I really like the solution to the "reply all" problem that is used at Google. It's part social and part technological. The social part is that people make an effort to trim TO and CC lines -- though "reply all" is the default, and for good reason. The technological part is "mute".
Since Gmail already groups all e-mail conversations into threads, it's easy for it to provide the user with a means to opt out of a conversation, even if they're still on CC. I use it all the time... if a thread is clearly no longer relevant to me, I just hit "m", and I never see that e-mail conversation in my inbox again. It's still in my archive and I can always search for it (including seeing all subsequent messages after I muted it)... but other than that it doesn't bother me.
Gmail also does an awesome job of collapsing quote text. It's there if I want to click on the "..." to see it, but otherwise it's out of the way, and it works equally well with both top- and bottom-posting. For that reason, the general practice is not to trim quotes. They're invisible when you don't care about them, but preserving them provides full context for any newcomers to the conversation.
It's still not ideal. I think the ultimate business communication vehicle will look something like a cross between e-mail and a web forum, but in practice Gmail is pretty darned good. Which is a really good thing, because Google runs on e-mail, and Googlers get massive amounts of it. Between direct e-mails, automated system status notifications and internal mailing lists (some are general discussion lists, others are focused on specific projects, or teams, or technologies), I get >2000 e-mails per day. Filtering, priority inbox and selective muting are all essential to making it manageable.
So obviously, the/. revenue model can deal with posters being able to stop ads.
Nonsense.
For/. to work, they have to sell ad space -- and they have to have visitors. The main draw here has always been high-quality user comments. Those comments bring eyeballs which see ads, and ads pay the bills. The people who produce those comments, however, are a fairly small percentage of the eyeballs in question, so it made sense to offer to forgo the ad revenue from them in order to encourage them to keep producing content.
I also have, and use, the checkbox. But the vast majority of slashdot readers are not posters, and they don't get the checkbox.
A new business model to propose? How about information should always be free? Isn't that what honest white hat hackers have been saying for decades now?
Information may want to be free, but gathering, collating, prioritizing and publishing information will never be free. It takes effort by someone, and there's a strong correlation between the amount of effort and the cost, even with computers to automate much of it. Now, that doesn't mean that anyone should be forced to pay for it, but it does mean that if there isn't a way for people to make a living doing it, it won't get done. Crowd-sourcing can effectively extract small amounts of volunteer effort from large numbers of people, and as a result produce something for free that would cost a lot if produced by a smaller, full-time group. But that model isn't applicable to everything.
Web search is a good example of an area in which it doesn't work well. Your UID is high, so you may be young enough that you don't remember the crowd-sourced predecessor of web search. I'm old, and I do remember it well. People collected bookmarks and published their huge lists of links on web pages. Groups collaborated to curate and organize these bookmark collections. Web site owners lobbied to get their links added. In the (tiny!) Internet of the day, it worked, sort of -- though the most popular bookmark collections had enough hardware and bandwidth costs that even with volunteer labor they had to resort to banner ads to pay the bills, so it doesn't really fit your ideal.
As the web grew, though, the approach became very, very hard to maintain. Yahoo! was considered the pre-eminent solution -- a large, curated, categorized directory of links maintained by a large group of full-time employees and funded by banner advertising. Even that, though, was being massively outpaced. Enter Google, which did fit your paradigm -- it was completely free. No ads, no fees, and thanks to its clever ranking algorithm it did approximately as good a job as the Yahoo! team... but it was able to scale much more easily. It wasn't necessary to add exponential people to keep up with the exponentially-growing web. And it could be free because its real estate and bandwidth was all donated by Stanford University, which means it was really primarily taxpayer funded. Labor and hardware was all donated by the founders, whose research project Google was. They, of course, lived on university stipends. Taxpayer-funded.
So, now, there is an "information wants to be free" business model that works, and scales: forcibly collecting money from everyone then doling it out (on some basis) to people who build and operate systems to collect and disseminate the information!
Except... it didn't scale. Not far enough. Eventually the hardware was overflowing the dorm room and the limit of even Stanford's patience with the exponentially-growing bandwidth consumption came to an end. Investment capital was obtained, real estate was leased (a house, actually -- Google finally obtained a garage) and a business was established, but one that didn't have any idea how to fund itself. Advertising was constantly suggested and rejected because the founders hated banner ads. They looked far and wide trying to find some way -- any way! -- to be able to keep doing what they were doing without advertising. Eventually, they caved, because there was no other way. Google had to become an advertising medium, or it had to close the doors. They held the line against allowing ads to pollute "organic" search results, and adopted a pay-per-click model based on a real-time auction for ad space that only permitted unobtrusive text ads which sought to be relevant to the user, but they had to go with ads.
I think the founders of Google are still unhappy about being in the advertising business (even though it has made them billionaires), but it's the only way anyone has found to provide a free service at a large scale, and a search engine is only useful if it covers the whole web.
