asciilifeform: when the last usg fighter runs headlong into the last usg bomber, and the fireball takes out their last aerial tanker, we can say 'can't'
asciilifeform: might check under the bed and see if the red button's still connected to something, before splat ?
asciilifeform: essentially, something so utterly catastrophic to usg that it could not possibly be a hangout☟︎
asciilifeform: as insinuated in that cryptome thing (pretty good yarn, recommended)
asciilifeform: what'd count as a -real, indisputable- usg leak? example: info leading to perma-pwn of a whole constellation (hell, why not all of them) of usg orbiting junk
asciilifeform: get the budget high enough without making secrecy impossible << this is right back to the 64-quadrillion-bzollar question. the dept-of-breaking-pgp gets $maxint and remains totally secret - not to say that they've succeeded or even tried, but we have no idea how much cocaine they were able to buy with the $maxint, nor the carat purity of the gold of which their toilets were made
asciilifeform did not see the film, but will say that he could probably produce a 'snowden' film with an arbitrarily high degree of 'truthiness' given a few $10M-usd
asciilifeform: but basic point is that machine doesn't just cost what machine costs, but some actuarial numbers based on what the corpses' legal reps are likely to attempt/achieve
asciilifeform unsurprised, recalls a list of similar gotchas that added up to 'give us money because you're retarded'
asciilifeform: what does ben_vulpes do with his apple boxen? just throws them out when disk fills ?
asciilifeform only opened it because had an ssd from visually identical machine of the same make, which turned out to be incompatible.
asciilifeform - as ben_vulpes will be entertained to learn - just opened a 'macbook air' in dire need of a modern-sized drive to discover that said box made use of an obscure type of disk interface previously unknown to him, with aftermarket units only available from cn
asciilifeform: so whole line of thought goes nowhere
asciilifeform: otoh the original war was never declared, iirc
asciilifeform: ^ could co-exist with a technically unfinished state of war
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: now -that's- interesting. got a link to the treaty ?
asciilifeform: the best fight is put up by 'homo homini lupus est'
asciilifeform: try the ice cap training wheels first.
asciilifeform: king, if he has any sense, begins with 'i want a tetris and underlying stack that doesn't crash, and if it does, you+extended family get intimate with anthills'
asciilifeform: how would you engineer if every morning you got to see a colleague slowly lowered into a piraña tank for having made a mistake ?
asciilifeform: as in, how would you engineer if, were your creations to fail, everything you have ever loved will be tortured and killed by nazi cannibals for the rest of eternity; every truth you hold dear will be buried and never seen again, etc, etc
asciilifeform: call it megalomania, but i'm fascinated with a certain kind of engineering
asciilifeform: this is merely a hypothesis in my mind, i'm putting it here for others to ponder.
asciilifeform: and heads (at least once did) roll upon failure
asciilifeform: and another where the rocket actually gets flown on occasion
asciilifeform: one, academia, where they spew obscurantist haskellian garbage that serves solely to make perpetrators 'look smart' and pull each other's cocks;
asciilifeform: but something that looks more like a programming lang you might've learned as a kid.
asciilifeform: but still light-years ahead of just-winging-it-in-c, so long as the required 'furniture' isn't fifty pounds of fetid haskellian squigglies printed on telephone book paper
asciilifeform: so not a magical guarantee (want guarantees, pray to the gods?)
asciilifeform: this naturally rests on the 'turtles' and 'elephants' of your priors, e.g. hardware functioning as printed on the box, and so on
asciilifeform: e.g., show that output of ecdsa signing routine can only be affected by the given parameters and not by anything else
asciilifeform: but you can still do a few useful tricks like taint/flow analysis
asciilifeform: (this trivially follows from turing's 'halting theorem.' no need to invoke herr gödel even.)
asciilifeform: re: proof: studious readers of log may recall the old thread where we spoke of general-case attributes of a proggy being unprovable
asciilifeform: they let the 'doctors' bleed them, too.
