You can't speed in central London, the average speed during the day is 3 mph. I have a better idea, how about charging people more for going to slowly, that would certainly make things more interesting. Put in additional penalties for not passing a traffic light within 2 seconds of it turning yellow, make 70% of the roads bus lanes and heres a really novel one: limit the amount of traffic entering the charge zone by keeping relevant traffic lights red until enough cars have exited the zone - kind of like a car-park full light.
I'll tell you something about Mac software: today I had to actually download a program to eject CDs because the mother fuckers at apple decided it would be too 'inside the box' to include a 'force eject' option even somewhere hidden on an advanced menu! That is until i discovered you had to reboot and hold the mouse button down, seriously WTF is wrong with that picture? Oh and while we're on the topic, what sort of software that comes with a computer forces you to upgrade in order to view videos in full screen mode? Quick-time is what. Oh and apparently deleting songs from iPods is a bit of an issue for some people.
I think hes right on - video games are fast becoming world sims, and story aside, its you who controls the character. GTA has such great re-playability because you can just walk around doing whatever you like, i think the future of GTA is to just get rid of the story line all together and concentrate on making it a good world simulator, this is a place where you can do things you couldn't or wouldn't want to do in real life, you can drive around fast and shoot people with no consequences, when the game gets to the point where you feel the same sensations as real life then why would you feel the need to shoot someone in real life? you wouldn't.
Im sure she was aware of the seriousness that her job entailed. If it was a minimum wage KFC employee tapping the wrong number it would be different. if you are given the job of entering extremely large sums of money on keyboards then your job pretty much concentrates on making sure that number is correct, otherwise what are they paying her for? In reality though it was probably down to an extremely badly designed system that allows mistakes to be easily made. Cars are another bad system - look how easy it is in some configurations to press a peddle a fraction of an inch the wrong way (on a manual at least) and watch the car surge, this financial system is probably the same.
Isn't the whole point of cult TV that its not mainstream 'masses' but a smaller number of dedicated fans? And while we are at it, the internet is not a broadcast medium, unlike TV/radio where a transmitter costs a fixed amount no matter how many people tune in, a website costs less to run with fewer visitors, sure it gets to a point where the overhead outweighs the variable cost but 700,000 people? The BBC should just start a BitTorrent tracker or something similar if the costs are too high for a full video server.
Anyway the BBC is supposed to be pushing the masses up not dumbing down. A commercial network might bow to the biggest demographic but the point of a socialist/communist/whatever corporation is that it gives the masses good intelligent programming whether they like it or not, both types are needed - commercial TV is more 'fair' in its finances, non-commercial tax-funded TV is more 'fair' in its representation of all demographics. I call on the BBC to go back to educating people so they will realise how valuable a service it is and continue to make sure its funded.
Unfortunately there's a ton of software and databases that probably cant handle that. Kind of like the Y2K bug except in this day there's no excuse. Also, if your going to let people have any TLD then what's the point of a TLD??? Why not just get rid of the whole concept? I think restricted TLDs are actually very useful, I can generally trust that camden.gov.uk is my local council's website (spoofing aside) and the same with anything else.gov. Individual countries can be free to set their own rules for their own TLDs which is a good thing and you could use this to set up TLDs that are guaranteed safe for kids without doing any kind of censorship or unfair treatment.
Its all about money and im as greedy as the next man. Its in the economies best interests to enforce these laws because in the end of the day, 'sharing' or allowing free downloads and charging for concerts or taking donations just does not bring in as much money as the current industry approach, and im not talking about money for artists, the ones without it are too small a voice to matter and the ones with it got it from selling music. Its all very well cracking down on paedophiles but paedophiles don't hurt the economy so in the eyes of the government and business they are less important. It might seem harsh (well actually it IS harsh) but just ask yourself this: if you could be rich beyond your wildest dreams or you could put a paedophile behind bars what would you do? Im sure you would stop the paedophile but you would probably be thinking about the money for the next few weeks.
