True. Infact it is very hard to do even stuff in parallell that is *far* away from our abilities.
Moving your left foot in a circle is trivial to do. Drawing a square on a piece of paper is trivial to do (aslong as neither needs to be perfect), now try doing both simultaneously.
I wasn't talking "should be", I was purely describing todays actual current law in Norway. (and likely other scandinavic countries).
Here there are certain "ideal rigths" that you cannot sign away, even if you did, it'd be moot. (i.e. even if your employer *had* a contract with you saying you don't have the rigth to be recognized as the author, you could still turn around and sue him for not recognizing you as author)
Eliptic curve is currently believed to be significantly stronger, for the same keylength than public-key schemes based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers.
The thing is, we don't have any mathemathical proof of any of this. We don't even have proof that trap-door-functions exist. (i.e. functions which are "easy" to compute in one direction and "hard" to reverse.
We *believe* that multiplication/factorisation is one: That multiplying too large primes is fundamentally easier than factoring the product to get back the two original primes -- but we ain't got no proof of this. If there *is* an "easy" (as in computationally) way of factoring large numbers we ain't found it yet though, despite tons of man-years being spent searching for one. Which gives some assurance.
It's the same for elliptic-curve and all the others, only much less time has been spent searching for ways to efficiently reverse the functions used.
Yes, you did say that you would lock a kid up. You said to physically drag them to their room. When the child refuses to stay there, the only way to keep them their is to lock the door, or even more abusively, hold them down. When that doesn't work the first time, you will do it again, and again. It is highly abusive.
Oh, I get it. I said it -- even though I didn't say it ? Listen, it's intellectually dishonest when you're discussing something with someone to claim that they've stated stuff that they infact never stated. What you are now claiming (which is completely different!) is that "locking a kid in their room for days on end" is a nessecary *consequence* of something I said.
It is bullshit too, by the way. Locking the door is not, infact the only way to make a child stay in their room for a short period. Nor is your hyperbole "for days on end" justified by anything I said. Infact, the normal procedure if my son, for example, makes a ruckus at the dinner-table is first to calmly tell him that unless he can eat properly, he'll have to leave the table. If he doesn't, then ask tell him to leave until he's calmed down. Normally this results in him going into the living-room, calming down, and returning within less than 3 minutes. On rare occasions I've had to physically carry him there.
I'm wondering about the (lack of) respect that you're accustomed to if children in your surrounding require physical locking for accepting something as simple as calming down and behaving normally at the dinner-table.
As for your 14 year old, if 14 year olds could be reasoned with, and they would just obey the rules. This line of reasoning would also apply to 15, 17, 25, and 40 year olds. Given that, the only logical conclusion to your argument is that all police forces should be immediately disbanded.
Either you need to accept that physical pain as punishment for children is justified, or else we need to disband all police-forces ? You do realize that that logic is rather strained ? Police *already* are not allowed to use pain for punishment. They are allowed to force compliance with orders by use of force. But that is not and will not be the same thing, regardless of your posturing to the oposite effect.
Accidentally, a large portion of the situations where police are forced to use violence are indeed partially or completely the result of poor parenting.
This whole idea that we can stop people from misbehaving by just asking them not to is what is pathetic.
That's nice. Lucky for me I never said anything of the sort. Pity for you you're arguing against your own straw-men rather than my actual position.
You have already condoned assault and battery of children.
I tire of this. I never did anything of the sort, and you know it. You do, however, constantly, indeed, this entire thread is about you beliieving that physical pain as punishment is THE ONLY way to make children understand that certain behaviour is inacceptable. In much of the western world, spanking your child is plainly illegal and counts as battery.
Unless you can stop constantly claiming that I said this and that that I never, infact, said, I'm not going to bother with further responses for you. It's perfectly fine to disagree, but I want an honest discussion, and that means arguing with what the other actually says rather than invented strawmen.
If I, personally, infact, created a certain work. Then that is a simple fact. That *fact* cannot be changed by any contract between me and my employer, or by any monetary or other compensation. True -- someone may have *paid* me to do it. But I'm still the one who did it.
