I think you nailed it. Kinda like it's not what you know, it's who. These are the days of big data sifting and pattern analysis. Unless one is doing nefarious stuff in which case you'd be an idiot for doing so in a way that can be rendered open, it's background noise as you say. If one needs to deal with confidential business stuff there are plenty of ways to share sensitive docs.
Else, don't bother. Cousin Avery's gallbladder and Aunt Suzy's use of medical herb just aren't that important. The one possible catch is number of hops; if you talk with somebody who talks with someone who talks with someone else who talks with someone that's being looked at, you have to question whether you get looked at or not. Over time it's easier to sift data than put eyeballs on the street.
The latter is what's needed but it's very consuming of time and people and thus expensive, so the powers that be have simply re-written the laws to basically make anyone already guilty, so it's just a matter of if they want you or not - in which case no fancy security theater on your part will make a bloddy bit of difference.
Thanks for the heads up re endocrine. I wasn't trying to minimize the humongous amount of stuff involved in how the body does what it does, rather I was making a simple list, part tongue in cheek, about what I use as a general guide to what I can manage to get, make, and eat on any kind of regular basis, and a bit about why.
In your sense I am indeed wrong-footed; in my sense, it's what I can do from day to day.
"I don't think it is simple... The solution to western metabolic disorders is simple..."
Make up your mind. [grin] (I know, apples and oranges, but hey...)
"Iran? They took over our embassy in the 70's, didn't they? Never mind that the embassy was taken over by citizens angry at the US for overthrowing their government."
Long memory, those students, who in summer of '79 took the embassy in retaliation for what we and the Brits engineered by way coup d'etat over Mossadegh in 1953 so's to put Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in power. I reckon they were far more angered at the predations of SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, and thus us by extension for putting him in power.
I mean, you're right, of course, but at the end of a chain, not the beginning.
Unless someone comes up with a bio true grey goo, no, not really. Weaponizing stuff is hard; getting something energetic enough to spread well, slow enough to have a long enough incubation to let carriers pervade the target, and with a high enough mortality to reduce your target as required, is just not that easy. Generally it's really more a terror weapon, not a WMD (although using the guidelines of law enforcement, fire crackers qualify - tremendously brain-dead stooopid, but it sure grabs headlines and boosts slam-dunk convictions.)
Unless, as others point out, with the newer genetic knowledge and spiffy machinery, it's gotta increase the possibility for making something both horrendous and effective.
Reminds me of "If a felon commits felony, then God is an iron." (Um, Spider Robinson, maybe, although I'd long thought it to be Harlan Ellison.) I'm trying to remember a sci-fi story where ridicule was the weapon of choice against terrorists and hard measures were used only as needful. Also, of the two or three large studies on classification I recall, done by the government itself, one of the recurring findings was that the bulk of items marked secret were to prevent embarrassment of high-ranking people. Seems rigid personalities can't tolerate mockery, yet who more deserving?
Doubly ironic that only sociopaths generally bother doing all the hard work needed to be rulers, yet they're so aptly ill-suited for the job. Given that maybe half of humans are, however gently, generally functionally idiotic about anything much past their nose and most of the other half willfully so, what's in the offing?
Btw, your second para in the linked essay, I'd definitely include, even emphasize, space-based solar power systems. Hasn't been a good study yet that could knock it down excepting against current coal costs or the temporary glut of natural gas (and not factoring in costs attendant to coal-fired power plants.) In other words there a no valid arguments against it. The one quibble is over assessing environmental impact of a slew of launches over a ten to twenty year period. Using methane or hydrogen rather than kerosene and such might help, I should think, although there are some design problems owing to difference in specific impulse and whatnot. Meanwhile, have some reading to finish.
Oh, and yeah, one problem with bio stuff is that if one party looks into something everyone has to look into it, both to have a counter - the MAD thing, but also to look for remedy, does one exist.