The problem with biometrics is that it has become too much of a buzzword and bandwagon to jump on. Were at the stage similar to the Internet in 1999 when everyone was 'getting on-line' because everyone else was and a whole load of sites popped up that had no content or purpose. The police have historically used biometrics for years because they have a very good reason - when you arrive at a crime scene its likely that someone has left allot of evidence in the form of finger prints and possibly DNA, the police then usually produce a list of suspects by other means and the biometric evidence is used as the final proof. Now its probably at the stage where a finger print can be matched with all criminal finger-prints on file, is this fair? well these people were on file for a reason and its often the same people offending, but after you have done your time are you not clear? so the system gets a little tighter but everyone is fine with that because, well its targeting past criminals only.
Biometrics in airports serve little purpose other than to help identify who blew themselves up _after_ they did. As has been said time and time again like a broken record totally ignored by everyone, the 9/11 hijackers where all legal, all presented real ID, had no previous records except a speeding ticket and originated from a country that was supposedly a US ally (sure) but in fact I think they entered the US from somewhere in Europe which would raise no flags?
The most worrying use of biometrics now is this stupid fast-lane system where you can get a background check and you will be allowed to go straight through security with only a fingerprint scan.
The other use of biometrics is for the most stupid things you can imagine - ATM's, payment systems, cars! these things all work perfectly without biometrics, if I want to give my ATM card and pin, or car keys to a trusted friend who's business is that? But worse is the potential for criminals, if they want your fingerprint they can cut off your finger, this palm system might be slightly more secure (someone will figure out a way) but the point is, some people won't know that!! you can imagine some idiots cutting someone's hand off and later finding that it doesn't work oh fucking great, they've failed to break into whatever it was, im sure the owner is over the FUCKING MOON! The same is true for most biometric systems so how have we managed before? ID cards usually have your face on them and a human will look at it and generally humans can tell if you are really the person on the card or if you are holding up the severed head of someone else. It all boils down to computers replacing people in an area that computers just can't compete. We are lead to believe that all these new biometric systems work great when in fact most of them are barely out of beta testing and are full of hacks and workarounds and poorly designed systems that will continue to produce false positives and negatives and allow them to be fooled - they might detect pulses and blood flow but as the biometric readers become more advanced so will the tricks employed to get around them, you will be seeing a device in the near future that can be pressed up to a finger print left on a table and will instantly produce a replica fake either on a visible screen or some electro-static thing and will have all the pulse and movement effects of a real finger, the same will happen for your iris and palm print, these systems will get more and more advanced until you are able to hide them in contact lenses and fingers.
Remember kids, biometrics is the new hotness, get your selves kitted out today.
The point is, the direction we are going in is the absolute identification of people. Surely this is not as important as stopping crime in the first place? Which is the better of these too options
1) You let a known terrorist on a plane but you thoroughly search him and the plane first and the plane is full of anti-hijacking innovations and the passengers are not going to take any crap.
If a method/action has been used in real life for hundreds of years then you are free to patent that method/action in the context of computing with purely theoretical speculation. So for example:
"A method of encoding information or data into structurally organised units, visually represented by a set of symbols which can be laid out to form a mentally recognisable concept. Such a method would is not limited to one set of symbols or organisational rules. Storage of encoded information can be achieved through the use of look-up tables to produce a short binary code for each symbol. In addition to the aforementioned method of symbol layout or 'text', the use of space between symbols will denote separation of symbol units henceforth known as 'words' and additional symbols to support the separation of related 'words' into logically coherent blocks or 'sentences'. Symbols or 'characters' will be given phonetic properties to aid audible transmission."
I think you should all be aware that my patent passed this morning, please cease and desist.
My girlfriend is Iranian and she is not pleased with the crap thats going on in Iran, this is why people are leaving. It may be that the un-washed masses outside the big cities who have little education and live in fear of their shadows, might be scared of the internet, but its unlikely they have ever used it. People like that use insanely stupid arguments which shape their unsophisticated views, at the very least they need to be educated to find more intelligent arguments for censorship - the internet could be that source of education.
