Google's "Chromebooks" have a fairly trivial (and documented/vendor-provided) mechanism for booting whatever you want on them. They default to using the crypto-tastic signed image; but it's not a hack to turn that off.
The phones that they sell directly (at least if you don't count the...um...wonderful people at Motorola) also tend not to be terribly touchy on that score.
Google TV devices, though, and now this 'Chromecast' thing they lock up tight. Are they trying to appease some paranoic video rightsholder? Is there some benefit to Google that I'm not seeing? Why the (comparatively) hands-off treatment of other devices compared to the freaking out about things that connect to TVs by default? It's doubly odd because many contemporary phones and tablets can connect to TVs, though that isn't their primary use case.
Thankfully, the extraordinary productive power of division of labor and fossil fuels allow us to afford both amusement and repression! Take that, dystopian future!
Why not spend the time you have teaching them some practical information they can use? How are they going to benefit from hearing someone's social agenda? Are the students there for your benefit, for you to use to advance your societal goals? Or are you there for their benefit, to help them learn things and improve their future lives?
My suggestion: skip these "society" lessons and use the time to teach them how to search text with regular expressions.
Are there any humanities or social science topics that aren't a useless liberal plot?
That post struck me as pretty abjectly apologetic for the NSA. Sure "I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form."; but then, same paragraph no less, a bunch of fuzz about how visiting the NSA was pretty neat, and the engineers there seemed like a smart, likeable bunch, who asked good questions, and the problem is clearly with Politicians, not with the NSA (lets just not talk about the...somewhat creative...approach to informing anyone outside the NSA what the NSA does, right?)
What was he expecting? The NSA to actually be running (probably) the world's most sophisticated electronic surveillance program with a skeleton crew of idiots and sadists? Were they supposed to sneer and wear evil henchman uniforms? Perhaps more importantly, why would the niceness-or-not of the NSA minions me met be relevant to much of anything? It's sort of a commonplace at this point that you can set an organization composed almost entirely of just decent regular folks on an arbitrarily unpleasant path, and that even the most beneficent of institutions can't avoid hiring a total asshole from time to time.
What somewhat surprises me is that Samsung's phones would be holding out against the torrent of slightly-to-substantially cheaper indigenous handsets in China. Sure, the quality can be somewhere between 'uneven' and 'totally fucking dire'; but Samsung's phones are also well known for being plasticky and horribly skinned, so they aren't competing that aggressively on quality.
Am I being too harsh on Samsung? Are the local offerings Just That Dreadful?
For whatever reason (whether it be power/gate constraints or sheer laziness) the state of 'security' in low power RF security systems (automotive keyless entry, MIFARE and friends payment and access control fobs, etc.) is maybe 10 years behind the (atrocious) state of security in general purpose software. On a good day.
I'd be amazed to see somebody print such a beast; but (if one simply had to prove that a rifled polymer barrel could be constructed) getting the fiber reinforcements in a polymer structure to follow the rifling might actually be doable.
For textile purposes (socks, shoelaces, ropes, pantihose, that sort of thing) circular weaving machines, capable of pumping out seamless woven tubes, of varying complexity, are ancient. More recently, with the enthusiasm for carbon fiber composites, there has been some work adapting such machinery to weave carbon fiber structures, with the necessary detail included, that are then resin-impregnated and used as structural elements. It would probably be possible, if nontrivial, to weave a tube that, rather than having an ornamental pattern, has the necessary helical rifled shape, which you could then fill with whatever resin seemed least likely to die horribly before you've emptied your first magazine.
The finished product would still be lousy, even metal barrels aren't always what we want them to be, particularly for more demanding ammunition or rates of fire, and plastics don't compare favorably; but I suspect that it could be done. (It'd just be tricky enough that rifling your own barrels at home would be easy and efficient by comparison)
It's important that important people be shielded from consequences. Without exception, the Important People, and their talking heads, that I see on TV assure me that this is so.
Back when 'verification' might have required pulling out your good quill and sealing wax, I can see how pulling a blatant con of this flavor might have made some sense, however unethical it is. Now, though, when it is trivial for just about anybody, never mind the people considering you for the job, to take a look at your CV and start asking annoying questions like "How did you get a degree in XYZ in 1994 at a university that didn't offer that degree until 2001?" and "Why does the registrar at Foo University have no idea who you are, when you got a PhD there?".
