Do you have a good backup? If so, it can't exactly be murder. Quite. But I'm not sure exactly *what* to call it. Perhaps "temporary exteriorization of the Thetan", which is clumsy, but most groups don't even have a concept that comes close. I'm having a real trouble trying to come up with a better phrase, and that one stinks.
I doubt that the event is rare, but being able to detect it probably depends on rare events happening. Most mutations are neutral. Most of the rest are fatal before a period has been missed. It's only the remainder that even have a chance of being detected. Of those, most aren't blatant. Of the blatant, most are fatal before birth. So we're looking at that small residue.
OTOH, if it ever becomes common to do whole genome sequencing, then there will probably be a lot more evidence of this happening.
That's not the way to figure it. What you figure is the investment cost over evolutionary time.
In most of our ancestral species the males did not support the children. So their cost was the cost of access to the female plus the cost of generating sperm. Females, OTOH, have the cost of supporting the fetus during pregnancy. The cost of birth. The cost of ovulation. Etc. This is a much higher cost, so they will be more careful about the production.
It is essentially NEVER to an organisms benefit to generate a mutant. The mutant may be more likely to survive (HAH! extremely rare AND unpredictable), but it will differ from the parent, and so will not be to the advantage of the genes that were mutated. This is a summated cost-benefit calculation over all the genes, and is only handled by approximation (i.e., evolution essentially never delivers perfection).
But no evolutionary calculation should ever assume that an organism counts itself expendable except in the case where it benefits its close relatives. And then the math gets quite tricky. Look into the justification of hive bees, and then look into the justification of termites. Then look into the Portuguese Man 'o War (a communal organism). But in each case each entity is acting in an attempt to maximize the extension of "DNA like mine" into the future.
I didn't address epigenetic changes here, as that's both irrelevant, and I don't actually understand it. (Does anyone?) But epigenetic changes are usually temporary (only a few generations) and reversible (often within the same generation).
The problem is that people won't find out what's wrong with those proposals until awhile after they start depending on them. Saying "study them" doesn't convince. I've tried to debug too much code that everyone said was bug free...until they found it wasn't.
The key doesn't need to be the same length as the cleartext, it can be considerably shorter. This does weaken the encoding, but not fatally. You just need to encrypt the message before you encode it with the one-time pad with a code that's difficult to recognize. The more you shorten the key, the weaker the encoding, but shortening it by 50% is still quite safe if you use a decent encryption of the cargo.
Perfection isn't impossible, but is hideously expensive.
That said, any code that depends on factoring large primes is weak when used against quantum computers. And they may not be here today, but I wouldn't make strong bets about next year in secret government offices. So if it's worth it to you, by all means use one-time pads. And most of the expense of using them is in the transmission of the info, so you might as well use the most secure version. You can get a pretty good set of random numbers by processing a web cam of a candle flame, but turning that into terabytes of good random numbers could take awhile.
While there is suggestive evidence that the US spying agencies knew that 9-11 was going to happen and intentionally didn't act to prevent it (suggestive, not proof) I know of no credible evidence that it was an inside job. Being paranoid doesn't count as proof.
The thing is, I don't know that anyone every actually *proved* that the NSA elliptic cure constants were weak. But everyone suspects that they are because of other things they've done.
This is a point worth remembering. Once you get a bad reputation, people stop trusting you even if they can't prove that you're doing something wrong this time. And when they remember it later they'll remember it as a time they didn't fall into your trap.
And remember, perhaps those constants were good. Have you heard of anyone proving that they weren't? But would you want to trust them?
Which non-authoritarian governments? Actually, which governments that currently exist are non-authoritarian? I'd believe it of Iceland, and possibly Sweden or Denmark. Maybe Holland. But those are all governments that I don't know much about. Somalia is suppose to have a non-authoritarian government, but only because it basically doesn't have one.