True, but not all computer use in school is about learning computing - most of the time you spend on the computer is supposed to be spent working on other subjects, doing research & writing etc. Its good for people to be able to learn different systems easily but OSX and Windows really aren't that different, you can teach someone who is familiar with one to use the other in a few minutes, and that's only if they can't figure it out for themselves. I still think desktops are the way to go - whether they are Mac or PC desktops or a mix of both (they could even afford that), notebooks cost more not only initially but in the long term, anything that goes wrong can be expensive to replace, and their nature dictates that the probability of them being dropped, spilled on, lost/stolen or damaged in transit is far far higher than any desktop.
Well being a recent graduate looking to be successful, Its in my interests to keep the younger generations at a level of computer literacy that allows them to click 'add to basket' but not much else, but of course thats probably not in their interests so it wouldn't be wise to put me incharge. I can understand giving them cheap laptops, but these were very very expensive and kitted out with even more expensive software, and they didn't even run Windows (the OS they will be most likely to use in the real world lets face it). When I was at school we had computer rooms and/or computers at home and that was enough, infact even those were abused, if you walked into the rooms at most times of the day you would see 90% of people on the net (not working), maybe 5% using the net for work and another 5% on Word trying to get their homework done before the next lession. Then when the admin had left early we would have the afternoon to load up some games and use the network for an even less academic purpose.
Now back to the school: if they had spent the same money on desktop PC's they could have had enough to put on every desk in every classroom so that every student could just login at the start of the lesson, it would have been far more difficult for them to mess around with AND they would have had enough money left over to give every student another PC to take home! after that they would still have a sizeable bit of cash left over!
Wow, the school management better hope they get absolutely exceptional graduation results from that investment. I just have a feeling the results will be the same or lower than before.
Makes me wonder how Microsoft, Gateway and Apple are listed as "recommended" brands. I have no reason to suspect a kickback or paid product placement, do you?
Well I guess that might be why these students were given these computers.
Anyway back to the topic, school is all about making mistakes and learning for real life and thats what these kids have done. im sure in the future they will remember to do it more discretely and avoid getting caught. They should have been more careful though, you don't just go through your school-issued computer willy-nilly, they should have first thought to themselves "why have we been given these machines?". They should have gathered some dirt on the principle - any kick-backs etc. If they didn't find anything they could either have written a report on his managerial incompetence or just made some dirt up - keeping it secure incase it was needed as 'coercion'. After that it would be prudent not to get caught, ok so its not right they should get felony charges, I would have made them write a report on 'covering your ass' and left it at that. They need to learn how to deal with this crap before they leave school.
VISA is only required to admit this (by law) in some states as far as i know, if they choose not to divulge certain things - break ins, security policies, lost data then there's not much you can do except hope that its in their best interests to tell you everything. The board/owner/CEO's will sit round the table thinking "will I personally make less money if we tell the public about X". In government (or so the theory goes) the Freedom of Information Act would be your ticket to finding out whats going on, and since the management has no personal gain or loss other than keeping their job they should be more willing to make sure the job is done properly according to the budget they are given. The public isn't going to blame a government department if they simply didn't have the funds to do something, as long as they at least made a recommendation the buck stops at the person who is ultimately responsible - the president, and he answers to the voters. Ok so in reality it doesn't quite work like that but it should and it doesn't mean that system is flawed - just that it needs some work.
Problem is HD's are going to be cheaper per GB for some time and the capacity is what wins most people. Mini HD's are becoming better in all the categories (power, reliability, speed) but of course the idea of a spinning disk (in portable devices) is going to be replaced eventually because its just not the right way to go, so these improvements are to milk the last bit out of the technology while it still has the edge on capacity/cost. One day moving parts will be a thing of the past in computing...
