Some of us prefer not to inhale the byproduct of other people's addictions (or suffer the consequences of a new class of DUI drivers). For me, the smoke is a migraine trigger and the only argument for legalization I can see even having the slightest merit is the medical one (and I suspect that even that argument is greatly exaggerated due to bias). I would say it's fine to do only in your own homes, but I have no evidence to believe that the majority of people would be able to manage such self-control.
Have you ever been to California? When I was a kid, you couldn't go into a restaurant or bowling alley without getting saturated with cigarette smoke. Now, we have all sorts of laws (some of which seem kind of extreme) keeping cigarettes out of places where smoke concentrates (public buildings, etc.). I honestly only catch the smallest whiff of cigarette smoke once in a while these days. There are still plenty of smokers out there, but I think it's pretty clear that simply regulating where you can smoke has done wonders for their "self-control" and resulted in the effective elimination of second hand smoke. If you want to avoid cigarette smoke, it's not too difficult these days. I don't see how marijuana smoke would be any different.
Then I doubt you have done drugs on a regular basis. The difference between pot and alchohol is huge. One can pretty much consume a moderate amount of alchohol every night and go to work the next day completely sober and capable. But if you smoke a moderate amount of dope every night, it builds up and begins to effect (negatively) your concentration, your memory, and your perception of social situations. I know, because I was a former moderate pot smoker and it affected me that way. It's also been proven that THC will build up in your brain and have these effects. Making pot legal will only increase misery, it won't alleviate it.
Whose misery, though? I'm all for increasing the misery of people who choose to do drugs if it means a net decrease in the misery of innocent bystanders whose lives are made infinitely worse off by the invariable organized crime that comes along with any large black market. The tobacco industry may be kind of scary, but they don't hold a candle to mass murdering drug cartels, human traffickers, or even the local dealer down the street who may start shooting people when a deal goes bad. If some poor dope sits in his house and gets progressively less able to concentrate as a result of his own decisions, I'm just going to have to say that it's too bad for him. I'll trade his misery for the misery of the guy walking down the street getting hit by a stray bullet any day.
The kind of objective principle I had in mind is closer to, "Because human beings actually matter, have real value"--such that there's something wrong with someone who doesn't value, respect, care for their fellow man.
I think that makes quite a lot of sense, and it's one of the best general forumlations I've heard. I think that the idea that human beings matter almost has to be taken as axiomatic, though. From the atheist side, the simplest formulation is, "I matter to myself, and I see myself reflected in others, so I should understand the wants and needs of my fellow human beings."
I think you're missing the possibility that firings were done in retribution for failed attempts to influence the midterm elections and/or Congressional interference in ongoing legislation. This would be a clear violation of law, and is the reason for the brouhahah.
As much as it would delight me to see what comes up in this fishing expedition, I honestly think that there needs to be some reasonable evidence of malfeasance before Congress can step in and start second-guessing Bush's management of his employees. If there was some evidence beyond general suspicion (and I think that the suspicion is very reasonable--and likely true), I'd be in favor of it. As it stands, supporting this kind of stuff is essentially giving Congress a blank check to audit any internal personnel matter in hopes of digging up some dirt. It all smells too much of the Tenure of Office Act to me.
The whole situation puts the administration in an amusingly awkward position politically, though. They have to say no to this because it probably would turn up a pile of embarrassing stuff, even though they're probably well within their rights to refuse until evidence of actual malfeasance shows up. Meanwhile, they're stuck taking the position that they'll testify if they're allowed to lie and later deny what they said. That part of it is just hilarious. It seems like the best position to take would be, "You don't have any evidence that we did anything wrong, and until you do, this is an internal matter." Don't even bother with the, "We'll help you as long as we're allowed to mislead you and deny it later" olive branch.
Every major attack against Christianity in the US is led by liberal or Democratic-run organizations and every big court decision that attacks Christianity (while ignoring or even protecting other religions) has been handed down by a Democrat judge.
Please, tell me more about the downtrodden state of Christianity in the US today. I hear it's really tough being COMPLETELY IN CHARGE OF EVERYTHING.
No, it is very certain that all US attorneys are political appointees. Their hiring and firing, however abruptly or delayed, is completely within the administration's rights at any time.
I'd be understating it if I said I was no fan of the Bush administration. I also think that it's very unlikely that all of those attorneys were fired for completely pure motives. I do, however, find myself in agreement here. The US Attorneys work for the President and can come and go as the President pleases. If it's done for stupid reasons, it's a bad reflection on President Bush, but I don't think that it's the place of Congress to step in and start with the subpoenas. Confirmation of new attorneys is where Congress gets its say. President Bush could fire anybody in his cabinet for disagreeing with him as well. If he did, he'd be a bonehead and the public would probably think less of him (although I'm starting to have my doubts), but there's no reason to get other branches of government involved until he appoints a replacement.
