"I want it and my government friends have guns..." Is this the best we can do?
The reason Verizon can stay in business despite having "very limited interest in what their customers want" is because of municipal and state granted monopolies, federal grants and subsidies, and the reason they even exist at all is because of a government approved corporate charter. Why is "government friends with guns" an acceptable argument for them getting their way, but not an acceptable argument against it?
It isn't as though each $50,000 (say) job lost in the US or Europe leads to $50,000 worth of jobs in India or whereever, though. Jobs aren't being moved overseas out of some egalitarian desire to bring the third world up. The difference in wages is pocketed and further enriches the already wealthy. Instead of making the entire world better, you're making one place slightly better while making another significantly worse. At the moment, the people paying the salaries of those jobs are the people who are losing their own jobs. If offshoring is all about fairness, why is the whole system run as a labor arbitrage: paying third world salaries for labor but charging first world prices for products? That is wrong.
Besides that, it's nice that you and the wealthy get to decide who is more deserving of these jobs when your lot clearly isn't on the line. Why is it fair to demand that the American middle class give up their tiny portion of the pie (to make the world a better place, no less) while demanding nothing of those who hold most of the pie?
If you weren't dead set on saving a few bucks, you wouldn't be using a Raspberry Pi. Especially the first one, which is filled with rookie mistakes.
Touché.
HAHAHAHA. I love that you accidentally dropped a word, and that made your comment dramatically more accurate. The modules you propose people should use are not only three times the price, but they're also non-variable* — they might be better-made, but they also have inferior specifications.
Three times a small number is still a small number. I don't think $15 is too extravagant and if you need more than a one-off part, you're better off making your own anyway. The link I included was just an example, but their list includes four with adjustable output of the fourteen total. What do you mean by "variable", if not that? (Anyway, that wasn't part of the original specification, nor was that part of your original description.)
Unless you're dead set on saving a few bucks, you're much better off getting little modules like this from a reputable source (with schematics, test results, and so on) than from fly-by-night eBay sellers. For example, here's a decent buck-boost from Pololu that fits the bill and it's that much more expensive.
If you start looking hard at some of the anonymously produced and undocumented stuff that comes from China, you'll scream. You wouldn't believe some of the rookie mistakes made in the design of (some of) those modules. Also, in some cases there are some serious compromises made to reach the lowest possible price.
You're claiming that ten percent of the US citizens (~32 million people) don't have Social Security numbers assigned or ID of any kind? That's hard to believe, which is why the parent suggested that you were talking about illegal aliens. Nearly 85% of the US population lives within a largish metropolitan area [], which would mean that half-to-most rural people would have to lack a SSN for your claim to be true.
That's a cop-out, though. Yes, there is always an element of trust in whatever you do. That's unavoidable, though it's smart to minimize the amount of trust you must put in others. Taken to the extreme it's ludicrous, as you've pointed out. But, that doesn't mean that there's no merit in limiting the amount of trust you put in third parties. Just because you can't completely trust your OS or compiler, doesn't mean that you should throw the entire concept of limiting trust out the window. It's dishonest to suggest that the risk is the same between trusting (your compiler), (your compiler + your OS), and (your compiler + your OS + the CA system).
The CA system is truly an honor system by design. It requires you to put your complete trust in a large, and growing, list of opaque and unfamiliar third parties and the decision to trust them is made by others though an opaque and unaccountable process. It's putatively a "security system", but is insecure by design. It depends entirely on unaccountable, secretive, and self-selected "authorities" to determine who should trust who.
Look at your OS's list of trusted CAs sometime. Any of these organizations, or anyone delegated by any single one of them, are implicitly trusted by your system. Completely trusting Microsoft, Apple, or various Linux devs is naive, but completely trusting everyone in the root CA list is absolutely insane!
OK, to clarify... disappearances and purges are bad news, but it's not as if these historical dictatorships were all fine and dandy up until the point where people started disappearing. Holding off judgement until something is allowed to fully develop into its inevitable final product is dangerous and naive.
So people disappearing is the line at which you think a government is atrocious? There was more wrong with the dictatorships of the past than just purges. Would a dystopia where everyone is kept locked up in cages, but nobody is missing, not compare to a real fascist dictatorship? This argument people like you keep parroting is like the No True Scotsman argument of bad government.
But everyone wants to pay the rates of the healthiest, safest, best maintained because if you have to pay more than that you must be getting ripped off.
