Ways to Do Telecommunications

There are an amazing number of different ways to do telecommunications on Unix systems. I have just been looking at HTTP/HTTPS connections such as are used to transfer data between web browsers and web servers, but there are a lot of different ways that you can connect these things. Traditionally one uses C programs and the Unix libc system interface library, but as SSL/TLS is a complex protocol typically another library such as OpenSSL or LibreSSL is used for the secure layer. The C program approach is a little complicated because you need to write your programs in a certain way to be able to use the libc and SSL libraries effectively. But there are other ways to do much of what most people need using higher-level tools such as socat. 

I got sidetracked, but it' still relevant: it's a talk by Professor Conor McHugh, given at the University of Southampton in 2015 as part of the Philosophy Café series. See also the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on The Problem of the Criterion.

I'm having trouble keeping my attention on what he's saying because so many questions keep occurring to me and he doesn't sound like he's going to address any of them. Around 19:40 I had the thought that this question of a criterion might only be a problem if you insist that you already have an idea of what actual knowledge actually is. In other words it's all predicated on some fundamental actual knowledge one must have to even ask it. I notice that in the diagram illustrating the idea there is a 'you' on each side. That was good enough for Descartes, and presumably his readers, but I think its appallingly arrogant to think that this is a problem that should be resolvable by any particular individual person. This is a problem that shows up a lot in philosophy after Aristotle and it makes me think that modern philosophy is just people who didn't understand Aristotle. The essential nature of rational knowledge is that it is shared and communicated in written and spoken/signed/imagined language. [27:45 he does mention something close to this, calling it reflective equilibrium, but he is not clear in his use of 'we' whether this is supposed to apply to humanity as a whole or to each of us individually. And in his summing up at 34:10 he seems to agree with me. But is there really nothing to say about this idea? What about all the life experience one needs before one can say that that stuff over there is grass, and that it's green? Doesn't he believe in AstroTurf(TM)?]

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Lera Boroditsky - How the Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We Think 


 15:49 ?!

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Steven Murdoch has been looking at GPS data:


My comment:

Isn't it quite useful to have a random bitstream that's broadcast globally? I mean, it's like a public global numbers station so that narco syndicates etc. can use it to build one-time pads.

See also Emil Post.

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