I can't imagine letting anyone take a drill to my teeth but the most skilled DMD I can afford to pay. I'm surprised others don't feel that way (but hey, whatever floats your boat).
I'm not a West Hater by any means, but I'd say the war started when the US and the UK engineered a coup in Iran because Iran nationalized their oil industry (after the British oil company running it refused to be audited or to renegotiate terms).
That does not justify overthrowing another country's government. Most countries, including the United States, recognize the state's eminent domain over its land and its natural resources. Besides which, the Iranians tried to negotiate, the British refused, so the Iranians nationalized in response.
I'm not sure. But nationalisation is certainly a violation of rights.
Of course, I'd be interested to see how those assets were set up in the first place - my bet would be during a non-rights-respecting period of colonialism.
You go to when the country got a democratically elected government.
As for nationalisation is certainly a violation of rights do you hold that all eminent domain is a violation of rights? IE if the government wants to build a road and uses compulsory purchase orders it's a violation of rights?
They can just block everything by default and only enable what they can decrypt. Maybe you could try tunelling encrypted data over HTTP, but heuristics could probably pick that up too.
Well, in that case I'm just going to invent a TCP-over-cat-pictures VPN. Encode all the TCP packets in the subtle details of the fur and package everything up as innocent-looking HTTP GET requests.
This realistically shouldn't be too hard to do with obfsproxy's already-built framework.
I've been thinking about this lately, and it seems that you could use something like a book code. Client and server use existing internet accessible images as the book and then your communication simply references bytes in those images: client requests a URL that encodes the bytes it wants to send, server returns HTML containing the urls of images containing the bytes it wants to send in response (and any extra content that helps make the page seem normal, ignored by the client). Pictures could be anything anywhere (lolcats, wikipedia, etc.), client should only ever need to download the picture once. Bandwidth wouldn't be great, but if the server is accessible via a wide (and evolving) variety of domains it seems like it would be quite hard to distinguish this from normal browsing.
Just pass a DVD with white noise when you meet in person. That should keep you in one time pads as long as you want to communicate with someone. All you need is XOR and a bookmark. Of course you need to meet once, if that's not feasible you're going to get more technical.
In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep I recall a plot element along these lines. Traders traffic in cubes of material that acts as a super dense source of pad data. Your communication partner on another ship would have the twin cube, and the two would be synced up and then provide the carrier data stream for video and other content. When your cubestuff is exhausted your secure authenticated comms cease.
If the censorship is based on the government being able to make some sense of what you're communicating, XORing with a PSK will not work, because they will see meaningless garbage and block it. The reason I suggested cat pictures is because the censors will see actual cat pictures and (hopefully) consider the protocol not worthy of blocking.
Pretty easy really. Without knowing the key for the steganographic algorithm, it's really hard to get the data out unless you can compare it to the original. So if you're sourcing the pictures from somewhere, you'll need to manipulate false bits that aren't called for from the data itself to keep it from being breakable in such a manner.
If I had the free time, I'd create a cryptographic protocol running on top of telnet that looked like someone playing a MUD.
For email, you'd encrypt data to have it look like regular prose. So you'd only get a few bits per English word, but that would be sufficient for short messages. Could also make use of extra spaces in between words.
The real trick with that would be to take an existing document, and alter it to encode a message. So you'd be doing things like using synonym choice to get your bits.
Wait, isn't reddit already used for this extensively? With each subreddit being a separate comms channel.
Or is there another reason why very little reddit content makes sense?
I seem to recall a profile of the game and it's creators that said it's mostly by choice.
Found it: they were offered 300K just to license the name.
He has refused a programming job at a major developer
(he asked that I keep its name off the record) and
turned down a $300,000 offer from another company to
license the Dwarf Fortress name, fearing that the
proposed sum wouldn’t sufficiently offset the long-term
donations drop that would likely result.
A one-off 300K isn't a lot for two people to live on if it would cut off their donation stream completely, and if you've been doing this for 10 years it may not be easy to find a job.
There are still a lot of employers who see time spent on your own venture as a gap in employment history. I mean, I guess it literally is, since you aren't an "employee". But they completely discount any applicable experience during that time.
The founder Tarn Adams has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Stanford, so I don't think any of his potential employers will mind that he spent his time working on a fantasy economic simulator of this scope.
I think it's indicative of the value of the property that just the name alone is worth 300K. If they were interested in commercializing the game I suspect they would be able to make a lot more.
The point is that calling for his resignation was grossly disproportionate.
Depends where you draw the line. Many people feel that when Eich chose to support groups that were running bigoted TV ads (beyond simply expressing an opinion as to a ballot issue) he effectively crossed that line.
...I know some will be skeptical about this, and that words
alone will not change anything. I can only ask for your support
to have the time to "show, not tell"; and in the meantime
express my sorrow at having caused pain. ...
and who has never even been accused of discrimination, harassment, or abuse of any kind in his professional capacity (or otherwise AFAIK) should be given the chance to prove himself.
I'm pretty sure they didn't send the ads out for the approval of every campaign contributor before they aired them.
Eich's statement in that posting is indeed a valid, mitigating factor in his favor.
He could have done more, by addressing the issue of the TV ads directly. By not doing so, people had reason to believe he was sidestepping that key issue (and that he may not really understand why people were offended by those ads).
What can I say, that is just not the world I want to live in. A world in which your defeated [1] political opponents must repent, wear sackcloth, and cast ashes in their hair or else be professionally destroyed.
[1] Proposition 8 had been struck down by the time of Eich's appointment to CEO
It's now about repenting and wearing sackcloth. And it isn't even about Eich.
