huge raging political battles can be held over it, allowing politicians to slander each other with stupidity and create non-existent problems or overstate the terrible actions of their opponents. That helps keep us fighting by giving us one more difference (democrat vs republican, works even better than highlighting racial differences and the like through diversity education and legislation) so that the poor and the middle class can remain at each others' throats while the rich run away with all the fucking money.
The Way of Kings by Sanderson is actually really good (it's huge but it's doable). The language isn't too heavy (i.e. Donaldson), it doesn't have sex in it and somehow isn't detracted from by this (it's not "childish", it just doesn't focus on the sexual undertones too much--well, some stuff about girls exposing their left hands, a few girls naked i.e. while bathing, a guy naked due to a few unfortunate events but nobody screaming PENIIIIIIISSSS HIS PENIS IS FLOPPING AROUND OMG!!!!!).
The story is somewhat violent, not incredibly graphic about it but it's bloody now and then. It's not a kid's story, but it's definitely digestible. Give it a read yourself first by all means. The world is besieged by high storms (hurricanes etc) and so most of the curses revolve around references to storms--people curse a LOT, but it's not hot-button (really there's no difference between that and just saying 'fuck,' but try convincing your irrational little brain of that once).
This contrasts to Age of Misrule (lots of drugs/sex), Something Secret This Way Comes (graphic sex, graphic gore), The Gap Cycle (LOTS OF GRAPHIC SEX AND VIOLENCE), etc. AoM and TGS are excellent, Secret is... pulp, but decent pulp... it's too episodic for me. Vampire Hunter D as well, violent and sexual at times, but milder.
The Way of Kings is mild enough for a kid yet definitely up there with The Gap Cycle, and at a palatable reading level (not too simplified, but not overly complicated with big fancy Master's English words).
That still relies on some sort of centralized authorities still, what is to stop a physical intervention. Where an armed force threatens someone under the cost of their lives to sign a new "digital ID", invalidate the old ones etc?
Then, what of the similar situation to now, government requires these 'authorities' to follow or face the consequences of breaking the law?
What is to stop them from requiring all computers sold in country X, only trust authorities Y and Z that is under their control?
What if the network isn't controlled by a single person, but rather multiple people with Shamir Scheme style keys? What if those people are in different countries? Without at least 14 people to submit their keys, we can't derive even one bit of the actual encryption key used to sign things. What if they only exist as an online entity and you have to track them all down?
What is to stop people from downloading and installing software that didn't come with their computer? No Firefox, no extensions, no Linux?
No central server. It's all peer to peer, you send connections out, find someone on the network, find others. The stuff that was lost in time to inferior technology like Bittorrent. Gnutella never needed a tracker or whatever other crap; it had a server list of peers in its distribution, and if that failed it would send out connection attempts to random addresses. LimeWire used Gnutella, with its central peer list on a LimeWire controlled server; when LimeWire went down, someone added a static list of known reliable peers to try to connect to instead of having it phone home for said list.
All services are elective. DNS is a peer to peer service, with a DNS namespace (let's say ICANN) having their own signature. A request goes out to ICANN to sign microsoft.com's certificate. ICANN does whatever verification it'd like (a business transaction) and then signs the certificate. The fact that microsoft.com (or anyone else) can supply an ICANN signed certificate upon request proves it's the valid microsoft.com certificate in ICANN namespace.
Now, if you don't like ICANN, you can set up your own DNS namespace; you can hold discussions by having an unvalidated key sign messages, verify whatever you want in an encrypted and authenticated session, and then when you decide that the holder of the private key for this certificate is sufficiently worthy of owning the name by your metric, you sign their certificate and send it back to them. In theory this means mass fragmentation with ICANN and DARKNET and WIKILEAKS and FREENET and all kinds of other namespaces (just like if we made.com into.com.icann,.com.darknet,.com.wikileaks, etc); but in practice people would stick to whatever becomes the de-facto official (ICANN, if they took it) and the secondary underdog that won't listen to the government. It's also possible, in practice, to do a web-of-trust model; but that's too open to abuse.
