So can we dispense with this "He cannot get a fair trial" garbage and say what you really mean "The law is bad"? They are separate issues.
He can't get a fair trial BECAUSE the law is bad, and he almost certainly won't be tried before a jury of his peers.
But, whatever. We're quibbling over definitions. Whether the US has bad courts or simply bad laws enforced by good courts makes little practical difference for anybody on US soil.
My point wasn't that checking passenger lists for known terrorists isn't a good idea.
My point was that simply excluding people from flying and not doing more doesn't make sense. You don't need a special no-fly list for Richard Reid. You need a known fugitive terrorists list that is an arrest-on-sight list for him, and of course that also includes not letting him board a plane, bus, train, boat, etc.
And if it is important you should probably pay for a cert anyway, or at least pay the 25$ for a revocation.
Meh, the non-free certificates are hardly more secure. There are hundreds of trusted CAs out there all over the world, and any one of them can subvert SSL for any domain out there. The SSL Certificate racket is just that. We should be using DNSSEC and embedding certificates in our DNS records. Sure, that still lets your upstream DNS providers exploit you, but for the typical foo.com that is one or two entities that can mess you up, and not hundreds, and you get to pick most of them by picking a different TLD.
I'm sure in 2013 earthquakes in California weren't all that much worse than they were in Florida. Certainly there were no major headliners.
However, it would be foolish to use the same building codes in both states.
Hurricanes and Earthquakes are both chaotic events. You can practically guarantee that they will happen on a long timescale, but you can never predict when they will happen a year out.
And it makes the provider a public utility--they build plants and sell electricity to customers--and therefore are unhappy to find themselves categorized and regulated as such under the laws governing public utilities.
It does not make sense to regulate them in the same way.
The local electric utility needs to run wires all over the town. If a wire falls on my property, they need to come in and fix it in order to get things running for the whole town. It wouldn't make sense if they had to beg permission to fix wires from every landowner in the city, and if one is on vacation they just have to leave the city in a blackout for a few days until they get back. It doesn't make sense for landowners to be able to charge utilities to run wires either.
So, we give electric utilities powers that we do not ordinarily grant to businesses. On the other hand, we regulate them to keep them in check.
On the other hand, a company installing solar panels on your house isn't encroaching on anybody else's property. If their systems have problems it doesn't cause a blackout for the entire city - just for the one guy who agreed to buy their services. If they break their contract, the courts can deal with it in a simple civil matter between one individual and one company. They also aren't natural monopolies - any company has about the same opportunity to sell a set of solar panels to a homeowner.
These kinds of arrangements are a bit like leasing a car. The homeowner doesn't trust the company to keep it's word about the savings and longevity of their panels, so the company assumes that risk.
I'm not saying that there isn't some room for regulation in this space, but it probably is best to limit it to the sorts of things that are already on the books, like requiring a licensed electrician to mess with any connections to the grid which aren't protected by a circuit breaker, etc. Just basic safety stuff that has a potential to affect others.
Hate to self-reply, but by TON of them, I mean that 95% of the stars in the universe are actually inhabited by intelligent life who have built dyson spheres, and everything we see are just the remnants that they haven't bothered to settle, which seems rather unlikely to me.
Well, dyson spheres seems a bit implausible unless there are a TON of them, and they're not actually invisible as they would radiate waste heat - they'd appear as IR black bodies.
However, if they were invisible I'd think they'd be consistent with the bullet cluster image. That image showed that intergalactic gas interacted during the collision, but dark matter did not. I wouldn't expect large objects like stars to interact the way that gas would. If you point a fan into a room full of air, you'll feel a breeze up close and nothing at any distance. if you throw two rocks past each other in a room, they'll just sail past each other unimpeded. In both cases you get miniscule gravitational interaction, but the electromagnetic interactions are dramatic with air currents, and non-existent with large objects.
Don't worry about CO2, the plants need it to live, the more there is, the more they grow.
That's why we don't need fire departments. Fires just produce heat, and the sun produces far more heat in a day than every house fire that burns in a year.
The problem with this kind of argument is that it ignores kinetics. Sure, plants use CO2, and with more CO2 there will be more plants, and eventually all of that CO2 will be fixed.
