Registrars already do a reasonably good job of controlling ownership of domains. I haven't really seen any cases where a registrar transferred ownership of a domain of importance (like Google/etc) to a random 3rd party unless they allowed the registration to lapse. Sure, you can register google.zz where zz is some obscure country code, but that really isn't the same thing. DNSSEC will protect against DNS spoofing, which is a much more common attack vector.
I would think that most CAs are only going to verify the CN to the extent that they ensure that you control it, which is what DNSSEC does anyway. Anything stored in any field other than the CN in a certificate is worthless 99% of the time since the browser can only check the CN and nobody reads the rest of the certificate.
So, what DNSSEC ensures is that when you type google.com into your browser, you get the site hosted by google.com. It doesn't guarantee that you get the site run by Google, and neither does the present CA system. (If Google's domain expired I should be able to register it and get a certificate legitimately for John Smith, CN=google.com which works just fine in any browser.)
DNS is also much more heirarchical. You have one administrator for a domain who is responsible for running it correctly. With CAs there is no scope limit on trust - so some obscure CA in Singapore can issue microsoft.com certificates. With DNSSEC only Verisign can issue a microsoft.com certificate, and if they botch the job they can lose their contract.
DIY tends to be better quality in general. When you mass produce with robots you can negotiate a 0.004 cent discount on each capacitor by getting the lousiest part you can find, and then trust that it will work fine since you found some other part that is equally lousy in the opposite way so they just happen to work together - until a few years later the capacitor goes out of tolerance and the thing dies, which is a feature since that means the customer will buy another one.
With Heathkit you actually give the person the parts list and schematics and lousy parts are just going to be obvious, and any EE will spot a poorly designed circuit pretty quickly. The parts probably cost $5 more and the unit lasts for 50 years as a result.
This isn't like DIY PC builds - buying the $35 motherboard instead of the $15 motherboard goes a long way to making the system last.
Well, Amazon's only real issue is with its affiliates. It is already looking to deal with the warehouse problem. Recently it was announced that South Carolina agreed to exempt Amazon from collecting sales tax entirely in exchange for them building a huge distribution center in Spartanburg. That essentially sends a message to everybody else that one way or another they aren't collecting tax, and other states can take the jobs or leave them.
So, I'd be the first to agree that direct democracy is not the best way to govern most government affairs.
However, clearly the specific will of the voters as expressed on a particular issue should be given more regard than the indirectly expressed will of the voters expressed simply in who they elect to office.
Suppose I own a store and tell my employees - Fred is in charge, but I want to ensure that two people are still required to open the safe so Fred only gets half the combo. Then 5 minutes after I leave Fred asks Sally for her half of the combo because he wants to be able to open the safe on his own. Sally complains, and Fred said that if I didn't trust him I wouldn't have put him in charge. This is absurd, since I clearly stated my intentions when I left - nobody has to guess at what I want.
It isn't like Amazon is tacking x% onto the transaction labeled as sales tax and then pocketing it. They're just not charging people the tax in the first place.
Collecting sales tax won't have a direct impact on Amazon per-se - the impact is on all the consumers who will be charged it.
Now, it will have an indirect effect insofar as it eliminates a relative advantage compared to local retailers, for the 99.9999% of US Citizens who themselves avoid paying sales tax on interstate commerce. Of course, said taxes are unconstitutional (but not in the opinion of the courts) in the first place, which is why they call them use taxes (as if what you call a tax has anything to do with its constitutionality).
Also, if you go ask a selection of 100 random people who are involved with faxing signatures, who are not on Slashdot, I bet a large majority will not give you "because the courts accept it as evidence" as a reason.
No, but their lawyers would. I FAX forms to companies all the time. Why do I FAX them - because the companies accept only FAX or mail. Why do they accept only FAX and mail - because that is their policy. Who wrote their policy - a lawyer!
Most people don't bother to understand the reason why they end up doing the things they end up doing.
And while courts do involve people, I wouldn't really say that their operation is purely at the whim of those people. If a judge rules against the integrity of a FAX they are almost guaranteed to be overturned, since courts have been upholding them for decades. The same guarantee doesn't apply to email - you have to argue it based on the merits and that costs money either way.
