So I pay for a product - someone signs over a certain amount of Bitcoin to my private key - and I receive the product (the ability to do the same to someone else). So I'm sorry, what's the scam, again? It's all there, in black and white mathematics.
Don't confuse a hash with a key derivation function. A hash is just a cryptographic primitive, you shouldn't use it directly (like you don't use block ciphers directly). It should be fast, and if you need it to be slower, you can iterate its output through itself and slow it artificially.
A MAC like HMAC uses a hash, but it accepts a secret key as a parameter and it does some stuff to prevent so-called length-extension attacks (whereby given Hash(x) you can determine very quickly Hash(Concat(x, y)) for some C and x, meaning attackers can append data to your secret communications and go unnoticed). Speed is important in this application, and your secret key should already have enough security that speed doesn't matter: 128 bits of security (= 256 bit key) should outlive much of the combined computational power of the Earth. (There's 512 bit hashes because, among other reasons, one use of hashes is to cut their output in half thereby eliminating information about their internal state, and then the effective security is one-half of that, or 128 bits.)
Key derivation functions, like PBKDF2, by contrast, have to work with very low input strength, usually 40-80 bits. By iterating the hash 1000 times, you add 10 bits of security on top of your input strength. It's still not very secure, but it's better than the alternative of nothing.
But the very-dark-green-on-dark-green is damned impossible to read in anything except exceptionally well lit rooms, and entering functions isn't even half as quick as it could be. Its whole directory/namespace system is uninspired, and reading input/output from functions is bizarre. There's no easy way to get the argument list of a function without consulting the catalog, which forces you to scroll through all its hundreds of functions or so, and even then it's not very informative (the TI-84 is way better at this even). And so on.
Yes, you can have innovation. The whole point of innovation is to make people's lives easier in ways they couldn't have otherwise anticipated.
EULAs are ridiculous "rules" expected to be enforced after the terms of the contract have been completed (I give you software product X if you pay me $100.)
A service is ongoing. (I will give you service Y every month you pay me $100, or, I will give you service product Y that serves ads if you use your real name.)
So you can post whatever you want on my website and expect to be able to continue to do so? No getting thrown out? No court will invalidate such rules.
What they should and often do invalidate are calling it "criminal trespass". Short of causing measurable fiscal damage, most you can do is throw the user out.
So if someone wanted to challenge the numerous real-name laws (saying you cannot use a nickname), that's not okay to challenge either, I assume? Of course not. Bad laws are unjust laws.
That's how terms work. We provide you with a service, you agree to certain rules, or we kick you out. That's basic property rights.
It has nothing to do with production. Hyperinflation happens only because the government prints money to cover it's operating costs. This bids up prices, compared to taxing the money or issuing treasuries. It's as simple as that.
What? The entire size of the USD monetary supply is only ten trillion! Nor can you take out a loan and use it to pay off your debt that's... taking from one pocket to put in the other.
Printing money does not do anything except reduce the real savings of people holding money or debt. In layman's terms: It bids up prices. There's this thing called supply and demand, you know. It's a settled science, and your statement is about as bold as me saying "We should challenge the physics that says we must be pulled towards other masses at some acceleration proportional to the inverse-square of their distance."
You know what happened to those countries that spent more than they took in? HYPERINFLATION.
Yeah. It's probably worth mentioning it's debated to what extent you can prosecute someone when there is no contract (explicit or implied) to uphold. And more often than not it's the libel and slander cases themselves that are fraudulent, if not all the time.
"Free speech" means the government will not bring force against you for your speech. False and malicious speech, however, is a type of fraud: a different crime.
I think you're missing the fact that there's no such thing as a "deflationary spiral". Likewise, inflationary spirals don't happen out of the blue, not without an influx of new money to bid up prices.
If people knew for a fact that prices were going to be spiraling upward at a constant rate for the next period of time, speculators would bid up prices to that level in the present, plus the cost of time (interest). This is a mathematical theorem
does the perfect free market require perfect information? yes
Absolutely not. If we had perfect information there would be no such thing as risk, so there would be no such thing as money, and there would be no such thing as prices.