The problem is that all of that CO2 won't get fixed instantly, so it builds up in the atmosphere and raises temperatures globally.
Will things like climate change happen on their own if man weren't around? Of course. Does that make it any more desirable? No.
This whole thread is basically somebody from Google saying that they did foo and attackers stopped doing bar. Then somebody else who has no affiliation with Google says that attackers didn't stop doing bar. There is no way for anybody outside of Google to know whether the original claim is correct or not.
By all means be skeptical, but it is a bit much to just say he's wrong.
Like it or not, our criminal legal system works just fine and generally produces the right results.
Depends on whether you define the "right results" as convicting anybody who breaks a law. If the law is wrong, then enforcing the law is just as wrong.
Al Qa'ida's greatest achievement was the indiscriminate slaughter of almost 3000 civilians in pursuit of their delusional but still very real goal of establishing a califat once more. Give me an example of someone getting killed because of the indiscriminate collection of meta data and I'll start listening to your crazy rants again.
If the goal was to prevent Al Qaida from killing another 3k people via airplane hijacking, the US government didn't need to do anything at all. Today if terrorists take over a plane, the passengers aren't just going to sit back and wait until they crash and die. Sure, they can blow up a plane, but they still can do that, or just blow up a bus instead.
However, if they wanted to do something prudent, then taking steps to harden cockpit doors would go a long way towards improving things.
The post-9/11 measures did nothing to prevent the Boston Marathon bombing. Indeed, the guy responsible wasn't even caught until after the curfew was lifted, and he was discovered by a local resident.
What did you do about Heartbleed. Did you pony up the $25 to change your key? I understand that they won't let you give them a new CSR without revoking the old one, and they won't revoke it for free.
StartSSL still give out free certificates to individuals right?
Yes, as long as you don't change your certificate after the key is lost as a result of HeartBleed. If you want your users to be secure, then you need to pony up $25. How that isn't a violation of the Mozilla policies is beyond me. I can give StartSSL clear proof that a private key has been disclosed, and they won't revoke it unless somebody pays them to do it.
I did find out that about 280 people on the list are US residents or citizens, so that gives us some sense of the level of threat required...I would say that a nation has the right to deny entry for any reason whatsoever.
Well, I wouldn't say that this right extends to citizens of that country. There is no reason to deny entry to a US citizen whatsoever. If they're wanted for a crime by all means arrest them when they enter, but they're still entitled to their day in court and incarceration in a US prison. If they're wanted overseas then they should be the treated the same as any US citizen already in the country. You can't make a citizen persona non-grata.
A no-fly list is also the wrong way to do any of this stuff. If we think a list of individuals are going to blow up planes, then tell the government in the originating country of the flight so that they can check them carefully before boarding. We don't want them to go blow up some non-US-bound plane instead, and if there is enough evidence to arrest them I'm sure the foreign government will do so. If the foreign government can't be trusted to keep terrorists off of planes, then they shouldn't be allowed to screen passengers bound for the US in the first place.
And if any of those 280 US citizens/residents are actually living in the US, then WTF? Just go get them already, or put them on most-wanted lists.
The laws concerning internet security are in place, where we fail is executing them. As long as fines are petty change, security will be handled by accounting, not risk management.
Writing secure software is hard though. Sure, projects like Chrome do a much better job of it than your typical corporate process automation application does. But, even Chrome has a steady stream of discovered vulnerabilities.
I think the password is the real weakness here. We really need to get away from having them at all. You should have a two-factor module that itself demands a password and does all the authentication. The thing is we can't have every website out there provide their own, because I don't want to carry around 387 dongles. We really need an authentication standard so that people can buy a smartcard that has their credentials on it, and use it for everything. Then you have to figure out what to do with authentication between computer systems, such as having Gmail access your ISP mail via POP3 using regular polling.
Security is hard. We could do better, but it is still only as strong as its weakest link.
I still think that it is a harder sell since it requires tricking millions of users into installing an exploit and hoping that they all use the site. If you were able to pull this off, stealing their password for the target site would be the least valuable thing you would have stolen.
No, you get people to install a keylogger period. You might have to hack into some site to do it, or maybe you hack directly into their computers, or maybe you send them an email with an exploit, or maybe you purchase a banner ad and embed an exploit.