FFS never mind this, why the fuck are kids being given laptops in the first place? High school students have NO use for all this equipment, they are going to use it for music, porn and games and very very occasionally write a report on it. Seriously is it that important to waste that much money so some students can do word processing?? what the fuck happened to using the computer room or their home computer or even just writing with a bloody pen? This is just an insane waste of resources for no purpose other than to hype the fact that everyone has laptops. Yeah sure it would be _nice_ to give kids laptops but at the moment it just costs too much, when the price eventually drops to a reasonable level then this will be a viable option. For the price of this project they could probably have afforded smaller class sizes, useful equipment or more one-to-one tutoring. These computers will be useless in a few years - many of them will be broken (they're not designed to last forever), some lost or stolen, and the rest will be nearing the end of their useful life as glorified word-processors with computing power that would have only been found in a Cray a few decades ago. I would sack who-ever is responsible for this and who ever DARED to pass the buck for their mother fucking failure on to kids that are doing what kids do (at least they aren't jacking cars).
For a much simpler method simply have a program load your private data into RAM on start-up and remove it from the disk with an insane number of write/erases, then put it back if you shut down properly (maybe a hidden key sequence and password).
When the cops come to raid you they will just hit the power and rip the machine off your desk (how many times have you seen cops carrying computers out of raids on the news?), and viola, not only have they destroyed the evidence (technically it was their incompetence and nothing to do with you), they have _also_ destroyed the data copying program (which also copied into RAM) so there's no evidence that there was any evidence in the first place.
Remember just destroying something is useless if you're left with a charred remains, that's evidence in itself and can get you into allot of trouble.
The great advantage of this method is its hardware independent - you could potentially install it on any system in minutes, its untraceable in almost every way (buying a physical piece of hardware might be tracable, especially if your credit card bill says 'data safe hard disk' on it) and with the insane explosion in memory you can easily fit most things on it.
The only downside would be unreliability if you lost power or had a crash but this can be over come with additional systems and UPS.
I just hope that in this day and age we're not breaking any laws by just talking about data destruction.
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Well I see an eject button on the top right of my iBook keyboard, but this was a Power Book and I didnt see it.
Sorry i forgot to mention, the CD in question was corrupt and the icon never appeared on the desktop.
You can't speed in central London, the average speed during the day is 3 mph. I have a better idea, how about charging people more for going to slowly, that would certainly make things more interesting. Put in additional penalties for not passing a traffic light within 2 seconds of it turning yellow, make 70% of the roads bus lanes and heres a really novel one: limit the amount of traffic entering the charge zone by keeping relevant traffic lights red until enough cars have exited the zone - kind of like a car-park full light.
I'll tell you something about Mac software: today I had to actually download a program to eject CDs because the mother fuckers at apple decided it would be too 'inside the box' to include a 'force eject' option even somewhere hidden on an advanced menu! That is until i discovered you had to reboot and hold the mouse button down, seriously WTF is wrong with that picture? Oh and while we're on the topic, what sort of software that comes with a computer forces you to upgrade in order to view videos in full screen mode? Quick-time is what. Oh and apparently deleting songs from iPods is a bit of an issue for some people.
I think hes right on - video games are fast becoming world sims, and story aside, its you who controls the character. GTA has such great re-playability because you can just walk around doing whatever you like, i think the future of GTA is to just get rid of the story line all together and concentrate on making it a good world simulator, this is a place where you can do things you couldn't or wouldn't want to do in real life, you can drive around fast and shoot people with no consequences, when the game gets to the point where you feel the same sensations as real life then why would you feel the need to shoot someone in real life? you wouldn't.
Im sure she was aware of the seriousness that her job entailed. If it was a minimum wage KFC employee tapping the wrong number it would be different. if you are given the job of entering extremely large sums of money on keyboards then your job pretty much concentrates on making sure that number is correct, otherwise what are they paying her for? In reality though it was probably down to an extremely badly designed system that allows mistakes to be easily made. Cars are another bad system - look how easy it is in some configurations to press a peddle a fraction of an inch the wrong way (on a manual at least) and watch the car surge, this financial system is probably the same.
Isn't the whole point of cult TV that its not mainstream 'masses' but a smaller number of dedicated fans? And while we are at it, the internet is not a broadcast medium, unlike TV/radio where a transmitter costs a fixed amount no matter how many people tune in, a website costs less to run with fewer visitors, sure it gets to a point where the overhead outweighs the variable cost but 700,000 people? The BBC should just start a BitTorrent tracker or something similar if the costs are too high for a full video server.
