Assuming that any explosives test is 100% specific is the kind of error I'd expect an untrained fool to make, not a supposed expert. There are lot of substances which are chemically similar enough to explosives and are also household chemical which many people come into contact with and thus trigger a false positive. A test like that is supposed to be to help you decide which people need further scrutiny, not as a definitive stop this person from flying tool. Even then if you assume that someone has come into contact with explosives if they don't have any on them then they are not going to explode through magic pixie dust. Hell if I walk through one of my wet labs on the wrong day or perform a magic trick I'm likely to end up with nitrocellulose dust all over my clothing and hair. Once they had determined he had no explosives on him he should have been free to go (whilst filing a report with Homeland Security to follow up); further detention served absolutely no justifiable purpose. If he were a terrorist for example doing a dummy run, as long as he had no explosives it would be more useful to observe him than spend hours questioning people.
As for Jet Blue they have absolutely no excuse, if someone allegedly has explosive residue on them today but no explosives then there is no rational reason to prevent them from flying today or tomorrow or any other day. If he doesn't have any explosives on him, the results of the test are irrelevant because it's far more likely that the test gave a false positive than not.
Some people are missing the point here, so for emphasis: this product only prepares DNA for sequencing, it doesn't do the sequencing itself. Half an hour of preparation is reduced to minutes, but the actual work still takes days.
It used to take days, and still does if funding is short but an Illumina HiSeq 2500 can produce 150-180 Gbases in 40 hours in rapid run mode [1]. Most labs still run it in high output mode because of the reagent cost but the option is there. This means that if I was prepared to pay the extra and I sent a sample into "core sequencing" where I work, they could potentially return mapped DNA in a week. After that there's still some improvement tools we'd need to run to clean up artefacts, followed by calling and filtering variants, those bits can take weeks. Whilst it is true that the bottleneck is currently the physical sequencing process of things but pretty soon that is going to shift to the informatics.side.
I've no idea whether this particular set of experiments will be continued and animals replaced or not.
If not at Milan then elsewhere, the research will be done as long as there are still diseases to be cured. There's pretty much no other way to model the complex system that is life, except with more life, computers can't cut it.
And now the question is always asked, is vivisection the only way this can be done?
Using this word to describe animal experimentation as a whole is a deliberate deception. Actual vivisection is actually pretty bloody rare because it doesn't often tell us much, instead an animal is usually euthanised and then dissected instead. A lot of the time the research involves simple phenotyping, aka mutating a gene and then testing animals to see the effect. E.g. whether it makes them faster or slower; live longer or shorter; stronger or weaker; etc. There isn't much cutting a live animal open, that cutting a dead animal open doesn't tell you (which is far far easier). There are exceptions, but vivisection is a rarity not the norm.
Will she be similarly defensive against the wholesale offshoring of IT jobs FROM Australia to China/India?
How do you propose she or any other PM does this? A lot of outsourcing outfits are independent Indian companies which are paid by overseas companies to fulfil a contract. You'd have to stop or make more expensive the Australian companies doing business this way, and aside from the issues this would cause with free trade agreements it would be damn ticklish to define.
I disagree, I think software companies would love to pay a competitive salary, as long as ALL of their competitors are paying it too. Your problem is that your competition is now international, and Australia has a very high cost of living. In the late 1990's the internet hadn't properly taken hold in CEO's brains so your competition for software was still mostly domestic (international companies like Microsoft, IBM, etc were the exception).
Politicians don't seem to get is whilst high tech jobs are the future, they're not subject to the same geographical constraints that low tech jobs like farming are. Why would a company want to pay an Australian developer a high rate of pay when he can pay an Indian developer a lower wage and the Indian guy gets to live in the lap of luxury? Why would a company or consumer want to buy software developed in Australia, when Indian, American or European software can be bought cheaper over the net? (Region locks have plusses and minuses in this case)
The causes of the high cost of living needs to be tackled, but this is probably going to involve low-skilled immigration and they've sealed that exit off.
