I think he probably meant SHA512 hash, but didn't know he meant it.

for what it's worth, Unicomp dumped the pckeyboard.com domain

Incorrect. pckeyboard.com works fine, and from whois:
Registrant Name: Unicomp, Incorporated
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2018-01-18T05:00:00Z

Well, I personally take the view that any society that forcibly sterilized 50% of its residents doesn't deserve to continue as a society.

I also don't think Malthus was correct.

Someone insinuated that I'd be ok with Jewish concentration camps if that resulted in a society that survived.

That's a hard question to answer. On one hand, what was done to the Jews was clearly immoral. On the other hand, a society that goes extinct isn't around to argue that it was a moral society. Heinlein noted that survival is somewhat of a precursor to moral behavior.

What we'd like to hope is that the choice between survival and violence against others is a false choice - that there is always a way to both survive and not harm others.

But that may not be the case for all societies in all situations.

It may be that the Native Americans came to the conclusion that you did -- that anything beyond a certain population was unsustainable given the technology level and resources they had available to them.

That may have been an eminently moral choice.

It also means that what they thought doesn't matter today - because there weren't enough of them to defend themselves against an invading society with different ideas.

Another question to wrestle with:

Why didn't the colonization and empire building go the other direction?

Why weren't the native Americans launching ocean going vessels towards Europe? Why, when the Europeans arrived, were the NAs unable to repel them?

Why were there so many top-notch German scientists and engineers in that society in the 1930s and 1940s? Why, given its amazing technological advantages, did Nazi Germany still ultimately lose the war?

If you want a really uncomfortable question: why was South Africa apparently a much nicer place -- for everyone -- under European management with the distasteful Apartheid policy? Why has that society _regressed_ since kicking out the colonial invaders?

There are books on these topics that take varying points of view.

My point is very simple: pining for primitive cultures is romantically appealing but intellectually dishonest. And holding our ancestors to the standards of today is also silly - we can only hold them to the standards of their day --- unless you mean to imply that there has been no human progress.

It is precisely the fact that the Western world has shown dramatic human progress - even at the cost of slowing its own rate of expansion and conquest - that we can be confident that Western Civilization has something to offer the world.

I don't believe that inside Nazi Germany nor in Stalinist Russia, there was the problem of a foreign empire clashing with an indigenous culture.

It seems the best American analogue to the experiences of those regimes was what was done to Japanese Americans in WW2 - which while awful, thankfully, doesn't hold a candle to what was done to the German Jews or the Soviet victims of Stalinism.

The history of the world is filled with violent tribal conflict, usually over the right to settle and tax a given piece of land.

The Jews and Nazis weren't fighting for control over Bavaria.

The Europeans did not set out with the goal of exterminating the native Americans. The NAs had their land taken from them by force, which is how it has always worked on this planet.

There are two general possibilities for how to proceed from here

1) convince people that taking land from other people is immoral

2) find additional land that is both unsettled and desirable

#1 is worth working on, and can show some real improvements, but will ultimately not be enough.

#2 is also worth working on, and why I am a space nutter, and why I am interested in how seasteading plays out.

A mix of #1 and #2 may help humanity not kill each other completely. We've gone almost 70 years with the ability to wipe ourselves out and we haven't done so yet. That's an encouraging indicator.

Small Part Native American here. Grandpa and mom are buried on the Res.

Not that my heritage should matter, but some people can't hear the message until they've decided what bucket to put the messenger in....

How is the way of life and/or world view of the Native Americans worth saving?

Same question for impoverished rural Africans?

We are having this conversation only because an objectively superior culture with an objectively superior propensity for technical development has built this amazing medium for our use.

My ancestors were excellent hunters, excellent farmers, and excellent stewards of natural resources. There are many things to admire and respect about what they did.

Ultimately, however, I'm glad I don't live in a house made of animal skin; I'm glad I have modern medicine; I'm glad my other ancestors - my white European ones - have shot themselves into space, and have opened a way for my children to someday get off this rock.

In many ways, Humans of all colors and shapes are still participating in the tribal violence that shaped native Americans and still shapes many Africans.

