SubstantialNothingness [none/use name]

Hell, I have a biology textbook from ten years ago talking about the inevitablity of a devistating pandmec and the steps that could be taken to prevent it.

This was a big train of thought in the early 2000s due to the SARS outbreak. I seem to recall that it was a talking point even by the end of Clinton’s presidency.

I agree it is very much like what is going on with climate change. And of course, more pandemics. We learned nothing!

The virus isn’t unable to be eradicated.

Well, it’s endemic among wildlife now. Of course, we should still try to manage it among humans. But eradication might be tricky at this point.

Yes, I think we might be missing each other a little bit again, perhaps due to different ideas about how the auto-encryption is operating.

The correct public and private keys will always be used if the communication is going to work. Auto-PGP would still be using public and private keys for the buyer and the vendor.

The way I understand it, auto-encryption is a one-sided mechanic: It’s something that the buyer ticks on/off.

If so then it is designed to interface fine with people using manual PGP, such as vendors.

If such a system generates the proper keys for the buyer and handles encryption/decryption automatically so that everything always appears to them as plaintext on the frontend (because the system maintains their keys), then it would still be able to serve the vendor a traditional UX that requires manually handling the keys. In this case, the experience of the vendor would be identical regardless of whether the buyer is using auto-encryption or not.

This would only expose one side of the conversation to the server admins, of course: The messages sent from the vendor to the buyer (because the system only has the buyer’s private key).

I do not know if this is the way it was actually implemented. However there is discussion on Dread right now that leads me to believe that auto-encryption works somewhat similarly to what I have just described (at least from the vendor’s perspective).

edit: Looking back, I might have introduced some confusion with this line:

to identify whether a specific buyer was using their own PGP key or the auto-encryption feature

It would have been more clear for me to say:

to identify whether a specific buyer was using their own manually-generated PGP keys or using PGP keys generated for them through the auto-encryption feature.

for vendors to state up front they only vend to people who will use PGP

If you’re playing it by-the-book, that is the standard operation procedure. You don’t want to give any data to or have any other connection with a vendor who doesn’t 100% require PGP.

Vendors I think have the ability to deny customers for whatever reason they want and vice versa.

What I meant is: I don’t know if there was a way for vendors to identify whether a specific buyer was using their own PGP key or the auto-encryption feature. Both might have looked the same from the vendor’s side of things. If so, they wouldn’t have been able to selectively deny auto-encryption users.

That’s like saying reddit was the same before and after the digg exodus, though.

Auto-encrypt is a shady feature to have on a shady site. I wonder if vendors had a way to deny those customers? Even if there was, I get the impression that it wasn’t a common practice. It also looks like some people were still using BTC.

Wow that’s pretty wild, even for the darknet. The operator is putting a lot of heat on themselves by doing this.

To think, if we all legalized drugs then there would be none of these darknet exit scams.

It sounds like those who practiced proper OPSEC are unaffected by the extortion. Hopefully that encourages more people to take their own OPSEC seriously.

My understanding is that there is still a lot of PED use in tested competitions for a lot of things, and this drives the designer-drug approach of staying ahead of the test panels among other tactics.

Sometimes these “clean” comp people push weird purity ideas - they’re already manipulative enough to dope and say they don’t, and sometimes they’re talking to the more gullible audiences (as people who know they are watching dopers might as well watch the untested competitions). I’ve only dipped my toes in these scenes but from what I’ve seen there is a lot of exploitation going on in some circles.

I’d like to see the drugs decriminalized, the stigmas about them ended, more research done on them, and the top competitions openly acknowledging use. If people realize how “enhanced” their influencers are (including all of Hollywood), I think they would be a lot more supportive on trans health issues and other health initiatives. I think a lot of perceptions would change.

iirc it goes back to O/X meaning yes/no in Japanese, but US players naturally hitting X for confirmation instead. I think there was layout switching already common in localization while the xbox was still being designed.

Nothing to see here, just the typical reaction of a privileged person seeing pushback on their privilege. It’s not like it’s going to change his behavior.

I think part of the reason it is undiscussed is because it is illegal. I’m not so sure there’d be as much of a stigma about being honest if there was no threat of it tanking your career and leading to a jail cell. As it is they (especially the influencers) are certainly very disingenuous about it.

It’s some real reactionary shit, that’s for sure.

deleted by creator

I think you could theoretically angle it so that the trajectory leads it to fall into orbit, no?

Presumably these planes would have some means of propulsion once they were out of the atmosphere, otherwise their usefulness would be very limited. I did say “rockets […] during their entire burn” but I should have said the lift rockets, which iirc is most of the weight so it’s still a big deal. However I agree that in no way would this circumvent the need for propulsion outside of the atmosphere for most intents and purposes.

Anyway, it’s all probably a pipe dream with the upcoming climate change challenges. But the science is fun and apparently some experts consider this more-or-less feasible.

I’m not sure if that makes it any more practical, but the principles seem sound enough. More importantly, it sounds awesome.

I don’t know the answer to your question (unfortunately) but I’ve run into this idea before, and it seems that it’s an idea that has been passed around for many years now including by NASA. As I understand it, one of the perks is that you don’t have to carry your fuel and engines - so you don’t have to move nearly as much mass. You could launch a satellite with just a protective shell around it. So the magnets don’t have to instantaneously exert as much force as the rockets do during their entire burn. I assume these planes would be drones so they might be rather small.

If the idea is that they’re sending up people with railguns then it’s simply bullshit afaik. It would have to be rail-assisted and the output would be marginal. (edit: super long barrels have apparently been discussed for human launches [with rockets for later stages], but it appears to be generally considered unfeasible right now.)

The acceleration even for drones would be mind-numbing. Definitely some bleeding-edge engineering challenges on making something that can survive that. I’m not really well-informed on it so I won’t speculate in detail, but I do get the impression that most of those challenges are theoretically solvable with today’s science. However it would be a breakthrough for many applied science fields.

If any nation could do this, imo, it’s China. They’re really taking the lead in almost every measure right now (including the most important outside of welfare imo - research). It’s not their fault if the 5eyes want to fear-monger about falling behind. (It is incredibly aggravating, though.)

I don’t know either but it’s probably more than exists in my bank account!

steal his identity

Find a guy looking to disappear and you’ve got yourself an even trade.

How much are you paying for this bit?

Termination shock - temperature masking becoming unmasked. I think James Hansen determined this was only a minor effect, while the main driver is a higher climactic sensitivity than the previous consensus.

I have a decade-old bet on 2025.