Still leaves you w/the problem of individual entities having control over other people's domain names.
We need a system where people can publish the information about their own domain names, but with enough authoritative info. attached to it as it is distributed so that it is easily distinguishable from info. published from anyone else.
I think the DNS system needs major help - the namespace is just so restricted it's almost screaming for naming collisions (instant trademark arguments).
Here's my suggestion: you need a multi-dimensional naming system (where the dimensions themselves can be dynamically defined) - essentially, having each site being identified by a combination of keywords & categories that IT presents itself as (title, name, author, reason-for-existing, related subjects, version, etc), and keywords & categories that OTHER ppl assign to it (where hosted, date/timestamp, ratings, etc).
Because of the multidimensionality, you can pick things based only on specific categories (and either exclude or include items which have other categories, at the risk of getting back a HUGE list of items).
This can be taken a little further by marking the SOURCE of the keywords/categories with known identities (so you can ignore somebody's irritating opinions, or put preferences on some "professional" societies's categorizations).
Take all this information, distribute it around ala Gnutella/Freenet/search engine-style technology, where the publisher of a given categorization of data holds the "master" copy of that description.
The existing DNS addresses could be a subset of this type of addressing scheme (category: DNS, value: www.boing.com) and boolean filters could be applied (e.g., find `category'=`regexp' or (`category'=`regexp' and `category'=`regexp').
With this kind of setup, you wouldn't have to worry about naming collisions, since the names being submitted would always be tagged by the entity doing submission, so you would be able to tell the difference between a key describing CocaCola being submitted by the CocaCola company, or one being submitted by a fan or critic.
You also won't have to worry about anyone controlling a central naming point, since each entity would be responsible for publishing their own categorization/names.
Each entity would also have control over which categorizations/names that they make available to OTHERs who ask them to resolv a search spec (which will prob. make for interesting censorship analysis).
Of course, with this kind of setup, the cumulative keys will prob. end up being larger than most of the data they are pointing to:)
I fail to see, on a very basic level, why they should be better than a good, solid priority queue for traffic scheduling.
Possibly because you're never going to be able to implement a priority queue which will be effective for all kinds of traffic w/o having some kind of dynamic adaptation to the changing traffic characteristics?
BackOrifice or NetBus-style monitors would give you this kind of info, allow you remote (at least command-line) control of the victim's computer (even at the same time they're using it!), collect screenshots, and conceal themselves from the "usual" methods of determining what's running on their own machine - that's what they were designed to do.
As for WHY he doesn't say how he did it - maybe he's anticipating being able to "get" them again, and doesn't want them cutting off his access?
Light can orbit a black hole at the event horizon because at that radius the attraction from the black hole is exactly enough to keep a particle in orbit at the speed of light.
I thought light was massless, and you therefore can't treat it like a particle w/mass orbiting a gravitational source - you have to analyze it in the context of the curvature of space/time which it is traveling through (to the LIGHT, it looks like it's always traveling in a straight line, but due to the curvature of space/time due to the gravitational effects, the light might end up going in circles around the hole, kind of like one of those coin-circling-the-hole playthings @ various malls, except w/o friction).
Of course, if I remember the basic concepts of general relativity correctly, you can treat EVERYTHING, mass or massless, in the context of curvature of space/time (and even "massless" objects kind of have mass-equivalent, by virtue of whatever energy they contain, so perhaps the whole debate is moot:)
BTW, if a photon has "mass"-behavior by virtue of the energy it contains at a point in space/time, and photons can cross each other w/o interference, and you managed to get a whole bunch of high-energy photons to cross @ the same point in space/time, could you cause a large enough bend in space/time to rip a hole in it?:)
As the photon has no rest mass, it is pure energy, and so with its energy reduced to zero, it has effectively "destroyed" itself in its efforts to escape the event horizon.
I thought that the reason light couldn't escape the black hole's grasp was because the mass of the black hole had stretched the local space/time curvature so much, that the light was essentially going around in circles inside the black hole's event horizon, not that the gravity of the black hole was directly "attracting" the photons.
As annother counterpoint, what about criminals who travel? Unless criminal records are replicated centrally a person could just move and take advantage of the next town. My dad (who is a cop) always complains about personal license plates for this reason, many cops get killed because they cannot quickly ID a plate and don't know that they might be dealing with an escaped convict, drug smuggler, etc.
A valid point - in a distributed environment, where each person is only really aware of those people that he or she immediately interacts with, they can only really protect themselves from such activity by cooperating with each other to "watch each other's back". If a stranger comes into the community, then they are going to be watched extremely closely by the members of that community before they are accepted.