Because you are getting ripped off (at both ends of the risk pool). Insurance is about pooling risk so that the cost of unlikely events are spread among more people. If statistical analysis allows insurance companies to segregate and condense those pools by risk, then eventually all of the individuals (high and low risk) end up paying what they'd normally pay if they didn't have insurance plus the profit that the insurance company is collecting. Insurance companies are profitable because the risks of the insured are increasingly well known, but withheld from the insured.
You're getting ripped off by being moved between the risk pools without any regard to what you've already payed into the system. When you're young and healthy, your premiums are pure profit as you never collect on them. When you're old and sick, your premiums rise to cover your costs (plus profit). If increased data mining allows even finer grained risk assessment (and adjusted premiums), where is the benefit in having insurance?
On whose land and with whose water will they grow this food? Mortgages, property taxes, and water rights will still be traded in the old economy. The lord won't tolerate anyone squatting on his land.
Fixating on 'gestures' and reducing the entire scope of the input device to them is where the Leap went wrong. And from the summary: "...respond to a set of pre-programmed gestures...", it's where this one will go wrong, too. Gestures are fine for making limited input devices more powerful (as is the case with trackpads) but there's nothing intuitive or compelling about a 'set of pre-programmed gestures' in itself.
There's a bunch cool stuff you could do with these sort of input devices, but everyone seems so compelled to turn them into clumsy trackpad replacements.
The mandate expanded the state of things from "Oh, you're poor, so you get the failure-prone pill because it's cheap"...
You got that backward, though. An IUD is considerably cheaper than the pill. The pill is popular in the US for the same reason that brand name drugs and freshly patented drugs are more popular than generics: pharmaceutical marketing and kickbacks to prescribing doctors.
The reasoning for the poor getting the pill is a gift to the pharma companies. Relative effectiveness was never even considered when making the decision.
...understanding the constitution requires more than just reading it and deciding what you think it means.
It really doesn't, though. The validity of our entire government hinges on the support of the governed and the idea that understanding the basis of government (which is a short document in plain English) is beyond the capability of ordinary citizens abuses that validity.
If a simple and straightforward statement like, "No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..." can be twisted to mean that a person can be compelled to do so, then the changes that history has made to the document are much greater than "nuance".
To further clarify my point: the key, as a physical object, can be seized if it can be found. The safe can also be seized and its lock forced, but none of that requires the cooperation of the defendant.
...you have to provide LOTS of other information during disclosure...
You actually don't have to provide anything other than to identify yourself. As a defendant, you don't have to cooperate in the investigation against you. It may help you to cooperate (if you're innocent and can prove it), but you aren't required to do so.
A key is a physical object and as such can be compelled.
In what circumstances are you compelled to produce physical objects? If this was the case, wouldn't murder trials always start by compelling the defendant to produce the murder weapon and the body?
...after the seized computer is shipped to a lab; the first thing they will do is remove the storage media from the computer, hook it up...
This is what you take advantage of. Crack the drive open and rewire the drive so that attaching it to a normal power supply destroys the drive. This may be as easy as just swapping around the 12V, 3.3V, and 5V pins. Make the corresponding modifications to your computer.
There's all sorts of empty space inside of modern SSD drives, so you could add an extra circuit to boost the voltage and apply it directly to the memory chips or fill the case with thermite or whatever. If you go this route, you don't even need to worry about strong encryption methods because the analysis will never get that far. If the failure is not catastrophic (say, melting into a puddle or bursting into flames), there might not even be any suspicion of foul play. Electronics die all of the time and SSDs have no outward feedback to indicate whether they're failing or not...
It's great if you're a cheapskate who feels like you've won if you got a $5/yr service free for five years. If your time is worth anything at all to you, or you're trying to establish some sort of reliable process that you don't have to fuck with on short notice, it's not such a great deal.
What good is Google as an industry giant who will be around indefinitely if they have the attention span of a gnat?
In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.
Of course the Chinese can manufacture good quality products. The fact that they very often don't has less to do with Chinese capabilities and more to do with their customers. When a company is uprooting its entire manufacturing capability and moving it overseas, they are in a serious cost-cutting mindset. Shipping the manufacturing to China and maintaining the current quality will save a little bit of money, but shipping the manufacturing to China and cutting quality to the bone will save so much more.
Doing something like this is a big sale for the top executives and it may not pan out in the long term. If they're going to tank the company, they need to cash out now, while there's still something left of the brand name.
Slashdot Mirror
"I want it and my government friends have guns..." Is this the best we can do?
The reason Verizon can stay in business despite having "very limited interest in what their customers want" is because of municipal and state granted monopolies, federal grants and subsidies, and the reason they even exist at all is because of a government approved corporate charter. Why is "government friends with guns" an acceptable argument for them getting their way, but not an acceptable argument against it?
