We can come up with a million dollars to make a sequel to one of the worst games of all time, Myst, and we can't come up with $22,000 to actually change the world?
$22,000 doesn't buy a lot of "world change". Sorry. And there's this other thing called quality of life: Our suck. We work 40, 50, even 60 hours a week doing stressful jobs, waking up at the butt crack of dawn, and dragging ourselves and our cars through miles of clogged roadways, etc., all for those few glorious hours on friday night and saturday where we can relax. And do you wanna know what I think of "world change" at 3pm on a Friday? Fuck. World. Change. I wanna go home, kick off my shoes, and forget that I'm just one of a couple hundred million other Americans grinding away their body and soul in thankless jobs. All I want, is some soothing, mind numbing entertainment. And alcohol. Over a third of Americans are alcoholics, and we have the highest incident rate of mental illness of any country on Earth. Three guesses as to why, and first two don't count.
So don't ask me about "world change". Nobody really cares about it once they get out of college and realize the next forty years of their life is going to be spent worrying about bills, about the car, about the kids, about whether the boss likes you, about... well, everything. Entertainment... and drugs... is what allows us to get by. Don't even think about trying to take either one away... it's all we have left besides over-priced coffee and status symbol cars to make us happy.
In the US "maximize the revenue of medical providers and vendors" is how we roll.
Excuse me, but you're wrong. Very. Wrong. You think your doctors, nurses, etc., have an easy time of it? Let me break it down for you:
Wanna be a doctor? You're going to need four years of medical school. Cha-ching: $156,000 was the average student loan debt for a graduate. In 2009. You may have heard; tuition has been showing double-digit percentage gains every year since. But let's ignore that. Now you'll need another five years of surgical residency training. Yay! You get to start making money here! Er, $56,000 a year average. Great, right? Nope. That average salary comes with the expectation of up to eighty hours a week. Rumor has it the government plans on putting restrictions on this; if that happens, your 5 years just became about 7. Fun fact: Most residents defer their student loans during this time period (did you say compound interest? Oh yeah baby!). There's another cost too: Medical malpractice insurance. It's quite a bit higher for residents, but let's say you make it all the way out into the field. Yay! You're a doctor! A prestigious position where you make so much money even Tony Stark would nod his head approvingly. Well... actually, no. For all this work; you can now earn $156,000 a year as a pediatrician or family practitioner. Nice, huh? Not so fast there, sunshine: The government wants its due: Your takehome is now about $4022 biweekly, or a take home of $104,572 per year. Om nom nom! And don't even think about trying to get a specialist job for another 4-8 years.
Oh, and now that you can pay those student loans you might have forgotten about? on a 10 year repayment plan, your monthly loan payment will be $1,795.25 or thereabouts. That's $21,543 per year. Sooo now your take home is down to $83,029. But wait, there's more: Medical malpractice insurance to the tune of around $3,000 per year. Burp. $80k.
So after 11 years of hard work, maybe more, you can finally sit back and enjoy your first year's wages. You probably won't reach parity with your non-college educated peers that are making median income for another 7 years, but hey -- it's a prestigious line of work. Oh, I should mention one more thing: Thanks to the medicare crisis, your salary's probably going to drop by 15-20% over the next 7 years because of all those old people that are going to no longer be contributing anything to the economy except racking up medical bills and passing on their massive consumer debt (which eclipses the national debt, by the way -- you think the government is bad at managing their checkbook, wait until you see what the Boomers did with theirs) to those still able to work. And you can bet the top earners -- of which you are now in that category despite your own high debt load, are going to be paying for.
And to use your own words, "That's why in the US there's almost no money spent educating people on basic health and nutrition"... except that's a lie. We do educate them, they just don't listen. Not that it would matter much at this point even if we shovelled piles of cash by the dump truck load into our public schools... because the Boomers bled us dry, and there's nobody investing in infrastructure or anything anymore. They lived beyond their means, and I sincerely doubt America will recover, at least not in our lifetimes. Get used to each generation earning less than the previous for the next 70 years or so.
The person adding the metatag rotting in a federal prison?
You're ignoring another part of the equation, perhaps even more important: A 100% conviction rate. Law enforcement need only enter a properly-formatted search string into one of dozens of popular search engines, and it will happily print out a list of every website bearing this meta tag. A whois search and a phone call later, it's time to kick in the door of Sir Web Provider, demand the customer records for the web site, and then rain down upon him like... well, like the NSA. -_-
The fact that a company has received a NSL doesn't provide any context by itself; Any sufficiently large company can probably be expected to have received at least one. It offers you no guidance on a course of action, either as a citizen or a criminal.
And you're giving them an argument to expand their powers that may just hold weight with the current sitting justices: If companies are leaking that they're receiving NSLs, then one easy solution would be to spam them on pretty much every company with over 500 employees. Thus your "canary" meta tag appears on every. damn. page., and loses any value as an indicator.
There's a dark irony in so-called skeptics pushing their own conspiracy theories (mysterious gangs hate our way of life) to muffle out the obvious truth that it's (always) all about the money.
You're one of those so-called skeptics, buddy. You just vomited up a Level 5 Tin Foil Rant in this very thread with false flags, the matrix has you, and a limited-edition Agent 'NSA' Smith on display. Then you turn around and invalidate your own post by saying "it's (always) about the money."
As for being pessimistic, it's a normal feeling but not useful. Read my book (free, see below) for a background into how this state of affairs came to be, and how to fix things.
On sale now: "The Sky Is Falling", by Chicken Little. A stunning critique of the government, with intro by Sir Tinfoil Hatsalot.
as it is cracking down on the young smart kids wh...
Today's fail post brought to you by Derpy McStereotypes and the Dept. of Redundancy Department. The government isn't discriminating on the basis of age here. They're discriminating on the basis of ability. We do not have the director of the FBI coming out and going "Generation Y: We gotta Pokemon This Shit And Catch Them All!"
So it's fairly likely that the FBI/NSA and their legal or criminal subcontractors are heavily involved in any dramatic security-related event.
Great. Another guy who thinks the NSA is the personification of the character Agent Smith from The Matrix. They're everywhere! They're everyone! They're responsible for every bad thing that happens! Please.
The fact that government websites are targeted makes no difference. Simple little false flags that keep the pressure up on legislators.
Whenever I hear someone mumble "false flag" I think of one thing: Fox News viewer. Because invariably they're trying to roll their conspiracy theory around in the batter of a phrase that sounds better than "tin foil hat brigade" and then deep fry it in bullshit reasoning.