If you have an industry who is trying to compete solely on cost then the work is going to be done by the lowest bidder via H1B or outsourcing, take your pick. The tiny advantage of H1B being slightly more jobs and dollars manage to stay in the US. Unfortunately software companies have demonstrated that if they can't bring the workers to them then they have already demonstrated they are willing to send the whole kit and caboodle overseas. The US software industry can only compete with this by competing on quality and the ability to understand a client's needs and write software for it rapidly, on time and to budget. You've got a cultural advantage in that a US based employee is more likely to understand how a US business process works than someone used to a different business environment but it seems few companies are setup to take advantage of that. The other problem being that management culture needs to be encouraged to reward look at long term balance sheet rather than saving a few bucks on buying rubbish software and paying hundreds of bucks to make it work for you.
You go to all the trouble of catching the asteroid, mining it and it turns out to be Veldspar... Either that or some Goons turn up and steal it from your hauler when you try and take it home.
The problem with this is that it creates a new barrier to entry that wasn't there before. If prior to this I wanted to set up a French language news aggregator site, it wouldn't cost me much more than the hosting, the spidering and the other regular overheads of running a website all of which I could recoup by selling ads. However with this law in place I'd have to spend a lot of time and money making sure the news sites got paid. It means you can't set up a French news aggregator without some serious startup capital.
So basically, not finding items of historical value is better than finding them and destroying a bit of historically valuable surroundings?
Yes. They will still be there for a proper archaeologist to discover at some future time. Given how many artifacts were damaged or ruined by bungling explorers in the 1800's and early 1900's, I'd say it is prudent to leave the task to experts.
Amusingly many of those bungling explorers were the "experts" of the time. Also in order for archeologists to know there's anything worth digging up, someone has to make a chance discovery. Proper archeology takes a lot of time and resources, and thus sites are only excavated if there's reason to suspect there's something to look for in the first place.
Elsewhere it was revealed that it was a young kid who threw the rocks, and a staffer "accidentally" wiped the computers with a Linux disk.
I say accidentally because he was being investigated for illegal use of campaign funds, and some of the data that may have been of interest to the investigation was lost. And it's not exactly trivial to accidentally wipe your disks with a Linux disk. I can see someone doing it, but you do have to go through enough steps that you have to have been trying to do *something* with that disk even if it wasn't wiping the system.
Yep, New York Daily New has the story here. Apparently like the data wasn't deleted and whoever they had to do their IT didn't know enough about Linux and partitions to realise.
I assume it's not a WSUS solution then as that can install IE9. What about service packs? Windows 7 loses support unless you update to SP1 by April and you can't buy extended support to avoid that. It just seems like it's asking for trouble not to have some kind of mechanism to deploy fixes after the machine has been deployed, no amount of testing can guarantee you have it 100% perfect nor can it anticipate every need.
The NSW Department of Education which uses google apps for all student email, has all of their win 7 laptops (one for each yr9+ student) locked on IE8, the only way to upgrade them to IE9 would be recall and re-image every single one. Considering the size of the laptop program is so large that Microsoft actually allowed a final version of win7 to be installed on them before its global launch you'd think google wouldn't want to alienate such a large customer?
Then the people running this program NSW Department of Education are well intentioned idiots. The person who authorised such a massive deployment without a proper upgrade mechanism other than re-imaging it should be fired (and I mean the one who let it happen at board level and not just a handy minion). I've spent a good deal of time dealing with some fairly large educational networks and having a system which allows you to centrally track deployment of software on locked down machines is such an essential thing. You can barely run a small school network without it, let alone a local or state government wide system. I mean crickey, without something like this, how do you stop the whole lot becoming one giant botnet? Don't tell me they're so locked down that it will protect against that unless each one is relaunching a clean VM on boot. Ring 3->0 exploits are a dime a dozen.
Imagine you were given a slightly buggy 3.2Gig piece of software used to run a group of factories and to managing communications between them. You were told to debug this piece of software, but you had no source code, only the machine code only. You could of course observe it's behaviour and set up situations in various factories to see how it behaved. To complicate matters further, you realised that the factories were all performing different functions and making different things but they were all running the same software, but it wasn't immediately obvious why they behaved differently. This is pretty much a huge oversimplification of the challenge that faces modern genetics. We have the assembler language, but we're still not sure entirely what bits are coding sections, which are data sections and which sections are marked up to act as configurations sections. It's a huge task and I love it.
