Of course they pay more in total dollars. However, I suspect that nonetheless also benefit more, economically, per dollar of taxes. For instance, I'd like to see these huge companies try to make their current profits without pax Americana, and that shit ain't cheap at all. On the other hand, the very poor also owe their very lives to the state, so you could logically make the cold-hearted argument for regressive taxation. On the other other hand, we probably only have social welfare because it's more expedient than just outright leaving them to die and starting riots. It's cheaper and less declasse to pay them off than to deploy the gatling guns.

wtf, I thought this comment would be about eating pussy, not the other kind of "Dune".

If you're worrying about which data storage medium would be most likely to survive a fire, you've already lost. It's about as stupid as getting a circumcision to avoid getting HIV.

Since you're asking Slashdot for advice, you can't be that big of a deal, which means you need to protect against idiot script kiddies and basically nothing else. Any meaningful adversary wouldn't hack you, but rather confront you through blackmail, seduction, or just plain old hitting you with a crowbar. If you are a big deal, or have ties to organized crime or other significant risks (just covering all the bases here), then what the hell are you asking here for? Hire a competent security professional; ask Slashdot for tips on finding one of those, if you must.

Now that this is established: what you do is you wad up your files with whatever you want (tar, zip, whatever you're comfortable with) and use AES (or CAST5, or whatever). Then, if you really want, you can etch the key into a big piece of steel or stone and put that in your safe. Using the alphabet {|, -, /, \} for ease of carving and to avoid ambiguity, you can represent it in 128 strokes. Assuming 2"x2" space for each one (including border), that's about 3.5 sqft, or ~5 sheets of steel in US Letter/A4 size. A more sane thing to do, might be to store copies of the key on paper in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory in the basement of one or more of your friends' or family's homes.

By the way, I find it hilarious that the same crowd which once would have told you to encrypt and store remotely is now tripping over itself to find ridiculous reasons not to, just because it's easy enough for anyone to do now.

It wouldn't be stacked, ffs. Stacking encryption wastes compute time at best, or compromises the encryption at worst. Basically, the single encryption key would literally be split into pieces; each of k members would get N/k of the bits according to some protocol (perhaps interleaved). Shamir's Secret Sharing is an elaborate example of doing a lot better than that, so using it as an example of an attack against stacked encryption is rather ironic.

I defy you to take any currently-good cryptosystem and craft a "fake key" which will decrypt a known cyphertext, C, as plaintext B as opposed to the intended A, when combined with other fixed keys. Jesus christ, even if you knew what the other keys were, we're talking about an insanely difficult task.

it's a good analogy, really. the carriers are the abusive billionaires, the phone companies sell the gear, and the customers are eager to be controlled, restrained, and penetrated with only brief moments of regret.

Well, yes. This is an important piece of information, no?

right, mere attendance, as i said. if you're not merely attending, you don't have any time to sit there and prevaricate over your "investment".

if you use a university education correctly (collaborating with world-class professors or at least second-degree collaborators thereof, doing cutting edge research, etc.), it can be worth one hell of a lot. in fact it can be invaluable.

as for inflation, i agree. on the other hand, if you can't get a nearly-free ride through a state school, you probably shouldn't be going to college anyway. among the people for whom college used to be a birthright or the investment of a lifetime, it's now almost free. the people getting bilked are the ones who think it will compensate for mediocrity. i have little sympathy.

i didn't even take intro CS courses at college because it wasn't required and i already knew the material. taking the course online basically means "do the tests and place in" but i guess they want to save face by not admitting that or something. the "best and brightest" programmers really shouldn't take intro CS at all since it just wastes everyone's time. instead they should give the spots to bright math or science folks who happen to not have spent years already doing this stuff for fun.

It's more or less true. A side effect of the oversupply of postdocs is that excellent professors are available everywhere. Given an ounce of initiative, a student can get an excellent education at a state school. There are still significant benefits to attending big-name universities, though, and they increasingly bend over backwards to help you pay if you're actually good. Stanford just announced zero tuition for families under $125K/yr (!!), and they're not alone. If someone said they dropped out of Stanford or MIT because of the money, anyone under 50 would find this a bit odd. Suspicious, even. I'd ask what happened.

This is assuming that you actually give a shit, though. If you just want to coast, drop out of the good schools. Hell, drop out of the state schools and do something you'd enjoy or find worthwhile. Part of the academic "crisis" is that people are catching on and mere attendance is no longer a golden ticket. That's a good thing.

640k is enough for anyone, right? lol

there is a LOT you can do with 32-bit operations, and oftentimes it's better to push more data through than to get precision you don't need anyway. don't mistake your pedantic ignorance for insight.

it's not a bad strategy for the gaming market either (not great, but not bad). it's a developer gateway to including physics simulations in games. rather than cramming in even more pixels (at the point where most people won't even notice them) or cosmetic effects, even adding fluid simulation can create a more significant market differentiation than more anti-aliasing. pushing these cards on the "early-adopter" (read: sucker) crowd opens that door.

Maybe you're missing the point. The names aren't usually for using or discovering them; they're for understanding them. A lot of algorithms are trivial to implement (at least in the limited form they are usually taught in), but proving optimality and knowing when to apply them (i.e. understanding their generality) is another story.

Care to give a few examples before you christen yourself a genius?

The prisons house people who were sloppy, stupid, and lazy.

script kiddies often fall into those categories, yes.

and prisons also house people who didn't quit while they were ahead.

which means very little in itself.

And yet he was brainwashed by the communist Federation despite that... that's the real "inspiration" here, whatever you're inspired to do with it.

The only characters with consistent ethics or integrity were the Ferengi, who expressed their logic rationally and improved utility on average through free trade rather than elitist self-indulgence.