On the negative side, if the "distributed" society becomes stagnant (e.g., elements of the society are not being exposed to new ideas on a regular basis), then there is a high potential for severe xenophobia (for example, the stereotypical response of small towns in the USA Deep South before mass media became such a pervasive influence).
The system probably needs some kind of underlying "idea churn" - a low-level, chaotic element which makes sure that the elements of the society don't enter statis. (Actually, travelers, and yes, criminals, might actually be part of this churn process.)
I could prob. BS a little more social engineering, but I'm running on 8 hours sleep in the last week, my last brain cell is shutting down, and it took me 5 minutes to type the last sentence.
True, but when the MASSES have been "corrupted" with propaganda, then they are doing what they "want" to do (even if what they want to do has been influenced by the propaganda).
As far as the mass monitoring is concerned, you will note that I did *NOT* state that the information being collected by the society's individuals go back to some kind of central agency - the means of enforcement must ALSO be distributed. The examples you mention above assume that a centralized organization is using the "masses" solely for monitoring purposes, but keeping the control for themselves.
The whole point is to distribute both monitoring & reaction decisions throughout the fabric of the society. There must be NO centralized point of control, and the "rules" of the society should be set up to resist any attempts to create such a point of control.
With this kind of system, altho there will probably be great diversity (and frustration for ppl traveling outside of their niche), any changes in the functioning of the society must be carried out by the members of the society, and must therefore be accepted by the members of the society, instead of delegating the responsibility for societal functions to centralized organizations which can be corrupted.
While I agree with many of your previous points I have to take exception to this. Many very disturbed people can appear reasonable and normal to others, rapists and child molesters don't have signs on their back that say "I'm a craaazzy kook, arrest me!". These people dont't "stand out a mile", and that's the problem.
From what I've read, I'd agree with this. I also think, however, that handing a centralized authority the ability to monitor EVERYone's behavior is not the best way to handle these cases. The preferable way to handle situation is through DISTRIBUTED monitor & enforcement - e.g., training the members of your society to make rational judgements about the health of the others they are interacting with, and to be able to respond in ways that will improve their health, or to protect society from danger.
Any centralized law enforcement organization has the possibility of being corrupted.
Actually, I live in fear of the people with the guns - both in the government, and civilians. Even if I had a gun, I would still be in fear of them - and they might be in fear of me.
I would prefer that neither had guns, then it would be more difficult to hurt each other. Unfortunately, due to the "prisoner's dilemma"-type situation, if any party has a gun, then to maintain the balance of power, the OTHER parties have to have guns. Then everyone sits around waiting for each other to pull the trigger - and sooner or later, some crazy will.
Re:What's Really Important Here
on
Virtual War
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· Score: 2
Don't you think that any government that was really interested in cracking down on internal dissent would spend more money on lightweight, concealable small arms and body armor for secret police than for bombs that demolish a city block?
Dunno about bombs that demolish entire city blocks, but it makes sense to me that anyone that REALLY wanted a dictatorship would much prefer weapons which don't have the potential of questioning orders.
Just about every repressive agency has dreamed that their "secret police" were this dependable, and they do their best to approach this "ideal" situation by brainwashing their minions, and isolating them to make sure no new ideas pollute their scrubbed minds.
They don't have to worry about that if they have a technological solution though.
I thought that there were already certain mathematical areas of study where the advantages of quantum computers did not apply (in a decryption sense).
In particular, I thought that the encryption algorithms being worked out using elliptical curves as a basis were still thought to be immune to the ability to break them through massively parallel factorization and/or discrete logarithm techniques.
Be sure to tie the format to the screensaver, and possibly to a window late at night, so that the format will take place when nobody is around to stop it.
IMHO, the real beauty of async designs is that your bit shifter op can take 1 nanosecond, your add op can take 3 nanoseconds, and your subtract op can take 4 nanoseconds, rather than having them each take a 4 nanosecond cycle. It really disturbs me to see designs where a multiplication (inherently slower by a minimum factor of lg(bits)) takes the same amount of time as an addition.
Properly-implemented asychronous circuitry ALSO has the quality of modularity - you can hook each individual module together w/o regard for inter-module timing - and if you come up with a better implementation for one of the modules, you can swap it in w/o adjusting timing in any of the other modules - just as long as the interfaces are well-defined and asynchronous.
Most engineers would probably agree that this is a good thing.
I've tried using their stuff a couple of times, and the browsing performance has always sucked - and I have a 1.1MB direct connection to the net.
Plus, you can't run ANY scripting, in order to maintain your anonymity (because there wasn't an easy way for them to protect you from malicious scripts).
They have some interesting concepts, but I'm not sold on it yet.
