It's much, much worse than that. People have been fooled into believing some bullshit about public support for college and upward mobility of the poor.

My position is to eliminate the Government from vocational education. In case you haven't figured it out yet, that means college, because all anyone hears when you say "college" is "that school I go to after school so that I can get a job", and because every career job requires a college degree. You have to go to medical school to be a doctor, and you can't start at medical school without a college degree in nursing--so what the fuck is medical school there for, if they can't train you in the basics of medicine?!

It's a position everybody hates, because they cannot think objectively when you are taking things away from them. It's the rope effect: if you give a man rope enough to hang himself, he will complain about being strangled to death in a noose, but will hold tight to that rope if you try to take it from him. That is what government support of college is, though: rope enough to hang yourself.

Without governments supplying loan programs, grants, state funding, and such, only rich kids could go to college. Ignoring that rich kids only care for MBAs, there just aren't nearly enough rich kids to fill all the needs of businesses. Businesses will need millions of newly-trained, skilled laborers every year; they can't have them if nobody is able to afford college on their own. This causes businesses to hire them from other businesses, and then lose them to other businesses, as salaries run through the roof: $250,000 Web designers, accountants, and programmers.

In the above scenario, a business would gain an enormous competitive advantage by hiring entrants, engaging them in on-the-job training, and educating them via funding their college and trade school. As these entrants gain skill, more work can shift onto them: even the least skilled carpenter can cut wedges and shims, and can soon be taught to lay joists; it takes a great deal of skill to cut and carve and shape decorative furniture, and the guy building the tables and chairs is not someone you want to pay to cut wedges and lay floor joists. Law entrants can be clerks and run around the office grabbing legal briefs, and then help with research; they will absorb knowledge, and can be shaped into competent lawyers. Plumbers, nurses, accountants, computer programmers. All of these, you can provide with menial tasks and with education to build skilled labor.

Instead, businesses wait for the Government to train students, with loans or with taxpayer money. Students speculate on what the businesses will need, and come into the market with many students who saw the hot job and have now flooded the market with excess supply. They then receive low salaries and experience long unemployment.

In short: our model of "get everyone an education by way of government" has produced an economy of putting risk and expense on individuals in order to create a crop of cheap labor for businesses. You are a commodity, and you have to invest in and sell yourself, and take all risks and costs thereof. Taxpayer funding would just spread the costs to all, without reducing the risk.

There is a third option. It is a political option: it is functionally equivalent to simply removing government intervention wholesale, but it sounds like the government is still supporting you, and it moves the cost onto the student. Keep our current system, but require businesses to sponsor a student: the businesses must provide that they will have a job for this person upon graduation, and select his degree program; if they fail to hire him after college, they must pay off his loans. Businesses taking those terms would need to keep the person employed long enough to escape that obligation, then cut him off; it would be a costly and inflexible investment for them, and a risk for the student.

The above makes it seem like we're helping to reduce a student's risk without taking anything; but, compared to cutting away the system entirely, we're simply moving the cost onto the student versus the reference system. In theory, businesses may opt to hire the student for entry-level salary in exchange for covering his college while employed with them, mirroring the reference system; but the risk may be lower to simply keep the student, let him run up excessive college bills, then cut him off when you've sunk $150k into him and let him have the $200k of college debt, if you have a high degree of success with such entrants.

Canadinese aside, how do you know? Maybe he was a total asshole.

People have left behind the good Christian religion in favor of the religion of Science. It's like when L. Ron Hubbard wrote all that scifi stuff, and some crazy people made a religion of it; we came up with the Scientific Process, and now the unwashed masses who fancy themselves intellectuals bow down and worship Science as if it were some sort of religion, right down to attacking others for their false gods.

People want space flight because space flight is sciencey. They'll talk about colonizing Mars and saving ourselves from extinction, but that's really fancy talk. They want to live in Star Trek, end of story.

It's why, when I point at our limited resources and say we could shift some of NASA's budget away to a socialized medical research institute, people stamp their feet and claim NASA is integral for developing future innovations like satellite television, cool Nikes, and Tempurpedic beds--all things the private sector would have developed, save for satellite TV (which the military probably would have developed anyway, by way of spy satellites). Joint cooperation for a space station has been useful; a lot of everything else has been.. mosty a circle jerk.

The truth is NASA is the ultimate image of a public effort to develop new techie gadgets. Nobody cares about space; they just want space ships that can take them to the ISS for a pointless and non-productive vacation tour.

I was assuming they had HASH(seed) = 0xDEADBEEF and they were trying to HASH("FACEBOOK" + whatever) and get 0xDEADBEEF. To do this, you would feed your hash function--which iteratively generates a hash based on a stream--"FACEBOOK", and then start appending 40-bit strings.

There was some assertion that the full length of the identifier is 80 bits, and that Facebook only brute forced 40 bits. This is how you find a hash collision with a known prefix: you hash the prefix, then continue computing the next 40 bits in brute force, rather than running the full 80 bits repeatedly. There is always the danger of not finding a collision, of course, even if your hash function is smaller than 40 bits.

It's 80 bits.

It's an SHA-1 hash, but in square root of the time. Facebook wanted to work out facebook*.onion, so they only had to sha-1 'facebook' and then store that state. After that, feed 40 sha-1 bits to the sha-1 function to generate a bunch of different hashes, keeping the ones that match.

This works all the time, as long as there are collisions in that space that match your hash.

Because I need the ultimate in privacy between me and the video billboard in Times square where I'm posting the intimate details of my life. Yeah, right.

Problem is, there will be many, many people who will think "Oh! Facebook is protecting my privacy now, so they must be OK!"

My new tax bill will completely eliminate planetary homelessness by creating an intergalactic market opportunity providing dwarf stars to the most poverty-stricken of planets at a viable profit.

Sikh are awesome, though. They're bound by the tenants of their religion to intervene when somebody is in need of aid. Think about that: they have a religion that specifically damns them for wandering by a murder or rape and deciding it's not their business.

But they're still brown, and this is America.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, actually. He had a Ph.D., and Luther was not his first name. Can you get any simple facts right?

You really aren't familiar with speech-writing literary devices, are you? Repetition in structure is a well-known method of keeping a reader's or listener's mind engaged and attended to what is being said, thus saving them the strain of interpretation. The polar opposite is mismatching of clauses in a list, such as "with honor, dignity, and by doing the right thing" (i.e. "with honor, with dignity, and with by doing the right thing"--you can see the error). Reduction is used in compact, technical explanations: "I see the poor, the abused, the forgotten"; expansion is used in persuasive arguments: "I see the poor; I see the abused; I see the forgotten."

Perhaps you could learn something from an education.

Battery life for phones is getting better again, after 4-5 years of steep decline.

The G2 is a 5.2" smartphone. Battery life has been on the mend across the industry ever since the body sizes started enhugening.

(Of course, a consequence of phablets is that they're obnoxiously big to dig out of your pocket constantly, so people are like, "I want something more casual that I can just glance at while I leave my phone in the bag." Thus watch.)