Information wants to be free, but people gotta eat.
But if she can find the devil in an RFID badge, I'm wondering what else she'll shun because of a religious concern
No need to wonder. "Mark of the beast" concerns are strong and well-established in much of mainstream Christianity; she's not going way out on an unusual limb here. If you want to know what else will worry her, just look at what worries similar Christians. There's nothing in physics or chemistry that bothers them (though cosmology can be a bit touchy). The life sciences may or may not be a concern with respect to evolution. With respect to medicine, she'll almost certainly have a problem with abortion, dislike fetal stem cell research due to the source of the cells and be uncomfortable with genetic manipulation that seems to cross the line to "playing God". That pretty much covers the areas of science and engineering that might be problematic for her. Other elements of Revelations that would raise concerns are more about social structures (as is the mark of the beast, actually, though it obviously has a potential physical analogue).
If a one-time pad was used, it doesn't matter one bit whether the paper contains the key or the message. No amount of cryptanalysis will recover anything, ever.
Chrome makes it needlessly hard to leave the Google mothership for search
Chrome makes it very easy to "leave the Google mothership" for search. When you install it, it prompts you to pick a search engine. And you can trivially switch search engines at any time from the settings.
Now, DDG isn't one of the initial search engine options, that's true. I don't think that's because Google hates DDG, but because DDG isn't a very popular search engine. Bing and Yahoo are clearly much more widely-used, so they're offered. The argument that DDG is hard to set as the default engine in Chrome is also something of a stretch. Here's the process:
1. Use DDG
2. Go into settings and click "Manage search engines"
3. Find DDG in the "Other Search Engines" list and click the "make default" button next to it.
The only even vaguely non-obvious or difficult thing there is that you must use DDG "manually" once before it shows up in the list. Presumably, most users try it out before deciding to make it the default (or before assigning a shortcut to it, which is the other thing you can do on the "Manage search engines" dialog -- I have it set to "ddg", myself, not that I ever use it).
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on Chrome or Search. The above represents my own opinions, nothing more).
Rich or poor, people have to breathe. They need shelter.
Breathable air isn't at risk. Worst case, much of the population will have to relocate -- which will mean building places for them to live, certainly, but that's not that difficult (assuming McMansions are not required). Food is likely to be the biggest problem (assuming the weather patterns really change significantly), but there are solutions to that as well, largely the same solutions we're going to need to handle the population growth, which will top out around 10B.
The worst case could be pretty traumatic, but overblown rhetoric like that doesn't help.
Wealth creation is a long tried and true, but ultimately vacuous destination. Maybe we sacrifice a little as a world community and benefit greatly from having done so, rather than hedonistically building wads of cash and grandiose castles.
You're implying a false dichotomy here. The choice isn't between hedonistic individual wealth of the already-comfortable and environmental damage, even assuming there is a tradeoff between wealth and the environment it's between general wealth and the environment. When you spend money to improve the environment it's not the wealthy who will feel the worst of the bite, it's the poor. In the United States, even the poor are pretty well off and so we can take a little hit... but the US has already begun reducing its emissions. The really big greenhouse gas growth is occurring in the developing world, where the poor are really poor, and the developing world is very unlikely to be able to afford to both lift themselves economically and reduce their emissions at the same time.
I'm not saying you're wrong about the need to focus on the environment (nor am I saying you're right; I'm actually on the fence about it myself), but the cost will be much more severe than just smaller McMansions. It will hit people who it will really hurt -- and in fact it will hit them harder than the McMansion crowd.
P.S. it's particularly stupid to think you can for 99% of people replace airline travel with train travel. The extra time simply makes it impractical
This would be less true if we had faster trains. If trains moved at, say, half the speed of an airliner. But at about 1/8th the speed, you're right. Anything that's within reasonable train travel time is also within car travel time, and car travel is more convenient -- and in many cases cheaper, thanks to subsidized highways.
Insurance companies have actuaries who spend their lives studying and calculating risk, and they work out the rates on insurance policies. And the verdict is that premiums will need to go up.
I would be amazed, if ever in the history of insurance companies, that a study of risk calculated that they could lower their premiums.
Why would that amaze you? Insurance companies have a very large incentive to lower their premiums: competition. There are a lot of insurance companies and the market for common types of insurance is extremely competitive. They want to charge the lowest premium they can, consistent with their estimated risk level and their desired profit margin -- which must itself be tempered by competitive concerns.
This is why as soon as one insurance company started identifying classes of people who were particularly low risk and discounting their rates, all the rest had to follow suit.
Interesting idea, but I think in practice it would prove to be a bad one. Service providers demonstrably have a hard enough time properly implementing a single level of access control. Requiring them to provide valet key passwords would inevitably result in more mistakes.
In this case it's also unnecessary. The simple solution here is for the woman to give her passwords to her attorney, who will then go through all of the data and extract everything relevant. This is the way it's normally done in civil suits.
