Interesting study. But described in a misleading way.
In particular, since they only looked at accidents with some deaths and some survivors, you can't compare the risks or make intelligent tradeoffs.
Naive readers might assume that if 49% survive in the front but 69% survive in the rear, then you are 69/49=1.4 times more likely to live in the back.
But most fatal plane accidents result in everyone dying and those were left out. So the difference is much less. And they don't help you find out how much less.
Unanswered questions:
* how many totally-fatal accidents happened over that period of time?
* how many people died in the ones they studied?
* how many people died if you include all the accidents?
And for another study:
* what about injuries - did those vary by location?
Politics > Law > Legal Jurisdiction > Robo-rights: Utopian dream or rise of the machines? Issue ID: 53 Last updated: 30/11/2006 15:43:58
ABSTRACT:**Humans are increasingly reliant on computers, robots and machines. Currently, robots and machines are inanimate objects without rights or duties. If artificial intelligence is achieved and widely deployed (or if they can reproduce and improve themselves) calls may be made for human rights to be extended to robots. If so, this may be balanced with citizen responsibilities (e.g. voting, paying tax). A push for robots' rights may clash with owners' property rights. More strain may be placed on the environment (e.g. energy, waste, resource & space usage).**
Human interest and advocacy on behalf of animals has continued to rise in recent years. This has been occurring in parallel with a trend that has seen more and more aspects of the human existence reliant on robots, computers and machines.
As computers and robots become increasingly important to humans and over time become more and more sophisticated, calls for certain rights to be extended to robots could be made. If artificial intelligence is developed to a level where it can be deployed widely -- a development some argue is likely in the coming years -- this debate may intensify [3]. Under present law, robots are just inanimate property without rights or duties [1]. Computers are not legal persons and have no legal standing. In other words they cannot be sued or prosecuted but at the same time they cannot sue or launch complaints against others. Their owners, however, can act to protect their property rights.
But I tend to agree with Kurzweil, that these changes will happen organically. We don't look at people with technological advances like eyeglasses or coclear implants as unworthy of human rights. We will gradually overcome the many limitations of the human body over time. Or at least that's what I hope, because as Bill Joy notes, the alternatives are pretty scary.
Two points to remember please: a) the validation is still considered
"pending" until it is posted on the NIST site...in no more than 2
weeks from the announcement date -- NIST official protocol, and b)
the validation does not immediately solve all FIPS 140-2 compliance
issues.
This document is required as a part of the FIPS 140-2 validation
process. It describes the OpenSSL FIPS cryptographic module in
relation to FIPS 140-2 requirements. The companion document
OpenSSL FIPS 140-2 User Guide (Reference 14)is a technical
reference for developers using, and system administrators
installing, the OpenSSL FIPS software, for use in risk assessment
reviews by security auditors, and as a summary and overview for
program managers.
The "validated OpenSSL USER GUIDE" will be available within two weeks of the announcement date.
No sign yet of OpenSSL 0.9.7j on the openssl site.
Helps in securing mail (DKIM) and other protocols
on
Secure DNS a Hard Sell
·
· Score: 1
SSL is helpful for some protocols, but not others. PKI via X.509 is also hard to deploy, and more complicated, and requires distribution of root certs in clients. And the user interface issues with SSL in todays browsers is a whole 'nother topic....
DNSSEC helps secure all DNS-based protocols, even those that couldn't adopt SSL/TLS. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is the lastest case in point, and if adopted will help drive DNSSEC deployment since it relies on DNS to help stop spam etc.
$ dig @bind.dnssec.se www.ripe.net +retry=1 +dnssec +multiline and look for the "flags" to include "ad":;; flags: qr rd ra ad; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
KGNU: independent noncommerecial community radio
for Boulder, Denver and beyond, has a weekly 25-minute science show " How on Earth.
We don't quite yet have it configured as a podcast with nice topic information, but you can listen
to the mp3s off of our web site. For the shows starting 2005-09-06, go to
http://kgnu.net/audio/HowOnEarth/. "Jim Hightower" is the segment just before How on Earth, and in our current state you'll usually have
to skip a minute or two of his show before the science show.
How on Earth is the Tuesday feature of the KGNU
"Morning Magazine" news show.
Once you become a fan:-) you can go back to the Tuesday editions of that show and you'll find HowOnEarth shows back to 2002 or so, about 37-minutes in to each audio file.
