I work at a company that uses videoconferencing pretty heavily. We have all dedicated equipment and lines for it. I have heard numbers tossed around for the cost of the end-units (which look to be about 10 years old now) and I suspect $10k might be on the low end. It runs over dedicated ISDN lines (two of them!) and has a camera and several microphones, and the capability of supporting multiple cameras (for document viewing, etc.). The cameras have fun features like remote pan/tilt/zoom and auto motion-seeking, which is creepy. (The system this thing uses would be great on a gun turret.) This is a photo of the type of machine we use. (Note strange "antennae" on top; that has something to do with the motion detection.) Formerly made by Picture-Tel, which is now owned by PolyCom. Their newer stuff doesn't seem to be quite as impressive as the old gear, but probably does more without looking like it's plotting the demise of humanity.
We use it all the time. It's not well set up for impromptu meetings, but neither is our company or organizational structure. We use it several times a week for scheduled meetings across locations, and it's good. There are people that I've only ever met via the VTC; if not for it, they'd just be disembodied voices on the telephone.
I think videoteleconferencing is not something you can do on the cheap. Or rather, the money you're going to put into it is going to directly influence the quality of the results. If you're willing to spend $50k, you can get something totally usable; but it's going to require ISDN lines (or special tap into your IP network, more likely today), a room to itself, and space in people's schedules when they want to use it.
But not having to actually work in the same office with some people? Priceless.
I think the tags are great; they let me get my whole article's worth of Slashdot groupthink in just a few seconds of skimming.
For instance: "IT: Vista Designed to Make Malware Easy" is tagged "troll, fud, vista, notfud, microsoft". I mean -- that's it! That's the whole discussion right there. Point, spastic head-nodding, counterpoint, rehash of the original article. Thank you sir, may I have another.
I'm hopeful that on some future "Slashdot Mobile," they'll remove everything but the titles and tags, and display it as a feed. Maybe after that, they'll even get rid of the titles, so you can just see a constant stream of tags.
Forget a boot stamping on the face of humanity; that's the future for you: "microsoft fud notfud troll itsatrap google dupe evil internet hardware nvidia slashvertisement pigpile dupe sun esr fud ubuntu dupe microsoft dupe... "
There are many things seriously wrong with the U.S., but none of them are easily solvable, nor are they trivial issues. There are thousands of possible inputs which can all have "crime" as one possible output, ranging from the legacies of slavery and discrimination (urban collapse, "white flight"), to drug policy, to basic taboos (sex "education" leading to ridiculously high teen pregnancy rates), to culture (glorification of violence, acceptability of violence in mainstream media). I could literally go on all day. Each one is an incredibly complex issue, in many cases rooted in generations of conflict and bad feelings and issues that people prefer not to discuss. A whole lot of very smart people have worked hard to solve them, and where we are today is the best compromise found so far.
In short, given the existence of fairly high crime rates here anyway, coupled with a well-justified sense of distrust of government and authority, and the extreme symbolic importance of the firearm, it would make little sense and cause great harm to intentionally disarm law-abiding people and remove the means with which they might defend themselves. This is particularly true since there's no convincing evidence showing that disarming law abiding citizens would reduce crime; rather, logically we'd expect to see it increase.
What people in other countries do may well be fine solutions for their needs (although I would probably disagree on fundamental philosophical grounds), but it's foolish to make sweeping cross-cultural comparisons and then blame the resulting difference on a single factor.
Well, although they may be discriminated against, on the list of reasons to justifiably avoid physical contact with someone, contagious skin diseases are pretty high on my list. Can't say I really blame people in regions where universal precautions, much less medical care, are unavailable, to stay the hell away from any possible transmission vectors. Hanson's Disease is barely well-understood in the first world; I doubt most people who haven't received specialized medical training know anything about it other than it looks like no fun to have.
I find it amusing that Europeans love to bemoan Americans for thinking, particularly when they travel, that Europe should be just like America; however, whenever a European or Euro-phile analyzes crime in the U.S., the only difference that ever gets brought up between the two places in question is the difference in gun control. Really... so that's the most significant difference between "many places" in Europe and the U.S.? You don't think there are, just perhaps, some more significant social, economic, and cultural contributors to the difference in crime?
