A "life time warranty" (even if it really is - most life time warranties are the life of the product, which can be very short indeed) only means the vendor will pay out or replace stuff if it dies.
Is there some other possible definition of "life time warranty" other than "the vendor will pay out or replace stuff if it dies (within the lifetime as defined by the vendor)"?
...It probably would have been cheaper to build an ISS in orbit...
Then I nominate to put your happy ass in space with a wrench and a torch...
It's a little late for that (or early) since the USA has no heavy lift capability to speak of currently, plus I think you missed his point. The ISS weighs 450 tonnes, the Saturn V could lift 120 tonne to LEO, compared to 24 tonne for the space shuttle. So 4 Saturn V launches could have gotten the whole thing launched, compared with a minimum of 20 space shuttle launches. And the Russians could have shuttled crew much more cost efficiently than the space shuttle leaving more money for other things.
... then we need to shut down this thing NOW! We seriously have NOTHING BETTER TO DO WITH BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF TREASURE than to record a music video? This is rediculous. Let's turn off the lights, lock the door on the way out and save that money for something more important. Don't give me this "national pride" or "scientific discover" B.S. If that stuff needs to get done, then F'ing do it and don't waste time singing in space. This is probably the most collossal waste of resources imaginable. How many resources were needed to scrub the air necessary for the singing? When you are in space, that stuff matters, A LOT! The first take wasn't the last take, that I know. Don't give me the "get kids into science" schtick either. Kids who are swayed by silly things like this, statistically don't end up any good at the math needed for real science anyway. I teach our "future engineers" in a top state university. Most can't even solve a triangle, let alone deal with any higher math. If you are swayed by this commercial, you don't have the chops to stick with an engineering career.
Humans, even astronauts, need downtime - If you want a human to be effective, then you can't fill 100% of their waking time with work.
I know the ISS isn't considered a glamorous undertaking like a mars trip would be, but damn it is one impressive piece of hardware, and the most advanced thing we've built in space to date.
Is it really that much more impressive than Skylab, which launched 40 years ago? Skylab had a pressurized volume of 320 m^2 versus 837 m^2 of the ISS today - not even 3 times larger, despite launching nearly 30 years later. You'd think that in 40 years we could have something in space that's more impressive. The Curiosity Rover seems much more impressive in comparison than a tin can that orbits 250 miles above the earth.
Wait until he sees one of the 3D Lego Printers, then he'll want to regulate Legos too. 8 year old kids will have to pass a security check to purchase a set of Legos.
Why would I want to sync my iPad to a hotel computer? It syncs directly with Apple or Dropbox and when I get back home all my stuff is on the iMac also. I also can take my iPad to a friend's house and plug it into their big TV which has an HDMI input connection. Anything I can display on the iPad will also display on the screen. I don't need a dock for this!
You sound like you're pretty happy with using your iPad for mobile computing and your iMac for home computing when you want a big screen and keyboard (and you're satisfied with using a tablet UI even on a big non-touchscreen display), but if you go a few comments up the thread, this thread was started by this comment:
I would like to have a single device that is a lightweight tablet with a tablet interface, but when I drop it into a dock with a real keyboard, mouse, and screen , it switches UI modes to the right UI for that. A "single experience" would be a flawed approach IMO.
So apparently not everyone likes having to switch from tablet to desktop and would rather have a tablet that becomes a desktop when plugged into a dumb (and relatively cheap) dock. You seem happy with your iMac + iPad solution, so this is probably not something that you would be interested in.
No matter how powerful a processor and how much memory you put in the tablet, you will always have a small screen compared to large desktop monitor. If you don't care much about efficiency in your work, you can get away with a tiny screen, but there isn't and there never will be a substitute for big screen real estate.
