The Chinese would like to be able to invade Taiwan, but the presence of a Carrier Battle Group in the region has a deterrring effect. An Antiship ballistic misdle capability would deter the carrier from doing much interference.
The US would just turn half of Beijing into rubble with cruise missiles if the Chinese wiped out a carrier battle group. The Chinese economy would sink overnight - those big expensive high-tech factories take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build and one bomb going off in the middle makes one worthless. Nobody outsources their business to a war zone.
This is all fantasy scenario stuff. The Chinese aren't going to invade Taiwan, because the US is going to intervene, and about all the Chinese could do in retaliation is tick off the US population as thoroughly as the Japanese did in WWII. You can't just kill a few thousand soldiers in a single attack without basically getting into an unrestricted conventional war. Taiwan is a matter of national pride, so they're going to continue to posture over it and no doubt wrangle economically, but they're not going to get into a shooting war with the country that buys most of their manufactured goods.
"Oh noes! Dont allow users to use fake geolocation! That will ruin our datamining operations! Oh no! Not our playstore advert shit too!? Did you REALLY just give users the ability to say "NO" to that app maker's blanket permissions requirement AFTER they said yes initially to let it install!? How will Facebook get its hentai tentacles into users' contact lists!? That removes the "Our way or the highway" tactic from the table!! AHHH!"
Cyanogenmod is clearly better than stock, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. You can't prevent an application from getting your device ID, or from accessing the Internet in stock Cyanogenmod. For that you need something like XPrivacy.
Where do you think those old cannons that used to be in many town squares came from? They were once used by the local militia, when they had more to do.
I was lumping militia and army together. My point was mainly that they weren't personally owned.
A couple of guys couldn't take over a base, but a hundred could, if they had the element of surprise. And there are many citizens who can operate the anti-aircraft systems, some better than the regulars. What light arms get you, is the ability to capture heavy arms.
Against a modern army using combined arms? Just how long do you think it would take for the Pentagon to find out that one of their bases is under attack - most likely minutes. Maybe if you knocked out communications at a time of complete peace they might not assume the worst and it would take them a bit longer.
I think you're really over-estimating the ability of a rag-tag group to coordinate their operations in a modern military. However, even if they did they're now defending a fixed position against the entire US military. This isn't the revolutionary war when it would take six months for the British to ship over more troops followed by a month of them marching in with advance notice by scouts. You're going to be completely on the defensive and probably not for very long. That then begs the question of just why you bothered to capture the base in the first place - you're not going to be able to do anything with it.
... so why don't Unix machines have this problem... gee, maybe because they don't use a single bloated binary config file.
Just give Poettering some time, he'll take care of this.
Actually, if anything he is pushing to improve things - the goal is to allow stateless systems - as in you can mount your distro as/usr on a ram drive and have everything work. If you use something like systemd then all the OS-provided stuff is in/usr and will be cleaned by the package manager, and the only stuff in/etc is stuff the admin puts there (and presumably can clean up themselves). Also, just about all the config file templates can be overrided on a per-line basis so that what you put in/etc is the minimum necessary to do the job.
The problem is that the data models are probably customized for every hospital, doctor, whatever. John Smith the world famous cardiologist obviously can't use the same data elements that some other world famous cardiologist uses, for heavens sake!
Frankly, Clinton had the right idea with the national health id. If we could create an ID that everybody had that was only used for medical identification, that'd be great. But I doubt that'll happen, so we will be stuck with a huge data deduplication problem.
Frankly, a LOT of problems would be solved with a national ID system of some kind. Give everybody an ID card, a number, and have the ID card be a smartcard housing a private key (not copied elsewhere) with a solid certificate chain. Boom, you've just solved single sign-on for just about every system everywhere, identity theft, credit card fraud, and 47 other problems.
The reason we don't have this is that everybody is afraid of big brother tracking everybody. The problem is that big brother moved on a long time ago. They just capture every bit of data everywhere and connect all the dots with phone records (likely including position), facial recognition, number recognition, and likely archival of all financial data everywhere. They already do track everybody - they don't need your government ID - they already know who you are. So, we all suffer with a problem that big brother basically solved for us in an insane manner but big brother isn't allowed to give us any of the benefits.
