Joshua

general recent conversations

The BBS

General discussion for retrocomputing.stackexchange.com

Joshua

Jun 11 17:55

Link to deleted post https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/31745/418
1) I really wanted to upvote a comment on it.
2) Why does the user still exist?

Discussion on answer by vidarlo: Long…

Imported from a comment discussion on security.stackexchange.c...

Joshua

May 28 13:42

Yes; S/MIME certificates are broken today. The only way to verify them is to know _which_ root is supposed to have signed them and fetch the entire certificate transparency hash chain from the root and verify.

The problem is essentially an untrustworthy root problem; this is solved in the online world by the combination of certificate transparency chains, certificate revocation servers, and deployed sensors in multiple countries, the combination of all of which make the NSA's attack unfeasible without getting caught with the penalty of distrust root certificate, but that is not available f…

Joshua

May 26 17:00

@Happyblue: NSA attacked the security infrastructure and demonstrated the capacity to get a certificate for a site they don't own. Their attack vector was closed by certificate sensors and certificate hash chaining; both of which are online methods; but email certificate verification is offline, so you don't get to use it.

Joshua

May 26 17:00

We might as well all go to self-signed client certificates anyway. Email's async verification doesn't work anymore (thanks NSA) and there are no other use cases that can't be made to work with client certificates.

Discussion on answer by TheDemonLord:…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...

Joshua

Apr 9 08:43

I'm not sure I can't bend the defensive magic into something unable to constrain me.

Discussion on answer by D Stanley: In…

Imported from a comment discussion on money.stackexchange.com/...

Joshua

Mar 5 21:00

25% interest is plain old usurious.

Discussion on question by templatetyp…

Imported from a comment discussion on space.stackexchange.com/...

Joshua

Mar 2 19:01

@JimmyJames: Apollo Program ran on feet per second. Some old hands at NASA and JPL were on the imperial system into this century (barely).

TRPG General Chat

Main chat room for tabletop role-playing games. Anyone can ask...

Joshua

Feb 13 03:49

Almost useless magic item: trinket of summon cottingly fairy (10x/day, no attunement)

Unfortunately for you it's a painted cardboard cutout with minor illusion to be perceived as real at a glance

Joshua

Dec 4, 2024 02:58

There are two famed transmutation devices, the C remover which can make a cantelope run; but that pales in power with the K remover which can make rock fly.

Joshua

Nov 29, 2024 05:16

Fun fact: it takes more energy to unbody a planet than it does to vaporize one.

Joshua

Sep 27, 2024 01:21

What's up with skeletor's spellcasting. He casts like he's at int 20 but he talks like he's at int 7.

Joshua

Sep 12, 2024 00:24

Party? What party?

Joshua

Sep 12, 2024 00:24

Helm of Asteroid Attraction: Cursed Magic Item, Requires Attunement
This item appears as a magic helm providing +2 to AC when attacked by bludgening weapons, magic or otherwise. In addition, equipped character is immune to damage from falling asteroids.
However when attuned; once per day, DM rolls a d20. On a roll of 1, an asteroid strikes, doing 10000 bludgeoning damage to everyone and everything within 100 squares.

Joshua

Jul 18, 2024 04:20

@JoelHarmon: To quote Hobbes: "No sleep tonight I see." Take the fatigue hit, avoid the exposure hit, and recharge your spell slots if possible.

Joshua

Jul 17, 2024 22:00

I like the idea of setting known spam accounts to Spammer McSpamface. That way nobody paying one iota of attention goofs up the review.

Joshua

Jul 17, 2024 00:54

So the idea should be obvious. Create bonfire will keep the entire party warm.

Joshua

Jul 16, 2024 23:23

Too bad you can't cast cantrips during a long rest; otherwise even my level 1 druid character would be fine.

Discussion on answer by Ja1024: Is SQ…

Imported from a comment discussion on security.stackexchange.c...

Joshua

Dec 28, 2024 23:37

Correction: For some reason I wrote down the byte sequence on a big endian processor; on x64 it would be 20 00 27 00 20 27

Joshua

Dec 28, 2024 23:34

@Ja1024: You don't get an exception that way; you reliably get the string that is space followed by single quote followed by hyphenation point. The bytes in memory are always 00 20 00 27 20 27. There's no way to get it to erroneously treat that 0x2027 as another single quote or otherwise; if that Unicode symbol leads to SQL injection, file a bug against your database client library.