If you install a "keylogger" (more likely a rootkit that captures everything in every form submission with URLs as well as keyboard input and probably a whole lot more) on somebody's computer, you get their usernames and passwords for every site that they use. You don't have to touch the target site at all. Infect them with a keylogger from some random unsecure blog, and you can log into their highly-secured bank website.
Timothy McVeigh wasn't, to my knowledge, associated with any recognized terrorists organizations. That doesn't mean he shouldn't have been on a list of people the FBI is concerned about.
Yup, if only they had put him on a no-fly list there is no way he could have driven a truck under the federal building.
Keeping an eye on people you believe to be terrorists makes sense to me. If there is actual evidence then arresting them makes even more sense. The only reason to put them on a no-fly list would be if you are trying to arrest them, and just want to ensure they don't blow up a plane before you get a chance to do so.
If you don't have enough evidence to arrest somebody, how do you justify putting them on the list in the first place? That is right up there with seizing and selling off assets before you even get a conviction.
So what happens when everyone uses too much electricity? You get brown outs because too many people are taxing the system.
When was the last time you experienced a brownout in the US? It almost never happens. And yet, people complain about slow data service on their cell phones all the time.
The difference is that you pay for usage when consuming electricity. The only way you end up with a brownout is when everybody in a region has an unusually high demand for electricity, especially an unpredictable one. That almost never happens, because in the aggregate usage tends to be very predictable and the service providers budget to meet it. A brownout means lost revenue for the provider - they had an opportunity to sell electricity but were unable to do so.
With cell phones people sell way more service than they have the means to deliver, and then basically punish people for actually trying to use the service. Dropped voice calls were fairly rare even back in the old days of cell phone coverage when towers couldn't handle nearly as much traffic, because voice calls were billed by the minute.
The solution is simple - just charge for usage and get rid of flat-rate plans. Oh, and charge something reasonable - not measured in cents per kilobyte or some such nonsense. There are so few competitors that rates really should be regulated as they are with any other utility.
These unlimited contracts came into being at a time when 3G radios had just come out, so the amount of traffic any one device could produce on their network was an order of magnitude less than what they can today with LTE.
Sure, but a 3G radio running at maximum speed utilizes a large portion of the total capacity of a 3G tower, just as an LTE radio running at maximum speed utilizes a large portion of the total capacity of an LTE tower.
Modern phones can send far more data, but the towers also have the capacity to handle far more data.
The tower should be the rate-limiting part of the operation. The infrastructure from there to the net should be able to handle a saturated tower. Landlines can handle far more bandwidth than radio.
Well, the lawsuit is something new, but Tek has been using software-unlockable features since the 80s as far as I'm aware.
It doesn't make sense for them to have 14 different front-end designs and software designs to allow for different feature sets. On the other hand, the cost to develop the high-end features is higher than developing a cheap scope, so they don't want to just give that stuff away for free. From what I understand there is some really good design in the high-end gear.
So, if you want companies to produce really high-quality gear, you have to pay them for the effort somehow. If they only sold one high-end model for a very high price and a different low-end model for a low price you still wouldn't get the high end features for free, and it would actually raise the cost to buy either. By having a consolidated design it lowers their total costs and thus everybody's price.
One of the big advantages of freenet from this standpoint is that it doesn't support bidirectional communication. There are no "servers" on freenet. That means no search engines, or storefronts, or anything like that. You publish information, and you retrieve information.
So, implementing something like silk road on freenet would be tricky. On the other hand, it would be harder to interfere with if you did.
That was what I was curious about. Would the government have to give back the proceeds of the sale or the actual value at the time of seizure or the amount they are worth now?
What the government would do is one thing (most likely they'd say this was seized property and it does not need to be returned - DEA can seize and sell property even if you are found innocent in court, amazingly enough).
However, if it wanted to do the right thing the most appropriate thing to do would be to just return the same quantity of bitcoins that was seized, perhaps by buying them on the market. Then nobody has to argue about the value of a bitcoin - they're just returning what was taken, even if it isn't the exact same set of bitcoins.
