And none of this counters anything I said. "They intercept traffic and insert a nice little exploit for FF" is exactly what I mentioned. They do not crack the encryption itself, they use loopholes, side channel attacks, improper configurations, and exploits to get to you. Also, intercepting won't work with HTTPS, unless they take control over the CAs. This may work with CAs from the US, but not with overseas CAs.

Instead of writing some vague stuff about an almighty NSA, do tell how they are supposed to break properly configured encryption algorithms? Do you think they have magical quantum computers in their basement which can crack AES-128 during coffee break?

The actual NSA attacks are most likely focused on exploiting improper configurations (which are unfortunately far more common than one would think), side channel attacks, or outdated and broken encryption algorithms. Or they simply wrestle US CAs into forging certificates and then do a MITM attack.

Always remember http://xkcd.com/538/ .

> Also, how are you applying the many worlds theory? Aside from the fact that it's not universally accepted, and the fact that I don't have a clue how to falsify it, it applies to phenomena that could go more than one way. When I measure the spin on an electron, there are two possible values. The many worlds theory says that there are now twice as many universes, half with spin one way and half with spin the other way. Are you claiming that, when I drop a banana, there are universes where it falls and universes where it doesn't?

This is correct. Note that Many Worlds is not a theory, but a QM interpretation. But you correctly described how it would be applied. What can happen, will happen, in one of the infinite number of universes. The trick is to see all frames of reference over all universes. This way, there really are no preferred ones (in other universes, you do the FTL travel, so you enter these frames of reference, and then a causality violation happens in these universes). If you just look at the frames of reference of your universe, then yes, there would be a preferred one.

The actual problem is that Many Worlds is an interpretation of quantum mechanics, and nobody has ever actually attempted to combine it with special and general relativity, both because Many Worlds is (currently at least) not falsifiable, and because QM and relativity have fundamental incompatibilities, which need to be resolved anyway. So it's all speculation at this point. For instance, "all frames of reference", does this extend to all frames of all universes or not? It is unclear without merging.

No, we can observe this other FTL travel as well, but *then*, the universe in which it is observed ends. "It is impossible to observe", on the other hand, would mean that it cannot happen in *any* universe. From the point of view of our universe, you are right, it does appear as if some types of FTL travel are disallowed. But this is solved by allowing them to happen in general, and just the ones where it didn't happen "survive". So, these other types of FTL travel only appear to be disallowed, they aren't really disallowed.

Another example would be a spontaneous transition to a lower quantum vacuum state. It is highly unlikely, but could happen. With the many worlds interpretation, it spontaneusly happens in some universes, which then end, or at least we aren't around to observe it. In others, it doesn't happen, and we are still around to observe these universes.

No, they *can* happen, but when they happen, the universes cease to exist. The many worlds interpretation then implies that only those universes where these things *didn't* happen survive. It's not about forbidding certain events, its about how precisely these events prune universes.

> I think Stewart's gone senile.

Nah, he's just lazy :)

To be exact, a scientific theory is not just an idea, it is a rigid and solid mathematical framework that has been demonstrated to hold up scrutiny.

> That's the scary thing about people with some education but not enough, they think they know FAR more than they really do and are more than happy to attack anything they think the people "above them" don't agree with even if they aren't qualified to do so..

Yep. That's the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

> There are solutions to GR equations which allow for spacetime to be bent to the point where something that *looks* like FTL to fall out, but they tend to require exotic matter, and there's no evidence to suggest that said matter exists.

This is the big one. Alcubierre's metric has been heavily optimized over time to require energy amounts that could be feasible one day, but the exotic matter bit is the second problem. We can only hope that (a) exotic matter exists (b) an alternate solution can be found (perhaps something based on dark energy once it is understood).

As for the frame of reference, perhaps this isn't such a big deal. If for example the many worlds interpretation is valid, and a causality violation leads to some sort of breakdown of a universe, then you simply would never notice them, since the universes where the violation did happen just cease to exist. So, if a spaceship FTL-flies from A to B, B is a planet in movement relative to A, and the ship FTL-flies back to A, perhaps in the "surviving" universes it flies to A slower for example.

It's all hypothetical of course, but it shows that the causality problem could be circumvented.

Then again, we shouldn't be talking about FTL if we don't event have (relatively) cheap and commercial mass transportation to LEO and beyond yet. The sun won't increase its luminosity to lethal levels for the next 700 million years or so, so we have time.

The former if any incident involving a killer robot that went haywire results in huge penalties and murder sentences I guess..

> You can improve safety, which is always a good thing to do, but improvements will be asymptotic to a value below perfectly safe.

To be exact, this is true for *everything* in life. There simply is no such thing as "perfectly safe".

I do agree with your posting though.

Great. Name calling, with zero actual substance. I am reminded now why I don't frequent Slashdot much anymore. I suppose you can't be bothered to bring actual arguments against what I wrote in my earlier, post, right? No, spitting out curses is much easier of course. It should be completely obvious that I am *not* speaking for Raster, but instead am stating that he *would* agree with what I said since his design decisions for Evas are pretty much what I described. But hey, I don't expect an actual discussion anymore. Continue with your infantile name calling.

If you mean enlightenment evas, note that the lead developer would agree with me. Evas has been one of the earlierst adopters of client-side drawing. It is so efficient that it can even outperform GL-accelerated 2D drawing in certain cases. Evas has (or had) support for the Xrender extension as well, but quickly dropped that, because letting the application handle all of the drawing and small-bitmap blitting (by that I mean stuff like icons) is so much more efficient. If anything, Evas is a perfect example of why the "blitting bitmaps" paradigm is the better one.

And none of them use the X way of remote desktop either. Yet, they are efficient, and in heavy use. You make it sound as if remote desktop is unfeasible without the X remote functionality, which simply isn't true. Stick VNC/RDP to Wayland, and you are done.

Again, I wrote:

Also, you completely disregard the MUCH bigger number of administrators and helpdesk personnel working with VNC, RDP, Citrix etc.

You said it yourself: the X remote functionality is okay for *old* stuff (RHEL5 is from when, 2007?), which still draws content by asking X draw this line, that text etc. It is much more efficient to let the application draw these things by itself these days, which is why every newer toolkit and application uses this client-side drawing model. And this is *exactly* where X is broken: it is fundamentally ill-suited for this new paradigm, which only needs a much simpler system. One like Wayland, which only provides surfaces applications can draw into. That's it. Anything else is an anachronism.