Joshua

Dec 20, 2024 16:28

@Ja1024: No. Java's internal representation of a string is always in UTF-16; if you have direct UTF-8 pieces that haven't been changed to UTF-16 first they must be another type.

Joshua

Dec 20, 2024 16:28

@Ja1024: In which case a typecheck error would appear in both the language I use and the language OP uses due to trying to concatenate strings in different encodings. While the coverage is not complete (UTF-8 and legacy multibyte would concatenate without error), UTF-8 and UTF16 can't be concatenated without a type error. Good try though; PHP might have this problem.

Joshua

Dec 20, 2024 16:28

@Ja1024: If you know your input is SQL in some unicode encoding you can reliably determine the right one; or if your SQL receiver didn't implement that it can and should reliably throw on getting the wrong one due to unable to parse the initial statement keyword.

Joshua

Dec 20, 2024 16:28

This seems like a legacy multibyte encoding problem with the solution of always use a unicode encoding internally.

Discussion between Dcleve and Matthew

Imported from a comment discussion on philosophy.stackexchange...

Joshua

Nov 3, 2024 21:31

If you want to throw shade I can do it better. Why is the CMB variation aligned to the Earth's orbit around the sun to the limit of our ability to measure? Why does the combined data from Hubble and James Webb telescopes report a falsification of "all spiral galaxies are the same age"? Why do cosmologists continue to claim an infinite universe despite the fact this causes the basic probability models to collapse.

Joshua

Nov 3, 2024 21:23

@Matthew: I've heard the speed of light not constant claims. There actually is some evidence behind it; but there's annoying problems with the model. You could have a long physics discussion but it requires c ≠ c subscript g (that is, the speed of light is not equal to the speed of gravity) thus the model quickly becomes hard to reason over.+

Discussion on answer by David Gudeman…

Imported from a comment discussion on philosophy.stackexchange...

Joshua

Oct 27, 2024 09:48

@ScottRowe: Given an Abrahamic religion; you get the devil trying to disprove religion. And that's not something so easily answered. You will also find this has explaining power.

Joshua

Oct 27, 2024 09:48

Religion is exceptionally hard at this because you dealing with an adversarial theory; there's someone or something trying its hardest to prove the religion wrong by producing counter-evidence.

Discussion on answer by ohwilleke: A …

Imported from a comment discussion on law.stackexchange.com/qu...

Joshua

Oct 19, 2024 22:09

@ohwilleke: I haven't seen so much as a case of going to the newspaper and saying "We the prosecutors know this man is innocent" yet so I'm not too sure how sure they are of their facts right now. All I see are cases of concerns of insufficient evidence.

Joshua

Oct 19, 2024 22:09

@ohwilleke: On the contrary, if the prosecutor's office is sufficiently convinced of actual innocence; the mere threat of trying to bring murder charges on everybody involved including the judge will be enough to end it. These charges will fall but the court would not want to deal with that.

Discussion on question by user80226: …

Imported from a comment discussion on philosophy.stackexchange...

Joshua

Oct 19, 2024 04:35

@ScottRowe: "wherever conscious life arose, we would be talking about it. This inverts the probability from about 0 to about 1. " You can't actually use the anthropic principle like that. The origin of the blockquote is a natural explanation/supernatural explanation debate blockquote and the anthropic principle has no power to decide between those positions.

The Nineteenth Byte

The Nineteenth Byte: General discussion for codegolf.stackexc...

Joshua

Oct 11, 2024 02:27

Downside: you do have to specify the target platform for comparisons to be meaningful.

Joshua

Oct 11, 2024 02:26

Code-golf like challenge: write some standard utilities, but golf the executable binary size. I used to play this from 1999 to 2001.

Discussion on answer by ohwilleke: Te…

Imported from a comment discussion on law.stackexchange.com/qu...

Joshua

Sep 20, 2024 13:25

I'm pretty sure the company has already committed an illegal act, that of firing the guy while on the road without providing transport home. In which case, the unclean hands doctrine will protect him.