The question here that's being begged is: Why would the government shoot themselves in the foot? Because it's fun? To keep the tin foil hat brigade on their toes? Because "pressure" on the "legislators" is a bullshit thing.. especially since you mention the "corporate para-state"... which in Tin Foil Speak(tm) is the corporate-military superstructure that already owns the legislators. So what's the point in convincing people of something you've already bought off? An actual false flag, like, from the military-- involves carrying out a tactical strike against an enemy (or occasionally neutral party) while pretending to be a different actor so as to prompt a retaliatory strike against them.
It's easy to mock all this but the threat to our digital lifestyle is real and serious.
Yes sir, the NSA is working tirelessly to take us away from our dull facebook posts and cat videos off Youtube.
We're a few years away from a fully regulated Internet where if you don't conform -- by running approved hardware, approved software, approved monitoring -- you simply won't get access, period.
Yes... the NSA is going to assassinate Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, then go murdering and gin-suing their way through the entire open source community. We'll all be shipped off to concentration camps where we'll be forced to either recant on our heretical devotion to open standards and start carrying iphones and wearing turtlenecks, or it's into a pit of acid. Let's be clear: That's about the only way you're going to get this fairy-tale world you're aiming for.
Clipper chip, remember that?
I remember it died. Horribly. I guess you forgot.
And the only way to convince the mass of "who cares?" public are a series of dramatic, dangerous, unacceptable attacks on websites, infrastructure, transport, etc.
Okay, are you some kind of troll? Seriously. How is it that you can first claim the government is engaging in "false flag" operations to blow itself up, and then turning around and saying that the only way to get the public engaged is to blow up government websites? Nevermind the historical success rate of terrorism like this (it's a goose egg), please tell me how all this fits together.
Because as it sits right now, your logic here looks like a box of randomly assorted conspiracy theories strung together without an obvious conclusion, any supporting facts, and make about as much sense as believing all those animals Noah rescued fit on a boat, or that the world was created by a benevolent flying spaghetti monster and we're all derived from primitive manicotti. Actually... FSM probably has you beat.
Because a bunch of companies paid a fuckton to have it become a standard, yeah. Google up the history on that... a lot of money was handed out to get an ISO working group and get it stamped as a standard. It was bought and paid for by Adobe. So there's that.
There's also the fact that PDFs don't belong in a browser anyway. It's an outgrowth of PCL, a language for printing documents out of the 90s. It's not multimedia, and every attempt to make it web-friendly is a bandaid that opens large numbers of vulnerabilities up.
Don't put it in the browser. For the love of god don't put it in. Standard or no standard it's a shit technology.
In other words you got called out on your BS and refuse to back it up. Gotcha. I think you're the kind of person who knows just enough to be dangerous. Case in point:
First, I provided a link to an article from a respected trade magazine that backs up every claim I've made. You have provided nothing. I have provided examples of your own logical fallacies. You have responded with ad hominid attacks and strawmans. I shouldn't be responding to this post at all. But I will because you're a sad husk of a geek and I'm bored.
Safety hazard"?!? How much power do you think microwave links need?
*facepalm* Tell you what, why don't you climb up on the tower, stick your head in front of one, and sit there for a few hours listening to the hum between your ears. Yes, the microwave energy will resonate inside what you call a brain enough to trigger electrical impulses that will give an audible effect. As you so eloquently put it "You might want to familiarize yourself with the inverse square law and the basic fundamentals of RF engineering." I expect your up close and personal experience will likely leave you blind within a year due to developing cataracts, but at least you can say you showed someone on slashdot they were wrong about the safety of them. Meanwhile, the rest of us have figured out that if sticking your head in a home microwave is dangerous... putting your head in front of a microwave emitter that has a lot thicker cabling running into it and a giant yellow sticker that says "DANGER: RADIATION HAZARD" might not be smart and you know, maybe those government guys were right to mount them high up in the sky where they can't Darwin the people near them.
BTW, that link you gave the other poster doesn't even mention the word "T1" in any context, never mind validating your absurd claim that they're feeding 4G base stations with T1s.
It's in the first paragraph. Please update your eyeglass prescription.
That software has to run on hardware and if you can't trust the hardware you are screwed anyway,
You can't trust any of their competitors either. Everyone's talking about the NSA because that's all the media talks about. But in the business, nobody's talking about the NSA, because nobody gives a damn. Cisco builds good product. Globally, the market they're in is expected to hit close to $9 trillion in 2020. Our GDP is presently sitting at about $15.6 trillion. The way the global economy is moving, if Cisco continued to show growth the way it was before Snowden, it would probably be the largest company in the country by then. Now... it's trending down. Big time.
Our economy depends on selling goods and services, like all other economies. Snowden is a giant monkey wrench in that; He's done more to harm America than pretty much anyone since the turn of the century save perhaps Osama Bin Laden, if we want to count out dollars on it. I hope they find him and make him suffer for a long time, slowly. He claims to be a patriot, but he's done most damage than our biggest enemies.
And most of it is bullshit: All Snowden has done is say that the NSA spies on people. Big fucking deal! Every other country does the same thing, they just didn't get pantsed by some punk kid who decided to trash the biggest economy on the planet for the lulz. Cisco isn't building bugs into their products because they don't have to. That's not how the intelligence community operates; They put their own bugs on the wire, because if it ever got out that Cisco hardware was bugged, it would cost America far more in economic damage than any intelligent asset that would be developed from the bugs could outside of a war-time environment. It's common sense: Don't put your bugs where they can be found! And cisco hardware is some of the most studied there is.
I trust them on their high-end equipment, and their corporate-level offerings. Their consumer offerings have been shit, but then, that's not really where their focus is, and the market is puny by comparison. Cisco just buys out other companies already in that market, tells them to put a Cisco sticker on it, just to say they have a presence. So that people recognize the Cisco brand. It's like Dell -- they still make consumer PCs, but that's not where the majority of their cash flow is coming from. Go to work. Sit down. More than likely, you're staring at something that says "DELL" on it. And it helps maintain the status quo when you go home and see the same thing... but comparing the quality of one line of business with another? Get real. They might as well be separate companies.
And another example of some tools wanting to be the do-all where they weren't asked and don't belong.
I would prefer if the browser stick to rendering only what the standards tell it to: CSS, HTML, PNG, JPEG, GIF... these are all standards. "Adobe PDF" is not. Save it to disk; and let me worry about what to do with it. Everytime you add more features, more code, you add more vulnerabilities.
