Alicornutopia

Aestrix wrote:A Nadia might qualify for the enjoyment of hurting people in some extreme circumstances and after a whole lot of trauma, but I don't think one could at the same time desperately not want to hurt anyone.

....

Now I am trying to think of examples where that could happen.

Of course.

Gren is fully capable of wanting to hurt someone. She wanted to torture Coil in the Wormbox, for example, and held back Because Ethics and more also because doing that might have made people distrust her. But Because Ethics was not enough to prevent her from sarcasm-ing at him.

Mehitabel considers this, then says, "I'll think of a way to pronounce my cipher!"

That seems needlessly risky. It could offer anyone paying attention some ciphertext-cleartext pairs.

The cipher is not intended to be all that robust, just prevent casual reading.

Yeah, any cipher based on consistently writing one symbol in place of a different one is fairly easy to break with a notebookful of material. I think most simple Bell ciphers start out in this format, with more symbols being added later to represent shorthand.

Can Aya’s drawings store information, or are they just for processing?

DanielH wrote:Yeah, any cipher based on consistently writing one symbol in place of a different one is fairly easy to break with a notebookful of material. I think most simple Bell ciphers start out in this format, with more symbols being added later to represent shorthand.

Can Aya’s drawings store information, or are they just for processing?

I think they aren't hers to store. So she doesn't use them like that reliably?

The old woman sometimes hung them up around the house, and probably sometimes let her keep some without hanging them up, and of course Aelare lets her keep as many as she wants. My question is whether she could “read” an old one she was allowed to keep. A lot of Bells do processing in a format which even they forget after they’re done, when worried about privacy. Some Bells use better encryption methods than just letter substitution, although the details are not decided for all of them. There is some indication that the drawings can be used for information storage in at least some cases (she was considering adding a wing to a creature about who to avoid), but that might not be true of all of them all the time or I could have misread that section.

Drawings (Aya's or, while she's with Yellow, Promise's) can store a little information but are principally a processing tool.

Willow looks at Karen and says, "Maybe we should start a club for friends of people who will take over the world."

Empire boosters?

"So, I'm using about one percent of its information storage capacity and I have about," he squints at the display, "two hundred and fifty hours of music, two hundred hours of vids, and a hundred and fifty million books. And most of the physical size of the object is not data storage, it's cipher circuits and projection equipment. I don't know offhand how much physical space it would take to store the collected historical media output of the entire galaxy, but I'd be surprised if it overflowed this house."

If this is all that’s on the comconsole, and making a lot of assumptions about future compression, bitrates, book lengths, etc., this gives about 2 petabytes (plus or minus about an order of magnitude maybe) of storage on the comconsole. That’s not really that much (only about a thousand times as much as a $100 hard drive today), but I suppose there’s no reason to get more than that if he’s only using 1% and denser storage is probably available if necessary.

Also, Miles assumes that “Vor” is a syllable relevant to conquering the planet. I thought it might work more like “dottir” in “Odinsdottir”: not something that she could actually use. I hope he comes up with something like the version of Simon Says that Promise used to test whether fairies were actually her vassals, and hope it comes up in more situations; it is an effective and ethical way to test the orders thing.