I think Bitfrost is supposed to do this? It was never clear to me how extensive or how granular it was, or how mature it has become. Or for that matter if it would be deemed "acceptable" by users or developers. The later should ideally suck it up and "do it right", but if the users walk away there's still a social problem that needs more engineering.
I took two years of calculus in high school. I had to buy the same book twice. The publisher apparently was releasing a new version each year, and convincing teachers to use the new one. AFAICT high school calculus is not a rapidly changing field, and the identical chapters in the book bore this out. However, what did change were the numbered problems at the end of each chapter. Homework was along the lines of "Chapter 12, problems 1-4, 6 and 10-13". If you did not have that year's version of the book, you wouldn't do the right problems. $60 (20+ years ago), spent twice. I presume the school bookstore took a cut via normal markup.
The car is basically leaking drug particles all over the place, which is glaringly obvious if you have the wetware to detect it.
It would seem reasonable to consider the dog a "deployed detector", just as the X-ray machine is a "deployed detector". The dog is a living organism, but I presume (?) it's not considered an Officer of the Peace. If the officer had the "wetware" to see in the X-ray band (or other relevant part of the spectrum) he'd easily be able to see any contraband detectable by the van.
I have Ubuntu running on three systems at home and as my primary platform at work. I am generally happy with it... except when it comes to upgrading. It seems incapable of managing even simple customizations. The lowest hanging fruit that needs to be plucked is network configuration. At both work and home I am using static IPs. The network management wizard (or whatever it's called) keeps trying to overwrite the interfaces file; I eventually remember how to suppress this via google but it's usually an hour wasted. Worse, during transition to a new version, Ubuntu thoughtfully notes that a variety of configuration files have changed (eg gtetris or some such) proffers a diff, and asks if I want to keep the old one or use a new one. Then it merrily runs off and overwrites all the network configuration information without so much as a how-do-you-do. I was upgrading from 9.04 to 10.04* this morning, and had to recover nameserver and gateway info from a colleague - all I had was loopback setup.
Video and audio always seems to be an issue, too. I had to do a fresh install at home because the system couldn't cope with a change from Nvidia to ATI video chipset, and stopped running anything with OpenGL. Tomorrow I'm wiping the work system with a fresh 10.10 because the Nvidia drivers (pick one of several) are now not being recognized, and even if I get X up with generic drivers the mouse and keyboard are no longer functional in an X session (such that I can't even get out to a shell with Ctrl-Alt-F1), even though the KB is fine prior to X. The last time I ran through an upgrade I had been able to get twinview working after spending a profanity filled day, but audio was somehow collateral damage, even though I didn't muck with anything obviously related to it. I could spend another day pasting bits of my logs into google but would rather spend half a day installing cleanly and restoring my home directory. Ironically I was feeling smug about my Linux platforms having just done this a month ago as a matter of routine Windows maintenance.
* My plan was to stick with 9.04 but I really need Thunderbird 3 to use a javascript filter plugin to compensate for the horror that is our corporate spam "filter", and the non-standard TB3 install suddenly got upset over an updated flash pluggin "shared" (??) with Firefox. I naively thought it would be easier to just bite the bullet and upgrade to a version where TB3 was part of the default install.
Don't you mean you hope this is a gimmick? If it's not a gimmick, then they're gone and you can't make your planned purchases. I hope it's a gimmick, though it will be irritating if it is. I will continue to buy product from them so long as they stand behind "100% DRM free", and so long as they provide full downloads (not downloads of downloaders, which cease to function once they issue such an announcement that is not a gimmick).
Don't you mean you hope it's a gimmick? If it's "for real", then you can't make any of your planned purchases. If it's a gimmick, then you'll be irritated, but can at least resume making purchases. I hope it's a gimmick, although it will irritate me. So long as they continue to be "100% DRM free" and allow full download of the product (not download of a downloader that will cease to function the day such a message is not a gimmick) I will continue to buy product from them.
