the bigger question is *why* would society want to thaw someone from our time 500 or even 5000 years ahead?
There would be no practical reason, short of some bio-warfare having destroyed the genome of human species. This had been discussed in SciFi (search for "corpsicle," for example.) Short of some major philanthropy, nobody needs dead people - especially if their meager $1 investment 1000 years ago can today amount to quite something. It's much easier to just confiscate the money and destroy the corpse. Dead aren't going to complain, are they?
I can only think of one scenario where mass reanimation would make sense. Imagine that you have a planet that is barely suitable for human habitation - either it's too far, or it's too inhospitable, or it is too useless. You can ship all those corpsicles there and thaw them. Then let them fend for themselves. If they manage, that would be another colony. If they don't, no big loss. This would also take care of the disparity in social environment - the colonists will start with something that they are familiar with, receiving innovations only when they are ready for them.
I think society has a little right to frown upon people removing themselves from it, unless they made up for the effort society made in bringing them up. Your own family's effort is especially difficult to be offset.
This suggests that there is a social contract that you can be entered without your approval, and that contract imposes duties upon you. I say hell no, there is no such contract until I review it and agree to it. The society does not have to raise children. It does that anyhow, at the risk that some children will grow to be bad members of the society. At least that's what an enlightened society would do. Most societies on the planet are not enlightened; they make children just because it happens, and because women like to have them.
It does not matter why the family produced a child. Usually it's just because the parents "felt the need." (Hardly anyone can claim today that it was financial reasons, or support in old age, that prompted them to have children. If anything, children usually make you poorer.) You can say "your own family's effort is especially difficult to be offset," but someone can say that "your own family's effort is especially difficult to forgive." Making a decision on behalf of a sentient being is a huge responsibility. As a trivial example, imagine two slaves who are held in a cage for all their life. They one day produce a child - who, of course, will stay in the cage with them. Was the parents' decision wise? Can the child, who will never see anything but pain and suffering in his life, forgive his parents? If their decision was not wise, is there a nonarbitrary threshold past which we can say that a given level of comfort is sufficient? Remember, nobody escapes death. Teasing people with life and then taking it away is cruel in itself, regardless of all the philosophy that people invented to avoid talking about this issue.
The Bitcoin "difficulty" level is now increasing so fast that late hardware is unprofitable when delivered.
I am not an expert on BTC, but as I understand the miners are an essential part of the network. What happens to BTC if all miners take their hardware and unplug it? ("It was a good racket while it lasted, but not anymore.")
For example, some argue that self-abuse (e.g. chronic drug use, or suicide) counts as harming others, in that by removing yourself from society, the other people in the society lose the benefits of your productivity/friendship/support/expertise/etc.
As if those "others" have any right to those benefits.
But apparently many think so, and they want to keep you around, like a milk cow, to be milked of your labor. Prohibition of suicide is in most (all?) major religions for this very reason. A good slave must remain alive, no matter what opinion he may have on the subject. Nothing changed since middle ages; a person cannot control his birth, and may not control his departure. Others need your labor, peasant!
Drug users harm the society simply by being dependent on the drug. I always was in favor of giving the drugs (which are cheap if made in an industrial process) to anyone who is stupid enough to take them. Advise people to not do that, just as you currently advise people to not jump off the tall buildings and not to lick high voltage wires. But if they do, it's their choice. They can have as much drug as they want (it will become worthless in the street.) Narcomafia crashes and burns. And the average IQ of the society increases.
You cannot trust Google or the cloud with your data.
If you store your data in the cloud, it means that:
The 3rd party knows that you have some data stored, and they know its size, and they know how often you modify it or add to it. The observer does not need to have access to your private key to see that.
You can never be sure that the data that you deleted was in fact deleted. In most cases, due to existence of tiered backups, it will take a long time to purge your data from an honestly operated system. If the system is ran by a Google-like entity, nothing ever gets deleted.
If the observer wishes to decrypt your data, they can always use the $5 wrench, or (if they want to stay undetected) they can send people to duplicate your HDD or to install a keylogger.
The best way to store your data is on your own HDD, encrypted. The observer still can break into your house, but they would have to do it without any information leading to that. (Such as they wouldn't know that you even have a computer, let alone how often you modify certain files.) Modern terabyte drives (USB 3.0 or eSATA) remove every reason to bother with cloud storage - unless you want an additional bottleneck in form of the Internet link and a bunch of additional vulnerabilities, often for a small extra fee. Most people would be perfectly happy with an encrypted USB Flash disk (IronKey etc.) that they can always carry with them.
It's certainly not a good desktop replacement. But as just a laptop it can be pretty good. Few people need 100% performance 100% of the time. If you do, go and buy a server. A laptop cannot even be cooled well enough to maintain 100% load for any extended length of time. Laptops are portable things; the fact that they can speed up temporarily when you are starting a program or doing something CPU-intensive is just an added bonus.
I've never had an issue with brown-outs either, but then again I live in the UK where we don't have many
I don't know how the power grid is physically implemented in the UK, but in the USA the wires and millions of transformers are mounted on wooden poles. Only in densest areas of cities you will find those cables underground. Here are power poles in Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley.) Brownouts and blackouts are frequent (several per year.) They are caused primarily by downed wires and by blown transformers. I have about 6 battery backups scattered around the house; they supply power to everything that I don't want to crash and reboot on every power surge.
The last brownout was about 3 months ago. It lasted for most of the day. The line voltage was hovering around 75V. When the workers found the cause they turned the power off for another couple of hours. You cannot run a datacenter on that quality of power; batteries and diesels are required.