Knock it the fuck off, Google. Get your head together: We liked Chrome because it was fast and minimalist. If I wanted a bloated up kitchen sink I'd go with Firefox. Firefox is the emacs of browsers. Chrome is supposed to be the vi. Stop trying to make vi into Emacs!
That's a pretty impressive T1, since my LTE speed record
*facepalm* You're using your own personal assessment and valuing that higher than the body of research on this topic. I won't even bother replying to the rest. Put some citations to your busted ass logic... Google can turn up a surprising amount of documentation to support everything from Roswell aliens to how the government's pouring flouride into our water to make us stupid... I'm sure you can find at least a four color glossy off Verizon's page to backup your ludicrious claims.
Well, It's true. They're starting to integrate into other assets, as Time Warner points out: Many cell phone providers are hooking cable modems up to their towers to boost speeds. Some towers, where regulations permit, and where sufficiently high enough to avoid a safety hazard, also use microwave links to nearby central offices. But the majority of towers being deployed only have a T1 or equivalent for the backhaul.
If I understand Verizon's network setup correctly, I'd guess that they're using at least something like a OC-3c.
Except you aren't. Parts of their network do, sure, but a lot of towers don't. And you don't seem to understand how these cells mesh together. Your cell phone can, in a typical urban environment, probably talk to over a dozen towers. But it doesn't. It usually talks to the nearest one; To keep transmitter power low and keep wireless "slots" free in adjacent cells. But there may only be 1 or 2 4G towers, but maybe 5 3G, or phone-only towers.. or whatever. My point is that it's a mixed environment. They can even have you talking on one tower while making a data connection on another, and all of this is being handed off all the time when you're mobile. Sometimes a tower oversaturates and hands traffic off to another one, or forces your phone to downgrade; It'll say 4G but it's only talking on 3G, for example.
b) By my calculations. I could blow through my 2 GB data allowance in under 36 minutes just by maxing out my down speed.
Yeah. Why do you think the data allowances are so low, while believing the network capacity to be so great? It strikes me as a big flaw in your line of reasoning.
Seriously? You want to let the same government that is responsible for massive overspend and the obamacare website also manage your insurance? wow.
Yeah, actually. I do. The Obamacare website, as much of a failure it was, still cost the American public a tiny fraction of what they're paying in excessive profits to the insurance industry. We would need thousands of Obamacare website fails to equal just what we're losing this year to these people -- and getting nothing in return. We're lining their pockets.
People bitch about the government and toss around terms like "massive overspend", people like you, and they haven't got a single goddamned clue about how much everything else in their life costs them. Bank overdrafts. Insurance markups. Mortgages. Student loans. Cell phone 'hidden fees'. You're being bled dry by the private sector at a rate many multiples what the government takes from you. But you bitch about the government because that's what the talking heads on TV tell you to do.
You sit down someday with your checkbook and parse out how much these government "scandals" actually cost you, and I will be amazed if you even hit 1% of your gross income. And yet, companies like this steal 5, even 10% of your income... and you just bend over and grab your ankles with a smile.
The worse criminal you are, the less punishment prison actually is.
It may be a punishment, but it's not a deterrent of any kind, in even the slightest. The fact is that most crimes are crimes of opportunity. Most offenders are first-time. They made a bad call, and they got busted. But our lack of focus on rehabilitation, the fact that somewhere around 80% of Americans are now near or below poverty guideline according to recent reports coming out now, suggests that the major motivator of criminal activity today is desperation. And we reward them for our society's lackluster economic performance, high expectations, taxes, and cost of living, pushing them to do it, by taking away any future potential to get a real job. Every job that pays much more than minimum wage requires a background check. If you have ever even been arrested, let alone charged with a crime, chances are good you will not get any job, regardless of qualifications, that's any better than burger flipping, telemarketing, or cleaning rich people's houses.
And you know what that does? It pushes them into more crime. Prisons might as well be named Crime University. Everyone who's in will tell you there schemes. You go in for check fraud, and you come out knowing fifty new types of fraud, and no job prospects. It leads to one, inevitable conclusion.
And people wonder why the whole goddamned country is falling down all around us? It's easy: We're a good Christian country. And as a good christian country, we punish and oppress, we guilt, we lie, and we shit on the poor and downtrodden, while offering them token charity and telling ourselves they're morally weak and thus deserve what's done to them. We turn a blind eye to the suffering of others.
And then we wonder why record numbers of them are snapping, grabbing a gun, and going around shooting up schools, hospitals, and every other place where people congregate and there's a government presence. Because we don't let anyone cry, we don't help anyone who asks for it, and because they can't cry tears, and can't find help, they cry bullets, and find an outlet for their anger in the blood of innocent people.
They're all very pathetic. They're oversubscribed by many thousands to one; Your shittiest cable provider doesn't hold a candle to how pathetically oversubscribed the average mobile provider is. These towers typically only have a T1 backhaul... it only takes a couple of phones to saturate those links. You will never, ever, get the full-rated OTA speed. Anywhere.
And they employ super-massive buffers; They're the reason buffer-bloat has become a problem. Latencies far above what even 90s-era modems provide -- 500, 800ms easy. Bandwidth is irregular and employs highly manipulated QoS to allow access to a select few websites at full speed, while taking the piss out of the rest of them -- there's a reason Facebook loads quick, while a site like, say, Slashdot, takes 30 seconds or more.
The FCC needs to not just run bandwidth tests, but suss out their QoS; People need to show that anything but the top 50 websites give absolutely terrible performance. You can get your google results in seconds, but it might take several minutes to load up the homepage of the restaurant you were searching for.
Except you're missing the fundamental point that insurance companies are for-profit businesses rather than charities.
Except I mentioned profit already, and you missed the fundamental point of your fundamental point that there should be limits to the amount of profit someone can bleed others dry over; And most insurance is mandated by law, and are strictly regulated, which as anyone knows... creates artificial monopolies. Why can't we just get 1,500 people together, and put that money in an account managed by the government, and let them manage the insurance? What benefit is served by allowing private for-profit companies to provide most forms of mandated insurance -- like car or auto, over government administration?
Afterall, we've already legislated that you have to have it... why then not take the next step and simply roll it into our taxes? I am not sold on the idea that the private sector can do a better job. Or better yet, why don't I do it and explain in gritty detail just how fucked over your "fundamental point" is here -- and how badly for-profit enterprise is screwing over all of us.
In 2010 there were 5,419,000 police-reported accidents. Source The US population was 308,745,538 in 2010. Source That works out to about 1 car accident per 57 people. According to the CDC, the cost of those accidents collectively came out to "$99 billion, or nearly $500, for each licensed driver in the United States." That is about $41.67 per month.