Honestly, I'm surprised that it still works at all, not that people get caught at it. I'm half surprised that some school (or Google, in collaboration with some school trying to buff it's "We aren't a plodding dinosaur doomed to extinction!" cred) hasn't introduced an API that would allow HR to programmatically parse your resume/CV and verify the truth or falsity of educational claims made concerning that school with a few properly formed HTTP requests... (An alternate implementation, more student-focused, would be having a service provided by the office of the registrar where the student could request a cryptographically signed 'pull' of their record, to present to anybody who they wish to prove it to.)
Only a matter of time before the composites and process improve to the point where it will withstand these stresses.
Inconveniently, 3d printing techniques tend to make doing composites (properly) difficult. Extruder-based designs can use fiber reinforced feedstocks, if the usual parameter-fiddling is done properly; but doing that will mostly just serve to make the difference in strength between the continuous filament (relatively strong) and the bonds at the 'seams' where the newly extruded filament needs to fuse with the previous layer and any adjacent already-laid filament (absolute best case, these might be as strong as the continuous filament, almost always weaker, sometimes markedly so, depending on process control) even starker than it already is, since the reinforcement material won't extend throughout the part (as it does with injection-molded fiber reinforced parts).
Selective laser sintering, while classier, is similarly limited by the fact that the reinforcement material can't extend beyond the boundaries of the powder being sintered (and you can't make the powder particles larger without sending your resolution to hell).
(Now, in the hypothetical cyberpunk dystopian future, it might be possible to produce pre-woven carbon-nanotube/graphene/similar technobabble "sleeves" that would collapse down into easily concealable flat shapes (like a freshly ironed sock); but could be stretched over a simple form and impregnated with a polymer or epoxy to turn them into fiber-reinforced barrels quickly and with almost zero tools just before use, using the same basic techniques used for fiberglass or carbon fiber construction. Not obviously worth it vs. just smuggling normal guns; but it' be a cute trick.)
If you are planning to do something wildly illicit and clandestine, you might have better luck with (depending on whether you need Absolutely No Metal/searches at the entrance resistance or plausible deniability) either the cheapest, nastiest, most ridiculously common on the civilian grey market, gun in that jurisdiction, which is blatantly obvious; but indistinguishable from the background gun violence of the area or some much lower pressure pneumatic dart system with a chemical payload (Georgi Markov style). That strategy is extremely suspicious, unless you choose an agent very carefully; but 'blowgun' tech has materials engineering demands so low that people have been crafting the things out of practically any plant stem with a hollow core since before recorded history. If using chemical weapons doesn't make you squeamish, an all-polymer compressed gas dart/pellet weapon would not be a particularly demanding task.
(If you want a particularly cute variation on the 'just use something cheap and ubiquitous, they'll know he got shot; but not who shot him.' strategy, an S4M or conceptual equivalent may be for you. A handgun, specially designed for silent, short-range, firing of a bullet that looks almost exactly like the bullet you'd expect to see in somebody shot from considerably further away with any of the absurdly-common AK-variants that use 7.62x39 rounds...)
If it were purely a matter of pressure, you could probably get away with expensive plastic. I wouldn't want to be the person in charge of 3d-printing such a beast; but fiber-reinforced polymers are pretty tough (even better results, and markedly higher fabrication costs, if the fiber structures are correctly oriented to ensure that pressures on the barrel are mostly applied as tensile stress on the reinforcing fibers). At that point, though, you are probably talking a production process more difficult, possibly even more expensive, than the one used to produce normal metal barrels.
Even more vexingly, you still have heat and barrel erosion to deal with. If you don't mind a smoothbore with suitably low rate of fire, that's survivable; but 'rifle' more or less requires modestly complex barrel geometry tough enough to survive having a bullet rammed through it at alarming speeds. Plus, if you are using chemical propellants, the tendency of plastics to either start breaking down, or go into glass transition and send all their structural properties screaming through the floor, at fairly low temperatures combines beautifully with their relatively low thermal conductivity....
Unless Abe has some unwisely-published rantings about the reestablishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere stashed in his closet somewhere, this seems like the sort of 'controversial' that will lead to grumblings and not a whole lot else.
It's not as though any of Japan's neighbors are necessarily going to like it; but nation-states maintaining armed forces, even potentially threatening ones, is sufficiently universal that there isn't exactly any complaints department who would take you seriously. "Dear the UN, I think Japan may be deciding to maintain a military larger than the one that the Americans let them keep after fighting a particularly nasty war with them, that's mean!"