"they are VERY interested in viri concerning wheat, but oddly enough, not rice"
Not so odd. China has had it's share of difficulties including cross-border incursions (a delicate way of phrasing "small invasions") on both sides over the years with the Sovs, with at least several division-sized incidents in my lifetime; an also delicate, for different reasons, relationship with their supposed client, N. Korea; and historical North-South antipathy dating back over a millenium or two. Note that all but the southern portion of China eat wheat rather than rice as their staple grain.
So, offensive, no doubt, but many potential targets. I don't suppose the anti-wheat work was done in the south of China, was it? If so, it'd be almost a climate thing - rice eaters against those who live where it gets cold in winter. Siberia, for example, has boo-coo resources and it's not just Japan who has an interest in them.
Well, was leery of my memory on this.... so eventually spent some time reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streptococcus_mutans and a few of the included links. Was an eye opener and worth the time. About the only smart thing I've been doing is using baking soda and peroxide for brushing, along with a half-decent mouthwash. Never did find the reference I was looking for but don't want to take the time from other stuff right now to try to find it.
Looks properly trippy in Opera and Firefox. Oooh, the colors, man. Reminds me of the first acid trip, guy sticks his hand in front of your face and does the finger fan thing, watch the trails, like, wow, man, trippin', ya know? At least, that's my memory from '67, what's left of it.
Amen. Why you got voted down for making sense I dunno. Maybe they disliked your grammar. Seriously, paywalled research articles are for shit, and if a penny of tax funds went into doing the research, publish it openly.
Heck, I've crunched for World Community Grid since late '04, and last year they announced that a paper was given on the results of one study. I looked forward to reading it, something towards which I'd contributed in however small a manner, only to be allowed to read one para of a paywalled paper (the $40 or so was what I had to spend on getting to doctors' appointments that month). Fuck that. I'll still crunch for WCG because I believe the project contributes to a lot of good research, but I'll no longer have the same happy attitude towards it.
You reminded me of "The Body has a Head" by Gustav Eckstein. My takeaway is that we're a chemical-mechanical system of stuff wherein (or whereof) resides a mind. It's a great read, and presents among other things a biographical history to the advance of medical knowledge, the nesting and relation of systems, and the body's striving for homeostasis. Written in 1970 and to this day an indispensable book for anyone who wants to know about their body or of medicine. Sorry, this reads like an advert. Well, maybe so. It's one of a handful of books that I try to keep on my shelf, of the thousands of books I've enjoyed reading and would like to own again.
As I understood it, the mouth bacterium eats sugar and shits acid which eats the enamel at the gum line, creating an even better home for itself -> plaque -> gingivitis, etc. Apparently there is a cousin that'll live in the same 'ecological niche' that doesn't do this and it's possible to replace the nasty with the benign. Have read on this twice, both sourced from dentistry school at Duke, first time in late '70s; I've only met one dentist who'll admit to the bacteria bit, not any of the rest. Also, we don't start with it - it's acquired exiting the birth canal. Some people are born without it and cannot get tooth decay in the accepted sense unless that bacterium (one of the s. mutans) later takes hold through injury or disease.
Your two paras 'tween decay and acne oughta go into the texts as a concise statement of the realities. Hat off, etc.
As I understand it, which is probably not much, it's kinda simple, and it makes my life easier for dealing with all the crap that's making it more difficult. Also, a little balance goes a long way.
Glucose is fuel - what cells burn to do their stuff. Protein is used to repair and build tissue (which is pretty much everything.) Cholesterol is used to build cell walls, connective tissues, fingernails, and such. Fat is for stored energy, it tastes good, and helps regulate appetite (the 'appestat'.) Excess glucose is converted to fat.
Calories in = calories out - take in more than you burn, gain weight; take in less, lose.
Bread is used to make hamburgers easier to hold onto and make it easier to add ketchup and onions, etc. Also a wrapper for pb&j, and toast with eggs and bacon.
