J'accuse

[spinoza1111]

I'm continuing to research the constant attacks on personalities here
who when they respond are blamed as victims. Take a look at this shit:

http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/C_CPP/comp.lang.c/2006-04/msg02736.html

Heathfield STARTS the fight! Navia had implemented 128 bit arithmetic
in a new C compiler and Heathfield accuses him of being off topic!

For shame, Mr. Heathfield, for shame!

This is the same stunt Heathfield pulled when I made significant
connections between programming professionalism and general culture in
2000. If he cannot dominate a conversation (having a programming
career limited primarily to banks and insurance firms) he then seeks
to destroy people, often with absurd charges that the contribution is
off topic (the destruction of personalities being always, strangely
enough, on topic).

Navia has made a SIGNIFICANT contribution of FREE software to the C
programming community. His reward is to be targeted with posts with
anti-Semitic slurs in the title and to be told about "free speech"
when he rightfully complains. His reward for extending and
illuminating the murk of C is to be invited to go away.

Unlike smirking Seebach and foolish Feather, Navia didn't donate his
time to corporations in the hopes of social advancement. He made a
compiler that ordinary people can use with extensions we need. And
what is his reward!?

Schildt thanked me for cleaning up his wikipedia entry in a private
communication but perhaps wisely stays out of the fray.

Gerald Weinberg, by a simple application of a basic humanism to
programming inspired, in Weinberg's case, by the best traditions of
Judaism's humanism, realized that in structured walkthroughs, people
needed to make an effort to keep personalities out of technical
discussions. I'd only add that once this rule of common decency is
violated, especially at the egregious levels we see here (overt anti-
Semitism, codified anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism's grammatical
isomorphs, threats of violence, threats of career destruction), people
have the absolute RIGHT to be "drama queens", especially because the
very meaning of male and female is reversed in the corporation, where
men no longer defend themselves like men and no longer stick up for
each other like men.

Weinberg discovered that corporations could produce software on time
using basic decency. Nonetheless, corporations prize control over
decency and even, at times, profits, and the result was the
destruction of common decency and the elimination of the structured
walkthrough. It struggles to survive in Extreme Programming: yet
homophobic managers often destroy Extreme Programming or turn it into
a stupid competitive game.

The charter of this newsgroup needs to be revised. Any person who can
read can see when the focus of an article is not technology but the
destruction of a personality, and his or her decision can be supported
by statistical and grammatical analysis. If such a tool exists or is
developed, especially one that weights and factors by post sequence
(accounting for the fact that good people defend their good name), I
predict Heathfield will be found to be one of the worst offenders
here! He cannot give clear answers to programming questions: Herbert
Schildt can. He could not write a 128 bit arithmetic package: Navia
did. He cannot relate programming to the culture of which it is a
part: I did.

For this reason, he constantly starts useless wars and he needs to
behave himself, or leave. The charter of this ng must be changed. If
necessary, we should prohibit the use of person's names and FORCE each
contributor to refer STRICTLY to ideas and concepts alone, using an
automated tool!

You clowns don't know what happened to Captain Dreyfus in Navia's
France in 1900, of course: they don't teach that at community college.
A Jew, Dreyfus was falsely accused of spying for Germany and sent by
the thugs to Devil's Island. His case tore France apart because decent
people like Emile Zola saw that if Dreyfus could be railroaded, nobody
was safe, so Zola wrote J'Accuse, an indictment of a system dedicated
to the politics of personal destruction/. Likewise I accuse most of
the posters here of being the sort of people who lynched American
blacks, who persecuted Jews in France, and who programmed IBM tab
machines to produce neat lists for Auschwitz. You are banal and you
are evil because you come here to see people destroyed.

Oh am I being shrill? Too bad? Oh do I have to relearn a crap language
in order to fully analyze your beastly misuse of technology in the
service of barbarism? So be it. I accuse you of being barbarians and
incompetent, half educated little paraprogrammers who come here to
destroy.

