Many great ideas fail at first, and for a long time, because they’re massively ahead of their time. The helicopter, airplane, submarine, gun, and many more are fine examples. The submarine though has literally hundreds (or thousands if you stretch the definition) of years of abject failure before about a hundred years of resounding success.
That’s a long time to be essentially sending people to a watery grave (with a few limited successes) before materials and engineering technology caught up to the vision of submersibles.
I would go and say that for most innovative things, the invention and the implementation are almost always 2 different phases (sometimes years or even decades apart).
Sometimes the technology for implementation is not there and sometimes people have a hard time grasping what they’re looking at, even if an implementation is done.
People seem to easily forget the American government reaction to the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, and so much more. Violence, coercion, intimidation and breaking its own laws without consequence are the American modus operandi. How did fire-hosing, beating, jailing and murdering black people not prove this? How about tear gas and dogs being let loose on protesting students? The conduct of the FBI during the Red Scare? Iran Contra?
How about what Snowden revealed? Torture after 9-11?
A little time passes and people get back to calling anyone who thinks that a militarize police force isn’t a good thing un-American and kooky.
Yes, and it's a little... hypocritical? For a nation that is self-congratulatory to the point of nausea in it's rebellious origins, our institutions will repeatedly overextend themselves to prevent people from effecting positive disruptive change.
I think they wear it to protect their skin from the sun first and foremost, and the choice of fabric is then designed to alllow for good air circulation and evaporation. At least, that’s the point during the day, but it’s worth remembering that it can and does get damned cold at night, and the same garment works well then too. From a purely physical standpoint, If the sweat is evaporating from your skin, it is that action which moves heat, not the length of time the liquid stays on your skin. It’s a matter of the enthalpy of evaporation, so a high rate of evaporation can only be a good thing. A good light fabric to protect you from sunstroke and dust, breathable to allow for (ideally moderate) perspiration to evaporate rather than drench the fabric, and then the whole thing works to keep you warm at night. If you’re constantly on the move, it’s pretty efficient!
To be totally fair, FTL implies time travel, and even sub-light (but hefty fractions of light) lead to staggering time dilation effects. None of this is ever touched in most sci-fi and certainly not Star Trek. Everyone is sipping around at high multiples of lightspeed, yet no one ever remarks that they constantly arrive before they leave. They use impulse drives to go at high fractions of c, yet they never return to an Earth many thousands of years in their subjective future.
It’s a great series, but it’s not hard sci-fi, just a great storytelling mechanic.
True, but no one ever claimed (or should claim) that Star Trek was "hard" sci-fi.
At best, it sometimes tried, depending on the writer, to make nods to actual science. The original series seemed to have input from actual engineers and scientists, which is why you have the nacelles separated (to protect from radiation) and Bussard collectors, but then as time went on, it sort of became magic particles and subspace and not even bothering with the pretense.
Instead of trusting a third party to protect your credentials, you're trusting an auditable, open source platform. I cant see myself using it for anything important, but I understand the draw.
Any password manager that does the encryption stuff in offline, open-source software and puts it on any untrusted storage provides that, with the difference that it does not require making your encrypted copy public for all eternity, exposing it to unnecessary risk of compromise down the road.
There are risks either way. There have been plenty of vulnerabilities in popular password managers (some that also apply to this blockchain model). But I think your AES encrypted password being publically visible is a pretty low risk, compared to a PW manager being breached, having a flaw in the client, their being coerced by government, etc
How is this project any less at risk for those client-side implementation risks you mention? Basically, why should this nascent project be trusted over, say, KeePass?
On reflection, this is probably not as stupid as it sounds.
The point is using blockchain to store your (encrypted) data. It's not feasible to backup everything this way, but a list of passwords is short enough.
If all you do is open source and the only things you need to back up privately are passwords, this way you can avoid having your own backups at all.
But why would a blockchain be any better than a peer-to-peer filesystem, for example?
Also, it seems like a really bad idea to have your encrypted passwords open for anyone to have a crack at - any flaws in the b.lock encryption protocol or implementation could have disastrous consequences. Unfortunately I wasted some minutes of my life looking into their encryption, and it's bad (not using authenticated encryption, using a malleable encryption mode (CTR), directly encrypting secrets with your wallet private key...)
Americans really do think they own not only the world, but the language too, don’t they? I’m not arguing for the wisdom of insulting people, it’s just that it’s so arrogant to assume that one group in one country can declare a word belongs to them. A word that same group has spread as a part of popular culture through tv, music and so on through the rest of the world.
Just amazing. And this from a country full of people who can’t even pick out most other countries on a map, even the ones they’ve bombed. A country that apparently thinks some Palestinian, East Indian, Russian, Japanese, etc kid rapping along to a popular song is using “forbidden” words. I think Americans should worry less about their empty words, and more about their actions which the rest of the world judges them by.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think a lot of Americans are racist or not because of some words. I do think it’s a racist country because of their prison system, shooting and strangling unarmed black men, the systemic racial poverty, the Birther conspiracy, and who they go to war for and against. No amount of careful wording will change that.
Do you see a lot of Americans complaining about the use of the N-word on the opposite side of the world? I don't think I have ever witnessed that subject come up.
Why would you presume that an American author talking to an audience in America is discussing worldwide social norms rather than American ones?
And I can assure you Ta-Nehisi Coates has spent plenty of time discussing most, if not all, of the alternate subjects you suggested. I'm sure it would dwarf the amount of time he has spent discussing the N-word by a huge margin.
Were having this discussion on an international forum, online. People are making blanket statements about language without a scrap of distinction as to background or locale, just “white” and “black” and little else. Further back in this thread appears the phrase, Thanks for your assumption that I am an American, I am not.
So yes, the context I’m examining was very much on the table.
We are discussing an event that happened in the US. Social norms in other countries are not pertinent to the discussion. Do you think every single statement needs an explicit geographical qualifier regardless of context?
The problem is that like “Black people” the phrase “White people” is meaningless. Plenty of people who Americans would lump together as “blacks” were never enslaved ( or had ancestors enslaved). Plenty of people Americans would lump together has “whites” had nothing to do with the slave trade. I’m of Russian descent for example, and no one in my admittedly very white family tree enslaved anyone of African descent.
The whole world doesn’t have to answer to the crimes of Americans, Western Europe, and West Africa. That’s (presumably) your baggage, not mine. By contrast my ancestors have a lot to answer for where Tatars are concerned, and yet you fellow “white” person, had nothing to do with it.
I agree with you, and this is the whole issue with identity politics. It is all about categorizing people and assuming everything about them based on their groups.
We should look at the individuals.
Fyi, two years ago I asked 'rayiner (who is active on this thread, and also in the top 10 of all time on this site) whether I should feel guilty about slavery given that I am from a similar situation as yours.
This may come as a shock, but neither group is really cohesive and homogenous, and therefore each present a multitude of opinions on the topic ranging from permissive to prohibitive.
To be fair, Snow Crash has megacorps, oligarchs like L. Bob Rife and David, racism galore (New South Africa franchlettes anyone?) and the plot is literally all about using tech to seize power and splinter opposition. The whole system of FOQNE’s seems massively geared to cater to populist impulses, with the exception of Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong. It also neatly foresaw the role of self-sustaining media frenzy, increasingly stagnant economic prospects for most, and the resulting insularity and small-mindedness of much of society.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_submarines
That’s a long time to be essentially sending people to a watery grave (with a few limited successes) before materials and engineering technology caught up to the vision of submersibles.