That "service industry" is just economic masturbation. I sell services to you, you sell services to somebody else, they sell services to a third guy, around and around... until somebody decides that they'd like to eat today, or buy a DVD player, or whatever, and buys something that's imported. Suddenly that money is gone from the economy.
Relying on a bunch of corporate headquarters isn't how you maintain a civilization. Sure, they'll be the last thing to go, but when they do, there won't be a damn thing left. We'll have lots of service industry left, but no real exportable-wealth creation.
Service industry can act almost like manufacturing, when it 'produces' and 'exports' intellectual property, but as much as US politicians have fastened onto the idea of the 'information economy,' it's not a panacea. I don't see the US exporting enough music, movies, and microcode to make up for the amount of Canadian pressboard furniture, Chinese electronics, and Saudi oil that we consume.
Right now, we make up for this by issuing debt: we import (and in many cases, irreversibly consume) things that have real, intrinsic value, in return for scraps of paper (or, more likely, ephemeral digits in an account somewhere) that are only worth something because they're backed up by the US economy. When people decide that the US economy ain't what it used to be, suddenly those scraps of paper aren't worth much, and not only can we not buy any more, but the people who we've bought stuff from already are going to come calling for whatever we have of value left.
I've been asking for years how exactly the current US path is sustainable, and I've never gotten anything particularly reassuring. The current crop of politicians and financiers is selling the entire country up the river for enough gains today to them to retire on. But at some point in the future, the rest of us are going to be stuck holding the bag.
Eh, it's not worth arguing with them. The "America is a continent" thing is motivated by politics, not logic. Nobody really has any problem understanding what's being referred to by 'America' and 'Americans,' especially since there's little cause to refer to 'people from the Americas' generally (at least compared to the regularity with which Americans are discussed). And also, there's no problem in non-English languages either, making it a non-issue for most of the non-US, non-Canadian population of the Americas.
The whole thing is a manufactured controversy.
'North America' is a continent. 'South America' is a continent. 'Central America' is either a subcontinent or an isthmus or a region, depending on who you want to believe. These three areas can be referred to collectively as 'the Americas.'
'the Americas' != 'America', but fat chance convincing those who are politically motivated to believe that.
They are actually surprisingly accurate. Using inertial navigation alone, some of the SLBMs have a Circular Error Probable (CEP) that's less than a few thousand yards.* This is a good thing because it means you can use a smaller warhead while still guaranteeing destruction of a hard target, like an enemy bunker or silo. So even without GPS you can practically pick the city block you'd like to drop that half-megaton onto.
One of the reasons I've heard cited as to why U.S. missiles have usually had relatively small warheads compared to Soviet ones is that the Soviets had poorer guidance systems and made up for it with bigger bombs. Although since START I, the U.S. has actually upped it's SLBMs from 100kt to 475kt, one assumes because they have to spread the warheads across more targets rather than using a larger number of smaller ones.
* Wikipedia claims 380m CEP for the Trident II without using GPS. They do have a 'first strike' GPS-guided mode, which lets them get down to about 90m, again according to Wikipedia.
That's silly. "Big brother" existed, and has always existed, and used whatever technology was available at the time. Those seeking to work outside the law -- for whatever reasons, just or unjust -- have the same limitations.
In the 1930s, the government had high technology. It wasn't the same high technology as the government has in 2007, but it was sophisticated for its time: telegraphs, teletypes, keypunches and card-sorters. Similarly, people who wanted to flout the law didn't have nearly-unbreakable encryption that's available to anyone who wants it today, nor could they rely on the near-anonymity offered by our modern population and millions of miles of essentially identical, featureless suburbia and cheap personal transportation. (If you wanted anonymity in the 1930s, you were pretty much restricted to large cities; a stranger passing through a small town would have been noticed and remembered more easily than today.)
The sword of technology cuts both ways: as it gives advantages to Government, so too does it give advantages to those looking to remain undetected. Many tools can be used by either side, the question is mostly who can use them most effectively and can demonstrate the most flexibility and adaptability to changing times and circumstances.
Google "library tasering". It was at UCLA not that long ago. There are probably thousands of articles about it. I pick a particular one less because it would be difficult than because each one has their own unique spin on the issue and it's easier to let you choose your source of choice.
Here is the video on YouTube, which is as close to a primary source as you can get. Basically the guy got asked to leave when he couldn't produce a student ID, and started arguing (maybe, allegedly) with the cops, who repeatedly tasered him. The tasering was less for not having the ID than it was for being 'uppity,' at least IMO. That's how they tend to get used; you shoot your mouth off? That's a taserin'. Don't do what you're told? That's a taserin'. Look at a cop the wrong way? Well, you get the idea.
