Egalitarian Criticism

Egalitarian Computing

In this paper we explore several contexts where an adversary has an upper hand over the defender by using special hardware in an attack. These include password processing, hard-drive protection, cryptocurrency mining, resource sharing, code obfuscation, etc. We suggest memory-hard computing as a generic paradigm, where every task is amalgamated with a certain procedure requiring intensive acces...

Egalitarian Paxos

This paper describes the design and implementation of Egalitarian Paxos (EPaxos), a new distributed consensus algorithm based on Paxos. EPaxos achieves two goals: (1) availability without interruption as long as a simple majority of replicas are reachable—its availability is not interrupted when replicas crash or fail to respond; and (2) uniform load balancing across all replicas—no replicas ex...

Early Humans’ Egalitarian Politics

This paper proposes a model of human uniqueness based on an unusual distinction between two contrasted kinds of political competition and political status: (1) antagonistic competition, in quest of dominance (antagonistic status), a zero-sum, self-limiting game whose stake--who takes what, when, how--summarizes a classical definition of politics (Lasswell 1936), and (2) synergistic competition,...

Criticism of Benacerraf’s Criticism of Modern Eleatics

I analyze here Benacerraf’s criticism of Thomson arguments on the impossibility of ω-supertasks. Although Benacerraf’s criticism is well founded, his analysis of Thomson’s lamp is incomplete. In fact, it is possible to consider a new line of argument, which Benacerraf only incidentally considered, based on the functioning laws of the lamp. This argument leads to a contradictory result that comp...

The Art of Criticism? Criticism as Art!