Anyway the BBC is supposed to be pushing the masses up not dumbing down. A commercial network might bow to the biggest demographic but the point of a socialist/communist/whatever corporation is that it gives the masses good intelligent programming whether they like it or not, both types are needed - commercial TV is more 'fair' in its finances, non-commercial tax-funded TV is more 'fair' in its representation of all demographics. I call on the BBC to go back to educating people so they will realise how valuable a service it is and continue to make sure its funded.
Unfortunately there's a ton of software and databases that probably cant handle that. Kind of like the Y2K bug except in this day there's no excuse. Also, if your going to let people have any TLD then what's the point of a TLD??? Why not just get rid of the whole concept? I think restricted TLDs are actually very useful, I can generally trust that camden.gov.uk is my local council's website (spoofing aside) and the same with anything else .gov. Individual countries can be free to set their own rules for their own TLDs which is a good thing and you could use this to set up TLDs that are guaranteed safe for kids without doing any kind of censorship or unfair treatment.
Its all about money and im as greedy as the next man. Its in the economies best interests to enforce these laws because in the end of the day, 'sharing' or allowing free downloads and charging for concerts or taking donations just does not bring in as much money as the current industry approach, and im not talking about money for artists, the ones without it are too small a voice to matter and the ones with it got it from selling music. Its all very well cracking down on paedophiles but paedophiles don't hurt the economy so in the eyes of the government and business they are less important. It might seem harsh (well actually it IS harsh) but just ask yourself this: if you could be rich beyond your wildest dreams or you could put a paedophile behind bars what would you do? Im sure you would stop the paedophile but you would probably be thinking about the money for the next few weeks.
The problem with biometrics is that it has become too much of a buzzword and bandwagon to jump on. Were at the stage similar to the Internet in 1999 when everyone was 'getting on-line' because everyone else was and a whole load of sites popped up that had no content or purpose. The police have historically used biometrics for years because they have a very good reason - when you arrive at a crime scene its likely that someone has left allot of evidence in the form of finger prints and possibly DNA, the police then usually produce a list of suspects by other means and the biometric evidence is used as the final proof. Now its probably at the stage where a finger print can be matched with all criminal finger-prints on file, is this fair? well these people were on file for a reason and its often the same people offending, but after you have done your time are you not clear? so the system gets a little tighter but everyone is fine with that because, well its targeting past criminals only.
Biometrics in airports serve little purpose other than to help identify who blew themselves up _after_ they did. As has been said time and time again like a broken record totally ignored by everyone, the 9/11 hijackers where all legal, all presented real ID, had no previous records except a speeding ticket and originated from a country that was supposedly a US ally (sure) but in fact I think they entered the US from somewhere in Europe which would raise no flags?
The most worrying use of biometrics now is this stupid fast-lane system where you can get a background check and you will be allowed to go straight through security with only a fingerprint scan.
The other use of biometrics is for the most stupid things you can imagine - ATM's, payment systems, cars! these things all work perfectly without biometrics, if I want to give my ATM card and pin, or car keys to a trusted friend who's business is that? But worse is the potential for criminals, if they want your fingerprint they can cut off your finger, this palm system might be slightly more secure (someone will figure out a way) but the point is, some people won't know that!! you can imagine some idiots cutting someone's hand off and later finding that it doesn't work oh fucking great, they've failed to break into whatever it was, im sure the owner is over the FUCKING MOON! The same is true for most biometric systems so how have we managed before? ID cards usually have your face on them and a human will look at it and generally humans can tell if you are really the person on the card or if you are holding up the severed head of someone else. It all boils down to computers replacing people in an area that computers just can't compete. We are lead to believe that all these new biometric systems work great when in fact most of them are barely out of beta testing and are full of hacks and workarounds and poorly designed systems that will continue to produce false positives and negatives and allow them to be fooled - they might detect pulses and blood flow but as the biometric readers become more advanced so will the tricks employed to get around them, you will be seeing a device in the near future that can be pressed up to a finger print left on a table and will instantly produce a replica fake either on a visible screen or some electro-static thing and will have all the pulse and movement effects of a real finger, the same will happen for your iris and palm print, these systems will get more and more advanced until you are able to hide them in contact lenses and fingers.