Economics is a value-free science: just because it identifies winners and losers, it doesn't mean there is any sort of value judgement on if the respective parties deserve the winnings and losings.
e.g. you can argue that maybe drug prohibition or minimum wage is a good thing, but don't try and deny that prohibition creates black markets, and that minimum creates unemployment among unskilled workers.
Sorry, no. The problem with "'fire' in a crowded theater" is not that it's a limitation of free speech, rather, someone who does so can be held liable for any injury they cause in the course of a lie. Never mind it's completely hypothetical Supreme Court opinion; no one has ever actually been charged with the crime of "yelling 'fire'".
You can't hold people liable for political unrest that they create, or harm that people do, never mind harm (what an ordinary person would see as harmful) that a person causes to themselves. Restrictions based on content is subject to strict scrutiny, do some reading. Almost certainly your proposal does not stand up to strict scrutiny.
Also, TFA is about whether continuing to publish the event is good journalistic standards, not if it should be censored.
You don't... actually believe that the law of supply and demand is in any way comparable to physics or geometry, right? Then again, you compared it to Newton's gravity laws (which are incorrect) so perhaps you do.
You're about as foolish to deny evolution as you are to deny the basic laws of economics. And at least evolution is only a theory, you can actually prove the laws of supply and demand the same way you go about proving the Pythagorean theorem. You note that people prefer one outcome to another (this is the definition of cost, and our axiom in this law). You then construct a plot of how many people would be willing to trade at what price. It's mathematically necessary that as price goes up, demand goes down and supply goes up.
True but irrelevant, as the main use of oil is as an energy source, and if you need to burn more than a gallon of oil to get a gallon out of the ground you're making a net loss, no matter how much oil costs.
If this were true then you would turn something called a loss. You can't use up more wealth than you put out, and remain profitable. (By definition! Unless of course, you're getting subsidized or similarly, though this doesn't fall within the economist's definition of profit, unlike the accountant's definition.)
This, of course, leads to an economic collapse and eventually mass death when the amount of production per person falls below the level of being able to satisfy actual physical needs.
An "economic collapse" is not the same thing as "restructuring of capital resources in response to a change in demand". Sudden changes in demand that mis-matches our capital structure (and debt) is what a recession is. We tend to recover from those relatively quickly when allowed. And you do understand that the price will go up gradually, right? It's not like we wake up one day and boom, $50/gal gas. We choose oil because it's the cheapest, in comparison to all the other things we could use. That doesn't mean the slightest that we need it for any particular end, it just means it makes our lives that much more livable.
Many civilizations have collapsed due to resource scarcity, for reasons outlined above. The laws of physics trump the laws of economics.
Um, welcome to economics, which means the study of scarcity (after all, what does it mean to say "I want to economize my electricity usage"). We're saying we do not consume resources at the same rate until we suddenly run out, instead, we start migrating away as the price increases. Some people will prefer oil squirting up out of the ground in Texas to solar-power electric lighting. Those same people will prefer electric to oil that has to be dug up a mile below the Ocean (which is much more costly). Your argument is about as stupid as saying the laws of geometry trump the laws of architecture. What?
Protip: Don't try lecturing an economist on the causes of the fall of Rome.
Again, consult your local Economics textbook for more help. It shouldn't be my job to correct all your misunderstandings for you. Here's a good one for you (free, too): http://mises.org/books/econforrealpeople.pdf
You don't come across "problems" applying supply and demand any more than you come across "problems" applying Newton's laws of gravitation to the Earth's revolution around the sun, or "problems" when calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Supply and demand is a provable scientific law.
You've got it down that the cost of continuing to develop these resources will increase. This is called... the law of increasing marginal cost. We go after the cheapest resources first, then the more expensive ones. It's related to the law of decreasing marginal utility.
How much energy gets used up in the extraction of oil has nothing at all to do with how much energy is in the oil itself. Different forms of energy have different marginal utilities. We don't heat homes on any large scale with electricity, and we don't power computers on any large scale with hydrocarbons. Different devices are better suited for using different energy sources. It very well may use more energy to get out of the ground, however that doesn't mean it's not efficient . Note that it takes more oil to produce a gallon of corn ethanol than the corn ethanol itself provides!