The government shouldn't be able to sell seized property without a conviction in the first place, which would be the best solution. In fact, they probably shouldn't be able to seize the property at all without a conviction, unless the property is illegal to own on its face.
None of those computer-assisted brake technologies require: 1. That the brake pedal input be transmitted over a single electronic cable (or even a single physical cable for that matter). 2. That the computers applying ABS communicate in any way with anything else in the car, other than perhaps turning on a warning light if there is a failure. 3. That the failure warnings that appear on the dashboard be communicated using anything more than a single output line.
I'm not against automation of safety systems. I just think that the design has to be robust when you're talking about a situation where a failure can result in fatalities. Even a single physical brake cable is an undesirable point of failure - usually the emergency brake will be completely independent for this reason.
There is definitely no need for brakes to talk to something like a radio.
Yes, unpleasant surprises seems to be the fate of breeders in general. For that matter, the accident rate for once through reactors, though lower, is unacceptably high. Urging moving to an even more accident prone and unstable technology is irresponsible.
The problem is that the default alternative ends up being coal, and that seems just-about guaranteed to cause a catastrophe of a different sort. Oh, and there is oil which causes the same problems plus it results in lots of dead kids in the middle east.
Part of the problem with nuclear power is that nobody seriously does the necessary R&D to improve it. Breeder reactors haven't been abandoned for safety reasons - they've been abandoned due to proliferation concerns. If there were the political willpower to take it seriously I suspect that the engineering issues could be addressed.
I don't really see proliferation as a real problem. That is just a matter of physical security. We can secure nuclear bombs without losing them even though those are relatively easy to transport and detonate if you have access to them. I don't see why we can't secure a pile of fuel that is only partially useful for making nuclear weapons with a lot of know-how, which is in a pool of molten sodium/salt/whatever and emitting instant-death levels of gamma rays inside of a huge reactor vessel. If it is a moral argument issue, "how can the US tell others not to use breeder reactors if it uses them?," then the answer is the same as for the question, "how can the US tell others not to have nuclear weapons if it has them?"
Slashdot Mirror
So can we dispense with this "He cannot get a fair trial" garbage and say what you really mean "The law is bad"? They are separate issues.
He can't get a fair trial BECAUSE the law is bad, and he almost certainly won't be tried before a jury of his peers.
But, whatever. We're quibbling over definitions. Whether the US has bad courts or simply bad laws enforced by good courts makes little practical difference for anybody on US soil.
My point wasn't that checking passenger lists for known terrorists isn't a good idea.
My point was that simply excluding people from flying and not doing more doesn't make sense. You don't need a special no-fly list for Richard Reid. You need a known fugitive terrorists list that is an arrest-on-sight list for him, and of course that also includes not letting him board a plane, bus, train, boat, etc.
And if it is important you should probably pay for a cert anyway, or at least pay the 25$ for a revocation.
Meh, the non-free certificates are hardly more secure. There are hundreds of trusted CAs out there all over the world, and any one of them can subvert SSL for any domain out there. The SSL Certificate racket is just that. We should be using DNSSEC and embedding certificates in our DNS records. Sure, that still lets your upstream DNS providers exploit you, but for the typical foo.com that is one or two entities that can mess you up, and not hundreds, and you get to pick most of them by picking a different TLD.
I'm sure in 2013 earthquakes in California weren't all that much worse than they were in Florida. Certainly there were no major headliners.
However, it would be foolish to use the same building codes in both states.
Hurricanes and Earthquakes are both chaotic events. You can practically guarantee that they will happen on a long timescale, but you can never predict when they will happen a year out.
And it makes the provider a public utility--they build plants and sell electricity to customers--and therefore are unhappy to find themselves categorized and regulated as such under the laws governing public utilities.
It does not make sense to regulate them in the same way.
The local electric utility needs to run wires all over the town. If a wire falls on my property, they need to come in and fix it in order to get things running for the whole town. It wouldn't make sense if they had to beg permission to fix wires from every landowner in the city, and if one is on vacation they just have to leave the city in a blackout for a few days until they get back. It doesn't make sense for landowners to be able to charge utilities to run wires either.
So, we give electric utilities powers that we do not ordinarily grant to businesses. On the other hand, we regulate them to keep them in check.
