The International Olympic Committee says: [ioc]
The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind, in a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.
One of the other great things about the Tao Te Ching is that it’s a deep mine for quotes.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
Memories of the Hofstadters are pretty minimal: we used to walk down the stairs of the apartment building on Claremont Ave – we were on the 11th floor and they were on 9. I remember the hollow echo of the stairwell, and the dizzying height.
There are lots of stories around flat Earth theories – so many that I’ve lost interest in keeping up with all the various debunkings and origin stories. Since Ptolemy was working on longitude and latitude in the 2nd century AD, I’m willing to say our knowledge goes back at least that far and probably much farther.
Warning: Discussion of Butts, particularly squeezing thereof.
I’m going to vent for just a second.