Well, every system is analog by that standard unless it has neither input nor output. Your monitor is analog, and so is your keyboard.
Your broadband connection is digital data modulated on some kind of analog carrier.
And even the bits in your computer are just digital interpretations of analog signals. It isn't like the voltage on a data line changes in zero time.
FAXes certainly are a digital technology, and a little line noise isn't going to distort the final image as a result. Now, it isn't as robust as more modern technologies, and a lot of line noise will distort the image. However, I can't remember the last time I got a FAX that had any artifacts likely to be the result of line noise.
Also, most modern FAX machines support newer transfer technologies, which I assume have more robust error correction.
Most modern FAX machines have the same sort of scanner you'd use to turn a document into a PDF file, and the same kind of printer any business would use to print their documents. So, sort of ditching paper entirely you're not going to get a lot of improvement.
In any case, I wasn't trying to suggest that FAX was a superior technology. I was only pointing out that it was digital, and it is a mature technology. It is fairly fit for its purpose (which is mainly to stand up in court), and that is why it is still used.
In that case the data is as secure as whatever memory unit stores the key. That is probably fairly secure, but of course it can never be completely secure (unless it requires a user to enter a reasonably complex encryption key on boot and uses protection against low-entropy attacks - not just a passcode).
Yup, in my book too big to fail is too big to exist.
When something too big to fail does fail, the solution should be a government takeover for the public interest. The government keeps the operation running, dives through the records for evidence, and then files criminal charges against the former management and sues them for damages.
The too-big organization is then chopped up into manageable pieces and they're all IPOed. The proceeds are used to pay off first any expenses incurred by the government to run the operation, then any debts held by the organization, and then the former shareholders (if there is anything left then it is the true value of the company and this satisfies the eminent domain requirements). The new companies are considered debt-free and are owned only by their new shareholders.
With such an arrangement you won't find too many companies begging for bailouts...
Right now if you lookup bank.com in DNS you get a bunch of records that are maintained by Verisign. With DNSSEC those records will be signed by Verisign so that you can be sure they aren't tampered with.
There is no reason that one of those records can't be an SSL certificate. There is also no reason that one of those records can't be an indicator of how much verification Verisign performed.
For 99% of intended uses just verifying that the domain owner uploaded the certificate should be adequate. Unless you actually read the certificates for the sites you browse you aren't getting more than that today anyway.
If verisign tries to charge to include certs it is a non-issue - just run the site off of a subdomain and then you can put the certs on your own DNS server. You still have a signed chain of trust protecting the DNS records due to DNSSEC so it is just as secure.
DNS is already scalable to the entire internet, and is designed to handle distributing arbitrary host records. SSL would only fail if DNS fails, and if DNS fails you're not going to be connecting to the server anyway.
Now you're talking, but most phones aren't that secure. And of course if you start running phones in VMs all bets are off. In fact, unless IT has the phone in their hands when they provision it they don't really know that the phone isn't virtualized in the first place, or that it really has those protections.
Believe it or not FAX is digital technology. At least, it encodes its data in the equivalent of ones and zeros in pixelated form. It lacks error-checking/etc, but it is digital.
Of course, most of the corporate requirements are still silly. They want you to have a phone that somebody can steal, but they can't read the data off of it. Unless that phone requires a strong boot-up password that is used to encrypt the drive that you have to re-enter on every unlock that isn't really possible. I've yet to see a phone that actually implements security that isn't fairly trivially breakable (by pulling the battery and directly reading data off the flash chips).
So you haven't seen an iPhone, a BlackBerry, or a WM7 phone using the built in security?
And is the security on any of those phones implemented such that the data can't be simply read off the flash chips, which was my whole point? Every smartphone OS out there implements EAS/etc in some fashion - but every implementation I've seen is fairly straightforward to break with physical access to the device. This is just the illusion of security, which is typically all corporate IT cares about.
That's quite a bit of spin.... rather capitalism *accounts* for it. When you know it's a factor instead of pretending it is not, it's a lot easier to deal with.
