Another simple way to reproduce:

1) Turn off immediately switching to new tab
2) Go to the slashdot index page
3) Middle click "Read More..." on any article
4) Try to scroll down the page
5) ???
6) Profit!

But in all seriousness, this can be a problem when browsing slashdot!

By blocking, BitZtream is talking about blocking for a significant amount of time. Technically, all calls are blocking, but there is a significant difference between blocking for a few milliseconds or blocking for a few tenths of a second. For example, reading from a pipe can block for a long time if nothing is writing to the other end; however, you can tell the read function to be non-blocking, and just return an error or nothing if there is nothing to read at the moment.

Obviously, these are system calls. And, being system calls, they are talking to another process, namely part of the kernel. However, this does not make your program multithreaded, because if it did, by that definition, there would be no such thing as a single threaded program on any OS that uses process switching.

So does this mean that it won't take several hours to compile it anymore?

Link to PDF version for those without access to Nature. http://arxiv.org/pdf/0903.2030

No, no, no. You divide the larger by the difference.

See the third definition.

The problem with voting in people with strong principles is that they often expect everybody else to also have strong principles, and pass laws accordingly. For example, libertarianism in the strictest sense works if everybody has strong principles and foresight. In the long run, it is disadvantageous to be anticompetitive as a company because it prevents you from improving your product. Soon (or several years) after something significantly better arrives at a better price than you can give, it will take over. However, people in charge of companies do not think that way. They think in the short term, as does any competition they may have at the moment. Therefore, they cannot be trusted to not be anticompetitive.

This is only one example why strict libertarianism does not work, and also only one example why relying on politicians with strong principles does not work. Thinking of other examples is an exercise left to the reader.

Same sort of thing here. The only time I see even the beginning of my password is when I type too fast in the terminal, and start typing my password before sudo or login turns off echoing.

I would totally buy a pen that could do that! Let me know when you make it!
:)

He said, "...invented to benefit the people...", not "...invented to benefit people..."

You are twisting his words instead of coming up with a real counter-argument.

Note: there are real counter-arguments, but you have not produced one here.

usul@SietchTabr:~$ dict hung

5 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

    Hang \Hang\ (h[a^]ng), v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Hanged} (h[a^]ngd)

          or {Hung} (h[u^]ng); p. pr. & vb. n. {Hanging}.

          Usage: The use of hanged is preferable to that of hung, when

                        reference is had to death or execution by suspension,

                        and it is also more common.] [OE. hangen, hongien, v.

                        t. & i., AS. hangian, v. i., fr. h[=o]n, v. t. (imp.

                        heng, p. p. hongen); akin to OS. hang[=o]n, v. i., D.

                        hangen, v. t. & i., G. hangen, v. i, h[aum]ngen, v.

                        t., Icel. hanga, v. i., Goth. h[=a]han, v. t. (imp.

                        ha['i]hah), h[=a]han, v. i. (imp. hahaida), and perh.

                        to L. cunctari to delay. [root]37. ]

          1. To suspend; to fasten to some elevated point without

                support from below; -- often used with up or out; as, to

                hang a coat on a hook; to hang up a sign; to hang out a

                banner.

                [1913 Webster]

...[definitions continue]...

Emphasis mine. It appears as though our grammar nazis, in addition to being tactless and unsympathetic, are also unaware that this "rule" in English is merely a suggestion, and not an actual rule.

The problem with trust agencies is that they are centralized because all users must be certain that they have the correct public key for each and every agency. Just because there are multiple points does not mean that it is totally decentralized if all users must know about all agencies in order for the system to work.

Furthermore, there is the problem of trusting the "trust" companies. How can you be absolutely certain that the public key you hold is actually the public key belonging to the trust company? What key distribution techniques can be used in this case, keeping in mind that before you have the public key of the trust company, you have no way of knowing that it is actually them. If you think about it, it becomes clear that this is circular unless you have a single trusted source that everybody knows about (such as a government) which has the ability to bring down wrath upon anyone who tries to forge their own certificates.

The only way that you could be certain that the public key you hold actually belongs to the trust company is to retrieve it from them through a secure channel (i.e. sneakernet) where you can verify that it is actually theirs (by visiting their physical establishment as described by whatever agency that deemed them a trustworthy).

I am not advocating a centralized system. However, I am saying that a partially decentralized system is not actually provably secure for most people (see sneakernet counterexample above).

The true solution is to use something that mimics the way trust forms in a social community. Essentially, this works on the basis of reputation as determined by other users/devices/nodes on the network. The basis for it is that in the real world, trust doesn't work because untrustworthy parties are prosecuted; instead, real people base their trust on a "web of trust" -- a small-world network of people who trust each other at different levels based on past experience.

This is the difference between the current system of "trusted networks" (be honest or be criminally prosecuted) and social networks (be honest or you will no longer be trusted). The latter, however, requires some sort of intelligent logic, which I am still working on.

I was thinking of starting with the BitTorrent protocol, but I would have to add so many things to it that it would be unrecognizable. I think that starting a ground-up implementation with extensibility in mind might be a better idea. However, part of what I want to do is make it possible to have multiple backends for the lowest software level transportation of data, and for that I could write an extension to allow bittorrent to be the protocol used there.

I'm not sure why I was modded funny...I'm actually planning this out. It'll be a while before I actually have the time to implement it, but I am planning it.

I completely agree that we need something not centralized. In fact, I'm actually in the planning stages of an entire decentralized system to possibly replace the web. I know, I know...ambitious goals. But I am convinced that the concept could work.

The idea is essentially to create a decentralized web of trust, and have nodes on the network find each other by asking other nodes. One of the advantages is that it abstracts the underlying IP addresses that are used to identify network devices into something that can be extensible once IP addresses become infeasible (for example, in mobile devices whose subnets keep changing).

When you post as AC you don't get notification when people respond to your post, so you have to check for yourself periodically if you want to know if somebody has replied.