It's about giving women a chance to do the same things that men are doing - like run a business, smoke a cigar, and play golf in a golf club
OK, so now that women can do all those things, what are feminists fighting for?
you have no idea how large your advantage actually has been
Yeah, because men like me who grew up in working class families had so many advantages in life compared to women who grew up in suburbs and had private tutors to help them get into college -- where women now make up the majority. Feminists love suburban women, because they are best able to live the feminist ideal of self-empowerment. Symbols of success are what feminists really care about -- running successful businesses, smoking cigars, and playing golf. Feminists are not interested in women who work on railroads (like my mother did), because it conflicts with their own preconceived notion about what everyone wants.
OK, cool, women are better at some things. Men are also better at some things, but where are the people parading those results in the media? Nobody tries to "level the playing field" when it comes to things that women are better at, unlike people who want to make fire department physical exams less challenging so that women will have a better chance:
As long as the public continuously hears that women are as capable or better than men, it will weaken their preexisting notion that men are better in some fields. It makes no difference whether or not it is true, whether or not studies support a claim, or whether or not studies that present a different result are left out. The feminist goal is to change society, not to present accurate information about anything, and logic and reason are irrelevant to effecting change.
I hate this notion people have that research is somehow censored to be politically correct and that it is therefore not trustworthy.
As long as the research is only discussed among educated researchers, you are correct. Yet if some scientist gets on TV and says that women are somehow less able than men to perform some task, politics kicks in -- the researcher is obviously a misogynist (unless the researcher is a woman, in which case she is just misguided). It does not matter what the results say, what matters is that nobody ever publicly suggests that women are less capable.
The secret service was made responsible for computer crime investigations in 1984, as part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act (the same act that allows police forces to recycle the proceeds from asset forfeitures into their own budgets). The secret service was involved in numerous computer crime cases in the late 80s and early 90s, and had to back off somewhat after some high profile embarrassments. Somewhat telling that the bill that resulted in vast civil rights violations in America was passed in 1984, don't you think?
You probably would not go to prison. The prosecutor would basically have no evidence (assuming you do not have child pornography on your hard drive), and you would have all the reasonable doubt in the world due to your open wifi access point. Now, the difficulty with this approach is that you need to have nothing incriminating in your home; when the police show up and see a bong sitting on your table, they'll just add that to the charges against you.
The spender prepares N tokens, which each contain K hashes of pairs of XOR shares of the spender's identity and a randomly chosen serial number, and uses blinding to send copies to the bank (blinding means the bank cannot see the tokens, but can still sign them).
The bank chooses N-1 to be unblinded, to check that the tokens are valid. If any token is invalid, the spender is trying to cheat and appropriate action may be taken (e.g. the spender can be arrested, have his identity blacklisted, etc.). The spender also reveals the XOR shares for each blinded token, which the bank checks for consistency with the hashes and with the spender's identity.
The bank signs the remaining blinded token, which can now be spent.
Transaction Protocol
The spender gives the merchant a token.
The merchant checks the token for a valid signature from the bank.
The merchant sends the spender a randomly generated K bit string.
For each bit in the string b[i], the sender reveals x[i,b[i]], one of two XOR shares of his identity (the other will be required to compute his identity).
The merchant accepts the payment if each of the shares is consistent with the hash
Now, if the spender tries to double-spend, it is almost impossible for the spender to avoid reveal both of the XOR shares in some position i. When the merchants deposit the payments in the bank, the bank checks to see if the serial number has been deposited before; if it has, the bank checks the received shares of the spender identity, and if these differ in any position then the spender cheated and his identity will be revealed (by XORing the shares). If all of the shares are identical, the merchant is trying to cheat by making a double-deposit which will be rejected.