Once his captors were connected to Twitter they would simply freeze motionless for several hours, two or three times a day. He merely had to wait for one of these moments and then just walk away.
eg "Pat.Pend. 4852294213". I haven't looked recently but used to see that terminology on all sorts of products. The implication was the company was confident of gaining the patent and began production while the filing was still processing. IANAL, but it seems the phrase does not claim patent protection, it claims they expect to get one. It warns a potential infringer to check the patent to see if the product is protected, but makes no claim as to its current protection. For all you know, they never got it in the first place, and it is clearly making a conditional statement in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_pending#United_States
I don't know if it would be considered fraudulent to claim your patent was pending when you in fact already had it. Seems innocuous, but since it was technically not true may cause problems.
I wish I had the link to one example: there's one consulting company whose founder methinks writes a blog, the latter often featuring a rather hot, real engineer babe who knows Mandarin, and kicks ass at troubleshooting SMT production issues. My browser history doesn't go that far, otherwise I'd dig it up.
Are you possibly referring to Bunnie's Blog? AFAIK she's an engineer that works for Chumby. She's posted some interesting stuff on manufacturing in Asia, including jaw-dropping videos of high-throughput circuit assembly (by humans, not robots).
The link to the artist's Flickr page is shown in the article summary, but it's handy to view with HiveMind, which shows a slew of large thumbs per page and default sorts by "interestingness".
It's going to be trivial to defeat these. Just fire up the Giant Flying Blade of Doom and rather than picking a flight path parallel to the lines, plot a perpendicular course. Jump to 3:58 to see how MicroPlane removal would ultimately be effected.
The other advantage is that once the power-line perching Cessna is developed, the system is equally effective
Prior to the convention the US (through Martin-Marietta / GE) developed the Stingray laser system. My recollection was that it was man portable, but FAS says it's mounted on a Bradley AFV. It's putatively designed to disable enemy sensors; it has a scan mode where it sweeps low intensity lasers around and looks for back scatter from optical systems. When that occurs, it illuminates the source with much more powerful radiation, to disable the optics. Thing is, if the optics in question have a human retina at the far end rather than a CCD, it still serves it's functional role of "disabling the sensor". I presume that the system was shelved in '86 because of the protocol mentioned above, but am not sure.
Anyway, a risk of "less than lethal" systems is that it drops the activation energy for their use. If something like the Stingray were deployed, I'd think it would get co-opted for use in roles beyond just disabling range finders. Another link with more blinding systems.
Being a scientist, I would ask for the tests that show GM products to have a low risk of causing harm to the human body.
Could you clarify how these tests would not be a proof of the null hypothesis? How do you define "low"? I share your distrust of corporations, but asking every product to demonstrate that it's never harmful is obviously impossible. "Low risk" is going to be subjective; more helpful would be, say, the number of people in a study, the time followed, a difference in overall mortality and the statistical significance of that difference. I think most people would agree that GM foods are not dramatically harmful (eg drops of life expectancy by decades), so presumably to have the statistical power to detect "low risks" we're talking about a large (100s? 1000s?), long (years? 10s of years?) controlled (don't get to eat what you want) study. People tend not to sign up for those, so if that is your level of comfort you're probably just asking GM products to be shelved. I recognize that is a request/demand for many people.
The same issue can be applied to many other technological concerns; cell phone radiation, high voltage power lines, plasticizers, etc. Some of those have been addressed by epidemiology (eg HV lines / transformers), and some have shown statistical risk in animal models (bisphenol A). You have requested human data, though, and as mentioned above I don't think you can get adequately powered controlled groups of people for food consumption like you can for power lines or transformers, where you can at least segregate groups by proximity to EM fields at the place of residence. If you have a specific substance you suspect of causing harm, you can try to correlate presence of the substance to risk (for example, with, bisphenol A). If you could find a distinct chemical marker related to the GM product (ie a substance that remains in the human long enough to be sampled), then I think you could do a nicely powered study for even reasonably low risk. It's not clear what this correlating substance would be, though; I don't think the transgene, in either DNA, RNA or protein form, would be detectable in a human consuming the food.
