People are entitled to the product of their own labor, yes. They are entitled to many things, most of which are in opposition to one another. You CANNOT have a society that is free AND individuals who are free. ALL societies are a balance between those two. Anarchies have total freedom for the individual, for example, but have zero freedom for society as a whole. A corporate society has total freedom for that society but zero freedom for the individual. Most democracies and republics (other than dictatorships) try to be somewhere near the middle.
It turns out that the happiest and healthiest societies are ones that place greater emphasis on societal freedom than on personal freedom by a small margin. Too big a margin and you get some really nasty dictatorial effects. But too much personal freedom constricts societal freedom excessively. The US has chosen to have very little societal freedom, with the consequence that the US has been massively overtaken on just about every front. It has become dysfunctional and it may well be too expensive to correct some of those dysfunctions at this point in time. That's not to say I expect the US to face any kind of catastrophe - empires tend to end in a whimper, not a bang. Based on the example of the British Empire (which had died a good century before anyone noticed), I don't seriously expect anyone to really observe any real impact on the US until 2060 at the earliest. 2100 is a more likely timeframe for the US to be replaced as a superpower and it's doubtful anyone will really even notice for another 50-100 years after.
The problem resides in that there is actually a third player in this - governmental freedom. The US and UK have opted to restrict personal freedoms in favour of freedom for the government, rather than freedom for the society. THAT is where the problems lie. Government should be the instrument by which society is empowered and by which the balance of power is maintained, it should not have power in and of itself. I have no problems with large government, and indeed would favour the largest government of all (ie: everyone is involved in the government of their country in some way), nor have I any problem with a tax-and-spend government (I'd rather they did something more useful with their money than pay for Palin's hairdos, but that's precisely WHY I want more people involved in government and not less - fewer people means less accountability). I do have a problem with government forgetting to govern.
What most commentators forget is that most things in life aren't free, aren't affordable by individuals and aren't even practical for most corporations.
I prefer to believe in the basics of Owensian and Keynsian economics because those are the economics Europe has used to pull out of recession. I prefer to ignore the basics of American economics because it has failed to pull out of recession. I look for results and your books aren't producing any.
Wait a second. We wouldn't have Beowulf clusters if it weren't for the Government. (I'm not joking. They were developed at NASA and NASA isn't funded by charitable donations.) Most of the US aircraft manufacturers are only financially viable because the Government spends so much on hardware. IBM would have died a long time ago if it weren't for the Government contracts that kept them going. Much of the Internet in the US was laid down by the NSF.
In short, the fact that the US Government doesn't produce per-se is immaterial. They spend. The same is true of investors. They also don't produce, they spend. The difference is that the US Government is spending on items that are already produced (and thus buying up inventory) whereas investors are spending on items that are yet to be produced (and thus causing no mobilization of resources whatsoever). Further, the US Government (and indeed any Government) is capable of spending far more than any given investor, and the product so purchased is then (in theory - though not always in practice) available for the public interest. Investors do not invest for the public interest, they invest for their own interest. The two are very unlikely to ever coincide.
Free as in Freedom NOT as in beer. And, frankly, the OSI can go take a running jump. Although I do not regard Richard Stallman as god (demigod, perhaps), I do regard the premise on which he bases his definition of what is free as being fundamentally sound. The OSI is ethically suspect and morally dubious at best. At worst, who does it actually represent? The EFF handles all the legal matters and the various consortia that have sprung up (such as the FSF) represent the special interests of the groups involved. The OSI adds... what?
In the end, the only difference between the educated and the uneducated with regards to facts is the source of their beliefs.
Absolutely nobody has time to research everything they accept as factual, which means that they have to accept on trust.
The educated ideally have a system by which that trust can operate effectively. One part is the scientific method, the other part is peer review. We delegate bullshit detection to specialists in the appropriate fields.
The problem with this is that many specialists are, these days, financed by special interest groups who want specific answers to be asserted as true whether or not they actually are. Even if this had no actual impact (it actually does but that is unimportant), it destroys the entire web of trust.
If there is no web of trust that you can feel safe in relying on, then you have no alternative but to use the method used by the uneducated, which is to opt in to the mob mentality.
This is because the human condition will not permit a void. Where there is a gap in awareness, the brain will fill it with something. Anything. The brain abhors a void far more than nature ever did.
