> Smoking double isn't going to drop your grades by 100% after all.

It did in my case. Twenty years later, I'm trying again. So far it's. Working a lot better after reducing marijuana consumption by 100%. No doubt, getting stoned was fun. It just wasn't compatible with doing much else.

> who would not smoke when it is illegal but would when it is legal to swing the overall grade by 5%.

Grocery stores know that they sell a lot more candy of they put it at the checkout counter. People buy a lot more if it's within arms reach than if they have to walk down the aisle to get it. For pot we talking about much more than walking an extra 30 feet, you have to call and wait for a pot dealer, andbpot dealers are notoriously unreliable and rarely punctual. Vs stepping inside the store you're walking by across from campus.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if many people who used to smoke a few hits once a week now walk by the pot store and decide to take a few hits TWICE per week. Even the guy who used to smoke most nights may well do more lunchtime tokes if carrying it isn't going to send him to jail. So the people who would smoke anyway could easily smoke 5% MORE.

  Also, there are a few law abiding citizens who don't illegal drugs. Particularly young people haven't yet firmed up their own beliefs as much, so they look to others for validation of their potential decisions . Having the entire population vote that pot is okay will influence some young people's decisions.

Personally, I'd prefer a federal Consitutional republic in which the national government has enumerated powers. Let me break that down:
Federal: the people grant some power to their state, who in turn grant some power to the national union.
Consitutional: the role of government officials agreed upon ahead of time and written down. The congress and the president serve as written in the
Republic: citizens vote leaders
National enumerated powers: Washington handles certain things, like military defense, and anything not listed as Washington's job your state can tty it their way.

All of the above is what the Constitution and contemporary documents say the US should have. Notably, the national government was purposely NOT given the general police power, so the FBI really shouldn't exist without a Constitutional amendment authorizing the feds to police general crime.

I wonder if one could draw or print a circuit, then coat it to be thicker. For example, we know if you lay a cheap circuit board with copper traces into a pan of melted solder, the solder will only stick to the copper traces, making them thicker while rolling right off the bare board. Perhaps a copper based pen/marker could be used in that way. You'd prefer something more convenient than melting enough solder to the bottom of a pan, but the general concept make work.

Along the same lines, when I was a little kid I attached a battery to a copper penny and a quarter, then left them in water overnight. That resulted in electroplating the quarter with copper. It would therefore be possible to draw or print your circuit, then easily electroplate it with pure, low-resistance copper. I think electroplating applies a very thin layer. You might need it thicker, so again that concept would need to be refined.

> What happens when one of their sting operations don't go according to plan? Maybe their guy goes a little nuts and decides to do things his own way,

A federal sting could NEVER go wrong. It's not like the federal government (illegally) provides weapons to murderous drug cartels, who then use exactly those weapons to kill border patrol officers and others. Well okay, that could happen, but if it did, they'd immediately put a stop to the program. They wouldn't KEEP selling weapons to organized crime even knowing the weapons were being used to kill people in Texas. Well surely they'd stop when the information became public. The feds wouldn't send Eric Holder to go lie to Congress about the whole thing.

Nothing like that could ever happen, because whatever the problem is, the federal government is always the solution. The feds are never the problem, and the Constitution is "just a piece of paper", ad one famous law professor / community organizer put it.

> It makes absolutely NO sense for them to flaunt their ability and willingness to do so as the simple course of action the entire reset of the world would take is a simple matter of NULL routing China and going on about their daily business

It amazes me how many Slashdot posts theorize about what *would* happen, under conditions that *already* have been going on for years. If you said that in 1990, it would be a reasonable prediction, an intelligent guess. After 20 years of attacks, very few networks have blocked China completely. We know what *would* happen, because it's *been* happening for many years.

    PLA Unit 61398 hacked a few low level sites, the US and Europe did nothing. They hacked some smaller companies. The US and Europe did nothing. They started blasting US and European banks and other key targets with constant attacks. A few web sites started blocking Chinese traffic locally. The US and Europe did nothing. The hacked solar companies and started shipping panels baed on technology recently developed in the US. A couple of government bureaucrats grumbled. They hacked some shell companies nominally involved in solar, but primarily engaged in federal grants and political donations. The US government indicted their officers, a purely ceremonial exercise - we're not actually going to go get those officers and put them in jail.

That's what actually HAS happened. Your theory about how the US WOULD respond might have been a reasonable guess in 1990, but it's rather outdated now. Like the arguments about what the results would be from banning guns - the UK DID ban handguns, violent crime did double. it already happened. Pretty silly to make guesses about what you think might happen.

There are of course exceptions. In some cases, increasing the salary takes an act of Congress. Or at least an act of the state legislature. In a very large company or a deep government bureaucracy such as a university system consisting of several universities, the board may have instituted a freeze and the person hiring you is six levels of management away from that decision. It's helpful to have a friend on the inside who can give you a hint as to how flexible budgets are that year. Otherwise, at least read up on the company to see how their cash position is and how budgets look that year.

