One problem with it is that the bizarre notion that a suit is "professional" is a tool of social exclusion, and anyone wearing one where it's expected will support the notion, and hence help to exclude people who aren't interested in them or can't afford them.
Also simply just having to abandon my own personal culture and yield to a hateful culture where we judge people by arbitrary qualities of the clothing they wear is an awful feeling, and if I could do this willingly, I wouldn't be so good at demanding correctness elsewhere, and hence writing disciplined and secure code. You want to be able to be yourself at a place you'll be spending a significant proportion of your life. The suits game is wrong on multiple levels, and utterly rejecting it is part of my being.
Actually, heroin would be safer than alcohol or tobacco if it wasn't for prohibition. Long term use of tobacco, or overuse of alcohol significantly increases your chance of dying from various things. Long term use of heroin doesn't actually do very much. It's the unreliable doses, sky-high costs, substances it's cut with and injection hazards which make heroin so dangerous under prohibition. None of these would be a problem if it was legal.
How about the entirely unnecessary, bigoted coercion and force used against them by society to incarcerate them, which they wouldn't have to suffer if they were addicted to something mainstream, i.e. alcohol or tobacco?
Having your life ruined merely for being different is something which should attract sympathy from anyone.
The first question is not actually how you can create such a culture, but whether it's actually a good thing in the first place. You seriously need to evaluate this. One of the primary means of being secure is not trusting others. But trusting others is an incredibly useful tool to get things done, and it may be worth taking the security hit. Stand on a crowded railway platform, and you're trusting so many people, each of whom could push you off and kill you so easily, without even thinking about it. Without trust, society itself would be impossible.
So for example, if everyone believed they were immune to the security risk of terrorism, this would very obviously be such a good thing for society. There have been security economic analyses done of various security measures recommended by security guys, thinking their users to be fools who just wouldn't listen, which established that the users who ignored them were actually completely right, that the cost of implementing these measures was hundreds of times greater than the benefit of preventing the attacks they were effective against.
A security professional who thinks doing things securely must always be a priority just because that's his field, instead of taking the time to gain a more holistic understanding of the situation, deserves to be ignored.
There might be some extra sexism, we don't have enough information to tell. The question being whether the people who have made this decision would have made the same decision if they were teaching boys. We can only guess at this.
I've just constructed my own simple password manager. Attach a short ident for each password to a strong master password, and then SHA512 and base64, truncate the result as necessary. Can be easily reconstructed wherever you want.
Judit Polgar was one of eight players who participated in what FIDE called the "World Chess Championship 2005". Now, the FIDE world championship during the era when the champion wasn't participating was of course a joke, but the winner of that tournament, Topalov, challenged the world champion Kramnik for the title on the basis of his win. This makes the FIDE "World Chess Championship 2005" a de-facto candidates tournament, and hence, the eight participants, including Judit, world championship candidates. Players who were candidates to challenge for the world title.
And moreover, since Judit Polgar was capable of becoming a world championship candidate, it's proven that women can compete with men at the top.
The problem is that chess, or at least, serious chess seems to be an almost exclusively male pastime, for reasons I can only guess at. This leads to there being very few women in the top ranks of the game, simply because there are very few women at all ranks of the game, which creates the perception that they can't compete. So people organise separate tournaments for girls because that's what you do in sport. And so girls learning chess only have a tiny pool of other people to practice against, so they don't get the broad range of experience that the boys do, and they imagine becoming women's world champion rather than world champion so they don't get the ambition boys do, and so the regular stream of Judit Polgars which we need to break this idea is suppressed.
Segregation is a disaster for women's chess, but it creates a self-propagating vicious circle. It is its own explanation.
I think the problem the author has is that he wants to believe that there is a singular notion of "best chess player". In reality, there are multiple notions of the best chess player. Ratings measure more the ability to stay consistent throughout your career and never let your form dip, tournament wins measure more your ability to take points off weaker players and shift our mindset rapidly to deal with the next style which comes along... and the world championship measures more your ability to present an impregnable wall of defensive ability and be unbeatable.
These are all very valuable things to have, and wanting to take one of them away just because your mind isn't flexible enough to cope with them all existing simultaneously is selfish.
