Yup - it is VERY common in the US which is why there are so many ambulance chasers. However, there needs to be a reasonable chance of getting a sizable award for an attorney to take the case on contingency. If the only thing likely to come out of it is the judge telling the record company "try not to do that again" and maybe give the guy $500 for the downtime, no lawyer is going to recoup their expenses for taking the case.
They also mentioned to me that if I had been flying in the opposite direction I would have had an allowance of 32Kg per case, so there was no technical reason for the weight limit.
Yeah, because it isn't like the jet stream would allow a plane to make the reverse trip with tens of thousands of pounds less fuel, right? Or, perhaps somebody contracted to ship a lot of stuff in one direction and not the other, and the space was already reserved for them.
Sure, it could be arbitrary, but my understanding is that international flights usually take off right at the max weight/fuel limits. There is just way too much money in freight and if they end up with three empty seats they probably toss in an extra crate of mail for a quick profit.
I don't have an issue with weight/size/etc limits, or fees for exceeding them, as long as they're well-communicated in advance. This is the shipping/transportation industry, and the more stuff you ship, the more expensive it is to ship it. That's just physics...
At work they had a big article about "differently abled persons" recently. I just don't get it? How is it derogatory to call somebody disabled? Am I "differently abled" if I can juggle?
There is no need to use slurs like "fatass" or whatever. You can just call them overweight, or oversized - kind of like luggage. It is hardly unusual to charge a different rate when shipping a piano when compared to shipping a book. Will amazon.com start a "products of size" shipping policy soon?
Then they can follow you. They don't need to pull your cell phone records.
Essentially this amounts to having somebody follow everybody every minute of the day without any indication that they are committing a crime, and then looking back at these records once somebody becomes a person of interest, even if they STILL don't have evidence that they may have committed a crime.
What is wrong with warrants? All they need to do is show a judge probable cause that somebody did something wrong.
The next thing we'll see is the phone company asked for everybody who was within half a mile of a place where a crime was committed so that they're all automatic suspects.
Also - if he did write off the settlement in bankruptcy, would Nintendo be able to sue him again, since the original settlement no longer stands? I have no idea how Austrailian law works...
It's why you can usually take a Win 3.1 application, compile it for Win7, and it'll work,
Forget the compile step - just run the setup.exe on a CD from 1992 and there is a very good chance that it will install and work reasonably well if it is just an ordinary app. You're more likely to have Y2K problems than OS API problems.
I'm always amazed at how much scientific software is still floating around which is limited to 8.3 filenames on windows - because they're pre-win32.
I'm not sure if it is still in there, but I know that for quite a while (post win95) you could even launch sidekick in a DOS window and it would actually support it in TSR operation (of course, only within that window). First, that is purely DOS API (which makes windows 3.1 look modern), and it isn't even official/published API at that (TSRs are full of OS hacks and undocumented/internal OS calls).
On the other hand, even MS probably has trouble getting windows to build these days as a result - I can only imagine how many ancient API behaviors something like Win7 has to support.
On the other hand, I can't get kdirstat to work at all now that KDE 3.5 is considered a dinosaur. If only somebody wrote a replacement (rumor has it that it is being ported to KDE4).
The summary seems misleading. From what I understand, you aren't allowed to actually drop off the grid - they want you to actually perform certain activities, check in, provide clues, etc.
Otherwise I'd just take a month off of work and buy a ton of food and go wilderness camping somewhere (Canada would be nice, but not in Feb). There is almost no way anybody would be able to track you down.
On the other hand, I'd never take a month of vacation time just to live like a hermit and maybe win $10k - they really need to up the ante if they want people to do this for real.
It sounds like the contest is just about lying low, but posting hints. That obviously makes you far more detectable than if you were allowed to participate without any constraints.
Insurance is a gamble for both sides - but it's one sided if they get to look at the cards you are carrying, which should be your private information.
It is also one-sided if you get to look at the cards you are carrying, and they don't. You can opt to buy more insurance if you have a higher risk. Insurance only works if NOBODY has information, or everybody is fully able to use the same information (although the latter does not promote socialism which is a goal different from true insurance).