As the cost of extracting oil goes up, as it takes more and more external resources to pump, the price will go up. As the price goes up, consumption necessarily must go down in proportion to other products, because it will start taking up more and more of people's incomes. This is called income elasticity
At the point when gasoline is $50/gallon, we'll start looking for electric cars. For some people, electricity is already more efficient (remember not all forms of energy have equal utility for different uses). Also at $50/gallon, It'll become profitable to do ridiculous things to get at this oil, for the benefit of the remaining few people who still depend on oil more than any other form of energy (this is that law of decreasing marginal utility, when gas is at $50/gal, it will only go to the very most urgent of uses).
You don't ever "run out" of oil. Grab a stupid econ 101 textbook and learn the rest why.
In 1972, the Limits researchers estimated known global oil reserves at 455 billion barrels.
Since this book isn't freely available online, and not within a reasonable time's distance away from me, how about you go open your copy, and tell us the actual figure that the book lists (since you claim it's not this 455 million barrels number).
Then go onto Wikipedia, and tell us the actual production to date.
But even this misses the point of the article: A higher price will cause supply to go up, and demand to go down. This is called the law of supply and demand, maybe you've heard of it.
Slashdot Mirror
So I pay for a product - someone signs over a certain amount of Bitcoin to my private key - and I receive the product (the ability to do the same to someone else). So I'm sorry, what's the scam, again? It's all there, in black and white mathematics.
Don't confuse a hash with a key derivation function. A hash is just a cryptographic primitive, you shouldn't use it directly (like you don't use block ciphers directly). It should be fast, and if you need it to be slower, you can iterate its output through itself and slow it artificially.
A MAC like HMAC uses a hash, but it accepts a secret key as a parameter and it does some stuff to prevent so-called length-extension attacks (whereby given Hash(x) you can determine very quickly Hash(Concat(x, y)) for some C and x, meaning attackers can append data to your secret communications and go unnoticed). Speed is important in this application, and your secret key should already have enough security that speed doesn't matter: 128 bits of security (= 256 bit key) should outlive much of the combined computational power of the Earth. (There's 512 bit hashes because, among other reasons, one use of hashes is to cut their output in half thereby eliminating information about their internal state, and then the effective security is one-half of that, or 128 bits.)
Key derivation functions, like PBKDF2, by contrast, have to work with very low input strength, usually 40-80 bits. By iterating the hash 1000 times, you add 10 bits of security on top of your input strength. It's still not very secure, but it's better than the alternative of nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I love my TI-89.
But the very-dark-green-on-dark-green is damned impossible to read in anything except exceptionally well lit rooms, and entering functions isn't even half as quick as it could be. Its whole directory/namespace system is uninspired, and reading input/output from functions is bizarre. There's no easy way to get the argument list of a function without consulting the catalog, which forces you to scroll through all its hundreds of functions or so, and even then it's not very informative (the TI-84 is way better at this even). And so on.
Yes, you can have innovation. The whole point of innovation is to make people's lives easier in ways they couldn't have otherwise anticipated.
"Educators simply weren’t asking for them until recently... We don’t want to create technology for technology’s sake"
Translation: "We haven't the slightest clue what the word innovation means or why it's important."
The law does not get to define how gravity works, or what shape the Earth is. Nor does it get to define what I get to do with my website.
The law can be wrong.
Rules are not EULAs.
EULAs are ridiculous "rules" expected to be enforced after the terms of the contract have been completed (I give you software product X if you pay me $100.)
A service is ongoing. (I will give you service Y every month you pay me $100, or, I will give you service product Y that serves ads if you use your real name.)
But you're demanding that you be able to post to my site under an alias, even if my rules say you're not allowed to.
Sure, you're allowed to use an alias (many places don't care). I'm also allowed to kick you out if my rules don't permit such behavior.
So you can post whatever you want on my website and expect to be able to continue to do so? No getting thrown out? No court will invalidate such rules.
