The nice thing about inaccuracy is that (as long as you are tactful in your exploitation of the data) the user will never know if you fuck up; and if it becomes 'common knowledge' that people shrouded in mystery are usually passed over in favor of transparent choices, we'll probably start seeing advice on 'building persona', just as we currently have people interacting with financial institutions purely for the purpose of 'building a credit score'.
When you use your Twitter account for authentication, it doesn't need to be authorised for tweeting. You only need to avoid places that request that permission.
One gets the impression that NYCC was...tactful... in eliding exactly what level of privilege delegation users were clicking through, and certainly less than forthright about how those privileges would be put to use.
ReedPop's apology was insincere and showed no remorsefulness. They've done it before and they'll do it again.
Morale of the story: don't use your social media accounts for any type of authentication.
Would you expect the sort of abhuman scum who would pull a stunt like this to even be capable of comprehending the concepts of 'sincerity' or 'remorse'? Not only do they not exhibit them, they probably don't possess them, and may not even have the cognitive mechanisms required to acquire an understanding of them.
"we were probably too enthusiastic in our messaging and eagerness to spread the good word about NYCC. We have since shut down this service completely and apologize for any perceived overstep"
I thought that that sort of invasive narcissism was only found among inebriated 'pick-up artists' trying to avoid going home alone toward the end of an evening...
So you want the broadcasters to shrivel up & die.. That would leave Aereo with nothing to retransmit. Who wins then? Certainly not the consumer!
If a service that snags OTA transmissions out of the air (using a Rube Goldberg device, for legal reasons) and then shoves them over the internet is commercially viable, I have a sneaky plan: shut down the 'OTA transmission' and 'ridiculous antenna farm' parts of the process and just sell streaming video over the internet. Win-win. The OTA guys don't need depend on shaking down the cable companies and ad-spamming their customers for money; because they can just have subscribers, and the goofy unnecessary infrastructure intricacies can be removed, saving money and spectrum for everyone.
If the courts decide Aereo doesn't have to pay the broadcasters, then Big Cable won't have to either. The networks will have to go back to 100% advertising revenue. I promise that will not be good for the consumers.
Are you seriously suggesting that there is anything on OTA that is even worth the RF space is chews up? The broadcasters would be doing us all a favor by shrivelling up, dying, and leaving the field open for people who give a damn to pay for service, and people who don't not to have to deal with the ripple effects of the subsidies that keep them creaking along.
Oh, that's a cute little subsidy. I'm sure I'd throw up in my mouth if I heard the 'justification' for why a cable provider should be required to carry OTA signals and pay more or less whatever is demanded, because they are required.
Is that just a pure handout to the broadcast guys, or is there anything even slightly redeeming about it?
If pressed, I assumed that they would fall back on the 'mere abuse' allowance. If made in sufficiently absurd terms that a reasonable listener/reader would concluded that they are not meant literally (and, given the nontrivial difficulty of 'stealing' an unencrypted RF transmission, rather than merely receiving it, 'stealing' is unlikely to be literal) they can be treated as (legal) generic rubbishing of the opponent, rather than (illegal) false and defamatory claims.
It's the difference between calling John Smith a 'goatfucker' and asserting that 'John Smith practices bestiality with goats'.
The world just keeps on turning: Cable TV, as an industry, got its start in providing access to broadcast signals(by putting antennas in good locations and running coax to lousy ones). As usual, the broadcast guys cried hysterically about how this...um... free access to additional customers would ruin them, America, and apple pie.
Unfortunately, it didn't, and the broadcasters are still around, while the cable guys have whitewashed their past as upstarts and are playing 'asshole incumbent' with the best of them.
So we have no rights to the content beamed into our homes, but they have the Right to Profit, even with a bad business model.
It's more vexing because it's a bad business model that also sits smack in the middle of some very nice spectrum. The broadcasters are stomping around like their right to profit was handed down by god, when they should be begging for the right to continue to exist in the context of more interesting uses.
I wonder if this isn't a big deal because Aereo isn't rebroadcasting. Broadcasting is transmitting to a wider audience. Aereo has a single antenna distributing to a single person. Obviously this is what Aereo thinks is the case, the stream from my DVR to my TV is not a "rebroadcast." Contrast this with the cable TV operators, who receive the signal once, often through specialized equipment, and send it to all of their local subscribers.
