it is a very insightful look into something that is missing from a lot of people's lives.
I don't find that "missing piece" valuable. It's far more important to discuss things with people wherever they are, at their convenience. Meeting people in person locks you into a local circle of acquaintances. You might as well buy a time machine and move back into Middle Ages. I, for one, prefer the world where distances are inconsequential.
As I understand, postal deliveries are done on routes, where the postman drives the entire route every day, just in case if he needs to collect outgoing mail.
A parcel delivery service (of any kind) sends a truck to a location only if there is a pickup request, or if they have a package to deliver. Much more efficient this way.
I used to send checks via USPS until several months ago. Then I switched to the free Bill Pay service that Wells Fargo offers. They can pay anyone, as long as you have the address of the company and your account number. One advantage of this method is that it's largely (if not completely) automated. All payments are traceable; there are no checks to lose, and there is no need to guess if they received the check or not. Writing checks takes time - about 5 minutes, including the envelope. Paying online requires just two clicks of the mouse, with my payees already listed on the screen.
Newspapers are a modern equivalent of buggy whips. Their business is based around limited availability of information - and on explaining the information to a minimally educated person.
Today you can get your news directly from news agencies of all countries in the world. Cost of each short piece of news is nearly zero. Some news are produced on taxpayer's dime (NASA and other government entities; BBC.) Other news sources are financed by governments to disseminate the information about the country.
Not every newspaper has a journalist in the US President's team. If you don't report news in your own words then you are only repeating someone else. This is not worth of paying for. Most non-local news that are published in newspapers are just a day old copies of what you saw on the Internet.
Some people want to read local news. I do not. There is nothing of importance for me in those. I do not need to know that another bicycle rider was ran over at a certain intersection (if I am not that bicyclist.) I do not need to know what plans a certain school has for a certain event. All that is irrelevant to me; I'm not willing to pay for collection and presentation of local news.
Journalists also act as interpreters of news - to those, I guess, who are mentally incapable to understand the news themselves. How many people today need such an interpreter? Why would an opinion of a certain journalist be even important?
This means that newspapers are dying simply because they fulfilled their role to the end. With instant, wireless worldwide communication in your pocket, with millions of twits and other budding journalists chomping at the bit to report this or that event, who needs newspapers?
Video games are nearly free, compared to the cost of maintaining a GF.
Porn is entirely free. The material does not age, and once released it remains "out there" and gets reposted by owners from time to time. All you may need to pay for is access to a decent NNTP server.
Games and porn are an excellent alternative. They never expect anything from you; they never get angry at you; you never get angry at them (except when a mission is poorly designed.) Games have no relatives and they don't make new ones; they require no care and feeding. And if a game needs to be dumped, it is as easy as pressing a button on the console. There will be no threats of a lawsuit, and the police will not be called on you either. Your life becomes orderly and you are in control. What's not to like?
During most of the human history family was a nearly required method of establishing your own household. The man and the wife both worked on the property, and there was no time left (or even a legal opportunity) for them to split and look for someone else. Necessity caused acquiescence, and most family members eventually got used to each other.
These functions of a family are not required in modern societies. In fact they are counter-indicated. There is no property to toil on, so you don't need a helping hand. A woman has the same legal rights as a man, so she does not need to attach herself to a man to become a citizen (or as a recognized member of the society.) Children are no longer needed to help their parents and feed them when the parents get old. (Modern children expect the parents to feed them when *they* get old.)
So in all this mass of negative reasons only one positive reason for having a family remains - availability of a regular sex. This, however, is not guaranteed today from a spouse - but is guaranteed from a lover or from porn.
Family also requires considerable investment of money and time. A century or two ago a family would produce a child and, once the child is ambulatory, they would be just milling around on their own, with minimal maintenance. If the child gets kicked by a horse... too bad. But today the family is expected to pay for someone to look over the child, and if anything happens they sometimes get dragged into courts. The price of a child can be pretty high. Outside of sentimental reasons, you don't need them.
Yesterday I would have considered looking into one of her books. Tomorrow if I come across one I will not touch it. I do not understand what could be possibly gained from alienating people who are her customers? It's not like SciFi is read by low IQ people whose feeble minds can be easily clouded by ridiculous statements about RFID chips on a battlefield. Such a plot in any book would be unbelievable. Anyone with a grain of sense (or who reads newspapers) can tell that there is no technical way to tell a combatant apart from a noncombatant in a modern war (since 1939, for example.) What you see is not exactly what you get. The flag "is_combatant" is set and reset in person's mind, arbitrarily, depending on the situation.
Why don't you go listen to the actual audio clip it's in chapter 2 a bit past the half way mark
If a writer cannot deliver her message in writing then there is no reason to listen to her or read her books. But if she did deliver it correctly then there is a good reason to never have anything in common with her. Public figures can't just throw things at the wall and see what sticks. There is such a thing as backlash.