Not so much for insufficient evidence, since this information will provide evidence for the defense (or at least the defense hopes so). But, yes, refusal to comply with the discovery process would cause the judge to toss the case, at the very least.
Passwords must be given (just change it to something random and hand it to the court) so the court can appoint a reviewer to select which info is pertinent to the case. The reviewer then hands it off to the owner of the account (the plaintiffs) and they block/redact any info they say is private or unrelated. The reviewer then presents the evidence to the court (both plaintiff and defendant) and tells the judge if he thinks the owner of the account chose to block / redact any pertinent information.
The more normal process is for the attorney of the party requested to provide the data to sift through the mass of potentially relevant information and to extract what needs to be disclosed, redacting anything that isn't relevant to the questions at hand. The attorney's duty to the court ensures that all relevant information is provided, and the attorney's duty to the client ensures that nothing else is.
FYI, the LDS church wouldn't allow marriage of 13 year-olds, even if the law did.
Even back when the church practiced polygamy, little girls weren't married. Sometimes they were married as young as about 16, but that was unusual, and frowned-upon. It was also very common among non-Mormons of the frontier, so the Mormons were viewed as being unusually protective of young women.
As it happens, I have an ancestor who was a polygamist. He went on a trip to Salt Lake one month and came back with a new (third, IIRC) wife, who was a pretty 17 year-old. His other wives left him, taking the kids, the livestock, the wagon and farm equipment, the money, and anything else they could move. When he appealed to the Bishop (who also acted as the justice of the peace) over the "theft" of his property, he was told he was a damned fool and a sinner who deserved what he got and a licking too. When the women arrived at a neighboring town, they told their story and were sold land at a deep discount and given assistance to set up a new homestead. The Bishop there directed local men to donate part of their time every week to helping to plow, plant and harvest the "widows'" crops, even though everyone knew they weren't really widows. That gives a pretty clear indication of what Mormons of the time thought about a man marrying a 17 year-old girl -- and doing it without the permission of his wives. And modern-day Mormons are less accepting of too-young marriages, not more.
Anyway, I find it difficult to reconcile the religious aspect of her argument with the fact that she's attending a science and engineering based magnet school. I'm not saying that religion and science are inherently incompatible, but I am saying that her equating an RFID badge to the "mark of the beast" makes me think her devotion to her religion will place a shadow over her science education.
Why does it make you think that, if you honestly don't think they're incompatible? Try to articulate it precisely, and I think you'll find that your rationale boils down to believing that they are incompatible.
It's possible that she has strong creationist beliefs, which would make some branches of biology, cosmology and geology uncomfortable for her -- or not. Plenty of scientists in these fields believe in creation via natural processes and see researching the details as a way to gain greater insight into the nature and character of God. But even if she shies away from some branches of science, it's a big house and there is a great deal of both pure research and virtually any sort of engineering which won't pose any conflicts at all, no matter how fundamentalist her beliefs.
In Washington state, and probably others, when you get your chipped "Enhanced Driver's License", the DOL issues it along with a "tinfoil" sleeve to keep it in when you're not producing it to display to The Authorities.
That's hilarious. A "technical" solution to the problem of uninformed social dissent (note that I have no problem with the social dissent part, just the uninformed part). The range on the inductively-powered contactless chips used in such licenses is sufficiently short that reading it through your wallet generally won't work, even if you hold your wallet right against the reader. It's a completely different technology than the badges discussed in this article, and doesn't enable identification -- or even presence-checking -- from any range beyond a few centimeters. Some researchers have demonstrated how use of a battery powered repeater, placed next to the card, can enable reading from great distances, but that's an easily-avoided risk.
Aside: I've yet to find a US/Canada border crossing that can read the chips. They always swipe the EDLs through what I assume is a magcard reader. Now that could just be a charade of some sort and they're actually reading the chips, but that seems somewhat unlikely, and, well, tinfoil-hattish. When asked, one of the US interrogators said that the smaller crossings didn't get all the high-tech goodies such as the readers and had to do things the old-fashioned way.
Yeah, I'm sure they were just reading the magnetic stripe that's also on your DL. Relatively few states issue chip cards but all (AFAIK) states have been issuing cards with magnetic stripes and 2D barcodes, so that's the more generally-useful technology at this point.
Glass doesn't have the ability to change the appearance of things in your field of vision. It deliberately places its screen above and to the right of your normal area of vision so as not to obscure your visual field. For this to work with Glass, you'd have to carefully only look at what you're eating in the Glass screen... and it would probably take a lot of practice to learn to navigate the cookie to your mouth while watching it in the Glass screen. Might be easier if you looked at it in the screen and then closed your eyes before trying to eat.