While preparing for the Trinity test in the Manhattan Project there was serious concern that the test might actually ignite the atmosphere (ie, all the atmosphere):
Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei. Bethe calculated that it could not happen. However, a report co-authored by Teller showed that ignition of the atmosphere was not impossible, just unlikely
Fortunately, Bethe was right (at least for all tests performed to date). Teller by all accounts was a genius and critical to the development of a functional fusion weapon, however. I don't have a good feeling how seriously the concern was initially taken, but it seems to have been dismissed with frightening swiftness.
I'll enthusiastically second this. I have been running FreeNAS solidly for 2 months now. I have configured 5 x 1.5TB drives in RAID-Z2 configuration. That gives me 4.01Tb of storage, allowing for two simultaneous drive failures without data loss. My final build uses an ECS 945GCD-M(1.0) Atom 330 Micro ATX board with an Intel 1Gb PCI card; I had a lot of trouble getting the network working with a pure intel board (which did NOT have an Intel network controller on it, GRR). While a highly regarded SATA controller worked with the original Intel MoBo, it didn't with my current one, but a cheaper one does. I'm using a 400MW 80 Plus PSU, and Kill-a-Watt says I pull about 75W total while running, motherboard reports that it's running at about 30C. I have 4Gb of RAM, of which maybe 30% gets used, and CPU seems to be around 10-20% generally. Discounting the hardware that didn't work, it comes to about $1000. I also invested in $130 of UPS (which brought it through a 5 second mini-blackout), and a Gb switch. I get sustained 30-40MB/sec, both to/from Vista and Ubuntu systems over a wired Cat-5e home network; far more than needed for use as a HTPC.
ZFS is stunning. I was sure I was missing something when I set it up but - it's - just - that - easy. It's like encountering a bullet train after spending two decades using hand-drawn sledges to get around. Copy-on-write, self-healing, snapshots as easy as sneezing. RAID configuration that would fit into a Twitter message. Hot spares, automatic re-silvering when adding or removing disks. It's about 4 tech levels above what I'm conversant in, which does make me nervous; I have not tried to recover from a drive failure yet. I'd also like to move the OS off the ancient 30Gb boot drive and onto a flash disk, but want to make sure my tertiary backups (mostly external USB drives) are *really* up-to-date. FreeNAS allows export and import of configuration XML files, so hopefully that will be relatively easy.
I did learn that while you don't need to explicitly format the drives, if you have used them for a prior ZFS system you should wipe them before reusing them. I lost three weekends of my life to trying to configure OpenSolaris (the time would have been better spent getting femur piercings). In the process, I briefly had a four drive ZFS zpool. When I tried to build a pool with those plus one more in FreeNAS, Bad Things Happened. I had to use DBAN to clear off the drives, after which everything went fine. I earlier tried FreeBSD, but it refused to boot from a USB CD with the EliteGroup motherboard. Ah, and I did need to modify vm.kmem_size and vm.kmem_size_max, I think both to 4G. That can be done from the FreeNAS config page (99% of FreeNAS management is done from a webpage, similar to router configuration).
Wise up, people. That's not a telescope, it's a wave motion gun. Just compare to its predecessor, Space Telescope Yamato - although the main weapon has been moved from a spinal mount to a giant deck emplacement, they're using the same hull layout and even an identical color scheme.
Agree. I'll also add that our best defense against another Holocaust-scale tragedy is open, high-quality information throughout the world, and there are vigorous efforts by many forces to move in the other direction. Access to reliable, complete information in many ways is more important than a formal democratic foundation; even in a totalitarian state I have the option to rise up in revolt when I learn things are bad, but can sit idly by in a democracy if I am cocooned in pleasant misinformation.