It isn't like she is campaigning to have governments do this.
Many a scientist said, after the fact, "I honestly never thought that the government will ever use my $invention for evil purposes!" She is carrying water for dictators, whether she understands it or not.
It can be easily stolen or lost. The thief only needs a sharp knife and a few minutes of instruction from a back alley surgeon.
Lifetime criminals will obviously remove them or get forged ones.
With trust to those implanted RFID chips being sky high, it becomes trivial for anyone to change identity. A target person, with the chip, can be hit over the head, chip removed, and the person then can be disposed of in many different ways, lethal or not. The stolen chip then is worn by the criminal - not necessarily inside his flesh, which allows use of many chips, creating multiple identities, unimpeachable alibis, etc.
They are trying to leverage not only existing Android apps, but also future ones, and the Android SDK, and all the libraries, and all the skills and the numbers of developers who are familiar with Android.
If you write a Qt application you write it for a specific device. In fact, it won't work anywhere but on the system that has Qt runtime. If you write an Android application you can run it on more devices than you dare to count.
I used Qt for at least a decade, and I believe that for one Qt hacker there are 100 Android hackers.
Blowing through a stop sign's obviously a Bad Thing, but I see no reason to come to a complete stop when I'm the only one on the road.
There are some obvious flaws in this reasoning. Traffic laws apply equally to a healthy young man with perfect eyesight and to an elderly grandma who ventured out in her $old_vehicle to visit the church. The same laws will apply at night and in the rain. The same laws will apply to bicycles - especially those that you cannot see because the riders are wearing dark clothes and dark shoes after dark. I saw plenty of such geniuses.
I have a stop sign near where I live, and I pass through that intersection wherever I go. I always stop for 1 second and look around. Not everyone does that; I have no clue what those guys are (or are not) seeing. One second does not make any difference.
The trained habit of always stopping at stop signs also relieves your mind from the need to make a quick decision whether to run it or to stop. Perhaps your mind is fast enough to make that determination. Plenty of people are not so fast; they can be older, or tired, or not feeling well, or distracted. They can look around, observe an oncoming car and fail so see it. Human mind is quite capable of such tricks; most of our field of vision is synthetic. Tired people probably shouldn't be on the road, but with life being what it is, what choice do they have? Not to go home after work?
Smart, successful people that are more interested in leading the country as a whole instead of expanding their personal empires will become politicians, not to make money or grift off some cream, but to actually attempt to successfully lead. Yes, that's a very rare breed of person, but our leaders should be a rare breed.
If only governments were composed of such people. You could give them unlimited power and they would use it wisely.
But such men do not exist. First of all, it would require a saint to even try to become one. Then that saint would have to walk over dead bodies of less lucky candidates to be elected. Then that saint would have to survive negative ads and other lies that are spread by small but well organized groups of people (a.k.a. swiftboating.) Finally, that saint would have to survive a plain vanilla assassination (JFK style.) There are massive forces at play that are interested in keeping the status quo. Just read a generic alternative history where a random Joe falls through some crack in time and gets to become a progressor for a while. Good luck, he'd be burned at the stake as fast as the wood can be gathered.
Most of the complexity in the government is there to protect the country from the government. That's why the USA used to have the Constitution and separation of powers. However these protections work only if the people are watchful and if the separated powers are not willing to cooperate. Today the people don't care and all people in power (even the "opposing" political parties) are actively and happily working for their own interests. President appoints judges, judges judge for the President (that's why the balance of power within the US Supreme Court is so closely watched; that system is also fundamentally broken.)
Truth be told, "the people" are outgunned. The government pays hordes of lawyers who will prove in any court whatever they want (your opinion does not matter, and jury nullification is dead.) The government has perfect training in all things bureaucratic, and people do not. People cannot even comprehend the tax code, for a good reason! The tax code is not intended for comprehension. Want to see the original BC of one Barack Obama? You have no standing, go away. It must be acknowledged that the US government is in full control and the US population does not even realize that this is not how it was meant to be.
Well, my temporary politicians should do whatever that thing is, too. Write a book. Bang a Kennedy. Ex-patriate to New Zealand to continue the hunt for Orlando Bloom. Whatever; done is done, you did your part, and hopefully you added net value, but let the new dude pick up your torch.
I'm unsure how to interpret this. If you are saying that the ex-politician should be given cushy pension and let out to pasture, like US Presidents are, then it will be very expensive, and every two-bit idiot would be fighting for the privilege to sit on his $behind in the Congress for $n years and then be all set for the rest of his life.
