Interesting to hear about your neighbour. I have a neighbour who also is convinced about the stars and the future, too, with one subtle difference: she believes that she can tell where the stars will be in the future. And guess what? Thanks to the wonders of modern astronomical models, she's mostly right. The whole value of models of the physical world is that they can provide some level of predictive accuracy. Pompous announcements that Dr Solomons hasn't convinced you of the validity of her model until you've seen "some evidence that [it] is actually useful" just make you come across as an ass. Have you reviewed the various articles she's published on the details of her model and do you have the necessary learning (note, not qualification, but hours of intensive study) that enable you to make an informed judgement? I heartily doubt it but stand willing to be corrected. If you have, perhaps you'd care to list the detail of where her papers are wrong, plus links to the letters you've written to the various learned journals she's been published in, where you explained how she was wrong. That, after all, is how science is done.
It's interesting that the author thinks there's no real infosec issues. I don't think they've shown that at all. You can have all the fancy-shmancy encryption you like on the president's device, but it doesn't matter worth a damn unless the same encryption exists on the devices of all the people that the president is going to be sending messages to. And that's a lot of mobile devices to keep secure.
Additionally, the idea that you can solve many issues by saying pragmatically "well, the president will just have to not use it except for low-security matters" just ignores what we know about how humans use IT. There's no very obvious dividing line between low-security and high-security matters -- lots of things exist in the fuzzy middle -- and inevitably, the president will be tempted to use the device to do real work, which will mean treating more and more of the fuzzy middle as low-security.
And the Court doesn't enforce some continental idea of human rights; it enforces the rights drawn up by Winston Churchill's government's lawyers in 1950, to ensure that the kinds of outrages perpetuated by Nazi Germany could not happen again. Perhaps the Daily Mail's ignoble record of supporting the Nazis explains its opposition to the European Convention on Human Rights. It certainly seems like it would quite like to bring back the fascists.
Three questions for you: 1) Are you seriously asking, "what was so bad about going to war on a false pretext?". Aside from that being a vile moral position, do you not think that it poses just a few teenyweeny problems of pragmatism, which have indeed come to pass? For example, making it difficult to build and maintain a coalition, providing cover for other acts of naked aggression by other nations (eg Russia), encouraging a first-strike mentality among the worst of America's enemies, providing cover for an insurrection in Iraq post-invasion, creating a power vacuum in which Iran could meddle with relative impunity, making it impossible to draw up honest and thus workable post-invasion plans, etc etc. And those liberals who were warning of a quagmire five days after the invasion (and in fact before the invasion too) have been shown to be absolutely right. As your thinking appears stuck in angry teenager mode, I suggest you go read a classic Robert Heinlein book like "Red Planet" or "Citizen of the Galaxy" and see what lessons it may have about the intractable difficulties of imposing imperial hegemony on unwilling populations. 2) Do you think honestly believe that removing Saddam has resulted in less violence and oppression in Iraq? If so, why are you not informing yourself of the facts. More civilians are dying now than before, and in worse circumstances. Given that Saddam was an internationally notorious criminal shit of world-class standing, that takes some doing. 3) And what makes Saddam the dictator who had to be removed, while the dozens of others who are just as bad or worse, get left alone? Despite Saddam having been among the worst in the world, he wasn't obviously the worst in the world, or even the worst of the ones America could reasonably be expected to take on (ie no point attacking China or N Korea as they'd use their WMD -- oh, wait...what does that imply about America's willingness to attack Iraq?). Africa alone has half-a-dozen.
You're just wrong in thinking that the unequal distribution of wealth has no effect on the health and well-being of Americans. Google Michael Marmot and read his work on the social determinants of health. You'll find that poverty is *the* great killer.
Surely it must be blindingly obvious to you that there is a straightforward reason why poorer people pay lower income taxes than richer people? It's because if I earn $1m a year, I'm not going to go hungry if taxes were very high -- even say 80%. But if I earn $10k per year, a tax rate of 20% may be enough to reduce my gross income so that I have to choose between food and fuel. For the same reason of simple maths, even if there were a flat rate of tax, poor people would be contributing less to the national pot than rich people because, doh, they have less money in the first place to contribute. I wonder if you are aware just how unequal income and wealth are in the US? There are rich people who are each worth more than the poorest 10% of the entire population. Plenty of people last year made incomes of just $10k; yet some Americans increased their wealth by $1bn. In other words, some people made the same amont of money as 100,000(!) of their compatriots. The idea that the rich are suffering the travails of a socialist-minded state just does not stand up to scrutiny.