Suppressing bad information can go a long way to placating an oppressed population, as in North Korea. Skewing or outright fabrication of information can lead even a modern population to provide the democratic majority needed for outright war, as in the leadup to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
So no, I also don't feel secure from another Hitler. If information control is fully ceded to the powerful, even a well intentioned and "educated" population could drop the world into another maelstrom.
I would have been fine with allowing the airlines to resume flying if they had said "We've done our own tests, conditions are fine for flying. As evidence of our confidence, we have secured bonds worth $20 million for every passenger airborne at any given time, and if any of our aircraft crash during this time, we will release this money without delay or question to the relatives of the deceased."
Of course that didn't happen, and of course even if it did it would be a near certainty that any ensuing loss would be eaten by the government (ie taxpayers). With corporations, I only trust them if significant money is on the line. If they assure us that something is 100% safe, then they should have no problem agreeing to massive financial compensation in the 0% chance that they were wrong. At a higher probability-impact level, they should be held to this even for non-zero-but-exceptionally-tiny likelihoods.
Reference to The Forge of God, for those unfamiliar with it. Postulates a universe with three types of civilizations; Sterilizers, in the phraseology used above, naive civilizations that reveal themselves to the sterilizers and are annihilated, and then a very loose consortium of non-Sterilizers who band together for mutual defense. This third category hides from its own members, effectively using anonymous communication to coordinate defense and response to the sterilizers. The later group is actually revealed in his follow-on novel, Anvil of Stars.
Next time this happens yell out to an imaginary colleague somewhere on the other side of the cube farm "Frank! Hey Frank! Were you able to purge all the trojans from our latest release? Bob needs to decide if we can fix this quietly or if we have to inform our customers."
Slashdot Mirror
I think Bitfrost is supposed to do this? It was never clear to me how extensive or how granular it was, or how mature it has become. Or for that matter if it would be deemed "acceptable" by users or developers. The later should ideally suck it up and "do it right", but if the users walk away there's still a social problem that needs more engineering.
I took two years of calculus in high school. I had to buy the same book twice. The publisher apparently was releasing a new version each year, and convincing teachers to use the new one. AFAICT high school calculus is not a rapidly changing field, and the identical chapters in the book bore this out. However, what did change were the numbered problems at the end of each chapter. Homework was along the lines of "Chapter 12, problems 1-4, 6 and 10-13". If you did not have that year's version of the book, you wouldn't do the right problems. $60 (20+ years ago), spent twice. I presume the school bookstore took a cut via normal markup.
The car is basically leaking drug particles all over the place, which is glaringly obvious if you have the wetware to detect it.
It would seem reasonable to consider the dog a "deployed detector", just as the X-ray machine is a "deployed detector". The dog is a living organism, but I presume (?) it's not considered an Officer of the Peace. If the officer had the "wetware" to see in the X-ray band (or other relevant part of the spectrum) he'd easily be able to see any contraband detectable by the van.
I have Ubuntu running on three systems at home and as my primary platform at work. I am generally happy with it... except when it comes to upgrading. It seems incapable of managing even simple customizations. The lowest hanging fruit that needs to be plucked is network configuration. At both work and home I am using static IPs. The network management wizard (or whatever it's called) keeps trying to overwrite the interfaces file; I eventually remember how to suppress this via google but it's usually an hour wasted. Worse, during transition to a new version, Ubuntu thoughtfully notes that a variety of configuration files have changed (eg gtetris or some such) proffers a diff, and asks if I want to keep the old one or use a new one. Then it merrily runs off and overwrites all the network configuration information without so much as a how-do-you-do. I was upgrading from 9.04 to 10.04* this morning, and had to recover nameserver and gateway info from a colleague - all I had was loopback setup.
