I actually formed my opinion of Rand by (wait for it) reading her work. The problem with Rand's work is that it is all just one big knee jerk reaction to communism that hand waves away all of the details just as badly as Marx ever did. She blathers on and on about how terrible it is for the government to take what is rightfully ours, but neglects to address what we are supposed to do when corporations, in the vacuum of power created by a government that does not participate in the economy, are powerful enough to enact that same force. And what's worse, the government is made up of elected officials, so they at least don't have a direct motive to enshrine additional power to those in their position, because we could vote them out tomorrow, and they don't actually want to be oppressed any more than we do. A laissez faire economy, on the other hand, lets people amass power (money is just a big abstraction for the power to make people do things, which Rand loathes so much) and then hand it off to their children, which means if you can lock everybody but you and your friends into serfdom, you've won the game. When you give the economy free reign, you move first to industrial revolution-era abuse of the lower class, and then eventually into hereditary dictatorship (or feudalism). We know this because that is exactly how all of the old world monarchies formed. If you don't let your government participate in the government in any way, eventually the private sector will amass enough power that it can tell the government no (or more realistically, just control the government by proxy, which we are getting more and more of every day).
The way Rand talks about the free market, it sounds like it is some beneficent force powered by fairy dust and magical unicorns. The burden of proof for demonstrating anything should lie with Rand's followers, because that's as much a leap of faith as believing that some Jew died a couple thousand years ago for your sins. A capitalistic market is not a moral force. It is a tool with limitations. And if we do not recognize and address those limitations, it is about as useful as trying to put together a gun using a wet saw, only a lot more dangerous.
Not just Texas. There are, in fact, a few of us that have risen from savagery and become civilized here. They live in backwoods East Texas, which has much more in common with the folk in the swaps of Louisiana than us city folk in big Texas cities where our judges might have half a chance in hell of knowing what a video codec is.
Dude, why do I care if your house burns down, whether the road to your house is maintained, and whether you are protected from foreign invasion? The next time you or one of your family members starts a cooking fire in your kitchen, I expect you to pay for a private company to come put it out. (After all, you live outside city limits to avoid paying property taxes, right? That way other people can pay the fire fighters to protect you?) Or maybe your neighbor's house will catch fire, but he won't be able to afford to pay somebody to put it out, so it will burn until your property lights up, as well!
We wouldn't want the government to pay for those things with stolen money after all.
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple." Luke 14:26
I don't know, I think the Bible has her back on this one.
It is more like saying that a thief can get everything out of your house safe if they have enough access to pick the safe up and walk out the front door with it and also pick up the technical schematic of the safe from your desk drawer on the way out.
It means jack squat though if someone get's your salt, because now they can map 091823dfa792ca9120aef1200c9266aa to 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 and 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 to password (and a whole bunch of other ones, but this string would look awfully likely as your password)
That's wrong. If you are using salt for your hashing, you have to map 091823dfa792ca9120aef1200c9266aa to my password because there is no way to map 091823dfa792ca9120aef1200c9266aa to 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 even if you have my salt. That's not how any reasonable one way hashing function works.
Actually, that's exactly what you couldn't detect. The VOID only would appear in uniform areas, which means that in addition to all other stated problems with this technique, you can still photoshop Ryan Reynold's head onto a porn star's body as long as you use a magic wand tool and/or a paint bucket on any uniform areas of the image.
Actually, after playing with it a little bit, it becomes readily apparent that resizing (at least in Opera) affects this the exact same way that re-compressing the data as a jpeg does. As I run through the compression qualities in paint.net, I see the exact same patterns of compression artifacts in the images that I do when scrolling through zoom levels in my browser. Really, image scaling and compression are very similar problems, so this shouldn't surprise anyone.
This means two things. First, this technique currently only works at very specific jpeg compression levels (and on this particular image, it only works at qualities way lower than what I'd ever use for even a 10 minute cheesy photoshop hack job, which means it is probably just the default for MS Paint), so circumventing the protection is even easier than switching formats (just slide the quality bar over to the right when saving in any real image editing software). Second, and more importantly, even if they could make this technique universal, it would have the exact problem with resizing that GP mentioned.
Because there has always historically been a pyramid and therefore always somebody who can control through force. Your options are to either have everybody be roughly equal in power (communism) or you have to pick which entity carries the biggest stick. In a representative democracy, the idea is to try to keep the entity with the stick under your thumb, which is a whole lot better than some arbitrary rich guy/corporation amassing enough power to control you, where you have no recourse at all.
Methinks you do not grasp what general relativity has to say on the concept of simultaneity. You have to pick a frame of reference to talk about something happening "at the same time" because observing the same events at a different speed will cause them to occur at different times.
To quote GP:
It's funny how many comments that involve relativity seem to implicitly assume there is one preferred frame of reference. Talk about not getting the point!
I would assume this has the exact same problem as serial key DRMing schemes on the PC: it only works for multiplayer. For single player games, you'll just get a cracked version of the game that doesn't require serial key validation, like we've been doing on the PC for more than a decade.