What they should and often do invalidate are calling it "criminal trespass". Short of causing measurable fiscal damage, most you can do is throw the user out.
So if someone wanted to challenge the numerous real-name laws (saying you cannot use a nickname), that's not okay to challenge either, I assume? Of course not. Bad laws are unjust laws.
That's how terms work. We provide you with a service, you agree to certain rules, or we kick you out. That's basic property rights.
It has nothing to do with production. Hyperinflation happens only because the government prints money to cover it's operating costs. This bids up prices, compared to taxing the money or issuing treasuries. It's as simple as that.
What? The entire size of the USD monetary supply is only ten trillion! Nor can you take out a loan and use it to pay off your debt that's... taking from one pocket to put in the other.
Printing money does not do anything except reduce the real savings of people holding money or debt. In layman's terms: It bids up prices. There's this thing called supply and demand, you know. It's a settled science, and your statement is about as bold as me saying "We should challenge the physics that says we must be pulled towards other masses at some acceleration proportional to the inverse-square of their distance."
You know what happened to those countries that spent more than they took in? HYPERINFLATION.
Yeah. It's probably worth mentioning it's debated to what extent you can prosecute someone when there is no contract (explicit or implied) to uphold. And more often than not it's the libel and slander cases themselves that are fraudulent, if not all the time.
"No consequences" is misleading.
"Free speech" means the government will not bring force against you for your speech. False and malicious speech, however, is a type of fraud: a different crime.
I think you're missing the fact that there's no such thing as a "deflationary spiral". Likewise, inflationary spirals don't happen out of the blue, not without an influx of new money to bid up prices.
If people knew for a fact that prices were going to be spiraling upward at a constant rate for the next period of time, speculators would bid up prices to that level in the present, plus the cost of time (interest). This is a mathematical theorem
Try paying your taxes with Gold, or corn, or cattle, or any other commodity publicly traded on an exchange. That doesn't mean it has no value.
Sorry, but value is subjective. You don't get to tell other people how much they value what they own and what they're allowed to sell it for.
And if Bitcoin isn't on topic for Slashdot (News for Nerds), then I give up, I don't know what is.
Corporate welfare at its finest.
Absolutely not. If we had perfect information there would be no such thing as risk, so there would be no such thing as money, and there would be no such thing as prices.
The more demand there is for bitcoins from people buying them, the more bitcoins are worth.
You know what else works this way? Every single commodity ever
Yes, and I'd agree with them.
Economics is a value-free science: just because it identifies winners and losers, it doesn't mean there is any sort of value judgement on if the respective parties deserve the winnings and losings.
e.g. you can argue that maybe drug prohibition or minimum wage is a good thing, but don't try and deny that prohibition creates black markets, and that minimum creates unemployment among unskilled workers.
Sorry, no. The problem with "'fire' in a crowded theater" is not that it's a limitation of free speech, rather, someone who does so can be held liable for any injury they cause in the course of a lie. Never mind it's completely hypothetical Supreme Court opinion; no one has ever actually been charged with the crime of "yelling 'fire'".
You can't hold people liable for political unrest that they create, or harm that people do, never mind harm (what an ordinary person would see as harmful) that a person causes to themselves. Restrictions based on content is subject to strict scrutiny, do some reading. Almost certainly your proposal does not stand up to strict scrutiny.
Also, TFA is about whether continuing to publish the event is good journalistic standards, not if it should be censored.
How about we link to Schneier's actual blog post? https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/09/sha-3_will_be_a.html
You don't... actually believe that the law of supply and demand is in any way comparable to physics or geometry, right? Then again, you compared it to Newton's gravity laws (which are incorrect) so perhaps you do.
You're about as foolish to deny evolution as you are to deny the basic laws of economics. And at least evolution is only a theory, you can actually prove the laws of supply and demand the same way you go about proving the Pythagorean theorem. You note that people prefer one outcome to another (this is the definition of cost, and our axiom in this law). You then construct a plot of how many people would be willing to trade at what price. It's mathematically necessary that as price goes up, demand goes down and supply goes up.