Video and audio always seems to be an issue, too. I had to do a fresh install at home because the system couldn't cope with a change from Nvidia to ATI video chipset, and stopped running anything with OpenGL. Tomorrow I'm wiping the work system with a fresh 10.10 because the Nvidia drivers (pick one of several) are now not being recognized, and even if I get X up with generic drivers the mouse and keyboard are no longer functional in an X session (such that I can't even get out to a shell with Ctrl-Alt-F1), even though the KB is fine prior to X. The last time I ran through an upgrade I had been able to get twinview working after spending a profanity filled day, but audio was somehow collateral damage, even though I didn't muck with anything obviously related to it. I could spend another day pasting bits of my logs into google but would rather spend half a day installing cleanly and restoring my home directory. Ironically I was feeling smug about my Linux platforms having just done this a month ago as a matter of routine Windows maintenance.
* My plan was to stick with 9.04 but I really need Thunderbird 3 to use a javascript filter plugin to compensate for the horror that is our corporate spam "filter", and the non-standard TB3 install suddenly got upset over an updated flash pluggin "shared" (??) with Firefox. I naively thought it would be easier to just bite the bullet and upgrade to a version where TB3 was part of the default install.
Your HR goons know how to use grep? Eek. That makes me think of velociraptors that know how to open doors.
Just give in and use Shady URL instead. For example, link to this article: http://5z8.info/5waystokillwithamelon_f9j6f_hitler.
Thid is whu I usw a dynakicly genwrated captcja fomt. Supdr-secire, witr onky minor typo skde effrcts.
Don't you mean you hope this is a gimmick? If it's not a gimmick, then they're gone and you can't make your planned purchases. I hope it's a gimmick, though it will be irritating if it is. I will continue to buy product from them so long as they stand behind "100% DRM free", and so long as they provide full downloads (not downloads of downloaders, which cease to function once they issue such an announcement that is not a gimmick).
Don't you mean you hope it's a gimmick? If it's "for real", then you can't make any of your planned purchases. If it's a gimmick, then you'll be irritated, but can at least resume making purchases. I hope it's a gimmick, although it will irritate me. So long as they continue to be "100% DRM free" and allow full download of the product (not download of a downloader that will cease to function the day such a message is not a gimmick) I will continue to buy product from them.
Once his captors were connected to Twitter they would simply freeze motionless for several hours, two or three times a day. He merely had to wait for one of these moments and then just walk away.
eg "Pat.Pend. 4852294213". I haven't looked recently but used to see that terminology on all sorts of products. The implication was the company was confident of gaining the patent and began production while the filing was still processing. IANAL, but it seems the phrase does not claim patent protection, it claims they expect to get one. It warns a potential infringer to check the patent to see if the product is protected, but makes no claim as to its current protection. For all you know, they never got it in the first place, and it is clearly making a conditional statement in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_pending#United_States
I don't know if it would be considered fraudulent to claim your patent was pending when you in fact already had it. Seems innocuous, but since it was technically not true may cause problems.
Google Maps
I wish I had the link to one example: there's one consulting company whose founder methinks writes a blog, the latter often featuring a rather hot, real engineer babe who knows Mandarin, and kicks ass at troubleshooting SMT production issues. My browser history doesn't go that far, otherwise I'd dig it up.
Are you possibly referring to Bunnie's Blog? AFAIK she's an engineer that works for Chumby. She's posted some interesting stuff on manufacturing in Asia, including jaw-dropping videos of high-throughput circuit assembly (by humans, not robots).
The link to the artist's Flickr page is shown in the article summary, but it's handy to view with HiveMind, which shows a slew of large thumbs per page and default sorts by "interestingness".
It's going to be trivial to defeat these. Just fire up the Giant Flying Blade of Doom and rather than picking a flight path parallel to the lines, plot a perpendicular course. Jump to 3:58 to see how MicroPlane removal would ultimately be effected.