The point is that for a great many people, the original "try to be like US/West" premise transformed into "US/West tried to tell us how to live", and all the negative outcomes were attached to that. And from there the next logical conclusion is - why would they tell us to do this, knowing that it would end up so badly, if they weren't deliberately trying to hurt us? It must be a cunning plan! OMG!
Well, now we know from the inside: the West itself doesn't have a clue how to live, and Western countries are plagued with all kinds of social problems. For one, they have ran out of other people's money after building up a HUGE population of welfare recipients. As another, they shipped all the industry to China. What is left? Half of the country is angry, hungry useless eaters with nothing to do.
Do I think the West was honest but just uneducated when they promoted the reforms? No way. Of course this opportunity was used by global chessboard players for their advantage. But all the heavy lifting (I mean "theft" here) was done by Russians themselves. Not by all, but that's only because an average Russian wasn't invited to steal whole industries. Well-connected ones got it all. And in the end, when Khodorkovsky was thrown onto the tarmac, very few cried for him. He made his bed, all by himself. He misread the tea leaves and forgot who is the boss. Too bad; but "ego primer - drugim nauka." Looks like it worked. Otherwise we'd be dragged into feudal wars all over Russia. Do not want.
Elsewhere you say:
whenever one of those NGOs becomes politically inconvenient, then - surprise surprise! - that particular one is "outed".
That plugs directly into the discussion of what system of government is better - a cathedral or a bazaar. Navalny and Kasparov are arguing for a bazaar because they can get a chance there. But is it better for the society? Historically, strong king (like Peter I) is associated with a strong country, and a weak king (Nikolay II) is associated with revolutions and dissolution of the empire. If you, as an average person, could choose when to live, which epoch would you pick?
Democracy is not the answer for one simple reason: the demos is not divinely wise. It has only an average IQ before the brainwashing is applied. (After the brainwashing you need a micro-IQ meter and a shielded room to make the measurement.) Why would you entrust the country to a [collective] person who is just smart enough to put his pants on with an instruction book? Many have said that people would be better off if the office holders are selected randomly from a phone book. The elections only select those who are most power-hungry, those who are the most convincing liars. And now we wonder why Obama lies about this and about that... because that's what he does best! The stupid electorate cannot make decisions above their own IQ level. We can see plenty of proof of that in recent history of the USA: "potatoe", tank, the towering intellect of W, the swiftboating meme, the destruction of Herman Cain... a smart elector would look at you as at an idiot if you mention any of that. But from the POV of an idiot, if a candidate uses an alternative spelling of a vegetable, he is not a presidential material.
As it seems, Putin is heavily borrowing from the Chinese model: "you can do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't involve politics." For most people that's all they want to hear, as long as the current President is not eating babies for breakfast. The concept of "good enough" is well known in the industry. At the same time the messy "bazaar," with never-ending political struggle, is not a good thing. People want stability, and bazaar does not offer stability even in the West.
In the Russian universe, the driving force behind everything is the USA.
Not everything, of course. You are exaggerating. But there are reasons why NGOs are hated so much. The reasons are in their history. NGOs formed - and were financed by the USA - as soon as Gorbachev made it possible. It was not perceived as bad at that time. But as those NGOs started pushing US policies in Russia, and as those policies started to crash and burn, the opinion flipped. NGOs' reputation was tarnished. Today the leaders of earliest NGOs are seen as traitors because they took foreign money and influenced the society to do what, as it is apparent today, was not the wisest choice. Was that an honest mistake? Who knows. It's not important. What is important is the end result. They failed. Today Russians are voting for an autocratic, strong, imperial President because they are sick and tired of weak figures (Yeltsin) because his lack of control resulted in massive theft of people's shared wealth. If you were not in Russia back then and you don't know what a voucher means in that context, then you are not fully aware of the situation.
How many NGOs today are financed by the CIA? It's not clear. But, just as it is in the USA, NGOs now have to report foreign sources and become registered as foreign agents. This does not create any new love to them. "Thus attacking NGO's is a patriot's duty," as you said. Would *you* want foreign agents push foreign policies in your own country?
Syrians, wonder why Russia works so hard to keep your local tyrant in power? The answer's there
Syrians don't need to watch TV to compare Assad, who was largely benign, to AQ head-choppers who burn churches. Perhaps it would be nice to have a 3rd option, just as it would be nice to have a choice outside of Obama and McCain/Romney, but that's not in the cards. Syrians want to survive first - and their chances are far better under Assad, especially if they have a misfortune to pray to a wrong god. Assad, just as any dictator, was pretty protective of his own office; but if you just live life and don't get involved in big politics, you are not in any danger. Same in China; same under Saddam (modulo his sons.) Dictators need their power base just as much as any democrat; bayonets of the Elite Guard reach only so far. The war in Syria shows that Assad has significant popular support. It's not overwhelming, but it's not a paper tiger either.
I generally don't disagree what you are saying. But here are some comments.
(1) If you buy a system with this chip and leave it off, part of your purchase price is a payment supporting the companies pushing this crap.
When all systems have that chip you simply have no option of not buying into it. This is already the case; that's why the OP was compelled to ask.
(2) If you buy a system with this chip and leave it off, you are contributing to their install-base figures, advancing them to the line where they start can start deploying the really nasty tactics.
I am not sure who "they" are. If you are talking about the Trusted Computing Group, they already have sufficient deployed base to offer services based on that chip.