Discussion on answer by Speakpigeon: …

Imported from a comment discussion on philosophy.stackexchange...

Joshua

Sep 10, 2024 04:43

@ThePointer: And I have a counter-proof. Basically it goes; I can enumerate all theorems in my own theorem solving language and see if the statement is true, false, paradoxical, or independent. In first order logic you can't do this, but in second order logic you can. Here's an accessible demonstration: stats.stackexchange.com/a/316227/107903 (There's handwaving at "unspooling the output" the hard part of the theorem is proving that's unnecessary but for this particular question I didn't need to.)

Joshua

Sep 10, 2024 04:43

@ThePointer: No. There exists at least one second order logic formulation where it is false. I had thought I had disproved it for awhile because I didn't know what second order logic was while using it.

Joshua

Sep 10, 2024 04:43

@ThePointer: I've had to change my opinions and edit a few of my old answers when I learned this. Godel's incompleteness theorem has no flaw but it's still wrong because GR + QM is not in first order logic and a hypercomputer may be admissible in physics, not that we know how to build one yet.

Discussion on answer by Aadiraj Anil:…

Imported from a comment discussion on aviation.stackexchange.c...

Joshua

Sep 3, 2024 07:34

@MadPhysicist: Reverse thread nuts and bolts exist. This comes up from time to time when dealing with rotating parts.

Joshua

Sep 3, 2024 07:34

I was totally expecting the answer to be if it spun the other way it would loosen the Jesus nut on the top rather than tighten it.

Discussion on answer by Kodiologist: …

Imported from a comment discussion on english.stackexchange.co...

Joshua

Aug 13, 2024 13:25

Dragons are big, green, and humanitarian.

Discussion on question by Mikhail Kat…

Imported from a comment discussion on philosophy.stackexchange...

Joshua

Aug 4, 2024 17:31

Not really. You constructed a scenario that calls for the end of an infinite sequence; you need relativistic physics to consider an answer. For a variant that has an interesting answer, I provided one here stats.stackexchange.com/a/316227/107903

Discussion on answer by grawity_u1686…

Imported from a comment discussion on superuser.com/questions/...

Joshua

Jul 5, 2024 17:11

@grawity_u1686: Ohh; it's changed since a decade ago.

Joshua

Jul 5, 2024 17:11

@JeffLearman: The debian teams says there's no stable way to force a package to be resolved from a specific repository; their equivalent of PPAs are published with higher version numbers to force the matter.

Joshua

Jul 5, 2024 17:11

@DrMoishePippik: It's nonsense. In apt we have what amounts to almost an absolute defense against dll hell: apt-get -b source.

Joshua

Jul 5, 2024 17:11

@JeffLearman: I wonder if the solution is remove and pin snap.

Discussion on question by Scott Rowe:…

Imported from a comment discussion on philosophy.stackexchange...

Joshua

Jun 10, 2024 14:51

If a computer gains a new spirit I want to know about it.

Discussion on question by Bubbles: So…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...

Joshua

Jun 5, 2024 14:04

@RobertRapplean: While 2GT is an unreasonably large nuclear bomb, most likely beyond a feasible yield, it is not a planet buster.

Joshua

Jun 5, 2024 14:04

My ship is a star destroyer like thing. Note that an actual impact would shatter the nuke faster than it detonates; and a proximity blast isn't getting through the armor plating because there are no pressure waves in space. Even if you did soft-contact and detonate, while that is a real threat, one nuke just isn't enough. The ship's just too large and well constructed.

Discussion on answer by Jen: If Trump…

Imported from a comment discussion on law.stackexchange.com/qu...

Joshua

Jun 5, 2024 03:02

@bharring: Same difference as far as my comment is concerned though.

Joshua

Jun 4, 2024 23:33

@Jen I finally located the specific problem. The problem is not in the answer; it's in the question. The question references the 2020 Georgia incident for which I knew New York would have trouble holding jurisdiction; but the actual charges convicted on are stormy daniels payoff charges dated 2017.

Joshua

Jun 4, 2024 22:57

I have; you did not believe.