You must be some kind of terrorist, to be putting down the War on Drugs like that. Why doesn't everyone understand that it's all for their own damn good? Do we have to beat it into them, or what?!
Any method of encryption short of say, a private cypher, can be eventually cracked.
Now someone will probably make a point about a 4096 bit key to make the effort take years, but consider this: how long ago would a 64 bit key been considered sufficient?
You don't really know much about encryption, do you? Most modern-day encryption techniques are based on mathematical problems which (always assuming that no genius comes up with a shortcut) have an exponential time-to-solve curve based on the size of the problem.
Your "eventually" and "years" can easily be extended to problem sizes which would take a computer many age-of-the-universe time periods, even if you were able to use every single particle in the universe as a computing element.
Having said that, however, if an entity with the resources of the government really wants to, there are _much_ easier ways (which have nothing to do with computation) for it to find out what you're hiding, with or without your cooperation.
Aside from the conversation you're having with the other guy, I'll also note that you are making the mistake of applying a risk calculation based on a large population to your own personal situation.
The genetic makeup & environment of some people is going to make their risk _much_ higher than that large-scale "average" which you are stating. (To be fair, the reverse would be true as well.)
But my main point is that your perception of risk based on the statistics applied on a large population is just as worthless as the perception of risk that you accuse everyone else of using.
To be a useful factor for making a decision, you need to calculate your risk based on factors that are directly applicable to your own personal situation.
Hmmm, after examining a large number of the web pages available, I'll admit that I didn't find the large #s of studies about rice yield decreasing that I remember reading several years back, but the broad consensus of most of the pages that I read don't exactly support your "CO2 is only good" viewpoint either.
Most probably, many societies/countries are going to have to relocate their "bread baskets" or change the mix of crops that they are planting in specific areas to accomodate the changes in temperature & climate. Given how a lot of cities depend on surrounding farmland to keep the inhabitants of the city fed, these kinds of changes are going to be pretty uncomfortable.
In worse cases, some countries may discover that their fertile zones have changed to the point where they can no longer feed their own population (for instance, if many fertile zones get flooded by salt water due to increased ocean levels). In a situation like that, they're probably going to start that their neighbors' land is looking pretty attractive.
I know you were joking, but if history is any guide, "hitting the wall of finite natural resources" is more likely to result in the sound of bombs & bullets.
Seems to me higher temperature and CO2 levels would spur photosynthesis and expand crop yields.
You'd do well to buttress your argument if you did a quick Google to check your assumptions.
Most plants have a preferred window of temperatures to grow at. Increased CO2 levels can counteract being outside the "zone", but the amount of effect it has varies by plant.
Apparently rice (staple for 1/2 the world's population) is one of those plants that get hurt worse by temperature increases than it gets benefit by CO2 increases, for net reduction in productivity.
But it SHOULD NOT stop me from setting the CEO's machine to copy anything from any device.
Yeah, the only thing that should stop you would be that it's not in the company's best interests for the CEO to be able to copy anything from any device, even if he or she might have been given the legal authority to do so.
Even CEOs function on a "need-to-know" basis for their job, and most of them don't need to know (and couldn't process all) of the scraps of information stored on every device throughout the enterprise.
The only thing that unlimited access by the CEO will get you is the inevitable use of such access to do surveillance & punish enemies.
Just think about how powerful an enterprise-level network admin could be if he/she could properly datamine all of the info they could access & collect enough dirty secrets about enough people in the company to take unofficial control of it (through extortion) - especially since he/she could deliver anonymous instructions to his/her patsies. Fortunately, most competent network admins are content (or because they are naturally lazy:-) to just do their jobs.
Yes, but only in government programs. And only when republicans are in control.
Nah, I consider myself a current-Republican-party-hater and even I'll say without reservation that the Democrats do the exact same thing.
You aren't going to get any honesty in government finances (if ever) until you run them up against a really hard spending limit, like a Constitutionally-mandated government fixed spending limit, where the legislators are forced to balance their desire for pork against against actually paying for really important infrastructure support.
The basic problem is that we need a better system for comparing the relative value of patents. I propose that we fall back on the old economist standby: hold an auction.
How 'bout this for a patent system:
* relatively small fixed number of valid patents at any time
* as patent "slots" become available (through expiration, or if "valid" patents are shot down through prior art or obviousness), then people/companies can bid to secure a patent slot for their patent.
A couple of benefits:
1) by keeping the total # of enforceable patents at a reasonable level, you make it a lot easier for people to tell whether they are violating any particular patent, plus most "innovators" won't have to worry about violating a bunch of crap patents for every little system that they engineer.