This is the problem that non-state currencies have. One of the ways that states exert power is by control over the currency. They need to see a bit advantage in giving up that control before they will do so. So, e.g., Lithuanian might see their own currency as not being used much internally, with people preferring to use something else (DM? Rubles?) and say, well, BitCoin isn't any worse, so we might as well try it. But most countries see "good reasons" to discourage its use. It's probably technically illegal in the US for example, though trading stamps, customer reward points, etc. have resulted in that law not being generally enforced. They'd probably have to enforce it against a huge raft of companies if the prosecution wasn't to be defended against under the rubric of "random enforcement" (which, if I've got the term correct, actually means "targeted enforcement" which is a cause to throw out a case).
Damn right I don't. I want my phone to be a good phone. Anything else is extra and readily sacrificed to improve the phone aspect. (The built-in address book is an example of a smart phone acting well. The camera is "OK, that's unobtrusive, but I wouldn't pay extra for it". Much of the other stuff is garbage that gets in the way. It's totally lousy as a computer. The interaction is too limited, you can't really type on it, etc. Before I got the smartphone I was thinking a tablet might be a good idea, but after the phone I don't want anything with a similar OS. It's jammed full of misfeatures, there's more misfeatures than features. And it's a very poor phone, which is what I got it to be.
Can you name a smartphone that doesn't meet that description? I think that any cell phone you can sell is legally required to enable tracking by official parties (ie., must have a GPS), and practically the cell phone towers would provide that information anyway. The part that isn't legally required is the non-removable battery, but that was invented by marketing, and ensures that phones will be replaced every few years. That it means the phone is an always-on tracker was a bonus that the governments appreciated, but didn't require.
Mind you, I don't like smartphones. I think they are lousy phones. A lot worse than the cell phones of a decade ago, and the screens are so small that they aren't useful for anything else. I have occasionally thought of getting a tablet, but after using a smartphone I've pretty much decided against it. The OS doesn't work very well, the applications are poor, etc. They aren't even good cameras, though there they do have some advantages, especially in low light conditions. But I see no advantages over a laptop the same size.
It's possible that for a phone Gnome would be allright. My main objection to it for a computer is that I want to have several widow using applications running at once. (Of course, if I actually tried to use it I might have more objections. It sure doesn't seem to have many fans.)
Well, the existing ways that involve surgery also require lots of effort, which people imagine they won't. They're also slower than typing on a keyboard, and have other defects.
I doubt that we'll come up with a way similar to what people imagine when they think of typing via the brain in the coming decade, and if we do it will involve reading the tensions of muscles around the larynx. With direct brain feed it would probably be simpler to do visualization transmission...but do you have any idea how poorly most people visualize?
Possibly so, but (almost) irrelevant. This guy was representing the Linux Foundation at a public event. And the Linux Foundation nominally pushes Linux, so he should have been using Linux. That he wasn't, however, isn't surprising given the actual historic trends of Linux Foundation actions.
Since he was representing the Linux Foundation he should have used Linux. But it's long been clear that the "Linux Foundation" doesn't actually speak for or represent Linux, but rather a collection of businesses that have some connection, however oblique, with Linux.
If they are indeed open source, then the MIT license would make them interesting if they did something I wanted to do. So that's a plus..NET core was unable to build GUIs, without additional libraries that hadn't been released (perhaps that's changed) which was its sole advantage over other approaches. But it probably could have been used for other things, if it had seemed worth learning. (Since I had no reason to pick up C#, they would have needed to be very good reasons.) At the time I stopped using MSWindows ASP was a notoriously insecure approach that anyone who cared about security avoided. Perhaps they've fixed that. Etc.
But you're right, it's been nearly a decade (possibly longer) since I've been willing to even look seriously at a MS offering. There's too much else that doesn't come with their normal strings and hassles. I probably couldn't even look at their web site (this is a guess) without disabling my ad-blocker, which I'm definitely not willing to do for a site run by someone who has so frequently proven themselves untrustworthy.
Well, Java's a lot better than C at handling multi-processing. And it's easier to handle most use-cases of unicode strings. It's got a few other minor advantages.
I, personally, don't like it, but I haven't yet found a language that meets all my requirements. D (dmd) comes quite close, and I'm currently investigating Go. (One of my main problems with D is program documentation...not theirs, but mine. The autogenerated documentation is too ugly.)
Do you find that convincing? I don't. Those things don't help Linux, they only help MS. What license are they under?