Europe and the U.S. are not the same place, and you'd have to control for a whole lot more variables than "gun control" in order to start comparing something as high-level as per-capita murder rates.
Their probation officer pays more attention to them, and they feel trapped in the system. They can't move on and contribute positively, and lash out violently.
Alternately, their probation officer ignores them, and they get dumped out on the street, where they're unable to find a job and contribute positively, and turn to crime instead.
GRU author Vladimir Rezun, "Viktor Suvorov" alleges in Inside Soviet Military Intelligence that Penkovsky was bound to a board with piano wire and 'cremated alive'.
So, yes, I think that's where the anecdote comes from.
This is really the only good reason for the "notability" standards, IMO. It doesn't 'hurt' WP to have articles on obscure subjects, except insofar as they become impossible to verify once you get below a certain 'critical mass' where you can reasonably expect to find people who are going to know something about the subject.
Part of the benefit of Wikipedia is that it has articles on a wide variety of things, far more than a paper encyclopedia ever could. If I wanted to read Encyclopedia Britannica, I'd just go and read it. One of the reasons I search WP is because it has far more content, on a wider variety of things, than a traditional encyclopedia would.
The only reason to eliminate articles is when they're such small niche topics, that they necessarily represent the views of only a small number of people.
It certainly wouldn't be good for software development generally. All corporate development and all free-software development that's funded or backed by companies would stop.
However, if the industry really did get paralyzed by liability and litigation, free software in its purest form (without any corporate support) is basically immune. You set up a SVN or CVS server in some neutral jurisdiction (*cough* Sealand *cough*), and then have the developers work pseudonymously. Since more FOSS development is done without payment, it's a lot harder to track down developers based on a money or paper trail if they're trying to be covert about it.
There are a lot of situations where I could see free software surviving even in extremely adverse or legally hostile environments. It's just that these sort of precautions are inconvenient and ensure that you probably won't be able to take credit or payment for your work, therefore nobody does them unless they have to. (Though I think you'll find anonymous or pseudonymous contributors to controversial or legally questionable projects today -- e.g. anti-DRM or patent-encumbered projects that aren't legal in the U.S., etc.)
But is it their responsibility if their waitress (a helpful service bundled with Red Lobster) misunderstands what you meant by "crabs"? Are they liable for compromising your systems and causing an infection?
I don't think they offer those kind of services at Red Lobster. Out in back of Hooters, maybe.
The biggest "insecurities" in Safari, that I've seen recently anyway, all relate to configuration issues and default security policy. There were a few issues surrounding Safari's tendency to helpfully open 'safe' files after downloading -- where 'safe' were files that assumedly couldn't carry executable code, like PDFs and TXT. However, by using a legacy feature of OS X, it was possible to conceal an application as a 'safe' file, and make Safari run it, if you could get a user to download it.
However, because Safari isn't integrated into the OS very deeply, and just runs as a basic user process, anything that you did get a user to run in this way would just be executed with their privileges. Not a laughing matter to be sure (particularly combined with other priv-escalation bugs), but it was nothing on the scale of IE and its ActiveX flaws.
I think Apple updated Safari to have the "open safe files" option off by default, and that eliminated the autorun vulnerability, although it still leaves open lots of more social-engineering-based attacks where you just get the user to double-click on, and then execute, a downloaded file. However you can hardly blame that on the browser -- regardless of manufacturer -- at that point.
Whether Safari is really less prone to attacks because of its and OS X's inherent architecture, or just because of its smaller target profile to potential hackers, I'm not sure, but I haven't ever seen or heard of the kind of "drive by rooting" on OS X that occurs regularly with Windows machines via ActiveX.
If it was as easy to shoplift as it is to download movies, no doubt people would do that just as often. Most people honestly don't give a damn about the moral/ethical/legal implications of their entertainment, aside from how likely it is to land them in jail.
