> The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ‘90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA.
I find this deeply troubling. So the seeds were provided by the NSA and they said "don't worry, they were generated hashing a trivial sentence. Unfortunately we forgot it now, but trust us, it's just Jerry joking about getting a raise, nothing more..."
I can't believe this didn't undergo further scrutiny earlier, and I can't believe the seeds haven't been chosen in a more sensible way, such as combining random seeds provided by different parties with competing interests, also including hardware RNGs, etc...
Protons are non-perturbative, indeed, but this does not mean that there are no virtual particles exchanged inside a proton. It seems like your comment implies that, sorry if I misunderstood.
On the contrary, this means that there are too many virtual particles (gluons) being exchanged inside a proton, so many that perturbation theory is not applicable.
Nuclear wastes are incredibly small, the whole energy you would need in your life would fill a soda can of wastes, if only nuclear was used.
Geological repositories are an excellent solution. Those place are geologically stable, and can contain thousand of years of wastes. It’s not very expensive to collect wastes there, as well!
Why does every company need to try to take over the world?
They make toy bricks, they actually make the freaking best toy bricks ever… Just stick to that!
I know I might be exceedingly idealistic, and as soon as MBAs and consultants take over a company things need to change, but have strong feelings towards LEGO and I am fine being idealistic here!
The problem is that the alternative is way worse… You have to create some authority that decides what constitutes a nasty opinion and what doesn’t.
And the moral of the history is: in 2020 the COVID lab-leak hypothesis was considered a nasty idea, one that only uneducated, bitter conspiracy theorists could support. People have been banned from the effective monopolists of public discourse over this idea.
Then sometime around 2021 the same idea became acceptable.
Not surprisingly, this change in the public perception of this idea over social media followed the viewpoint of the major political party the owners of social media cheer for.
This is bad, bad, bad for political discourse and rational thinking!!
As far as I am concerned: long love the free market of ideas!
Free speech is a very well defined concept, as done by literally hundreds of political science scholars. The fact that the US Constitution applies it only to the Government does not mean it cannot be discussed in a different context. For instance I would like new regulations to extend free speech outside the scope of the First Amendment. This is an extremely well defined politica stance.
You seem to agree that Twitter is NOT a common carrier, and then it must be treated as an editor. This would imply that they are responsible for the tweet they decide to publish.
These are exactly the far-reaching legal ramifications of free speech (outside Government) that I was mentioning.
Elon’s flight records are public, but the account aggregated them and made them available to the public in a different form.
A better example would be: a Twitter account reports your position when you are in a public space every five minutes, including pictures of you at the bar, jogging, on a date at a restaurant, etc…
All of these are public informations, but the way they are aggregated amounts to stalking in my opinion.
Your are mixing up the first amendment with the broader idea of free speech.
The 1A (roughly speaking) limits the scope of the Government as not too limit free speech.
Twitter, as a private company, is not restricted by the first amendment. However, one can note that Twitter does not allow free speech.
This is quite important from a legal standpoint, because since Twitter practices censorship of ideas they don’t like, they are no longer considered a common carrier.
I find this deeply troubling. So the seeds were provided by the NSA and they said "don't worry, they were generated hashing a trivial sentence. Unfortunately we forgot it now, but trust us, it's just Jerry joking about getting a raise, nothing more..."
I can't believe this didn't undergo further scrutiny earlier, and I can't believe the seeds haven't been chosen in a more sensible way, such as combining random seeds provided by different parties with competing interests, also including hardware RNGs, etc...