However if you mean that the ex-congressman is just given a cardboard box with all his personal pens and sticky notes and escorted off the premises... then this ex-congressman would have to build his new life from scratch. This is painful, even though you say that this should be a fair price for being a politician.
But if this is enacted, how many successful businessmen - who are competent - will want to abandon their businesses for 4 years? The business will be surely dead by then, without them being in charge. These people will NOT want to be on the ballot; they simply can't do that if hundreds of jobs depend on this businessman. Who will then become a candidate? Everyone else - namely, people who do not matter. Only those people can afford a whole year of campaigning (even ignoring the fact that the said campaigning is not free.) Do you want your politicians to come from the pool of less important persons?
MSDN is far more than msdn.microsoft.com. A book is also free to read in a library. But if you want more then you have to part with some big bucks.
One of companies that I worked for had a subscription, and MS sent to us tons of CDs with everything under the Sun. Don't you want to test your software, at least once, on a Hungarian or Korean build of Windows 7 Ultimate? Especially without going to Korea to buy their localized copy? MSDN subscription gives you all that. Do you need a checked build of Windows Server $whatever to work on a driver? MSDN subscription has that. Where else would you get a checked build of any MS product?
I figure politicians should only be paid the average wage of the state they represent
This guarantees that successful, smart people will not become politicians. They already earn above the average wage.
and then punted out after 4 years no matter what.
So, how'd you like to quit your well paying job for 4 years to boss people around? You'd have to go back to your coding after your congressional employment is gone. But can a coder, who hasn't done even a single LOC in all these years, easily find a job? Will he be comfortable in a cube after leaving his personal office and a bunch of aides?
Also note that being rich usually correlates with people skills. To get rich (on your own, not from your grandparents' stash) you need to build a business up from the ground. You need to take risks, to negotiate, to work hard. Those are necessary qualities of a politician. A geek from a basement lair simply does not understand how the world works (nor he wants to.) How will he vote for a budget, for example? My guess is that he will be played like a fiddle by professional bureaucrats, heads of departments and agencies.
It is not abnormal to retain able leaders. What is abnormal, though, is to have no effective mechanism of telling those leaders who are leading us astray that they shouldn't be doing so. Voting is not such a mechanism for many reasons; in particular, because there is no vote on policies. Voting is only for specific people and for their pet agendas - which may be changed without notice. The party line is always implied, and that is not under control of any voter.
On the other side of the problem, democracy presumes that majority is always right. This has been proven wrong many times in human history. This is doubly so today, when people gladly detach themselves from state problems and focus instead on the TV in front of them.
US politicians play on that fact by making the electorate elect them. Once elected, they can do whatever they want, including voting for Obamacare, Patriot act and such. The feedback from voters is delayed by years and very weak. Even then some politicians lose their offices... but a replacement is elected at the same time. That replacement continues the failed policy, so nothing really changes.
I have no idea if they are using it for their own secure needs. However even if they do, why would it be difficult to have MS sign and replace one of DLLs? Perhaps the backdoor is automatically disabled if all the steps required to prepare a PC for work in a SCIF are followed?
Also, as far as I heard, secret and above computer (Windows, Linux or anything else) cannot connect to unsecured networks. Security is not maintained exclusively by encryption of login credentials. That HDD with secret data goes into the vault whenever you are done (I remember reading about the case when it didn't happen once and the whole lab was frantically searching for a week.)
Bridges between more secure and less secure devices do exist, but they are not PCs running Windows but microcontroller-based, tamper-proof sealed boxes with ciphers implemented in hardware and checked for TEMPEST issues.
I don't want to sound too paranoid here, though. I only wanted to highlight the flaw in the original argument.
When they use it for their own top secret you can bet they are not at all interested in the existence of a backdoor, that also others could use.
There may be smart implementations of the backdoor that take as much effort to exploit as to break the customer's own key. For example you embed a backdoor public key into Windows. If you have the matching private key then you are golden. If you don't have that key then you are free to attack either the customer's private key or the backdoor key, you won't succeed anyway.
But if you do this then all Windows installations in all countries (all that you can connect to, at least) are yours for breaking into and looking around and messing with data...
"Confirm transport true or false repeat until true" For that matter since pattern buffer exist in Star Trek why do they even lose peoples on away mission?
How would you know if the transport was successful if you are beaming people a hundred miles away (from a low orbit to the surface) ??? There is nobody there to confirm except the beamee. If the beamee for any reason does not respond fast enough what do you do back at the transporter controls? The beamee may be busy with defending himself; the communication may be jammed or attenuated by something; he could be overcome with atmosphere, gravity or other natural conditions of the site...
"How hard could it be to put a small loop in the transporter software just before the disintegration function. Am no coder but it could look like this."