I can offcourse give my employer exclusive rigths to *use* the work. To the point where I myself can only use it with his permission, but nevertheless, I've still got the rigth to be recognized as the author.
A perfectly valid choice. There's advantages and disadvantages to both choices. Not having children does mean you get a *TON* more time for other stuff, it also means you get more money for other stuff, particularily if you're in a relationship.
Living together as a couple slashes costs radically, while being without kids makes it possible to both work fulltime (if one so chooses). A couple needs less than 1.5 times the resources of a single person to enjoy the same standard of living. This is so because there's so many things you just don't need double off.
It's not ok for the police to use more force than they need in order to force compliance. True, the smaller the difference in physical capacity, the more force you may need to use.
Restraining a 2-year-old without hurting him is easy for an adult. The same can't be said for a 14-year-old. But if you've been doing your job you shouldn't really need to anyway, by the time someone is 14 they should be able to understand and respect other consequences than physical ones.
Oh, and drop it with the straw-men, will you, it's pathethic. Where did I write anything about "locking a kid in a room for days on end" ? Indeed, where did I write anything about locking a kid in at all ?
You should be able to teach a kid what is unacceptable by showing it that their actions have consequences.
If you are unable to eat like a normal human being, you may not be invited to sit at the table with the others. If you are unable to handle a item with care, you may not be allowed to borrow that item at all. It's not that hard.
I agree with you that *not* showing a child that there are limits to their behaviour is abusive. Punishment ain't the only way to get that across though. (though an acceptable one, and in some cases the best one, I just don't think the punishment needs to be physical pain)
Just out of curiosity, do you advocate the same treatment for adults ?
Should your boss, your university-professor, or the policeman on the street be authorized to hit you if you misbehave ? Should we start sentencing people to physical pain (like in Sharia-law and other barbaric traditions we normally don't like to be associated with ?) Or is this something unique to children ?
I never said you shouldn't give any kind of physical response. Indeed you are correct that young children often require physical responses along with the words before they understand that words have consequences. It is perfectly OK to physically remove, by force if nessecary, the object which the kid ain't allowed to play with. It is perfectly OK to physically remove the child from the dinner-table if it misbehaves inacceptably. But neither of these involve the deliberate infliction of pain.
The younger ones are actually easier, not harder. To a 3-month-old, every rejection from the parents is a punishment, hell most of them will even take it as a punishment if you look away and refuse to interact with them if they're misbehaving. You can normally teach a 3-month-old not to bite the breast (for example) in less than half an hour by the simple expedient of removing it from the breast for half a minute every time it tries anything approaching biting.
There's atleast 2 problems with this line of reasoning;
First, it assumes that the child will not be able to learn without experiencing pain. This is just plainly wrong, to the contrary children learn the best when theyre having fun and are interested.
Second, it assumes that all forms of learning are equally good, which they ain't.
The problem with not doing something because you are afraid you'll get spanked if you do is that if *that* is the reason, then there's no reason not to go play on the street the moment you know daddy won't discover it. In other words, behaving correctly because of fear means a high risk of behaving badly the moment that fear lifts.
In contrast, a child which stays off the street because it understands and has internalized the dangers, will be safe playing outdoors regardless of if daddy is around or not.
The tendency is for the child to behave in a way optimized to avoid being slapped. Which ain't the real goal; the real goal is to make the child behave in a way optimized to avoid being hit by a car. The two aren't the same.
Children are curious. They *want* to understand the world. Take the time to show and explain it to them. A child that *understands* the dangers of cars is a much much safer child than a child that is scared of daddy.
There are not "shortcuts" in raising a child. Deal with it. Take the time. You'll be paid back handsomely.
Dunno about 11th century, but you do have the unconditional rigth to be attributed for creative works. This rigth is non-transferable, so even if you create stuff for your employer, it still holds.