If you're producing the documents, I think the best solution is Google Docs. You can be absolutely sure that whoever you send the document to will be able to see exactly what you send, and if they need to make changes the collaboration capabilities are unparalleled. That doesn't help when so much when you're the recipient of the docs, and especially not if you're just one of many steps in the chain of modifying a document you didn't originate. Depending on the content, there may also be security concerns -- not that Google is going to read and misuse your documents, but for important stuff you really shouldn't even take the chance. But for many, many business documents I think it's the best solution.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. However, I'd say exactly the same if I didn't work for Google.)
Yes. Key management is surprising difficult, and does not scale.
Key management is surprisingly difficult, but to say it does not scale is too strong.
Existing CA-based PKI has proven to have a number of deficiencies, but in spite of those it still works pretty well and has proven to scale extremely well. For e-mail, we already have a great solution in place (S/MIME) but unfortunately it's not widely used and isn't even widely supported on the most widely-used e-mail clients -- webmail providers like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.
Ignoring the issue of web-based clients for the moment, there's really no reason S/MIME encrypted/signed e-mail couldn't be used by everyone, if we could streamline the process of S/MIME certificate issuance. Given certificates for everyone (yeah, that's not handwaving, that's whole body waving), all e-mail with previous correspondents could be trivially encrypted and it we could even establish a protocol for dynamically retrieving certificates for addresses which have never been e-mailed before.
The two problems, webmail clients and certificates, can, I think, be solved together, and "the cloud" can further be used to facilitate key management.
There is a W3C proposal for a Web Cryptography API that would enable web applications to perform cryptographic operations using keys that are stored and managed by the web browser -- and unavailable to the web apps that are using them. This will address the single biggest obstacle to useful S/MIME on webmail -- the fact that it doesn't do you much good to have all your e-mail encrypted if Google has the keys. But with the Web Crypto API, Gmail (or Yahoo mail, etc.), could do all of the crypto in the browser with the keys stored only on your computer.
Further, it would be trivial for a webmail provider, who has already authenticated you for purposes of access to your e-mail account, to certify your public key as authentically being associated with your e-mail address. Additional, optional, certification processes could be used to validate other aspects of your identity if desired, but the core association between certificate and address can be trivially verified by the e-mail provider.
There's another problem, though, which is backup and availability of the decryption keys. Having the browser store them only on the local machine is great from a security perspective, but sucks if you're using some other computer, or if your computer dies. In fact it defeats most of the greatest advantages of webmail, and worse, could actually cause you to lose access to all of your e-mail forever.
The cloud offers a solution to that as well, though. Consider the Chrome "sync" feature, which creates an encrypted bundle of all of the passwords and other information that Chrome stores locally for users and synchronizes it all to the cloud. The encryption key is derived from a user-provided password. This could be leveraged to provide secure cloud storage of your e-mail decryption and signing keys, ensuring they're safely backed up to the cloud but unavailable to either the cloud service provider or the mail provider.
Obviously, this approach would place the security of your e-mail in the password used to encrypt your cloud-based key bundle, and it would mean that forgetting this password would effectively destroy all of your e-mail, unless you had arranged for some other secure key escrow service. There are many ways the latter could be done, with various tradeoffs. I think a reasonable starting point, though, would simply be to tell people that forgetting that password would cause permanent loss of access to all their encrypted e-mail, then let them make the decision about whether or not to activate the feature.
There are a number of ways this scheme could be subverted, but most boil down to subverting the web browser. It would be possible for the webmail service provider to certify a new key (known to t
But none of that has much to do with the chance that your DNA matches that of a specific sample from a crime scene, other than the fact that searching for false positives in pairwise database matches is a good way to compute the average false positive rate.
If if the odds of 'me' being a false positive match is extremely low, I still feel sorry for the one poor bastard in that database that did match and had no alibi because he was home alone watching a Star Wars marathon.
Right, but keep in mind that even that is different from pairwise database matches. To illustrate: If there's a 1 in 1 million chance of a false positive, then there's a 1 in 1 million chance of matching me. To get a 50% chance of finding some poor random sap, they'd have to check the crime scene DNA against 693,000 people. To have a 50% chance of finding a pairwise match in a database (checking every entry against every other entry), you'd only need a database of 1177 people.
The three problems -- matching a sample against a given individual, matching a sample against a database and matching a database against itself are very different scenarios.
I don't think your observation is inconsistent with mine. The examples you cite have massive numbers of variables, known and unknown -- and it's also known that other people have had success in similar situations, so it can't be said that you're "doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome".
I also like the Serenity Prayer -- and have no problem with God as a source of assistance and answers; indeed I've found Him to be a very useful source of both. The Serenity Prayer is often associated with addiction recovery programs, and in that context belief in and reliance on an outside, higher power, has been proven a million times over to not only be useful, but essential. And, actually, the Einstein quote is one that is also heavily used in addiction recovery, because addicts need to understand that they also cannot continue doing the same things they always have and expect a different outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
I really like the solution to the "reply all" problem that is used at Google. It's part social and part technological. The social part is that people make an effort to trim TO and CC lines -- though "reply all" is the default, and for good reason. The technological part is "mute".