2) by forcing patent ideas to compete with each other for "value" (how much are the participants willing to pay to grab that patent slot?), you will force all of the participants to do proper "due diligence" on the value of their own patent before entering it into the patent-application process. (Patent isn't going to be worth much if it easily gets knocked down due to obviousness or prior art.)
Of course, a system like this would favor deep pockets, so I propose a 3rd aspect:
_Anyone_ can submit an idea for a patent into the patent bidding process, even if they might not be able to afford to bid on getting the patent themselves. If the bidders think that idea is a good one, then they can bid to get the patent rights for that idea - and if they get the patent for that idea, then the money that they (the bidders) paid to win the auction will go to the original idea submitter.
This should encourage a LOT of people to submit ideas to the patent bidding process, since if their idea gets selected it could potentially be the equivalent of winning the Powerball Jackpot. Society wins, since whoever wins will probably have the resources to start using that idea in products & services immediately
he's actually more left wing than any other president.
Nah, he's right wing, but it's more of the Benito Mussolini fascist government right-wing direction instead of the Liberterian less-government right-wing direction.
(Whoever was responsible for reducing the description of anyone's political views down to a simple left or right direction has really done a lot of damage to the possibility of diversity in our public discussions.)
Doing the same thing on a complex, ~20 stages out-of-order pipeline is very different.
A "pipeline" is necessary only because you are trying to coordinate multiple clock-steps of data so that they don't collide with each other as they are being shepherded through the execution units. With an asynchronous design, the data will shepherd itself through the execution units at whatever rate it can be handled.
Properly implemented, you could create a design where you can have parallel execution units picking up & handling whatever data happens to be available for them, rather than having to timeslice all of your operations because of the need to match your data against a block signal.
Having said all that, since designs tools for asynchronous designs are still in their infancy, verification will be a nightmare compared to the current tools available for synchronous designs. I'm optimistic that this doesn't necessarily have to remain that way - if you think about it, since you don't have to worry about clock skew relative to your logic circuitry, that's a major source of uncertainty that you can remove from your validation suite.
The major problem with asynchronous design, as I understand it, is that all that handshaking between each logic component can end up causing a LOT more wire/gate overhead than the equivalent synchronous logic. The question is whether it will be possible (once decent tools are developed) to consistently create asynchronous designs of equivalent functionality, but with obviously better characteristics than equivalent synchronous designs.
Your assumption is that everyone can get richer at the same time. This is possible only if there is a large amount of resources available that each person can have access to.
My assumption is that, in the situation where there is a fairly small amount of available resources per person (like when you have too many people to be sustainably supported by the planet, for instance), the rich can get richer only by taking resources from the poor - resources which the poor can't replenish which taking it from someone else (most likely from other poor person).
Spitzer has been pissing off rich and powerful people for a long time, with about the same fervor whether or not he's seen as running for Governor. I think he gets off on bringing the big guys down, and IMO, the more power to him.
If he _does_ get elected Governor, I hope every crooked politician & business executive in his state go bankrupt from the dry-cleaning bills that they have to pay to clean their underwear every time he makes a move.
Only in the same way that any other craftsperson is one step ahead of poverty. A cabinetmaker or plumber doesn't need special laws for them to make a living - they just have to work hard and provide goods/services that people are willing to pay for. There's no reason why so-called content-creators shouldn't be expected to do the same.
As an example of a "content-creator" who is making a living, I write code for a living. I don't expect to write one program and get paid every time someone uses it - I provide the _service_ to my employer of generating code, and assume that if I want my employer to keep paying me, I have to keep writing MORE code.
"Intellectual property" has no place in a discussion about the merits or demerits of "true capitalism", since it is a purely legal definition with no basis in natural law which provides no additional value to buyers & sellers who are not the "owner" of the IP.
By your standard of "if it makes a lot of money, it must be capitalism", murdering people and taking all their money is "just" capitalism.
I highly suggest that you reexamine your beliefs about capitalism to include the concept that every transaction in a "perfect" capitalist system is supposed to be a win-win arrangement for both parties to the transaction, i.e., each person is happy with the trade. _That_ is capitalism - not your "anything-goes-money-making" viewpoint.
I believe your fear of too much wealth going to fewer hands is "fixed" by anarcho-capitalism.
