I've used the site longer and reserve the right to use Doctor Who references where I'm suspicious of technical details, especially as relate to timing vulnerabilities. This is allowed, as per The Hacker's Dictionary. Bonus points for finding the Doctor Who references included.

That was pretty much my interpretation as well. Which would be great for ad-hoc encrypted tunnels - the source and destination can have keys that are valid only until the tunnel's authentication expires (typically hourly) and where the encryption is based on the identity the other side is known by. Ad-hoc tunnels need to generate keys quickly and efficiently, but also don't need to be super-secure. In fact, they can't be.

If RIBE isn't useful in ad-hoc, then you'd end up having to ask when it would be useful.

Anything that depends on a third party, including PGP/GPG with keyservers, is vulnerable to some form of compromise, SSL/TLS certificates all have a third party signer and Kerberos depends on all kinds of behind-the-scenes work being secure. However, although they're imperfect, they're considered adequate for what they do. Well, except for SSL, perhaps.

RIBE presumably therefore also has a niche where it's good. Rapid key turnover is what's wanted for conversation-based protocols with timeouts. That makes RIBE sound promissing for IPSec ad-hoc and SSL, as it makes store and crunch by attackers less likely to work. But is that the right niche?

Look up the Tueller Drill. Quite a bit of research has been put into this. If I remember right, even Mythbusters tested this once and confirmed it.

Actually it's more like 7 billion (I think 6.9?) people on Earth, and he's saying that 1.5 billion Android phones are sold every day. I had no idea, but that's pretty impressive.

Of course we won't arrest you for drunk driving or domestic assault Mr. FBI, just like you won't arrest us for violating civil rights or using this highfalutin' cell phone spy gizmo.

Won't someone require a verification of ID tags against actual equipment serial numbers in a case like this, at least for some statistically significant portion of the equipment list?

Otherwise, you're just inventorying ID tags which could be stuck to anything. Now if they could manage to integrate the tag into the system somehow, although you'd have to define what the system was, otherwise you kind of get into a Theseus paradox situation.

Which makes me wonder how many empty computer cases have been "inventoried" even though there was functionally no computer inside.

And to repeat, "Ah, I see, you're thinking of some kind of high-school debate format..." Which is nice and all, but not terrifically helpful. Debates and arguments in the real world aren't so easily broken down into two sides. Like if I said, "Let's debate the following idea: America should go to war with other countries. Either you're in favor of this idea, meaning you want America to always go to war with all countries, or you're against, and believe that America should never go to war with any other country under any circumstances." That's a great little nice dumb false dichotomy.

Now you probably don't agree with either side, but you probably also aren't actually neutral. You have an opinion. You have a position. If opinion doesn't fall neatly into the false dichotomy as presented, that doesn't mean you're neutral.

I think what's unimaginative is, you seem to think that opinions fall on a neat, nice little spectrum, and being "neutral" is falling dead in the center between two endpoints on the spectrum. The reality is that, if you're involved in the debate and you care about the income, then you've got something at stake. All kinds of people have different things at stake. Not everyone in favor of net neutrality have the same interests, and neither do all those who oppose it. People will be in-favor or against for different reasons and to different degrees, with different degrees of passion. There will be those who are undecided, or people who are in favor of some other solution, some "middle road" solution. They may be passionately in favor of a "middle road solution", or even passionately "undecided", feeling that there are just too many complex factors to make a real decision right now. Those passionate positions are not "neutral".

What's more, you could be arguing in favor or against, not because you genuinely believe in either side, but because you want to sound smart, or because you have some other agenda you're interested in pushing. Those people aren't neutral, but the people who refuse to alignment themselves with one side or the other, for those same reasons, are equally not-neutral. They've taken position in the argument, and may be just as hard to sway from their position.

If it helps, how about a metaphor: Each of the two "sides" of the argument are like a team playing tug-of-war. One side pulls in one direction, one side pulls in another. You're saying that their are "neutral" people in between, because they're sitting in the middle, holding onto the rope, but not pulling in either direction. My point is, if they're holding on tightly, then they're not neutral. They're still having an effect on the game by adding inertia to the system, making it harder for either side to win. The only way to be truly neutral would be to let go of the rope.

I like the multigenerational family setup, although it could have some annoyances (will I really have to listen to my dad's ideas on how I am supposed to mow the fucking lawn forever?).

The biggest problem is that employers don't want to give you time to manage the lives of your children, let alone elderly parents.