If you can delegate awareness (be it to some system, some radio station, some religion, or some political belief), then the void is filled by that system. You don't have to know the answer as you have assigned the problem of knowing elsewhere.
In the case of the scientific method and peer review, this substitution actually works remarkably well - provided there is no failure within that system.
In the case of religion, etc, the substitution has some value in that it permits an uninformed society to function. We could never have developed civilization without such a substitution. It may not be the only reason for religion to have existed, but it is definitely a function religion served.
(Even in the early days of civilization, delegation to superstition was essential. The Hippocratic Oath was a splendid method of creating a codified standard of conduct and a method of enforcement in a society that neither understood standards nor recognized enforcement. Modern society also lacks these, but also lacks any backbone for the Hippocratic Oath, hence the abuse of medicine.)
Those who do not delegate anything and try to be totally self-reliant -- bad mistake. Those who don't end up addicts end up schizophrenic. It is a factor in why I reject utterly the popular American ideal of the self-reliant person. The people who actually achieve such an ideal do so by entering the nuthouse or the grave. Doesn't sound very ideal to me.
Fact: Obama himself thinks that continuing to spend is the answer to the economic problems we face.
Well, yes it is. The economic problems are because you need a certain minimum level of cashflow for a market economy to work. Either you have to re-inflate the economy or abandon the capitalist system. You can't have capitalism without capital.
(Which, interestingly, means that Republicans are anti-capitalist and anti-market at the moment. You cannot believe in market forces if you do not believe in the right of a market to exist.)
It depends. If this is a problem of accumulation in the body and not the actual intake per-se, then all you need is something that can draw the toxins from the body. Unfortunately, most of the methods that exist that actually do this (desfereoxamine for toxic levels of iron or aluminium, for example) are highly destructive to the body in their own right. The methods that are "safe" are also complete myths. And sometimes not all that safe either. Sweat lodges, for example, are extremely dangerous on top of being useless.
Since the key is to bind to the toxin more tightly than anything else, I would say that nanotech might be the direction we would need to look for a safe extraction method.
On the other hand, if the problem is indeed with the intake, we've got problems. Any soil contamination is going to get into all aspects of the food chain and there is absolutely no way to prevent it other than a massive cleanup and decontamination operation. Britain can't even afford to decontaminate the Irish Sea of the plutonium sludge it has left there. Do you seriously imagine that it - or any other country - could afford to decommission every inch of farmland for possibly several years to extract the dioxins present?
It may be possible to introduce a genetically-modified bacteria that can process the dioxin contamination into something safer, but I'm not convinced it would be terribly safe (you can't order a mass recall if something goes wrong) and I'm certainly not convinced it would be politically acceptable. Way too much risk of backlash - both from those against GM organisms and those who would ask why - if dioxin contamination was so dangerous - industry was permitted to produce the levels of pollutions that it does.
For now, the best solution is to drink more tap water. The anti-depressants that contaminate it will help ease your fears.
Not necessarily. It depends on how "safe" is defined. If "unsafe" means that you can expect a statistically measurable drop in life expectancy and measurable increase in related illnesses over a lifetime of exposure (ie: pretty much the same case as you have for smoking-related illnesses), then you would not necessarily have an obviously sick population even though said population was, indeed, sick - merely not sick enough for it to be visible at that time.
Lifetime exposure is one factor. Yearly exposure and daily exposure are other measures. I don't know exactly which of these the 1200x refers to. It matters. It matters a lot. You can't simply assume that exposure is utterly uniform and devoid of any fluctuation, nor can you assume that accumulation is also uniform and devoid of any fluctuation. Thus, the 1200x may well be an average that never actually happens, but where you are very likely to get millions of times safe levels for brief periods of times at intervals in your life. Or it might be that 1200x is the maximum value that the fluctuations are likely to reach, or it might be the root-mean-square value of the fluctuating values, or any number of other things. The summary is useless (as usual) in understanding what the numbers mean.
Or maybe 1200x is not actually the exposure level at all, but rather the peak value observed for bodily accumulation of the toxin. Or the average. Or the root-mean-square. Or some other statistical value.