Long summers we got, more to the point, long summer-days, even now there's sunligth 18 hours a day where I live, and midnigth-sun for those in the more northern latitudes, at midsummer there's about 20 hours of sunligth a day, even in the southern parts.
Unberably hot it's not. Temperature in Norway tops out at about body-temperature, and at the coast normal summer-temperature is lower than that.
It's pretty common for the abused to repeat the pattern, being unable to see that it can be different. Many girls growing up in families where the mother is beaten grow up to choose partners who abuse them lateron. Doesn't make it rigth.
The minimum amount of physical pain required to get a 5-year old to understand that certain behaviour is unacceptable is zero.
If you're close enough to the kid to be able to slap him, surely you're also close enough to physically remove him from whatever is dangerous and/or unwished.
Kids will generally *notice* if doing certain things causes them to be removed from the situation.
Geting to leave the table after having made a ruckus, and have the other people eat their dessert while you don't is plenty "immediate and tangible" for a kid.
You don't need to dig it out of the ground. Instead you need to collect it from all over the country/planet, because originally it comes in small, widely dispersed packages. You then need to deal with the mix of chemicals in there observing safety-standards and health-regulations.
If you think that collecting 100 tons of computer-waste (aproximately 10.000 - 30.000 computers!) in one spot is cheaper than digging out 20 cubic meter of rock, well, then that's your problem.
The metal-parts in a typical computer weighs something around 5 kg, so you'll need on the order of 200.000 of them for a single metric ton. To get a "million ton pile" you would thus need to collect 200000000000, which is aproximately 1000 times the total count of computers in the world today. Somehow I doubt there's all that many such piles....
OK, so computers ain't by a long shot everything there is to electric waste, if you count everything electric, it gets more realistic, a million tons is only about 3kg/american afterall, people in the western world certainly toss away 10 times that amount yearly. (30kg, sounds in the ballpark, if you include all electric waste), but most of that ain't circuit-boards. Copper, ok. Gold ? Less so.
Fact is, if electrical-waste-ore was so valuable, people would be willing to *pay* quite a bit to buy it, which fails to match the real world. In the real world you're lucky to get it taken off your hands for free, even in quite large quantities. Smaller quantities have negative value (because the transport etc costs more than the stuff is worth)
Here there are extensive rigths for everyone to roam the countryside. Property-rigths are what a society decides that they should be. Anyone not happy with the set of rigths they get if they purchase, say a Norwegian forest, are free not to buy one, so any arguments along the lines that it's "unfair" are pretty pathethic if you ask me.
Anyone can (in the countryside)
Travel freely on foot, ski, bike, horse, canoe.
Pick berries, mushrooms, flowers
Pick nuts eaten on the spot (not allowed to bring nuts out of an area though, like for example for sale)
Camp for up to 2 days at a place (or longer if you're "far away" from inhabited areas)
Swim and bathe in rivers, lakes or the sea.
If you're under 15, you can also fish with no needed license.
I don't think so. I know theres urban myths to this effect, or similar.
But in reality, I just can't see any CPS complaining about, for example, the method mentioned in the article: The daugther (17) racks up $1100 of charges by texting around-the-clock, and as a consequence, she'll have to work in summer in the parents shop to pay off the debt.
To the contrary, *NOT* teaching your kid that actions have consequences and debts have to be paid is, imho, atleast borderline abusive. I definitely believe that there's parents harming their kids by *not* setting limits and showing consequences.
17 is late though, for learning this sort of stuff. It's best for children to learn the basics before they're teenagers. And best for parents too. The younger the child is, the more cards the parents have. For a really young child you as a parent holds pretty much *all* the cards. Physical abuse simply is not nessecary.
Law-enforcement does not use pain as a method of punishment.
They use withdrawal of priviledges or property, or in extreme cases removal of personal freedoms (prison).
Now, they may use physical force, even the kind that causes you pain, in order to force you to comply with their demands.
Put differently, a police-officer *can* use physical force against you to force you to follow orders.
He can not (though I'm aware that some parts of the US police-force seems unaware of this) use force against someone who is under control and poses no threat in order to punish them.