That depends. If X-Pire works as described in TFA, then yes, because the only thing their server is described as doing is passing out the same keys I would be. If X-Pire actually causes the image to be encrypted with different keys depending on either time or originating IP or something like that, then you have to actually cache the image. No matter what they do, though, there has to be a way for me to uniquely identify the image they need decrypted, so the caching will only happen once.
I'm ready to start a new service called Un-X-Pire. What you will do is run my browser add-on, which will find X-Pire tagged images, request the decryption key from the X-Pire service, and then cache it the first time it is requested for each image. After that, it will just serve out the decryption key over and over (or, if the decryption does something fancy like swap keys based on current time, it will go ahead and decrypt the image for you by spoofing the time the key was initially first cached as the current system time for the decryption process), and then everybody who uses my plug-in will be able to view the image for the rest of eternity so long as at least one person views it with my plugin before it expires.
Also, I bet mine takes a lot less time to code than theirs.
At least with government interference, when you've hit rock bottom you can vote people out of office. If you hit rock bottom by having a completely free market, you end up with cool things like hereditary dictatorships and hundreds of years of oppression.
That was my first thought, too. Even then, the actual evolutionary forces would be such that speciation seems so improbable as to be impossible. The environment for colonists would be almost entirely artificial, and it seems doubtful that the color of light on Mars would significantly impact children's ability to grow to adulthood and procreate themselves, especially not with a sample size that is small enough that it wouldn't also be cross-breeding with Earth's population.
The only real scenario I can come up with involves Mars being terraformed and then completely cut off from Earth somehow.
That's funny, I didn't see GP say that you shouldn't be convicted of murder without DNA evidence, just that you shouldn't be put to death. But hey, strawmen are cool, too.
For an easy, current, US-specific example, take a look at racism in the deep south. I work in rural Texas, and sure they aren't all in the KKK, but a significant number of the folk out here actually seem like they would be more incensed about somebody accidentally killing their pet dog than a person meeting an untimely demise, as long as that person had dark skin.
Popularity never has and never will be a redeeming quality in and of itself. Your average person is a mouth-breathing buffoon and it surprises me on a daily basis that they manage to tie their shoes in the morning much less go to work and do anything productive for society. Why would their view on what is a quality news source influence my opinion in the least?
Slashdot Mirror
I actually formed my opinion of Rand by (wait for it) reading her work. The problem with Rand's work is that it is all just one big knee jerk reaction to communism that hand waves away all of the details just as badly as Marx ever did. She blathers on and on about how terrible it is for the government to take what is rightfully ours, but neglects to address what we are supposed to do when corporations, in the vacuum of power created by a government that does not participate in the economy, are powerful enough to enact that same force. And what's worse, the government is made up of elected officials, so they at least don't have a direct motive to enshrine additional power to those in their position, because we could vote them out tomorrow, and they don't actually want to be oppressed any more than we do. A laissez faire economy, on the other hand, lets people amass power (money is just a big abstraction for the power to make people do things, which Rand loathes so much) and then hand it off to their children, which means if you can lock everybody but you and your friends into serfdom, you've won the game. When you give the economy free reign, you move first to industrial revolution-era abuse of the lower class, and then eventually into hereditary dictatorship (or feudalism). We know this because that is exactly how all of the old world monarchies formed. If you don't let your government participate in the government in any way, eventually the private sector will amass enough power that it can tell the government no (or more realistically, just control the government by proxy, which we are getting more and more of every day).
The way Rand talks about the free market, it sounds like it is some beneficent force powered by fairy dust and magical unicorns. The burden of proof for demonstrating anything should lie with Rand's followers, because that's as much a leap of faith as believing that some Jew died a couple thousand years ago for your sins. A capitalistic market is not a moral force. It is a tool with limitations. And if we do not recognize and address those limitations, it is about as useful as trying to put together a gun using a wet saw, only a lot more dangerous.
Not just Texas. There are, in fact, a few of us that have risen from savagery and become civilized here. They live in backwoods East Texas, which has much more in common with the folk in the swaps of Louisiana than us city folk in big Texas cities where our judges might have half a chance in hell of knowing what a video codec is.
Yes, only dumb people set accidental cooking fires. I see my point was well taken.
I grok wrongness.
Dude, why do I care if your house burns down, whether the road to your house is maintained, and whether you are protected from foreign invasion? The next time you or one of your family members starts a cooking fire in your kitchen, I expect you to pay for a private company to come put it out. (After all, you live outside city limits to avoid paying property taxes, right? That way other people can pay the fire fighters to protect you?) Or maybe your neighbor's house will catch fire, but he won't be able to afford to pay somebody to put it out, so it will burn until your property lights up, as well!
We wouldn't want the government to pay for those things with stolen money after all.
More people need to read Atlas Shrugged.
No. No no no. No no no no no no no. Nononononononononononononnonononono.
Ayn Rand was a decent novelist, and a travesty of an economist and philosopher.