Your problem isn't really with private vs public insurance (they both have pros/cons, but this isn't one of them). Your problem is actually with universal vs non-universal coverage. You can achieve that with either a private or public option, and both solve the problem of pre-existing conditions.
You cannot cover pre-existing conditions unless you have universal coverage. Either sick people can't get insurance, or healthy people don't buy insurance - either fails financially.
Note that most public options are universal and compulsory by design - which contributes to this confusion. When the insurance is paid via taxes then people aren't allowed to opt-out (maybe they can opt-out of the benefits, but their taxes still pay for them).
I'm not trying to say private or public insurance is good or bad, or that socialism is good or bad. All these approaches have pros and cons. What is important is that people honestly realize what aspects of various models cause various problems, so that they can have an informed opinion.
Plus, this ignores the other side of the case - if you KNOW your kid will never get cystic fibrosis, why pay for insurance that covers that disease? If you KNOW your kid will be diabetic (most likely), why not go ahead and buy the super-deluxe no-copay/no-limit health plan?
Insurance only works in the absence of knowledge by BOTH parties. Genetic testing makes true insurance impossible.
Now you can still have socialized medicine, and many people call it "insurance" but that really isn't what it is. A kid born with a bad heart valve or whatever doesn't need insurance - they need health care. In the US, for a number of reasons, the one has become synonymous with the other. What most people think of as "insurance" is just a discount buying plan so that you're not taken advantage of by price-gouging hospitals and doctors/etc.
Note, this isn't intended as a criticism of either private insurance or socialized medicine. The problem we as a society has it that most people don't really appreciate what both of these things really are, and what their inherent pros/cons are. The fact that people with a profit motive (from insurers to vendors to doctors to everybody else) bribe politicians left and right doesn't help to clarify things either.
Yup - I once worked on an IT project that dealt with voluntarily collected samples from patients. While knowing the health of the donor was useful information it was pretty-much universally the case that NOBODY wanted the stuff to be personally identifiable - to the level of near paranoia.
If you discard any data that could be considered private you eliminate any concern of mishandling of data and any grounds for lawsuits, data-leaks, etc. You also get out of a ton of regulation.
Now, designing databases to have all kinds of information sources available and NOT be able to do the appropriate joins is an interesting task - especially if you want to still be able to keep the data reasonably clean (how do you prevent dups without IDs, etc)...
1. Compulsory insurance / universal coverage. EVERYBODY buys it (or the government just taxes them for the cost of it if they refuse). 2. Denial of pre-existing conditions (genetic or otherwise).
Take your pick. If you try to require coverage of pre-existing conditions but don't force people to pay for a policy, then people can wait until after they get sick to buy insurance. In this particular case, somebody who is genetically likely to have some cronic sickness can beef up their insurance before they even get symptoms. That means that insurance companies on the whole end up with more coverage for sicker people and less coverage for healthier people on average, and rates have to skyrocket until nobody can afford coverage at all, and then they all go bankrupt.
As diagnostics improve (especially genetics) I think we're going to be stuck with #1 no matter what. As technology improves the uncertainties go down and instead of people having a 10% risk of X they have either a 0.0001% risk or a 99.9999% risk.
Note that nationalized health care is effectively #1. Also, note that you can have #1 in any number of financing models (everybody pays the same, rich pay more, poor get it free, etc). #1 only speaks to people not being able to opt out of coverage and payment responsibility however that ends up being allocated.
Anything other than #1 or #2 is fantasy. Sure, I'm all for cutting costs, and that can lower the costs to people under either #1 or #2, but fundamentally even the most efficient insurance and care operation cannot be sustained without picking one or the other (unless you have government bailouts, but those are effectively #1 anyway since they end up covering the people who wouldn't otherwise be covered).
Yup - this sounds like a gold mine for Symantec/etc.
Cop: Sir, you can't go online because you were caught browsing without antivirus.
Geek: But, I have all my traffic go through a squid proxy and it is screened by clamav. Tests have shown it is 10x safer than any commercial scanner.
Cop: Hmm, I don't see that on the official list. Are you sure the ClamAV Co paid their $100k quarterly antivirus certification fee?
