[cap-talk] "ambient authority" on wiki.erights.org, take 2

[Chip Morningstar]

Mark Miller <erights at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Charles Landau <clandau at macslab.com> wrote:
>
>> In an ambient authority system, often there is no way to identify a
>> specific permission, so there is no concept of having different
>> permissions.
>
>Even knowing what you are trying to say, I find this last paragraph
>confusing. I also think it is unnecessary.

I agree that the paragraph is somewhat confusingly worded, but I think Charlie
hits an important point that speaks to the difficulty we are having
communicating capability ideas to folks outside our circle: if you are
accustomed to thinking of a permission as an attribute of some thing, rather
than as a thing in its own right, then you miss seeing some of the abstractions
we routinely work with and so a lot of the descriptions we use and arguments we
make will be hard to follow.

Chip