P.S.: I found.net.core is basically useless without the rest of it. I looked at using it when they announced it was released. Most of the others I haven't even looked at, and don't intend to. C# could be interesting, but the last time I looked it wasn't, I don't remember the details of why, but it had to do with the interesting parts being tied to MSWindows.
So basically that list of things is all tied to MSWindows, and being able to run the parts on some other system doesn't change that at all. It's a PR ploy, not a contribution.
On what basis do you claim that Microsoft has changed? While this particular story says that some people within MS want to take advantage of Linux, other stories paint a very different picture of other actions. I see no reason whatsoever to trust them.
Please note that it is quite possible for certain individuals within the company to be enthusiastic supporters of Linux, while management continues to plot to tear it down. There is no contradiction there, and management determines corporate policy. (It's also happened historically that certain individuals within MS claimed to support Linux while their actions were quite destructive. Whether they realized the actions were destructive is not clear.)
Don't watch the PR line, watch their actions. That will tell you what they're doing, and takes a lot less time. PR lies to everyone, and have no qualms at all about lying to someone who isn't even a customer. But watching their actions doesn't give you as much lead time, so you need to play it safer...by avoiding dealing with them.
I, personally, try to avoid dealing with companies that have repeatedly lied to me.
PyPi isn't the official repository of the Python project, is a useful adjunct site. It does hold lots of packages that aren't in the official repository. But it's no more the official Python repository then http://ftp.us.debian.org/debia... which also holds a lot of Python packages that are easy to install (on a Debian system).
Do you understand the difference between major and minor version numbers? Or realize that major version number changes frequently indicate breaking compatibility?
I will grant you that Linux has (recently) dropped that tradition, but that was because the number of minor version changes has gotten too large. Very few pieces of software have that rationale. (It's also because Linus found large numbers of minor version changes esthetically unpleasant.)
If you go back a bit further, the sub-minor version changes were also significant, in that the minor version number told you what features were available, and the sub-minor version number told you the patch level. My feeling is that this was a better system, and the only problem what that it should have been two hexadecimal digits rather than decimal digits. Sometimes there were enough patches that three digits were needed, which complicated things.
OTOH, this is all based on memory, and that earlier change was so long ago that I've probably got some of the details wrong.
Those guys are stupid, unless their contracts said that they wouldn't be required to work with anything that wasn't under an OSI approved license. Nothing I've heard indicates that the software has become close source, merely that it's become too dangerous to depend on.
They've got a right to their license if they wrote it, but that doesn't cause me to accept it. I just won't blame them for *that*. I reserve the right to blame them for other things independent of that.
P.S.: As a bit company, Facebook is in a good position to be a big bully. So being dubious about giving the actual legal ground is merely sensible.
It's not definitely a false flag operation. It's not even definitely a real effect. It could be a neurologic problem, and allergy, a disease, or even plumbing noises and lack of sleep.
That it's something real is quite believable. That it's a sonic weapon is a bit dubious. That it's an attack by someone is plausible.
If it were a sonic weapon, where would that weapon need to be located? How big would it need to be? Would it need a clear air path? What could it use for reflectors, and are such things present?
Most of those questions look quite dubious for a secretly concealed weapon. OTOH, the Russians are reported to have used microwaves to irradiate the US embassy staff (though I find it more believable that they were somehow involved in an attempt to bug the joint). So if I were going to pick a villain, and believed they hypothesis of attack, I'd opt for the Russians. And a sonic weapon seems quite dubious, though that it might be perceived as a sonic attack when the actual modality was something electromagnetic doesn't seem too implausible.
That's not a unreasonable question, and it might even have some application to this particular case, though it would certainly be an edge effect. Toxoplasmosis does seem to encourage risky behavior (of certain types) so it could affect political leanings. But curing it wouldn't reverse political leanings because those are largely habitual. That said, it has been demonstrated, e.g., that, statistically, Republicans are more sensitive to disgust than are Democrats. So there certainly are deep connections that could over time change things. Just *how* that would change things is unclear. And it's not as if toxoplasmosis is the only bacterial mind-control agent that inhabits people. They aren't all even parasites, unless you consider your gut bacteria parasites.
