voidmain

21 ms·

271.
by voidmain 9y ago
If you view trade as just another production technology, it's pretty easy to see that foreign goods being cheaper is isomorphic to an improvement in technology, and therefore presumably good for overall welfare. Foreign governments cou
272.
by voidmain 9y ago
The old counterexample to this claim (I got this from David Friedman, but I don't know if it's original to him) is that there are two ways to make cars in the US: build them in Detroit, or grow them in Iowa. The way the second tec
273.
by voidmain 9y ago
"John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then yo
274.
by voidmain 9y ago
Reactionless? Presumably the reaction mass would be... air.
275.
by voidmain 9y ago
Matter and Interactions [1] is a great introductory physics course that (among other innovations) makes extensive use of simple simulations (by students). Here [2] is an example of a program, complete with 3D graphics. [1] https:/&#x2
276.
by voidmain 9y ago
It says something about the engineering maturity of the industry that destructive testing in production environments is among the more sophisticated practices.
277.
by voidmain 9y ago
The function in question takes a pointer to a variable sized buffer that only starts with a struct. So your alternative won't work (the declared size of the struct only has room for a single character of filename). And there are cert
278.
by voidmain 9y ago
This plan is roughly isomorphic to option compensation. It has a serious incentive compatibility problem: the value of the options increases with volatility/risk, so incentivizes unnecessary, and even negative expectation, risk taking.
279.
by voidmain 9y ago
I guess I need to add this to the long list of companies I should start, then? It doesn't seem very hard; I explained how to do it downthread. The cost to the client should be reasonable.
280.
by voidmain 9y ago
The client incrementally builds a search index, encrypts it using an appropriate random access encryption primitive, and writes it to the cloud encrypted. At search time it reads as necessary from the encrypted index. (This allows some ligh
281.
by voidmain 9y ago
End to end encryption isn't incompatible with full text search. More to the point, end to end encryption is necessary (but far from sufficient!) to keep communication secure . If you don't need your communication to be secure, th
282.
by voidmain 9y ago
No, hardware bugs could work like you describe, but Spectre/Meltdown does not make the result of executing a program depend on the results of speculative execution. It just makes timings depend on such results. If you can't time t
283.
by voidmain 9y ago
If the companies that are actually leaking personal data had any liability, perhaps they would want to buy software that came with such a warranty! I don't think software warranties should be mandated by law - if that were the case, op
284.
by voidmain 9y ago
If you buffer all I/O until the program has finished executing, I don't think this type of timer works. (The message to the user is displayed only after the process you are trying to time completes, and then when the user clicks t
285.
by voidmain 9y ago
... and then you have to make, for example, scheduling of threads based on "fake time". rr does just this! I think it uses the "instructions retired" performance counter as its "fake time"; that turns out to be
286.
by voidmain 9y ago
The root of all evil is nondeterminism. A program which executes deterministically cannot receive a timing channel! So "all" we have to do to end this entire class of problems is deny all nondeterministic features, including share
287.
by voidmain 9y ago
That approach - safe harbors or a negligence standard - leads to compliance box checking, breaches, and shrugging of shoulders. Ultimately it leads to obsolete standards and regulatory capture that actively mandate insecure practices. Stric
288.
by voidmain 9y ago
Attacks are not asteroids: attackers constantly improve them to bypass improved defenses, and the "improbability" of an attack is no defense. Bypassing KASLR with these attacks is easy and real attackers will do it.
289.
by voidmain 9y ago
And I fear there's little reason to think that the "three variants" from project zero's announcement are the full scope of the problem. They were just the variants that the few people in on this found time to develop exp
290.
by voidmain 9y ago
Denying access to timers is kind of practical for browser JavaScript, and should and will happen. But it's not practical for native processes, because shared memory multithreading provides as high precision a timer as anyone could as
291.
by voidmain 9y ago
It seems like practical attacks rely on having a reasonably precise timer available. The spectre paper uses SharedArrayBuffer to synthesize a timer, which is a recent and obscure feature: https://groups.google.com/a/c
292.
by voidmain 9y ago
"Does it need to provide 4x the utility to be worth 4x the price? No." Exactly! This fallacy of comparing ratios rather than differences in price is extremely common, totally unjustified, and causes people lots of harm from bad sp
293.
by voidmain 9y ago
The ideal would be useful work that is a public good - no one can profit from it individually (other than by using it as a PoW), but the world benefits from it in some way.
294.
by voidmain 9y ago
I'm no expert, but this is weak sauce. If these are the biggest "loopholes" to be found in a tax bill that doesn't just change rates but makes major conceptual changes like switching to a territorial tax system, and whic
295.
by voidmain 9y ago
To add some real world numbers: it seems that federal, state, and local taxes total about 40% of the $18.6 trillion GDP, or $7.4 trillion per year. The broad money supply M2 is about $13.8 trillion. So more than half of all the USD in exist
296.
by voidmain 9y ago
I really think you have this wrong. At the least, you need a better defense of your position. Assume for the moment that the number of USD in circulation is fixed. (Presumably we agree that if the government prints or retires currency they
297.
by voidmain 9y ago
Yes, of course, but those uses are not very important to understanding the current price of gold. Likewise, I own a $100 billion Zimbabwean dollar bill as a curiosity, but that market doesn't put an important floor on fiat currency p
298.
by voidmain 9y ago
"So when Japan said they would accept Bitcoin for payment of taxes ... ?" I'm not able to find any reference to such a move, which I would think would be widely reported in English. So I suspect you may have your facts wrong.
299.
by voidmain 9y ago
@patrick Every American participating in that economy must pay taxes every year on their income. The taxes must be paid in US dollars, even if the economic activity uses a different currency or barter. Therefore Americans must come up wit
300.
by voidmain 9y ago
It's really an astounding accomplishment to make a browser developed by a non-profit less trustworthy in this respect than the one developed by the world's largest advertising company.

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