Now how much are we paying? According to these guys, in 2010, the average expenditure $791, or about $65.92 per month. If these numbers are accurate, than that means that the administrative overhead and profit combined comes out to about 37%.
That means that over a third of what you're paying is above and beyond what's necessary. Now many have railed against medicare and numerous cases of gross incompetence, cost-overruns, and flat out fraud have come out of the program. I'm sure you've heard of it. But take a guess at the total cost of administrative overhead for that program. Okay, now here's the truth: It's about 1.5-2%.
So even the much-maligned medicaid program, routinely paraded out as an example of how our taxpayer dollars are being wasted... comes in at a fraction of the cost of private for-profit insurance.
Now, please... tell me how capitalism is saving us money. I fucking dare you.
Insurance isn't supposed to be about profit, it's supposed to be about cost-management. Say that for every 1,500 people, one of them will be in a car accident each year. The average cost of a car accident in terms of legal costs, replacement, etc., we'll say is $50,000 -- or about $136.98 per day. Let's add a 15% administrative cost -- that is, the cost to hire people and collect the funds. That's $157.53 -- Now divide that by 1500 and multiply it by 30.5 (the average length of a month) you get $3.20 per month per person.
And that's how insurance is supposed to work: Distribute the costs so that the one poor bastard that would otherwise be broke, bankrupt, and his life ruined, avoids that fate because the risk is distributed over a large number of people. The administrators take home a reasonable profit -- that is their salaries plus maybe 5%, which is about average profit for a successful business, and you call it a day. Then you only need to manage the edge cases -- that 1% that gets in lots of accidents for no apparent reason. And those should be pretty easy to detect... since, you know, they're getting in accidents a lot. Set a threshold beyond which it's statistically improbable it could be random chance just kicking one guy's ass, and you're all set.
There is no need for any of the rest of this. The reason they put it in, is the same reason our health care went to absolute and total shit: They're determining risk based on the individual, not the group, and maximizing profit. That is, insurance today has become about avoiding risk, not absorbing it.
We are talking about $3 billion. With a fucking capital B.
I'm sorry, but size may matter to you, but it's not everything to everyone. Go buy a Ferrarri like every other middle-aged man feeling impotent... don't post it on slashdot.
Vulture capitalists would never turn down 3 billion dollars. They may be vultures, but they know very well when to cash out.
You never accept the first offer. There's negotiation. It doesn't matter what the offer is for, or the conditions, etc. When you're selling, you don't take the first offer. Ever. Because once an offer's made, that's a signal that it's feeding time. Sharks do not hunt alone.
In other news, Iran took credit for the downing of this drone as well, saying they have already begun disassembling it and that 'Murica should be very afraid. Pictures have already appeared on the internet of Iranians holding cans of Ginger Ale and eating pancakes, showing their cunning ability to blend in with the indigenous population in order to get close enough to strike at the very heart of the imperialist dogs!
Linux support would make this more interesting so I could...
You know, this kind of thing has been tried pretty much since the mainframe was invented. After that it was timesharing, after that it was dumb terminals, after that it was thin clients, after that it was virtualization, after that it was cloud, after that... well, and here we are. Hi Amazon.
Look, ever since Moses descended from the Mountain and brought with him two stone tables, 0 and 1, and said to us Thou Shalt Not Goto, and other things... people have been trying to get this off the ground. And it's always ended in failure because it's a bad idea.
The fact that it's Amazon's turn to derp it up shouldn't get your hopes up... and neither should adding Linux support. Or MacOS, or anything else. It's technology that has died more times than the Daleks have in Doctor Who... and yet it stubbornly comes back in via another whack plot-twist... also, just like the Daleks.
Once you have multiple different keys for the one site which are both signed as valid, then you can't safely encrypt traffic to that site.
It's the difference between tamper-resistant and tamper-evident. You get one or the other, but not both. I think tamper-evident systems are better when it comes to impersonation. I'd rather it self-destruct then let someone exploit it.
'm not going to trust the certificate authorities with the location of the bodies I've buried, but the existing system provides sufficient security for my day to day activities.
Ask the people who lost tens to hundreds of millions out of their bank accounts when a CA in Africa had their root certificate's private key stolen and thousands of fake banking sites launched mere hours later, and started collecting their credentials and draining their accounts if they thought the security was "sufficient". You don't seem to understand: Your dead bodies aren't worth as much as the hundreds of millions of dollars in just consumer-based purchases that happen worldwide every day. Those rotting corpses rankling your conscience like Poe's tell tale heart may figure highly in your own thoughts... but not in the world's.
But here's something I don't understand: just because I met Aeris at a key signing party and verified her identity at a key signing party doesn't necessarily mean I feel confident in vouching for her diligence in verifying other people's identities or especially the diligence of the other people whose identity she verified.
That's because you're looking at a network of trust as being about identity verification. That may have been what PGP key signing parties were about, but that's not the goal here. The goal in the case of websites is not to be who they say they are to a high level of reliability, it is to be enough that another website that tries to impersonate that one can be detected; In other words, to detect there's a doppleganger. So you may not trust Aeris, or her diligence.. but as long as somebody, somewhere in the chain, is checking IDs or for bullshit stories, that work is passed to everyone else. In other words, you're not building a chain... you're casting a net.
It's like playing a game of telephone.
False. The game of telephone only works when we ask humans to pass information along. We're not asking humans to pass the information on; we're asking machines to. And machines faithfully reproduce what we pass on hundreds, thousands, even billions of times, without even a single bit of error creeping in.
id you know that most artificial steroids used on digital content leads to premature bit rot? Digithol Rightose Managemone being one of the worst of the bunch.
That's why it's a controlled substance that only licensed providers under strict government regulation can prescribe it. It is usually prescribed as a treatment for Avaritia Maximus, a degenerative condition frequently seen in industry executives. It's the result of occupational exposure to high levels of bogon radiation.
Sure, pragmatic constraints affect every design. But if you're worried about being spotted by cosmic rays, that's a lot better than being worried about being spotted by guards or radar.
I'd be more worried about dying of cancer, honestly. And metamaterials do offer the promise of light-weight shielding against radioactivity in space -- as has been pointed out, they do operate over certain ranges of frequencies. I'm just tired of people calling them 'invisibility cloaks', when all they're doing is reflecting emissions at certain frequencies in a novel fashion. There are a great many useful applications for this... but "invisibility cloak" doesn't make the list. Sorry. That's bad science.
Slashdot Mirror
We can come up with a million dollars to make a sequel to one of the worst games of all time, Myst, and we can't come up with $22,000 to actually change the world?