In order to get to jail you'd have to be convicted of wilfully avoiding paying your taxes. This I believe would make you a felon no? Bye bye right to vote. Is it worth that?
It looks like this is just a bunch of shoplifters who retaliated on-line to being sued.
This isn't about the shoplifters at all. This is the Citizens Advice Bureaux who are a non-profit legal advice service over here in Britain. They basically provide legal advice to folks about civil law, debt, and similar stuff. Essentially there are open legal questions about whether the actual damages in RLP cases are as big as RLP claim they should be.
Beggars can't be choosers - we are NOT beggers, we should be choosers.
The problem is you aren't choosing, so instead of choosing you get whoever is determined enough to come. The thing is you actually need more less skilled migrants as well along with the skilled ones (and the green card lotto is a joke). Unfortunately that's not politically palatable for Repubs (their base) or Dems (their unions) so nothing gets done about it. This leads employers to go through the back doors and you get illegals who you don't get to choose.
What studies? That's like me saying "scientists say giving realxmp £100 is good for your health", which is true, a scientist did say it, me. A study is only as good as the person who wrote it and the data they obtained.
If you want to worry about people taking your jobs, worry about China, India and Brazil. It isn't immigrants taking your jobs, it's the jobs themselves emigrating!
You're right, you'd have no case against the people providing the equipment, but you would probably have one against those operating it (likely in their personal capacity too given that it's criminal law). In the UK this would definitely be illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which whilst it grants broad exceptions for regulatory, diagnostic and business reasons does not allow you to monitor all traffic indiscriminately (and definitely not if you have reason to believe it is personal). In the US it would probably depend on each state and how their law was written (aka whether it was just conversations protected or electronic communications in general). Unfortunately if you did get IP traffic from a two party state you might be committing an offence in that state, even if you aren't committing one in your own. Technically if you angered the wrong company in the UK at least, a prosecutor could extradite you under the UK-US extradition treaty with just a probable cause standard of evidence needed.
While it's possible that animal testing has contributed to medical science in the past, these days it's mostly done in the name of developing pharmaceutical products of dubious social value. I would propose to you that by your equation, any such testing would be highly unethical. Especially when you consider that a lot of the drugs developed ultimately do more harm than good.
Firstly I'll call citation needed on your statement that they've only contributed to science in the past. Animals are still used in basic biological research and the level of understanding gained in the past 10 years of genetics and biology in general has been an order of magnitude faster. Unfortunately studying biology is like trying to debug a vast application written in assembler and known to have global variables all over the shop by just looking at the UI and tracking filesystem reads and writes. Yes you can read the source code, but static analysis is only going to get you so far. You have to insert traces deep into the application and observe it running, to actually find out how various bits relate to each other. Scientists reduce, reuse and replace where they can but there are times when sadly a functioning organism is the only way to figure out for definite why something is happening. We have learnt a massive amount but we still know next to nothing about how the body really works, are you content to stop here and say more knowledge is worthless? Also not everything coming out of biology and medical research is a drug, sometimes it's simply a test which tells us how to treat someone instead of the educated guesses we've used in the past. My point is this, you seem to be saying all medical science involving animals is big pharma in the name of drugs and profit, but in actuality it isn't, a good part of it is in fact research funded by the NIH and others for basic science and the benefit of all.
Secondly what are these pharmaceutical products of dubious social value? Also who judges their social value? You're just firing that statement out there without any specifics. If an anti-retroviral keeps a mother alive just long enough to bring up her kids so they don't become street children and perpetuate the cycle is that of dubious social value? What about a cancer drug that gives someone another 20, 10 or 5 years? Where do you draw the line? How do you know before you develop a drug how long term its effects will be?
