A more recent casualty of the same phenomenon is David Graeber, who wrote a mostly impressive anthropological study, but which included this howler, which he defended to the bitter end:
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages...
Whatever the validity of your other points, I had to balk at this bit:
The authors of Angry Birds have benefited from free education at the Helsinki University of Technology
Virtually all successful programmers got that way by hacking it on their own time and learning on their own. I seriously doubt any university education was a significant cause.
Would you, for example, attribute Gates / Jobs / Zuckerberg's success in software to their e.g. Harvard education? Don't make me laugh. What fraction of present programmers (let alone *good* programmers) picked up their skills in a university class?
Okay, so the educational campaign wasn't the real purpose of the tax, therefore by your argument the education stragey is orthogonal to the tax approach. Thank you for admitting when you are wrong. It's rare to see in online forums, but you are a mature adult, willing to admit when you made an incorrect statement and have been corrected. Kudos to you.
Well, you actually only established that without the tax it would have been slightly harder to find the money for the ads. One percent of tax that itself is a small percent of government revenues is...
There was a story reported on slashdot a while back, aptly titled "Police data-mining done right": they gathered copious data, and found where the crime spikes were (check cashing places on common paydays).
But what makes this different from "departments of precrime" is that the police don't actually arrest anyone in advance, but rather, show up ready at the places where they predicted crime to happen, and then wait for the illegal act to be imminent or in progress.
That, my friends, is how the police can use the data *correctly*.
Furthermore, it's not a case of some cop using his "gut feel" (or prejudice) that "all them criminals're gonna be at check2cash at the end of the month", but rather, using real data to back it up, showing that the police attention was deployed in an objective manner.
Maybe we're splitting hairs now, but when they charge you with "conspiracy to commit murder", they're not "charging you with a crime you might commit in the future" (i.e., murder). They're punishing you for what you already did: take steps narrowly optimized for leading to someone's death, involving the cooperation of others intending to achieve this end.
WTF? You imagine some world where human-driving a car will be banned, but human-driving a motorcycle won't be? And you also think that illegally keeping your high-beamers on is somehow justified because of stupid drivers that won't notice them?
Of course, if it were understood that the password input routine was going to immediately hash the password into a suitably safe string and that was what would be returned in the password variable, then most of these problems simply go away.
I go one step further and have all the hashing done client-side!
Oh, I know, right? Just the other day I was skimming over our plaintext password file, and it was just filled with crap like that! I mean, they think they have these brilliant passwords, and yet they also complain about their accounts being cracked all the time!
Right. Increasing population plus constant money supply equals decreasing money-to-population ratio. No shit. Didn't need an elaborate example to communicate that.
I was just expressing the standard definition of deflation, which doesn't make reference to population ratios.
You think that a declining money-to-population ratio is "as bad as" deflation? Fine, but it's orthogonal to the point.
Sure, I'll try to give you the intuition behind it.
Let's say I have a belief ("theory") that tries to describe/predict how the world really is ("reality"). My theory is sometimes going to be right, and sometimes going to be wrong. Sometimes it will predict an event to happen more often than it really does; sometimes less.
The KL divergence is a measure of how far my theory differs from reality.
The specific way that it quantifies it is basically by asking, "If I go around expecting the reality to be just like in my theory, then how often, and how badly will I be surprised?"
"Surprise" is itself quantified in such a way that if you assign a *low* probability to an event that *does* happen (or vice versa), that counts as "high" surprise. Likewise, if you predict a high probability for something that does happen, you get a low surprise-value. (The math involves taking the log of the inverse expected probability of the event.)
So the KL divergence goes through the world's "probability distribution", and at each point (i.e. experience all events at least once, but with differing frequencies depending on how probable the event is) it compares to my theory's probability distribution, finds how surprised I am, and sums over the whole thing.
The result is a measure of how bad my theory is (i.e., theories that are often wrong get a high KL divergence from the world).
Make any more sense now?
As for the joke: It's saying that information theory is the theory, and any deviation of the world from it is the KL divergence.