Go a few comments up the thread:
I would like to have a single device that is a lightweight tablet with a tablet interface, but when I drop it into a dock with a real keyboard, mouse, and screen
That was essentially what I have and it is called an iPad. It communicates wirelessly with a screen that is called an iMac and synchronizes all important information between the two. The screen is the most expensive part of most computing devices. A 27 inch screen is not exactly cheap. For a marginal increase in cost, a powerful processor, storage and a decent keyboard can be added to the iPad. As a bonus, I can use the big screen for real work my home office, while someone else uses the iPad in the kitchen to look up some recipes.
If your iMac was just a display device, then what you describe is what the original poster was asking for, but since your iMac is a smart device that hosts the apps (that aren't the same apps that are on the iPad), you have no assurance that it can handle the files that were synced from the iPad. If the tablet is the computing device, then you know that you can take it anywhere - home, work, a friends house, hotels, etc, plug it into a display and all of your apps will be there and everything will work just as it did at home. Would you trust a hotel computer enough to sync your data up to it?
A 27" screen costs $390 or $999 if you buy it from Apple. A 27" iMac costs $1799. So you're paying $800 - $1400 more to have an iMac at home versus having a dumb display that uses your tablet as the computer -- you can buy your wife her own iPad with the savings.
No matter how powerful a processor and how much memory you put in the tablet, you will always have a small screen compared to large desktop monitor. If you don't care much about efficiency in your work, you can get away with a tiny screen, but there isn't and there never will be a substitute for big screen real estate.
Go a few comments up the thread:
I would like to have a single device that is a lightweight tablet with a tablet interface, but when I drop it into a dock with a real keyboard, mouse, and screen
The problem with your approach is that when I have a tablet I want battery life and ease of use. And when I use a PC I want power, and speed! They are orthogonal to each other. As the CAP theorem, says, you can have 2 out of 3, not all three, so choose what you want.
Battery life and speed needn't be orthogonal to each other - a manufacturer could use something like Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa core CPU - low power (and low-performance) cores for use on battery and high power (and high performance) cores for use when docked. So a tablet could be power efficient (and slower) while on battery, but when plugged into a dock, it can become a more powerful, full-featured desktop.
Though it's probably going to need something more powerful than the Cortex-A15 as the high-power core to give a good desktop experience.
Let's see: Ice storm of 98: Cell coverage was spotty. POTS worked fine. Great east coast blackout: Cell coverage was non-existent. POTS worked fine Earthquake couple years ago (it was a 6 which is huge for this area): Cell coverage was crap since every body was calling everybody else. POTS... was fine See a pattern? At least with the wired power has never been an issue since it gets it from the switch. Before the blackout we had got rid of our wired phone and had only cordless. At that point I was thinking of getting rid of our wired connection. That changed my mind.
When I was in an earthquake in Hawaii followed by an island-wide power outage, POTS was useless - took 20 - 30 minutes with the phone off hook just to get a dial-tone, and calling anyone (local or long distance) resulted in an "all circuits are busy" recording. Both AT&T and Verizon wireless cell sites were working for at least 6 hours hours after the power went off, I still couldn't get a voice call through, but I was able to get (slow) internet access, and send SMS messages to check on family/friends (SMS within the same carrier worked fine, sending across carriers had a 10 minute - 1 hour delay).
I did continue to have good DSL internet, until the UPS that was powering my DSL modem ran out of power 30 minutes after the power went out.
POTS doesn't guarantee service in a disaster, and as people continue to abandon POTS and telcos reduce the capacity of the system, it won't get any better.
DIG THE CABLES DOWN, stop putting up pylons, you morons. Take a frikkin' clue from the model all the European telcos and power companies use.
Underground cables aren't a panacea that protect you from all outages -- underground cables are more susceptible to water intrusion, ground shifting (a big issue in an earthquake), digging accidents etc. And outages take longer to fix.
I could never figure out why insurance is needed in the first place. I've had mobile phones for 15 years at least, and I can count the number of times I dropped them on one hand. I've never bothered with insurance and never will.
