Actually, emacs and gcc are pretty triumphant pieces of computer programming.

Sounds like D2. I played for hundreds of hours, farming the high end caves, and managed to build enough wealth on battle.net to trade for pretty awesome gear. But it was a long haul. Very fun, though.

Actually, unless I'm misunderstanding you, that's a key feature of D2 that D3 was missing. I remember collecting runes to build weapons that gave me all sorts of cool abilities from other classes.

Coffee. Splat. Monitor.

It's not that he doesn't know what the term "accident" means, it was more an incorrect understanding of its' meaning.

I know everyone wants an electronic everything, but it sounds like in your situation paper records may actually be optimal. If you have to have a paper system in place anyway, why do the added expense of going digital as well? Sometimes, what is really needed is to optimize the paper system, rather than replace it with an electronic one.

Wow, I'm dyslexic today. I read "how the economy fares AFTER their 4 or 8 years in office" as "how the economy fares AFTER 4 or 8 years from their office." My bad! I'll try to read more clearly next time. I really have heard quite a few people espouse the belief that I had incorrectly mistaken for your actual point.

Claiming that 4 or 8 years is the magic amount of time that all economic policy effects lag behind their enactments is every bit is flawed as direct correlation.

In truth, the economy *can* fluctuate wildly based on day to day activity. If Wall Street doesn't like who is in power, Wall Street will often respond immediately.

But I agree with your larger point; evaluating economic policy needs to be based upon sound economic analysis. Good luck getting that from our childish politicians and kneejerk media outlets :(

This comment is so wrong. When the AMT kicks in, your available deductions reduces dramatically. Virtually no deductions will move the needle for your effective tax rate at that point.

Rich people pay fewer taxes because they can stop taking salaries and pay 15% on capital gains. They can also hide money in places that aren't taxable.

I think there is a practical difference between a 2-party system and a n-party system where n > 2. It's not what you think, though, and I'm not sure which one is really better in practice.

At least from my observations, a two-party system produces heavy polarization. Nowhere have I seen such a polarization as the one in US between Democrats and Republicans. Everyone is sure that their POV is the good one and cannot comprehend how someone can possibly support the other party. As you say, you can choose your flavor of police state.

A system of three roughly equally big parties, however, seems to emphasize consensus. As none of the three parties can hope to form a government alone, they will need to secure the cooperation of at least one of the two other. None of them can afford to become the lone different party, because that would just result always in the other two parties forming a government (unless the winning party manages to persuade enough smaller parties to join a coalition government with the two other parties left out). The result is that you have three basically identical parties that are more or less only differentiated by how they market themselves. Of course there are politicians in the parties that would like to be different, but in order to secure a government with another of the parties, you will need to make concessions, which usually excludes the points of view that are unique to one party.

So, the end result is that you can choose from three flavors which are not really that different. Not that consensus policymaking would necessarily be bad - it's not.

In my country a fourth big party has recently emerged. It will be interesting to see how this affects the dynamics as we've only seen something like two elections where this was the case.

Of course it also depends on the system used in elections. I think the US-style "winner takes it all" system basically forces only two big parties to emerge.

Still, as someone who lives in a country with more than two big parties, I don't think I'd ever want to see a government effectively controlled by only a single party, not for any period of time.

Well, that's exactly the new thing here. You can think it this way:

The program being interpreted is a black box function, taking in an encrypted state and outputting an action to execute and the resulting encrypted state (this is accomplished using homomorphic encryption). The state can include things like values for variables, but it also includes the program counter. What the interpreter does is it loops this function over and over, at each step executing the action it outputs. Because you cannot observe the state (as you never have it in decrypted form), you cannot deduce anything beyond the actions.

Note that any program can be expressed in this form: Essentially, in a conventional processor the black box boolean function you are executing is the function from a state to the next state (to the next instruction or next clock cycle, however you wish to view it).

As to how it's possible to keep the state and the computed function secret, that's the thing done using homomorphic encryption, and nobody claimed that to be easy, but there's no reason why it should be theoretically impossible, and it in fact turns out to be possible. The thing is, you *do* have the state, including the program counter, but it's only available to you in a form which you cannot read.

And how easy do you think watching in a debugger an interpreter execute a program is, even if nothing there is obfuscated?

Here, the interpreter is not obfuscated. You do not need to run it in a debugger, you can read the source code. But the program being interpreted is such that you can only deduce what it does to an input by running it on that input, and you gain no additional information of its workings.

Even not being new to Slashdot, I'm completely baffled by your talk about "an article with little details", considering it links to the paper that will be presented in a conference that has all the details you would want.

Consider an (non-JITing) interpreter. The interpreter is a standard piece of software, which is not obfuscated. The program being interpreted can be obfuscated, and no part of it will ever be run directly on the CPU - every machine instruction that runs is part of the interpreter.

Yeah, like the range of useful inputs for a C compiler.