No need. It's been so heavily mythologised, only historians seem to know what it was actually about. Lots of people have somehow come to believe it was a big protest against whatever they dislike.
This is especially amusing in the case of the Tea Party, who took their name from it and believe it to be a protest against high taxation. Taxes were involved - but the key change in tax law that started it was a tax exemption. The British passed a tax on tea, but granted an exemption to the politically well-connected East India Company. This allowed them to undercut independent (And especially colonial) shipping companies on price and drive them out of business. The tax itself wasn't the issue, it was the obvious manner in which a British company had used their lobbying influence to get laws passed to their own advantage at the expense of rivals without such influence. The protester's cause had more in common with Operation Wall Street than the Tea Party movement.
Charisma without wisdom is especially dangerous. It leads to people who are consistently wrong, but manage to convince others they are right. That's how you end up with a Jenny McCarthy - someone who can spout easily-disproven falsehoods on a topic upon which they have no qualifications, and still be believed by a large number of people.
I'd ask my sister, the qualified environmental scientist, except she is busy washing her uniform after another day cleaning out the cages at a pet-care company. There is just no work to be had in that field.
My own career dead-ended at Helldesk, but that's largely due to my lack of ambition. The only way up from here is into management, a place I have absolutely no desire to be, and I'm not willing to leave my current hard-obtained job because of convenient transport and a good team of co-workers. Even if it doesn't actually pay enough to live off of.
Yes, but not by much. You let it divide for a while, then pull one cell out to sequence - by that point it's got enough cells that the loss of one makes no difference, it heals perfectly. This is already an established procedure used for parents who have a serious genetic condition and wish to ensure that it isn't passed on. It's only a little more complicated than IVF - and it really is just IVF with one extra step.
BNW achieved an interesting thing: It described a dystopia which actually functioned very well. Minimal crime, no unemployment, high standard of living, a happy population with a high amount of free time for recreation, and a minimum of coercion. Actually seemed like rather a pleasant place to live. It took a contrast with a 'savage' to highlight the oppressive aspects, and even then those were shown to be only oppressive by our own standards - to one raised in the culture, our objections would seem silly. I can certainly envision worse futures.
With current selective pressure, Marching Morons does seem inevitable given enough time. But humans are a very slow species to evolve - twenty year or so reproductive cycle, very large population. Chances are circumstances will change before natural selection can have any major effect.
The US/UK extradition agreement is not symmetrical. The US need only ask nicely and we are supposed to turn over the accused, while the UK would need to provide evidence sufficient for conviction to even ask for someone to be extradited from the US.
Don't be quite so sure. Around the middle ages, fat was attractive. Fat showed a person had plenty of food, a sign of economic success. A bit of fat and some very wide hips on a woman marked them as well-suited to bearing children, which was a prime concern.
If you're fiddling with genes, a good option might be to try to weaken that craving for fat and sugar.
Science tells us that life began about four billion years ago, and hasn't ended since. An individual doesn't 'come to life' at some point. The egg is alive, the sperm is alive, the zygote is alive - it never stops being alive. Science can pinpoint a few key points in the process, like the formation of a new uniqueish* individual genetic code, but that's all. A genome is not an individual.
The black thing is something of an annoyance right now. Due to simple economic correlations, the rate of elective abortion in the US black population is a fair bit higher than the US non-black population. Blacks have on average lower incomes and lower educational level (Due to some historic injustices which had a lasting effect) - that means they have a higher rate of unplanned pregnancy, and are less likely to be able to then keep their surprise baby. A well-off white couple can fit it into their lives, a black couple on the poverty line with both parents working to make ends meet cannot. Nothing really surprising there, until politics gets involved: A lot of pro-life campaigners have noticed this correlation too and, with brazen disregard for the first rule of statistics*, proclaim this to be proof that the 'abortion lobby' is out to finish the mission of Hitler and exterminate the lesser races. Just throw in a few carefully mined quotes from key figures in the history of the sexual revolution** and you've a campaign that can exploit racial tensions to be as effective as it is idiotic.
*Correlation is not causation. **Yes, Sanger was a racist. This was before desegregation: Everyone was a racist, and she was a lot better than most.
Favorable genetics may be required to create a great scientist, but they are not in themselves sufficient. They also need the life-forming events that direct them towards a career in science, and access to an education system or academic associations that will provide the environment to develop that potential intellect, and a significant amount of luck.
America is a de facto two party system. A vote for the republicans is a vote against the democrats, and vice versa. Third parties and independence have only a small presence in state politics, and a negligible presence at the national level.
