Unless you're talking brute force as in "rubber-hose decryption", you'd have to practically have the omniscience of God to decrypt a sufficient bit-sized AES encryption through "brute force" decryption.
If they have broken AES (or know of a weakness in the particular implementation), or have captured the encryption key through snooping of some sort, then that doesn't qualify as "brute force".
The fact that you think that algorithms like AES can be broken easily through brute force shows how little you understand of the nature of encryption.
Actually, the final form of communism is about as far from centralized government control you can get. The big problem occurs because of Phase 2 when transitioning from a capitalist/fascist society to the utopian form of communism:
Phase 1) you supposedly have to instigate a revolution to get control of the society away from the rich fatcats,
Phase 2) there is a totalitarian phase where the revolutionaries assume absolute control in order to reconstruct all of the social & economic institutions to support the new communistic structures (while crushing any attempts by the fatcats to reestablish THEIR institutions), and
Phase 3) eventually everyone lives in little communes caring for each other (hence the name communism) and the political power is supposed to flow UP from those little communes.
I have forgotten just about all of the details, but this was the gist of what I remember reading (a long, long time ago) about Marxist Communism.
Needless to say, there hasn't been a major attempt at communism yet that made it past step #2. Somehow, the revolutionaries always seem to get stuck at that phase stamping out just one more discontented "enemy of the State" before they're quite ready to give up power.
The cynical might even suspect that, at least in some cases, the revolutionaries never actually intended to get past step #2, and instead were just using the "workers unite!" propaganda to build their revolutionary armies from the poor, desperate and gullible.
It's hard to tell because the moderator often changes the names of the companies & individuals involved, plus some of the identifiable details, "to protect the guilty" (and to avoid getting sued). Depending on what kind of transformation was applied, the stories can definitely sound a little fake.
I'm getting to hate that phrase "Never ascribe to malice what can be more easily blamed on incompetence". That works all right when the people involved don't have a history of doing stuff that they don't want other people to know about. When you're getting strong evidence of rampant skullduggery (torture, warrantless wiretapping, incredibly sloppy bookkeeping esp. w/regards to suspicious contractors, etc), then you really need to go about the investigation with the opposite mindset.
If you don't, the people you're investigation will keep trying to divert you by throwing "Never ascribe to malice" phrase in your face. "Oops, I didn't know we were/weren't supposed to do that!" "Ooo, what a stupid mistake!" "Gee, I guess I'm just a moron!", but they could very easily be hiding their corruption behind a facade of incompetence. If you don't ignore their protests & keep digging until all trails die out, then you haven't been doing your job as an investigator.
As far as I know, aside from the description of how the Electoral College is supposed to operate, the U.S. Constitution leaves the question of what process to use for voting for candidates up to each state legislature (one of the reasons why it has been so hard to enforce any kind of national standard on voting procedures).
Given that "intellectual property" requires government enforcement to create an artificial scarcity, business models depending on that scarcity for viability have very little to do with capitalism.
It's not a bad thing to have a machine print out the ballot. You can get nice clean ballot, printed out in easily user & machine-readable letters, and with ONLY the choices that the user has made (no mixing them up with the other choices that had been on the voting selection lists). It's also easier to have specialized machines that can help the disabled to vote without help.
Letting machines do the COUNTING is much more problematic.
You want "normal" market forces, but want to replace a system that encourages the market to innovate, with one where innovation is done by a central social body?
Uh...no, that's not what I meant. What part of my response are you translating to mean "central social body"? Any group of citizens (or companies) can pool their resources to finance research which will encourage innovation. It doesn't need to be government/taxpayer-financed (although it COULD be if enough voters agree its worth it), and you can have many such pools based on what kinds of innovation the different groups want to encourage.
The point is that, it is much more straightforward to encourage innovation by just collecting resources together & directly applying it for the purpose of encouraging innovation, rather than indirectly trying to "encourage" innovation by government-enforced artificial scarcity.
In a capitalistic system, there is a way to provide for persons to have a limited monopoly on "inventions", which is what the patent process is designed for.
The moment you introduce the concept of government-enforced "limited monopoly", you are no longer dealing with capitalism. As I mentioned, the whole idea of "intellectual property" is an attempt at social engineering by using government-enforced artificial scarcity. Frankly, this is more socialist than the idea of a bunch of citizens pooling & spending resources to try and encourage innovation directly.