The risk/benefit analysis works out (for many people) in favor of downloading, but not in favor of shoplifting.
At risk of violating some sort of Godwin's-Law like rule for making 9/11 analogies, doesn't what you're saying sound a bit like someone sitting around on Sept. 10, 2001 saying "With a little bit of thought, the terrorists could set off car bombs in front of a bunch of major airports and totally screw up air travel? Since they cannot accomplish even that minor task, they don't have the skills to accomplish a major attack."
I think you're leaving out a major psychological motivator: the terrorists in large part aren't satisfied by and don't want just small, anonymous, disruptive attacks; they want large, public, anything-but-anonymous disruptive attacks.
Messing around with spreadsheet numbers would probably seem like a computer glitch. While its effects might actually be more crippling to the United States economy than taking out the NYSE for an afternoon (just like there are a lot of other physical-terrorism scenarios that would have been even more disruptive to the U.S. than destroying the WTC), that doesn't mean that they're as attractive to a potential terrorist.
I'm not sure if a lack of small-scale attacks really indicates that the enemy is incapable of larger ones; I think that's a terribly dangerous assumption to make. All the lack of smaller attacks means is that we have no idea what their capabilities are, and need to protect ourselves on all fronts.
I remember when that happened; it was widely ridiculed as a meaningless stunt. It wasn't the sort of hack you couldn't just apply to any Mac that's sitting on the Internet, it was more of a privilege escalation challenge that you could apply to a machine that you already had a user account on. So either you'd need to have an account on the machine, or you'd need to have some sort of phishing/bruteforce/social-engineering attack to get a user's password. The take-home lesson was "don't give user accounts to people you really don't trust, duh." It was not a true remote-root or zombification.
I also remember after the press release about 'Hack My Mac Mini,' some fairly high-profile Mac sysadmin (for some uni, IIRC he posts here on Slashdot) announced a challenge in response under more typical circumstances where the machine was exposed to the internet and was running typical services. I never heard about it again, which makes me suspect it wasn't hacked. (If anyone knows what happened to that, I'd love to know.)
Not that the plural of anecdote is data, but I have had a Mac OS X machine sitting with a few ports (usually only 22 for sshd but sometimes also 80 for apache and 25 for postfix) exposed to the Internet for years, and the only thing I've ever had happen to it is that it gets regular bruteforce attempts via SSH. If OS X were as insecure as the '30 minute' claims would have you believe, surely I'd have been thoroughly pwned by now. (In the same amount of time, I've had several Windows machines without any exposed services turn into spam zombies by virtue of IE's ActiveX controls.)
Yeah, next thing you know they'll be making grasses with grains so heavy, they won't blow around in the wind anymore and people will need to manually harvest and re-seed the fields every year. Lazy meddling Mesopotamians.
There must be some reason (I hope) but the security model that they're describing in TFA seems horribly flawed. It depends purely on the security of some black-box hardware modules embedded at different points in the system.
Basically, what they're saying is that there's no end-to-end encryption of your "PIN block" (PIN+Account number, don't ask me why they're transmitted together instead of separately with some random transaction identifier). Instead, the ATM encrypts it for the next machine in the network, where it's decrypted and re-encrypted inside an (assumedly secure) hardware module. Then it's passed to the next link in the chain, ad infinium.
This wouldn't be bad, if the ATM first encrypted the PIN block using the public key of the eventual destination bank -- after all, the intermediate machines have no reason to actually know your information, they're just shuffling bits. However, to just use this transmission-level wrapper without actually encrypting the data seems horrifically stupid. It's nothing but 'security through inconvenience.' (It's not exactly even obscurity, since people seem to know how the system works, they just make it inconvenient to intercept the information by making the places where it's unencrypted relatively small.) From a crypto perspective, it's a broken system.
The problem that I can see is that if you eliminated patents altogether, it might lead companies to be very, very aggressive about preventing the disclosure of trade secrets. Working for an electronics firm would be like joining the Manhattan Project, and every device you bought would have all of its circuit boards potted in epoxy, mixed with iron filings to mess up X-rays and PET scanners. They'd probably also self-destruct if you opened the case. Industrial espionage would be de rigeur.
