The thing I never understood was that the fruit was meant to give 'knowledge of good and evil,' allowing them to choose between good and evil. Before eating the fruit, they were only capable of good, and yet were naked. After eating the fruit, they were still naked, but now they realised being naked was 'evil,' and so they must have been doing 'evil' while they were only capable of 'good.'
Before they ate the fruit, they were amoral. Hence, nothing they did was either 'good' or 'bad'... they simply reacted, and they, like the other animals, never noticed their own nakedness.
The best way to think of the forbidden fruit is that it made them conceptual. Prior to eating it, they lived as -- and conversed with -- the animals. Wake up, wander around, eat whatever is growing nearby, hang out, go to sleep. After eating the fruit, they acquired the power of choice, and hence became moral creatures. That's when they felt ashamed of their nakedness, per Christianity's delusion that its anti-sex opinions are universal. That's also when, by implication, they lost the ability to converse with animals.
Then, God observed that they were conceptual + immortal, which qualified them as deities. He therefore revoked their immortality and threw them out. They were forced to work the land for their food.
The whole story amusingly mirrors (in an abstract way) our own evolution.
So adorable! I think I would like this robot to carry me to bed every night and tuck me in.
You laugh, but this is not far from the point. Our grunts these days are mostly kids, fresh out of high school and standing on legs that are a bit shakey. When you're nineteen, camped out in a foreign country, surrounded by enemies, shot, and bleeding, you're going to be asking for your Mommy.
It's easy to forget how young our soldiers are... but it explains a lot about the occasional mistakes, freakouts, and over-the-top-treatment-of-enemy-civilians that we hear about. The war for civilian morale would probably go very differently if it were being conducted by actual adults.
It's not difficult to do if the two objects are in approximately the same orbital path. So, perhaps, we might soon get a probe looking at Phobos and Deimos.
Too late, I understand there's already a UAC base established there, as well as a brigade of marines (which has a curiously high ratio of sargeants to grunts).
Sure it does. Every time I get one of those questions, I tell the person that Sony (or whoever it is that sold the media) ripped you off. They gave you a rental model when you paid for the purchase model, and that is wrong.
Given the likelihood and ease of redistributing a non-DRM'd sound track, the $1-2 price could not possibly be a purchase model. Sony or whoever would have to charge you the usual $50K-500K to cover the re, re-re, re-re-re, and re-re-re-redistributions that the track is reasonably expected to experience once Joe MP3er gets ahold of it.
Or to put it another way: since you believe that modern consumers are still of the "buy it and you own it" mindset, then they should also innately understand that giving a thing away means that they no longer own it.
And another thing. Since you here on slashdot know that Sony is in fact offering a rental model, you cannot apply to yourself the excuse that you are desperately agitating for the laymen. And don't fancy yourself a caped crusader who is out to avenge Sony's wrongs by copying their music tracks. At least do yourself the service of being honest about your ends and means.
Memory checkers? GARBAGE COLLECTORS?! Have you no HONOR?!
We are KLINGON. We need no checkers. We need no garbage collectors. We need none of these weak HUMAN facilities. We write our CODE from the COMMAND LINE:
> COPY CON DECAPITATOR.EXE
[Alt+077] [ALT+090] . . .
For obvious reasons, I can see why they may want to avoid 'outing' those who are involved in payola, but it would be nice to get a few more names from the article on who we can legitimately trust.
Probably better that they didn't, because any site that gets publicly branded 'trustworthy' will immediately sell out, under a deluge of brib^H^H^H^Hmarketing funds attempting to purchase their good reputation.
No, not *that* genesis (but I made you look, didn't I). The answer to the question, "why haven't we found life yet" really lies in the fact that what actually gets life going is still quite a mystery.
No, it's not a mystery at all, you heathen. The answer is stated very clearly in Genesis.
There's something that bugs me about this whole thing; Like we're ashamed of who we are, or like we're trying to keep ourselves safe from all the judgmental people out there, or like we don't have the courage to tell people, "Hey, this is how I have a good time, and you just have to deal with it."