Your comment about Buffet is truly bizarre. The ultra-rich only pay capital gains when they realise a gain. And they structure their finances to minimise the times when that happens -- there was a big furore in the UK recently when the government appeared to choose to forget this fact in reorganising tax regimes. The net tax burden for Buffet including income and capital gains tax will be a lower % of his wealth than for his secretary. Finally, as you must surely recognise, if I get a net $1m extra in my bank account due to capital gains as opposed to income, it makes no earthly difference to the fact that I have got richer by that amount. That's why many states have capital gains tax structures that, like income tax, include a tax-free threshold and then a charge at the marginal rate.
As for Ireland -- given that the economy is wobbling due to a massive over-leveraging of the Irish financial sector, we may find that corporate tax forum shopping reduces over the coming years.
Finally, bear in mind that individuals also do tax forum shopping -- sneaking out of their obligations by squirreling money away offshore. I'd say that someone who does this fits the description of "not fully participating in being citizens" rather more aptly than some poor sod who gets a welfare check. I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to swap places with the poor person, who not only has a shitty life but has people like you telling them they're scrounging goodfornothings as well.
It's truly extraordinary that you chose to call yourself Gandhi_2. Your viewpoint and his are hugely different. You propose that you should keep your all your money and only give away what you want to. Presumably that means that you are happy to have poor people live shitty lives and die young; in fact, the current setup in the US isn't tough enough for you. If some eighty-five year old pauper in Buttfuck, Alabama is able to have some protein in their main meal because they got food stamps from the government, you'd presumably think that was a Socialist Disgrace. You'd far rather see them die on principle than claim money from the government which might have come from someone else's income. What a shame you couldn't have lived in Victorian times in England. You'd have so enjoyed that muscular form of laissez-faire capitalism.
What difference does it make that the risks are analogous to those that already exist? If the new system increases both the frequency and the severity of the risk, that means that there will be worse problems than we currently have. Indeed, the problems may be systemically dangerous, as the financial industry is neatly demonstrating for us right now -- no new risks there, just too much debt resting on too little capital, but it's enough to cause huge threats.
My thinking is not the same dumb thinking that led to Iraq -- it's derived from reading and reflecting on what credible security analysts such as Ross Anderson have to say.
In addition, you've just made some bland assertions on the detail that don't stand up to scrutiny. It's a stated aim of the new system to make access to services dependent (note the spelling; dependant is someone who relies on you financially) on successful reads from the ID card. The services that have been mooted include such everyday items as seeing a GP, using a bank account, etc. You do *not* need DVLC or NIC to do these things. Indeed, the times when you need your NI number or driver's licence are very few and far between (albeit important at that time). As is well known, you don't have to have your driver's licence on you to drive. By contrast, the aim of the ID card system is that you won't be able to walk down the street without your ID card -- if you get stopped by a state agent (I refuse to consider a PCSO a public servant or an office holder), you will be expected to produce your ID card on demand.
2. The argument that "well, our current system is insecure, so what the hell, we might as well introduce something that's even more insecure" is just bizarre. What is the point in making things much simpler for both individual abusers and criminal gangs? From a standpoint of the economics of security this is completely barking. I'm not arguing here that we get plunged into the dark world of Orwell (although given that members of my family were caught and sent to concentration camps by German state agents using much less effective technology, I think I'm right to fear systemic abuse by the state of these kinds of tools). I am arguing, though, that if there are currently hundreds of cases of abuse each year due to impersonation / tracking victims down etc, there will be tens of thousands more with the introduction of ID cards, and that this outweighs the purported benefits of the cards. The system holds vastly more data, so the chance of a malicious user finding what they want is greatly increased, and it is accessed by vastly more people including remotely, so the number of points of failure is hugely increased.
You can only publish if you can find a publisher. The most obvious solution is to expand the role of the (inter)national trial register to be a place to go to find out results as well.
You're creating a false threat model and dismissing the real threat too lightly.
