What would be really nice is a CAPTCHA for phones. So if someone calls me, they get a message that says "press seven if you are a human", and my phone only rings if they pass the test. It would also need to have a whitelist, since I get legitimate robo-calls from my kids' school.

Or just plain whitelist: if the calling number is on my phonebook, the call gets accepted and the phone rings, otherwise it's silently ignored.

You say it like it's a good thing.. a big country isolated, hated and full of unhappy people. What could go wrong?

The difference between then and now is that now Russia has more resources, and thus poses more of a threat. It already keeps on trying to conquer its neighbours, directly and indirectly, every chance it gets.

I live right next door to them, and I'd much rather see them happy and enjoying life, because that way they'd probably be lot less likely to start new conflicts.

I'd rather see them become a peaceful democracy too, but I don't think it's going to happen. Modern Russia is simply a new iteration of Soviet Russia, which was a new iteration of Russian Empire. It keeps on rising leaders like Putin, since they match the true spirit of the nation, and it keeps on being a threat to everyone around it, being hell-bent on empire-building as it is.

To agents in the NSA: It doesn't matter if 999 of 1000 of you are honest. All it takes is one G. Gordon Liddy type who ignores requirements for warrants to listen in on political opponents, and the whole thing is worthless.

It takes one agent who gets paid in gold and 999 who get paid in security and convenience. The exact same as with police or Catholic Church's abuse scandal. That's the way systematic corruption works: one bad apple didn't make the tree rotten, the tree was always rotten and the bad apple just gave it a chance to demonstrate that. And all it takes is one Snowden to blow it all wide open.

However, the government has since been modified to include supposedly everyone in the first-class citizen pool.

Or so you were told, anyway. Welcome to reality, third-class citizen.

So Putin, who is responsible for arming these terrorists with missiles capable of bringing down airliners at cruising altitude has just killed 23 US citizens. Let's hope that US & EU sanctions get truly serious in response.

They won't. The problem is that Russia supplies much of Europe's fossile fuels, specifically oil and gas. That's yet another reason to stop using them.

With any luck, this crisis might serve to start a long-term program to achieve energy independence for Europe, after which Russia can be isolated like the rogue nation hated by all its neighbours it is. But right now that's impossible.

Have my computer remember all my passwords, and still have to write them all down for when I am out of the house.

If you don't worry about a random computer having a keylogger, why would you worry about writing your passwords down? At least you have a chance of noticing a pickpocket.

The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. There's no point in closing the barn door after the horses have ran away. Etc. etc.

I can think of a simple counter to this statement, RSA (or any other major encryption scheme) are published algorithms whose security is decided by the strength of the keys used.

Can you do RSA in your head? Because once you're willing to use a computer for password management, you can as well simply use a keyring app with password generation and not worry about any of this.

Also, I think you meant a hashing scheme, not encryption, since making the algorithm one-way would seem to be a very desirable property.

Company Stores and scripts are an abuse of power. Here is what I said about abuses of power ...

" Libertarianism oppose to abuses of power, and only want a government big enough to stop abuses of power. "

No government is big enough to stop all abuses of power. The current one, for example, is failing to stop a new iteration of company script. Then there's domino effect, like the current financial crisis, where a few greedy and disproportionately powerful people or institutions manage to screw the entire economy and everyone who operates in it. So while this is a fine principle, it sadly doesn't really guide us.

The fact that these types of "company towns" operated, with impunity was simply because government was NOT doing its job properly.

Specifically, it merely guaranteed property rights and enforcement of contracts (you know, the libertarian ideal), thus allowing those with more property than average to use the associated power to gather even more, until they had enough to dictate any terms they wanted for the rest. A government that doesn't restrict concentration of economic power cannot stop the majority of people from becoming beholden to the will of those who control the resources.

For the record, my ideal solution for this would be unconditional citizen pay sufficient to live on. Let those who can stand to spend the rest of their life in their beds do so; it's not like they were likely contributing much anyway. And let those institutions who need the whip to get anyone to serve them die off; what were they ever, but soul-crushing slavemasters? We're moving to post-industrial economy and have little if any need for human robots to man the assembly line, so why stick to an economic model designed to make people just that? People enjoy building and accomplishing things, so why not simultaneously encourage that by removing the sting from failure and depotentate economic power as a tool of abuse?

However, I would suggest to you that the Government taxes and fees and whatnot amount to the same " no longer free, and it's just ugly and messy." you complain about in Libertarianism. We are serfs to the Government masters.

How do you propose a government to perform any function, proper or not, without resources? And I have a hard time imagining what way of getting them wouldn't cause far more problems than taxation.

But yes, our societies are still suffering from hierarchical power structures, of having masters and serfs. As far as I can tell, Libertarianism wold make them worse, not better. After all, a government is, at least in theory, beholden to me; a company is not.

I love people who don't know or understand Libertarianism try to describe it.

We do, that's why we don't vote for them. Rand Paul does as well, that's why he's focusing on CEOs, who he can reasonably guess are more likely to have bloated egos than the average.

I want unbridled liberty. It is messy, ugly and free.

At least until the only employer around (since there's no anti-monopoly laws anymore) will only pay to you with company script (since there's nothing stopping them anymore). Then you're no longer free, and it's just ugly and messy. But at least the company store gets a captive customer base.

Liberals are people who see "Excellence" and think "That's not fair" and want to make the playing field "level" for the players that don't work and practice hard. So they saddle those that do work hard with extra weight "because they deserve it for taking advantage" of those that don't work hard.

So, workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains? Or is this yet another bizarre example of saying "work hard" when you meant "getting dividends"?

In other words we are not National Socialists..... like you.

I think this here sums up libertarianism nicely, as well as how anyone who isn't a true believer can expect to be treated should they ever win. Most might not be so blunt about it, but it's the idea behind all the sweet words about liberty. A movement that believes everyone who isn't them are Nazis can't settle for compromise or tolerate dissent, so it's fundamentally incompatible with anyone actually having liberty. And that, in turn, makes it fundamentally incompatible with such things as democracy or freedom of speech - or even of thought.

And it's interesting to note that this is pretty much exactly what Nazis themselves, or hard-line communists, or really any totalitarians spouted. Just replace the name of the enemy with something appropriate.

This is not my password but it's an example of how I create one:

And this is why the algorithm method won't work: people can't keep their mouths shut. Letting everyone know how clever you are is a drive that's almost impossible to resist, because it simultaneously helps your group and demonstrates your value to it, so it's selected for double strength. Consequently, the only way to have secure passwords is to generate them randomly and just write them down. Heck, just generate them for the user and tell them to use "save password" option on the browser - it's safe unless the machine gets infected, in which case it's gonna leak anyway.

and another site like a bank site that I want higher entrophy on will use a different algorithm

If a bank lets its customers pick their own passwords, that should be your cue that the bank thinks it won't be on the hook for any online thefts. After all, a lot of those passwords will be "password".

NOT new. We've had Postus, the frog headed god of messengers and package deliverers, as a deity in one of our homebrew D&D campaigns for about 25 years now.

Most people who have lived somewhere with a postal system have probably prayed to someone that their mail gets where it's intended to. But in the context of Marvel Universe, a mail god is a novel idea, or at least a lot more so than yet another iteration of "muscles, weapons and severe psychological problems" -formula.

mail god

Aaand we have a new character idea right here.

The outcome is fines paid by one part of government to another, but it does focus the leadership to get it right

Or discourage reporting any incidents. If losing a container of Anthrax means you get punished, then you have strong incentives to not tell anyone and hope you'll find it, rather than rise alarm and put the place in a lockdown.