Clearly, this is not a perfect system; it is pretty inefficient (quadratic token sizes in the security parameter and correspondingly heavy storage requirements for the bank), and it does not allow arbitrary-length transaction chains (i.e. tokens can only be used once before the bank must be involved). It does possess the desired property, however: the bank does not know the serial numbers of the currency units that it issues until those units are received, and spender identities are only revealed in cases of double spending. Chaum published quite a bit of work on this; it is worth the time to read if you are interested in secure electronic payments.
Sorry to be glib, but if I'm the authority, I take the spender's information and issue a copy, now double spending has occurred, triggering the release of identity, or is it just the identity of the second man to the bank that gets revealed?
Well, in Chaum's system the bank does not actually know what token a person receives; this is Chaum's use of blind signatures, where the bank signs a token but does not learn what the token is.
Oh look, the anarchist contingent shows up right on schedule. Why should we have government, when people will just do what needs to be done without any leadership or guidance? Why should we have taxes -- people will just volunteer their effort in wars or other government functions, right? Taxes with money? Why not just use cattle, grain, and so forth?
It sounds like you have a solid plan for managing the world there.
Every single secure untraceable system relies on a "trusted authority" to destroy information that they possess at some point,
No, Chaum's system relies on a trusted authority to issue currency; the information the authority stores is not enough to identify a spender except when double spending occurs.
Or if you set things up so that a single transaction leaves you with one equation in two variables, and a second transaction with the same token leaves you with two equations in two variables; the solution to the equations reveals the identity of the spender.
We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies)
Why should we get rid of money? Governments are a necessary thing in society, and governments need to collect taxes in order to function -- and money is basically the best way we know of for governments to collect those taxes.
laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing",
These are two very, very, very different problems. Someone who makes unauthorized copies of some creative work is violating a regulation on industry (which is very much out of date in the modern world). Someone who counterfeits money is basically committing fraud, pretending to have something they do not really have. Creatives works are valuable because of what they look like, what they sound like, the information they convey, etc., regardless of who produced the copy; money is valuable because a government issues it.
The real problem we should be working on is not how to get rid of national currencies. It is how to ensure that every gets to live a good life, a life where they are not trapped or enslaved. Money is how we determine how much a particular person should be allowed to get; it is a way to quantify what people can have, and a way to give people the freedom to choose what they want to possess. In terms of quantifying the problem, we should be working to ensure that everyone has at least enough money to not merely live, but to live a meaningful life, to have hobbies -- to go beyond simply subsisting, simply working to keep oneself alive long enough to work the next day.
Money is a way that governments can organize societies and enable people to have the freedom to direct their own lives. A loss of money is a loss of freedom. How money is divided among people determines the power structure of society; if some people have vastly more money than others, those people will rule, and if some people only have enough money to live one more day, they will be enslaved. The goal should be preventing people from reaching either of those extremes, preventing the formation of aristocracies or slave classes.
Money is not the enemy, it is a tool for managing a large group of people. The legal structure that surrounds money, its distribution and its use are how that tool is used, and determine whether money will free people and empower or if it is will trap people and enslave them. The far-right has worked hard in America to turn money into a tool for controlling people, trapping them in their position in society and enforcing a rigid social structure; that is what needs to be attacked.
Except that Chaum did publish a system where digital cash could be spent in multiple transactions before being deposited. Double spending is thwarted by revealing the identity of people who double-spend, as in Chaum's earlier work. Okamoto also published a system with similar properties.
Like many things in public key cryptography, it sounds like it should be impossible but it actually is not.
It is also a crime to wiretap someone, but the police do it all the time. Judges can grant warrants to allow law enforcement agencies to do otherwise illegal things.
Regardless, I don't see what is wrong in teaching kids both evolution and the evidence for or against it
I agree, except that there is no strong evidence "against" the theory of evolution; there are gaps in the theory, phenomena that are yet to be explained, but nothing that creates any major problem with the theory itself (aside from the fact that some pieces of the theory are still missing).
creationism and the evidence for or against it
What evidence is there to support creationism as a scientific theory? An ancient story book and a bunch of good feelings about it are not evidence.
