So as I understand, you do agree that moxie's mock protocol ( http://thoughtcrime.org/blog/telegram-crypto-challenge/ ), which he designed to be as awful as possible, is as secure as Telegram's mtproto? There's no exact way to break it either, it's just as new, it doesn't use 'limited set of tools' too, both don't have any mathematical proofs. By your logic, I can't see how is it different to mtproto then? How do we know you don't have a protocol just like his?
You can drop the first two. And the third can have different motivations: I think here we just have a mathematician with sufficient time on their hands who enjoyed coming up with this. I think the primary valid complaint is: overly complex for its task.
it's not just overly complex, the use of 'dependent types' for this indicates that the author doesn't understand how they are really useful. neither he seems to know what serialization is, he apparently wants to serialize linked lists.
KGB is much better than NSA: they simply don't have money for data processing on that scale.
Yandex Mail is a great competitor to gmail, some things even work better -- you've got a separate list of thread's attachments, ability to unsubscribe from whole spam categories in one click, SMS (maybe only in russia) and so on
That's a dangerous assumption to make, many world governments may have purchased intelligence from the NSA and now they'll have to re-allocate funds for locally-sourced intelligence.
FSB does not need the money for it, but they already spy on everyone for 15 years. In Putin's Russia, the ISPs purchase the necessary equipment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM
and you both are saying that from experience? You know the elites, and the poor, more than what we have seen through the media?
No, unless you are North Korean citizens for years, it is hard to grasp the truth.
Of course, we all made this judgement, by comparing our life, and putting ourself in what NK's seem like living in right now, and adjudged that we would hate such a life, so the actual North Koreans must be hating their life as well.
But truth be told, Many of the people there haven't even seen foreigners in their whole life, they are like a modern tribe, living in seclusion, we have to let their curiosity take its course, instead of pointing fingers at them saying, "look how boring is there football" "look at that, they don't have any fast food chains " etc etc.
Your first comment wasn't so good. But here you pose a great thought experiment.
To run with your point for a moment - it is possible to consider the idea of a caste system. Most hacker news readers would be disgusted at it, but you could imagine it being run humanely, and the people there would be content to live as they are.
Here's my rule zero of political freedom: do you live in fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night?
So long as someone lives-and-lets-live, they should never need to live in fear of an authority with a power to arbitrarily do nasty things to them.
To me - that's valid for North Korea, The Lives of Others, middle eastern dictatorships, black helicopters, people who live in gangland Baltimore, domestic violence, children, pets, farm animals and the cold war.
People fear knocks in the night in the USA, Canada, even Sweeden now adays. If you're damn fool enough to run afoul of copyright laws. In fact I would say it's a distopia, if all I did was focus on every incident of homes getting bashed in and governments misstepping. It's easy to fall into a focus illusion, and whenever mainstream media gets involved, there's going to be a focus illusion.
Yes. I made this point several times in drafts of the comment you replied to. But kept removing it because it didn't help me make the point and would have triggered offence in some people who'd otherwise get the point. (I was pushing my luck by mentioning farm animals already)
A British citizen was extradited to the US to be jailed for a crime that did not violate the principle of live and let live. That's an evil that's got long arms.
I guess I can see it as a limited dystopia - one of the worlds that Heinlein puts Job through. But I'd avoid using a word like that for this, for risk of overuse.
Yes, you have a very good point regarding caste system. About first post being, not that good, well I got that feeling (haha) No shit!
well, there is a need for scrutiny, as to why there haven't been a popular revolt, against the government, if people are that oppressed, as we are being lead to believe.
Erm.. propaganda is a very powerful tool, when combined with extreme violence it is easy to oppresse a great number of people.
Your argument that "Given north koreans haven't revolted, might mean they don't mind", would be similar to saying "Maybe the jews didn't mind the holocaust, else why didn't they just overrun the prison camps"
You seem to just be trolling this whole article. There are number of accounts of how bad NK is from people who have escaped the country. There are a number of independent media groups who have made very compelling unbiased reports of what is happening in NK. There are a number of journalists who have been imprisoned while reporting in and around NK.
That coupled with the very public (false) propaganda that is produced by NK itself. Paints a very compelling case that NK is ruled by a single family that is controlling the entire population through miseducation (propaganda) and violence.
Could you show some evidence that suggests it is just media hype?
Regarding the caste thing, had some more thoughts. Django Unchained plays with this. At first, you don't know where Stephen fits in. Is he a slave who "knows his place"? But he's so disrespectful! Gradually you learn that he has carved out a special role for himself at the expense of others.
