It's always comical when bigots and oppressors try to whine that they are the victims, try to pull the "show tolerance of intolerance" crap.

If someone wants to deny people equal rights, deny people the right to get married, based on the color of their skin or their religion or gender, then I will defend their rights such as free speech. However I will not invite them to my dinner table. I will not welcome them in my home. I will not welcome them in my social circle. I will earnestly endeavor not to put on damn dollar in their pocket. And I will damn well use MY right to free speech to call them a vile bigoted scum.

Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance-of-intolerance is self contradictory. Tolerance does not mean I need to be polite or accommodating to a Ku Klux Klan group who are directly harming innocent people, or who inflict or advocate indirect harm of innocent people via laws or other force of government to deny them equal rights.

Whether it's interracial marriage or gay marriage, I do not need to be "tolerant" of the HARM inflicted or advocated in denying people equal rights.

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Most polls use the sample size to obtain a 3% or 4% error margin. The percentages I posted was the midpoint of 6 polls taken this year, and they were all within +/- 3% of what I posted. Very consistent. The vast number of polls over the last few decades show a strikingly clear and steady shift.

The political and other major events on the subject don't seem to be really pushing the numbers around. It seems that this is something that's just plain percolating through society, and the political fireworks and the court battles and the news items are more like an effect of this process rather than a driver of it.

I suspect almost the opposite. I think positions are changing faster than feelings. I think a lot of the shift is people who are still "uncomfortable" with the idea of gay marriage, but who are actively overcoming that discomfort to try to "do the right thing". I suspect a lot of the ideas and attitudes and understanding developed during the interracial marriage shift are directly responsible for the speed of the gay marriage shift. I think a lot of people are recognizing that "doing the right thing" here means supporting other people's equal rights, even when it means taking an uncomfortable position.

All of the complex factors behind it is why I find it particularly striking to compare it to the equivalent polls on interracial marriage. The shift on gay marriage is almost exactly twice as fast. Whatever the forces and processes are, they are twice as fast this time. That's huge.

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While MD5 isn't really secure against intentional attacks any more, the probability of an random collision is still negligible.

I originally started using MD5 for this purpose because in a test I did many years ago one some machine, md5sum actually ran faster than cksum. The shorter cksum data also does have a chance to generate hash collisions on reasonable sized data sets, although that probably doesn't matter too much for just disk error checking. I don't use the newer algorithms because they're overkill and their hash strings just look too long.

I never archive any significant amount of data without first running this script at the top:

find -type f -not -name md5sum.txt -print0|xargs -0 md5sum >> md5sum.txt

It's always good to run md5sum --check right after copying or burning the data. In the past, at least a couple of percent of all the DVDs that I've burned had some kind of immediate data error

(A while back, I rescanned a couple of hundred old DVDs that I burned ranging up to 10 years old, and I didn't find a single additional data error. I think that a lot of cases where people report that DVDs deteriorate over time, they never had good data on them in the first place and only discover it later.)

Since the server never hands out the same prekey twice (and the client would never accept the same prekey twice), we are able to provide forward secrecy in a fully asynchronous environment.

PFS only if you trust the server. Haven't we seen the "trust the server"-concept a few times too much lately?

Polling on interracial marriage showed it increased in acceptance at a fairly steady rate of 1% per year.
Polls show acceptance of gay marriage rising 2% per year. It's currently about 55% support vs 39% against.

Approval of gay marriage is overwhelming among the younger generation, who largely view it as a civil rights issue. The strongest opposition among senior citizens, who are literally dropping dead day by day. There is nothing that can stand against the force of a generational shift.

You lost this fight. You lost this fight several years ago. YOU are the gadfly that has been swatted. Get used to the word "bigot", because you're going to be hearing increasingly often.

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So few of even those who understand what the government is doing were interested, much less concerned, or more properly, panicked and furious beyond belief. Maybe this will ring a bell that means something to them?

The one guy being ridiculous is you. We do have to solve the problem, since we created it. Pushing it in front of us, out of sight, out of our generation is not a viable option.
Oh - and there are a few more issues with keeping our descendants in the loop. Information will be lost, no matter how careful you are....

Uhm. Easy to fake? So, how will they fake out the huge amount of telescopes that will be pointed at the moon when they approach? How do they fake the large amount of listening posts that will listen for the chinese signals from the moon?

Not to mention, flybys by other nations, later, will look for the equipment. It would be kind of embarrassing when nobody can find it. ;)

Not quite. It's true that for the majority of western music it performs just as well as AAC and Vorbis, however there are certain classes of audio that it does poorly with, in particular polyphonic music. This is an inherent limitation (steming from the pre/post comb filter), that cannot be overcome in future encoders.

For streaming audio, this isn't a big deal as it is somewhat of a corner case and people don't hold streaming audio to flawless standards. However, for a music library, you want an audio format to encode anything you throw at it to transparent level of quality, without thinking about the technical details or limitations.

Opus uses less computational resources than Vorbis, to the point where doing it in hardware is almost pointless for a smartphone (especially for streaming where the radio will be active and using more power than the encoding/decoding), and ultra-low power dedicated MP3 players are becoming scarcer. So it's less of an issue that it was in Vorbis's day.

Yes, they have limitations, and want to lock you in. But iPads, like most Apple products, are designed obsessively to Just Work. Also, you get the option of having a Retina display, which may or may not be extra-helpful, depending on your dad's vision.