...it's always going to come down to a judgement call based on less than perfect knowledge of the circumstances.
Well, sure. Insurance has always been that way. They're looking for trends and correlations (not necessarily perfect correlations, either) in their aggregate data.
Because I'm male, I pay higher insurance rates. When I was younger, I paid higher insurance rates. I've never had an accident, and I don't plan on doing so. I'm a safe driver, but I pay a severe financial penalty because people with whom I share certain traits (youth, maleness) have a statistically significantly greater likelihood of being in an accident. My age and my gender I have no control over. My driving habits I do. It's a step forward if I can use the latter to influence my insurance premiums.
There are young, male drivers who drive safely. There are middle-aged females who are a menace on the road. Nevertheless, the age and gender correlations with accident rate are strong enough to base rate adjustments on. Similarly, there are people who drive fast, brake hard, and steer violently who don't have accidents--but I'm willing to bet that there's a correlation between those traits and an increased accident rate. (Why am I willing to make that bet? Simple: the insurance companies are willing to make that bet, and I know that they know their numbers.)
If it's fair to discriminate on the basis of age and gender in deciding someone's auto insurance rates, it seems pretty reasonable to discriminate on the basis of driving habits.
Ha... How much longer will it take before it becomes compulsory?
This is where 'mutual' insurance companies come in. They're owned by the policy holders, who can actually vote on corporate policy. Can't find an insurance company that lets you drive without a black box? Start one. I'm sure you'll find lots of like-minded individuals. Of course, if you discover that your rates are too high because they are bad drivers, well....
I waited 3 days before I actually went to the hospital...
In medicine, these are the words that cause more morbidity and mortality....
Please, everyone--do yourselves a favour. If you're in such pain that walking ten feet leaves you short of breath, consult a physician. Even if you're apparently young and healthy, it could be a heart attack, or something equally nasty. Millions of years of evolution have given you a sense of pain for a reason. Listen to it--things don't hurt just because God is a sadist.
Chest pain is one of those things that can really challenge a physician because there are so many potential underlying causes, with widely varying degrees of severity. Sources of symptoms that may be confused with pneumothorax include, "costochondritis, esophageal origin, myocardial infarction or ischemia, pericarditis, pleurisy, pneumonia, and pulmonary embolus." Self-diagnosis is not recommended.:)
Particularly for acute circulatory problems (heart attack, stroke) time is of the essence. We've got a lot of really powerful treatments that are rendered essentially useless if you wait several hours. By that time, the tissue you want to save is dead.
Seriously, I though all electronics were tested for interference in important bands. There is a little FCC logo on my VCR. Isn't what that means?
It's not an unreasonable precaution. It doesn't do any harm--there's zero risk to the aircraft if the passengers turn off their damn phones.
On the other hand, that little FCC sticker means that your devices probably won't interfere with anything in a bad way--but how many phone manufacturers have performed exhaustive safety testing with their phones from every position in the cabin on every aircraft under every possible condition? Aircraft built in the last twenty or so years should be pretty resistant to RF interference, but there are a lot of birds much older than that still flying. Their designers probably didn't anticipate a profusion of personal radio transmitters in the cabin.
The airlines (and other passengers, for that matter) don't want to lose an aircraft to "electronic interference, possibly due to cellular phone usage", and Nokia doesn't want to have to issue a recall of one of their phones because they discover after the fact that "it may cause 737s to crash."
But AFAIK, pebble bed reactors work at fairly high temperatures. If air leaks into the reactor vessel and the fuel starts to burn, it would get really messy.
Ceramic pebbles won't burn; it would be like trying to ignite a dinner plate. It's one of the nice built-in safety features. At elevated temperatures the pebbles expand, which automatically takes you back below a critical mass.
Worst case, a few of the pebbles have physical flaws (minor cracks and whatnot) that permit a small amount of radioactivity to escape--but it's not a Chernobyl, and it probably would still put less radioactivity into the air than a coal plant.
Canada's Population Density Reading the caption reveals that 60% of their population lives in a tiny fraction of their land -- "a thin belt of land representing 2.2% of the land between Windsor, Ontario and Quebec City."