There's lots of room for talking about knocks on the door, and who fears who in Pulp Fiction too.
Thinking about North Korea is interesting because the media coverage is so slim. What can I trust? Maybe I'm just living in a personalised version of the Truman Show. But the closest we have to a knock on the door is fear of economic strife, and very rare but overhyped incidents of domestic terrorism.
> why there haven't been a popular revolt, against
> the government, if people are that oppressed
Revolution is a rare thing.
I assume North Koreans have to deal with twisted language as well, and they're not allowed to talk to one another to work out their ideas. Marxism is filled with weasel words like "permanent revolution".
Imagine how your brain would work if you had been born and bred on a diet of astrology, and taught that even discussing interpretations of what the people with guns say will have immediate, dire consequences.
Most of history is dictatorship and compliance. What we have at the moment feels normal because it's what we know. But really it's a special exception to everything that has come before, and the reality for most of the people who are alive even today.
I'm glad you challenged the post, I didn't have a bunch of these ideas an hour ago.
It depends, whether this is the case with NK as well. As it is, they are indeed subject to a fair amount of our interference, Ideas, or whatever you call it.
But the fundamental issues of a country are poverty, education, shelter, etc. Why?
Well, if you are hungry, a lifetime of servitude to psychological brainwash, would not turn the millions of years of instinct. If that situation worsens, people across North Korea would have been angry, even if they don't express it immediately.
This anger, increases overtime based on atrocities caused by the government.
But imagine, America coming in to NK, in the name of liberalizing the people, and causing more death, famine, and stuff in the process, which is not avoidable.
It would be too easy for the great leader to propagate, and even easier for the people to accept, that all fault lies with America and its allies, thus causing a failure of attainment of objective, i.e to provide people a way to better life.
The war against NK, if it exist, is at the base level. Organizations like RedCross, UNESCO, and others have to be pressed upon.
Not more economic sanctions, and threats to a society, that understands very little about your intention.
> But imagine, America coming in to NK, in the name of liberalizing the people, and causing more death, famine, and stuff in the process, which is not avoidable.
Ugh, this dichotomy of America as world police vs. cultures it doesn't really understand is juvenile at best.
The US drone strikes on Pakistani civillians are horrible, but if you want a lesson in brutality towards non-combatants, look no further than Pakistan during partition or the Bangladeshi independence war. The U.S. dropped nukes on Japan, but the atrocities carried out by the Japanese military at Nanking and Unit 731 are about the most terrible you'll read about outside of the Third Reich.
Morality, especially in terms of the actions of nations over time is complex and nuanced. Pointing out that the North Korean regime is fucking insane does not imply that you think the U.S. should roll in guns blazing.
> Organizations like RedCross, UNESCO, and others have to be pressed
upon.
Pressed upon to do what exactly? Provide even more aid to the North Korean regime who will distribute it to citizens it deems fit to eat?
I applaud the sentiment here, but this belies either naivete about the complexities and long-term effects of supplying aid to developing countries (especially dictatorships) or a complete lack of knowledge about the North Korean track record.
The grim western consensus on the North Korean problem has always been to sit-tight and let the country implode and hopefully unify with the South, though whether this is likely to happen soon is anyones guess.
Why are all the downvotes here? rikacomet isn't obnoxious, just making a point that you're uncomfortable with. Or maybe you can see flaws - if so then respond. If you can't explain why you disagree, maybe that's something you need to work on more constructively then silently downvoting something just because you disagree with it.
Maybe the propagandaid has seeped too far in the (un)conscious minds of people to the extent that they cannot/do not question their own reality (maybe to the same extent that NK's?) and feel the need to fight/put down all existential threats to such.
Then again, nothing more depleted uranium rounds can't fix because terrorism.
And how would we know about that popular revolt? I know you're busy answering everybody's replies... but I'd like to add, stating the obvious, that I strongly doubt there's any society with millions+ people where "they live as they want", with "they" = "they all". It just so happens that I can if I so desire read the American Chomskies but not his North Korean counterparts, who, I feel (without proof), must exist.
please read about Soviet Union. on elites, i recommend you "Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class" by Michael Voslenski. the soviet elites were screaming happy when borders were finally opened. and it's not like NK's lower classes have absolutely no idea what the outside world is like. it is well-known that many have access to SK TV shows and so on. speaking of the poorest, i don't think that you can get used to or love starvation.