It is sometimes difficult to store very large arrays of data for a long time. If you use today's RAM for that it would take the volume of many Libraries of Congress and power that is sufficient for a medium sized city. There are technologies today that allow you storing a lot of data at cost of either having it deteriorate over time (DRAM,) or of having lesser reliability (MLC Flash.) Considering that the pattern buffer hardware is physically smaller than the Enterprise, they were [will be?] using a storage technology that is only sufficient for a relatively brief holding time, such as tens of seconds.
Today, for example, you could build it with a spool of a fiber optic cable that has a very low velocity factor (and still you need a very long cable.) You feed pulses of light, modulated by amplitude and frequency-divided into many bands, into one end. Once the light reaches the other end of the fiber you read it, and that's all you can do (unless you loop the buffer, which was the plot of one episode.)
Something that I always found to be a design flaw should you disintegrate after you materialised the copy not before your even sure that the process worked? That way if there a fuck up the "original" is still well and alive!
If you do it this way then you will have two copies with diverging identity. The copy at the origin site will have to be, essentially, given a gun and told to shoot himself. Who will agree to that? Disintegration before transport avoids this problem because there is no duplication of consciousness.
As Ben said... "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
And that would be fine and dandy as long as only the actors would be experiencing the consequences.
But in this case 80% of population have given up essential liberty for 100% of the population. People who never signed up for this foolishness have to suffer along. This is especially said because those 80% are least qualified to express any opinion whatsoever on the subject. What did Romans say, "Divide and Rule" ?
Still not the best comparison, as no group of marksmen would ever hold off a serious military assault from a modern military force.
No group of marksmen will even try to do that. It's not their job.
If the armor rolls into town the marksmen will keep low profile. However as opportunities arise, a marksman will be making a single shot from a large distance (half a mile) and disappearing before the enemy can direct forces to his location. In an urban environment the rifle goes into someone's grill or under porch or into the crawlspace, and the shooter walks away with no real chance of being associated with the shot. (Even residue tests will fail because gases don't leak from a rifle, unlike a revolver. But rubber gloves are cheap.) The rifle can be later retrieved by someone else on his way to another mission.
The essence of the piece is that to defeat an army you need to defeat its soldiers. But soldiers are humans, not robots. They cannot live only inside of their tanks. Not only this is not possible biologically, it is not practical tactically - the soldiers in tanks can't see much. So foot patrols and guards are a necessity. That's when they become vulnerable. It does not take much to change the morale of the army; just make it so each patrol that goes out will bring back one of their soldiers on his shield. An army may feel OK if it's all about burning and pillaging; but it is not a suicide club. If the army that you are fighting is composed of your own countrymen it will not take much to make soldiers thinking.
But that's all about fighting an army. If TSHTF you will not have to do that right away - or perhaps ever. The primary purpose of a weapon at that time is to keep you and your family alive. There will be plenty of people who are intent on "equalizing" your property and your valuables. The same people will be happy to kill you and to rape/torture your children, just for fun (and there are other reasons too; dead men tell no tales.) This is when you need the weapon most. The army pales in comparison to riots and pogroms; soldiers will not shoot you for no reason; their purpose is to control the territory, not to exterminate its population (do not confuse with Daleks.)
The right to bear arms will never figure into national security, or not in our lifetimes.
That's exactly what people thought at inauguration of Slobodan Milosevic. And they didn't even have the constitutional right to bear arms. But within a decade they would be doing just that, whether they wanted it or not. Nobody ever expects a war. In the USA there are enough "disadvantaged" lumpen proletariat to start deadly riots in every city of or above medium size. With pogroms approaching and nowhere to run most people would wish they were armed. History is written by winners.
I'm willing to bet that the mostly likely way it will figure into your and my personal security is if someone shoots us.
Well, I guess that's one possibility. But most people would like to shoot the attacker, even if they are professional hoplophobes. When TSHTF wery few people will be willing to die for an abstract opinion - one that may be even wrong.
There is extremely little waste in the US government.
It is very difficult to debate this statement, largely because the statement itself defies belief. For example, are you saying that the whole TSA infrastructure, with their airport gropers and the VIPERs on buses, who steals travelers' belongings and can't see a gun on a passenger, is just fine and we should keep financing it?
Slashdot Mirror
it is a very insightful look into something that is missing from a lot of people's lives.
I don't find that "missing piece" valuable. It's far more important to discuss things with people wherever they are, at their convenience. Meeting people in person locks you into a local circle of acquaintances. You might as well buy a time machine and move back into Middle Ages. I, for one, prefer the world where distances are inconsequential.
As I understand, postal deliveries are done on routes, where the postman drives the entire route every day, just in case if he needs to collect outgoing mail.