Regardless, the EPA is usually wildly optimistic - the EU generally permits levels only half the EPA estimates of what is safe, and the value is generally much closer to the value considered sensible by environmental chemists and inorganic biochemists. Both the EPA and EU values are usually also much lower than the values industry will stomach, with the result that either the law is widely flouted (since jobs = votes and nobody is stupid enough to vote themselves out of office by risking jobs through environmental crackdowns) or the law is widely bypassed by moving the most polluting component(s) to places like Bhopal, where the people are too poor or too dead to complain.
(I don't know what the solution is, but since a company pays for whatever it wastes, it would seem to follow that the less you waste the more you make.)
Oh, but you can. There's over 100 mutations in the genome per generation, so between any two siblings there's up to 200 differences. A complete genome decode would therefore certainly allow you to identify an individual. However, the police don't use genome decodes. They use much cruder methods of comparing individuals which will produce a fair number of false positives. Having said that, if you think you have privacy concerns now, wait until the police DO start using full genome decodes. And sooner or later they will. It's inevitable. Higher-grade intelligence, plus extra goodies like knowing what chemicals you might be sensitive to, is bound to eventually become too tempting. The technology will need to be cheaper and quicker, but that's just a matter of time.
I'm also expecting this kind of DNA work to be coupled with more sophisticated chemical analysis. If, as has been claimed, you can identify where a person has been by the chemical traces in their body, then some samples (such as blood) will likely contain those same traces. Once it becomes cost-effective and time-effective to extract that kind of extra information, it seems certain that it will become routine.
(It is unclear just how far you can go back, or with what level of detail, as far as geographic chemical tracing goes, but as some chemicals accumulate whereas others have a definite half-life in the body, it would make sense to say that geographical tracing has the potential to get fairly complex with time.)
There may well be other sources of information that have yet to be discovered or for which there are no tests (or at least, none that are well-known). For example, if there's a blood sample, it will likely contain red blood cells and may even contain trapped air molecules. That may tell you a little about the air quality at the time, placing additional constraints on both time and place of origin. No idea if it would be all that useful or cost-effective, but that's largely immaterial in comparison to the fact that clearly it is possible to imagine that further tests could exist. Once you know they can exist, you know that sooner-or-later they will exist.
(I'd be rather happier if there was a little more in the way of community policing versus some of the current practices, and if justice was a little more about balancing crime prevention via therapy and rehabilitation against the apparent need in society for revenge and retribution. It seems to me that if the criminal justice system had less reasons to be hostile, there would be less inclination to abuse that system from within. There will always be a lunatic fringe, but the smaller it is, the safer it will be to have such technology where it needs to be.)
So long as your system could duplicate the analogue waves perfectly (no messy variations in response, which is what tape-to-tape copy prevention relied on), you'd be absolutely correct. The problem is that most analogue electronics will have variable response, which means that the vendor need merely find things that alias to the "correct" sound in the human ear but which do NOT alias to the "correct" sound after being passed through a typical analogue coping device.
However, fundamentally you are correct. So long as the decoded data is duplicated exactly, then there is no way to distinguish the copy from the original.
The problem with deep caving is that you'll often want to go where steel/rigid capsules could never be transported. And if you actually DID find the Everest of caves, you're looking at needing 5+ of these, which you somehow have to convey through the previous ones.
Inflatable capsules would not be a joke - indeed even NASA has seriously considered whether inflatable modules might be better than rigid structures for some parts of space stations. They would, however, be extremely difficult to get right.
I am talking about a non-flooded capsule - basically something that would be comparable to a pressure chamber - in which SCUBA (do people really consider this an acronym any more?) gear is not required. Why? Because one of the big dangers in any form of deep diving is that the only people who have either the skill or the nerve to go that deep are also friggin' insane and often push themselves way too far. Although not cave diving, I seem to recall the curator for the Andrea Dores wreck museum died on a dive to the ship from the bends. He was no fool and certainly no amateur, and we'll never know for sure what went wrong. However, it is an absolute certainty that he made some sort of mistake and that this snowballed to the point of catastrophe.
The kind of shallow caves that tourists go visit don't pose those kinds of threats. The kind of deep sea caves these explorers are wanting to find - well, there are plenty of surface caves that go down thousands of feet. That's four times deeper than any wreck diver has ever gone and that's before you even factor in the starting depth for such an undersea cave. You will NOT find instructions on how to accomplish such a feat on page 47 of your fireside girl's handbook. You have to invent a way.