Heck, I run a tor relay so I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA had a copy of every hard drive I own. The thing is, I need to keep my own backups because if anything happens I'm not allowed to ask them for the copy they made. What a waste...
+1000 relevant. when any iOS malware is reported, the first question is, "does it require jailbreaking". To my knowledge all of the trojan/spyware/NSAware/etc require a jailbroken iphone.
That's great, but seriously, who doesn't jailbreak their iphone? The security of the walled garden is fairly theoretical since there is so much incentive to disable it.
It is a bit like saying that some website can't steal your personal info unless you click through that warning that shows up the first time you use Firefox on a webpage with a non-SSL form.
True. In any case, I think all of this is like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. It is just way to easy to manufacture a gun to try to control access to them. Once both guns and ammo are easy to replicate using legal-to-obtain materials/equipment I suspect you'll see a rise in gun ownership even in countries that ban them.
The truly scary time will come when the same is true of more serious weapons, like chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons. As technology progresses these may become more accessible to individuals as well. It will be an interesting world when the disgruntled kid at school can just blow up the city instead of shooting up the school
This all asumes the army actually fires on it's own people, ultimately "their" people. Not sure how that would play out. I'd bet you'd have the military split as well.
Well, that was what I was getting at about requiring military collusion. It happens, and depending on the situation it may be more or less likely to happen.
I am kinda curious where this 'the 2nd amendment is so we can keep the government in check' idea came from. Historically it is complete nonsense.
At the time the US just got through fighting the revolutionary war. In that war the average citizen was about as well-armed as a professional soldier, with most people providing their own arms. Stuff like artillery was of course controlled by armies, but at the time a fairly small force with small arms was able to do stuff like capture the guns at Ft Ticoderoga.
Things have changed significantly since then. The weapons of war have become much more powerful and expensive. Communications has become much more robust for an army (and during peacetime for the general citizenry, but in an actual uprising that can change quickly). A couple of guys with guns can't sneak into an air force base and take it over. Before they finish subjugating the base there would be helicopters full of troops arriving from 100 miles away, and a bunch of guys with guns aren't going to improvise an air defense using captured aircraft the way a bunch of people could man the guns at a fort to defend against a counter-attack that takes three months to arrive.
The reality is that there is no real way to put a modern government in check without the collusion of the military (either active, or at least their refusal to brutally put down rebellion), or a foreign military. Heck, the US revolution required the aid of the French or it probably would have gone on quite a bit longer.
Guys in their basements with AR15s can certainly harass supply lines, and they can probably keep it up for generations if you want to live in a country that resembles Kosovo. That is about it though.
The difference is that I have precedence on my side where as you have nothing but speculation on yours.
Sure, just like the folks who said that real estate prices would never go down had all kind of precedence on their side. History is useful, but we're talking about technological change here. What precedence can you possibly cite that has any bearing on the creation of artificial intelligence?
As to your fear of the future... that merely makes me sad for you. The future holds promise. But only if it is allowed to become.
I don't fear the future. Nobody has to allow the future to become - it is inevitable that it will become. It holds the possibility of both promise and peril. I think in large part it will just come down to who makes the big breakthroughs. What would the world look like if Germany or Japan had developed the atomic bomb in quantity in WWII (the latter part of that being very unlikely so this is pretty hypothetical I'll admit)? Hard to say for sure, but certainly it would look a lot different than it does today.
You have no interest in examining this question and because of that you will never even attempt to understand what is going on.
You seem to think that the only reason I am not coming to the same conclusion as you is that I haven't given the matter any thought. The one does not follow from the other.