It could work to prevent the inheritance of certain very well-defined conditions. Huntington's being a perfect example, but not the only candidate. If you could get access and acceptance of the technologies wide enough it would be possible to be rid of them forever. Unfortunately a certain Mr Hitler ruined the reputation of eugenics forever by misapplying the ideas, and now any such proposal would be politically impossible to support - and even aside from that, it would face heavy opposition from religious groups who still believe that worshiping sky-daddy gives them a moral authority above everyone else.
But W also used the influence the commerce department has to block the.xxx domain name for political reasons, because the social conservatives were afraid it would legitimise pornography and make it more difficult to ban..xxx is still a stupid idea, but not for that reason.
The firewire technique is very good against full-disk encryption. If police find the computer turned on and encrypted disk mounted, that means the key must be in RAM. Compromise the RAM, the key will be in there somewhere. It has to be done on site, because the moment you turn the computer off to move it the key will be lost. I still stress that this isn't something that would be available for investigating run-of-the-mill criminals though. Maybe if you're suspected of running Silk Road.
Look at the odd XXX replacements. Why overwrite commands with garbage? That's obvious: In order to maintain byte positions, and thus TCP sequence numbers, allowing for it to be done via DPI rather than (more expensive and noticeable) conventional proxying.
If I had to speculate why, I'd wonder if they want to block encryption in order to monitor emails for advertising purposes, or possibly have been given some form of secret 'tell no-one' warrant that demands they disable encryption because some unspecified user is under investigation.
The tools exist. The CSI fantasy crap is that you'll ever be on the recieving end, unless you manage to do something that threatens national security or run a criminal empire. But if they were going to be used, they'd be used in conjunction with the no-knock everyone GET ON THE FLOOR NOW! raid in an attempt to get everyone arrested before they can make a dive for the power cord.
Buy business. Just about all PCs/laptops aimed at business buyers come with Windows 7, because the number of businesses using Windows 8 is negligable.
Most business buyers will immediately wipe the system and install from their own site-licensed image anyway though, which does make the lack of blank systems seem a little suspicious. Doubtless Microsoft is offering some very sweet deals to OEMs if they'll refrain from selling OS-less computers.
Bitlocker under standard settings uses the TPM for key management. You have only the manufacturer's* word that the TPM is free of backdoors, as it's a hardware component. That's why truecrypt doesn't use it.
And go looking for more crimes to charge you with.
There is no such thing as an innocent person. Everyone, without exception, has committed crimes. Lots of crimes. The only difference between an innocent person and a criminal is that the criminal has done something serious enough to bother prosecuting.
Password cracking does scale perfectly. It's the textbook example of a task well-suited to paralllisation.
I imagine the NSA's cracking system is based on ASICs, rather than conventional processors. A couple of racks full of ASICs for each of the commonly encountered hashes or cryptosystems, very densely packed. Look at bitcoin miners to see the reason: Compared to an ASIC brute-forcing truncated SHA256, any conventional processor is simply negligable.
Police do have access to tools for countering the off switch. Devices that connect via firewire DMA to dump the contents of RAM and thus any keys within, or warm boot attack tools. But such things are specialised and expensive, and will not be deployed to the arrest of a run-of-the-mill criminal. They would have to have reason to suspect you of a serious technology-related crime before going to the trouble of sending a digital forensics specialist and their toolbox to the scene.
Stopping you hitting the 'off' switch is a long established issue - destruction of evidence has been an issue for decades, with people burning papers and flushing their drugs stash down the toilet as soon as they see the police coming. The counter-strategy is popular, but effective: Speed. If the police have reason to believe you may destroy evidence (Which is really common practice in all drugs related crimes) they get a no-knock warrant which allows them to smash your door down at four in the morning while everyone is in bed, charge into the house and force everyone to the ground at gunpoint. Done properly it means they can get their arrests done before anyone has the chance to destroy evidence, though many critics claim the method is heavily overused in the US, and there have been many incidents where people have mistaken the police assault for a robbery, grabbed for their gun and been swiftly killed in self defence by police officers.
Perhaps there is a deeper problem to look into here. Not the victim, nor the leaker. Look at the motivation for all parties involved.
Then look at the massive outcry, and the rapidity of dissemination, and the media circus.
Here's the odd thing: It's just nudity. Everyone is naked beneath their clothes, and it isn't at all difficult to find some naked pictures for the curious. I could find a few thousand of them with one google search. Yet somehow, the sight of a person undressed is something so sacred that people will feel violated just for being seen, while others will go to great lengths to catch a glimpse of the right individual.
This should not be a big deal. Everyone should be able to just shrug it off, including the victim - who hasn't actually been directly harmed in any way. What harm they experience doesn't come from people seeing the images, but their own reaction.
Slashdot Mirror
No need. It's been so heavily mythologised, only historians seem to know what it was actually about. Lots of people have somehow come to believe it was a big protest against whatever they dislike.
