asciilifeform: i am trying - and apparently failing - to make the point that there is no such thing as 'good hardware' for finding out 'what time' it is on ~my~ atomic clock from across an ocean.

asciilifeform: and drift.

asciilifeform: if your local clock is shit, i can still induce you to rely on it more, more

asciilifeform: decimation: re: 'round trip' ntp - you still are at the mercy of local clock's accuracy when computing the trip time

asciilifeform: 'isn't that bad' l0l

asciilifeform: then swear with your life that it's 100% covered

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: go, do

asciilifeform: early cannoneers accepted double-digit chances of being blown up by own barrel ☟︎

asciilifeform: for contrast: i just finished a neat little book (ru) on early artillery

asciilifeform: it'll be generations after a sane computer exists that this kind of thinking even gets a chance of drawing to a close.

asciilifeform: this is what 25 yrs of winblowz did to the mind

asciilifeform: 'computer', to an experienced commander, means 'twerp will cast a spell and enemy will walk clean across, shredding you'

asciilifeform: the reason, afaik, why 'defuse with key' did not catch on is a ~well-founded~ distrust of computer

asciilifeform: 'get killed 10 times' is actually doing pretty well ahead of the curve!

asciilifeform: (if rated is 5)

asciilifeform: there is a certain statistic for how many have, e.g., 1sec fuse

asciilifeform: ask folks who work with frags

asciilifeform: this is sop btw

asciilifeform: rather, because winblowz

asciilifeform: dun think thats why

asciilifeform: notice, not popular

asciilifeform: the 'safe defuse with key' thing already exists

asciilifeform: shoot the idiots while they crawl around rebooting.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you want them on the other side, aha

asciilifeform: decimation: not only classic, but so cliche that there are 1,001 commercial copies

asciilifeform: i stand by this.

asciilifeform: a land mine that has to be rebooted by hand every few weeks is a sad joke.

asciilifeform: i thought those just set things on fire ?

asciilifeform: not directly.

asciilifeform: and hardly ever anyone asks 'what is this'

asciilifeform: believe.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: many, many more people who can 'commandeer' a broom closet with ethernet

asciilifeform: but it has to be practical

asciilifeform: no shortage of eligible cuckolds and cuckolders for this

asciilifeform: and have them operate

asciilifeform: one ought to be able to drop pogos on a dumb corp's net

asciilifeform: there is also cuckoldry aspect here

asciilifeform: that's all i was trying to say

asciilifeform: i.e. a sad joke

asciilifeform: and if it has to be blessed with the magical breath of life of intelligence every time mains power flickers, it is a proverbial 'assembly line requiring ph.d.s' to borrow from al schwartz

asciilifeform: then wtf is the point

asciilifeform: because that's how many people alive are ~actually qualified~

asciilifeform: ^ then there ought to be 100 nodes, running on 'microvax'

asciilifeform: there is not actually a way out of this

asciilifeform: but as soon as you ask another person 'what time is it' you are playing political games

asciilifeform: it is possible to count the pulses of a pulsar, of cesium atom, of quartz, etc

asciilifeform: all of this goes back to the 'protocol vs promises' discussion

asciilifeform: while leading you straight to hell

asciilifeform: can be perfectly consistent

asciilifeform: comparing a subset of your field of vision with the rest does nothing against the latter.

asciilifeform: in my expected battlefield, chances are that either none of your links are sybils, or ALL OF THEM ARE

asciilifeform: aka lifting yourself up by own cock.

asciilifeform: let me guess, by comparing the behaviour of one node with others

asciilifeform: how ?

asciilifeform: but delay ?

asciilifeform: replay i can see

asciilifeform: nor do we get the luxury of precise, predictable delta from that world.

asciilifeform: much of our thought takes place in an imaginary world where communication is instantaneous, perfectly reliable, and perfectly incorruptible. but we do not actually live in that world.

asciilifeform: and when

asciilifeform: the accuracy doesn't matter because you have no way of knowing whether the above have been done to you

asciilifeform: and also can replay.

asciilifeform: as long as he likes

asciilifeform: picture the proverbial devil in the cable. he perhaps cannot diddle your packets (because you signed them, and have traded pubkeys in person) but he can... delay them

asciilifeform: and why rsa signatures do not make it less of one

asciilifeform: try to grasp why political time is a fiction

asciilifeform: let's also imagine dragons.

asciilifeform: and meet in the flesh to sync it ?

asciilifeform: arse-to-mouth is a strictly fact-of thing

asciilifeform: aha, ben_vulpes has it

asciilifeform: so it uses interrupt-based timing, like msdos

asciilifeform: (marvell chipset ~has~ rtc, but the vendor omitted the 32kHz crystal and power source.)

asciilifeform: because the thing drifts to all hell

asciilifeform: except then danielpbarron reminded us that this will have to happen regularly

asciilifeform: (and don't forget the merely lazy)

asciilifeform: point of pogo is to allow well-meaning but illiterate or even stupid people to run therealbitcoin.

asciilifeform: because whole fucking point of it is that and only that.

asciilifeform: then shouldn't have any interest in pogo

asciilifeform: left it to ben_vulpes to solve

asciilifeform: no idea

asciilifeform: still lost on me

asciilifeform: and are no longer using classical bitcoin

asciilifeform: if you plug block times into wall clock, letting the former adjust the latter, you've plugged arse into mouth

asciilifeform: i spent all morning trying to hammer this into thick headz

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: they take place with wall clock as invariant

asciilifeform: 'in place of timekeeping'

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: for the same reason pulling one's cock doesn't work as a means of flight

asciilifeform: !b 3 ✂︎

asciilifeform: don't give much of a shit any more

asciilifeform: i forget.

asciilifeform: perhaps it was the one who did 'across difficult country'

asciilifeform: 'racist gets just deserts'

asciilifeform: i recall the liberast blogosphere laughing maniacally about this

asciilifeform: isn't that the fella who got 'beaten to death by accident' in a johannesburg police station ?

asciilifeform: thttp://www.hardforkcoin.org << for entomologists only!111!!1

asciilifeform: mats is surprised to discover that unicorn's snatch depth does not correlate with mermaid's cock length ?

asciilifeform: latest memo to police almost certainly reads 'plz shoot only white, thx'

asciilifeform: 1) spray orange paint on 'thompson' 2) pull out in front of police 3) ??? 4) profit!!!111!

asciilifeform: 'Mr. Schumer said a federal law requires toy or imitation guns to feature a highly visible orange mark at the end of the barrel to identify them as harmless. Since the phone case does not have the marker, he said, he would work with customs officials to block its import and sale.' << l0l! srsly?

asciilifeform: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/08/us/gun-shaped-iphone-case-is-a-terrible-idea-police-officials-warn.html << in other lulz

asciilifeform wonders if they recycled map of communists from '50s or bothered to make a new one