Full disclosure, that's not an accident, you'll find my email address all through the Serval Project's commit logs on github.

If this mentality of allowing P2P communications with phone radios becomes pervasive, then the Serval Project has been successful. Even if we don't get credit for the idea.

But I fear that this solution will still need a nearby LTE tower to manage the spectrum. I also doubt that 3rd party developers will have access to the underlying API's.

I highly doubt there will be an exposed API at the application layer, without paying the carrier in some fashion. You would still be using the carrier's licensed spectrum and they'll be heavily involved in the process.

I haven't found any information about how access to the spectrum is managed, or if this Direct mode can work without a nearby tower.

Pity, as this is exactly what applications like the Serval would like to use for long range / low power communications.

Apparently any new code they write can co-exist with a different license. So they intend to slowly replace it all.

Weird, the minus sign was there, but /. seems to have dropped it, perhaps because it was quoted. Note that I included it when converting to Joules.

I was basing that on some other stuff I've read before, I might have been wrong.

https://www.schneier.com/book-...;

So 4.4 × 10^-23 Joules minimum per bit flip * minimum of 2^128 bit flips = 1.4 * 10^16 J. Though of course our current computers are far from ideal and it would take many bit flips to test each key. Unless someone has a better source for the energy cost of computation?

https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwi...

So an ideal computer might be able to count to 2^128 without boiling the oceans (doh). It would take a 10^11 increase in energy usage per bit before boiling the oceans was impossible to avoid.

That's the problem with exponential functions, the human brain is too easily tricked. Doubling the bit length of a key doesn't just make it twice as hard to break.

Over the past 40-ish years, we've transitioned from 8-bit computing to 16-bit, 32 and now 64 bit is common. We might need pointers bigger than 64-bits eventually, but we will never need a pointer bigger than 256-bits in length.

The same is true of encryption, for the same reasons. We measure the strength of a crypto system based on the number of keys we would need to attempt in a brute force search. Sometimes we find mathematical short-cuts that weaken a crypto system, reducing the number of keys we need to try. But if we can't do that, we need to test every value.

Counting through all possible values of a 128-bit number would use enough energy to raise the oceans to 100 decrees Celsius and then convert all of the water to steam. This is an amount of energy that we might be able to do harness one day, if we could be bothered. Counting through all values in a 256-bit number would require capturing all of the energy released by every star we can see.

These are the only statistic that matters. Who cares how many people sign up and never do anything, maybe they decided it wasn't what they expected. Maybe they don't have the time. But if people are getting something out of it, and some are putting the effort in to complete it, it looks like a success in my book.

A couple hundred thousand course completions? I'd call that a success.

This season, in Australia, we're getting the latest Dr Who episode within 24 hours broadcast on ABC. Plus it's also available on iView. So there's no reason to pirate it.

However, the ABC doesn't run any advertising. So if you do pirate it, does anyone lose money?

A national credit limit of around 40% of GDP should be plenty to cover short to medium term shortfalls and entrepreneur activity. That would include all household, business and government debts. Why have we allowed the banking sector to convince us they are essential for the functioning of every part of the economy? They have a perverse incentive to encourage us to borrow, and over the last 50 years we've bought into their propaganda. Take away all of the interest payments we're currently making and our economy has a chance to thrive.

Where did the majority of your spending money begin its life? Bank loans. Remember that massive issue the banking sector had recently?

We need to get our economy off credit. We need to stop borrowing against every security we can find. Either we reduce our debts voluntarily, or we go bankrupt. Either way, we will reduce our debt level over the next 5-20 years. This is going to remove money from circulation. If the government runs a surplus, this will also remove money from circulation. If we stop deficit spending the economy will shrink and may falter.

Back in the 30's we were facing a similar (but much smaller) debt problem. The "new deal" in 1933(-ish) was a program of government spending that helped to reduce the impact of the Depression. When spending was cut in 1937, the economy dipped again. While the level of debt continued to drop, what finally eliminated the remaining debt was the massive spending and manufacturing to fight WWII.

Government deficit spending isn't the problem. It's the only thing that can save us from ruin as we inevitably reduce our debts.

But the limit is still 70. If they pull you over with a measurement of 80mph, but you take them to court with evidence that your GPS measured 75mph, you're still guilty.

Bored while camping, my family started spear fishing with garden forks in knee deep reeds. Caught about 40 carp, buried them in someone's garden for fertiliser.

I've talked with the developers before at conferences. They were (and probably still are...) using google contacts and messaging for the initial handshake in establishing connections. That may change in future.

They also weren't doing any kind of onion routing. So if they get big enough to be noticed, passive network monitoring may reveal the very social graph that lantern depends on.

Only if you assume;

When you actually dig into the assumptions of economic theories like that, they usually turn out to be completely absurd. Of course governments can create wealth. Running a deficit creates both income and money for the rest of the economy.

Banks have the same effect when they issue loans. But they can't do that forever, which is why we're having so much trouble returning the economy to "normal".

Could you place the stamps next to each other and focus behind them? Like looking at a 3d stereo-gram?