I've dropped my phone a number of times during the past year, since I'm putting it in and out of my pocket a dozen times a day, using it 1 handed in the train, using it outside in the rain to call a cab, using it on the treadmill at the gym, plugging it into my laptop and forgetting it's plugged in when I take the laptop, etc. There are lots of chances to accidentally drop the phone or knock it to the floor.
You'd think if people are buying expensive items they'd take better care of them.
I don't know what you do with your phone, but I actually *use* my phone, why carry a $600 device around with me if I'm afraid to use it. Every time it comes out of my pocket I'm at risk of dropping it. If I take it out of my pocket 10 times a day, and I manage to not drop it 99.9% of the time, I'm still likely to drop it 3 or 4 times over a year.
So far the phone is fine, but I still have insurance on it. I last used the insurance with my original Droid that stopped working when I bumped it on the edge of a table while I was walking - the insurance company overnighted me a new phone.
FPL is still a government regulated utility so their rates are set by the state of Florida. They can't raise or lower their rates without requesting a rate case hearing which takes at least a year to submit and can take as much as two years to get an answer. So it is in their best interest to be as efficient as possible. Full disclosure - I work for Nextera Energy parent company to FPL.
PG&E in California has to go through the PUC before raising rates too, but that doesn't mean that they are efficient or use the money for what they said they will since there have been rate increases that were supposed to go to pipeline maintenance that never happened. Now that a pipeline exploded with fatal results (and with PG&E discovering that it doesn't have a full audit trail for much of its pipeline network), they want ratepayers to pay again for the maintenance that they supposedly already paid for.
Having a regulated utility doesn't ensure fair rates.
It's interesting that the utility says "and helped some customers save money, according to the utility that operates it", but was there an overall average savings across all customers, or are customers paying more overall to pay off the $800M investment while the utility cuts their generating and transmission costs, earning more profit?
General revenue is also a tax. I fail to see the point of what pot of gold it is plucked from. It makes far more sense to me to have the users of that safety network support it.
Right, general revenue is a tax, which is how infrastructure that benefits everyone should be paid (or through use taxes, like gas taxes). Not buried in a spectrum sale that will lead to higher cell phone prices for consumer with the revenue used for something that benefits everyone whether they use a cell phone or not. What if all agencies decided that they should earn revenue - maybe the FDA should charge meat packing plants $10M/annually for their required inspections and then use the revenue to pay for new police cars because everyone needs the police, right? And it's better than a tax, because it's "free money" for the government that will be paid by consumers through higher meat prices.
Your point fails because even on hardwired lines there are charges for the safety network (911 fees they are generally called). If you want to talk fairness then what you are proposing is the landline users pay for it when you don't have to. Doesn't sound very fair to me. And taking it out of the general revenue means those who don't use it (for whatever reason) are subsidizing those that do.
Your argument fails because the Public Safety Network has nothing to do with 911 service (other than the fact that when the 911 operator calls a firetruck, the firetuck will use the public safety network to say he's on the way). The public safety network is a tool used by EMS responders, just like a firetruck or police car, and I certainly don't see why a hidden fee buried in cell phone costs should pay for firetrucks.
If a nationwide coordinated public safety network is something that the federal government should be paying for, then it must be something that we'll all benefit from and should be paid for by everyone, not just cell phone users.
Every time the government doesn't get every penny and ounce of blood it can out of everyone doesn't mean it's "costing" the government anything.
Exactly - sky high spectrum auctions amount to a tax on the consumers that are forced to pay back the billions that the company spent to buy the spectrum. Encouraging more competition from smaller carriers by banning the big boys will likely save consumers many more billions than the government would have "earned".
From TFA:
But a policy to restrict the ability of Verizon Wireless and AT&T to bid on the spectrum would drive down the bidding during the auction and leave less money for a nationwide public safety network and the U.S. treasury
Why should spectrum auctions (i.e. my cell phone bill) pay for a public safety network?
Yeah! We crimin... drug... pirat... SECURITY EXPERTS want to know!
I think you mean "citizens".