1. While terrorists may or may not be interested in impersonation, that will affect relatively few people. However, if the ID card becomes part of the UK's critical infrastructure, ie the provision of services becomes dependent on successful reads from cards, then it may be of interest to terrorists or states to attempt DoS attacks. 2. Criminal gangs, on the other hand, will be very interested in impersonation, and could affect many thousands or tens of thousands of people. Not generally for fitting people up (although that will happen, and corrupt officials -- wifebeaters, fraudsters, bent coppers etc -- will likely be in the forefront), but instead to gain access to services / assets. 3. Security is as strong as its weakest link. If the one-way hash is strong, attacks will be made on other parts of the infrastructure instead. But there will be successful attacks, many facilitated via social engineering.
Only on slashdot would someone describe ssh'ing into a server as real work that "most people" do.
As for your question re the "10%", the problem is that *users* have to wade through the 90% to find the 10%. That's a lot of crap to filter to get to the diamonds.
Finally, developer friendliness is also about how quick and easy it is to build an app, and how quick and easy it is to bring it to a large market willing to pay. The iPhone is good for both of those points.
You really are a complete norbert, aren't you? And pointlessly rude, as well. Just to spell it out: of course I know that computers can print. I'm also aware that if the computer prints the voting paper and you then have that as the fall-back system on which you rely, there was no fucking point whatsoever in using the computer in the first place. You could have just used a pen and paper.
To commit large-scale fraud involving physically altering ballot papers requires you to tamper with very large numbers of physical artefacts. That is non-trivial and involves substantially more personal risk than electronic tampering. How does the fact that a computer can print help with anything if the printed paper is not what's being counted? How do running tallies help if the tampering is upstream? How does knowing the source code help if you need an expert to tell you if that's the source code that's actually running? And no-one on God's green earth can guarantee that the whole electronic chain-of-transmission is secure. You have way too much faith in electronic systems. I suggest you buy a copy of Ross Anderson's book on Security Engineering.
Of course it's a bad idea! At the end of the day, any computer-based system is inherently opaque and impermanent, whereas paper-based systems are inherently transparent and permanent. It requires the simplest of skills (literacy and numeracy) to check out the veracity of a paper poll, and once a mark is made it's difficult to erase. Contrast that with computer systems.
Thanks for the snarky comment. The rest of the world is plenty aware that we are unable to vote, and that there's a bunch if americans who will actually be put off a candidate simply because foreigners are positive about that candidate. However, it's hardly surprising that lots of non-Americans have a preference when you consider the extent of America's global power: Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, Sudanese, Georgians, Ukrainians to take just a few exampkes are all at greater or lesser risk of being injured or killed depending on the election results. Not surprising that they care, then.
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business?
on
Tech Vs. Business?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
perhaps you should pick up the phone or go and see him and not just send emails.
For me, what's interesting in that is that one of the character says they put their phone in their suitcase so they didn't have to answer it. It's that very human interaction with technology that makes his writing so believable -- even when, as in this example, he didn't predict the exact form of the future (ie the need for a power button).
Actually, the website makes a stronger claim than what you've said here. It says "The number of challenge and response pairs for each IC can be *arbitrarily large* (2^64 in this example)" -- my emphasis.
Can't you see the difference? Obama isn't telling anyone that divorce is a good or a bad thing. Palin, by contrast, is to abstain from sex before they're married. She's an evangelical Christian -- she's saying this because she thinks it's sinful. Yet she couldn't get her own daughter to follow her rules. She's got a set of stupid ideas that she wants us all to follow despite her daughter being the living embodiment of the failure of those ideas.
Of course it's not absurd to say that her daughter getting pregnant says nothing about the effectiveness of abstinence programs. If she can't persuade her own frickin' daughter of the importance of abstention, how's she going to persuade everyone else? Meanwhile, there's good comparative evidence to demonstrate that ready access to contraception and good sex education lead to lower STI and pregnancy rates.
Oh goody, an insight from pre-history! Let's have some more. Can we think of any other differences between Michigan now and Michigan 14,000 years ago. Hmmm.
Well, how about this one?
14,000 years ago, there were no large cities filled with human beings who like to live in comfort to be affected by the presence or absence of a glacier in the first fucking place.
Contrary to what you appear to believe, the problem we face is not just "humans are heating the planet up". The problem is that humans appear to be heating the planet up, and humanity is not very well placed to cope, what with there being 6 billion people on it, quite a lot of whom have a fairly perilously long way to fall in terms of living standards, if things go tits up (although the landing for a Sylheti peasant is sadly likely to be a lot more nasty than the landing for you)
The logic is "no single weather event can be definitively said to have been caused by global warming, but the long term trend is for greater climate change caused by human injection of vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere".
