There has been massive hero inflation in recent years. Heroes have been devalued to the point you need a train load of heroes to save a little old lady from an out of control semi.

Not sure if the devaluation was due to 24/7 news networks, unscrupulous policians or social networks. Probably some of each.

People should be given all the leave they want to deal with newborn children. They ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT BE PAID by their employer while they are doing it unless they are using sick leave and vacation time like everyone else. Paid leave for a life styule choice is wrong at every level. Its especially unfair to coworkers who, for whatever reason, are not having childern. Its also unfair to shareholders and customers.

This strikes me as a case of CEO, who just had a child, whose perspective has been warped in favor of people who make the same choices she is making.

If you make paid leave a mandate at a governmental level you are nearly insuring employers will balk at hiring employees who are likely to have children and become a ball and chain on the payroll, taking off huge amounts of time with pay and requiring him to also pay a temp to cover for them.

Actually the current Fed campaign to hold interest rates artificially low for years going on a decade is in fact a form of "looting my pockets". Economist refer to it as "financial repression". In addition they rig the inflation rate computation and report it much lower than it really is, primarily by leaving out food and energy. They've also printed trillions of dollars since 2008 so they are debasing the currency, and are paying basically nothing on savings deposits so they are in fact stealing from people quietly but very efficiently.

Your only option to not be victimized in this way is to pour your money in to relatively dangerous stocks and commodities too, and get out before the current bubble pops and the the next crash. Real estate used to be a fairly safe investment but in recent years has become dangerous as well due to bubbles⦠caused by the Fed holding interest rates too low for too long.

Central bank actarions are proving to be a very effective tactic to make people invested in the stock market, which are disproportionately 1%ers very rich and is causing another huge increase in income inequality.

The only reason the dollar isn't completely destroyed at this point is the EU, China and Japan are all printing money furiously too. Since everyone is doing it all currencies are being debased at the same time which makes it look like all is well.

Central banks printing trillions and using it to bankroll government sovereign debt is almost certain to not end well, like Weimar republic and Zimbabwe not well, just give it time.

Just google "salad shooter". It's a kitchen gadget.

A pretty fair percentage of frontiersmen probably faced a fairly equal proposition of killing or being killed, some of them probably killed natives but I doubt all did.

The really organized and effective genocides usually originated from expansionist governments and their militaries.

Possibly, but you would need to do the math on how long it will take you to reach the point you can maintain a self sustaiing colony there. Until that happens you are completely dependent on Earth's governments to allow the launches you need to survive. You will be dependent on Earth for a long time for things like computers.

If someone actually managed to sustain a colony on Mars the next question would be how long it would be before Earth's governments try to exert control over it. As inept as they've been at venturing in to space you might have some breathing room, but as long as they control your launch pads to get supplies from Earth you are vulnerable.

I imagine seasteading would be a more viable option but sitting on a platform in the middle of the ocean probably wouldn't be the greatest life and being heavily dependent on supply ships coming from countries who might decide to cut them off also might be unpleasant.

The Amazon might be an option for a while but the rate at which its being deforested, especially in Brazil, I imagine you will probably be bumping in to loggers, ranchers and farmers and its only going to continue to shrink.

Why don't you name some of the countries and we will evaluate how really free they are and how insulated they are from the reach of the U.S. government.

"If you don't like the "state" you live under then move or change it."

There really aren't any places to flee to any more. Most governments are turning oppresive, corrupt and are trampling civil liberties. Computers and networking are making it extremely easy to make a police states these days. When East Germany and the U.S.S.R. did oppresive police state it was man power intensive, its much easier now. There is almost no effective defense of civil liberties being mounted any more. Once your government stacks the courts in their favor there is almost no peaceful path to oppose stripping your civil liberties. The U.S. can and frequently does use "state secrets" provision to shut down any challenge to its power. Y

ou can pretend ballot boxes in the places that have them will make a difference but they seldom do.

In particular, the reach of the U.S. government has extended to most of the nooks and crannies on the planet, with the possible exception of places like China, North Korea and Iran which are sufficiently oppresive without any help from the U.S. The U.S. has military bases and FBI offices in a staggering number of countries. They've used rendition all over the world to snatch people, sometimes innocent people, off the streets to torture . With drone bases in the middle of all of the hard to reach places the U.S. will soon have total global coverage and the ability to assassinate by drone anyone, anywhere, with no judiicial oversight.

Its the down side of living on a small planet with no frontiers left and a civilization with accelerating technology development.

There isn't any place to go if you want to escape.

You don't want to use SHA-256 by itself, because that's a high speed unsalted hash algorithm.

Ulrich Drepper created a good password crypt algorithm which incorporates SHA-256 or SHA-512, but the features that make it resistant to dictionary attack are the salt and the massive iterations over SHA to slow down the algorithm.

BCrypt uses the same techniques to slow down dictionary attacks.

The OP is right that there's no point in using a high speed naked hash algorithm, but BCrypt isn't the only good alternative.

There's also SHACrypt-256 and SHACrypt-512, which have been supported in GNU LibC since October 2007.

Wikipedia has a pretty thorough discussion of the various password hash routines that are in use on Unix/Linux systems, for that matter.

"Only a manned aircraft can autonomously enter hostile airspace and release weapons without any active communications links that could give its position away, and it is always going to be this way."

Cruise missiles have been doing exactly that for decades.