Or over watching the original Matrix again. God, what an overrated film that is. TFA claims "creativity"; there was hardly a creative moment in the entire thing. It's a sorry hash of sophomoric interpretations of solipsism, Baudrillard and other poststructuralist thinkers, that new-age self-actualization crap the W's are into, and poorly-shot US versions of Asian action scenes, with none of the daring, skill, or humor of their source. The plot was nonsensical, even by Hollywood SF standards. The acting alternated between minimal to the point of nothingness and hyperbolic scenery-chewing. Just awful in every respect.
"People desperately need a universal solution which is secure, decentralized, fault tolerant, not attached to your phone number, protects your privacy, supports video and audio chats and sending of files, works behind NATs and other firewalls and has the ability to send offline messages."
I don't see the sense in that. There's so much evidence to the contrary.
It's just missing an existential qualifier. Exist people who desperately need blah blah blah? True. All people desperately need blah blah blah? False.
This is what happens when people write comments without first formalizing them in first-order predicate calculus.
Then what you really want is just to change which [time] zone you're in.
Obviously that doesn't help, since the pro-DSTers want to change the delta between local and astronomical time. Changing time zones changes local time.
On the other hand, if a DST fan lives close to the eastern edge of their time zone, they should just move to the western edge. That's nearly an hour's difference right there, obviously.
Darker mornings mean kids are on the streets in the dark. That's the reality of today.
It's been the reality since streets were invented. And it used to be far more common for kids to walk to school - I walked to school from 2nd through 8th grade, through a small, densely-populated city, to schools that were nearly a mile away.[1] What's your point?
[1] Yes, in the snow, when there was some, but not enough to cancel classes. Yes, there were hills. It was quite pleasant, actually. We'd all be better off if we lived in a less dangerist[2] society and kids still walked to school.
So what? In Michigan, at roughly the same latitude, keeping the DST offset wouldn't make much difference. If you live in Detroit and get up at 7 AM, you're getting up before dawn on the day DST ends and every day thereafter until March (specifically 6 March, this year).
Keeping the offset would cost you less than a week of rising after the dawn.
Yes, dawn isn't the whole story, and not everyone gets up at 7AM. Some get up later; many get up earlier. In any case, though, the "it's dark in the morning" argument for falling back is pretty damn weak.
(If you want to look at sunrise times in your neck of the woods, try this.)
I live in Michigan. I have to be to work at 8 AM and get out at 5 PM. Come late December it's dark when I go to work and dark when I get out so who gives a fuck?
Alas, the fucks are given by Michigan's own genius Congressional rep Fred Upton, one of the main proponents of DST and its expansion a few years back.
Massachusetts' Ed Markey was the other rocket scientist behind that one, though of course all their fellow idiots who voted in favor of it share some of the blame. There's a worrisome correlation between states I've lived in that have names starting with "M" and DST proponents. Just to be safe, I'm staying out of Montana until this is over.
Franklin did not invent DST. He published a satire (so semi-serious) suggestion that French citizens be encouraged to rise earlier during summer months.
There are a couple of claimants to the invention of DST, because - as is usually the case - it was invented more than once, independently. That wasn't until around the turn of the 20th century, though, because the idea doesn't make sense until you have coordinated time in a sufficiently large political region.
The arguments for DST made some sense before electric lighting, and possibly even a little until the widespread use of air conditioning. Now they're rubbish, except for the egoist "well, I like it, and I can't change my schedule unless the government mandates it" stuff you'll see from the pro-DSTers in discussions like this. (Hey, I'd like it if there were fewer stupid reality shows on television, and I didn't have to hear a lot of crap about the Stuporbowl every year - but I don't want the government to legislate those changes.)
If a majority of people really, really, really feel they need the clocks set an hour ahead, that's easily fixed too. We set them ahead once, and then never change for DST again. There's no reason to "fall back" in the winter hours when many people end up rising before dawn and retiring after sunset.
We'll just permanently have the sun reach its apex around 13:00. The DST proponents will be satisfied, and rational people won't care.
And following up on my own comment, I'm curious how the law or courts determine how a non-expert is required to evaluate an image or other artifact as "child porn". What's the legal test? Reasonable person? What degree of knowledge is the non-expert required to have about child-pornography statutes and their definitions of illegal material? Is the observer supposed to deduce the ages of subjects in the media, and how accurate are those evaluations supposed to be? What kinds of depicted acts are illegal? Does nudity have to be involved? What about physical contact?
If you find child porn (as a technician or in any other way) you need to report to avoid becoming a criminal yourself.
Citation, please.