That's the essence of Aereo's legal position(founded on the 'Cablevision Case', where CableVision's 'cloud DVR product, with a similar 'one tuner and storage allocation per user, controlled by the user' was upheld as licit).
Team Broadcast is apparently shitting themselves for some combination of (A) reactionary stupidity and (B) fear that cable companies that currently pay absurd fees to retransmit OTA programming will find it cheaper to set up these goofy antenna-array things than to pay off the broadcasters(which is a pretty good sign that the broadcasters are currently overpaid, if such a silly mechanism actually saves money; but they obviously like being overpaid...)
I'm not an EE; but it depends on your location, hills and other clutter, distance to tower, etc.
Especially with ATSC's limited amount of error correction capacity, if you are in a strong signal area you can probably get a perfect image by unbending a paper clip and shoving it in, or just about any other horrible maldesign you care to subject your tuner to.
If you live in the sticks? Maybe some combination of HAM enthusiast and radio astronomer skills will save you, no guarantees. In areas of intermediate strength, vague competence may actually be required; but antenna design has improved since that monstrosity was bolted to the roof in 1965.
Aereo has no right to profit from the significant money spent and effort made to deliver the broadcast signals in the first place. Not without compensation.
The courts have so far, begged to differ. In the now-famous CableVision case, the court concluded that Cablevision's offer of a 'cloud DVR' product was legitimate: although Cablevision's hardware was making what would (otherwise) be illicit copies, it was operating as a direct extension of the customer's record and playback requests. Just a DVR; but with the hardware offsite rather than in a set top box.
Aereo specifically designed their service to follow the same model: Aereo operates banks of antennas at their facilities, each customers is allocated(possibly dynamically; but always 1-to-1 at any given time) their own antenna and their own DVR/buffer storage, effectively creating an OTA set top box, just with the video being transported over an IP link, rather than a meter of HDMI cable, and user inputs also going over the internet rather than over IR.
So far, the courts' response has been favorable (if sometimes bemused), in the various markets that Aereo has expanded into. They've been sued in every venue, and prevailed.
Well, that is the flip side of the fact that safe buildings are a kind of engineering that money can buy (fairly reliably), along with the fact that copying buildings is more expensive than copying bits.
The bugginess of the software you use says very little about your perceived value. If you can afford something Turing complete, you probably enjoy the same crap as the rest of the world (except if you live in South Korea, in which case your odds of using a weirdo encryption algorithm that only works with IE are significantly higher). Outside of a few tiny niches, where higher levels of verification are demanded, at nontrivial expense, you can't really buy your way into a 'better neighborhood' with software.
With buildings, though, you get the buildings that people think you are worth. Often, that isn't good news.
"If it is a hasty decision, then they deserve it even less. Chemical deaths are less than 1% of the deaths in Syria. Tens of thousands have died by conventional means. Someone decides they want to get rid of the chemical weapons and they are suddenly deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize?"
My suspicion (based on the apparent complete incompetence and goldfish-calibre historical memory of the Peace Prize selection committee) is that the decision was hasty, and based largely on dramatic (but, as you say, statistically almost negligible) recent deaths in Syria.
However, it's important to distinguish between the organization and the decision. The OPCW has been in operation for something like 15 years, with largely the same objectives and activities. It presumably has been tapped by one or more member nations for work in Syria, since the organization is dedicated to having expertise in chemical-weapons-related testing and destruction-verification; but that's been their remit since their founding(most of it being rather duller technical work and oversight of the destruction facilities gradually processing legacy stockpiles), there isn't anything 'hasty' about them, nor is Syria even their call (as a disarmament group, the OPCW is, of course, against chemical weapons and encourages the perception that they are ghastly things that only terrible people would use; but they don't make the call on whether a given country will comply or not).
Choosing a largely faceless organization that provides technical and logistical support to the implementation of an almost-two-decade-old treaty strikes me as kind of feckless on the selection committee's part; but my distinct lack of being impressed is with them, not with the OPCW's work.
TFA mentioned 'large salary gaps' as a problem in certain areas (like finance); but other factors in areas like the sciences (a successful academic career isn't penury; but the cash per unit effort and talent is kind of mediocre).