Remember kids, biometrics is the new hotness, get your selves kitted out today.
The point is, the direction we are going in is the absolute identification of people. Surely this is not as important as stopping crime in the first place? Which is the better of these too options
1) You let a known terrorist on a plane but you thoroughly search him and the plane first and the plane is full of anti-hijacking innovations and the passengers are not going to take any crap.
2) Yo
If a method/action has been used in real life for hundreds of years then you are free to patent that method/action in the context of computing with purely theoretical speculation. So for example:
"A method of encoding information or data into structurally organised units, visually represented by a set of symbols which can be laid out to form a mentally recognisable concept. Such a method would is not limited to one set of symbols or organisational rules. Storage of encoded information can be achieved through the use of look-up tables to produce a short binary code for each symbol. In addition to the aforementioned method of symbol layout or 'text', the use of space between symbols will denote separation of symbol units henceforth known as 'words' and additional symbols to support the separation of related 'words' into logically coherent blocks or 'sentences'. Symbols or 'characters' will be given phonetic properties to aid audible transmission."
I think you should all be aware that my patent passed this morning, please cease and desist.
Remember kids, when you pirate movies the artists loose money, because of piracy Peter Jackson has lost $100m... oh wait...
Human Rights Act? EU Law?
Im guessing it can walk, sit on command, know what walkies means and sniff other dogs butts...
Nope.
My girlfriend is Iranian and she is not pleased with the crap thats going on in Iran, this is why people are leaving. It may be that the un-washed masses outside the big cities who have little education and live in fear of their shadows, might be scared of the internet, but its unlikely they have ever used it. People like that use insanely stupid arguments which shape their unsophisticated views, at the very least they need to be educated to find more intelligent arguments for censorship - the internet could be that source of education.
True, but not all computer use in school is about learning computing - most of the time you spend on the computer is supposed to be spent working on other subjects, doing research & writing etc. Its good for people to be able to learn different systems easily but OSX and Windows really aren't that different, you can teach someone who is familiar with one to use the other in a few minutes, and that's only if they can't figure it out for themselves. I still think desktops are the way to go - whether they are Mac or PC desktops or a mix of both (they could even afford that), notebooks cost more not only initially but in the long term, anything that goes wrong can be expensive to replace, and their nature dictates that the probability of them being dropped, spilled on, lost/stolen or damaged in transit is far far higher than any desktop.
Well being a recent graduate looking to be successful, Its in my interests to keep the younger generations at a level of computer literacy that allows them to click 'add to basket' but not much else, but of course thats probably not in their interests so it wouldn't be wise to put me incharge. I can understand giving them cheap laptops, but these were very very expensive and kitted out with even more expensive software, and they didn't even run Windows (the OS they will be most likely to use in the real world lets face it). When I was at school we had computer rooms and/or computers at home and that was enough, infact even those were abused, if you walked into the rooms at most times of the day you would see 90% of people on the net (not working), maybe 5% using the net for work and another 5% on Word trying to get their homework done before the next lession. Then when the admin had left early we would have the afternoon to load up some games and use the network for an even less academic purpose.
Now back to the school: if they had spent the same money on desktop PC's they could have had enough to put on every desk in every classroom so that every student could just login at the start of the lesson, it would have been far more difficult for them to mess around with AND they would have had enough money left over to give every student another PC to take home! after that they would still have a sizeable bit of cash left over!
Wow, the school management better hope they get absolutely exceptional graduation results from that investment. I just have a feeling the results will be the same or lower than before.
Makes me wonder how Microsoft, Gateway and Apple are listed as "recommended" brands. I have no reason to suspect a kickback or paid product placement, do you?