I'll ask you the same question I ask any other IP proponent: do you have a reference to some kind of peer-reviewed study which indicates that intellectual property laws have demonstrably encouraged net innovation? I'm not talking about anecdotal evidence like "I heard about this one guy who came up with a cool patent & got lots of money", I'm talking about either some sort of statistical study which shows "rates of innovation" between societies with & without intellectual property protections, or even academic studies using simulations and/or market survey studies to show the effect.
One of my big complaints about IP proponents is that they continually talk about how IP laws encourage innovation, but they very rarely have any kind of evidence other than anecdotal to back up their opinion. Most of them have accepted the status quo as "common sense" and haven't really done any kind of analysis into whether or not their assumptions have any kind of empirical evidence of being true.
P.S. If you post a link, make sure it is truly a peer-reviewed paper - the web is full of editorials & opinion pieces by proponents & opponents of IP, but there doesn't seem to be very many true studies available about the advantages or disadvantages of IP regulation.
In the absence of empirical evidence that IP laws actually promote innovation, my preference is to default to normal "market" behavior, which doesn't include government-enforced artificial scarcity. Having a bunch of citizens pool resources to do applied research, however, CAN be fit into a normal market.
Not that I'm defending current IP laws, but some patent and copyright system is necessary.
Only to maintain the status quo. If you're not worried about that, then there are plenty of ways to make a living without depending on IP laws.
The whole concept of "intellectual property" is essentially an attempt at social engineering (trying to encourage innovation) through government-enforced artificial scarcity. It would be much healthier to see where "normal" market forces take us & limit the government regulation to the parts of the market that cause potential danger to peoples' health.
If society wants to encourage innovation, they should simply come up with mechanisms to pool resources for funding applied research, and then make the results of that research available for any entrepreneurs who want to use it. This would be much more efficient & cause fewer market distortions than the mechanisms of intellectual property laws.
I'm not too worried about Obama's "Cult of Personality". Sure, he's building a lot of expectations right now - but that's a two edged sword, especially among the left-wing. Unlike right-wingers, who tend to support their leaders no matter how malicious or incompetent they prove themselves to be (proof: how long it has taken for a lot of the right-wingers to finally get a vague sense of discomfort about what the neocons have been doing to the country?), left-wingers will rip their leaders apart like a pack of vicious hyenas if they feel that their expectations have been betrayed.
I'll leave it up to you to decide which "wing" has more idiots. (Disclaimer: I consider myself a progressive turning increasingly cynical about the entire political system.)
That is why one of the reasons I suggested that part of the public investment into applied research should include helping U.S.-only entrepreneurs to use the fruits of that applied research - to give American companies a small advantage (or big, depending on the complexity of using that technology) at using what American taxpayers helped research.
There are issues such as multinational corporations & their subsidiaries (whether you give them any help), and whether you stop a U.S.-only company that you have given help from being bought by a foreign or multinational owner. Perhaps in the latter case part of the "technology assistance" would include a contract that says if the rights to the technology get transferred to a non-U.S. owner, then the non-U.S. owner is required to recoup the American taxpayer for the costs of the original research. (I'm obviously still daydreaming about the issue, but I'm sure there are smarter people than I who could design a pretty good system of such incentives.)
Also, you are ignoring the synergistic effects. If you also simultaneously invest in public education and the public infrastructure, then U.S. entrepreneurs will be in better shape to take advantage of the results of any public research than any other country on the planet. The foreign competition will help keep them honest (in terms of efficiency), and the American consumers will reap the benefits accordingly.
> And what economic good are all those scientists if all the knowledge they create effectively goes into the public domain?
The economic good is created by the entrepreneurs who take those public domain ideas & use them to sell goods & services of course. That's why investing in public domain research is an "infrastructure" investment, not a means of creating direct economic value.
I strongly disagree with your assertion that IP protection will "protect America's future". If anything, IP protection will strangle America's ability to compete with foreign competitors.
There's even a precedent: when America was entering the Industrial Revolution, it built up a great deal of its powerful industrial base by "stealing" inventions from Europe. The European countries protested a lot about the U.S. stealing industrial secrets, but that didn't stop the U.S. from using those ideas to leapfrog its competitors into an economic powerhouse.
Doesn't that sound similar to the relationship that the U.S. has with China right now? What could the U.S. possibly offer China that would be worth China deliberately ignoring all those good inventions that it can use to build itself up?
If America really wanted to maintain a technological lead, it would be investing in educating its citizens in hard math & science, investing in applied research, and helping U.S.-only companies use the fruits of that research.
