Shaun

My basis for calling you racist is you said you hope you never get an aboriginal prime minister. That obviously is racist. (HotBlooded is one of Deags's many identities) Feb 23 11:28:35 <HotBlooded> Shaun dude the south of america is gonna be pissed ot the max Feb 23 11:28:46 <HotBlooded> i'd hate if a aboriginal got in here

I don't think it's true that you can't joke like that, I think humour can be a very powerful weapon against racism, using satire in such a way as to point out how absurd people who say those kinds of things are. That said, I don't think Deags had any satirical point he was trying to make, he actually is just racist.

One of the highest unemployment rates out of what? The entire world? It's 7.5%, which isn't exactly great but I don't think you could call it out of control by any means. The US has 5.5%, making a 2% absolute difference. I don't know why you picked France particularly, in fact I do because it fit what you wanted to say, but Nordic countries also have extensive social services and large welfare systems (larger than France in fact) with very high taxes. So let's look at them. From http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-social-welfare-state As we can see, in these countries they have a HIGHER income per capita for the working age population (in fact Norway has the second highest GDP per capita overall in the world after Luxembourg). They have a slightly higher average unemployment rate, but even with 1% more of their population out of work they are still more productive than the English speaking countries on average (since as the article says "the low-tax, high-income countries are mostly English-speaking ones that share a direct historical lineage with 19th-century Britain and its theories of economic laissez-faire"). They also have less than half of the level of poverty we do. Now, I'm not suggesting that Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc are perfect utopias and they do have some problems with their system, because there is no perfect system, but your suggestion that somehow high taxes and comprehensive welfare systems leads to social breakdown in some way doesn't fit the evidence.

A progressive tax is not a punishment for making money, you are an idiot. It's simply a way to be able to raise enough money to effectively run the country without forcing poor people even further into poverty. As a small scale model let's say there are two guys, one guy who earns $10000 a year and one guy who earns $100000. Now, let's say we have a flat tax of 25%. This means the poor guy now has $7500 left and the other guy has $75000 left, with total tax revenue of $27500. The guy living on $75000 can still easily live a very comfortable life I think you'd agree, but do you think the poor guy can take that $2500 tax hit very easily? Not really? So what's the solution? Reduce the flat tax? Any adjustment of our flat tax to relieve the poor guy of that crushing poverty will reduce the tax income significantly needed to pay for the services and infrastructure of society. Let's look at a progressive tax instead. Instead of a 25% flat tax we have a 10% tax on the first $20000 of earnings, and 30.625% on anything above that (in real life obviously there would be more brackets, but let's not overcomplicate the example). Now, we have the same tax income for the government of $27500, but in this case the poor guy is only paying $1000 in tax, leaving him with an extra $1500 a year to feed and clothe himself. The other guy is now paying $26500 in tax of course, leaving him with a slightly lower net income of $73500 compared to his earlier income of $75000. Do you think this will affect his life at all? I don't think you can argue that the loss of $1500 is going to affect him in anyway similar to the way it would affect the guy earning $10000. Anyone arguing that the former is a more sensible system in all honesty is a selfish moron.

Socialism is a good thing. Not particularly communism but social liberalism, and the fucking idiotic fear so many Americans have of it is why they have a country so ridiculous that even with the most money in the world it can't look after its own people. There are a lot of good thing about the US, but I would not live there because there are so many fucking idiots who'd rather see the poor die in a gutter than pay a bit more in tax (and if I hear one more American say a progressive tax is a punishment for making money then I think my head will explode).

I did see your hidden text, which is pretty obvious since I included some of my own, I'm just basing my belief you are racist on your views on aboriginal australians.

I knew I was right when I repeatedly called you racist. JOKE... actually, no, you really are racist

I don't believe in marriage in general, but in terms of the legal institution of marriage I don't see why it should apply to exclusively heterosexual couples. Some people might argue marriage is a religious institution, but if that's the case why are they still regulated by the government and given special benefits even in secular countries? I'd say the religious ceremony is separate from the legal institution, and there's not really any reason for the restrictions on the latter. Having a separate but equal thing like civil partnerships seems a bit pointless.

This thread is stupid.

Well, Dids from IRC promised he'd wrap them around his balls when he got his and post photos, but he never did because he's a damn liar.

Wrap them around your cock.