The other advantage is that once the power-line perching Cessna is developed, the system is equally effective
Prior to the convention the US (through Martin-Marietta / GE) developed the Stingray laser system. My recollection was that it was man portable, but FAS says it's mounted on a Bradley AFV. It's putatively designed to disable enemy sensors; it has a scan mode where it sweeps low intensity lasers around and looks for back scatter from optical systems. When that occurs, it illuminates the source with much more powerful radiation, to disable the optics. Thing is, if the optics in question have a human retina at the far end rather than a CCD, it still serves it's functional role of "disabling the sensor". I presume that the system was shelved in '86 because of the protocol mentioned above, but am not sure.
Anyway, a risk of "less than lethal" systems is that it drops the activation energy for their use. If something like the Stingray were deployed, I'd think it would get co-opted for use in roles beyond just disabling range finders. Another link with more blinding systems.
Being a scientist, I would ask for the tests that show GM products to have a low risk of causing harm to the human body.
Could you clarify how these tests would not be a proof of the null hypothesis? How do you define "low"? I share your distrust of corporations, but asking every product to demonstrate that it's never harmful is obviously impossible. "Low risk" is going to be subjective; more helpful would be, say, the number of people in a study, the time followed, a difference in overall mortality and the statistical significance of that difference. I think most people would agree that GM foods are not dramatically harmful (eg drops of life expectancy by decades), so presumably to have the statistical power to detect "low risks" we're talking about a large (100s? 1000s?), long (years? 10s of years?) controlled (don't get to eat what you want) study. People tend not to sign up for those, so if that is your level of comfort you're probably just asking GM products to be shelved. I recognize that is a request/demand for many people.
The same issue can be applied to many other technological concerns; cell phone radiation, high voltage power lines, plasticizers, etc. Some of those have been addressed by epidemiology (eg HV lines / transformers), and some have shown statistical risk in animal models (bisphenol A). You have requested human data, though, and as mentioned above I don't think you can get adequately powered controlled groups of people for food consumption like you can for power lines or transformers, where you can at least segregate groups by proximity to EM fields at the place of residence. If you have a specific substance you suspect of causing harm, you can try to correlate presence of the substance to risk (for example, with, bisphenol A). If you could find a distinct chemical marker related to the GM product (ie a substance that remains in the human long enough to be sampled), then I think you could do a nicely powered study for even reasonably low risk. It's not clear what this correlating substance would be, though; I don't think the transgene, in either DNA, RNA or protein form, would be detectable in a human consuming the food.
Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei. Bethe calculated that it could not happen. However, a report co-authored by Teller showed that ignition of the atmosphere was not impossible, just unlikely
Fortunately, Bethe was right (at least for all tests performed to date). Teller by all accounts was a genius and critical to the development of a functional fusion weapon, however. I don't have a good feeling how seriously the concern was initially taken, but it seems to have been dismissed with frightening swiftness.
I'll enthusiastically second this. I have been running FreeNAS solidly for 2 months now. I have configured 5 x 1.5TB drives in RAID-Z2 configuration. That gives me 4.01Tb of storage, allowing for two simultaneous drive failures without data loss. My final build uses an ECS 945GCD-M(1.0) Atom 330 Micro ATX board with an Intel 1Gb PCI card; I had a lot of trouble getting the network working with a pure intel board (which did NOT have an Intel network controller on it, GRR). While a highly regarded SATA controller worked with the original Intel MoBo, it didn't with my current one, but a cheaper one does. I'm using a 400MW 80 Plus PSU, and Kill-a-Watt says I pull about 75W total while running, motherboard reports that it's running at about 30C. I have 4Gb of RAM, of which maybe 30% gets used, and CPU seems to be around 10-20% generally. Discounting the hardware that didn't work, it comes to about $1000. I also invested in $130 of UPS (which brought it through a 5 second mini-blackout), and a Gb switch. I get sustained 30-40MB/sec, both to/from Vista and Ubuntu systems over a wired Cat-5e home network; far more than needed for use as a HTPC.