Frankly, I'm not a big fan of having any software that opens TCP/IP connections go the route of tax preparation software in the US - would you like $30 choice A or $30 choice B?
And just think what these test subjects are thinking.
Here they are stuck inside their minds for years - in solitary confinement able to stare at the ceiling and hear what is going on, but not respond. They are going insane from a form of torture FAR more cruel than anything the CIA could come up with.
Then suddenly somebody starts asking them questions after putting them in a machine. The scientists start talking - HEY - THEY REALIZE I CAN HEAR THEM. I CAN COMMUNICATE NOW. MY FAMILY WILL START TALKING TO ME AND I CAN TALK BACK. Ok, maybe this is still a horrible condition to be in, but there is hope now!
Then the scientists say "ok, subject looks positive - let's take a look at the next one" and the patient goes back to their room wondering when anybody will bother to take another look at them. They get to listen to their family talking to the doctors about it, and the doctor indicates that fMRI time is far too precious to spend on family conversations. They are doomed to at least a few more years of complete isolation, maybe for the rest of their lives unless fMRIs get a lot cheaper.
Unless this actually results in an improvement to quality of life for those in this condition I fear that it will only prolong suffering. Now, if this provides diagnostic information or some chance at being released from their coma then that would be a great thing all around.
Having been in a hospital for short periods of time and having been with others in hospitals, it can be near-torture for those who are nearly ambulatory. Just imagine what it would be like to be in a coma.
I'm not sure that it should be only up to the person involved, unless they've pre-paid their medical expenses in perpetuity. If you're going to ask society or your relatives to pay the bill for your continued existence, then you're now giving them a vote in your continued existence.
Hmm - sounds like there is a market for zombie insurance...:)
Likewise, if you want to pay to have your head/body frozen before death or whatever, by all means feel free to do so. It is likely to be far more affordable than paying to keep yourself on life support indefinitely, and probably about as practical.
The one thing I can pretty-much guarantee for every American is that one day they will die. We sometimes get a little bit of say in how that ends up being.
Yup - the guy was studying the structure of spider silk, and to do some structural work via NMR you need NMR-active nuclei, which includes 13C. Easiest way to make 13C silk is by making 13C spiders and "milking" them (since then there has been newer work on how to make it without the spider, although I'm not sure where that is - the proteins apparently don't fold right if you just make them in bacteria or whatever).
This was actually quite a while back - I imagine things have progressed since then. I just had interesting visions of farms of 13C insects eating 13C algae and being eaten by 13C spiders. At the time 13C algae was the cutting edge technique since they can grow on CO2 as a carbon source, and obviously that is relatively cheap to purify isotopically.
So, getting isotopcially pure diamond is a way to make it stronger and higher-performance... but really the gains are small compared to the considerable effort required to purify.
I'm not sure how artificial diamonds are made, but 13C is only about $300/gram and is sold commercially, and many compounds containing it are cheaper than that. I imagine that artificial diamonds are already quite expensive, so a few percent boost in strength might make the materials cost worth it. I knew of a guy who was raising 13C spiders for NMR work and that had to be a lot more expensive than some graphite. For those who want to know - how do you get a 13C spider? Start with a C12 spider and grow a generation or two on nothing but 13C-based food. How do you get 13C-based food? You just do the same thing working your way up the food chain (I suspect spiders can live off of algae so you don't have to go too far before you're back to stuff like 13C-CO2).
I doubt you'd want to use 14C for this unless the resulting radioactivity and decay aren't going to cause problems. Given a period of time it won't all be 14C anyway, and handling is going to become an issue (as well as reporting/etc).
Hey - I'm not sure I'm a fan of this policy either. I was just saying that the reason that stuff like this happens is that there is no rational dialog about these kinds of things.
What exactly is the value of privacy, and what exactly is the value of not being killed on your way to wherever? If we assigned values to all of these things and also figured out what the actual risk reduction of the new technology is, then we'd have a pretty rational basis for a decision.