IBM actually had a cryptography algorithm based on the TSP once, but they must have found a flaw because it was never popularized
There are cryptosystems based on the knapsack problem, which is also NP-complete. (The basic idea is that your private key is a super-increasing set like 1,2,4,8... -- a special case for which the knapsack problem is easy -- but you disguise it via modular arithmetic as a plain ol' hard-as-fuck knapsack knapsack problem)
But like with (what you say of) the IBM/TSP cryptosystem, they always seem to get broken -- not universally breakable, but commonly-breakable enough to fail crypto standards. I can't remember the reason why they keep failing though.
Er, not quite. When you lose the private key to a bitcoin public key that has received (net) bitcoins, those bitcoins are gone. You would have to somehow infer the private key from the public key, which is by design impossible to do in feasible time.
There is no mechanism for getting the network to "re-credit" you your lost coins. No amount of whining about how this or that HD crashed or computer was hacked will allow you to regain access to the credits. At the very least, it would require a full fork and migration of the entire blockchain (i.e. global ledger), with full cooperation, to cover up your little oopsie... which isn't going to happen.
As always, of course, if you have the private key(s) backed up somewhere, you can go right on re-spending like nothing happened.
The definition of deflation is *decreasing* money supply, not stagnant money supply.
It's just that our current world is so hopped up on pro-inflation propaganda that even a failure to sufficiently pump up the money supply in perpetuity is, to some, "the same thing as deflation".
Bitcoin is an attempt to remove third-parties from transactions altogether.
Pardon if this is pedantic, but that overstates it, as you next sentence suggests. Bitcoin doesn't remove third-parties, as the network *is* the third party. Rather, what it removes is the need for a specific third party (the "network in general" serves this function), or a 3rd party that needs to know specific details about you.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, really? What practical applications of AI did anything from Chomsky's work facilitate?
A more recent casualty of the same phenomenon is David Graeber, who wrote a mostly impressive anthropological study, but which included this howler, which he defended to the bitter end:
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages...
Apparently, the company was selling reports to employers, but not following principles set forth by the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Call me cynical, but it sounds like their real crime was not being one of the Big Three credit agencies, probably do worse stuff, more often.
You could try designing Bitcoin mining rigs (no, I'm serious), but I doubt you could do much software improvement over existing mining software.
Unless you consider that "the financial industry" (which would be bizarre).
Whatever the validity of your other points, I had to balk at this bit:
The authors of Angry Birds have benefited from free education at the Helsinki University of Technology
Virtually all successful programmers got that way by hacking it on their own time and learning on their own. I seriously doubt any university education was a significant cause.
Would you, for example, attribute Gates / Jobs / Zuckerberg's success in software to their e.g. Harvard education? Don't make me laugh. What fraction of present programmers (let alone *good* programmers) picked up their skills in a university class?
A lot of it be spend as medicaid/medicare anyways.
Fair enough, but I'm not sure why you'd care either way, given as pirate ships usually don't have to pay into these programs in the first place.
Okay, so the educational campaign wasn't the real purpose of the tax, therefore by your argument the education stragey is orthogonal to the tax approach. Thank you for admitting when you are wrong. It's rare to see in online forums, but you are a mature adult, willing to admit when you made an incorrect statement and have been corrected. Kudos to you.
Well, you actually only established that without the tax it would have been slightly harder to find the money for the ads. One percent of tax that itself is a small percent of government revenues is ...
They might have been funded by about 1% of the cigarette tax revenues, sure, but the rest is usually diverted to a (more) general fund.
There was a story reported on slashdot a while back, aptly titled "Police data-mining done right": they gathered copious data, and found where the crime spikes were (check cashing places on common paydays).
But what makes this different from "departments of precrime" is that the police don't actually arrest anyone in advance, but rather, show up ready at the places where they predicted crime to happen, and then wait for the illegal act to be imminent or in progress.
That, my friends, is how the police can use the data *correctly*.
Furthermore, it's not a case of some cop using his "gut feel" (or prejudice) that "all them criminals're gonna be at check2cash at the end of the month", but rather, using real data to back it up, showing that the police attention was deployed in an objective manner.
Maybe we're splitting hairs now, but when they charge you with "conspiracy to commit murder", they're not "charging you with a crime you might commit in the future" (i.e., murder). They're punishing you for what you already did: take steps narrowly optimized for leading to someone's death, involving the cooperation of others intending to achieve this end.
Considering that LinkedIn was storing the passwords unsalted, it's really not much better than plaintext.