I like brown rice and potatoes (sweet potatoes too), so I eats 'em. Veggies add to a meal, and fruits are tasty, so I eat some of them also - and they add easily a slew of minerals used everywhere in the bod for different stuff including repairing bone, and fibre which makes it easier to poop regularly and helps keep the pipes clean. Oatmeal is OK, just don't tell anybody you eat it. Add some yoghurt and maybe cheese; tastes good and good for you. There's other stuff going on, of course, but it's the basics.
That's about it. YMMV.
Going by the news over the past year or so I begin to think the only thing that doesn't cause or is highly associated with dementia is dying young. You live long enough, something is gonna get you. The real question becomes if you'll enjoy your second childhood more than your first. I tend to prefer mens sana, corpore sano, at least some reasonable semblance thereof; crapping out too far one way or the other leaves me looking for the off switch while that choice is still possible. The thought of stroking out to living coma or becoming mindless veg gives me the willies. I saw some of that at the nursing home/rehab place and it wasn't pretty.
I suppose it mostly depends on time available or if the hard drive is encrypted. Else it's a matter of rebooting and going into safe mode to get at the passwords. If necessary, use a good recovery CD or Reatogo with the appropriate tools packaged in. Knoppix and such ought to work as well, if memory serves.
If there's a BIOS pword, reset with jumper or take the battery out for a minute. If the HD is encrypted then it's beyond what I can do.
Agreed, with a few changes in settings for services and a few other tweaks (the learning of which required more reading and learning than I initially appreciated) one had a fast and generally quite stable Vista system. I've watched it recover from things that would have locked up an XP install. The only issues remaining were with some drivers and with the graphics system bottleneck.
After making the necessary changes, I and those I did the same for started to really like Vista and had no complaints. The one real caveat is that we were all fairly simple end users doing fairly simple things, doing little more strenuous than simple video editing, using some big spreadsheets, and playing some games that made full use of the available resources.
Re the link you gave, I just read most of it, and initial reaction by this very simple end user is: Wow!
Thanks very much for the info linked to. If I still had my old Vista and XP installs, I'd be busily about testing this. Hmm, I do have an XP vm... but no current need for using more than 4GB (indeed, I've set the vm to use just 1GB of RAM.)
Thanks, again; I learned more than I probably needed to, and I like that as well - it's good to stretch.
"I'll worry about that when my bank gets online banking to work with linux"
Huh? Isn't that done via a browser anyway? My bank works that way and doesn't care what OS I'm using. I'm running Ubuntu and talk with my bank with Firefox.
Amen to that. Since using ghostery have less clutter on pages and they load faster as well. Only difficulty is when something on a page isn't working and I don't readily know how to find out what's blocking it - that can get tedious and much of the time I give up.
Thanks; I'm a bit dense and didn't know where you were coming from with that. This stuff is well above my pay grade - and I'm retired. (Below, a poster notes that pacemakers apparently can be over-ridden/stopped by powerful magnet - I have to wonder if that's part of EM techs' kit.
My stupid idea would be that the security holes would be closed by the makers (better, they should not exist at all) - and I don't think it all that likely until someone important dies, as others have said. As you point out, passwords and such may easily create more problems than they're worth. So a totally innocent bystander has to ask: what to do?
Yeah, docs aren't well-known with being all that free with their time. Too many of us, too few of them, for starts. So, another problem.
I thought the subject was vulnerabilities of medical devices and other things and that the bulk of the discussion concerned disclosing and getting fixed those vulnerabilities. I don't understand how papering something over with a password would fix anything, and that wasn't even something discussed until you brought it up.
I certainly agree, though, that if you have an implanted device that needs monitoring or adjusting remotely there has to be a way to authenticate the identities and verify the authority to do the monitoring or make a change. In an emergency not having a password may be irrelevant since the EMTs likely don't have the equipment to talk to, in this example, a pacemaker anyway. So either they can stabilize you or you're toast, regardless. I suppose a more adventurous responder might try to nullify the pacemaker in some way, hoping that he'd be covered by Good Samaritan law. The current situation is a mess all around, not only with the various vulns, some of which I suspect are more than statistically improbable, but with the lack of ability or machinery by the ambulance techs to deal with the implants. I'm guessing on this latter bit, but the times I've been in an ambulance of late the most technical stuff I saw were a pulse-ox and a defibrillator, along with the EEG box and radio.