We aren't necessarily hiding ourselves from all inspection and judgment, Rather, we are hiding ourselves from judgment against the many irrational moral codes out there. For example, some people have accepted the idea that alcohol is immoral in any quantity, and so they will wrongly condemn you for being at that party.
Such condemnation matters because (as others have pointed out already) it can cost you a job that you deserve, a promotion that you've earned, or a social opportunity that would be constructive. It also matters because condemnation will cause you pain -- being as we are tribal creatures who are still hard-wired to feel real pain when others disapprove of us.
Not to mention our erratic lawmaking, in which perfectly moral actions (such as, for example, spanking your kid, or smoking a joint) might suddenly become illegal. Privacy protects us from that, too. We wouldn't need privacy if all laws and all employees of the legal system were rational, honest, and conscientious.
Googlable tagging of photos is a giant step away from privacy... at a time when our society's level of rationality does not support such a move.
Hacking tools are more like guns: make them illegal and only the criminals will have them.
The parallel doesn't end there.
After the end of the Civil War, southern states passed gun-control laws that made it illegal to carry guns, or sometimes even to own them. These laws had to be written in general terms: the North would not countenance* a law written specifically to disarm blacks. But the local legislatures and the police understood that they were to be enforced only against blacks. Or perhaps the law was written to allow the sheriff 'discretion' in issuing permits to private citizens carry a gun, which meant the sheriff could simply choose to issue permits only to whites.
Later, the 'understanding' was forgotten, and now those laws are applied to all of us.
Sysadmins in Germany are now like the whites (white-hats?) after the Civil War: they expect to be overlooked by the enforcers, but how many years will it take for that understanding to be forgotten?
And another thing. Police love it when people accept a "It's understood that we good guys are going to break the law, because the law was written overbroad" law. Like speed limits. They love it because the policeman's only power is to crack down on lawbreakers... and oh what fun it is when the good guys -- once arrogantly immune to the policeman's intimidations -- are now required to break the law, and to place themselves on the defensive, in their normal course of business.
*My isn't it an addictive rush, feeling virtuous at someone else's expense.
"It's quite clear that the district is talking about conduct in the classroom and not the videotape," Lind said.
Remember when obvious liars would get boo'd and pelted with tomatoes?
Yeah, me neither, but it's a pleasant thought. But at least we can hope that karma catches up with this Lind creature some day, in the form of self-hatred or perhaps a falling piano.
Re:Why Does Encryption Need to "Scramble" Informat
on
A Mighty Number Falls
·
· Score: 1
Alice has transferred information to Bob and Jesus is confused. It seems that no amount of analysis could decipher what Alice and Bob are talking about. I suppose the implied information could still be considered a "key", but I imagine that this database of implicit information pieces could be very large.
Alice and Bob's memories constitute a "back channel" which, because it occurred in the past, is secure from Jesus.
If you have a secure back channel, then you can just use that to exchange AES keys (i.e. symmetric keys) and be done with it forever. AES won't be cracked for a century.
It is only when you have no such back channel, that you need asymmetric (i.e. public-key) cryptography like RSA or ECC. This is because you must exchange your keys over an insecure channel. Asymmetric cryptography relies on the hardness of problems such as prime factorization, which is what the current discussion is about.
It's not about the tools; it's about the laws that govern their use. Why is a drone a problem? Cameras in public spaces? Because it makes law enforcement "too" aware? I'll accept that argument, but you'll have to make it a cogent and relevant one...
Drones, cameras, and overall law-enforcement awareness are great *if* our laws are rational. And if they can be trusted to always remain so.
I don't want a maximally efficient government. I like the fact that no one can push a button, and find out what I have eaten in the last two weeks.
I'm with you on this one... and I have an insight for you:
A maximally efficient government is A Good Thing *if* we believe that our laws are rational... which means: if we believe that our neighbors have a rational moral code that they will legally enforce against us.