Let's see...computer programs are proofs of mathematical statements (see: Curry-Howard correspondence)...so does this ruling finally invalidate software patents? Or are we still going to have software patents, and just demand that they not cover statements that are "obvious" to some judge?
Do you think the world would be a better place without the US, the West, and the ability to project and protect principles of freedom and liberal democracy, even if imperfectly?
At what point did the US project or protect liberal democracy? We are more concerned with the profitability of our businesses than with the rights and freedoms of foreign citizens (sometimes we are even more concerned about business profits than with the rights or freedoms of Americans). How are we projecting liberal democracy in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait? How are we projecting liberal democracy in South America? How about Africa?
I know some people might be stunned to learn this, but the primary mission of the foreign intelligence agencies is FOREIGN intelligence.
Why would anyone be stunned by it? The real question is not whether the NSA is gathering foreign intelligence, but what is being done with that intelligence. We know little because of the secrecy; what we do know is this:
What is that? Foreign intelligence operations being used to promote the interests of US businesses and harm the interests of their foreign competitors? We are really pushing liberal democracy with that one, right?
We only push for "democracy" when it coincides with favorable policies for US businesses, period. If a dictatorship is friendly to US corporations, we would never dream of trying to subvert the dictator or promote democracy. We put on a great show of things, criticizing censorship and other human rights abuses, but at the end of the day our foreign policy puts corporate interests first and foremost.
However, they do still have quite a bit of information: where you spent your money, when you spent your money, and how much money you spent. These are all things that I would prefer to keep private.
Someone has to manage and filter the peer-reviewing though
Why not have the universities collaborate on this as well? For all the money universities receive from grants, and all the money they currently spend on journal subscriptions, I do not think it is asking too much for universities (and other institutions) to work together to manage the peer review process. As it is, peer review is a volunteer effort; the only real thing the journal publishers do is to connect reviewers with papers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's about giving women a chance to do the same things that men are doing - like run a business, smoke a cigar, and play golf in a golf club
OK, so now that women can do all those things, what are feminists fighting for?
you have no idea how large your advantage actually has been
Yeah, because men like me who grew up in working class families had so many advantages in life compared to women who grew up in suburbs and had private tutors to help them get into college -- where women now make up the majority. Feminists love suburban women, because they are best able to live the feminist ideal of self-empowerment. Symbols of success are what feminists really care about -- running successful businesses, smoking cigars, and playing golf. Feminists are not interested in women who work on railroads (like my mother did), because it conflicts with their own preconceived notion about what everyone wants.
Women ARE better at certain things than men are
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFD
OK, cool, women are better at some things. Men are also better at some things, but where are the people parading those results in the media? Nobody tries to "level the playing field" when it comes to things that women are better at, unlike people who want to make fire department physical exams less challenging so that women will have a better chance:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-07-20/news/ct-met-chicago-firefighter-lawsuit-20110720_1_firefighters-exam-african-american-firefighter-candidates-female-firefighters
As long as the public continuously hears that women are as capable or better than men, it will weaken their preexisting notion that men are better in some fields. It makes no difference whether or not it is true, whether or not studies support a claim, or whether or not studies that present a different result are left out. The feminist goal is to change society, not to present accurate information about anything, and logic and reason are irrelevant to effecting change.
I hate this notion people have that research is somehow censored to be politically correct and that it is therefore not trustworthy.
As long as the research is only discussed among educated researchers, you are correct. Yet if some scientist gets on TV and says that women are somehow less able than men to perform some task, politics kicks in -- the researcher is obviously a misogynist (unless the researcher is a woman, in which case she is just misguided). It does not matter what the results say, what matters is that nobody ever publicly suggests that women are less capable.