A fairer comparison might then be between Canada and California.
Canada's total area is a bit under 4 million square miles (land and water), and its population a shade over 30 million. If 60% of the Canadian population lives in 2.2% of the area, that's about 225 people per square mile.
California's total area is about 160,000 square miles, and its population is about 35 million. That's a density of 219 per square mile.
So--is broadband coverage in California better or worse than broadband coverage immediately north of the 49th parallel?
All the ones that would sell their souls to be noticed by Google?
There are more than a few 'real' geeks that would write the code in BASIC while in a barrel going over Niagara Falls in exchange for a chance to work for Sergey Brin.
I notice MS Research doing lots of basic research that has never been productized.
Gaaaaaaah! We have an interesting thread on English, and linguistics, and word recognition, and then someone has to go and use a word like 'productized'.
Remember, kids--"Verbing weirds language." (Thanks to Bill Watterson for that observation, by the way.)
It's a moot point--you can indeed throw your hundred rocks out towards the nearest stars, or towards the stars that you feel are most likely to be life-bearing, or whatever.
On the other hand, you can also focus your radio transmission. The inverse square law only applies if you are emitting in all directions. If you send a relatively well collimated beam out from Aricebo, you're going to have a very well-behaved signal that you can detect a long way off. Indeed, this was done decades ago.
The chief advantage of throwing rocks is that it requires no maintenance at this end. If you want to use a radio beacon, then you have to maintain it for as long as you want to transmit, and you're limited quite a bit in terms of the number of targets you can point to with each dish. Meanwhile, radio signals will get to your target a lot faster (whether this is a good thing or not is open to discussion) and are probably easier to detect than a rock.
to say that, as a citizen of the west, you don't have control over things outside your country
Of course, I didn't say that in my post.
Reread it. I believe it is important to challenge threats to freedom, large and small, international and domestic.
An analogy: There are people in our cities without homes. Should I ignore the termites in my walls until all the homeless are sheltered? It's so much easier to be my brother's keeper....
For that matter, there are nations where many people lack food, or access to the most basic medical care. How could anyone in good conscience waste their breath complaining about the suppression of free speech in the West or in China when there are hundreds of millions of people without food, shelter, or medicine? Complaining about Chinese censorship is obviously inappropriate, since they should be happy to enjoy such a high standard of living in other respects.
Incidentally, I am a Canadian. I should think that basic rights are abrogated at the 49th parallel, not the Rio Grande. Cheers.
Dude, calm down, take a deep breath, and meditate on the value of punctuation and SHIFT keys.
The grandparent poster was pointing out, quite correctly, that there are individuals in public office and private business who would like to see some 'objectionable' content on the Internet filtered. (What precisely constitutes such objectionable content is the subject of heated debate, of course.) Internet access in the United States is often screened for content in certain contexts--many public schools, workplaces, and public libraries.
The grandparent also observed that the Chinese firewall is a very solidly executed proof-of-concept, that demonstrates that such large-scale filtering is technically possible and at least reasonably effective, though it may have a few holes that the technically adept can slip through.
The grandparent did not presume that politicians in the West would automatically abuse such technology now that it is available and amply demonstrated. On the other hand, the grandparent poster quite correctly observed that there were individual politicians, political organizations, and lobbyists who would be more than happy to push for its adoption...and that it behooves us to watch that we don't slip into hypocrisy.
there are great fights, much more important fights, going on outside the borders of the western democracies for rights most of us take for granted, and that is a shame, as real good can be done if the children of the western democracies took up ideological and rhetorical arms in that fight, rather than obsessing over comparatively much more minor issues in their home countries
The reason why things are 'better' and freer in the West is because of the vigilance of people like the grandparent poster. The notion that encroachments on civil liberties in the West should be tolerated or just not spoken of because things are much worse elsewhere is...decidedly unpalatable. Why should it be impossible to take up 'ideological and rhetorical arms' to support freedom of expression and conscience everywhere, locally and abroad? "It could be worse"--the rallying cry of the indifferent and downtrodden.