Well, I don't agree with you here - IMO, without a systemic way to redistribute wealth, wealth will almost inevitably be concentrated in fewer hands for the simple common-sense reason that it is easier to gather wealth once you already have a decent amount (given that you don't screw up bigtime and lose all your wealth in one fell swoop). The kind of financial corruption that you described might make this process go faster, but even without such systemic bias, rich people will get richer faster than poor people.
Over a long enough period of time, and over a large population, you _will_ end up with a population of a small number of "merchant princes" and everyone else will be the equivalent of indentured servants, living at the princes' whims.
Of course, my basic assumption is that there is a relatively finite amount of desired resources relative to the overall population (which becomes more and more true as the world's population grows), resulting in a zero-sum game situation. If the world population were small enough so that no one needed to compete for resources, then there wouldn't necessary be any bad-for-society wealth & power concentration (since everyone would be filthy rich).
While that's true, the net effect of the GPL is to drive the cost of software down to zero.
The net effect of the GPL is to cause software development to be economically effective only as a _service_, rather than as a product. If you want to keep getting paid, you can't rest on your laurels - you have to keep coding. And in a truly capitalism-based market, this is as it should be.
I am a true capitalist (anarcho-capitalist) at heart, and I believe that earning money requires constant work in the field you're in.
Hear, hear.
True capitalists believe that you get paid for providing desired goods or services for your customers.
If you don't provide desired goods or services, you don't deserve to get paid.
If you want to _keep_ getting paid, then you have to _continue_ to provide desired goods or services.
Expecting anything more than that is just greed, no matter how you rationalize it.
(To be honest, I'm not a True Capitalist - I do believe that for societal health reasons there needs to be a systemic mechanism to prevent wealth and power from accumulating in too few hands - but I'm definitely of the opinion that IP laws have no place in a properly-functioning free market.
One way to deal with excess pork deniably buried in huge bills
Actually, the most straightforward way to deal with excess pork is to put strict, hard limits on how much Congress can spend, like a Constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment, or some similar solution.
Right now, there is no incentive for legislators to prioritize which "pork" items are actually important for the country, except for public relations and vague fears of future financial collapse, both of which are seeming to have very little effect on legislative behavior.
I think the "Read the Bill" act is more of an attempt to put the brakes on the sheer _amount_ of legislation which gets turned into laws. My favorite variation of that concept is to require that any legislation must be _orally_, and _by memory_, read on the floor of the relevant legislative chamber by an elected legislator before it can become an actual law. Legislative simplicity achieved through the max limits of human brains:). Also, some kind of sunset provision so that laws which aren't regularly reenacted won't perform "submarine" attacks on unsuspecting citizens.
Of course, as much as I daydream about that, it would probably only push all the legislative complexity down into the various agency/bureaucracy "rules & regulations", which tend to be complete legal systems on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
ISPs shape their traffic to optimize bandwidth for _all_ of their customers (and their own profit margins of course), not just you.
Ahhh, nostril-based mind-control protection with bling. Very classy.
Are they doing the same kind of things as these guys?
http://www.mechaps.com/
(Saw a presentation of their progress at an Anime convention...)
You must be some kind of terrorist, to be putting down the War on Drugs like that. Why doesn't everyone understand that it's all for their own damn good? Do we have to beat it into them, or what?!
You don't really know much about encryption, do you? Most modern-day encryption techniques are based on mathematical problems which (always assuming that no genius comes up with a shortcut) have an exponential time-to-solve curve based on the size of the problem.
Your "eventually" and "years" can easily be extended to problem sizes which would take a computer many age-of-the-universe time periods, even if you were able to use every single particle in the universe as a computing element.
Having said that, however, if an entity with the resources of the government really wants to, there are _much_ easier ways (which have nothing to do with computation) for it to find out what you're hiding, with or without your cooperation.
Aside from the conversation you're having with the other guy, I'll also note that you are making the mistake of applying a risk calculation based on a large population to your own personal situation.
The genetic makeup & environment of some people is going to make their risk _much_ higher than that large-scale "average" which you are stating. (To be fair, the reverse would be true as well.)
But my main point is that your perception of risk based on the statistics applied on a large population is just as worthless as the perception of risk that you accuse everyone else of using.
To be a useful factor for making a decision, you need to calculate your risk based on factors that are directly applicable to your own personal situation.
Most probably, many societies/countries are going to have to relocate their "bread baskets" or change the mix of crops that they are planting in specific areas to accomodate the changes in temperature & climate. Given how a lot of cities depend on surrounding farmland to keep the inhabitants of the city fed, these kinds of changes are going to be pretty uncomfortable.
