[cap-talk] Capabilities and Freedom vs. Safety

[Stiegler, Marc D]

> James A. Donald wrote:
> > The you have to download music, then run another program to 
> play what 
> > you just downloaded - you the human has to transport information 
> > between these two programs by hand.
> 
> Why does me "the human" have to do this, just because we've 
> got lots programs involved doesn't mean that a human needs to 
> manually initiate each step of the procedure.
> 
> > An all in one program provides substantial convenience.

While this is sometimes true, it is important never to let this claim
stand as a necessary truth. StarOffice demonstrated that this may sound
nice but is not always correct.


> 
> And is something computer science has been battling with for 
> a long, long time.
> 
> > More convenient to play as it is being downloaded, and 
> after the song 
> > is finished, decide to add it to your file collection, or not.  And 
> > then of course you want to browse your file collection.  
> Inconvenient 
> > to switch programs at that point.

Just for the exotic entertainment value of it, I will point out another
solution, though it is a solution for which I do not yet know how to
build a nice user interface. It is possible to force programs to forget
their history (the Darpabrowser was able to do this to its malicious
renderer -- when memorylessness was configured, the renderer would be
forced to forget everything during each page transition).

So one could build a system in which the single monolithic program,
every time it requested the chance to use the download channel, would
lose its authority to read the music area (still being granted an
append-only authority, so it could add the new song) and would forget
everything it ever knew. When it closed the download connection the read
authority would be re-granted.

--marcs