2510c39011c5

> why then have all the moves against Ukraine were when Trump was not in office?

In regards to the timing of the two Russian invasions, perhaps Putin felt those were his best chances to make such moves.

The first time when Russia invaded Crimea on February 20, 2014 was because of the Maidan Revolution. At the time Ukrainian government was a mess. The then Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, who was an ally of Putin, was to be ousted on the next day of the Russian invasion and eventually fled to Russia.

As for the timing when Russia invaded Ukraine again on February 24, 2022, I think one of the reasons was because of US troops chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan happened a few months ago. And after that, the US would be politically unlikely to get itself involved directly in another overseas war so soon; and Putin hoped this time it would be a blitzkrieg coup, and then he could replace Zelensky with a puppet president.

I am not saying that Putin intentionally invaded Ukraine at a time when Trump was or wasn't in office; I only feel that these are two very opportune moments for Putin to seize, which both happened to be at times when Trump was not in office.

they even have a patent for cutting undersea cable by dragging anchor...

https://patents.google.com/patent/CN111203499A/en

the page on archive.org could not be loaded now...

but google cache still serves a copy...

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...

  The one big problem, though, is that China does not believe in freedom

I feel it is not that china doesn’t believe in freedom...it is just that they don’t practice freedom for the time being...but their government always promises future freedom to their people — although that promise may never become true...but the good thing about promising without a specific time is that the promise can always appear to be credible even when one is pushing the day of its realization to the infinity...

I think one of the major benefits is, when china’s currency is accepted by other countries, that means the products (or service) made in china are accepted by other countries. When chinese products are accepted by other countries, those countries are willing to use their own products to trade with those chinese products...

I am not talking about specific products, but those manufacturing in macro sense...

There is no use to hold a certain currency when you are not able to use it for the time being or at some point of time in the future...and the more you hold a certain currency, the longer you are expecting it is useable or the more you expect it to increase its value.

it is all about different labels...and different labels have different visibility, in terms of effort to get to that information...so I guess by narrowing unflagging privilege to a very small group of users, the mod hopes to make it significantly more difficult for people to advocate a certain post here through purposeful manipulation...thus perhaps “unflagging” capability, as one of the last lines of defense, is only given to a very small group of ultimately verified users, through manual assignment or some thrshold based on percentage rather than an absolute karma value...

that’s my guess...

well, how to define “ordinary user” is a huge problem for the system administrator — access control is at the root of all security issues...

I was hoping to get some quick solution by asking here, so I could join that conversation before its fad fades...

But yes, generally, questions like this should be emailed to the moderators and then wait for their response...

They probably would give better visibilities to those new accounts created from certain well-known IP address ranges...

And their visibility mechanism seems to be a bit involved...as for now, each of my three different HN accounts has a different view scope for posts in a same thread...

Seems these days it is much more difficult for a new account of vague origin to participate in a discussion here than it was a few years ago...

thanks for the pointing...

but for some reason that I am not quite sure, I do not have this "vouch" nor "flag" option for any of the posts that I have the read access...seems the discussion system here works in a way that involves more parameters than "karma" alone...

Perhaps the question could be rephrased as, "how to make any comment posted by an account created less than 5 hours ago visible by any other accounts?"

It looks like the system does not allow a new account to initiate a discussion thread; so I have to ask with an account with a certain accumulation of karma in order to solicit that information.

notice the release dates for the recent issues...

  issue 66:  2009-11-06
  issue 67:  2010-11-17
  issue 68:  2012-04-14
  issue 69:  2016-05-06

the intervals: 1 yr -> 2 yr -> 4 yr

Are they now on an exponential backoff tendency? Will their next issue come out in 2024?

People were still willing to fly when the crude oil price was at $100+ a barrel, although I am not sure if a well-designed and tested escape capsule is more complicated than the plane it self...

I just feel that is do-able, and had we made a good one now, we could use it for all the years to come -- and that could also be used in other travels or in case of catastrophic event...

and this guy survived SR-7 mid-air disintegration at mach 3+, wearing pressure suit...

theaviationist.com/2015/03/17/sr-71-mid-air-disintegration/

Yes, I was thinking about the same thing...

And I feel even a commercial airline could make a similar device a standard configuration...that might make flying more expensive, but perhaps we could be able to reduce the cost somehow when manufacturing in massive scale...

but getting ejected out first also means withstanding the force for a longer duration, especially going through the middle troposphere at high speed...I am not sure if that would be easier in terms of survival...

But to increase the chance, in this kind of high speed ejection situation, why not make the escape pod or capsule a standard configuration, in place of an ejection seat...I just feel a well-designed pod or a capsule would provide an extra layer to buffer the extremely strong impact...

And capsule or pod has been deployed on some super-sonic aircraft such as Rockwell B-1 Lancer (still in service at this time)...That might be more expensive and would definitely require much more complicated design and extended experiments...But comparing to human life, all the other costs would seem to me much less important...

I saw this quote from wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_crew_capsule

  Kelly Johnson, founder of Lockheed Skunk Works, and developer of
  the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird family of spy planes, commented on
  escape crew capsules when discussing development of the
  YF-12A (Blackbird) ejection seat: ".... I have never been
  convinced that a capsule ejection is required for anything other
  than high velocity re-entry from outer space...."

But clearly, a shredded suit is nothing like a capsule...