ZFS is stunning. I was sure I was missing something when I set it up but - it's - just - that - easy. It's like encountering a bullet train after spending two decades using hand-drawn sledges to get around. Copy-on-write, self-healing, snapshots as easy as sneezing. RAID configuration that would fit into a Twitter message. Hot spares, automatic re-silvering when adding or removing disks. It's about 4 tech levels above what I'm conversant in, which does make me nervous; I have not tried to recover from a drive failure yet. I'd also like to move the OS off the ancient 30Gb boot drive and onto a flash disk, but want to make sure my tertiary backups (mostly external USB drives) are *really* up-to-date. FreeNAS allows export and import of configuration XML files, so hopefully that will be relatively easy.
I did learn that while you don't need to explicitly format the drives, if you have used them for a prior ZFS system you should wipe them before reusing them. I lost three weekends of my life to trying to configure OpenSolaris (the time would have been better spent getting femur piercings). In the process, I briefly had a four drive ZFS zpool. When I tried to build a pool with those plus one more in FreeNAS, Bad Things Happened. I had to use DBAN to clear off the drives, after which everything went fine. I earlier tried FreeBSD, but it refused to boot from a USB CD with the EliteGroup motherboard. Ah, and I did need to modify vm.kmem_size and vm.kmem_size_max, I think both to 4G. That can be done from the FreeNAS config page (99% of FreeNAS management is done from a webpage, similar to router configuration).
Wise up, people. That's not a telescope, it's a wave motion gun. Just compare to its predecessor, Space Telescope Yamato - although the main weapon has been moved from a spinal mount to a giant deck emplacement, they're using the same hull layout and even an identical color scheme.
You can never say never.
Agree. I'll also add that our best defense against another Holocaust-scale tragedy is open, high-quality information throughout the world, and there are vigorous efforts by many forces to move in the other direction. Access to reliable, complete information in many ways is more important than a formal democratic foundation; even in a totalitarian state I have the option to rise up in revolt when I learn things are bad, but can sit idly by in a democracy if I am cocooned in pleasant misinformation.
Suppressing bad information can go a long way to placating an oppressed population, as in North Korea. Skewing or outright fabrication of information can lead even a modern population to provide the democratic majority needed for outright war, as in the leadup to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
So no, I also don't feel secure from another Hitler. If information control is fully ceded to the powerful, even a well intentioned and "educated" population could drop the world into another maelstrom.
I would have been fine with allowing the airlines to resume flying if they had said "We've done our own tests, conditions are fine for flying. As evidence of our confidence, we have secured bonds worth $20 million for every passenger airborne at any given time, and if any of our aircraft crash during this time, we will release this money without delay or question to the relatives of the deceased."
Of course that didn't happen, and of course even if it did it would be a near certainty that any ensuing loss would be eaten by the government (ie taxpayers). With corporations, I only trust them if significant money is on the line. If they assure us that something is 100% safe, then they should have no problem agreeing to massive financial compensation in the 0% chance that they were wrong. At a higher probability-impact level, they should be held to this even for non-zero-but-exceptionally-tiny likelihoods.
Reference to The Forge of God, for those unfamiliar with it. Postulates a universe with three types of civilizations; Sterilizers, in the phraseology used above, naive civilizations that reveal themselves to the sterilizers and are annihilated, and then a very loose consortium of non-Sterilizers who band together for mutual defense. This third category hides from its own members, effectively using anonymous communication to coordinate defense and response to the sterilizers. The later group is actually revealed in his follow-on novel, Anvil of Stars.
Next time this happens yell out to an imaginary colleague somewhere on the other side of the cube farm "Frank! Hey Frank! Were you able to purge all the trojans from our latest release? Bob needs to decide if we can fix this quietly or if we have to inform our customers."
The role playing game Paranoia? Sounds like it at least.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_%28role-playing_game%29