This is especially amusing in the case of the Tea Party, who took their name from it and believe it to be a protest against high taxation. Taxes were involved - but the key change in tax law that started it was a tax exemption. The British passed a tax on tea, but granted an exemption to the politically well-connected East India Company. This allowed them to undercut independent (And especially colonial) shipping companies on price and drive them out of business. The tax itself wasn't the issue, it was the obvious manner in which a British company had used their lobbying influence to get laws passed to their own advantage at the expense of rivals without such influence. The protester's cause had more in common with Operation Wall Street than the Tea Party movement.
Bicycle Repair Man.
Just-Us League.
You could trawl the indy comics for ideas, plenty of really obscure publishers who'd sell the rights for fifty bucks and a shot at fame.
Charisma without wisdom is especially dangerous. It leads to people who are consistently wrong, but manage to convince others they are right. That's how you end up with a Jenny McCarthy - someone who can spout easily-disproven falsehoods on a topic upon which they have no qualifications, and still be believed by a large number of people.
Ask any smart person: The stupid people are a lot happier.
I'd ask my sister, the qualified environmental scientist, except she is busy washing her uniform after another day cleaning out the cages at a pet-care company. There is just no work to be had in that field.
My own career dead-ended at Helldesk, but that's largely due to my lack of ambition. The only way up from here is into management, a place I have absolutely no desire to be, and I'm not willing to leave my current hard-obtained job because of convenient transport and a good team of co-workers. Even if it doesn't actually pay enough to live off of.
Yes, but not by much. You let it divide for a while, then pull one cell out to sequence - by that point it's got enough cells that the loss of one makes no difference, it heals perfectly. This is already an established procedure used for parents who have a serious genetic condition and wish to ensure that it isn't passed on. It's only a little more complicated than IVF - and it really is just IVF with one extra step.
BNW achieved an interesting thing: It described a dystopia which actually functioned very well. Minimal crime, no unemployment, high standard of living, a happy population with a high amount of free time for recreation, and a minimum of coercion. Actually seemed like rather a pleasant place to live. It took a contrast with a 'savage' to highlight the oppressive aspects, and even then those were shown to be only oppressive by our own standards - to one raised in the culture, our objections would seem silly. I can certainly envision worse futures.
With current selective pressure, Marching Morons does seem inevitable given enough time. But humans are a very slow species to evolve - twenty year or so reproductive cycle, very large population. Chances are circumstances will change before natural selection can have any major effect.
The US/UK extradition agreement is not symmetrical. The US need only ask nicely and we are supposed to turn over the accused, while the UK would need to provide evidence sufficient for conviction to even ask for someone to be extradited from the US.
Don't be quite so sure. Around the middle ages, fat was attractive. Fat showed a person had plenty of food, a sign of economic success. A bit of fat and some very wide hips on a woman marked them as well-suited to bearing children, which was a prime concern.
If you're fiddling with genes, a good option might be to try to weaken that craving for fat and sugar.
Science tells us that life began about four billion years ago, and hasn't ended since. An individual doesn't 'come to life' at some point. The egg is alive, the sperm is alive, the zygote is alive - it never stops being alive. Science can pinpoint a few key points in the process, like the formation of a new uniqueish* individual genetic code, but that's all. A genome is not an individual.
*Baring identical twins and chimeras.
The black thing is something of an annoyance right now. Due to simple economic correlations, the rate of elective abortion in the US black population is a fair bit higher than the US non-black population. Blacks have on average lower incomes and lower educational level (Due to some historic injustices which had a lasting effect) - that means they have a higher rate of unplanned pregnancy, and are less likely to be able to then keep their surprise baby. A well-off white couple can fit it into their lives, a black couple on the poverty line with both parents working to make ends meet cannot. Nothing really surprising there, until politics gets involved: A lot of pro-life campaigners have noticed this correlation too and, with brazen disregard for the first rule of statistics*, proclaim this to be proof that the 'abortion lobby' is out to finish the mission of Hitler and exterminate the lesser races. Just throw in a few carefully mined quotes from key figures in the history of the sexual revolution** and you've a campaign that can exploit racial tensions to be as effective as it is idiotic.
*Correlation is not causation.
**Yes, Sanger was a racist. This was before desegregation: Everyone was a racist, and she was a lot better than most.
Favorable genetics may be required to create a great scientist, but they are not in themselves sufficient. They also need the life-forming events that direct them towards a career in science, and access to an education system or academic associations that will provide the environment to develop that potential intellect, and a significant amount of luck.
America is a de facto two party system. A vote for the republicans is a vote against the democrats, and vice versa. Third parties and independence have only a small presence in state politics, and a negligible presence at the national level.