But the whole point of capitalism is that you DON'T deal with it. You reward it. The most ruthless CEO who runs the competition into the ground, avoids righting any wrong they commit except where they stand to suffer even greater costs at the hands of the courts, and who pays their workers subsistence wages to make iPods or whatever isn't just considered an inevitable result of capitalism, but instead it is the desired result. When that CEO applies for a job elsewhere boards will sack more humane people in favor of the sociopath, or if they don't they'll be sued by their shareholders for failing to do so.
Well, it is true that in many ways the US is a meritocracy, but that doesn't really do much for the 80% of people who don't have a lot of "merit."
A mentally retarded paraplegic is in no way able to earn a living, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be kept alive. The treatment of those who are unfortunate should be considered a reflection on those who are well off, and not on themselves.
Yup. I tend to favor capitalism, but I actually see socialism or even communism eventually taking over, maybe with some form of population control.
Most societies have socialism to some extent, because nobody likes seeing a mentally retarded person starve to death.
However, I think the nature of automation is slowly raising the bar on "retarded" - eventually we'll all be retarded. Once upon a time having a strong back was all it took to be employed. Now you need to have skills. However, most of those skills could someday be automated. Then eventually AI will come along, and it will be possible to make all the products we expect without employing a single person. What happens when AI is superior to a human - what person would employ a human to do a job that an AI would do for free? Or, if you allow AIs to own capital then what AI would employ a human at all?
I think we'll see the transformation first in healthcare once genomics really takes off. People will try to buy insurance only for conditions that they are likely to suffer, and insurers will try to deny coverage to those same people. No matter how you legislate it the industry will collapse. Now all healthcare will have to be socialized, unless we want to see people dying on the streets if they are born with the wrong genes.
95% of what you call laziness is just genetics anyway. I probably spent 1/10th the time studying in math or science as my average classmate in school, and I exceeded even the most diligent students in scores. I did nothing really to earn that performance. In my thinking that gives me some kind of responsibility to try to look after those who are less fortunate in that talent, not the right to call them lazy and financially exploit them. In the same way if I were ever stuck in a burning building with an Olympic athlete I'd hope that they'd give me a hand and not just prove that they can run and jump further than me.
At some point it does turn into laziness - I wouldn't even try to practice to compete in a sprint against a bunch of Olympic-class sprinters, and I imagine that they wouldn't waste the time trying to compete for me in a job where my talents are an advantage. Some people are just mediocre or worse across the board and trying to get a decent job is just an exercise in futility for them. I'm not sure that I see virtue in doing work if the product of that work is something that is trivial in value.
I would hope that any reasonable court would not uphold a case on such a bogus piece of evidence. If they did then there is something very wrong with the legal system and an expert witness should be brought in to explain to the court just how bogus that evidence is.
Something is wrong with the legal system! News at 11!:)
Courts have been upholding the validity of FAXes for decades. A judge might have a little mercy on a lawyer's client if they can prove your FAX machine is broken, but a judge is likely to be ticked at a lawyer simply for having a broken FAX machine and thus wasting the court's time.
Sure, one party can go ahead and pay for an expert witness and try to overturn decades of legal precedent. Oh, and they can pay for the appeals all the way to the Supreme Court when they lose.
You don't have to like it. However, the courts don't really care if you like it - if you end up being called to court you play the game their way or you better not have any physical possessions that you are close to. The court decides how the game is played, and who wins and loses. Then the sheriff helps the winner plunder the loser. If you lose, you're at the mercy of society.
My doctor does this via some website that uses SSL. No doubt the pharmacy has an arrangement with them as well.
That is much different from general email where people send documents all over the place without any kind of relationship with all the companies hosting servers in-between.
Uh, what does a FAX machine send in ASCII? Maybe it uses it to send metadata like timestamps or return numbers. However, the contents of the document are transmitted as an image.
In a traditional FAX I think it is just a frequency-shift key of 1/0 of a row of pixels going across a line, with an end-of-line code (which can come at any point which optimizes transmission of empty lines). I forget the details - the last time I read up about it was decoding some FAXes over radio ages ago.
