I took my first programming class in 1976. We used punch cards on an IBM mainframe. Somebody have a link to a job req. for a "digital native?" I could have some fun.

Cheers,
Dave

- ha, if by one step from 'anarchy' you mean the Federal Reserve bank, the IRS, FDA, EPA, FCC, FBI, FDIC, DHS, FHA, departments of agriculture, business, interior, education, health care, labour, etc. Sure, 1 step being 99% of what governments (federal and state and municipal) do.

Actually very few really understand how it works today, which is why it will not be fixed, because the way that people think they understand it is wrong, they don't see the actual problem so the solution cannot be understood if people don't understand the problem in the first place.

Considering that it is the Slashdot, the true missing option is the "I'm the ISP."

I know that. That's basic AAA.

I think you fail to realize the scale, the proportions, of the opposition the browsers face.

It's not some script kiddies who are threat here.

That's countries covering close to a half planet's population. They might as well simply outlaw the browsers. In fact, they already do outlaw some encryption software.

But that's another problem: you can't make CA distributed. CAs are the "single point of failure" which are allowed to be that, based on the promise that they will work hard not to fail. Making it distributed would basically nullify the promise, making the whole CA system vulnerable. IOW, nothing changes.

"When somebody sounds like a total fucking crackpot, they almost always are."

Aristarchus of Samos sounded like a total fucking crackpot, and if you had called him out your prediction would have been right - for a couple millennia.

What if instead of taking your attitude, the Greeks had devoted their energy to developing better sensors to test Aristarchus's claims about the parallax motion of the stars? Instead of sitting around calling him a crackpot, we could have had an accepted heliocentric model of the solar system some 1800 years before Copernicus.

Why the fetishistic obsession with balance? Isn't anti-symmetry the reason we exist at all?

Laws of conservation are derived from Thermodynamics which makes very limiting assumptions.

Violations of conservation laws are empirically measured: Dark Energy, for example.

I just saw this article on today's front page:

http://science.slashdot.org/st...

The EM drive is controversial in that it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer, converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, thereâ(TM)s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraftâ(TM)s momentum during acceleration.

Hey, it was Purge day.

Even with the identity verification, the encryption is not a guarantee against the MITM.

Because the man (the one in the middle) could have hijacked the certificate.

The oft quoted example here is the China injecting the JS into the unencrypted traffic. They probably do not even need to hack anything to hijack the certificate - they likely already have the laws which force the CA to hand over the certificates legally. And once that happens, back you are at the drawing board.

Decoupling at least allows the two technologies (A) to be developed independently and (B) to be easier replaced.

Only users??

Most serious hosters still charge by traffic. The web-site owners too would appreciate the increased traffic and higher bill.

Just decouple the traffic encryption and the identity verification already.

- there is absolutely 0 wrong with providing a company with a promise to buy scheduled services on the clock without interruptions and to pay for the service whether or not you can use 100% of its capacity that day.

If I want to start a shipping business I can talk to an import/export broker and work out a schedule, where regardless of my circumstances I will ship 1 container every 2 days with him on a clock and because of that certainty of payment he will give me a much better price than he could anybody else.

As to Rockefeller's 'secret deal to prevent shipping for others' - baloney. The so called 'secret deal' was no such thing, it was a discount that Rockefeller was getting that nobody else could get because they would not ship a supply of that much oil on the clock, whether they have it or not that time and pay for a prearranged amount of delivery as promised.

Rockefeller was absolutely right and the reason that oil never went below 7 cents was exactly because government destroyed his company and did not allow him to find new ways to increase demand by lowering prices even further. Nobody was finding any better way of doing business in that time, otherwise they would have won against Rockefeller and that is all there is to it.

Microsoft had a temporary monopoly for a very good reason: they provided the computing platform that nobody else could provide at the price and just because you can't accept that doesn't change that fact. Microsoft and others also pushed hard enough in the market that competitors actually had to innovate to become competitive in that market, which is how free and open source software came to existence.

As to me being 'religious' about free market - I cannot stand hypocrisy of the modern society that will vilify the individual and promote the collective and use the force of the collective to oppress the individual. If I am 'religious' about anything that would be the belief that individual freedom tramps every so called 'societal good' that you can come up with that is based on lies, oppression, destruction of the individual, theft from the individual, slavery of the individual by the collective.

Yes, I am saying precisely that, because free market is market free from government oppression, which means government cannot give a monopoly to a company and as long as a monopoly status is not given and not protected by a government the so called 'monopoly' is a temporary state of affairs that clients assign to a company if the company does exactly what the clients want.

A monopoly in a free market is not a problem at all because it doesn't become a monopoly by using force and oppression of government, so it may be a temporary monopoly (temporary as long as the company provides the best product at the best price) but no company stays a monopoly for too long. As an example I consider the break up of Standard Oil in 1911 to be a complete and utter travesty and destruction of individual freedoms. That company was started with one goal, to make money the best way Rockefeller knew how: by building a company that over time reduced prices and improved quality of service, both of which that company did.

The prices for oil product (kerosene at the time) went down from 60 or so cents in 1860s to just around 7 cents a gallon by late 1890s. All of this improved standard of living for people buying the product, the government wanted to steal the proceeds and let inefficient friends to enter the market where in the free market they could not compete on those prices at all.

Yes, a monopoly in a free market shows that the company is doing everything right.