I think the average person in the US isn't employed is because the average American isn't employable for wages that allow survival in the US. Wages in the 3rd world are so incredibly low compared to what people in the 1st world can afford to pay for products right now that there is a delay while wealth is transferred from the 1st to 3rd world before the same thing happens there. Most of the jobs that have been outsourced are jobs that could be done by machines, but labor is just so insanely cheap overseas that even machines can't compete. Sooner or later things will level out and machines will continue to get cheaper, and even $5/day will seem like too much to pay somebody for menial labor.
If you want to understand why the jobs are going away, just think about the average kid in any school class you've ever taken. They're just not up to it.
Sure, but for whatever reason PA is always brought up as an example of a two-party state, and I'm not sure how any of this extends to recording what happens in your car.
A problem in the US is that your rights are whatever you're willing to pay to try to defend. The fact is that you can be taken to court for just about anything, by just about anybody. If the letter of the law is on your side, it will certainly help, and if it is against you, it will certainly hurt. However, the legal system is fuzzy enough that you can't really predict with certainty the outcome of any case.
What you can do is look at how past court cases have gone, but recording conversations is something that is rarely prosecuted.
I am not sure what you mean by "a properly-regulated insurance industry regulates itself." I am sensing a paradox between "properly-regulated ", which implies external, and "regulates itself", which implies internal. So I am not sure what you are trying to say.
I was just referring to a minimalistic approach to regulation that gives the insurance market-based incentives that are aligned to the consumer. In the case of insurnace, you just have to make sure that they REALLY have skin in the game.
If I can sell you FlyByNightCo insurance with no reserves, then I can start FlyByNightCo with an investment of $200 to some lawyer to do the paperwork, start collecting $20 premiums for $200k policies, and pay myself dividends and disappear when the claims arrive.
On the other hand, if FlyByNightCo needs reserves based on historical payout rates in order to sell policies, then in order to sell $200k policies I might need $1k in reserves. I can't put up $1k in reserves if I'm only making $20 on the premium, because if I try to pull a disappearing act the government will just take my company's reserves and I'M the one who gets screwed.
So, the government doesn't have to regulate the price of an insurance policy. They just have to make sure that insurance company investors actually lose money on bad policies, and there won't be any bad policies.
The reason the CDS market was so huge was that anybody could sell them, and nobody really intended to actually pay on them if anything really went wrong, and the lack of reserves meant that nobody could make them pay either.
There was a car customization shop around me that had a souped up minivan that they would drag race people with sports cars (and smoke them). Then hand out business cards.
You know, you could actually put quite a bit of power in a minivan with all that space... Heck, you could easily fit a gas turbine in there.
Really the biggest problem with using a mesh network for disaster is that anywhere you have enough people to support a mesh network, you could probably just as easily use a bullhorn to communicate.
A bullhorn is useful for general announcements, but not specific ones like "We need Fred to come in early for a shift at the hospital due to an emergency."
Sure, you can put that out over the bullhorn at 3AM, but if you have a constant trickle of those then nobody anywhere gets sleep, and then Fred ends up killing somebody due to a fatigue-induced surgical error.
The advantage of a mesh network is that you can get the message to Fred whose phone rings, without having to bug every other human being in the city. The downside is that nobody wants a non-centrally-controlled mesh network for the same reasons that Beijing doesn't want it.
Heck, I'm a believer in modern medicine, but any of the stuff on the first list would have to be horrible before I'd go to a hospital. Unless the hospital screens everybody with a cough for Ebola they won't bat an eye at that list of symptoms.
Even the second list doesn't really get weird until halfway down. Nausea is hardly uncommon. Bloody diarrhea probably would get noticed, if there was quite a bit of blood (a few drops and people won't think twice of it).
If the symptoms were really intense they'd probably get attention. If I feel tired, nauseous, etc I'll lie in bed. If it causes excruciating pain to roll over in bed, I'll call 911.
How does a hospital release someone who just traveled from Liberia and has symptoms consistent with Ebola? They allowed this person to expose people for twice as long compared to if they had handled the situation as common sense would dictate. [Isolate and test]
What is their insurance company policy on admissions? It isn't like the doctor decides who gets checked in. Also, we don't lock people in hospitals either, so the patient gets a say.
