The two main criteria for choosing someone to spy on you would be that they are as close to powerless to affect you as possible, and don't share information with anyone more able to exert power on you. Some tiny country I know little about but the name and approximate location is probably going to be the best answer.

Judit Polgar was one of eight players who participated in what FIDE called the "World Chess Championship 2005". Now, the FIDE world championship during the era when the champion wasn't participating was of course a joke, but the winner of that tournament, Topalov, challenged the world champion Kramnik for the title on the basis of his win. This makes the FIDE "World Chess Championship 2005" a de-facto candidates tournament, and hence, the eight participants, including Judit, world championship candidates. Players who were candidates to challenge for the world title.

And moreover, since Judit Polgar was capable of becoming a world championship candidate, it's proven that women can compete with men at the top.

The problem is that chess, or at least, serious chess seems to be an almost exclusively male pastime, for reasons I can only guess at. This leads to there being very few women in the top ranks of the game, simply because there are very few women at all ranks of the game, which creates the perception that they can't compete. So people organise separate tournaments for girls because that's what you do in sport. And so girls learning chess only have a tiny pool of other people to practice against, so they don't get the broad range of experience that the boys do, and they imagine becoming women's world champion rather than world champion so they don't get the ambition boys do, and so the regular stream of Judit Polgars which we need to break this idea is suppressed.

Segregation is a disaster for women's chess, but it creates a self-propagating vicious circle. It is its own explanation.

I think the problem the author has is that he wants to believe that there is a singular notion of "best chess player". In reality, there are multiple notions of the best chess player. Ratings measure more the ability to stay consistent throughout your career and never let your form dip, tournament wins measure more your ability to take points off weaker players and shift our mindset rapidly to deal with the next style which comes along... and the world championship measures more your ability to present an impregnable wall of defensive ability and be unbeatable.

These are all very valuable things to have, and wanting to take one of them away just because your mind isn't flexible enough to cope with them all existing simultaneously is selfish.

What do you have against AES? The US government doesn't pick bad algorithms for itself to use as a matter of principle or anything, suspicion is only really warranted on algorithms which contain data which claims or appears to be random, but could have been specially chosen to have some property. (If you want people to trust your magic numbers, you generate them by doing something like taking the hash of the square root of 2.) The difference between AES and Twofish is that AES got more positive comments from around the world during the AES selection process, and fewer negative comments. Twofish is still a well-respected algorithm which will protect your data, but AES is generally regarded as slightly superior, and this is why NIST recommend it.

There's no need for a replacement for Dual_EC_DRBG, because it was only one of several recommended choices, and was both slow and suspicious, so nobody was using it anyway. Hash-based PRNGs seem to be faring best at the moment, though something which everyone can call good is still yet to really emerge.

The main crypto algorithm which is both trusted and now under suspicion is ECDSA/ECDH, where people have tended to use curves recommended by NIST, which have data in which we can't verify the generation of. It's not clear just how dangerous this is, whether this data could actually hold any malicious secrets or not, but it can certainly be solved just by generating our own curves, or using curves from organisations we trust more.

There is a key difference between Libya and Syria, beyond the geopolitical considerations of Syria being a big part of the Israel-Arab enmity. Libya ended up being a struggle between nearly all the people of the country and a bunch of foreign mercenaries, nobody really supported the previous government. Syria is just a standard civil war.

Without knowing the details, this sounds perfectly reasonable. Going to 256-bit symmetric keys is future-proofing. Nobody can break 128-bit encryption now, but in thirty years time, it's quite possible that someone could. (In particular, quantum computing could effectively halve symmetric key lengths, in addition to its better known effect of killing all the practical asymmetric crypto we've got right now.) So if the military didn't want their messages to be readable in even 30 years time, they would be advised to use 256-bit, whereas if a guy who decrypts a message which is part of some banking protocol 20 years after it was sent couldn't do much with the information because everything has already happened, it would be an unnecessary move for the banks.

We are imaginative animals; we produce pictures, sounds, smells, tastes and the sense of touch in our minds. When you read a book, you live it without the limits and limitations imposed by cinematic arts.

Imagining sensory input is pretty much irrelevant to the goals of storytelling. It's a means to an end. The end of storytelling is to convey feelings, and ideas which are linked to feelings. (If plain ideas are what you want to convey, you're better off with non-fiction, so as not to risk being misunderstood.) The real advantage that prose has is the ability to directly describe what people are thinking, and to a certain extent, the ideas which are in play without it seeming forced and unnatural. Their sensory input is just really something to have thoughts and feelings about, it's very much secondary.