Particularly for the scientists and other less-likely-to-be-salary-motivated types, I have to wonder if it suggests that the quality of life, at least for people of the class who have options, that a small country in a mostly-hostile neighborhood can offer just isn't that high.
In the US, for instance, there is a lot of migration, from state to state, or even within the larger states, that would count as 'brain drain' except that the US is huge so both the origin and the destination are American for accounting purposes.
By area, Israel is just slightly larger than Massachusetts, which isn't exactly a big state(and, although it scores pretty well on academic opportunities, quality of life, etc. is hardly retains all the people born there, nor is it even imaginable how it could be world-class at enough things to do so, you can only fit so much, and there is plenty of competition with other virtues).
Arguably, the sheer lousiness of software is more striking because it (still, despite decades of work and the amount of money riding on some of it) crops up in the face of well heeled customers, whether retail buyers of expensive personal electronics or enterprise/gov buyers who are willing to spend nearly unlimited amounts on their pet contractors...
With buildings, there is plenty of construction that's roughly on the standards of software (Just do an image search for 'Shantytown' if you doubt me...); but structural quality is mostly stratified economically. If you want a building that works, and you have the cash, you can have one. With software, the cities of the world would be a nearly random assortment of mostly shacks, some incrementally nicer than others, with a scattering of structures that were built in 3,000 BC and are in perfect condition, buildings that are constructed from graphene and carbon nanotubes; but have doors made of soggy cardboard stuck to the frame with chewing gum, and other such oddities.
That's the odd thing. Plenty of kinds of engineering are hard and expensive, and sometimes subject to unexpected cost overruns and such; but we've gotten it to the point where if you live in a country with a functional society and fire codes and things, you can buy good buildings, aircraft that don't crash, and other nice things.
Aside from the whole 'a tightly sandboxed "app" taking down the system' thing (which makes one wonder if Apple's apps follow the same rules as everyone else's, or whether there is some Nasty bug in an API), don't iDevices use a totally different design for their screen of death? Macs, certainly, both PPC and Intel, can be made to execute BSOD-level crashes; but the process looks totally different.
...are on par with Barack Obama, which is to say non-existent.
But at least they're better than Yasser Arafat or Le Duc Tho.
I'm pretty sure that the OPCW would need to be actively manufacturing and selling chemical weapons for that analogy to hold.
Actually, they seem like a fairly good choice (if, unfortunately, probably one made in knee-jerk response to the recent Syrian incident, rather than any more significant thought). The OPCW mostly does banal, administrative stuff in support of identifying and classifying scheduled compounds and precursors for the purposes of trade controls, and acting as a technical and advocacy group for the (huge) stockpile drawdowns that have occurred in the US, Russia, and a few other Cold War belligerent types who manufactured vast amounts of the things.
War is not something that's made by a single telegenic villain with a snappy mustache, nor is peace something made by a single charismatic diplomat or saintly empathy-jockey. Peace needs a bunch of relatively dull institutional groundwork in organophosphate and other chemistry. Good for the OPCW.
I find it hard to imagine that they weren't deliberately being dicks when they named their 'enterprise' DRM-for-documents-and-stuff system "Rights Management Services" and refer to it as 'RMS' throughout the documentation.
That aside, they probably are proposing themselves as the totally-neutral-and-disinterested seller of 'trusted' systems and software to absolutely everybody. Like good old Clipper; but private sector!
Even if you thought that this was a good idea, how would you?
The foundation of DRM is building computers whose primary allegiance is to some entity other than their owners, with this allegiance enforced by technical means (and, in the most pure form, building computers that 'default-deny' all non-DRMed content in order to make cracked cleartext copies from subverted systems useless: the iDevice 'app' situation or the contemporary console space is probably the best example of this: both realize that the cat is out of the bag for music, and most of the way for movies; but unblessed application binaries are simply refused; so, while doing so is easy, obtaining 'cracked' apps is useless without a blessed signing key).
If the intended victim is end users, this works; because the root-of-control entity simply has to have financial and/or legal ties with the 'content owners' that are closer than its ties to end users.
If actually-powerful-and-influential data brokers/advertisers/spooks/etc. are the target, though, who, pray tell, is going to be the cryptographic root of control? Google? Uncle Sam? Microsoft? Don't be absurd.