Wang, Feng, Lai, and Yu can find collisions on MD5 deliberately, with practical amounts of computer power. They have done this more than once, and have at least outlined a plausible theoretical explanation of how they can do it. That means MD5 does not provide the guarantees that a secure hash function must provide; MD5 is not a secure hash function.
It depends on how you define 'secure' and for what purposes you intend to use MD5. For a lot of cases, MD5 is still 'secure'.
Wang et al. have demonstrated that they can generate collisions in a reasonable period of time. They have not demonstrated that they can generate a collision for a given hash--a so-called preimage attack.
In other words, it is possible to produce two files full of junk that have the same MD5 hash. It's not possible (yet) to produce a file that has the same MD5 hash as a Linux kernel. It's not possible to create Trojan malware that shares an MD5 hash with a useful application. For most of us, that still counts as 'secure'.
ust to give you back a little bit of a warm-fuzzy feeling about RSA strength, realize that every bit added doubles the brute-force keyspace. So if you can brute-force 40-bit SSL in 10 seconds, you can do 41-bit SSL in 20 seconds, but it'll take 98 billion-billion years for the same computer to do 128-bit SSL.
Of course, that presumes that your computer gets no faster in the next hundred pentillion years. If Moore's Law holds--really, more Moore's Observation--then you get an extra bit off the key 'for free' every eighteen months. You might be able to do the 128 bit SSL in ten seconds about a hundred and thirty years from now. Not that I believe Moore's Trend will continue unabated for that long, but who knows? Regardless, as long as processing speed doubles in less than half the time it takes to exhaust the keyspace, you might as well hold off on starting to try to brute-force the key.
I dunno--suppose an entire city were to buy their broadband access through them...those wireless access points have to connect to the Internet somehow, though some sort of provider.
Plus, the expensive and inconvenient hassles of tech support get offloaded on to the city.
What I'm thinking is, how will some health groups react? Adverse affects on health by wireless, especially in such large roll-out, are still not entirely proven harmless.
The can is open, the worms are everywhere. Any major city is already saturated with AM, FM, television, and cellular transmissions. If we're still mostly okay after all of that, then what harm is WiFi going to do on top?
I can think of one group who will be less than pleased about a city-wide wireless network: hospitals. They have a fit when someone has a cell phone turned on and they're inside the hospital.
Hospitals probably aren't too worried about wireless networks based outside the physical confines of their building. Hospitals usually have a lot of concrete in them, and they attenuate things like cellular and WiFi signals pretty well. They get bent out of shape with cell phones because you're bringing an active radio transmitter inside the walls, and possibly into areas that have been shielded from outside interference. (Break out the old inverse square law here, too--the cell phone on my belt one meter away from the heart monitor delivers RF interference to the instrument ten thousand times more efficiently than the cellular tower a hundred meters away. That neglects the attenuation effects of the building itself, as well as the harmonics and nonlinear RF effects my cell phone has in a small room full of metallic objects.)
1. they laugh at you
2. they ignore you
3. they fight you
4. you win.
Although I don't mean to pick on the parent poster specifically, I see this line of reasoning (paraphrasing a popular quotation) quite often applied to open source software.
We would all do to remember that being laughed at or ignored is not necessarily an indicator of guaranteed future success. Sometimes people ignore products that are genuinely hopeless, too. Perhaps there are some types of software development that genuinely don't lend themselves to a full-on open source apporach.
Then either the Merchant loses or the Bank loses. You, the cardholder don't unless you use a crappy card company that charges you to reissue a new card. Of course there's the inconvenience of being short of one usable credit card. But it's not as big a disaster to cardholders as some people make it.
In short with credit cards, if anything happens it's mainly SOMEONE ELSE's money involved NOT yours. Whereas cash, debit cards, cheques are riskier. Coz if anything happens - it's YOUR money.
Two points--first, the direct loser is the merchant. The bank (almost) never eats a fraud-related loss, because the merchant (supposedly) should be doing a better job of verifying the identity of the purchaser.