Back in 2003 I started designing a Gnutella-like network aimed at being HTTP over P2P, effectively. Centralized server, CGI, distributed caching, end-to-end encryption, the works. It was based in domain resolution via named domain registries, with trust by digital signatures (PKI/PGP)--in other words, my idea of "DNS" was "I want the FOO DNS service and the BAR DNS service," and when I put in www.microsoft.com it would find records signed by FOO and BAR (no matter on who has it). These records may differ, so you would be able to use different "networks" (or really, name spaces). A DNS record would more be a digital ID than anything, too: microsoft.com carries with it a digital signature and certificate, and that is used to identify information from them on the network. It's possible to ask that a certain node verify time/datestamp and signature, so you could send out asking for a thing and have a copy coming down from a random node, which is also asking if it's up to date from the main server, as you ask as well--if not, the client drops that out-of-date page and grabs the new one directly, and the cached copy out on the network is dropped.
My argument was that it's cheaper for me to light rail around than to drive. The cost of a month pass for light rail is less than the cost of gasoline for me to drive to work all month; a single tank is $10 less than a month pass, and I burn through more than 2 full tanks. On top of that there's insurance costs, maintenance costs, etc.
I will never have a light rail month pass because I bicycle the 7 miles to work. Well, maybe in winter if I decide bicycling is no fun in the cold. A one way ticket is $1.60. Unfortunately it will probably cost them $2 trillion to build 14 miles of rail because the government is stupid.
That Candlejack fellow shows up for tea once in a while, but pretty rare. He tried to tie me up once and I hit him in his head with a candy cane pretty hard, so he usually doesn't come around me anymore...
It's $275/month for a month pass to ride the metro to DC as much as you want from Baltimore; it's $3.20 per day for a light rail day pass or bus pass; it's $64/mo for a month pass on MTA bus and light rail. The east-west Red Line will be fantastic for Baltimore, connecting the east side population area and west side population area to the central commerce area (harbor) and west side commerce area (out west of the city's population center). My car is utterly expensive to own and drive (it's a Mazda 3) compared to just biking to work and riding the light rail north to Hunt Valley's major commerce area (look up Wegman's, take a look at all the shit there).
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No, it's worse than that. Look at the second amendment debate. Does the "Right of the People to bear arms" mean to have a military or to carry private weapons? Does "The People" refer to the body of people, and thus the state--the spirit that the people own the state, thus the military is of the people--or to individual persons? It doesn't say the right of "individual persons," but that doesn't mean you're not meant to interpret "People" that way. It goes even so far as to argue over the semantic use of a comma, which may be intended as a semi-colon instead (more specific functional clause separation).
And when we're done arguing about what the written law actually says, we can argue more subtle things. I can't take a sword into any shop anywhere, but I'm legally within my rights to carry? If I can't carry my weapons into any private place I go, I can't carry them anywhere, and thus my legal rights are stripped. Does the law thus hold the failure of a private business to at least supply a weapons check as a gross infringement of my right to carry a weapon? Or is the effective nullification of a law by societal behavior allowed?
Perhaps we need a new law regulating private enterprise such that public places--as in non-membership clubs--are required to allow weapons carry or supply weapons check. This would protect our rights. Of course, then we can go on haggling over the exact wording of THAT law, and its subtle implications ...
Laws are hard not just because there's too many of 'em, but because--even if you write them out clearly--people will interpret them in a variety of ways. Even if it's absolutely certain today, in 10 years the language drift may render the law's intent and interpretation questionable.
This is separate from the issue that the laws cannot possibly cover every criminal action and would be ineffective if written to absolutely NOT cover any non-criminal action. The lawmakers cannot predict the future; they can write laws however they like, even achieve a bill that's logical and sane and doesn't criminalize anything anyone's ever done that hasn't been established as wrong and criminal, and yet still find in a few short hours someone who is now violating the new law yet presents a situation in which the lawmakers hadn't intended to mark such behavior as a crime.
And you want a computer to deal with all this? Even honest men can't deal with this shit!
It's the "fear" part, not the "ration" part. He was indicating that, rather than being paranoid and frightened, they had a policy in place based on simplistic interpretation of their moralistic views. They can be homophobic, hysterical, or militant; but they can also simply be following stricture.
You'll find the same in churches, really: some ministers are insane and flame and condemn homosexuals; others actually preach that it goes against their holy texts, and that such behavior shouldn't be engaged in, but offer their moral support to those that bring such issues forward to them (i.e. they insist it's 'wrong', but also insist that having those tendencies don't make you a bad person--they tend to press that homosexuals should remain chaste, though).