Well I guess that might be why these students were given these computers.
Anyway back to the topic, school is all about making mistakes and learning for real life and thats what these kids have done. im sure in the future they will remember to do it more discretely and avoid getting caught. They should have been more careful though, you don't just go through your school-issued computer willy-nilly, they should have first thought to themselves "why have we been given these machines?". They should have gathered some dirt on the principle - any kick-backs etc. If they didn't find anything they could either have written a report on his managerial incompetence or just made some dirt up - keeping it secure incase it was needed as 'coercion'. After that it would be prudent not to get caught, ok so its not right they should get felony charges, I would have made them write a report on 'covering your ass' and left it at that. They need to learn how to deal with this crap before they leave school.
VISA is only required to admit this (by law) in some states as far as i know, if they choose not to divulge certain things - break ins, security policies, lost data then there's not much you can do except hope that its in their best interests to tell you everything. The board/owner/CEO's will sit round the table thinking "will I personally make less money if we tell the public about X". In government (or so the theory goes) the Freedom of Information Act would be your ticket to finding out whats going on, and since the management has no personal gain or loss other than keeping their job they should be more willing to make sure the job is done properly according to the budget they are given. The public isn't going to blame a government department if they simply didn't have the funds to do something, as long as they at least made a recommendation the buck stops at the person who is ultimately responsible - the president, and he answers to the voters. Ok so in reality it doesn't quite work like that but it should and it doesn't mean that system is flawed - just that it needs some work.
Problem is HD's are going to be cheaper per GB for some time and the capacity is what wins most people. Mini HD's are becoming better in all the categories (power, reliability, speed) but of course the idea of a spinning disk (in portable devices) is going to be replaced eventually because its just not the right way to go, so these improvements are to milk the last bit out of the technology while it still has the edge on capacity/cost. One day moving parts will be a thing of the past in computing...
FFS never mind this, why the fuck are kids being given laptops in the first place? High school students have NO use for all this equipment, they are going to use it for music, porn and games and very very occasionally write a report on it. Seriously is it that important to waste that much money so some students can do word processing?? what the fuck happened to using the computer room or their home computer or even just writing with a bloody pen? This is just an insane waste of resources for no purpose other than to hype the fact that everyone has laptops. Yeah sure it would be _nice_ to give kids laptops but at the moment it just costs too much, when the price eventually drops to a reasonable level then this will be a viable option. For the price of this project they could probably have afforded smaller class sizes, useful equipment or more one-to-one tutoring. These computers will be useless in a few years - many of them will be broken (they're not designed to last forever), some lost or stolen, and the rest will be nearing the end of their useful life as glorified word-processors with computing power that would have only been found in a Cray a few decades ago. I would sack who-ever is responsible for this and who ever DARED to pass the buck for their mother fucking failure on to kids that are doing what kids do (at least they aren't jacking cars).
For a much simpler method simply have a program load your private data into RAM on start-up and remove it from the disk with an insane number of write/erases, then put it back if you shut down properly (maybe a hidden key sequence and password).
When the cops come to raid you they will just hit the power and rip the machine off your desk (how many times have you seen cops carrying computers out of raids on the news?), and viola, not only have they destroyed the evidence (technically it was their incompetence and nothing to do with you), they have _also_ destroyed the data copying program (which also copied into RAM) so there's no evidence that there was any evidence in the first place.
Remember just destroying something is useless if you're left with a charred remains, that's evidence in itself and can get you into allot of trouble.
The great advantage of this method is its hardware independent - you could potentially install it on any system in minutes, its untraceable in almost every way (buying a physical piece of hardware might be tracable, especially if your credit card bill says 'data safe hard disk' on it) and with the insane explosion in memory you can easily fit most things on it.
The only downside would be unreliability if you lost power or had a crash but this can be over come with additional systems and UPS.
I just hope that in this day and age we're not breaking any laws by just talking about data destruction.
Oh, well this must be a different Lockheed Martin, with the same logo and address then...
= fec&ci=12992&sc=400
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp
Freedom of Information Act.