Welcome to PayPal. You are about to be redirected to a non-PayPal site hosted by the claims administrator for the recently-announced class action settlement. At the site, you will be able to learn more about the litigation and class action settlement agreement.
and redirects to http://www.settlement4onlinepayments.com
which is "not found: 2(SERVFAIL)" right now. Sigh.
Liberty Alliance is working closely with the
Shibboleth
project (part of Internet2's Middleware Initiative) which is
is similar but doesn't even have a centralized server with account info. It is purely a federation, and the central "wayfarer" server
just helps point the users' browser to the right local authentication servers, and the user can use that along with browser redirection magic to do single sign on to web servers in the federation. It also is designed to be able to preserve pseudonymity ("the user is authorized to access these journal articles because they are a member of the Ohio State university community").
This is a weakness in MD5, but how feasible is it today? Has anyone ever actually publically done this? Can you point to two different files with the same hash?
We agree that for spacecraft navigation, UTC is inappropriate. But UTC and timezone offsets from it are the right thing for everyday use on earth by people that want "noon" to have a long term correlation with the position of the sun. So all I'm saying is that we need both UTC for the latter, and something else for things like spacecraft navigation.
Further, those "fixed offsets" do matter in the real world, so it makes sense to promote a single standard designed for avoiding leap seconds. It is really unfortunate that GPS picked yet another different fixed offset. The best relevant standard is TAI.
For lots more insight, see http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/timescal es.ht ml though that page notes that once again people are proposing yet another new TAI-like time scale, offset by yet another fixed number of seconds. Does anybody really know what time it is?
UTC is damn awful time system because of leap seconds which cannot be predicted. All calculations must use ET....
For the purpose at hand (communicating to humans who live around the world about time to within a minute or two) UTC is just the thing.
Leap seconds are necessary for many purposes because the earth spins at an unpredictable rate, and people (and navigators) like to keep in sync with sunrise, star transits, etc.
You might want to check your own reference about "ET": It is common to see outdated references to ET when TT is intended, even in currently operating flight projects.
When leap seconds are inconvenient, TT/ET is indeed a reasonable choice. It is an old time scale, but very useful because it remains pretty consistent in usage over longer time periods. But what you probably want is an official time standard (one that is widely available via radio signals, NTP, etc) without leap seconds. TAI is the right starting point there. It is pretty much a constant offset from TT, but more official outside astronomical circles, and thus more likely to be made available conveniently like UTC is.
Ignore the loonies who are trying to do away with leap seconds in UTC - that is just silly. Use TAI if you don't like leap seconds.
It is a shame that this is presented as a webbug so eric can track who visits your site. So grab the image for your own server, add size info so it renders more quickly, add an alt tag for accessibility, and voila:
The Boulder Community Network
(BCN) was the second WWW-based community
network in the US, going on-line on the
ides of March, 1994. Newsweek
named us as one of four best "E-villages" in the country.
We have survived
longer than most because our vision was more about information and
outreach than about Internet access. Internet access requires a lot
of time and effort, and there are many companies that want to provide
it. Putting together information about the community is relatively
easy, but only a grassroots citizens organization can do the job
right, preserving freedom of speech and avoiding entanglements
with governmental and commercial bureaucracies and interests.
Volunteers maintain an ODP-like categorical index of web
sites relevant to Boulder County. We also
host hundreds of nonprofit web sites.
And we make good use of our large volunteer pool to teach
classes and help nonprofit organizations.
For folks just starting out, I'd recommend using
ODP to maintain the
categorical index. A community forum based on something like
slash is a good idea. Obviously, promote (even demand) the
use of open source software so you can share with others.
Promote accessibility and World-Wide-Web Consortium (w3.org) standards
also for better search-engine indexing, accessibility from handhelds,
use from other operating systems. "Best used by any browser"...
Don't rely on plugins, flash, custom fonts or any of that non-standard
stuff.
Funding is the hard part. Don't bite off more than you can
maintain. We're all-volunteer at this point, supported in
many ways by the generosity of the University of Colorado
and other donors.
The credentials used in a public key infrastructure (PKI) typically consist of a public/private key pair, a corresponding certificate or certificate chain and some trust or root certification authority information. They are usually stored on a desktop or laptop system as part of an application specific store. Currently, support for credential export/import is uneven and end users need to get too involved with the mechanics of creating and maintaining their PKI credentials.