$22,000 doesn't buy a lot of "world change". Sorry. And there's this other thing called quality of life: Our suck. We work 40, 50, even 60 hours a week doing stressful jobs, waking up at the butt crack of dawn, and dragging ourselves and our cars through miles of clogged roadways, etc., all for those few glorious hours on friday night and saturday where we can relax. And do you wanna know what I think of "world change" at 3pm on a Friday? Fuck. World. Change. I wanna go home, kick off my shoes, and forget that I'm just one of a couple hundred million other Americans grinding away their body and soul in thankless jobs. All I want, is some soothing, mind numbing entertainment. And alcohol. Over a third of Americans are alcoholics, and we have the highest incident rate of mental illness of any country on Earth. Three guesses as to why, and first two don't count.
So don't ask me about "world change". Nobody really cares about it once they get out of college and realize the next forty years of their life is going to be spent worrying about bills, about the car, about the kids, about whether the boss likes you, about... well, everything. Entertainment... and drugs... is what allows us to get by. Don't even think about trying to take either one away... it's all we have left besides over-priced coffee and status symbol cars to make us happy.
In the US "maximize the revenue of medical providers and vendors" is how we roll.
Excuse me, but you're wrong. Very. Wrong. You think your doctors, nurses, etc., have an easy time of it? Let me break it down for you:
Wanna be a doctor? You're going to need four years of medical school. Cha-ching: $156,000 was the average student loan debt for a graduate. In 2009. You may have heard; tuition has been showing double-digit percentage gains every year since. But let's ignore that. Now you'll need another five years of surgical residency training. Yay! You get to start making money here! Er, $56,000 a year average. Great, right? Nope. That average salary comes with the expectation of up to eighty hours a week. Rumor has it the government plans on putting restrictions on this; if that happens, your 5 years just became about 7. Fun fact: Most residents defer their student loans during this time period (did you say compound interest? Oh yeah baby!). There's another cost too: Medical malpractice insurance. It's quite a bit higher for residents, but let's say you make it all the way out into the field. Yay! You're a doctor! A prestigious position where you make so much money even Tony Stark would nod his head approvingly. Well... actually, no. For all this work; you can now earn $156,000 a year as a pediatrician or family practitioner. Nice, huh? Not so fast there, sunshine: The government wants its due: Your takehome is now about $4022 biweekly, or a take home of $104,572 per year. Om nom nom! And don't even think about trying to get a specialist job for another 4-8 years.
Oh, and now that you can pay those student loans you might have forgotten about? on a 10 year repayment plan, your monthly loan payment will be $1,795.25 or thereabouts. That's $21,543 per year. Sooo now your take home is down to $83,029. But wait, there's more: Medical malpractice insurance to the tune of around $3,000 per year. Burp. $80k.
So after 11 years of hard work, maybe more, you can finally sit back and enjoy your first year's wages. You probably won't reach parity with your non-college educated peers that are making median income for another 7 years, but hey -- it's a prestigious line of work. Oh, I should mention one more thing: Thanks to the medicare crisis, your salary's probably going to drop by 15-20% over the next 7 years because of all those old people that are going to no longer be contributing anything to the economy except racking up medical bills and passing on their massive consumer debt (which eclipses the national debt, by the way -- you think the government is bad at managing their checkbook, wait until you see what the Boomers did with theirs) to those still able to work. And you can bet the top earners -- of which you are now in that category despite your own high debt load, are going to be paying for.
And to use your own words, "That's why in the US there's almost no money spent educating people on basic health and nutrition" ... except that's a lie. We do educate them, they just don't listen. Not that it would matter much at this point even if we shovelled piles of cash by the dump truck load into our public schools... because the Boomers bled us dry, and there's nobody investing in infrastructure or anything anymore. They lived beyond their means, and I sincerely doubt America will recover, at least not in our lifetimes. Get used to each generation earning less than the previous for the next 70 years or so.
The person adding the metatag rotting in a federal prison?
You're ignoring another part of the equation, perhaps even more important: A 100% conviction rate. Law enforcement need only enter a properly-formatted search string into one of dozens of popular search engines, and it will happily print out a list of every website bearing this meta tag. A whois search and a phone call later, it's time to kick in the door of Sir Web Provider, demand the customer records for the web site, and then rain down upon him like... well, like the NSA. -_-
The fact that a company has received a NSL doesn't provide any context by itself; Any sufficiently large company can probably be expected to have received at least one. It offers you no guidance on a course of action, either as a citizen or a criminal.
And you're giving them an argument to expand their powers that may just hold weight with the current sitting justices: If companies are leaking that they're receiving NSLs, then one easy solution would be to spam them on pretty much every company with over 500 employees. Thus your "canary" meta tag appears on every. damn. page., and loses any value as an indicator.
There's a dark irony in so-called skeptics pushing their own conspiracy theories (mysterious gangs hate our way of life) to muffle out the obvious truth that it's (always) all about the money.
You're one of those so-called skeptics, buddy. You just vomited up a Level 5 Tin Foil Rant in this very thread with false flags, the matrix has you, and a limited-edition Agent 'NSA' Smith on display. Then you turn around and invalidate your own post by saying "it's (always) about the money."
As for being pessimistic, it's a normal feeling but not useful. Read my book (free, see below) for a background into how this state of affairs came to be, and how to fix things.
On sale now: "The Sky Is Falling", by Chicken Little. A stunning critique of the government, with intro by Sir Tinfoil Hatsalot.
as it is cracking down on the young smart kids wh...
Today's fail post brought to you by Derpy McStereotypes and the Dept. of Redundancy Department. The government isn't discriminating on the basis of age here. They're discriminating on the basis of ability. We do not have the director of the FBI coming out and going "Generation Y: We gotta Pokemon This Shit And Catch Them All!"
So it's fairly likely that the FBI/NSA and their legal or criminal subcontractors are heavily involved in any dramatic security-related event.
Great. Another guy who thinks the NSA is the personification of the character Agent Smith from The Matrix. They're everywhere! They're everyone! They're responsible for every bad thing that happens! Please.
The fact that government websites are targeted makes no difference. Simple little false flags that keep the pressure up on legislators.
Whenever I hear someone mumble "false flag" I think of one thing: Fox News viewer. Because invariably they're trying to roll their conspiracy theory around in the batter of a phrase that sounds better than "tin foil hat brigade" and then deep fry it in bullshit reasoning.