Actually, that's often precisely what happens with inventions. However, only one in a billion of those ideas are ever worth anything. That's where the problem lies.
If there is a variable encryption key which cannot trivially be deduced from a "fair use" segment, then all the labels have to do is require that reviewers request a set of pre-generated keys for the specific segment they want to quote.
I'm not saying this would be sane or rational, merely that it would meet the objectives of fair use without eliminating DRM. There is no serious fear of a "secure" DRM ever existing - the companies aren't skilled enough to fix trivial flaws, so there's not the slightest possibility of them even reaching the point of making things difficult. In fact, the methodology seems to be one of relying on the law for security with DRM providing a rationale. On that basis, I'd say that the loss of any level of legal protection in any country in the Americas will prove troublesome.
I would say yes, you could make an inflatable base that could be installed in a cave. You'd need to have some fairly ingenious materials tech to prevent such a capsule from shredding itself on any sharp rocks or being at-risk in general from any uneven surfaces. You'd also need a fair amount of extra air in order for any kind of airlock system to not flood the capsule. Overcoming the pressure sufficiently to expand and then reducing pressure to equalize would also pose technical challenges. However, I see nothing that is actually impossible in any of this. Difficult, yes. Possibly impractical. But not impossible.
One solution is to have people enter their e-mail address when they want to change their password. If the MD5 or SHA1 has of the entered address matches the hash of the e-mail address on file, then send out the e-mail. If it does not, then that's not the right person. Then you don't need the actual address on file at all.
How many cities (other than Chester) still even have City Walls? But, yes, you're right, the system in England is one of superseding past laws rather than removing the old ones. Partly, as you say, for reasons of cost. But also partly because it's easier. Same reason that the Constitutional amendment enabling prohibition is still in the Constitution, but was abolished by another amendment.
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People are entitled to the product of their own labor, yes. They are entitled to many things, most of which are in opposition to one another. You CANNOT have a society that is free AND individuals who are free. ALL societies are a balance between those two. Anarchies have total freedom for the individual, for example, but have zero freedom for society as a whole. A corporate society has total freedom for that society but zero freedom for the individual. Most democracies and republics (other than dictatorships) try to be somewhere near the middle.
It turns out that the happiest and healthiest societies are ones that place greater emphasis on societal freedom than on personal freedom by a small margin. Too big a margin and you get some really nasty dictatorial effects. But too much personal freedom constricts societal freedom excessively. The US has chosen to have very little societal freedom, with the consequence that the US has been massively overtaken on just about every front. It has become dysfunctional and it may well be too expensive to correct some of those dysfunctions at this point in time. That's not to say I expect the US to face any kind of catastrophe - empires tend to end in a whimper, not a bang. Based on the example of the British Empire (which had died a good century before anyone noticed), I don't seriously expect anyone to really observe any real impact on the US until 2060 at the earliest. 2100 is a more likely timeframe for the US to be replaced as a superpower and it's doubtful anyone will really even notice for another 50-100 years after.
The problem resides in that there is actually a third player in this - governmental freedom. The US and UK have opted to restrict personal freedoms in favour of freedom for the government, rather than freedom for the society. THAT is where the problems lie. Government should be the instrument by which society is empowered and by which the balance of power is maintained, it should not have power in and of itself. I have no problems with large government, and indeed would favour the largest government of all (ie: everyone is involved in the government of their country in some way), nor have I any problem with a tax-and-spend government (I'd rather they did something more useful with their money than pay for Palin's hairdos, but that's precisely WHY I want more people involved in government and not less - fewer people means less accountability). I do have a problem with government forgetting to govern.
What most commentators forget is that most things in life aren't free, aren't affordable by individuals and aren't even practical for most corporations.
I prefer to believe in the basics of Owensian and Keynsian economics because those are the economics Europe has used to pull out of recession. I prefer to ignore the basics of American economics because it has failed to pull out of recession. I look for results and your books aren't producing any.
Wait a second. We wouldn't have Beowulf clusters if it weren't for the Government. (I'm not joking. They were developed at NASA and NASA isn't funded by charitable donations.) Most of the US aircraft manufacturers are only financially viable because the Government spends so much on hardware. IBM would have died a long time ago if it weren't for the Government contracts that kept them going. Much of the Internet in the US was laid down by the NSF.