It also wouldn't be a total surprise if some of the Japanese increase is aimed specifically at replacing the (never entirely popular) American bases in the area, which would leave the total amount of force roughly constant, just changing the label (and hopefully saviing the US some cash).
I assume that it is treated as a 'scam against Cisco' because their precious, precious IP rights were violated in building and branding the counterfeit gear(I'm just guessing that counterfeit shops don't exactly bother with doing cleanroom re-implementations of 100% Cisco compatible gear, which might actually be legal, save any exciting patents involved; but would also be far more valuable to one of Cisco's competitors than it would be to some slimy flea-marketeer...) and the individual customers who got stiffed aren't the ones with the resources to push a successful investigation and prosecution.
(It's also possible that, depending on what parts were on offer, the customers didn't really suspect they were getting genuine goods; but the price was good enough that they didn't much care, in which case they probably aren't lining up to tell the feds their tale of woe.)
You may be an 'anarchist'; but you apparently aren't an empiricist...
Outside the adorably twee world of exposing the contradictions inherent in the system, man! the track record of people actually not being subjected to laws just because they are excessively complex, deeply confusing, unbelievably vague, or thousands of pages long and buried in a filing cabinet somewhere is deeply unimpressive. If you count various zillion-page contracts of adhesion with provisions for one party(and only ever one party) to change them unilateraly as 'law', since they do tend to be enforced on behalf of the people who write them, or the whole kangaroo-court 'binding arbitration' system, the numbers just get a whole lot worse.
It's cute, sure, but unless you have exactly the resources that would make all but the most incomprehensible or classified laws open to you(eg. nigh unlimited legal resources), it's also irrelevant.
Given that, if there were to be some sort of vast, malevolent, conspiracy; Joe Average would fill a role somewhere between 'ant' and 'human resource, to be harvested at leisure', I suspect that's exactly the sort of thing that conspiracy theorists wouldn't find comforting...
Rather like trying to convince somebody who thinks you are trying to poison them that, really, cyanide is statistically indistinguishable from the millions of tons of carbon/nitrogen mixtures in the food supply.
Details are a bit thin, and will presumably depend on the hardware; but Google has this to say:
"Android also now supports hardware-backed storage for your KeyChain credentials, providing more security by making the keys unavailable for extraction. That is, once keys are in a hardware-backed key store (Secure Element, TPM, or TrustZone), they can be used for cryptographic operations but the private key material cannot be exported. Even the OS kernel cannot access this key material. While not all Android-powered devices support storage on hardware, you can check at runtime if hardware-backed storage is available by calling KeyChain.IsBoundKeyAlgorithm()."
They don't explicitly say how the media DRM features are handled; but it would certainly appear that they've been busy supporting higher-than-kernel hardware mechanisms that would certainly have the capability to verify the system state and freak out if filthy 'owners' have the temerity to mess with the device.
(Google has also owned Widevine for some time now, a company that is studiously unhelpful about the details; but which, according to its patent portfolio and past press releases, has been doing set-top-box DRM for a while now, with a long list of chipset vendors on the client list. They have a lot of chatter about a 'Virtual Smartcard', which sounds software-like; but 'software' could include firmware baked into a system well below the level of being manipulated by the kernel, short of a successful attack against the firmware.)
It's true that the people pushing anti-smut don't have a fucking clue; but that's because noisy moral indignation is the job that gets handed to whatever idiot is best at feeling really hard instead of thinking, and most unironic in their delivery of 'Won't somebody please think of the children?!?!'. The point of this job is to appeal to voters with similar tendencies and even dimmer capabilities.
Look at, say, what we've recently learned about the NSA, and their colleagues internationally, and what they can do: those are the people who know what they are doing, and have gone ahead and done it: basically every service provider, network link, NOC, etc. large enough to be worth the trouble, all quietly brought to heel and pumping data back to the mothership as fast as it is cost-effective to crunch it.
Here's the problem: If the parade of clowns and con-men who they line up for the amusement of the values-voters manage to receive an electoral mandate(or a slim edge that feels like a mandate when You Are On The Side Of Good, they commonly get confused on this point), they'll eventually have to hand the project over to the competent people for implementation. Once that happens, you get a system built by the dangerously competent and aimed by the feelings of the dangerously clueless.