The secret service was made responsible for computer crime investigations in 1984, as part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act (the same act that allows police forces to recycle the proceeds from asset forfeitures into their own budgets). The secret service was involved in numerous computer crime cases in the late 80s and early 90s, and had to back off somewhat after some high profile embarrassments. Somewhat telling that the bill that resulted in vast civil rights violations in America was passed in 1984, don't you think?
You probably would not go to prison. The prosecutor would basically have no evidence (assuming you do not have child pornography on your hard drive), and you would have all the reasonable doubt in the world due to your open wifi access point. Now, the difficulty with this approach is that you need to have nothing incriminating in your home; when the police show up and see a bong sitting on your table, they'll just add that to the charges against you.
Ironically, the DOJ itself uses MegaUpload.
No, that means that you are only traceable if you try to cheat by double spending.
Here is a basic system:
Issuing currency
Transaction Protocol
Now, if the spender tries to double-spend, it is almost impossible for the spender to avoid reveal both of the XOR shares in some position i. When the merchants deposit the payments in the bank, the bank checks to see if the serial number has been deposited before; if it has, the bank checks the received shares of the spender identity, and if these differ in any position then the spender cheated and his identity will be revealed (by XORing the shares). If all of the shares are identical, the merchant is trying to cheat by making a double-deposit which will be rejected.
Clearly, this is not a perfect system; it is pretty inefficient (quadratic token sizes in the security parameter and correspondingly heavy storage requirements for the bank), and it does not allow arbitrary-length transaction chains (i.e. tokens can only be used once before the bank must be involved). It does possess the desired property, however: the bank does not know the serial numbers of the currency units that it issues until those units are received, and spender identities are only revealed in cases of double spending. Chaum published quite a bit of work on this; it is worth the time to read if you are interested in secure electronic payments.
Sorry to be glib, but if I'm the authority, I take the spender's information and issue a copy, now double spending has occurred, triggering the release of identity, or is it just the identity of the second man to the bank that gets revealed?
Well, in Chaum's system the bank does not actually know what token a person receives; this is Chaum's use of blind signatures, where the bank signs a token but does not learn what the token is.
Oh look, the anarchist contingent shows up right on schedule. Why should we have government, when people will just do what needs to be done without any leadership or guidance? Why should we have taxes -- people will just volunteer their effort in wars or other government functions, right? Taxes with money? Why not just use cattle, grain, and so forth?
It sounds like you have a solid plan for managing the world there.
Every single secure untraceable system relies on a "trusted authority" to destroy information that they possess at some point,
No, Chaum's system relies on a trusted authority to issue currency; the information the authority stores is not enough to identify a spender except when double spending occurs.
Or if you set things up so that a single transaction leaves you with one equation in two variables, and a second transaction with the same token leaves you with two equations in two variables; the solution to the equations reveals the identity of the spender.
We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies)
Why should we get rid of money? Governments are a necessary thing in society, and governments need to collect taxes in order to function -- and money is basically the best way we know of for governments to collect those taxes.
laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing",
These are two very, very, very different problems. Someone who makes unauthorized copies of some creative work is violating a regulation on industry (which is very much out of date in the modern world). Someone who counterfeits money is basically committing fraud, pretending to have something they do not really have. Creatives works are valuable because of what they look like, what they sound like, the information they convey, etc., regardless of who produced the copy; money is valuable because a government issues it.
The real problem we should be working on is not how to get rid of national currencies. It is how to ensure that every gets to live a good life, a life where they are not trapped or enslaved. Money is how we determine how much a particular person should be allowed to get; it is a way to quantify what people can have, and a way to give people the freedom to choose what they want to possess. In terms of quantifying the problem, we should be working to ensure that everyone has at least enough money to not merely live, but to live a meaningful life, to have hobbies -- to go beyond simply subsisting, simply working to keep oneself alive long enough to work the next day.
Money is a way that governments can organize societies and enable people to have the freedom to direct their own lives. A loss of money is a loss of freedom. How money is divided among people determines the power structure of society; if some people have vastly more money than others, those people will rule, and if some people only have enough money to live one more day, they will be enslaved. The goal should be preventing people from reaching either of those extremes, preventing the formation of aristocracies or slave classes.
