WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

RamiK's comments

RamiK | 12 years ago | on: We need new countries !

Not really. You had to have been of the wealthy third estate (free gentry or an ex-service man).

Even an established guild member - above a journeyman and by consequence a free-citizen with voting and mobility rights - would have been disqualified since leaving the city for new residents would have meant leaving the guild and losing the (limited) freedom of mobility they need to board a ship. So they had to leave on good legal terms, still owning some land, which meant a large surplus of money.

Now, can you think of a reason beyond religious persecution for someone of such a privileged class and circumstances to just decide to risk sea-travel for himself and his entire family and just pack up and leave?

RamiK | 12 years ago | on: IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments

For this discussion's sake, there are two forms of communication: (1) The public forum you can meet up with new people and talk. (2) And the direct message sending kind like phones and emails. Though the NSA is actively monitoring both, here we're discussing the latter.

With that out of the way, they're targeting the former in-order to make it impossible for people to come together and organise privately and anonymously around subversive ideas.

The specifics of targeting IRC are probably tied to the efficiency of the protocol which allows very cheap hardware and minimal bandwidth to the extent that non-complying private foreigners may provide a free forum the government can't control.

RamiK | 12 years ago | on: IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments

Try to remember the NSA is an intelligence agency, not a law enforcement agency. They're not interested in producing evidence and bringing anything to trial.* Rather, they're targeting anonymity and privacy in all forms since these oppose their core mission (Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Information Assurance (IA)... http://www.nsa.gov/about/mission/index.shtml).

* Though through inter-agency collaboration, they tip off other agencies when they have something...

RamiK | 12 years ago | on: Five Paragraph Essays

Agreed.

Even more so, essays, like the serial novels, are antiquated formats from the time of letter-writing and paper publishing.

At least the Victorian novels gave way to their readership's desires and moved to a more concise format. The essays, annoyingly, remain overly wordy as the academic standards retain their obsoleteness in demanding a set word counts.

Already, the short novels are becoming dominant in the on-line publishing sites. With any lack, the current tide against the printed humanist\scientific publishing houses will bare fruit soon and in a decade or two we will be reading the thesis, facts and analysis rather then the dribble we've become accustomed to.

Present me your thesis in a sentence and a few bullet points: List the facts; Lay the arguments; Tie it all up in a paragraph. I don't want long prosaic discussions or fine poetics.

RamiK | 12 years ago | on: About Python 3

Fix the GIL.

Python 3 isn't getting used because it breaks backwards compatibility without offering many meaningful benefits. Sure, the syntax clean ups and the new sugar are nice and all. But you don't rewrite a working code base because of "nice".

So, fix the GIL; Replace the spaces indentations with tabs; Take out the stupid 79 line limit off PEP8; Even clean up the standard library... After all, if you don't need to worry about backwards compatibility, then you might as well re-do it all properly.

RamiK | 12 years ago | on: GnuPG - 16 Years of protecting privacy

Client side encryption\decryption(can be done in javascript) with Gmail storing and passing nothing but encrypted data they themselves have no means of reading.

Of course, that would mean Google has no means of directing ads based on content so they would have no incentive to run Gmail in the first place...

RamiK | 12 years ago | on: Letter From A Psychopath

Shame might be too hard, but I agree with OP. It's a general human interest piece that has little place in a dedicated technical news forum.

Mind you, I feel similarly about most NSA submissions and while I would very much like to have a dedicated mews aggregator \ Groklaw'esque blog-forum dedicated to the NSA\Snowden revelations, I don't try making HN into one.

RamiK | 12 years ago | on: Clearer Conditionals using De Morgan's Laws

No need for a full blown electronics class. This subject falls under Switching Theory and can be covered thoroughly in the first (and often a single) semester. Starting with elementary set theory and boolean algebra, you go into the combinatorial logic (that covers De Morgan and Karnaugh), and finish with finite state machines (automata).

There are very few requisites too. Some high schools and trade schools teach the material to 16-18 year-olds in a year or two. I suspect this is partially why it's so often omitted in CS curriculum. It's too easy.

RamiK | 12 years ago | on: Go 1.3+ Compiler Overhaul

There's nothing magical about a compiler. If the Go team decides to build a C compiler using Go that targets Go instead of machine code, they will.

Worse case scenario the resulting code will be a GOTO littered state-machine with 'import "unsafe"' on every source file.

Though I like to think the Go team would fare better then that.

RamiK | 12 years ago | on: First, Let's Fire All The Managers

Parkinson's law and Peter's Principle apply to privately held corporate structures as well. There's whole mountains of busywork and paperwork related to hierarchical structures that give the impression of "work" to both outsiders and insiders where it's really just non-productive paper shovelling.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Mind you, I'm not sure getting rid of the managerial staff is enough to address these problems fully.

page 2
newer more