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文言 wenyan-lang by Ling Dong uses classical Chinese as a syntax. It is Turing complete.

Breaking news:
https://twitter.com/golan/status/1206959246988005379

Source code:
https://github.com/LingDong-/wenyan-lang

Web page:
http://wenyan-lang.lingdong.works/

That said, it's also clearly not just her, or even primarily her. It's her parents, who are professional propagandists, and a whole team of paid professionals all around her who are clearly running the show. She's effectively a child actress, and that often turns out to be a very difficult thing. I hope her parents are more concerned with her welfare than they appear to be.

That comment brings up the question of why is it working? She's got a great act, even if a fair number of people find it obnoxious. And it's allowed her to go to fancy meetings, meet heads of state, and get anointed by the media (Time Person of the Year and Nature's Most Influential Person in Science for 2019 as a "climate catalyst"). It quite clear that Thunberg gets a lot out of these events. Publicity is good for her and her cause. The real question is what do the other sides get out of this? Not just anyone can walk into a Davos or UN meeting and rant.

She's not an expert in climatology or its effects on civilization. There's nothing she will say that the experts in the field haven't said already and better. Nor as I'll note in a bit, does she really have that much to say.

Instead, I think she is a Joan of Arc figure. France in 1429 was on the ropes with victory by the English near at hand. She won several key victories in short order and her capture and execution provided a martyr for the French cause, resulting in France finally end the Hundred Years War on their terms. Her appeal was purely religious. They needed something to fight for, and she provided that.

I think the same thing goes on here. Environmentalist advocacy is losing the war on climate change. Unless circumstances change, there's no way that 2 C thresholds (much less 1.5 C) will be met. They need someone to galvanize their side. Thus enters Thunberg.

Moving on, let's consider her message. For example, consider the transcript of her September 2019 speech to the UN Climate Action Summit:

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight? You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in ten years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of setting up irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. Fifty percent may be acceptable to you, but those numbers do not include tipping points most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution, or the aspects of equity and climate justice.

They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us. We who have to live with the consequences. To have a 67 percent chance of staying below the 1.5 degree of temperature rise, the best odds given by the IPCC, the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on January 1, 2018.

Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just business as usual and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 that entire budget will be gone is less than 8 and a half years. There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us, but young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this, right here, right now, is where we draw the line. The world is waking up, and change is coming whether you like it or not.

So a great tale of woe and betrayal. But where is even lip service to the remarkable society that allowed her family to live well and her to sail around the world giving speeches? This is paperclip maximizing, measuring a society solely by its greenhouse gases emissions rather than its achievements or other flaws.

To get to the point where hundreds of world leaders can be scolded by a young girl, a lot of stuff has to go right. Yet this never gets into the viewpoint. It's all about this imaginary betrayal. So what happens when this dogmatic, unyielding viewpoint runs over things like poverty, overpopulation, and war? I think it won't be pretty and we probably would be worse for it than if they didn't try at all.

As a final remark, what is wrong with expecting future generations to carry the load? They will be adults by then. Sorry, I think Thunberg's generation is quite capable of handling several C increase in global temperature (definitely more than 2 C). Instead, shouldn't we work on making our societies more resilient, adaptable, and wealthy rather than merely emitting less CO2? That's a far better gift for the future.

93 Virginia Jurisdictions are Now Declared Second Amendment Sanctuaries

Multiple sites are carrying that blurb, which I quote here in it's entirety.

Not happy with the blurb, I tracked down the original source, which is little more than a blurb, itself.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/virginias-second-amendment-sanctuaries-an-update/

Last week I wrote about the spread of Virginia’s “Second Amendment sanctuaries” — counties, towns, and cities that vow not to enforce state gun laws they deem unconstitutional, in the wake of the Democrats’ taking control of the state government. There are a few new developments worth noting.

For starters, the sanctuaries have spread dramatically. They’re up to 93 jurisdictions — covering roughly 40 percent of the population, by my quick spreadsheet tally. That’s huge, though the biggest victory, in Prince William County, is likely to be overturned when the county board flips to the Democrats, and some of these places have passed vague resolutions in support of the Constitution rather than the more aggressive language proposed by the Virginia Citizens Defense League.

As I noted in my previous piece, these resolutions have limited legal effect; local governments are basically subordinate to state governments. But defiance like this can put political pressure on moderate Democrats — and, failing that, can force the state government to either (A) take drastic action to stamp out resistance or (B) give up and let these places refuse to enforce new gun laws, possibly ramping up state-police activity there as a replacement.

On the politics, it’s worth noting that the state Democrats have already caved on confiscating “assault weapons,” modifying a bill so that it would still ban sales going forward but would require current owners to register their guns rather than turning them in.

