True enough, but that says nothing about what kinds of processing can be realized in either. There are so many layers of abstraction between the brain and the mind that it doesn't make sense to say that minds are made of neurons. Minds are made of abstract things which are made of abstract things, (which are... etc, etc), which are eventually made of neurons. But they could eventually be made of transistors, what does it matter how the bottom few layers work?

They're just playing the game that's being played, they all do it. For example: Apple's Tax Strategy
They'd be incompetent if they didn't. You can order your own tax sandwich here (pdf)

Oops, I guess I did imply that. I just meant that their are good reasons why the tax code is complicated, and that shouldn't prevent the taxation of intellectual property. The whole system needs massive reform anyway; companies that own a lot of IP already put them in holding companies and then licence them back to themselves.

Hmm.... Maybe they should do this with intellectual property.

The owner of intellectual property would be taxed based on a value the owner specifies annually. The government would have the option to purchase it for that amount, perhaps with an added premium. If the property is sold, the purchaser is taxed initially based on what they paid. Licences & royalties would be limited based on the taxed value.

I was about to say maybe this would be too complicated to get right... then I remembered our tax code.

Found a nice simple explanation of how this works here. There is a secret somewhere that isn't compromised, but it is ephemeral and isn't ever stored anywhere or transmitted. So that's what you meant by "long term". It's very clever. Makes perfect sense now, but it's counterintuitive, at least to me.

Anyway, thanks. I learned something new, which is why I still come to /.

I can't wrap my head around that. The way you've described it, it isn't possible, unless the original intended recipient also can't decrypt it. There must be at least one secret somewhere that isn't compromised (the recipient's private key maybe).

BTW, does your sig ever get you modded redundant? :)

You're right. They usually aren't, but unintentional vulnerabilities can be subtle. Intentional vulnerabilities can be subtle to the point of genius. If you're just casually reviewing code that isn't specifically known to be vulnerable, and especially if the vulnerability is intentional, it may never be discovered.

This is why security sensitive functions need to be system code, not application code. System code, and hopefully coders, tend to get more scrutiny, have higher standards of quality, and have a more conservative approach in general. Repeating security functions in each application is insane.

How are you going to test a CPU? Unless you analyze the circuits physically, how are you going to do that it doesn't allow privileged instructions in unprivledged code e.g. when r14=6368696e65736520, r15=6261636b646f6f72?

I don't think that's (usually) true, but I'm no expert. My understanding is that latency is an issue because of excessive amounts of buffering in routers, because RAM is cheap and they can.

Exactly. The payload is encrypted, not the entire packet. You can't route traffic if you don't know where it's going. If people start watching Netflix through tunnels, the ISPs will just throttle tunnels.

Net neutrality doesn't have to mean that each packet is equally important, it should just mean that the ISPs and backbone network should be neutral about it. How about letting the endpoints decide how to prioritize their own traffic? Seems like an obvious way to stop abuse from ISPs and still get QoS for things that need it like games and video.

I don't get it. This makes absolutely no sense. A page full of apps each with their own implementation of encryption is not what we need. Why are we doing this at the application level? Have we all gone insane?

Agreed. I have a suggestion: internet layer encryption that hasn't been compromised by the NSA?

Excellent post, but one thing bothers me.

Isn't that begging the question? I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that the question of determinism is a matter of interpretation. (Quantum mechanics can be understood to be deterministic.) Isn't that the question they are poking at here?

Typical programmers.
FTFY.

Besides, if you think that's bad, you should see what happens when they actually do do something. <grin/>

Why would they have any goal to be working toward at all? We take it for granted that an intelligent entity would necessarily value self-preservation. But it doesn't have to be so, that's a product of natural selection. Why would a machine intelligence "care" if it survived? Why would it care about anything, for that matter? If anything, it'll be selected to have goals to serve us.

If intelligent machines ever pose a threat to humans, it will be because of another group of humans giving them that goal.

Hey, you said it, not me. ;)