I didn't get a chance to see that discussion, so I don't know why it was posted. Was the poster(s) trying to make some kind of point about the material? Would their actions fall under "fair use" guidelines (posting the document in order to have a discussion about it)?
Did anyone else boggle at the thought that this sucker is 135 miles long & 58 miles wide, and mainly METAL? Would it be cost effective to go mine this sucker?
Hey, this would fit perfectly if you integrated a bar code scanner into a wireless PalmPilot - a quick scan of the newspaper (or whatever), and then the mini-web page pops up on your PalmPilot for further mastication.
Re:Corporations still not in charge but they could
on
The Corporate Republic
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· Score: 2
Witness the whole Microsoft trial - the biggest company in the world was not immune to being put on trial for all its vast wealth. And even the most international of corporations is vulnerable through the various treaties that bind countries together, and through the domino effect a successful case against a company can have.
The case isn't done until the Supreme Court has ruled on it (or refused to deal with it). Microsoft's money may yet prevail, and even if it eventually doesn't, don't you think this case would've been over a lot sooner if they didn't have so much money?
Think of what an advantage that could be to a company. No matter what other countries may think of them, they are practically immune to interference thanks to their status as a soverign government. They can move all of their assets to their own country and establish distribution channels originating there. In this scenario, the corporation truly does rule.
Dunno - a true government has to do a lot of stuff for the citizens (even if it's not treating them real well) which a "normal" corporation doesn't really want to deal with (since it's generally considered "overhead").
Also, I doubt that "normal" governments would appreciate another government appearing solely for the purpose of supporting a single corporation - and "normal" governments have a tendency to enforce their desires using heavy-duty weaponry financed by their taxpayers.
Still, it would make an interesting fiction story - and I could see a large company essentially "buying" the government of a small country, and then exploiting that country for resources & labor. They'd still have to work behind the scenes pretty much, though.
I'm just waiting for real-time virt. reality
on
ATI Radeon 256
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· Score: 2
That's all I want - full, dual eyeball resolution. Is that too much to ask?
Don't need to be so sarcastic - don't you think things would've been even more interesting than it already is, if you could create custom chips at home with the same ease as you write & compile programs?
Capacitance is still (AFAIK) dominated by the diffusion capacitance of transistor sources/drains connected to the wire. Second contributor, IIRC, was gate capacitance. Both of these go down with feature size.
You might point out that gate and drain area will only go down in one dimension, as I'll be sticking more devices on the bus, but they'll still go down.
Wire resistance similarly isn't a huge contributor AFAIK. In all of the sets of parameters that I've seen, even a long bus wire would have resistance lower than the effective resistance of a MOSFET in saturation mode.
Re: wire capacitances - not true (at least directly) anymore, AFAIK.
Our customers (we are working with various companies working in the 0.13 process regions). They are continually complaining about the effects of wire impedance (including resistance, not just capacitance!) on their designs - particularly because the current-state-of-the-art logic synthesis tools do not MODEL this wire impedence well & end up making lousy decisions which impact the tail-end design flow severely. The relative impact of wire impedance to cell delay is only expected to get worse as feature sizes get smaller.
The performance of individual logic gates have been scaling pretty well as the feature size goes down, particular because companies can spend so much time & computation analyzing & refining each cell. The behavior of the wires, esp. in the context of large-scale routing across large "geographic" areas is analyzed in a far cruder manner, making it much harder to get reliable results.
Slashdot Mirror
Still leaves you w/the problem of individual entities having control over other people's domain names.
We need a system where people can publish the information about their own domain names, but with enough authoritative info. attached to it as it is distributed so that it is easily distinguishable from info. published from anyone else.
I think the DNS system needs major help - the namespace is just so restricted it's almost screaming for naming collisions (instant trademark arguments).
Here's my suggestion: you need a multi-dimensional naming system (where the dimensions themselves can be dynamically defined) - essentially, having each site being identified by a combination of keywords & categories that IT presents itself as (title, name, author, reason-for-existing, related subjects, version, etc), and keywords & categories that OTHER ppl assign to it (where hosted, date/timestamp, ratings, etc).
Because of the multidimensionality, you can pick things based only on specific categories (and either exclude or include items which have other categories, at the risk of getting back a HUGE list of items).
This can be taken a little further by marking the SOURCE of the keywords/categories with known identities (so you can ignore somebody's irritating opinions, or put preferences on some "professional" societies's categorizations).
Take all this information, distribute it around ala Gnutella/Freenet/search engine-style technology, where the publisher of a given categorization of data holds the "master" copy of that description.