Application specific stores also mean that users cannot easily use the same credential in multiple applications or on multiple devices. In effect, today, credentials aren't portable. PKIs that use hardware tokens (e.g., smart cards, PCMCIA cards) do allow for portability of the user's credentials, however, most systems do not use hardware tokens, but would benefit if similar portability features were available. Ideally, users would be able to use a common set of credentials with their desktop and laptop PCs, PDAs, cell phones, and other Internet-ready devices. Even where hardware tokens are used, there may also be substantial benefit derived from using credential portability protocols in support of management functions such as, for example, installation, token recovery (e.g. locked PIN), or token replacement.
Factor Name Symbol Origin Derivation
2^10 kibi Ki kilobinary: (2^10)^1
2^20 mebi Mi megabinary: (2^10)^2
2^30 gibi Gi gigabinary: (2^10)^3
2^40 tebi Ti terabinary: (2^10)^4
2^50 pebi Pi petabinary: (2^10)^5
2^60 exbi Ei exabinary: (2^10)^6
Misleading title and intro - they aren't all "worlds"....
The transiting objects may be Jupiters, brown dwarfs, or M dwarfs. Future determination of the amplitude of radial velocity changes will establish their masses, and will confirm or refute the reality of the so called "brown dwarf desert".
The Heise article is in German, but refers to
the original paper which is
in English
Normally, the file/etc/shadow (or/etc/password on old systems) is regarded one of the most vulnerable points of an unix system
[Uni99]. If an attacker can obtain the information in this file, the system is nearly hacked. Using Microsoft's PPTP protocol, information about your passwords is not only publicly available, you also provide additional hints about the passwords, which allow to speed-up the attack by a factor of up to 2^16 .
With this said, it is clear why we believe Microsoft's PPTP implementation isn't suitable for securing wireless networks.
I'm still trying to find out why the last few years have seen the
earth spinning faster than it has since the 1960's, despite a
long-term slowdown caused by tidal drag.
The last leap second was 1999-01-01, and I bet we won't have another
until 2004 or so. They used to come every year or two.
2001-08-02 was the day of fastest rotation in years:.000706 s faster
than 86400 s, whereas the typical day fluctuates between zero and two
ms slower than 86400 s.
It varies significantly on a bimonthly cycle due to lunar influences.
August is currently the month with the fastest spins.
For background, see http://maia.usno.navy.mil/
For the raw data, take differences between the "UT1-UTC" column
at ftp://maia.usno.navy.mil:/ser7/ser7.dat
"The goal of CoopX is to define a standard format based on XML to exchange information on projects hosted by facilities such as SourceForge, Serveur Libre, tuxfamily or Savannah. With this format a project maintainer could migrate his project from one hosting platform to the other or mirror it."
This really is a travesty. There were 30,000 comments, mostly against this sham. The justice dept gets 30 more days to evaluate and summarize and then publish on Feb 27th.
Then only 2 business days for the rest of the workd to see it before the last hearing on March 4th, to last only one day with
no outside parties allowed comment,
not even the many dissenting states.
So much for respecting the public interest. This process seeks to sweep the whole thing under the rug before the press can even read the comments....
I hope the judge sees this desperation bid
as a reflection of how inappropriate the actions
of the new Ashcroft justice department are,
and finds that the whole settlement is entirely
contrary to the public interest.
Once again the headline is wrong on who is saying what. NACI is more like the US National Academy of Engineering. This report is good news, but
the important thing is to get the government
to pass legislation to implement the recommendations.
From their home page:
The National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) has been created by legislation [NACI Act of 1997] to advise the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology of South Africa, and through the Minister, the Ministers Committee and the Cabinet, on the role and contribution of science, mathematics, innovation and technology, including indigenous technologies, in promoting and achieving national objectives. The national objectives are the following: to improve and sustain the quality of life of all South Africans, develop human resources for science and technology, build the economy, and strengthen the country's competitiveness in the international sphere. The South African Government has a need for informed advice on the problems and opportunities facing the country - in no area is this need more salient than in the concern for the stimulation of innovation in the pursuit of the national vision.
Slashdot Mirror
3.0 is still not released - just RC3. People will just have to re-download the real thing later....
And why not push bittorrent downloads? Much more efficient. I don't see it mentioned anywhere.