The unfortunate part of all of this is that it's distracting attention away from the real problems with abuse of authority--like the topic of this whole discussion. I don't know how this turned into such a shitstorm while the whole NSL issue is just at a quiet simmer on the back burner.
Yeah, it's a real shame that we don't generally let people starve to death these days. It was a real hoot when that used to happen. Of course, we can still point and laugh at the people who have Very Low Food Security.
In particular, I will be very interested to see whether "That is wrong" turns out to mean "I don't like that". I'm curious to know what would he say to someone who doesn't care whether their genes survive.
I would say that "That is wrong" more closely approximates "I would not like to have that done to me." It's not simply a matter of survival and procreation (although I'm sure that's where the instinct comes from), but also a higher understanding that if everybody did things that were "wrong" just about everybody would be worse off. It's as artificial as any other morality, but it works rather well. To me "That is wrong" simply means "That is something I should not do." The reasons for it may be pragmatic or random, but I think that it reduces to that. I can't really construct an argument for an absolute set of moral rights that doesn't boil down to simple utilitarianism, with or without divine intervention.
See, when most people say that something is wrong, they mean something more than that they don't like it. They're appealing to a principle--and not a pragmatic principle, as the evolutionary explanation seems to be.
Is that principle really anything other than pragmatic? It seems that following a set of laws imposed by an outside entity is really just as arbitrary. I don't really see how "God doesn't like it" is really all that much more compelling than "I don't like it." I suppose the question of whether it's a pragmatic principle or not could be resolved by the following thought experiment: Do moral codes lose some of their weight if the deity imposing them does not offer reward or punishment? The whole situation raises the question, what makes God's moral codes objectively correct?
The RIAA isn't a company. It's a trade association.
Which is essentially a company that acts as an abstraction to take on all of the worst traits of the companies it represents and concentrate them into a single evil entity.
The issue about the Federal Reserve is something I've seen much discussion over, and there is a large amount of information on that one supporting various views.
That may be the case, but you may want to take a look at the sources to figure out where the weight of the argument stands. On the one hand, you have economists, bankers, and international finance experts who can actually point to the financial statements and operating documents of the Federal Reserve. On the other side, you generally have a motley crew of people who, by and large, don't even understand inflation and generally can't even explain the Fed's org chart. The idea that all opinions on a matter of simple fact are equally valid typically the last refuge of a crackpot. Just be cautious when evaluating the information you're being given.
Thing is, though, that saying people who think this stuff are "conspiracy theorists" is simply an opinion no better or worse than your own.
I'd put my opinion on this topic up against most of the anti-Fed activists. When I say "conspiracy theorist" I'm not talking about people who are well informed on a topic but somewhat cynical. I tend to be that way on a lot of issues regarding our government. The people who point out that the Fed is made up of individual corporations are generally of the, "The fed is controlling my water supply and doing all sorts of other evil things, but I can't really tell you what they are" variety or the "Buddha has a ghost penis that lives in my cereal" variety. The corporate structure of the Fed is really not all that hard to understand, and it should be abundantly clear that there's no conflict of interest, so people who bring the idea up are generally selling something or clueless themselves.
There seems to be a large contingent of otherwise reasonable people who get their information about our monetary system from crackpot sites on the Internet, so I tend to like to point out factual inaccuracies when they pop up to keep people from getting the idea that the experts simply agree to disagree on whether the Fed is out to get us. It's very easy to become misinformed, so I strongly recommend digging into the factual accuracy of most of the charges leveled against the Federal Reserve system.
Instead, if one can watch the sectors and bits changed, one can identify after the "sucker" password is given. A hidden volume can be identified.
I think you're really not understanding how this system works. If you only have the "sucker" password, you can manipulate the contents of the mounted outer volume all you want. TrueCrypt, having no clue that there's a hidden volume, will simply overwrite useful data blocks and destroy the hidden volume. Hidden volumes are only protected from corruption if you mount the outer volume with both passphrases. If you don't have the inner volume passphrase, this attack is a non-starter.
By definition of a hidden setup, one should NEVER know if any password works.
I suspect that suddenly finding plaintext data is a strong indication that the password worked.