(3) If we don't aggressively get to the message to not buy these PCs, people who are buying Windows regardless are more likely to buy ones with these chips
This is a hopeless quest. Even people on/. do not entirely understand what Trusted Computing is. People in the street haven't even heard the name. There is zero chance of educating them. Besides, some percentage of them will benefit from this technology - their computers *should* be protected from them:-) Too few people have strong feelings about their right to be free and anonymous on the net. Far more are happy to tell everything about themselves to every web site and every FB twit that comes along. You cannot protect stupids from themselves.
I dunno... two or three years it's possible you'll start running into an increasing percentage of websites that you can't view at all unless you have a Trust chip certifying that you're not running an ad-blocker, and that the Browser is DRM-compliant to not download copies of pictures and other page content.
Why would an independent business want to reduce its own audience? A "trust chip" cannot certify that you are not running something. That would require it to furnish reports about cryptographic signatures on the browser and on all the HTTP proxies that are present. I can compile my own Firefox or Konqueror or Lynx or Links or a number of other browsers.
Tablets and phones and other mobile devices do not have TC chips, so far. If the Web site owner insists on those signatures, his site will disappear from the face of Earth to everyone with a mobile browser. As their share grows, this is a suicidal tactic.
Besides, if major news sites switch to that method, you know what will happen? All the news will migrate to Slashdot. If Slashdot adopts this tactic, Slashdot2 will be open for business on the next morning. Geeks will have no difficulty with putting up their own servers. Even Freenet supports message boards and forums. Will that result in segregation of geeks into yet another slice of the society? Yes, it will - but only because of actions of the lawmakers.
in a decade or somesuch a large majority of home PCs could have the chip installed and ISP's could start deploying Trusted Network Connect do a "health check" before permitting you any internet access at all.
A good number of Internet-connected devices are not PCs. The simplest example: your router is not a PC. However it is a host on the Internet. What it does with IP packets that are sent to it is its personal affair. But some are terminated at the router itself, such as ICMP and port 8080 (if enabled.) The router can also issue its own HTTP requests for firmware update. You cannot block that. Then there are SIP phones and other communication gateways; there is industrial equipment.
Because obviously it's a "good thing" for an ISP to ensure that you're not connecting an infected or vulnerable computer to their network
It's not obvious to me. The only obvious thing that the ISP benefits from is money that you pay for the service. If your computer is infected and downloads terabytes of Viagra ads, it's just peachy - the ISP can charge you for extra traffic. If th
Those keys, and those reports, won't go anywhere if you use an OS that does not access the TPM hardware. (I presume the TPM hardware does not communicate with the PHY directly, and does not maintain TCP sessions. It's hard enough to do over Ethernet, and is even harder over WiFi, where encryption is the norm and where many different PHYs are present on the market, often connected over USB.) If your OS sends reports to 3rd parties, then the OS is the problem here.
If the OP wants to have a computer without TPM he can easily build a Linux box that runs on TPM-free hardware. There are tons of ARM boards, starting with R-Pi, that do not seem to have TPM. Browsing the Web does not require petaflops; encoding of a movie does, but it doesn't need the Internet. Keep your Windows computers behind the air gap.
On the other hand, if you are intent on using a proprietary OS, written by a company that is happy to exploit you, then perhaps you have no reason to complain. If Windows wants to report something to someone, you cannot stop that no matter what you do. Are you ready to block DNS queries, for example? They exfiltrate data. A well designed firewall would take a considerable effort to build, and even then you cannot be sure that Windows doesn't use yet another, 0-day trick to send the bits out. You simply cannot be sure. The same firewall will break lots of network-dependent software.
I specifically mentioned "fair." Why would it be fair for the humankind to pay a tax to a group of people who haven't done anything to earn those monies? Some were just standing around when the unique characteristics of their relative's cells was discovered; others weren't even born yet. Neither they, nor Ms. Lacks herself, worked toward that goal. A religionist would say that Ms. Lacks got her cells from God. I'd understand if she made her own body by her own design, but that's not the case.
IMO, it would be fair enough to just name the line of cells after the donor - and that was done. Her descendants shouldn't be mentioned at all, since they haven't done anything that would warrant honoring them for this particular discovery. The society doesn't need yet another clan of trust fund babies.
What would be a fair payment to the family for a sample of cells of a dead person? At that time nobody knew of any specific, unique properties of cells in that sample. Biopsies are always taken as part of the lab work. What happens to the cells later? Who cares? Is it even moral to try to stop a use of such cells if that use is so beneficial to the humankind?
Those megabucks that hundreds of companies earned were payment for the work of those companies. The HeLa cells only made it possible; but you cannot honestly charge an architect, today, 100x the price for the paper if his design, many years later, becomes known as the best building in the world. Your product - paper - did not become more valuable because a genius added something to it. HeLa cells would be useless if not another genius who recognized their value.
Was there an ethical problem? Perhaps. A permission should have been sought. But I, personally, don't care what happens to my body after I'm done using it. If it can be utilized with some benefit to others, more power to you. If not, just discard it.
An ebook reader is likely to be lighter and offer better battery life
The reader has to have at least a terabyte of storage. Ebook readers are generally toys; yes, you probably can cram several hundred books onto an e-reader, with minimum illustrations and probably in four shades of gray. That won't be very informative if color is of importance.
You also want your reader to be maintainable. Your laptop is just as fragile as the rest of the inheritance. You want to copy your data onto another laptop, and keep copying as necessary. Sometimes you will copy the data as payment. You cannot do that with an ebook reader - they are poor as computers.
Sometimes you will want something printed. There are many millions of printers out there, and many (laser ones) will survive for quite some time. Printed instructions will be necessary - people cannot memorize more than a handful of items, and writing by hand is not efficient. ebook readers cannot print.