'Cretinism', the sufficiently-severe-to-be-clinically-obvious manifestation of iodine deficiency has been known for a considerable length of time, in places without sufficient soil iodine. I would imagine that smaller gains would only be a surprise if you thought that everybody not obviously diseased was fully healthy, rather than frequently mildly subnormal.
If gun ownership in a society is as ubiquitous as in the United States then the police necessarily have to be at least as well armed and trained in military tactics.
That actually makes doing SWAT-style raids a worse idea most of the time. If there are lots of people with guns(but, by the numbers, not a lot of people interested in shooting police officers), playing 'armed home invasion' and trusting that superior force will keep you from getting shot, rather than just, say, telling everyone to come outside, is a risky strategy.
The problem(in addition to the effects on the public being 'protected and served') is that this sort of disproportionate force isn't even a positive development for officer safety.
Doing no-knock full SWAT raids probably improves safety against people who are willing to shoot police; but those people are relatively rare: shooting at cops is risky, and you have to be guilty of a lot before you won't notice the additional jail time. Against people who wouldn't ordinarily be motivated to shoot police, though, it's performing a very convincing violent home invasion(a situation where a great many more people would consider shooting to be a reasonable thing to do) for no good reason. Overwhelming force might usually mean that the resident loses; but you only have to get unlucky once.
Or you'll start soiling your diapers earlier, effectively taking away a year of good health.
Probably worse than that. Particulate-related health effects tend to concentrate either in the lungs, for obvious reasons, or the heart/major blood vessels(because suitably small particulates can enter the bloodstream through the gas-exchange surfaces of the lungs and trigger various inflammatory freakouts).
If you think pissing yourself is inconvenient and humiliating, try operating on substantially substandard oxygen supplies... Every shallow gasp giving you about half the oxygen you really want...
Slashdot Mirror
Google's "Chromebooks" have a fairly trivial (and documented/vendor-provided) mechanism for booting whatever you want on them. They default to using the crypto-tastic signed image; but it's not a hack to turn that off.
The phones that they sell directly (at least if you don't count the...um...wonderful people at Motorola) also tend not to be terribly touchy on that score.
Google TV devices, though, and now this 'Chromecast' thing they lock up tight. Are they trying to appease some paranoic video rightsholder? Is there some benefit to Google that I'm not seeing? Why the (comparatively) hands-off treatment of other devices compared to the freaking out about things that connect to TVs by default? It's doubly odd because many contemporary phones and tablets can connect to TVs, though that isn't their primary use case.
Thankfully, the extraordinary productive power of division of labor and fossil fuels allow us to afford both amusement and repression! Take that, dystopian future!
Why not spend the time you have teaching them some practical information they can use? How are they going to benefit from hearing someone's social agenda? Are the students there for your benefit, for you to use to advance your societal goals? Or are you there for their benefit, to help them learn things and improve their future lives?
My suggestion: skip these "society" lessons and use the time to teach them how to search text with regular expressions.
Are there any humanities or social science topics that aren't a useless liberal plot?
That post struck me as pretty abjectly apologetic for the NSA. Sure "I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form."; but then, same paragraph no less, a bunch of fuzz about how visiting the NSA was pretty neat, and the engineers there seemed like a smart, likeable bunch, who asked good questions, and the problem is clearly with Politicians, not with the NSA (lets just not talk about the...somewhat creative...approach to informing anyone outside the NSA what the NSA does, right?)
What was he expecting? The NSA to actually be running (probably) the world's most sophisticated electronic surveillance program with a skeleton crew of idiots and sadists? Were they supposed to sneer and wear evil henchman uniforms? Perhaps more importantly, why would the niceness-or-not of the NSA minions me met be relevant to much of anything? It's sort of a commonplace at this point that you can set an organization composed almost entirely of just decent regular folks on an arbitrarily unpleasant path, and that even the most beneficent of institutions can't avoid hiring a total asshole from time to time.
What somewhat surprises me is that Samsung's phones would be holding out against the torrent of slightly-to-substantially cheaper indigenous handsets in China. Sure, the quality can be somewhere between 'uneven' and 'totally fucking dire'; but Samsung's phones are also well known for being plasticky and horribly skinned, so they aren't competing that aggressively on quality.