That is unacceptable. By preventing writes to a range of areas deemed hidden allows mapping of hidden data. In filling up a container with a hidden section, one fills up approaching the boundaries of the hidden one, but never encroaching upon it. In order to prevent hiding, one must allow above all overwriting of data. The loss of data can only be mitigated by creating duplicate sectors around the container (with changing encryption codes locked to your start code + salt).
Read more deeply into the documentation. There are two ways to mount the outer volume. The first is "outer volume passphrase only" in which case TrueCrypt knows nothing of the hidden volume. Any writes to the outer volume risk data loss on the inner volume. The second mode of operation involves entering two separate passphrases, the second of which allows TrueCrypt to figure out where the blocks of the hidden volume are and avoid destroying the hidden volume. If you get a volume mounted this way, it's trivial to figure out which blocks contain the hidden volume. The problem is that if you have a volume mounted that way, you already have the passphrase to the hidden volume making the whole exercise moot.
Re:Spread the word - truecrypt volumes can be rsyn
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TrueCrypt 4.3 Released
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Or is the word rsunc ? Regardless, a lot of people do not realize that a truecrypt volume, although it is a single encrypted file, can be successfully kept up to date with the rsync tool. This is because the entire file is NOT reorganized every time it is unmounted. Therefore, if you only change a few files in a truecrypt volume, you can rsync it to a remote system in an efficient (changes only) manner.
It should be noted that this is not necessarily a good idea if you have a hidden volume and like to write to it. In that case, you'd be keeping two different versions of the same volume at two different points in time, which can allow an attacker to negate your plausible deniability. To put it in a concrete example, if somebody takes your two machines at the same time and they're not up to date, the attacker can compare the "free" space on your outer volume and determine that you're using a hidden volume.
How I would attack this stego: I would obtain a sector-logger via ICE or somesuch driver first. Then I would mount the container and proceed to do a "DOD 7 times rewrite" via eraser or somesuch tool. I then would watch what sectors arent affected. Those would be the hidden ones. Essentially I would show hidden places by what isnt touched.
More terse version of another response you've seen already: If you do this, TrueCrypt will happily overwrite the hidden sectors and you will get nothing. TrueCrypt will protect hidden sectors ONLY if you say "protect my hidden sectors, and here's the key that will allow you to find them." If you don't do that, TrueCrypt is as clueless as the attacker is as to which "unused" sectors store secret data.
If multi-algorithm cascades weakened the protection, that's what the codebreakers would do: encrypt the data again and crack the "weakened" data.
There's a special case you're not considering: Multi-algorithm cascade with the same key. Arbitrary (and dumb) example: A single cipher in CTR mode. Encrypt once with key k and you're in good shape. Run the algorithm again with key k and your data is plaintext again. It's an extreme case, but one can come up with other more reasonable thought experiments. It's quite possible that two algorithms that are secure by themselves can interact in funny ways when you use the same (or a related) key for both of them.
Anyway, for independent keys, I agree with your assessment. If algorithm B weakens algorithm A when used with an independent key, it's a bug in algorithm A, not in the idea of cascading ciphers.
I am, actually, a mathematician (though not a cryptographer), but I could've sworn that doing "cascades" like this is actually a bad idea, mathematically? I seem to remember times where it can actually *weaken* the overall level of protection if you just do it carelessly without regard to the mathematics.
My understanding is that in the general case, there's no truly compelling reason to believe that cascades are either stronger or weaker. I believe that there are special cases with certain algorithms, but the people who maintain TrueCrypt are aware of them. I don't recall the exact details, but it's discussed fairly frequently on sci.crypt.
I think you are being overly pessimistic - it's just sabre rattling they are not stupid enough to do it even for big bribe from extremists in Israel. It just like the fools that want a cold war with China which would turn the USA into an isolated economic basket case within a couple of years.
Well, I would think that's probably true except that they do seem to be stupid enough to let Ahmadinejad and company play them like a fiddle time after time. I remember the good old days when our government was evil and interventionist, but they had a seriously long game plan. Every evil dictator they propped up, every innocent person they had killed, was at least part of a fairly sensible (if ruthless and cynical) long term plan.
These days, our government seems to be doing everything they can to realize the wettest of the wet dreams of our enemies. Want a way to recruit Muslim extremists? Here you go! Want a way to solidify flagging support for your nutty-extremist presidency? Pick a fight with the US and get Bush & Company to saber rattle and rally your base behind you! Want a way to stimulate your softening oil driven economy? Act the ass, get the US to threaten you, and cause oil prices to increase due to uncertainty without cutting back supply and get a shot in the arm! Want somebody to take out the dangerous neighbor who kept you from being a dominant power in your region? Taken care of! The list of things that nobody (until now) was stupid enough to do goes on and on.