Dunno, man, that stuff's over my head. I don't know exactly what Rod does or if he's made source available.
I figure that in the main folks will use the tools that are known to them, that are reasonably congenial with their wonts, and serve to accomplish their needs, whatever those tools might be.
Ah, well, thanks for looking. Perhaps, in the justice of it, like many another good homilies, we simply re-issue it with a newer attribution and to avoid confusion and uncertainty, we just go with mcgrew's Law and be done with it;-)
That last para got a good laugh out of me, thanks!
I agree, particularly in that it seems that much will depend on what a given OEM will deliver. I am unsure exactly what the spec requires about access to setup mode; my reading of the relevant stuff on Wikipedia, openboot, and a few other places has left me confused - and I admit much of the discussion was a bit over my head to begin with.
I really dislike being in the situation that my best reaction to an impending situation is summed up with: "Aw, shit."
Let's see, on my Ubuntu install, or any of the mainstream distros so far as I know, for instance, I get an update notifier which gives me the choice of update or remind me later (just did this within the hour, including Netflix).
Click update. Enter password. Click okay or continue, whatever the damn thing is. System updates - OS, drivers, applications. (If OS, then reboot is needed.) When done, get message about updates complete, click OK, go on with life.
This by you is complicated?
To me it is most often simpler than Windows updates. If using Windows, setting up Soluto and Secunia's Personal Software Inspector goes a long ways to making updating applications, drivers, plugins, and patches easier than a basic generic install. Anything from Adobe may be problematic, btw.
Otherwise a Windows user is left updating the OS and then doing application, driver, and plugin updates separately - which is one reason so many things on a Windows box are often not updated by so many end-users.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you nailed it. Kinda like it's not what you know, it's who. These are the days of big data sifting and pattern analysis. Unless one is doing nefarious stuff in which case you'd be an idiot for doing so in a way that can be rendered open, it's background noise as you say. If one needs to deal with confidential business stuff there are plenty of ways to share sensitive docs.
Else, don't bother. Cousin Avery's gallbladder and Aunt Suzy's use of medical herb just aren't that important. The one possible catch is number of hops; if you talk with somebody who talks with someone who talks with someone else who talks with someone that's being looked at, you have to question whether you get looked at or not. Over time it's easier to sift data than put eyeballs on the street.
The latter is what's needed but it's very consuming of time and people and thus expensive, so the powers that be have simply re-written the laws to basically make anyone already guilty, so it's just a matter of if they want you or not - in which case no fancy security theater on your part will make a bloddy bit of difference.
Thanks for the heads up re endocrine. I wasn't trying to minimize the humongous amount of stuff involved in how the body does what it does, rather I was making a simple list, part tongue in cheek, about what I use as a general guide to what I can manage to get, make, and eat on any kind of regular basis, and a bit about why.
In your sense I am indeed wrong-footed; in my sense, it's what I can do from day to day.
"I don't think it is simple...
The solution to western metabolic disorders is simple..."
Make up your mind. [grin] (I know, apples and oranges, but hey...)
A small quibble, if you will.
"Iran? They took over our embassy in the 70's, didn't they? Never mind that the embassy was taken over by citizens angry at the US for overthrowing their government."
Long memory, those students, who in summer of '79 took the embassy in retaliation for what we and the Brits engineered by way coup d'etat over Mossadegh in 1953 so's to put Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in power. I reckon they were far more angered at the predations of SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, and thus us by extension for putting him in power.
I mean, you're right, of course, but at the end of a chain, not the beginning.
Btw, for an interesting little bit of reading,
http://globalresearch.ca/the-1979-iranian-us-embassy-siege-and-hostage-crisis-was-it-a-covert-cia-operation/30291
might as well add some cayenne to the stew.