All in all, an ebook reader would be far less valuable than a small notebook. There are many notebooks out there, and they can be mixed and matched to keep your system repaired or replaced. You cannot repair an ebook reader; if you open it up, there is nothing inside that you can pull out, move into another reader and access. Even the battery is custom, and it is often not replaceable. An ebook reader is a device for a rich and safe world.
This does not even touch other aspects of a general purpose computer that a notebook is. You can run software on it. Perhaps email and Internet would not be very valuable then, but you may want some engineering software, MS Office for taking notes, simple image processing software, offline maps. What is the value of GnuPG or PGP when you have to send a message so that if one of many gangs intercepts it, they can't figure out what it is about?
One important use of a computer is in radio communication; I mean digital modes here. It can be easily assumed that all communication lines would be inactive. Radio communication then becomes the primary method. CW and SSB on HF are nice; however they are not very useful for transmission of large amounts of data, and they require trained operators. Modes like PSK and MFSK transmit digital data, such as bytes. You can transmit and receive megabytes of text entirely automatically - and encrypted if necessary. But those modes are encoded and decoded by a computer. All this means that if you have a choice between carrying an ebook reader and a notebook, pick the notebook.
It will take years of survival before you'd be stable to make use of the knowledge stored by a laptop (did I mention the ebook reader? Yes I did) - even a hammer may be more useful until then.
As I mentioned, canned food is of no use when you are running away from pursuers. It doesn't mean that your bugout bag must contain nothing but 37 pairs of running shoes. You need a little of everything. A hammer may be useful, but hammers are a low value item - they can be grabbed in many places, and there are millions of hammers out there, and they are all the same. As SuricouRaven already mentioned, you will need tradeable items very soon. What are you going to trade? If you have a thousand tons of canned food in your pocket then probably you are OK. But if you are an average geek, your primary worth is in what you know and what you can do. A handyman would be very handy after TEOTWAWKI. Everyone can wield a hammer; but how many people have enough knowledge, in their head or in their computer, to rework a grid-synchronized inverter to work as an off-grid device? A standard solar panel makes DC that varies from zero to 340V. You can't connect anything to it directly, and the grid is gone, so the inverter happily stays off. What is the value of fixing that?
'scuse me for asking: why would you need a laptop in a post-apocalyptic world?
Knowledge will be the most valuable asset after the collapse of the civilization. Do you know off the top of your head how to make powder? No, not the smokeless propellant - just the good old black powder? It's not entirely trivial; many a powder plant blew up before scientists and engineers figured out how to work with it in relative safety. Or take the initiating explosives, such as primers. There are about twenty formulations known to man today; some are obsolete, some are OK, some are top notch. Do you know how to make one? Without a primer you will be relegated to flint locks, if not to muskets with ignition from a cord.
There will be a lot of technology left over after the collapse. Most of it will need repair. Who would readily remember how to disassemble, repair and put back together a certain pump? If you have a manual, you are golden. But the most valuable repair manual is the manual on repair of humans. Do you have medical ebooks in your collection? It just happens that I have a few broad references; not enough for brain surgery, but enough to deal with everyday injuries and diseases.
But where would you store all those Libraries of Congress with all that valuable data, in such a way that you can carry it, and in such a way that you can access it easily? A laptop with a terabyte drive would do it nicely. A bicycle, outside of a direct survival situation, does not even compare. But in a survival situation nothing matters except what helps you to survive. It doesn't mean that canned food is useless if you are, at this very moment, shooting at your pursuers.
Wouldn't it just be easier to teach people not to buy shit from spammers?
This is about just as easy as to teach people not to send spam.
The fact is that exactly 50% of the population have IQ below average. They operate with what is available to them. Some are only smart enough to send spam; other are not even as good, they read it and believe what they see. Some can't even read cursive:-) I can't imagine what avenues are open to those.
You cannot stop a social problem with a technological measure. If all fails, the spammer will hire 10,000 people in Africa to post spam using cut and paste templates.
A partial solution can be achieved only if each poster has to authenticate with the server using a globally unique ID that is assigned to that person at birth. Then if that person abuses their right to post, you can kick them by that ID - and they have no other ID to use. In the end spammers will run out of willing workers.
Naturally, religionists will have a problem with their panties, but it is indeed strange that people don't have a planet-wide ID. They should have it; then so many problems would disappear. (and new ones appear.)
There are strong Constitutional walls that prevent the Executive Branch from interfering with the operations of the Judicial Branch.
There are no walls, Constitutional or any other, on a golf course. If the safe with money can be only opened with three keys, held by three different key keepers, the simplest way to open the safe is to make sure that keepers of those keys are your men. Today not only that is in place, but also the public observers - who are expected to detect and report unusual happenings - are on your payroll.
A large number of unique breeds that exist today for specific purpose will be gone. You will end up with only a handful - a couple for meat, a couple for milk, and that's all. Small populations will disappear by dissolving in larger populations. Some herds will be just shipped to the beef processor while the plant is open.
But there is a larger question here. What is more humane: to create millions of calves, let them live for a couple years, and then kill them - or to not let them be in the first place? This is not an idle question. Life of a wild animal is full of pain and suffering. Would it be more humane to, say, sterilize all animals on the planet, so that they don't have to struggle for survival every day of their lives?
The answer "yes" to that would be very strange (though not unheard of.) The answer "no" would be far more common; however that answer would also indicate that it is more humane to continue breeding cattle.
Slashdot Mirror
the bigger question is *why* would society want to thaw someone from our time 500 or even 5000 years ahead?