Ah, I see, you're thinking of some kind of high-school debate format, where I take the pro- position and you take the against- position, and we have a formal silly little discussion that gets graded by an English teacher, or some nonsense. That's not what I'm talking about. In fact, my point in my original post was partially to point out how silly it is to approach an argument/debate that way.

There's no such thing as being truly neutral without being indifferent and disinterested. If you are not disinterested, then you must have some aspect of the debate which interests you and which you care about. Everyone who cares is going to have specific points of the debate that they care about, and reasons why they care about those things. That doesn't necessarily mean that they have a strong binary position on the issue that's being discussed, either 'yes' or 'no'. The fact that someone has some kind of interest in the debate is not a good reason to dismiss their arguments as biased, since if they had no interest, they wouldn't participate.

A position in an argument may be subtle, complex, conflicted, ambivalent, and altruistic. That's still a position.

Well, the sky is just a little less dense than the ocean so you need to work on your buoyancy.

So then you won't participate in a debate, because you don't care at all.

Like ask me whether I think the best college football team is, and I'll tell you, I don't care. I just don't. If you say it's the University of Alabama, I'll say, "Yeah, sure. Whatever." I don't care. If I engage, it's because I care and have some kind of position.

Ok, so that's still a position. If there's a debate between emacs and vi, and I say, "I don't like either," that's a definite position, even if it's neither pro-vi nor pro-emacs. If I bother to argue that position, then it must mean that I have some interest, I have something at stake in the argument, even if it's not really about emacs or vi. In fact, when people argue about things, it's very common for them to not-really be arguing about the thing that they're officially arguing about.

It's not. It's a process for developing improved models our material world. "Truth" is a much broader field.

Not necessarily the "ultimate cause", though, depending on what you mean by that. I mean, I don't necessarily know what the original author means, but I could make some guesses. At least one of those guesses would basically amount to "God". But regardless of that question of "what exactly does he mean?" it's true that science inquires into some kinds of causes, but perhaps not others. Just to give a completely weird example, proper science wouldn't begin to tell us why Brutus participated in the assassination of Caesar. You could use science to try to model psychology to determine reasons why people betray their friends, but there's no scientific experiment to determine a historical or fictional character's motivation.

All this just to say, there are different kinds of causes.

I agree with you somewhat, but on the other hand, there's a real problem with "basing words on usage" without clarifying what each usage is, and which one you're using. People confuse concepts quite a lot because they use the same word for multiple concepts, without ever understanding that's what they were doing.

So if you want to say, the word "science" has multiple definitions, including these 4 (listed above), I have no problem with that. But keep them straight. When you use the word, be clear about which meaning you're using. Because according to those definitions, I could say any of the following: I think science is the most important development of the past few hundred years. I think science is often quite stupid. Science constantly brings people to incorrect conclusions. Science is unreliable. Science is in terrible shape these days, and doesn't really work. Science is essentially a religion to most people.

I can say all of those things honestly, and you don't actually know what I mean well enough to argue. Which sense of "science" do I mean, and what do I then mean by each statement? The result of such muddled language is that people go around either thinking that science (in all 4 senses you list) is either stupid and unreliable, or completely infallible-- so much so that I'm probably going to get flamed for a lot of those statements, even though the people responding won't understand what they mean.

So sure, we can go with words having a bunch of unclear definitions that nobody knows what they mean. I keep trying to clarify the situation, but I know there are a lot of people who will resent that effort for a lot of different reasons.

So you're not neutral. You're picking a side that you feel is under-represented, and you're taking that position. You're doing so... probably either to educate, or because you have some feeling that the under-represented side is important somehow.

I'm not saying that, in order to debate, you need to be biased and serving selfish ulterior motives. It's just that, on some level, you need to be interested, and you need to have some kind of agenda-- even if that agenda is just "entertainment at flexing my intellectual capacity".

Engineering and science are linked, at least. Science could be described as a sort of "engineering of our understanding". It's improved through a lot of trial and error, and we pick a solution that "works" in providing predictive results.

Also, engineering is generally performed with some level of scientific understanding. The first airplane may have been a bit stumbled-upon, built without understanding exactly all of how it worked. However, the Wright brothers were working within a certain level of scientific understanding. Also, once the airplane existed, it was studied, and an understanding of the forces at work were refined using the scientific method. New designs were proposed based on those new understandings.

So he's not wrong, there. An engineer working on a new vaccine will be making use of the scientific process, and making use of prior scientific knowledge.