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple." Luke 14:26 I don't know, I think the Bible has her back on this one.
House members voting against what their constituents want
You do know what a representative democracy is, right? Hint: it isn't the same thing as a direct democracy.
It is more like saying that a thief can get everything out of your house safe if they have enough access to pick the safe up and walk out the front door with it and also pick up the technical schematic of the safe from your desk drawer on the way out.
It means jack squat though if someone get's your salt, because now they can map 091823dfa792ca9120aef1200c9266aa to 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 and 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 to password (and a whole bunch of other ones, but this string would look awfully likely as your password)
That's wrong. If you are using salt for your hashing, you have to map 091823dfa792ca9120aef1200c9266aa to my password because there is no way to map 091823dfa792ca9120aef1200c9266aa to 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 even if you have my salt. That's not how any reasonable one way hashing function works.
Actually, that's exactly what you couldn't detect. The VOID only would appear in uniform areas, which means that in addition to all other stated problems with this technique, you can still photoshop Ryan Reynold's head onto a porn star's body as long as you use a magic wand tool and/or a paint bucket on any uniform areas of the image.
Actually, after playing with it a little bit, it becomes readily apparent that resizing (at least in Opera) affects this the exact same way that re-compressing the data as a jpeg does. As I run through the compression qualities in paint.net, I see the exact same patterns of compression artifacts in the images that I do when scrolling through zoom levels in my browser. Really, image scaling and compression are very similar problems, so this shouldn't surprise anyone.
This means two things. First, this technique currently only works at very specific jpeg compression levels (and on this particular image, it only works at qualities way lower than what I'd ever use for even a 10 minute cheesy photoshop hack job, which means it is probably just the default for MS Paint), so circumventing the protection is even easier than switching formats (just slide the quality bar over to the right when saving in any real image editing software). Second, and more importantly, even if they could make this technique universal, it would have the exact problem with resizing that GP mentioned.
Because there has always historically been a pyramid and therefore always somebody who can control through force. Your options are to either have everybody be roughly equal in power (communism) or you have to pick which entity carries the biggest stick. In a representative democracy, the idea is to try to keep the entity with the stick under your thumb, which is a whole lot better than some arbitrary rich guy/corporation amassing enough power to control you, where you have no recourse at all.
It's funny how many comments that involve relativity seem to implicitly assume there is one preferred frame of reference. Talk about not getting the point!
Whoosh?
I would assume this has the exact same problem as serial key DRMing schemes on the PC: it only works for multiplayer. For single player games, you'll just get a cracked version of the game that doesn't require serial key validation, like we've been doing on the PC for more than a decade.
That depends. If X-Pire works as described in TFA, then yes, because the only thing their server is described as doing is passing out the same keys I would be. If X-Pire actually causes the image to be encrypted with different keys depending on either time or originating IP or something like that, then you have to actually cache the image. No matter what they do, though, there has to be a way for me to uniquely identify the image they need decrypted, so the caching will only happen once.
I'm ready to start a new service called Un-X-Pire. What you will do is run my browser add-on, which will find X-Pire tagged images, request the decryption key from the X-Pire service, and then cache it the first time it is requested for each image. After that, it will just serve out the decryption key over and over (or, if the decryption does something fancy like swap keys based on current time, it will go ahead and decrypt the image for you by spoofing the time the key was initially first cached as the current system time for the decryption process), and then everybody who uses my plug-in will be able to view the image for the rest of eternity so long as at least one person views it with my plugin before it expires.
Also, I bet mine takes a lot less time to code than theirs.
At least with government interference, when you've hit rock bottom you can vote people out of office. If you hit rock bottom by having a completely free market, you end up with cool things like hereditary dictatorships and hundreds of years of oppression.
No True Scotsman fallacy much?
That was my first thought, too. Even then, the actual evolutionary forces would be such that speciation seems so improbable as to be impossible. The environment for colonists would be almost entirely artificial, and it seems doubtful that the color of light on Mars would significantly impact children's ability to grow to adulthood and procreate themselves, especially not with a sample size that is small enough that it wouldn't also be cross-breeding with Earth's population.
The only real scenario I can come up with involves Mars being terraformed and then completely cut off from Earth somehow.
That's funny, I didn't see GP say that you shouldn't be convicted of murder without DNA evidence, just that you shouldn't be put to death. But hey, strawmen are cool, too.
Okay, that's the hardest I've had to try in weeks to not burst out laughing at work so that people didn't know I was reading Slashdot comments. Bravo.
For an easy, current, US-specific example, take a look at racism in the deep south. I work in rural Texas, and sure they aren't all in the KKK, but a significant number of the folk out here actually seem like they would be more incensed about somebody accidentally killing their pet dog than a person meeting an untimely demise, as long as that person had dark skin.
Popularity never has and never will be a redeeming quality in and of itself. Your average person is a mouth-breathing buffoon and it surprises me on a daily basis that they manage to tie their shoes in the morning much less go to work and do anything productive for society. Why would their view on what is a quality news source influence my opinion in the least?