Totally immune to EMP. Besides, we need people to magnify the Casimir effect if we're to ever get wormhole technology. And, trust me on this, you do NOT want an evil general on the other side to go around suppressing it when you're half-way through.
Plus, ICBMs controlled by valves just have a 'warmer' trajectory. It's hard to describe; but the flight path just isn't nearly as 'harsh' as semiconductor ICBMs.
I'd imagine that 'invulnerable' is hyperbole; but I would tend to suspect that MEM gear is less touchy than semiconductors, especially modern very-high-density compute logic(on recent x86 CPUs, loss of magic smoke is a distinct possibility at vCore of 2 volts or less (never mind if you do something genuinely impolite like reversing power and ground...))
I assume that the nuke jockies use older, better hardened, stuff; but semiconducters small enough for serious computing purposes are real wimps(SCR pucks large enough to be used as blunt weapons, not so much; but we need to fit the computer inside the missile, no?).
Oh, I agree that the institutional incentives are almost always perverse (plus, in the case of a badly damaged nuclear plant, I'm assuming that some serious bodging, emergency rerouting, and general urgent-and-ill-documented ad-hoc modification happened to the piping after the accident as they tried to cut off coolant loops too damaged for use, reroute whatever systems were available into coolant loops that were still functional, make do without access to heavily irradiated and/or rubble-strewn areas, and so on).
My wish was largely to point out that, humans being what they are (fallible, easy to stress beyond their limits, liable to the occasional dumb mistake), any sufficiently fucked-up system will provide a steady stream of 'human fucks up, something bad happens' stories; but the individual fucker-up is just a hapless fall guy. Occasionally a hapless fall guy with a BAC of.15 who should probably see some slammer time; but normally just some guy. That being so, we should always avoid letting the individual losers distract us from the broken system that makes their failures into accidents, rather than safely contains/ignores/interlocks them.
True, true. There are some clever cryptographic tricks designed largely around the problems of building voting systems(I'm no number theory expert; but apparently at least some of the problems are tractable); but those systems look rather little like the 'crypto' that we usually see around (which tends to fail one or more requirements of voting rather blatantly.)
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, much easier just to be theatrically 'tough on crime' and ascribe psych issues to weakness of character. Your approach sounds like effort.
The nice thing about inaccuracy is that (as long as you are tactful in your exploitation of the data) the user will never know if you fuck up; and if it becomes 'common knowledge' that people shrouded in mystery are usually passed over in favor of transparent choices, we'll probably start seeing advice on 'building persona', just as we currently have people interacting with financial institutions purely for the purpose of 'building a credit score'.
When you use your Twitter account for authentication, it doesn't need to be authorised for tweeting. You only need to avoid places that request that permission.
One gets the impression that NYCC was...tactful... in eliding exactly what level of privilege delegation users were clicking through, and certainly less than forthright about how those privileges would be put to use.
ReedPop's apology was insincere and showed no remorsefulness. They've done it before and they'll do it again.
Morale of the story: don't use your social media accounts for any type of authentication.
Would you expect the sort of abhuman scum who would pull a stunt like this to even be capable of comprehending the concepts of 'sincerity' or 'remorse'? Not only do they not exhibit them, they probably don't possess them, and may not even have the cognitive mechanisms required to acquire an understanding of them.
"we were probably too enthusiastic in our messaging and eagerness to spread the good word about NYCC. We have since shut down this service completely and apologize for any perceived overstep"
I thought that that sort of invasive narcissism was only found among inebriated 'pick-up artists' trying to avoid going home alone toward the end of an evening...
So you want the broadcasters to shrivel up & die.. That would leave Aereo with nothing to retransmit. Who wins then? Certainly not the consumer!
If a service that snags OTA transmissions out of the air (using a Rube Goldberg device, for legal reasons) and then shoves them over the internet is commercially viable, I have a sneaky plan: shut down the 'OTA transmission' and 'ridiculous antenna farm' parts of the process and just sell streaming video over the internet. Win-win. The OTA guys don't need depend on shaking down the cable companies and ad-spamming their customers for money; because they can just have subscribers, and the goofy unnecessary infrastructure intricacies can be removed, saving money and spectrum for everyone.
If the courts decide Aereo doesn't have to pay the broadcasters, then Big Cable won't have to either. The networks will have to go back to 100% advertising revenue. I promise that will not be good for the consumers.