> But by no means is our solar system special in any light: it's only special in that its particular conditions produced lifeforms able to observe it.
sorry, but i don't understand what's the logic here? it's not special, but it's only very special in sustaining/producing life? isn't that more than enough to call it special? :-)
Not in the requisite sense. Suppose that our existence depended on a purely random roll of a six-sided die coming up as 1. If the roll had come up anything else, we would not be here to reflect on it. But if it did come up as 1, that does not mean a mystical force guaranteed that it came up as 1.
Our existence (whether likely or not) does not constitute evidence that our existence was guaranteed or predetermined. Low-probability events happen sometimes, their actually having happened once does not make them high-probability.
it seems like you, and the top comment are interpreting this news story as some attack on atheism? i don't see how that's even related. is that your preemptive strike against non-atheistic interpretation?
Absolutely not. My intention was to broaden the point by introducing the mind-blowing anthropic principle and a new perspective on the conditions leading to life, nothing more.
It's special from our perspective, certainly. It's just not special in a cosmic sense: it just happened, and the universe produced something that could observe it. It could have happened anywhere, but it happened to happen on Earth. To me, that's the special part, and I find it fascinating and mind-blowing to think about.
i don't think that so-called 'Disruptor' is something more than a trivial implementation of 'pipeline parallelism'. i'm sure this keyword typed in google scholar would lead you to far more interesting things in real computer science
> agriculture as we know it (the plants we're used to eating in bulk) are no longer feasible in the quantity or quality we expect.
of course everyone will have to move, but isn't there a huge amount of land that will become good for agriculture, e.g. siberia, northern america, maybe even some of antarctica?
No, those regions will not become good for agriculture just by being heated. There is no soil there.
In places where the ground is frozen permanently (permafrost), i.e. most places above the Arctic Circle, there is essentially no decomposition, and hence no soil production. You can often estimate the soil depth by looking at the tree height; the tundra supports no trees, and most of the rest of Alaska has pine and spruce that grow to maybe 5 meters.
The other thing to consider is the effect of heating permafrost, which is well-known. Well. To Alaskans anyway. Houses in permafrost zones are built on stilts, because anything that generates heat will turn the ground beneath it into a bog. If you heat Alaska and Siberia, they will turn into an unimaginable morass (and remain so for the indefinite future) and release gigatonnes of CO2 and CH4. That will wipe out any existing human habitation as well.
In short, I cannot imagine the confusion of ideas that would lead you to suggest such a thing.
most of the siberia is below arctic circle. where i'm from we've got a lot of soil, but not enough heat to have good agriculture.
what kind of the confusion would lead you to suggesting permafrost occupies most of the siberia and north america? however, your point is correct for antarctica i suppose.
Here's the crux of the argument - all the resources (time, money, energy, social costs, possible wars etc) that would be spent adjusting to climate change could instead be spent on productive uses.
The costs of being energy efficient today outweight the possible risks from having to pay for the consequences.
well, i guess we'll have to move, be it sooner or later. a lot of migrations have happened in the last 500 years. why insist on status quo for 200-400 more years?
> The costs of being energy efficient today outweight the possible risks from having to pay for the consequences.
i'm curious, is there any research to back up these claims?
Because just about every habitable location on the planet is already claimed by some group. People do not just up and move en mass without huge social and political implications. Wars would be inevitable in this supposed future.
Also: those that have the resources to adjust to climate change ARE NOT the same as those who feel the heaviest weight of the stresses of drought, violent storms, water access, etc. Those with the most resources are also the least likely to be politically instabilized by the effects of climate change.
So you have a mismatch of effort: those who can don't have an incentive to fix the problem for those who can't.
(Or have a counter-incentive: I'm reminded of the anti-monsanto anti-gmo fad in the USA -- despite the fact that GMO foods are our best weapon in producing drought resistant crops for regions most heavily affected by those problems!)
The only transgenes in use for plant crops are for pest resistance. I don't know if they have anything for growth habits or metabolic engineering. All of that is done with classical breeding, and I might add that recently breeders have been breeding towards less resistance to drought; high response to irrigation and fertilizer means less energy "wasted" as roots leaving more for seeds.
They have transgene drought resistant crops that basically are no better than non-transgene versions.
However, if we stop the research now (by attacking the researchers through monsanto or by passing oppressive gmo regulation that forces them out of the industry), we will never develop superior drought resistant crops.
I believe that the precise modification of crops will be critical to responding to the stresses of climate. Classical breeding can only help us so much and the true impact of climate stress is still in the future.
kdb+ is available for raspberry pi, is that cross platform enough?
https://kx.com/2016/06/08/kx-releases-raspberry-pi-build-wit...