There is a difference between, for example, physically carrying a 8-year-old to bed -- because he refuses to come peacefully on the one hand, and on the other hand intentionally inflicting pain on him as a form of punishment.
Fact is, parents hold *ALL* the cards. If they're unable to make their child understand that something is unacceptable without resorting to physical abuse, I pity them.
Oh, and before you start, I say this as the father of 3 children. Don't even think about going "perhaps in theory" on me.
Offcourse it is. Using physical pain as punishment is inacceptable towards *anyone*. We don't do that to adults, I don't see how it should be different for kids.
Not just Sweden. Most of Europe. Certainly Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Germany.... (quite possibly exceptions for the UK and southern europe which is much more conservative)
It's nothing new either, been this way since atleast the 70ies, possibly longer. (I wouldn't know, I'm not older...)
Even if it is true that computer-trash contains 17 times the gold, compared to gold-ore, it does not follow that it is "worth more", that would be true only if getting the raw-material, handling it and extracting the valuable metals cost precisely the same. Which ain't likely.
You also don't find all that many million-ton piles of computer-scrap just sitting around.
Anything can be faked. Security ain't an absolute, but just a question of reasonable assurances.
Read-only media can be faked too -- how do you plan on proving that this is the holomem recorded in 1997, and not a replacement-one made and recorded in 2002 ?
That being said, you understate the difficulty of breaking a modern hash, 2^128 is a humongous number, large enough that brute-forcing a collision is out of the question, especially since the starting-point being known stops you from using the birthday-attack (which lowers your workload to aproximately sqrt(2^128) if you only need to find 2 equal hashes, not a second message that hashes to a given value.
Finding a second file that gives the same sha1-hash is very very likely to be much more difficult than faking other records such as the typical standard of today: plain old paper.
First, you only prove that it's not been changed -after- it was written to the medium, which don't bring you much unless you verify the medium after writing it.
And you can do this with read-write media anyway, by writing a *tiny* bit of information on non-changeable media. Put an ad in the NY-time with the SHA-sum of your hard-disc, and you've got pretty good proof 5 years from now that it's been unchanged ever since.
Fine with me, yeah. I'd have no problem whatsoever with a law stating that computer-equipment sold to end-users have to be specified in binary sizes. (Kib Mib Gib etc)
It *is* confusing to end-users that a 100GB hard-disc does NOT hold 100 times the data stored on a 1GB memory-module.
Where I work they're actually taking over from GB/MB on account of being *less* cumbersome.
Though people don't say "Mebibyte" or "Gibibyte", they say "Mib" and "Gib".
"Where did you put that four-gib-stick for the new laptop ?"
Certainly easier than: using "Gigabyte" which people would do earlier, on account of "GB" not really being pronouncable.
Nobody says "North Atlantic Treaty Organisation" either, most don't even know that thats what it means -- they just say "Nato" and are even likely to capitalize it like that, using what is really a shortening as if it was a normal word.
I don't see any problems with "Mib", "Gib" and "Tib" -- they're certainly *easier* than the alternatives in everyday use.
True. And people don't even really *need* to know what it means to be able to compare.
Even those with no clear idea how much a Gib(or GB) really is, are able to easily see that a computer with 300GB storage has somewhat more storage than one with 200GB.
Slashdot Mirror
Moving your left foot in a circle is trivial to do. Drawing a square on a piece of paper is trivial to do (aslong as neither needs to be perfect), now try doing both simultaneously.
Here there are certain "ideal rigths" that you cannot sign away, even if you did, it'd be moot. (i.e. even if your employer *had* a contract with you saying you don't have the rigth to be recognized as the author, you could still turn around and sue him for not recognizing you as author)
It's getting modded as insigthful because, unlike you, some of the mods understand sarcasm.
The thing is, we don't have any mathemathical proof of any of this. We don't even have proof that trap-door-functions exist. (i.e. functions which are "easy" to compute in one direction and "hard" to reverse.