People will treat Ebola like it is the common cold until 10% of the country is bleeding out of their eyeballs, and then we'll start to debate whether more drastic measures are required.
The problem with this is that unless the new OS uses win32 on all those platforms, they don't have that huge application base they're trying to leverage.
Win8 was the attempt to get everybody to move to Metro, and it failed. Of course, they were stupid to introduce the app store on the desktop since that probably REALLY deterred people from porting over. They should have gotten everybody to port first, and then changed the rules once everybody was on the new cross-platform API.
In any case, I think they'd be doomed anyway. If you're building a Facebook reader it isn't that big of a deal to make a one-size-fits-all UI. If it only has 6 menu options users on the 20" screen won't care so much about the 1" tile buttons. The problem is that nobody has come up with a way to make full productivity applications work on things like phones. You can strip out all the features, and people will tolerate them as viewers or apps for making tweaks, but what serious business says, "you know, we don't need professional tools - we're going to compose the next Hollywood movie using an app designed to add filters to something shot with a phone cam."
Heck, Adobe just announced that they're making Photoshop available over a web browser. I'm still not sure how well that will work (does html5 support graphics tablets?). Even that potential source of failure exposes the real problem here - people doing serious work are hard to box into super-simplified applications. People want their 15 floating windows, and their magic USB tablet that senses pen pressure, angle (2DOF), button pressure, distance, etc.
No, the issue was that they priced the insurance too cheaply. It was a quick way to juice the returns. A example would be insurance companies offering cheap earthquake insurance. All of the premiums they take in is free money until the big one hits. Then they all collapse. Which speaks to a different type of regulation.
Sure, but that is the reason that insurance is regulated. In fact, a properly-regulated insurance industry regulates itself.
Even absent a law saying I can't buy insurance on a car that you own, nobody would sell it to me. They would be required to cover that policy with assets which means that they would have to make good on the policy, and they would realize that I have no incentive to preserve something I don't even own. Responsible insurance companies structure their policies so that the person who is insured has incentive to preserve the assets that are insured. The people who invest the money in the insurance companies stand to lose if the company is irresponsible, so they ensure it isn't.
However, these CDS instruments were created by people who had no intent to ever cover any substantial losses. Their incentive was to collect their bonus today, and let somebody else hold the bag tomorrow. Since they didn't have to have assets to cover the policies, nobody had incentive to play it safe. If I could legally sell flood insurance for $10/yr without any assets, I'd probably be selling it to half the country if I didn't have a conscience.
My understand is that the drivers are the main factor for just about any LED light. I'm sure there is quality variation in the LEDs themselves, but most of the stuff that costs money, wears out, and impacts quality is in the drivers.
The red light thing isn't neurological/perceptual at all. The pigments used by rod cells do not respond strongly to red light the way they do to other colors. It is the decomposition of those pigments that destroys your night vision.
Your brain may very well self-adjust to color temperature as well, but that isn't the reason that blue light is so destructive.
IN short: you're boned and trusting third parties irrespective of how open your OS is - unless all of your hardware is open, all of the firmware for your hardware is open, and you have personally audited all of it.
Heck, I'm trusting my next door neighbor to not shoot me when I step out the door.
The fact that I didn't build every component of my computer from raw silicon doesn't mean that there isn't value in having some knowledge of how some parts of it work.
Besides, I'm not talking about keeping my data out of the hands of the NSA. I wasn't actually concerned with security at all in my post. I'm just saying that open source software gives you options that you don't otherwise have, because having the source gives you the ability to fix the 99.999999% of problems that weren't caused by the NSA sticking a rootkit into your CPU.
I believe the consent can be implicit, hence announcements like those. Of course, if you made the same announcement when calling a business they'd just hang up on you, and you'd end up having to resort to registered mail or such (which they could also refuse to accept, but that would give you quite a bit of legal advantage).
