I think they become stupid. It's a group dynamic thing. Take a reasonable person, put him in a group with those he subconsciously recognises as his 'tribe,' give them a cause to celebrate. Everyone bases their standards of behavior on everyone else in the group, so the apparent stupidity escalates rapidly.
It'll be great for catching the Keystone Terrorists though. Every time some pathetic idiot posts on facebook about how he wants to blow up a building, Homeland Security (or their French counterparts) can swoop in for an arrest. Then simply boast to the public of another terrorist attack successfully aveted.
Qwerty was designed to be optimal for mechanical typewriters. The claim that it was designed to slow typing down to prevent jams is only half-true - it's actually designed so that the most commonly used letter combinations were kept apart but still typed with one hand, to minimise the possibility of two keys at once being pressed and jamming the mechanism. The non-grid, staggered rows feature is another mechanical relic, to allow the link bars from the lower rows to pass between the bars for those above.
While alternative layouts designed to ignore mechanical limitations may allow for faster typing in theory, the gain isn't really great, and applies only to skilled typists. The view of most is that even if qwerty isn't ideal, it's close-enough that the costs of switching to a new layout are not justified for such marginal gains.
Ceramic does offer the advantage of extreme mass production: You could churn them out for pennies each and dump them by the millions out of helicopers over vast areas. Surely a few will survive.
Brass corrodes, ceramic abrades. They could last centuries - but they won't last millenia under 'buried in the dirt' conditions. For every ancient clay tablet we have today, thousands were lost - and most of what we have now are heavily damaged and barely readable. Tungsten does seem like a good possibility.
If you're planning for the fall and rise of civilisation, you need to prepare for the possibility of deliberate destruction - it's possible that a future civilisation might be so sickened by the actions of the past they seek to destroy all their works, or a religion might emerge which considers your documents heretical and in need of destruction, or perhaps a king feels that his people are living in the shadow of legendary greatness and only by destroying the legend will their story be honored.
So you're going to need to mass-produce whatever storage media you choose - make them by the millions and put them all over the world. In museums, in caves, burried or sunk offshore (Add a big chunk of iron, ready for when the metal detector is reinvented), as many as you can. So many it'd be impossible to destroy them all.
As for the actual storage medium? Tiny etchings on iridium would work. It's corrosion-resistant, and very, very hard wearing. It's last for millenia with ease, even in burried in moist soil or scoured by desert sand, and with such a high melting point it'd be untouched even if the containing building burned down. The only issue is the price: That stuff is expensive. Really expensive. It's cheaper than gold, but not by much.
There's a good chance this 'cure' will kill the patent. It works, but it's dangerous. The choice is between a treatment that may kill you now, or a disease that will kill you eventually. And either way you'll get to take lots and lots of drugs with nasty side effects.
Easiest way to get new bodies would be via the justice system: First you pass a law that mandates harvesting the organs or entire bodies from executed criminals (easy to justify), then just start lowering the standard for the death penalty to increase the supply of spare parts.
If you're really evil, you might have to frame a relative to gain access to their sweet genetically-compatible pieces.
In theory, yes - but it'd need a life-support complex that would fill a room.
There was a short sci-fi play on the subject, about a very rich and very old lady who survived crippling illness in just such a manner: She lived as a head-on-a-stick, connected to a huge machine in the room below that kept her alive. Fixed in place and able to interact only through a pair of robotic arms, she became depressed and attempted suicide - something the designers of the machine had forseen, and taken measures to prevent. Her death would mean no more machine, and no more research grants.
This was written pre-internet though. You could probably find plenty of WoW players now who would barely notice the change.
The usual issue with change. From the perspective of the users, BIOS works. It's long-established, well-tested and generally very reliable. There are numerous advantages of UEFI to the engineers, but those people not left supporting a mountain of dubious code need to see some advantage to justify the change. What can UEFI do that BIOS cant?
Apple isn't just a hardware company. Hardware is just one aspect of a larger business. They make PCs and laptops, but they also make consumer electronics - media players and smartphones. They run a successful media store, too. One of their big successes is tying all this together into an ecosystem, so every product serves to promote all the others.
Someone who buys a mac and runs linux brings Apple money, but not as much as someone who bought the mac and started utilising the app store and itunes media store, which in turn would push them towards buying an iPad and iPhone.
The idea is basically the same: Chain of trust. The firmware only loads signed bootloaders, the bootloader only loads signed OSs, the OS only loads signed drivers. The difference is just in the response to unsigned code: Secure Boot simply refused to load it, while the Palladium/NGSCB would load the code but set a 'don't trust this' flag which a trusted store could use to verify system integrity. So while you could install an unauthorised OS or drivers on a NGSCB computer, your DVD/blu-ray drive would disable itsself, your secure cryptographic locker would refuse to open and you wouldn't have a hope of getting your legitimately paid-for downloaded movies and music to play.