You're thinking like a programmer, not like a lawyer. When the doctor loses its practice, it won't be as a result of the action of programmers.
Paper is good enough because it was used for hundreds of years. FAXes are good enough because after what was no doubt a long battle they became accepted for decades. Email is automatically not good enough because it isn't paper or a FAX, and now the onus is on you to convince 90% of the judges in the US differently. Until this is done people will have concerns with it in a legal setting.
Nobody cares if a FAX is secure - they only care that nobody has been sued successfully for using a FAX machine in a typical way.
Yes, the legal system is dumb. That won't stop it from taking everything you care about away from you...
There are just as many ways to verify an e-mail was sent/received as there are to verify a fax was received. If it comes down to a legal matter, you can prove it one way or the other.
The issue with a FAX is that you don't need to "prove" it as long as you have a transmission record or maybe a phone bill. The use of FAXes is long established. With an email it is hard to say how things will go and you end up arguing something that would be a slam dunk if you used a FAX. Sure, it is dumb, but we're talking about the legal system.
People still use fax machines because they think that SIGNATURES, when scanned by a fax machine, are secure.
No, they use fax machines because they know that SIGNATURES, when scanned by a fax machine, are accepted as valid by courts as a matte of course. The onus is on the other party to try to prove they aren't genuine, which is pretty hard to do with a standard-quality FAX.
If a lawyer publishes a FAX number, and you FAX a complaint to that number and hang onto the transmission report, then you can file that complaint in court and consider it served. If the other party doesn't respond they're stuck having to try to explain to the judge how they lost it. If, on the other hand, you email it to them then the court might or might not consider it served, and if the other party complains then chances are you're going to be battling it out and calling experts on read receipt protocols and such, which is a distraction from whatever you really were suing them about.
In a court, tradition is everything. Since almost any document of any importance in the US could end up in court, companies tend to stick with tradition as well.
Compare that to entering a NOC and rooting the router without a valid keycard.
I don't think this is the right comparison. Sure, deliberately targeting one specific FAX line might be easier than targeting one specific email server (assuming we're talking about a typical small business - not some mega-corp with a perimeter fence). However, email servers get hacked every single day, and when one is hacked often tens of thousands of addresses can be compromised for a long period of time, and sometimes even retroactively. All of that email is easily searched and finding useful things like credit card numbers of text like "Classified" or "Draft Quarterly Statement" is very easy.
Chances are that if a place tends to send/receive a lot of sensitive FAXes it has given some thought to the security of its phone lines. Phone companies also tend to have a fair bit of security (often through obscurity). However, a company can't control the security of every single mail server an email might happen to end up on.
In any case, the decision to avoid FAX has to be supported by both parties. I ended up sending a FAX simply because the recipient accepted only FAX and mail. If they don't provide an email address, then you're stuck with the FAX.
Entire VMs could be encrypted and provisioned by your IT staff, to meet the needs of policy. Those irritating 5-minute auto-screen-locks? Now it's only a problem on your "work" phone. At the end of the day, flip back to your personal device, and you're good to go - all the while your email continues to download in the background.
Company decides to remote-wipe? There goes the VM. But only the VM. You're still as mobile as you ever were.
Yup, and one snapshot restore later that wiped phone is back and running with nobody the wiser (once you block net access at the VM level). Oh, and the encryption key is stored on the drive or in the virtualized TPM (that you can trivially query from outside the VM) if it doesn't require a password to boot. Then again, it is virtualization, so it must be good for corporate IT, right?:)
Today's phones don't have the hardware to pull this off effectively. But, tomorrow's phones will arrive.
Well, today's phone have more power than the fanciest workstations that existed 15 years ago, and yet they struggle to run word processors/etc. I have yet to see a word processor for Android that is feature-equivalent to Word for Windows v2, and yet that ran on 20MHz PCs and consumed probably half a megabyte of RAM with a few MB of installed files. It is hard to find notepad apps for android that work in those constraints.
So, no doubt by the time every phone is dual-core we'll just have twice as many threads drawing rounded corners as we do today.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not convinced of that.