Since we don't believe any such thing, we need privacy. We need it in order to escape punishment (legal, social, emotional) at the hand of irrational moral codes. Those codes would have us doing stupid things, such as (for example) refrain from spanking an unruly child who is resistant to the more fashionable forms of inflicted discomfort.
In order to have privacy, we have to sacrifice some of our government's enforcement efficiency. (Either that, or we need ironclad protections for the data being gathered... but only a fool would trust in such paper walls.)
I know you already know all this in your heart, and always have, as have I. But I find that it helps to have the matter clarified in these terms. Privacy gives us the ability to do what stupid people believe to be wrong.
It is important to note that the social norms of many cultures are not compatible with western ideals. This causes conflict when the west tries to use its power (economic and military) to force its ideals on the rest of the world. The irony is that one of the most powerful ideas expressed by the US constitution that has been adopted by the western world is the concept of freedom of choice (association, religion, expression are all choices we make). By forcing western values on the rest of the world we are in effect violating them ourselves by not giving other cultures a choice.
Look closer. We aren't exactly sending in the B-52s to airdrop loads of McMuffins, LOTR DVDs, sneakers, and twinkies onto the Noble Primitive Peoples who are Honoring the Sacred Traditions of Their Ancestors. It's a pull situation much more than a push. Western culture, simply put, is addictive.
It's the Noble Primitive leaders that don't like this, because the Sacred Traditions are invariably religious-authoritarian.
From over here we only hear about people bewailing Western culture, but we aren't hearing the real opinions of the Noble Primitive People themselves.
My point is that attempting to create or uphold laws that no one respects is futile. They can't and won't be able to prosecute every uploader of files, and eventually, the laws on the books will match the reality of what goes on in day to day life.
Not everyone has lost their honor to such downloadable temptations.
The DMCA, is a law that steals from most American citizens, and penalizes no-one outside your borders. The DMCA hinders your economy, because without it your *IAA industries would need to adapt to survive - and they do have the means and technology to successfully adapt and survive in a manner that allows you value and fair choice.
It would if we were still a manufacturing economy, where our primary product was widgets. But you, and most of slashdot it seems, are still living in the past. Nowadays, anyone can crank out widgets, and there is no profit margin left. The vital resource has become information.
Western economies are primary information-based now. Manufacturing is for chump^H^H^H^H^Hthird-world countries, who justly desire to pass through that phase and become information-based too, because honestly, an assembly line is no place for a human mind.
But good information is expensive to produce and valuable to its possessor. Movies, for example, are a high-grade form of information... one which you and others seem to value so highly that you would embrace your handily provincial ideology that tells you that information is not widgets, and therefore it lies outside of the concept of 'property'.
I have that exact charger, and yes, it's a glorious departure from traditional dumb-timer chargers. It's nice to be able to "top off" my batteries any time I wish. I ordered it from Thomas Distributing, and one for my brother too, and we're very happy with it.
Shift builds on an existing technology known as Offset Cursor, which displays a cursor just above the spot a user touches on the screen. That allows a user to place their finger below the item they wish to choose so that they can see the item, rather than hiding it with their finger.
Am I the only one who read this and thought -- with a sigh -- that there was surely already an odious patent application filed for it?
"Method and Apparatus for Displaying a Cursor Below the Designated Location" -- with the following attached C++ code:
My baby monitor uses AAs, and I *can* put nicads or nimhs in, but they go dead just from self-discharge as fast as they do from use, so I stick to cheap Kirkland alkalines.
The new Sanyo Eneloop NiMH batteries don't have that problem.
I recently $wapped out my vast collection of piss-poor Energizer (2500 mAH) AAs for Eneloop (2000 mAH) AAs, and there's no going back!
In reality, angry people have high testosterone, whether they are men or women. The bodies of both men and women [jeanhailes.org.au] produce testosterone.
Men produce about ten times as much testosterone as women. It's ~500ng/ml in men versus ~50ng/ml in women, though levels vary widely (most notably with age). Testosterone deficiency in aging men is a widespread but lamentably misunderstood and denied problem.