In short, a world without patents could be a pretty ugly place. I could easily see a future where ideas were locked up for longer, and less accessible to the public at large, due to trade secrets and the precautions taken to protect them, than under a sane patent system.
That said, the current system is hardly sane. First, the terms are far too long. Right now, patents for some of the earliest computer developments are just expiring; hey, anyone want to implement the ISA bus? You can go right ahead now! That doesn't do anyone a whole lot of good. Patent terms need to be made more flexible depending on the field. Drug patents are probably good at 10+ years, because of the large sums of money and long regulatory approval processes required before they can turn a profit (although in a perfect world, we'd streamline those processes too). Patents on electronic devices probably shouldn't be any longer than 5 years at the outside. Algorithms and software shouldn't be patentable, except in narrowly defined circumstances where they form part of a patented device, but even then are not protected independently.
So in short, there are valid reasons for the existence of the patent system. It's better to have some public control in the marketplace of ideas; if you didn't have a patent system, it wouldn't just become this free and open love-fest, you'd just be handing over control of the whole system to the corporations themselves.
Um, while I thoroughly agree with you on the income tax being far too high, I think you're off on the cost of college. $100,000-160,000 for four years seems about right; $100,000 per year is ridiculous. A lot of colleges are up in the high $30ks or low $40ks per year in tuition right now.
Unless you meant the $100k figure as a per-student cost inclusive of what colleges receive from alumni donations, government funding, etc.; basically just dividing their total budget by the number of students. I suppose at some places you could arrive at $100k+ per student per year by doing that.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps that's because so many of them are BOHF, power freaks who treat "their" users like crap.
Bastard Operator Hell From? Is that like the non-union Second-world equivalent of a Bastard Operator From Hell?
I work at a company that uses videoconferencing pretty heavily. We have all dedicated equipment and lines for it. I have heard numbers tossed around for the cost of the end-units (which look to be about 10 years old now) and I suspect $10k might be on the low end. It runs over dedicated ISDN lines (two of them!) and has a camera and several microphones, and the capability of supporting multiple cameras (for document viewing, etc.). The cameras have fun features like remote pan/tilt/zoom and auto motion-seeking, which is creepy. (The system this thing uses would be great on a gun turret.) This is a photo of the type of machine we use. (Note strange "antennae" on top; that has something to do with the motion detection.) Formerly made by Picture-Tel, which is now owned by PolyCom. Their newer stuff doesn't seem to be quite as impressive as the old gear, but probably does more without looking like it's plotting the demise of humanity.
We use it all the time. It's not well set up for impromptu meetings, but neither is our company or organizational structure. We use it several times a week for scheduled meetings across locations, and it's good. There are people that I've only ever met via the VTC; if not for it, they'd just be disembodied voices on the telephone.
I think videoteleconferencing is not something you can do on the cheap. Or rather, the money you're going to put into it is going to directly influence the quality of the results. If you're willing to spend $50k, you can get something totally usable; but it's going to require ISDN lines (or special tap into your IP network, more likely today), a room to itself, and space in people's schedules when they want to use it.
But not having to actually work in the same office with some people? Priceless.
I think the tags are great; they let me get my whole article's worth of Slashdot groupthink in just a few seconds of skimming.
... "
For instance: "IT: Vista Designed to Make Malware Easy" is tagged "troll, fud, vista, notfud, microsoft". I mean -- that's it! That's the whole discussion right there. Point, spastic head-nodding, counterpoint, rehash of the original article. Thank you sir, may I have another.
I'm hopeful that on some future "Slashdot Mobile," they'll remove everything but the titles and tags, and display it as a feed. Maybe after that, they'll even get rid of the titles, so you can just see a constant stream of tags.