You might think this isn't likely to come up, but you have to bear in mind you're not just intercepting his family's communications by doing this but any guests and also the communications of anyone who is communicating with his family. I'm assuming by your reference to the NSA that you're working with someone from the United States and this makes things tricky. Many people mistakenly believe, "well I paid for it, I can do what I like with it", but this is not the case, particularly with communications services. A lot of states have "two party consent" wiretap laws, which means even if hypothetically he could consent on behalf of his children (which is debatable), he can't consent on behalf of the persons they may be communicating with.
Let's say he were to take evidence from this into school and say: "My child is being bullied!", the question would be how do you know? Also if he were to discover anything serious (grooming etc), what he discovered may not be admissible as evidence as fruit of the tainted tree. Also you may wish to see a lawyer, because you may also be committing an offence installing this.
The other thing is that an intelligence source the well is going to dry up pretty fast the moment he presents any evidence to his family. He also better have discussed this with his wife, because he certainly can't consent for her and her reaction to being spied on may be somewhat awkward. If I know teenagers, their reaction is not going to be the one he'd hoped, they'll be very very very angry and the lesson he's trying to impart will likely be lost.
Which was why I said destroy your copy of the key once you've loaded it... It's far more likely you'd be compelled by a court order than an M4 anyway. The point being if the only copy of the private key is in the crypto processor then it doesn't matter whether your opponent uses rubber hose cryptography or has a court order, because you don't have a copy of the key to give them and they know that because you've advertised that fact before hand.
If we're going to trust these remailers then we need to do things properly. Key goes into the crypto processor, never comes out. Means someone can't just seize your server and image it then use that image to decrypt all traffic that passed through. If they want to try and get it out, fine but they'll need a guy with an Electron microscope to do so and they'll likely trip the tamper measures and bye bye key. If you're particularly paranoid you can even destroy your copy of the key once you've loaded it, this might mean changing your key if you have to move servers but it means that the service you offer is truly tamper evident. Plus you also have the added bonus that a dedicated hardware security module is usually quicker than your processor at doing encryption/decryption.
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Assuming that any explosives test is 100% specific is the kind of error I'd expect an untrained fool to make, not a supposed expert. There are lot of substances which are chemically similar enough to explosives and are also household chemical which many people come into contact with and thus trigger a false positive. A test like that is supposed to be to help you decide which people need further scrutiny, not as a definitive stop this person from flying tool. Even then if you assume that someone has come into contact with explosives if they don't have any on them then they are not going to explode through magic pixie dust. Hell if I walk through one of my wet labs on the wrong day or perform a magic trick I'm likely to end up with nitrocellulose dust all over my clothing and hair. Once they had determined he had no explosives on him he should have been free to go (whilst filing a report with Homeland Security to follow up); further detention served absolutely no justifiable purpose. If he were a terrorist for example doing a dummy run, as long as he had no explosives it would be more useful to observe him than spend hours questioning people.
As for Jet Blue they have absolutely no excuse, if someone allegedly has explosive residue on them today but no explosives then there is no rational reason to prevent them from flying today or tomorrow or any other day. If he doesn't have any explosives on him, the results of the test are irrelevant because it's far more likely that the test gave a false positive than not.
Some people are missing the point here, so for emphasis: this product only prepares DNA for sequencing, it doesn't do the sequencing itself. Half an hour of preparation is reduced to minutes, but the actual work still takes days.
It used to take days, and still does if funding is short but an Illumina HiSeq 2500 can produce 150-180 Gbases in 40 hours in rapid run mode [1]. Most labs still run it in high output mode because of the reagent cost but the option is there. This means that if I was prepared to pay the extra and I sent a sample into "core sequencing" where I work, they could potentially return mapped DNA in a week. After that there's still some improvement tools we'd need to run to clean up artefacts, followed by calling and filtering variants, those bits can take weeks. Whilst it is true that the bottleneck is currently the physical sequencing process of things but pretty soon that is going to shift to the informatics.side.
[1] http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq_2500_1500/performance_specifications.ilmn
I've no idea whether this particular set of experiments will be continued and animals replaced or not.
If not at Milan then elsewhere, the research will be done as long as there are still diseases to be cured. There's pretty much no other way to model the complex system that is life, except with more life, computers can't cut it.
