A specific cite would be appreciated. My understanding is that it was once illegal, but is no longer. Your recourse is limited to taking your business elsewhere. Let me know where to report them and I'd be happy to do it.
Libertarian, probably. Librarian's knowledge, doubt it. He doesn't seem to be aware that fighting things like Homelessness, hunger, youth without hope, etc. have been considered part of the responsibility of states since the days when there was a grain subsidy in democratic Athens.
Let's just say I aspire to maintain an awareness that the stuff I don't know outweighs that which I do.:) I have to ask, though, considered by who? I could certainly name plenty of governments who not only didn't feel responsible for housing, hunger, or hope, but felt that whether one subset or another of their citizens lived or died wasn't all that important. I think this is one of the errors too many fall into. We want to believe that everyone thinks like this, so let's move on. Nope, sorry, Athenians may have thought so, but plenty of contemporary governments disagree. Maybe I should admit that I'm not a philosopher, but I do try to be a student of history. As such, certain theoretical niceties have to give way to practical realities. The purpose of a state is whatever the leaders of the state say it is, even though that's not the way we'd like it to be. The purpose of the state if you were in Cambodia in the late 1970s was to create an agrarian utopia, whether you liked it or not. Whether you thought 1.7 million lives were a fair price to pay assuming back breaking labor was your idea of fun was also not relevant. States are formed by those who have the power to do so, or to wrest control of an existing one from its leaders.
My position is that minimizing the power we all seem to be so concerned with waving over each other is a good thing. Certainly economically powerful (short for the vilified rich, right?) can take advantage of the poor. The high risk lending industry is a good example. Similarly the politically powerful can victimize the politically weak. Political power in a one person, one vote system comes in numbers. There's lots of poor people and not that many rich ones, consequently we now have a tax code where economically weak, politically powerful people don't pay much in taxes and are still pandered to by politicians who say tax cuts should be targeted at the poor. I say this as someone who has been there, and believe me, you could have cut my taxes by 50% and it wouldn't have made much difference. Half of not much is still not much. More than either I'd worry about governmental power. The Money Store may tell me I have to pay 25% interest rates or whatever they charge, but I don't think they're going to herd me into showers that never get wet or work me to death (literally) in pursuit of an agrarian utopia which will never come. Similarly the Republicrats and the Demicans (can you tell the difference? It's getting harder) may cause my tax burden to increase at a much faster rate than my income, but they probably aren't going to herd me and everyone who looks kind of like me out of the country, shooting those who protest.
I think what I want is relatively simple. Personal responsibility. You're responsible for providing for your own needs. If you can't, get voluntary help from the nearest possible source, family and community first. Coercion should be avoided. When the government absolutely must be involved, use that force, which is what it is, at a point as local to the problem as possible, and in as small an increment as possible. Today's good intentions become tomorrow's governmental powers. The ostensibly good intentioned people creating those powers today won't be there when their successors misuse them in the years to come. Sadly what seems to happen is that rather than banding together to solve problems, we get special interest groups running to get government to "solve" their problems, that being a euphamism for complicate current problems with brand new ones.
You'll have to judge for yourself whether this makes me a libertarian. Some of what they have to say has merit. Some is a bit...idealistic. Like the rest of us, they want to believe the world is simpler than it really is.
Government should restrict itself to tackling the problems that can't be handled by other means. National defense is one such problem because it is shared equally by all citizens and the incremental cost is insupportably high to be borne by cities or states. Defense spending "excesses" serve to keep the crazy bastards of the world at bay. That there are crazy bastards in the world who need to be kept at bay is historical fact. Turn the other way or play the appeasement game, a la WW II, and you get to spend millions of lives cleaning up the mess. Homelessness, hunger, youth without hope, etc, are all problems which can and should be solved at the local level from an entirely different pot of money. *YOU* personally, can go out on the street and help with regards to homelessness, hunger, and youth problems. Volunteer. You can't take up a collection at work to buy an ICBM or a long range bomber.
It's time to stop pointing fingers and blaming government for not creating an ideal world. First, that's your job. Second, their version of an ideal world is probably not what you have in mind.
It isn't obvious, and isn't even necessarily true.