We *believe* that multiplication/factorisation is one: That multiplying too large primes is fundamentally easier than factoring the product to get back the two original primes -- but we ain't got no proof of this. If there *is* an "easy" (as in computationally) way of factoring large numbers we ain't found it yet though, despite tons of man-years being spent searching for one. Which gives some assurance.
It's the same for elliptic-curve and all the others, only much less time has been spent searching for ways to efficiently reverse the functions used.
Yes, you did say that you would lock a kid up. You said to physically drag them to their room. When the child refuses to stay there, the only way to keep them their is to lock the door, or even more abusively, hold them down. When that doesn't work the first time, you will do it again, and again. It is highly abusive.
Oh, I get it. I said it -- even though I didn't say it ? Listen, it's intellectually dishonest when you're discussing something with someone to claim that they've stated stuff that they infact never stated. What you are now claiming (which is completely different!) is that "locking a kid in their room for days on end" is a nessecary *consequence* of something I said.
It is bullshit too, by the way. Locking the door is not, infact the only way to make a child stay in their room for a short period. Nor is your hyperbole "for days on end" justified by anything I said. Infact, the normal procedure if my son, for example, makes a ruckus at the dinner-table is first to calmly tell him that unless he can eat properly, he'll have to leave the table. If he doesn't, then ask tell him to leave until he's calmed down. Normally this results in him going into the living-room, calming down, and returning within less than 3 minutes. On rare occasions I've had to physically carry him there.
I'm wondering about the (lack of) respect that you're accustomed to if children in your surrounding require physical locking for accepting something as simple as calming down and behaving normally at the dinner-table.
As for your 14 year old, if 14 year olds could be reasoned with, and they would just obey the rules. This line of reasoning would also apply to 15, 17, 25, and 40 year olds. Given that, the only logical conclusion to your argument is that all police forces should be immediately disbanded.
Either you need to accept that physical pain as punishment for children is justified, or else we need to disband all police-forces ? You do realize that that logic is rather strained ? Police *already* are not allowed to use pain for punishment. They are allowed to force compliance with orders by use of force. But that is not and will not be the same thing, regardless of your posturing to the oposite effect.
Accidentally, a large portion of the situations where police are forced to use violence are indeed partially or completely the result of poor parenting.
This whole idea that we can stop people from misbehaving by just asking them not to is what is pathetic.
That's nice. Lucky for me I never said anything of the sort. Pity for you you're arguing against your own straw-men rather than my actual position.You have already condoned assault and battery of children.
I tire of this. I never did anything of the sort, and you know it. You do, however, constantly, indeed, this entire thread is about you beliieving that physical pain as punishment is THE ONLY way to make children understand that certain behaviour is inacceptable. In much of the western world, spanking your child is plainly illegal and counts as battery.
Unless you can stop constantly claiming that I said this and that that I never, infact, said, I'm not going to bother with further responses for you. It's perfectly fine to disagree, but I want an honest discussion, and that means arguing with what the other actually says rather than invented strawmen.
I agree, makes sense to me too.
If I, personally, infact, created a certain work. Then that is a simple fact. That *fact* cannot be changed by any contract between me and my employer, or by any monetary or other compensation. True -- someone may have *paid* me to do it. But I'm still the one who did it.
I can offcourse give my employer exclusive rigths to *use* the work. To the point where I myself can only use it with his permission, but nevertheless, I've still got the rigth to be recognized as the author.
Restraining a 2-year-old without hurting him is easy for an adult. The same can't be said for a 14-year-old. But if you've been doing your job you shouldn't really need to anyway, by the time someone is 14 they should be able to understand and respect other consequences than physical ones.
Oh, and drop it with the straw-men, will you, it's pathethic. Where did I write anything about "locking a kid in a room for days on end" ? Indeed, where did I write anything about locking a kid in at all ?
You should be able to teach a kid what is unacceptable by showing it that their actions have consequences.
If you are unable to eat like a normal human being, you may not be invited to sit at the table with the others. If you are unable to handle a item with care, you may not be allowed to borrow that item at all. It's not that hard.