There are certainly positions which carry mandatory-reporting responsibility for particular crimes, but this is the first I've heard of this particular one. Can you provide the relevant law or precedent?
aside from deliberate and willful lawlessness which circumvents legal protections the Founders saw fit to write into the foundational law of [the] country
I agree, but skip the appeal to authority. It doesn't matter whether the prohibition is in the Bill of Rights or we added it to the Constitution last Tuesday; whether it was proposed by James Madison or Madison McKinley or a group of undergrads at U Wisconsin, Madison; whether it's a concise articulation of a right guaranteeing freedom from unreasonable search and seizure or just says "yo, dudes, the Feds are totally forbidden from encouraging commercial computer-repair services to snoop in your stuff". Unconstitutional is unconstitutional.
The Founders put some crap into the Constitution, too, which we've had to amend out. There's no profit in holding them up as political exemplars - that just leads us into the trap of intentionality. We should be capable of looking at the plain language of the Fourth Amendment and saying, nope, the FBI can't get away with this.
Should anyone be crazy enough to want to disable WebAssembly support in FF,[1] use about:config to set javascript.options.wasm to false.
[1] I am, and did. There are so many config options that I can't bear to read through them all, but when my attention is drawn to a new feature like this, typically the first thing I do is find the option to disable it. If it's new, chances are I don't want it.
a mean[s] to increase the performance of applications in the browser
No doubt this is an issue for many people, but I've been using Javascript for as long as it's existed, and I have never, ever, ever, not even once, wanted it to run faster.
Indeed, I'd be very happy if all the extant implementations were an order of magnitude or so slower; that would greatly reduce the incentive for unnecessary scripting.
Once WebAssembly is updated to support access to the DOM (the current version can't do that), then there is no good reason for anyone to use JavaScript for anything ever again.
Sure, sure. Why have crap web pages serve crap scripts written in one crap language, when they can serve crap binaries written in any of several crap languages?
"Binaries" in the sense that WebAssembly serves scripts in compiled form. So in addition to letting incompetents demonstrate their failures by attempting to create "web applications" in, say, C++, WebAssembly prevents us from easily viewing those scripts and working around them with, say, Greasemonkey. Or determining that we don't need them, and can safely block them with NoScript. And so forth.
Sure, you can minimize and otherwise obfuscate Javascript. And there's asm.js, which was basically WebAssembly version 0. But certainly on the sites I use, most Javascript is either unobfuscated or just the minimized version of a third-party library that exists in unminimized form, so it's easy to reconstruct what it's doing.
There's rarely a compelling reason for Javascript now. But I see even less of one for WebAssembly, personally. I don't want games and scientific visualization and all sorts of other rubbish running in my browser, thanks anyway. I want to use it to read stuff, and once in a while to rant.
This means that, even if Obama did have Trump wiretapped, it was likely due to connections to a foreign power (likely Russia).
Even that would violate clause B, since Trump is, technically, a "United States person". IANAL, but a plain reading strongly implies this section could not be used to authorize tapping the Trumpster, even if he were talking to foreign agents.
Indeed. It would be weird (and to my mind deeply worrying) if China didn't issue this sort of diplomatic nothing.
I know many folks these days are too young to remember the Cold War, but this is what superpowers do. They engage in a slightly more polite version of schoolyard taunts whenever one of their peers has any sort of public embarrassment. It's part of how you maintain your diplomatic face. It's protocol.
This isn't a matter of enough money. It's a matter of theoretical possibility and astronomical technical [hurdles]...
To be fair, it's also a matter of enough money and other resources. That is, even if we assume the NSA has magically solved all the technical problems (which I, for one, think is hugely unlikely), and has a QC that can break, say, 2048-bit RSA using Shor's algorithm. How long does it take to do that? How many private keys can it derive in practice, in unit time? Shor's algorithm isn't instantaneous - it's fast, in complexity terms (log N), but it does take some time. And setup and extraction are also going to take time. And power.
So the Unicorn NSA might use their fairy-dust magic computer to break the occasional RSA key, but they aren't going to break all the keys ever everywhere. That would require devoting ridiculous resources to building a great many of these magic computers, and there's very little benefit to doing so. Yes, the NSA and its ilk like to sweep up data just for the hell of it, but they'd reach the point of diminishing returns pretty quickly.
I understand the interest in post-quantum cryptography (not a little driven by considerations of selling products to the US Federal government, which will likely be pushed by NIST, under NSA influence, to PCC as it becomes commercially available). But I agree - trapdoor functions in BQP are not going to be the weakest link in crypto soon, and probably not ever. I'd vote for user error, implementation error, and side channels, in that order.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear Larry just tears his victims apart himself.
Antonio Banderas is.... Uno
Eh, I'd take that over a Matrix reboot.
Or over watching the original Matrix again. God, what an overrated film that is. TFA claims "creativity"; there was hardly a creative moment in the entire thing. It's a sorry hash of sophomoric interpretations of solipsism, Baudrillard and other poststructuralist thinkers, that new-age self-actualization crap the W's are into, and poorly-shot US versions of Asian action scenes, with none of the daring, skill, or humor of their source. The plot was nonsensical, even by Hollywood SF standards. The acting alternated between minimal to the point of nothingness and hyperbolic scenery-chewing. Just awful in every respect.