Since Gmail already groups all e-mail conversations into threads, it's easy for it to provide the user with a means to opt out of a conversation, even if they're still on CC. I use it all the time... if a thread is clearly no longer relevant to me, I just hit "m", and I never see that e-mail conversation in my inbox again. It's still in my archive and I can always search for it (including seeing all subsequent messages after I muted it)... but other than that it doesn't bother me.
Gmail also does an awesome job of collapsing quote text. It's there if I want to click on the "..." to see it, but otherwise it's out of the way, and it works equally well with both top- and bottom-posting. For that reason, the general practice is not to trim quotes. They're invisible when you don't care about them, but preserving them provides full context for any newcomers to the conversation.
It's still not ideal. I think the ultimate business communication vehicle will look something like a cross between e-mail and a web forum, but in practice Gmail is pretty darned good. Which is a really good thing, because Google runs on e-mail, and Googlers get massive amounts of it. Between direct e-mails, automated system status notifications and internal mailing lists (some are general discussion lists, others are focused on specific projects, or teams, or technologies), I get >2000 e-mails per day. Filtering, priority inbox and selective muting are all essential to making it manageable.
So obviously, the /. revenue model can deal with posters being able to stop ads.
Nonsense.
For /. to work, they have to sell ad space -- and they have to have visitors. The main draw here has always been high-quality user comments. Those comments bring eyeballs which see ads, and ads pay the bills. The people who produce those comments, however, are a fairly small percentage of the eyeballs in question, so it made sense to offer to forgo the ad revenue from them in order to encourage them to keep producing content.
I also have, and use, the checkbox. But the vast majority of slashdot readers are not posters, and they don't get the checkbox.
A new business model to propose? How about information should always be free? Isn't that what honest white hat hackers have been saying for decades now?
Information may want to be free, but gathering, collating, prioritizing and publishing information will never be free. It takes effort by someone, and there's a strong correlation between the amount of effort and the cost, even with computers to automate much of it. Now, that doesn't mean that anyone should be forced to pay for it, but it does mean that if there isn't a way for people to make a living doing it, it won't get done. Crowd-sourcing can effectively extract small amounts of volunteer effort from large numbers of people, and as a result produce something for free that would cost a lot if produced by a smaller, full-time group. But that model isn't applicable to everything.
Web search is a good example of an area in which it doesn't work well. Your UID is high, so you may be young enough that you don't remember the crowd-sourced predecessor of web search. I'm old, and I do remember it well. People collected bookmarks and published their huge lists of links on web pages. Groups collaborated to curate and organize these bookmark collections. Web site owners lobbied to get their links added. In the (tiny!) Internet of the day, it worked, sort of -- though the most popular bookmark collections had enough hardware and bandwidth costs that even with volunteer labor they had to resort to banner ads to pay the bills, so it doesn't really fit your ideal.
As the web grew, though, the approach became very, very hard to maintain. Yahoo! was considered the pre-eminent solution -- a large, curated, categorized directory of links maintained by a large group of full-time employees and funded by banner advertising. Even that, though, was being massively outpaced. Enter Google, which did fit your paradigm -- it was completely free. No ads, no fees, and thanks to its clever ranking algorithm it did approximately as good a job as the Yahoo! team... but it was able to scale much more easily. It wasn't necessary to add exponential people to keep up with the exponentially-growing web. And it could be free because its real estate and bandwidth was all donated by Stanford University, which means it was really primarily taxpayer funded. Labor and hardware was all donated by the founders, whose research project Google was. They, of course, lived on university stipends. Taxpayer-funded.
So, now, there is an "information wants to be free" business model that works, and scales: forcibly collecting money from everyone then doling it out (on some basis) to people who build and operate systems to collect and disseminate the information!
Except... it didn't scale. Not far enough. Eventually the hardware was overflowing the dorm room and the limit of even Stanford's patience with the exponentially-growing bandwidth consumption came to an end. Investment capital was obtained, real estate was leased (a house, actually -- Google finally obtained a garage) and a business was established, but one that didn't have any idea how to fund itself. Advertising was constantly suggested and rejected because the founders hated banner ads. They looked far and wide trying to find some way -- any way! -- to be able to keep doing what they were doing without advertising. Eventually, they caved, because there was no other way. Google had to become an advertising medium, or it had to close the doors. They held the line against allowing ads to pollute "organic" search results, and adopted a pay-per-click model based on a real-time auction for ad space that only permitted unobtrusive text ads which sought to be relevant to the user, but they had to go with ads.
I think the founders of Google are still unhappy about being in the advertising business (even though it has made them billionaires), but it's the only way anyone has found to provide a free service at a large scale, and a search engine is only useful if it covers the whole web.
Information wants to be free, but people gotta eat.
So when did making a buck off me start to take precedence over everything in the Bill of Rights?
What does the Bill of Rights have to do with this?