I turned a friend onto OO.o a couple of years ago. He used it for about a year, then went back to Office. He said he gave it a shot, but just couldn't get comfortable with it. To me, that is an HONEST assessment. I don't buy the blanket argument that OO.o is "just as good". MS Office is the leader, they have to be knocked off... it has to be proven, most likely repeatedly, that OO.o is just as good if not better. Hopefully with someone like IBM behind it, it can get a foothold in the business world. You can reach a lot of people that way. The problem, as I see it, is that OpenOffice spends an inordinate amount of time trying to be Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint. That's not a recipe for success. No matter how hard they try, they're never going to be MS Word. And to a certain extent, I think there's a sort of "uncanny valley" for software: if you make a piece of software that tries to feel like something else, and you get 99% of the way there, the 1% will drive people nuts. Sometimes it's better just to go for compatibility and stop trying to emulate the other guy.
What I'm a little disappointed in is that there isn't more emphasis on doing things better than Word. If you look at the places where other OSS software has succeeded, it's generally because the software is just honestly better at something than the commercial/closed-source competition, not just because the OSS one happens to be free of cost. Linux gets used a lot by industry because it's a good server platform, and for many years was a lot more stable and had a lot more features that Windows (arguably both are still true but I don't want to get into a discussion of it). The purchase price of software is a very small factor in most people's decisions to use it, as it should be.
I think Apple does a fairly good job of this; at least philosophically (their execution sometimes stumbles). You don't see them trying to doggedly emulate Excel in Numbers. It's generally compatible with Excel, and they tout this as a feature, but then they seem to have sat down and said "what can we beat Excel at?" And so it has a much slicker interface, produces nicer charts, etc. And it's adoption rate is faster than Calc's (although it's limited only to Mac users so the market it can hope to grab is smaller).
As long as a project has as its aim the emulation of an existing piece of software, it's always going to be burdened with an inferiority complex. And users may not totally understand that, but they'll sense it, and in many cases decide that they want the "real thing" even if it costs them extra.
Only in the USA, where centrism and moderate liberalism are routinely labelled "left-wing", could the New York Times be considered "left-wing". It suits the interests of the corporate media and the political goals of right-wing commentators to re-define terms of political alignment in this way. Well, duh. It's "left" and "right" of the political center in the United States. That center is probably right of the center in Europe, but you have to define a zero point somewhere. Politics isn't an absolute scale.
Just out of interest, what did you do with them when you'd finished with them? Burn them, of course. Purely as a precautionary measure -- it makes sure that nobody can steal those poor publisher's IP when you're not around to defend it.
I wonder who wrote that tripe, the MS legal team? And I wonder how much they paid MIT for the privilege.
Truth be told, there was a big falling out between MS and MIT over Kerberos. Microsoft, as they are wont to do, tried to take Kerberos and proprietize it. The MIT guys said "not so fast," and took them to court over it. On the eve of what most assumed would be a judgment not in their favor, Microsoft suddenly had an 11th-hour change of heart and revealed their changes (although with poison-pill licensing terms attached, at least initially).
Slammed in a court brief for the proprietary way it implements the Kerberos Web security standard in Windows 2000, Microsoft (MSFT) has moved to reassure customers and disarm critics by publishing the formerly secret details of its version of Kerberos - just one day before the brief was filed.... "They don't want anyone competing against them," says Paul Hill, co-leader of the Kerberos team at MIT, where the security standard was developed. "It's typical Microsoft behavior."... Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos seems a textbook example of [embrace, extend, extinguish].... The version of Kerberos in every Windows 2000 PC formally complies with the standard specification. It also takes advantage of an undefined field in the spec to store authorization data for Microsoft's operating system. (Emphasis mine)
"Joint proposal" my ass. Microsoft got dragged into that kicking and screaming. They would have buried Kerberos long ago if they had gotten their way.
As an eventual result of this, some of Microsoft's changes were written up as an (informational, non-standards-track) RFC, which takes pains to repeat, over and over, that Microsoft's implementation was compatible with the original. The monopolist doth protest too much, I think.
It isn't a perfect solution, but it beats living in a world where you have a massive non-working population being supported by a handful of workers shelling out vast chunks of wages in taxes to support them.
I hear what you're saying, but it's only true -- or even an option -- in the short* term. Paying for people's retirement by replacing each old worker with 1.5 younger workers just isn't sustainable as a steady state. Eventually you find some limiting condition or other, and things break down. Highly industrialized societies can prevent hitting that limit for a long time (although I would argue that there are serious quality-of-life consequences as a result of increasing your population density, but that's purely subjective), but eventually something's gotta give.
So looking ahead, societies must find a way of dealing with their non-working populations that doesn't rely exclusively on continual growth; robbing Peter to pay Paul and then giving birth to a few extra Peters to pay the interest. Exactly how we should deal with this is a very open question, but I think it's one that we should begin to tackle now, rather than just closing our eyes and hoping for the best later. It's not something that Western civilization has had to deal with recently (you have to look back practically to pre-agrarian societies to find examples of balanced, constant populations, and there you find a lot of examples of gericide; putting old people on ice floes and such).