Alternatively:
Be poor
Choose a good, reasonably priced college
Go to college
Apply for financial aid and take out loans
Major in something marketable
Work hard, differentiate yourself from your peers
Graduate
Get a job making more right out of college than your parents make after 20+ years in the work force
Prosper
Buy whatever you want
That's what I did. That's what a number of my family members a generation back did *before* the so-called Digital Divide was available to lay blame. Some of them are just plain rich, not because they got a free ride, but because they made wise choices and significant sacrifices to attain long term gains rather than instant gratification. I think about this every time I see a lower class person handing over food stamps or other forms of public assistance while chatting away on their cell phone. For the politically correct, I almost said "apparently lower class", but speaking in economic terms, you aren't middle class if you're on public assistance.
I have what may be surprising news for you on a couple fronts. Buying a computer doesn't lead to profit, in spite of what the signs tacked to utility poles everywhere lead you to believe. They're primarily entertainment devices. The so called working poor aren't all noble and hardworking but downtrodden people, though undoubtedly some are. Those that are don't spend their lives as "working poor". Some people find their comfort zones rather lower than others. Some people are in low paying jobs and complain up a storm but never get off their duffs to go look for something better. It's a competitive world. Those who figure that out and bother to show up for the competition are appropriately rewarded.
The simple fact is that there are no silver bullets to financial security. There's planning, hard work, good financial sense, and the like, but there's no "buy a computer, change your life". Getting an education can and does make a huge impact in your lifelong earnings. If you want to make a difference in people's lives, convince them to get one, take it seriously (don't spend your time swilling beer), and base their education on projected employment trends, not as some poor excuses for college advisors have said, on what you like.
This is only true in aggregate. Companies, at least those of sufficient size, couldn't care less whether they have your business. Mine was adamant that they had to have my SSN, and were perfectly content to NOT have my business if I wouldn't divulge it. Only by trying to sign up repeatedly and declining to provide it did I eventually find someone who didn't care enough about corporate policy to refuse service. Some were even outraged that I didn't want to provide it. "Would you refuse to give your SSN to $TELCO?!?" Me: "Damn right, unless they're cutting my Social Insecurity checks in a few decades!" Bastards. Like it's so hard to create a unique customer ID. In fact, after getting service sans SSN, I found that they created a unique account number anyway.
This is one good reason to patronize small businesses. You're a bigger chunk of their revenue stream, and there's a correspondingly larger chance that they want you, personally, to be happy, rather than just upping the magic "customer satisfaction" number.
They're going to apply strict criminal penalties, are they? Now I'm all for prosecuting copyright violators, but no private company in the US has any rights to apply criminal penalties. They can't even bring criminal prosecution. They can ask the nice DA to do it, but that's the extent of it. They can sue private individuals, but that's another thing entirely.
Is there an upper clue limit to be a movie executive?
I'm curious, when did you start following rules because they're good for you? Have you yet? I disobeyed my parents until the moment I moved out, even when their rules were "good rules". I've been known to occasionally bend the speed limit and may have even run a red light or two at 3:00 am when the roads were deserted. Children make their own judgements on what rules are good rules. Generally speaking, their decisions are not the decisions they'd make as adults. They tend to underestimate risk.
The problem actually is that the Patent Office sucks and is staffed by idiots. Like most organizations, the ones in manglement can cause the most damage. In this case, they've done so by approving patenting obvious ideas, business models, overly broad ideas, and a quota system. Only the last is new information. The patent office should ask themselves, on each patent, does the R&D cost justify a virtual monopoly for the better part of 2 decades. Too often a patent is granted to the first person who noticed a problem, then came up with a trivial solution for it. That is not the proper purpose of patent protection. They should ask themselves are they acting in the public interest, or are they enriching a tiny group of people who have done nothing notable at the expense of the public.
Kids need freedom. Within limits, but freedom to explore.
Too many people say, when confronted with this topic, that devices like this somehow harm or constrain children in ways that they shouldn't be constrained. What you said is exactly right. Children need freedom within limits. They don't need the capability to deny their parents knowledge of their whereabouts. It is a parent's right and obligation to set boundaries, their responsibility to provide a safe way for those boundaries to be explored. If I can have reliable assistance from modern technology, I can enlarge those boundaries. If I can't then they remain more constrained.
As for employees, I don't think this is useful in many cases, but perhaps in some. It's entirely reasonable, IMO, to GPS an armored car and possibly the drivers for the duration of their work day.
I generally like Declan McCullagh's stuff, but I find this dangerously naive. Phil Zimmerman made the internet a minorly different place, sure, but that's true (in the US) only because:
He's not in prison trading *cough* private keys with the inmates
Use of PGP and encryption in general hasn't been banned
ISPs aren't being coerced into turning in users of encryption.
