I guess you failed to see the part where I said the middle of the "Indian Ocean" or the "Australian Outback". Internet satellites do not cover the entirety of the planet's surface with their coverage as they maintain a geosynchronous orbit.
Your 2mbps Internet connection is absolutely worthless outside it's coverage area. The question was for South America and Northeast Alaska which are probably not covered by your provider. Your 2mbps coverage for your RV is likely good only part of North America and absolutely useless beyond it.
Now go to your providers coverage map and look to see if they offer that coverage to the Indian Ocean at that rate....
I've had to do architecture work for sites (oil derricks, mines in the outback etc) that had satellite only links off and on over my career. What I've learned is that satellite will work, but it doesn't tend to work when you want it. You also have to be very careful about bandwidth provisioning for what you sending over the connection and overages can be very expensive. Latency is terrible, weather impacts it, but it does eventually go through. If you are only setting up a single link the cost is more, if you can get a contract for a number of sites it will help quite a bit with cost. You have to have very strict discipline on network utilization or you can see overages in the tens of thousands of dollars in a heartbeat.
In one case I had to send out about 40 GB of data to a number of sites and ran the numbers for the costs. When everything was said and done I literally ended up sending out teams of techs to oil rigs in the Indian Ocean on the weekly helicopter trip with a pair of server hard drives. It was cheaper to pay their overtime for the entire week than the overage on the bandwidth for satellite links. As long as we were paying for them to be out there we took advantage and went ahead and did a large amount of overdue maintenance anyways, but it still cost a fortune.
What they need to do is fix the real issues with check points. Get rid of the security theater, the 3.4 oz fluid limits, the shoes removals, the body scanners, the biggest of all being the understaffing of the checkpoints that allow the mass lines that would attract a terrorist to begin with and so on. Start training the TSA on real security measures and start teach training them on profiling. When's the last time you heard about an Isreali plane being hijacked - and they let you bring a pocket-knife on board?
The problem with the TSA isn't the members of the TSA, they are doing what they are trained to do. The problem is that Congress is overseeing the TSA and allowing politics to trump security. It's like getting mad at the IRS when the IRS is only doing what congress told them to do. Get mad at congress for giving them the byzantine rules to begin with.
The TSA should be staffed by real armed Federal Officers, with real training, and real skills. Start by phasing in the replacement of the current supervisors with real officers and work your way from there. The next thing they should do is follow the Federal Reserve model and make the TSA semi-independent from regular politics so that they can focus more on security and less on politics.
The day the color codes, shoes removals, 3.4 oz removals and similar useless rules go and get replaced by having the (usually unmanned) additional screening checkpoints getting opened up is the day you know the TSA has finally started to get security.
Logic is a wonderful thing and we need more critical thinking and less hyperbole with regards to green energy. Strident hyperbole with regards to the anti-nuclear energy has resulted in the real world build of coal power plants as renewals simply are suitable for baseline power. Coal power plants also release far more pollution and for the ignorant they also result in a lot of radiation being released into the air.
Nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest pollution, best carbon footprint of anything we have (it's largest footprint comes from the concrete used in it's construction) and could be far cheaper if it wasn't severely over-regulated. Thorium reactors are also starting to get planned for production and deserve a good look (and if fact a proof of concept plant was built in the past). Thorium reactors have the green advantages of nuclear reactors and should be included.
It's time to get real about getting green and put the likes of Greenpeace out to pasture. They have done far more harm to the environment than just about anyone short of the Koch brothers.
It's a pretty arrogant assumption to assume that the best are where you think they are because that's where you think the best are. I'll go back in time to make my point to a chap named Charles Lindbergh who you might recall was the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean. When he accomplished his feat it surprised many, many people because he was a former pilot for the US Post Office and not a traditional glamorous background. It turned out that flying for the Post Office back then was just about the most dangerous job you could have a pilot with 31 out of the original 40 pilots killed.
The presumption that the only people capable of doing a given thing well work at certain places is called arrogance, and that arrogance has cost entire countries their industry. History abounds with examples from the downfall of the American Auto industry to the rise of giants like Capital Group or Wal-Mart. You can't assume that just because someone didn't learn to do a given thing in a given circle of people that they can't do it. The arrogance of the circles also fails to understand that many people don't live in certain places (Silicon Valley etc) because they don't want to or because they can't. The entire concept of the social circle as being a decider for talent fails the tests of history with outsider after outsider unsurping the arrogant time and again in industry after industry.