In short, the fact that the US Government doesn't produce per-se is immaterial. They spend. The same is true of investors. They also don't produce, they spend. The difference is that the US Government is spending on items that are already produced (and thus buying up inventory) whereas investors are spending on items that are yet to be produced (and thus causing no mobilization of resources whatsoever). Further, the US Government (and indeed any Government) is capable of spending far more than any given investor, and the product so purchased is then (in theory - though not always in practice) available for the public interest. Investors do not invest for the public interest, they invest for their own interest. The two are very unlikely to ever coincide.
At least you have a brain. Mine leaped for safety.
Free as in Freedom NOT as in beer. And, frankly, the OSI can go take a running jump. Although I do not regard Richard Stallman as god (demigod, perhaps), I do regard the premise on which he bases his definition of what is free as being fundamentally sound. The OSI is ethically suspect and morally dubious at best. At worst, who does it actually represent? The EFF handles all the legal matters and the various consortia that have sprung up (such as the FSF) represent the special interests of the groups involved. The OSI adds... what?
In the end, the only difference between the educated and the uneducated with regards to facts is the source of their beliefs.
Absolutely nobody has time to research everything they accept as factual, which means that they have to accept on trust.
The educated ideally have a system by which that trust can operate effectively. One part is the scientific method, the other part is peer review. We delegate bullshit detection to specialists in the appropriate fields.
The problem with this is that many specialists are, these days, financed by special interest groups who want specific answers to be asserted as true whether or not they actually are. Even if this had no actual impact (it actually does but that is unimportant), it destroys the entire web of trust.
If there is no web of trust that you can feel safe in relying on, then you have no alternative but to use the method used by the uneducated, which is to opt in to the mob mentality.
This is because the human condition will not permit a void. Where there is a gap in awareness, the brain will fill it with something. Anything. The brain abhors a void far more than nature ever did.
If you can delegate awareness (be it to some system, some radio station, some religion, or some political belief), then the void is filled by that system. You don't have to know the answer as you have assigned the problem of knowing elsewhere.
In the case of the scientific method and peer review, this substitution actually works remarkably well - provided there is no failure within that system.
In the case of religion, etc, the substitution has some value in that it permits an uninformed society to function. We could never have developed civilization without such a substitution. It may not be the only reason for religion to have existed, but it is definitely a function religion served.
(Even in the early days of civilization, delegation to superstition was essential. The Hippocratic Oath was a splendid method of creating a codified standard of conduct and a method of enforcement in a society that neither understood standards nor recognized enforcement. Modern society also lacks these, but also lacks any backbone for the Hippocratic Oath, hence the abuse of medicine.)
Those who do not delegate anything and try to be totally self-reliant -- bad mistake. Those who don't end up addicts end up schizophrenic. It is a factor in why I reject utterly the popular American ideal of the self-reliant person. The people who actually achieve such an ideal do so by entering the nuthouse or the grave. Doesn't sound very ideal to me.
Fact: Obama himself thinks that continuing to spend is the answer to the economic problems we face.
Well, yes it is. The economic problems are because you need a certain minimum level of cashflow for a market economy to work. Either you have to re-inflate the economy or abandon the capitalist system. You can't have capitalism without capital.
(Which, interestingly, means that Republicans are anti-capitalist and anti-market at the moment. You cannot believe in market forces if you do not believe in the right of a market to exist.)
So what you're saying is that they end up thinking critically, except for the conspiracy theorists who end up thinking everything is critical.
That is because the sarcasm tags in HTML5 aren't implemented in all browsers yet.
It depends. If this is a problem of accumulation in the body and not the actual intake per-se, then all you need is something that can draw the toxins from the body. Unfortunately, most of the methods that exist that actually do this (desfereoxamine for toxic levels of iron or aluminium, for example) are highly destructive to the body in their own right. The methods that are "safe" are also complete myths. And sometimes not all that safe either. Sweat lodges, for example, are extremely dangerous on top of being useless.
Since the key is to bind to the toxin more tightly than anything else, I would say that nanotech might be the direction we would need to look for a safe extraction method.
On the other hand, if the problem is indeed with the intake, we've got problems. Any soil contamination is going to get into all aspects of the food chain and there is absolutely no way to prevent it other than a massive cleanup and decontamination operation. Britain can't even afford to decontaminate the Irish Sea of the plutonium sludge it has left there. Do you seriously imagine that it - or any other country - could afford to decommission every inch of farmland for possibly several years to extract the dioxins present?