Don't kid yourself for a second that Phil Zimmerman would be irrelevant if the legislature and law enforcement decreed that encryption was banned. It would go away, as would those who use it.
Remember, too, that.us's spotty history includes trampling any number of minority groups. Those groups have gone on to gain political power and rectify those wrongs, or are in the process of doing so now. I don't remember a civil rights movement which sought to outpace the law or make Congress irrelevant. I remember one which forced the issue and made the laws change.
If you do not want to be responsible, do not distribute.
I find that unreasonable and harmful. There are a lot of people out there who have the capability to create things I find useful, but don't have the capability to wage a legal battle, buy insurance, or compensate me if I use their product for something critical and it fails. I find it entirely reasonable to publish a piece of code I've written along with the honest assessment that I can't guarantee it won't fail in some catastrophic way. If your application is such that you'd be harmed more than you're willing to write off, don't use my software. If you want something which *won't* fail, barring hardware problems (in which case go sue the manufacturer or the hardware, NMF), you can pay me lots of money for the custom development work to produce it.
This is only partly a "software sucks" issue. It's also very much a "ya gets what ya pay for" issue. You should not be entitled to anything whatsoever when you paid nothing whatsoever. Need more? Pay more, and believe me, the "more" will be commeasurate with the level of risk you're asking me to be exposed to. Realistically all you'll do is spawn a new insurance industry, and tack the premiums on to every piece of software you buy. People who can't afford the insurance, virtually all free software developers, for example, will simply stop producing. I'm certainly not going to exchange a piece of software with you for nothing but the possibility of being sued into the ground.
To turn your phrase around, want somebody to be financially liable? Don't use my software without compensating me for the risk.
You incorrectly presume that the other party's insurance company is interested in liability actually attaching to the person whom the evidence identified as being at fault rather than just being interested in not paying the claim. You know, lawyers aren't interested in finding the truth either, just getting a win for their client.
I don't see the problem here. I read the email (did you?) and it looked clearly to be a solicitation from Comodo to leave their current CA and join them.
So why not upgrade your Certificate with Comodo and join our many customers, including the US Government and some of the world's largest organisations.
Yes, join our many customers. That's clearly a "You're not one now, but we'd like you to be!"
We are so confident that you will be satisfied with our products and service that we offer as standard, a 30 day money back guarantee.
Does this sound like any company you currently do business with? Most companies I do business with sound like this when you're not a customer. Once you're a customer, it's "Here's your bill for next year."
Move along, nothing to see. This is nothing more than a solicitation for business and an oversensitive recipient. There are enough valid targets for our annoyance with corporate lack of ethics without targeting a company which did nothing more than find people whose certs are expiring and let them know they have a choice.
That's a good example of a simple, but non-obvious patent. What really gets me upset is the number of obvious patents granted. These people came up with a simple solution, but a solution that countless others did not come up with, even though they were faced with the same problem for as long as we've had diapers. Contrast this with most of the IT crap patents which are more in the line of "We were among the first people to notice a problem to solve and we won the race to the patent office." Patents aren't a reward to the fastest, they're a method of insuring that those who spend significant time or money inventing something aren't ripped off by someone else copying it. If only our Congresscritters would understand this and give the patent orifice the LARTing it deserves.
Well, that IS how they teach people to do it in college...
Not where I went to college it isn't. Ironically, out in the real world what I'm asked isn't "Is it correct?" or "Is it safe?". I'm asked "Is it done?" It's ironic that Myhrvold is 100% right. Microsoft shovels crap at the consumer because the consumer has a ravenous appetite for it.
As for open source, I'm not impressed. I don't think I've yet seen a piece of open source code and been impressed with its maintainability. Some has been horrifically awful, including the C monstrocity which used #defines to make C look like Visual Basic. I'm not yet convinced that open source's primary value, and the one which dwarfs all the others, is that it's generally free as in beer. Documentation, which is critically important, is usually bad and often nonexistant. I'm keeping an open mind, but I'm still waiting.
I just don't see that as the problem. Long distance mass transit works just fine. If I want to go to the other side of the country, I'm going to take a plain, train, or bus. It's the short distance that's a problem. Local mass transit is absolutely no substitute for having a car. For example, I recently had to use alternate means to go 11 miles recently at 2:00 am. The only option was a taxi at $40.00 US. For those of us who don't live 9-5 lives and *need* to be able to go to and from random points at all hours, giving up a car isn't feasable until it's economically feasable.