Registrars already do a reasonably good job of controlling ownership of domains. I haven't really seen any cases where a registrar transferred ownership of a domain of importance (like Google/etc) to a random 3rd party unless they allowed the registration to lapse. Sure, you can register google.zz where zz is some obscure country code, but that really isn't the same thing. DNSSEC will protect against DNS spoofing, which is a much more common attack vector.
I would think that most CAs are only going to verify the CN to the extent that they ensure that you control it, which is what DNSSEC does anyway. Anything stored in any field other than the CN in a certificate is worthless 99% of the time since the browser can only check the CN and nobody reads the rest of the certificate.
So, what DNSSEC ensures is that when you type google.com into your browser, you get the site hosted by google.com. It doesn't guarantee that you get the site run by Google, and neither does the present CA system. (If Google's domain expired I should be able to register it and get a certificate legitimately for John Smith, CN=google.com which works just fine in any browser.)
DNS is also much more heirarchical. You have one administrator for a domain who is responsible for running it correctly. With CAs there is no scope limit on trust - so some obscure CA in Singapore can issue microsoft.com certificates. With DNSSEC only Verisign can issue a microsoft.com certificate, and if they botch the job they can lose their contract.
DIY tends to be better quality in general. When you mass produce with robots you can negotiate a 0.004 cent discount on each capacitor by getting the lousiest part you can find, and then trust that it will work fine since you found some other part that is equally lousy in the opposite way so they just happen to work together - until a few years later the capacitor goes out of tolerance and the thing dies, which is a feature since that means the customer will buy another one.
With Heathkit you actually give the person the parts list and schematics and lousy parts are just going to be obvious, and any EE will spot a poorly designed circuit pretty quickly. The parts probably cost $5 more and the unit lasts for 50 years as a result.
This isn't like DIY PC builds - buying the $35 motherboard instead of the $15 motherboard goes a long way to making the system last.
Well, Amazon's only real issue is with its affiliates. It is already looking to deal with the warehouse problem. Recently it was announced that South Carolina agreed to exempt Amazon from collecting sales tax entirely in exchange for them building a huge distribution center in Spartanburg. That essentially sends a message to everybody else that one way or another they aren't collecting tax, and other states can take the jobs or leave them.
So, I'd be the first to agree that direct democracy is not the best way to govern most government affairs.
However, clearly the specific will of the voters as expressed on a particular issue should be given more regard than the indirectly expressed will of the voters expressed simply in who they elect to office.
Suppose I own a store and tell my employees - Fred is in charge, but I want to ensure that two people are still required to open the safe so Fred only gets half the combo. Then 5 minutes after I leave Fred asks Sally for her half of the combo because he wants to be able to open the safe on his own. Sally complains, and Fred said that if I didn't trust him I wouldn't have put him in charge. This is absurd, since I clearly stated my intentions when I left - nobody has to guess at what I want.
It isn't like Amazon is tacking x% onto the transaction labeled as sales tax and then pocketing it. They're just not charging people the tax in the first place.
Collecting sales tax won't have a direct impact on Amazon per-se - the impact is on all the consumers who will be charged it.
Now, it will have an indirect effect insofar as it eliminates a relative advantage compared to local retailers, for the 99.9999% of US Citizens who themselves avoid paying sales tax on interstate commerce. Of course, said taxes are unconstitutional (but not in the opinion of the courts) in the first place, which is why they call them use taxes (as if what you call a tax has anything to do with its constitutionality).
Also, if you go ask a selection of 100 random people who are involved with faxing signatures, who are not on Slashdot, I bet a large majority will not give you "because the courts accept it as evidence" as a reason.
No, but their lawyers would. I FAX forms to companies all the time. Why do I FAX them - because the companies accept only FAX or mail. Why do they accept only FAX and mail - because that is their policy. Who wrote their policy - a lawyer!
Most people don't bother to understand the reason why they end up doing the things they end up doing.
And while courts do involve people, I wouldn't really say that their operation is purely at the whim of those people. If a judge rules against the integrity of a FAX they are almost guaranteed to be overturned, since courts have been upholding them for decades. The same guarantee doesn't apply to email - you have to argue it based on the merits and that costs money either way.