Instead, we get "leaders" who defund public education & finance anti-science propaganda campaigns, and who seem to think that America can keep a position of "world leadership" by waving its military dick around. Between those kinds of leaders & the idiots who blindly follow them, America has pretty much set itself up to be given the "Most Deserving of Becoming a Has-Been Superpower" award.
Just because you can't understand how it's possible to make money based on ideas without IP laws doesn't mean it isn't possible. It just means that you're not imaginative enough.
That's true of most IP proponents, although a lot of their objections are mainly fueled by the idea that they think their "creativity" is a lot more valuable than it really is.
Your last sentence is pretty funny. I make a living by programming (among other things). I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out how I make a living without depending on IP laws while using a skill set which is almost entirely based on a manipulation of concepts & ideas.
If musicians don't want their music copied, then they shouldn't release their music.
That doesn't give them the right to control other peoples' real private property.
Controlling what someone else may or may not do with something they have purchased is not something "creators" are entitled to, despite what some may think.
More generally, if "creators" don't want their ideas spread, then they shouldn't make those ideas spread. They don't have the "right" to control other people spreading those ideas.
People who "insist" they have the right to control what other people do with ideas should really get over themselves.
"Creativity" is worth whatever people will pay for it. If people won't pay a certain price for it, then it wasn't worth that much.
A lot of people have a greatly inflated idea of what their creativity is "worth", and when reality doesn't turn out the way they think it should, they turn to the government to force people to give them the money they think they deserve.
Many people might find that kind of programming environment valuable, but there are times when being able to define your program as a set of abstract symbols is MUCH more powerful than anything you can visualize (and/or it's really difficult to come up with a good visualization that fits the type of operation that you want to perform).
The scary (illegal) exception to the ability of Congress to cut off funding is the very high probability that the at least some of the "Black Ops" programs are being funded by illegal smuggling of stuff like drugs, arms, etc. Because those kinds of programs are externally funded, Congress would not be able to terminate them simply by withholding funding.
From a twisted amoral viewpoint, it's logical to fund those programs in that manner: not only can they conceal from ANYONE (including Congress) where and how much they are making & spending, but doing that sort of illegal activity probably also gives them all sorts of useful underground contacts.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're talking brute force as in "rubber-hose decryption", you'd have to practically have the omniscience of God to decrypt a sufficient bit-sized AES encryption through "brute force" decryption.
If they have broken AES (or know of a weakness in the particular implementation), or have captured the encryption key through snooping of some sort, then that doesn't qualify as "brute force".
The fact that you think that algorithms like AES can be broken easily through brute force shows how little you understand of the nature of encryption.
Actually, the final form of communism is about as far from centralized government control you can get. The big problem occurs because of Phase 2 when transitioning from a capitalist/fascist society to the utopian form of communism:
Phase 1) you supposedly have to instigate a revolution to get control of the society away from the rich fatcats,
Phase 2) there is a totalitarian phase where the revolutionaries assume absolute control in order to reconstruct all of the social & economic institutions to support the new communistic structures (while crushing any attempts by the fatcats to reestablish THEIR institutions), and
Phase 3) eventually everyone lives in little communes caring for each other (hence the name communism) and the political power is supposed to flow UP from those little communes.
I have forgotten just about all of the details, but this was the gist of what I remember reading (a long, long time ago) about Marxist Communism.
Needless to say, there hasn't been a major attempt at communism yet that made it past step #2. Somehow, the revolutionaries always seem to get stuck at that phase stamping out just one more discontented "enemy of the State" before they're quite ready to give up power.
The cynical might even suspect that, at least in some cases, the revolutionaries never actually intended to get past step #2, and instead were just using the "workers unite!" propaganda to build their revolutionary armies from the poor, desperate and gullible.
It's hard to tell because the moderator often changes the names of the companies & individuals involved, plus some of the identifiable details, "to protect the guilty" (and to avoid getting sued). Depending on what kind of transformation was applied, the stories can definitely sound a little fake.
I'm getting to hate that phrase "Never ascribe to malice what can be more easily blamed on incompetence". That works all right when the people involved don't have a history of doing stuff that they don't want other people to know about. When you're getting strong evidence of rampant skullduggery (torture, warrantless wiretapping, incredibly sloppy bookkeeping esp. w/regards to suspicious contractors, etc), then you really need to go about the investigation with the opposite mindset.