I tend to agree that this is security theater, but it is hard to say for sure without a real analysis of the impact. Personally, I could care less if somebody wants to stare at my fine physique - dealing with that is more their problem than my problem. I do realize that others might be sensitive about this, and as a result there is a need for a national dialog on these sorts of things...
That would allow for a DOS attack - unless the ban were only temporary. Just connect to a device and give it x wrong passwords, and now even the owner can't get into it.
The solution is what I think is already employed for things like ssh - connection throttling. If the ssh server does not allow a given IP to attempt more than one login per second or two that won't impact legitimate users at all but it pretty-much eliminates brute force attacks against all but the weakest passwords.
And if you set up fail2ban or whatever with a timeout that re-enables the account, that is just a really SLOW connection throttle under another name.
I can't say that I agree. Yes, having to guess both the username and the password does improve security, but no more than simply making the password that many characters longer. Essentially you're just making the username part of the password.
The only reason that your approach would add value is if the password length were somehow artificially limited, and the username were protected like a password and assigned using strong password conventions.
Otherwise it just adds inconvenience, and no real additional security.
Yes and no - if the brakes aren't properly used I imagine you could wear them down - especially if they were already worn.
I imagine for the brakes to reliably stop the car you'd need to apply full force to the brakes so that the car rapidly stops, and then the wheels lock (obviously you'd want to avoid locking the wheels before you stop).
Instead imagine that you tentatively hit the brakes - you apply moderate braking but you're afraid to jam on the brakes. Now the engine doesn't get enough opposition to decelerate the car much, and the pads begin to wear down. If you hold this braking force long enough the pads will fully wear.
That isn't to say that there isn't a braking problem - I don't know one way or another. However, a car with perfectly good brakes won't be able to stop against the engine if the driver doesn't use them properly.
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Yup - it is VERY common in the US which is why there are so many ambulance chasers. However, there needs to be a reasonable chance of getting a sizable award for an attorney to take the case on contingency. If the only thing likely to come out of it is the judge telling the record company "try not to do that again" and maybe give the guy $500 for the downtime, no lawyer is going to recoup their expenses for taking the case.
They also mentioned to me that if I had been flying in the opposite direction I would have had an allowance of 32Kg per case, so there was no technical reason for the weight limit.
Yeah, because it isn't like the jet stream would allow a plane to make the reverse trip with tens of thousands of pounds less fuel, right? Or, perhaps somebody contracted to ship a lot of stuff in one direction and not the other, and the space was already reserved for them.
Sure, it could be arbitrary, but my understanding is that international flights usually take off right at the max weight/fuel limits. There is just way too much money in freight and if they end up with three empty seats they probably toss in an extra crate of mail for a quick profit.
I don't have an issue with weight/size/etc limits, or fees for exceeding them, as long as they're well-communicated in advance. This is the shipping/transportation industry, and the more stuff you ship, the more expensive it is to ship it. That's just physics...
At work they had a big article about "differently abled persons" recently. I just don't get it? How is it derogatory to call somebody disabled? Am I "differently abled" if I can juggle?
There is no need to use slurs like "fatass" or whatever. You can just call them overweight, or oversized - kind of like luggage. It is hardly unusual to charge a different rate when shipping a piano when compared to shipping a book. Will amazon.com start a "products of size" shipping policy soon?
Then they can follow you. They don't need to pull your cell phone records.
Essentially this amounts to having somebody follow everybody every minute of the day without any indication that they are committing a crime, and then looking back at these records once somebody becomes a person of interest, even if they STILL don't have evidence that they may have committed a crime.
What is wrong with warrants? All they need to do is show a judge probable cause that somebody did something wrong.
The next thing we'll see is the phone company asked for everybody who was within half a mile of a place where a crime was committed so that they're all automatic suspects.
Yes, but in this case the correct buzzword would be "private cloud." What's old is new...
No nation that I'm aware of recognizes any legal limit on its reach.
In the real world, the only limit on any government's reach is how many guns it has, and how many guns everybody else has.
Also - if he did write off the settlement in bankruptcy, would Nintendo be able to sue him again, since the original settlement no longer stands? I have no idea how Austrailian law works...