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Do you have a good backup? If so, it can't exactly be murder. Quite. But I'm not sure exactly *what* to call it. Perhaps "temporary exteriorization of the Thetan", which is clumsy, but most groups don't even have a concept that comes close. I'm having a real trouble trying to come up with a better phrase, and that one stinks.
I doubt that the event is rare, but being able to detect it probably depends on rare events happening. Most mutations are neutral. Most of the rest are fatal before a period has been missed. It's only the remainder that even have a chance of being detected. Of those, most aren't blatant. Of the blatant, most are fatal before birth. So we're looking at that small residue.
OTOH, if it ever becomes common to do whole genome sequencing, then there will probably be a lot more evidence of this happening.
That's not the way to figure it. What you figure is the investment cost over evolutionary time.
In most of our ancestral species the males did not support the children. So their cost was the cost of access to the female plus the cost of generating sperm. Females, OTOH, have the cost of supporting the fetus during pregnancy. The cost of birth. The cost of ovulation. Etc. This is a much higher cost, so they will be more careful about the production.
It is essentially NEVER to an organisms benefit to generate a mutant. The mutant may be more likely to survive (HAH! extremely rare AND unpredictable), but it will differ from the parent, and so will not be to the advantage of the genes that were mutated. This is a summated cost-benefit calculation over all the genes, and is only handled by approximation (i.e., evolution essentially never delivers perfection).
But no evolutionary calculation should ever assume that an organism counts itself expendable except in the case where it benefits its close relatives. And then the math gets quite tricky. Look into the justification of hive bees, and then look into the justification of termites. Then look into the Portuguese Man 'o War (a communal organism). But in each case each entity is acting in an attempt to maximize the extension of "DNA like mine" into the future.
I didn't address epigenetic changes here, as that's both irrelevant, and I don't actually understand it. (Does anyone?) But epigenetic changes are usually temporary (only a few generations) and reversible (often within the same generation).
The problem is that people won't find out what's wrong with those proposals until awhile after they start depending on them. Saying "study them" doesn't convince. I've tried to debug too much code that everyone said was bug free...until they found it wasn't.
The key doesn't need to be the same length as the cleartext, it can be considerably shorter. This does weaken the encoding, but not fatally. You just need to encrypt the message before you encode it with the one-time pad with a code that's difficult to recognize. The more you shorten the key, the weaker the encoding, but shortening it by 50% is still quite safe if you use a decent encryption of the cargo.
Perfection isn't impossible, but is hideously expensive.
That said, any code that depends on factoring large primes is weak when used against quantum computers. And they may not be here today, but I wouldn't make strong bets about next year in secret government offices. So if it's worth it to you, by all means use one-time pads. And most of the expense of using them is in the transmission of the info, so you might as well use the most secure version. You can get a pretty good set of random numbers by processing a web cam of a candle flame, but turning that into terabytes of good random numbers could take awhile.
While there is suggestive evidence that the US spying agencies knew that 9-11 was going to happen and intentionally didn't act to prevent it (suggestive, not proof) I know of no credible evidence that it was an inside job. Being paranoid doesn't count as proof.
The thing is, I don't know that anyone every actually *proved* that the NSA elliptic cure constants were weak. But everyone suspects that they are because of other things they've done.
This is a point worth remembering. Once you get a bad reputation, people stop trusting you even if they can't prove that you're doing something wrong this time. And when they remember it later they'll remember it as a time they didn't fall into your trap.
And remember, perhaps those constants were good. Have you heard of anyone proving that they weren't? But would you want to trust them?
Which non-authoritarian governments? Actually, which governments that currently exist are non-authoritarian? I'd believe it of Iceland, and possibly Sweden or Denmark. Maybe Holland. But those are all governments that I don't know much about. Somalia is suppose to have a non-authoritarian government, but only because it basically doesn't have one.
This is the problem that non-state currencies have. One of the ways that states exert power is by control over the currency. They need to see a bit advantage in giving up that control before they will do so. So, e.g., Lithuanian might see their own currency as not being used much internally, with people preferring to use something else (DM? Rubles?) and say, well, BitCoin isn't any worse, so we might as well try it. But most countries see "good reasons" to discourage its use. It's probably technically illegal in the US for example, though trading stamps, customer reward points, etc. have resulted in that law not being generally enforced. They'd probably have to enforce it against a huge raft of companies if the prosecution wasn't to be defended against under the rubric of "random enforcement" (which, if I've got the term correct, actually means "targeted enforcement" which is a cause to throw out a case).