What do you have against AES? The US government doesn't pick bad algorithms for itself to use as a matter of principle or anything, suspicion is only really warranted on algorithms which contain data which claims or appears to be random, but could have been specially chosen to have some property. (If you want people to trust your magic numbers, you generate them by doing something like taking the hash of the square root of 2.) The difference between AES and Twofish is that AES got more positive comments from around the world during the AES selection process, and fewer negative comments. Twofish is still a well-respected algorithm which will protect your data, but AES is generally regarded as slightly superior, and this is why NIST recommend it.
There's no need for a replacement for Dual_EC_DRBG, because it was only one of several recommended choices, and was both slow and suspicious, so nobody was using it anyway. Hash-based PRNGs seem to be faring best at the moment, though something which everyone can call good is still yet to really emerge.
The main crypto algorithm which is both trusted and now under suspicion is ECDSA/ECDH, where people have tended to use curves recommended by NIST, which have data in which we can't verify the generation of. It's not clear just how dangerous this is, whether this data could actually hold any malicious secrets or not, but it can certainly be solved just by generating our own curves, or using curves from organisations we trust more.
Without knowing the details, this sounds perfectly reasonable. Going to 256-bit symmetric keys is future-proofing. Nobody can break 128-bit encryption now, but in thirty years time, it's quite possible that someone could. (In particular, quantum computing could effectively halve symmetric key lengths, in addition to its better known effect of killing all the practical asymmetric crypto we've got right now.) So if the military didn't want their messages to be readable in even 30 years time, they would be advised to use 256-bit, whereas if a guy who decrypts a message which is part of some banking protocol 20 years after it was sent couldn't do much with the information because everything has already happened, it would be an unnecessary move for the banks.
Could we please stop making everything about drugs? There is so much to life that is much more important than potheads and their perceived "right" to self-injury through drug abuse.
This isn't about the right of 'potheads' to 'self-injury' through drug-'abuse'. It's about the rights of 'potheads', who abuse and injure themselves far less than 'boozeheads' or 'tarheads', to be free of the threat of government violence if they don't report themselves to prison. We shouldn't be violent to people just because they don't conform. This sort of thing is really important. How would you like it if government locked you up because of some way in which you didn't conform (without doing harm to anyone else)?
Given that drug abuse is endemic amongst low-income minorities in America, I can't help but think that drug legalization is a covert form of racism -- keep them hooked, make the drugs easier, cheaper to get.
It's racism to STOP sending minorities to prison for failing to conform? That's a good piece of doublespeak you've got there.
Here are some examples of actual racism for you:
The first American opium laws applying only to Chinese people
The campaign to ban Cannabis reviving the foreign-sounding term 'marijuana' and claiming that black men would get high on it and attack white women
Tobacco, a fairly dangerous leaf popular amongst white Americans, is accepted. Coca, a fairly dangerous leaf popular amongst some cultures somewhere in South America is an excuse for government violence the world over
Sending people from low-income minorities in America to prison for not being like white guys.
There are some things simply beyond the pale in any decent society. Entertaining people through showing a grisly, cruel murder can do nothing but harm the family, friends, and love ones of the victim. It has absolutely no political, educational, moral effect, nor any deterrent to any crime. It has no value whatsoever to shock and delight those deranged enough to view a heinous act.
And yet, it's not actually an act of violence. Arresting someone; saying "if you don't come with us, we'll use force on you" is.
Merely observing that someone is disgusting and has no possible excuse for their behaviour is not an excuse for the use of force against them, even when that force is wrapped up in the notion of 'law', made to look civilised, generally agreed upon, governed by individuals who wear fancy clothes to increase their perceived status. Force, and therefore law, should be a tool of last resort. An argument for anything to be illegal must identify a problem with serious consequences if it is not solved, and explain why there is no other good way of solving it.
If the problem you were solving was fun, there's be an open source project that was solving it.
Not if it's the sort of problem which for-fun coders aren't going to notice exists in the first place. (Or just won't have the necessary technical specifications.)
1) They are the two main ways of doing "imagine if the world was different" fiction.
2) Because of this, there is a large amount of very good fiction (less so in literature perhaps, which seems to attract the purer forms of each, but certainly in media generally) which combines the two. Drawing a line between them would be impossible.
3) And combining the two is actually a quite good idea, because each counters the weaknesses of the other. Science fiction which gets too hard can lose drama by becoming unrelateable and missing dramatic opportunities which don't seem plausible enough, and fantasy which gets too soft can lose drama by making cause and effect too arbitrary, which undermines narrative.