Am I being too harsh on Samsung? Are the local offerings Just That Dreadful?
I taught this one died 10 years ago...
For whatever reason (whether it be power/gate constraints or sheer laziness) the state of 'security' in low power RF security systems (automotive keyless entry, MIFARE and friends payment and access control fobs, etc.) is maybe 10 years behind the (atrocious) state of security in general purpose software. On a good day.
I'd be amazed to see somebody print such a beast; but (if one simply had to prove that a rifled polymer barrel could be constructed) getting the fiber reinforcements in a polymer structure to follow the rifling might actually be doable.
For textile purposes (socks, shoelaces, ropes, pantihose, that sort of thing) circular weaving machines, capable of pumping out seamless woven tubes, of varying complexity, are ancient. More recently, with the enthusiasm for carbon fiber composites, there has been some work adapting such machinery to weave carbon fiber structures, with the necessary detail included, that are then resin-impregnated and used as structural elements. It would probably be possible, if nontrivial, to weave a tube that, rather than having an ornamental pattern, has the necessary helical rifled shape, which you could then fill with whatever resin seemed least likely to die horribly before you've emptied your first magazine.
The finished product would still be lousy, even metal barrels aren't always what we want them to be, particularly for more demanding ammunition or rates of fire, and plastics don't compare favorably; but I suspect that it could be done. (It'd just be tricky enough that rifling your own barrels at home would be easy and efficient by comparison)
It's important that important people be shielded from consequences. Without exception, the Important People, and their talking heads, that I see on TV assure me that this is so.
Back when 'verification' might have required pulling out your good quill and sealing wax, I can see how pulling a blatant con of this flavor might have made some sense, however unethical it is. Now, though, when it is trivial for just about anybody, never mind the people considering you for the job, to take a look at your CV and start asking annoying questions like "How did you get a degree in XYZ in 1994 at a university that didn't offer that degree until 2001?" and "Why does the registrar at Foo University have no idea who you are, when you got a PhD there?".
Honestly, I'm surprised that it still works at all, not that people get caught at it. I'm half surprised that some school (or Google, in collaboration with some school trying to buff it's "We aren't a plodding dinosaur doomed to extinction!" cred) hasn't introduced an API that would allow HR to programmatically parse your resume/CV and verify the truth or falsity of educational claims made concerning that school with a few properly formed HTTP requests... (An alternate implementation, more student-focused, would be having a service provided by the office of the registrar where the student could request a cryptographically signed 'pull' of their record, to present to anybody who they wish to prove it to.)
Only a matter of time before the composites and process improve to the point where it will withstand these stresses.
Inconveniently, 3d printing techniques tend to make doing composites (properly) difficult. Extruder-based designs can use fiber reinforced feedstocks, if the usual parameter-fiddling is done properly; but doing that will mostly just serve to make the difference in strength between the continuous filament (relatively strong) and the bonds at the 'seams' where the newly extruded filament needs to fuse with the previous layer and any adjacent already-laid filament (absolute best case, these might be as strong as the continuous filament, almost always weaker, sometimes markedly so, depending on process control) even starker than it already is, since the reinforcement material won't extend throughout the part (as it does with injection-molded fiber reinforced parts).
Selective laser sintering, while classier, is similarly limited by the fact that the reinforcement material can't extend beyond the boundaries of the powder being sintered (and you can't make the powder particles larger without sending your resolution to hell).
(Now, in the hypothetical cyberpunk dystopian future, it might be possible to produce pre-woven carbon-nanotube/graphene/similar technobabble "sleeves" that would collapse down into easily concealable flat shapes (like a freshly ironed sock); but could be stretched over a simple form and impregnated with a polymer or epoxy to turn them into fiber-reinforced barrels quickly and with almost zero tools just before use, using the same basic techniques used for fiberglass or carbon fiber construction. Not obviously worth it vs. just smuggling normal guns; but it' be a cute trick.)
For a spy all you need is 1 shot
If you are planning to do something wildly illicit and clandestine, you might have better luck with (depending on whether you need Absolutely No Metal/searches at the entrance resistance or plausible deniability) either the cheapest, nastiest, most ridiculously common on the civilian grey market, gun in that jurisdiction, which is blatantly obvious; but indistinguishable from the background gun violence of the area or some much lower pressure pneumatic dart system with a chemical payload (Georgi Markov style). That strategy is extremely suspicious, unless you choose an agent very carefully; but 'blowgun' tech has materials engineering demands so low that people have been crafting the things out of practically any plant stem with a hollow core since before recorded history. If using chemical weapons doesn't make you squeamish, an all-polymer compressed gas dart/pellet weapon would not be a particularly demanding task.