Interesting study. But described in a misleading way.
In particular, since they only looked at accidents with some deaths and some survivors, you can't compare the risks or make intelligent tradeoffs.
Naive readers might assume that if 49% survive in the front but 69% survive in the rear, then you are 69/49=1.4 times more likely to live in the back.
But most fatal plane accidents result in everyone dying and those were left out. So the difference is much less. And they don't help you find out how much less.
Unanswered questions:
* how many totally-fatal accidents happened over that period of time?
* how many people died in the ones they studied?
* how many people died if you include all the accidents?
And for another study:
* what about injuries - did those vary by location?
Some information on some of the years is at
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Table6.htm
Here's the original study: http://www.sigmascan.org//ViewIssue.aspx?IssueId=5 3
Politics > Law > Legal Jurisdiction >
Robo-rights: Utopian dream or rise of the machines?
Issue ID: 53 Last updated: 30/11/2006 15:43:58
ABSTRACT:**Humans are increasingly reliant on computers, robots and machines. Currently, robots and machines are inanimate objects without rights or duties. If artificial intelligence is achieved and widely deployed (or if they can reproduce and improve themselves) calls may be made for human rights to be extended to robots. If so, this may be balanced with citizen responsibilities (e.g. voting, paying tax). A push for robots' rights may clash with owners' property rights. More strain may be placed on the environment (e.g. energy, waste, resource & space usage).**
Human interest and advocacy on behalf of animals has continued to rise in recent years. This has been occurring in parallel with a trend that has seen more and more aspects of the human existence reliant on robots, computers and machines.
As computers and robots become increasingly important to humans and over time become more and more sophisticated, calls for certain rights to be extended to robots could be made. If artificial intelligence is developed to a level where it can be deployed widely -- a development some argue is likely in the coming years -- this debate may intensify [3]. Under present law, robots are just inanimate property without rights or duties [1]. Computers are not legal persons and have no legal standing. In other words they cannot be sued or prosecuted but at the same time they cannot sue or launch complaints against others. Their owners, however, can act to protect their property rights.
The original studies (deltascan and sigmascan) are in two places, both linked from the Foresight Strategic Horizon Scans page.
R E/Strategic_Horizon_Scans/Strategic_Horizon_Scans. html
http://www.foresight.gov.uk/HORIZON_SCANNING_CENT
Hundreds of papers there. I haven't found the one with this "legal rights" suggestion yet.
See also the Singularity Summit:
http://sss.stanford.edu/program/
But I tend to agree with Kurzweil, that these changes will happen organically. We don't look at people with technological advances like eyeglasses or coclear implants as unworthy of human rights. We will gradually overcome the many limitations of the human body over time.
Or at least that's what I hope, because as Bill Joy notes, the alternatives are pretty scary.
Congrats and thanks to the team - I can only imagine what a struggle this has been.
o licy_FINAL.pdf
p s-nist-update_oss-institute.org
From http://www.oss-institute.org/
Two points to remember please: a) the validation is still considered
"pending" until it is posted on the NIST site...in no more than 2
weeks from the announcement date -- NIST official protocol, and b)
the validation does not immediately solve all FIPS 140-2 compliance
issues.
The big thing available now is "OpenSSL Security Policy Version 1.0"
http://oss-institute.org/images/OpenSSL_SecurityP
This document is required as a part of the FIPS 140-2 validation
process. It describes the OpenSSL FIPS cryptographic module in
relation to FIPS 140-2 requirements. The companion document
OpenSSL FIPS 140-2 User Guide (Reference 14)is a technical
reference for developers using, and system administrators
installing, the OpenSSL FIPS software, for use in risk assessment
reviews by security auditors, and as a summary and overview for
program managers.
The "validated OpenSSL USER GUIDE" will be available within two weeks
of the announcement date.
No sign yet of OpenSSL 0.9.7j on the openssl site.
There is an email list available for updates:
http://mail.oss-institute.org/mailman/listinfo/fi
SSL is helpful for some protocols, but not others. PKI via X.509 is also hard to deploy, and more complicated, and requires distribution of root certs in clients. And the user interface issues
with SSL in todays browsers is a whole 'nother topic....
