You might want to check out NIST's page on authenticating+encrypting modes.
You might want to look at Diffe-Hellman key exchange, where nothing is provided that cannot be entrusted to a wiretapper.
You might want to look at the Byzantine class of problems and their use in encryption.
You might want to look at the reasons for and against random oracles.
I see very, very little in cryptography that has to do with trust. Almost everything is dedicated to assuming that nothing can be trusted. People are encouraged to compress data before encrypting it because even the maths isn't trusted.
Most of what you're complaining about is in the standard library, not the core language. The standard library is semi-open, you can alter the code, rip out what you don't want. Only the core language is Java, the rest is just a programming aid.
As for what COBOL has, Admiral Hopper was running software on a non-networked sequential architecture. This is rather different from operating in a multicore SMP-architectured server farm. There is nothing complicated about parallelism, but naivety and self-blinding are two great ways to make every mistake in the book - and then some.
Stability, predictability and reliability could be done with Erlang, Occam, Eiffel, Smalltalk or Ada.
Business could have build "enterprise" applications with any of these. Most existed before Java or, indeed, the web. Servlets could have churned out WAIS or Gopher data for businesses. Graphics, via SGI's VRML, Apple's Postscript or the ancient GKS standard, could have given you everything that Swing delivered. Not that businesses use Swing, as a rule.
Portable applications in the form of Tcl/Tk packages could have provided everything Java applets did. Not that anyone uses applets either.
It should be self-evident that absolutely bugger all of the usual explanations hold water. If the explanations were valid, the role would already have been filled and Java would have never taken off.
Businesses flocked to Java and not to any other technology. Even technologies pushed by very large corporations. Businesses liked, and like, Java. That is obvious. "Why" is not obvious, Java does nothing that couldn't be done better in other ways. It isn't done in other ways, it's done in Java. There will be a sound reason for this, but it won't involve stability, reliability or predictability.
Oak was originally designed for household appliances.
D looks intriguing, certainly superior in theory to C++ or C#, but I'm seeing nothing substantial in it so far.
For other C derivatives, there's Aspect C and related attempts at adding high-level abstraction. On the other end of the spectrum, you've Silk and UPC - efforts to make parallelism simpler, safer and usable. Again, though, how many here have even got these compilers, never mind written anything in them?
For highly protected work, Occam-Pi is unbeatable. And almost unusable. Extraordinarily powerful, but extraordinarily formal. You could easily write an OS or virtual machine using it that could exploit multicore, SMP and clustering transparently. You just couldn't easily get it to do anything else, like hot-swap resources, add memory, access the busses, support RDMA, exploit hardware...
That's the rub. Most of what is needed in an OS is inherently unsafe. It's why there's so much interest in splitting operating systems into unsafe parts (which often need to be fast and low-level) and safe parts (the stuff that does all the managing and abstraction). So long as the unsafe parts are well-behaved with valid data AND the safe bits provably give only valid data (though it doesn't have to be provably correct), then the system is guaranteed to be stable.
You ideally want to split these up further. The safe bit should access an independent security kernel that handles all the access control, for example. The security kernel should be provably correct, which is a very different constraint than that imposed on other safe sections. Some sections of code should be able to self-replicate or migrate, to take advantage of resources rather than create bottlenecks. That would require greater emphasis on abstraction and adaptability, rather than validity or correctness.
No single language can handle this level of versatility. All languages obtain specific characteristics through constraints and freedoms. This means you need superior linkage between languages and optimization that takes into account that different paradigms are used to solve different problems and that there is insufficient data to optimize at compile time, that it has to be done at link time.
I've been pointing out the risks of router poisoning for, what, 17 years now.
Ever since the NSA started demonstrating router poisoning, it was only a matter of time before even the script kiddies figured it out.
I've been pointing out that the current rash of cryptocurrencies have excessive reliance on trust for the past year.
