Posts by Moz
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Bart Janssen,
That I think that will be the conclusion that history make of this as well
... a senseless act precipitated ...I suppose I'm cynical enough to look at who has nothing to lose as well as people who have something to win. And there seem to be a few factions in that position.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Alex Coleman,
Bart:
I did just say that
(for some reason that's coming up as Alex)
Yes, but you proceeded to write it off as so obviously preposterous that it wasn't worth discussing. I don't agree. Hezbollah vs Fatah in Palestine, for example, has led to a great number of fatalities. The suggest that just over the border in Syria those two factions are happy comrades in arms seems odd. Add in the other factions and the idea that they are all focussed on evicting Assad and are waiting until after that to begin the war of succession just seems unlikely.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Bart Janssen,
makes equally little sense for the rebels to use chemical weapons on their own people.
Why do people keep talking about "the" rebels, when there are multiple factions of rebels. There are enough competing factions, plus enough long-standing feuds within Syria, for one faction to decide that gassing their enemies-who-are-also-rebels is well worth the effort.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Andrew C,
<q>TrueCrypt how much random seed is enough?
It doesn’t take much initial randomness to escalate into massive entropy after they start cycling the hashes.</q>
Thanks. That's handy because I fairly regularly find myself regenerating keys for TB+ drives, and aside from going "gosh, that's a lot of bits", I've never really had a feel for just how much random input is required.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Stephen R,
At least a couple of people have gone to gaol over that clause.
I half expect to go the same way. Not because I'm unusually prone to breaking the law, or doing anything particularly dodgy (I ride a push bike, so I'm not exactly mainstream), but because I have no intention of decrypting anything outside a public courtroom. Hopefully I'll have the guts to stick with that if shit happens.
One problem is that I share a computer with my partner, who necessarily has the boot passwords which also mount the shared/common disk space.
Also, I wish TrueCrypt gave some indication of how much random seed is enough... if I watch a half hour TV episode while jiggling the mouse is that much better than a 30 second scribble? How much? Does it matter? Who knows?
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
it should be possible to build an infrastructure that’s strong enough and tamper-evident enough to make systematic monitoring very difficult.
The standard way is to use an outside channel. The simple(ish) way is just to put the hash of your public key in visible places - an image on your website for example. That's hard to mechanically detect and change, but easy to verify.
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Up Front: The Missing Stair and the…, in reply to Hebe,
One ... person... I know actually said to me, while laughing, that he was trying to wind me up and wasn't it good that it was working because he liked to get under people's skin.
One of my old friends has a one-hour rule for his wife's rellies: he goes to everything then leaves after an hour, no exceptions.
This is something I try to do, and it works quite well most of the time. Partly I do it by starting work early, which means I just say "sorry, I have to leave by 8pm because I start work at 7am tomorrow" and most people go "ok, thanks for saying" and move on. Unfortunately some people are experts at "but soon we're going to {something special}" and string that out for hours. Which leaves the missing stair far too much time to fill with amusing wind-up games.
Hebe, the "look for humanity/weakness" thing resonates with my. Fortunately I've managed to cut those people out of my lives. And I'm sorry for turning a couple of people like that who aimed at others into jokes. At the time it seemed that shunning them would make me the only one who hadn't forgiven.
I keep reading this discussion and thinking of a: serial abusers in various communities; and b: microaggressions. The abuser problem is similar, and abusers are by definition missing stairs, but a lot of the same problems arise - people like that are often good at digging into communities and making themselves difficult to remove. In activist circles, often by getting related jobs so the activists have to deal with them, but in BDSM, for example, they're often a source of new members because they're always hunting for interested people who don't know about them. Microagressions is a handy term for describing the other end of the spectrum - the stream of little niggly things that just make people unpleasant to be around.
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Up Front: The Missing Stair and the…, in reply to Marcus Turner,
It's hard to say, from your description, exactly where the "Missing Stair" was.
I wasn't trying to create a situation where the fine details of my family are published so you get to pick over everything that's happened and decide how you want to judge me. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
My point was that a short lunch with a missing stair was enough to transform my girlfriends attitude. Even through a solid layer of politeness and obligation towards family. I was agreeing with Emma that the missing stair is usually obvious.
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I sympathise on the mysteriously missing family members front. I have one relative who... ew. I had this nice girlfriend who was very "must be nice" to everyone, but one lunch with relative x and she said "I would prefer not to see him again". Missing stair or missing staircase, you decide.
I suspect I am a missing stair to many people, because I struggle with the whole "be nice to rude people" thing. I'll either argue or more often, just leave. I can make fairly cutting remarks if pushed. Experience has shown that I'm not the person to persuade (eg) a smoker that their behaviour is profoundly antisocial, let alone someone who's over-entitled. I'm pretty introverted the idea of leaving a social situation and getting some recovery time is usually inviting. It's a win-win :)
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to B Jones,
Sticking timid kids into environments that freak them out can show them their inner strength, or it can scar them for life.
That's not limited to timid kids. Every kid will have things that freak them out, and it's foolish to blind yourself to the difference between thrilled and terrified. Not much fun for the kid involved, either.
I suspect I'm not unusual in managing to damage myself on a fair number of "safe" items of play equipment. I got stitches on my forehead from running head first into a safety barrier (I kid you not), and on the back of my head from sliding down a pole that had a nice rubber mat at the bottom. I don't actually know how I hit the back of my head on that, but it did involve jumping at the pole while running. Mind you, before I was 18 months old I had broken a bone in my foot by stepping boldly off the top of some playground structure and landing in "sqidgy mud" (my mother's term). Newton watched an apple, I stepped boldly into thin air than plummeted to the ground. Both of us discovered gravity :)