Eradicating disease sounds like a noble pursuit and indeed Nobel prizes have been awarded for efforts there. However the problem with success is that disease is one of natures ways of keeping populations in check. The other natural method of keeping populations in check is predators and we humans have pretty much eliminated most of our natural predators. Were one of the very rare species that dies from old age, a luxury not available to most of the animal kingdom.
Overpopulation is a serious problem in parts of the world and it's only getting far worse. Not only does overpopulation lead to problems like a shortage of food it also leads to increase in pollution of all kinds. It also further strains social services as more and more people need services such as medical care. The net result would be an inevitable surplus of humans a substantial risk of not being able to take care of them.
Unless we can pair getting rid of diseases with far better birth control all were going to do is create a perfect dystopian future.
How many years have people been complaining that the only the thing the long lines at the screening areas do is make for a target rich environment? Attacking waiting points for security lines is a time honored practice in some parts of the world, the only surprising thing is that it took this long for it to occur here.
Security theater isn't just an inconvenience, it's a security risk in and of itself. I used to travel for a living and I have easily seen times in major airports where there were thousands of people queued up to go through the security checkpoints. It's a target rich environment where you can't miss for trying in some airports.
It's time to end security theater and demand real security.
Now the problem is that non everyone shares the same values, or even definitions of what a word means.
Let's say you have an 'honest' company by your given view. Now let's say we talk with someone else and get their idea of an 'honest' company. Chances are you will have slightly different views about what 'honest' means. Now, let's extend this to hundreds or thousands of different people and see what happens to the definition of honest.
Many of those people would probably agree that someone that breaks their word is dishonest. You don't even need to bring up politics, just describe that someone (Snowden) broke their vow to protect secrets. It would be a very safe bet that most people would describe Snowden as dishonest if they only knew about his behavior and not his name.
What I'm trying to illustrate is that your concept of having nothing to hide (just curious if you believe in privacy) is that it can't withstand your own proposal of owning a company. Perhaps you hired a communist that thinks any profit is inherently dishonest? Perhaps you hired someone that thinks janitors deserve to be paid as much as PhD's as they do honest hard labor and PhD's sit around all day. Perhaps you hire someone that thinks all information should be free, despite the fact that your company spent years of time and millions on dollars on R&D costs?
The concept that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear simply cannot survive in the real world.
I'll go ahead and use the following definition from the Dictionary.com for reference.
A symmetrical bell-shaped curve that represents the distribution of values, frequencies, or probabilities of a set of data. It slopes downward from a point in the middle corresponding to the mean value, or the maximum probability. Data that reflect the aggregate outcome of large numbers of unrelated events tend to result in bell curve distributions. â-- The Gaussian or normal distribution is a mathematically well-defined bell curve used in statistics and in science generally.
It's purpose is to define what the mean average of a given set of values is. With a bell curve you can tell not only what the average of a set of numbers is, but what the mean average is. For this reason you can use a bell curve to get a better define what the "normal" or "average" for a set of data is without being thrown off by a small number of outlier values.
Now my argument that I'm putting forth is that if you have a set of values (in this case game review scores) and plot them in a bell curve you will find out what the actual average score is from a given site. If you plot a 100 data points from 1 to 10 and 80 of them range between a score of 6, 7 or an 8 you can discern that they actual mean "average" is probably a 7. By definition you can't have almost everything be above average.
An honest site will fit somewhat close to a bell curve for their defined range, whereas a dishonest site simply can't do that.
Remember that NIST standards and protocols are typically the same one the US requires for it's own use. What your proposing is either that the US would use known bad protocols for it's own use or would be making an epic scale security through obscurity blunder. You can't have a back door that only works for you, if it's in there any given foreign agency could discover it and use it. That simply doesn't pass the sniff test or Occam's razor.
What does concern me with the proposed standard is that they want to use certificates signed by a third party. You can't do that without having a dependency on someone that can be forced by a court order to work against you. This isn't a US specific issue either as other countries can and do use court orders to compel certificate authorities to cooperate.
Remember the only thing trust does with SSL and a certificate is verify a chain of identify. When your chain of identity is subject to a MITM attack or a warrant you have a standard that is for all intents and purposes next to worthless.