Damn right I don't. I want my phone to be a good phone. Anything else is extra and readily sacrificed to improve the phone aspect. (The built-in address book is an example of a smart phone acting well. The camera is "OK, that's unobtrusive, but I wouldn't pay extra for it". Much of the other stuff is garbage that gets in the way. It's totally lousy as a computer. The interaction is too limited, you can't really type on it, etc. Before I got the smartphone I was thinking a tablet might be a good idea, but after the phone I don't want anything with a similar OS. It's jammed full of misfeatures, there's more misfeatures than features. And it's a very poor phone, which is what I got it to be.
Can you name a smartphone that doesn't meet that description? I think that any cell phone you can sell is legally required to enable tracking by official parties (ie., must have a GPS), and practically the cell phone towers would provide that information anyway. The part that isn't legally required is the non-removable battery, but that was invented by marketing, and ensures that phones will be replaced every few years. That it means the phone is an always-on tracker was a bonus that the governments appreciated, but didn't require.
Mind you, I don't like smartphones. I think they are lousy phones. A lot worse than the cell phones of a decade ago, and the screens are so small that they aren't useful for anything else. I have occasionally thought of getting a tablet, but after using a smartphone I've pretty much decided against it. The OS doesn't work very well, the applications are poor, etc. They aren't even good cameras, though there they do have some advantages, especially in low light conditions. But I see no advantages over a laptop the same size.
It's possible that for a phone Gnome would be allright. My main objection to it for a computer is that I want to have several widow using applications running at once. (Of course, if I actually tried to use it I might have more objections. It sure doesn't seem to have many fans.)
Well, the existing ways that involve surgery also require lots of effort, which people imagine they won't. They're also slower than typing on a keyboard, and have other defects.
I doubt that we'll come up with a way similar to what people imagine when they think of typing via the brain in the coming decade, and if we do it will involve reading the tensions of muscles around the larynx. With direct brain feed it would probably be simpler to do visualization transmission...but do you have any idea how poorly most people visualize?
Possibly so, but (almost) irrelevant. This guy was representing the Linux Foundation at a public event. And the Linux Foundation nominally pushes Linux, so he should have been using Linux. That he wasn't, however, isn't surprising given the actual historic trends of Linux Foundation actions.
Since he was representing the Linux Foundation he should have used Linux. But it's long been clear that the "Linux Foundation" doesn't actually speak for or represent Linux, but rather a collection of businesses that have some connection, however oblique, with Linux.
If they are indeed open source, then the MIT license would make them interesting if they did something I wanted to do. So that's a plus. .NET core was unable to build GUIs, without additional libraries that hadn't been released (perhaps that's changed) which was its sole advantage over other approaches. But it probably could have been used for other things, if it had seemed worth learning. (Since I had no reason to pick up C#, they would have needed to be very good reasons.) At the time I stopped using MSWindows ASP was a notoriously insecure approach that anyone who cared about security avoided. Perhaps they've fixed that. Etc.
But you're right, it's been nearly a decade (possibly longer) since I've been willing to even look seriously at a MS offering. There's too much else that doesn't come with their normal strings and hassles. I probably couldn't even look at their web site (this is a guess) without disabling my ad-blocker, which I'm definitely not willing to do for a site run by someone who has so frequently proven themselves untrustworthy.
Well, Java's a lot better than C at handling multi-processing. And it's easier to handle most use-cases of unicode strings. It's got a few other minor advantages.
I, personally, don't like it, but I haven't yet found a language that meets all my requirements. D (dmd) comes quite close, and I'm currently investigating Go. (One of my main problems with D is program documentation...not theirs, but mine. The autogenerated documentation is too ugly.)
Do you find that convincing? I don't. Those things don't help Linux, they only help MS. What license are they under?