There are lots of legitimate reasons a citizen may want to save information that they don't want even the US government to read. Just because I keep a diary doesn't mean I think some FBI agent should be privy to what I've written just because they suspect that I may have committed a crime.
Well, AES-256 is readily available but I guess only the Feds and the accused know what was used.
Anything that is worth it's salt (pun intended) will cause grief for any person trying to decrypt the data. There's lots of tools out there, just go look at a few.
Yes, I know there's lots of tools out there, that's why I asked the question. I've looked at a few, but I don't know which ones are so difficult to crack that the FBI was willing to try to get the judge to compel the defendant to reveal the key and risk having the judge rule that the defendant is within his rights to not reveal the decryption key. It seems like if the FBI secretly had the ability to break the encryption, they would have done that instead of risking that the judge would rule in the favor of the defendant. Though I guess it's possible that they *did* break the encryption and know what's there, but were looking for a way to make the evidence known without revealing that they cracked it.
Oh sorry, I thought the problem was radioactive elements leaking out into the environment. As long as no one is worried about the containment failing and allowing radioactive contaminants top leach into the soil and groundwater, then sure, just put an umbrella over the current reactor and call it a day.
Can't they just encase the plant in concrete/dirt and say fuk it? Seem to remember reading about Chernobyl being dealt with in similarly crude but effective fashion. Sure it would cost a lot to heap up that much rubble but hey, beats sitting on the thing for decades on end attempting to carefully spoon out all the nasties.
Concrete doesn't last forever, nor does a big dirt pile when you're in an earthquake and tsunami zone. Burying it just makes it even harder to clean up when whatever containment method you used fails the next time.
Slashdot Mirror
A "life time warranty" (even if it really is - most life time warranties are the life of the product, which can be very short indeed) only means the vendor will pay out or replace stuff if it dies.
Is there some other possible definition of "life time warranty" other than "the vendor will pay out or replace stuff if it dies (within the lifetime as defined by the vendor)"?
...It probably would have been cheaper to build an ISS in orbit...
Then I nominate to put your happy ass in space with a wrench and a torch...
It's a little late for that (or early) since the USA has no heavy lift capability to speak of currently, plus I think you missed his point. The ISS weighs 450 tonnes, the Saturn V could lift 120 tonne to LEO, compared to 24 tonne for the space shuttle. So 4 Saturn V launches could have gotten the whole thing launched, compared with a minimum of 20 space shuttle launches. And the Russians could have shuttled crew much more cost efficiently than the space shuttle leaving more money for other things.
... then we need to shut down this thing NOW! We seriously have NOTHING BETTER TO DO WITH BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF TREASURE than to record a music video? This is rediculous. Let's turn off the lights, lock the door on the way out and save that money for something more important. Don't give me this "national pride" or "scientific discover" B.S. If that stuff needs to get done, then F'ing do it and don't waste time singing in space. This is probably the most collossal waste of resources imaginable. How many resources were needed to scrub the air necessary for the singing? When you are in space, that stuff matters, A LOT! The first take wasn't the last take, that I know. Don't give me the "get kids into science" schtick either. Kids who are swayed by silly things like this, statistically don't end up any good at the math needed for real science anyway. I teach our "future engineers" in a top state university. Most can't even solve a triangle, let alone deal with any higher math. If you are swayed by this commercial, you don't have the chops to stick with an engineering career.
Humans, even astronauts, need downtime - If you want a human to be effective, then you can't fill 100% of their waking time with work.
I know the ISS isn't considered a glamorous undertaking like a mars trip would be, but damn it is one impressive piece of hardware, and the most advanced thing we've built in space to date.
Is it really that much more impressive than Skylab, which launched 40 years ago? Skylab had a pressurized volume of 320 m^2 versus 837 m^2 of the ISS today - not even 3 times larger, despite launching nearly 30 years later. You'd think that in 40 years we could have something in space that's more impressive. The Curiosity Rover seems much more impressive in comparison than a tin can that orbits 250 miles above the earth.