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The Chinese would like to be able to invade Taiwan, but the presence of a Carrier Battle Group in the region has a deterrring effect. An Antiship ballistic misdle capability would deter the carrier from doing much interference.
The US would just turn half of Beijing into rubble with cruise missiles if the Chinese wiped out a carrier battle group. The Chinese economy would sink overnight - those big expensive high-tech factories take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build and one bomb going off in the middle makes one worthless. Nobody outsources their business to a war zone.
This is all fantasy scenario stuff. The Chinese aren't going to invade Taiwan, because the US is going to intervene, and about all the Chinese could do in retaliation is tick off the US population as thoroughly as the Japanese did in WWII. You can't just kill a few thousand soldiers in a single attack without basically getting into an unrestricted conventional war. Taiwan is a matter of national pride, so they're going to continue to posture over it and no doubt wrangle economically, but they're not going to get into a shooting war with the country that buys most of their manufactured goods.
"Oh noes! Dont allow users to use fake geolocation! That will ruin our datamining operations! Oh no! Not our playstore advert shit too!? Did you REALLY just give users the ability to say "NO" to that app maker's blanket permissions requirement AFTER they said yes initially to let it install!? How will Facebook get its hentai tentacles into users' contact lists!? That removes the "Our way or the highway" tactic from the table!! AHHH!"
Cyanogenmod is clearly better than stock, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. You can't prevent an application from getting your device ID, or from accessing the Internet in stock Cyanogenmod. For that you need something like XPrivacy.
Where do you think those old cannons that used to be in many town squares came from? They were once used by the local militia, when they had more to do.
I was lumping militia and army together. My point was mainly that they weren't personally owned.
A couple of guys couldn't take over a base, but a hundred could, if they had the element of surprise. And there are many citizens who can operate the anti-aircraft systems, some better than the regulars. What light arms get you, is the ability to capture heavy arms.
Against a modern army using combined arms? Just how long do you think it would take for the Pentagon to find out that one of their bases is under attack - most likely minutes. Maybe if you knocked out communications at a time of complete peace they might not assume the worst and it would take them a bit longer.
I think you're really over-estimating the ability of a rag-tag group to coordinate their operations in a modern military. However, even if they did they're now defending a fixed position against the entire US military. This isn't the revolutionary war when it would take six months for the British to ship over more troops followed by a month of them marching in with advance notice by scouts. You're going to be completely on the defensive and probably not for very long. That then begs the question of just why you bothered to capture the base in the first place - you're not going to be able to do anything with it.
... so why don't Unix machines have this problem ... gee, maybe because they don't use a single bloated binary config file.
Just give Poettering some time, he'll take care of this.
Actually, if anything he is pushing to improve things - the goal is to allow stateless systems - as in you can mount your distro as /usr on a ram drive and have everything work. If you use something like systemd then all the OS-provided stuff is in /usr and will be cleaned by the package manager, and the only stuff in /etc is stuff the admin puts there (and presumably can clean up themselves). Also, just about all the config file templates can be overrided on a per-line basis so that what you put in /etc is the minimum necessary to do the job.
The problem is that the data models are probably customized for every hospital, doctor, whatever. John Smith the world famous cardiologist obviously can't use the same data elements that some other world famous cardiologist uses, for heavens sake!
Frankly, Clinton had the right idea with the national health id. If we could create an ID that everybody had that was only used for medical identification, that'd be great. But I doubt that'll happen, so we will be stuck with a huge data deduplication problem.
Frankly, a LOT of problems would be solved with a national ID system of some kind. Give everybody an ID card, a number, and have the ID card be a smartcard housing a private key (not copied elsewhere) with a solid certificate chain. Boom, you've just solved single sign-on for just about every system everywhere, identity theft, credit card fraud, and 47 other problems.
The reason we don't have this is that everybody is afraid of big brother tracking everybody. The problem is that big brother moved on a long time ago. They just capture every bit of data everywhere and connect all the dots with phone records (likely including position), facial recognition, number recognition, and likely archival of all financial data everywhere. They already do track everybody - they don't need your government ID - they already know who you are. So, we all suffer with a problem that big brother basically solved for us in an insane manner but big brother isn't allowed to give us any of the benefits.