DNSSEC helps secure all DNS-based protocols, even those that couldn't adopt SSL/TLS.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is the lastest case in point, and if adopted will help drive DNSSEC deployment since it relies on DNS to help stop spam etc.
http://dkim.org/
A lot is happening with DNSSEC these days. It is being deployed in the ccTLD for Sweden: ".se" Check out
;; flags: qr rd ra ad; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
p
http://dnssec.nic.se/
Tutorial/howto: http://www.ripe.net/disi/dnssec_howto/
$ dig @bind.dnssec.se www.ripe.net +retry=1 +dnssec +multiline
and look for the "flags" to include "ad":
http://www.dnssec-deployment.org/
Threat Analysis Of The Domain Name System
IETF RFC 3833 http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=3833
Cache poisoning, in the wild:
http://isc.sans.org/presentations/dnspoisoning.ph
http://www.dnssec-deployment.org/epi.htm
http://www.dnssec.net/
We don't quite yet have it configured as a podcast with nice topic information, but you can listen to the mp3s off of our web site. For the shows starting 2005-09-06, go to http://kgnu.net/audio/HowOnEarth/. "Jim Hightower" is the segment just before How on Earth, and in our current state you'll usually have to skip a minute or two of his show before the science show.
How on Earth is the Tuesday feature of the KGNU "Morning Magazine" news show. Once you become a fan :-) you can go back to the Tuesday editions of that show and you'll find HowOnEarth shows back to 2002 or so, about 37-minutes in to each audio file.
Well, https: /www.paypal.com/settlement/
says
Welcome to PayPal. You are about to be redirected to a non-PayPal site hosted by the claims administrator for the recently-announced class action settlement. At the site, you will be able to learn more about the litigation and class action settlement agreement.
and redirects to
http://www.settlement4onlinepayments.com
which is "not found: 2(SERVFAIL)"
right now. Sigh.
Liberty Alliance is working closely with the Shibboleth project (part of Internet2's Middleware Initiative) which is is similar but doesn't even have a centralized server with account info. It is purely a federation, and the central "wayfarer" server just helps point the users' browser to the right local authentication servers, and the user can use that along with browser redirection magic to do single sign on to web servers in the federation. It also is designed to be able to preserve pseudonymity ("the user is authorized to access these journal articles because they are a member of the Ohio State university community").
This is a weakness in MD5, but how feasible is it today? Has anyone ever actually publically done this?
Can you point to two different files with the same hash?
We agree that for spacecraft navigation, UTC is inappropriate. But UTC and timezone offsets from it are the right thing for everyday use on earth by people that want "noon" to have a long term correlation with the position of the sun. So all I'm saying is that we need both UTC for the latter, and something else for things like spacecraft navigation.
l es.ht ml
Further, those "fixed offsets" do matter in the real world, so it makes sense to promote a single standard designed for avoiding leap seconds. It is really unfortunate that GPS picked yet another different fixed offset. The best relevant standard is TAI.
For lots more insight, see
http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/timesca
though that page notes that once again people are proposing yet another new TAI-like time scale, offset by yet another fixed number of seconds. Does anybody really know what time it is?
UTC is damn awful time system because of leap seconds which cannot be predicted. All calculations must use ET....
For the purpose at hand (communicating to humans who live around the world about time to within a minute or two) UTC is just the thing.
Leap seconds are necessary for many purposes because the earth spins at an unpredictable rate, and people (and navigators) like to keep in sync with sunrise, star transits, etc.
You might want to check your own reference about "ET":
It is common to see outdated references to ET when TT is intended, even in currently operating flight projects.
When leap seconds are inconvenient, TT/ET is indeed a reasonable choice. It is an old time scale, but very useful because it remains pretty consistent in usage over longer time periods. But what you probably want is an official time standard (one that is widely available via radio signals, NTP, etc) without leap seconds. TAI is the right starting point there. It is pretty much a constant offset from TT, but more official outside astronomical circles, and thus more likely to be made available conveniently like UTC is.
Ignore the loonies who are trying to do away with leap seconds in UTC - that is just silly. Use TAI if you don't like leap seconds.
image for your own server, add size info so it renders more quickly, add an alt tag for accessibility, and voila:
A text HTML version wtih OCR document processing courtesy of Soylent Communications is now mirrored by EFF:
http://eff.org/Censorship/Terrorism_militias/son-o f-patriot.php
Volunteers maintain an ODP-like categorical index of web sites relevant to Boulder County. We also host hundreds of nonprofit web sites. And we make good use of our large volunteer pool to teach classes and help nonprofit organizations.