But if she can find the devil in an RFID badge, I'm wondering what else she'll shun because of a religious concern
No need to wonder. "Mark of the beast" concerns are strong and well-established in much of mainstream Christianity; she's not going way out on an unusual limb here. If you want to know what else will worry her, just look at what worries similar Christians. There's nothing in physics or chemistry that bothers them (though cosmology can be a bit touchy). The life sciences may or may not be a concern with respect to evolution. With respect to medicine, she'll almost certainly have a problem with abortion, dislike fetal stem cell research due to the source of the cells and be uncomfortable with genetic manipulation that seems to cross the line to "playing God". That pretty much covers the areas of science and engineering that might be problematic for her. Other elements of Revelations that would raise concerns are more about social structures (as is the mark of the beast, actually, though it obviously has a potential physical analogue).
If a one-time pad was used, it doesn't matter one bit whether the paper contains the key or the message. No amount of cryptanalysis will recover anything, ever.
Chrome makes it needlessly hard to leave the Google mothership for search
Chrome makes it very easy to "leave the Google mothership" for search. When you install it, it prompts you to pick a search engine. And you can trivially switch search engines at any time from the settings.
Now, DDG isn't one of the initial search engine options, that's true. I don't think that's because Google hates DDG, but because DDG isn't a very popular search engine. Bing and Yahoo are clearly much more widely-used, so they're offered. The argument that DDG is hard to set as the default engine in Chrome is also something of a stretch. Here's the process:
1. Use DDG
2. Go into settings and click "Manage search engines"
3. Find DDG in the "Other Search Engines" list and click the "make default" button next to it.
The only even vaguely non-obvious or difficult thing there is that you must use DDG "manually" once before it shows up in the list. Presumably, most users try it out before deciding to make it the default (or before assigning a shortcut to it, which is the other thing you can do on the "Manage search engines" dialog -- I have it set to "ddg", myself, not that I ever use it).
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on Chrome or Search. The above represents my own opinions, nothing more).
Yup, the false positives will exceed the number of real terrorists.
By at least three orders of magnitude.
Peanut oil.
Rich or poor, people have to breathe. They need shelter.
Breathable air isn't at risk. Worst case, much of the population will have to relocate -- which will mean building places for them to live, certainly, but that's not that difficult (assuming McMansions are not required). Food is likely to be the biggest problem (assuming the weather patterns really change significantly), but there are solutions to that as well, largely the same solutions we're going to need to handle the population growth, which will top out around 10B.
The worst case could be pretty traumatic, but overblown rhetoric like that doesn't help.
Wealth creation is a long tried and true, but ultimately vacuous destination. Maybe we sacrifice a little as a world community and benefit greatly from having done so, rather than hedonistically building wads of cash and grandiose castles.
You're implying a false dichotomy here. The choice isn't between hedonistic individual wealth of the already-comfortable and environmental damage, even assuming there is a tradeoff between wealth and the environment it's between general wealth and the environment. When you spend money to improve the environment it's not the wealthy who will feel the worst of the bite, it's the poor. In the United States, even the poor are pretty well off and so we can take a little hit... but the US has already begun reducing its emissions. The really big greenhouse gas growth is occurring in the developing world, where the poor are really poor, and the developing world is very unlikely to be able to afford to both lift themselves economically and reduce their emissions at the same time.
I'm not saying you're wrong about the need to focus on the environment (nor am I saying you're right; I'm actually on the fence about it myself), but the cost will be much more severe than just smaller McMansions. It will hit people who it will really hurt -- and in fact it will hit them harder than the McMansion crowd.
P.S. it's particularly stupid to think you can for 99% of people replace airline travel with train travel. The extra time simply makes it impractical
This would be less true if we had faster trains. If trains moved at, say, half the speed of an airliner. But at about 1/8th the speed, you're right. Anything that's within reasonable train travel time is also within car travel time, and car travel is more convenient -- and in many cases cheaper, thanks to subsidized highways.
Insurance companies have actuaries who spend their lives studying and calculating risk, and they work out the rates on insurance policies. And the verdict is that premiums will need to go up.
I would be amazed, if ever in the history of insurance companies, that a study of risk calculated that they could lower their premiums.
Why would that amaze you? Insurance companies have a very large incentive to lower their premiums: competition. There are a lot of insurance companies and the market for common types of insurance is extremely competitive. They want to charge the lowest premium they can, consistent with their estimated risk level and their desired profit margin -- which must itself be tempered by competitive concerns.
This is why as soon as one insurance company started identifying classes of people who were particularly low risk and discounting their rates, all the rest had to follow suit.
Interesting idea, but I think in practice it would prove to be a bad one. Service providers demonstrably have a hard enough time properly implementing a single level of access control. Requiring them to provide valet key passwords would inevitably result in more mistakes.
In this case it's also unnecessary. The simple solution here is for the woman to give her passwords to her attorney, who will then go through all of the data and extract everything relevant. This is the way it's normally done in civil suits.