Also, blacks have a lot more than other races, and Orientals much less... as is obviously apparent in their respective physiologies.
Honestly, I wish the DRM enthusiasts of the world would get a clue. There is nothing you can try to protect digitally that someone can't break digitally. It's bits of data and there is always a combination of 1 and 0's that will open Pandora's chastity belt.
The greatest mistake anyone can make, is underestimating one's enemy.
The RIAA is not stupid. They, of anybody, have money to burn on purchased expertise. They already understand that bits are inherently copyable. And they've been told many times that crypto will always fail in finite time when Eve is given the ciphertext, the plaintext, and the key.
What DRM is, is their attempt to tilt the economics of copying in their favor. In the same way that we are attempting to tilt the economics of spam in our favor. In both cases, the root problem (copying or spam) is intractable... but it can be satisfactorily tamed by a change in the economics.
By raising the cost (i.e. the hassle, the legil peril, the hardware requirements, the software expertise, etc.) of copying, and of receiving copies, above the price of retail media, they'll solve the problem enough.
Yes, you've told us a thousand times that the problem cannot be conclusively solved, but everyone already knows that. They aren't seriously trying to do that. They're just trying to tame it, and they're succeeding. You are blind to this because you've underestimated them. You hang out here on slashdot talking about how stupid they are, but meanwhile BluRay is taking over the world, and most of your and my friends have closed down their bittorrent servers in fear.
Slashdot Mirror
Before they ate the fruit, they were amoral. Hence, nothing they did was either 'good' or 'bad'... they simply reacted, and they, like the other animals, never noticed their own nakedness.
The best way to think of the forbidden fruit is that it made them conceptual. Prior to eating it, they lived as -- and conversed with -- the animals. Wake up, wander around, eat whatever is growing nearby, hang out, go to sleep. After eating the fruit, they acquired the power of choice, and hence became moral creatures. That's when they felt ashamed of their nakedness, per Christianity's delusion that its anti-sex opinions are universal. That's also when, by implication, they lost the ability to converse with animals.
Then, God observed that they were conceptual + immortal, which qualified them as deities. He therefore revoked their immortality and threw them out. They were forced to work the land for their food.
The whole story amusingly mirrors (in an abstract way) our own evolution.
You laugh, but this is not far from the point. Our grunts these days are mostly kids, fresh out of high school and standing on legs that are a bit shakey. When you're nineteen, camped out in a foreign country, surrounded by enemies, shot, and bleeding, you're going to be asking for your Mommy.
It's easy to forget how young our soldiers are... but it explains a lot about the occasional mistakes, freakouts, and over-the-top-treatment-of-enemy-civilians that we hear about. The war for civilian morale would probably go very differently if it were being conducted by actual adults.
The makers of rules are never motivated to personally abide them. Rules are for you to follow.
Ergo, it is up to us to demand that rulemakers comply at least as well as the rest of us.
Too late, I understand there's already a UAC base established there, as well as a brigade of marines (which has a curiously high ratio of sargeants to grunts).
Given the likelihood and ease of redistributing a non-DRM'd sound track, the $1-2 price could not possibly be a purchase model. Sony or whoever would have to charge you the usual $50K-500K to cover the re, re-re, re-re-re, and re-re-re-redistributions that the track is reasonably expected to experience once Joe MP3er gets ahold of it.
Or to put it another way: since you believe that modern consumers are still of the "buy it and you own it" mindset, then they should also innately understand that giving a thing away means that they no longer own it.
And another thing. Since you here on slashdot know that Sony is in fact offering a rental model, you cannot apply to yourself the excuse that you are desperately agitating for the laymen. And don't fancy yourself a caped crusader who is out to avenge Sony's wrongs by copying their music tracks. At least do yourself the service of being honest about your ends and means.
"Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!"
P.S. If I ever start LARPing like that, please just shoot me, run me over, whatever you gotta do.