A parcel delivery service (of any kind) sends a truck to a location only if there is a pickup request, or if they have a package to deliver. Much more efficient this way.
I used to send checks via USPS until several months ago. Then I switched to the free Bill Pay service that Wells Fargo offers. They can pay anyone, as long as you have the address of the company and your account number. One advantage of this method is that it's largely (if not completely) automated. All payments are traceable; there are no checks to lose, and there is no need to guess if they received the check or not. Writing checks takes time - about 5 minutes, including the envelope. Paying online requires just two clicks of the mouse, with my payees already listed on the screen.
Newspapers are a modern equivalent of buggy whips. Their business is based around limited availability of information - and on explaining the information to a minimally educated person.
Today you can get your news directly from news agencies of all countries in the world. Cost of each short piece of news is nearly zero. Some news are produced on taxpayer's dime (NASA and other government entities; BBC.) Other news sources are financed by governments to disseminate the information about the country.
Not every newspaper has a journalist in the US President's team. If you don't report news in your own words then you are only repeating someone else. This is not worth of paying for. Most non-local news that are published in newspapers are just a day old copies of what you saw on the Internet.
Some people want to read local news. I do not. There is nothing of importance for me in those. I do not need to know that another bicycle rider was ran over at a certain intersection (if I am not that bicyclist.) I do not need to know what plans a certain school has for a certain event. All that is irrelevant to me; I'm not willing to pay for collection and presentation of local news.
Journalists also act as interpreters of news - to those, I guess, who are mentally incapable to understand the news themselves. How many people today need such an interpreter? Why would an opinion of a certain journalist be even important?
This means that newspapers are dying simply because they fulfilled their role to the end. With instant, wireless worldwide communication in your pocket, with millions of twits and other budding journalists chomping at the bit to report this or that event, who needs newspapers?
Yeah they are both too expensive ...
Video games are nearly free, compared to the cost of maintaining a GF.
Porn is entirely free. The material does not age, and once released it remains "out there" and gets reposted by owners from time to time. All you may need to pay for is access to a decent NNTP server.
Games and porn are an excellent alternative. They never expect anything from you; they never get angry at you; you never get angry at them (except when a mission is poorly designed.) Games have no relatives and they don't make new ones; they require no care and feeding. And if a game needs to be dumped, it is as easy as pressing a button on the console. There will be no threats of a lawsuit, and the police will not be called on you either. Your life becomes orderly and you are in control. What's not to like?
During most of the human history family was a nearly required method of establishing your own household. The man and the wife both worked on the property, and there was no time left (or even a legal opportunity) for them to split and look for someone else. Necessity caused acquiescence, and most family members eventually got used to each other.
These functions of a family are not required in modern societies. In fact they are counter-indicated. There is no property to toil on, so you don't need a helping hand. A woman has the same legal rights as a man, so she does not need to attach herself to a man to become a citizen (or as a recognized member of the society.) Children are no longer needed to help their parents and feed them when the parents get old. (Modern children expect the parents to feed them when *they* get old.)
So in all this mass of negative reasons only one positive reason for having a family remains - availability of a regular sex. This, however, is not guaranteed today from a spouse - but is guaranteed from a lover or from porn.
Family also requires considerable investment of money and time. A century or two ago a family would produce a child and, once the child is ambulatory, they would be just milling around on their own, with minimal maintenance. If the child gets kicked by a horse... too bad. But today the family is expected to pay for someone to look over the child, and if anything happens they sometimes get dragged into courts. The price of a child can be pretty high. Outside of sentimental reasons, you don't need them.
Well played Ms. Moon. You will sell more books.
Yesterday I would have considered looking into one of her books. Tomorrow if I come across one I will not touch it. I do not understand what could be possibly gained from alienating people who are her customers? It's not like SciFi is read by low IQ people whose feeble minds can be easily clouded by ridiculous statements about RFID chips on a battlefield. Such a plot in any book would be unbelievable. Anyone with a grain of sense (or who reads newspapers) can tell that there is no technical way to tell a combatant apart from a noncombatant in a modern war (since 1939, for example.) What you see is not exactly what you get. The flag "is_combatant" is set and reset in person's mind, arbitrarily, depending on the situation.
Why don't you go listen to the actual audio clip it's in chapter 2 a bit past the half way mark
If a writer cannot deliver her message in writing then there is no reason to listen to her or read her books. But if she did deliver it correctly then there is a good reason to never have anything in common with her. Public figures can't just throw things at the wall and see what sticks. There is such a thing as backlash.
It isn't like she is campaigning to have governments do this.
Many a scientist said, after the fact, "I honestly never thought that the government will ever use my $invention for evil purposes!" She is carrying water for dictators, whether she understands it or not.
except it can't easily be stolen or lost
It can be easily stolen or lost. The thief only needs a sharp knife and a few minutes of instruction from a back alley surgeon.