Wait until he sees one of the 3D Lego Printers, then he'll want to regulate Legos too. 8 year old kids will have to pass a security check to purchase a set of Legos.
wtf is a megayear? I only know gigadays.
It's just marketing fraud by geologists to make the time span seem longer, 3 mega-years is only 2.86 mebi-years.
How hard can it be to launch a missle?
1) The red light starts flashing
2) Open safe and confirm codes
3) Press big red button
4) Commit suicide
It's not like they need to be rocket scientists or anything.
If the world gets to the point where we're launching nuclear missiles, I think step 4 is redundant.
Isn't the whole point of open source to take good ideas and merge them together?
What gave you that idea? There are many Linux window managers, Word Processors, Image Editors, etc. That diversity is both a strength and a weakness.
Why would I want to sync my iPad to a hotel computer? It syncs directly with Apple or Dropbox and when I get back home all my stuff is on the iMac also. I also can take my iPad to a friend's house and plug it into their big TV which has an HDMI input connection. Anything I can display on the iPad will also display on the screen. I don't need a dock for this!
You sound like you're pretty happy with using your iPad for mobile computing and your iMac for home computing when you want a big screen and keyboard (and you're satisfied with using a tablet UI even on a big non-touchscreen display), but if you go a few comments up the thread, this thread was started by this comment:
I would like to have a single device that is a lightweight tablet with a tablet interface, but when I drop it into a dock with a real keyboard, mouse, and screen , it switches UI modes to the right UI for that. A "single experience" would be a flawed approach IMO.
So apparently not everyone likes having to switch from tablet to desktop and would rather have a tablet that becomes a desktop when plugged into a dumb (and relatively cheap) dock. You seem happy with your iMac + iPad solution, so this is probably not something that you would be interested in.
No matter how powerful a processor and how much memory you put in the tablet, you will always have a small screen compared to large desktop monitor. If you don't care much about efficiency in your work, you can get away with a tiny screen, but there isn't and there never will be a substitute for big screen real estate.
Go a few comments up the thread:
I would like to have a single device that is a lightweight tablet with a tablet interface, but when I drop it into a dock with a real keyboard, mouse, and screen
That was essentially what I have and it is called an iPad. It communicates wirelessly with a screen that is called an iMac and synchronizes all important information between the two. The screen is the most expensive part of most computing devices. A 27 inch screen is not exactly cheap. For a marginal increase in cost, a powerful processor, storage and a decent keyboard can be added to the iPad. As a bonus, I can use the big screen for real work my home office, while someone else uses the iPad in the kitchen to look up some recipes.
If your iMac was just a display device, then what you describe is what the original poster was asking for, but since your iMac is a smart device that hosts the apps (that aren't the same apps that are on the iPad), you have no assurance that it can handle the files that were synced from the iPad. If the tablet is the computing device, then you know that you can take it anywhere - home, work, a friends house, hotels, etc, plug it into a display and all of your apps will be there and everything will work just as it did at home. Would you trust a hotel computer enough to sync your data up to it?
A 27" screen costs $390 or $999 if you buy it from Apple. A 27" iMac costs $1799. So you're paying $800 - $1400 more to have an iMac at home versus having a dumb display that uses your tablet as the computer -- you can buy your wife her own iPad with the savings.
No matter how powerful a processor and how much memory you put in the tablet, you will always have a small screen compared to large desktop monitor. If you don't care much about efficiency in your work, you can get away with a tiny screen, but there isn't and there never will be a substitute for big screen real estate.
Go a few comments up the thread:
I would like to have a single device that is a lightweight tablet with a tablet interface, but when I drop it into a dock with a real keyboard, mouse, and screen
The problem with your approach is that when I have a tablet I want battery life and ease of use. And when I use a PC I want power, and speed! They are orthogonal to each other. As the CAP theorem, says, you can have 2 out of 3, not all three, so choose what you want.