English wikipedia is only 6.5GB uncompressed if you only get the current revisions and text only, and there's currently no way to download all the images anyway. If you get all revisions it's somewhat over 300GB. http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/

I couldn't find my old image shack file storage thing, but I felt like rewriting the image encoding part, the old one had input checking, split files into multiple images and handled all the uploading and downloading from imageshack too, but this is just an encoder/decoder. It uses 32bit PNGs unlike when you import files into photoshop as RAWs. This PNG is actually 25% smaller (400kB) than the MP3 file it was encoded from due to the PNG RLE compression, which just shows how shitty MP3 is as a codec. It seems that having a wide image results in better compression than a long image, but too wide seems to cause problems. The one improvement I made is storing the file length of the original file in the PNG metadata, so there is no need to have an extra file to store the file length in order to be able to strip off any padding necessary to make the data fit in the image. The only downside of this is some image host or utility which doesn't respect PNG metadata could strip the data necessary to turn it back into a file, but imageshack at least leaves your files alone. I considered putting the file length in the first pixel or something, but I like it this way. Here's the code if anyone wants it, it needs Python 2.5 with the Python Imaging Library 1.1.6. Also a Windows binary here if you can't be bothered to install those. #!/usr/bin/env python import Image, PngImagePlugin import random import sys, getopt class BinPng(): def __init__(self, png_path = None, bin_path = None, constraint = None, longest = None): self.bin_data = None self.png = None self.metadata = None self.constraint = constraint self.longest = longest if (png_path): self.load_png(png_path) if (bin_path): self.load_bin(bin_path) def load_bin(self, bin_path): f = open(bin_path, 'rb') data = f.read() f.close() self.bin_data = data def load_png(self, png_path): self.png = Image.open(png_path) def bin_to_png(self): if (not self.bin_data): return False data = self.bin_data #make a PNG metadata field to store the actual file length so we can strip off the padding later self.metadata = PngImagePlugin.PngInfo() self.metadata.add_text('length', str(len(data))) data = self.pad_data(data, self.constraint) size = self.get_dimensions(len(data), self.constraint, self.longest) self.png = Image.fromstring('RGBA', size, data) def png_to_bin(self): if (not self.png): return False self.bin_data = self.png.tostring()[:int(self.png.info['length'])] def write_bin(self, file_path, auto_convert = True): if (auto_convert == True): self.png_to_bin() f = open(file_path, 'wb') f.write(self.bin_data) f.close() def write_png(self, file_path, auto_convert = True): if (auto_convert == True): self.bin_to_png() self.png.save(file_path, 'PNG', pnginfo = self.metadata) def fermat_primality(self, n): checks = 0 #do 20 fermat checks, should be good enough for this porpoise while checks &lt; 20: a = random.randint(1, n-1) if pow(a, n-1, n) != 1: return False checks += 1 return True def pad_data(self, data, dimension_constraint = None): length = len(data) #pad data to make it fit in 32bit pixels extra = '\x00' * (4 - length % 4) length += (4 - length % 4) if (dimension_constraint and dimension_constraint &lt; length/4): extra += '\x00' * 4 * (dimension_constraint - length/4 % dimension_constraint) length += 4 * (dimension_constraint - length/4 % dimension_constraint) return data + extra while (self.fermat_primality(length/4)): #pad probable prime pixel lengths to get nicer dimensions extra += '\x00' * 4 length += 4 return data + extra def get_dimensions(self, length, dimension_constraint = None, longest = None): length /= 4 if (dimension_constraint and dimension_constraint &lt; length): ceil = dimension_constraint else: ceil = int(length**0.5) while (ceil &gt; 0): if (length % ceil == 0): if (length / ceil &gt; ceil): size = (length / ceil, ceil) else: size = (ceil, length / ceil) if (longest == 'x' or not longest): return size else: return (size[1], size[0]) ceil -= 1 if __name__ == '__main__': usage = '-e &lt;file&gt;\tEncode this file to PNG\n' + \ '-d &lt;file&gt;\tDecode from this PNG\n' + \ '-o &lt;file&gt;\tFile to write to\n\n' + \ 'Optional options only used for encoding:\n' + \ '-c &lt;number&gt;\tConstrain one dimension to this length, defaults to 1024\n' + \ '-l &lt;x or y&gt;\tMake the X or Y dimension the longest, defaults to Y' try: opts, args = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], 'he:d:o:l:c:') except getopt.GetoptError, e: print str(e) print usage sys.exit() operation = None in_file = None out_file = None l = 'y' c = 1024 for opt, arg in opts: if (opt == '-h'): print usage sys.exit() elif (opt == '-e'): operation = 'e' in_file = arg elif (opt == '-d'): operation = 'd' in_file = arg elif (opt == '-o'): out_file = arg elif (opt == '-l'): l = arg.lower() elif (opt == '-c'): c = int(arg) if (operation == 'e'): BinPng(bin_path = in_file, longest = l, constraint = c).write_png(out_file) elif (operation == 'd'): BinPng(png_path = in_file).write_bin(out_file) elif (not operation): print usage

