You don't need to keep the commands to the lights secret; you just need to authenticate them. Each light having a copy of a single signing key and digital signatures on the messages will suffice.

I know he is against gay marriage but that doesn't even necessarily make him a homophobe, ...

Except, yeah, it pretty much does.

And I'll bet over 90% of slashdotters are using microcomputers to get on line.

Nope, sorry, I only log on from my System/360 so I can troll with JCL.

However, my girlfriend hand...

Would that be Lisa Left or Rachel Right?

... could probably hold several brains the size of her own.

You must be where all the stereotypes about heterosexual male Slashdotters and virginity come from.

It's not enough he ruined my state, he has to ruin my comic-con now too...

I don't see why you couldn't do the same with DNA without understanding all the physics and chemistry that makes it work.

Because software is designed by humans who only have enough attention and memory capacity for a bit of it at a time and use layered abstractions to manage complexity. Evolution faces no such cognitive constraint, and so is less prone to building systems with easily comprehensible structure. It's perfectly happy to exploit whatever awkward wart or weird side effect it left in by accident ten million years earlier if it's what happens to work.

Human beings are made of nothing but random hacks that happened to work crufted together for eons, The Story of Mel repeated endlessly for a billion years.

Can I just have a 'Dislike' button for all of Facebook, please?

Actually, I think I'll take a 'Tactical Nuclear Strike' button instead, now that I think of it.

I got to do that with LVM logical volume to physical volume mapping tables once after managing to trip over the power cable during a pv move. The array did work perfectly after a few hair-raising hours with a hex editor.

Somehow I suspect that someone whose job description contains the phrase 'BDSM porn star' would be even less worried about visibility of bruises than I am.

So where do you work where coming in with visible bruises regularily is genuinely accepted and not questioned?

Linden Lab

I didn't say they were in *visible* places, mind you. I wouldn't especially worry about it if they were, though. I semi-regularly do show up to work in outfits I would also show up to my local goth club in.

Even consentual abuse is not exactly healthy and could be disturbing to some people.

I'll decide for myself what constitutes 'abuse' and 'healthy', thank you very much.

No one in role playing ever wants a real black eye ... If its convincing enough to seem like real abuse, it's disturbing.

Oh, bullshit. I've had way worse than a black eye from perfectly consensual BDSM activities. I've been pierced dozens of times at once, taken beatings that left bruises still visible months later, had an electro-shock baton that could throw a spark centimeters long (allegedly of a type favored by Apartheid-era South African riot police) used on me, and enjoyed it all. I wasn't being filmed at the time, but it seems very likely that if I had been, it would look like 'real abuse' to you. To me, it was just fun. Real, intense masochists *do* exist, and 'disturbing' is always in the eye of the beholder.

Agreed. Just because something is innately easy for some people doesn't mean it isn't difficult or impossible for others. To fail to appreciate that different people are, well, different as in geekoid's seems to suggest - dare I say it? - a certain lack of social skills.