 

[jacob navia]

Richard Heathfield a écrit :

Topicality is essential to Usenet's users. I know that you don't
understand this. Destruction of personalities is not topical here, so
please do it in a newsgroup where it is topical.

<nonsense snipped>

My answer was on topic. The user asked how he could use 128 bit numbers
in C. I answered that my compiler provides native support for 128 bit
numbers.

Note that this extensions are EXPLICTELY mentioned in the C standard as
common extensions.

There is NO WAY that you can say that my answer was off topic.

Of course when you discuss the bible (with lowercase!) or english
literature that's always on topic by definition.

There only one english word that describes your behavior

HYPOCRISY hyâ‹…pocâ‹…riâ‹…sy
–noun, plural -sies.
1. a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious
beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.
2. a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.

 

[spinoza1111]

In


The cited thread was not about C, but about an extension to an
implementation. It properly belonged in comp.compilers.lcc.

It was about C. Navia made a contribution. Because you cannot even
talk sensibly about runtime stacks, you set out to destroy his
reputation and you enabled anti-semitic comments to be made about him.

That thread was more about sociology than about programming, and
properly belonged in a sociology newsgroup, not a programming
newsgroup.

It was one of the most popular threads of 2000, and on the basis of
that and other threads, I was invited to a forum sponsored by
Princeton University Press with Mike Godwin and Cass Sunstein.

Topicality is essential to Usenet's users. I know that you don't
understand this. Destruction of personalities is not topical here, so
please do it in a newsgroup where it is topical.

You're the destructive bastard here. Simple sequencing shows that you
start shit all the time while people are trying to have a civilized
conversation. PLEASE LEAVE.

And as I have said, your hatred, and your closeted homophobia and ill-
concealed sexual problems cause you to attack men who have the
maturity and courage to take risks and make mistakes. Your hatred is
always your topic, and it is off topic. JUST LEAVE.

This newsgroup has no charter.

How nice for you.

 

[spinoza1111]

Richard Heathfield a écrit :





My answer was on topic. The user asked how he could use 128 bit numbers
in C. I answered that my compiler provides native support for 128 bit
numbers.

Note that this extensions are EXPLICTELY mentioned in the C standard as
common extensions.

There is NO WAY that you can say that my answer was off topic.

Of course when you discuss the bible (with lowercase!) or english
literature that's always on topic by definition.

There only one english word that describes your behavior

HYPOCRISY hyâ‹…pocâ‹…riâ‹…sy
–noun, plural -sies.
1.      a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious
beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.
2.      a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.

Cinq etoiles!

 

[jacob navia]

Richard Heathfield a écrit :

No, it wasn't.


Yes, I know. That doesn't make your answer topical.

According to who?

Ahh According to mr heathfield of course

Right. So a topical answer would have been something like: "Although
native integer types are permitted to be wide enough to meet your
requirement, they are not required to be; unless your implementation
supports types that are wide enough, you will need to use (or write)
an arbitrary-precision integer library. Some implementations may
provide this as extensions, and at least two third-party libraries
(GMP and MIRACL) exist."

Note the complete absence of any mention of a particular compiler.

Of course, only mention of GNU. Miracl is commercial in the same
sense as lcc, but of course heathfield DICTATES that mentioning
lcc is bad but mentioning MIRACL is OK.


[snip rest of drivel]

heathfield has NO AUTHORITY here to say that a common extension,
mentioned as such in the C standard is "off topic".

 

[spinoza1111]

Richard Heathfield a écrit :

According to who?

Ahh According to mr heathfield of course

According to the current topicality conventions of this group. I have
lobbied for looser topicality, but so far I have been unsuccessful.

Of course, only mention of GNU. Miracl is commercial in the same
sense as lcc, but of course heathfield DICTATES that mentioning
lcc is bad but mentioning MIRACL is OK.

The mentions of GMP and MIRACL are of course off-topic, and I should
have either omitted them from the above suggested answer or at least
marked them as off-topic.

If I had a commercial interest in MIRACL (which I don't), it would be
inappropriate for me to mention it at all without also mentioning
that commercial interest.

[snip rest of drivel]

heathfield has NO AUTHORITY here to say that a common extension,
mentioned as such in the C standard is "off topic".

If you're saying I don't get to decide what is topical and what isn't,
I agree. I personally would prefer it if the topic were a little
looser, but it is *not* up to me, and neither is it up to you.

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
Sig line vacant - apply within- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

This is complete nonsense. When I started to relearn C, I searched for
a free compiler that would run simply under Windows in its DOS
environment. I found Dave Hansen of Princeton's computer science
department, who I knew and from whom I took a class in compiler
development as an auditor, using the compiler. Therefore, Navia's work
and contribution is of high value, right here in clc. We need to know
about it.

Its extensions and improvements have been made diligently separable
from the standard by a considerable amount of hard work from Navia,
and they are useful. In particular, 128 bit arithmetic is useful in
cryptography. Many expert C programmers have felt a need for extra
precision: when I worked for John Nash at Princeton, he was
implementing extended precision for his mathematical research.

Whereas Richard Heathfield's constant attempts to undermine people who
don't share his half-educated vision thing and his moronic truthiness
are most definitely off-topic, since they belong in a newsgroup for
personal destruction.

By his constant attempts to undermine Navia, and re-present him as the
friendless, excluded "drama queen" not fit to post here, Richard
Heathfield exposed Navia to antisemitic attacks placed in the title of
posts. He sent the message that thereby attacking Navia would be
"valid criticism" and "free speech". This is what SS thugs did who
were too cowardly to beat up Social Democrats and Communists: the used
the SA to do their dirty work.

I do NOT think linking Navia's treatment to the Holocaust or the case
of Dreyfus extreme. I instead sense real hatred here, and real fear
based on the fact that many of you creeps appear to me unemployable as
programmers.

 

[spinoza1111]

In

spinoza1111wrote:


Having reviewed the thread in the light of Jacob Navia's reply just
now, I note that I missed the OP for that thread. I am perfectly
prepared to concede that the OP's question was topical. It was Jacob
Navia's reply that was not.

Nonsense. He met a need. You don't meet people's needs except for the
newbiest of newbie questions.

Unlike you, I don't try to force people to leave this newsgroup.

I have no ability to force you. I'm asking you to. Whereas you
deliberately try to drive people out by making the topic of thousands
of thread the professional competence and standing of your opponents
in such an extreme manner that you endanger their employment. You also
encourage anti-Semites and people with anger management problems to
act out here in ways that may yet lead to violence done to your
targets in meat space.

 

[spinoza1111]

No, it wasn't.


Yes, I know. That doesn't make your answer topical.


Right. So a topical answer would have been something like: "Although
native integer types are permitted to be wide enough to meet your
requirement, they are not required to be; unless your implementation
supports types that are wide enough, you will need to use (or write)
an arbitrary-precision integer library. Some implementations may
provide this as extensions, and at least two third-party libraries
(GMP and MIRACL) exist."

Note the complete absence of any mention of a particular compiler.


Your answer was off-topic.


No, it isn't, whether it be in upper, lower, or mixed case. Yes, I
occasionally take part in off-topic discussions. When I do so, you
are perfectly within your rights to call me on it. You frequently
start off-topic discussions, or turn them off-topic. When you do so,
I am perfectly within my rights to call you on it.





Right. Everyone is a hypocrite - even those who pretend otherwise. For

This is the nihilism of the criminal who can't concede that anything
is clean because he's a piece of filth.

example, you frequently claim that you don't charge for your
software, but it is plain from your Web site that you do.

Richard Heathfield, you're a rat bastard son of a bitch. Have you no
shame, sir?

Like many creators of open source or "free" software, Navia is
perfectly willing to let people use his software noncommercially for
free, but would like businesses to pay. This is not "hypocrisy". How
dare you, sir, make this charge.

 

[Chris McDonald]

.... when I worked for John Nash at Princeton, he was
implementing extended precision for his mathematical research.

Do you think you could squeeze any more mileage out of this?
Perhaps you could convince just one person of its relevance if you state
it in in every post that you make?

 

[spinoza1111]

Do you think you could squeeze any more mileage out of this?
Perhaps you could convince just one person of its relevance if you state
it in in every post that you make?

I don't mention it in every post, but I will use it to establish a
verifiable credibility as appropriate, because programmers who've
worked for "banks and insurance companies" shouldn't be allowed to
bully guys like Navia, and if I can use my background to defend him,
there's no point in hiding this small point of light under a bushel. I
understand very, very well that in corporations which hire programmers
who sit around and play games while the "end users" spend months
trying to figure out "what they want", the boundary between competence
and pretension becomes blurred.

 

[spinoza1111]

In

spinoza1111wrote:


Presumably you mean you deny you're a hypocrite. How hypocritical.

You are a child. The issue isn't one of hypocrisy. It's that Jacob's a
contributor and on-topic, and you contribute jack and are forever
changing the subject to the defective character of your adversary, and
then, of course, you deny your hate and rage.

Once again. Isn't Sams Publishers paying you to be hear? I would need
to be paid to post as much as you.

You misunderstood the "charge", like you misunderstand so many things.
Really it's quite amazing you manage to make it to work each day
without getting lost - if indeed you do.

It is not hypocrisy to allow noncommercial use for free whilst
charging for commercial use. The hypocrisy comes in claiming that he
doesn't charge for his compiler, when quite clearly he does charge
for it. The fact that he doesn't *always* charge for it doesn't mean
he doesn't charge for it.

Stallman explained a long time ago that "free software" isn't
necessarily free of charge although it can be: he said it's more like
free speech than free beer. You are making a false charge.

 

[spinoza1111]

In <[email protected]>,

spinoza1111wrote:



Look up "therefore" in a good English dictionary.

Gee, are you still using Johnson's Dictionary? Was it a prize in
Borstal?

As for the value of Jacob Navia's work, it is obviously valuable to
/him/, since it represents an income stream for him. Here in
comp.lang.c, however, the focus is on the language, not on
implementations, which tend to have their own newsgroups. The
newsgroup comp.compilers.lcc is well-suited for lcc-win32-specific
discussions.

These groups are for specific questions about installation and use.
Navia was addressing an aporia in C for which he had a solution. He
needed to reach people who unlike Nash didn't want to have to write
their own extended precision C code. And they needed to hear about his
work.

You already know about it.


Undoubtedly. So are mass spectrometers. That doesn't make them topical
in this newsgroup, however.

Well, if you're a moron, then it's shoes and ships and sealing wax, or
the mad gardener's song: nothing, or everything, has anything to do
with anything. But part of being an educated person is being able to
see relationships. It's even part of the ability to reuse software.

Actually, it isn't as useful as you might think. For public key
crypto, for example, you need a lot more than 128 bits if you want to
stop people reading your stuff.

Arguably false, since computer security in general and cryptography in
particular is about "good enough security" because there is no
absolute security. Many people want to learn about this issue and 128
bit arithmetic is useful at this level. You need to stop speaking with
authority about things you know nothing about, since reading your
online bio, I find you've worked only for a series of banks and
insurance companies. I don't know if you were fired from a series of
banks and insurance companies, but I'd hasard that you've lost your
job more than once for being a pompous idiot.

I have every respect for John Nash, although if you are telling the
truth (not a given) about working for him then his judgement about
his workers is obviously a little suspect. But I have never heard him
described as an expert C programmer. Do you have any independent
corroborative evidence? (I know you won't provide any, so I guess
it's safe to conclude that you have none, because you're just making
stuff up again.)

As one who's worked and traveled all over the world and been
privileged to teach at DeVry and tutor at Princeton, I discovered by
1987 that only the lower middle class believes in "expertise" in
programming languages. I've already told you that I taught C at
Princeton because the computer science department was unwilling to
dignify C as an academic topic. I've worked for several entrepreneurs
who've written software packages for their business in C and Visual
Basic on their lunch breaks.

Some of these entrepreneurs may not know about certain things: others
in my experience have avoided common programming errors through native
intelligence. Nash was representative of the latter class. Without for
a moment thinking that "computer programming" was any more important
than "penmanship", Nash naturally wrote in a style that encapsulated
discoveries arrived at by others after years of work.

Rubbish. As an implementor, Jacob Navia could and should be a very
valuable member of this newsgroup.

But he won't be because you won't let him.

You keep saying this. I have no idea why. It's simply not true. I have
nothing but revulsion for anti-Semitism. I believe you referred to
Spinoza (a Jew) as a slob. Clearly, you are anti-Semitic.

Many Germans (cf Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust) had revulsion for
anti-semitism but nonetheless enthusiastically wired plugboards for
IBM card punch equipment and printed beautiful lists of Jews for the
camps. The apparatus (here, the Internet) allows you to fantasize that
you're not harming people but you are.

I know you don't pay any attention to Godwin's Law, but you just lost
the debate in the eyes of those who do.

As I have said before, Godwin doesn't know the implication and meaning
of his own law. The fact is that the demographic of these newsgroup is
white male and lower middle class, and this demographic is the most
likely to be Fascist.

If you think I hate Jacob Navia you really are completely nuts. I
don't particularly /like/ him, but I certainly don't hate him, and I
even have a fair amount of respect for him. I'd respect him a lot
more if he could learn not to promote his product here and if he
could learn how to disagree politely.

This is a lie. You're fucking with him, you're creating a "digital
shadow" which is available to potential employers and clients, and you
may be doing this on behalf of an employer or publisher.

 

[Willem]

spinoza1111 wrote:
) Once again. Isn't Sams Publishers paying you to be hear? I would need
) to be paid to post as much as you.

You post more than him. So who is paying you ?


SaSW, Willem
--
Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for any of the statements
made in the above text. For all I know I might be
drugged or something..
No I'm not paranoid. You all think I'm paranoid, don't you !
#EOT

 

[Nick Keighley]

don't quote sigs.

This is complete nonsense. When I started to relearn C, I searched for
a free compiler that would run simply under Windows in its DOS
environment. I found Dave Hansen of Princeton's computer science
department, who I knew and from whom I took a class in compiler
development as an auditor, using the compiler. Therefore, Navia's work
and contribution is of high value, right here in clc. We need to know
about it.

be careful. There's lcc which was written by someone else and lcc-
win32
writtin by Jacob Navia. I don't believe Jacob's compiler will run
under
DOS.

People sometimes ask about C compilers and get a list of available
compilers. No one calls "off-topic" in these threads. But Jacob was
discussing a non-standard extension which makes it, a bit, off-topic.
I must admit if I needed to do calculations with 128 bit quantities
then a compiler that supported it might be handy. I'd also like
to be told that I *was* using an extension.

[lcc-win32]'s extensions and improvements [...] are useful.

no one denied this

In particular, 128 bit arithmetic is useful in cryptography.

I do NOT think linking Navia's treatment to the Holocaust or the case
of Dreyfus extreme.

then you are certifiable

 

[Nick Keighley]

Like many creators of open source or "free" software, Navia is
perfectly willing to let people use his software noncommercially for
free, but would like businesses to pay. This is not "hypocrisy". How
dare you, sir, make this charge.

is lcc-win32 open source? It certainly ain't "free"

 

[Noob]

Of course, only mention of GNU.

Your bitterness against GCC is somewhat entertaining.

Miracl is commercial in the same
sense as lcc, but of course heathfield DICTATES that mentioning
lcc is bad but mentioning MIRACL is OK.

YOUR mentioning lcc (without proper disclaimers) is inappropriate.

 

[spinoza1111]

is lcc-win32 open source? It certainly ain't "free"

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32/ (Navia's terms)
http://opensource.org/docs/osd (OSI definition)

Navia is what we'd commonly understand as open software, but it is not
open source, since there's no indication at the above site. He may
give us more correct information in this discussion.

 

[spinoza1111]

don't quote sigs.


be careful. There's lcc which was written by someone else and lcc-
win32
writtin by Jacob Navia. I don't believe Jacob's compiler will run
under
DOS.

Of course. I meant I wanted to run it in the DOS-like window that
still exists even in Vista.

People sometimes ask about C compilers and get a list of available
compilers. No one calls "off-topic" in these threads. But Jacob was
discussing a non-standard extension which makes it, a bit, off-topic.
I must admit if I needed to do calculations with 128 bit quantities
then a compiler that supported it might be handy. I'd also like
to be told that I *was* using an extension.

That's what he said it was. This is ridiculous. Under a strict
application of your own rule, you could not even discuss problems in
writing applications programs in C, since understanding how a C
program to do accounting would necessitate some discussion of
accounting! And you most certainly would have to cease making
individuals the grammatical subject (Mr. Poo did this, Mr Fu did that)
or object (we hate him) of your verbs. You would have to discuss using
C to write compilers for C in the most abstract terms, and not one of
you has the writing skill, charity or discipline to do this.

[lcc-win32]'s extensions and improvements [...] are useful.

no one denied this

Which makes his treatment worse.

then you are certifiable\

Only if psychiatry has become a tool of control. Look, life looked
normal inside German "tabulating" shops during the Holocaust, and
people to whom it looked deviant were at a minimum called crazy. In
the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, life looked normal inside
computer centres and people to whom it looked deviant were labeled as
"functioning schizophrenics" and carted away. John Nash was considered
"crazy" in Roanoke because of conventional attitudes, but for us at
Princeton, riding a bicycle, checking out library books, and working
on equations in a cafeteria were "normal" activities.

You need to take a long hard look at yourself and what's going on
here. You collectively act like maddened children.

 

[spinoza1111]

spinoza1111wrote:

) Once again. Isn't Sams Publishers paying you to be hear? I would need
) to be paid to post as much as you.

You post more than him.  So who is paying you ?

Not constantly, Mijn Heer. I take long vacations. He doesn't. And are
you making an offer?

 

[spinoza1111]

In <[email protected]>,





spinoza1111wrote:



Whether or not you are correct about that, *this* group is for
specific discussion about C, not about specific implementations.
Whether those groups have the topic you specify or not, they
certainly have a topic. So does this one.


I already covered that elsethread.




Not for the criteria I specified.


Those who speak with authority on Usenet do so because they speak from
knowledge. That's why I would pay a huge amount of attention to a
claim by Keith Thompson or Dik Winter or James Kuyper or Larry Jones
or any of a number of others that I'd made a mistake - they speak
from knowledge, and thus have my respect. They have the authority
that comes from knowing what you're talking about. Faced, however,
with such a claim from someone like - oh, you for example, I would
pay much less attention, since I know from experience that you don't
know spit about C. I grant you less authority over my reaction than I
grant to them because they know more about C than you do.

I really don't care, because as it happens, Dik, Keith et al. don't
impress me in the slightest, and you have so inappropriately
specialised in and used C (apparently at banks and insurance
companies, where its use is a threat to the public interest) that you
don't "know" it in context.

Read Heidegger or Husserl, if you can. It's a scientific, Western
fallacy to put a lion in a zoo and say with complete seriousness that
"this is a lion", because a lion in a zoo is a mangy caged animal, not
a lion at all, because the lion (unlike an hominid) was bred by
evolution (you know, evolution) to exist and flourish in the savannah.