Yes, I chose those codes on purpose. Do you know what they mean, as the first two bytes of a wintel executable?
Memory checkers? GARBAGE COLLECTORS?! Have you no HONOR?!
We are KLINGON. We need no checkers. We need no garbage collectors. We need none of these weak HUMAN facilities. We write our CODE from the COMMAND LINE:
> COPY CON DECAPITATOR.EXE
[Alt+077] [ALT+090] . . .
Probably better that they didn't, because any site that gets publicly branded 'trustworthy' will immediately sell out, under a deluge of brib^H^H^H^Hmarketing funds attempting to purchase their good reputation.
No, it's not a mystery at all, you heathen. The answer is stated very clearly in Genesis.
We aren't necessarily hiding ourselves from all inspection and judgment, Rather, we are hiding ourselves from judgment against the many irrational moral codes out there. For example, some people have accepted the idea that alcohol is immoral in any quantity, and so they will wrongly condemn you for being at that party.
Such condemnation matters because (as others have pointed out already) it can cost you a job that you deserve, a promotion that you've earned, or a social opportunity that would be constructive. It also matters because condemnation will cause you pain -- being as we are tribal creatures who are still hard-wired to feel real pain when others disapprove of us.
Not to mention our erratic lawmaking, in which perfectly moral actions (such as, for example, spanking your kid, or smoking a joint) might suddenly become illegal. Privacy protects us from that, too. We wouldn't need privacy if all laws and all employees of the legal system were rational, honest, and conscientious.
Googlable tagging of photos is a giant step away from privacy... at a time when our society's level of rationality does not support such a move.
The parallel doesn't end there.
After the end of the Civil War, southern states passed gun-control laws that made it illegal to carry guns, or sometimes even to own them. These laws had to be written in general terms: the North would not countenance* a law written specifically to disarm blacks. But the local legislatures and the police understood that they were to be enforced only against blacks. Or perhaps the law was written to allow the sheriff 'discretion' in issuing permits to private citizens carry a gun, which meant the sheriff could simply choose to issue permits only to whites.
Later, the 'understanding' was forgotten, and now those laws are applied to all of us.
Sysadmins in Germany are now like the whites (white-hats?) after the Civil War: they expect to be overlooked by the enforcers, but how many years will it take for that understanding to be forgotten?
And another thing. Police love it when people accept a "It's understood that we good guys are going to break the law, because the law was written overbroad" law. Like speed limits. They love it because the policeman's only power is to crack down on lawbreakers... and oh what fun it is when the good guys -- once arrogantly immune to the policeman's intimidations -- are now required to break the law, and to place themselves on the defensive, in their normal course of business.
*My isn't it an addictive rush, feeling virtuous at someone else's expense.
Indeed.
Remember when obvious liars would get boo'd and pelted with tomatoes?
Yeah, me neither, but it's a pleasant thought. But at least we can hope that karma catches up with this Lind creature some day, in the form of self-hatred or perhaps a falling piano.
Alice and Bob's memories constitute a "back channel" which, because it occurred in the past, is secure from Jesus.
If you have a secure back channel, then you can just use that to exchange AES keys (i.e. symmetric keys) and be done with it forever. AES won't be cracked for a century.
It is only when you have no such back channel, that you need asymmetric (i.e. public-key) cryptography like RSA or ECC. This is because you must exchange your keys over an insecure channel. Asymmetric cryptography relies on the hardness of problems such as prime factorization, which is what the current discussion is about.
Drones, cameras, and overall law-enforcement awareness are great *if* our laws are rational. And if they can be trusted to always remain so.
Are they? Can they?
I'm with you on this one... and I have an insight for you:
A maximally efficient government is A Good Thing *if* we believe that our laws are rational... which means: if we believe that our neighbors have a rational moral code that they will legally enforce against us.
Since we don't believe any such thing, we need privacy. We need it in order to escape punishment (legal, social, emotional) at the hand of irrational moral codes. Those codes would have us doing stupid things, such as (for example) refrain from spanking an unruly child who is resistant to the more fashionable forms of inflicted discomfort.