Unless someone comes up with a bio true grey goo, no, not really. Weaponizing stuff is hard; getting something energetic enough to spread well, slow enough to have a long enough incubation to let carriers pervade the target, and with a high enough mortality to reduce your target as required, is just not that easy. Generally it's really more a terror weapon, not a WMD (although using the guidelines of law enforcement, fire crackers qualify - tremendously brain-dead stooopid, but it sure grabs headlines and boosts slam-dunk convictions.)
Unless, as others point out, with the newer genetic knowledge and spiffy machinery, it's gotta increase the possibility for making something both horrendous and effective.
Reminds me of "If a felon commits felony, then God is an iron." (Um, Spider Robinson, maybe, although I'd long thought it to be Harlan Ellison.) I'm trying to remember a sci-fi story where ridicule was the weapon of choice against terrorists and hard measures were used only as needful. Also, of the two or three large studies on classification I recall, done by the government itself, one of the recurring findings was that the bulk of items marked secret were to prevent embarrassment of high-ranking people. Seems rigid personalities can't tolerate mockery, yet who more deserving?
Doubly ironic that only sociopaths generally bother doing all the hard work needed to be rulers, yet they're so aptly ill-suited for the job. Given that maybe half of humans are, however gently, generally functionally idiotic about anything much past their nose and most of the other half willfully so, what's in the offing?
Btw, your second para in the linked essay, I'd definitely include, even emphasize, space-based solar power systems. Hasn't been a good study yet that could knock it down excepting against current coal costs or the temporary glut of natural gas (and not factoring in costs attendant to coal-fired power plants.) In other words there a no valid arguments against it. The one quibble is over assessing environmental impact of a slew of launches over a ten to twenty year period. Using methane or hydrogen rather than kerosene and such might help, I should think, although there are some design problems owing to difference in specific impulse and whatnot. Meanwhile, have some reading to finish.
Oh, and yeah, one problem with bio stuff is that if one party looks into something everyone has to look into it, both to have a counter - the MAD thing, but also to look for remedy, does one exist.
"they are VERY interested in viri concerning wheat, but oddly enough, not rice"
Not so odd. China has had it's share of difficulties including cross-border incursions (a delicate way of phrasing "small invasions") on both sides over the years with the Sovs, with at least several division-sized incidents in my lifetime; an also delicate, for different reasons, relationship with their supposed client, N. Korea; and historical North-South antipathy dating back over a millenium or two. Note that all but the southern portion of China eat wheat rather than rice as their staple grain.
So, offensive, no doubt, but many potential targets. I don't suppose the anti-wheat work was done in the south of China, was it? If so, it'd be almost a climate thing - rice eaters against those who live where it gets cold in winter. Siberia, for example, has boo-coo resources and it's not just Japan who has an interest in them.
Well, was leery of my memory on this.... so eventually spent some time reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streptococcus_mutans
and a few of the included links. Was an eye opener and worth the time. About the only smart thing I've been doing is using baking soda and peroxide for brushing, along with a half-decent mouthwash. Never did find the reference I was looking for but don't want to take the time from other stuff right now to try to find it.
Looks properly trippy in Opera and Firefox. Oooh, the colors, man. Reminds me of the first acid trip, guy sticks his hand in front of your face and does the finger fan thing, watch the trails, like, wow, man, trippin', ya know? At least, that's my memory from '67, what's left of it.
Amen. Why you got voted down for making sense I dunno. Maybe they disliked your grammar. Seriously, paywalled research articles are for shit, and if a penny of tax funds went into doing the research, publish it openly.
Heck, I've crunched for World Community Grid since late '04, and last year they announced that a paper was given on the results of one study. I looked forward to reading it, something towards which I'd contributed in however small a manner, only to be allowed to read one para of a paywalled paper (the $40 or so was what I had to spend on getting to doctors' appointments that month). Fuck that. I'll still crunch for WCG because I believe the project contributes to a lot of good research, but I'll no longer have the same happy attitude towards it.