I agree with you that *not* showing a child that there are limits to their behaviour is abusive. Punishment ain't the only way to get that across though. (though an acceptable one, and in some cases the best one, I just don't think the punishment needs to be physical pain)
Should your boss, your university-professor, or the policeman on the street be authorized to hit you if you misbehave ? Should we start sentencing people to physical pain (like in Sharia-law and other barbaric traditions we normally don't like to be associated with ?) Or is this something unique to children ?
I never said you shouldn't give any kind of physical response. Indeed you are correct that young children often require physical responses along with the words before they understand that words have consequences. It is perfectly OK to physically remove, by force if nessecary, the object which the kid ain't allowed to play with. It is perfectly OK to physically remove the child from the dinner-table if it misbehaves inacceptably. But neither of these involve the deliberate infliction of pain.
The younger ones are actually easier, not harder. To a 3-month-old, every rejection from the parents is a punishment, hell most of them will even take it as a punishment if you look away and refuse to interact with them if they're misbehaving. You can normally teach a 3-month-old not to bite the breast (for example) in less than half an hour by the simple expedient of removing it from the breast for half a minute every time it tries anything approaching biting.
The problem with not doing something because you are afraid you'll get spanked if you do is that if *that* is the reason, then there's no reason not to go play on the street the moment you know daddy won't discover it. In other words, behaving correctly because of fear means a high risk of behaving badly the moment that fear lifts.
In contrast, a child which stays off the street because it understands and has internalized the dangers, will be safe playing outdoors regardless of if daddy is around or not.
The tendency is for the child to behave in a way optimized to avoid being slapped. Which ain't the real goal; the real goal is to make the child behave in a way optimized to avoid being hit by a car. The two aren't the same.
Children are curious. They *want* to understand the world. Take the time to show and explain it to them. A child that *understands* the dangers of cars is a much much safer child than a child that is scared of daddy.
There are not "shortcuts" in raising a child. Deal with it. Take the time. You'll be paid back handsomely.
Long summers we got, more to the point, long summer-days, even now there's sunligth 18 hours a day where I live, and midnigth-sun for those in the more northern latitudes, at midsummer there's about 20 hours of sunligth a day, even in the southern parts.
Unberably hot it's not. Temperature in Norway tops out at about body-temperature, and at the coast normal summer-temperature is lower than that.
The minimum amount of physical pain required to get a 5-year old to understand that certain behaviour is unacceptable is zero.
Kids will generally *notice* if doing certain things causes them to be removed from the situation.
Geting to leave the table after having made a ruckus, and have the other people eat their dessert while you don't is plenty "immediate and tangible" for a kid.
Ok. Screw that. Messed up the number of zeroes. As a consequence, all the numbers in here are crap. My bad.
If you think that collecting 100 tons of computer-waste (aproximately 10.000 - 30.000 computers!) in one spot is cheaper than digging out 20 cubic meter of rock, well, then that's your problem.
The metal-parts in a typical computer weighs something around 5 kg, so you'll need on the order of 200.000 of them for a single metric ton. To get a "million ton pile" you would thus need to collect 200000000000, which is aproximately 1000 times the total count of computers in the world today. Somehow I doubt there's all that many such piles....
OK, so computers ain't by a long shot everything there is to electric waste, if you count everything electric, it gets more realistic, a million tons is only about 3kg/american afterall, people in the western world certainly toss away 10 times that amount yearly. (30kg, sounds in the ballpark, if you include all electric waste), but most of that ain't circuit-boards. Copper, ok. Gold ? Less so.
Fact is, if electrical-waste-ore was so valuable, people would be willing to *pay* quite a bit to buy it, which fails to match the real world. In the real world you're lucky to get it taken off your hands for free, even in quite large quantities. Smaller quantities have negative value (because the transport etc costs more than the stuff is worth)
Here there are extensive rigths for everyone to roam the countryside. Property-rigths are what a society decides that they should be. Anyone not happy with the set of rigths they get if they purchase, say a Norwegian forest, are free not to buy one, so any arguments along the lines that it's "unfair" are pretty pathethic if you ask me.