It isn't as though each $50,000 (say) job lost in the US or Europe leads to $50,000 worth of jobs in India or whereever, though. Jobs aren't being moved overseas out of some egalitarian desire to bring the third world up. The difference in wages is pocketed and further enriches the already wealthy. Instead of making the entire world better, you're making one place slightly better while making another significantly worse. At the moment, the people paying the salaries of those jobs are the people who are losing their own jobs. If offshoring is all about fairness, why is the whole system run as a labor arbitrage: paying third world salaries for labor but charging first world prices for products? That is wrong.
Besides that, it's nice that you and the wealthy get to decide who is more deserving of these jobs when your lot clearly isn't on the line. Why is it fair to demand that the American middle class give up their tiny portion of the pie (to make the world a better place, no less) while demanding nothing of those who hold most of the pie?
If you weren't dead set on saving a few bucks, you wouldn't be using a Raspberry Pi. Especially the first one, which is filled with rookie mistakes.
Touché.
HAHAHAHA. I love that you accidentally dropped a word, and that made your comment dramatically more accurate. The modules you propose people should use are not only three times the price, but they're also non-variable* — they might be better-made, but they also have inferior specifications.
Three times a small number is still a small number. I don't think $15 is too extravagant and if you need more than a one-off part, you're better off making your own anyway. The link I included was just an example, but their list includes four with adjustable output of the fourteen total. What do you mean by "variable", if not that? (Anyway, that wasn't part of the original specification, nor was that part of your original description.)
Unless you're dead set on saving a few bucks, you're much better off getting little modules like this from a reputable source (with schematics, test results, and so on) than from fly-by-night eBay sellers. For example, here's a decent buck-boost from Pololu that fits the bill and it's that much more expensive.
If you start looking hard at some of the anonymously produced and undocumented stuff that comes from China, you'll scream. You wouldn't believe some of the rookie mistakes made in the design of (some of) those modules. Also, in some cases there are some serious compromises made to reach the lowest possible price.
You're claiming that ten percent of the US citizens (~32 million people) don't have Social Security numbers assigned or ID of any kind? That's hard to believe, which is why the parent suggested that you were talking about illegal aliens. Nearly 85% of the US population lives within a largish metropolitan area [], which would mean that half-to-most rural people would have to lack a SSN for your claim to be true.
That's very unlikely.
Hughes' legacy is enormous, too. As a philanthropic institute, it's endowment is second only to Gates.
That's a cop-out, though. Yes, there is always an element of trust in whatever you do. That's unavoidable, though it's smart to minimize the amount of trust you must put in others. Taken to the extreme it's ludicrous, as you've pointed out. But, that doesn't mean that there's no merit in limiting the amount of trust you put in third parties. Just because you can't completely trust your OS or compiler, doesn't mean that you should throw the entire concept of limiting trust out the window. It's dishonest to suggest that the risk is the same between trusting (your compiler), (your compiler + your OS), and (your compiler + your OS + the CA system).
The CA system is truly an honor system by design. It requires you to put your complete trust in a large, and growing, list of opaque and unfamiliar third parties and the decision to trust them is made by others though an opaque and unaccountable process. It's putatively a "security system", but is insecure by design. It depends entirely on unaccountable, secretive, and self-selected "authorities" to determine who should trust who.
Look at your OS's list of trusted CAs sometime. Any of these organizations, or anyone delegated by any single one of them, are implicitly trusted by your system. Completely trusting Microsoft, Apple, or various Linux devs is naive, but completely trusting everyone in the root CA list is absolutely insane!
OK, to clarify... disappearances and purges are bad news, but it's not as if these historical dictatorships were all fine and dandy up until the point where people started disappearing. Holding off judgement until something is allowed to fully develop into its inevitable final product is dangerous and naive.
So people disappearing is the line at which you think a government is atrocious? There was more wrong with the dictatorships of the past than just purges. Would a dystopia where everyone is kept locked up in cages, but nobody is missing, not compare to a real fascist dictatorship? This argument people like you keep parroting is like the No True Scotsman argument of bad government.
But everyone wants to pay the rates of the healthiest, safest, best maintained because if you have to pay more than that you must be getting ripped off.
Because you are getting ripped off (at both ends of the risk pool). Insurance is about pooling risk so that the cost of unlikely events are spread among more people. If statistical analysis allows insurance companies to segregate and condense those pools by risk, then eventually all of the individuals (high and low risk) end up paying what they'd normally pay if they didn't have insurance plus the profit that the insurance company is collecting. Insurance companies are profitable because the risks of the insured are increasingly well known, but withheld from the insured.