This is not such a difficult concept, even for people who appear to have very tiny brains. It's analogous to saying "We cannot say for certain that your particular mesothelioma was caused by asbestos fibres, but asbestos is a cause of mesothelioma in humans"
If you took the buttplug of indignation out, you'd be less full of righteous hot air and more likely to be able to cope with the thinking required.
Oh my fat fucking ass. The Oregon petition was signed by a bunch of people who said they were scientists. Some of them were, but only a few of them even claimed to do any work in climatology (~10% said they worked in climate or geosciences). Many of them turned out to have done no more than an undergraduate degree in some scientific field, in common with several million other people on the planet.
If you're going to appeal to authority, at least make it an authoritative authority!
1) You don't honestly believe, do you, that the real justice scandal in relation to rape is the rate of false accusations rather than the rate of failure to punish rapists? 85% of rapes are not reported to the police. 94% of reported rapes result in acquittal. So 99.4% of cases do not result in punishment. Even allowing for a pretty high rate of false accusation, it's likely that the vast majority of rapes go unpunished.
2) The police provide only some temporary and limited anonymity prior to naming someone accused of murder. At the point of charge (still mostly within a day or two, despite the government's best efforts), an accused will normally be named. Indeed, that's what happened here to the wealthy executive.
What's common across both these examples is that in criminal cases, the UK has tended to decide that it is fairer to defendants for them to know that people will know if they are locked up by the police (ie they can't be made to disappear anonymously) than it is for defendants to have their name protected from a possible slur associated with being accused of a crime. Laws on terrorism are of course changing all this, and not for the better.
Your comment is unintentionally funny for a number of reasons.
What really jumped out for me was the implied tone in comparing the apparent idiocy of spending money on social security, healthcare and welfare as opposed to spending money on security theatre at airports and blowing up Iraqis.
The other really funny bit was when you pretended that free-marketeers think that taxes are really rubbish at correcting for market imperfections but would be perfectly fine with regulation ("mandate that "polluting, non-renewable" forms of energy meet certain environmental standards). The truth, of course, is that business objects to both, on principle (the principle being, "but I want to make more money and you're stopping me").
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting to hear about your neighbour. I have a neighbour who also is convinced about the stars and the future, too, with one subtle difference: she believes that she can tell where the stars will be in the future. And guess what? Thanks to the wonders of modern astronomical models, she's mostly right. The whole value of models of the physical world is that they can provide some level of predictive accuracy. Pompous announcements that Dr Solomons hasn't convinced you of the validity of her model until you've seen "some evidence that [it] is actually useful" just make you come across as an ass. Have you reviewed the various articles she's published on the details of her model and do you have the necessary learning (note, not qualification, but hours of intensive study) that enable you to make an informed judgement? I heartily doubt it but stand willing to be corrected. If you have, perhaps you'd care to list the detail of where her papers are wrong, plus links to the letters you've written to the various learned journals she's been published in, where you explained how she was wrong. That, after all, is how science is done.
It's interesting that the author thinks there's no real infosec issues. I don't think they've shown that at all. You can have all the fancy-shmancy encryption you like on the president's device, but it doesn't matter worth a damn unless the same encryption exists on the devices of all the people that the president is going to be sending messages to. And that's a lot of mobile devices to keep secure.
Additionally, the idea that you can solve many issues by saying pragmatically "well, the president will just have to not use it except for low-security matters" just ignores what we know about how humans use IT. There's no very obvious dividing line between low-security and high-security matters -- lots of things exist in the fuzzy middle -- and inevitably, the president will be tempted to use the device to do real work, which will mean treating more and more of the fuzzy middle as low-security.
And the Court doesn't enforce some continental idea of human rights; it enforces the rights drawn up by Winston Churchill's government's lawyers in 1950, to ensure that the kinds of outrages perpetuated by Nazi Germany could not happen again. Perhaps the Daily Mail's ignoble record of supporting the Nazis explains its opposition to the European Convention on Human Rights. It certainly seems like it would quite like to bring back the fascists.
Three questions for you:
1) Are you seriously asking, "what was so bad about going to war on a false pretext?".