This whole administration has been dream after dream come true for Iran because they seem to have no problem taking their eyes off the strategic ball in favor of short-term blunt-instrument ideology-driven fireworks. I used to think that they were too smart to make idiotic decisions like invading Iran, but I've learned to set aside my doubts and just wait and see. Either way it's a win-win situation for Ahmadinejad and the powers that be, all thanks to years of complete mismanagement of our foreign policy and military resources.
The problem with the phone companies, the Federal Reserve, and, as I understand it, even the IRS, is they are privately owned and controlled interests. They are not owned by US voters. They are not transparent. Heck, many of the phone companies are not even in US hands!
I'll agree with you on the phone companies, but not the IRS or Fed. The IRS is, in fact, a bureau within the Treasury Department regardless of what conspiracy theorists tell you. It most certainly is a government organization and not some sort of privately-owned for-profit entity.
There's a grain of truth to the Federal Reserve statement, but it too is ultimately wrong in that it implies that the Fed is some sort of vastly profitable wealth-making entity leeching off the backs of Americans. The regional Federal Reserve banks are indeed corporations whose stock is privately held by for-profit member banks. The difference is that shareholders in Fed banks have very little power in determining how the banks operate. They can elect directors for day to day operations, and those boards elect bank presidents, but even those appointments must be approved by the Board of Governors. The power ultimately rests with the Board of Governors, who are 100% government appointees. The idea that the system is run by a bunch of private interests who are out to enrich themselves is essentially the product of paranoid fantasy.
Of course, none of this means that the people whose jobs exist because those agencies exist don't have an interest in keeping their jobs. That's a different matter entirely.
Get yourself a mac and it will actually be in a useful state to build upon when you get it. No crapware, no ads, no huge glaring security issues, even if you decide to connect the machine to a network.
I use Debian at home. Not so much a problem. As for the Mac being in a useful state, I suppose I could start a flame war by sharing my opinion on OS X's place in the pantheon of UNIX systems, but I just won't go there. I threw my hands up when I realized that they released the software without a solution for the "UNIX utilities don't understand resource forks and hose your system in unexpected ways" problem.
In the meantime, enjoy martyrdom.
Eh, I live with it. I think we all have computer illiterate relatives who need tech support. I've tried moving them to other platforms, but as soon as they get an email from a friend with a nifty joke-light-show-virus-Windows-exe that they can't execute, they get frustrated. I've found that the best way to deal with it is to leave them with a clean WinXP install locked down as much as possible and resign myself to reinstalling for them once a year or so. If I were honestly supporting more than personal toys (or if I were in any position of authority to design their systems), I consumer-grade PCs with XP Home + crapware wouldn't be my first choice. That's all.
This is one of the reasons why I can't stand the default install on any off-the-shelf computer. Normally, it takes a while before enough useless shit has made its way onto a Windows install to "ripen" it to the point where it's easier to reinstall than to fix it. If you buy a machine from Compaq or some similar company, it already comes most of the way eroded for you. I have a hard enough time training users not to install 50 different search toolbars, pointless background tasks, redundant time sync tools, and general spyware. Having AOL's toolbar and teeming hordes of other resource hungry, registry eating pieces of trash pre-installed isn't helping any.
This is how a cop can pull you over for a burnt out license plate light and search your car. Then he uses the evidence found in the trunk that everyone else was sure didn't exist before opened it as evidence against you. I know it sound petty but do you see how easy it is to get probable cuase?
In a case like this, you'd probably have to give consent for the officer to search your trunk. Generally, they can only search your car if you give consent, if you're being arrested for something, or if there's some sort of emergency that necessitates it. Of course, if you have something illegal in plain view through the glass, they can nail you for that as well.
It always kills me to see people on the treadmill, elypical, etc reading away and barely breaking a sweat.
Well, those people are definitely burning calories and contributing to weight loss, but I agree, if they're able to go faster and actually work toward fitness they definitely should.
Because that money was already "earned". It was already taxed.
If I pay a contractor to put in a new window, is it unjust to tax his income just because I already paid taxes on the money I gave him. Inheriting $2M is income no matter how you slice it. The fact that when the $2M belonged to somebody else, they paid taxes on it doesn't change that.
It's not new wealth being created using benefits paid for by the taxpayer, therefore there is little justification for it.
The point of a tax isn't to punish people for creating wealth. It's to raise revenue for services by taking that money from people. One of the most equitable ways of doing it is to measure that person's income stream and take a percentage of it. We tax people based on what they can afford to pay. The fact that a person got a particular chunk of income because fell into his lap rather than working for it doesn't change the fact that the additional income increases his ability to pay taxes.