This sort of attack was inevitable. Bitcoin can plead semi-innocence because strong authentication is counter to strong anonymity. However, no router on the Internet should accept rogue announcements - even from three letter agencies - or accept unauthorized changes to the running configuration or active router tables.
MITM attacks are exceptionally dangerous and the hazards can only get worse.
Last I heard, they reluctantly release updates when other parts of the OS beat them on bugs per kg of code. (They stopped measuring lines when someone googled the term.)
I wouldn't worry too much about Fukushima, per se.
It's the fact that the State Secret law passed days after the abandonment of the pacifist sections of the Constitution, at a time Japan desperately needs to get rid of masses of deadly radioactive material, that you need to concern yourself with.
A lack of timely information lies at the heart of all nuclear accidents, large and small. It would seem to follow that to improve safety, you'd want to improve on sensors - the number, resilience and backups.
They were using helicopters, IIRC, which raises the question of what cameras and other sensors could have been used on those helicopters to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.
Did they try firing simple rockets into the reactor core? Something capable of carrying a rad-hardened instrument package and a transmitter capable of being received by a helicopter. A camera, a spectrometer, a thermometer even. Something that would extend their knowledge of the problem.
If they failed to make any real effort to prepare an adequate sensor grid in advance and failed to take basic steps to minimize uncertainty, then blunders from a lack of knowledge can't be blamed simply on that lack of knowledge. It stops being one of those things and starts looking like a massive failure and disastrous incompetence.
Back when the accident happened, a significant number of Slashdotters were saying that no meltdown had occurred, that there was no significant structural damage, that no radioactive material would reach the sea, that the incident was overblown and that the plant would be largely still operational.
At this point, the discussion is not about how thoroughly the facility has been totalled but in what way.
I don't care that there was limited data available at the start, drawing conclusions from data you don't have (aka making things up) is not an excuse. If you don't know, don't pretend you do. It is because TEPCO pretended that they knew that the world lacks much-needed nuclear power. It is because TEPCO made things up rather than obtained data that an accident was possible. Don't be a TEPCO.
For those who defended the company, who downplayed the crisis as a nothing, who ignored any available information that didn't suit their preferred outcome, I am still awaiting an apology.
An apology for deliberate pollution of the debate An apology for every post by every sceptical slashdotter modded to oblivion for the purpose of stifling debate An apology to Slashdot itself for so abusing the moderating system An apology for depriving the community of your own thought processes An apology for not once, in all subsequent Slashdot debates, conceding that honest debate is superior to dishonest control
Maybe, by 2024, pride and conceit will be at levels where this is possible.
Assume they cracked the NSA backdoor default password and can now access everything on every computer not running a hardened operating system. In other words, everything, whether you change your passwords or not. Further, assume they have remote access via UEFI to every motherboard built in the past year.
You might as well, that level of access has been built into modern technology, if this group hasn't figured it out, someone will. Or maybe already has.
We live in an age where technology is insecure by design. You can either abandon all hope (my preferred option) or you can adjust your approach to not depend on external security.
It's 70% average. For the Democratic judges, it's much lower. For the Republican judges, you could probably dispense with them and use the code as it stands. Since the algorithm falls short of true AI, this clearly implies a lot about how decisions are made and what with.
Since you fail on the example you tried to parse, I suggest that although the theory is easy, personal prejudice always takes precedence over what is written.
I reject the argument that you should wait for the distro to release their own roll, except in those cases where custom patches are required to support the hardware or other software.
Instead, you should think about what it is you want, what you need to support, and what isn't working the way you like. Bring in only those external patches that actually do something for you, then configure and build the kernel.
Use hardware probes, the proc directory and whatever documentation you've not accidentally shredded to configure the kernel for what you actually have, not for generics that distros can get away with, and not excluding things the distros don't care about. The specific processor is a good place to start.
Configure latency according to what you specifically do. Microsecond latency on a wordprocessor is going to slow you down. Microsecond latency on X-Plane might be too long.
Disable everything you absolutely know won't be used between now and the next time you want to update.