Some pretty fundamental assumptions about what it means to get old are going to have to change. Just as a guess, I'd say that the idea of physically-able individuals 'retiring' from the workforce while they are still capable of contributing productively is probably going to disappear. You don't see a lot of retired people in societies that have stable populations (hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture communities); it's a concept that's totally predicated on growth.
* "Short" on evolutionary timescales. Human beings have only been aggressively growing for probably about 12000 to 15000 years, since the beginning of agriculture, prior to which (for some 235,000 years or so) the growth rate was much more limited.
Legally, the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine applies only when there's some sort of causative link between the illegal discovery of something and the investigation into it. E.g., if a police officer breaks into your house without cause and finds your coke-cutting equipment, you're probably safe. But if your house gets broken into by a(nother) criminal while you're away, and in the course of the ensuing investigation the police find your stash... tough luck. That's pretty much how I see this situation. The fact that the information came out because some guy's GMail got hacked pales in significance compared to the content that was disclosed, and I don't see any reason to cover my eyes just because of the source, when the source was just due to chance (or, perhaps, some sort of karma/fate/God).
Morally, these scumbags gave up any claim to anything a long time ago. Morally, they all deserve to be soundly beaten and left for dead on some island somewhere so they can learn to play nice with each other or starve. Because that's sadly illegal, pointing and laughing at their misfortune is a close second.
I agree with the rest of your post, but you shouldn't just blithely toss in "DDT" with your list of toxins. There's nothing particularly wrong with DDT, used correctly, particularly in malaria-prone areas. In fact it was/is one of our best weapons against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. That the developed world has choked off supplies of DDT to the developing world, without providing much in the way of a replacement (ironically, many of the replacements for DDT are much more toxic than DDT is) is a travesty.
DDT was a casualty of Western gluttony and reactionism. We took something that worked well and sprayed it absolutely everywhere, far in excess of any defensible use, until it created a problem. Then, when we realized it was a problem, we went totally arse over teakettle: banned the stuff completely and pressured other countries to do the same, rather than realizing that it was the irresponsible use that was really to blame, and that there were parts of the world where any rational cost/benefit analysis still called for it.
For a long time I was an inner-city enthusiast and happy to not own a car and get around on public transit. Now, I'm sorta burned out on living all bunched in a crowded space. I like walking out to my small orchard of apple trees. I didn't 'sell out' to get my present circumstances, mind you. I just moved outta the city to an area of the country where the money from my two-bedroom attached townhouse (a fourplex) bought me a 100+ year old country house and 5 acres. Agreed, and congratulations on purchasing a place. I, like many other people, are still working towards that. I live in a city, but only because that's where the big money is at the moment. I find it tiring; every day I wake up and can't wait to move to a place where I can not constantly be surrounded with other people. There's just something vaguely claustrophobia-inducing about it.
To be honest, I don't think that humanity's situation in general will really ever start looking up until the population decreases dramatically from it's current, unsustainable level. I just don't see how we can sustain the current growth rate -- or even the current level frozen in place -- particularly if the petroleum (which is a main contributor to the world's food supply) runs out. Eventually, you're going to hit a hard limit; maybe it's food, maybe it's energy, maybe it's environmental damage. Any of those things could cause a catastrophic population collapse (as could disease).
But I'm not a pessimist. I think there's a good chance that as a species, we can avoid either a catastrophic collapse, while also not having to devolve to agrarianism; modern Western societies have only had two or three generations of reliable birth control, and only a few more of universal education and literacy; the impact on those societies has been immense. If we can spread both the technology of birth control and the ideas that people (women in particular) are more than simply reproduction machines to all corners of the globe in the next few generations, I think we can stay ahead of declining resources.
"Copyleft" is just a way of licensing creative works in a way that lets other people use them. The legal framework by which "copyleft" (or any other type of) licenses are enforced, is copyright. Well, that and basic contract law.
If you use a work that's under the GFDL, or a CC license, in a way that's not allowed by the license, then you are violating the author's copyright, since you no longer have permission to reproduce the work. (Fair use excepted.)
What? No, I think you're wrong about the key exchange.
Go read the wiki article on The TLS Handshake in Detail. Basically, what happens during a TLS handshake is that the two parties connect to each other, and exchange certificates (for authentication). Then they do a public-key exchange to establish the session key. There are multiple possible algorithms for both the public-key and the symmetric cipher. (I think Diffie-Hellman exchange is used currently in most, if not all, TLS implementations.) Essentially, each party uses the other party's public key to send some random information (which, encrypted with their public key, can only be decrypted with their private key), which the other party uses to construct the symmetric session key.