If you don't, the people you're investigation will keep trying to divert you by throwing "Never ascribe to malice" phrase in your face. "Oops, I didn't know we were/weren't supposed to do that!" "Ooo, what a stupid mistake!" "Gee, I guess I'm just a moron!", but they could very easily be hiding their corruption behind a facade of incompetence. If you don't ignore their protests & keep digging until all trails die out, then you haven't been doing your job as an investigator.
As far as I know, aside from the description of how the Electoral College is supposed to operate, the U.S. Constitution leaves the question of what process to use for voting for candidates up to each state legislature (one of the reasons why it has been so hard to enforce any kind of national standard on voting procedures).
"Approval voting" FTW. It has most of the benefits of IRV, plus it's easier to explain to layman.
Given that "intellectual property" requires government enforcement to create an artificial scarcity, business models depending on that scarcity for viability have very little to do with capitalism.
Can the judge reject the plaintiff's motion to dismiss the case?
It's not a bad thing to have a machine print out the ballot. You can get nice clean ballot, printed out in easily user & machine-readable letters, and with ONLY the choices that the user has made (no mixing them up with the other choices that had been on the voting selection lists). It's also easier to have specialized machines that can help the disabled to vote without help.
Letting machines do the COUNTING is much more problematic.
Isn't it annoying when you can't quite tell? :P
Hey, and if you keep .zip-ing your data over and over, you'll eventually be able to store all of it in 0 space! Wow, that's clever!
If each one-time pad is used to send the next pad, where is there any room for the message?
Uh...no, that's not what I meant. What part of my response are you translating to mean "central social body"? Any group of citizens (or companies) can pool their resources to finance research which will encourage innovation. It doesn't need to be government/taxpayer-financed (although it COULD be if enough voters agree its worth it), and you can have many such pools based on what kinds of innovation the different groups want to encourage.
The point is that, it is much more straightforward to encourage innovation by just collecting resources together & directly applying it for the purpose of encouraging innovation, rather than indirectly trying to "encourage" innovation by government-enforced artificial scarcity.
The scary thing is, this has already happened a few times, with each new instantiation of the universe being more bizarre than the last. :-P
The moment you introduce the concept of government-enforced "limited monopoly", you are no longer dealing with capitalism. As I mentioned, the whole idea of "intellectual property" is an attempt at social engineering by using government-enforced artificial scarcity. Frankly, this is more socialist than the idea of a bunch of citizens pooling & spending resources to try and encourage innovation directly.
I'll ask you the same question I ask any other IP proponent: do you have a reference to some kind of peer-reviewed study which indicates that intellectual property laws have demonstrably encouraged net innovation? I'm not talking about anecdotal evidence like "I heard about this one guy who came up with a cool patent & got lots of money", I'm talking about either some sort of statistical study which shows "rates of innovation" between societies with & without intellectual property protections, or even academic studies using simulations and/or market survey studies to show the effect.
One of my big complaints about IP proponents is that they continually talk about how IP laws encourage innovation, but they very rarely have any kind of evidence other than anecdotal to back up their opinion. Most of them have accepted the status quo as "common sense" and haven't really done any kind of analysis into whether or not their assumptions have any kind of empirical evidence of being true.
P.S. If you post a link, make sure it is truly a peer-reviewed paper - the web is full of editorials & opinion pieces by proponents & opponents of IP, but there doesn't seem to be very many true studies available about the advantages or disadvantages of IP regulation.
In the absence of empirical evidence that IP laws actually promote innovation, my preference is to default to normal "market" behavior, which doesn't include government-enforced artificial scarcity. Having a bunch of citizens pool resources to do applied research, however, CAN be fit into a normal market.
Only to maintain the status quo. If you're not worried about that, then there are plenty of ways to make a living without depending on IP laws.
The whole concept of "intellectual property" is essentially an attempt at social engineering (trying to encourage innovation) through government-enforced artificial scarcity. It would be much healthier to see where "normal" market forces take us & limit the government regulation to the parts of the market that cause potential danger to peoples' health.
If society wants to encourage innovation, they should simply come up with mechanisms to pool resources for funding applied research, and then make the results of that research available for any entrepreneurs who want to use it. This would be much more efficient & cause fewer market distortions than the mechanisms of intellectual property laws.
I'm not too worried about Obama's "Cult of Personality". Sure, he's building a lot of expectations right now - but that's a two edged sword, especially among the left-wing. Unlike right-wingers, who tend to support their leaders no matter how malicious or incompetent they prove themselves to be (proof: how long it has taken for a lot of the right-wingers to finally get a vague sense of discomfort about what the neocons have been doing to the country?), left-wingers will rip their leaders apart like a pack of vicious hyenas if they feel that their expectations have been betrayed.
