It's possible to verify the signature on the message using the public key in the profile for purposes of authentication (*NOT* authorization!) and non-repudiation purposes. You would require the intersection of two information vectors be compromised in order to alter someone's message - equivalent to controlling both the forward and reverse DNS entries for SMTP spoofing; presumably, you would not be subject to unsigned information there, the way the DNS system *without* DNSSEC fails to protect SMTP today.

I already specifically noted that it's arranged as a mutual security game on the GloboCop model. This is the same model that was used during the cold war to prevent active warfare larger than brushfire wars. The math on it is rather complex to explain, but I could give you references to works by the Sante Fe Institute and the Brookings Institute. It's mathematically supportable.

Let me stop you right there. This would open the protocol to the "cancelbot" problem. It can't be allowed. What you can do instead is to implement "no_see_ums". You, or any exterior level of containing groups of subsets of the implied group "everybody" (but not "everybody" itself) can decide to "subscribe" to a set of of things in the category "I'd rather not see that". The top level is always unfiltered, and you can have "politeness" groups of "I'd rather you not see my drunken ramblings" on top of that. Polite people join the "politeness" group, and everyone else can (if they look hard enough) see your drunken ramblings. Forard distribution ACLS (immutable) would let you limit distribution to members of a politeness group. Thus - internal, but not external visibility + cancel. Assuming you group your drunken ramblings instead of flinging them to the winds.

No. It's a permanent record of the data, or at least as permanent as "until an EMP takes out, simultaneously, all the replicas". Deleting a profile would be tantamount to deleting everything the profile has done in the past, which is tantamount to the historical rewrite, without the "polite consent" of those it's being rewritten out from under.

I'm not sure how you'd deal with "multiple persona" in a reasonable way; you could, I suppose, simply allow it, and allow for mutual adoption and unilateral dissociation - "A adopts B & B adopts A" and "A adopts B and B rejects the adoption", but the storage requirements balloon. For example, I have a number of distinct digital persona that I maintain for reasons of separation of roles, and I'd be sorry to lose that, but I probably would not maintain more than a handful in a social network setting in any case, corresponding to my current social networks and the roles the networks themselves are intended to fulfill. I have a persona on Facebook, I have a persona on LinkedIn, I have a persona on Google+, and so on.

I rather expect that any system that got built on this model would want to be able to subsume, or at lest replica the data and organizational structure from those networks. I think Google Groups / Google Wave / Google+ attempted (and failed) to do this by having groups and groups of groups, but the associative relationships necessary for such a thing are necessarily more complex than the representational geometry of the latest offering(s). It's something you have to design in - you can design large and scale down, but scaling up is a PITA if it requires a redesign. To put it another way: you have to map the absolute problem space, not the intended initial deployment space, with your architecture.

Like I said, I typically do not see a great deal of monteizable value in this, unless you get people to also self-select into profile groups. Perhaps you could get them to do this in exchange for Google Fiber service? I expect most people would do so to avoid paying for Internet service, but it would be a radical rethink of the value of physical communications infrastructure; I expect Verizon et. al. would shit themselves and hire hit men before they'd allow it to happen.

I'm pretty sure that means that's what left of them after they have been ashed by the volcano will easily fit in one hand...

You mean that ... *GASP!!!!!* That earthquake machine I built for the government was used for *EVIL*, rather than for the peaceful, *GOOD* type of earthquakes?!?!

I am so glad you were here to enlighten me!!! I'm quitting my job at the government labs, right after I finish the solar flare machine I've been working on!!!!!

Convert Larry Ellison's island back to it's historical use, when we had no effective treatments for Hansen's Disease (Leprosy)?

Historically, Ellis and Angel Islands managed quarantine just fine for massive numbers of immigrants. It's a solvable problem to run a rolling quarantine.

It's all muscle memory, once you have your routine down. It doesn't require thinking to accomplish. It's like the cross-country running I did in High School in order to get out of a PE credit so I could take the first CS class that was offered there. I did it because I had to, not because I wanted to.