People had just gotten very, very, VERY tired of the pseudo-tolerant stance he was endorsing [1], and didn't want to feel that they were lending credibility to it, by having him at the head of an organization they were a part of. The message they were trying to send was simply, "we're really tired of this shit, and we want it to stop."
[1] "Love the sinner, hate the sin". Those aren't his words, but that's the gist of the religious-based opposition to gay marriage. You have to understand that at some point, people just get sick of hearing it -- or being a party to it.
It was the activists who dragged Eich's donation from years ago into the spotlight, made it an issue, and demanded that he apologize. The "pseudo-tolerant stance" people are/were "sick of hearing" or "being a party to" would never have seen the light of day if the activists just left Eich's personal political beliefs alone. This is precisely a demand for repentance.
Eich's stance was "pseudo-tolerant" because the activists were demanding that he renounce his religious beliefs. At least he had the stones not to say something he didn't believe just to keep his job. So instead he was cast out. Should a Catholic CEO be subjected to the same treatment if they personally oppose abortion? A Republican one for opposing Affirmative Action?
It's right there in your comment. You said "Love the sinner, hate the sin" was not considered an acceptable viewpoint for him to hold.
But even removing that point from my comment the rest stands. You wrote that people were "sick of hearing" about his views on gay marriage. Well all they had to do to stop hearing about it was to stop asking him about it.
You said "Love the sinner, hate the sin" was not considered an acceptable viewpoint for him to hold.
No, that's not what I said. Or even close to what I said.
I'd continue with you further on this, but it seems there's been a lot of gratuitous word-bending and insinuation in what you've been saying of late. That's not my style of communicating, and I don't see what I can learn from it -- but if you want to continue to feel the way you feel about the issue, that's fine with me.
People had just gotten very, very, VERY tired of the
pseudo-tolerant stance he was endorsing [1], and didn't
want to feel that they were lending credibility to it,
by having him at the head of an organization they were a
part of.
[1] "Love the sinner, hate the sin".
Can you please explain how this could possibly mean anything other than "The CEO of Mozilla must not hold the viewpoint 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' because then it is implied that the members of the Mozilla community endorse that view". Because the logical consequence of that position is that Eich must either 1) renounce his view or 2) be removed.
Nobody protested Eich for privately "holding" a particular point of view. Their concern was around his donating money (and implicitly, legitimacy) to groups they felt were engaged in various harmful activities (running TV ads with derogatory rhetoric, for example).
The two phenomena are very different. You understand this - yes?
And so then we're back to demanding that a defeated political opponent repent. "Here is our political issue, you advocated against it, you lost, so now you must beg our forgiveness or lose your job which is completely unrelated to the issue."
Like I said, that's not the world I want to live in. If others like it they are welcome to it, but then they shouldn't start complaining if abortion-rights advocates are fired from their jobs in the American South.
Q: Was Brendan Eich forced out by employee pressure?
A: No. Mozilla employees expressed a wide range of views on Brendan’s appointment as CEO: the majority of them positive and in support of his leadership, or expressing disappointment in Brendan’s support of Proposition 8 but that they nonetheless felt he would be a good leader for Mozilla. A small number (fewer than 10) called for his resignation, none of whom reported to Brendan directly. However media coverage focused disproportionately on the small number of negative comments — largely ignoring the wide range of reactions across the Mozilla community.
Mozilla’s culture of openness extends to encouraging our staff and community to be candid about their views on Mozilla’s direction, including during and after Brendan’s appointment as CEO. We’re proud of that openness and how it distinguishes Mozilla from most organizations.
The problem is not that the piano has too many strings, it's that the notes are fixed. The same is true for any string instrument with frets, like a guitar, or wind instruments with fixed holes, like a flute.
The video also refers to the fact that equal temperament allows playing in any key, but doesn't really explain why that's important or what the tuning has to do with it. (Short answer, before equal temperament, different compromises were made in which notes were out of tune with respect to which others, and the schemes commonly chosen only allowed some of the keys (as in "c major" not the physical key) to be sufficiently in tune to be usable.)
As I understand it, people were aware of the problems of the temperaments, but a temperament is a technology. Each of the old temperaments came with an algorithm, that your regular Joe musician could use to keep their own instrument in tune. This in turn was needed because instruments didn't stay in tune for very long.
Equal temperament requires an expert, which in turn requires an instrument with stable tuning -- the modern piano.
Wind instruments actually have no straightforward temperament, but are just as close as possible, and the musician is expected to bend notes as needed. For all practical purposes, an orchestra is an un-tempered instrument.
CSPRNGs are a type of pseudo random number generator, which are defined to be deterministic. I have no problem with calling /dev/urandom a CSPRNG for practical purposes, but very strictly speaking, it's not.
Do you mean there cannot be a CSPRNG? Most of cryptography is based on security in practice, not in absolute theory (i.e. everything except for one time pads and maybe some quantum crypto). That's like saying there are no cryptographically secure encryption algorithms other than one time pads, since you can break all of them in theory. That's a pretty useless definition of cryptographically secure.
edit: By in theory I mean that with enough computation resources you could break them even if you didn't find some new, clever weakness. Not that you could break them in theory because a weakness could always be found.
No, I mean that the fact that /dev/urandom "reseeds" in mid stream means it is not strictly speaking pseudo-random, since it is not completely deterministic. Maybe I'm wrong, but the comment I was replying to was arguing that /dev/urandom was the only CSPRNG, and things like stream cipher algorithms are not.
The comment I was replying to said nothing about the environment, only individual wealth.
Also, it doesn't matter what economic system you're using, if your ratio of working people to non-working people decreases, your quality of life will also decrease.
Lastly, what I said doesn't require the population to grow, only to stay constant. If you want to reduce the population because it's somehow bad for the planet, you can do it gradually.