I've said this many times before, but here's one more time. If you want me on public transportation, it has to not cost me more money (including the tax subsidy), it has to not cost me more time, and it can't restrict where I can go and at what times I can go there. Failing those tests, I *still* have to have a car. Having a car, there's no good reason to ever not use it.
Darn it, my moderator points seem to have expired. Ah well, I'll just have to reply then.:)
I used to work with someone who was an avid napster user but vehemently denied she was doing anything wrong. I have no problem believing 80% of pirates don't see themselves as such.
I couldn't agree more. I'm superstitious, and yet to the best of my understanding, the opposing viewpoint is that you have some number of cells which does not constitute a human life, and then a miracle occurs, and it does. When someone can persuade me that such a miracle does occur, and pinpoint when, I'll change my view.
There is no good resource on why it is, because it isn't.:P
I say this for one simple reason. The code tells me what you actually did. It doesn't tell me what you intended to do. Auditing someone elses code is a royal PITA when they haven't bothered to tell you what a function is supposed to be doing.
Steve McConnell doesn't work for Microsoft. He's worked for them in a contracting role, and has also written a highly insightful piece which explains a heck of a lot about why Microsoft is so hopeless, although he may not have intended it to carry that meaning. Basically, a high premium is placed on making the developer happy. Creeping featurism isn't seen as a problem. Of course you can figure this out by using any of their products as well.
Well that's the interesting thing. They didn't "find that a common workplace/home device is direly in need of disinfecting". They found that it had lots of bacteria. Our non-thinking consumers will rush out to buy disinfectant products because they presume it's a problem. If they want to show anything at all meaningful, they need to correlate bacterial concentration on the keyboard with illnesses. I don't care if my keyboard has bacteria on it, I care if it has bacteria on it that can actually cause me problems.
You'd need a secure enough a lot of things, and that's where it always falls apart. You'd need readers that can't be compromised, a central database that can't be compromised, development staff who can't be compromised and won't backdoor the thing, maintainers who can't be compromised. In the end, the question becomes not can it be compromised, but when will it be. More likely, was it ever NOT compromised. Actually when you factor in things like the witness protection program, it becomes a given that there's a backdoor. I guess we're back to the old security dilemma. There is no secure, there's only secure from who, using what tools, in what timeframe, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
A specific cite would be appreciated. My understanding is that it was once illegal, but is no longer. Your recourse is limited to taking your business elsewhere. Let me know where to report them and I'd be happy to do it.
Let's just say I aspire to maintain an awareness that the stuff I don't know outweighs that which I do.
My position is that minimizing the power we all seem to be so concerned with waving over each other is a good thing. Certainly economically powerful (short for the vilified rich, right?) can take advantage of the poor. The high risk lending industry is a good example. Similarly the politically powerful can victimize the politically weak. Political power in a one person, one vote system comes in numbers. There's lots of poor people and not that many rich ones, consequently we now have a tax code where economically weak, politically powerful people don't pay much in taxes and are still pandered to by politicians who say tax cuts should be targeted at the poor. I say this as someone who has been there, and believe me, you could have cut my taxes by 50% and it wouldn't have made much difference. Half of not much is still not much. More than either I'd worry about governmental power. The Money Store may tell me I have to pay 25% interest rates or whatever they charge, but I don't think they're going to herd me into showers that never get wet or work me to death (literally) in pursuit of an agrarian utopia which will never come. Similarly the Republicrats and the Demicans (can you tell the difference? It's getting harder) may cause my tax burden to increase at a much faster rate than my income, but they probably aren't going to herd me and everyone who looks kind of like me out of the country, shooting those who protest.
I think what I want is relatively simple. Personal responsibility. You're responsible for providing for your own needs. If you can't, get voluntary help from the nearest possible source, family and community first. Coercion should be avoided. When the government absolutely must be involved, use that force, which is what it is, at a point as local to the problem as possible, and in as small an increment as possible. Today's good intentions become tomorrow's governmental powers. The ostensibly good intentioned people creating those powers today won't be there when their successors misuse them in the years to come. Sadly what seems to happen is that rather than banding together to solve problems, we get special interest groups running to get government to "solve" their problems, that being a euphamism for complicate current problems with brand new ones.
You'll have to judge for yourself whether this makes me a libertarian. Some of what they have to say has merit. Some is a bit...idealistic. Like the rest of us, they want to believe the world is simpler than it really is.
