Epicurus apparently suffered from kidney stones and eventually he died of one at age 78. The account I recall is that he got in a hot bath to reduce the pain and drank wine and drank wine until finally he passed out and slid under the water and that was the end of him.
Elsewhere I have implied that the US, UK, Russia, and China are (to some degree or another) oligarchies masquerading as democracies. They probably could be ordered on a scale from greater to lesser – but that’s a debate for another day. Today, we’re going to consider some of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus as reported by Will Durant in Story of Philosophy. [amazon]
I just stumbled across this one; perhaps it’s what was going on with my browser the other day. I’ve been thinking about how to enumerate all the stuff that’s going on in a system – building a “petri dish” surrounded with sniffers, then watching and memory-scraping my browser to see what it was doing. It sounds like the answer would be “too much.”
Another of my dad’s friends and colleagues was one Peter Gay, who was an immigrant whose family fled to the US during WWII, carrying all their wealth in the form of rare postage stamps, pasted to a postcard collection that Peter carried. They boarded the ill-fated St. Louis, a refugee-ship that cruised up and down the US East Coast being denied landing rights because the US didn’t want any jewish refugees.[wik] The family managed to sneak off the boat in Cuba and later got a ride to the US. He was a stamp collector until his death in 2015. He was a great expert on Voltaire, and wrote a seminal text Voltaire’s Politics, the Poet as Realist [amzn].
But first: Are you experienced?
The currency of computer security is Trust – the degree to which you can believe that your system is doing what you expect it to. There are a lot of properties that comprise trust, including integrity, reliability, etc., each of which is made up of smaller properties like non-repudiation, auditability, resistance to replay attacks, ad infinitum. We talk about trust loosely; it’s like Liberty or Good Cinematography – it’s a useful concept for describing the relationship between ourselves and the systems we use – whether they work right for any given notion of “right.”
Russian cosmonaut says that swabs of the outside of the ISS contain “deep space bacteria.”
I have a weird visual memory. I have been watching House of Cards lately, (just in time for Kevin Spacey to ruin it) and one scene meshed weirdly with something I saw on the news yesterday.
In a previous thread, chigau suggested that some drone footage of deer might be interesting.
Net Neutrality is a great big buzz-item right now, but I hate to tell you that battle has already been lost. It was lost in the late 90s, when marketing firms took over. All that the current controversy is arguing about is how much worse things are going to get.