Belief systems are strange. They make more obvious sense when you want to burn the evil people at the stake; they make much less sense when you actually try to enforce your beliefs without inflicting harm--could you imagine employers barring all homosexuals like the US Military did? "Just policy" becomes "Removing your ability to live," and to some people the decision would become extremely complex: the 'sin' or 'amoral fault' or whatnot of homosexuality stands in opposition to the sin of condemning a man whose sins are between him and God (somewhere in there didn't we say you're not supposed to pass judgment?). It's easy to abstract away the consequences of your actions, much harder to hold firmly to your beliefs of what behavior shouldn't be supported while not violating other beliefs of not harming other people.
Dangerous. Very dangerous. Rattlesnakes are relatively harmless--that's what the rattle is, it's a signal to let them alone--but you have to realize they don't like to be pestered. Copperhead, if you get close without notice, it'll immediately nail you with a small venom injection to make you leave; rattlesnake will just make a bunch of noise, then leave. If you move at the rattlesnake, it will defend itself. Why would you intentionally capture one?
Uh, we put them in armor. Rugby (England) is like American football without the padding.
It would, in fact, make a decent dystopian story. We use human judges because sometimes we have to realize that the facts of the case sit very well with the law and we should clearly execute these fuckers; but the spirit of the case is ridiculous, the law is being twisted cautiously, and new precedent needs setting. An absolute system would condemn everyone in this country to jail time.
Very few. I go and put Linux on the misbehaving machine and it works. This went as far as OCZ Agility 3 SSD flat out not working, but you boot the Maintenance CD--a fucking Linux Live CD--and flash the firmware to fix it up ... a hardware issue, ok. But wait, the maintenance CD boots... oh, ont off the flash drive, that's different.
I never booted the maintenance CD.
I installed Ubuntu on the SSD. Booted it. Downloaded the maintenance tool, ran it from Ubuntu running on the SSD to update the firmware. Continued using Ubuntu, then cold booted later to re-initialize the drive's firmware.
This is how life has always been for me. Hell once I had a BIOS that had invalid ACPI tables, so I fixed them (a Web site explained the bug, and showed which values to change, and had a dump of the table; I followed the instructions) and put a copy into a Linux driver (their instructions were to patch the latest BIOS image and reflash--fuck that). I had it do a check for the hardware, verify the table, and if it found the damaged table it would load the hard-coded correction. It worked! The HP laptop's brightness controls were suddenly functional, fuck yeah!
My hardware was obscure, and the problem was obscure. Linux often has specific fixes for well-known corner cases in badly designed hardware; but more significantly, Linux has a lot of generalizations. A LOT. If a hard drive ceases to respond properly, Linux will send it a reset (shut the drive off, flush cache, bring it back up, re-issue read/write commands). Linux sanity checks some graphics hardware behavior. Linux sanity checks memory buffers. Linux recognizes a wide range of erroneous conditions and calmly takes the hardware into a known good state by some means (up to and including shutting it off and turning it back on), then proceeds as normal. Sure it's not Minix, but it doesn't panic() whenever the wind blows.
Windows, upon encountering something unexpected, either bluescreens or ignores it and crashes trying to make use of very invalid data. Graphics card sent something funky? Telll it to play with framebuffer anyway. What do you mean it just randomly DMA'd a bunch of random areas of RAM and stomped all over them, then entered an internal error state and crashed?
This will be hilarious if HP or Dell or Toshiba loses Microsoft OEM support, has to pay $100 instead of $20 per license, and thus can't compete as well anymore. "Oh, you think so? Ubuntu's looking good these days..." Too bad they'd feed us that Unity crap instead of Gnome-Shell though.
Banning gas-powered lawnmowers helps avoid the RRRRRHHRRHRHRHRRRGHRRRGRHRHRGRGRHRG
No, the Vulcan High Council has proven time and again to be a self-serving political caucus that lives by what is "right and moral." Mind melding? Scary cultist shit. Time travel? Not logical, not possible.
the premise behind patents is that it promotes the progress of science and useful arts by encouraging businesses to reveal trade secrets. We don't want inventors taking their ideas to the grave; we want them rushing out to tell the world. There's vultures waiting to steal all their ideas, though, so we give them legal right to decide who's allowed to play that way for a little while in exchange for telling us how they do it. Then in 14 years we can build on their ideas, or at least use them everywhere, advancing technology in general.