Government should restrict itself to tackling the problems that can't be handled by other means. National defense is one such problem because it is shared equally by all citizens and the incremental cost is insupportably high to be borne by cities or states. Defense spending "excesses" serve to keep the crazy bastards of the world at bay. That there are crazy bastards in the world who need to be kept at bay is historical fact. Turn the other way or play the appeasement game, a la WW II, and you get to spend millions of lives cleaning up the mess. Homelessness, hunger, youth without hope, etc, are all problems which can and should be solved at the local level from an entirely different pot of money. *YOU* personally, can go out on the street and help with regards to homelessness, hunger, and youth problems. Volunteer. You can't take up a collection at work to buy an ICBM or a long range bomber.
It's time to stop pointing fingers and blaming government for not creating an ideal world. First, that's your job. Second, their version of an ideal world is probably not what you have in mind.
Companies most certainly can and do cut your incoming calls if you don't pay, at least in the U.S.
Alternatively:
That's what I did. That's what a number of my family members a generation back did *before* the so-called Digital Divide was available to lay blame. Some of them are just plain rich, not because they got a free ride, but because they made wise choices and significant sacrifices to attain long term gains rather than instant gratification. I think about this every time I see a lower class person handing over food stamps or other forms of public assistance while chatting away on their cell phone. For the politically correct, I almost said "apparently lower class", but speaking in economic terms, you aren't middle class if you're on public assistance.
I have what may be surprising news for you on a couple fronts. Buying a computer doesn't lead to profit, in spite of what the signs tacked to utility poles everywhere lead you to believe. They're primarily entertainment devices. The so called working poor aren't all noble and hardworking but downtrodden people, though undoubtedly some are. Those that are don't spend their lives as "working poor". Some people find their comfort zones rather lower than others. Some people are in low paying jobs and complain up a storm but never get off their duffs to go look for something better. It's a competitive world. Those who figure that out and bother to show up for the competition are appropriately rewarded.
The simple fact is that there are no silver bullets to financial security. There's planning, hard work, good financial sense, and the like, but there's no "buy a computer, change your life". Getting an education can and does make a huge impact in your lifelong earnings. If you want to make a difference in people's lives, convince them to get one, take it seriously (don't spend your time swilling beer), and base their education on projected employment trends, not as some poor excuses for college advisors have said, on what you like.
This is one good reason to patronize small businesses. You're a bigger chunk of their revenue stream, and there's a correspondingly larger chance that they want you, personally, to be happy, rather than just upping the magic "customer satisfaction" number.
Is there an upper clue limit to be a movie executive?
I'm curious, when did you start following rules because they're good for you? Have you yet? I disobeyed my parents until the moment I moved out, even when their rules were "good rules". I've been known to occasionally bend the speed limit and may have even run a red light or two at 3:00 am when the roads were deserted. Children make their own judgements on what rules are good rules. Generally speaking, their decisions are not the decisions they'd make as adults. They tend to underestimate risk.
The problem actually is that the Patent Office sucks and is staffed by idiots. Like most organizations, the ones in manglement can cause the most damage. In this case, they've done so by approving patenting obvious ideas, business models, overly broad ideas, and a quota system. Only the last is new information. The patent office should ask themselves, on each patent, does the R&D cost justify a virtual monopoly for the better part of 2 decades. Too often a patent is granted to the first person who noticed a problem, then came up with a trivial solution for it. That is not the proper purpose of patent protection. They should ask themselves are they acting in the public interest, or are they enriching a tiny group of people who have done nothing notable at the expense of the public.
Too many people say, when confronted with this topic, that devices like this somehow harm or constrain children in ways that they shouldn't be constrained. What you said is exactly right. Children need freedom within limits. They don't need the capability to deny their parents knowledge of their whereabouts. It is a parent's right and obligation to set boundaries, their responsibility to provide a safe way for those boundaries to be explored. If I can have reliable assistance from modern technology, I can enlarge those boundaries. If I can't then they remain more constrained.
As for employees, I don't think this is useful in many cases, but perhaps in some. It's entirely reasonable, IMO, to GPS an armored car and possibly the drivers for the duration of their work day.
Don't kid yourself for a second that Phil Zimmerman would be irrelevant if the legislature and law enforcement decreed that encryption was banned. It would go away, as would those who use it.
Remember, too, that
This is only partly a "software sucks" issue. It's also very much a "ya gets what ya pay for" issue. You should not be entitled to anything whatsoever when you paid nothing whatsoever. Need more? Pay more, and believe me, the "more" will be commeasurate with the level of risk you're asking me to be exposed to. Realistically all you'll do is spawn a new insurance industry, and tack the premiums on to every piece of software you buy. People who can't afford the insurance, virtually all free software developers, for example, will simply stop producing. I'm certainly not going to exchange a piece of software with you for nothing but the possibility of being sued into the ground.