People like you really piss me off. You make false claims about the consitution only to serve you own benifit. You think the enemy should have more rights then our soldiers who ar being killed by them. Some how you apear to make them the persecuted hero instead of the person protecting your freedoms.
You miss the point of the issue for most people. This isn't about giving terrorists or bad people due process. If we could get the right people all the time, I would be happy to skip the due process and jump straight to the boiling in oil. The problem here is a lack of accountability. Due process isn't just about keeping the government from making mistakes. It's a check against government power. Allowing the government the power to imprison anybody they like without any meaningful oversight is simply a bad idea. They may well have only done this to terrorists (although I *strongly* doubt it), but don't for a minute be naive enough to believe that powers like that will always be used for good.
If we gave cops the ability to execute offenders in the street with no trial and no witnesses, I bet that it would stop a lot of crime. I would bet that the vast majority of police would never use those powers to do bad things. There isn't a chance in hell that I would ever support that idea, though. When the government doesn't have to justify its behavior, you can bet that some of its members will start doing unjustifiable things. The fewer sharp objects they have when they start to misbehave, the better.
So your willing to sell out all the men and women putting their life at risk to protect your freedoms just to make a political oponant look bad.
I would argue that disastrous foreign policy with hardly any meaningful gains to show for it has done a better job of that than any ranting leftist loony like me could ever do.
ANd i'm not limiting this to just you, it is everyone doing it. Most democrats screw around liek this. They have made Iraq into a vietnam to serve their needs.
I think that the guerrilla fighters who are chewing up our men and women and our imbecilic leadership managing a meat grinder of their own construction the same way they managed Vietnam is what's turning this conflict into a mini-Vietnam. Starting an optional war in a hostile part of the world, completely botching the occupation, and then trickling ill-equipped soldiers in just quickly enough for them to be maimed and sent back home is a guaranteed recipe for long term failure and pointless bloodbath. I'm no foreign policy expert, but even I can see that. The fact that the Democrats are a bunch of pussies who, by and large, wouldn't stand up and vote against letting Bush throw a firecracker into a fire ant nest is definitely a good reason to lay blame on them, but they're hardly the tactical geniuses who turned the whole operation into a small-scale Vietnam in the desert.
I don't doubt for a minute that there are very dangerous people out there who would like nothing more than to kill Americans. What I doubt is that the government needs the types of power it has been demanding in order to mitigate the threat. I'm more than willing to allow the government to tap my phone, for example, provided they have probable cause and get a warrant to do it. In fact, I'm willing to go with the FISA rules that allow a warrantless tap of my phone for a short time as long as they have to go before a judge to get a retroactive warrant and go on record with another branch of government as having tapped my phone.
What I'm not OK with is broad, sweeping police powers with little or no oversight. I don't think that there has ever been a time in history when a government with those types of powers didn't abuse them. There's a reason we involve two branches of government with search and seizure or wire tapping, and it's not just to get second opinion. The fact is, if one person or organization has the power to tap your phones or go through your bank records or search your house without having to justify it to anybody, they'll eventually start doing it for less than justifiable reasons.
"I thought he was involved with terrorism" eventually becomes "He was involved in organized crime" which becomes "We thought he might be committing mail fraud" which becomes "We thought he used pot" which eventually becomes "He's a member of the opposition party" or "I want to date his wife, so I'll try to ruin their marriage by digging up dirt on him." With nothing to stop them, there's no reason to think they'll stop at legitimate police action. I accept that the government has the right to search me, try me, deprive me of property, and even execute me as long as they do it for justifiable reasons that are accepted by a demonstrably neutral party. As for acting on their own with no checks and balances, I have a hard time even accepting the idea that we let them use scissors.
Re your conclusion: I more or less agree that improved wages will help meet demand. I don't agree that we are doing so much better in English than in math or science.. Read todays paper; or go to the grocery store and pick up a magazine if your think we don't have a problem.
I agree that English language skills are a disaster as well, but I'm not so sure that it's a lack of competent educators in that case. In the case of math or science, we can clearly demonstrate that the teachers don't understand the material they're supposed to be teaching. We're not even getting to the point where we criticize instructors for knowing the material but being unable to teach it. When I was in high school, my calculus teacher was hospitalized for a quarter. Because the district didn't have a sub who knew calculus, we were given one who did not. She tried hard to stay a lesson ahead of us, but that kind of deficiency really can't be overcome.