Heck, I run a tor relay so I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA had a copy of every hard drive I own. The thing is, I need to keep my own backups because if anything happens I'm not allowed to ask them for the copy they made. What a waste...
+1000 relevant. when any iOS malware is reported, the first question is, "does it require jailbreaking". To my knowledge all of the trojan/spyware/NSAware/etc require a jailbroken iphone.
That's great, but seriously, who doesn't jailbreak their iphone? The security of the walled garden is fairly theoretical since there is so much incentive to disable it.
It is a bit like saying that some website can't steal your personal info unless you click through that warning that shows up the first time you use Firefox on a webpage with a non-SSL form.
True. In any case, I think all of this is like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. It is just way to easy to manufacture a gun to try to control access to them. Once both guns and ammo are easy to replicate using legal-to-obtain materials/equipment I suspect you'll see a rise in gun ownership even in countries that ban them.
The truly scary time will come when the same is true of more serious weapons, like chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons. As technology progresses these may become more accessible to individuals as well. It will be an interesting world when the disgruntled kid at school can just blow up the city instead of shooting up the school
This all asumes the army actually fires on it's own people, ultimately "their" people. Not sure how that would play out. I'd bet you'd have the military split as well.
Well, that was what I was getting at about requiring military collusion. It happens, and depending on the situation it may be more or less likely to happen.
I am kinda curious where this 'the 2nd amendment is so we can keep the government in check' idea came from. Historically it is complete nonsense.
At the time the US just got through fighting the revolutionary war. In that war the average citizen was about as well-armed as a professional soldier, with most people providing their own arms. Stuff like artillery was of course controlled by armies, but at the time a fairly small force with small arms was able to do stuff like capture the guns at Ft Ticoderoga.
Things have changed significantly since then. The weapons of war have become much more powerful and expensive. Communications has become much more robust for an army (and during peacetime for the general citizenry, but in an actual uprising that can change quickly). A couple of guys with guns can't sneak into an air force base and take it over. Before they finish subjugating the base there would be helicopters full of troops arriving from 100 miles away, and a bunch of guys with guns aren't going to improvise an air defense using captured aircraft the way a bunch of people could man the guns at a fort to defend against a counter-attack that takes three months to arrive.
The reality is that there is no real way to put a modern government in check without the collusion of the military (either active, or at least their refusal to brutally put down rebellion), or a foreign military. Heck, the US revolution required the aid of the French or it probably would have gone on quite a bit longer.
Guys in their basements with AR15s can certainly harass supply lines, and they can probably keep it up for generations if you want to live in a country that resembles Kosovo. That is about it though.
It's a good idea to serialize it before you sell it though, and record the transaction.
Yup. When the police find an AR-15 with the number "1" cheaply engraved on it, they'll be hot on the trail of the person who bought it!
The difference is that I have precedence on my side where as you have nothing but speculation on yours.
Sure, just like the folks who said that real estate prices would never go down had all kind of precedence on their side. History is useful, but we're talking about technological change here. What precedence can you possibly cite that has any bearing on the creation of artificial intelligence?
As to your fear of the future... that merely makes me sad for you. The future holds promise. But only if it is allowed to become.
I don't fear the future. Nobody has to allow the future to become - it is inevitable that it will become. It holds the possibility of both promise and peril. I think in large part it will just come down to who makes the big breakthroughs. What would the world look like if Germany or Japan had developed the atomic bomb in quantity in WWII (the latter part of that being very unlikely so this is pretty hypothetical I'll admit)? Hard to say for sure, but certainly it would look a lot different than it does today.
You have no interest in examining this question and because of that you will never even attempt to understand what is going on.
You seem to think that the only reason I am not coming to the same conclusion as you is that I haven't given the matter any thought. The one does not follow from the other.