None of this is hard, none of this is painful unless you have ADD, what you will get is a kernel that runs faster and smoother, in less memory, than any stock kernel provided by any distro out there.
Ok, now that I can agree with. I have also seen some astonishing claims by scientists - usually archaeologists operating outside of their subdomain. And, yes, I also get tired of misleading claims (regardless of who by).
Yes, the dynamics will be complex, because in a feedback loop you can't distinguish cause and effect. It's a loop. There are also many, many variables at play and we simply don't have the data to do a multi-way analysis of variance capable of proving what variables were significant. (And because slash-and-burn, agriculture and high population densities alter climate, which impacts all the different elements humanity depended on, there's multi-step loops involved and we can't be sure we know all of them or all of the other factors that are enmeshed.)
Absolutely right that correlation is not causation. If there's a strong correlation, then you can be confident of a relationship via a common system, but that's it.
The correct approach is to always try to prove a model wrong. So, in this case, the place to start would be to look at the genomes of H. Denisovia and H. Neandertal. We've evidence Neandertals were the first to paint caves, and possible evidence of sophisticated rituals and music. So if the testosterone model is correct, we aught to see testosterone levels drop in human populations that are hybrids, relative to non-hybrid humans. Otherwise, you need additional models, which violates the rule of not multiplying entities unnecessarily.
Doesn't work. Humans started having more time on their hands 1.8 million years ago, but this DECLINED as religion (50k years ago) and agriculture (20k years ago) arose. With the advent of full-time farming (7k years ago) free time almost entirely vanished.
Nomadic peoples had more free time than any sedentary society prior to the middle of the 20th century, and even then only for the gentry and the middle classes, where said middle classes have since almost entirely suffered extermination at the hands of the rich.
This is settled science. Archaeology, genetics and anthropology have actually been in agreement on some things. The theories being propounded attempt to fit a new observation into said settled science. There is nothing naive about building on an existing foundation.
If you don't like said foundation, do the leg work, write up a paper and make yourself famous. Otherwise, stick to merely disagreeing with it rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
It needs to be funded the same way as the British BBC, by license fee, or the same was as for public utilities, tax.
It needs to have a charter guaranteeing payment in advance for the requested service and guaranteeing immunity for any actions provided within the terms of the charter. (If it's not chartered, you'll have every drug company and its brother suing you for publishing the suppressed papers Ben Goldacre keeps talking about.)
If it's not free, it won't have readers. Negative results aren't as desirable and readers will spend their time at PlosONE unless you've something compelling. If it doesn't pay for submission, researchers have greater financial incentive to keep shtum. That narrows your list of options.
Because research is expensive and governments are cheap. If a researcher has been humiliated a couple of times, publicly, their papers become worthless to the big names financing the work. The corporations cut funding, so the universities cut funding. The researcher has a job, technically, but no office, no lab, no work. Further, the job isn't guaranteed. Tenure can be withdrawn for gross malpractice. Being exposed as a fraud probably qualifies. So, no job either.
Tenure is poorly understood. It does not mean a job for life, or even for a fixed period. Tenure merely means that you can't be fired for political reasons. That's all. It guarantees that producing results that conflict with the views of management cannot lead to you facing consequences. You actually have to do something genuinely wrong.
Besides, mist of academia has disposed of tenure. Damn fools. If you want to reach new shores of discovery, you have to know that nobody with a vested interest in dragon beliefs can blow you out of the water. That guarantee no longer exists, which is why timidity and fraud have increased in recent years.
Agreed on study size, which is why social scientists look at meta-studies of hundreds of studies performed over as much as a decade, to eliminate the noise and other transient junk.
What they really need to do, though, is examine more hypotheses. You need 7-10 additional hypotheses, not including the null hypothesis, that are orthogonal to each other and to the hypothesis being tested. This would allow you to binary subdivide the problem space, not only showing what something isn't but also showing if the models being examined are founded on sound principles.