Well, every system is analog by that standard unless it has neither input nor output. Your monitor is analog, and so is your keyboard.
Your broadband connection is digital data modulated on some kind of analog carrier.
And even the bits in your computer are just digital interpretations of analog signals. It isn't like the voltage on a data line changes in zero time.
FAXes certainly are a digital technology, and a little line noise isn't going to distort the final image as a result. Now, it isn't as robust as more modern technologies, and a lot of line noise will distort the image. However, I can't remember the last time I got a FAX that had any artifacts likely to be the result of line noise.
Also, most modern FAX machines support newer transfer technologies, which I assume have more robust error correction.
Most modern FAX machines have the same sort of scanner you'd use to turn a document into a PDF file, and the same kind of printer any business would use to print their documents. So, sort of ditching paper entirely you're not going to get a lot of improvement.
In any case, I wasn't trying to suggest that FAX was a superior technology. I was only pointing out that it was digital, and it is a mature technology. It is fairly fit for its purpose (which is mainly to stand up in court), and that is why it is still used.
In that case the data is as secure as whatever memory unit stores the key. That is probably fairly secure, but of course it can never be completely secure (unless it requires a user to enter a reasonably complex encryption key on boot and uses protection against low-entropy attacks - not just a passcode).
Yup, in my book too big to fail is too big to exist.
When something too big to fail does fail, the solution should be a government takeover for the public interest. The government keeps the operation running, dives through the records for evidence, and then files criminal charges against the former management and sues them for damages.
The too-big organization is then chopped up into manageable pieces and they're all IPOed. The proceeds are used to pay off first any expenses incurred by the government to run the operation, then any debts held by the organization, and then the former shareholders (if there is anything left then it is the true value of the company and this satisfies the eminent domain requirements). The new companies are considered debt-free and are owned only by their new shareholders.
With such an arrangement you won't find too many companies begging for bailouts...
Yes - DNSSEC.
Right now if you lookup bank.com in DNS you get a bunch of records that are maintained by Verisign. With DNSSEC those records will be signed by Verisign so that you can be sure they aren't tampered with.
There is no reason that one of those records can't be an SSL certificate. There is also no reason that one of those records can't be an indicator of how much verification Verisign performed.
For 99% of intended uses just verifying that the domain owner uploaded the certificate should be adequate. Unless you actually read the certificates for the sites you browse you aren't getting more than that today anyway.
If verisign tries to charge to include certs it is a non-issue - just run the site off of a subdomain and then you can put the certs on your own DNS server. You still have a signed chain of trust protecting the DNS records due to DNSSEC so it is just as secure.
DNS is already scalable to the entire internet, and is designed to handle distributing arbitrary host records. SSL would only fail if DNS fails, and if DNS fails you're not going to be connecting to the server anyway.
Now you're talking, but most phones aren't that secure. And of course if you start running phones in VMs all bets are off. In fact, unless IT has the phone in their hands when they provision it they don't really know that the phone isn't virtualized in the first place, or that it really has those protections.
Believe it or not FAX is digital technology. At least, it encodes its data in the equivalent of ones and zeros in pixelated form. It lacks error-checking/etc, but it is digital.
So you haven't seen an iPhone, a BlackBerry, or a WM7 phone using the built in security?
And is the security on any of those phones implemented such that the data can't be simply read off the flash chips, which was my whole point? Every smartphone OS out there implements EAS/etc in some fashion - but every implementation I've seen is fairly straightforward to break with physical access to the device. This is just the illusion of security, which is typically all corporate IT cares about.
That's quite a bit of spin.... rather capitalism *accounts* for it. When you know it's a factor instead of pretending it is not, it's a lot easier to deal with.
But the whole point of capitalism is that you DON'T deal with it. You reward it. The most ruthless CEO who runs the competition into the ground, avoids righting any wrong they commit except where they stand to suffer even greater costs at the hands of the courts, and who pays their workers subsistence wages to make iPods or whatever isn't just considered an inevitable result of capitalism, but instead it is the desired result. When that CEO applies for a job elsewhere boards will sack more humane people in favor of the sociopath, or if they don't they'll be sued by their shareholders for failing to do so.