On the other hand, a company installing solar panels on your house isn't encroaching on anybody else's property. If their systems have problems it doesn't cause a blackout for the entire city - just for the one guy who agreed to buy their services. If they break their contract, the courts can deal with it in a simple civil matter between one individual and one company. They also aren't natural monopolies - any company has about the same opportunity to sell a set of solar panels to a homeowner.
These kinds of arrangements are a bit like leasing a car. The homeowner doesn't trust the company to keep it's word about the savings and longevity of their panels, so the company assumes that risk.
I'm not saying that there isn't some room for regulation in this space, but it probably is best to limit it to the sorts of things that are already on the books, like requiring a licensed electrician to mess with any connections to the grid which aren't protected by a circuit breaker, etc. Just basic safety stuff that has a potential to affect others.
Hate to self-reply, but by TON of them, I mean that 95% of the stars in the universe are actually inhabited by intelligent life who have built dyson spheres, and everything we see are just the remnants that they haven't bothered to settle, which seems rather unlikely to me.
Well, dyson spheres seems a bit implausible unless there are a TON of them, and they're not actually invisible as they would radiate waste heat - they'd appear as IR black bodies.
However, if they were invisible I'd think they'd be consistent with the bullet cluster image. That image showed that intergalactic gas interacted during the collision, but dark matter did not. I wouldn't expect large objects like stars to interact the way that gas would. If you point a fan into a room full of air, you'll feel a breeze up close and nothing at any distance. if you throw two rocks past each other in a room, they'll just sail past each other unimpeded. In both cases you get miniscule gravitational interaction, but the electromagnetic interactions are dramatic with air currents, and non-existent with large objects.
What schools should be teaching is basic entrepreneur skills so that people can create their own jobs after they graduate.
Skill #1 - be born to parents who can give you enough money to survive until your business makes a profit.
I think about half of kids in public schools are going to fail to master this one.
Don't worry about CO2, the plants need it to live, the more there is, the more they grow.
That's why we don't need fire departments. Fires just produce heat, and the sun produces far more heat in a day than every house fire that burns in a year.
The problem with this kind of argument is that it ignores kinetics. Sure, plants use CO2, and with more CO2 there will be more plants, and eventually all of that CO2 will be fixed.
The problem is that all of that CO2 won't get fixed instantly, so it builds up in the atmosphere and raises temperatures globally.
Will things like climate change happen on their own if man weren't around? Of course. Does that make it any more desirable? No.
This whole thread is basically somebody from Google saying that they did foo and attackers stopped doing bar. Then somebody else who has no affiliation with Google says that attackers didn't stop doing bar. There is no way for anybody outside of Google to know whether the original claim is correct or not.
By all means be skeptical, but it is a bit much to just say he's wrong.
Like it or not, our criminal legal system works just fine and generally produces the right results.
Depends on whether you define the "right results" as convicting anybody who breaks a law. If the law is wrong, then enforcing the law is just as wrong.
Al Qa'ida's greatest achievement was the indiscriminate slaughter of almost 3000 civilians in pursuit of their delusional but still very real goal of establishing a califat once more. Give me an example of someone getting killed because of the indiscriminate collection of meta data and I'll start listening to your crazy rants again.
If the goal was to prevent Al Qaida from killing another 3k people via airplane hijacking, the US government didn't need to do anything at all. Today if terrorists take over a plane, the passengers aren't just going to sit back and wait until they crash and die. Sure, they can blow up a plane, but they still can do that, or just blow up a bus instead.
However, if they wanted to do something prudent, then taking steps to harden cockpit doors would go a long way towards improving things.
The post-9/11 measures did nothing to prevent the Boston Marathon bombing. Indeed, the guy responsible wasn't even caught until after the curfew was lifted, and he was discovered by a local resident.
What did you do about Heartbleed. Did you pony up the $25 to change your key? I understand that they won't let you give them a new CSR without revoking the old one, and they won't revoke it for free.
StartSSL still give out free certificates to individuals right?
Yes, as long as you don't change your certificate after the key is lost as a result of HeartBleed. If you want your users to be secure, then you need to pony up $25. How that isn't a violation of the Mozilla policies is beyond me. I can give StartSSL clear proof that a private key has been disclosed, and they won't revoke it unless somebody pays them to do it.