Second, except in extreme cases the merchant doesn't just suck up the loss and declare bankruptcy. It comes back to the rest of us in the form of higher prices. All the rest of us using that product or service get screwed because the original cardholder didn't bother to protect his card. The original cardholder may not even be on the hook, if the fradulent purchase is of something the cardholder doesn't ever use. It's related to the tragedy of the commons--in this case, the cardholder enjoys protection from fraud despite having made little effort to secure his information, but a large portion of society has to suck up the loss.
The Lie is the implied assumption that 1GB a second to the home is going to allow you to download a DVD in 5 seconds. It isn't. You'd have to cache it in ram, then write it out to disc, and unless you RAID your disc you're limited to 30-50MB/second, which isn't bad, but that still runs at a minute and a half to get your DVD to disc, and then as you don't have a large enough hard disc to keep too many of them around, you have to wait how long to burn it to a blank DVD.
Why do you have to write it to disk? You could--in principle--download it in five seconds, and immediately be sending a copy on to another user. Work directly from the RAM cache. Sure, you'll spend a minute writing it to disk, but so what? You can send a dozen copies out in that time. And it will take you that long to figure out what the next movie you should download will be....
Heck, if you have that kind of bandwidth to burn, you could do video on demand (both legal and infringing). Never write anything to disk. Download a movie to RAM, view the whole thing or whatever scenes you feel like watching, and clear the space when you close your movie player. You don't need to store anything on physical media at all....
It should be noted that the current Serial ATA spec allows hard drive transfers of up to 150 MB/s, and that will be going up to 300 MB/s in the near future. That will be fifteen seconds to write an entire DVD to disk, and the SATA roadmap calls for 600 MB/s transfers in a few more years.
I expect by the time I have 1 GB/s service to my home, I will also have a 600 MB/s SATA hard drive, and will indeed be able to write a DVD worth of data to my hard drive in seven or eight seconds. Hard drives are readily available in 200 GB sizes now; home users will have drives pushing a terabyte in a few years. Why burn a DVD when you can put two hundred movies on your hard drive? Four to eight GB of RAM will also be much more reasonably priced.
Jack's not lying--by the time we have gigabyte home internet access (call it about 10 Gbps), we'll definitely have the other hardware to support it.
LIE "But I visited the labs at Caltech, and they?re running an experiment called FAST where they can bring down a DVD-quality movie in 5 seconds. " what's that - about 1GB per second?? Anyone know a hard drive that fast and affordable for my edit suite??? Sure cache it in RAM first..... Seriously Jack...
Caching the four or five gigabytes of a DVD in RAM isn't that far out there. 512 MB of RAM sells for about a hundred Canadian dollars right now. It wasn't that long ago that the same money bought you one lousy meg. I won't be surprised if my next upgrade takes me to a full GB, or if I have four or eight GB of RAM in a few years' time. Power users can have several gigabytes on their desk now, if they feel like it.
Further, although 1 GB per second is awfully fast to write to a hard drive or storage system, 100 MB per second isn't--and that still represents an entire DVD in less than a minute. You can push that much over gigabit ethernet, too. I'm confused as to why the parent considers Jack to be lying in this instance--Caltech does have the FAST project, and one of its stated goalsis to develop 100 gigabit per second (and faster) wide area networking technology.
...vote fraud was so prevalent that hand-counting was just a waste of time, since the "counters" couldn't be trusted.
This implies an embarrassingly poorly implemented counting system, however.
In Canadian elections, the two people counting ballots from each box are drawn from lists provided by the political parties. One official is chosen from each list; the parties supplying the lists are the two that received the most votes in the last election. (Officially, one serves as deputy returning officer and one as poll clerk, in case anyone is wondering.) In addition, any candidate may supply to each polling area a monitor (in Canada called a 'scrutineer') to observe the conduct of both the polling and the counting.
In any case, the counters don't have to be trusted, because at a minimum two different selfish interests are represented at every stage of voting and counting.
To fudge a Canadian ballot count, you need to have (a minimum of) two corrupt officials, supplied by two different political parties. Even then, they usually only have access to two or three hundred ballots. With a voting machine, you just have to get to the one guy who sets up or services the thing--and the machines tend to be used by more voters.