I'll leave it up to you to decide which "wing" has more idiots. (Disclaimer: I consider myself a progressive turning increasingly cynical about the entire political system.)
That is why one of the reasons I suggested that part of the public investment into applied research should include helping U.S.-only entrepreneurs to use the fruits of that applied research - to give American companies a small advantage (or big, depending on the complexity of using that technology) at using what American taxpayers helped research.
There are issues such as multinational corporations & their subsidiaries (whether you give them any help), and whether you stop a U.S.-only company that you have given help from being bought by a foreign or multinational owner. Perhaps in the latter case part of the "technology assistance" would include a contract that says if the rights to the technology get transferred to a non-U.S. owner, then the non-U.S. owner is required to recoup the American taxpayer for the costs of the original research. (I'm obviously still daydreaming about the issue, but I'm sure there are smarter people than I who could design a pretty good system of such incentives.)
Also, you are ignoring the synergistic effects. If you also simultaneously invest in public education and the public infrastructure, then U.S. entrepreneurs will be in better shape to take advantage of the results of any public research than any other country on the planet. The foreign competition will help keep them honest (in terms of efficiency), and the American consumers will reap the benefits accordingly.
> And what economic good are all those scientists if all the knowledge they create effectively goes into the public domain?
The economic good is created by the entrepreneurs who take those public domain ideas & use them to sell goods & services of course. That's why investing in public domain research is an "infrastructure" investment, not a means of creating direct economic value.
I strongly disagree with your assertion that IP protection will "protect America's future". If anything, IP protection will strangle America's ability to compete with foreign competitors.
There's even a precedent: when America was entering the Industrial Revolution, it built up a great deal of its powerful industrial base by "stealing" inventions from Europe. The European countries protested a lot about the U.S. stealing industrial secrets, but that didn't stop the U.S. from using those ideas to leapfrog its competitors into an economic powerhouse.
Doesn't that sound similar to the relationship that the U.S. has with China right now? What could the U.S. possibly offer China that would be worth China deliberately ignoring all those good inventions that it can use to build itself up?
If America really wanted to maintain a technological lead, it would be investing in educating its citizens in hard math & science, investing in applied research, and helping U.S.-only companies use the fruits of that research.
Instead, we get "leaders" who defund public education & finance anti-science propaganda campaigns, and who seem to think that America can keep a position of "world leadership" by waving its military dick around. Between those kinds of leaders & the idiots who blindly follow them, America has pretty much set itself up to be given the "Most Deserving of Becoming a Has-Been Superpower" award.
Just because you can't understand how it's possible to make money based on ideas without IP laws doesn't mean it isn't possible. It just means that you're not imaginative enough.
That's true of most IP proponents, although a lot of their objections are mainly fueled by the idea that they think their "creativity" is a lot more valuable than it really is.
Your last sentence is pretty funny. I make a living by programming (among other things). I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out how I make a living without depending on IP laws while using a skill set which is almost entirely based on a manipulation of concepts & ideas.
If musicians don't want their music copied, then they shouldn't release their music.
That doesn't give them the right to control other peoples' real private property.
Controlling what someone else may or may not do with something they have purchased is not something "creators" are entitled to, despite what some may think.
More generally, if "creators" don't want their ideas spread, then they shouldn't make those ideas spread.
They don't have the "right" to control other people spreading those ideas.
People who "insist" they have the right to control what other people do with ideas should really get over themselves.
"Creativity" is worth whatever people will pay for it. If people won't pay a certain price for it, then it wasn't worth that much.
A lot of people have a greatly inflated idea of what their creativity is "worth", and when reality doesn't turn out the way they think it should, they turn to the government to force people to give them the money they think they deserve.
Many people might find that kind of programming environment valuable, but there are times when being able to define your program as a set of abstract symbols is MUCH more powerful than anything you can visualize (and/or it's really difficult to come up with a good visualization that fits the type of operation that you want to perform).
The scary (illegal) exception to the ability of Congress to cut off funding is the very high probability that the at least some of the "Black Ops" programs are being funded by illegal smuggling of stuff like drugs, arms, etc. Because those kinds of programs are externally funded, Congress would not be able to terminate them simply by withholding funding.
From a twisted amoral viewpoint, it's logical to fund those programs in that manner: not only can they conceal from ANYONE (including Congress) where and how much they are making & spending, but doing that sort of illegal activity probably also gives them all sorts of useful underground contacts.