It may be possible to introduce a genetically-modified bacteria that can process the dioxin contamination into something safer, but I'm not convinced it would be terribly safe (you can't order a mass recall if something goes wrong) and I'm certainly not convinced it would be politically acceptable. Way too much risk of backlash - both from those against GM organisms and those who would ask why - if dioxin contamination was so dangerous - industry was permitted to produce the levels of pollutions that it does.
For now, the best solution is to drink more tap water. The anti-depressants that contaminate it will help ease your fears.
Not necessarily. It depends on how "safe" is defined. If "unsafe" means that you can expect a statistically measurable drop in life expectancy and measurable increase in related illnesses over a lifetime of exposure (ie: pretty much the same case as you have for smoking-related illnesses), then you would not necessarily have an obviously sick population even though said population was, indeed, sick - merely not sick enough for it to be visible at that time.
Lifetime exposure is one factor. Yearly exposure and daily exposure are other measures. I don't know exactly which of these the 1200x refers to. It matters. It matters a lot. You can't simply assume that exposure is utterly uniform and devoid of any fluctuation, nor can you assume that accumulation is also uniform and devoid of any fluctuation. Thus, the 1200x may well be an average that never actually happens, but where you are very likely to get millions of times safe levels for brief periods of times at intervals in your life. Or it might be that 1200x is the maximum value that the fluctuations are likely to reach, or it might be the root-mean-square value of the fluctuating values, or any number of other things. The summary is useless (as usual) in understanding what the numbers mean.
Or maybe 1200x is not actually the exposure level at all, but rather the peak value observed for bodily accumulation of the toxin. Or the average. Or the root-mean-square. Or some other statistical value.
Regardless, the EPA is usually wildly optimistic - the EU generally permits levels only half the EPA estimates of what is safe, and the value is generally much closer to the value considered sensible by environmental chemists and inorganic biochemists. Both the EPA and EU values are usually also much lower than the values industry will stomach, with the result that either the law is widely flouted (since jobs = votes and nobody is stupid enough to vote themselves out of office by risking jobs through environmental crackdowns) or the law is widely bypassed by moving the most polluting component(s) to places like Bhopal, where the people are too poor or too dead to complain.
(I don't know what the solution is, but since a company pays for whatever it wastes, it would seem to follow that the less you waste the more you make.)
Oh, but you can. There's over 100 mutations in the genome per generation, so between any two siblings there's up to 200 differences. A complete genome decode would therefore certainly allow you to identify an individual. However, the police don't use genome decodes. They use much cruder methods of comparing individuals which will produce a fair number of false positives. Having said that, if you think you have privacy concerns now, wait until the police DO start using full genome decodes. And sooner or later they will. It's inevitable. Higher-grade intelligence, plus extra goodies like knowing what chemicals you might be sensitive to, is bound to eventually become too tempting. The technology will need to be cheaper and quicker, but that's just a matter of time.
I'm also expecting this kind of DNA work to be coupled with more sophisticated chemical analysis. If, as has been claimed, you can identify where a person has been by the chemical traces in their body, then some samples (such as blood) will likely contain those same traces. Once it becomes cost-effective and time-effective to extract that kind of extra information, it seems certain that it will become routine.
(It is unclear just how far you can go back, or with what level of detail, as far as geographic chemical tracing goes, but as some chemicals accumulate whereas others have a definite half-life in the body, it would make sense to say that geographical tracing has the potential to get fairly complex with time.)
There may well be other sources of information that have yet to be discovered or for which there are no tests (or at least, none that are well-known). For example, if there's a blood sample, it will likely contain red blood cells and may even contain trapped air molecules. That may tell you a little about the air quality at the time, placing additional constraints on both time and place of origin. No idea if it would be all that useful or cost-effective, but that's largely immaterial in comparison to the fact that clearly it is possible to imagine that further tests could exist. Once you know they can exist, you know that sooner-or-later they will exist.
(I'd be rather happier if there was a little more in the way of community policing versus some of the current practices, and if justice was a little more about balancing crime prevention via therapy and rehabilitation against the apparent need in society for revenge and retribution. It seems to me that if the criminal justice system had less reasons to be hostile, there would be less inclination to abuse that system from within. There will always be a lunatic fringe, but the smaller it is, the safer it will be to have such technology where it needs to be.)