It's absolutely impossible to do real software reviews of many software products without risking getting sued. This is due to the industry using NDA's for software that prohibit unapproved reviews. NDA's are why on release day you will all of a sudden see a plethora of reviews on release day. Reviews off of sites like Amazon are largely worthless due to the sheer number of shills and the most popular reviewers getting large quantities of merchandise for free.
One merely needs to look at what happens with video games to know why. If you work for a video game magazine and give a scathing negative review you won't get selected to review the next product from that publisher. After a while you end up being unemployable as video game reviews have to be ready for release day. It doesn't take long to realize you have to carefully write about a game without pissing off the publishers. The net result is that pretty much every game review web site effectively becomes a shill for the publishers as they can't afford to miss out on day zero releases.
Take your favorite site and select all their reviews and put them on a bell curve. Most (average) software should fall somewhere in the middle of their scale. In practice you will find many sites will give average reviews of a 7 or 8 on a 10 point scale. An honest site will fit the bell curve, a dishonest site will quickly be exposed by the bell curve distribution being shifted towards better scores. These problems are why some sites make claims about refusing to sign NDA's, they are showing that they have more integrity to give honest reviews.
This can even extend through to things like operating systems where many beta or rtm releases have excluded the right to review the product without approval in exchange for getting an early release. One simply needs to review the history of Operating System releases to see the effect of reviewers that are afraid to piss up companies. Look back at Windows Me, Vista, Mac OS's before 10 and so on and you can find a plethora of initial approving reviews (ZD Net in particular comes to mind).
The problem gets even worse with actual commercial software. Read your fine print from Oracle or any other commercial product and you will almost certainly find the license prohibits benchmarking and other similar activities that could be used for a review - especially for trial versions. In addition to license issues the cost for commercial software makes it unfeasible to purchase.
Trying to review enterprise class software becomes even more unfeasible as you can't simply install it. In order to properly set it up you need a consultant who knows the product fairly well and that is cost prohibitive for a company that isn't even going to use it. Since enterprise software tends to include language in the EULA that prohibits unapproved reviews no consultant, who naturally depends on having a good relationship with the publisher, is going to help you if you might say critical things about it.
So how do you get a real review of a product that your considering investing a lot of money in? Go to a conference or users group for the software, find an admin who's been using it and take them out to a nice dinner for an off the record review of how the product actually works.
The IRS inspector general said this week that while some liberal groups were given extra scrutiny by the tax agency, they were not subjected to the same invasive queries as tea party groups
... In a letter sent late Wednesday and released Thursday, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George said that just 30 percent of groups with the word âoeprogressiveâ in their name were put through special scrutiny for tax-exempt applications, but 100 percent of groups with âoetea party,â âoepatriotâ or âoe9/12â in their name were subjected to invasive questioning.
The IRS targeted 292 conservative groups and only 6 progressive groups. Your playing revisionist history with reality and it doesn't withstand even a minimum of scrutiny.
Proven a lie? Obama himself apologized and the targeting guidelines literally had the very words that were being used by conservatives. You would be up in arms if this happened under Bush with an identical scenario focused on things like "progressive".
The IRS official in charge of the debacle pleaded the 5th amendment when asked to testify about the whole thing. You only do that because you don't want to incriminate yourself. The numbers for targeting conservative groups were overwhelming and it was one of the most blatant abuses of government power since Watergate.
Not a conservative, definitely not a tea party member, however revisionist propaganda to cover up a scandal like this is repulsive.
That attitude is why the journals continue to extort large amounts of money. Until academics are willing to put common sense ahead of prestige the problem will continue.
If you don't like the fact that the current journals charge the rates that they do you have to take your research to a new journal that doesn't. When enough people do this the present journals will change their policies or be left out of the market.
Right now your trying to be the tail that wagged the dog. Stop being the tail and start realizing that there are far more academics than journals and organize a new journal. With the Internet it is absurdly easy to communicate with like kind peers and set up a self publishing site for very little money.
At some point you have to realize that the journals need the academics more than the academics need the journals. A small number of professional journals are holding up millions of academics. Stop being the tail, start being the dog.
You still haven't got a citation, and neither has anyone else at this very anti Microsoft site. If you had proof you would be making a fortune by shorting their stock. Your going to have a hell of a time with your tinfoil hat shill claim when I've made comments critical of Microsoft on this site for over a decade. You need psychological help for your delusions.
