Comment Re:European Air Force? (Score 2) 148
I was as confused as you are. But I found that such a thing was actually proposed just over a year ago and even got a lot of support!
... to explore rules obliging internet and telecommunications companies operating in the EU to provide under certain conditions as set out in the relevant national laws and in full compliance with fundamental rights access of the relevant national authorities to communications (i.e. share encryption keys).
Settlers of Catan, you've probably heard about, but that was just the game which enabled the genre; honored for it, but otherwise left behind as a deeply flawed example of what a truly strategic board game should be.
While I agree with the general premise, you manage to give Catan both too much and too little credit. It was definitely not the first game in the genre, though it was probably the one that brought it to mainstream attention. But I don't agree with your statement that it is deeply flawed. I still find the basic game a lot of fun to play.
I'll confess immediately that I didn't read TFA. I just want to drop this link to a nice Isaac Asimov essay, back from 1962:
Not as We Know it – The Chemistry of Life
Remember that Asimov was a professor of biochemistry. In the article, he investigates alternatives to the chemistry of life as we know it. He comes up with the following list:
[H]ere, then, is my list of life chemistries, spanning the temperature range from near red heat down to near absolute zero:
1. fluorosilicone in fluorosilicone
2. fluorocarbon in sulfur
3.*nucleic acid/protein (O) in water
4. nucleic acid/protein (N) in ammonia
5. lipid in methane
6. lipid in hydrogen
Of this half dozen, the third only is life-as-we-know-it. Lest you miss it, I've marked it with an asterisk.
When you read the article, you may want to skip the first bit and start from about the paragraph "Well, that's what I want to discuss."
Life is life.
Na-naaa naa-na-na.
The plane was 10km up. It wasn't shot down by something bought for $50,000 from Bob's Quality Used Implements of Death and Destruction and delivered to you by a courier van. The suspected weapon system requires at minimum one tank sized tracked launcher vehicle, and for full capability it requires three such vehicles. This is way out of Bob the arms dealer's league. Although I'm pretty much guessing here, the missile alone I expect would cost over a million dollars to manufacture.
You mean something like http://www.mortarinvestments.e...
Many people don't seem to realise that by editing Wikipedia anonymously, you're giving away your IP address for everyone to see. I'd expected a comment to that effect here but didn't, so I'll be the first to post it.
In that sense, editing with a registered account is much more anonymous. Only some Wikipedia staff members can look up your IP address, so edits from Capitol Hill using an account won't be picked up by this twitter bot. Also, those staff members (should) have to follow procedures before they can look up your IP.
What an incredible non-story that was.
Is it messed up to add sensitive information to an entropy pool? From choice of wording it seems everyone should immediately and without reservation know better this is a stupid thing to do.
Question is this actually a valid position or more knee jerk based on unfounded fear, ignorance of operation of an entropy pool?
When functioning properly you shouldn't be able to extract anything except entropy from pool.
Emphasis mine. Putting it in the pool is yet another attack vector, and a great way to increase the chance of something going wrong down the line. Either by mistake or by a planned malicious code change in parts of the code that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the private key.
Actually, they are called movies. And I bet that on average, people watch a lot more movies than they read books.
(This is however not a statement of quality, and I guess there are hundreds of nerds who thinks that anectodes equals data which will reply to this and proudly proclaim that they read more books than they watch movies.)
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.