Anyone can (in the countryside)
But in reality, I just can't see any CPS complaining about, for example, the method mentioned in the article: The daugther (17) racks up $1100 of charges by texting around-the-clock, and as a consequence, she'll have to work in summer in the parents shop to pay off the debt.
To the contrary, *NOT* teaching your kid that actions have consequences and debts have to be paid is, imho, atleast borderline abusive. I definitely believe that there's parents harming their kids by *not* setting limits and showing consequences.
17 is late though, for learning this sort of stuff. It's best for children to learn the basics before they're teenagers. And best for parents too. The younger the child is, the more cards the parents have. For a really young child you as a parent holds pretty much *all* the cards. Physical abuse simply is not nessecary.
They use withdrawal of priviledges or property, or in extreme cases removal of personal freedoms (prison).
Now, they may use physical force, even the kind that causes you pain, in order to force you to comply with their demands.
Put differently, a police-officer *can* use physical force against you to force you to follow orders.
He can not (though I'm aware that some parts of the US police-force seems unaware of this) use force against someone who is under control and poses no threat in order to punish them.
There is a difference between, for example, physically carrying a 8-year-old to bed -- because he refuses to come peacefully on the one hand, and on the other hand intentionally inflicting pain on him as a form of punishment.
Fact is, parents hold *ALL* the cards. If they're unable to make their child understand that something is unacceptable without resorting to physical abuse, I pity them.
Oh, and before you start, I say this as the father of 3 children. Don't even think about going "perhaps in theory" on me.
Not just Sweden. Most of Europe. Certainly Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Germany .... (quite possibly exceptions for the UK and southern europe which is much more conservative)
It's nothing new either, been this way since atleast the 70ies, possibly longer. (I wouldn't know, I'm not older...)
Even if it is true that computer-trash contains 17 times the gold, compared to gold-ore, it does not follow that it is "worth more", that would be true only if getting the raw-material, handling it and extracting the valuable metals cost precisely the same. Which ain't likely.
You also don't find all that many million-ton piles of computer-scrap just sitting around.
Read-only media can be faked too -- how do you plan on proving that this is the holomem recorded in 1997, and not a replacement-one made and recorded in 2002 ? That being said, you understate the difficulty of breaking a modern hash, 2^128 is a humongous number, large enough that brute-forcing a collision is out of the question, especially since the starting-point being known stops you from using the birthday-attack (which lowers your workload to aproximately sqrt(2^128) if you only need to find 2 equal hashes, not a second message that hashes to a given value.
Finding a second file that gives the same sha1-hash is very very likely to be much more difficult than faking other records such as the typical standard of today: plain old paper.
First, you only prove that it's not been changed -after- it was written to the medium, which don't bring you much unless you verify the medium after writing it.
And you can do this with read-write media anyway, by writing a *tiny* bit of information on non-changeable media. Put an ad in the NY-time with the SHA-sum of your hard-disc, and you've got pretty good proof 5 years from now that it's been unchanged ever since.
It *is* confusing to end-users that a 100GB hard-disc does NOT hold 100 times the data stored on a 1GB memory-module.
Where I work they're actually taking over from GB/MB on account of being *less* cumbersome.
Though people don't say "Mebibyte" or "Gibibyte", they say "Mib" and "Gib".
"Where did you put that four-gib-stick for the new laptop ?"
Certainly easier than: using "Gigabyte" which people would do earlier, on account of "GB" not really being pronouncable.
Nobody says "North Atlantic Treaty Organisation" either, most don't even know that thats what it means -- they just say "Nato" and are even likely to capitalize it like that, using what is really a shortening as if it was a normal word.
I don't see any problems with "Mib", "Gib" and "Tib" -- they're certainly *easier* than the alternatives in everyday use.
Even those with no clear idea how much a Gib(or GB) really is, are able to easily see that a computer with 300GB storage has somewhat more storage than one with 200GB.