If you're into the endorphins/runners high, great. If you're in a team sport that requires strategy and tactics, great. If you're sitting at a Nautilus machine going through a workout routine, you might as well get totally stoned first, because it's going to be your medulla doing all the thinking about moving your muscles; there's no higher brain function involved.

Some of us find it rather impossible to "just zone out".

PS

Just because I could build this thing Bennett Haselton wants, doesn't mean that I agree that it would be a useful or monetarily rewarding or socially redeeming thing to do. I don't even think the technology would be all that tricky, or even patentable, for the most part. As far as I can tell, it's just a "I want to build an X just like Y, but different from Y in these ways" play, like all the other idiots who want to compete with a big player in a large market niche in the hopes of a big $$$ exist strategy.

Technically not true. A better model would be random partial replication between servers. This would follow the usenet "flood fill" distribution model, where multiple replicas end up on different machines. This interferes with the "I want to be able to unsay stupid stuff"/"I want to be able to use the server while high or drunk and fix it later" feature you (effectively) required in another discussion we were having. But it solves the "domain name hostage" problem for profiles.

To prevent editorializing of your profile and posts by putatively authoritative servers, you'd have to deal with the trus/revocaction issue, but this could be handled by treating it like the iTunes/iCloud CDN model, and having signing key of signing keys, generational signing, and a monotonically increasing version number on the signature knapsack for a given profile. This also solves the "stale cache in fraudulent/stale replica holder" problem, but requires a hierarchical and strongly distributed authoritative UUID/OID distribution model.

You could still dick with someone's profile, but you'd have to be a trusted server to do it, and you'd have to deeply compromise the server software such that the authoritative signing key infrastructure was effectively back-doored. If anyone ever found out about it, you'd lose your position of authority forever, and presumably these positions would only be granted to "superpowers" in a GloboCop-style mutual security network. You'd effectively be exposing all your vouchsafed users and their users (in an arms race analogy, you'd be giving China the a ability to vote with France and the U.S. to deactivate all of Russia's nuclear arsenal). A major player is unlikely to risk that on a petty vendetta, or even for an intelligence agency.

Way to address the 18% and not the 82%!

Given that you're not OK with the 70% remaining people that are currently unqualified, that'll get you another 12.6% overall, instead of 57.4% overall. Way to go for the 22% solution to the 100% of the problem there! Let's see... that'll give you a "C+" grade, on the standard scale... way to overachieve!

Perhaps you need to hire some otherwise unqualified STEM people to do your math for you, before you start making policy decisions based on your back of the envelope calculations...

You're thinking about this wrong.

Cardio myopathy? Heart murmur? Arterial-venous malformation? Scoliosis? Spina bifida? Multiple Sclerosis? Myasthenia Gravis? Hypertension? Etc.?

There are many medical reasons for turning inward to concentrate on ones intellect which I will freaking guarantee that you will dedicate yourself to the task, and without the help of Jesus personally laying hands on you, will preclude you from becoming physically fit.

This.

OCD people can generally accomplish anything they become obsessive about. They typically do not obsess about physical fitness, because it does not engage your brain.

LOL; yeah, I noticed that my markup had been filtered after I posted it.

You're being disingenuous, or intentionally obtuse. You putting up your own web page so people can see your rants is a far cry from some putative distributed Facebook competitor that exists only to get out from under the "heel" of what the OP dislikes as properties of Facebook he wants to make as architecturally difficult as possible to implement.

No, that's a feature of snapchat in particular which is considered by most people to be a means of evading law enforcement, at worst, and the same thing as having an expiration date where the service effectively has a sliding "we're going out of business, sorry" at best. Think MySpace.

Ephemeral is a feature to only a very few.

That more of a consequence of the inability of the journalists to classify it, and so they pick a lexicographically "a cherry is like a tomato, because both are red and fruit" close thing, and call it that. IT also sells itself as that, because if you can sell yourself as that, you can pretty much get VC funding.