Lifetime criminals will obviously remove them or get forged ones.
With trust to those implanted RFID chips being sky high, it becomes trivial for anyone to change identity. A target person, with the chip, can be hit over the head, chip removed, and the person then can be disposed of in many different ways, lethal or not. The stolen chip then is worn by the criminal - not necessarily inside his flesh, which allows use of many chips, creating multiple identities, unimpeachable alibis, etc.
They are trying to leverage not only existing Android apps, but also future ones, and the Android SDK, and all the libraries, and all the skills and the numbers of developers who are familiar with Android.
If you write a Qt application you write it for a specific device. In fact, it won't work anywhere but on the system that has Qt runtime. If you write an Android application you can run it on more devices than you dare to count.
I used Qt for at least a decade, and I believe that for one Qt hacker there are 100 Android hackers.
Blowing through a stop sign's obviously a Bad Thing, but I see no reason to come to a complete stop when I'm the only one on the road.
There are some obvious flaws in this reasoning. Traffic laws apply equally to a healthy young man with perfect eyesight and to an elderly grandma who ventured out in her $old_vehicle to visit the church. The same laws will apply at night and in the rain. The same laws will apply to bicycles - especially those that you cannot see because the riders are wearing dark clothes and dark shoes after dark. I saw plenty of such geniuses.
I have a stop sign near where I live, and I pass through that intersection wherever I go. I always stop for 1 second and look around. Not everyone does that; I have no clue what those guys are (or are not) seeing. One second does not make any difference.
The trained habit of always stopping at stop signs also relieves your mind from the need to make a quick decision whether to run it or to stop. Perhaps your mind is fast enough to make that determination. Plenty of people are not so fast; they can be older, or tired, or not feeling well, or distracted. They can look around, observe an oncoming car and fail so see it. Human mind is quite capable of such tricks; most of our field of vision is synthetic. Tired people probably shouldn't be on the road, but with life being what it is, what choice do they have? Not to go home after work?
Smart, successful people that are more interested in leading the country as a whole instead of expanding their personal empires will become politicians, not to make money or grift off some cream, but to actually attempt to successfully lead. Yes, that's a very rare breed of person, but our leaders should be a rare breed.
If only governments were composed of such people. You could give them unlimited power and they would use it wisely.
But such men do not exist. First of all, it would require a saint to even try to become one. Then that saint would have to walk over dead bodies of less lucky candidates to be elected. Then that saint would have to survive negative ads and other lies that are spread by small but well organized groups of people (a.k.a. swiftboating.) Finally, that saint would have to survive a plain vanilla assassination (JFK style.) There are massive forces at play that are interested in keeping the status quo. Just read a generic alternative history where a random Joe falls through some crack in time and gets to become a progressor for a while. Good luck, he'd be burned at the stake as fast as the wood can be gathered.
Most of the complexity in the government is there to protect the country from the government. That's why the USA used to have the Constitution and separation of powers. However these protections work only if the people are watchful and if the separated powers are not willing to cooperate. Today the people don't care and all people in power (even the "opposing" political parties) are actively and happily working for their own interests. President appoints judges, judges judge for the President (that's why the balance of power within the US Supreme Court is so closely watched; that system is also fundamentally broken.)
Truth be told, "the people" are outgunned. The government pays hordes of lawyers who will prove in any court whatever they want (your opinion does not matter, and jury nullification is dead.) The government has perfect training in all things bureaucratic, and people do not. People cannot even comprehend the tax code, for a good reason! The tax code is not intended for comprehension. Want to see the original BC of one Barack Obama? You have no standing, go away. It must be acknowledged that the US government is in full control and the US population does not even realize that this is not how it was meant to be.
Well, my temporary politicians should do whatever that thing is, too. Write a book. Bang a Kennedy. Ex-patriate to New Zealand to continue the hunt for Orlando Bloom. Whatever; done is done, you did your part, and hopefully you added net value, but let the new dude pick up your torch.
I'm unsure how to interpret this. If you are saying that the ex-politician should be given cushy pension and let out to pasture, like US Presidents are, then it will be very expensive, and every two-bit idiot would be fighting for the privilege to sit on his $behind in the Congress for $n years and then be all set for the rest of his life.
However if you mean that the ex-congressman is just given a cardboard box with all his personal pens and sticky notes and escorted off the premises ... then this ex-congressman would have to build his new life from scratch. This is painful, even though you say that this should be a fair price for being a politician.