Have a journal, call it Debunker's Weekly if you want, that is divided evenly between papers on replication and papers showing negative correlation at the start. Pay authors a nominal amount, according to the thoroughness of the work as judged by referees. Provide the journal free to University libraries. Submit summaries of major stories to Slashdot, The Guardian, various Skeptical societies and other places likely to raise the extreme ire of dodgy researchers. In fact, the more ire, the better.
The journal doesn't have to last long. Just long enough to force bad researchers to improve or quit, force regular journals to publish a wider range of findings to avoid humiliation, and to correct dangerously erroneous beliefs. Since there must be a stockpile of unpublished papers of this sort, you should probably be able to get six or seven bumper editions out before anyone notices the dates, and maybe another two before the journal is sued into oblivion for defamation.
That would be plenty to make some major course corrections and to "out" a few frauds.
If X can do it, then Y will believe they do/should have the tight to do it.
In this case, the "it" is to file, index and retrieve aspects of your private life.
If a company, without authorization, can do so, then so can a government. If necessary, by outsourcing to said company.
If a government, without authorization, can do so, it is inevitable companies will contend the same.
Since organizations are increasingly interchangeable with governments (similar powers, similar immunities, similar thirst for conquest), this can only get worse.
What we need is a clear set of universal rules that apply to EVERYONE. And, no, I don't mean everyone except Blogger Joe, Multinational Monolith Inc, or the government of the right honourable Sir Twiddlethumbs III. And I believe, absolutely, that well-defined boundaries encapsulating privacy will be a cornerstone of any such rules, even if that smudges some of the paintwork around various definitions of freedom. Freedom is zero-sum, the Tragedy of the Commons is a real issue, and damnit I am NOT a lab rat! Now where's that cheese...
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to check out NIST's page on authenticating+encrypting modes.
You might want to look at Diffe-Hellman key exchange, where nothing is provided that cannot be entrusted to a wiretapper.
You might want to look at the Byzantine class of problems and their use in encryption.
You might want to look at the reasons for and against random oracles.
I see very, very little in cryptography that has to do with trust. Almost everything is dedicated to assuming that nothing can be trusted. People are encouraged to compress data before encrypting it because even the maths isn't trusted.
Android is not Java. Android is Linux with a JVM set up as an "other binary format" engine.
Most of what you're complaining about is in the standard library, not the core language. The standard library is semi-open, you can alter the code, rip out what you don't want. Only the core language is Java, the rest is just a programming aid.
As for what COBOL has, Admiral Hopper was running software on a non-networked sequential architecture. This is rather different from operating in a multicore SMP-architectured server farm. There is nothing complicated about parallelism, but naivety and self-blinding are two great ways to make every mistake in the book - and then some.
Stability, predictability and reliability could be done with Erlang, Occam, Eiffel, Smalltalk or Ada.
Business could have build "enterprise" applications with any of these. Most existed before Java or, indeed, the web. Servlets could have churned out WAIS or Gopher data for businesses. Graphics, via SGI's VRML, Apple's Postscript or the ancient GKS standard, could have given you everything that Swing delivered. Not that businesses use Swing, as a rule.
Portable applications in the form of Tcl/Tk packages could have provided everything Java applets did. Not that anyone uses applets either.
It should be self-evident that absolutely bugger all of the usual explanations hold water. If the explanations were valid, the role would already have been filled and Java would have never taken off.
Businesses flocked to Java and not to any other technology. Even technologies pushed by very large corporations. Businesses liked, and like, Java. That is obvious. "Why" is not obvious, Java does nothing that couldn't be done better in other ways. It isn't done in other ways, it's done in Java. There will be a sound reason for this, but it won't involve stability, reliability or predictability.
Oak was originally designed for household appliances.
D looks intriguing, certainly superior in theory to C++ or C#, but I'm seeing nothing substantial in it so far.
For other C derivatives, there's Aspect C and related attempts at adding high-level abstraction. On the other end of the spectrum, you've Silk and UPC - efforts to make parallelism simpler, safer and usable. Again, though, how many here have even got these compilers, never mind written anything in them?