Aside from that being a vile moral position, do you not think that it poses just a few teenyweeny problems of pragmatism, which have indeed come to pass? For example, making it difficult to build and maintain a coalition, providing cover for other acts of naked aggression by other nations (eg Russia), encouraging a first-strike mentality among the worst of America's enemies, providing cover for an insurrection in Iraq post-invasion, creating a power vacuum in which Iran could meddle with relative impunity, making it impossible to draw up honest and thus workable post-invasion plans, etc etc. And those liberals who were warning of a quagmire five days after the invasion (and in fact before the invasion too) have been shown to be absolutely right. As your thinking appears stuck in angry teenager mode, I suggest you go read a classic Robert Heinlein book like "Red Planet" or "Citizen of the Galaxy" and see what lessons it may have about the intractable difficulties of imposing imperial hegemony on unwilling populations.
2) Do you think honestly believe that removing Saddam has resulted in less violence and oppression in Iraq?
If so, why are you not informing yourself of the facts. More civilians are dying now than before, and in worse circumstances. Given that Saddam was an internationally notorious criminal shit of world-class standing, that takes some doing.
3) And what makes Saddam the dictator who had to be removed, while the dozens of others who are just as bad or worse, get left alone?
Despite Saddam having been among the worst in the world, he wasn't obviously the worst in the world, or even the worst of the ones America could reasonably be expected to take on (ie no point attacking China or N Korea as they'd use their WMD -- oh, wait...what does that imply about America's willingness to attack Iraq?). Africa alone has half-a-dozen.
You're just wrong in thinking that the unequal distribution of wealth has no effect on the health and well-being of Americans. Google Michael Marmot and read his work on the social determinants of health. You'll find that poverty is *the* great killer.
Surely it must be blindingly obvious to you that there is a straightforward reason why poorer people pay lower income taxes than richer people? It's because if I earn $1m a year, I'm not going to go hungry if taxes were very high -- even say 80%. But if I earn $10k per year, a tax rate of 20% may be enough to reduce my gross income so that I have to choose between food and fuel. For the same reason of simple maths, even if there were a flat rate of tax, poor people would be contributing less to the national pot than rich people because, doh, they have less money in the first place to contribute. I wonder if you are aware just how unequal income and wealth are in the US? There are rich people who are each worth more than the poorest 10% of the entire population. Plenty of people last year made incomes of just $10k; yet some Americans increased their wealth by $1bn. In other words, some people made the same amont of money as 100,000(!) of their compatriots. The idea that the rich are suffering the travails of a socialist-minded state just does not stand up to scrutiny.
Your comment about Buffet is truly bizarre. The ultra-rich only pay capital gains when they realise a gain. And they structure their finances to minimise the times when that happens -- there was a big furore in the UK recently when the government appeared to choose to forget this fact in reorganising tax regimes. The net tax burden for Buffet including income and capital gains tax will be a lower % of his wealth than for his secretary. Finally, as you must surely recognise, if I get a net $1m extra in my bank account due to capital gains as opposed to income, it makes no earthly difference to the fact that I have got richer by that amount. That's why many states have capital gains tax structures that, like income tax, include a tax-free threshold and then a charge at the marginal rate.
As for Ireland -- given that the economy is wobbling due to a massive over-leveraging of the Irish financial sector, we may find that corporate tax forum shopping reduces over the coming years.
Finally, bear in mind that individuals also do tax forum shopping -- sneaking out of their obligations by squirreling money away offshore. I'd say that someone who does this fits the description of "not fully participating in being citizens" rather more aptly than some poor sod who gets a welfare check. I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to swap places with the poor person, who not only has a shitty life but has people like you telling them they're scrounging goodfornothings as well.
It's truly extraordinary that you chose to call yourself Gandhi_2. Your viewpoint and his are hugely different. You propose that you should keep your all your money and only give away what you want to. Presumably that means that you are happy to have poor people live shitty lives and die young; in fact, the current setup in the US isn't tough enough for you. If some eighty-five year old pauper in Buttfuck, Alabama is able to have some protein in their main meal because they got food stamps from the government, you'd presumably think that was a Socialist Disgrace. You'd far rather see them die on principle than claim money from the government which might have come from someone else's income. What a shame you couldn't have lived in Victorian times in England. You'd have so enjoyed that muscular form of laissez-faire capitalism.
What difference does it make that the risks are analogous to those that already exist? If the new system increases both the frequency and the severity of the risk, that means that there will be worse problems than we currently have. Indeed, the problems may be systemically dangerous, as the financial industry is neatly demonstrating for us right now -- no new risks there, just too much debt resting on too little capital, but it's enough to cause huge threats.