(If you want a particularly cute variation on the 'just use something cheap and ubiquitous, they'll know he got shot; but not who shot him.' strategy, an S4M or conceptual equivalent may be for you. A handgun, specially designed for silent, short-range, firing of a bullet that looks almost exactly like the bullet you'd expect to see in somebody shot from considerably further away with any of the absurdly-common AK-variants that use 7.62x39 rounds...)
If it were purely a matter of pressure, you could probably get away with expensive plastic. I wouldn't want to be the person in charge of 3d-printing such a beast; but fiber-reinforced polymers are pretty tough (even better results, and markedly higher fabrication costs, if the fiber structures are correctly oriented to ensure that pressures on the barrel are mostly applied as tensile stress on the reinforcing fibers). At that point, though, you are probably talking a production process more difficult, possibly even more expensive, than the one used to produce normal metal barrels.
Even more vexingly, you still have heat and barrel erosion to deal with. If you don't mind a smoothbore with suitably low rate of fire, that's survivable; but 'rifle' more or less requires modestly complex barrel geometry tough enough to survive having a bullet rammed through it at alarming speeds. Plus, if you are using chemical propellants, the tendency of plastics to either start breaking down, or go into glass transition and send all their structural properties screaming through the floor, at fairly low temperatures combines beautifully with their relatively low thermal conductivity....
Unless Abe has some unwisely-published rantings about the reestablishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere stashed in his closet somewhere, this seems like the sort of 'controversial' that will lead to grumblings and not a whole lot else.
It's not as though any of Japan's neighbors are necessarily going to like it; but nation-states maintaining armed forces, even potentially threatening ones, is sufficiently universal that there isn't exactly any complaints department who would take you seriously. "Dear the UN, I think Japan may be deciding to maintain a military larger than the one that the Americans let them keep after fighting a particularly nasty war with them, that's mean!"
It also wouldn't be a total surprise if some of the Japanese increase is aimed specifically at replacing the (never entirely popular) American bases in the area, which would leave the total amount of force roughly constant, just changing the label (and hopefully saviing the US some cash).
I assume that it is treated as a 'scam against Cisco' because their precious, precious IP rights were violated in building and branding the counterfeit gear(I'm just guessing that counterfeit shops don't exactly bother with doing cleanroom re-implementations of 100% Cisco compatible gear, which might actually be legal, save any exciting patents involved; but would also be far more valuable to one of Cisco's competitors than it would be to some slimy flea-marketeer...) and the individual customers who got stiffed aren't the ones with the resources to push a successful investigation and prosecution.
(It's also possible that, depending on what parts were on offer, the customers didn't really suspect they were getting genuine goods; but the price was good enough that they didn't much care, in which case they probably aren't lining up to tell the feds their tale of woe.)
You may be an 'anarchist'; but you apparently aren't an empiricist...
Outside the adorably twee world of exposing the contradictions inherent in the system, man! the track record of people actually not being subjected to laws just because they are excessively complex, deeply confusing, unbelievably vague, or thousands of pages long and buried in a filing cabinet somewhere is deeply unimpressive. If you count various zillion-page contracts of adhesion with provisions for one party(and only ever one party) to change them unilateraly as 'law', since they do tend to be enforced on behalf of the people who write them, or the whole kangaroo-court 'binding arbitration' system, the numbers just get a whole lot worse.
It's cute, sure, but unless you have exactly the resources that would make all but the most incomprehensible or classified laws open to you(eg. nigh unlimited legal resources), it's also irrelevant.
Given that, if there were to be some sort of vast, malevolent, conspiracy; Joe Average would fill a role somewhere between 'ant' and 'human resource, to be harvested at leisure', I suspect that's exactly the sort of thing that conspiracy theorists wouldn't find comforting...
Rather like trying to convince somebody who thinks you are trying to poison them that, really, cyanide is statistically indistinguishable from the millions of tons of carbon/nitrogen mixtures in the food supply.