It’s also worth comparing this map of sanctuaries:

. . . with this one of Virginia senate districts. (Click here to see the interactive version via the Virginia Public Access Project; I chose the senate because it’s much closer politically than the house.)

If an area is blue in both maps, it’s both a sanctuary and represented by a Democrat, suggesting a senator who might experience this movement as pressure from home. Such places do exist, though often the sanctuary jurisdictions make up only a minority of the Democratic district’s population. (See, e.g., districts 18, 21, and 25.) However, the senate is split 21–19, so it doesn’t take a lot of side-switching to stop a bill.

Finally, on how the Democrats will respond in the event they pass new gun laws and many local law-enforcement agencies refuse to enforce them, the governor has threatened “consequences,” and other Virginia Democrats have floated everything from prosecutions of local authorities, to cutting off state funds, to National Guard deployment.

Fun times.

Blurb, or no blurb, the important thing is, people are refusing to comply. Is it time to dance yet? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a8/Breakin2.jpg

It's only fair to note that the whiners at slate dot com consider these sanctuary counties to be different than liberal sanctuary cities.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/second-amendment-gun-sanctuary-movement-constitution.html

But some Virginia localities have gone further, indicating that they will not enforce state law that they deem unconstitutional. Some proponents have even resurrected words like nullification and interposition, terms first used extensively by Southern secessionists prior to the Civil War and more recently during the “massive resistance” to federal laws requiring desegregation in the 1960s.

New York’s Attorney General failed to prove that Exxon mislead shareholders over the true cost of climate change, a judge ruled Tuesday, ending the oil giant’s multiyear battle against the state.

“The Office of the Attorney General failed to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that ExxonMobil made any material misstatements or omissions about its practices and procedures that misled any reasonable investor,” Judge Barry Ostrager of the trial-level state Supreme Court wrote in his ruling.

[...]

The case was dismissed “with prejudice,” which means that “this case cannot be tried again on these facts in New York,” Columbia University Law Professor John Coffee said. He added that it could go to New York State Appellate Court and a federal case would be “very unlikely” and “ill-fated.”

What was particularly pernicious about the original case was that it happened merely because Exxon had some researchers look into the matter decades ago. There was no illegal or fraudulent activity in the first place. It didn't matter to the plaintiff, the Office of the Attorney General of New York that the research in question was inconclusive.

This is not the first time that merely looking for problems from a business's activities or products generates liability. But it would establish a precedent that the act of merely looking, even if one doesn't find anything, creates liability.

This song is about 30 years old, if I can remember through the mist of time. The girl died two days ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCorJG9mubk

I had an idea to do a thing or two using NVAPI, knowing nothing about it except that it exists. I started looking through the documentation that nvidia has on their website. Looked pretty good, until I checked NVAPI.DLL on my own system and saw that it only had a few exports. "WTF? Is it going to be some COM crap?" I asked my cat. He didn't respond.

Pretty soon I found this article which told me everything I needed to know and then some. If only finding info on the web was always this easy.

_<no-sarcasm>
Ordinarily, you keep a salted (and maybe peppered) hash function of a user's password in a database record associated with their name, login ID etc.

I have wondered, mused, whether it might be better to keep more than one hash function of the password. Possibly with different salt and pepper.

Database record fields:
* user ID
* user Name
* salt1
* pepper1
* passwordHash1
* salt2
* pepper2
* passwordHash2

Now here is the conjecture. If the database table could somehow be stolen, the attacker must find some plaintext password that hashes to passwordHash1. The plaintext password is prefixed with salt1, suffixed with pepper1, then hashed to the value passwordHash1.

It becomes infeasible to keep precomputed tables of hashed passwords once salt/pepper is introduced. The password "12345" for Jane would have a different hash than the same "12345" password for Joe, because of their different salt/pepper prefix/suffixes.

If there is a second random salt2/pepper2 and a different hash function of the plaintext password, then the attacker must not only find a plaintext that combined with salt1/pepper1 will hash to passwordHash1; but that same plaintext must also work for salt2/pepper2 for passwordHash2. It is important to point out that passwordHash2 is computed using a different hash function as well as different random prefix/suffix.

Would doing this truly increase the security of passwords if the table is stolen? Or is this just spinning wheels and cpu cycles to accomplish little if anything?

Opinions?
^{</no-sarcasm>}

Obviously using 12345 as a password is a well known best practice, no matter what other measures are taken.

So why is 5G network coverage so sparse? It turns out, there is a reason.

It is little known, yet well established that AT&T representatives are carefully disguised to have the form and appearance of ordinary human beings.

Due to lack of sufficient testing early on, it escaped AT&T's notice that 5G network signals interfered with the disguise making it possible for some people to perceive the true form and nature of their representatives. Because of this, AT&T representatives need to avoid being in areas where 5G signals are present. Thus it makes sense to ensure that 5G coverage is in as few areas as possible, and to manipulate other major carriers to do likewise.