The question here that's being begged is: Why would the government shoot themselves in the foot? Because it's fun? To keep the tin foil hat brigade on their toes? Because "pressure" on the "legislators" is a bullshit thing.. especially since you mention the "corporate para-state"... which in Tin Foil Speak(tm) is the corporate-military superstructure that already owns the legislators. So what's the point in convincing people of something you've already bought off? An actual false flag, like, from the military-- involves carrying out a tactical strike against an enemy (or occasionally neutral party) while pretending to be a different actor so as to prompt a retaliatory strike against them.
It's easy to mock all this but the threat to our digital lifestyle is real and serious.
Yes sir, the NSA is working tirelessly to take us away from our dull facebook posts and cat videos off Youtube.
We're a few years away from a fully regulated Internet where if you don't conform -- by running approved hardware, approved software, approved monitoring -- you simply won't get access, period.
Yes... the NSA is going to assassinate Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, then go murdering and gin-suing their way through the entire open source community. We'll all be shipped off to concentration camps where we'll be forced to either recant on our heretical devotion to open standards and start carrying iphones and wearing turtlenecks, or it's into a pit of acid. Let's be clear: That's about the only way you're going to get this fairy-tale world you're aiming for.
Clipper chip, remember that?
I remember it died. Horribly. I guess you forgot.
And the only way to convince the mass of "who cares?" public are a series of dramatic, dangerous, unacceptable attacks on websites, infrastructure, transport, etc.
Okay, are you some kind of troll? Seriously. How is it that you can first claim the government is engaging in "false flag" operations to blow itself up, and then turning around and saying that the only way to get the public engaged is to blow up government websites? Nevermind the historical success rate of terrorism like this (it's a goose egg), please tell me how all this fits together.
Because as it sits right now, your logic here looks like a box of randomly assorted conspiracy theories strung together without an obvious conclusion, any supporting facts, and make about as much sense as believing all those animals Noah rescued fit on a boat, or that the world was created by a benevolent flying spaghetti monster and we're all derived from primitive manicotti. Actually... FSM probably has you beat.
However ISO 32000-1 is a standard.
Because a bunch of companies paid a fuckton to have it become a standard, yeah. Google up the history on that... a lot of money was handed out to get an ISO working group and get it stamped as a standard. It was bought and paid for by Adobe. So there's that.
There's also the fact that PDFs don't belong in a browser anyway. It's an outgrowth of PCL, a language for printing documents out of the 90s. It's not multimedia, and every attempt to make it web-friendly is a bandaid that opens large numbers of vulnerabilities up.
Don't put it in the browser. For the love of god don't put it in. Standard or no standard it's a shit technology.
In other words you got called out on your BS and refuse to back it up. Gotcha. I think you're the kind of person who knows just enough to be dangerous. Case in point:
First, I provided a link to an article from a respected trade magazine that backs up every claim I've made. You have provided nothing. I have provided examples of your own logical fallacies. You have responded with ad hominid attacks and strawmans. I shouldn't be responding to this post at all. But I will because you're a sad husk of a geek and I'm bored.
Safety hazard"?!? How much power do you think microwave links need?
*facepalm* Tell you what, why don't you climb up on the tower, stick your head in front of one, and sit there for a few hours listening to the hum between your ears. Yes, the microwave energy will resonate inside what you call a brain enough to trigger electrical impulses that will give an audible effect. As you so eloquently put it "You might want to familiarize yourself with the inverse square law and the basic fundamentals of RF engineering." I expect your up close and personal experience will likely leave you blind within a year due to developing cataracts, but at least you can say you showed someone on slashdot they were wrong about the safety of them. Meanwhile, the rest of us have figured out that if sticking your head in a home microwave is dangerous... putting your head in front of a microwave emitter that has a lot thicker cabling running into it and a giant yellow sticker that says "DANGER: RADIATION HAZARD" might not be smart and you know, maybe those government guys were right to mount them high up in the sky where they can't Darwin the people near them.
BTW, that link you gave the other poster doesn't even mention the word "T1" in any context, never mind validating your absurd claim that they're feeding 4G base stations with T1s.
It's in the first paragraph. Please update your eyeglass prescription.
That software has to run on hardware and if you can't trust the hardware you are screwed anyway,
You can't trust any of their competitors either. Everyone's talking about the NSA because that's all the media talks about. But in the business, nobody's talking about the NSA, because nobody gives a damn. Cisco builds good product. Globally, the market they're in is expected to hit close to $9 trillion in 2020. Our GDP is presently sitting at about $15.6 trillion. The way the global economy is moving, if Cisco continued to show growth the way it was before Snowden, it would probably be the largest company in the country by then. Now... it's trending down. Big time.
Our economy depends on selling goods and services, like all other economies. Snowden is a giant monkey wrench in that; He's done more to harm America than pretty much anyone since the turn of the century save perhaps Osama Bin Laden, if we want to count out dollars on it. I hope they find him and make him suffer for a long time, slowly. He claims to be a patriot, but he's done most damage than our biggest enemies.
And most of it is bullshit: All Snowden has done is say that the NSA spies on people. Big fucking deal! Every other country does the same thing, they just didn't get pantsed by some punk kid who decided to trash the biggest economy on the planet for the lulz. Cisco isn't building bugs into their products because they don't have to. That's not how the intelligence community operates; They put their own bugs on the wire, because if it ever got out that Cisco hardware was bugged, it would cost America far more in economic damage than any intelligent asset that would be developed from the bugs could outside of a war-time environment. It's common sense: Don't put your bugs where they can be found! And cisco hardware is some of the most studied there is.
I trust them on their high-end equipment, and their corporate-level offerings. Their consumer offerings have been shit, but then, that's not really where their focus is, and the market is puny by comparison. Cisco just buys out other companies already in that market, tells them to put a Cisco sticker on it, just to say they have a presence. So that people recognize the Cisco brand. It's like Dell -- they still make consumer PCs, but that's not where the majority of their cash flow is coming from. Go to work. Sit down. More than likely, you're staring at something that says "DELL" on it. And it helps maintain the status quo when you go home and see the same thing... but comparing the quality of one line of business with another? Get real. They might as well be separate companies.
And another example of some tools wanting to be the do-all where they weren't asked and don't belong.
I would prefer if the browser stick to rendering only what the standards tell it to: CSS, HTML, PNG, JPEG, GIF... these are all standards. "Adobe PDF" is not. Save it to disk; and let me worry about what to do with it. Everytime you add more features, more code, you add more vulnerabilities.
Knock it the fuck off, Google. Get your head together: We liked Chrome because it was fast and minimalist. If I wanted a bloated up kitchen sink I'd go with Firefox. Firefox is the emacs of browsers. Chrome is supposed to be the vi. Stop trying to make vi into Emacs!