There would be no practical reason, short of some bio-warfare having destroyed the genome of human species. This had been discussed in SciFi (search for "corpsicle," for example.) Short of some major philanthropy, nobody needs dead people - especially if their meager $1 investment 1000 years ago can today amount to quite something. It's much easier to just confiscate the money and destroy the corpse. Dead aren't going to complain, are they?
I can only think of one scenario where mass reanimation would make sense. Imagine that you have a planet that is barely suitable for human habitation - either it's too far, or it's too inhospitable, or it is too useless. You can ship all those corpsicles there and thaw them. Then let them fend for themselves. If they manage, that would be another colony. If they don't, no big loss. This would also take care of the disparity in social environment - the colonists will start with something that they are familiar with, receiving innovations only when they are ready for them.
Sorry, sighs and handwaving are not enough. A philosopher has to explain his position and his reasons to believe that he is correct.
I think society has a little right to frown upon people removing themselves from it, unless they made up for the effort society made in bringing them up. Your own family's effort is especially difficult to be offset.
This suggests that there is a social contract that you can be entered without your approval, and that contract imposes duties upon you. I say hell no, there is no such contract until I review it and agree to it. The society does not have to raise children. It does that anyhow, at the risk that some children will grow to be bad members of the society. At least that's what an enlightened society would do. Most societies on the planet are not enlightened; they make children just because it happens, and because women like to have them.
It does not matter why the family produced a child. Usually it's just because the parents "felt the need." (Hardly anyone can claim today that it was financial reasons, or support in old age, that prompted them to have children. If anything, children usually make you poorer.) You can say "your own family's effort is especially difficult to be offset," but someone can say that "your own family's effort is especially difficult to forgive." Making a decision on behalf of a sentient being is a huge responsibility. As a trivial example, imagine two slaves who are held in a cage for all their life. They one day produce a child - who, of course, will stay in the cage with them. Was the parents' decision wise? Can the child, who will never see anything but pain and suffering in his life, forgive his parents? If their decision was not wise, is there a nonarbitrary threshold past which we can say that a given level of comfort is sufficient? Remember, nobody escapes death. Teasing people with life and then taking it away is cruel in itself, regardless of all the philosophy that people invented to avoid talking about this issue.
The Bitcoin "difficulty" level is now increasing so fast that late hardware is unprofitable when delivered.
I am not an expert on BTC, but as I understand the miners are an essential part of the network. What happens to BTC if all miners take their hardware and unplug it? ("It was a good racket while it lasted, but not anymore.")
For example, some argue that self-abuse (e.g. chronic drug use, or suicide) counts as harming others, in that by removing yourself from society, the other people in the society lose the benefits of your productivity/friendship/support/expertise/etc.
As if those "others" have any right to those benefits.
But apparently many think so, and they want to keep you around, like a milk cow, to be milked of your labor. Prohibition of suicide is in most (all?) major religions for this very reason. A good slave must remain alive, no matter what opinion he may have on the subject. Nothing changed since middle ages; a person cannot control his birth, and may not control his departure. Others need your labor, peasant!
Drug users harm the society simply by being dependent on the drug. I always was in favor of giving the drugs (which are cheap if made in an industrial process) to anyone who is stupid enough to take them. Advise people to not do that, just as you currently advise people to not jump off the tall buildings and not to lick high voltage wires. But if they do, it's their choice. They can have as much drug as they want (it will become worthless in the street.) Narcomafia crashes and burns. And the average IQ of the society increases.
You cannot trust Google or the cloud with your data.
If you store your data in the cloud, it means that:
The best way to store your data is on your own HDD, encrypted. The observer still can break into your house, but they would have to do it without any information leading to that. (Such as they wouldn't know that you even have a computer, let alone how often you modify certain files.) Modern terabyte drives (USB 3.0 or eSATA) remove every reason to bother with cloud storage - unless you want an additional bottleneck in form of the Internet link and a bunch of additional vulnerabilities, often for a small extra fee. Most people would be perfectly happy with an encrypted USB Flash disk (IronKey etc.) that they can always carry with them.
Doesn't sound like a very good laptop.
It's certainly not a good desktop replacement. But as just a laptop it can be pretty good. Few people need 100% performance 100% of the time. If you do, go and buy a server. A laptop cannot even be cooled well enough to maintain 100% load for any extended length of time. Laptops are portable things; the fact that they can speed up temporarily when you are starting a program or doing something CPU-intensive is just an added bonus.
I've never had an issue with brown-outs either, but then again I live in the UK where we don't have many
I don't know how the power grid is physically implemented in the UK, but in the USA the wires and millions of transformers are mounted on wooden poles. Only in densest areas of cities you will find those cables underground. Here are power poles in Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley.) Brownouts and blackouts are frequent (several per year.) They are caused primarily by downed wires and by blown transformers. I have about 6 battery backups scattered around the house; they supply power to everything that I don't want to crash and reboot on every power surge.
The last brownout was about 3 months ago. It lasted for most of the day. The line voltage was hovering around 75V. When the workers found the cause they turned the power off for another couple of hours. You cannot run a datacenter on that quality of power; batteries and diesels are required.
The point is that for a great many people, the original "try to be like US/West" premise transformed into "US/West tried to tell us how to live", and all the negative outcomes were attached to that. And from there the next logical conclusion is - why would they tell us to do this, knowing that it would end up so badly, if they weren't deliberately trying to hurt us? It must be a cunning plan! OMG!