For highly protected work, Occam-Pi is unbeatable. And almost unusable. Extraordinarily powerful, but extraordinarily formal. You could easily write an OS or virtual machine using it that could exploit multicore, SMP and clustering transparently. You just couldn't easily get it to do anything else, like hot-swap resources, add memory, access the busses, support RDMA, exploit hardware...
That's the rub. Most of what is needed in an OS is inherently unsafe. It's why there's so much interest in splitting operating systems into unsafe parts (which often need to be fast and low-level) and safe parts (the stuff that does all the managing and abstraction). So long as the unsafe parts are well-behaved with valid data AND the safe bits provably give only valid data (though it doesn't have to be provably correct), then the system is guaranteed to be stable.
You ideally want to split these up further. The safe bit should access an independent security kernel that handles all the access control, for example. The security kernel should be provably correct, which is a very different constraint than that imposed on other safe sections. Some sections of code should be able to self-replicate or migrate, to take advantage of resources rather than create bottlenecks. That would require greater emphasis on abstraction and adaptability, rather than validity or correctness.
No single language can handle this level of versatility. All languages obtain specific characteristics through constraints and freedoms. This means you need superior linkage between languages and optimization that takes into account that different paradigms are used to solve different problems and that there is insufficient data to optimize at compile time, that it has to be done at link time.
I've been pointing out the risks of router poisoning for, what, 17 years now.
Ever since the NSA started demonstrating router poisoning, it was only a matter of time before even the script kiddies figured it out.
I've been pointing out that the current rash of cryptocurrencies have excessive reliance on trust for the past year.
This sort of attack was inevitable. Bitcoin can plead semi-innocence because strong authentication is counter to strong anonymity. However, no router on the Internet should accept rogue announcements - even from three letter agencies - or accept unauthorized changes to the running configuration or active router tables.
MITM attacks are exceptionally dangerous and the hazards can only get worse.
IE is supported? When did this happen?
Last I heard, they reluctantly release updates when other parts of the OS beat them on bugs per kg of code. (They stopped measuring lines when someone googled the term.)
I wouldn't worry too much about Fukushima, per se.
It's the fact that the State Secret law passed days after the abandonment of the pacifist sections of the Constitution, at a time Japan desperately needs to get rid of masses of deadly radioactive material, that you need to concern yourself with.
The union of the two sets is not equal to the universal set of all nuclear power options.
Your argument is therefore irrelevant. Please meme and try again.
I can accept that, but with reservations.
A lack of timely information lies at the heart of all nuclear accidents, large and small. It would seem to follow that to improve safety, you'd want to improve on sensors - the number, resilience and backups.
They were using helicopters, IIRC, which raises the question of what cameras and other sensors could have been used on those helicopters to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.
Did they try firing simple rockets into the reactor core? Something capable of carrying a rad-hardened instrument package and a transmitter capable of being received by a helicopter. A camera, a spectrometer, a thermometer even. Something that would extend their knowledge of the problem.
If they failed to make any real effort to prepare an adequate sensor grid in advance and failed to take basic steps to minimize uncertainty, then blunders from a lack of knowledge can't be blamed simply on that lack of knowledge. It stops being one of those things and starts looking like a massive failure and disastrous incompetence.
Back when the accident happened, a significant number of Slashdotters were saying that no meltdown had occurred, that there was no significant structural damage, that no radioactive material would reach the sea, that the incident was overblown and that the plant would be largely still operational.
At this point, the discussion is not about how thoroughly the facility has been totalled but in what way.
I don't care that there was limited data available at the start, drawing conclusions from data you don't have (aka making things up) is not an excuse. If you don't know, don't pretend you do. It is because TEPCO pretended that they knew that the world lacks much-needed nuclear power. It is because TEPCO made things up rather than obtained data that an accident was possible. Don't be a TEPCO.
For those who defended the company, who downplayed the crisis as a nothing, who ignored any available information that didn't suit their preferred outcome, I am still awaiting an apology.