Without public-key cryptography, there would not be any way to securely establish the session key.
I think where you are getting confused is in the idea of perfect forward secrecy: this just means that the session key is randomly derived, and that after it's done being used, both parties throw it away. Thus even if you got the private keys from one of the parties after the fact (and assuming they did their job and got rid of the session key and random generation material), you still would not be able to decrypt the previously-encrypted material. "Perfect forward secrecy" doesn't really say anything about the actual method by which the symmetric cipher's keys are exchanged, it just means that you don't use one symmetric key to generate the next. Each one is done individually.
PFS fails if you can compromise both parties' secret keys, however, and you have a record of the handshake/key-agreement process. It also is absolutely reliant on public-key cryptography. Without public-key crypto, there wouldn't be PFS.
You can't get a one-time pad as a cookie. You can't send the OTP via the same channel of communication that the encrypted data is going to go down; if you do that, you might as well send plaintext.
The nature of OTPs requires a secure channel of communication from one party to the other by which you can send the 'pad. E.g., when we wanted to talk to our Embassy in the USSR, we'd send some guy over with tapes filled with millions of random digits, handcuffed to his wrist, or in the diplomatic pouch. Without that secure channel, it doesn't work.
So if you wanted to get your Gmail securely, via a OTP, either Google would have to make up a DVD of random information and send it to you (securely, somehow), or you'd have to do the same and send it to them. And then you'd have to have that disc in your computer all the time (or copied onto your hard drive) so that you could XOR the incoming bits with the ones on the disc. (Or alternately, to preserve the OTP at a small security cost, you could just use 2048-bit chunks of the OTP as keys to a symmetric session cipher.)
It's not a practical solution on the large scale. It's fine for some special-purpose applications, for for secure communication where you're not going to plan ahead in advance, it's quite impractical.
Not totally true. "Explosive power" could also mean the ability of the bomb to knock stuff down on the ground (i.e., what someone might refer to as a 'powerful' explosion), which would have more to do with the characteristics of the pressure wave rather than the net energy produced. When it's being used outside a physics/engineering context, 'power' is a bit of a vague term.
Deal with it, you're pissed at MS for being the top dog. Then you've looked around for the low hanging fruit, that exists for all projects, for your justifications. No, I dislike Microsoft for two major reasons: one is that they promote and maintain a monoculture, and actively try to make that monoculture incompatible with anything else. Windows would be a lot more acceptable, if it played nice and interoperated with other systems based on established standards. I'm more than happy to let everyone choose whatever OS they want, based on their needs and what fits them best, but "the Microsoft way" works directly against that: their use of proprietary, incompatible, or just plain broken 'standards' forces many people who would be best suited with a different OS to use Windows, and that's a net loss for everyone.
On a more personal level, I dislike most Microsoft products (with certain notable exceptions), because I think they have a corporate culture that promotes mediocrity and "good enough"-ness. As someone who has always labored to pursue quality and technical correctness as an end in itself, I find the inherent laziness in their products offensive. I understand this is a personal decision; looking at other product arenas, the mass market is usually filled with garbage. This is fine, and consumers should have a choice as to what they want to buy. However, I detest Microsoft for virtually eliminating the consumer's ability to buy better.
Also, they have an apparent contempt for both their competitors, which is understandable if unwarranted, and their customers, which is unacceptable.
I don't hate Microsoft for being on top. I hate them for being on top, while pushing an inferior product than the market would produce in their absence, on all of us.
It doesn't mean that it has four times the explosive power of the MOAB, because that would be pretty ridiculous. I don't think there's any reason why it couldn't, if by "explosive power" you mean energy release. The Russian device in question is only slightly smaller in size than a MOAB, and probably uses newer, more powerful explosives. Just on those grounds alone, its energy yield is probably about the same or larger. (The fact that the bomb is designed to disperse the explosives into a cloud and then detonate them -- a Fuel Air Device rather than a conventional integrated-mix explosive -- probably doesn't change the energy yield much but has more of an effect on how the blast is actually delivered.)
Fuel Air Devices aren't really that interesting, from a fundamental engineering standpoint. Scaling them up isn't that hard -- you just add more fuel. Eventually you run into delivery problems. Like the Tsar Bomba (the Russkies giant H-bomb), it's more of a question of priorities than design ability. You can scale a hydrogen bomb up pretty much arbitrarily, by adding more tritium; similarly, FADs can be made bigger simply by adding more fuel and then changing the dispersion calculations accordingly (so that you achieve the right fuel/air mix at the right target altitude). The real question is 'why would you bother?' It's probably easier to drop twice as many bombs of half the size, than one really monster bomb, in most combat scenarios.