Well, now we know from the inside: the West itself doesn't have a clue how to live, and Western countries are plagued with all kinds of social problems. For one, they have ran out of other people's money after building up a HUGE population of welfare recipients. As another, they shipped all the industry to China. What is left? Half of the country is angry, hungry useless eaters with nothing to do.
Do I think the West was honest but just uneducated when they promoted the reforms? No way. Of course this opportunity was used by global chessboard players for their advantage. But all the heavy lifting (I mean "theft" here) was done by Russians themselves. Not by all, but that's only because an average Russian wasn't invited to steal whole industries. Well-connected ones got it all. And in the end, when Khodorkovsky was thrown onto the tarmac, very few cried for him. He made his bed, all by himself. He misread the tea leaves and forgot who is the boss. Too bad; but "ego primer - drugim nauka." Looks like it worked. Otherwise we'd be dragged into feudal wars all over Russia. Do not want.
Elsewhere you say:
whenever one of those NGOs becomes politically inconvenient, then - surprise surprise! - that particular one is "outed".
That plugs directly into the discussion of what system of government is better - a cathedral or a bazaar. Navalny and Kasparov are arguing for a bazaar because they can get a chance there. But is it better for the society? Historically, strong king (like Peter I) is associated with a strong country, and a weak king (Nikolay II) is associated with revolutions and dissolution of the empire. If you, as an average person, could choose when to live, which epoch would you pick?
Democracy is not the answer for one simple reason: the demos is not divinely wise. It has only an average IQ before the brainwashing is applied. (After the brainwashing you need a micro-IQ meter and a shielded room to make the measurement.) Why would you entrust the country to a [collective] person who is just smart enough to put his pants on with an instruction book? Many have said that people would be better off if the office holders are selected randomly from a phone book. The elections only select those who are most power-hungry, those who are the most convincing liars. And now we wonder why Obama lies about this and about that... because that's what he does best! The stupid electorate cannot make decisions above their own IQ level. We can see plenty of proof of that in recent history of the USA: "potatoe", tank, the towering intellect of W, the swiftboating meme, the destruction of Herman Cain... a smart elector would look at you as at an idiot if you mention any of that. But from the POV of an idiot, if a candidate uses an alternative spelling of a vegetable, he is not a presidential material.
As it seems, Putin is heavily borrowing from the Chinese model: "you can do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't involve politics." For most people that's all they want to hear, as long as the current President is not eating babies for breakfast. The concept of "good enough" is well known in the industry. At the same time the messy "bazaar," with never-ending political struggle, is not a good thing. People want stability, and bazaar does not offer stability even in the West.
when you're home is being bombed, you may not ask too many questions when someone offers you a gun or to help fight back.
What if someone offers you a nuke? That's what happened. AQ masterfully played on internal tensions.
Of course if Syrians *still* think that the civil war is the way to go then who I am to protest? It's their country and their lives.
Which is the most free country left in the world?
Somalia.
In the Russian universe, the driving force behind everything is the USA.
Not everything, of course. You are exaggerating. But there are reasons why NGOs are hated so much. The reasons are in their history. NGOs formed - and were financed by the USA - as soon as Gorbachev made it possible. It was not perceived as bad at that time. But as those NGOs started pushing US policies in Russia, and as those policies started to crash and burn, the opinion flipped. NGOs' reputation was tarnished. Today the leaders of earliest NGOs are seen as traitors because they took foreign money and influenced the society to do what, as it is apparent today, was not the wisest choice. Was that an honest mistake? Who knows. It's not important. What is important is the end result. They failed. Today Russians are voting for an autocratic, strong, imperial President because they are sick and tired of weak figures (Yeltsin) because his lack of control resulted in massive theft of people's shared wealth. If you were not in Russia back then and you don't know what a voucher means in that context, then you are not fully aware of the situation.
How many NGOs today are financed by the CIA? It's not clear. But, just as it is in the USA, NGOs now have to report foreign sources and become registered as foreign agents. This does not create any new love to them. "Thus attacking NGO's is a patriot's duty," as you said. Would *you* want foreign agents push foreign policies in your own country?
Syrians, wonder why Russia works so hard to keep your local tyrant in power? The answer's there
Syrians don't need to watch TV to compare Assad, who was largely benign, to AQ head-choppers who burn churches. Perhaps it would be nice to have a 3rd option, just as it would be nice to have a choice outside of Obama and McCain/Romney, but that's not in the cards. Syrians want to survive first - and their chances are far better under Assad, especially if they have a misfortune to pray to a wrong god. Assad, just as any dictator, was pretty protective of his own office; but if you just live life and don't get involved in big politics, you are not in any danger. Same in China; same under Saddam (modulo his sons.) Dictators need their power base just as much as any democrat; bayonets of the Elite Guard reach only so far. The war in Syria shows that Assad has significant popular support. It's not overwhelming, but it's not a paper tiger either.
I generally don't disagree what you are saying. But here are some comments.
(1) If you buy a system with this chip and leave it off, part of your purchase price is a payment supporting the companies pushing this crap.
When all systems have that chip you simply have no option of not buying into it. This is already the case; that's why the OP was compelled to ask.
(2) If you buy a system with this chip and leave it off, you are contributing to their install-base figures, advancing them to the line where they start can start deploying the really nasty tactics.
I am not sure who "they" are. If you are talking about the Trusted Computing Group, they already have sufficient deployed base to offer services based on that chip.
(3) If we don't aggressively get to the message to not buy these PCs, people who are buying Windows regardless are more likely to buy ones with these chips
This is a hopeless quest. Even people on /. do not entirely understand what Trusted Computing is. People in the street haven't even heard the name. There is zero chance of educating them. Besides, some percentage of them will benefit from this technology - their computers *should* be protected from them :-) Too few people have strong feelings about their right to be free and anonymous on the net. Far more are happy to tell everything about themselves to every web site and every FB twit that comes along. You cannot protect stupids from themselves.