Germany's green jobs are very heavily subsidized by the government. Jobs are certainly being created, however the cost is enormous to their economy. The latest figures show Germany has spent over $130 Billion dollars for 6000 green jobs. That is a cool $20 million per job created. Each consumer subsidizes these jobs to the tune of an extra $260 per year making German electricity among the most expensive in the world. To quote that hard core leftist site Slate
Moreover, this sizeable investment does remarkably little to counter global warming. Even with unrealistically generous assumptions, the unimpressive net effect is that solar power reduces Germanyâ(TM)s CO2 emissions by roughly 8 million metric tonsâ"or about 1 percent â" for the next 20 years.
... In the meantime, Germans have paid about $130 billion for a climate-change policy that has no impact on global warming.
The one thing that they were really doing right, nuclear energy they voted to get rid of once the Greens got in power. Now since even Germany can't run everything off of renewables the net effect is that Germany is massively ramping up building more coal power plants. So, how about those Germans?
I had heard they were trying to reopen it, but haven't heard it was successful. It's a good step in the right direction for components that are vitally necessary for modern society. Hopefully this time they wont be shut down as easily by price competition from Chinese companies that don't have to worry about environmental regulations.
The point is that the FUD has become so think about anything Nuclear that even something as benign as an MRI had to renamed to remove the word Nuclear. It's an example to illustrate just how bad the FUD has gotten.
Wow, your going to go there, you picked about the worst cases you could. I could bother doing the same thing with coal and quickly show far worse pollution and death figures, but you can google that all by yourself. So let's take your worst case scenario and run with it (you have researched these things, right?). How many people were killed in these or all other nuclear related incidents? How much actual damage was done?
Now compare those numbers to your favorite form of green energy, how about windmills? Go on, google this and tell me how it compares. Why don't you compare pollution figures while your at it. Remember your windmills require the very rare earths that come from these types of mines.
Okay, now that you've bothered to do a bit of research scale your numbers of for world wide power and tell me what they would look like. You see, if strip mining is done in a place like Greenland they will bother with these pesky things called environment regulations. The Chinese don't do that and as a result they have cornered the market. You can't get rare earths from Unicorn farts and rainbows, you have to get them out of the ground. Better we do the mining, so that it can be done responsibly.
A country repealing environmental regulation made for a mythical world and replacing it for real world environmental concerns. The current process of mining rare earths in China is horrendously bad for the environment, however because of Greenpeace inspired laws almost no else would do it. Rare earths aren't rare, but environmental laws that actually have anything to do with the environment are.
It's time to put the rest of the Greenpeace inspired FUD laws about radiation and all other things nuclear out to the FUD farm where they belong. The laws were written for one purpose only, and that was to prevent anything relating to nuclear from ever being viable. It's idiots like these why an MRI doesn't use nuclear in the name even though that is what the technology is based on.
It's like the opposition to any form of Nuclear power or gas power plant, the net real world result was that for decades we built coal power plants instead. It's time to replace fear mongering with science and start to look out for the environment instead. Nuclear energy is the greenest form of energy we have, and it will remain so until Fusion is up and running.
Actually it's exactly the strategy in use on the Surface RT. Apple will at least let you install software from third party sources, the RT doesn't. Mind you Microsoft modeled this strategy after Apple's so I guess you could blame Apple.
Put down the tinfoil hat and join the real world. You haven't got a citation because it's only something you want to believe and has no basis in reality. What's next, claiming that Linux has a backdoor for the NSA and that Linus Torvalds is on their payroll?
If something like what you claim existed Snowden would have dumped it along with the rest. It would have been revealed and Microsoft stock would have taken a massive multi-billion dollar hit from the news. All that kind of talk does it make you sound like a crazy conspiracy theory nut.
Hey, let's play this game with computers, after all we don't need freedom behind the keyboard either and **AA's claim piracy cost the economy countless billions of dollars every year. Let's have autonomous computers! We'll make the operating system and hardware completely closed to prevent anyone from altering their 'trusted' environment. Now in order to keep anyone from hacking into their computers and driving by themselves we'll have to make sure that we take away the ability to install software that hasn't been approved.
