homeomorphic

Grab the source packages from Ubuntu and build debs with debuild (see the man page). Most of the time, the build dependencies match up well (the dependencies for the Ubuntu-built debs don't). With pbuilder and friends it's also easy to set up your own PPA-like infrastructure.

This is taught around day one of the mandatory theory course kids take before being allowed to even try for their licenses here. And it's on the theory tests that also need to be passed.

Wouldn't this make nice foundations for hardware cryptographic tokens such as CryptoStick?

Who decides what that is? The Internet is a network of peers, not a network of "real hosts" serving "simply clients". Without honoring that, an ISP isn't really an ISP, is it? It's more of an "Internet client facilitator".

I feel differently. While I am well-versed in computers and know nothing about cars, I feel that my attitude towards cars is different than that of many computer illiterates towards computers. I envy the knowledge of the mechanics. If some mechanic says to me "I can fix your car for $x, but I wanna educate you about the reason your car is in trouble in the first place", I'd be very interested, and not (just) for economic reasons!

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130626/00193023622/suppo... is pretty chilling (but at least it has an entertaining picture) if you haven't seen it.

In my opinion, no, but you do raise a question that legitimately is in the realm of politics: how much free reign should the secret agencies have, and how much security (measured in kilochildren?) should we get in return?

A huge problem with the NSA's activities is that they are, or at least have been, so secret that it is impossible to even discuss in a meaningful way the political question you posed. This should be unacceptable even to those who think catching the 300 terrorists made the surveillance ok.

youtube-dl (http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/) is a nice cross-platform solution. It also works with vimeo and a bunch of other services.

This is wonderful. Thanks for sharing, and thanks to prof. Anderson for taking the stand he took.

A nice exhibition of Mars Direct can be seen in the documentary The Mars Underground [1]. There's also Zubrin's book [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDWvsdEYSqg (I don't know the copyright status of this, but it's been on YouTube for well over a year with many views).

[2] Robert Zubrin. The Case for Mars.

This is the culmination of a very nice subthread. While there is certainly a huge need for a systemic fix, the subthread shows how technology can help us fight the problem on a temporary case-by-case basis. Brilliant!

> A. it is clearly what they want.

We all encounter at times fellow humans who want something that clearly is based on lacking information. Of course we respect such things, but only up to a certain point. We often do try to help people see the bigger picture - sometimes we do say "I hear you say that that is what you want, but have you considered the fact that...".

> B. contact with us is likely to be deadly to them.

This can be remedied with technology. A crude solution would be to land in hazmat suits and have a chat. I don't know how we should deal with the bows and arrows though.

I don't know… suppose some highly advanced aliens with for the most part benign intent found us. Would you really like them to "stay the fuck away"? I, for one, would love for our technology to leapfrog ahead centuries, even though it would completely change our culture.

The disease part can be handled today. We could go visit them in hazmat suits. And I know I'm being really generous when I'm comparing the modern world to benign aliens, but properly managed (as access to the island already appears to be) surely we can approach them in a decent way?

That they violently defend themselves is of course a highly complicating factor.

I guess all I'm saying is that not establishing contact is also a choice that we're making on their behalf. Is deciding that they can't parttake in modern society any more OK than deciding they must? Can we not contact them in a way where they get to choose?

Edit: I certainly agree that we as humans have an absolutely horrible track record on these kinds of things. But it's been a while now, hasn't it? Can't we pull this off by now? These guys are our brothers and sisters - should we at least not have a chat with them to see if they really want to be left the fuck alone, or if they might want to not die whenever they get an infected wound, or half the time they have kids, or whenever they break a leg? Hell, it might well be that some of them want to be left the fuck alone, while some would like to see the world. How come those latter ones have to stay on that island just because we say so?

I've said this before, but I'll do so again: forget about the cars. How long before your friend can type in a person's name and get a similar record of that face's movement based on data the general public continuously records and shares?

I'm sure the authorities' line of defense will go something like "oh but you're not in the database by default!" Then you'll be added as soon as you cross a border, apply for a passport, or get a parking ticket. Time to buy stock of facemask producers...

So you've understood the Finnish national mood - the exact opposite to how you felt after swearing :)

This is great.