You reminded me of "The Body has a Head" by Gustav Eckstein. My takeaway is that we're a chemical-mechanical system of stuff wherein (or whereof) resides a mind. It's a great read, and presents among other things a biographical history to the advance of medical knowledge, the nesting and relation of systems, and the body's striving for homeostasis. Written in 1970 and to this day an indispensable book for anyone who wants to know about their body or of medicine. Sorry, this reads like an advert. Well, maybe so. It's one of a handful of books that I try to keep on my shelf, of the thousands of books I've enjoyed reading and would like to own again.
Nice summary, thank you.
As I understood it, the mouth bacterium eats sugar and shits acid which eats the enamel at the gum line, creating an even better home for itself -> plaque -> gingivitis, etc. Apparently there is a cousin that'll live in the same 'ecological niche' that doesn't do this and it's possible to replace the nasty with the benign. Have read on this twice, both sourced from dentistry school at Duke, first time in late '70s; I've only met one dentist who'll admit to the bacteria bit, not any of the rest. Also, we don't start with it - it's acquired exiting the birth canal. Some people are born without it and cannot get tooth decay in the accepted sense unless that bacterium (one of the s. mutans) later takes hold through injury or disease.
Your two paras 'tween decay and acne oughta go into the texts as a concise statement of the realities. Hat off, etc.
As I understand it, which is probably not much, it's kinda simple, and it makes my life easier for dealing with all the crap that's making it more difficult. Also, a little balance goes a long way.
Glucose is fuel - what cells burn to do their stuff.
Protein is used to repair and build tissue (which is pretty much everything.)
Cholesterol is used to build cell walls, connective tissues, fingernails, and such.
Fat is for stored energy, it tastes good, and helps regulate appetite (the 'appestat'.)
Excess glucose is converted to fat.
Calories in = calories out - take in more than you burn, gain weight; take in less, lose.
Bread is used to make hamburgers easier to hold onto and make it easier to add ketchup and onions, etc. Also a wrapper for pb&j, and toast with eggs and bacon.
I like brown rice and potatoes (sweet potatoes too), so I eats 'em.
Veggies add to a meal, and fruits are tasty, so I eat some of them also - and they add easily a slew of minerals used everywhere in the bod for different stuff including repairing bone, and fibre which makes it easier to poop regularly and helps keep the pipes clean.
Oatmeal is OK, just don't tell anybody you eat it.
Add some yoghurt and maybe cheese; tastes good and good for you.
There's other stuff going on, of course, but it's the basics.
That's about it. YMMV.
Going by the news over the past year or so I begin to think the only thing that doesn't cause or is highly associated with dementia is dying young. You live long enough, something is gonna get you. The real question becomes if you'll enjoy your second childhood more than your first. I tend to prefer mens sana, corpore sano, at least some reasonable semblance thereof; crapping out too far one way or the other leaves me looking for the off switch while that choice is still possible. The thought of stroking out to living coma or becoming mindless veg gives me the willies. I saw some of that at the nursing home/rehab place and it wasn't pretty.
I suppose it mostly depends on time available or if the hard drive is encrypted. Else it's a matter of rebooting and going into safe mode to get at the passwords. If necessary, use a good recovery CD or Reatogo with the appropriate tools packaged in. Knoppix and such ought to work as well, if memory serves.
If there's a BIOS pword, reset with jumper or take the battery out for a minute. If the HD is encrypted then it's beyond what I can do.
Agreed, with a few changes in settings for services and a few other tweaks (the learning of which required more reading and learning than I initially appreciated) one had a fast and generally quite stable Vista system. I've watched it recover from things that would have locked up an XP install. The only issues remaining were with some drivers and with the graphics system bottleneck.
After making the necessary changes, I and those I did the same for started to really like Vista and had no complaints. The one real caveat is that we were all fairly simple end users doing fairly simple things, doing little more strenuous than simple video editing, using some big spreadsheets, and playing some games that made full use of the available resources.
Re the link you gave, I just read most of it, and initial reaction by this very simple end user is: Wow!