I don't really doubt that you could make a FAD that's bigger than the MOAB. They have more real-world experience in the area than other nations -- they used FADs extensively in Chechnya -- and have shown a propensity in the past for building "the biggest" simply for the penis-length factor. That doesn't mean that the rest of the world should be rushing out to do the same thing, or really care.
I bet you anything you like Microsoft can identify which region a license key was shipped to, probably from just a few characters in it. I further bet you anything you like that there will be absolutely NO license keys from China in the "Definitely Not Genuine" list. That would rather undermine their anti-piracy goal, then. All that pirates (not just Chinese pirates, but pirates the world over) would have to do is punch in one of the activation keys that's assigned to somewhere in China, and they'd never get blacklisted. I'd give you maybe a week before the always-whitelisted keys were on Usenet.
If you absolutely guarantee never to disable a block of keys, then you castrate the system as a means of piracy control, since it only takes one person to figure out that one of those keys "mysteriously works" and publishes it to Usenet (or some other medium) for the rest of the world to know.
The effectiveness of such a system is directly proportional to the willingness to use it on any and all keys that get leaked into the pirate community. If you start picking and choosing which ones to disable, it's Game Over.
TDM is at least a reasonable solution to the problem. That's really not any better a solution to the problem than collision-avoidance algorithms on shared-media wired networks were, in their time.
Thankfully, wired networks moved beyond shared media to switched topologies, and thus the need for such hacks was obviated (at least on the client level, it's still a concern for switches and routers). But with RF, except perhaps with some highly directional form of UWB, it's always going to be a consideration.
It's a solution, sure, but so is just going with wires and having a dedicated circuit all to yourself, and not having to worry about playing nice with (or shouting over top of) others.
Why do you think people "sell" their disks to the used disk stores? Because they're tired of them, and the money offsets the cost of a new disk. Or, they're out of money to buy weed with, and putting their CDs onto their iPod and then hauling the discs down to the used-record shop is an easy way of getting some cash without having to actually do anything.
Yeah, there are some people who trade CDs, buying them, listening for a while, and then selling them to buy more music... but in my experience that's not really the source of most of the discs in used shops. Most of them come from people who just need the cash for something (whether it's to pay the bills or to pay their dealer), and CDs are easy to liquidate and are painless to part with once copied.
It would make sense if more people bought CDs with an eye towards their resale value, but I think very few people do. They buy and hold them and regard them as a possession rather than as an asset until they're in trouble, and then they go from possession to asset to cash very quickly indeed.
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That "service industry" is just economic masturbation. I sell services to you, you sell services to somebody else, they sell services to a third guy, around and around ... until somebody decides that they'd like to eat today, or buy a DVD player, or whatever, and buys something that's imported. Suddenly that money is gone from the economy.
Relying on a bunch of corporate headquarters isn't how you maintain a civilization. Sure, they'll be the last thing to go, but when they do, there won't be a damn thing left. We'll have lots of service industry left, but no real exportable-wealth creation.
Service industry can act almost like manufacturing, when it 'produces' and 'exports' intellectual property, but as much as US politicians have fastened onto the idea of the 'information economy,' it's not a panacea. I don't see the US exporting enough music, movies, and microcode to make up for the amount of Canadian pressboard furniture, Chinese electronics, and Saudi oil that we consume.
Right now, we make up for this by issuing debt: we import (and in many cases, irreversibly consume) things that have real, intrinsic value, in return for scraps of paper (or, more likely, ephemeral digits in an account somewhere) that are only worth something because they're backed up by the US economy. When people decide that the US economy ain't what it used to be, suddenly those scraps of paper aren't worth much, and not only can we not buy any more, but the people who we've bought stuff from already are going to come calling for whatever we have of value left.
I've been asking for years how exactly the current US path is sustainable, and I've never gotten anything particularly reassuring. The current crop of politicians and financiers is selling the entire country up the river for enough gains today to them to retire on. But at some point in the future, the rest of us are going to be stuck holding the bag.
Eh, it's not worth arguing with them. The "America is a continent" thing is motivated by politics, not logic. Nobody really has any problem understanding what's being referred to by 'America' and 'Americans,' especially since there's little cause to refer to 'people from the Americas' generally (at least compared to the regularity with which Americans are discussed). And also, there's no problem in non-English languages either, making it a non-issue for most of the non-US, non-Canadian population of the Americas.
The whole thing is a manufactured controversy.
'North America' is a continent.
'South America' is a continent.
'Central America' is either a subcontinent or an isthmus or a region, depending on who you want to believe.
These three areas can be referred to collectively as 'the Americas.'
'the Americas' != 'America', but fat chance convincing those who are politically motivated to believe that.