I think I pretty much want to out Bob as a Nazi everywhere. I want to punish him for being a Nazi by ensuring he is socially ostracized to the point that he gives up being a Nazi because he's decided that his perceived costs outweigh his perceived benefit. It'd also be nice if he can't pass on his heinous meme to another unsuspecting person by being sly about slowly indoctrinating them, and it'd be nice if any woman who might get into a relationship with him and have his kids would be able to make that decision on the basis of complete information. People frequently make an emotional or financial investment in a bad venture, and then rather than cut their losses, they "throw good money after bad".

This is how gambling addiction works. It why people stay in abusive relationships.

You are either an old anarchist, or you are otherwise not very knowledgable about how younger people view "friends" on Facebook. Calling them "friends" is a terminology Facebook uses; these are not "friends" in terms of "web of trust". This is not like a PGP key-signing party.

Younger users accept *all* friend requests. If it turns out they don't like what the person is saying or doing, they "unfriend" them later. But the default is to accept *all* requests. This is not how older people do it, and it's not how you would expect them to treat an online relationship, but it's how it works.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...

I think you haven't been following the whole GamerGate sock puppet situation very closely. Yes, it's the equivalent of real-world stalking, and there's no mechanism to deal with trolls now. In a distributed social network, you could be scrupulously upstanding with your immediate peer nodes, and be a total asshole otherwise. Once you are inside the web of trust, you're inside, and even if someone wants to not hear from you, as a peer node, your node doesn't have to run unadulterated software; it can imply graph relationships that don't exist outside their rogue node.

This is, in fact, precisely how the TOR network had been infiltrated by various third parties: peer-of-peer implied trust relationships.

I don't think this is a workable concept, unless you can figure out a way to (1) Stop the whole GamerGate thing in its traces, without hugely invasive surveillance to root out bad actors at their houses, and figure a way to cut out the cancers permanently and/or take criminal and/or civil action to force them to not be bad actors ("Bob is a Nazi; let's put social pressure on him to change that"/"Bob is a criminal; lets put social pressure on him to not act that way by locking him in a cell"), and (2) Figure out a way to do source verification so that if ted trusts Bob, and Alice trusts Ted, that Alice can legitimately not trust Bob without having to throw away the trust relationship with Ted.

I expect all of the number crunching is being done by an on-board AI trying to figure out how the heck to get away from the high pressure water jet...

They are.

In order to apply critical thinking skills, however, you have to establish a corpus of information (knowledge) from which to operate as a base when testing new information for validity.

In other words, you can't start from a phenomenological basis from the start, you have to assume language in order to be able to communicate about concepts, and then adequately judge their validity or invalidity.

What this means is that you have to shovel their heads full of as much rote knowledge as you can possibly shovel in, prior to their critical thinking filter slamming into place and interfering with the process o communicating things like "rules of grammar", "mathematical concepts", "tigonometric identities", and so on. Because once those filters slam into place, they are going to be thinking for themselves, and so busy questioning the validity of what an authority is saying, and their motives for saying it, that it's going to be difficult to jam anything in.

As to the validity of the rote knowledge you've already jammed into their heads prior to that event - effectively, where they stop being sponges, and wake up into themselves as human beings - well, hopefully the event that throws up the gates occurs after you have taught them Aristotelian logic, and Platonic/Homeric introspective self examination ("The unexamined life is not worth living"), so that they can selectively filter for any "bullshit" that was inserted, along with their times tables or the idea that sin(x) + cos(x) = 1.

So while their motivations may be impure, I have to agree with them that, at least through High School, you want to just shovel as fast as you possibly can, and then when they get to their Sophomore year in college, you send them to the philosophy department to teach them symbolic logic, and you send them to the physics department to teach them how to think rationally about problem solving (something physics is good at, because it's as unforgiving about facts as gravity in a "Road Runner" cartoon isn't).

And if they never make it to their Sophomore year in college, because they stop after the mandatory public schooling, and don't pursue further education... well, they will likely be happier as people not having had their delusions challenged, particularly since those delusions were probably shoveled into their heads at a young age - say 5 or so - and all you are going to do by having taught them critical thinking skills early is to make them miserable as adults.

She can't. This was a test of the stem cell transplant, and didn't hook the new cells up to anything that would provide vision.

There's a gene therapy technique which would have worked, but she didn't get that:

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu...