On the other hand, if that good of a tranny mech, what Ijit locked him up?

A good tranny mech is worth a 1000 trigger happy LOs, hell their rarer then good brain surgeons.

You can have algorithms that generate pseudorandom numbers from a smallish (100 bit or so) seed that are unpredictable, even if you see lots of outputs from the generator. Those are called cryptographic PRNGs, and they’re pretty common in crypto programs. But most PRNGs used by games and statistical software and used by default in compilers are the weaker non-cryptographic kind.

The secret seed has to be generated by some unpredictable process, which can’t come down to just running an algorithm. In hardware, the process is usually built on top of thermal noise in circuits. In software, it’s usually based on measuring stuff that is ultimately affected by timing of hard drive accesses and human interaction with the computer and race conditions between independent pieces of hardware vying for the computers attention.

The seed is a potential weak point, since if someone steals it they can predict all outputs, even if you are using a crytpographic PRNG. So some systems just do the physical process (like those lottery ball machines) or generate a new seed for every output (you can think of /dev/random as working kind of that way).

But they never see the reality, such as their memory being replaced by a blighted lot, or a run down building, or an unused church or movie theater. Even then, they adjust the picture in their mind to see the memory. If there’s a completely different reality facing them, that’s different. Plus, it’s the guilt factor: “oh, we *should* preserve heritage.” “We *shouldn’t* ‘let’ them tear that building down.”

So they give these boards power that’s essentially unchecked by anything except the legislature and the governor (for state agencies) or the Mayor and city council. They’re not elected, and they have absolutely no reason to give in on anything, because they can always point to “We’re protecting ‘history’.” So you do what they want, or you don’t get your concurrence / permit.

i rebuilt a building that is now 115 years old, had burned down three times, and had been abandoned for 36 years specifically because the developer that bought the land to build a college dormitory was disallowed to tear the building down to do so. The building was unsafe, rotten, and in a state of disrepair that I cannot even begin to describe. Skylights had been broken out decades ago, so it was raining, snowing, and so forth inside the building. Moreover, the building had been abandoned 36 years prior because it was essentially useless once it’s original use was finished – it was a hotel and storefront in a part of town that had evolved beyond hotels and storefronts – it is now an industrial center if anything. A college is moving into the area so they needed dorm space, and the HPS wouldn’t let them tear out this derelict of a building. he had to rebuild it to make it into a dormitory, sacrificing 20,000 square feet that he could have had had he been allowed to build the new building, and resulting in a moldy, rotten POS building that IMHO is unsafe for any student to live in. Your government, hard at work, splitting atoms with their mind.

So trying to minimize the effects of change might be worthwhile for some, but for humanity as a whole, the effort is a loser, and in no way historically significant in the frame of reference of the earth.

Probably a completely made up story, but fits the template: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/balusters_and_bureaucrats.html

http://www.stltoday.com/news/state-and-regional/missouri/article_4234f7f1-332a-5072-b73f-3c34a013c85b.html

I’ve been told that generating random numbers is impossible. They have to simulate this ‘randomness’ with complex algorithms.

Software developer here. This isn’t really true, although I suppose there is some “truthiness” to it. In software, if you want to make a random number, you usually use what is called a “pseudorandom” number generator. These generate random numbers, but in a way that can be predicted. This is fine for most situations.

However, it is not impossible to get “true random” numbers, and you will want to use a “true random” source for many applications, especially anything related to cryptography. One way to get “true random” numbers would be to measure radioactive decay of a physical sample, measuring background radiation from the sky, or various functions dealing with sound. It is not impossible, and if the applications is important enough you should use a true random source.

2. Yay Cory Maye!

Example: owner of an old ass house has part of his fence destroyed in a storm. Historic preservation board says he has to rebuild it in the exact same place, same style. Code Enforcement says that all new fencing has to be X number of feet from the street and he can’t rebuild exactly where it was.

Pissing match ensues.