Well, stuff like that is just memorization. We memorize different (and hopefully fewer) things these days. Memorization is the lowest form of learning.

Replace CS with English literature:

Why would you make such a worthless class a requirement? Just to make sure boys take it? And yes, most English majors are women.

The reason to make CS a required class would be to expose more people to it so that they understand the concepts that underlie the machines playing such an important role in our world today. Also so that, when they choose what to specialize in, they have some understanding of what choosing to specialize in CS would entail.

I am not going to defend English literature. But there are are some sensible arguments for requiring people to have an understanding of how to communicate ideas, understand literary archetypes from ancient mythologies that come up frequently, etc. This is not to say modern English classes accomplish any of that. The curtains are fucking blue.

Uh ... those seemed to be about on the level of eighth grade at the middle school I went to.

First, I'd like to point out we're hearing a third-hand rendition of what happened in each case. The kid told his parents told the media why he got suspended.

Black isn't a racial slur. The name of the race on the US Census is "Black or African American". The only way it could possibly be okay to suspend him is if he repeatedly and with intent to harass called someone who didn't like being called black, black. Did this happen, or is some teacher using her power to engage in a personal vendetta against a word she doesn't like but is generally considered acceptable? I don't know. Like I said, we know one side of the story.

Maybe, in this most recent case, the kid actually, for fun, tormented a superstitious classmate into thinking he was really in danger of being exiled from existence due to black magic.

TLDR: Many kids are assholes. Many teachers are assholes. Parents will never admit, due to myopia, that their kids are assholes. Schools will never admit, for legal and union reasons, that their teachers are assholes. Who was an asshole here? We'll never know. But I do assure, someone was.

LavaBit didn't "fold" in the sense you intend. LavaBit complied with the letter of the court order, then raised a giant middle finger to the government by shutting down the entire email service with just enough information to tell everyone what was going on without violating the gag order. By shutting down the service, they ensured that handing over the private key, necessary to comply with the court order, gave them exactly zilch. LavaBit's only mistake was not using PFS, but there's no evidence the FBI was competent enough to take advantage of that oversight.*

Of course, LavaBit was doing something stupid to begin with. If you want secure email, USE PGP not some random company that may or may not be run by the ballsiest technologist this side of the Russian border.

*LavaBit was in the US, so theoretically the NSA shouldn't have been logging all the ciphertext as a matter of course. But maybe the NSA did and the FBI shared the key with them. We'll never know. My speculation: Snowden (the almost-certain target) would have been indicted on even more stuff after the LavaBit raid if that had happened as the FBI would have demanded access to the NSA's data on Snowden so it could complete its investigation and "do something" about this evil dude who hated freedom so much. Remember, it was the FBI going after the key and Snowden, not the NSA. Why would the FBI have helped the NSA without getting Snowden's emails in return, and why would the FBI not have charged Snowden afterwards to rack up political points? I think Occam's Razor points to the FBI having failed. YMMV.

No idea what you're saying, so I can't critique it.

But I really want to know why so many people interested in time travel apparently hate their grandfathers so much.

Yeah. I've always found that to be a bit of a bummer :(

I like to think the aliens running the simulation will reboot it before then.

I think his name would be "Dangerman" and he'd be the leader of a motorcycle gang.

It is unsettled law whether the 5th Amendment protects against subpoenaing someone for their disk encryption keys, without giving them immunity for whatever they find. Current case law seems to be leaning toward that it is.

Note that after the final case discussed in that presentation was decided, a state supreme court decided opposite. But federal circuit court decisions are probably more compelling than state court decisions.

State courts do stupid shit pretty frequently.

Dude ... don't give away the plot for the next Die Hard movie!

Sure you can. It's called PGP, or GPG if you want the name of the best implementation rather than the protocol, and Wikileaks was incompetent if it wasn't using it in 2012.

"Well they can outlaw PGP"...maybe, but they haven't, and US courts may very well look unkindly on such laws and find them unconstitutional.

Better tech is often an integral part of fixing bad government policy in an imperfect world.