"People desperately need a universal solution which is secure, decentralized, fault tolerant, not attached to your phone number, protects your privacy, supports video and audio chats and sending of files, works behind NATs and other firewalls and has the ability to send offline messages."
I don't see the sense in that. There's so much evidence to the contrary.
It's just missing an existential qualifier. Exist people who desperately need blah blah blah? True. All people desperately need blah blah blah? False.
This is what happens when people write comments without first formalizing them in first-order predicate calculus.
It more dangerous for kids to be out in the dark of mornings than when it's light out. Do you disagree with that?
Yes, until you provide some reliable evidence showing a meaningful correlation, controlled for other variables.
Then what you really want is just to change which [time] zone you're in.
Obviously that doesn't help, since the pro-DSTers want to change the delta between local and astronomical time. Changing time zones changes local time.
On the other hand, if a DST fan lives close to the eastern edge of their time zone, they should just move to the western edge. That's nearly an hour's difference right there, obviously.
To be fair, Pence wasn't governor when Indiana made the change. It was Mitch Daniels, who's now busy fucking up Purdue.
Darker mornings mean kids are on the streets in the dark. That's the reality of today.
It's been the reality since streets were invented. And it used to be far more common for kids to walk to school - I walked to school from 2nd through 8th grade, through a small, densely-populated city, to schools that were nearly a mile away.[1] What's your point?
[1] Yes, in the snow, when there was some, but not enough to cancel classes. Yes, there were hills. It was quite pleasant, actually. We'd all be better off if we lived in a less dangerist[2] society and kids still walked to school.
[2] Beware Dangerism!
So what? In Michigan, at roughly the same latitude, keeping the DST offset wouldn't make much difference. If you live in Detroit and get up at 7 AM, you're getting up before dawn on the day DST ends and every day thereafter until March (specifically 6 March, this year).
Keeping the offset would cost you less than a week of rising after the dawn.
Yes, dawn isn't the whole story, and not everyone gets up at 7AM. Some get up later; many get up earlier. In any case, though, the "it's dark in the morning" argument for falling back is pretty damn weak.
(If you want to look at sunrise times in your neck of the woods, try this.)
I live in Michigan. I have to be to work at 8 AM and get out at 5 PM. Come late December it's dark when I go to work and dark when I get out so who gives a fuck?
Alas, the fucks are given by Michigan's own genius Congressional rep Fred Upton, one of the main proponents of DST and its expansion a few years back.
Massachusetts' Ed Markey was the other rocket scientist behind that one, though of course all their fellow idiots who voted in favor of it share some of the blame. There's a worrisome correlation between states I've lived in that have names starting with "M" and DST proponents. Just to be safe, I'm staying out of Montana until this is over.
Franklin did not invent DST. He published a satire (so semi-serious) suggestion that French citizens be encouraged to rise earlier during summer months.
There are a couple of claimants to the invention of DST, because - as is usually the case - it was invented more than once, independently. That wasn't until around the turn of the 20th century, though, because the idea doesn't make sense until you have coordinated time in a sufficiently large political region.
The arguments for DST made some sense before electric lighting, and possibly even a little until the widespread use of air conditioning. Now they're rubbish, except for the egoist "well, I like it, and I can't change my schedule unless the government mandates it" stuff you'll see from the pro-DSTers in discussions like this. (Hey, I'd like it if there were fewer stupid reality shows on television, and I didn't have to hear a lot of crap about the Stuporbowl every year - but I don't want the government to legislate those changes.)
That's easily fixed. Start your day earlier.
If a majority of people really, really, really feel they need the clocks set an hour ahead, that's easily fixed too. We set them ahead once, and then never change for DST again. There's no reason to "fall back" in the winter hours when many people end up rising before dawn and retiring after sunset.
We'll just permanently have the sun reach its apex around 13:00. The DST proponents will be satisfied, and rational people won't care.
And following up on my own comment, I'm curious how the law or courts determine how a non-expert is required to evaluate an image or other artifact as "child porn". What's the legal test? Reasonable person? What degree of knowledge is the non-expert required to have about child-pornography statutes and their definitions of illegal material? Is the observer supposed to deduce the ages of subjects in the media, and how accurate are those evaluations supposed to be? What kinds of depicted acts are illegal? Does nudity have to be involved? What about physical contact?
I am, shall we say, dubious.
If you find child porn (as a technician or in any other way) you need to report to avoid becoming a criminal yourself.
Citation, please.