Are you seriously suggesting that there is anything on OTA that is even worth the RF space is chews up? The broadcasters would be doing us all a favor by shrivelling up, dying, and leaving the field open for people who give a damn to pay for service, and people who don't not to have to deal with the ripple effects of the subsidies that keep them creaking along.
Oh, that's a cute little subsidy. I'm sure I'd throw up in my mouth if I heard the 'justification' for why a cable provider should be required to carry OTA signals and pay more or less whatever is demanded, because they are required.
Is that just a pure handout to the broadcast guys, or is there anything even slightly redeeming about it?
If pressed, I assumed that they would fall back on the 'mere abuse' allowance. If made in sufficiently absurd terms that a reasonable listener/reader would concluded that they are not meant literally (and, given the nontrivial difficulty of 'stealing' an unencrypted RF transmission, rather than merely receiving it, 'stealing' is unlikely to be literal) they can be treated as (legal) generic rubbishing of the opponent, rather than (illegal) false and defamatory claims.
It's the difference between calling John Smith a 'goatfucker' and asserting that 'John Smith practices bestiality with goats'.
The world just keeps on turning: Cable TV, as an industry, got its start in providing access to broadcast signals(by putting antennas in good locations and running coax to lousy ones). As usual, the broadcast guys cried hysterically about how this...um... free access to additional customers would ruin them, America, and apple pie.
Unfortunately, it didn't, and the broadcasters are still around, while the cable guys have whitewashed their past as upstarts and are playing 'asshole incumbent' with the best of them.
So we have no rights to the content beamed into our homes, but they have the Right to Profit, even with a bad business model.
It's more vexing because it's a bad business model that also sits smack in the middle of some very nice spectrum. The broadcasters are stomping around like their right to profit was handed down by god, when they should be begging for the right to continue to exist in the context of more interesting uses.
I wonder if this isn't a big deal because Aereo isn't rebroadcasting. Broadcasting is transmitting to a wider audience. Aereo has a single antenna distributing to a single person. Obviously this is what Aereo thinks is the case, the stream from my DVR to my TV is not a "rebroadcast." Contrast this with the cable TV operators, who receive the signal once, often through specialized equipment, and send it to all of their local subscribers.
That's the essence of Aereo's legal position(founded on the 'Cablevision Case', where CableVision's 'cloud DVR product, with a similar 'one tuner and storage allocation per user, controlled by the user' was upheld as licit).
Team Broadcast is apparently shitting themselves for some combination of (A) reactionary stupidity and (B) fear that cable companies that currently pay absurd fees to retransmit OTA programming will find it cheaper to set up these goofy antenna-array things than to pay off the broadcasters(which is a pretty good sign that the broadcasters are currently overpaid, if such a silly mechanism actually saves money; but they obviously like being overpaid...)
I'm not an EE; but it depends on your location, hills and other clutter, distance to tower, etc.
Especially with ATSC's limited amount of error correction capacity, if you are in a strong signal area you can probably get a perfect image by unbending a paper clip and shoving it in, or just about any other horrible maldesign you care to subject your tuner to.
If you live in the sticks? Maybe some combination of HAM enthusiast and radio astronomer skills will save you, no guarantees. In areas of intermediate strength, vague competence may actually be required; but antenna design has improved since that monstrosity was bolted to the roof in 1965.
Aereo has no right to profit from the significant money spent and effort made to deliver the broadcast signals in the first place. Not without compensation.
The courts have so far, begged to differ. In the now-famous CableVision case, the court concluded that Cablevision's offer of a 'cloud DVR' product was legitimate: although Cablevision's hardware was making what would (otherwise) be illicit copies, it was operating as a direct extension of the customer's record and playback requests. Just a DVR; but with the hardware offsite rather than in a set top box.
Aereo specifically designed their service to follow the same model: Aereo operates banks of antennas at their facilities, each customers is allocated(possibly dynamically; but always 1-to-1 at any given time) their own antenna and their own DVR/buffer storage, effectively creating an OTA set top box, just with the video being transported over an IP link, rather than a meter of HDMI cable, and user inputs also going over the internet rather than over IR.
So far, the courts' response has been favorable (if sometimes bemused), in the various markets that Aereo has expanded into. They've been sued in every venue, and prevailed.