In the meantime marketing will work on hype for a new 6G network so that the entire 5G debacle can be swept under the rug as quickly and quietly as possible.

You read it on the intarweb tubes. So it MUST be true!

This post partially motivated in response to fustakrakich journal post: https://soylentnews.org/~fustakrakich/journal/4779

I don't really expect that civilians understand the real issues at stake here. Some will, most won't.

Bottom line, in this issue, is whether the military answers to civilian authority, or it does not. Like it or not, President Trump is the Commander in Chief of our armed forces. Soldiers and sailors in the enlisted ranks don't get to pick and choose which officers they will follow. Junior officers don't get to pick and choose their own superior officers. And, flag officers don't get to pick and choose who will be elevated to the office of Commander in Chief. Things just don't work that way.

That was true when Obama was president, when Bush 1 and 2 were president, when Clinton was president, Ford, Reagan, Carter, and the other 40 or so presidents.

Military discipline is not threatened by Trump's decision - it is threatened by the rebellion of flag officers.

Further, streiff explains clearly how this rebellion is based on nothing more, and nothing less, than hypocrisy.

Read on, be enlightened, and enjoy.

To be quite honest, there is a lot of bullsh** being slung about here. First and foremost, Gallagher was tried by a jury and acquitted of all but the most chicknsh** of charges. It was a verdict that expressed revulsion at the tactics of the Navy JAG officers carrying out the prosecution and their minions in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and a total rejection of the evidence presented against Chief Gallagher. Even the court-martial convening authority thought the punishment meted out went too far and he intervened to prevent Gallagher from being reduced to the lowest enlisted grade. The whole episode, as I’ve posted before, was nothing more or less than an admiral who was torqued because a court-martial panel did not give him the verdict he wanted decided he’d take his pound of flesh.

On the subject of war crimes, the United States has never severely punished war crimes by our own troops, even in egregious cases. William Calley served some three years of a life sentence in house arrest for the My Lai Massacre. His commander, Ernest Medina, was acquitted. (I, myself, made the pilgrimage to V.V. Vick Jewelers at Cross Country Plaza where Calley worked.) The soldiers convicted of kidnapping, raping, and murdering Phan Thi Mao in 1966 served a mere four years of a life sentence before being released. I’ve posted on two cases from Sicily in 1943 were some 72 Italian and German prisoners were executed by two Americans. One was acquitted based on a “following orders” defense, the other was sentenced to life but served less than a year before being restored to duty and eventually receiving an honorable discharge. In short, Clint Lorance served longer for a war crime than any other American ever convicted of one, in fact, he served nearly as a long as all previous convictions combined.

Every senior officer who was interviewed for the CNN and New York Times articles, at a minimum, violated the UCMJ. Their statements were, where not outright contemptuous (Article 88 of the UCMJ), manifestly detrimental to the maintenance of good order and discipline by expressing the opinion they did not trust President Trump’s decisions. This issue with the pardons for Gallagher, Lorance, and Golsteyn is not the first instance of rebellion. We’ve seen this as the military hierarchy fought tooth and nail to continue to allow transgenders into the military despite an order to cease doing so (imagine this, a straight man with braces is barred from enlisting but a person who is unbalanced psychologically and taking several varieties of drugs is cleared). We saw a military judge tie the UCMJ to the rack and torture it in order to allow the duplicitous, if not outright treasonous, Bowe Bergdahl go free in order to take a jab at President Trump. All of this calls into question whether the military command structure would actually obey President Trump when called upon to do something that they viewed against their institutional interests or if they would take action favorable to their perceived prerogatives despite a presidential order to the contrary. This, by the way, is not something unique to the past three years. If you’ll recall, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki was fired because he tried to do an end run to Congress around Don Rumsfeld to preserve a redundant artillery system that he had championed. So the rot is deep and long standing but only clearly visible today.

source: https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2019/12/01/real-question-not-whether-military-trusts-president-trump-whether-nation-can-still-trust-military/

citations found in source:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-sabotaging-his-military/2019/11/21/6b46199e-0cad-11ea-97ac-a7ccc8dd1ebc_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-undercuts-his-military-leadership--and-dishonors-troops-who-uphold-our-values/2019/11/24/67702788-0d66-11ea-8397-a955cd542d00_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/24/firing-richard-spencer-trump-recklessly-crosses-another-line/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-ill-advised-pardons-will-damage-americans-view-of-the-military/2019/11/21/5c356fda-0c9a-11ea-97ac-a7ccc8dd1ebc_story.html
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/27/politics/pentagon-concern-trump-decision-making/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/us/politics/trump-seals-eddie-gallagher.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_on_Hill_192