ESR would go right along with the Chinese. He is deeply offended by the "sexygirl69 problem" as he calls it. I followed him on G+ for a while and got disgusted by the fellating of Google and the Right of Corporations to know your real name. Never mind that there are valid reasons for anonymity, including violent ex-spouses, stalkers, or governments bent on silencing dissent.
The backers of totalitarianism are within our community.
Anonymity is unimaginably important when you are standing up to a power structure that does not want you saying what you are saying.
The SCOTUS has come down time and again saying that anonymity is crucial to free speech, and nearly everyone cites the Federalist Papers as a shining example.
In China, the Communist Party has a great big problem with corruption, and online communication is exposing that. So they try to cover it up by making people fear for their lives for posting about corruption under their real names.
Remove anonymity and you remove the last check against an abusive government.
"As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web cultureâ"the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websitesâ"as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself."
Oh you mean Fidonet? AKA Fight-O-Net? Or like my local bbses where everyone knew each other? One wag commented just hours ago at another forum that the local networks were "the crazy story of raging hostility and love." And they were. We would fight it out online and go to Rock&Bowl and RHPS every weekend. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory doesn't account for cruelty and bickering among the people you know and love. It also doesn't account for the BS people post under their *real names* - see Facebook for that.
This isn't some new phenomenon. This is human nature being acted out online. I don't know where he's coming from that he should be surprised at all. I think he led a very sheltered life online and offline. He thinks that the masses should go back to where they came from. We're well past that point of no-return. Maybe if he doesn't want to be immersed in society, he should go create another Internet, with a population of 1, himself.
WebTV, when even the keyboard was an *option* for using the Internet. You had AOLers, and then you really scraped the bottom of the barrel in Usenet with WebTVers.
"SmartTVs" are WebTV but with even less functionality and more walled-garden. It's simply better to have a dumb device that only receives signal from various devices like computers, game consoles, and video-storage devices and acts like a "receiver" of sorts, much like how a stereo receiver takes input from various audio sources.
This "television cum internet terminal" was always a dumb idea, mostly because instead of being used to enable people, such devices are used to separate people from their money in the crudest ways possible.
And manufacturers wonder why the uptake isn't as much as they'd hope.
"No, the notion of "secure" computing is ridiculous"
Security is a spectrum from "totally promiscuous and do anything to this machine" to "no, you can't even turn it on, and if you do, it will cost you your life" kind of horror-show.
Sane people, when they talk about secure computing, talk about something in the middle. The insane say it's an all or nothing false dichotomy. These are the same people who implement stupid password policies as administrators that ultimately result in the recycling of insecure passwords,for example.
>me being belligerant
Only because I've been around the block a few times and spot nonsense easily. Like this "not being able to trust the firmware" stuff.
If it comes to the point where you can't trust the firmware, then you have either become clinically paranoid, or you have angered the wrong people. In either case, you are royally screwed and have much larger problems than simply being able to visit your bank's website securely.
>To go from Buffalo NY to Toronto Canada by car takes about 1.44 hours,
On what planet?
The 401 is nearly impassible if you don't get your butt on the highway from the Peace Bridge before 4AM.
1.44 hours from the Peace Bridge only happens if you happen to hit that magical time of the day when traffic is light, and that is generally "before the Devil gets his shoes on."
>by train is 4.5 hours >amtrak >As if you can take the train directly from the Peace Bridge to Union Station.
1. Amtrak doesn't operate in Canada. 2. You can't even get there from there. You have to pick up VIA Rail from Niagara Falls in Ontario. That's the furthest away from Union Station you can get and still take the train in, which is not recommended. 3. Frankly, going from Buffalo to Toronto, in a word, sucks. It sucks all the way around. 4. I recommend parking in Port Credit and taking the GO train.
Don't use a computer. Ever. If there is no end to what you can trust, not even a computer encased in concrete at the bottom of the Challenger Deep is enough.
>you are not starting with an asteroid that is in a convenient orbit that is just a few tens of metres per second away from a perfect intercept.
Really?
REALLY?
This is the basis for your dispute with me? You rule out asteroids that may be convenient, and then say it's going to be difficult to delta-v something?
An interesting result would have been "strangely, groundwater doesn't cause erosion here" because groundwater causes erosion everywhere.
Even here in New England, groundwater does a bang-up job of dissolving the iron out of granite and producing what is known as "rotten rock" and causing bathtub-rings of rust in ISDS test pits that make seasonal water table estimations easy. Water also dissolves out feldspars giving the classic pitting of granite rocks.
This wasn't interesting in the least. "Yup, groundwater is causing erosion here too." Wow.
Show me where water doesn't cause erosion. THAT would be pretty cool.
But we already know that subsurface groundwater causes erosion.