Pirate media would, of course, play without a problem.
I'm saying that a religion is too diverse to make blanket statements, because there are very few things within any religion which every follower at every time and in every place will agree on. Any claims that a religion allows or prohibits anything need to be of a more limited scope.
Social conventions like owed favors do not exist in the world of business. When billions of dollars are at stake, there is no room to be 'nice.' That's why contracts were invented.
Just to clarify: UEFI is not the problem. It's just a replacement for the old BIOS system which addresses the decades of accumulated legacy bodging that is the PC. Secure Boot is a feature that UEFI enables. You can have UEFI without Secure Boot.
Microsoft won't sign a blob that can simply load any kernal, because doing so would defeat the purpose of Secure Boot: An attacker could simply load the linux signed loader with their malicious rootkit and use that.
It's supposed to be a protection against bootloader-infecting rootkits. No-one questions that it can do this, but bootloader-infecting rootkits are incredibly rare things to encounter, and given Microsoft's long history of anticompetative business tactics it isn't hard to imagine their ulterior motive for pushing the technology.
No, they'll just ship machines carrying both the Microsoft and their own key. Apple are no fans of linux - just look at all the hoops you have to jump through to get it running on the new retina macbook pro. They've never officially supported it, and there's no reason they would.
In the PC area, Apple are dependant upon OSX to be their identity and differentiator. Without OSX, they are just another maker of high-end PCs - and it'd be very hard to sell Apple PCs if they were interchangeable with the one-third-the-price offerings from Dell.
They dont 'have' to accept shim loaders. They are doing so for now, to minimise the backlash. There's no assurance they'll continue to do so in future, or (more likely) that they won't start imposing onerous requirements in the name of 'security' like mandating that any qualifying bootloader be incapable of loading an OS that allows unsigned drivers.
Perhaps prices will be lower in the future - and you can be sure that some organisations, somewhere, have named their servers after brand names. Administrators like memorable names - the first ISP I used named their dialup servers after pokemon - so it's almost certain that someone has been naming their servers after cars or foodstuffs.
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I think they become stupid. It's a group dynamic thing. Take a reasonable person, put him in a group with those he subconsciously recognises as his 'tribe,' give them a cause to celebrate. Everyone bases their standards of behavior on everyone else in the group, so the apparent stupidity escalates rapidly.
It'll be great for catching the Keystone Terrorists though. Every time some pathetic idiot posts on facebook about how he wants to blow up a building, Homeland Security (or their French counterparts) can swoop in for an arrest. Then simply boast to the public of another terrorist attack successfully aveted.
Qwerty was designed to be optimal for mechanical typewriters. The claim that it was designed to slow typing down to prevent jams is only half-true - it's actually designed so that the most commonly used letter combinations were kept apart but still typed with one hand, to minimise the possibility of two keys at once being pressed and jamming the mechanism. The non-grid, staggered rows feature is another mechanical relic, to allow the link bars from the lower rows to pass between the bars for those above.
While alternative layouts designed to ignore mechanical limitations may allow for faster typing in theory, the gain isn't really great, and applies only to skilled typists. The view of most is that even if qwerty isn't ideal, it's close-enough that the costs of switching to a new layout are not justified for such marginal gains.
Ceramic does offer the advantage of extreme mass production: You could churn them out for pennies each and dump them by the millions out of helicopers over vast areas. Surely a few will survive.
Still traceable, though - you had to pay for it somehow.
Brass corrodes, ceramic abrades. They could last centuries - but they won't last millenia under 'buried in the dirt' conditions. For every ancient clay tablet we have today, thousands were lost - and most of what we have now are heavily damaged and barely readable. Tungsten does seem like a good possibility.
If you're planning for the fall and rise of civilisation, you need to prepare for the possibility of deliberate destruction - it's possible that a future civilisation might be so sickened by the actions of the past they seek to destroy all their works, or a religion might emerge which considers your documents heretical and in need of destruction, or perhaps a king feels that his people are living in the shadow of legendary greatness and only by destroying the legend will their story be honored.
So you're going to need to mass-produce whatever storage media you choose - make them by the millions and put them all over the world. In museums, in caves, burried or sunk offshore (Add a big chunk of iron, ready for when the metal detector is reinvented), as many as you can. So many it'd be impossible to destroy them all.
As for the actual storage medium? Tiny etchings on iridium would work. It's corrosion-resistant, and very, very hard wearing. It's last for millenia with ease, even in burried in moist soil or scoured by desert sand, and with such a high melting point it'd be untouched even if the containing building burned down. The only issue is the price: That stuff is expensive. Really expensive. It's cheaper than gold, but not by much.