We'll do this through a centralized market place where every application is signed and approved. Now the signing agency is taking on a lot of work to act as big brother and censor everything so it's only fair that they get a cut of 30%. How if your application sells well we'll cut the fee down to 20%. Now we have to make sure that your computer can't be used to pirate software so we'll keep up the autonomous trend and make all updates automatic. By locking out software from any distribution method other than the market and ensuring updates are automated your environment will stay trusted for software companies to continue offering you software.
Welcome to Microsoft Surface RT of the future, big brother knows best. What possible legitimate reason do you have for driving your own computer and endangering the economy by enabling the possibility of piracy? Think of the children!!!
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I guess you failed to see the part where I said the middle of the "Indian Ocean" or the "Australian Outback". Internet satellites do not cover the entirety of the planet's surface with their coverage as they maintain a geosynchronous orbit.
Your 2mbps Internet connection is absolutely worthless outside it's coverage area. The question was for South America and Northeast Alaska which are probably not covered by your provider. Your 2mbps coverage for your RV is likely good only part of North America and absolutely useless beyond it.
Now go to your providers coverage map and look to see if they offer that coverage to the Indian Ocean at that rate....
Your consumer grade service isn't offered in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Australian Outback or other places that need industrial grade service.
I've had to do architecture work for sites (oil derricks, mines in the outback etc) that had satellite only links off and on over my career. What I've learned is that satellite will work, but it doesn't tend to work when you want it. You also have to be very careful about bandwidth provisioning for what you sending over the connection and overages can be very expensive. Latency is terrible, weather impacts it, but it does eventually go through. If you are only setting up a single link the cost is more, if you can get a contract for a number of sites it will help quite a bit with cost. You have to have very strict discipline on network utilization or you can see overages in the tens of thousands of dollars in a heartbeat.
In one case I had to send out about 40 GB of data to a number of sites and ran the numbers for the costs. When everything was said and done I literally ended up sending out teams of techs to oil rigs in the Indian Ocean on the weekly helicopter trip with a pair of server hard drives. It was cheaper to pay their overtime for the entire week than the overage on the bandwidth for satellite links. As long as we were paying for them to be out there we took advantage and went ahead and did a large amount of overdue maintenance anyways, but it still cost a fortune.
What they need to do is fix the real issues with check points. Get rid of the security theater, the 3.4 oz fluid limits, the shoes removals, the body scanners, the biggest of all being the understaffing of the checkpoints that allow the mass lines that would attract a terrorist to begin with and so on. Start training the TSA on real security measures and start teach training them on profiling. When's the last time you heard about an Isreali plane being hijacked - and they let you bring a pocket-knife on board?
The problem with the TSA isn't the members of the TSA, they are doing what they are trained to do. The problem is that Congress is overseeing the TSA and allowing politics to trump security. It's like getting mad at the IRS when the IRS is only doing what congress told them to do. Get mad at congress for giving them the byzantine rules to begin with.
The TSA should be staffed by real armed Federal Officers, with real training, and real skills. Start by phasing in the replacement of the current supervisors with real officers and work your way from there. The next thing they should do is follow the Federal Reserve model and make the TSA semi-independent from regular politics so that they can focus more on security and less on politics.
The day the color codes, shoes removals, 3.4 oz removals and similar useless rules go and get replaced by having the (usually unmanned) additional screening checkpoints getting opened up is the day you know the TSA has finally started to get security.
Logic is a wonderful thing and we need more critical thinking and less hyperbole with regards to green energy. Strident hyperbole with regards to the anti-nuclear energy has resulted in the real world build of coal power plants as renewals simply are suitable for baseline power. Coal power plants also release far more pollution and for the ignorant they also result in a lot of radiation being released into the air.
Nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest pollution, best carbon footprint of anything we have (it's largest footprint comes from the concrete used in it's construction) and could be far cheaper if it wasn't severely over-regulated. Thorium reactors are also starting to get planned for production and deserve a good look (and if fact a proof of concept plant was built in the past). Thorium reactors have the green advantages of nuclear reactors and should be included.
It's time to get real about getting green and put the likes of Greenpeace out to pasture. They have done far more harm to the environment than just about anyone short of the Koch brothers.
It's a pretty arrogant assumption to assume that the best are where you think they are because that's where you think the best are. I'll go back in time to make my point to a chap named Charles Lindbergh who you might recall was the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean. When he accomplished his feat it surprised many, many people because he was a former pilot for the US Post Office and not a traditional glamorous background. It turned out that flying for the Post Office back then was just about the most dangerous job you could have a pilot with 31 out of the original 40 pilots killed.