I think the average person in the US isn't employed is because the average American isn't employable for wages that allow survival in the US. Wages in the 3rd world are so incredibly low compared to what people in the 1st world can afford to pay for products right now that there is a delay while wealth is transferred from the 1st to 3rd world before the same thing happens there. Most of the jobs that have been outsourced are jobs that could be done by machines, but labor is just so insanely cheap overseas that even machines can't compete. Sooner or later things will level out and machines will continue to get cheaper, and even $5/day will seem like too much to pay somebody for menial labor.
If you want to understand why the jobs are going away, just think about the average kid in any school class you've ever taken. They're just not up to it.
Sure, but for whatever reason PA is always brought up as an example of a two-party state, and I'm not sure how any of this extends to recording what happens in your car.
A problem in the US is that your rights are whatever you're willing to pay to try to defend. The fact is that you can be taken to court for just about anything, by just about anybody. If the letter of the law is on your side, it will certainly help, and if it is against you, it will certainly hurt. However, the legal system is fuzzy enough that you can't really predict with certainty the outcome of any case.
What you can do is look at how past court cases have gone, but recording conversations is something that is rarely prosecuted.
I am not sure what you mean by "a properly-regulated insurance industry regulates itself." I am sensing a paradox between "properly-regulated ", which implies external, and "regulates itself", which implies internal. So I am not sure what you are trying to say.
I was just referring to a minimalistic approach to regulation that gives the insurance market-based incentives that are aligned to the consumer. In the case of insurnace, you just have to make sure that they REALLY have skin in the game.
If I can sell you FlyByNightCo insurance with no reserves, then I can start FlyByNightCo with an investment of $200 to some lawyer to do the paperwork, start collecting $20 premiums for $200k policies, and pay myself dividends and disappear when the claims arrive.
On the other hand, if FlyByNightCo needs reserves based on historical payout rates in order to sell policies, then in order to sell $200k policies I might need $1k in reserves. I can't put up $1k in reserves if I'm only making $20 on the premium, because if I try to pull a disappearing act the government will just take my company's reserves and I'M the one who gets screwed.
So, the government doesn't have to regulate the price of an insurance policy. They just have to make sure that insurance company investors actually lose money on bad policies, and there won't be any bad policies.
The reason the CDS market was so huge was that anybody could sell them, and nobody really intended to actually pay on them if anything really went wrong, and the lack of reserves meant that nobody could make them pay either.
There was a car customization shop around me that had a souped up minivan that they would drag race people with sports cars (and smoke them). Then hand out business cards.
You know, you could actually put quite a bit of power in a minivan with all that space... Heck, you could easily fit a gas turbine in there.
Really the biggest problem with using a mesh network for disaster is that anywhere you have enough people to support a mesh network, you could probably just as easily use a bullhorn to communicate.
A bullhorn is useful for general announcements, but not specific ones like "We need Fred to come in early for a shift at the hospital due to an emergency."
Sure, you can put that out over the bullhorn at 3AM, but if you have a constant trickle of those then nobody anywhere gets sleep, and then Fred ends up killing somebody due to a fatigue-induced surgical error.
The advantage of a mesh network is that you can get the message to Fred whose phone rings, without having to bug every other human being in the city. The downside is that nobody wants a non-centrally-controlled mesh network for the same reasons that Beijing doesn't want it.
Heck, I'm a believer in modern medicine, but any of the stuff on the first list would have to be horrible before I'd go to a hospital. Unless the hospital screens everybody with a cough for Ebola they won't bat an eye at that list of symptoms.
Even the second list doesn't really get weird until halfway down. Nausea is hardly uncommon. Bloody diarrhea probably would get noticed, if there was quite a bit of blood (a few drops and people won't think twice of it).
If the symptoms were really intense they'd probably get attention. If I feel tired, nauseous, etc I'll lie in bed. If it causes excruciating pain to roll over in bed, I'll call 911.
How does a hospital release someone who just traveled from Liberia and has symptoms consistent with Ebola? They allowed this person to expose people for twice as long compared to if they had handled the situation as common sense would dictate. [Isolate and test]
What is their insurance company policy on admissions? It isn't like the doctor decides who gets checked in. Also, we don't lock people in hospitals either, so the patient gets a say.