And now the question is always asked, is vivisection the only way this can be done?
Using this word to describe animal experimentation as a whole is a deliberate deception. Actual vivisection is actually pretty bloody rare because it doesn't often tell us much, instead an animal is usually euthanised and then dissected instead. A lot of the time the research involves simple phenotyping, aka mutating a gene and then testing animals to see the effect. E.g. whether it makes them faster or slower; live longer or shorter; stronger or weaker; etc. There isn't much cutting a live animal open, that cutting a dead animal open doesn't tell you (which is far far easier). There are exceptions, but vivisection is a rarity not the norm.
Will she be similarly defensive against the wholesale offshoring of IT jobs FROM Australia to China/India?
How do you propose she or any other PM does this? A lot of outsourcing outfits are independent Indian companies which are paid by overseas companies to fulfil a contract. You'd have to stop or make more expensive the Australian companies doing business this way, and aside from the issues this would cause with free trade agreements it would be damn ticklish to define.
I disagree, I think software companies would love to pay a competitive salary, as long as ALL of their competitors are paying it too. Your problem is that your competition is now international, and Australia has a very high cost of living. In the late 1990's the internet hadn't properly taken hold in CEO's brains so your competition for software was still mostly domestic (international companies like Microsoft, IBM, etc were the exception).
Politicians don't seem to get is whilst high tech jobs are the future, they're not subject to the same geographical constraints that low tech jobs like farming are. Why would a company want to pay an Australian developer a high rate of pay when he can pay an Indian developer a lower wage and the Indian guy gets to live in the lap of luxury? Why would a company or consumer want to buy software developed in Australia, when Indian, American or European software can be bought cheaper over the net? (Region locks have plusses and minuses in this case)
The causes of the high cost of living needs to be tackled, but this is probably going to involve low-skilled immigration and they've sealed that exit off.
If you have an industry who is trying to compete solely on cost then the work is going to be done by the lowest bidder via H1B or outsourcing, take your pick. The tiny advantage of H1B being slightly more jobs and dollars manage to stay in the US. Unfortunately software companies have demonstrated that if they can't bring the workers to them then they have already demonstrated they are willing to send the whole kit and caboodle overseas. The US software industry can only compete with this by competing on quality and the ability to understand a client's needs and write software for it rapidly, on time and to budget. You've got a cultural advantage in that a US based employee is more likely to understand how a US business process works than someone used to a different business environment but it seems few companies are setup to take advantage of that. The other problem being that management culture needs to be encouraged to reward look at long term balance sheet rather than saving a few bucks on buying rubbish software and paying hundreds of bucks to make it work for you.
You go to all the trouble of catching the asteroid, mining it and it turns out to be Veldspar... Either that or some Goons turn up and steal it from your hauler when you try and take it home.
Because in the UK, a lot of the bill isn't funded by the student, it's funded by the taxpayers.
Not for overseas students they pay the whole whack.
The problem with this is that it creates a new barrier to entry that wasn't there before. If prior to this I wanted to set up a French language news aggregator site, it wouldn't cost me much more than the hosting, the spidering and the other regular overheads of running a website all of which I could recoup by selling ads. However with this law in place I'd have to spend a lot of time and money making sure the news sites got paid. It means you can't set up a French news aggregator without some serious startup capital.
Yes. They will still be there for a proper archaeologist to discover at some future time. Given how many artifacts were damaged or ruined by bungling explorers in the 1800's and early 1900's, I'd say it is prudent to leave the task to experts.
Amusingly many of those bungling explorers were the "experts" of the time. Also in order for archeologists to know there's anything worth digging up, someone has to make a chance discovery. Proper archeology takes a lot of time and resources, and thus sites are only excavated if there's reason to suspect there's something to look for in the first place.
Elsewhere it was revealed that it was a young kid who threw the rocks, and a staffer "accidentally" wiped the computers with a Linux disk.
I say accidentally because he was being investigated for illegal use of campaign funds, and some of the data that may have been of interest to the investigation was lost. And it's not exactly trivial to accidentally wipe your disks with a Linux disk. I can see someone doing it, but you do have to go through enough steps that you have to have been trying to do *something* with that disk even if it wasn't wiping the system.