But if this is enacted, how many successful businessmen - who are competent - will want to abandon their businesses for 4 years? The business will be surely dead by then, without them being in charge. These people will NOT want to be on the ballot; they simply can't do that if hundreds of jobs depend on this businessman. Who will then become a candidate? Everyone else - namely, people who do not matter. Only those people can afford a whole year of campaigning (even ignoring the fact that the said campaigning is not free.) Do you want your politicians to come from the pool of less important persons?
Like you, I do not know what the perfect s
MSDN is free to access.
MSDN is far more than msdn.microsoft.com. A book is also free to read in a library. But if you want more then you have to part with some big bucks.
One of companies that I worked for had a subscription, and MS sent to us tons of CDs with everything under the Sun. Don't you want to test your software, at least once, on a Hungarian or Korean build of Windows 7 Ultimate? Especially without going to Korea to buy their localized copy? MSDN subscription gives you all that. Do you need a checked build of Windows Server $whatever to work on a driver? MSDN subscription has that. Where else would you get a checked build of any MS product?
[citation needed]
MSDN, I guess...
He isn't talking about 3rd party software. He talks about unwanted software that is automatically installed for you. In Ubuntu it's Unity :-)
I figure politicians should only be paid the average wage of the state they represent
This guarantees that successful, smart people will not become politicians. They already earn above the average wage.
and then punted out after 4 years no matter what.
So, how'd you like to quit your well paying job for 4 years to boss people around? You'd have to go back to your coding after your congressional employment is gone. But can a coder, who hasn't done even a single LOC in all these years, easily find a job? Will he be comfortable in a cube after leaving his personal office and a bunch of aides?
Also note that being rich usually correlates with people skills. To get rich (on your own, not from your grandparents' stash) you need to build a business up from the ground. You need to take risks, to negotiate, to work hard. Those are necessary qualities of a politician. A geek from a basement lair simply does not understand how the world works (nor he wants to.) How will he vote for a budget, for example? My guess is that he will be played like a fiddle by professional bureaucrats, heads of departments and agencies.
It is not abnormal to retain able leaders. What is abnormal, though, is to have no effective mechanism of telling those leaders who are leading us astray that they shouldn't be doing so. Voting is not such a mechanism for many reasons; in particular, because there is no vote on policies. Voting is only for specific people and for their pet agendas - which may be changed without notice. The party line is always implied, and that is not under control of any voter.
On the other side of the problem, democracy presumes that majority is always right. This has been proven wrong many times in human history. This is doubly so today, when people gladly detach themselves from state problems and focus instead on the TV in front of them.
US politicians play on that fact by making the electorate elect them. Once elected, they can do whatever they want, including voting for Obamacare, Patriot act and such. The feedback from voters is delayed by years and very weak. Even then some politicians lose their offices... but a replacement is elected at the same time. That replacement continues the failed policy, so nothing really changes.
What else could government do to solve problems besides passing laws/regulations, adjusting taxes, or going to war?
It can do nothing. This will be a massive improvement already.
we need the tools developed to help dissidents in China to protect people here in the "free world."
Haven't you already used just such a tool to tell me and millions of others about your opinion on this subject?
Hint: Twitbook is evil. Do not touch. Slashdot and thousands of other blogs are good - they allow you to remain anonymous.
I have no idea if they are using it for their own secure needs. However even if they do, why would it be difficult to have MS sign and replace one of DLLs? Perhaps the backdoor is automatically disabled if all the steps required to prepare a PC for work in a SCIF are followed?
Also, as far as I heard, secret and above computer (Windows, Linux or anything else) cannot connect to unsecured networks. Security is not maintained exclusively by encryption of login credentials. That HDD with secret data goes into the vault whenever you are done (I remember reading about the case when it didn't happen once and the whole lab was frantically searching for a week.)
Bridges between more secure and less secure devices do exist, but they are not PCs running Windows but microcontroller-based, tamper-proof sealed boxes with ciphers implemented in hardware and checked for TEMPEST issues.
I don't want to sound too paranoid here, though. I only wanted to highlight the flaw in the original argument.
When they use it for their own top secret you can bet they are not at all interested in the existence of a backdoor, that also others could use.
There may be smart implementations of the backdoor that take as much effort to exploit as to break the customer's own key. For example you embed a backdoor public key into Windows. If you have the matching private key then you are golden. If you don't have that key then you are free to attack either the customer's private key or the backdoor key, you won't succeed anyway.
But if you do this then all Windows installations in all countries (all that you can connect to, at least) are yours for breaking into and looking around and messing with data...
"Confirm transport true or false repeat until true" For that matter since pattern buffer exist in Star Trek why do they even lose peoples on away mission?
How would you know if the transport was successful if you are beaming people a hundred miles away (from a low orbit to the surface) ??? There is nobody there to confirm except the beamee. If the beamee for any reason does not respond fast enough what do you do back at the transporter controls? The beamee may be busy with defending himself; the communication may be jammed or attenuated by something; he could be overcome with atmosphere, gravity or other natural conditions of the site...