People will treat Ebola like it is the common cold until 10% of the country is bleeding out of their eyeballs, and then we'll start to debate whether more drastic measures are required.
The problem with this is that unless the new OS uses win32 on all those platforms, they don't have that huge application base they're trying to leverage.
Win8 was the attempt to get everybody to move to Metro, and it failed. Of course, they were stupid to introduce the app store on the desktop since that probably REALLY deterred people from porting over. They should have gotten everybody to port first, and then changed the rules once everybody was on the new cross-platform API.
In any case, I think they'd be doomed anyway. If you're building a Facebook reader it isn't that big of a deal to make a one-size-fits-all UI. If it only has 6 menu options users on the 20" screen won't care so much about the 1" tile buttons. The problem is that nobody has come up with a way to make full productivity applications work on things like phones. You can strip out all the features, and people will tolerate them as viewers or apps for making tweaks, but what serious business says, "you know, we don't need professional tools - we're going to compose the next Hollywood movie using an app designed to add filters to something shot with a phone cam."
Heck, Adobe just announced that they're making Photoshop available over a web browser. I'm still not sure how well that will work (does html5 support graphics tablets?). Even that potential source of failure exposes the real problem here - people doing serious work are hard to box into super-simplified applications. People want their 15 floating windows, and their magic USB tablet that senses pen pressure, angle (2DOF), button pressure, distance, etc.
No, the issue was that they priced the insurance too cheaply. It was a quick way to juice the returns. A example would be insurance companies offering cheap earthquake insurance. All of the premiums they take in is free money until the big one hits. Then they all collapse. Which speaks to a different type of regulation.
Sure, but that is the reason that insurance is regulated. In fact, a properly-regulated insurance industry regulates itself.
Even absent a law saying I can't buy insurance on a car that you own, nobody would sell it to me. They would be required to cover that policy with assets which means that they would have to make good on the policy, and they would realize that I have no incentive to preserve something I don't even own. Responsible insurance companies structure their policies so that the person who is insured has incentive to preserve the assets that are insured. The people who invest the money in the insurance companies stand to lose if the company is irresponsible, so they ensure it isn't.
However, these CDS instruments were created by people who had no intent to ever cover any substantial losses. Their incentive was to collect their bonus today, and let somebody else hold the bag tomorrow. Since they didn't have to have assets to cover the policies, nobody had incentive to play it safe. If I could legally sell flood insurance for $10/yr without any assets, I'd probably be selling it to half the country if I didn't have a conscience.
My understand is that the drivers are the main factor for just about any LED light. I'm sure there is quality variation in the LEDs themselves, but most of the stuff that costs money, wears out, and impacts quality is in the drivers.
The red light thing isn't neurological/perceptual at all. The pigments used by rod cells do not respond strongly to red light the way they do to other colors. It is the decomposition of those pigments that destroys your night vision.
Your brain may very well self-adjust to color temperature as well, but that isn't the reason that blue light is so destructive.
IN short: you're boned and trusting third parties irrespective of how open your OS is - unless all of your hardware is open, all of the firmware for your hardware is open, and you have personally audited all of it.
Heck, I'm trusting my next door neighbor to not shoot me when I step out the door.
The fact that I didn't build every component of my computer from raw silicon doesn't mean that there isn't value in having some knowledge of how some parts of it work.
Besides, I'm not talking about keeping my data out of the hands of the NSA. I wasn't actually concerned with security at all in my post. I'm just saying that open source software gives you options that you don't otherwise have, because having the source gives you the ability to fix the 99.999999% of problems that weren't caused by the NSA sticking a rootkit into your CPU.
I believe the consent can be implicit, hence announcements like those. Of course, if you made the same announcement when calling a business they'd just hang up on you, and you'd end up having to resort to registered mail or such (which they could also refuse to accept, but that would give you quite a bit of legal advantage).