I would have thought the most obvious reason for "refusing" to buy a game that's console-only would be not owning the relevant console. And that slashdotters would be likely to own more consoles than random game-buyers.
I remember when words like 'racist', and others such as 'discrimination' were only used against people who were prejudiced, who were acting according to ideas which only existed within their own heads. I'm pretty sure the idea that Jews are more likely to support Israel than non-Jews is actually factual. It's not anything special about Jews; almost all groups of people have a tendency to support the organisations of those similar to them, but it's true nevertheless. And the existence of counterexamples doesn't mean you can't observe a general rule.
If someone was to make a similar observation about something non-emotive - say, "that guy supporting the American sports team? He's an American citizen. What do you expect?" I doubt anyone would be jumping to point that counterexamples exist and suggesting the observation was racist.
And everything you just said about books, I can say about television. (Well, being strip-searched for a TV setup aside.) People are different, y'know. But if you've never created a world within your mind from watching something cinematic, that's a limitation of yours, not a limitation of the medium. I find that combination of media far more effective at beaming a creator's thoughts into my brain; you've got the same narrative and dialogue, plus you've got sound, music, space, colour, precisely controlled pacing...
The game corporations will claim that there is no right to play, and maybe even insert a clause that means roughly that into the EULA. It is their right: if you don't agree with their offer, don't buy it!
You shouldn't have to decrypt a load of legalese (which you may not even have access to) in order to work out whether an offer to sell a game is genuine. Purporting to sell a product but designing it so that it refuses to work in certain situations should just be illegal.
Hordes of derivative and uninspired entries in the lower half of the market is a given in practically any media market and age. You ignore them, and pay attention to what the top guys are doing. And once upon a time, untested "IP" as you call it was frequently found. I don't know much about the console scene, but I'm sure today, if a game such as, say, Gods arrived, with rarely or never seen ingredients on the level of its "help bonuses" for struggling players, and monsters which avoid firepower and pick objects up, its level of innovation would be regarded as most acceptable, even rather praiseworthy. In its own day, the Bitmaps were criticised for not pushing the boat out as much as other developers of similar levels of talent.
We've classified games into genres almost forever. The modern complete lack of innovation is a more recent phenomenon, probably brought about by the graphics arms race and the greater budgets which have resulted; the more money you're spending, the more corporates and committees need to be convinced it's going to bring in a return.
I think it started happening at about the same time that it started to become common for games to have multiple sequels. I remember once observing that you never saw fourth versions of things. See them all the time now.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem with it is that the bizarre notion that a suit is "professional" is a tool of social exclusion, and anyone wearing one where it's expected will support the notion, and hence help to exclude people who aren't interested in them or can't afford them.
Also simply just having to abandon my own personal culture and yield to a hateful culture where we judge people by arbitrary qualities of the clothing they wear is an awful feeling, and if I could do this willingly, I wouldn't be so good at demanding correctness elsewhere, and hence writing disciplined and secure code. You want to be able to be yourself at a place you'll be spending a significant proportion of your life. The suits game is wrong on multiple levels, and utterly rejecting it is part of my being.
Would you be able to answer the same question about your own personal porn preferences? I know I wouldn't be able to answer it about mine.
Actually, heroin would be safer than alcohol or tobacco if it wasn't for prohibition. Long term use of tobacco, or overuse of alcohol significantly increases your chance of dying from various things. Long term use of heroin doesn't actually do very much. It's the unreliable doses, sky-high costs, substances it's cut with and injection hazards which make heroin so dangerous under prohibition. None of these would be a problem if it was legal.
How about the entirely unnecessary, bigoted coercion and force used against them by society to incarcerate them, which they wouldn't have to suffer if they were addicted to something mainstream, i.e. alcohol or tobacco?
Having your life ruined merely for being different is something which should attract sympathy from anyone.
The first question is not actually how you can create such a culture, but whether it's actually a good thing in the first place. You seriously need to evaluate this. One of the primary means of being secure is not trusting others. But trusting others is an incredibly useful tool to get things done, and it may be worth taking the security hit. Stand on a crowded railway platform, and you're trusting so many people, each of whom could push you off and kill you so easily, without even thinking about it. Without trust, society itself would be impossible.
So for example, if everyone believed they were immune to the security risk of terrorism, this would very obviously be such a good thing for society. There have been security economic analyses done of various security measures recommended by security guys, thinking their users to be fools who just wouldn't listen, which established that the users who ignored them were actually completely right, that the cost of implementing these measures was hundreds of times greater than the benefit of preventing the attacks they were effective against.