The presumption that the only people capable of doing a given thing well work at certain places is called arrogance, and that arrogance has cost entire countries their industry. History abounds with examples from the downfall of the American Auto industry to the rise of giants like Capital Group or Wal-Mart. You can't assume that just because someone didn't learn to do a given thing in a given circle of people that they can't do it. The arrogance of the circles also fails to understand that many people don't live in certain places (Silicon Valley etc) because they don't want to or because they can't. The entire concept of the social circle as being a decider for talent fails the tests of history with outsider after outsider unsurping the arrogant time and again in industry after industry.
Eradicating disease sounds like a noble pursuit and indeed Nobel prizes have been awarded for efforts there. However the problem with success is that disease is one of natures ways of keeping populations in check. The other natural method of keeping populations in check is predators and we humans have pretty much eliminated most of our natural predators. Were one of the very rare species that dies from old age, a luxury not available to most of the animal kingdom.
Overpopulation is a serious problem in parts of the world and it's only getting far worse. Not only does overpopulation lead to problems like a shortage of food it also leads to increase in pollution of all kinds. It also further strains social services as more and more people need services such as medical care. The net result would be an inevitable surplus of humans a substantial risk of not being able to take care of them.
Unless we can pair getting rid of diseases with far better birth control all were going to do is create a perfect dystopian future.
How many years have people been complaining that the only the thing the long lines at the screening areas do is make for a target rich environment? Attacking waiting points for security lines is a time honored practice in some parts of the world, the only surprising thing is that it took this long for it to occur here.
Security theater isn't just an inconvenience, it's a security risk in and of itself. I used to travel for a living and I have easily seen times in major airports where there were thousands of people queued up to go through the security checkpoints. It's a target rich environment where you can't miss for trying in some airports.
It's time to end security theater and demand real security.
Now the problem is that non everyone shares the same values, or even definitions of what a word means.
Let's say you have an 'honest' company by your given view. Now let's say we talk with someone else and get their idea of an 'honest' company. Chances are you will have slightly different views about what 'honest' means. Now, let's extend this to hundreds or thousands of different people and see what happens to the definition of honest.
Many of those people would probably agree that someone that breaks their word is dishonest. You don't even need to bring up politics, just describe that someone (Snowden) broke their vow to protect secrets. It would be a very safe bet that most people would describe Snowden as dishonest if they only knew about his behavior and not his name.
What I'm trying to illustrate is that your concept of having nothing to hide (just curious if you believe in privacy) is that it can't withstand your own proposal of owning a company. Perhaps you hired a communist that thinks any profit is inherently dishonest? Perhaps you hired someone that thinks janitors deserve to be paid as much as PhD's as they do honest hard labor and PhD's sit around all day. Perhaps you hire someone that thinks all information should be free, despite the fact that your company spent years of time and millions on dollars on R&D costs?
The concept that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear simply cannot survive in the real world.
I'll go ahead and use the following definition from the Dictionary.com for reference.
It's purpose is to define what the mean average of a given set of values is. With a bell curve you can tell not only what the average of a set of numbers is, but what the mean average is. For this reason you can use a bell curve to get a better define what the "normal" or "average" for a set of data is without being thrown off by a small number of outlier values.
Now my argument that I'm putting forth is that if you have a set of values (in this case game review scores) and plot them in a bell curve you will find out what the actual average score is from a given site. If you plot a 100 data points from 1 to 10 and 80 of them range between a score of 6, 7 or an 8 you can discern that they actual mean "average" is probably a 7. By definition you can't have almost everything be above average.
An honest site will fit somewhat close to a bell curve for their defined range, whereas a dishonest site simply can't do that.
Remember that NIST standards and protocols are typically the same one the US requires for it's own use. What your proposing is either that the US would use known bad protocols for it's own use or would be making an epic scale security through obscurity blunder. You can't have a back door that only works for you, if it's in there any given foreign agency could discover it and use it. That simply doesn't pass the sniff test or Occam's razor.
What does concern me with the proposed standard is that they want to use certificates signed by a third party. You can't do that without having a dependency on someone that can be forced by a court order to work against you. This isn't a US specific issue either as other countries can and do use court orders to compel certificate authorities to cooperate.
