Yes, I have to concur. I was complete baffled, trying to imagine what kind of person would be tech savvy and not appreciate the value of autocomlete in life. Then I noticed pattern. Since I prefer not to respond to an AC unless they are saying something truly unique or it is blatantly clear that they are legitimately trying to add to the conversion, I kept reading and waiting to find a good one to which I might respond. Someone logged in or writing something that remotely approaches a rational thought. Perhaps it is coincidence, but I gave up trying to find a dissenter that wasn't an AC, or was an AC that seemed sincere.

This guy did: https://rolandh31.wordpress.co...

Please tell... which computer and software would you use to convert a 10 GB large, 2h long 1080p video to 1366x768 in 2 minutes? Keeping embedded subtitles in is a requirement.

Not only are most "secret question" answers easily guessable for anyone you know well, it's also a security risk not unlike reusing the same password on multiple sites.

If I sign up at banks A and B and provide truthful answers to security questions, then any employee of bank A can authenticate /as me/ to bank B, and the reverse as well, on top of anyone that knows me well who could likely pull it off with both banks.

I store secret questions picked and that sites answers along with the rest in my password manager.

If I ever expect to possibly one day maybe need it for say phone verification, I'll put 3-5 seconds of thought into what in-context would be the most off-topic, shocking, and hilarious answers possible that can be spoken over the phone.
Otherwise nonsensical random words are used just like you did.

aka, when signing up for a bank loan, perhaps:
Q: What is the name of the first street you lived on?
A: The corner of blackjack rd and slot-machine ave, next to "i don't have a problem" park.

When we had that 90% tax rate, the tax code was nothing but loopholes. It's important to remember that the more you make, the more flexibility you have in how, where, and when you get compensated. Remember the Maryland millionaires tax? One year later, 1/3 of the people in that bracket went missing. If you own houses in two states, how hard is it to change your residency? France has a problem today with people leaving to avoid their recent high rates (also a 90% top rate IIRC).

But you're talking about an income tax, not a wealth tax. When it comes to non-property wealth, it takes a very small tax indeed to totally change the game, and create a huge disincentive to to business here (or at least to find some way to own US stocks from elsewhere, I guess). Large investment firms move will their assets around immediately for a 0.1% better guaranteed annual return. A 1% difference in property tax rates makes a big difference in affording a new house (and in a regressive way).

Maybe people are confused about how much overall property (wealth or otherwise) there is to begin with?

Since the rest of your post seems sane, I'm just assuming my sarcasm detector is on the fritz again with this line.

Sometimes people accuse progressives of wanting to punish success, to hurt the rich just for the sake of hurting. Your plan is why people say stuff like that.

In practice, when individual states start "taxing millionaires", the millionaires move to different states. We're just looking for a way to fund the government here, as a means to the end of improving everyone's standard of living. A plan that would cause the successful to move elsewhere might raise some funds for a while, but is a terrible long-term strategy for improving standard of living. (And I'm fully aware that some actually want to build a metaphorical wall around the nation to keep the successful from escaping - not the sort of nation I want to live in.)

While this sounds convincing on the surface, it is utterly false in reality. You cannot determine from the contents of communication whether some people communicating are terrorists if they have at least minimal OpSec. You can, to a degree, identify groups when you have one member, but that works regardless of encryption.

These days there are only two kinds of terrorists (disregarding the ones created by the FBI): The dead ones and those with good OpSec. Of course, there are not many of either, and the whole thing is completely blown out of proportion. By "Qui bono?" is also becomes clear why it is being blown out of all proportion: It means more money and power for various police, state security and other anti-freedom organizations. These people are habitually lying to us these days and milking the fear for all its worth.

No, it is not. What spooks them is ordinary citizens being able to talk without them being able to listen in. These people are pathological paranoids and very, very afraid of the general population. Terrorists are not even using email or cellphones these days, the US drone-kill "strategy" made sure of that.

Terrorists do not use encryption for communication. With encryption, you can still determine sources and destinations and that gets people drone-killed on the mere suspicion of being terrorists. Of course, those that survive have become smarter, as part of an ordinary evolutionary process under predator pressure.

As far as we know, not a single terrorist attack would have ever been averted if encryption had been breakable. This person is either terminally stupid or exceptionally dishonest. In either case he is a serious threat to society and should be removed from his position immediately.

This is TAILS. There are no guest accounts. This is not a distribution intended to be installed at all. It is intended to run from CD or (preferably write-protected) memory stick. Without jumping through major hoops, you cannot even write persistent changes to it even if is on an unprotected memory stick.

That said, if configuration changes by a legitimate user, installing of packages by legitimate user, etc. are needed to open a backdoor, then that is not a security vulnerability. For example, it just takes one small change to the tunneling config of TAILS to send clear-text messages out over the normal network. It it just takes some very small config changes to open up any Unix installation to the world. Or it just takes a very small configuration change to your car to make it exceptionally easy to steal (leave the key in the ignition and the door open). These are not security vulnerabilities.

Really? That's how you think about it? Carrying the car?

People drive cars though the walls of buildings all the time. Sometimes on purpose as a weapon, more often just by clumsy driving, or even just forgetting the parking break, as happened to a friend of mine. This is real danger in the real world, unlike fantasies involving flamethrower-wielding maniacs. And when something ruptures the gar's gas tank, that's extremely dangerous - there's a reason they'll close a freeway when that happens in an accident, until the fire department handles it.

Yes, everyone in science realizes this, believe it or not (though I'll grumble about string theorists). What else do you think the scientific method is?

I believe you've got that backwards., IIRC. GR was first published in 1915. Hubble discovered in 1929 that the universe was expanding, which GR didn't explain in any way (not it it contradict). Einstein tried a couple of approaches to reconcile the new data with GR, one of which along the way was the cosmological constant. Thus far, that still seems to b the bats model (and it has nothing to do with GR).

Sure - that's science. There's always an establishment trying to explain away new data, and many trying to make a name for themselves by overturning everything with their great new theory. Sometimes the same guy doing both. But GR doesn't come into conflict with dark energy theories, any more than it does with fluid dynamics or genetics - it just doesn't explain those things.

No, it really doesn't. There's no conflict at all between GR and dark matter, and in fact GR gives us one of the 3 sets of evidence for dark matter in the first place: gravitational lensing consistent with a large mass that we can't see. As far as QM, there's certainly more to learn, and I'd bet GR becomes a poor model at sufficiently small scale, as it assumes spacetime is smooth.

GR has so far successfully accurately predicted more far-fetched and surprising results than just about anything else in physics. It's the most well-tested of physical theories. There may well be a scale or conditions in which it fails, but skepticism of such claims is well justified.

The Firefox phone was like $30 and intended for developing nations, so see #7.