So, unless your cellphone is expressing 115db ringtones, for over 15 minutes, and you're STILL listening to it, you have nothing to worry about. DUH!!!!!!
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Some rough guesstimates--I'm in a bit of a hurry this morning, and someone is welcome to do a sanity check.
Say the phone rings at perceived 85 dB when it's on your belt or in your pocket. That's loud enough to be heard over most traffic downtown, though you would likely miss it if a truck was going by. Figure the phone is one meter (a little over three feet) away from your eardrum.
When the phone is at your ear, the speaker is maybe three centimeters (about an inch) from your eardrum. That's a reduction in distance by a factor of around thirty or so. Since sound intensity follows an inverse square relation, you're looking at about a thousand times as much intensity. The decibel scale is logarithmic, so that's an extra 30 dB right there, putting us at 115 dB.
If the phone is a little louder than that initial estimate, or held slightly closer to the ear, we're moving towards 120 dB and up. Even if it's not doing permanent harm, those sounds are loud enough to be physically painful at short durations, especially if the person is listening intently and not expecting to be blasted. The startle response that's prompted could also be harmful.
Anyone who wants to take a small light aircraft up (and has one/rents one and has a licence) can pretty much go for it.
It's still a lot harder to get a license for and rental of a small aircraft than a car.
To get a driver's license in the United States, the chief requirement seems to be a pulse. To rent a car, you need a credit card in addition to the pulse.
Pilot's licenses--for good reason--are more difficult to get.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sure. Insurance has always been that way. They're looking for trends and correlations (not necessarily perfect correlations, either) in their aggregate data.
Because I'm male, I pay higher insurance rates. When I was younger, I paid higher insurance rates. I've never had an accident, and I don't plan on doing so. I'm a safe driver, but I pay a severe financial penalty because people with whom I share certain traits (youth, maleness) have a statistically significantly greater likelihood of being in an accident. My age and my gender I have no control over. My driving habits I do. It's a step forward if I can use the latter to influence my insurance premiums.
There are young, male drivers who drive safely. There are middle-aged females who are a menace on the road. Nevertheless, the age and gender correlations with accident rate are strong enough to base rate adjustments on. Similarly, there are people who drive fast, brake hard, and steer violently who don't have accidents--but I'm willing to bet that there's a correlation between those traits and an increased accident rate. (Why am I willing to make that bet? Simple: the insurance companies are willing to make that bet, and I know that they know their numbers.)
If it's fair to discriminate on the basis of age and gender in deciding someone's auto insurance rates, it seems pretty reasonable to discriminate on the basis of driving habits.
This is where 'mutual' insurance companies come in. They're owned by the policy holders, who can actually vote on corporate policy. Can't find an insurance company that lets you drive without a black box? Start one. I'm sure you'll find lots of like-minded individuals. Of course, if you discover that your rates are too high because they are bad drivers, well....
In medicine, these are the words that cause more morbidity and mortality....
Please, everyone--do yourselves a favour. If you're in such pain that walking ten feet leaves you short of breath, consult a physician. Even if you're apparently young and healthy, it could be a heart attack, or something equally nasty. Millions of years of evolution have given you a sense of pain for a reason. Listen to it--things don't hurt just because God is a sadist.
Chest pain is one of those things that can really challenge a physician because there are so many potential underlying causes, with widely varying degrees of severity. Sources of symptoms that may be confused with pneumothorax include, "costochondritis, esophageal origin, myocardial infarction or ischemia, pericarditis, pleurisy, pneumonia, and pulmonary embolus." Self-diagnosis is not recommended. :)
Particularly for acute circulatory problems (heart attack, stroke) time is of the essence. We've got a lot of really powerful treatments that are rendered essentially useless if you wait several hours. By that time, the tissue you want to save is dead.
It's not an unreasonable precaution. It doesn't do any harm--there's zero risk to the aircraft if the passengers turn off their damn phones.