Remember the only thing trust does with SSL and a certificate is verify a chain of identify. When your chain of identity is subject to a MITM attack or a warrant you have a standard that is for all intents and purposes next to worthless.
It's absolutely impossible to do real software reviews of many software products without risking getting sued. This is due to the industry using NDA's for software that prohibit unapproved reviews. NDA's are why on release day you will all of a sudden see a plethora of reviews on release day. Reviews off of sites like Amazon are largely worthless due to the sheer number of shills and the most popular reviewers getting large quantities of merchandise for free.
One merely needs to look at what happens with video games to know why. If you work for a video game magazine and give a scathing negative review you won't get selected to review the next product from that publisher. After a while you end up being unemployable as video game reviews have to be ready for release day. It doesn't take long to realize you have to carefully write about a game without pissing off the publishers. The net result is that pretty much every game review web site effectively becomes a shill for the publishers as they can't afford to miss out on day zero releases.
Take your favorite site and select all their reviews and put them on a bell curve. Most (average) software should fall somewhere in the middle of their scale. In practice you will find many sites will give average reviews of a 7 or 8 on a 10 point scale. An honest site will fit the bell curve, a dishonest site will quickly be exposed by the bell curve distribution being shifted towards better scores. These problems are why some sites make claims about refusing to sign NDA's, they are showing that they have more integrity to give honest reviews.
This can even extend through to things like operating systems where many beta or rtm releases have excluded the right to review the product without approval in exchange for getting an early release. One simply needs to review the history of Operating System releases to see the effect of reviewers that are afraid to piss up companies. Look back at Windows Me, Vista, Mac OS's before 10 and so on and you can find a plethora of initial approving reviews (ZD Net in particular comes to mind).
The problem gets even worse with actual commercial software. Read your fine print from Oracle or any other commercial product and you will almost certainly find the license prohibits benchmarking and other similar activities that could be used for a review - especially for trial versions. In addition to license issues the cost for commercial software makes it unfeasible to purchase.
Trying to review enterprise class software becomes even more unfeasible as you can't simply install it. In order to properly set it up you need a consultant who knows the product fairly well and that is cost prohibitive for a company that isn't even going to use it. Since enterprise software tends to include language in the EULA that prohibits unapproved reviews no consultant, who naturally depends on having a good relationship with the publisher, is going to help you if you might say critical things about it.
So how do you get a real review of a product that your considering investing a lot of money in? Go to a conference or users group for the software, find an admin who's been using it and take them out to a nice dinner for an off the record review of how the product actually works.
Funny that the IRS themselves disagrees with you.
The IRS targeted 292 conservative groups and only 6 progressive groups. Your playing revisionist history with reality and it doesn't withstand even a minimum of scrutiny.
Proven a lie? Obama himself apologized and the targeting guidelines literally had the very words that were being used by conservatives. You would be up in arms if this happened under Bush with an identical scenario focused on things like "progressive".
The IRS official in charge of the debacle pleaded the 5th amendment when asked to testify about the whole thing. You only do that because you don't want to incriminate yourself. The numbers for targeting conservative groups were overwhelming and it was one of the most blatant abuses of government power since Watergate.
Not a conservative, definitely not a tea party member, however revisionist propaganda to cover up a scandal like this is repulsive.
That attitude is why the journals continue to extort large amounts of money. Until academics are willing to put common sense ahead of prestige the problem will continue.
If you don't like the fact that the current journals charge the rates that they do you have to take your research to a new journal that doesn't. When enough people do this the present journals will change their policies or be left out of the market.
Right now your trying to be the tail that wagged the dog. Stop being the tail and start realizing that there are far more academics than journals and organize a new journal. With the Internet it is absurdly easy to communicate with like kind peers and set up a self publishing site for very little money.
At some point you have to realize that the journals need the academics more than the academics need the journals. A small number of professional journals are holding up millions of academics. Stop being the tail, start being the dog.
You still haven't got a citation, and neither has anyone else at this very anti Microsoft site. If you had proof you would be making a fortune by shorting their stock. Your going to have a hell of a time with your tinfoil hat shill claim when I've made comments critical of Microsoft on this site for over a decade. You need psychological help for your delusions.