To turn your phrase around, want somebody to be financially liable? Don't use my software without compensating me for the risk.
You incorrectly presume that the other party's insurance company is interested in liability actually attaching to the person whom the evidence identified as being at fault rather than just being interested in not paying the claim. You know, lawyers aren't interested in finding the truth either, just getting a win for their client.
Does this sound like any company you currently do business with? Most companies I do business with sound like this when you're not a customer. Once you're a customer, it's "Here's your bill for next year."
Move along, nothing to see. This is nothing more than a solicitation for business and an oversensitive recipient. There are enough valid targets for our annoyance with corporate lack of ethics without targeting a company which did nothing more than find people whose certs are expiring and let them know they have a choice.
That's a good example of a simple, but non-obvious patent. What really gets me upset is the number of obvious patents granted. These people came up with a simple solution, but a solution that countless others did not come up with, even though they were faced with the same problem for as long as we've had diapers. Contrast this with most of the IT crap patents which are more in the line of "We were among the first people to notice a problem to solve and we won the race to the patent office." Patents aren't a reward to the fastest, they're a method of insuring that those who spend significant time or money inventing something aren't ripped off by someone else copying it. If only our Congresscritters would understand this and give the patent orifice the LARTing it deserves.
Not where I went to college it isn't. Ironically, out in the real world what I'm asked isn't "Is it correct?" or "Is it safe?". I'm asked "Is it done?" It's ironic that Myhrvold is 100% right. Microsoft shovels crap at the consumer because the consumer has a ravenous appetite for it.
As for open source, I'm not impressed. I don't think I've yet seen a piece of open source code and been impressed with its maintainability. Some has been horrifically awful, including the C monstrocity which used #defines to make C look like Visual Basic. I'm not yet convinced that open source's primary value, and the one which dwarfs all the others, is that it's generally free as in beer. Documentation, which is critically important, is usually bad and often nonexistant. I'm keeping an open mind, but I'm still waiting.
I've said this many times before, but here's one more time. If you want me on public transportation, it has to not cost me more money (including the tax subsidy), it has to not cost me more time, and it can't restrict where I can go and at what times I can go there. Failing those tests, I *still* have to have a car. Having a car, there's no good reason to ever not use it.
I used to work with someone who was an avid napster user but vehemently denied she was doing anything wrong. I have no problem believing 80% of pirates don't see themselves as such.
I couldn't agree more. I'm superstitious, and yet to the best of my understanding, the opposing viewpoint is that you have some number of cells which does not constitute a human life, and then a miracle occurs, and it does. When someone can persuade me that such a miracle does occur, and pinpoint when, I'll change my view.
I say this for one simple reason. The code tells me what you actually did. It doesn't tell me what you intended to do. Auditing someone elses code is a royal PITA when they haven't bothered to tell you what a function is supposed to be doing.
Steve McConnell doesn't work for Microsoft. He's worked for them in a contracting role, and has also written a highly insightful piece which explains a heck of a lot about why Microsoft is so hopeless, although he may not have intended it to carry that meaning. Basically, a high premium is placed on making the developer happy. Creeping featurism isn't seen as a problem. Of course you can figure this out by using any of their products as well.
Bah, he was hard to work with, he was easy to terminate.
Well that's the interesting thing. They didn't "find that a common workplace/home device is direly in need of disinfecting". They found that it had lots of bacteria. Our non-thinking consumers will rush out to buy disinfectant products because they presume it's a problem. If they want to show anything at all meaningful, they need to correlate bacterial concentration on the keyboard with illnesses. I don't care if my keyboard has bacteria on it, I care if it has bacteria on it that can actually cause me problems.
Sure, why not. It doesn't address any of the vulnerabilities, but knock yourself out.
You'd need a secure enough a lot of things, and that's where it always falls apart. You'd need readers that can't be compromised, a central database that can't be compromised, development staff who can't be compromised and won't backdoor the thing, maintainers who can't be compromised. In the end, the question becomes not can it be compromised, but when will it be. More likely, was it ever NOT compromised. Actually when you factor in things like the witness protection program, it becomes a given that there's a backdoor. I guess we're back to the old security dilemma. There is no secure, there's only secure from who, using what tools, in what timeframe, etc.