In worse cases, some countries may discover that their fertile zones have changed to the point where they can no longer feed their own population (for instance, if many fertile zones get flooded by salt water due to increased ocean levels). In a situation like that, they're probably going to start that their neighbors' land is looking pretty attractive.
I know you were joking, but if history is any guide, "hitting the wall of finite natural resources" is more likely to result in the sound of bombs & bullets.
You'd do well to buttress your argument if you did a quick Google to check your assumptions.
Most plants have a preferred window of temperatures to grow at. Increased CO2 levels can counteract being outside the "zone", but the amount of effect it has varies by plant.
Apparently rice (staple for 1/2 the world's population) is one of those plants that get hurt worse by temperature increases than it gets benefit by CO2 increases, for net reduction in productivity.
Sounds like you found the right studies to justify your own beliefs.
Yeah, the only thing that should stop you would be that it's not in the company's best interests for the CEO to be able to copy anything from any device, even if he or she might have been given the legal authority to do so.
Even CEOs function on a "need-to-know" basis for their job, and most of them don't need to know (and couldn't process all) of the scraps of information stored on every device throughout the enterprise.
The only thing that unlimited access by the CEO will get you is the inevitable use of such access to do surveillance & punish enemies.
Just think about how powerful an enterprise-level network admin could be if he/she could properly datamine all of the info they could access & collect enough dirty secrets about enough people in the company to take unofficial control of it (through extortion) - especially since he/she could deliver anonymous instructions to his/her patsies. Fortunately, most competent network admins are content (or because they are naturally lazy :-) to just do their jobs.
You mean for the oversight of not classifying this incident under National Security?
Nah, I consider myself a current-Republican-party-hater and even I'll say without reservation that the Democrats do the exact same thing.
You aren't going to get any honesty in government finances (if ever) until you run them up against a really hard spending limit, like a Constitutionally-mandated government fixed spending limit, where the legislators are forced to balance their desire for pork against against actually paying for really important infrastructure support.
The basic problem is that we need a better system for comparing the relative value of patents. I propose that we fall back on the old economist standby: hold an auction.
How 'bout this for a patent system:
* relatively small fixed number of valid patents at any time
* as patent "slots" become available (through expiration, or if "valid" patents are shot down through prior art or obviousness), then people/companies can bid to secure a patent slot for their patent.
A couple of benefits:
1) by keeping the total # of enforceable patents at a reasonable level, you make it a lot easier for people to tell whether they are violating any particular patent, plus most "innovators" won't have to worry about violating a bunch of crap patents for every little system that they engineer.
2) by forcing patent ideas to compete with each other for "value" (how much are the participants willing to pay to grab that patent slot?), you will force all of the participants to do proper "due diligence" on the value of their own patent before entering it into the patent-application process. (Patent isn't going to be worth much if it easily gets knocked down due to obviousness or prior art.)
Of course, a system like this would favor deep pockets, so I propose a 3rd aspect:
_Anyone_ can submit an idea for a patent into the patent bidding process, even if they might not be able to afford to bid on getting the patent themselves. If the bidders think that idea is a good one, then they can bid to get the patent rights for that idea - and if they get the patent for that idea, then the money that they (the bidders) paid to win the auction will go to the original idea submitter.
This should encourage a LOT of people to submit ideas to the patent bidding process, since if their idea gets selected it could potentially be the equivalent of winning the Powerball Jackpot. Society wins, since whoever wins will probably have the resources to start using that idea in products & services immediately
Nah, he's right wing, but it's more of the Benito Mussolini fascist government right-wing direction instead of the Liberterian less-government right-wing direction.
(Whoever was responsible for reducing the description of anyone's political views down to a simple left or right direction has really done a lot of damage to the possibility of diversity in our public discussions.)
A "pipeline" is necessary only because you are trying to coordinate multiple clock-steps of data so that they don't collide with each other as they are being shepherded through the execution units. With an asynchronous design, the data will shepherd itself through the execution units at whatever rate it can be handled.
Properly implemented, you could create a design where you can have parallel execution units picking up & handling whatever data happens to be available for them, rather than having to timeslice all of your operations because of the need to match your data against a block signal.
Having said all that, since designs tools for asynchronous designs are still in their infancy, verification will be a nightmare compared to the current tools available for synchronous designs. I'm optimistic that this doesn't necessarily have to remain that way - if you think about it, since you don't have to worry about clock skew relative to your logic circuitry, that's a major source of uncertainty that you can remove from your validation suite.