It's why you can usually take a Win 3.1 application, compile it for Win7, and it'll work,
Forget the compile step - just run the setup.exe on a CD from 1992 and there is a very good chance that it will install and work reasonably well if it is just an ordinary app. You're more likely to have Y2K problems than OS API problems.
I'm always amazed at how much scientific software is still floating around which is limited to 8.3 filenames on windows - because they're pre-win32.
I'm not sure if it is still in there, but I know that for quite a while (post win95) you could even launch sidekick in a DOS window and it would actually support it in TSR operation (of course, only within that window). First, that is purely DOS API (which makes windows 3.1 look modern), and it isn't even official/published API at that (TSRs are full of OS hacks and undocumented/internal OS calls).
On the other hand, even MS probably has trouble getting windows to build these days as a result - I can only imagine how many ancient API behaviors something like Win7 has to support.
On the other hand, I can't get kdirstat to work at all now that KDE 3.5 is considered a dinosaur. If only somebody wrote a replacement (rumor has it that it is being ported to KDE4).
The summary seems misleading. From what I understand, you aren't allowed to actually drop off the grid - they want you to actually perform certain activities, check in, provide clues, etc.
Otherwise I'd just take a month off of work and buy a ton of food and go wilderness camping somewhere (Canada would be nice, but not in Feb). There is almost no way anybody would be able to track you down.
On the other hand, I'd never take a month of vacation time just to live like a hermit and maybe win $10k - they really need to up the ante if they want people to do this for real.
It sounds like the contest is just about lying low, but posting hints. That obviously makes you far more detectable than if you were allowed to participate without any constraints.
Insurance is a gamble for both sides - but it's one sided if they get to look at the cards you are carrying, which should be your private information.
It is also one-sided if you get to look at the cards you are carrying, and they don't. You can opt to buy more insurance if you have a higher risk. Insurance only works if NOBODY has information, or everybody is fully able to use the same information (although the latter does not promote socialism which is a goal different from true insurance).
Your problem isn't really with private vs public insurance (they both have pros/cons, but this isn't one of them). Your problem is actually with universal vs non-universal coverage. You can achieve that with either a private or public option, and both solve the problem of pre-existing conditions.
You cannot cover pre-existing conditions unless you have universal coverage. Either sick people can't get insurance, or healthy people don't buy insurance - either fails financially.
Note that most public options are universal and compulsory by design - which contributes to this confusion. When the insurance is paid via taxes then people aren't allowed to opt-out (maybe they can opt-out of the benefits, but their taxes still pay for them).
I'm not trying to say private or public insurance is good or bad, or that socialism is good or bad. All these approaches have pros and cons. What is important is that people honestly realize what aspects of various models cause various problems, so that they can have an informed opinion.
Plus, this ignores the other side of the case - if you KNOW your kid will never get cystic fibrosis, why pay for insurance that covers that disease? If you KNOW your kid will be diabetic (most likely), why not go ahead and buy the super-deluxe no-copay/no-limit health plan?
Insurance only works in the absence of knowledge by BOTH parties. Genetic testing makes true insurance impossible.
Now you can still have socialized medicine, and many people call it "insurance" but that really isn't what it is. A kid born with a bad heart valve or whatever doesn't need insurance - they need health care. In the US, for a number of reasons, the one has become synonymous with the other. What most people think of as "insurance" is just a discount buying plan so that you're not taken advantage of by price-gouging hospitals and doctors/etc.
Note, this isn't intended as a criticism of either private insurance or socialized medicine. The problem we as a society has it that most people don't really appreciate what both of these things really are, and what their inherent pros/cons are. The fact that people with a profit motive (from insurers to vendors to doctors to everybody else) bribe politicians left and right doesn't help to clarify things either.
Yup - I once worked on an IT project that dealt with voluntarily collected samples from patients. While knowing the health of the donor was useful information it was pretty-much universally the case that NOBODY wanted the stuff to be personally identifiable - to the level of near paranoia.
If you discard any data that could be considered private you eliminate any concern of mishandling of data and any grounds for lawsuits, data-leaks, etc. You also get out of a ton of regulation.