The existing DNS addresses could be a subset of this type of addressing scheme (category: DNS, value: www.boing.com) and boolean filters could be applied (e.g., find `category'=`regexp' or (`category'=`regexp' and `category'=`regexp').
With this kind of setup, you wouldn't have to worry about naming collisions, since the names being submitted would always be tagged by the entity doing submission, so you would be able to tell the difference between a key describing CocaCola being submitted by the CocaCola company, or one being submitted by a fan or critic.
You also won't have to worry about anyone controlling a central naming point, since each entity would be responsible for publishing their own categorization/names.
Each entity would also have control over which categorizations/names that they make available to OTHERs who ask them to resolv a search spec (which will prob. make for interesting censorship analysis).
Of course, with this kind of setup, the cumulative keys will prob. end up being larger than most of the data they are pointing to :)
Possibly because you're never going to be able to implement a priority queue which will be effective for all kinds of traffic w/o having some kind of dynamic adaptation to the changing traffic characteristics?
BackOrifice or NetBus-style monitors would give you this kind of info, allow you remote (at least command-line) control of the victim's computer (even at the same time they're using it!), collect screenshots, and conceal themselves from the "usual" methods of determining what's running on their own machine - that's what they were designed to do.
As for WHY he doesn't say how he did it - maybe he's anticipating being able to "get" them again, and doesn't want them cutting off his access?
I thought light was massless, and you therefore can't treat it like a particle w/mass orbiting a gravitational source - you have to analyze it in the context of the curvature of space/time which it is traveling through (to the LIGHT, it looks like it's always traveling in a straight line, but due to the curvature of space/time due to the gravitational effects, the light might end up going in circles around the hole, kind of like one of those coin-circling-the-hole playthings @ various malls, except w/o friction).
Of course, if I remember the basic concepts of general relativity correctly, you can treat EVERYTHING, mass or massless, in the context of curvature of space/time (and even "massless" objects kind of have mass-equivalent, by virtue of whatever energy they contain, so perhaps the whole debate is moot :)
BTW, if a photon has "mass"-behavior by virtue of the energy it contains at a point in space/time, and photons can cross each other w/o interference, and you managed to get a whole bunch of high-energy photons to cross @ the same point in space/time, could you cause a large enough bend in space/time to rip a hole in it? :)
I thought that the reason light couldn't escape the black hole's grasp was because the mass of the black hole had stretched the local space/time curvature so much, that the light was essentially going around in circles inside the black hole's event horizon, not that the gravity of the black hole was directly "attracting" the photons.
Of course IANAP.A valid point - in a distributed environment, where each person is only really aware of those people that he or she immediately interacts with, they can only really protect themselves from such activity by cooperating with each other to "watch each other's back". If a stranger comes into the community, then they are going to be watched extremely closely by the members of that community before they are accepted.
On the negative side, if the "distributed" society becomes stagnant (e.g., elements of the society are not being exposed to new ideas on a regular basis), then there is a high potential for severe xenophobia (for example, the stereotypical response of small towns in the USA Deep South before mass media became such a pervasive influence).
The system probably needs some kind of underlying "idea churn" - a low-level, chaotic element which makes sure that the elements of the society don't enter statis. (Actually, travelers, and yes, criminals, might actually be part of this churn process.)
I could prob. BS a little more social engineering, but I'm running on 8 hours sleep in the last week, my last brain cell is shutting down, and it took me 5 minutes to type the last sentence.
True, but when the MASSES have been "corrupted" with propaganda, then they are doing what they "want" to do (even if what they want to do has been influenced by the propaganda).
As far as the mass monitoring is concerned, you will note that I did *NOT* state that the information being collected by the society's individuals go back to some kind of central agency - the means of enforcement must ALSO be distributed. The examples you mention above assume that a centralized organization is using the "masses" solely for monitoring purposes, but keeping the control for themselves.
The whole point is to distribute both monitoring & reaction decisions throughout the fabric of the society. There must be NO centralized point of control, and the "rules" of the society should be set up to resist any attempts to create such a point of control.
With this kind of system, altho there will probably be great diversity (and frustration for ppl traveling outside of their niche), any changes in the functioning of the society must be carried out by the members of the society, and must therefore be accepted by the members of the society, instead of delegating the responsibility for societal functions to centralized organizations which can be corrupted.
From what I've read, I'd agree with this. I also think, however, that handing a centralized authority the ability to monitor EVERYone's behavior is not the best way to handle these cases. The preferable way to handle situation is through DISTRIBUTED monitor & enforcement - e.g., training the members of your society to make rational judgements about the health of the others they are interacting with, and to be able to respond in ways that will improve their health, or to protect society from danger.
Any centralized law enforcement organization has the possibility of being corrupted.