Actually, I have found that the amount of open source you use and your chances of getting herpes are, strangely, inversely proportional. ;)
They are actually surprisingly accurate. Using inertial navigation alone, some of the SLBMs have a Circular Error Probable (CEP) that's less than a few thousand yards.* This is a good thing because it means you can use a smaller warhead while still guaranteeing destruction of a hard target, like an enemy bunker or silo. So even without GPS you can practically pick the city block you'd like to drop that half-megaton onto.
One of the reasons I've heard cited as to why U.S. missiles have usually had relatively small warheads compared to Soviet ones is that the Soviets had poorer guidance systems and made up for it with bigger bombs. Although since START I, the U.S. has actually upped it's SLBMs from 100kt to 475kt, one assumes because they have to spread the warheads across more targets rather than using a larger number of smaller ones.
* Wikipedia claims 380m CEP for the Trident II without using GPS. They do have a 'first strike' GPS-guided mode, which lets them get down to about 90m, again according to Wikipedia.
That's silly. "Big brother" existed, and has always existed, and used whatever technology was available at the time. Those seeking to work outside the law -- for whatever reasons, just or unjust -- have the same limitations.
In the 1930s, the government had high technology. It wasn't the same high technology as the government has in 2007, but it was sophisticated for its time: telegraphs, teletypes, keypunches and card-sorters. Similarly, people who wanted to flout the law didn't have nearly-unbreakable encryption that's available to anyone who wants it today, nor could they rely on the near-anonymity offered by our modern population and millions of miles of essentially identical, featureless suburbia and cheap personal transportation. (If you wanted anonymity in the 1930s, you were pretty much restricted to large cities; a stranger passing through a small town would have been noticed and remembered more easily than today.)
The sword of technology cuts both ways: as it gives advantages to Government, so too does it give advantages to those looking to remain undetected. Many tools can be used by either side, the question is mostly who can use them most effectively and can demonstrate the most flexibility and adaptability to changing times and circumstances.
Google "library tasering". It was at UCLA not that long ago. There are probably thousands of articles about it. I pick a particular one less because it would be difficult than because each one has their own unique spin on the issue and it's easier to let you choose your source of choice.
Here is the video on YouTube, which is as close to a primary source as you can get. Basically the guy got asked to leave when he couldn't produce a student ID, and started arguing (maybe, allegedly) with the cops, who repeatedly tasered him. The tasering was less for not having the ID than it was for being 'uppity,' at least IMO. That's how they tend to get used; you shoot your mouth off? That's a taserin'. Don't do what you're told? That's a taserin'. Look at a cop the wrong way? Well, you get the idea.
It's a good thing that the big nuclear weapons that they'd use to retaliate with ... don't use GPS.
(Hint: ICBMs and SLBMs use inertial and stellar navigation for this reason.)
If the legacy crap works, it isn't crap.
Truer words were never spoken.
What I'm a little disappointed in is that there isn't more emphasis on doing things better than Word. If you look at the places where other OSS software has succeeded, it's generally because the software is just honestly better at something than the commercial/closed-source competition, not just because the OSS one happens to be free of cost. Linux gets used a lot by industry because it's a good server platform, and for many years was a lot more stable and had a lot more features that Windows (arguably both are still true but I don't want to get into a discussion of it). The purchase price of software is a very small factor in most people's decisions to use it, as it should be.
I think Apple does a fairly good job of this; at least philosophically (their execution sometimes stumbles). You don't see them trying to doggedly emulate Excel in Numbers. It's generally compatible with Excel, and they tout this as a feature, but then they seem to have sat down and said "what can we beat Excel at?" And so it has a much slicker interface, produces nicer charts, etc. And it's adoption rate is faster than Calc's (although it's limited only to Mac users so the market it can hope to grab is smaller).
As long as a project has as its aim the emulation of an existing piece of software, it's always going to be burdened with an inferiority complex. And users may not totally understand that, but they'll sense it, and in many cases decide that they want the "real thing" even if it costs them extra.
Truth be told, there was a big falling out between MS and MIT over Kerberos. Microsoft, as they are wont to do, tried to take Kerberos and proprietize it. The MIT guys said "not so fast," and took them to court over it. On the eve of what most assumed would be a judgment not in their favor, Microsoft suddenly had an 11th-hour change of heart and revealed their changes (although with poison-pill licensing terms attached, at least initially).
From an article published in 2000:"Joint proposal" my ass. Microsoft got dragged into that kicking and screaming. They would have buried Kerberos long ago if they had gotten their way.
As an eventual result of this, some of Microsoft's changes were written up as an (informational, non-standards-track) RFC, which takes pains to repeat, over and over, that Microsoft's implementation was compatible with the original. The monopolist doth protest too much, I think.
It isn't a perfect solution, but it beats living in a world where you have a massive non-working population being supported by a handful of workers shelling out vast chunks of wages in taxes to support them.