"How hard could it be to put a small loop in the transporter software just before the disintegration function. Am no coder but it could look like this."
It is sometimes difficult to store very large arrays of data for a long time. If you use today's RAM for that it would take the volume of many Libraries of Congress and power that is sufficient for a medium sized city. There are technologies today that allow you storing a lot of data at cost of either having it deteriorate over time (DRAM,) or of having lesser reliability (MLC Flash.) Considering that the pattern buffer hardware is physically smaller than the Enterprise, they were [will be?] using a storage technology that is only sufficient for a relatively brief holding time, such as tens of seconds.
Today, for example, you could build it with a spool of a fiber optic cable that has a very low velocity factor (and still you need a very long cable.) You feed pulses of light, modulated by amplitude and frequency-divided into many bands, into one end. Once the light reaches the other end of the fiber you read it, and that's all you can do (unless you loop the buffer, which was the plot of one episode.)
BitLocker is FIPS 140-2 certified, I seriously doubt there is a backdoor in it.
The certification is done by the same government agency that is most interested in having a backdoor.
Something that I always found to be a design flaw should you disintegrate after you materialised the copy not before your even sure that the process worked? That way if there a fuck up the "original" is still well and alive!
If you do it this way then you will have two copies with diverging identity. The copy at the origin site will have to be, essentially, given a gun and told to shoot himself. Who will agree to that? Disintegration before transport avoids this problem because there is no duplication of consciousness.
As Ben said... "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
And that would be fine and dandy as long as only the actors would be experiencing the consequences.
But in this case 80% of population have given up essential liberty for 100% of the population. People who never signed up for this foolishness have to suffer along. This is especially said because those 80% are least qualified to express any opinion whatsoever on the subject. What did Romans say, "Divide and Rule" ?
"I want to opt out."
"Why?"
"Because I prefer a human touch."
The screener will be unsure who is violating who.
Still not the best comparison, as no group of marksmen would ever hold off a serious military assault from a modern military force.
No group of marksmen will even try to do that. It's not their job.
If the armor rolls into town the marksmen will keep low profile. However as opportunities arise, a marksman will be making a single shot from a large distance (half a mile) and disappearing before the enemy can direct forces to his location. In an urban environment the rifle goes into someone's grill or under porch or into the crawlspace, and the shooter walks away with no real chance of being associated with the shot. (Even residue tests will fail because gases don't leak from a rifle, unlike a revolver. But rubber gloves are cheap.) The rifle can be later retrieved by someone else on his way to another mission.
For a more detailed reading you can go here.
The essence of the piece is that to defeat an army you need to defeat its soldiers. But soldiers are humans, not robots. They cannot live only inside of their tanks. Not only this is not possible biologically, it is not practical tactically - the soldiers in tanks can't see much. So foot patrols and guards are a necessity. That's when they become vulnerable. It does not take much to change the morale of the army; just make it so each patrol that goes out will bring back one of their soldiers on his shield. An army may feel OK if it's all about burning and pillaging; but it is not a suicide club. If the army that you are fighting is composed of your own countrymen it will not take much to make soldiers thinking.
But that's all about fighting an army. If TSHTF you will not have to do that right away - or perhaps ever. The primary purpose of a weapon at that time is to keep you and your family alive. There will be plenty of people who are intent on "equalizing" your property and your valuables. The same people will be happy to kill you and to rape/torture your children, just for fun (and there are other reasons too; dead men tell no tales.) This is when you need the weapon most. The army pales in comparison to riots and pogroms; soldiers will not shoot you for no reason; their purpose is to control the territory, not to exterminate its population (do not confuse with Daleks.)
That's exactly what people thought at inauguration of Slobodan Milosevic. And they didn't even have the constitutional right to bear arms. But within a decade they would be doing just that, whether they wanted it or not. Nobody ever expects a war. In the USA there are enough "disadvantaged" lumpen proletariat to start deadly riots in every city of or above medium size. With pogroms approaching and nowhere to run most people would wish they were armed. History is written by winners.
I'm willing to bet that the mostly likely way it will figure into your and my personal security is if someone shoots us.
Well, I guess that's one possibility. But most people would like to shoot the attacker, even if they are professional hoplophobes. When TSHTF wery few people will be willing to die for an abstract opinion - one that may be even wrong.
There is extremely little waste in the US government.
It is very difficult to debate this statement, largely because the statement itself defies belief. For example, are you saying that the whole TSA infrastructure, with their airport gropers and the VIPERs on buses, who steals travelers' belongings and can't see a gun on a passenger, is just fine and we should keep financing it?