Now, designing databases to have all kinds of information sources available and NOT be able to do the appropriate joins is an interesting task - especially if you want to still be able to keep the data reasonably clean (how do you prevent dups without IDs, etc)...
Well, you have two choices:
1. Compulsory insurance / universal coverage. EVERYBODY buys it (or the government just taxes them for the cost of it if they refuse).
2. Denial of pre-existing conditions (genetic or otherwise).
Take your pick. If you try to require coverage of pre-existing conditions but don't force people to pay for a policy, then people can wait until after they get sick to buy insurance. In this particular case, somebody who is genetically likely to have some cronic sickness can beef up their insurance before they even get symptoms. That means that insurance companies on the whole end up with more coverage for sicker people and less coverage for healthier people on average, and rates have to skyrocket until nobody can afford coverage at all, and then they all go bankrupt.
As diagnostics improve (especially genetics) I think we're going to be stuck with #1 no matter what. As technology improves the uncertainties go down and instead of people having a 10% risk of X they have either a 0.0001% risk or a 99.9999% risk.
Note that nationalized health care is effectively #1. Also, note that you can have #1 in any number of financing models (everybody pays the same, rich pay more, poor get it free, etc). #1 only speaks to people not being able to opt out of coverage and payment responsibility however that ends up being allocated.
Anything other than #1 or #2 is fantasy. Sure, I'm all for cutting costs, and that can lower the costs to people under either #1 or #2, but fundamentally even the most efficient insurance and care operation cannot be sustained without picking one or the other (unless you have government bailouts, but those are effectively #1 anyway since they end up covering the people who wouldn't otherwise be covered).
Maybe freedom means some people fail.
I don't think many actually have a big problem with this. The ones I struggle with are:
Maybe freedom means that some people's children fail.
and
Maybe genetics combined with freedom means some people fail.
A LOT of money gets spent to try to prevent this, and sometimes I wonder if it is really possible.
Yup - this sounds like a gold mine for Symantec/etc.
Cop: Sir, you can't go online because you were caught browsing without antivirus.
Geek: But, I have all my traffic go through a squid proxy and it is screened by clamav. Tests have shown it is 10x safer than any commercial scanner.
Cop: Hmm, I don't see that on the official list. Are you sure the ClamAV Co paid their $100k quarterly antivirus certification fee?
Frankly, I'm not a big fan of having any software that opens TCP/IP connections go the route of tax preparation software in the US - would you like $30 choice A or $30 choice B?
And just think what these test subjects are thinking.
Here they are stuck inside their minds for years - in solitary confinement able to stare at the ceiling and hear what is going on, but not respond. They are going insane from a form of torture FAR more cruel than anything the CIA could come up with.
Then suddenly somebody starts asking them questions after putting them in a machine. The scientists start talking - HEY - THEY REALIZE I CAN HEAR THEM. I CAN COMMUNICATE NOW. MY FAMILY WILL START TALKING TO ME AND I CAN TALK BACK. Ok, maybe this is still a horrible condition to be in, but there is hope now!
Then the scientists say "ok, subject looks positive - let's take a look at the next one" and the patient goes back to their room wondering when anybody will bother to take another look at them. They get to listen to their family talking to the doctors about it, and the doctor indicates that fMRI time is far too precious to spend on family conversations. They are doomed to at least a few more years of complete isolation, maybe for the rest of their lives unless fMRIs get a lot cheaper.
Unless this actually results in an improvement to quality of life for those in this condition I fear that it will only prolong suffering. Now, if this provides diagnostic information or some chance at being released from their coma then that would be a great thing all around.
Having been in a hospital for short periods of time and having been with others in hospitals, it can be near-torture for those who are nearly ambulatory. Just imagine what it would be like to be in a coma.
I'm not sure that it should be only up to the person involved, unless they've pre-paid their medical expenses in perpetuity. If you're going to ask society or your relatives to pay the bill for your continued existence, then you're now giving them a vote in your continued existence.
Hmm - sounds like there is a market for zombie insurance... :)
Likewise, if you want to pay to have your head/body frozen before death or whatever, by all means feel free to do so. It is likely to be far more affordable than paying to keep yourself on life support indefinitely, and probably about as practical.