Well, it is true that in many ways the US is a meritocracy, but that doesn't really do much for the 80% of people who don't have a lot of "merit."
A mentally retarded paraplegic is in no way able to earn a living, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be kept alive. The treatment of those who are unfortunate should be considered a reflection on those who are well off, and not on themselves.
Yup. I tend to favor capitalism, but I actually see socialism or even communism eventually taking over, maybe with some form of population control.
Most societies have socialism to some extent, because nobody likes seeing a mentally retarded person starve to death.
However, I think the nature of automation is slowly raising the bar on "retarded" - eventually we'll all be retarded. Once upon a time having a strong back was all it took to be employed. Now you need to have skills. However, most of those skills could someday be automated. Then eventually AI will come along, and it will be possible to make all the products we expect without employing a single person. What happens when AI is superior to a human - what person would employ a human to do a job that an AI would do for free? Or, if you allow AIs to own capital then what AI would employ a human at all?
I think we'll see the transformation first in healthcare once genomics really takes off. People will try to buy insurance only for conditions that they are likely to suffer, and insurers will try to deny coverage to those same people. No matter how you legislate it the industry will collapse. Now all healthcare will have to be socialized, unless we want to see people dying on the streets if they are born with the wrong genes.
95% of what you call laziness is just genetics anyway. I probably spent 1/10th the time studying in math or science as my average classmate in school, and I exceeded even the most diligent students in scores. I did nothing really to earn that performance. In my thinking that gives me some kind of responsibility to try to look after those who are less fortunate in that talent, not the right to call them lazy and financially exploit them. In the same way if I were ever stuck in a burning building with an Olympic athlete I'd hope that they'd give me a hand and not just prove that they can run and jump further than me.
At some point it does turn into laziness - I wouldn't even try to practice to compete in a sprint against a bunch of Olympic-class sprinters, and I imagine that they wouldn't waste the time trying to compete for me in a job where my talents are an advantage. Some people are just mediocre or worse across the board and trying to get a decent job is just an exercise in futility for them. I'm not sure that I see virtue in doing work if the product of that work is something that is trivial in value.
Yup. What I can't see is the value in actually building an entire city.
If you want to test self-driving cars, you just need roads and maybe curbs. Maybe wooden walls to obstruct vision.
If you want to test electrical distribution you just need tons of dummy loads and some distance.
I just don't see why you actually need to build something like this - it seems like massive overkill on costs.
I would hope that any reasonable court would not uphold a case on such a bogus piece of evidence. If they did then there is something very wrong with the legal system and an expert witness should be brought in to explain to the court just how bogus that evidence is.
Something is wrong with the legal system! News at 11! :)
Courts have been upholding the validity of FAXes for decades. A judge might have a little mercy on a lawyer's client if they can prove your FAX machine is broken, but a judge is likely to be ticked at a lawyer simply for having a broken FAX machine and thus wasting the court's time.
Sure, one party can go ahead and pay for an expert witness and try to overturn decades of legal precedent. Oh, and they can pay for the appeals all the way to the Supreme Court when they lose.
You don't have to like it. However, the courts don't really care if you like it - if you end up being called to court you play the game their way or you better not have any physical possessions that you are close to. The court decides how the game is played, and who wins and loses. Then the sheriff helps the winner plunder the loser. If you lose, you're at the mercy of society.
Yup, and it isn't email either.
My doctor does this via some website that uses SSL. No doubt the pharmacy has an arrangement with them as well.
That is much different from general email where people send documents all over the place without any kind of relationship with all the companies hosting servers in-between.
Uh, what does a FAX machine send in ASCII? Maybe it uses it to send metadata like timestamps or return numbers. However, the contents of the document are transmitted as an image.
In a traditional FAX I think it is just a frequency-shift key of 1/0 of a row of pixels going across a line, with an end-of-line code (which can come at any point which optimizes transmission of empty lines). I forget the details - the last time I read up about it was decoding some FAXes over radio ages ago.