My thinking is not the same dumb thinking that led to Iraq -- it's derived from reading and reflecting on what credible security analysts such as Ross Anderson have to say.
In addition, you've just made some bland assertions on the detail that don't stand up to scrutiny. It's a stated aim of the new system to make access to services dependent (note the spelling; dependant is someone who relies on you financially) on successful reads from the ID card. The services that have been mooted include such everyday items as seeing a GP, using a bank account, etc. You do *not* need DVLC or NIC to do these things. Indeed, the times when you need your NI number or driver's licence are very few and far between (albeit important at that time). As is well known, you don't have to have your driver's licence on you to drive. By contrast, the aim of the ID card system is that you won't be able to walk down the street without your ID card -- if you get stopped by a state agent (I refuse to consider a PCSO a public servant or an office holder), you will be expected to produce your ID card on demand.
2. The argument that "well, our current system is insecure, so what the hell, we might as well introduce something that's even more insecure" is just bizarre. What is the point in making things much simpler for both individual abusers and criminal gangs? From a standpoint of the economics of security this is completely barking. I'm not arguing here that we get plunged into the dark world of Orwell (although given that members of my family were caught and sent to concentration camps by German state agents using much less effective technology, I think I'm right to fear systemic abuse by the state of these kinds of tools). I am arguing, though, that if there are currently hundreds of cases of abuse each year due to impersonation / tracking victims down etc, there will be tens of thousands more with the introduction of ID cards, and that this outweighs the purported benefits of the cards. The system holds vastly more data, so the chance of a malicious user finding what they want is greatly increased, and it is accessed by vastly more people including remotely, so the number of points of failure is hugely increased.
You can only publish if you can find a publisher. The most obvious solution is to expand the role of the (inter)national trial register to be a place to go to find out results as well.
You're creating a false threat model and dismissing the real threat too lightly.
1. While terrorists may or may not be interested in impersonation, that will affect relatively few people. However, if the ID card becomes part of the UK's critical infrastructure, ie the provision of services becomes dependent on successful reads from cards, then it may be of interest to terrorists or states to attempt DoS attacks.
2. Criminal gangs, on the other hand, will be very interested in impersonation, and could affect many thousands or tens of thousands of people. Not generally for fitting people up (although that will happen, and corrupt officials -- wifebeaters, fraudsters, bent coppers etc -- will likely be in the forefront), but instead to gain access to services / assets.
3. Security is as strong as its weakest link. If the one-way hash is strong, attacks will be made on other parts of the infrastructure instead. But there will be successful attacks, many facilitated via social engineering.
Only on slashdot would someone describe ssh'ing into a server as real work that "most people" do.
As for your question re the "10%", the problem is that *users* have to wade through the 90% to find the 10%. That's a lot of crap to filter to get to the diamonds.
Finally, developer friendliness is also about how quick and easy it is to build an app, and how quick and easy it is to bring it to a large market willing to pay. The iPhone is good for both of those points.
You really are a complete norbert, aren't you? And pointlessly rude, as well. Just to spell it out: of course I know that computers can print. I'm also aware that if the computer prints the voting paper and you then have that as the fall-back system on which you rely, there was no fucking point whatsoever in using the computer in the first place. You could have just used a pen and paper.
To commit large-scale fraud involving physically altering ballot papers requires you to tamper with very large numbers of physical artefacts. That is non-trivial and involves substantially more personal risk than electronic tampering.
How does the fact that a computer can print help with anything if the printed paper is not what's being counted?
How do running tallies help if the tampering is upstream?
How does knowing the source code help if you need an expert to tell you if that's the source code that's actually running? And no-one on God's green earth can guarantee that the whole electronic chain-of-transmission is secure.
You have way too much faith in electronic systems. I suggest you buy a copy of Ross Anderson's book on Security Engineering.
Of course it's a bad idea! At the end of the day, any computer-based system is inherently opaque and impermanent, whereas paper-based systems are inherently transparent and permanent. It requires the simplest of skills (literacy and numeracy) to check out the veracity of a paper poll, and once a mark is made it's difficult to erase. Contrast that with computer systems.
You misunderstood me. I am part of the rest of the world, hence "we are unable to vote" is not a conspiracy theory but a statement of fact.