The one thing I can pretty-much guarantee for every American is that one day they will die. We sometimes get a little bit of say in how that ends up being.
Yup - the guy was studying the structure of spider silk, and to do some structural work via NMR you need NMR-active nuclei, which includes 13C. Easiest way to make 13C silk is by making 13C spiders and "milking" them (since then there has been newer work on how to make it without the spider, although I'm not sure where that is - the proteins apparently don't fold right if you just make them in bacteria or whatever).
This was actually quite a while back - I imagine things have progressed since then. I just had interesting visions of farms of 13C insects eating 13C algae and being eaten by 13C spiders. At the time 13C algae was the cutting edge technique since they can grow on CO2 as a carbon source, and obviously that is relatively cheap to purify isotopically.
So, getting isotopcially pure diamond is a way to make it stronger and higher-performance... but really the gains are small compared to the considerable effort required to purify.
I'm not sure how artificial diamonds are made, but 13C is only about $300/gram and is sold commercially, and many compounds containing it are cheaper than that. I imagine that artificial diamonds are already quite expensive, so a few percent boost in strength might make the materials cost worth it. I knew of a guy who was raising 13C spiders for NMR work and that had to be a lot more expensive than some graphite. For those who want to know - how do you get a 13C spider? Start with a C12 spider and grow a generation or two on nothing but 13C-based food. How do you get 13C-based food? You just do the same thing working your way up the food chain (I suspect spiders can live off of algae so you don't have to go too far before you're back to stuff like 13C-CO2).
I doubt you'd want to use 14C for this unless the resulting radioactivity and decay aren't going to cause problems. Given a period of time it won't all be 14C anyway, and handling is going to become an issue (as well as reporting/etc).
Clever, wasn't it? :)
Hey - I'm not sure I'm a fan of this policy either. I was just saying that the reason that stuff like this happens is that there is no rational dialog about these kinds of things.
What exactly is the value of privacy, and what exactly is the value of not being killed on your way to wherever? If we assigned values to all of these things and also figured out what the actual risk reduction of the new technology is, then we'd have a pretty rational basis for a decision.
I tend to agree that this is security theater, but it is hard to say for sure without a real analysis of the impact. Personally, I could care less if somebody wants to stare at my fine physique - dealing with that is more their problem than my problem. I do realize that others might be sensitive about this, and as a result there is a need for a national dialog on these sorts of things...
And that would be why Europe uses the loser-pays system, with security of costs for out-of-jurisdiction claimants.
That would allow for a DOS attack - unless the ban were only temporary. Just connect to a device and give it x wrong passwords, and now even the owner can't get into it.
The solution is what I think is already employed for things like ssh - connection throttling. If the ssh server does not allow a given IP to attempt more than one login per second or two that won't impact legitimate users at all but it pretty-much eliminates brute force attacks against all but the weakest passwords.
And if you set up fail2ban or whatever with a timeout that re-enables the account, that is just a really SLOW connection throttle under another name.
I can't say that I agree. Yes, having to guess both the username and the password does improve security, but no more than simply making the password that many characters longer. Essentially you're just making the username part of the password.
The only reason that your approach would add value is if the password length were somehow artificially limited, and the username were protected like a password and assigned using strong password conventions.
Otherwise it just adds inconvenience, and no real additional security.
Yup - just like that. :)
What can I say - the Woz has my vote now...
Yes and no - if the brakes aren't properly used I imagine you could wear them down - especially if they were already worn.
I imagine for the brakes to reliably stop the car you'd need to apply full force to the brakes so that the car rapidly stops, and then the wheels lock (obviously you'd want to avoid locking the wheels before you stop).
Instead imagine that you tentatively hit the brakes - you apply moderate braking but you're afraid to jam on the brakes. Now the engine doesn't get enough opposition to decelerate the car much, and the pads begin to wear down. If you hold this braking force long enough the pads will fully wear.
That isn't to say that there isn't a braking problem - I don't know one way or another. However, a car with perfectly good brakes won't be able to stop against the engine if the driver doesn't use them properly.