An apology for deliberate pollution of the debate
An apology for every post by every sceptical slashdotter modded to oblivion for the purpose of stifling debate
An apology to Slashdot itself for so abusing the moderating system
An apology for depriving the community of your own thought processes
An apology for not once, in all subsequent Slashdot debates, conceding that honest debate is superior to dishonest control
Maybe, by 2024, pride and conceit will be at levels where this is possible.
Assume they cracked the NSA backdoor default password and can now access everything on every computer not running a hardened operating system. In other words, everything, whether you change your passwords or not. Further, assume they have remote access via UEFI to every motherboard built in the past year.
You might as well, that level of access has been built into modern technology, if this group hasn't figured it out, someone will. Or maybe already has.
We live in an age where technology is insecure by design. You can either abandon all hope (my preferred option) or you can adjust your approach to not depend on external security.
It's 70% average. For the Democratic judges, it's much lower. For the Republican judges, you could probably dispense with them and use the code as it stands. Since the algorithm falls short of true AI, this clearly implies a lot about how decisions are made and what with.
Since you fail on the example you tried to parse, I suggest that although the theory is easy, personal prejudice always takes precedence over what is written.
I reject the argument that you should wait for the distro to release their own roll, except in those cases where custom patches are required to support the hardware or other software.
Instead, you should think about what it is you want, what you need to support, and what isn't working the way you like. Bring in only those external patches that actually do something for you, then configure and build the kernel.
Use hardware probes, the proc directory and whatever documentation you've not accidentally shredded to configure the kernel for what you actually have, not for generics that distros can get away with, and not excluding things the distros don't care about. The specific processor is a good place to start.
Configure latency according to what you specifically do. Microsecond latency on a wordprocessor is going to slow you down. Microsecond latency on X-Plane might be too long.
Disable everything you absolutely know won't be used between now and the next time you want to update.
None of this is hard, none of this is painful unless you have ADD, what you will get is a kernel that runs faster and smoother, in less memory, than any stock kernel provided by any distro out there.
Ok, now that I can agree with. I have also seen some astonishing claims by scientists - usually archaeologists operating outside of their subdomain. And, yes, I also get tired of misleading claims (regardless of who by).
Yes, the dynamics will be complex, because in a feedback loop you can't distinguish cause and effect. It's a loop. There are also many, many variables at play and we simply don't have the data to do a multi-way analysis of variance capable of proving what variables were significant. (And because slash-and-burn, agriculture and high population densities alter climate, which impacts all the different elements humanity depended on, there's multi-step loops involved and we can't be sure we know all of them or all of the other factors that are enmeshed.)
Absolutely right that correlation is not causation. If there's a strong correlation, then you can be confident of a relationship via a common system, but that's it.
The correct approach is to always try to prove a model wrong. So, in this case, the place to start would be to look at the genomes of H. Denisovia and H. Neandertal. We've evidence Neandertals were the first to paint caves, and possible evidence of sophisticated rituals and music. So if the testosterone model is correct, we aught to see testosterone levels drop in human populations that are hybrids, relative to non-hybrid humans. Otherwise, you need additional models, which violates the rule of not multiplying entities unnecessarily.
Doesn't work. Humans started having more time on their hands 1.8 million years ago, but this DECLINED as religion (50k years ago) and agriculture (20k years ago) arose. With the advent of full-time farming (7k years ago) free time almost entirely vanished.
Nomadic peoples had more free time than any sedentary society prior to the middle of the 20th century, and even then only for the gentry and the middle classes, where said middle classes have since almost entirely suffered extermination at the hands of the rich.
This is settled science. Archaeology, genetics and anthropology have actually been in agreement on some things. The theories being propounded attempt to fit a new observation into said settled science. There is nothing naive about building on an existing foundation.