But because sight is so powerful, the advantages of cinema are quite overwhelming, when deployed properly. It's far more than "showing what things look like". I'm not an expert so I can't go into much convincing detail, but the art of cinema is all about communicating with things like space, colour, geometry, motion etc. Things like if you have two people separated by a vertical line in the background, it feels quite different to if they are separated by a slanted line in the background, and again different if they're overlapping one another instead. Since it's only about a century old, and it's such a powerful and abstract form of communication, we're still beginners at making it, really. But we're getting better and better, and if you find the best modern examples and gain the skills necessary to fully process the visual language, nothing else compares.

The whole idea of thinking about 'limitations' is really the wrong way round. It's better to think of different media as toolboxes for conveying stuff. Prose is a pretty good toolbox, it's been around for a long time and we know how to use it pretty much to its maximum extent. Cinema is an incomprehensibly vast toolbox, with almost limitless potential, that we're still playing with. It's very easy to mess up, but as we learn to get it right, it can do incredible things which couldn't be dreamed of without it.

Humans are visual animals, we process pictures better than anything else. So well-directed cinematic arts are the most effective storytelling media.

But cinema is just outdated, a relic of the time before television. A film needs to tell the entire story in one go, so the duration always ends up in a shallow band which is long enough to be worth going out for, but not so long that you get tired. It also leaves no opportunities to process bits of what you've seen before you get to the next bits. The serialised media that television can provide deliver the story in short, sharp bursts, so you can bring maximum concentration to what you're viewing, digest each piece thoroughly, and it can go on for as long as it needs.

And special effects are only an issue if you use the inferior "live action" format.

I don't think the effect of watching something like, most recently, From the New World could be matched by any other format.

(Games are an interesting case which may have the potential to go even beyond that. But nobody has really figured out how to solve the conflict between allowing the player to control the story, since it's a game, and allowing the author to control the story so it can be maximally effective. And this may be an unsolvable problem.)

Could we please stop making everything about drugs? There is so much to life that is much more important than potheads and their perceived "right" to self-injury through drug abuse.

This isn't about the right of 'potheads' to 'self-injury' through drug-'abuse'. It's about the rights of 'potheads', who abuse and injure themselves far less than 'boozeheads' or 'tarheads', to be free of the threat of government violence if they don't report themselves to prison. We shouldn't be violent to people just because they don't conform. This sort of thing is really important. How would you like it if government locked you up because of some way in which you didn't conform (without doing harm to anyone else)?

Given that drug abuse is endemic amongst low-income minorities in America, I can't help but think that drug legalization is a covert form of racism -- keep them hooked, make the drugs easier, cheaper to get.

It's racism to STOP sending minorities to prison for failing to conform? That's a good piece of doublespeak you've got there.

Here are some examples of actual racism for you:

• The first American opium laws applying only to Chinese people
• The campaign to ban Cannabis reviving the foreign-sounding term 'marijuana' and claiming that black men would get high on it and attack white women
• Tobacco, a fairly dangerous leaf popular amongst white Americans, is accepted. Coca, a fairly dangerous leaf popular amongst some cultures somewhere in South America is an excuse for government violence the world over
• Sending people from low-income minorities in America to prison for not being like white guys.

There are some things simply beyond the pale in any decent society. Entertaining people through showing a grisly, cruel murder can do nothing but harm the family, friends, and love ones of the victim. It has absolutely no political, educational, moral effect, nor any deterrent to any crime. It has no value whatsoever to shock and delight those deranged enough to view a heinous act.

And yet, it's not actually an act of violence. Arresting someone; saying "if you don't come with us, we'll use force on you" is.

Merely observing that someone is disgusting and has no possible excuse for their behaviour is not an excuse for the use of force against them, even when that force is wrapped up in the notion of 'law', made to look civilised, generally agreed upon, governed by individuals who wear fancy clothes to increase their perceived status. Force, and therefore law, should be a tool of last resort. An argument for anything to be illegal must identify a problem with serious consequences if it is not solved, and explain why there is no other good way of solving it.

The Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories got many children into reading in the first place.

Not if it's the sort of problem which for-fun coders aren't going to notice exists in the first place. (Or just won't have the necessary technical specifications.)

1) They are the two main ways of doing "imagine if the world was different" fiction.

2) Because of this, there is a large amount of very good fiction (less so in literature perhaps, which seems to attract the purer forms of each, but certainly in media generally) which combines the two. Drawing a line between them would be impossible.

3) And combining the two is actually a quite good idea, because each counters the weaknesses of the other. Science fiction which gets too hard can lose drama by becoming unrelateable and missing dramatic opportunities which don't seem plausible enough, and fantasy which gets too soft can lose drama by making cause and effect too arbitrary, which undermines narrative.

It's quite easy to argue that if you can't use the button they've left you with.