We've known for a long time. We have national parks dedicated to pretty examples of this. Insurance companies hate extreme examples of this like karst topographies, especially when a house falls in a sinkhole.
Somehow someone thought that this didn't apply to islands and needed a study to find this out? How do I get a grant to do a similar study in another tropical paradise to prove the obvious?
Furthermore, I find your signature/tagline most ironic since you can't see that the math for missing and hitting is all the same except for the tolerances for the resulting answer. The algorithms are identical.
You are hung up on the technology when all this is really just a lot of math called "orbital mechanics" and whether you use the gravity well of Jupiter or the gloved hand of an astronaut giving a sufficient shove (because the further out you are, the less of a shove you need) makes not one bit of difference if the vector is correct.
Missing and hitting are all the same situations with the same math.
>Beyond that, the force of groundwater will eventually win and Oahu will begin its transformation to a flat, low-lying island like Midway."
What do you mean "begin?" Begun it has, already./yoda.
Oahu's eventual metamorphosis is to that of a seamount, like all the other seamounts that stretch along the ocean floor all the way to the Aleutians and Kamchatka.
This is not news at all for Geologists, or anyone for that matter, who has seen a map of the ocean floor on Google Earth or the globe at the Boston Museum of Science in the 70s (yours truly).
Delta V is Delta V and whether it is applied with white paint, ion thrusters, chemical rockets, gravity, etc, makes no difference if the magnitude and direction is the correct amount for capture or mere avoidance.
Your thinking is too narrow. You are hung up on whether the application is high-tech enough, when the technology doesn't matter except for cost.
>Why not tell a little white lie that this asteroid will hit earth in 2040
Because after we spend $TRILLIONS on the mission, and the conspiracy is revealed, when the real thing comes along, people won't believe it. It's tough enough convincing people to evacuate a barrier island before a hurricane or to get Mr. Truman away from Mt. St. Helens before the eruption.
Also
>assuming such a secret can be kept
General Petraeus couldn't even keep his affair secret and he was an intelligence expert. This is why the moon hoaxers are fucking stupid, thinking that not just one, but thousands of engineers, scientists, and politicians can keep a lid on a consipiracy all at once.
"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead" - Franklin
Users in the chatrooms: L2 : bmo - room 1 - "Appeal's bedroom" ---- SO LONELY. A TUMBLEWEED ROLLS THROUGH TOWN. Last logout: 18+22:08:40 ago from entropy.tmok.com ----- THAT'S RIGHT, I CHECKED IN ALMOST 19 DAYS AGO, AND IT NEVER CHANGES. SO LONELY. THE WIND HOWLS THROUGH THE VACANT CHAT, EVOKING GHOSTS AND CHAT NOIR. You have 122 notes in your notebox ! (13 pages)/finger bmo Lets see if "bmo" likes your finger: ----- OH YOU BETTER BELIEVE I LIKE YOUR FINGER.
Level 2 Login: "bmo - #include guinness/beer.h" ----- SO WITTY I AM. NO, REALLY.
Logins: 4384 Total: -24855+-3:-14:-8 ----- SO MANY HOURS IT WRAPPED AROUND.
Last time on: "Dec 22 04:13:47 2012" (0+00:00:09 ago)
Homepage: "http://owlcomm.dyndns.org:3898" ----- GOOD LUCK.
ICQ-number: BLAH. ----- I STILL KNOW THIS BY HEART.
Email: bmo@ids.net ---- DON'T EVEN TRY. WITHER IDS.NET?
Maker: Eagle2 Maketime: "Sep 18 16:13:45 1996" (16 years 98+13:00:11 ago) ----- DANG, SON.
I have an account on euts.org (enchantment under the sea!) that is older, but I'll be damned if I can remember my password.
I unfoed you and a few other people, but the process is so slow waiting for the page to refresh and I have so many to go through that I had to give up unless you (or anyone else) have a tip on how to do a batch process. I've done a list of URLs with UIDs but FF pukes trying to open so many tabs.
I'm going to have to look at what happens when I click on "I'm sure" and I can't be arsed right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Without talking and organization, you are just some idiot with a gun.
--
BMO
ESR would go right along with the Chinese. He is deeply offended by the "sexygirl69 problem" as he calls it. I followed him on G+ for a while and got disgusted by the fellating of Google and the Right of Corporations to know your real name. Never mind that there are valid reasons for anonymity, including violent ex-spouses, stalkers, or governments bent on silencing dissent.
The backers of totalitarianism are within our community.
--
BMO
Anonymity is unimaginably important when you are standing up to a power structure that does not want you saying what you are saying.
The SCOTUS has come down time and again saying that anonymity is crucial to free speech, and nearly everyone cites the Federalist Papers as a shining example.
In China, the Communist Party has a great big problem with corruption, and online communication is exposing that. So they try to cover it up by making people fear for their lives for posting about corruption under their real names.