If you don't like said foundation, do the leg work, write up a paper and make yourself famous. Otherwise, stick to merely disagreeing with it rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
I can believe that. But this was too good of an opportunity to recycle the meme. :)
(Seriously, I have Linux and one of the BSDs in a computer at all times. Which BSD depends on my mood.)
It needs to be funded the same way as the British BBC, by license fee, or the same was as for public utilities, tax.
It needs to have a charter guaranteeing payment in advance for the requested service and guaranteeing immunity for any actions provided within the terms of the charter. (If it's not chartered, you'll have every drug company and its brother suing you for publishing the suppressed papers Ben Goldacre keeps talking about.)
If it's not free, it won't have readers. Negative results aren't as desirable and readers will spend their time at PlosONE unless you've something compelling. If it doesn't pay for submission, researchers have greater financial incentive to keep shtum. That narrows your list of options.
Because research is expensive and governments are cheap. If a researcher has been humiliated a couple of times, publicly, their papers become worthless to the big names financing the work. The corporations cut funding, so the universities cut funding. The researcher has a job, technically, but no office, no lab, no work. Further, the job isn't guaranteed. Tenure can be withdrawn for gross malpractice. Being exposed as a fraud probably qualifies. So, no job either.
Tenure is poorly understood. It does not mean a job for life, or even for a fixed period. Tenure merely means that you can't be fired for political reasons. That's all. It guarantees that producing results that conflict with the views of management cannot lead to you facing consequences. You actually have to do something genuinely wrong.
Besides, mist of academia has disposed of tenure. Damn fools. If you want to reach new shores of discovery, you have to know that nobody with a vested interest in dragon beliefs can blow you out of the water. That guarantee no longer exists, which is why timidity and fraud have increased in recent years.
Fixed typo.
Agreed on study size, which is why social scientists look at meta-studies of hundreds of studies performed over as much as a decade, to eliminate the noise and other transient junk.
What they really need to do, though, is examine more hypotheses. You need 7-10 additional hypotheses, not including the null hypothesis, that are orthogonal to each other and to the hypothesis being tested. This would allow you to binary subdivide the problem space, not only showing what something isn't but also showing if the models being examined are founded on sound principles.
Have a journal, call it Debunker's Weekly if you want, that is divided evenly between papers on replication and papers showing negative correlation at the start. Pay authors a nominal amount, according to the thoroughness of the work as judged by referees. Provide the journal free to University libraries. Submit summaries of major stories to Slashdot, The Guardian, various Skeptical societies and other places likely to raise the extreme ire of dodgy researchers. In fact, the more ire, the better.
The journal doesn't have to last long. Just long enough to force bad researchers to improve or quit, force regular journals to publish a wider range of findings to avoid humiliation, and to correct dangerously erroneous beliefs. Since there must be a stockpile of unpublished papers of this sort, you should probably be able to get six or seven bumper editions out before anyone notices the dates, and maybe another two before the journal is sued into oblivion for defamation.
That would be plenty to make some major course corrections and to "out" a few frauds.
If X can do it, then Y will believe they do/should have the tight to do it.
In this case, the "it" is to file, index and retrieve aspects of your private life.
If a company, without authorization, can do so, then so can a government. If necessary, by outsourcing to said company.
If a government, without authorization, can do so, it is inevitable companies will contend the same.
Since organizations are increasingly interchangeable with governments (similar powers, similar immunities, similar thirst for conquest), this can only get worse.
What we need is a clear set of universal rules that apply to EVERYONE. And, no, I don't mean everyone except Blogger Joe, Multinational Monolith Inc, or the government of the right honourable Sir Twiddlethumbs III. And I believe, absolutely, that well-defined boundaries encapsulating privacy will be a cornerstone of any such rules, even if that smudges some of the paintwork around various definitions of freedom. Freedom is zero-sum, the Tragedy of the Commons is a real issue, and damnit I am NOT a lab rat! Now where's that cheese...
Ooops, sorry, wrong OS.
Microsoft is dead, Netcraft confirms it!
Schools will be paid in casino chips and their first task will be to find the correct casino.