Forget a boot stamping on the face of humanity; that's the future for you: "microsoft fud notfud troll itsatrap google dupe evil internet hardware nvidia slashvertisement pigpile dupe sun esr fud ubuntu dupe microsoft dupe
There are many things seriously wrong with the U.S., but none of them are easily solvable, nor are they trivial issues. There are thousands of possible inputs which can all have "crime" as one possible output, ranging from the legacies of slavery and discrimination (urban collapse, "white flight"), to drug policy, to basic taboos (sex "education" leading to ridiculously high teen pregnancy rates), to culture (glorification of violence, acceptability of violence in mainstream media). I could literally go on all day. Each one is an incredibly complex issue, in many cases rooted in generations of conflict and bad feelings and issues that people prefer not to discuss. A whole lot of very smart people have worked hard to solve them, and where we are today is the best compromise found so far.
In short, given the existence of fairly high crime rates here anyway, coupled with a well-justified sense of distrust of government and authority, and the extreme symbolic importance of the firearm, it would make little sense and cause great harm to intentionally disarm law-abiding people and remove the means with which they might defend themselves. This is particularly true since there's no convincing evidence showing that disarming law abiding citizens would reduce crime; rather, logically we'd expect to see it increase.
What people in other countries do may well be fine solutions for their needs (although I would probably disagree on fundamental philosophical grounds), but it's foolish to make sweeping cross-cultural comparisons and then blame the resulting difference on a single factor.
Well, although they may be discriminated against, on the list of reasons to justifiably avoid physical contact with someone, contagious skin diseases are pretty high on my list. Can't say I really blame people in regions where universal precautions, much less medical care, are unavailable, to stay the hell away from any possible transmission vectors. Hanson's Disease is barely well-understood in the first world; I doubt most people who haven't received specialized medical training know anything about it other than it looks like no fun to have.
Wouldn't that be AssassinAssassin?
This is the most insightful comment in this discussion so far.
... was yours? The lack of a sarcasm tag gets me every time.
It was also a joke.
Wait
many places in europe (with virtually no legal gun ownership) are in fact much safer than the usa
c ausation
... so that's the most significant difference between "many places" in Europe and the U.S.? You don't think there are, just perhaps, some more significant social, economic, and cultural contributors to the difference in crime?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_implies_
I find it amusing that Europeans love to bemoan Americans for thinking, particularly when they travel, that Europe should be just like America; however, whenever a European or Euro-phile analyzes crime in the U.S., the only difference that ever gets brought up between the two places in question is the difference in gun control. Really
Europe and the U.S. are not the same place, and you'd have to control for a whole lot more variables than "gun control" in order to start comparing something as high-level as per-capita murder rates.
Yeah except in Minority Report, they were using psychics to predict who would kill; here it's just an overgrown spam filter.
Their probation officer pays more attention to them, and they feel trapped in the system. They can't move on and contribute positively, and lash out violently.
Alternately, their probation officer ignores them, and they get dumped out on the street, where they're unable to find a job and contribute positively, and turn to crime instead.
It's a real win/win.
This is really the only good reason for the "notability" standards, IMO. It doesn't 'hurt' WP to have articles on obscure subjects, except insofar as they become impossible to verify once you get below a certain 'critical mass' where you can reasonably expect to find people who are going to know something about the subject.
Part of the benefit of Wikipedia is that it has articles on a wide variety of things, far more than a paper encyclopedia ever could. If I wanted to read Encyclopedia Britannica, I'd just go and read it. One of the reasons I search WP is because it has far more content, on a wider variety of things, than a traditional encyclopedia would.
The only reason to eliminate articles is when they're such small niche topics, that they necessarily represent the views of only a small number of people.
It certainly wouldn't be good for software development generally. All corporate development and all free-software development that's funded or backed by companies would stop.
However, if the industry really did get paralyzed by liability and litigation, free software in its purest form (without any corporate support) is basically immune. You set up a SVN or CVS server in some neutral jurisdiction (*cough* Sealand *cough*), and then have the developers work pseudonymously. Since more FOSS development is done without payment, it's a lot harder to track down developers based on a money or paper trail if they're trying to be covert about it.