Well, that is the flip side of the fact that safe buildings are a kind of engineering that money can buy (fairly reliably), along with the fact that copying buildings is more expensive than copying bits.
The bugginess of the software you use says very little about your perceived value. If you can afford something Turing complete, you probably enjoy the same crap as the rest of the world (except if you live in South Korea, in which case your odds of using a weirdo encryption algorithm that only works with IE are significantly higher). Outside of a few tiny niches, where higher levels of verification are demanded, at nontrivial expense, you can't really buy your way into a 'better neighborhood' with software.
With buildings, though, you get the buildings that people think you are worth. Often, that isn't good news.
"If it is a hasty decision, then they deserve it even less. Chemical deaths are less than 1% of the deaths in Syria. Tens of thousands have died by conventional means. Someone decides they want to get rid of the chemical weapons and they are suddenly deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize?"
My suspicion (based on the apparent complete incompetence and goldfish-calibre historical memory of the Peace Prize selection committee) is that the decision was hasty, and based largely on dramatic (but, as you say, statistically almost negligible) recent deaths in Syria.
However, it's important to distinguish between the organization and the decision. The OPCW has been in operation for something like 15 years, with largely the same objectives and activities. It presumably has been tapped by one or more member nations for work in Syria, since the organization is dedicated to having expertise in chemical-weapons-related testing and destruction-verification; but that's been their remit since their founding(most of it being rather duller technical work and oversight of the destruction facilities gradually processing legacy stockpiles), there isn't anything 'hasty' about them, nor is Syria even their call (as a disarmament group, the OPCW is, of course, against chemical weapons and encourages the perception that they are ghastly things that only terrible people would use; but they don't make the call on whether a given country will comply or not).
Choosing a largely faceless organization that provides technical and logistical support to the implementation of an almost-two-decade-old treaty strikes me as kind of feckless on the selection committee's part; but my distinct lack of being impressed is with them, not with the OPCW's work.
TFA mentioned 'large salary gaps' as a problem in certain areas (like finance); but other factors in areas like the sciences (a successful academic career isn't penury; but the cash per unit effort and talent is kind of mediocre).
Particularly for the scientists and other less-likely-to-be-salary-motivated types, I have to wonder if it suggests that the quality of life, at least for people of the class who have options, that a small country in a mostly-hostile neighborhood can offer just isn't that high.
In the US, for instance, there is a lot of migration, from state to state, or even within the larger states, that would count as 'brain drain' except that the US is huge so both the origin and the destination are American for accounting purposes.
By area, Israel is just slightly larger than Massachusetts, which isn't exactly a big state(and, although it scores pretty well on academic opportunities, quality of life, etc. is hardly retains all the people born there, nor is it even imaginable how it could be world-class at enough things to do so, you can only fit so much, and there is plenty of competition with other virtues).
Arguably, the sheer lousiness of software is more striking because it (still, despite decades of work and the amount of money riding on some of it) crops up in the face of well heeled customers, whether retail buyers of expensive personal electronics or enterprise/gov buyers who are willing to spend nearly unlimited amounts on their pet contractors...
With buildings, there is plenty of construction that's roughly on the standards of software (Just do an image search for 'Shantytown' if you doubt me...); but structural quality is mostly stratified economically. If you want a building that works, and you have the cash, you can have one. With software, the cities of the world would be a nearly random assortment of mostly shacks, some incrementally nicer than others, with a scattering of structures that were built in 3,000 BC and are in perfect condition, buildings that are constructed from graphene and carbon nanotubes; but have doors made of soggy cardboard stuck to the frame with chewing gum, and other such oddities.
That's the odd thing. Plenty of kinds of engineering are hard and expensive, and sometimes subject to unexpected cost overruns and such; but we've gotten it to the point where if you live in a country with a functional society and fire codes and things, you can buy good buildings, aircraft that don't crash, and other nice things.
With software... your mileage may vary.
Aside from the whole 'a tightly sandboxed "app" taking down the system' thing (which makes one wonder if Apple's apps follow the same rules as everyone else's, or whether there is some Nasty bug in an API), don't iDevices use a totally different design for their screen of death? Macs, certainly, both PPC and Intel, can be made to execute BSOD-level crashes; but the process looks totally different.
...are on par with Barack Obama, which is to say non-existent.