Germany's green jobs are very heavily subsidized by the government. Jobs are certainly being created, however the cost is enormous to their economy. The latest figures show Germany has spent over $130 Billion dollars for 6000 green jobs. That is a cool $20 million per job created. Each consumer subsidizes these jobs to the tune of an extra $260 per year making German electricity among the most expensive in the world. To quote that hard core leftist site Slate
The one thing that they were really doing right, nuclear energy they voted to get rid of once the Greens got in power. Now since even Germany can't run everything off of renewables the net effect is that Germany is massively ramping up building more coal power plants. So, how about those Germans?
I had heard they were trying to reopen it, but haven't heard it was successful. It's a good step in the right direction for components that are vitally necessary for modern society. Hopefully this time they wont be shut down as easily by price competition from Chinese companies that don't have to worry about environmental regulations.
The point is that the FUD has become so think about anything Nuclear that even something as benign as an MRI had to renamed to remove the word Nuclear. It's an example to illustrate just how bad the FUD has gotten.
Wow, your going to go there, you picked about the worst cases you could. I could bother doing the same thing with coal and quickly show far worse pollution and death figures, but you can google that all by yourself. So let's take your worst case scenario and run with it (you have researched these things, right?). How many people were killed in these or all other nuclear related incidents? How much actual damage was done?
Now compare those numbers to your favorite form of green energy, how about windmills? Go on, google this and tell me how it compares. Why don't you compare pollution figures while your at it. Remember your windmills require the very rare earths that come from these types of mines.
Okay, now that you've bothered to do a bit of research scale your numbers of for world wide power and tell me what they would look like. You see, if strip mining is done in a place like Greenland they will bother with these pesky things called environment regulations. The Chinese don't do that and as a result they have cornered the market. You can't get rare earths from Unicorn farts and rainbows, you have to get them out of the ground. Better we do the mining, so that it can be done responsibly.
A country repealing environmental regulation made for a mythical world and replacing it for real world environmental concerns. The current process of mining rare earths in China is horrendously bad for the environment, however because of Greenpeace inspired laws almost no else would do it. Rare earths aren't rare, but environmental laws that actually have anything to do with the environment are.
It's time to put the rest of the Greenpeace inspired FUD laws about radiation and all other things nuclear out to the FUD farm where they belong. The laws were written for one purpose only, and that was to prevent anything relating to nuclear from ever being viable. It's idiots like these why an MRI doesn't use nuclear in the name even though that is what the technology is based on.
It's like the opposition to any form of Nuclear power or gas power plant, the net real world result was that for decades we built coal power plants instead. It's time to replace fear mongering with science and start to look out for the environment instead. Nuclear energy is the greenest form of energy we have, and it will remain so until Fusion is up and running.
Actually it's exactly the strategy in use on the Surface RT. Apple will at least let you install software from third party sources, the RT doesn't. Mind you Microsoft modeled this strategy after Apple's so I guess you could blame Apple.
Put down the tinfoil hat and join the real world. You haven't got a citation because it's only something you want to believe and has no basis in reality. What's next, claiming that Linux has a backdoor for the NSA and that Linus Torvalds is on their payroll?
If something like what you claim existed Snowden would have dumped it along with the rest. It would have been revealed and Microsoft stock would have taken a massive multi-billion dollar hit from the news. All that kind of talk does it make you sound like a crazy conspiracy theory nut.
Hey, let's play this game with computers, after all we don't need freedom behind the keyboard either and **AA's claim piracy cost the economy countless billions of dollars every year. Let's have autonomous computers! We'll make the operating system and hardware completely closed to prevent anyone from altering their 'trusted' environment. Now in order to keep anyone from hacking into their computers and driving by themselves we'll have to make sure that we take away the ability to install software that hasn't been approved.
We'll do this through a centralized market place where every application is signed and approved. Now the signing agency is taking on a lot of work to act as big brother and censor everything so it's only fair that they get a cut of 30%. How if your application sells well we'll cut the fee down to 20%. Now we have to make sure that your computer can't be used to pirate software so we'll keep up the autonomous trend and make all updates automatic. By locking out software from any distribution method other than the market and ensuring updates are automated your environment will stay trusted for software companies to continue offering you software.
Welcome to Microsoft Surface RT of the future, big brother knows best. What possible legitimate reason do you have for driving your own computer and endangering the economy by enabling the possibility of piracy? Think of the children!!!