Likewise, you cannot make a serious claim to know C as an authority,
since you are so ignorant about, and baselessly prejudiced against, so
many other languages. As is the case with most corporate programmers,
your worklife has so debased you through long hours that you are
starkly ignorant, not only of cultural matters as they impinge upon
technology, but of basic computer science: your absurd claims about
stacks versus "parameter blocks" make this clear.

Whereas Herb Schildt is polymath with regards to C. He knows Java, he
knows VB, and he knows enough about basic runtime computer science to
be dangerous, in the sense that unlike you, Seebach, Thompson, Winter
or Clive Feather, he can teach his knowledge. You folks claim
knowledge but cannot teach it, and this means you don't have the
knowledge you claim in my view.

Your "C" is a few acres of rain forest left untouched by an oil
company to show it cares about the environment, or a mangy "lion" in a
zoo, because you're unable to relate, and you whine about people being
"off topic" when they can connect the dots.

I have seen half of your level of knowledge acquired overnight by
people in Shenzen and entrepreneurs who want to develop software for
their business. The other half consists mostly of saws, prejudice and
folklore such as your absurd and silly claims about main() and
"parameter blocks". The remainder consists of "knowledge" which can
only be groaned minatorily as prohibition and negative facts in a
weird folkloric world.

So - speaking with such authority as I can muster on the subject of
cryptography - I would reiterate that, for public key crypto, 128
bits is insufficient if the goal is to stop people reading your
stuff.

I already know how to stop people reading my stuff (that's a joke,
bonehead).

People wanted to "run before they could walk" and 128 bits helps them
to do so. You're insisting on being right in the same way as my
student "Otto": low self-esteem.

The following quotation from RSA's Web site is from an FAQ after news
had been received of a successful factorisation of a 512-bit number:

"The practical significance is a reminder of the importance of
choosing sufficiently large key sizes. Just as the DES Challenges
that RSA Laboratories sponsored in recent years have emphasized the
potential risks of staying at the 56-bit level for session
encryption, the RSA Factoring Challenges highlight the issues around
staying at the 512-bit level for the RSA algorithm. Although these
lower key sizes have been popular in products developed in the past,
RSA Laboratories has been recommending larger key sizes in both cases
for several years. Most new standards for cryptography specify higher
key sizes, and the factorization result is an encouragement to follow
those recommendations."

RSA clearly thinks that staying at 512 bits has security implications
(note that as mentioned earlier this is specifically for public key
crypto, not symmetric crypto). How do you think they feel about 128
bits?

zzzzz....



His utility to this group is under his control, not mine. He
continually undermines himself by posting commercial stuff and by

Yeah, I've seen corporate drones kick the shit out of women
programmers, and good programmers, and then go on break or to Hooters
after Elvis has left the building, and talk about how she or he knew
their stuff, but was "her own worst enemy". The function of this
language is to blame the victim so that we can feel good about
ourselves.

fighting with C experts instead of discussing with them. He has often
called people names - "liar", "moron", etc - when they disagree with
him.

You're not "C experts" in my book. A "C expert" would be a tenured
computer science professor or CIO who learned C years ago in a day,
wrote a magnificent program in it, and then abandoned it as soon as
Mathematica (in Nash's case) or Visual Basic .Net (in Dan Appleman's
case) came out. A "C Expert", if he stays with C for some masochistic
reason, would be a guy who's written a C compiler in C.

And who has written a C compiler in C?

My goodness, here comes Herb the Schildt and Jacob le Navia. Isn't
that a kiss my ass?

I wouldn't be surprised if Dik Winter or maybe, just maybe, Keith
Thompson have written C compilers in C.

But YOU need to go away for a while for a long rest (giving us a rest
as well as your sorry ass). Then, you need to write a C compiler in C.
Then you may come back. Have fun with those parameter blocks.