The only question at this point is whether their "security" team suffers from mild, or severe learning disabilities.
Imagine typing only "google" into the address bar and getting google.
Add a pause before hitting enter, and you basically have Chrome.
Yeah, and likewise, how is it different from putting up a sign that says "Fucking", which is imitating another Austrian villiage?
What are you talking about? It's perfectly legal in China to announce "Fuck the US, and fuck the US government."
So would that make you Captain or Admiral Obvious?
WTF? You imagine some world where human-driving a car will be banned, but human-driving a motorcycle won't be? And you also think that illegally keeping your high-beamers on is somehow justified because of stupid drivers that won't notice them?
Of course, if it were understood that the password input routine was going to immediately hash the password into a suitably safe string and that was what would be returned in the password variable, then most of these problems simply go away.
I go one step further and have all the hashing done client-side!
Oh, I know, right? Just the other day I was skimming over our plaintext password file, and it was just filled with crap like that! I mean, they think they have these brilliant passwords, and yet they also complain about their accounts being cracked all the time!
Right. Increasing population plus constant money supply equals decreasing money-to-population ratio. No shit. Didn't need an elaborate example to communicate that.
I was just expressing the standard definition of deflation, which doesn't make reference to population ratios.
You think that a declining money-to-population ratio is "as bad as" deflation? Fine, but it's orthogonal to the point.
Sure, I'll try to give you the intuition behind it.
Let's say I have a belief ("theory") that tries to describe/predict how the world really is ("reality"). My theory is sometimes going to be right, and sometimes going to be wrong. Sometimes it will predict an event to happen more often than it really does; sometimes less.
The KL divergence is a measure of how far my theory differs from reality.
The specific way that it quantifies it is basically by asking, "If I go around expecting the reality to be just like in my theory, then how often, and how badly will I be surprised?"
"Surprise" is itself quantified in such a way that if you assign a *low* probability to an event that *does* happen (or vice versa), that counts as "high" surprise. Likewise, if you predict a high probability for something that does happen, you get a low surprise-value. (The math involves taking the log of the inverse expected probability of the event.)
So the KL divergence goes through the world's "probability distribution", and at each point (i.e. experience all events at least once, but with differing frequencies depending on how probable the event is) it compares to my theory's probability distribution, finds how surprised I am, and sums over the whole thing.
The result is a measure of how bad my theory is (i.e., theories that are often wrong get a high KL divergence from the world).
Make any more sense now?
As for the joke: It's saying that information theory is the theory, and any deviation of the world from it is the KL divergence.
IBM actually had a cryptography algorithm based on the TSP once, but they must have found a flaw because it was never popularized
There are cryptosystems based on the knapsack problem, which is also NP-complete. (The basic idea is that your private key is a super-increasing set like 1,2,4,8... -- a special case for which the knapsack problem is easy -- but you disguise it via modular arithmetic as a plain ol' hard-as-fuck knapsack knapsack problem)
But like with (what you say of) the IBM/TSP cryptosystem, they always seem to get broken -- not universally breakable, but commonly-breakable enough to fail crypto standards. I can't remember the reason why they keep failing though.
Er, not quite. When you lose the private key to a bitcoin public key that has received (net) bitcoins, those bitcoins are gone. You would have to somehow infer the private key from the public key, which is by design impossible to do in feasible time.
There is no mechanism for getting the network to "re-credit" you your lost coins. No amount of whining about how this or that HD crashed or computer was hacked will allow you to regain access to the credits. At the very least, it would require a full fork and migration of the entire blockchain (i.e. global ledger), with full cooperation, to cover up your little oopsie ... which isn't going to happen.
As always, of course, if you have the private key(s) backed up somewhere, you can go right on re-spending like nothing happened.
The definition of deflation is *decreasing* money supply, not stagnant money supply.
It's just that our current world is so hopped up on pro-inflation propaganda that even a failure to sufficiently pump up the money supply in perpetuity is, to some, "the same thing as deflation".
Bitcoin is an attempt to remove third-parties from transactions altogether.
Pardon if this is pedantic, but that overstates it, as you next sentence suggests. Bitcoin doesn't remove third-parties, as the network *is* the third party. Rather, what it removes is the need for a specific third party (the "network in general" serves this function), or a 3rd party that needs to know specific details about you.