A security professional who thinks doing things securely must always be a priority just because that's his field, instead of taking the time to gain a more holistic understanding of the situation, deserves to be ignored.
There might be some extra sexism, we don't have enough information to tell. The question being whether the people who have made this decision would have made the same decision if they were teaching boys. We can only guess at this.
I've just constructed my own simple password manager. Attach a short ident for each password to a strong master password, and then SHA512 and base64, truncate the result as necessary. Can be easily reconstructed wherever you want.
Judit Polgar was one of eight players who participated in what FIDE called the "World Chess Championship 2005". Now, the FIDE world championship during the era when the champion wasn't participating was of course a joke, but the winner of that tournament, Topalov, challenged the world champion Kramnik for the title on the basis of his win. This makes the FIDE "World Chess Championship 2005" a de-facto candidates tournament, and hence, the eight participants, including Judit, world championship candidates. Players who were candidates to challenge for the world title.
And moreover, since Judit Polgar was capable of becoming a world championship candidate, it's proven that women can compete with men at the top.
The problem is that chess, or at least, serious chess seems to be an almost exclusively male pastime, for reasons I can only guess at. This leads to there being very few women in the top ranks of the game, simply because there are very few women at all ranks of the game, which creates the perception that they can't compete. So people organise separate tournaments for girls because that's what you do in sport. And so girls learning chess only have a tiny pool of other people to practice against, so they don't get the broad range of experience that the boys do, and they imagine becoming women's world champion rather than world champion so they don't get the ambition boys do, and so the regular stream of Judit Polgars which we need to break this idea is suppressed.
Segregation is a disaster for women's chess, but it creates a self-propagating vicious circle. It is its own explanation.
I think the problem the author has is that he wants to believe that there is a singular notion of "best chess player". In reality, there are multiple notions of the best chess player. Ratings measure more the ability to stay consistent throughout your career and never let your form dip, tournament wins measure more your ability to take points off weaker players and shift our mindset rapidly to deal with the next style which comes along... and the world championship measures more your ability to present an impregnable wall of defensive ability and be unbeatable.
These are all very valuable things to have, and wanting to take one of them away just because your mind isn't flexible enough to cope with them all existing simultaneously is selfish.
What do you have against AES? The US government doesn't pick bad algorithms for itself to use as a matter of principle or anything, suspicion is only really warranted on algorithms which contain data which claims or appears to be random, but could have been specially chosen to have some property. (If you want people to trust your magic numbers, you generate them by doing something like taking the hash of the square root of 2.) The difference between AES and Twofish is that AES got more positive comments from around the world during the AES selection process, and fewer negative comments. Twofish is still a well-respected algorithm which will protect your data, but AES is generally regarded as slightly superior, and this is why NIST recommend it.
There's no need for a replacement for Dual_EC_DRBG, because it was only one of several recommended choices, and was both slow and suspicious, so nobody was using it anyway. Hash-based PRNGs seem to be faring best at the moment, though something which everyone can call good is still yet to really emerge.
The main crypto algorithm which is both trusted and now under suspicion is ECDSA/ECDH, where people have tended to use curves recommended by NIST, which have data in which we can't verify the generation of. It's not clear just how dangerous this is, whether this data could actually hold any malicious secrets or not, but it can certainly be solved just by generating our own curves, or using curves from organisations we trust more.
Without knowing the details, this sounds perfectly reasonable. Going to 256-bit symmetric keys is future-proofing. Nobody can break 128-bit encryption now, but in thirty years time, it's quite possible that someone could. (In particular, quantum computing could effectively halve symmetric key lengths, in addition to its better known effect of killing all the practical asymmetric crypto we've got right now.) So if the military didn't want their messages to be readable in even 30 years time, they would be advised to use 256-bit, whereas if a guy who decrypts a message which is part of some banking protocol 20 years after it was sent couldn't do much with the information because everything has already happened, it would be an unnecessary move for the banks.
This isn't about the right of 'potheads' to 'self-injury' through drug-'abuse'. It's about the rights of 'potheads', who abuse and injure themselves far less than 'boozeheads' or 'tarheads', to be free of the threat of government violence if they don't report themselves to prison. We shouldn't be violent to people just because they don't conform. This sort of thing is really important. How would you like it if government locked you up because of some way in which you didn't conform (without doing harm to anyone else)?
