brians

Most Secret War, a tale of the Battle of the Beams and the nascent technical intelligence groups that set the context for the Battle of Britain.

That’s to balance out Traveller.

Ah, but the trick is to get the low tolerance ones. Two reasons: A) then it’s +/- 20%, right? Which means you bucket them and resell the + ones, using the rest to mine crypto, and B) you save money because 5% of 0 is no more than 20%.

Or we could just burn it. In what way is bitcoin more valuable than smoke?

Is it Asian? I'd assumed—with no real support whatsoever—that it was descended from Roman garum, a fermented fish sauce that's a lot closer.

This is very true. Whereas the USSR was run by one man who controlled the state security apparatus, and so controlled the country as an autocrat, Russia is run by a man who controls the country as an autocrat, having controlled the state security apparatus.

That’s a good start! But it doesn’t always help; I have plenty of physical copies of games that won’t work without Ubisoft servers.

Could you point me towards parts of the crypto industry that aren’t scammers, unwise risk-takers, or shady operators?

There aren’t that many places doing planetary-scale distributed computing, with an opportunity to influence total human welfare, so I applied to all of them—and got in touch place whose people, overall, demonstrated the closest values match. So far, so good?

Yes, but it’s specifically using data you published to harm you. Compare Blind, which is engineered to not be attributable in this way.

The Georgist land tax taxed the unimproved value of the land. The tax remains the same whatever you build on it.

Sale price already nudges you to preserve, improve, or augment the value of the land.

So I think your concern either already would have happened, or if not, a Georgist land value tax makes it no more likely. Thanks for the opportunity to think this through this far; what am I missing?

“all the binary formats of the 1990s can be opened today”

Oh, sweet summer child. Scribe/mss. Koalapad. A bunch of Apple 2GS, Apple 3, and Lisa formats. Lotus Improv.

The points about semantics and authenticity are wonderful, but I think the presumption that all formats can be opened is mistaken exactly because those that can’t be opened become effectively invisible and lost.

Yes. Exactly.

Dyneema bags are light, strong (i.e., hold a heavy load), flexible, can have good water resistance and attractive colors—and will wear a hole through in one drag through an airport.

It has happened. Repeatedly. Sometimes at the FBI’s instigation: look at the E911 memo stuff, where FBI pushed AT&T to count the cash value of any computer accessed as damage!

The server has to do an encryption and a decryption. A legit client has to do the pre-SYN dance. In your protocol, I don’t spam pre-SYNs; I spam SYNs with fake tokens. Thus I send only the same number of packets as before, but the server has to do these decryptions! Or I can mix and match spoofed SYNs with pre-SYNs and legitimate SYNs in whatever way finds the best leverage.

Your pre-SYN design is very close to the design of TLS 1.2, by the way. That’s how I knew how to attack it. TLS is attackable in just this way: open a real connection, then lots of fake handshake requests. No crypto required to generate them, but the server has to do lots.

Now that said, BCP 38 would go a LONG way towards addressing this. There will come a day when the well-behaved networks decide they’re not accepting traffic from non-compliant peers.

That’s actually been an issue for some non-GPL Smalltalk systems. What does it mean to distribute the “preferred form for modification” when that’s an image file for a closed-source interpreter? Same deal with GPL’d Mathematica code.

Can you describe a system that is effective when your phone has malware?

I have a little experience with this, designing systems that use TPMs and remote attestation to shut down communication rather than allow forgery or leaks. It’s very delicate to begin with, even if one entity owns all the devices, and unsolved for the general case.

But iOS and ChromeOS seem pretty good.

That can work. Or you can have A use TCP to B, C use TCP to D, and B and C are connected by a very short one-way cable, maybe something optical.

The US government term of art for this pattern is a “guard”, often with a regex or manual filter.

Please don’t spread this sort of FUD. I’ve had cleared colleagues who had nuanced opinions on which pot or acid to use, or who were draft dodgers from their home countries, or who were flamingly out with any kink you could care to name.

They care about blackmail material, oaths to other governments, felonies, and not a lot else.

The point is not light or no-light, push the button or don’t push the button.

The point is to sculpt the life of the practitioner—so that we remember God and His creative presence in our lives in all that we do. Extra work beforehand, moving effort around to clear the Sabbath, then having a weird day on the Sabbath, is a great way of doing that. Acting as a family on the Sabbath doesn’t hurt either!

The orthodox all seem to feel an obligation like that of lay brothers in Christianity. Even there: God is eternal, so prayer cannot change Him. Why pray? It changes us. Why pray unceasingly? For unceasing change.

In most societies, we leave most people at the default shape of life and set apart those who want to sculpt their living of their life. Orthodox Judaism asks that level of commitment of all its members, and so has persisted for a couple hundred years with less change than most.

The storefront was SSL2. It needed major software overhaul that wasn’t justified without being the star revenue source.

Heinlein’s Waldo might be a good thing to read, then. It’s the origin of the word “Waldo” in English.

I suppose it matters why you have rate limits. Just to have them? As a soft failure case before hitting some harder boundary, like memory or fd exhaustion?

Sure, a Kenwood TH-D74A can send messages over APRS. The older ‘72’ could too. So can a Yaesu FT-1DR. Plenty of cheaper devices can too. Now if you look at those, you’ll find some odd ideas—features like a built in 320x240 camera. They’re an odd mix of very young and very old tech ideas, because they’re the products of small engineering teams and weird budgets.

They had two fuses, so they had a 2:1 safety margin! Just like the NASA managers who decided that 30% erosion in an O-ring designed for no erosion meant a 3:1 safety margin.

And if it shoots back, that’s briefly interesting too.

My model 3 has an enclosed trunk. Why would you call it a hatchback?

This is the class that made my career. The idea that humanities sorts of skills – critical reading, analysis, discussion — could contribute to the work of systems engineering was a revelation. That I had the knack for it, and that it turns out to be the core work of engineering, I found later.

The THERAC paper, the X11 paper, the Kerberos sequence—still resonate 22 years later. But the big lesson wasn’t in any of the papers, but in the structure as it communicated that engineering was not a solitary enterprise.

I found it fun. There’s more opportunity for sweetness as you get to know the characters. The arc of the QA engineers is excellent.

How do you put them into the set in O(n), exactly?