I dunno... two or three years it's possible you'll start running into an increasing percentage of websites that you can't view at all unless you have a Trust chip certifying that you're not running an ad-blocker, and that the Browser is DRM-compliant to not download copies of pictures and other page content.
Why would an independent business want to reduce its own audience? A "trust chip" cannot certify that you are not running something. That would require it to furnish reports about cryptographic signatures on the browser and on all the HTTP proxies that are present. I can compile my own Firefox or Konqueror or Lynx or Links or a number of other browsers.
Tablets and phones and other mobile devices do not have TC chips, so far. If the Web site owner insists on those signatures, his site will disappear from the face of Earth to everyone with a mobile browser. As their share grows, this is a suicidal tactic.
Besides, if major news sites switch to that method, you know what will happen? All the news will migrate to Slashdot. If Slashdot adopts this tactic, Slashdot2 will be open for business on the next morning. Geeks will have no difficulty with putting up their own servers. Even Freenet supports message boards and forums. Will that result in segregation of geeks into yet another slice of the society? Yes, it will - but only because of actions of the lawmakers.
in a decade or somesuch a large majority of home PCs could have the chip installed and ISP's could start deploying Trusted Network Connect do a "health check" before permitting you any internet access at all.
A good number of Internet-connected devices are not PCs. The simplest example: your router is not a PC. However it is a host on the Internet. What it does with IP packets that are sent to it is its personal affair. But some are terminated at the router itself, such as ICMP and port 8080 (if enabled.) The router can also issue its own HTTP requests for firmware update. You cannot block that. Then there are SIP phones and other communication gateways; there is industrial equipment.
Because obviously it's a "good thing" for an ISP to ensure that you're not connecting an infected or vulnerable computer to their network
It's not obvious to me. The only obvious thing that the ISP benefits from is money that you pay for the service. If your computer is infected and downloads terabytes of Viagra ads, it's just peachy - the ISP can charge you for extra traffic. If th
Those keys, and those reports, won't go anywhere if you use an OS that does not access the TPM hardware. (I presume the TPM hardware does not communicate with the PHY directly, and does not maintain TCP sessions. It's hard enough to do over Ethernet, and is even harder over WiFi, where encryption is the norm and where many different PHYs are present on the market, often connected over USB.) If your OS sends reports to 3rd parties, then the OS is the problem here.
If the OP wants to have a computer without TPM he can easily build a Linux box that runs on TPM-free hardware. There are tons of ARM boards, starting with R-Pi, that do not seem to have TPM. Browsing the Web does not require petaflops; encoding of a movie does, but it doesn't need the Internet. Keep your Windows computers behind the air gap.
On the other hand, if you are intent on using a proprietary OS, written by a company that is happy to exploit you, then perhaps you have no reason to complain. If Windows wants to report something to someone, you cannot stop that no matter what you do. Are you ready to block DNS queries, for example? They exfiltrate data. A well designed firewall would take a considerable effort to build, and even then you cannot be sure that Windows doesn't use yet another, 0-day trick to send the bits out. You simply cannot be sure. The same firewall will break lots of network-dependent software.
I specifically mentioned "fair." Why would it be fair for the humankind to pay a tax to a group of people who haven't done anything to earn those monies? Some were just standing around when the unique characteristics of their relative's cells was discovered; others weren't even born yet. Neither they, nor Ms. Lacks herself, worked toward that goal. A religionist would say that Ms. Lacks got her cells from God. I'd understand if she made her own body by her own design, but that's not the case.
IMO, it would be fair enough to just name the line of cells after the donor - and that was done. Her descendants shouldn't be mentioned at all, since they haven't done anything that would warrant honoring them for this particular discovery. The society doesn't need yet another clan of trust fund babies.
I'd suggest we should, at a minimum, arrange for 100,000 people to swing by their house and say "thank you".
As they say, no good deed goes unpunished :-)
What would be a fair payment to the family for a sample of cells of a dead person? At that time nobody knew of any specific, unique properties of cells in that sample. Biopsies are always taken as part of the lab work. What happens to the cells later? Who cares? Is it even moral to try to stop a use of such cells if that use is so beneficial to the humankind?
Those megabucks that hundreds of companies earned were payment for the work of those companies. The HeLa cells only made it possible; but you cannot honestly charge an architect, today, 100x the price for the paper if his design, many years later, becomes known as the best building in the world. Your product - paper - did not become more valuable because a genius added something to it. HeLa cells would be useless if not another genius who recognized their value.
Was there an ethical problem? Perhaps. A permission should have been sought. But I, personally, don't care what happens to my body after I'm done using it. If it can be utilized with some benefit to others, more power to you. If not, just discard it.
An ebook reader is likely to be lighter and offer better battery life
The reader has to have at least a terabyte of storage. Ebook readers are generally toys; yes, you probably can cram several hundred books onto an e-reader, with minimum illustrations and probably in four shades of gray. That won't be very informative if color is of importance.
You also want your reader to be maintainable. Your laptop is just as fragile as the rest of the inheritance. You want to copy your data onto another laptop, and keep copying as necessary. Sometimes you will copy the data as payment. You cannot do that with an ebook reader - they are poor as computers.
Sometimes you will want something printed. There are many millions of printers out there, and many (laser ones) will survive for quite some time. Printed instructions will be necessary - people cannot memorize more than a handful of items, and writing by hand is not efficient. ebook readers cannot print.