> A relatively easy way to get all those samples is to inject a script into somebody's HTTP response - say, for http://slashdot.org/ - which constantly does nothing but request the same HTTPS URL

Not with a https url you're not going to do that. You're going to need to attack a protocol in which bytes from the master key are reused in each transaction. WEP was such a protocol, TLS isn't one. TLS rc4 hashes a nonce with the key each time, so the bits used as the rc4 key are different each time, making probabilistic attacks useless.

That's the "bits can't be reused in the xor" part of my post.

I've noticed a pattern with you. You're reasonably well informed regarding cryptography, and understand the concepts well (though you sometimes read too fast and miss the details). You therefore decide that ONLY you are informed and everyone else are idiots. Here's the thing. You've read a lot, but forget that everything you've read was written by someone other than you. You HEARD about an attack on a cipher. Great, so did everybody else. Somebody actually developed that attack. Somebody who is in the set "not you, therefore an idiot" developed the attack. You'd do well to actually read what others have to say rather than skipping what they said said because after all, anyone other than you is an idiot. (No, some of us actually created what you study).

There are a few schools that offer essentially that. I'm doing it at WGU.edu, which is a state school in many states (WGU Texas, for example, is a state school in Texas). You finish each class whenever you can pass the test, which in many cases is an industry-recognized certification test from CompTIA, CIW, Microsoft, etc. I just finished my database course, which took me a week to get four college credits since I know the material very well. If you knew ALL the material well enough to pass all of the tests, you could get a bachelor's degree in six months or so. They ALSO provide curriculum to teach you the material, but you study it only as much as you need to.

You mentioned the cost. With WGU, you don't pay per-credit or per-class, but per-semester, and you can take as many courses in that semester as you want. (Minimum 12 credits for financial aid.) IF you knew everything you need to know for your degree, you could do the whole thing in one six-month semester at a cost of only $3000. The tax credit is about $1,200, so the net cost to you is only $1,800.

Personally, I have a full time job, a part-time business, and a family, so I'm doing it in just a few hours per week and it will take a while.

Other schools offer similar programs. WGU offers low cost and reasonable credibility - it's a state school just like Texas A&M, University of Texas, etc. Not AS flagship prestigious, but also not a joke like some online programs. Exclesior is somewhat similar in that you get credit for knowing the material, not for attendance or homework.

As others have pointed out, xor is actually very strong - unbreakable in fact, IF the key is long enough. A key may be made long enough by any of many key-stretching algorithms. Also, the same portion of the identically stretched key shouldn't be reused.

In practice, that means that plain xor by itself is limited to either a) short plaintexts such as passwords or other keys or b) highly secure one time pad based systems, which require that key books be shared ahead of time. XOR can also be used as an essential component of a strong algorithm which is more, complicated. Basically, xor as the actual encryption on the data plus some method to extend the key securely.

For a much longer plaintext, you'd be correct. Starting with a long plaintext and reducing the entropy by using it's hash would be bad. That's actually recommended practice for hashing PASSWORDS. Yes, it increases the risk of of collisions but given the length of passwords, that's not very significant. More significant is that it then takes an attacker 2048 times as long to check a password in an offline attack.

She says it's "not protected by the first amendment." The first amendment is "Congress shall make no law ..." So the first protects speech FROM CONGRESS. To say it "is not protected by the first amendment " is to say that Congress can ban it.

  She then says it "should be removed ". You ask "by whom?" Considering that she just said Congress can do it, the only reasonable interpretation of "should" is that she means Congress should do so, possibly indirectly through a federal agency. That's scary only because Congress is HER, she's a senior member and she thinks that her colleagues and her should do this.

Feinstein said:

not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed

The first amendment says that the federal government may not violate freedom of speech. So saying "not protected by the first amendment " is saying "can be removed by the federal government ".

I think that's covered in fourth grade, so ...
> It is notable that she did not say who should remove these from the internet, or how.

She's either a) quite unfamiliar with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, or b) saying it should be removed by the federal government, which is her and her buddies. Either option is rather bad.

> 5% of the total energy use is still

The 5% neither of total energy, nor of use.

It's 5% of electricity generated within the state.
Most of the energy isn't electricity, and a large percentage of the electricity they use is generated in Arizona, where regulation has allowed new power plants that generate reliable electricity to be built.

In other words, it's really just how many new electric plants were built in California (only solar ones) as a percentage of the plants that California already had prior to them shutting down development and forcing any new plants capable of providing reliable electricity to be built across the state line in Arizona.

Given that the population of California has increased by 10% in the last 15 years, the fact that their electric capacity hasn't kept up, that they've become more dependent on power from Arizona, isn't actually a good thing.