That's a pretty impressive T1, since my LTE speed record
*facepalm* You're using your own personal assessment and valuing that higher than the body of research on this topic. I won't even bother replying to the rest. Put some citations to your busted ass logic... Google can turn up a surprising amount of documentation to support everything from Roswell aliens to how the government's pouring flouride into our water to make us stupid... I'm sure you can find at least a four color glossy off Verizon's page to backup your ludicrious claims.
At least try man. Sigh.
No offense, but I have to call BS on this:
These towers typically only have a T1 backhaul.
Well, It's true. They're starting to integrate into other assets, as Time Warner points out: Many cell phone providers are hooking cable modems up to their towers to boost speeds. Some towers, where regulations permit, and where sufficiently high enough to avoid a safety hazard, also use microwave links to nearby central offices. But the majority of towers being deployed only have a T1 or equivalent for the backhaul.
If I understand Verizon's network setup correctly, I'd guess that they're using at least something like a OC-3c.
Except you aren't. Parts of their network do, sure, but a lot of towers don't. And you don't seem to understand how these cells mesh together. Your cell phone can, in a typical urban environment, probably talk to over a dozen towers. But it doesn't. It usually talks to the nearest one; To keep transmitter power low and keep wireless "slots" free in adjacent cells. But there may only be 1 or 2 4G towers, but maybe 5 3G, or phone-only towers.. or whatever. My point is that it's a mixed environment. They can even have you talking on one tower while making a data connection on another, and all of this is being handed off all the time when you're mobile. Sometimes a tower oversaturates and hands traffic off to another one, or forces your phone to downgrade; It'll say 4G but it's only talking on 3G, for example.
b) By my calculations. I could blow through my 2 GB data allowance in under 36 minutes just by maxing out my down speed.
Yeah. Why do you think the data allowances are so low, while believing the network capacity to be so great? It strikes me as a big flaw in your line of reasoning.
Seriously? You want to let the same government that is responsible for massive overspend and the obamacare website also manage your insurance? wow.
Yeah, actually. I do. The Obamacare website, as much of a failure it was, still cost the American public a tiny fraction of what they're paying in excessive profits to the insurance industry. We would need thousands of Obamacare website fails to equal just what we're losing this year to these people -- and getting nothing in return. We're lining their pockets.
People bitch about the government and toss around terms like "massive overspend", people like you, and they haven't got a single goddamned clue about how much everything else in their life costs them. Bank overdrafts. Insurance markups. Mortgages. Student loans. Cell phone 'hidden fees'. You're being bled dry by the private sector at a rate many multiples what the government takes from you. But you bitch about the government because that's what the talking heads on TV tell you to do.
You sit down someday with your checkbook and parse out how much these government "scandals" actually cost you, and I will be amazed if you even hit 1% of your gross income. And yet, companies like this steal 5, even 10% of your income... and you just bend over and grab your ankles with a smile.
Moron.
The worse criminal you are, the less punishment prison actually is.
It may be a punishment, but it's not a deterrent of any kind, in even the slightest. The fact is that most crimes are crimes of opportunity. Most offenders are first-time. They made a bad call, and they got busted. But our lack of focus on rehabilitation, the fact that somewhere around 80% of Americans are now near or below poverty guideline according to recent reports coming out now, suggests that the major motivator of criminal activity today is desperation. And we reward them for our society's lackluster economic performance, high expectations, taxes, and cost of living, pushing them to do it, by taking away any future potential to get a real job. Every job that pays much more than minimum wage requires a background check. If you have ever even been arrested, let alone charged with a crime, chances are good you will not get any job, regardless of qualifications, that's any better than burger flipping, telemarketing, or cleaning rich people's houses.
And you know what that does? It pushes them into more crime. Prisons might as well be named Crime University. Everyone who's in will tell you there schemes. You go in for check fraud, and you come out knowing fifty new types of fraud, and no job prospects. It leads to one, inevitable conclusion.
And people wonder why the whole goddamned country is falling down all around us? It's easy: We're a good Christian country. And as a good christian country, we punish and oppress, we guilt, we lie, and we shit on the poor and downtrodden, while offering them token charity and telling ourselves they're morally weak and thus deserve what's done to them. We turn a blind eye to the suffering of others.
And then we wonder why record numbers of them are snapping, grabbing a gun, and going around shooting up schools, hospitals, and every other place where people congregate and there's a government presence. Because we don't let anyone cry, we don't help anyone who asks for it, and because they can't cry tears, and can't find help, they cry bullets, and find an outlet for their anger in the blood of innocent people.
What I've learned: My carrier is pretty pathetic.
They're all very pathetic. They're oversubscribed by many thousands to one; Your shittiest cable provider doesn't hold a candle to how pathetically oversubscribed the average mobile provider is. These towers typically only have a T1 backhaul... it only takes a couple of phones to saturate those links. You will never, ever, get the full-rated OTA speed. Anywhere.
And they employ super-massive buffers; They're the reason buffer-bloat has become a problem. Latencies far above what even 90s-era modems provide -- 500, 800ms easy. Bandwidth is irregular and employs highly manipulated QoS to allow access to a select few websites at full speed, while taking the piss out of the rest of them -- there's a reason Facebook loads quick, while a site like, say, Slashdot, takes 30 seconds or more.
The FCC needs to not just run bandwidth tests, but suss out their QoS; People need to show that anything but the top 50 websites give absolutely terrible performance. You can get your google results in seconds, but it might take several minutes to load up the homepage of the restaurant you were searching for.
Except you're missing the fundamental point that insurance companies are for-profit businesses rather than charities.
Except I mentioned profit already, and you missed the fundamental point of your fundamental point that there should be limits to the amount of profit someone can bleed others dry over; And most insurance is mandated by law, and are strictly regulated, which as anyone knows... creates artificial monopolies. Why can't we just get 1,500 people together, and put that money in an account managed by the government, and let them manage the insurance? What benefit is served by allowing private for-profit companies to provide most forms of mandated insurance -- like car or auto, over government administration?
Afterall, we've already legislated that you have to have it... why then not take the next step and simply roll it into our taxes? I am not sold on the idea that the private sector can do a better job. Or better yet, why don't I do it and explain in gritty detail just how fucked over your "fundamental point" is here -- and how badly for-profit enterprise is screwing over all of us.
In 2010 there were 5,419,000 police-reported accidents. Source
The US population was 308,745,538 in 2010. Source
That works out to about 1 car accident per 57 people.