You're getting ripped off by being moved between the risk pools without any regard to what you've already payed into the system. When you're young and healthy, your premiums are pure profit as you never collect on them. When you're old and sick, your premiums rise to cover your costs (plus profit). If increased data mining allows even finer grained risk assessment (and adjusted premiums), where is the benefit in having insurance?
Or more robots... It's robots all the way down.
On whose land and with whose water will they grow this food? Mortgages, property taxes, and water rights will still be traded in the old economy. The lord won't tolerate anyone squatting on his land.
Fixating on 'gestures' and reducing the entire scope of the input device to them is where the Leap went wrong. And from the summary: "...respond to a set of pre-programmed gestures...", it's where this one will go wrong, too. Gestures are fine for making limited input devices more powerful (as is the case with trackpads) but there's nothing intuitive or compelling about a 'set of pre-programmed gestures' in itself.
There's a bunch cool stuff you could do with these sort of input devices, but everyone seems so compelled to turn them into clumsy trackpad replacements.
The mandate expanded the state of things from "Oh, you're poor, so you get the failure-prone pill because it's cheap"...
You got that backward, though. An IUD is considerably cheaper than the pill. The pill is popular in the US for the same reason that brand name drugs and freshly patented drugs are more popular than generics: pharmaceutical marketing and kickbacks to prescribing doctors.
The reasoning for the poor getting the pill is a gift to the pharma companies. Relative effectiveness was never even considered when making the decision.
Augmented reality glasses sound awesome, and these look much more interesting than Google Glass, but I'm not sure spies are the market here.
From the article: "Admittedly, for spy glasses, they lack a certain subtlety." A bit of an understatement, I'd say.
they are entitled to the whole truth.
On what basis are they entitled to this?
...understanding the constitution requires more than just reading it and deciding what you think it means.
It really doesn't, though. The validity of our entire government hinges on the support of the governed and the idea that understanding the basis of government (which is a short document in plain English) is beyond the capability of ordinary citizens abuses that validity.
If a simple and straightforward statement like, "No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..." can be twisted to mean that a person can be compelled to do so, then the changes that history has made to the document are much greater than "nuance".
To further clarify my point: the key, as a physical object, can be seized if it can be found. The safe can also be seized and its lock forced, but none of that requires the cooperation of the defendant.
...you have to provide LOTS of other information during disclosure...
You actually don't have to provide anything other than to identify yourself. As a defendant, you don't have to cooperate in the investigation against you. It may help you to cooperate (if you're innocent and can prove it), but you aren't required to do so.
A key is a physical object and as such can be compelled.
In what circumstances are you compelled to produce physical objects? If this was the case, wouldn't murder trials always start by compelling the defendant to produce the murder weapon and the body?
...after the seized computer is shipped to a lab; the first thing they will do is remove the storage media from the computer, hook it up...
This is what you take advantage of. Crack the drive open and rewire the drive so that attaching it to a normal power supply destroys the drive. This may be as easy as just swapping around the 12V, 3.3V, and 5V pins. Make the corresponding modifications to your computer.
There's all sorts of empty space inside of modern SSD drives, so you could add an extra circuit to boost the voltage and apply it directly to the memory chips or fill the case with thermite or whatever. If you go this route, you don't even need to worry about strong encryption methods because the analysis will never get that far. If the failure is not catastrophic (say, melting into a puddle or bursting into flames), there might not even be any suspicion of foul play. Electronics die all of the time and SSDs have no outward feedback to indicate whether they're failing or not...
It's great if you're a cheapskate who feels like you've won if you got a $5/yr service free for five years. If your time is worth anything at all to you, or you're trying to establish some sort of reliable process that you don't have to fuck with on short notice, it's not such a great deal.
What good is Google as an industry giant who will be around indefinitely if they have the attention span of a gnat?
Yeah. Using mysterious black box software and making/trusting claims about its security is a bit naive.
In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.
Of course the Chinese can manufacture good quality products. The fact that they very often don't has less to do with Chinese capabilities and more to do with their customers. When a company is uprooting its entire manufacturing capability and moving it overseas, they are in a serious cost-cutting mindset. Shipping the manufacturing to China and maintaining the current quality will save a little bit of money, but shipping the manufacturing to China and cutting quality to the bone will save so much more.
Doing something like this is a big sale for the top executives and it may not pan out in the long term. If they're going to tank the company, they need to cash out now, while there's still something left of the brand name.
Maybe on the moon, but not on this planet.