Yep, New York Daily New has the story here. Apparently like the data wasn't deleted and whoever they had to do their IT didn't know enough about Linux and partitions to realise.
I assume it's not a WSUS solution then as that can install IE9. What about service packs? Windows 7 loses support unless you update to SP1 by April and you can't buy extended support to avoid that. It just seems like it's asking for trouble not to have some kind of mechanism to deploy fixes after the machine has been deployed, no amount of testing can guarantee you have it 100% perfect nor can it anticipate every need.
The NSW Department of Education which uses google apps for all student email, has all of their win 7 laptops (one for each yr9+ student) locked on IE8, the only way to upgrade them to IE9 would be recall and re-image every single one. Considering the size of the laptop program is so large that Microsoft actually allowed a final version of win7 to be installed on them before its global launch you'd think google wouldn't want to alienate such a large customer?
Then the people running this program NSW Department of Education are well intentioned idiots. The person who authorised such a massive deployment without a proper upgrade mechanism other than re-imaging it should be fired (and I mean the one who let it happen at board level and not just a handy minion). I've spent a good deal of time dealing with some fairly large educational networks and having a system which allows you to centrally track deployment of software on locked down machines is such an essential thing. You can barely run a small school network without it, let alone a local or state government wide system. I mean crickey, without something like this, how do you stop the whole lot becoming one giant botnet? Don't tell me they're so locked down that it will protect against that unless each one is relaunching a clean VM on boot. Ring 3->0 exploits are a dime a dozen.
Imagine you were given a slightly buggy 3.2Gig piece of software used to run a group of factories and to managing communications between them. You were told to debug this piece of software, but you had no source code, only the machine code only. You could of course observe it's behaviour and set up situations in various factories to see how it behaved. To complicate matters further, you realised that the factories were all performing different functions and making different things but they were all running the same software, but it wasn't immediately obvious why they behaved differently. This is pretty much a huge oversimplification of the challenge that faces modern genetics. We have the assembler language, but we're still not sure entirely what bits are coding sections, which are data sections and which sections are marked up to act as configurations sections. It's a huge task and I love it.
In order to get to jail you'd have to be convicted of wilfully avoiding paying your taxes. This I believe would make you a felon no? Bye bye right to vote. Is it worth that?
It looks like this is just a bunch of shoplifters who retaliated on-line to being sued.
This isn't about the shoplifters at all. This is the Citizens Advice Bureaux who are a non-profit legal advice service over here in Britain. They basically provide legal advice to folks about civil law, debt, and similar stuff. Essentially there are open legal questions about whether the actual damages in RLP cases are as big as RLP claim they should be.
Beggars can't be choosers - we are NOT beggers, we should be choosers.
The problem is you aren't choosing, so instead of choosing you get whoever is determined enough to come. The thing is you actually need more less skilled migrants as well along with the skilled ones (and the green card lotto is a joke). Unfortunately that's not politically palatable for Repubs (their base) or Dems (their unions) so nothing gets done about it. This leads employers to go through the back doors and you get illegals who you don't get to choose.
What studies? That's like me saying "scientists say giving realxmp £100 is good for your health", which is true, a scientist did say it, me. A study is only as good as the person who wrote it and the data they obtained.
If you want to worry about people taking your jobs, worry about China, India and Brazil. It isn't immigrants taking your jobs, it's the jobs themselves emigrating!
You're right, you'd have no case against the people providing the equipment, but you would probably have one against those operating it (likely in their personal capacity too given that it's criminal law). In the UK this would definitely be illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which whilst it grants broad exceptions for regulatory, diagnostic and business reasons does not allow you to monitor all traffic indiscriminately (and definitely not if you have reason to believe it is personal). In the US it would probably depend on each state and how their law was written (aka whether it was just conversations protected or electronic communications in general). Unfortunately if you did get IP traffic from a two party state you might be committing an offence in that state, even if you aren't committing one in your own. Technically if you angered the wrong company in the UK at least, a prosecutor could extradite you under the UK-US extradition treaty with just a probable cause standard of evidence needed.