Battery life and speed needn't be orthogonal to each other - a manufacturer could use something like Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa core CPU - low power (and low-performance) cores for use on battery and high power (and high performance) cores for use when docked. So a tablet could be power efficient (and slower) while on battery, but when plugged into a dock, it can become a more powerful, full-featured desktop.
Though it's probably going to need something more powerful than the Cortex-A15 as the high-power core to give a good desktop experience.
Let's see:
Ice storm of 98: Cell coverage was spotty. POTS worked fine.
Great east coast blackout: Cell coverage was non-existent. POTS worked fine
Earthquake couple years ago (it was a 6 which is huge for this area): Cell coverage was crap since every body was calling everybody else. POTS... was fine
See a pattern?
At least with the wired power has never been an issue since it gets it from the switch. Before the blackout we had got rid of our wired phone and had only cordless. At that point I was thinking of getting rid of our wired connection. That changed my mind.
When I was in an earthquake in Hawaii followed by an island-wide power outage, POTS was useless - took 20 - 30 minutes with the phone off hook just to get a dial-tone, and calling anyone (local or long distance) resulted in an "all circuits are busy" recording. Both AT&T and Verizon wireless cell sites were working for at least 6 hours hours after the power went off, I still couldn't get a voice call through, but I was able to get (slow) internet access, and send SMS messages to check on family/friends (SMS within the same carrier worked fine, sending across carriers had a 10 minute - 1 hour delay).
I did continue to have good DSL internet, until the UPS that was powering my DSL modem ran out of power 30 minutes after the power went out.
POTS doesn't guarantee service in a disaster, and as people continue to abandon POTS and telcos reduce the capacity of the system, it won't get any better.
DIG THE CABLES DOWN, stop putting up pylons, you morons. Take a frikkin' clue from the model all the European telcos and power companies use.
Underground cables aren't a panacea that protect you from all outages -- underground cables are more susceptible to water intrusion, ground shifting (a big issue in an earthquake), digging accidents etc. And outages take longer to fix.
I could never figure out why insurance is needed in the first place. I've had mobile phones for 15 years at least, and I can count the number of times I dropped them on one hand. I've never bothered with insurance and never will.
I've dropped my phone a number of times during the past year, since I'm putting it in and out of my pocket a dozen times a day, using it 1 handed in the train, using it outside in the rain to call a cab, using it on the treadmill at the gym, plugging it into my laptop and forgetting it's plugged in when I take the laptop, etc. There are lots of chances to accidentally drop the phone or knock it to the floor.
You'd think if people are buying expensive items they'd take better care of them.
I don't know what you do with your phone, but I actually *use* my phone, why carry a $600 device around with me if I'm afraid to use it. Every time it comes out of my pocket I'm at risk of dropping it. If I take it out of my pocket 10 times a day, and I manage to not drop it 99.9% of the time, I'm still likely to drop it 3 or 4 times over a year.
So far the phone is fine, but I still have insurance on it. I last used the insurance with my original Droid that stopped working when I bumped it on the edge of a table while I was walking - the insurance company overnighted me a new phone.
FPL is still a government regulated utility so their rates are set by the state of Florida. They can't raise or lower their rates without requesting a rate case hearing which takes at least a year to submit and can take as much as two years to get an answer. So it is in their best interest to be as efficient as possible. Full disclosure - I work for Nextera Energy parent company to FPL.
PG&E in California has to go through the PUC before raising rates too, but that doesn't mean that they are efficient or use the money for what they said they will since there have been rate increases that were supposed to go to pipeline maintenance that never happened. Now that a pipeline exploded with fatal results (and with PG&E discovering that it doesn't have a full audit trail for much of its pipeline network), they want ratepayers to pay again for the maintenance that they supposedly already paid for.
Having a regulated utility doesn't ensure fair rates.
It's interesting that the utility says "and helped some customers save money, according to the utility that operates it", but was there an overall average savings across all customers, or are customers paying more overall to pay off the $800M investment while the utility cuts their generating and transmission costs, earning more profit?
General revenue is also a tax. I fail to see the point of what pot of gold it is plucked from. It makes far more sense to me to have the users of that safety network support it.