Remove anonymity and you remove the last check against an abusive government.
--
BMO
Yup. He'd be the one in the Warsaw Ghetto talking about safety and cooperation with the Nazis.
The doublethink in this boy is strong.
No, this is not a Godwin.
--
BMO
If you don't have the balls to say something with your name attached to it then don't say it.
Then why are you using a nom-de-plume, or is your real name BitZtream?
Hypocrite.
--
BMO
"As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web cultureâ"the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websitesâ"as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself."
Oh you mean Fidonet? AKA Fight-O-Net? Or like my local bbses where everyone knew each other? One wag commented just hours ago at another forum that the local networks were "the crazy story of raging hostility and love." And they were. We would fight it out online and go to Rock&Bowl and RHPS every weekend. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory doesn't account for cruelty and bickering among the people you know and love. It also doesn't account for the BS people post under their *real names* - see Facebook for that.
This isn't some new phenomenon. This is human nature being acted out online. I don't know where he's coming from that he should be surprised at all. I think he led a very sheltered life online and offline. He thinks that the masses should go back to where they came from. We're well past that point of no-return. Maybe if he doesn't want to be immersed in society, he should go create another Internet, with a population of 1, himself.
--
BMO
WebTV, when even the keyboard was an *option* for using the Internet. You had AOLers, and then you really scraped the bottom of the barrel in Usenet with WebTVers.
"SmartTVs" are WebTV but with even less functionality and more walled-garden. It's simply better to have a dumb device that only receives signal from various devices like computers, game consoles, and video-storage devices and acts like a "receiver" of sorts, much like how a stereo receiver takes input from various audio sources.
This "television cum internet terminal" was always a dumb idea, mostly because instead of being used to enable people, such devices are used to separate people from their money in the crudest ways possible.
And manufacturers wonder why the uptake isn't as much as they'd hope.
--
BMO
"No, the notion of "secure" computing is ridiculous"
Security is a spectrum from "totally promiscuous and do anything to this machine" to "no, you can't even turn it on, and if you do, it will cost you your life" kind of horror-show.
Sane people, when they talk about secure computing, talk about something in the middle. The insane say it's an all or nothing false dichotomy. These are the same people who implement stupid password policies as administrators that ultimately result in the recycling of insecure passwords,for example.
>me being belligerant
Only because I've been around the block a few times and spot nonsense easily. Like this "not being able to trust the firmware" stuff.
If it comes to the point where you can't trust the firmware, then you have either become clinically paranoid, or you have angered the wrong people. In either case, you are royally screwed and have much larger problems than simply being able to visit your bank's website securely.
--
BMO
>To go from Buffalo NY to Toronto Canada by car takes about 1.44 hours,
On what planet?
The 401 is nearly impassible if you don't get your butt on the highway from the Peace Bridge before 4AM.
1.44 hours from the Peace Bridge only happens if you happen to hit that magical time of the day when traffic is light, and that is generally "before the Devil gets his shoes on."
>by train is 4.5 hours
>amtrak
>As if you can take the train directly from the Peace Bridge to Union Station.
1. Amtrak doesn't operate in Canada.
2. You can't even get there from there. You have to pick up VIA Rail from Niagara Falls in Ontario. That's the furthest away from Union Station you can get and still take the train in, which is not recommended.
3. Frankly, going from Buffalo to Toronto, in a word, sucks. It sucks all the way around.
4. I recommend parking in Port Credit and taking the GO train.
--
BMO
Then you know what?
Don't use a computer. Ever. If there is no end to what you can trust, not even a computer encased in concrete at the bottom of the Challenger Deep is enough.
Your response is ridiculous.
--
BMO
>use an entirely separate computer.
No. You don't have to. If you can boot from a USB port or CD/DVD, use a live read-only OS and boot from it.
An example of it is here: http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm
You can do the same thing with other live distributions like Knoppix, Trinity, Ubuntu, etc.
--
BMO
>you are not starting with an asteroid that is in a convenient orbit that is just a few tens of metres per second away from a perfect intercept.
Really?
REALLY?
This is the basis for your dispute with me? You rule out asteroids that may be convenient, and then say it's going to be difficult to delta-v something?
Go away.
--
BMO
An interesting result would have been "strangely, groundwater doesn't cause erosion here" because groundwater causes erosion everywhere.
Even here in New England, groundwater does a bang-up job of dissolving the iron out of granite and producing what is known as "rotten rock" and causing bathtub-rings of rust in ISDS test pits that make seasonal water table estimations easy. Water also dissolves out feldspars giving the classic pitting of granite rocks.
This wasn't interesting in the least. "Yup, groundwater is causing erosion here too." Wow.
Show me where water doesn't cause erosion. THAT would be pretty cool.
--
BMO
But we already know that subsurface groundwater causes erosion.
