I see you're also not a parent. Not that parents shouldn't teach their children, but there's nothing simple at all about it. Each child is different and needs to be understood and taught appropriately. Parenting is the most difficult thing you'll ever do. Unless you luck out and get an angel, as the GP says... which does happen from time to time, but luck is what it is.

No, the text you quoted asks for the test to be made at n-bit block generation, not output. And I'd say for n greater than, say, 40, any incidence of consecutive identical blocks indicates, with very high probability, that the RNG is broken. I do think the clause is odd, though, and can't think of any good reason to have it in there.

FYI, low speed isn't a virtue in a crypto algorithm, either. This is true whether by "crypto algorithm" you mean "cipher" or "secure hash". Really, the only context in which poor performance is a virtue is password hashing, and you can always make a slow hash out of a fast one by iterating it.

I don't buy it. I work for Google and not only am I headhunted to an almost ridiculous degree by firms large and small, I know plenty of other Google engineers who've left the company to work for others, including a couple who didn't arrange a new job before they left, choosing instead to just take a few months off. I also know a number of Apple engineers and none of them have any trouble finding other jobs, either.

I'll take that bet. What proof of intention would you accept?

Meant to mod parent funny, misclicked "overrated", posting to undo.

Yes, it is. On the other hand, it's just as expensive to employ all of those high-priced actuaries and not have them do the statistics properly. And they have them on staff, lots of them. I have a few friends who work in that industry -- doing the statistics you say don't get done.

This would imply there's a ripe opportunity for an insurance company to use actual numbers to set their rates, and be more profitable, at lower premiums, than their competitors. But I'm sure none of them would want to do that.

I'm not really interested in debating this deeply, so I'll let you have the last word, but the above is a remarkably shallow characterization of the views of many of the opponents of gay marriage. In general, I find that is the way that most really strongly held views on common disputes arise: by not only failing to understand the other's position, but actually misinterpreting it, effectively setting up a strawman which is simple and hateful enough to be easily despised.

That's your opinion.

Okay, I'm being a little snarky, but, seriously, if it's not a difference of opinion what is it? We're talking about an issue about which the nation is pretty deeply divided, and it's not really a boolean question, either. There is a whole range of opinions. The implication of your statements is that you consider opposition to gay marriage such a hateful position that those who hold it must be bad people, with whom you cannot associate in any capacity, even if the association has nothing to do with that question. That means that you consider a majority of Americans to be said "bad people". Perhaps you should reconsider your various relationships with all of them? Perhaps you shouldn't be a resident of the United States (assuming you are) since the majority nationwide opposes gay marriage?

FWIW, I opposed prop 8 and think the fight against gay marriage is silly and doomed, because there's simply no justification for it under the 14th amendment. Personally, I'd rather just get government out of the business of recognizing marriage in any form, but if we're not going to do that there's no way to refuse homosexual marriage. Nor polygamy, for that matter.

... in games designed by people with low Charisma.

And, at the end of the day, even the opinion of the nation states is meaningless if the people stop believing.

Agreed.

While the odds of that are hugely greater than the odds of people deciding dollars are no longer worth anything, I don't think evaporation is at all likely. Time will tell.

Sure, but on the other hand, how would you like to exchange your gold for an equal weight of aluminum -- which is also not worth nothing, but until the late 19th century was more valuable than gold. . Or silicon, which is also valuable in industrial processes, particularly in the manufacture of semiconductors, but only after tremendous work has been done to purify it?

The fact that some physical substance always has some utility doesn't mean all that much. The actual industrial value of gold is not nothing, but neither is it all that large. Further, it's possible that in the not too distant future we could be mining gold from asteroids and shipping millions of tons of it per year to Earth. Or we could find a cost-efficient and safe way to manufacture gold, by transmuting other metals. Or we could just become better at finding it and digging it up. In any of those scenarios, dramatically-increased supply will cause the value to fall, probably even more dramatically, since much of gold's current price is driven by the expectation that it will always be valuable and evidence that that is untrue will quickly erase the speculative drivers of gold's current high price.

About the only thing I can think of which truly has intrinsic value is energy, since it is the necessary input to all productive processes. It's hard to store in a vault, though, physical or electronic.