There are a lot of situations where I could see free software surviving even in extremely adverse or legally hostile environments. It's just that these sort of precautions are inconvenient and ensure that you probably won't be able to take credit or payment for your work, therefore nobody does them unless they have to. (Though I think you'll find anonymous or pseudonymous contributors to controversial or legally questionable projects today -- e.g. anti-DRM or patent-encumbered projects that aren't legal in the U.S., etc.)
But is it their responsibility if their waitress (a helpful service bundled with Red Lobster) misunderstands what you meant by "crabs"? Are they liable for compromising your systems and causing an infection?
I don't think they offer those kind of services at Red Lobster. Out in back of Hooters, maybe.
This is revolutionary because...?
Because I still had a spot on my wall that was lacking an awesome solar-flare poster, duh.
Wait...you mean, they put those telescopes and stuff up there for some purpose other than making really neat posters and desktop patterns? Bonus.
The biggest "insecurities" in Safari, that I've seen recently anyway, all relate to configuration issues and default security policy. There were a few issues surrounding Safari's tendency to helpfully open 'safe' files after downloading -- where 'safe' were files that assumedly couldn't carry executable code, like PDFs and TXT. However, by using a legacy feature of OS X, it was possible to conceal an application as a 'safe' file, and make Safari run it, if you could get a user to download it.
However, because Safari isn't integrated into the OS very deeply, and just runs as a basic user process, anything that you did get a user to run in this way would just be executed with their privileges. Not a laughing matter to be sure (particularly combined with other priv-escalation bugs), but it was nothing on the scale of IE and its ActiveX flaws.
I think Apple updated Safari to have the "open safe files" option off by default, and that eliminated the autorun vulnerability, although it still leaves open lots of more social-engineering-based attacks where you just get the user to double-click on, and then execute, a downloaded file. However you can hardly blame that on the browser -- regardless of manufacturer -- at that point.
Whether Safari is really less prone to attacks because of its and OS X's inherent architecture, or just because of its smaller target profile to potential hackers, I'm not sure, but I haven't ever seen or heard of the kind of "drive by rooting" on OS X that occurs regularly with Windows machines via ActiveX.
Easier to get caught that way.
If it was as easy to shoplift as it is to download movies, no doubt people would do that just as often. Most people honestly don't give a damn about the moral/ethical/legal implications of their entertainment, aside from how likely it is to land them in jail.
The risk/benefit analysis works out (for many people) in favor of downloading, but not in favor of shoplifting.
At risk of violating some sort of Godwin's-Law like rule for making 9/11 analogies, doesn't what you're saying sound a bit like someone sitting around on Sept. 10, 2001 saying "With a little bit of thought, the terrorists could set off car bombs in front of a bunch of major airports and totally screw up air travel? Since they cannot accomplish even that minor task, they don't have the skills to accomplish a major attack."
I think you're leaving out a major psychological motivator: the terrorists in large part aren't satisfied by and don't want just small, anonymous, disruptive attacks; they want large, public, anything-but-anonymous disruptive attacks.
Messing around with spreadsheet numbers would probably seem like a computer glitch. While its effects might actually be more crippling to the United States economy than taking out the NYSE for an afternoon (just like there are a lot of other physical-terrorism scenarios that would have been even more disruptive to the U.S. than destroying the WTC), that doesn't mean that they're as attractive to a potential terrorist.
I'm not sure if a lack of small-scale attacks really indicates that the enemy is incapable of larger ones; I think that's a terribly dangerous assumption to make. All the lack of smaller attacks means is that we have no idea what their capabilities are, and need to protect ourselves on all fronts.
I remember when that happened; it was widely ridiculed as a meaningless stunt. It wasn't the sort of hack you couldn't just apply to any Mac that's sitting on the Internet, it was more of a privilege escalation challenge that you could apply to a machine that you already had a user account on. So either you'd need to have an account on the machine, or you'd need to have some sort of phishing/bruteforce/social-engineering attack to get a user's password. The take-home lesson was "don't give user accounts to people you really don't trust, duh." It was not a true remote-root or zombification.