On the other hand, that little FCC sticker means that your devices probably won't interfere with anything in a bad way--but how many phone manufacturers have performed exhaustive safety testing with their phones from every position in the cabin on every aircraft under every possible condition? Aircraft built in the last twenty or so years should be pretty resistant to RF interference, but there are a lot of birds much older than that still flying. Their designers probably didn't anticipate a profusion of personal radio transmitters in the cabin.
The airlines (and other passengers, for that matter) don't want to lose an aircraft to "electronic interference, possibly due to cellular phone usage", and Nokia doesn't want to have to issue a recall of one of their phones because they discover after the fact that "it may cause 737s to crash."
Ceramic pebbles won't burn; it would be like trying to ignite a dinner plate. It's one of the nice built-in safety features. At elevated temperatures the pebbles expand, which automatically takes you back below a critical mass.
Worst case, a few of the pebbles have physical flaws (minor cracks and whatnot) that permit a small amount of radioactivity to escape--but it's not a Chernobyl, and it probably would still put less radioactivity into the air than a coal plant.
Oops. You're quite right, of course. Too much typing on insufficient coffee this morning.
A fairer comparison might then be between Canada and California.
Canada's total area is a bit under 4 million square miles (land and water), and its population a shade over 30 million. If 60% of the Canadian population lives in 2.2% of the area, that's about 225 people per square mile.
California's total area is about 160,000 square miles, and its population is about 35 million. That's a density of 219 per square mile.
So--is broadband coverage in California better or worse than broadband coverage immediately north of the 49th parallel?
All the ones that would sell their souls to be noticed by Google?
There are more than a few 'real' geeks that would write the code in BASIC while in a barrel going over Niagara Falls in exchange for a chance to work for Sergey Brin.
Gaaaaaaah! We have an interesting thread on English, and linguistics, and word recognition, and then someone has to go and use a word like 'productized'.
Remember, kids--"Verbing weirds language." (Thanks to Bill Watterson for that observation, by the way.)
On the other hand, you can also focus your radio transmission. The inverse square law only applies if you are emitting in all directions. If you send a relatively well collimated beam out from Aricebo, you're going to have a very well-behaved signal that you can detect a long way off. Indeed, this was done decades ago.
The chief advantage of throwing rocks is that it requires no maintenance at this end. If you want to use a radio beacon, then you have to maintain it for as long as you want to transmit, and you're limited quite a bit in terms of the number of targets you can point to with each dish. Meanwhile, radio signals will get to your target a lot faster (whether this is a good thing or not is open to discussion) and are probably easier to detect than a rock.
Of course, I didn't say that in my post.
Reread it. I believe it is important to challenge threats to freedom, large and small, international and domestic.
An analogy: There are people in our cities without homes. Should I ignore the termites in my walls until all the homeless are sheltered? It's so much easier to be my brother's keeper....
For that matter, there are nations where many people lack food, or access to the most basic medical care. How could anyone in good conscience waste their breath complaining about the suppression of free speech in the West or in China when there are hundreds of millions of people without food, shelter, or medicine? Complaining about Chinese censorship is obviously inappropriate, since they should be happy to enjoy such a high standard of living in other respects.
Incidentally, I am a Canadian. I should think that basic rights are abrogated at the 49th parallel, not the Rio Grande. Cheers.
The grandparent poster was pointing out, quite correctly, that there are individuals in public office and private business who would like to see some 'objectionable' content on the Internet filtered. (What precisely constitutes such objectionable content is the subject of heated debate, of course.) Internet access in the United States is often screened for content in certain contexts--many public schools, workplaces, and public libraries.
The grandparent also observed that the Chinese firewall is a very solidly executed proof-of-concept, that demonstrates that such large-scale filtering is technically possible and at least reasonably effective, though it may have a few holes that the technically adept can slip through.
