22july2013

I once wrote a letter to Asimov and I got a typewritten and signed postcard back from him. I asked him why he wrote science fiction if, as he wrote in one of his science books, "I live to learn." He answered me, in short, by saying that "you can learn from anything and everything."

Encryption by itself solves nothing. If it did, everything on the Internet would be secure because every character on the Internet is encoded in ASCII, which is a code with a key. What matters is the algorithm, key production, and key management. A VPN may use a good algorithm, but the session keys are held by the VPN provider, in addition to yourself, which could completely negate the security of both the algorithm and the key.

entropys said:

Xed said:

Japhey said:

Finally. Foundation is the show I’ve most looked forward to. Now I only have 3 months left to reread the novels. 

I doubt Apple is throwing as much money into it as Amazon is into LOTR which has a reported price tag of $1 billion so far (which a quarter of that going to Tolkien rights), but I expect it will be done well based without skimpy based on what I've seen from their other shows. I think this is the first series from them with a long and popular history where they can establish a world that can evolve for many seasons to come and offer countless spinoffs.

The only connection with the books will be the character names.

“The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” novel and film trilogy are set thousands of years after the Second Age, toward the end of the Third Age. The Second Age, on the other hand, in which the Amazon series is set, is most notable for being the time period when Sauron (the titular lord of the rings and very integral to the Second Age) created the One Ring to rule all the other Rings of Power. By the time Smeagol had come across the Ring, it had been lost for over 2,000 years.

https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/amazons-lord-of-the-rings-explained-plot-cast/d1d5xluv4aapw9a/ <--

minus31 said:

"If the Canadian Senate kills the bill" - that's laughable - I don't think that's ever happened. They just rubber stamp everything.

"From 2000 to 2013, the Senate rejected 75 bills in total." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_of_Canada ;

Y'all wouldn't believe how many people have defective IDs. I spent 15 years validating people's IDs before I, or people who worked for/with me, granted them access to certain things - things which must remain nameless, or I'll have to... you know. They had to show two valid IDs with full names and the exact names on both IDs had to match - letter for letter. If they were as much as one letter off, or if a middle name was missing, access was denied. There are so many things that can go wrong with IDs. For example, people may get their name changed (eg, marriage, divorce) and not update all their IDs. Sometimes their IDs don't match because their names were spelled wrongly from the very beginning and they didn't bother to get it changed. Some ID issuers make it difficult to get their name changed, which is why people sometimes don't try very hard to update their IDs. Some people's names have odd characters like apostrophes and dashes, and they don't always match across different IDs (because some issuers don't use apostrophes or dashes) which results in mismatches when computer programs are searching for names.

Based on my experiences, I would estimate that 5% of all people have at least one ID with a wrong name issued. And people never think of that as a positive thing, but it is if you want the government to be confused about your identity. Some people would love to have no IDs at all from any level of government. A conflicting ID might get you out of a speeding ticket, because the name on the ticket might not be an exact match with one of your other IDs. But I'm not a lawyer.

People think that the government is one monolithic entity with a single database containing people's data, including their names. In fact it's a complex assembly of databases each one of which may contain an error for any specific person. These different departments, especially between federal and state governments, don't share data readily, and certainly don't validate and correct each others' data. I believe there are some laws which require separate databases for different departments. RealID is another potential mismatch. Everyone who hates being tracked by their government should be eager to try to get one of their "wrong names" onto their RealID. And then you can show your misspelled ID to all your close friends for a great laugh. I once met someone who had three digits in one of his names, on an unimportant ID, and he sent an email to request a correction, and I tried to stop him, "Don't do that! You're the only person in the world with a digit in your name!" He tried to cancel the request, but it was too late; it got fixed.