We've known for a long time. We have national parks dedicated to pretty examples of this. Insurance companies hate extreme examples of this like karst topographies, especially when a house falls in a sinkhole.
Somehow someone thought that this didn't apply to islands and needed a study to find this out? How do I get a grant to do a similar study in another tropical paradise to prove the obvious?
--
BMO
Furthermore, I find your signature/tagline most ironic since you can't see that the math for missing and hitting is all the same except for the tolerances for the resulting answer. The algorithms are identical.
--
BMO
>[Sigh] Try reading what I actually wrote
I did.
You are hung up on the technology when all this is really just a lot of math called "orbital mechanics" and whether you use the gravity well of Jupiter or the gloved hand of an astronaut giving a sufficient shove (because the further out you are, the less of a shove you need) makes not one bit of difference if the vector is correct.
Missing and hitting are all the same situations with the same math.
--
BMO
>Beyond that, the force of groundwater will eventually win and Oahu will begin its transformation to a flat, low-lying island like Midway."
What do you mean "begin?" Begun it has, already. /yoda.
Oahu's eventual metamorphosis is to that of a seamount, like all the other seamounts that stretch along the ocean floor all the way to the Aleutians and Kamchatka.
This is not news at all for Geologists, or anyone for that matter, who has seen a map of the ocean floor on Google Earth or the globe at the Boston Museum of Science in the 70s (yours truly).
--
BMO
Delta V is Delta V and whether it is applied with white paint, ion thrusters, chemical rockets, gravity, etc, makes no difference if the magnitude and direction is the correct amount for capture or mere avoidance.
Your thinking is too narrow. You are hung up on whether the application is high-tech enough, when the technology doesn't matter except for cost.
Seriously.
--
BMO
But that's wrong.
Delta v can be applied in any case with white paint for either capture or avoidance. It's all the same math.
--
BMO
>Why not tell a little white lie that this asteroid will hit earth in 2040
Because after we spend $TRILLIONS on the mission, and the conspiracy is revealed, when the real thing comes along, people won't believe it. It's tough enough convincing people to evacuate a barrier island before a hurricane or to get Mr. Truman away from Mt. St. Helens before the eruption.
Also
>assuming such a secret can be kept
General Petraeus couldn't even keep his affair secret and he was an intelligence expert. This is why the moon hoaxers are fucking stupid, thinking that not just one, but thousands of engineers, scientists, and politicians can keep a lid on a consipiracy all at once.
"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead" - Franklin
--
BMO
Yes, people have calculated it. Depending on how far out you are, it can be enough to paint the asteroid white.
--
BMO
Did you have anything on Bitnet?
I doubt it.
Newbie indeed.
--
BMO
>main email address is 16 years old
My chat account is over 16 years old.
Users in the chatrooms: /finger bmo
L2 : bmo - room 1 - "Appeal's bedroom" ---- SO LONELY. A TUMBLEWEED ROLLS THROUGH TOWN.
Last logout: 18+22:08:40 ago from entropy.tmok.com ----- THAT'S RIGHT, I CHECKED IN ALMOST 19 DAYS AGO, AND IT NEVER CHANGES. SO LONELY. THE WIND HOWLS THROUGH THE VACANT CHAT, EVOKING GHOSTS AND CHAT NOIR.
You have 122 notes in your notebox ! (13 pages)
Lets see if "bmo" likes your finger: ----- OH YOU BETTER BELIEVE I LIKE YOUR FINGER.
Level 2 Login: "bmo - #include guinness/beer.h" ----- SO WITTY I AM. NO, REALLY.
Logins: 4384 Total: -24855+-3:-14:-8 ----- SO MANY HOURS IT WRAPPED AROUND.
Last time on: "Dec 22 04:13:47 2012" (0+00:00:09 ago)
Homepage: "http://owlcomm.dyndns.org:3898" ----- GOOD LUCK.
ICQ-number: BLAH. ----- I STILL KNOW THIS BY HEART.
Email: bmo@ids.net ---- DON'T EVEN TRY. WITHER IDS.NET?
Maker: Eagle2 Maketime: "Sep 18 16:13:45 1996" (16 years 98+13:00:11 ago) ----- DANG, SON.
I have an account on euts.org (enchantment under the sea!) that is older, but I'll be damned if I can remember my password.
--
BMO
I unfoed you and a few other people, but the process is so slow waiting for the page to refresh and I have so many to go through that I had to give up unless you (or anyone else) have a tip on how to do a batch process. I've done a list of URLs with UIDs but FF pukes trying to open so many tabs.
I'm going to have to look at what happens when I click on "I'm sure" and I can't be arsed right now.
--
BMO
No, nobody's done that. There was the "evil spock (you know the one with the goatee) and good spock" episode but it's not quite what you've written
You should write it.
I would read it.
--
BMO