FYI, here the link to its paper,

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/papers/2015/10face/th...

if they could keep it secret until then, their lips must be really tight...

Anyone knows what's the RAM size in the forthcoming ipad pro? It was rumored to carry 4GB DDR4 RAM (which would be really awesome), but since then the source of the rumor (e.g. an Adobe blog post) has been redacted for the part talking about the RAM size...

It's understandable that Apple always tries to conceal certain hardware configuration details for their products, possibly out of the worry that consumers might compare those configurations across devices built on different platforms...But I just wish I could at least mentally compare a certain Apple device to its predecessors, then I could know if some apps will freeze again when I switch tasks...

this reminds me of the destruction of the Parthenon in the late 17th century...The stupid Ottoman Turks used the temple to store gunpowder. The temple still had been relatively well preserved for 2 millenniums, until one night in the year of 1687, the gunpowder blew up and severely damaged the building. Much part of it had fallen into rubble...The next year after this great explosion, the Turks took the rubble and built a small mosque upon the ruins...Through the rest of the time, the survived remains continued to crumble and disintegrate, and then becomes what we could see it today, which is still a magnificent piece of monument...

But I could imagine it would be really really awe-inspiring, if we could see how the Parthenon looked before the 17th century...

The model above actually doesn't directly contradict with the examples you gave...

You can easily create a seemingly dilemma case within the model -- for instance, use the independent creativity to create more common ground (much of which was not visible/observable before) between people, and hence make them more agreeable with each other.

But actually this is not a dilemma, as it is only crucial for the process to be independent, not the ending result -- especially when the goal of your independent creativity process is to make the ending result to be more correlated to some preconceptions.

> Creativity implies the ability to create humour, and making people laugh is one of the easiest ways to get them to like you...

Well, regarding jokes, if all people are making a same joke repetitively, so you heard about it many many times, do you still feel that you could laugh out naturally? (I mean laugh not for the sake of laugh, alone)

I just feel that the reason why a joke is a joke, is because you have never heard of it (or at least have never got it) in the past...So this difference -- or this independence from the past -- is the creativity in your sense...

> Feynman represents a good example of this, achieving social success by using his creativity as a fount of humour.

If, there have already been 500 people making jokes in the same way as Feynman did -- for instance, if before reading his book, everyone already played prank on some waitress girl in a restaurant by putting the tips under an upside-down filled cup, would they still find the description in the book funny? Just like what I typed, do you still find this re-description of Feynman's joke funny, like the first time you read about it?

If by "creativity" we mean to do things in the most informative way, in the sense of high entropy, (creativity is thus by this assumption equivalent to the capability of producing the most information), I feel "thinking independently" is the key to creativity -- as an event independent of all other events would produce the highest amount of information, for this matter...

Quite often, "thinking independently" could lead to social rejection, as being independent means being non-related with other people's thinking, and hence with much less likelihood of being agreeable with other people's opinion. If we define (roughly) social acceptance as the property of sharing common opinions among the crowd, then we can infer that thinking independently would unlikely lead to social acceptance.

Hence creativity would unlikely lead to social acceptance.

Perhaps that's why a tolerant environment that allows different ideas and different opinions (even those you don't agree with) to coexist is also very crucial to creativity -- as otherwise intolerance would simply kill it.

there are quite a lot of shellcode tutorials on the internet (or in bookstores)...

This shellcoder handbook is good...

http://www.amazon.com/Shellcoders-Handbook-Discovering-Explo...

And articles such as this one by steve hanna

http://www.vividmachines.com/shellcode/shellcode.html

and this one by Aleph One on phrack,

http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html

(by the way, many articles on phrack are really good)

Some more recent versions of smashing the stack are,

http://www.mgraziano.info/docs/stsi2010.pdf

https://paulmakowski.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/smashing-the-s...

also check out the ezines by 29A -- although they are old, but you know, some good stuff are still really good today...

just do a little search...there are tons of articles out there on this topic...

Google has a cached page for this article...

To access the cached copy, just search in google with the "cache" keyword prefix

  "cache:" + ${original_URL}

for example:

  cache:expdev.byethost7.com/2015/05/22/shellcode/

that seems to be a folklore on the swimming requirement...

And they actually did some historical research on it, http://asklib.hcl.harvard.edu/a.php?qid=31265

this is a good database :)

Thanks for the pointer!

that would be a good universal solution -- it's just that would be too fast and too assuring to get the most fun out of the puzzle...

It's nice that sometimes intuition works out better than desperate reasoning...

...I just spent 1 hour or so on the sequence...and the following clue is the farthest I've got,

the first parameter is the cumulative sum of the sequence,

  >>> log(1002, 10)
  3.0008677215312267
  >>> log(634, 9)
  2.936454025222717
  >>> log(409, 8)
  2.89198567764725
  >>> log(275, 7)
  2.8864493565611764
  >>> log(186, 6)
  2.9165447502641713
  >>> log(108, 5)
  2.9091716996047423
  >>> log(61, 4)
  2.9653686687814433
  >>> log(39, 3)
  3.3347175194727923
  >>> log(18, 2)
  4.169925001442312

EDIT:

yes, I saw that "read more" at first...I did not want to spoil the puzzle so I tried to solve it on my own for a while but then realized I might have to spend more than 1 hour on this thing -- and at this point I totally forgot there is a spoiler there...