You're thinking like a programmer, not like a lawyer. When the doctor loses its practice, it won't be as a result of the action of programmers.
Paper is good enough because it was used for hundreds of years. FAXes are good enough because after what was no doubt a long battle they became accepted for decades. Email is automatically not good enough because it isn't paper or a FAX, and now the onus is on you to convince 90% of the judges in the US differently. Until this is done people will have concerns with it in a legal setting.
Nobody cares if a FAX is secure - they only care that nobody has been sued successfully for using a FAX machine in a typical way.
Yes, the legal system is dumb. That won't stop it from taking everything you care about away from you...
There are just as many ways to verify an e-mail was sent/received as there are to verify a fax was received. If it comes down to a legal matter, you can prove it one way or the other.
The issue with a FAX is that you don't need to "prove" it as long as you have a transmission record or maybe a phone bill. The use of FAXes is long established. With an email it is hard to say how things will go and you end up arguing something that would be a slam dunk if you used a FAX. Sure, it is dumb, but we're talking about the legal system.
People still use fax machines because they think that SIGNATURES, when scanned by a fax machine, are secure.
No, they use fax machines because they know that SIGNATURES, when scanned by a fax machine, are accepted as valid by courts as a matte of course. The onus is on the other party to try to prove they aren't genuine, which is pretty hard to do with a standard-quality FAX.
If a lawyer publishes a FAX number, and you FAX a complaint to that number and hang onto the transmission report, then you can file that complaint in court and consider it served. If the other party doesn't respond they're stuck having to try to explain to the judge how they lost it. If, on the other hand, you email it to them then the court might or might not consider it served, and if the other party complains then chances are you're going to be battling it out and calling experts on read receipt protocols and such, which is a distraction from whatever you really were suing them about.
In a court, tradition is everything. Since almost any document of any importance in the US could end up in court, companies tend to stick with tradition as well.
Compare that to entering a NOC and rooting the router without a valid keycard.
I don't think this is the right comparison. Sure, deliberately targeting one specific FAX line might be easier than targeting one specific email server (assuming we're talking about a typical small business - not some mega-corp with a perimeter fence). However, email servers get hacked every single day, and when one is hacked often tens of thousands of addresses can be compromised for a long period of time, and sometimes even retroactively. All of that email is easily searched and finding useful things like credit card numbers of text like "Classified" or "Draft Quarterly Statement" is very easy.
Chances are that if a place tends to send/receive a lot of sensitive FAXes it has given some thought to the security of its phone lines. Phone companies also tend to have a fair bit of security (often through obscurity). However, a company can't control the security of every single mail server an email might happen to end up on.
In any case, the decision to avoid FAX has to be supported by both parties. I ended up sending a FAX simply because the recipient accepted only FAX and mail. If they don't provide an email address, then you're stuck with the FAX.
Entire VMs could be encrypted and provisioned by your IT staff, to meet the needs of policy. Those irritating 5-minute auto-screen-locks? Now it's only a problem on your "work" phone. At the end of the day, flip back to your personal device, and you're good to go - all the while your email continues to download in the background.
Company decides to remote-wipe? There goes the VM. But only the VM. You're still as mobile as you ever were.
Yup, and one snapshot restore later that wiped phone is back and running with nobody the wiser (once you block net access at the VM level). Oh, and the encryption key is stored on the drive or in the virtualized TPM (that you can trivially query from outside the VM) if it doesn't require a password to boot. Then again, it is virtualization, so it must be good for corporate IT, right? :)
Today's phones don't have the hardware to pull this off effectively. But, tomorrow's phones will arrive.
Well, today's phone have more power than the fanciest workstations that existed 15 years ago, and yet they struggle to run word processors/etc. I have yet to see a word processor for Android that is feature-equivalent to Word for Windows v2, and yet that ran on 20MHz PCs and consumed probably half a megabyte of RAM with a few MB of installed files. It is hard to find notepad apps for android that work in those constraints.
So, no doubt by the time every phone is dual-core we'll just have twice as many threads drawing rounded corners as we do today. :)