Not so much for insufficient evidence, since this information will provide evidence for the defense (or at least the defense hopes so). But, yes, refusal to comply with the discovery process would cause the judge to toss the case, at the very least.
Passwords must be given (just change it to something random and hand it to the court) so the court can appoint a reviewer to select which info is pertinent to the case. The reviewer then hands it off to the owner of the account (the plaintiffs) and they block/redact any info they say is private or unrelated. The reviewer then presents the evidence to the court (both plaintiff and defendant) and tells the judge if he thinks the owner of the account chose to block / redact any pertinent information.
The more normal process is for the attorney of the party requested to provide the data to sift through the mass of potentially relevant information and to extract what needs to be disclosed, redacting anything that isn't relevant to the questions at hand. The attorney's duty to the court ensures that all relevant information is provided, and the attorney's duty to the client ensures that nothing else is.
Otherwise pedo Mormons could marry 13 year-olds
FYI, the LDS church wouldn't allow marriage of 13 year-olds, even if the law did.
Even back when the church practiced polygamy, little girls weren't married. Sometimes they were married as young as about 16, but that was unusual, and frowned-upon. It was also very common among non-Mormons of the frontier, so the Mormons were viewed as being unusually protective of young women.
As it happens, I have an ancestor who was a polygamist. He went on a trip to Salt Lake one month and came back with a new (third, IIRC) wife, who was a pretty 17 year-old. His other wives left him, taking the kids, the livestock, the wagon and farm equipment, the money, and anything else they could move. When he appealed to the Bishop (who also acted as the justice of the peace) over the "theft" of his property, he was told he was a damned fool and a sinner who deserved what he got and a licking too. When the women arrived at a neighboring town, they told their story and were sold land at a deep discount and given assistance to set up a new homestead. The Bishop there directed local men to donate part of their time every week to helping to plow, plant and harvest the "widows'" crops, even though everyone knew they weren't really widows. That gives a pretty clear indication of what Mormons of the time thought about a man marrying a 17 year-old girl -- and doing it without the permission of his wives. And modern-day Mormons are less accepting of too-young marriages, not more.
Anyway, I find it difficult to reconcile the religious aspect of her argument with the fact that she's attending a science and engineering based magnet school. I'm not saying that religion and science are inherently incompatible, but I am saying that her equating an RFID badge to the "mark of the beast" makes me think her devotion to her religion will place a shadow over her science education.
Why does it make you think that, if you honestly don't think they're incompatible? Try to articulate it precisely, and I think you'll find that your rationale boils down to believing that they are incompatible.
It's possible that she has strong creationist beliefs, which would make some branches of biology, cosmology and geology uncomfortable for her -- or not. Plenty of scientists in these fields believe in creation via natural processes and see researching the details as a way to gain greater insight into the nature and character of God. But even if she shies away from some branches of science, it's a big house and there is a great deal of both pure research and virtually any sort of engineering which won't pose any conflicts at all, no matter how fundamentalist her beliefs.
In Washington state, and probably others, when you get your chipped "Enhanced Driver's License", the DOL issues it along with a "tinfoil" sleeve to keep it in when you're not producing it to display to The Authorities.
That's hilarious. A "technical" solution to the problem of uninformed social dissent (note that I have no problem with the social dissent part, just the uninformed part). The range on the inductively-powered contactless chips used in such licenses is sufficiently short that reading it through your wallet generally won't work, even if you hold your wallet right against the reader. It's a completely different technology than the badges discussed in this article, and doesn't enable identification -- or even presence-checking -- from any range beyond a few centimeters. Some researchers have demonstrated how use of a battery powered repeater, placed next to the card, can enable reading from great distances, but that's an easily-avoided risk.
Aside: I've yet to find a US/Canada border crossing that can read the chips. They always swipe the EDLs through what I assume is a magcard reader. Now that could just be a charade of some sort and they're actually reading the chips, but that seems somewhat unlikely, and, well, tinfoil-hattish. When asked, one of the US interrogators said that the smaller crossings didn't get all the high-tech goodies such as the readers and had to do things the old-fashioned way.
Yeah, I'm sure they were just reading the magnetic stripe that's also on your DL. Relatively few states issue chip cards but all (AFAIK) states have been issuing cards with magnetic stripes and 2D barcodes, so that's the more generally-useful technology at this point.
Glass doesn't have the ability to change the appearance of things in your field of vision. It deliberately places its screen above and to the right of your normal area of vision so as not to obscure your visual field. For this to work with Glass, you'd have to carefully only look at what you're eating in the Glass screen... and it would probably take a lot of practice to learn to navigate the cookie to your mouth while watching it in the Glass screen. Might be easier if you looked at it in the screen and then closed your eyes before trying to eat.