There are certainly positions which carry mandatory-reporting responsibility for particular crimes, but this is the first I've heard of this particular one. Can you provide the relevant law or precedent?
aside from deliberate and willful lawlessness which circumvents legal protections the Founders saw fit to write into the foundational law of [the] country
I agree, but skip the appeal to authority. It doesn't matter whether the prohibition is in the Bill of Rights or we added it to the Constitution last Tuesday; whether it was proposed by James Madison or Madison McKinley or a group of undergrads at U Wisconsin, Madison; whether it's a concise articulation of a right guaranteeing freedom from unreasonable search and seizure or just says "yo, dudes, the Feds are totally forbidden from encouraging commercial computer-repair services to snoop in your stuff". Unconstitutional is unconstitutional.
The Founders put some crap into the Constitution, too, which we've had to amend out. There's no profit in holding them up as political exemplars - that just leads us into the trap of intentionality. We should be capable of looking at the plain language of the Fourth Amendment and saying, nope, the FBI can't get away with this.
Only to find it, they'd arrest anyone they knew of who planted it.
Oh, that's just adorable.
it's English's only native diacritical mark
M' learnèd friend is perhaps forgetting the grave accent?
Should anyone be crazy enough to want to disable WebAssembly support in FF,[1] use about:config to set javascript.options.wasm to false.
[1] I am, and did. There are so many config options that I can't bear to read through them all, but when my attention is drawn to a new feature like this, typically the first thing I do is find the option to disable it. If it's new, chances are I don't want it.
a mean[s] to increase the performance of applications in the browser
No doubt this is an issue for many people, but I've been using Javascript for as long as it's existed, and I have never, ever, ever, not even once, wanted it to run faster.
Indeed, I'd be very happy if all the extant implementations were an order of magnitude or so slower; that would greatly reduce the incentive for unnecessary scripting.
Once WebAssembly is updated to support access to the DOM (the current version can't do that), then there is no good reason for anyone to use JavaScript for anything ever again.
Sure, sure. Why have crap web pages serve crap scripts written in one crap language, when they can serve crap binaries written in any of several crap languages?
"Binaries" in the sense that WebAssembly serves scripts in compiled form. So in addition to letting incompetents demonstrate their failures by attempting to create "web applications" in, say, C++, WebAssembly prevents us from easily viewing those scripts and working around them with, say, Greasemonkey. Or determining that we don't need them, and can safely block them with NoScript. And so forth.
Sure, you can minimize and otherwise obfuscate Javascript. And there's asm.js, which was basically WebAssembly version 0. But certainly on the sites I use, most Javascript is either unobfuscated or just the minimized version of a third-party library that exists in unminimized form, so it's easy to reconstruct what it's doing.
There's rarely a compelling reason for Javascript now. But I see even less of one for WebAssembly, personally. I don't want games and scientific visualization and all sorts of other rubbish running in my browser, thanks anyway. I want to use it to read stuff, and once in a while to rant.
Yes. UK libel laws are a regressive nightmare.
Now try reading the actual story.
People who support their arguments based on newspaper headlines shouldn't be allowed to argue.
This means that, even if Obama did have Trump wiretapped, it was likely due to connections to a foreign power (likely Russia).
Even that would violate clause B, since Trump is, technically, a "United States person". IANAL, but a plain reading strongly implies this section could not be used to authorize tapping the Trumpster, even if he were talking to foreign agents.
Indeed. It would be weird (and to my mind deeply worrying) if China didn't issue this sort of diplomatic nothing.
I know many folks these days are too young to remember the Cold War, but this is what superpowers do. They engage in a slightly more polite version of schoolyard taunts whenever one of their peers has any sort of public embarrassment. It's part of how you maintain your diplomatic face. It's protocol.
This isn't a matter of enough money. It's a matter of theoretical possibility and astronomical technical [hurdles]...
To be fair, it's also a matter of enough money and other resources. That is, even if we assume the NSA has magically solved all the technical problems (which I, for one, think is hugely unlikely), and has a QC that can break, say, 2048-bit RSA using Shor's algorithm. How long does it take to do that? How many private keys can it derive in practice, in unit time? Shor's algorithm isn't instantaneous - it's fast, in complexity terms (log N), but it does take some time. And setup and extraction are also going to take time. And power.
So the Unicorn NSA might use their fairy-dust magic computer to break the occasional RSA key, but they aren't going to break all the keys ever everywhere. That would require devoting ridiculous resources to building a great many of these magic computers, and there's very little benefit to doing so. Yes, the NSA and its ilk like to sweep up data just for the hell of it, but they'd reach the point of diminishing returns pretty quickly.
I understand the interest in post-quantum cryptography (not a little driven by considerations of selling products to the US Federal government, which will likely be pushed by NIST, under NSA influence, to PCC as it becomes commercially available). But I agree - trapdoor functions in BQP are not going to be the weakest link in crypto soon, and probably not ever. I'd vote for user error, implementation error, and side channels, in that order.
Well done. Your point.