P.S.: I found .net.core is basically useless without the rest of it. I looked at using it when they announced it was released. Most of the others I haven't even looked at, and don't intend to. C# could be interesting, but the last time I looked it wasn't, I don't remember the details of why, but it had to do with the interesting parts being tied to MSWindows.
So basically that list of things is all tied to MSWindows, and being able to run the parts on some other system doesn't change that at all. It's a PR ploy, not a contribution.
Only if the Linux system is embedded in a computer that's running MSWindows.
On what basis do you claim that Microsoft has changed? While this particular story says that some people within MS want to take advantage of Linux, other stories paint a very different picture of other actions. I see no reason whatsoever to trust them.
Please note that it is quite possible for certain individuals within the company to be enthusiastic supporters of Linux, while management continues to plot to tear it down. There is no contradiction there, and management determines corporate policy. (It's also happened historically that certain individuals within MS claimed to support Linux while their actions were quite destructive. Whether they realized the actions were destructive is not clear.)
Don't watch the PR line, watch their actions. That will tell you what they're doing, and takes a lot less time. PR lies to everyone, and have no qualms at all about lying to someone who isn't even a customer. But watching their actions doesn't give you as much lead time, so you need to play it safer...by avoiding dealing with them.
I, personally, try to avoid dealing with companies that have repeatedly lied to me.
PyPi isn't the official repository of the Python project, is a useful adjunct site. It does hold lots of packages that aren't in the official repository. But it's no more the official Python repository then http://ftp.us.debian.org/debia... which also holds a lot of Python packages that are easy to install (on a Debian system).
Do you understand the difference between major and minor version numbers? Or realize that major version number changes frequently indicate breaking compatibility?
I will grant you that Linux has (recently) dropped that tradition, but that was because the number of minor version changes has gotten too large. Very few pieces of software have that rationale. (It's also because Linus found large numbers of minor version changes esthetically unpleasant.)
If you go back a bit further, the sub-minor version changes were also significant, in that the minor version number told you what features were available, and the sub-minor version number told you the patch level. My feeling is that this was a better system, and the only problem what that it should have been two hexadecimal digits rather than decimal digits. Sometimes there were enough patches that three digits were needed, which complicated things.
OTOH, this is all based on memory, and that earlier change was so long ago that I've probably got some of the details wrong.
Those guys are stupid, unless their contracts said that they wouldn't be required to work with anything that wasn't under an OSI approved license. Nothing I've heard indicates that the software has become close source, merely that it's become too dangerous to depend on.
They've got a right to their license if they wrote it, but that doesn't cause me to accept it. I just won't blame them for *that*. I reserve the right to blame them for other things independent of that.
P.S.: As a bit company, Facebook is in a good position to be a big bully. So being dubious about giving the actual legal ground is merely sensible.
It's not definitely a false flag operation. It's not even definitely a real effect. It could be a neurologic problem, and allergy, a disease, or even plumbing noises and lack of sleep.
That it's something real is quite believable. That it's a sonic weapon is a bit dubious. That it's an attack by someone is plausible.
If it were a sonic weapon, where would that weapon need to be located? How big would it need to be? Would it need a clear air path? What could it use for reflectors, and are such things present?
Most of those questions look quite dubious for a secretly concealed weapon. OTOH, the Russians are reported to have used microwaves to irradiate the US embassy staff (though I find it more believable that they were somehow involved in an attempt to bug the joint). So if I were going to pick a villain, and believed they hypothesis of attack, I'd opt for the Russians. And a sonic weapon seems quite dubious, though that it might be perceived as a sonic attack when the actual modality was something electromagnetic doesn't seem too implausible.
That's not a unreasonable question, and it might even have some application to this particular case, though it would certainly be an edge effect. Toxoplasmosis does seem to encourage risky behavior (of certain types) so it could affect political leanings. But curing it wouldn't reverse political leanings because those are largely habitual. That said, it has been demonstrated, e.g., that, statistically, Republicans are more sensitive to disgust than are Democrats. So there certainly are deep connections that could over time change things. Just *how* that would change things is unclear. And it's not as if toxoplasmosis is the only bacterial mind-control agent that inhabits people. They aren't all even parasites, unless you consider your gut bacteria parasites.