Money is not the enemy, it is a tool for managing a large group of people. The legal structure that surrounds money, its distribution and its use are how that tool is used, and determine whether money will free people and empower or if it is will trap people and enslave them. The far-right has worked hard in America to turn money into a tool for controlling people, trapping them in their position in society and enforcing a rigid social structure; that is what needs to be attacked.
Except that Chaum did publish a system where digital cash could be spent in multiple transactions before being deposited. Double spending is thwarted by revealing the identity of people who double-spend, as in Chaum's earlier work. Okamoto also published a system with similar properties.
Like many things in public key cryptography, it sounds like it should be impossible but it actually is not.
You can't be anonymous (disconnected) while at the same time expect digital currency to remain globally consistant and secure. It's an oxymoron.
Hm...
http://www.simovits.com/archive/dcash.pdf
David Chaum would disagree with you, and published numerous papers on how to create secure payment systems that are not traceable.
Or just not own a TV:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/26/28-not-having-a-tv/
It is also a crime to wiretap someone, but the police do it all the time. Judges can grant warrants to allow law enforcement agencies to do otherwise illegal things.
Did I forget something?
Regardless, I don't see what is wrong in teaching kids both evolution and the evidence for or against it
I agree, except that there is no strong evidence "against" the theory of evolution; there are gaps in the theory, phenomena that are yet to be explained, but nothing that creates any major problem with the theory itself (aside from the fact that some pieces of the theory are still missing).
creationism and the evidence for or against it
What evidence is there to support creationism as a scientific theory? An ancient story book and a bunch of good feelings about it are not evidence.
Let's see...computer programs are proofs of mathematical statements (see: Curry-Howard correspondence)...so does this ruling finally invalidate software patents? Or are we still going to have software patents, and just demand that they not cover statements that are "obvious" to some judge?
Do you think the world would be a better place without the US, the West, and the ability to project and protect principles of freedom and liberal democracy, even if imperfectly?
At what point did the US project or protect liberal democracy? We are more concerned with the profitability of our businesses than with the rights and freedoms of foreign citizens (sometimes we are even more concerned about business profits than with the rights or freedoms of Americans). How are we projecting liberal democracy in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait? How are we projecting liberal democracy in South America? How about Africa?
I know some people might be stunned to learn this, but the primary mission of the foreign intelligence agencies is FOREIGN intelligence.
Why would anyone be stunned by it? The real question is not whether the NSA is gathering foreign intelligence, but what is being done with that intelligence. We know little because of the secrecy; what we do know is this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820758.stm
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN
What is that? Foreign intelligence operations being used to promote the interests of US businesses and harm the interests of their foreign competitors? We are really pushing liberal democracy with that one, right?
We only push for "democracy" when it coincides with favorable policies for US businesses, period. If a dictatorship is friendly to US corporations, we would never dream of trying to subvert the dictator or promote democracy. We put on a great show of things, criticizing censorship and other human rights abuses, but at the end of the day our foreign policy puts corporate interests first and foremost.
Indeed, determining what combination of items you purchased for a given total sounds an awful lot like this NP-complete problem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset-sum_problem
However, they do still have quite a bit of information: where you spent your money, when you spent your money, and how much money you spent. These are all things that I would prefer to keep private.
Someone has to manage and filter the peer-reviewing though
Why not have the universities collaborate on this as well? For all the money universities receive from grants, and all the money they currently spend on journal subscriptions, I do not think it is asking too much for universities (and other institutions) to work together to manage the peer review process. As it is, peer review is a volunteer effort; the only real thing the journal publishers do is to connect reviewers with papers.
Perhaps some portion of the shortwave spectrum could be used for a (low speed) link with the tip of South America, Africa, or perhaps Australia?