Then surely they must logically also assume that when the prime minister's FM radio is tuned between channels he is receiving encrypted transmissions from terrorists. Are they going to xkcd-538 him for the key then?

This stuff is not ok. Not at all.

This is disgusting. White noise is all around us - how is possessing a recording of it in any way a crime?

I'm sorry I sound so naive, but I'm still incredibly flabbergasted by this.

If you hadn't provided a link I would have assumed you were joking. What happens under this law with people who carry USB sticks with truly random noise files on them?

That was a wonderful read. Thank you.

Forget the cars. How long before people accept discounts on Google glass (or similar) in exchange for continuously running face recognition software and streaming the information back to some company providing a similar service where you can look up people instead of cars?

"User #129334, we have detected a person of interest in your field of view. A client would like Enhanced Position Information (TM) on this individual. Nod if you agree to keep him in sight for the next hour and receive a month of free cable!"

For a long time we've enjoyed the goods arising from the fact that technology can rarely be stopped. I have a feeling we'll see some awful things in the coming decade... It unsettles me greatly that I have this newfound fear or technology, but I really do.

Re 4: Only under incredibly optimistic models of the future survival and expansion of our species! The IPv6 address space has about 10^38 addresses. Earth's land surface is about 150*10^18 square meters. So in a future where the planet is so crowded that every person lives on a single square meter and owns 10^6 globally routable gadgets, we'd still need 10^12 Earth sized planets to exhaust IPv6.

(Caveat, I'm back-of-the-enveloping this on my phone about to go to sleep But still!)

> Face recognition, voice recognition, biometrics, kinematics, writing style, and of course metadata will make public an astounding amount of information. A video of a random group of strangers will be trivial to index and identify every individual through the above techniques. A shockingly detailed account of everyone's lives, where they've been, who they've met, what they've purchased, and so on will be determinable using, eventually, relatively little cost in computing power.

Indeed. I can't imagine it will be many years before we see a similar video, except now with a Terminator-style overlay (that the wearer also sees in real time) indicating the name, age, occupation, marital status, etc. of every person. I've never been afraid of technology before, but this really doesn't seem to me like a future society I'd like to live in. "Oh look, that girl over there just got dumped according to Facebook." "Haha, that guy that dresses like a bigshot really flips burger for a living!" "That family over there is from France." ... and so forth.

Others in this thread have said that it's just a gradual line of change from everybody carrying cellphones with cameras and an Internet connection. I sort of disagree. Even after smartphones became ubiquitous, it's not socially acceptable to obviously point it at strangers. Pointing your glasses in their general direction is, though.

I wonder if I'm just going through the same line of thought my parents did when they realized the Internet was here to stay in every part of life.

On the other hand, there's always masks :-)

GHC doesn't use Clang. It has two backends: native and LLVM. AFAIK there is some work going on to combine the latter with emscripten to get JS output, but apparently it doesn't work for the runtime yet.

> This shows crypto is much too hard. You can configure a bunch of things, but half the choices you can make (key length, exponent, etc...) will render your encryption worthless. I shouldn't have to know about the chinese remainder theorem to use crypto properly.

This attitude scares me. Some things really are hard to do. Some things really are hard to understand. Some are even both. Remember what Euclid is supposed to have said to Ptolemy I of Egypt when the king complained that geometry was hard to learn: There is no royal road to mathematics!

There's no shame in not being able to do or understand every difficult thing under the sun, but don't complain that such things "shouldn't be so hard". They often are. I think it's part of what makes life interesting.

> From a while ago: http://i.imgur.com/62WBzVZ.png

Firefox 22 on GNU/Linux looks a lot better, but still not as good as IE: http://imgur.com/GOCmiN9

Good point.

Tell me, what in economics plays the role of identical particles?

Thanks.

I've been meaning to finally get around to doing this myself, so I'll shoot you a question: Do you have a fallback MX? I'm thinking of getting a super-cheap VPS running only Postfix as a mail fallback in case my primary host goes down for an extended period. How is accessing mail on the fallback host (when primary is down) usually handled? An IMAP daemon running there as well? Should the fallback just wait for the main one to come back and then send all the waiting mail there?