It could work to prevent the inheritance of certain very well-defined conditions. Huntington's being a perfect example, but not the only candidate. If you could get access and acceptance of the technologies wide enough it would be possible to be rid of them forever. Unfortunately a certain Mr Hitler ruined the reputation of eugenics forever by misapplying the ideas, and now any such proposal would be politically impossible to support - and even aside from that, it would face heavy opposition from religious groups who still believe that worshiping sky-daddy gives them a moral authority above everyone else.
But W also used the influence the commerce department has to block the .xxx domain name for political reasons, because the social conservatives were afraid it would legitimise pornography and make it more difficult to ban. .xxx is still a stupid idea, but not for that reason.
The firewire technique is very good against full-disk encryption. If police find the computer turned on and encrypted disk mounted, that means the key must be in RAM. Compromise the RAM, the key will be in there somewhere. It has to be done on site, because the moment you turn the computer off to move it the key will be lost. I still stress that this isn't something that would be available for investigating run-of-the-mill criminals though. Maybe if you're suspected of running Silk Road.
Look at the odd XXX replacements. Why overwrite commands with garbage? That's obvious: In order to maintain byte positions, and thus TCP sequence numbers, allowing for it to be done via DPI rather than (more expensive and noticeable) conventional proxying.
If I had to speculate why, I'd wonder if they want to block encryption in order to monitor emails for advertising purposes, or possibly have been given some form of secret 'tell no-one' warrant that demands they disable encryption because some unspecified user is under investigation.
The tools exist. The CSI fantasy crap is that you'll ever be on the recieving end, unless you manage to do something that threatens national security or run a criminal empire. But if they were going to be used, they'd be used in conjunction with the no-knock everyone GET ON THE FLOOR NOW! raid in an attempt to get everyone arrested before they can make a dive for the power cord.
Buy business. Just about all PCs/laptops aimed at business buyers come with Windows 7, because the number of businesses using Windows 8 is negligable.
Most business buyers will immediately wipe the system and install from their own site-licensed image anyway though, which does make the lack of blank systems seem a little suspicious. Doubtless Microsoft is offering some very sweet deals to OEMs if they'll refrain from selling OS-less computers.
Bitlocker under standard settings uses the TPM for key management. You have only the manufacturer's* word that the TPM is free of backdoors, as it's a hardware component. That's why truecrypt doesn't use it.
*Usually Intel
And go looking for more crimes to charge you with.
There is no such thing as an innocent person. Everyone, without exception, has committed crimes. Lots of crimes. The only difference between an innocent person and a criminal is that the criminal has done something serious enough to bother prosecuting.
Password cracking does scale perfectly. It's the textbook example of a task well-suited to paralllisation.
I imagine the NSA's cracking system is based on ASICs, rather than conventional processors. A couple of racks full of ASICs for each of the commonly encountered hashes or cryptosystems, very densely packed. Look at bitcoin miners to see the reason: Compared to an ASIC brute-forcing truncated SHA256, any conventional processor is simply negligable.
Police do have access to tools for countering the off switch. Devices that connect via firewire DMA to dump the contents of RAM and thus any keys within, or warm boot attack tools. But such things are specialised and expensive, and will not be deployed to the arrest of a run-of-the-mill criminal. They would have to have reason to suspect you of a serious technology-related crime before going to the trouble of sending a digital forensics specialist and their toolbox to the scene.
Stopping you hitting the 'off' switch is a long established issue - destruction of evidence has been an issue for decades, with people burning papers and flushing their drugs stash down the toilet as soon as they see the police coming. The counter-strategy is popular, but effective: Speed. If the police have reason to believe you may destroy evidence (Which is really common practice in all drugs related crimes) they get a no-knock warrant which allows them to smash your door down at four in the morning while everyone is in bed, charge into the house and force everyone to the ground at gunpoint. Done properly it means they can get their arrests done before anyone has the chance to destroy evidence, though many critics claim the method is heavily overused in the US, and there have been many incidents where people have mistaken the police assault for a robbery, grabbed for their gun and been swiftly killed in self defence by police officers.
Perhaps there is a deeper problem to look into here. Not the victim, nor the leaker. Look at the motivation for all parties involved.
Then look at the massive outcry, and the rapidity of dissemination, and the media circus.
Here's the odd thing: It's just nudity. Everyone is naked beneath their clothes, and it isn't at all difficult to find some naked pictures for the curious. I could find a few thousand of them with one google search. Yet somehow, the sight of a person undressed is something so sacred that people will feel violated just for being seen, while others will go to great lengths to catch a glimpse of the right individual.
This should not be a big deal. Everyone should be able to just shrug it off, including the victim - who hasn't actually been directly harmed in any way. What harm they experience doesn't come from people seeing the images, but their own reaction.