I did find out that about 280 people on the list are US residents or citizens, so that gives us some sense of the level of threat required...I would say that a nation has the right to deny entry for any reason whatsoever.
Well, I wouldn't say that this right extends to citizens of that country. There is no reason to deny entry to a US citizen whatsoever. If they're wanted for a crime by all means arrest them when they enter, but they're still entitled to their day in court and incarceration in a US prison. If they're wanted overseas then they should be the treated the same as any US citizen already in the country. You can't make a citizen persona non-grata.
A no-fly list is also the wrong way to do any of this stuff. If we think a list of individuals are going to blow up planes, then tell the government in the originating country of the flight so that they can check them carefully before boarding. We don't want them to go blow up some non-US-bound plane instead, and if there is enough evidence to arrest them I'm sure the foreign government will do so. If the foreign government can't be trusted to keep terrorists off of planes, then they shouldn't be allowed to screen passengers bound for the US in the first place.
And if any of those 280 US citizens/residents are actually living in the US, then WTF? Just go get them already, or put them on most-wanted lists.
The laws concerning internet security are in place, where we fail is executing them. As long as fines are petty change, security will be handled by accounting, not risk management.
Writing secure software is hard though. Sure, projects like Chrome do a much better job of it than your typical corporate process automation application does. But, even Chrome has a steady stream of discovered vulnerabilities.
I think the password is the real weakness here. We really need to get away from having them at all. You should have a two-factor module that itself demands a password and does all the authentication. The thing is we can't have every website out there provide their own, because I don't want to carry around 387 dongles. We really need an authentication standard so that people can buy a smartcard that has their credentials on it, and use it for everything. Then you have to figure out what to do with authentication between computer systems, such as having Gmail access your ISP mail via POP3 using regular polling.
Security is hard. We could do better, but it is still only as strong as its weakest link.
I still think that it is a harder sell since it requires tricking millions of users into installing an exploit and hoping that they all use the site. If you were able to pull this off, stealing their password for the target site would be the least valuable thing you would have stolen.
No, you get people to install a keylogger period. You might have to hack into some site to do it, or maybe you hack directly into their computers, or maybe you send them an email with an exploit, or maybe you purchase a banner ad and embed an exploit.
If you install a "keylogger" (more likely a rootkit that captures everything in every form submission with URLs as well as keyboard input and probably a whole lot more) on somebody's computer, you get their usernames and passwords for every site that they use. You don't have to touch the target site at all. Infect them with a keylogger from some random unsecure blog, and you can log into their highly-secured bank website.
Timothy McVeigh wasn't, to my knowledge, associated with any recognized terrorists organizations. That doesn't mean he shouldn't have been on a list of people the FBI is concerned about.
Yup, if only they had put him on a no-fly list there is no way he could have driven a truck under the federal building.
Keeping an eye on people you believe to be terrorists makes sense to me. If there is actual evidence then arresting them makes even more sense. The only reason to put them on a no-fly list would be if you are trying to arrest them, and just want to ensure they don't blow up a plane before you get a chance to do so.
If you don't have enough evidence to arrest somebody, how do you justify putting them on the list in the first place? That is right up there with seizing and selling off assets before you even get a conviction.
So what happens when everyone uses too much electricity? You get brown outs because too many people are taxing the system.
When was the last time you experienced a brownout in the US? It almost never happens. And yet, people complain about slow data service on their cell phones all the time.
The difference is that you pay for usage when consuming electricity. The only way you end up with a brownout is when everybody in a region has an unusually high demand for electricity, especially an unpredictable one. That almost never happens, because in the aggregate usage tends to be very predictable and the service providers budget to meet it. A brownout means lost revenue for the provider - they had an opportunity to sell electricity but were unable to do so.
With cell phones people sell way more service than they have the means to deliver, and then basically punish people for actually trying to use the service. Dropped voice calls were fairly rare even back in the old days of cell phone coverage when towers couldn't handle nearly as much traffic, because voice calls were billed by the minute.
The solution is simple - just charge for usage and get rid of flat-rate plans. Oh, and charge something reasonable - not measured in cents per kilobyte or some such nonsense. There are so few competitors that rates really should be regulated as they are with any other utility.