Some tribes are better run than others, with better results to show for it. Adapt or die.

I never understood the sophistry involved in the quest for a "humane" execution. You are depriving someone of their LIFE. How humane can that be?

OK, I can hear you guys before the chorus starts. "But, but, suffering!" I'm not sure why that bothers certain people so much in this particular context, but rather than going down a long path of logic against deaf ears, I'm perfectly willing to concede it. There are methods that are guaranteed to involve no physical suffering or discomfort whatsoever. Inhalation of 99.995% helium or nitrogen is one. A fully encirling explosive helmet would be another. Just a hand grenade under the chin is pretty goddam instant and sure.

I'll give you another one. You know all those amps in a electric chair? Skull sizzling; eyes popping out; convulsions? It's utterly pointless horseshit. You don't need that. Two tiny needles with a local anesthetic, insertied to touch the heart, with an AC current of literally microamps will cause instant fibrillation and consciousness will be lost in a few seconds with no drama whatsoever. Lights out, baby.

The death penalty should only be used when there is absolutely no doubt of guilt.

It's a coward's way out, and I'll tell you why. Guilt is never 100% certain. I mean that literally. NEVER. Not ever. Eyewitnesses can be deceived or malicious. DNA tests can be in error (that has happened). There are situations where the probability of guilt is very, very high. Close to 100%. So close that the uncertainty approaches zero. But it will never BE zero.

This is why the concept of "beyond a reasonable doubt" evolved. It is a high standard, but there is no metric. It is by definition a judgement. If "beyond a reasonable doubt" isn't good enough, the only honorable decision is that you don't favor capital punishment, period, end of story.

I can respect both the viewpoint favoring capital punishment for heinous crimes, and the viewpoint that capital punishment is NEVER justified. But I could never respect the concept of "capital punishment, but only when guilt is magically certain". It is a dodge.

I can serve up lots of links on how poorly the economies are doing.

You didn't make a single link, you lazy bum.

Also, Iridium was built for voice communications only. It will only get data support in a couple of years when they will literally send up a completely new full set of satellites.

Data has been sent via Iridium as a matter of course for years. I know from experience with floats and autonomous underwater vehicles that modems are commercially available and used every day. We got usable throughput on the order of a couple of hundred bits per second with a very unfavorable antenna location inches above the sea surface.

Here is such a modem.

Thousands separators in numbers are your friend.

Yeah, um, all you gotta do is take off the spurious / after the .php

I don't think the distinction you're making is as bright of a line as many people wish it were.

When you think of "for profit" college, do you think of the motivations? The governance? The educational results?

I look at "normal" colleges and I see many examples of
- bad motivations: if you don't think "normal" colleges aren't motivated by the wrong things, look at how much money gets pumped into athletics programs. look at how much money goes to administrative stafff. look at how much money goes to building lavish student unions, extra rec facilities, and all kinds of other things that aren't really related to the "stated" mission of the university. instead, they're related to attracting student enrollment with candy; attracting not the top of the intellectual pyramid, but the broad base, with bread and circuses...

- bad governance. University administration and leadership live like royalty in some places. In my humble state the university chancellor is apparently forcing campus cops to be his personal chauffer. The higher ed system in this state badly misdirects state funds, over and over, and is never held accountable.

  - bad outcomes: plenty of people coming out of "normal" universities with toy degrees that are unemployable, and worse, really have no insight or understanding into anything worthwhile... and yet are saddled with plenty of debt.

Private universities are a response to current realities: many low-risk jobs require a paper degree, but no actual skills. Many traditional universities are needlessly stupid and expensive if all you want is that paper. And there is plenty of free money to go around, irrespective of merit.

I agree that for-profit diploma mills are probably a net negative. My point is that "normal" universities, in broad strokes, may not be any better.

There may be no such thing as a truly winnable war, but there sure as hell are losers in war. The Nazis, Italian fascists, and Japanese militarists LOST. They lost up the wazoo. They lost everything. Had the US and USSR (as examples) lost WW2 in that way, they never would have had 45 subsequent years of burgeoning influence before history finally well and truly caught up to them.