All in all, an ebook reader would be far less valuable than a small notebook. There are many notebooks out there, and they can be mixed and matched to keep your system repaired or replaced. You cannot repair an ebook reader; if you open it up, there is nothing inside that you can pull out, move into another reader and access. Even the battery is custom, and it is often not replaceable. An ebook reader is a device for a rich and safe world.
This does not even touch other aspects of a general purpose computer that a notebook is. You can run software on it. Perhaps email and Internet would not be very valuable then, but you may want some engineering software, MS Office for taking notes, simple image processing software, offline maps. What is the value of GnuPG or PGP when you have to send a message so that if one of many gangs intercepts it, they can't figure out what it is about?
One important use of a computer is in radio communication; I mean digital modes here. It can be easily assumed that all communication lines would be inactive. Radio communication then becomes the primary method. CW and SSB on HF are nice; however they are not very useful for transmission of large amounts of data, and they require trained operators. Modes like PSK and MFSK transmit digital data, such as bytes. You can transmit and receive megabytes of text entirely automatically - and encrypted if necessary. But those modes are encoded and decoded by a computer. All this means that if you have a choice between carrying an ebook reader and a notebook, pick the notebook.
It will take years of survival before you'd be stable to make use of the knowledge stored by a laptop (did I mention the ebook reader? Yes I did) - even a hammer may be more useful until then.
As I mentioned, canned food is of no use when you are running away from pursuers. It doesn't mean that your bugout bag must contain nothing but 37 pairs of running shoes. You need a little of everything. A hammer may be useful, but hammers are a low value item - they can be grabbed in many places, and there are millions of hammers out there, and they are all the same. As SuricouRaven already mentioned, you will need tradeable items very soon. What are you going to trade? If you have a thousand tons of canned food in your pocket then probably you are OK. But if you are an average geek, your primary worth is in what you know and what you can do. A handyman would be very handy after TEOTWAWKI. Everyone can wield a hammer; but how many people have enough knowledge, in their head or in their computer, to rework a grid-synchronized inverter to work as an off-grid device? A standard solar panel makes DC that varies from zero to 340V. You can't connect anything to it directly, and the grid is gone, so the inverter happily stays off. What is the value of fixing that?
'scuse me for asking: why would you need a laptop in a post-apocalyptic world?
Knowledge will be the most valuable asset after the collapse of the civilization. Do you know off the top of your head how to make powder? No, not the smokeless propellant - just the good old black powder? It's not entirely trivial; many a powder plant blew up before scientists and engineers figured out how to work with it in relative safety. Or take the initiating explosives, such as primers. There are about twenty formulations known to man today; some are obsolete, some are OK, some are top notch. Do you know how to make one? Without a primer you will be relegated to flint locks, if not to muskets with ignition from a cord.
There will be a lot of technology left over after the collapse. Most of it will need repair. Who would readily remember how to disassemble, repair and put back together a certain pump? If you have a manual, you are golden. But the most valuable repair manual is the manual on repair of humans. Do you have medical ebooks in your collection? It just happens that I have a few broad references; not enough for brain surgery, but enough to deal with everyday injuries and diseases.
But where would you store all those Libraries of Congress with all that valuable data, in such a way that you can carry it, and in such a way that you can access it easily? A laptop with a terabyte drive would do it nicely. A bicycle, outside of a direct survival situation, does not even compare. But in a survival situation nothing matters except what helps you to survive. It doesn't mean that canned food is useless if you are, at this very moment, shooting at your pursuers.
Wouldn't it just be easier to teach people not to buy shit from spammers?
This is about just as easy as to teach people not to send spam.
The fact is that exactly 50% of the population have IQ below average. They operate with what is available to them. Some are only smart enough to send spam; other are not even as good, they read it and believe what they see. Some can't even read cursive :-) I can't imagine what avenues are open to those.
Does it have to work?
You cannot stop a social problem with a technological measure. If all fails, the spammer will hire 10,000 people in Africa to post spam using cut and paste templates.
A partial solution can be achieved only if each poster has to authenticate with the server using a globally unique ID that is assigned to that person at birth. Then if that person abuses their right to post, you can kick them by that ID - and they have no other ID to use. In the end spammers will run out of willing workers.
Naturally, religionists will have a problem with their panties, but it is indeed strange that people don't have a planet-wide ID. They should have it; then so many problems would disappear. (and new ones appear.)
They probably had an allocation of weight. They could ship anything they wanted in that allocation, from a toy to dried whale meat.
There are strong Constitutional walls that prevent the Executive Branch from interfering with the operations of the Judicial Branch.
There are no walls, Constitutional or any other, on a golf course. If the safe with money can be only opened with three keys, held by three different key keepers, the simplest way to open the safe is to make sure that keepers of those keys are your men. Today not only that is in place, but also the public observers - who are expected to detect and report unusual happenings - are on your payroll.
A large number of unique breeds that exist today for specific purpose will be gone. You will end up with only a handful - a couple for meat, a couple for milk, and that's all. Small populations will disappear by dissolving in larger populations. Some herds will be just shipped to the beef processor while the plant is open.
But there is a larger question here. What is more humane: to create millions of calves, let them live for a couple years, and then kill them - or to not let them be in the first place? This is not an idle question. Life of a wild animal is full of pain and suffering. Would it be more humane to, say, sterilize all animals on the planet, so that they don't have to struggle for survival every day of their lives?
The answer "yes" to that would be very strange (though not unheard of.) The answer "no" would be far more common; however that answer would also indicate that it is more humane to continue breeding cattle.