Actually, I live in fear of the people with the guns - both in the government, and civilians. Even if I had a gun, I would still be in fear of them - and they might be in fear of me.
I would prefer that neither had guns, then it would be more difficult to hurt each other. Unfortunately, due to the "prisoner's dilemma"-type situation, if any party has a gun, then to maintain the balance of power, the OTHER parties have to have guns. Then everyone sits around waiting for each other to pull the trigger - and sooner or later, some crazy will.
Dunno about bombs that demolish entire city blocks, but it makes sense to me that anyone that REALLY wanted a dictatorship would much prefer weapons which don't have the potential of questioning orders.
Just about every repressive agency has dreamed that their "secret police" were this dependable, and they do their best to approach this "ideal" situation by brainwashing their minions, and isolating them to make sure no new ideas pollute their scrubbed minds.
They don't have to worry about that if they have a technological solution though.
I guess if the motherboard (and operating system) supported it, then you could just GET that much memory (and get rid of the swap file entirely!).
Do they use cheap (and relatively slow) memory for this thing, or what? How much would 8GB of 133Mhz SDRAM cost if you bought retail?
I thought that there were already certain mathematical areas of study where the advantages of quantum computers did not apply (in a decryption sense).
In particular, I thought that the encryption algorithms being worked out using elliptical curves as a basis were still thought to be immune to the ability to break them through massively parallel factorization and/or discrete logarithm techniques.
Be sure to tie the format to the screensaver, and possibly to a window late at night, so that the format will take place when nobody is around to stop it.
These concepts are probably patented. You shouldn't even be discussing them w/o licensing the technology from the patent holders.
Properly-implemented asychronous circuitry ALSO has the quality of modularity - you can hook each individual module together w/o regard for inter-module timing - and if you come up with a better implementation for one of the modules, you can swap it in w/o adjusting timing in any of the other modules - just as long as the interfaces are well-defined and asynchronous.
Most engineers would probably agree that this is a good thing.
I've tried using their stuff a couple of times, and the browsing performance has always sucked - and I have a 1.1MB direct connection to the net.
Plus, you can't run ANY scripting, in order to maintain your anonymity (because there wasn't an easy way for them to protect you from malicious scripts).
They have some interesting concepts, but I'm not sold on it yet.
I didn't get a chance to see that discussion, so I don't know why it was posted. Was the poster(s) trying to make some kind of point about the material? Would their actions fall under "fair use" guidelines (posting the document in order to have a discussion about it)?
Did anyone else boggle at the thought that this sucker is 135 miles long & 58 miles wide, and mainly METAL? Would it be cost effective to go mine this sucker?
Hey, this would fit perfectly if you integrated a bar code scanner into a wireless PalmPilot - a quick scan of the newspaper (or whatever), and then the mini-web page pops up on your PalmPilot for further mastication.
The case isn't done until the Supreme Court has ruled on it (or refused to deal with it). Microsoft's money may yet prevail, and even if it eventually doesn't, don't you think this case would've been over a lot sooner if they didn't have so much money?
Dunno - a true government has to do a lot of stuff for the citizens (even if it's not treating them real well) which a "normal" corporation doesn't really want to deal with (since it's generally considered "overhead").
Also, I doubt that "normal" governments would appreciate another government appearing solely for the purpose of supporting a single corporation - and "normal" governments have a tendency to enforce their desires using heavy-duty weaponry financed by their taxpayers.
Still, it would make an interesting fiction story - and I could see a large company essentially "buying" the government of a small country, and then exploiting that country for resources & labor. They'd still have to work behind the scenes pretty much, though.
That's all I want - full, dual eyeball resolution. Is that too much to ask?
They'd still have their property - it's just that everyone else would have a copy of it too :)
Don't need to be so sarcastic - don't you think things would've been even more interesting than it already is, if you could create custom chips at home with the same ease as you write & compile programs?
Re: wire capacitances - not true (at least directly) anymore, AFAIK.
Our customers (we are working with various companies working in the 0.13 process regions). They are continually complaining about the effects of wire impedance (including resistance, not just capacitance!) on their designs - particularly because the current-state-of-the-art logic synthesis tools do not MODEL this wire impedence well & end up making lousy decisions which impact the tail-end design flow severely. The relative impact of wire impedance to cell delay is only expected to get worse as feature sizes get smaller.
The performance of individual logic gates have been scaling pretty well as the feature size goes down, particular because companies can spend so much time & computation analyzing & refining each cell. The behavior of the wires, esp. in the context of large-scale routing across large "geographic" areas is analyzed in a far cruder manner, making it much harder to get reliable results.