In order to have privacy, we have to sacrifice some of our government's enforcement efficiency. (Either that, or we need ironclad protections for the data being gathered... but only a fool would trust in such paper walls.)
I know you already know all this in your heart, and always have, as have I. But I find that it helps to have the matter clarified in these terms. Privacy gives us the ability to do what stupid people believe to be wrong.
Funny, when I dictated this sentence to my computer today, it came out "Is Slashdot's Shameless Plug Recognition Finally 'Good Enough'?"
Today somebody at Dragon got moved to a corner office.
Look closer. We aren't exactly sending in the B-52s to airdrop loads of McMuffins, LOTR DVDs, sneakers, and twinkies onto the Noble Primitive Peoples who are Honoring the Sacred Traditions of Their Ancestors. It's a pull situation much more than a push. Western culture, simply put, is addictive.
It's the Noble Primitive leaders that don't like this, because the Sacred Traditions are invariably religious-authoritarian.
From over here we only hear about people bewailing Western culture, but we aren't hearing the real opinions of the Noble Primitive People themselves.
Not everyone has lost their honor to such downloadable temptations.
It would if we were still a manufacturing economy, where our primary product was widgets. But you, and most of slashdot it seems, are still living in the past. Nowadays, anyone can crank out widgets, and there is no profit margin left. The vital resource has become information.
Western economies are primary information-based now. Manufacturing is for chump^H^H^H^H^Hthird-world countries, who justly desire to pass through that phase and become information-based too, because honestly, an assembly line is no place for a human mind.
But good information is expensive to produce and valuable to its possessor. Movies, for example, are a high-grade form of information... one which you and others seem to value so highly that you would embrace your handily provincial ideology that tells you that information is not widgets, and therefore it lies outside of the concept of 'property'.
I have that exact charger, and yes, it's a glorious departure from traditional dumb-timer chargers. It's nice to be able to "top off" my batteries any time I wish. I ordered it from Thomas Distributing, and one for my brother too, and we're very happy with it.
FTFS:
Am I the only one who read this and thought -- with a sigh -- that there was surely already an odious patent application filed for it?
"Method and Apparatus for Displaying a Cursor Below the Designated Location" -- with the following attached C++ code:
The new Sanyo Eneloop NiMH batteries don't have that problem.
I recently $wapped out my vast collection of piss-poor Energizer (2500 mAH) AAs for Eneloop (2000 mAH) AAs, and there's no going back!
Men produce about ten times as much testosterone as women. It's ~500ng/ml in men versus ~50ng/ml in women, though levels vary widely (most notably with age). Testosterone deficiency in aging men is a widespread but lamentably misunderstood and denied problem.
Also, blacks have a lot more than other races, and Orientals much less... as is obviously apparent in their respective physiologies.
The greatest mistake anyone can make, is underestimating one's enemy.
The RIAA is not stupid. They, of anybody, have money to burn on purchased expertise. They already understand that bits are inherently copyable. And they've been told many times that crypto will always fail in finite time when Eve is given the ciphertext, the plaintext, and the key.
What DRM is, is their attempt to tilt the economics of copying in their favor. In the same way that we are attempting to tilt the economics of spam in our favor. In both cases, the root problem (copying or spam) is intractable... but it can be satisfactorily tamed by a change in the economics.
By raising the cost (i.e. the hassle, the legil peril, the hardware requirements, the software expertise, etc.) of copying, and of receiving copies, above the price of retail media, they'll solve the problem enough.
Yes, you've told us a thousand times that the problem cannot be conclusively solved, but everyone already knows that. They aren't seriously trying to do that. They're just trying to tame it, and they're succeeding. You are blind to this because you've underestimated them. You hang out here on slashdot talking about how stupid they are, but meanwhile BluRay is taking over the world, and most of your and my friends have closed down their bittorrent servers in fear.