I also remember after the press release about 'Hack My Mac Mini,' some fairly high-profile Mac sysadmin (for some uni, IIRC he posts here on Slashdot) announced a challenge in response under more typical circumstances where the machine was exposed to the internet and was running typical services. I never heard about it again, which makes me suspect it wasn't hacked. (If anyone knows what happened to that, I'd love to know.)
Not that the plural of anecdote is data, but I have had a Mac OS X machine sitting with a few ports (usually only 22 for sshd but sometimes also 80 for apache and 25 for postfix) exposed to the Internet for years, and the only thing I've ever had happen to it is that it gets regular bruteforce attempts via SSH. If OS X were as insecure as the '30 minute' claims would have you believe, surely I'd have been thoroughly pwned by now. (In the same amount of time, I've had several Windows machines without any exposed services turn into spam zombies by virtue of IE's ActiveX controls.)
Yeah, next thing you know they'll be making grasses with grains so heavy, they won't blow around in the wind anymore and people will need to manually harvest and re-seed the fields every year. Lazy meddling Mesopotamians.
My thoughts exactly.
There must be some reason (I hope) but the security model that they're describing in TFA seems horribly flawed. It depends purely on the security of some black-box hardware modules embedded at different points in the system.
Basically, what they're saying is that there's no end-to-end encryption of your "PIN block" (PIN+Account number, don't ask me why they're transmitted together instead of separately with some random transaction identifier). Instead, the ATM encrypts it for the next machine in the network, where it's decrypted and re-encrypted inside an (assumedly secure) hardware module. Then it's passed to the next link in the chain, ad infinium.
This wouldn't be bad, if the ATM first encrypted the PIN block using the public key of the eventual destination bank -- after all, the intermediate machines have no reason to actually know your information, they're just shuffling bits. However, to just use this transmission-level wrapper without actually encrypting the data seems horrifically stupid. It's nothing but 'security through inconvenience.' (It's not exactly even obscurity, since people seem to know how the system works, they just make it inconvenient to intercept the information by making the places where it's unencrypted relatively small.) From a crypto perspective, it's a broken system.
The problem that I can see is that if you eliminated patents altogether, it might lead companies to be very, very aggressive about preventing the disclosure of trade secrets. Working for an electronics firm would be like joining the Manhattan Project, and every device you bought would have all of its circuit boards potted in epoxy, mixed with iron filings to mess up X-rays and PET scanners. They'd probably also self-destruct if you opened the case. Industrial espionage would be de rigeur.
In short, a world without patents could be a pretty ugly place. I could easily see a future where ideas were locked up for longer, and less accessible to the public at large, due to trade secrets and the precautions taken to protect them, than under a sane patent system.
That said, the current system is hardly sane. First, the terms are far too long. Right now, patents for some of the earliest computer developments are just expiring; hey, anyone want to implement the ISA bus? You can go right ahead now! That doesn't do anyone a whole lot of good. Patent terms need to be made more flexible depending on the field. Drug patents are probably good at 10+ years, because of the large sums of money and long regulatory approval processes required before they can turn a profit (although in a perfect world, we'd streamline those processes too). Patents on electronic devices probably shouldn't be any longer than 5 years at the outside. Algorithms and software shouldn't be patentable, except in narrowly defined circumstances where they form part of a patented device, but even then are not protected independently.
So in short, there are valid reasons for the existence of the patent system. It's better to have some public control in the marketplace of ideas; if you didn't have a patent system, it wouldn't just become this free and open love-fest, you'd just be handing over control of the whole system to the corporations themselves.
It's significantly more fun to look at when you view it as linear and not a log plot. It really makes it clear how far they've fallen.
I mean -- they once traded at over $100 a share.
Um, while I thoroughly agree with you on the income tax being far too high, I think you're off on the cost of college. $100,000-160,000 for four years seems about right; $100,000 per year is ridiculous. A lot of colleges are up in the high $30ks or low $40ks per year in tuition right now.
Unless you meant the $100k figure as a per-student cost inclusive of what colleges receive from alumni donations, government funding, etc.; basically just dividing their total budget by the number of students. I suppose at some places you could arrive at $100k+ per student per year by doing that.