According to the CDC, the cost of those accidents collectively came out to "$99 billion, or nearly $500, for each licensed driver in the United States." That is about $41.67 per month.
Now how much are we paying? According to these guys, in 2010, the average expenditure $791, or about $65.92 per month. If these numbers are accurate, than that means that the administrative overhead and profit combined comes out to about 37%.
That means that over a third of what you're paying is above and beyond what's necessary. Now many have railed against medicare and numerous cases of gross incompetence, cost-overruns, and flat out fraud have come out of the program. I'm sure you've heard of it. But take a guess at the total cost of administrative overhead for that program. Okay, now here's the truth: It's about 1.5-2%.
So even the much-maligned medicaid program, routinely paraded out as an example of how our taxpayer dollars are being wasted... comes in at a fraction of the cost of private for-profit insurance.
Now, please... tell me how capitalism is saving us money. I fucking dare you.
Insurance isn't supposed to be about profit, it's supposed to be about cost-management. Say that for every 1,500 people, one of them will be in a car accident each year. The average cost of a car accident in terms of legal costs, replacement, etc., we'll say is $50,000 -- or about $136.98 per day. Let's add a 15% administrative cost -- that is, the cost to hire people and collect the funds. That's $157.53 -- Now divide that by 1500 and multiply it by 30.5 (the average length of a month) you get $3.20 per month per person.
And that's how insurance is supposed to work: Distribute the costs so that the one poor bastard that would otherwise be broke, bankrupt, and his life ruined, avoids that fate because the risk is distributed over a large number of people. The administrators take home a reasonable profit -- that is their salaries plus maybe 5%, which is about average profit for a successful business, and you call it a day. Then you only need to manage the edge cases -- that 1% that gets in lots of accidents for no apparent reason. And those should be pretty easy to detect... since, you know, they're getting in accidents a lot. Set a threshold beyond which it's statistically improbable it could be random chance just kicking one guy's ass, and you're all set.
There is no need for any of the rest of this. The reason they put it in, is the same reason our health care went to absolute and total shit: They're determining risk based on the individual, not the group, and maximizing profit. That is, insurance today has become about avoiding risk, not absorbing it.
We are talking about $3 billion. With a fucking capital B.
I'm sorry, but size may matter to you, but it's not everything to everyone. Go buy a Ferrarri like every other middle-aged man feeling impotent... don't post it on slashdot.
Vulture capitalists would never turn down 3 billion dollars. They may be vultures, but they know very well when to cash out.
You never accept the first offer. There's negotiation. It doesn't matter what the offer is for, or the conditions, etc. When you're selling, you don't take the first offer. Ever. Because once an offer's made, that's a signal that it's feeding time. Sharks do not hunt alone.
In other news, Iran took credit for the downing of this drone as well, saying they have already begun disassembling it and that 'Murica should be very afraid. Pictures have already appeared on the internet of Iranians holding cans of Ginger Ale and eating pancakes, showing their cunning ability to blend in with the indigenous population in order to get close enough to strike at the very heart of the imperialist dogs!
Linux support would make this more interesting so I could...
You know, this kind of thing has been tried pretty much since the mainframe was invented. After that it was timesharing, after that it was dumb terminals, after that it was thin clients, after that it was virtualization, after that it was cloud, after that... well, and here we are. Hi Amazon.
Look, ever since Moses descended from the Mountain and brought with him two stone tables, 0 and 1, and said to us Thou Shalt Not Goto, and other things... people have been trying to get this off the ground. And it's always ended in failure because it's a bad idea.
The fact that it's Amazon's turn to derp it up shouldn't get your hopes up... and neither should adding Linux support. Or MacOS, or anything else. It's technology that has died more times than the Daleks have in Doctor Who... and yet it stubbornly comes back in via another whack plot-twist... also, just like the Daleks.
Once you have multiple different keys for the one site which are both signed as valid, then you can't safely encrypt traffic to that site.
It's the difference between tamper-resistant and tamper-evident. You get one or the other, but not both. I think tamper-evident systems are better when it comes to impersonation. I'd rather it self-destruct then let someone exploit it.
'm not going to trust the certificate authorities with the location of the bodies I've buried, but the existing system provides sufficient security for my day to day activities.
Ask the people who lost tens to hundreds of millions out of their bank accounts when a CA in Africa had their root certificate's private key stolen and thousands of fake banking sites launched mere hours later, and started collecting their credentials and draining their accounts if they thought the security was "sufficient". You don't seem to understand: Your dead bodies aren't worth as much as the hundreds of millions of dollars in just consumer-based purchases that happen worldwide every day. Those rotting corpses rankling your conscience like Poe's tell tale heart may figure highly in your own thoughts... but not in the world's.
But here's something I don't understand: just because I met Aeris at a key signing party and verified her identity at a key signing party doesn't necessarily mean I feel confident in vouching for her diligence in verifying other people's identities or especially the diligence of the other people whose identity she verified.
That's because you're looking at a network of trust as being about identity verification. That may have been what PGP key signing parties were about, but that's not the goal here. The goal in the case of websites is not to be who they say they are to a high level of reliability, it is to be enough that another website that tries to impersonate that one can be detected; In other words, to detect there's a doppleganger. So you may not trust Aeris, or her diligence.. but as long as somebody, somewhere in the chain, is checking IDs or for bullshit stories, that work is passed to everyone else. In other words, you're not building a chain... you're casting a net.
It's like playing a game of telephone.
False. The game of telephone only works when we ask humans to pass information along. We're not asking humans to pass the information on; we're asking machines to. And machines faithfully reproduce what we pass on hundreds, thousands, even billions of times, without even a single bit of error creeping in.
id you know that most artificial steroids used on digital content leads to premature bit rot? Digithol Rightose Managemone being one of the worst of the bunch.
That's why it's a controlled substance that only licensed providers under strict government regulation can prescribe it. It is usually prescribed as a treatment for Avaritia Maximus, a degenerative condition frequently seen in industry executives. It's the result of occupational exposure to high levels of bogon radiation.
Sure, pragmatic constraints affect every design. But if you're worried about being spotted by cosmic rays, that's a lot better than being worried about being spotted by guards or radar.
I'd be more worried about dying of cancer, honestly. And metamaterials do offer the promise of light-weight shielding against radioactivity in space -- as has been pointed out, they do operate over certain ranges of frequencies. I'm just tired of people calling them 'invisibility cloaks', when all they're doing is reflecting emissions at certain frequencies in a novel fashion. There are a great many useful applications for this... but "invisibility cloak" doesn't make the list. Sorry. That's bad science.