Viewing profile — wafflebear

Hitchens called himself an "antitheist" and certainly expressed that sentiment freely, I don't see why someone shouldn't express anti- atheism freely. Violence is obviously already…

Really? Name one NSA cipher that is better than an equivalent academic-designed cipher? DES? SHA2?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

In other words, the best system of government is a sham democracy where the public are mollified by frequent elections, but prevented from changing the status quo.

OK but then we're not talking about the real world where teenagers are able to access anything on the internet (regardless of filtering), but a hypothetical world where adults have…

Teenagers can get jobs and buy their own devices. Any age restriction past 13 or so is kind of pointless in the 21st century.

Not applicable to Telegram, but if the app is open source and you have a Mac (!) you can install it using Xcode. Since Signal is actually open source, you can install it even if Ap…

The users of Coq and Isabelle are generally people with mathematics degrees who check their work . Not your average programmer.

Only criminal laws are prohibited from being retroactive, because the Supreme Court works in mysterious ways.

How about adding the number of days in the current month?

It seems very implausible. Anyone with that level of sophistication may as well look for exploits in bitcoin exchanges and steal the bitcoins directly.

I believe "persons" is similar to "people" but differs in register. For example, there is a UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities . Obviously, native speakers wo…

You must live in a very safe country if you think it's reasonable to post your home address on the internet for all to see.

The problem is that there is essentially no limit to how detailed a map can be. As long as Google continues to add detail to their maps as fast as Apple does, Apple will not be abl…

It's completely absurd. If it transpired that China had been attacking the foreign missions it was hosting, it would instantly go from superpower to pariah state. Countries would p…

Do you dispute that Russia poisoned Litvinenko as well? Enemies of the Russian state just seem to be poisoned by incredibly rare substances every now and again.

That's just it, doing something unbelievably stupid for marginal gain is the Russian M.O. right now. There are still people in hazmat suits cleaning up leftover nerve agent in Sali…

An attack on diplomatic missions in China is an attack on China too.

If it is an attack rather than an accident, then after the Skripal poisoning, Russia should be the #1 suspect. There is only one country in the world that is brazen enough to attac…

You are thinking of ADSL, which is limited to 24mpbs. BT does sell VDSL as fibre, but usually the distance of copper connection is only out to the street.

Climate modelling on Earth generally refers to the scale of tens or hundreds of years, not to billions of years. Our climate model for the next few billion years is essentially "Ev…

The Guardian has always been a newspaper with politics most closely aligned with the Lib Dems. In the past, this meant that they were left of Labour. Labour has shifted waaay to th…

Should we install security cameras in public toilets? It would certainly reduce crimes such as assaults that occur in public toilets. There would be very little impact on our perso…

Only if you consider privacy as a means to an end rather than a goal by itself. Facial recognition has a negative effect on literally everyone's privacy.