It's racism to STOP sending minorities to prison for failing to conform? That's a good piece of doublespeak you've got there.
Here are some examples of actual racism for you:
And yet, it's not actually an act of violence. Arresting someone; saying "if you don't come with us, we'll use force on you" is.
Merely observing that someone is disgusting and has no possible excuse for their behaviour is not an excuse for the use of force against them, even when that force is wrapped up in the notion of 'law', made to look civilised, generally agreed upon, governed by individuals who wear fancy clothes to increase their perceived status. Force, and therefore law, should be a tool of last resort. An argument for anything to be illegal must identify a problem with serious consequences if it is not solved, and explain why there is no other good way of solving it.
The Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories got many children into reading in the first place.
If the problem you were solving was fun, there's be an open source project that was solving it.
Not if it's the sort of problem which for-fun coders aren't going to notice exists in the first place. (Or just won't have the necessary technical specifications.)
1) They are the two main ways of doing "imagine if the world was different" fiction.
2) Because of this, there is a large amount of very good fiction (less so in literature perhaps, which seems to attract the purer forms of each, but certainly in media generally) which combines the two. Drawing a line between them would be impossible.
3) And combining the two is actually a quite good idea, because each counters the weaknesses of the other. Science fiction which gets too hard can lose drama by becoming unrelateable and missing dramatic opportunities which don't seem plausible enough, and fantasy which gets too soft can lose drama by making cause and effect too arbitrary, which undermines narrative.
but from a usability perspective it's hard to argue that one button is less usable than six.
It's quite easy to argue that if you can't use the button they've left you with.
I would have thought the most obvious reason for "refusing" to buy a game that's console-only would be not owning the relevant console. And that slashdotters would be likely to own more consoles than random game-buyers.
I remember when words like 'racist', and others such as 'discrimination' were only used against people who were prejudiced, who were acting according to ideas which only existed within their own heads. I'm pretty sure the idea that Jews are more likely to support Israel than non-Jews is actually factual. It's not anything special about Jews; almost all groups of people have a tendency to support the organisations of those similar to them, but it's true nevertheless. And the existence of counterexamples doesn't mean you can't observe a general rule.
If someone was to make a similar observation about something non-emotive - say, "that guy supporting the American sports team? He's an American citizen. What do you expect?" I doubt anyone would be jumping to point that counterexamples exist and suggesting the observation was racist.
And everything you just said about books, I can say about television. (Well, being strip-searched for a TV setup aside.) People are different, y'know. But if you've never created a world within your mind from watching something cinematic, that's a limitation of yours, not a limitation of the medium. I find that combination of media far more effective at beaming a creator's thoughts into my brain; you've got the same narrative and dialogue, plus you've got sound, music, space, colour, precisely controlled pacing...
The game corporations will claim that there is no right to play, and maybe even insert a clause that means roughly that into the EULA. It is their right: if you don't agree with their offer, don't buy it!
You shouldn't have to decrypt a load of legalese (which you may not even have access to) in order to work out whether an offer to sell a game is genuine. Purporting to sell a product but designing it so that it refuses to work in certain situations should just be illegal.
Hordes of derivative and uninspired entries in the lower half of the market is a given in practically any media market and age. You ignore them, and pay attention to what the top guys are doing. And once upon a time, untested "IP" as you call it was frequently found. I don't know much about the console scene, but I'm sure today, if a game such as, say, Gods arrived, with rarely or never seen ingredients on the level of its "help bonuses" for struggling players, and monsters which avoid firepower and pick objects up, its level of innovation would be regarded as most acceptable, even rather praiseworthy. In its own day, the Bitmaps were criticised for not pushing the boat out as much as other developers of similar levels of talent.
We've classified games into genres almost forever. The modern complete lack of innovation is a more recent phenomenon, probably brought about by the graphics arms race and the greater budgets which have resulted; the more money you're spending, the more corporates and committees need to be convinced it's going to bring in a return.
I think it started happening at about the same time that it started to become common for games to have multiple sequels. I remember once observing that you never saw fourth versions of things. See them all the time now.
BECAUSE IF A VIDEO GAME CHARACTER IS NOT REAL, WHY DO YOU DELIGHT IN HURTING IT?
Well, hurting things which are real is wrong.
(Extra text because this filter can't tell all the capitals are in a quote.)