Thanks for the snarky comment. The rest of the world is plenty aware that we are unable to vote, and that there's a bunch if americans who will actually be put off a candidate simply because foreigners are positive about that candidate. However, it's hardly surprising that lots of non-Americans have a preference when you consider the extent of America's global power: Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, Sudanese, Georgians, Ukrainians to take just a few exampkes are all at greater or lesser risk of being injured or killed depending on the election results. Not surprising that they care, then.
perhaps you should pick up the phone or go and see him and not just send emails.
For me, what's interesting in that is that one of the character says they put their phone in their suitcase so they didn't have to answer it. It's that very human interaction with technology that makes his writing so believable -- even when, as in this example, he didn't predict the exact form of the future (ie the need for a power button).
Actually, the website makes a stronger claim than what you've said here. It says "The number of challenge and response pairs for each IC can be *arbitrarily large* (2^64 in this example)" -- my emphasis.
Can't you see the difference? Obama isn't telling anyone that divorce is a good or a bad thing. Palin, by contrast, is to abstain from sex before they're married. She's an evangelical Christian -- she's saying this because she thinks it's sinful. Yet she couldn't get her own daughter to follow her rules. She's got a set of stupid ideas that she wants us all to follow despite her daughter being the living embodiment of the failure of those ideas.
Of course it's not absurd to say that her daughter getting pregnant says nothing about the effectiveness of abstinence programs. If she can't persuade her own frickin' daughter of the importance of abstention, how's she going to persuade everyone else? Meanwhile, there's good comparative evidence to demonstrate that ready access to contraception and good sex education lead to lower STI and pregnancy rates.
Oh goody, an insight from pre-history! Let's have some more. Can we think of any other differences between Michigan now and Michigan 14,000 years ago. Hmmm.
Well, how about this one?
14,000 years ago, there were no large cities filled with human beings who like to live in comfort to be affected by the presence or absence of a glacier in the first fucking place.
Contrary to what you appear to believe, the problem we face is not just "humans are heating the planet up". The problem is that humans appear to be heating the planet up, and humanity is not very well placed to cope, what with there being 6 billion people on it, quite a lot of whom have a fairly perilously long way to fall in terms of living standards, if things go tits up (although the landing for a Sylheti peasant is sadly likely to be a lot more nasty than the landing for you)
That is not the logic.
The logic is "no single weather event can be definitively said to have been caused by global warming, but the long term trend is for greater climate change caused by human injection of vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere".
This is not such a difficult concept, even for people who appear to have very tiny brains. It's analogous to saying "We cannot say for certain that your particular mesothelioma was caused by asbestos fibres, but asbestos is a cause of mesothelioma in humans"
If you took the buttplug of indignation out, you'd be less full of righteous hot air and more likely to be able to cope with the thinking required.
Oh my fat fucking ass. The Oregon petition was signed by a bunch of people who said they were scientists. Some of them were, but only a few of them even claimed to do any work in climatology (~10% said they worked in climate or geosciences). Many of them turned out to have done no more than an undergraduate degree in some scientific field, in common with several million other people on the planet.
If you're going to appeal to authority, at least make it an authoritative authority!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_petition
1) You don't honestly believe, do you, that the real justice scandal in relation to rape is the rate of false accusations rather than the rate of failure to punish rapists? 85% of rapes are not reported to the police. 94% of reported rapes result in acquittal. So 99.4% of cases do not result in punishment. Even allowing for a pretty high rate of false accusation, it's likely that the vast majority of rapes go unpunished.
2) The police provide only some temporary and limited anonymity prior to naming someone accused of murder. At the point of charge (still mostly within a day or two, despite the government's best efforts), an accused will normally be named. Indeed, that's what happened here to the wealthy executive.
What's common across both these examples is that in criminal cases, the UK has tended to decide that it is fairer to defendants for them to know that people will know if they are locked up by the police (ie they can't be made to disappear anonymously) than it is for defendants to have their name protected from a possible slur associated with being accused of a crime. Laws on terrorism are of course changing all this, and not for the better.
Your comment is unintentionally funny for a number of reasons.
What really jumped out for me was the implied tone in comparing the apparent idiocy of spending money on social security, healthcare and welfare as opposed to spending money on security theatre at airports and blowing up Iraqis.
The other really funny bit was when you pretended that free-marketeers think that taxes are really rubbish at correcting for market imperfections but would be perfectly fine with regulation ("mandate that "polluting, non-renewable" forms of energy meet certain environmental standards). The truth, of course, is that business objects to both, on principle (the principle being, "but I want to make more money and you're stopping me").