A transcript doesn't count as a recording for the purposes of wiretap law, otherwise you'd probably run into first amendment issues.
While it's possible that animal testing has contributed to medical science in the past, these days it's mostly done in the name of developing pharmaceutical products of dubious social value. I would propose to you that by your equation, any such testing would be highly unethical. Especially when you consider that a lot of the drugs developed ultimately do more harm than good.
Firstly I'll call citation needed on your statement that they've only contributed to science in the past. Animals are still used in basic biological research and the level of understanding gained in the past 10 years of genetics and biology in general has been an order of magnitude faster. Unfortunately studying biology is like trying to debug a vast application written in assembler and known to have global variables all over the shop by just looking at the UI and tracking filesystem reads and writes. Yes you can read the source code, but static analysis is only going to get you so far. You have to insert traces deep into the application and observe it running, to actually find out how various bits relate to each other. Scientists reduce, reuse and replace where they can but there are times when sadly a functioning organism is the only way to figure out for definite why something is happening. We have learnt a massive amount but we still know next to nothing about how the body really works, are you content to stop here and say more knowledge is worthless? Also not everything coming out of biology and medical research is a drug, sometimes it's simply a test which tells us how to treat someone instead of the educated guesses we've used in the past. My point is this, you seem to be saying all medical science involving animals is big pharma in the name of drugs and profit, but in actuality it isn't, a good part of it is in fact research funded by the NIH and others for basic science and the benefit of all.
Secondly what are these pharmaceutical products of dubious social value? Also who judges their social value? You're just firing that statement out there without any specifics. If an anti-retroviral keeps a mother alive just long enough to bring up her kids so they don't become street children and perpetuate the cycle is that of dubious social value? What about a cancer drug that gives someone another 20, 10 or 5 years? Where do you draw the line? How do you know before you develop a drug how long term its effects will be?
You might think this isn't likely to come up, but you have to bear in mind you're not just intercepting his family's communications by doing this but any guests and also the communications of anyone who is communicating with his family. I'm assuming by your reference to the NSA that you're working with someone from the United States and this makes things tricky. Many people mistakenly believe, "well I paid for it, I can do what I like with it", but this is not the case, particularly with communications services. A lot of states have "two party consent" wiretap laws, which means even if hypothetically he could consent on behalf of his children (which is debatable), he can't consent on behalf of the persons they may be communicating with.
Let's say he were to take evidence from this into school and say: "My child is being bullied!", the question would be how do you know? Also if he were to discover anything serious (grooming etc), what he discovered may not be admissible as evidence as fruit of the tainted tree. Also you may wish to see a lawyer, because you may also be committing an offence installing this.
The other thing is that an intelligence source the well is going to dry up pretty fast the moment he presents any evidence to his family. He also better have discussed this with his wife, because he certainly can't consent for her and her reaction to being spied on may be somewhat awkward. If I know teenagers, their reaction is not going to be the one he'd hoped, they'll be very very very angry and the lesson he's trying to impart will likely be lost.
Too late, the Brits have already named their command and control satellite network that.
Which was why I said destroy your copy of the key once you've loaded it... It's far more likely you'd be compelled by a court order than an M4 anyway. The point being if the only copy of the private key is in the crypto processor then it doesn't matter whether your opponent uses rubber hose cryptography or has a court order, because you don't have a copy of the key to give them and they know that because you've advertised that fact before hand.
If we're going to trust these remailers then we need to do things properly. Key goes into the crypto processor, never comes out. Means someone can't just seize your server and image it then use that image to decrypt all traffic that passed through. If they want to try and get it out, fine but they'll need a guy with an Electron microscope to do so and they'll likely trip the tamper measures and bye bye key. If you're particularly paranoid you can even destroy your copy of the key once you've loaded it, this might mean changing your key if you have to move servers but it means that the service you offer is truly tamper evident. Plus you also have the added bonus that a dedicated hardware security module is usually quicker than your processor at doing encryption/decryption.