These unlimited contracts came into being at a time when 3G radios had just come out, so the amount of traffic any one device could produce on their network was an order of magnitude less than what they can today with LTE.
Sure, but a 3G radio running at maximum speed utilizes a large portion of the total capacity of a 3G tower, just as an LTE radio running at maximum speed utilizes a large portion of the total capacity of an LTE tower.
Modern phones can send far more data, but the towers also have the capacity to handle far more data.
The tower should be the rate-limiting part of the operation. The infrastructure from there to the net should be able to handle a saturated tower. Landlines can handle far more bandwidth than radio.
Well, the lawsuit is something new, but Tek has been using software-unlockable features since the 80s as far as I'm aware.
It doesn't make sense for them to have 14 different front-end designs and software designs to allow for different feature sets. On the other hand, the cost to develop the high-end features is higher than developing a cheap scope, so they don't want to just give that stuff away for free. From what I understand there is some really good design in the high-end gear.
So, if you want companies to produce really high-quality gear, you have to pay them for the effort somehow. If they only sold one high-end model for a very high price and a different low-end model for a low price you still wouldn't get the high end features for free, and it would actually raise the cost to buy either. By having a consolidated design it lowers their total costs and thus everybody's price.
One of the big advantages of freenet from this standpoint is that it doesn't support bidirectional communication. There are no "servers" on freenet. That means no search engines, or storefronts, or anything like that. You publish information, and you retrieve information.
So, implementing something like silk road on freenet would be tricky. On the other hand, it would be harder to interfere with if you did.
That was what I was curious about. Would the government have to give back the proceeds of the sale or the actual value at the time of seizure or the amount they are worth now?
What the government would do is one thing (most likely they'd say this was seized property and it does not need to be returned - DEA can seize and sell property even if you are found innocent in court, amazingly enough).
However, if it wanted to do the right thing the most appropriate thing to do would be to just return the same quantity of bitcoins that was seized, perhaps by buying them on the market. Then nobody has to argue about the value of a bitcoin - they're just returning what was taken, even if it isn't the exact same set of bitcoins.
The government shouldn't be able to sell seized property without a conviction in the first place, which would be the best solution. In fact, they probably shouldn't be able to seize the property at all without a conviction, unless the property is illegal to own on its face.
None of those computer-assisted brake technologies require:
1. That the brake pedal input be transmitted over a single electronic cable (or even a single physical cable for that matter).
2. That the computers applying ABS communicate in any way with anything else in the car, other than perhaps turning on a warning light if there is a failure.
3. That the failure warnings that appear on the dashboard be communicated using anything more than a single output line.
I'm not against automation of safety systems. I just think that the design has to be robust when you're talking about a situation where a failure can result in fatalities. Even a single physical brake cable is an undesirable point of failure - usually the emergency brake will be completely independent for this reason.
There is definitely no need for brakes to talk to something like a radio.
Yes, unpleasant surprises seems to be the fate of breeders in general. For that matter, the accident rate for once through reactors, though lower, is unacceptably high. Urging moving to an even more accident prone and unstable technology is irresponsible.
The problem is that the default alternative ends up being coal, and that seems just-about guaranteed to cause a catastrophe of a different sort. Oh, and there is oil which causes the same problems plus it results in lots of dead kids in the middle east.
Part of the problem with nuclear power is that nobody seriously does the necessary R&D to improve it. Breeder reactors haven't been abandoned for safety reasons - they've been abandoned due to proliferation concerns. If there were the political willpower to take it seriously I suspect that the engineering issues could be addressed.
I don't really see proliferation as a real problem. That is just a matter of physical security. We can secure nuclear bombs without losing them even though those are relatively easy to transport and detonate if you have access to them. I don't see why we can't secure a pile of fuel that is only partially useful for making nuclear weapons with a lot of know-how, which is in a pool of molten sodium/salt/whatever and emitting instant-death levels of gamma rays inside of a huge reactor vessel. If it is a moral argument issue, "how can the US tell others not to use breeder reactors if it uses them?," then the answer is the same as for the question, "how can the US tell others not to have nuclear weapons if it has them?"