Thanks very much for the info linked to. If I still had my old Vista and XP installs, I'd be busily about testing this. Hmm, I do have an XP vm... but no current need for using more than 4GB (indeed, I've set the vm to use just 1GB of RAM.)
Thanks, again; I learned more than I probably needed to, and I like that as well - it's good to stretch.
"I'll worry about that when my bank gets online banking to work with linux"
Huh? Isn't that done via a browser anyway? My bank works that way and doesn't care what OS I'm using. I'm running Ubuntu and talk with my bank with Firefox.
Amen to that. Since using ghostery have less clutter on pages and they load faster as well. Only difficulty is when something on a page isn't working and I don't readily know how to find out what's blocking it - that can get tedious and much of the time I give up.
Thanks; I'm a bit dense and didn't know where you were coming from with that. This stuff is well above my pay grade - and I'm retired. (Below, a poster notes that pacemakers apparently can be over-ridden/stopped by powerful magnet - I have to wonder if that's part of EM techs' kit.
My stupid idea would be that the security holes would be closed by the makers (better, they should not exist at all) - and I don't think it all that likely until someone important dies, as others have said. As you point out, passwords and such may easily create more problems than they're worth. So a totally innocent bystander has to ask: what to do?
Yeah, docs aren't well-known with being all that free with their time. Too many of us, too few of them, for starts. So, another problem.
I thought the subject was vulnerabilities of medical devices and other things and that the bulk of the discussion concerned disclosing and getting fixed those vulnerabilities. I don't understand how papering something over with a password would fix anything, and that wasn't even something discussed until you brought it up.
I certainly agree, though, that if you have an implanted device that needs monitoring or adjusting remotely there has to be a way to authenticate the identities and verify the authority to do the monitoring or make a change. In an emergency not having a password may be irrelevant since the EMTs likely don't have the equipment to talk to, in this example, a pacemaker anyway. So either they can stabilize you or you're toast, regardless. I suppose a more adventurous responder might try to nullify the pacemaker in some way, hoping that he'd be covered by Good Samaritan law. The current situation is a mess all around, not only with the various vulns, some of which I suspect are more than statistically improbable, but with the lack of ability or machinery by the ambulance techs to deal with the implants. I'm guessing on this latter bit, but the times I've been in an ambulance of late the most technical stuff I saw were a pulse-ox and a defibrillator, along with the EEG box and radio.
Dunno, man, that stuff's over my head. I don't know exactly what Rod does or if he's made source available.
I figure that in the main folks will use the tools that are known to them, that are reasonably congenial with their wonts, and serve to accomplish their needs, whatever those tools might be.
Ah, well, thanks for looking. Perhaps, in the justice of it, like many another good homilies, we simply re-issue it with a newer attribution and to avoid confusion and uncertainty, we just go with mcgrew's Law and be done with it;-)
That last para got a good laugh out of me, thanks!
I agree, particularly in that it seems that much will depend on what a given OEM will deliver. I am unsure exactly what the spec requires about access to setup mode; my reading of the relevant stuff on Wikipedia, openboot, and a few other places has left me confused - and I admit much of the discussion was a bit over my head to begin with.
I really dislike being in the situation that my best reaction to an impending situation is summed up with: "Aw, shit."
Yes.
Ooops, my post was more for idontgno, below, although it fits here too.
Let's see, on my Ubuntu install, or any of the mainstream distros so far as I know, for instance, I get an update notifier which gives me the choice of update or remind me later (just did this within the hour, including Netflix).
Click update.
Enter password.
Click okay or continue, whatever the damn thing is.
System updates - OS, drivers, applications. (If OS, then reboot is needed.)
When done, get message about updates complete, click OK, go on with life.
This by you is complicated?
To me it is most often simpler than Windows updates. If using Windows, setting up Soluto and Secunia's Personal Software Inspector goes a long ways to making updating applications, drivers, plugins, and patches easier than a basic generic install. Anything from Adobe may be problematic, btw.
Otherwise a Windows user is left updating the OS and then doing application, driver, and plugin updates separately - which is one reason so many things on a Windows box are often not updated by so many end-users.