You're right. It's Corsair, not Crucial. They're roughly equivalent but different entities.
SSDs also have OCZ and Crucial leveraging MLC and SandForce's controllers to deliver optimized and boosted performance and extended life for reduced cost. SandForce SF-2200 chipsets compress data as it goes out to the chips, reducing write volume and thus giving fractional write amplification. This improves performance and reduces storage wear, improving product lifetime--hence the use of MLC. Of course already compressed data doesn't have those benefits, hence why OCZ's Vertex line has better write speeds--they use synchronous chips that write as fast as they read (Agility drives use much cheaper chips that read faster than they write, so for compressible data they're FAST but for non-compressible data they're slow), and use compression just to extend drive lifetime.
With all the manufacturers making good use of SandForce's better chips, and SandForce's strategic pricing (read: they're relatively cheap because they want to be a major consumer and enterprise supplier of SSD controllers, which would make them richer than charging a fistful of cash per chip), a lot of inexpensive SSDs have shown up. Essentially Intel tried to hold prices high, and SandForce stepped up and decided to help the whole market undercut them in order to gain market dominance (Intel uses SF chips in 2 models; they previously used Intel proprietary controllers, and have also used Marvell controllers).
That's called "competition," son. It's what big businesses try to prevent with patents, lock-in, vertical integration (so you can't undercut their prices ever), supply chain control (so you can't get the raw materials to make a competing product without buying from them), etc.
why? I read The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant when I was in middle school, around 12 years old. The Way of Kings doesn't demand as high of a reading level, I think.
Shallan has a Shardblade? What? Are you inferring this from the specifics of the damage to her father and his soulcaster (the great detail it's described in does highlight specifics that would indicate a shardblade; and she does confess to have murdered him), or did she whip it out somewhere?
No one ever argued that you need embryonic stem cells to produce medical advances. What people argue is that we don't really know the properties of embryonic stem cells, and there may be medical advances we can make with those that we cannot make adult stem cells.
Cute, but you're wrong.
What people argue is "Stem cells." The difference is ignored so that huge raging political battles can be held over it, allowing politicians to slander each other with stupidity and create non-existent problems or overstate the terrible actions of their opponents. That helps keep us fighting by giving us one more difference (democrat vs republican, works even better than highlighting racial differences and the like through diversity education and legislation) so that the poor and the middle class can remain at each others' throats while the rich run away with all the fucking money.
The Way of Kings by Sanderson is actually really good (it's huge but it's doable). The language isn't too heavy (i.e. Donaldson), it doesn't have sex in it and somehow isn't detracted from by this (it's not "childish", it just doesn't focus on the sexual undertones too much--well, some stuff about girls exposing their left hands, a few girls naked i.e. while bathing, a guy naked due to a few unfortunate events but nobody screaming PENIIIIIIISSSS HIS PENIS IS FLOPPING AROUND OMG!!!!!).
The story is somewhat violent, not incredibly graphic about it but it's bloody now and then. It's not a kid's story, but it's definitely digestible. Give it a read yourself first by all means. The world is besieged by high storms (hurricanes etc) and so most of the curses revolve around references to storms--people curse a LOT, but it's not hot-button (really there's no difference between that and just saying 'fuck,' but try convincing your irrational little brain of that once).
This contrasts to Age of Misrule (lots of drugs/sex), Something Secret This Way Comes (graphic sex, graphic gore), The Gap Cycle (LOTS OF GRAPHIC SEX AND VIOLENCE), etc. AoM and TGS are excellent, Secret is ... pulp, but decent pulp... it's too episodic for me. Vampire Hunter D as well, violent and sexual at times, but milder.
The Way of Kings is mild enough for a kid yet definitely up there with The Gap Cycle, and at a palatable reading level (not too simplified, but not overly complicated with big fancy Master's English words).
That still relies on some sort of centralized authorities still, what is to stop a physical intervention. Where an armed force threatens someone under the cost of their lives to sign a new "digital ID", invalidate the old ones etc?
Then, what of the similar situation to now, government requires these 'authorities' to follow or face the consequences of breaking the law?
What is to stop them from requiring all computers sold in country X, only trust authorities Y and Z that is under their control?
What if the network isn't controlled by a single person, but rather multiple people with Shamir Scheme style keys? What if those people are in different countries? Without at least 14 people to submit their keys, we can't derive even one bit of the actual encryption key used to sign things. What if they only exist as an online entity and you have to track them all down?