True but irrelevant, as the main use of oil is as an energy source, and if you need to burn more than a gallon of oil to get a gallon out of the ground you're making a net loss, no matter how much oil costs.
If this were true then you would turn something called a loss. You can't use up more wealth than you put out, and remain profitable. (By definition! Unless of course, you're getting subsidized or similarly, though this doesn't fall within the economist's definition of profit, unlike the accountant's definition.)
This, of course, leads to an economic collapse and eventually mass death when the amount of production per person falls below the level of being able to satisfy actual physical needs.
An "economic collapse" is not the same thing as "restructuring of capital resources in response to a change in demand". Sudden changes in demand that mis-matches our capital structure (and debt) is what a recession is. We tend to recover from those relatively quickly when allowed. And you do understand that the price will go up gradually, right? It's not like we wake up one day and boom, $50/gal gas. We choose oil because it's the cheapest, in comparison to all the other things we could use. That doesn't mean the slightest that we need it for any particular end, it just means it makes our lives that much more livable.
Many civilizations have collapsed due to resource scarcity, for reasons outlined above. The laws of physics trump the laws of economics.
Um, welcome to economics, which means the study of scarcity (after all, what does it mean to say "I want to economize my electricity usage"). We're saying we do not consume resources at the same rate until we suddenly run out, instead, we start migrating away as the price increases. Some people will prefer oil squirting up out of the ground in Texas to solar-power electric lighting. Those same people will prefer electric to oil that has to be dug up a mile below the Ocean (which is much more costly). Your argument is about as stupid as saying the laws of geometry trump the laws of architecture. What?
Protip: Don't try lecturing an economist on the causes of the fall of Rome.
Again, consult your local Economics textbook for more help. It shouldn't be my job to correct all your misunderstandings for you. Here's a good one for you (free, too): http://mises.org/books/econforrealpeople.pdf
You don't come across "problems" applying supply and demand any more than you come across "problems" applying Newton's laws of gravitation to the Earth's revolution around the sun, or "problems" when calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Supply and demand is a provable scientific law.
You've got it down that the cost of continuing to develop these resources will increase. This is called... the law of increasing marginal cost. We go after the cheapest resources first, then the more expensive ones. It's related to the law of decreasing marginal utility.
How much energy gets used up in the extraction of oil has nothing at all to do with how much energy is in the oil itself. Different forms of energy have different marginal utilities. We don't heat homes on any large scale with electricity, and we don't power computers on any large scale with hydrocarbons. Different devices are better suited for using different energy sources. It very well may use more energy to get out of the ground, however that doesn't mean it's not efficient . Note that it takes more oil to produce a gallon of corn ethanol than the corn ethanol itself provides!
As the cost of extracting oil goes up, as it takes more and more external resources to pump, the price will go up. As the price goes up, consumption necessarily must go down in proportion to other products, because it will start taking up more and more of people's incomes. This is called income elasticity
At the point when gasoline is $50/gallon, we'll start looking for electric cars. For some people, electricity is already more efficient (remember not all forms of energy have equal utility for different uses). Also at $50/gallon, It'll become profitable to do ridiculous things to get at this oil, for the benefit of the remaining few people who still depend on oil more than any other form of energy (this is that law of decreasing marginal utility, when gas is at $50/gal, it will only go to the very most urgent of uses).
You don't ever "run out" of oil. Grab a stupid econ 101 textbook and learn the rest why.
Just because it's not their property doesn't mean they don't own the copyright.
I *own* all the data on my hard drive. I don't (necessarily) own the copyright to all the data on my hard drive. Know the difference.
In 1972, the Limits researchers estimated known global oil reserves at 455 billion barrels.
Since this book isn't freely available online, and not within a reasonable time's distance away from me, how about you go open your copy, and tell us the actual figure that the book lists (since you claim it's not this 455 million barrels number).
Then go onto Wikipedia, and tell us the actual production to date.
But even this misses the point of the article: A higher price will cause supply to go up, and demand to go down. This is called the law of supply and demand, maybe you've heard of it.