The major problem with asynchronous design, as I understand it, is that all that handshaking between each logic component can end up causing a LOT more wire/gate overhead than the equivalent synchronous logic. The question is whether it will be possible (once decent tools are developed) to consistently create asynchronous designs of equivalent functionality, but with obviously better characteristics than equivalent synchronous designs.
Your assumption is that everyone can get richer at the same time. This is possible only if there is a large amount of resources available that each person can have access to.
My assumption is that, in the situation where there is a fairly small amount of available resources per person (like when you have too many people to be sustainably supported by the planet, for instance), the rich can get richer only by taking resources from the poor - resources which the poor can't replenish which taking it from someone else (most likely from other poor person).
If he _does_ get elected Governor, I hope every crooked politician & business executive in his state go bankrupt from the dry-cleaning bills that they have to pay to clean their underwear every time he makes a move.
Only in the same way that any other craftsperson is one step ahead of poverty. A cabinetmaker or plumber doesn't need special laws for them to make a living - they just have to work hard and provide goods/services that people are willing to pay for. There's no reason why so-called content-creators shouldn't be expected to do the same.
As an example of a "content-creator" who is making a living, I write code for a living. I don't expect to write one program and get paid every time someone uses it - I provide the _service_ to my employer of generating code, and assume that if I want my employer to keep paying me, I have to keep writing MORE code.
Expecting anything more than that is just greed.
Nonsense yourself.
"Intellectual property" has no place in a discussion about the merits or demerits of "true capitalism", since it is a purely legal definition with no basis in natural law which provides no additional value to buyers & sellers who are not the "owner" of the IP.
By your standard of "if it makes a lot of money, it must be capitalism", murdering people and taking all their money is "just" capitalism.
I highly suggest that you reexamine your beliefs about capitalism to include the concept that every transaction in a "perfect" capitalist system is supposed to be a win-win arrangement for both parties to the transaction, i.e., each person is happy with the trade. _That_ is capitalism - not your "anything-goes-money-making" viewpoint.
And IP laws don't meet that criteria.
Well, I don't agree with you here - IMO, without a systemic way to redistribute wealth, wealth will almost inevitably be concentrated in fewer hands for the simple common-sense reason that it is easier to gather wealth once you already have a decent amount (given that you don't screw up bigtime and lose all your wealth in one fell swoop). The kind of financial corruption that you described might make this process go faster, but even without such systemic bias, rich people will get richer faster than poor people.
Over a long enough period of time, and over a large population, you _will_ end up with a population of a small number of "merchant princes" and everyone else will be the equivalent of indentured servants, living at the princes' whims.
Of course, my basic assumption is that there is a relatively finite amount of desired resources relative to the overall population (which becomes more and more true as the world's population grows), resulting in a zero-sum game situation. If the world population were small enough so that no one needed to compete for resources, then there wouldn't necessary be any bad-for-society wealth & power concentration (since everyone would be filthy rich).
The net effect of the GPL is to cause software development to be economically effective only as a _service_, rather than as a product. If you want to keep getting paid, you can't rest on your laurels - you have to keep coding. And in a truly capitalism-based market, this is as it should be.
True capitalists believe that you get paid for providing desired goods or services for your customers.
If you don't provide desired goods or services, you don't deserve to get paid.
If you want to _keep_ getting paid, then you have to _continue_ to provide desired goods or services.
Expecting anything more than that is just greed, no matter how you rationalize it.
(To be honest, I'm not a True Capitalist - I do believe that for societal health reasons there needs to be a systemic mechanism to prevent wealth and power from accumulating in too few hands - but I'm definitely of the opinion that IP laws have no place in a properly-functioning free market.
I'm sure at least a few security guys' careers were flushed down the toilet a little while after they stated those words.
Actually, the most straightforward way to deal with excess pork is to put strict, hard limits on how much Congress can spend, like a Constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment, or some similar solution.
Right now, there is no incentive for legislators to prioritize which "pork" items are actually important for the country, except for public relations and vague fears of future financial collapse, both of which are seeming to have very little effect on legislative behavior.
I think the "Read the Bill" act is more of an attempt to put the brakes on the sheer _amount_ of legislation which gets turned into laws. My favorite variation of that concept is to require that any legislation must be _orally_, and _by memory_, read on the floor of the relevant legislative chamber by an elected legislator before it can become an actual law. Legislative simplicity achieved through the max limits of human brainsOf course, as much as I daydream about that, it would probably only push all the legislative complexity down into the various agency/bureaucracy "rules & regulations", which tend to be complete legal systems on their own.