What is to stop people from downloading and installing software that didn't come with their computer? No Firefox, no extensions, no Linux?
No central server. It's all peer to peer, you send connections out, find someone on the network, find others. The stuff that was lost in time to inferior technology like Bittorrent. Gnutella never needed a tracker or whatever other crap; it had a server list of peers in its distribution, and if that failed it would send out connection attempts to random addresses. LimeWire used Gnutella, with its central peer list on a LimeWire controlled server; when LimeWire went down, someone added a static list of known reliable peers to try to connect to instead of having it phone home for said list.
All services are elective. DNS is a peer to peer service, with a DNS namespace (let's say ICANN) having their own signature. A request goes out to ICANN to sign microsoft.com's certificate. ICANN does whatever verification it'd like (a business transaction) and then signs the certificate. The fact that microsoft.com (or anyone else) can supply an ICANN signed certificate upon request proves it's the valid microsoft.com certificate in ICANN namespace.
Now, if you don't like ICANN, you can set up your own DNS namespace; you can hold discussions by having an unvalidated key sign messages, verify whatever you want in an encrypted and authenticated session, and then when you decide that the holder of the private key for this certificate is sufficiently worthy of owning the name by your metric, you sign their certificate and send it back to them. In theory this means mass fragmentation with ICANN and DARKNET and WIKILEAKS and FREENET and all kinds of other namespaces (just like if we made .com into .com.icann, .com.darknet, .com.wikileaks, etc); but in practice people would stick to whatever becomes the de-facto official (ICANN, if they took it) and the secondary underdog that won't listen to the government. It's also possible, in practice, to do a web-of-trust model; but that's too open to abuse.
Back in 2003 I started designing a Gnutella-like network aimed at being HTTP over P2P, effectively. Centralized server, CGI, distributed caching, end-to-end encryption, the works. It was based in domain resolution via named domain registries, with trust by digital signatures (PKI/PGP)--in other words, my idea of "DNS" was "I want the FOO DNS service and the BAR DNS service," and when I put in www.microsoft.com it would find records signed by FOO and BAR (no matter on who has it). These records may differ, so you would be able to use different "networks" (or really, name spaces). A DNS record would more be a digital ID than anything, too: microsoft.com carries with it a digital signature and certificate, and that is used to identify information from them on the network. It's possible to ask that a certain node verify time/datestamp and signature, so you could send out asking for a thing and have a copy coming down from a random node, which is also asking if it's up to date from the main server, as you ask as well--if not, the client drops that out-of-date page and grabs the new one directly, and the cached copy out on the network is dropped.
Maybe it's time I stand up and lead...
Purchasing stolen goods would result in confiscation. Knowing the goods were stolen when you bought them would result in jail time.
My argument was that it's cheaper for me to light rail around than to drive. The cost of a month pass for light rail is less than the cost of gasoline for me to drive to work all month; a single tank is $10 less than a month pass, and I burn through more than 2 full tanks. On top of that there's insurance costs, maintenance costs, etc.
I will never have a light rail month pass because I bicycle the 7 miles to work. Well, maybe in winter if I decide bicycling is no fun in the cold. A one way ticket is $1.60. Unfortunately it will probably cost them $2 trillion to build 14 miles of rail because the government is stupid.
increased unto three times in the past two centuries from 0.7 parts per million to 1.7ppm
1.7 / 0.7 = 2.42 ~= 2.5 ~= 3 times which is almost 5 times which is like 10 times as much!
That Candlejack fellow shows up for tea once in a while, but pretty rare. He tried to tie me up once and I hit him in his head with a candy cane pretty hard, so he usually doesn't come around me anymore...
Argument by Verbosity. It's loud, wordy, and sounds impressive. Since he sounds like he has a point, he must be correct.
It's $275/month for a month pass to ride the metro to DC as much as you want from Baltimore; it's $3.20 per day for a light rail day pass or bus pass; it's $64/mo for a month pass on MTA bus and light rail. The east-west Red Line will be fantastic for Baltimore, connecting the east side population area and west side population area to the central commerce area (harbor) and west side commerce area (out west of the city's population center). My car is utterly expensive to own and drive (it's a Mazda 3) compared to just biking to work and riding the light rail north to Hunt Valley's major commerce area (look up Wegman's, take a look at all the shit there).