Details are a bit thin, and will presumably depend on the hardware; but Google has this to say:
"Android also now supports hardware-backed storage for your KeyChain credentials, providing more security by making the keys unavailable for extraction. That is, once keys are in a hardware-backed key store (Secure Element, TPM, or TrustZone), they can be used for cryptographic operations but the private key material cannot be exported. Even the OS kernel cannot access this key material. While not all Android-powered devices support storage on hardware, you can check at runtime if hardware-backed storage is available by calling KeyChain.IsBoundKeyAlgorithm()."
They don't explicitly say how the media DRM features are handled; but it would certainly appear that they've been busy supporting higher-than-kernel hardware mechanisms that would certainly have the capability to verify the system state and freak out if filthy 'owners' have the temerity to mess with the device.
(Google has also owned Widevine for some time now, a company that is studiously unhelpful about the details; but which, according to its patent portfolio and past press releases, has been doing set-top-box DRM for a while now, with a long list of chipset vendors on the client list. They have a lot of chatter about a 'Virtual Smartcard', which sounds software-like; but 'software' could include firmware baked into a system well below the level of being manipulated by the kernel, short of a successful attack against the firmware.)
That sounds,
...haven't a fucking clue.
It's true that the people pushing anti-smut don't have a fucking clue; but that's because noisy moral indignation is the job that gets handed to whatever idiot is best at feeling really hard instead of thinking, and most unironic in their delivery of 'Won't somebody please think of the children?!?!'. The point of this job is to appeal to voters with similar tendencies and even dimmer capabilities.
Look at, say, what we've recently learned about the NSA, and their colleagues internationally, and what they can do: those are the people who know what they are doing, and have gone ahead and done it: basically every service provider, network link, NOC, etc. large enough to be worth the trouble, all quietly brought to heel and pumping data back to the mothership as fast as it is cost-effective to crunch it.
Here's the problem: If the parade of clowns and con-men who they line up for the amusement of the values-voters manage to receive an electoral mandate(or a slim edge that feels like a mandate when You Are On The Side Of Good, they commonly get confused on this point), they'll eventually have to hand the project over to the competent people for implementation. Once that happens, you get a system built by the dangerously competent and aimed by the feelings of the dangerously clueless.
'Cretinism', the sufficiently-severe-to-be-clinically-obvious manifestation of iodine deficiency has been known for a considerable length of time, in places without sufficient soil iodine. I would imagine that smaller gains would only be a surprise if you thought that everybody not obviously diseased was fully healthy, rather than frequently mildly subnormal.
If gun ownership in a society is as ubiquitous as in the United States then the police necessarily have to be at least as well armed and trained in military tactics.
That actually makes doing SWAT-style raids a worse idea most of the time. If there are lots of people with guns(but, by the numbers, not a lot of people interested in shooting police officers), playing 'armed home invasion' and trusting that superior force will keep you from getting shot, rather than just, say, telling everyone to come outside, is a risky strategy.
1/31/07, Never Forget!
The problem(in addition to the effects on the public being 'protected and served') is that this sort of disproportionate force isn't even a positive development for officer safety.
Doing no-knock full SWAT raids probably improves safety against people who are willing to shoot police; but those people are relatively rare: shooting at cops is risky, and you have to be guilty of a lot before you won't notice the additional jail time. Against people who wouldn't ordinarily be motivated to shoot police, though, it's performing a very convincing violent home invasion(a situation where a great many more people would consider shooting to be a reasonable thing to do) for no good reason. Overwhelming force might usually mean that the resident loses; but you only have to get unlucky once.
Or you'll start soiling your diapers earlier, effectively taking away a year of good health.
Probably worse than that. Particulate-related health effects tend to concentrate either in the lungs, for obvious reasons, or the heart/major blood vessels(because suitably small particulates can enter the bloodstream through the gas-exchange surfaces of the lungs and trigger various inflammatory freakouts).
If you think pissing yourself is inconvenient and humiliating, try operating on substantially substandard oxygen supplies... Every shallow gasp giving you about half the oxygen you really want...
Especially if you give it a massive tooth ache in the process. Then it just might get really annoyed at you.
Sharks are too hardcore to even notice a minor problem like that.
When you are a shark, teeth are basically belt-fed consumables. Lose one? Multiple rows of failover teeth just waiting to replace it.
You can lead a student to learning, but you can't make them think.... or do the homework.
Apparently, ye olde traditional brick and mortar schools at least have an edge on making them do their homework, if not actually think...