For folks just starting out, I'd recommend using ODP to maintain the categorical index. A community forum based on something like slash is a good idea. Obviously, promote (even demand) the use of open source software so you can share with others. Promote accessibility and World-Wide-Web Consortium (w3.org) standards also for better search-engine indexing, accessibility from handhelds, use from other operating systems. "Best used by any browser"... Don't rely on plugins, flash, custom fonts or any of that non-standard stuff.
Funding is the hard part. Don't bite off more than you can maintain. We're all-volunteer at this point, supported in many ways by the generosity of the University of Colorado and other donors.
For more information, including a history, web hits, policies, etc. see http://bcn.boulder.co.us/bcn/.
Neal McBurnett
and http://www.imc.org/ietf-sacred
The credentials used in a public key infrastructure (PKI) typically consist of a public/private key pair, a corresponding certificate or certificate chain and some trust or root certification authority information. They are usually stored on a desktop or laptop system as part of an application specific store. Currently, support for credential export/import is uneven and end users need to get too involved with the mechanics of creating and maintaining their PKI credentials.
Application specific stores also mean that users cannot easily use the same credential in multiple applications or on multiple devices. In effect, today, credentials aren't portable. PKIs that use hardware tokens (e.g., smart cards, PCMCIA cards) do allow for portability of the user's credentials, however, most systems do not use hardware tokens, but would benefit if similar portability features were available. Ideally, users would be able to use a common set of credentials with their desktop and laptop PCs, PDAs, cell phones, and other Internet-ready devices. Even where hardware tokens are used, there may also be substantial benefit derived from using credential portability protocols in support of management functions such as, for example, installation, token recovery (e.g. locked PIN), or token replacement.
one mebibyte = 1 MiB = 2^20 B = 1 048 576 B
See http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html for more.
Factor Name Symbol Origin Derivation
2^10 kibi Ki kilobinary: (2^10)^1
2^20 mebi Mi megabinary: (2^10)^2
2^30 gibi Gi gigabinary: (2^10)^3
2^40 tebi Ti terabinary: (2^10)^4
2^50 pebi Pi petabinary: (2^10)^5
2^60 exbi Ei exabinary: (2^10)^6
I'm still trying to find out why the last few years have seen the
.000706 s faster
earth spinning faster than it has since the 1960's, despite a
long-term slowdown caused by tidal drag.
The last leap second was 1999-01-01, and I bet we won't have another
until 2004 or so. They used to come every year or two.
2001-08-02 was the day of fastest rotation in years:
than 86400 s, whereas the typical day fluctuates between zero and two
ms slower than 86400 s.
It varies significantly on a bimonthly cycle due to lunar influences.
August is currently the month with the fastest spins.
For background, see http://maia.usno.navy.mil/
For the raw data, take differences between the "UT1-UTC" column
at ftp://maia.usno.navy.mil:/ser7/ser7.dat
"The goal of CoopX is to define a standard format based on XML to exchange information on projects hosted by facilities such as SourceForge, Serveur Libre, tuxfamily or Savannah. With this format a project maintainer could migrate his project from one hosting platform to the other or mirror it."
Then only 2 business days for the rest of the workd to see it before the last hearing on March 4th, to last only one day with no outside parties allowed comment, not even the many dissenting states.
So much for respecting the public interest. This process seeks to sweep the whole thing under the rug before the press can even read the comments....
I hope the judge sees this desperation bid as a reflection of how inappropriate the actions of the new Ashcroft justice department are, and finds that the whole settlement is entirely contrary to the public interest.
From their home page: The National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) has been created by legislation [NACI Act of 1997] to advise the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology of South Africa, and through the Minister, the Ministers Committee and the Cabinet, on the role and contribution of science, mathematics, innovation and technology, including indigenous technologies, in promoting and achieving national objectives. The national objectives are the following: to improve and sustain the quality of life of all South Africans, develop human resources for science and technology, build the economy, and strengthen the country's competitiveness in the international sphere. The South African Government has a need for informed advice on the problems and opportunities facing the country - in no area is this need more salient than in the concern for the stimulation of innovation in the pursuit of the national vision.
What I do is point them to my web page on the topic:
Avoid E-Mail Attachments, Especially Microsoft Word