> No way. Mathematicians don't assume things to be true even if there are no counterexamples.
It depends: there do exist some conjectures for which there don't exist any proofs, but a huge amount of results assuming this conjecture (which is very near to assuming that the conjecture is true). Examples are:
- Riemann hypothesis [1]
- Generalized Riemann hypothesis (GRH) [2], and potentially also Extended Riemann hypothesis (ERH) [3]
> The doc won't point it out explicitly and I apologize if my explanation offends anybody, but the intention is basically leftist, state-friendly bitcoin. The authors took a look at the anarchy of real cryptocurrencies and realized they don't actually like anarchy, so instead they want to make something "wholesome" that governments would be willing to go along with (since they can tax it).
While this is correct, I want to add a point:
Many hackers are not per se opposed to taxation (how else should public services be financed), but deeply distrustful about the red tape involved (the taxation laws in Germany are insanely complicated). Basically, their attitude is: if the government wants to tax "my" cryptocurrency, it is the government's responsibility to make the taxation laws as elegant, privacy-conscious and hassle-free as humanly possible.
In other words: if the government does not create taxation laws that are as hassle-free and privacy-conscious as possible (in a very strong sense: if in terms of effort (including the time to understand and apply the laws), it is much easier to ignore the laws than to turn in your taxes, the government failed its job), the government failed its job, so it does not deserve a concession from the cryptocurrencies' developers side.
> They brag about their great "data protection" laws, and the same same day you read in the news how yet another of their universities got hacked and how some incompetent government agency leaked the sensitive private information of hundreds of thousands of their citizens.
I would claim those people from Germany who are very privacy-minded indeed have a huge distrust of these data collections exactly because they know that sooner or later someone will crack these systems.
> Hacker conference: against authoritarian government, with talk about security, privacy, opsec etc.
> Also: can only buy ticket online with credit card and real name, no onsite sell available, your name is probably give to conference administrator for checking ticket, he will probably give it to third parties or keep it for "good reasons", etc.
I am indeed quite certain that many hackers in Germany independently already devised the same thoughts ...
But not how you think, in this instance. I think Berlin has more places of questionable legality which require cash for presumably tax avoidance reasons.
> I have a strong bias towards recording public environments and a heavy aversion to any censorship, whatsoever.
This is a balancing of legally protected interests [Güterabwägung] between privacy and censhorship. Independently of what the law may say, many Germans are strongly biased towards privacy here. Be also aware that in Germany the strong US-American concept of "free speech" does not exist; the laws that do exist are weaker.
> Given that, however, if someone asks me not to take their picture, I first give them the option of receiving a copy for their own purposes, and if they decline, I respectfully delete.
Why not ask for permission instead of objection? (even if, as you claim, the formal written law may be on your side)
> Why not ask for permission instead of objection?
Because in most cases it was never my intention to photograph a stranger - they imposed this into the conversation by contacting me - most of the time I’m taking pictures of a lovely park, or a nice flower arrangement, or the broken beer glasses in the street after Carnival - and it is only after being interrupted that I offer the option. I certainly do not take photographs of random strangers unless it somehow captures the idyl of the scene, usually.
And in many cases actually, the conversation starts off irritable but ends quite friendly, especially if the photo is a good one and the person changes their mind and wants a copy.
It is possible to pivot from annoyance to friendliness. Especially if one understands the laws and the reasoning behind them. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
> It seems there is a persistent rift between what hardware designers think users want and what users are asking for
> Nobody I personally know wants a faster CPU; they want competent, faster, native feeling software and more power efficient hardware.
I think you miss the point: what you claim that users want is not something that hardware designers have a lot of influence on (except for the aspect that the IC should be (more) power-efficient): these are rather problems that software developers are there to solve. So, hardware designers are simply the wrong persons to ask if you have such wishes.
That’s right, but power efficiency is an important factor, one of the main points where Intel is lagging behind ARM. And it’s also correct to point out that the main issue for end users is software, even if hardware designers can’t do much about it.
AMD and even Intel have reasonable to good performance / watt for most of the curve... But they do let you explore the top side of the curve where you get a little more performance for a lot more power. This is mostly because of how Intel and AMD compete directly and high end performance looks good in reviews.
Few (if any) ARM processors let you do that.
In many (most?) Intel/AMD systems, you can limit the maximum power delivered to the CPU and get good efficiency and most of the possible perfomance.
> I'm convinced that all the quantum talk is the NSA propaganda to convince us to drop RSA and move to some secure post quantum algorithm that they can easily break.
It is rather consensus that by now,
- too many potential weaknesses for RSA are known (in particular in how it is used in standardized cryptosystems [1]),
- it is a bad idea if too many "free parameters" of the cryptosystem are decided by the practical implementation (in RSA: the decision which primes to use to generate the key pair) instead of these parameters being part of the standard
Thus the advice to drop RSA is in my opinion sound.
But otherwise: many people indeed have the suspicion that the panic that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer might get developed in the next year is indeed used to push novel "post quantum algorithms" which
- have not been analyzed as thoroughly as older algorithms, and thus might contain weaknesses,
- were covertly developed by some three letter agency, and contain backdoors.
In other words: your suspicion might not be unfounded - this just does not imply that RSA does not have its risks and should thus arguably indeed be abandoned.
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[1] Just to give one example: in the past, RSA was often used together with the padding scheme PKCS#1 v1.5, see [2]
It depends: there do exist some conjectures for which there don't exist any proofs, but a huge amount of results assuming this conjecture (which is very near to assuming that the conjecture is true). Examples are:
- Riemann hypothesis [1]
- Generalized Riemann hypothesis (GRH) [2], and potentially also Extended Riemann hypothesis (ERH) [3]
- Standard conjectures on algebraic cycles [4]
- perhaps Schanuel’s conjecture [5]
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Riemann_hypothesi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Generalized_Riema...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Generalized_Riema...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Standard_conjectu...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Schanuel%27s_conj...
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