The grandparent did not presume that politicians in the West would automatically abuse such technology now that it is available and amply demonstrated. On the other hand, the grandparent poster quite correctly observed that there were individual politicians, political organizations, and lobbyists who would be more than happy to push for its adoption...and that it behooves us to watch that we don't slip into hypocrisy.
there are great fights, much more important fights, going on outside the borders of the western democracies for rights most of us take for granted, and that is a shame, as real good can be done if the children of the western democracies took up ideological and rhetorical arms in that fight, rather than obsessing over comparatively much more minor issues in their home countries
The reason why things are 'better' and freer in the West is because of the vigilance of people like the grandparent poster. The notion that encroachments on civil liberties in the West should be tolerated or just not spoken of because things are much worse elsewhere is...decidedly unpalatable. Why should it be impossible to take up 'ideological and rhetorical arms' to support freedom of expression and conscience everywhere, locally and abroad? "It could be worse"--the rallying cry of the indifferent and downtrodden.
It depends on how you define 'secure' and for what purposes you intend to use MD5. For a lot of cases, MD5 is still 'secure'.
Wang et al. have demonstrated that they can generate collisions in a reasonable period of time. They have not demonstrated that they can generate a collision for a given hash--a so-called preimage attack.
In other words, it is possible to produce two files full of junk that have the same MD5 hash. It's not possible (yet) to produce a file that has the same MD5 hash as a Linux kernel. It's not possible to create Trojan malware that shares an MD5 hash with a useful application. For most of us, that still counts as 'secure'.
Of course, that presumes that your computer gets no faster in the next hundred pentillion years. If Moore's Law holds--really, more Moore's Observation--then you get an extra bit off the key 'for free' every eighteen months. You might be able to do the 128 bit SSL in ten seconds about a hundred and thirty years from now. Not that I believe Moore's Trend will continue unabated for that long, but who knows? Regardless, as long as processing speed doubles in less than half the time it takes to exhaust the keyspace, you might as well hold off on starting to try to brute-force the key.
I dunno--suppose an entire city were to buy their broadband access through them...those wireless access points have to connect to the Internet somehow, though some sort of provider.
Plus, the expensive and inconvenient hassles of tech support get offloaded on to the city.
The can is open, the worms are everywhere. Any major city is already saturated with AM, FM, television, and cellular transmissions. If we're still mostly okay after all of that, then what harm is WiFi going to do on top?
Hospitals probably aren't too worried about wireless networks based outside the physical confines of their building. Hospitals usually have a lot of concrete in them, and they attenuate things like cellular and WiFi signals pretty well. They get bent out of shape with cell phones because you're bringing an active radio transmitter inside the walls, and possibly into areas that have been shielded from outside interference. (Break out the old inverse square law here, too--the cell phone on my belt one meter away from the heart monitor delivers RF interference to the instrument ten thousand times more efficiently than the cellular tower a hundred meters away. That neglects the attenuation effects of the building itself, as well as the harmonics and nonlinear RF effects my cell phone has in a small room full of metallic objects.)
2. they ignore you
3. they fight you
4. you win.
Although I don't mean to pick on the parent poster specifically, I see this line of reasoning (paraphrasing a popular quotation) quite often applied to open source software.
We would all do to remember that being laughed at or ignored is not necessarily an indicator of guaranteed future success. Sometimes people ignore products that are genuinely hopeless, too. Perhaps there are some types of software development that genuinely don't lend themselves to a full-on open source apporach.
In short with credit cards, if anything happens it's mainly SOMEONE ELSE's money involved NOT yours. Whereas cash, debit cards, cheques are riskier. Coz if anything happens - it's YOUR money.
Two points--first, the direct loser is the merchant. The bank (almost) never eats a fraud-related loss, because the merchant (supposedly) should be doing a better job of verifying the identity of the purchaser.
Second, except in extreme cases the merchant doesn't just suck up the loss and declare bankruptcy. It comes back to the rest of us in the form of higher prices. All the rest of us using that product or service get screwed because the original cardholder didn't bother to protect his card. The original cardholder may not even be on the hook, if the fradulent purchase is of something the cardholder doesn't ever use. It's related to the tragedy of the commons--in this case, the cardholder enjoys protection from fraud despite having made little effort to secure his information, but a large portion of society has to suck up the loss.