The method iisonly posted is nothing to do with zipping, it just concatenates two files and the software that opens them is quite tolerant of extra unnecessary data and ignores it. The actual method used to inject viruses into EXEs usually not how you described, it's quite a bit more complicated, generally either fitting the extra instructions into exist code caves in the original EXE or extending or adding a section by editing the PE header and section table and putting the extra code in that. You can't just concatenate two EXEs because the length won't match up with the data in the PE header and windows will just tell you it's not a valid win32 application.

You can do it with an EXE, I don't know about this method but my utility I made which did the same thing worked with anything. The only reason I could think of might make it not work using this method is if the image dimensions meant that it had extra data on the end (would probably look like a line of black pixels) especially if the EXE length was prime maybe. If you add extraneous data to the end of an EXE it won't work, but a RAR will. My utility had a metafile with file length so it didn't read in extra data and MD5 hashes to make sure it wasn't corrupt. I might still have it somewhere.

My view on gays is from outside the window, in a tree, with binoculars... masturbating. Wait... what?

PNG is non-lossy, there is no reason it disable compression. I made a utility a few years ago to use this method to use image shack as a file hosting system, with files split into multiple images to get around the image size limit.

Well, it wouldn't be possible to get every email since people can run their own private mail servers, but I don't think it would be impossible to force it on the ISPs and other major companies doing business in the UK like Google and Microsoft (Google was all too happy to censor their search results for the chinese government after all) if you're willing to spend billions on it since it would only really be emails sent in the UK (there would be no way to force email providers outside the UK to adhere to the law obviously). The projected cost of the national ID register by the London School of Economics is £12 billion to £18 billion, so I don't doubt the government would be willing to waste a lot of money on this as well. ISPs are already required to retain traffic logs for 2 years, which no doubt uses a lot of storage, although that obviously isn't centralised. Also it's amusing to see how Labour flipped 180 degrees on ID cards (and most of their other policies actually) since they got into power: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m98HRbc0Gbw

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7409593.stm No one seems to take me seriously when I say the UK is moving quite quickly towards a police state, but the police can hold people without charge for 4 weeks (the government pushed for 3 months initially and are now trying to raise it to 42 days), the police can stop and search you without reasonable suspicion (the 2000 terrorism act brought this in and it's since been used on over one hundred thousand people, do you think those people were all suspected terrorists?), we have more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world (about one for every 14 people), the government has passed legislation for a massive centralised ID register with fingerprints and iris scans for all 60 million people in the country (although I'm skeptical of the government's ability to implement such a large IT project), and lots of other stuff I could list. And now this attempt by the government to gets its hands on all emails and phone records in another lovely database. Of course in the case of emails it would be fairly easy to get around, just don't use an email provider that operates in the UK and use encryption, but most people won't. They can already use subpoenas to get the information in some cases of course, but when it's on a centralised government database, where I have no doubt the information will remain for eternity -- they even refuse to destroy the DNA records the police take of people who are arrested and not even charged, or who are acquitted, of whom there are over a million, including a hundred thousand children -- it's a lot easier to misuse (or lose, as the government lost some disks containing the records of 25 million people including bank details last year). In the 20th century police states traditionally functioned by having a secret police spying on the population with systems of informants and people generally being encouraged to spy on their neighbours, and although there are some elements of that, I think this is a new sort of police state. There is largely no need to go out and find information on somebody when you can monitor everything they say over all digital media, follow their movement through a massive CCTV network with face recognition software and GPS tracking systems in their vehicles (ostensibly for a pay-as-you drive form of road taxation) and know everything they buy because they have to use their thumbprint as identification for transactions. Essentially total information awareness through technology replaces the need for a gestapo or stasi. And those are all either already in place, or proposals for future systems. I'm sure we'll all be super-safe from terrorism though, after all, that's what all this is in aid of, eh?

That might be true if it weren't for the matter of the flights, which would be at least £300 at the very low end. Also the drinking age there is 21, which could be a problem.

Hah, good luck.

Hot.

I'm at 6mm at the moment, I'm probably gonna go up to about 10mm, but I dunno, I'll see how they look at 10 and decide.

Yeah, the ticket I bought to London last time (and then forgot to use because I'm a moron) was like £60. I'm inclined to go to this (and not forget this time) although I think Moonlit said he'd kill me if he met me in real life. Edit: Also Amsterdam sounds good.