So long as your system could duplicate the analogue waves perfectly (no messy variations in response, which is what tape-to-tape copy prevention relied on), you'd be absolutely correct. The problem is that most analogue electronics will have variable response, which means that the vendor need merely find things that alias to the "correct" sound in the human ear but which do NOT alias to the "correct" sound after being passed through a typical analogue coping device.
However, fundamentally you are correct. So long as the decoded data is duplicated exactly, then there is no way to distinguish the copy from the original.
A Burmese Lovecraft? Does dread Cthulhu put up multiple elder signs in a row? These questions and more will be answered on some very future Slashdot.
The problem with deep caving is that you'll often want to go where steel/rigid capsules could never be transported. And if you actually DID find the Everest of caves, you're looking at needing 5+ of these, which you somehow have to convey through the previous ones.
Inflatable capsules would not be a joke - indeed even NASA has seriously considered whether inflatable modules might be better than rigid structures for some parts of space stations. They would, however, be extremely difficult to get right.
I am talking about a non-flooded capsule - basically something that would be comparable to a pressure chamber - in which SCUBA (do people really consider this an acronym any more?) gear is not required. Why? Because one of the big dangers in any form of deep diving is that the only people who have either the skill or the nerve to go that deep are also friggin' insane and often push themselves way too far. Although not cave diving, I seem to recall the curator for the Andrea Dores wreck museum died on a dive to the ship from the bends. He was no fool and certainly no amateur, and we'll never know for sure what went wrong. However, it is an absolute certainty that he made some sort of mistake and that this snowballed to the point of catastrophe.
The kind of shallow caves that tourists go visit don't pose those kinds of threats. The kind of deep sea caves these explorers are wanting to find - well, there are plenty of surface caves that go down thousands of feet. That's four times deeper than any wreck diver has ever gone and that's before you even factor in the starting depth for such an undersea cave. You will NOT find instructions on how to accomplish such a feat on page 47 of your fireside girl's handbook. You have to invent a way.
Actually, that's often precisely what happens with inventions. However, only one in a billion of those ideas are ever worth anything. That's where the problem lies.
If there is a variable encryption key which cannot trivially be deduced from a "fair use" segment, then all the labels have to do is require that reviewers request a set of pre-generated keys for the specific segment they want to quote.
I'm not saying this would be sane or rational, merely that it would meet the objectives of fair use without eliminating DRM. There is no serious fear of a "secure" DRM ever existing - the companies aren't skilled enough to fix trivial flaws, so there's not the slightest possibility of them even reaching the point of making things difficult. In fact, the methodology seems to be one of relying on the law for security with DRM providing a rationale. On that basis, I'd say that the loss of any level of legal protection in any country in the Americas will prove troublesome.
I would say yes, you could make an inflatable base that could be installed in a cave. You'd need to have some fairly ingenious materials tech to prevent such a capsule from shredding itself on any sharp rocks or being at-risk in general from any uneven surfaces. You'd also need a fair amount of extra air in order for any kind of airlock system to not flood the capsule. Overcoming the pressure sufficiently to expand and then reducing pressure to equalize would also pose technical challenges. However, I see nothing that is actually impossible in any of this. Difficult, yes. Possibly impractical. But not impossible.
That which is not dead may eternal lie
And in strange eons even death may die
One solution is to have people enter their e-mail address when they want to change their password. If the MD5 or SHA1 has of the entered address matches the hash of the e-mail address on file, then send out the e-mail. If it does not, then that's not the right person. Then you don't need the actual address on file at all.
I thought modern medicine got rid of the Greco-Roman notion of the Humours.
It's ok. Cats already took over the world. This is why there's a risk of tuna going extinct.
Bah Humbug! My effort to corrupt the English language has failed! (Ok, ok, I wasn't paying attention.)
How many cities (other than Chester) still even have City Walls? But, yes, you're right, the system in England is one of superseding past laws rather than removing the old ones. Partly, as you say, for reasons of cost. But also partly because it's easier. Same reason that the Constitutional amendment enabling prohibition is still in the Constitution, but was abolished by another amendment.
The longbow law was actually cited and used by a pastor in England in the last month. It's definitely real and on the books.