I hear what you're saying, but it's only true -- or even an option -- in the short* term. Paying for people's retirement by replacing each old worker with 1.5 younger workers just isn't sustainable as a steady state. Eventually you find some limiting condition or other, and things break down. Highly industrialized societies can prevent hitting that limit for a long time (although I would argue that there are serious quality-of-life consequences as a result of increasing your population density, but that's purely subjective), but eventually something's gotta give.
So looking ahead, societies must find a way of dealing with their non-working populations that doesn't rely exclusively on continual growth; robbing Peter to pay Paul and then giving birth to a few extra Peters to pay the interest. Exactly how we should deal with this is a very open question, but I think it's one that we should begin to tackle now, rather than just closing our eyes and hoping for the best later. It's not something that Western civilization has had to deal with recently (you have to look back practically to pre-agrarian societies to find examples of balanced, constant populations, and there you find a lot of examples of gericide; putting old people on ice floes and such).
Some pretty fundamental assumptions about what it means to get old are going to have to change. Just as a guess, I'd say that the idea of physically-able individuals 'retiring' from the workforce while they are still capable of contributing productively is probably going to disappear. You don't see a lot of retired people in societies that have stable populations (hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture communities); it's a concept that's totally predicated on growth.
* "Short" on evolutionary timescales. Human beings have only been aggressively growing for probably about 12000 to 15000 years, since the beginning of agriculture, prior to which (for some 235,000 years or so) the growth rate was much more limited.
Legally, the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine applies only when there's some sort of causative link between the illegal discovery of something and the investigation into it. E.g., if a police officer breaks into your house without cause and finds your coke-cutting equipment, you're probably safe. But if your house gets broken into by a(nother) criminal while you're away, and in the course of the ensuing investigation the police find your stash ... tough luck. That's pretty much how I see this situation. The fact that the information came out because some guy's GMail got hacked pales in significance compared to the content that was disclosed, and I don't see any reason to cover my eyes just because of the source, when the source was just due to chance (or, perhaps, some sort of karma/fate/God).
Morally, these scumbags gave up any claim to anything a long time ago. Morally, they all deserve to be soundly beaten and left for dead on some island somewhere so they can learn to play nice with each other or starve. Because that's sadly illegal, pointing and laughing at their misfortune is a close second.
I agree with the rest of your post, but you shouldn't just blithely toss in "DDT" with your list of toxins. There's nothing particularly wrong with DDT, used correctly, particularly in malaria-prone areas. In fact it was/is one of our best weapons against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. That the developed world has choked off supplies of DDT to the developing world, without providing much in the way of a replacement (ironically, many of the replacements for DDT are much more toxic than DDT is) is a travesty.
DDT was a casualty of Western gluttony and reactionism. We took something that worked well and sprayed it absolutely everywhere, far in excess of any defensible use, until it created a problem. Then, when we realized it was a problem, we went totally arse over teakettle: banned the stuff completely and pressured other countries to do the same, rather than realizing that it was the irresponsible use that was really to blame, and that there were parts of the world where any rational cost/benefit analysis still called for it.
To be honest, I don't think that humanity's situation in general will really ever start looking up until the population decreases dramatically from it's current, unsustainable level. I just don't see how we can sustain the current growth rate -- or even the current level frozen in place -- particularly if the petroleum (which is a main contributor to the world's food supply) runs out. Eventually, you're going to hit a hard limit; maybe it's food, maybe it's energy, maybe it's environmental damage. Any of those things could cause a catastrophic population collapse (as could disease).
But I'm not a pessimist. I think there's a good chance that as a species, we can avoid either a catastrophic collapse, while also not having to devolve to agrarianism; modern Western societies have only had two or three generations of reliable birth control, and only a few more of universal education and literacy; the impact on those societies has been immense. If we can spread both the technology of birth control and the ideas that people (women in particular) are more than simply reproduction machines to all corners of the globe in the next few generations, I think we can stay ahead of declining resources.
"Copyleft" is just a way of licensing creative works in a way that lets other people use them. The legal framework by which "copyleft" (or any other type of) licenses are enforced, is copyright. Well, that and basic contract law.
If you use a work that's under the GFDL, or a CC license, in a way that's not allowed by the license, then you are violating the author's copyright, since you no longer have permission to reproduce the work. (Fair use excepted.)
What? No, I think you're wrong about the key exchange.
Go read the wiki article on The TLS Handshake in Detail. Basically, what happens during a TLS handshake is that the two parties connect to each other, and exchange certificates (for authentication). Then they do a public-key exchange to establish the session key. There are multiple possible algorithms for both the public-key and the symmetric cipher. (I think Diffie-Hellman exchange is used currently in most, if not all, TLS implementations.) Essentially, each party uses the other party's public key to send some random information (which, encrypted with their public key, can only be decrypted with their private key), which the other party uses to construct the symmetric session key.
Without public-key cryptography, there would not be any way to securely establish the session key.