In the case of English skills, I have to think back to how I was educated. My teachers clearly knew their subject matter, but there was no formal training in grammar after age 12 or so. At that point, emphasis shifted to reading and analyzing literature. The new material came at the expense of fundamentals before the students really grasped those fundamentals. Students who didn't have the basic skills were allowed to slide along. It would be nice to think that an instructor who doesn't come down like a ton of bricks on a 16 year old who can't get his verb tenses to agree is just a rare case, but experience indicates that it's somehow built into the curriculum or teaching standards. Surely it's not because the teachers have equally poor writing skills.
Furthermore; I will restate that such unbalanced pay will cause good English teachers to quit (I"d probably be among the first) or move abroad to teach ESL(there is a demand),. ..
Why? Those English teachers were clearly being paid enough to work as it is. It doesn't make sense for them to leave simply because somebody else is getting a pay raise. I can certainly see leaving if the administration introduced pay cuts, or if wages for humanities teacher stagnated, but I just can't follow the reasoning otherwise. If the HR staff at my company gets raises across the board to keep pace with the market, I can't seem myself getting indignant and quitting simply because the engineers didn't get the same. Likewise, why on earth should you know what the person in the next classroom over is making anyway? I certainly don't know what my coworkers make. I could guess, but I'd probably be wrong. My wages are an agreement between me and my employer, and my satisfaction with my wage level is related only to my job satisfaction and what I might get doing comparable work elsewhere.
. ..and that in the hands of administrators the proposal would become cuts in the humanities; followed by gradual pay decreases in math and science.
I regard that issue as separate from allowing wages to float. It certainly makes sense that you can't mandate pay increases for employees without increasing the overall budget. Cuts in other programs wouldn't make any sense at all. If the question had been, "Would you accept cuts in other programs to fund increased pay for math and science teachers?" I would certainly have said no. As it stands, the real question is, "Should teachers' wages match market wages, regardless of whether it uniformly benefits all disciplines?" I definitely think so, both because it makes good economic sense and because it would probably result better pay for a number of underpaid humanities teachers as well. I think that by eschewing recognition of prevailing market wages, the union is probably shooting itself in the foot over the long run.
I agree that going the complete "market driven" route and starting with nonsense like vouchers is a bad idea, but markets a
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The whole situation puts the administration in an amusingly awkward position politically, though. They have to say no to this because it probably would turn up a pile of embarrassing stuff, even though they're probably well within their rights to refuse until evidence of actual malfeasance shows up. Meanwhile, they're stuck taking the position that they'll testify if they're allowed to lie and later deny what they said. That part of it is just hilarious. It seems like the best position to take would be, "You don't have any evidence that we did anything wrong, and until you do, this is an internal matter." Don't even bother with the, "We'll help you as long as we're allowed to mislead you and deny it later" olive branch.
The unfortunate part of all of this is that it's distracting attention away from the real problems with abuse of authority--like the topic of this whole discussion. I don't know how this turned into such a shitstorm while the whole NSL issue is just at a quiet simmer on the back burner.
Is that principle really anything other than pragmatic? It seems that following a set of laws imposed by an outside entity is really just as arbitrary. I don't really see how "God doesn't like it" is really all that much more compelling than "I don't like it." I suppose the question of whether it's a pragmatic principle or not could be resolved by the following thought experiment: Do moral codes lose some of their weight if the deity imposing them does not offer reward or punishment? The whole situation raises the question, what makes God's moral codes objectively correct?
I'd put my opinion on this topic up against most of the anti-Fed activists. When I say "conspiracy theorist" I'm not talking about people who are well informed on a topic but somewhat cynical. I tend to be that way on a lot of issues regarding our government. The people who point out that the Fed is made up of individual corporations are generally of the, "The fed is controlling my water supply and doing all sorts of other evil things, but I can't really tell you what they are" variety or the "Buddha has a ghost penis that lives in my cereal" variety. The corporate structure of the Fed is really not all that hard to understand, and it should be abundantly clear that there's no conflict of interest, so people who bring the idea up are generally selling something or clueless themselves.
There seems to be a large contingent of otherwise reasonable people who get their information about our monetary system from crackpot sites on the Internet, so I tend to like to point out factual inaccuracies when they pop up to keep people from getting the idea that the experts simply agree to disagree on whether the Fed is out to get us. It's very easy to become misinformed, so I strongly recommend digging into the factual accuracy of most of the charges leveled against the Federal Reserve system.
I suspect that suddenly finding plaintext data is a strong indication that the password worked.