If you're producing the documents, I think the best solution is Google Docs. You can be absolutely sure that whoever you send the document to will be able to see exactly what you send, and if they need to make changes the collaboration capabilities are unparalleled. That doesn't help when so much when you're the recipient of the docs, and especially not if you're just one of many steps in the chain of modifying a document you didn't originate. Depending on the content, there may also be security concerns -- not that Google is going to read and misuse your documents, but for important stuff you really shouldn't even take the chance. But for many, many business documents I think it's the best solution.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. However, I'd say exactly the same if I didn't work for Google.)
Yes. Key management is surprising difficult, and does not scale.
Key management is surprisingly difficult, but to say it does not scale is too strong.
Existing CA-based PKI has proven to have a number of deficiencies, but in spite of those it still works pretty well and has proven to scale extremely well. For e-mail, we already have a great solution in place (S/MIME) but unfortunately it's not widely used and isn't even widely supported on the most widely-used e-mail clients -- webmail providers like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.
Ignoring the issue of web-based clients for the moment, there's really no reason S/MIME encrypted/signed e-mail couldn't be used by everyone, if we could streamline the process of S/MIME certificate issuance. Given certificates for everyone (yeah, that's not handwaving, that's whole body waving), all e-mail with previous correspondents could be trivially encrypted and it we could even establish a protocol for dynamically retrieving certificates for addresses which have never been e-mailed before.
The two problems, webmail clients and certificates, can, I think, be solved together, and "the cloud" can further be used to facilitate key management.
There is a W3C proposal for a Web Cryptography API that would enable web applications to perform cryptographic operations using keys that are stored and managed by the web browser -- and unavailable to the web apps that are using them. This will address the single biggest obstacle to useful S/MIME on webmail -- the fact that it doesn't do you much good to have all your e-mail encrypted if Google has the keys. But with the Web Crypto API, Gmail (or Yahoo mail, etc.), could do all of the crypto in the browser with the keys stored only on your computer.
Further, it would be trivial for a webmail provider, who has already authenticated you for purposes of access to your e-mail account, to certify your public key as authentically being associated with your e-mail address. Additional, optional, certification processes could be used to validate other aspects of your identity if desired, but the core association between certificate and address can be trivially verified by the e-mail provider.
There's another problem, though, which is backup and availability of the decryption keys. Having the browser store them only on the local machine is great from a security perspective, but sucks if you're using some other computer, or if your computer dies. In fact it defeats most of the greatest advantages of webmail, and worse, could actually cause you to lose access to all of your e-mail forever.
The cloud offers a solution to that as well, though. Consider the Chrome "sync" feature, which creates an encrypted bundle of all of the passwords and other information that Chrome stores locally for users and synchronizes it all to the cloud. The encryption key is derived from a user-provided password. This could be leveraged to provide secure cloud storage of your e-mail decryption and signing keys, ensuring they're safely backed up to the cloud but unavailable to either the cloud service provider or the mail provider.
Obviously, this approach would place the security of your e-mail in the password used to encrypt your cloud-based key bundle, and it would mean that forgetting this password would effectively destroy all of your e-mail, unless you had arranged for some other secure key escrow service. There are many ways the latter could be done, with various tradeoffs. I think a reasonable starting point, though, would simply be to tell people that forgetting that password would cause permanent loss of access to all their encrypted e-mail, then let them make the decision about whether or not to activate the feature.
There are a number of ways this scheme could be subverted, but most boil down to subverting the web browser. It would be possible for the webmail service provider to certify a new key (known to t
But none of that has much to do with the chance that your DNA matches that of a specific sample from a crime scene, other than the fact that searching for false positives in pairwise database matches is a good way to compute the average false positive rate.
If if the odds of 'me' being a false positive match is extremely low, I still feel sorry for the one poor bastard in that database that did match and had no alibi because he was home alone watching a Star Wars marathon.
Right, but keep in mind that even that is different from pairwise database matches. To illustrate: If there's a 1 in 1 million chance of a false positive, then there's a 1 in 1 million chance of matching me. To get a 50% chance of finding some poor random sap, they'd have to check the crime scene DNA against 693,000 people. To have a 50% chance of finding a pairwise match in a database (checking every entry against every other entry), you'd only need a database of 1177 people.
The three problems -- matching a sample against a given individual, matching a sample against a database and matching a database against itself are very different scenarios.
It's possible that a bullet won't be dangerous when it comes back down, but it's irresponsible to take the chance.
I don't think your observation is inconsistent with mine. The examples you cite have massive numbers of variables, known and unknown -- and it's also known that other people have had success in similar situations, so it can't be said that you're "doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome".
I also like the Serenity Prayer -- and have no problem with God as a source of assistance and answers; indeed I've found Him to be a very useful source of both. The Serenity Prayer is often associated with addiction recovery programs, and in that context belief in and reliance on an outside, higher power, has been proven a million times over to not only be useful, but essential. And, actually, the Einstein quote is one that is also heavily used in addiction recovery, because addicts need to understand that they also cannot continue doing the same things they always have and expect a different outcome.