I think where you are getting confused is in the idea of perfect forward secrecy: this just means that the session key is randomly derived, and that after it's done being used, both parties throw it away. Thus even if you got the private keys from one of the parties after the fact (and assuming they did their job and got rid of the session key and random generation material), you still would not be able to decrypt the previously-encrypted material. "Perfect forward secrecy" doesn't really say anything about the actual method by which the symmetric cipher's keys are exchanged, it just means that you don't use one symmetric key to generate the next. Each one is done individually.
PFS fails if you can compromise both parties' secret keys, however, and you have a record of the handshake/key-agreement process. It also is absolutely reliant on public-key cryptography. Without public-key crypto, there wouldn't be PFS.
Huh?
You can't get a one-time pad as a cookie. You can't send the OTP via the same channel of communication that the encrypted data is going to go down; if you do that, you might as well send plaintext.
The nature of OTPs requires a secure channel of communication from one party to the other by which you can send the 'pad. E.g., when we wanted to talk to our Embassy in the USSR, we'd send some guy over with tapes filled with millions of random digits, handcuffed to his wrist, or in the diplomatic pouch. Without that secure channel, it doesn't work.
So if you wanted to get your Gmail securely, via a OTP, either Google would have to make up a DVD of random information and send it to you (securely, somehow), or you'd have to do the same and send it to them. And then you'd have to have that disc in your computer all the time (or copied onto your hard drive) so that you could XOR the incoming bits with the ones on the disc. (Or alternately, to preserve the OTP at a small security cost, you could just use 2048-bit chunks of the OTP as keys to a symmetric session cipher.)
It's not a practical solution on the large scale. It's fine for some special-purpose applications, for for secure communication where you're not going to plan ahead in advance, it's quite impractical.
Not totally true. "Explosive power" could also mean the ability of the bomb to knock stuff down on the ground (i.e., what someone might refer to as a 'powerful' explosion), which would have more to do with the characteristics of the pressure wave rather than the net energy produced. When it's being used outside a physics/engineering context, 'power' is a bit of a vague term.
On a more personal level, I dislike most Microsoft products (with certain notable exceptions), because I think they have a corporate culture that promotes mediocrity and "good enough"-ness. As someone who has always labored to pursue quality and technical correctness as an end in itself, I find the inherent laziness in their products offensive. I understand this is a personal decision; looking at other product arenas, the mass market is usually filled with garbage. This is fine, and consumers should have a choice as to what they want to buy. However, I detest Microsoft for virtually eliminating the consumer's ability to buy better.
Also, they have an apparent contempt for both their competitors, which is understandable if unwarranted, and their customers, which is unacceptable.
I don't hate Microsoft for being on top. I hate them for being on top, while pushing an inferior product than the market would produce in their absence, on all of us.
Fuel Air Devices aren't really that interesting, from a fundamental engineering standpoint. Scaling them up isn't that hard -- you just add more fuel. Eventually you run into delivery problems. Like the Tsar Bomba (the Russkies giant H-bomb), it's more of a question of priorities than design ability. You can scale a hydrogen bomb up pretty much arbitrarily, by adding more tritium; similarly, FADs can be made bigger simply by adding more fuel and then changing the dispersion calculations accordingly (so that you achieve the right fuel/air mix at the right target altitude). The real question is 'why would you bother?' It's probably easier to drop twice as many bombs of half the size, than one really monster bomb, in most combat scenarios.
I don't really doubt that you could make a FAD that's bigger than the MOAB. They have more real-world experience in the area than other nations -- they used FADs extensively in Chechnya -- and have shown a propensity in the past for building "the biggest" simply for the penis-length factor. That doesn't mean that the rest of the world should be rushing out to do the same thing, or really care.
If you absolutely guarantee never to disable a block of keys, then you castrate the system as a means of piracy control, since it only takes one person to figure out that one of those keys "mysteriously works" and publishes it to Usenet (or some other medium) for the rest of the world to know.
The effectiveness of such a system is directly proportional to the willingness to use it on any and all keys that get leaked into the pirate community. If you start picking and choosing which ones to disable, it's Game Over.
Thankfully, wired networks moved beyond shared media to switched topologies, and thus the need for such hacks was obviated (at least on the client level, it's still a concern for switches and routers). But with RF, except perhaps with some highly directional form of UWB, it's always going to be a consideration.
It's a solution, sure, but so is just going with wires and having a dedicated circuit all to yourself, and not having to worry about playing nice with (or shouting over top of) others.
Yeah, there are some people who trade CDs, buying them, listening for a while, and then selling them to buy more music
It would make sense if more people bought CDs with an eye towards their resale value, but I think very few people do. They buy and hold them and regard them as a possession rather than as an asset until they're in trouble, and then they go from possession to asset to cash very quickly indeed.