Why do you have to write it to disk? You could--in principle--download it in five seconds, and immediately be sending a copy on to another user. Work directly from the RAM cache. Sure, you'll spend a minute writing it to disk, but so what? You can send a dozen copies out in that time. And it will take you that long to figure out what the next movie you should download will be....
Heck, if you have that kind of bandwidth to burn, you could do video on demand (both legal and infringing). Never write anything to disk. Download a movie to RAM, view the whole thing or whatever scenes you feel like watching, and clear the space when you close your movie player. You don't need to store anything on physical media at all....
It should be noted that the current Serial ATA spec allows hard drive transfers of up to 150 MB/s, and that will be going up to 300 MB/s in the near future. That will be fifteen seconds to write an entire DVD to disk, and the SATA roadmap calls for 600 MB/s transfers in a few more years.
I expect by the time I have 1 GB/s service to my home, I will also have a 600 MB/s SATA hard drive, and will indeed be able to write a DVD worth of data to my hard drive in seven or eight seconds. Hard drives are readily available in 200 GB sizes now; home users will have drives pushing a terabyte in a few years. Why burn a DVD when you can put two hundred movies on your hard drive? Four to eight GB of RAM will also be much more reasonably priced.
Jack's not lying--by the time we have gigabyte home internet access (call it about 10 Gbps), we'll definitely have the other hardware to support it.
Caching the four or five gigabytes of a DVD in RAM isn't that far out there. 512 MB of RAM sells for about a hundred Canadian dollars right now. It wasn't that long ago that the same money bought you one lousy meg. I won't be surprised if my next upgrade takes me to a full GB, or if I have four or eight GB of RAM in a few years' time. Power users can have several gigabytes on their desk now, if they feel like it.
Further, although 1 GB per second is awfully fast to write to a hard drive or storage system, 100 MB per second isn't--and that still represents an entire DVD in less than a minute. You can push that much over gigabit ethernet, too. I'm confused as to why the parent considers Jack to be lying in this instance--Caltech does have the FAST project, and one of its stated goals is to develop 100 gigabit per second (and faster) wide area networking technology.
This implies an embarrassingly poorly implemented counting system, however.
In Canadian elections, the two people counting ballots from each box are drawn from lists provided by the political parties. One official is chosen from each list; the parties supplying the lists are the two that received the most votes in the last election. (Officially, one serves as deputy returning officer and one as poll clerk, in case anyone is wondering.) In addition, any candidate may supply to each polling area a monitor (in Canada called a 'scrutineer') to observe the conduct of both the polling and the counting.
In any case, the counters don't have to be trusted, because at a minimum two different selfish interests are represented at every stage of voting and counting.
To fudge a Canadian ballot count, you need to have (a minimum of) two corrupt officials, supplied by two different political parties. Even then, they usually only have access to two or three hundred ballots. With a voting machine, you just have to get to the one guy who sets up or services the thing--and the machines tend to be used by more voters.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Some rough guesstimates--I'm in a bit of a hurry this morning, and someone is welcome to do a sanity check.
Say the phone rings at perceived 85 dB when it's on your belt or in your pocket. That's loud enough to be heard over most traffic downtown, though you would likely miss it if a truck was going by. Figure the phone is one meter (a little over three feet) away from your eardrum.
When the phone is at your ear, the speaker is maybe three centimeters (about an inch) from your eardrum. That's a reduction in distance by a factor of around thirty or so. Since sound intensity follows an inverse square relation, you're looking at about a thousand times as much intensity. The decibel scale is logarithmic, so that's an extra 30 dB right there, putting us at 115 dB.
If the phone is a little louder than that initial estimate, or held slightly closer to the ear, we're moving towards 120 dB and up. Even if it's not doing permanent harm, those sounds are loud enough to be physically painful at short durations, especially if the person is listening intently and not expecting to be blasted. The startle response that's prompted could also be harmful.
It's still a lot harder to get a license for and rental of a small aircraft than a car.
To get a driver's license in the United States, the chief requirement seems to be a pulse. To rent a car, you need a credit card in addition to the pulse.
Pilot's licenses--for good reason--are more difficult to get.