There's a good chance this 'cure' will kill the patent. It works, but it's dangerous. The choice is between a treatment that may kill you now, or a disease that will kill you eventually. And either way you'll get to take lots and lots of drugs with nasty side effects.
Easiest way to get new bodies would be via the justice system: First you pass a law that mandates harvesting the organs or entire bodies from executed criminals (easy to justify), then just start lowering the standard for the death penalty to increase the supply of spare parts.
If you're really evil, you might have to frame a relative to gain access to their sweet genetically-compatible pieces.
"Morally and ethically, this simply should not happen and should not be pursued."
Screw ethics. Gimme my millenia-lifespan.
In theory, yes - but it'd need a life-support complex that would fill a room.
There was a short sci-fi play on the subject, about a very rich and very old lady who survived crippling illness in just such a manner: She lived as a head-on-a-stick, connected to a huge machine in the room below that kept her alive. Fixed in place and able to interact only through a pair of robotic arms, she became depressed and attempted suicide - something the designers of the machine had forseen, and taken measures to prevent. Her death would mean no more machine, and no more research grants.
This was written pre-internet though. You could probably find plenty of WoW players now who would barely notice the change.
Ubuntu did it first.
The usual issue with change. From the perspective of the users, BIOS works. It's long-established, well-tested and generally very reliable. There are numerous advantages of UEFI to the engineers, but those people not left supporting a mountain of dubious code need to see some advantage to justify the change. What can UEFI do that BIOS cant?
Apple isn't just a hardware company. Hardware is just one aspect of a larger business. They make PCs and laptops, but they also make consumer electronics - media players and smartphones. They run a successful media store, too. One of their big successes is tying all this together into an ecosystem, so every product serves to promote all the others.
Someone who buys a mac and runs linux brings Apple money, but not as much as someone who bought the mac and started utilising the app store and itunes media store, which in turn would push them towards buying an iPad and iPhone.
The idea is basically the same: Chain of trust. The firmware only loads signed bootloaders, the bootloader only loads signed OSs, the OS only loads signed drivers. The difference is just in the response to unsigned code: Secure Boot simply refused to load it, while the Palladium/NGSCB would load the code but set a 'don't trust this' flag which a trusted store could use to verify system integrity. So while you could install an unauthorised OS or drivers on a NGSCB computer, your DVD/blu-ray drive would disable itsself, your secure cryptographic locker would refuse to open and you wouldn't have a hope of getting your legitimately paid-for downloaded movies and music to play.
Pirate media would, of course, play without a problem.
You failed to understand the point.
I'm saying that a religion is too diverse to make blanket statements, because there are very few things within any religion which every follower at every time and in every place will agree on. Any claims that a religion allows or prohibits anything need to be of a more limited scope.
Religions mutate.
Social conventions like owed favors do not exist in the world of business. When billions of dollars are at stake, there is no room to be 'nice.' That's why contracts were invented.
Just to clarify: UEFI is not the problem. It's just a replacement for the old BIOS system which addresses the decades of accumulated legacy bodging that is the PC. Secure Boot is a feature that UEFI enables. You can have UEFI without Secure Boot.
That's actually standard procedure on season ticket sales. Likewise airlines. It wouldn't be economical otherwise.
Microsoft won't sign a blob that can simply load any kernal, because doing so would defeat the purpose of Secure Boot: An attacker could simply load the linux signed loader with their malicious rootkit and use that.
It's supposed to be a protection against bootloader-infecting rootkits. No-one questions that it can do this, but bootloader-infecting rootkits are incredibly rare things to encounter, and given Microsoft's long history of anticompetative business tactics it isn't hard to imagine their ulterior motive for pushing the technology.
No, they'll just ship machines carrying both the Microsoft and their own key. Apple are no fans of linux - just look at all the hoops you have to jump through to get it running on the new retina macbook pro. They've never officially supported it, and there's no reason they would.
In the PC area, Apple are dependant upon OSX to be their identity and differentiator. Without OSX, they are just another maker of high-end PCs - and it'd be very hard to sell Apple PCs if they were interchangeable with the one-third-the-price offerings from Dell.
For now.
They dont 'have' to accept shim loaders. They are doing so for now, to minimise the backlash. There's no assurance they'll continue to do so in future, or (more likely) that they won't start imposing onerous requirements in the name of 'security' like mandating that any qualifying bootloader be incapable of loading an OS that allows unsigned drivers.
Perhaps prices will be lower in the future - and you can be sure that some organisations, somewhere, have named their servers after brand names. Administrators like memorable names - the first ISP I used named their dialup servers after pokemon - so it's almost certain that someone has been naming their servers after cars or foodstuffs.
It doesn't. It uses a priority order: First resolve, if resolve fails then assume it was a search term.