Read more deeply into the documentation. There are two ways to mount the outer volume. The first is "outer volume passphrase only" in which case TrueCrypt knows nothing of the hidden volume. Any writes to the outer volume risk data loss on the inner volume. The second mode of operation involves entering two separate passphrases, the second of which allows TrueCrypt to figure out where the blocks of the hidden volume are and avoid destroying the hidden volume. If you get a volume mounted this way, it's trivial to figure out which blocks contain the hidden volume. The problem is that if you have a volume mounted that way, you already have the passphrase to the hidden volume making the whole exercise moot.
Anyway, for independent keys, I agree with your assessment. If algorithm B weakens algorithm A when used with an independent key, it's a bug in algorithm A, not in the idea of cascading ciphers.
These days, our government seems to be doing everything they can to realize the wettest of the wet dreams of our enemies. Want a way to recruit Muslim extremists? Here you go! Want a way to solidify flagging support for your nutty-extremist presidency? Pick a fight with the US and get Bush & Company to saber rattle and rally your base behind you! Want a way to stimulate your softening oil driven economy? Act the ass, get the US to threaten you, and cause oil prices to increase due to uncertainty without cutting back supply and get a shot in the arm! Want somebody to take out the dangerous neighbor who kept you from being a dominant power in your region? Taken care of! The list of things that nobody (until now) was stupid enough to do goes on and on.
This whole administration has been dream after dream come true for Iran because they seem to have no problem taking their eyes off the strategic ball in favor of short-term blunt-instrument ideology-driven fireworks. I used to think that they were too smart to make idiotic decisions like invading Iran, but I've learned to set aside my doubts and just wait and see. Either way it's a win-win situation for Ahmadinejad and the powers that be, all thanks to years of complete mismanagement of our foreign policy and military resources.
There's a grain of truth to the Federal Reserve statement, but it too is ultimately wrong in that it implies that the Fed is some sort of vastly profitable wealth-making entity leeching off the backs of Americans. The regional Federal Reserve banks are indeed corporations whose stock is privately held by for-profit member banks. The difference is that shareholders in Fed banks have very little power in determining how the banks operate. They can elect directors for day to day operations, and those boards elect bank presidents, but even those appointments must be approved by the Board of Governors. The power ultimately rests with the Board of Governors, who are 100% government appointees. The idea that the system is run by a bunch of private interests who are out to enrich themselves is essentially the product of paranoid fantasy.
Of course, none of this means that the people whose jobs exist because those agencies exist don't have an interest in keeping their jobs. That's a different matter entirely.
Eh, I live with it. I think we all have computer illiterate relatives who need tech support. I've tried moving them to other platforms, but as soon as they get an email from a friend with a nifty joke-light-show-virus-Windows-exe that they can't execute, they get frustrated. I've found that the best way to deal with it is to leave them with a clean WinXP install locked down as much as possible and resign myself to reinstalling for them once a year or so. If I were honestly supporting more than personal toys (or if I were in any position of authority to design their systems), I consumer-grade PCs with XP Home + crapware wouldn't be my first choice. That's all.
This is one of the reasons why I can't stand the default install on any off-the-shelf computer. Normally, it takes a while before enough useless shit has made its way onto a Windows install to "ripen" it to the point where it's easier to reinstall than to fix it. If you buy a machine from Compaq or some similar company, it already comes most of the way eroded for you. I have a hard enough time training users not to install 50 different search toolbars, pointless background tasks, redundant time sync tools, and general spyware. Having AOL's toolbar and teeming hordes of other resource hungry, registry eating pieces of trash pre-installed isn't helping any.
The point of a tax isn't to punish people for creating wealth. It's to raise revenue for services by taking that money from people. One of the most equitable ways of doing it is to measure that person's income stream and take a percentage of it. We tax people based on what they can afford to pay. The fact that a person got a particular chunk of income because fell into his lap rather than working for it doesn't change the fact that the additional income increases his ability to pay taxes.
If we gave cops the ability to execute offenders in the street with no trial and no witnesses, I bet that it would stop a lot of crime. I would bet that the vast majority of police would never use those powers to do bad things. There isn't a chance in hell that I would ever support that idea, though. When the government doesn't have to justify its behavior, you can bet that some of its members will start doing unjustifiable things. The fewer sharp objects they have when they start to misbehave, the better.
I would argue that disastrous foreign policy with hardly any meaningful gains to show for it has done a better job of that than any ranting leftist loony like me could ever do.
