I wondered when debtors prisons would be updated to the 21st century.

That's how it works, but not the key. The important thing is that the SK can't be understood by a computer program because it's a CAPTCHA, and therefore can't be brute forced.

...is that the whole password cannot be decrypted in an automated way, because even though a computer program would quickly guess the short password (SP), the fact that the strong key (SK) is stored as a CAPTCHA prevents the computer program from obtaining it, even with the correct SP.

The point is not (as some seem to believe) to help the user memorize a longer password by storing part of it for him. This approach actually wouldn't introduce any added security, as you still have a single point of failure (the memorized short password).

More like international legal hegemony.

I dual boot Windows 7 HP and Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on an Asus Eee PC T101MT. It's got a resistive touch screen that is not well supported by vendors, nor by Microsoft. While Windows7 does respect the 1024 pressure levels the screen can read, inking is extremely slow as compared to that in Ubuntu, and the pressure levels don't translate to Photoshop or the GIMP. The only programs that seem to recognize the pressure levels are Windows Journal and OneNote, neither of which is intended as an artist's tool. By contrast, Ubuntu has very fast smooth inking, and a wonderful paint program with full support for the pressure levels (MyPaint). Considering that I purchased this netbook for the explicit purpose of being able to paint as well as take notes and read books, etc., Ubuntu saved the day for me.

At this point in time I've got everything working spectacularly on this thing- from painting with pressure levels to reading Kindle books, multitouch to two-finger scrolling, media keys to Wiimote as gamepad, handwritten notes to DropBox, Skype to Arduino development, even handwriting recognition and an OSK. You name it, I've got it going on this thing, all thanks to Ubuntu. I am quite willing to say that, although almost every other computer I've ever had has in some way (usually proprietary hardware-related) ran better with Windows and in some way better on Linux, Ubuntu far outshines Windows on my T101MT in every way.

You do realize you made absolutely no point whatsoever, don't you? I mean, it's not even worth taking apart.

Franklin was a doddering old man when the DOI was signed. He played very little role in the AOC. Jefferson was a believer in natural law (from Locke.) Native Americans would have absolutely interested him, but not for the reasons you suppose. Check out Hobbes sometime.

I don't know which is worse -- your argument, or your lack of critical thinking skills in defending yourself. Quoting a bunch of biased articles? Mentioning how contemporary the Iroquois were to the founders? Mentioning some of the paralells? It's just not a defense of your ideas. It's a bunch of anecdotes and innuendo strown together. I could use these same techniques to show that Barbary Pirates founded the United States Marine Corps, or that Sam Brown was responsible for reconstruction. You can't write the words you've written and expect to persuade. Surely you know that, right? It's very simple: give me a quote from the AOC claiming Iroquois heritage, a quote from the authors of the AOC claiming inspiration, any direct reference supporting your claim. It's like you have no idea the true heritage of the things you're talking about, and instead cling to a bunch of loosely assembled pieces of stories. The real story is pretty cool too, you know.

Once upon a time, I was a big part of the Webcomics Wikiproject on Wikipedia.

Like other Wikiprojects, we worked together to establish a consistent framework of notability requirements for webcomics; we culled out freshly-minted vanity cruft; we welcomed and nurtured new articles; we maintained lists of deserving webcomics which did not yet have articles; the works. Most importantly, we had a process, carefully arrived at through discussion and consensus (involving some of the premier names in webcomics study and criticism, I might add), under which everyone could operate reasonably.

It worked.

I myself ran some entries through the AfD (VfD then, but still) process because they didn't fit (one that I recall was a webcomic with four pages, two of which were single-image "splash" pages); on those occasions, I took the trouble to carefully explain the community criteria involved, and encourage the overly enthusiastic contributors to keep working on their comic, and to stick around and contribute more to Wikipedia in the meantime.

For comics which did fit the inclusion criteria, I would go to the comic's forum, where inevitably someone would have just posted a "Hey, I just created an article about [xxxx] on Wikipedia!" message, and I would welcome them to Wikipedia, explain the process involved and why their webcomic was suitable for inclusion, explain how to get started editing, and how to avoid the standard eager-puppy newbie editing mistakes.

Like I said, we had a mutually-agreed upon framework in place; while not perfect, it succeeded in keeping WP free of vanity cruft, and, at the same time, kept contentious disagreements to a minimum.

And then I took a little vacation.

At the same time, a couple of the other major contributors took a break; as a result, there weren't enough people minding the store when two people, who had no real knowledge of webcomics, swept in and started tossing articles to the VfD buzz saw, right and left. Never mind the established process; never mind the carefully-negotiated group consensus -- they simply swept in, substituted their notions of notability for those of dozens of previous contributors to Wikipedia, and eviscerated the webcomics field.

After which, of course, most of the people who cared about webcomics simply gave up on Wikipedia. Some of their efforts moved over to the GFDL Comixpedia, but its user base, obviously, lacks the scale of Wikipedia's. Mostly, the folks who had devoted so many hours to webcomics articles simply found themselves deflated by the whole experience. In my case, it more or less chased me away from Wikipedia for a couple of years; and even now, I'm very careful about which articles I work on; I only have just so much time and attention I can spend, and I cannot afford to play guardian angel to every article I work on, to make sure that someone doesn't just delete it.


Since the dawn of the Great Webcomics Purge, Wikipedia's history with webcomics articles has been one long string of increasingly absurd "Oh my Gawd -- can you believe they {deleted, tried to delete} that?" moments. Time and again, articles have been proposed for deletion which would normally have served knowledgeable webcomics experts as reductio ad absurdam examples of articles which could never possibly be proposed for deletion.