With respect, I think you're far too apologetic wrt China's government ... and more than a little to cynical about the US's. Yeah, if China's government introduced democracy the wrong way, things could get hairy. But there have been several countries that went from totalitarianism to democracy without civil war. Russia is one, though Putin has taken the country a decade or two backwards. And your post borders on banal moral relativism: it is just WRONG to imprison people because of their political views, and just because China doesn't see it that way doesn't make it right. Some Islamists think it's fine to oppress women in a multitude of ways; they are not less wretched for doing this just because they don't see it's wrong.

Anyone in China's government with good intentions has a hard problem to solve, which is how to safely democratize the country, because democracy is really the only option for a government that long-term is both stable and respectful of human rights. Unfortunately, the government is going backwards, as evidenced by their increasing (and ineffective and therefore stupid, but that's another matter) escalation of Internet blocking and continuing intolerance of political dissent. They have a hard problem to solve, so it's wrong to be too hard on them. They appear to be making no efforts to solve it, though, and it's okay to observe that and criticize them for it.

I know I've criticized the US government in the past on Slashdot, so I'm not sure why you didn't find anything, but whatever. Pretty much any post I made on the DMCA probably criticized the US government.

But, regardless, the US government is much, much better regarding respecting the freedoms of citizens. It's not perfect; no government is, but it's not in the same league as China. For instance, yeah, the NSA shouldn't be reading everyone's email and stuff. But the government doesn't use that information to track down people who disagree with the party in power and silence them by throwing them in jail. China does that.

There's no comparison. And, as a debating tactic, it's best not to try to make a comparison with China or similarly authoritarian countries when complaining about the US government's failings. It's such hyperbole that many people will just ignore you if you do that. We shouldn't try to compare ourselves to China. We should aspire to be much, much better than that. And we are. For now.

I have no idea how you got from either of our posts that either ZackSchil or I hates China. Hate is a very strong word, and I most certainly do not "hate China". China is a country with a very rich history, many awesome tourist destinations, and many good people just trying to live their lives. It is also a country with a very unhealthy governmental structure and a sad recent history as a dictatorship with a decidedly non-benevolent dictator (see "Mao", "Great Chinese Famine", and "Cultural Revolution"). However, I have no doubt that there are many well-intentioned people in the government, despite its overall unhealthy structure.

Hating a country is not a healthy attitude to have. Countries are important social constructs, but they are composed of a wide variety of people, and there is no way each and every one of them has personally offended you such that it is fair for you to hate the country as a whole.

I don't like China's government. I can't speak for ZackSchil, but many in the West do not like China's government. The structure is undemocratic and has many other serious structural flaws, such as potential reversion to dictatorship and potential civil war due to its unstable power structure. The government doesn't provide to its citizens things I and many in the West value such as free speech, free association, etc.

But that's a structural critique. I don't "hate" China's government on an emotional level. I just think it's unfortunate that over a billion people have to live under such a dysfunctional system. I don't know enough about any individual Chinese politician to "hate" him, either, and I'm sure some in the government are probably working to try to fix some of the governmental structural flaws as best they can.

By the way, I don't "hate" North Korea either. I pity the millions of North Koreans who are currently suffering and hope those in power manage to reform that government soon, so that their suffering will end. I imagine most educated Westerners feel pretty much the same way about that hell on Earth.

You really need to start taking a less binary view of the world. It's not right to "hate" people you've never met just because they have the misfortune of living under a substandard government. Most of those people are victims, not perpetrators.

I was in China last summer. Essentially exactly the same thing happened to me, although I was using SOCKS5/ssh not PPTP. My girlfriend and I subsequently had a hell of a time playing Heroes 3 for Linux remotely even when not using ssh, so they must have shit-listed my IP address. Then, a few months later, everything magically started working again and the ssh proxy my girlfriend was using worked fine. So did Heroes 3, thankfully.

During the shit-listed time, I came across this list: https://www.torproject.org/doc...

Another option might be this: http://www.nocrew.org/software...

One of these options might be enough into fooling them the traffic isn't encrypted. Ultimately, if there's a way of exchanging data, there's a way of getting around the block. It's just a question of obfuscation.