I think that the guerrilla fighters who are chewing up our men and women and our imbecilic leadership managing a meat grinder of their own construction the same way they managed Vietnam is what's turning this conflict into a mini-Vietnam. Starting an optional war in a hostile part of the world, completely botching the occupation, and then trickling ill-equipped soldiers in just quickly enough for them to be maimed and sent back home is a guaranteed recipe for long term failure and pointless bloodbath. I'm no foreign policy expert, but even I can see that. The fact that the Democrats are a bunch of pussies who, by and large, wouldn't stand up and vote against letting Bush throw a firecracker into a fire ant nest is definitely a good reason to lay blame on them, but they're hardly the tactical geniuses who turned the whole operation into a small-scale Vietnam in the desert.
I don't doubt for a minute that there are very dangerous people out there who would like nothing more than to kill Americans. What I doubt is that the government needs the types of power it has been demanding in order to mitigate the threat. I'm more than willing to allow the government to tap my phone, for example, provided they have probable cause and get a warrant to do it. In fact, I'm willing to go with the FISA rules that allow a warrantless tap of my phone for a short time as long as they have to go before a judge to get a retroactive warrant and go on record with another branch of government as having tapped my phone.
What I'm not OK with is broad, sweeping police powers with little or no oversight. I don't think that there has ever been a time in history when a government with those types of powers didn't abuse them. There's a reason we involve two branches of government with search and seizure or wire tapping, and it's not just to get second opinion. The fact is, if one person or organization has the power to tap your phones or go through your bank records or search your house without having to justify it to anybody, they'll eventually start doing it for less than justifiable reasons.
"I thought he was involved with terrorism" eventually becomes "He was involved in organized crime" which becomes "We thought he might be committing mail fraud" which becomes "We thought he used pot" which eventually becomes "He's a member of the opposition party" or "I want to date his wife, so I'll try to ruin their marriage by digging up dirt on him." With nothing to stop them, there's no reason to think they'll stop at legitimate police action. I accept that the government has the right to search me, try me, deprive me of property, and even execute me as long as they do it for justifiable reasons that are accepted by a demonstrably neutral party. As for acting on their own with no checks and balances, I have a hard time even accepting the idea that we let them use scissors.
I agree that English language skills are a disaster as well, but I'm not so sure that it's a lack of competent educators in that case. In the case of math or science, we can clearly demonstrate that the teachers don't understand the material they're supposed to be teaching. We're not even getting to the point where we criticize instructors for knowing the material but being unable to teach it. When I was in high school, my calculus teacher was hospitalized for a quarter. Because the district didn't have a sub who knew calculus, we were given one who did not. She tried hard to stay a lesson ahead of us, but that kind of deficiency really can't be overcome.
In the case of English skills, I have to think back to how I was educated. My teachers clearly knew their subject matter, but there was no formal training in grammar after age 12 or so. At that point, emphasis shifted to reading and analyzing literature. The new material came at the expense of fundamentals before the students really grasped those fundamentals. Students who didn't have the basic skills were allowed to slide along. It would be nice to think that an instructor who doesn't come down like a ton of bricks on a 16 year old who can't get his verb tenses to agree is just a rare case, but experience indicates that it's somehow built into the curriculum or teaching standards. Surely it's not because the teachers have equally poor writing skills.
Why? Those English teachers were clearly being paid enough to work as it is. It doesn't make sense for them to leave simply because somebody else is getting a pay raise. I can certainly see leaving if the administration introduced pay cuts, or if wages for humanities teacher stagnated, but I just can't follow the reasoning otherwise. If the HR staff at my company gets raises across the board to keep pace with the market, I can't seem myself getting indignant and quitting simply because the engineers didn't get the same. Likewise, why on earth should you know what the person in the next classroom over is making anyway? I certainly don't know what my coworkers make. I could guess, but I'd probably be wrong. My wages are an agreement between me and my employer, and my satisfaction with my wage level is related only to my job satisfaction and what I might get doing comparable work elsewhere.
I regard that issue as separate from allowing wages to float. It certainly makes sense that you can't mandate pay increases for employees without increasing the overall budget. Cuts in other programs wouldn't make any sense at all. If the question had been, "Would you accept cuts in other programs to fund increased pay for math and science teachers?" I would certainly have said no. As it stands, the real question is, "Should teachers' wages match market wages, regardless of whether it uniformly benefits all disciplines?" I definitely think so, both because it makes good economic sense and because it would probably result better pay for a number of underpaid humanities teachers as well. I think that by eschewing recognition of prevailing market wages, the union is probably shooting itself in the foot over the long run.
I agree that going the complete "market driven" route and starting with nonsense like vouchers is a bad idea, but markets a