But at least they're better than Yasser Arafat or Le Duc Tho.
I'm pretty sure that the OPCW would need to be actively manufacturing and selling chemical weapons for that analogy to hold.
Actually, they seem like a fairly good choice (if, unfortunately, probably one made in knee-jerk response to the recent Syrian incident, rather than any more significant thought). The OPCW mostly does banal, administrative stuff in support of identifying and classifying scheduled compounds and precursors for the purposes of trade controls, and acting as a technical and advocacy group for the (huge) stockpile drawdowns that have occurred in the US, Russia, and a few other Cold War belligerent types who manufactured vast amounts of the things.
War is not something that's made by a single telegenic villain with a snappy mustache, nor is peace something made by a single charismatic diplomat or saintly empathy-jockey. Peace needs a bunch of relatively dull institutional groundwork in organophosphate and other chemistry. Good for the OPCW.
I find it hard to imagine that they weren't deliberately being dicks when they named their 'enterprise' DRM-for-documents-and-stuff system "Rights Management Services" and refer to it as 'RMS' throughout the documentation.
That aside, they probably are proposing themselves as the totally-neutral-and-disinterested seller of 'trusted' systems and software to absolutely everybody. Like good old Clipper; but private sector!
Even if you thought that this was a good idea, how would you?
The foundation of DRM is building computers whose primary allegiance is to some entity other than their owners, with this allegiance enforced by technical means (and, in the most pure form, building computers that 'default-deny' all non-DRMed content in order to make cracked cleartext copies from subverted systems useless: the iDevice 'app' situation or the contemporary console space is probably the best example of this: both realize that the cat is out of the bag for music, and most of the way for movies; but unblessed application binaries are simply refused; so, while doing so is easy, obtaining 'cracked' apps is useless without a blessed signing key).
If the intended victim is end users, this works; because the root-of-control entity simply has to have financial and/or legal ties with the 'content owners' that are closer than its ties to end users.
If actually-powerful-and-influential data brokers/advertisers/spooks/etc. are the target, though, who, pray tell, is going to be the cryptographic root of control? Google? Uncle Sam? Microsoft? Don't be absurd.
Totally immune to EMP. Besides, we need people to magnify the Casimir effect if we're to ever get wormhole technology. And, trust me on this, you do NOT want an evil general on the other side to go around suppressing it when you're half-way through.
Plus, ICBMs controlled by valves just have a 'warmer' trajectory. It's hard to describe; but the flight path just isn't nearly as 'harsh' as semiconductor ICBMs.
I'd imagine that 'invulnerable' is hyperbole; but I would tend to suspect that MEM gear is less touchy than semiconductors, especially modern very-high-density compute logic(on recent x86 CPUs, loss of magic smoke is a distinct possibility at vCore of 2 volts or less (never mind if you do something genuinely impolite like reversing power and ground...))
I assume that the nuke jockies use older, better hardened, stuff; but semiconducters small enough for serious computing purposes are real wimps(SCR pucks large enough to be used as blunt weapons, not so much; but we need to fit the computer inside the missile, no?).
Oh, I agree that the institutional incentives are almost always perverse (plus, in the case of a badly damaged nuclear plant, I'm assuming that some serious bodging, emergency rerouting, and general urgent-and-ill-documented ad-hoc modification happened to the piping after the accident as they tried to cut off coolant loops too damaged for use, reroute whatever systems were available into coolant loops that were still functional, make do without access to heavily irradiated and/or rubble-strewn areas, and so on).
.15 who should probably see some slammer time; but normally just some guy. That being so, we should always avoid letting the individual losers distract us from the broken system that makes their failures into accidents, rather than safely contains/ignores/interlocks them.
My wish was largely to point out that, humans being what they are (fallible, easy to stress beyond their limits, liable to the occasional dumb mistake), any sufficiently fucked-up system will provide a steady stream of 'human fucks up, something bad happens' stories; but the individual fucker-up is just a hapless fall guy. Occasionally a hapless fall guy with a BAC of
True, true. There are some clever cryptographic tricks designed largely around the problems of building voting systems(I'm no number theory expert; but apparently at least some of the problems are tractable); but those systems look rather little like the 'crypto' that we usually see around (which tends to fail one or more requirements of voting rather blatantly.)