Right, general revenue is a tax, which is how infrastructure that benefits everyone should be paid (or through use taxes, like gas taxes). Not buried in a spectrum sale that will lead to higher cell phone prices for consumer with the revenue used for something that benefits everyone whether they use a cell phone or not. What if all agencies decided that they should earn revenue - maybe the FDA should charge meat packing plants $10M/annually for their required inspections and then use the revenue to pay for new police cars because everyone needs the police, right? And it's better than a tax, because it's "free money" for the government that will be paid by consumers through higher meat prices.
Your point fails because even on hardwired lines there are charges for the safety network (911 fees they are generally called). If you want to talk fairness then what you are proposing is the landline users pay for it when you don't have to. Doesn't sound very fair to me. And taking it out of the general revenue means those who don't use it (for whatever reason) are subsidizing those that do.
Your argument fails because the Public Safety Network has nothing to do with 911 service (other than the fact that when the 911 operator calls a firetruck, the firetuck will use the public safety network to say he's on the way). The public safety network is a tool used by EMS responders, just like a firetruck or police car, and I certainly don't see why a hidden fee buried in cell phone costs should pay for firetrucks.
If a nationwide coordinated public safety network is something that the federal government should be paying for, then it must be something that we'll all benefit from and should be paid for by everyone, not just cell phone users.
Every time the government doesn't get every penny and ounce of blood it can out of everyone doesn't mean it's "costing" the government anything.
Exactly - sky high spectrum auctions amount to a tax on the consumers that are forced to pay back the billions that the company spent to buy the spectrum. Encouraging more competition from smaller carriers by banning the big boys will likely save consumers many more billions than the government would have "earned".
From TFA:
But a policy to restrict the ability of Verizon Wireless and AT&T to bid on the spectrum would drive down the bidding during the auction and leave less money for a nationwide public safety network and the U.S. treasury
Why should spectrum auctions (i.e. my cell phone bill) pay for a public safety network?
Yeah!
We crimin... drug... pirat... SECURITY EXPERTS want to know!
I think you mean "citizens".
There are lots of legitimate reasons a citizen may want to save information that they don't want even the US government to read. Just because I keep a diary doesn't mean I think some FBI agent should be privy to what I've written just because they suspect that I may have committed a crime.
Well, AES-256 is readily available but I guess only the Feds and the accused know what was used.
Anything that is worth it's salt (pun intended) will cause grief for any person trying to decrypt the data. There's lots of tools out there, just go look at a few.
I would recommend looking at TrueCrypt http://www.truecrypt.org/ and OpenPGP http://www.openpgp.org/ first.
Yes, I know there's lots of tools out there, that's why I asked the question. I've looked at a few, but I don't know which ones are so difficult to crack that the FBI was willing to try to get the judge to compel the defendant to reveal the key and risk having the judge rule that the defendant is within his rights to not reveal the decryption key. It seems like if the FBI secretly had the ability to break the encryption, they would have done that instead of risking that the judge would rule in the favor of the defendant. Though I guess it's possible that they *did* break the encryption and know what's there, but were looking for a way to make the evidence known without revealing that they cracked it.
What encryption algorithm did he use that's FBI-proof?
Who cares if the containment fails. It's buried.
Oh sorry, I thought the problem was radioactive elements leaking out into the environment. As long as no one is worried about the containment failing and allowing radioactive contaminants top leach into the soil and groundwater, then sure, just put an umbrella over the current reactor and call it a day.
Can't they just encase the plant in concrete/dirt and say fuk it? Seem to remember reading about Chernobyl being dealt with in similarly crude but effective fashion. Sure it would cost a lot to heap up that much rubble but hey, beats sitting on the thing for decades on end attempting to carefully spoon out all the nasties.
Concrete doesn't last forever, nor does a big dirt pile when you're in an earthquake and tsunami zone. Burying it just makes it even harder to clean up when whatever containment method you used fails the next time.