There is no real way for an individual to know if the receiver is driving.
Of course there is. "Hey Bob, I'm going to be driving my kid back to Uni this afternoon and I'd like you to keep an eye on the ManU football match for me, ok?" You know he's driving, he TOLD YOU.
But the cell provider knows - it has GPS data or data of towers being used.
Wrong again. GPS/cell site data cannot tell him someone is driving. It only tells the cell provider where he is.
His point is that the sender may know someone is driving but expect that driver to show reasonable judgement before reading or responding. Simply knowing someone is driving shouldn't hold the sender liable.
I think that's why the following was included in the summary:
"... if the texter knows, or has special reason to know, the recipient will view the text while driving."
So not "if the sender knows the recipient is driving", but a much more stringent "knows the driver will view the text".
For example, you know your friend is a Manchester United fanatic and he's missing the match because he's driving his kid back to Uni. You text him with the subject "ManU match status" or simply "GOOOOOOOOOOOAL!". You can be pretty sure he's going to read it right away. In fact, your motive in texting in the first place is to keep him up to date on the match.
My wife sends me text messages frequently while I'm driving, but that doesn't mean I whip out my phone to check it immediately upon alert.
Then since she would know this, she's not liable.
This isn't much different than other laws. A bartender can be liable if he serves a patron who is obviously drunk and has reason to believe that the patron will attempt to drive. We've got a case in court here where not only the last bartender to serve a guy who caused a fatal crash is being sued, but the bartender at the bar the guy was at before the last bar. And both bartenders correctly refused to serve him. That's why he got in his car and drove away.
So because the car's going to follow the law, you're upset?
The quickest way to create a traffic jam and an immense road hazard is to follow every driving law to the letter.
In the past, truck drivers have done this when they want to make a statement about a new law they don't like. All it takes is one for each lane. Each truck going exactly the truck speed limit (often lower than auto). The backup goes for miles. Even if they obey a law that prohibits trucks in the left-most lane of a more than 2 lane freeway, it still blocks traffic quite well.
If every autodrive car follows the laws to the letter, there will be no increase in traffic capacity. They'll all be going the same speed, and since they aren't passing, they'll all be in the right lane. Plenty of room for real drivers to play.
Now, the question is, will they all be obeying the laws? Will each vehicle computer do an analysis on its own driving ability and the outside conditions and determine the maximum safe speed? Will this become a sales point? "Our cars are safer than brand X at higher speeds under the same conditions, so you'll get where you want to go faster?"
My suggestions, having never done this - you need actual human contacts set up in advance who believe your story.
No, more important is being honest. Asking for a receipt that isn't honest is trying to push your corporate shady ethics off on an OS developer. It's not much different than going to bar for a "business meeting" and buying rounds until everyone is sloshed, and then asking the bar for a receipt that says you bought dinner because your corporate policy won't reimburse for liquor.
If they'd asked for a receipt that said "donation" instead of "services rendered: support", the chances are better the offer wouldn't have been viewed as a scam. As it was, it was a scam -- scamming the company auditors into thinking an expense was a valid expense and not a voluntary handout. From the description of the issue ("an underspend") it sounds like there was a contract from an outside party that still had money left over, and instead of saying "it didn't cost us the full amount to do the work for you, you don't have to pay it all", they decided to pad the expenses with a few donations. We don't know for sure, but that's the impression I get.
They need to understand how businesses work (it sounds stupid to people outside of large companies that budgets go away if you don't spend them,
I think most of them understand how business works, know that asking for a phony receipt is unethical, and know that accepting a large cash donation from a corporate vendor will create tax implications that they may not want to deal with. Every year I have to deal with a self-employment schedule C (IIRC) that I'd rather not have to deal with, all because some money I make comes in as royalties instead of in my normal paycheck. It makes my taxes much more complicated than I'd like them to be. Especially if you're talking about a group of developers and expecting one of them to accept the money (and tax liability) for money that they'll all benefit from. I mean, you only need to be paying a 10% tax rate and have ten developers to share the donation for it to be a loss for whoever accepts the money.
Just like Warren Buffet says (paraphrased), just because you'll have to pay tax on it, doesn't make anyone stop trying to earn an extra dollar.... except apparently you.
But paying tax so you can earn nothing more is often a reason not to earn more.
Some company with a few extra bucks wants to "donate" money to you in exchange for "services". Since you weren't before, you now need to become a business and start paying self-employment taxes. And taxes on income. To the state, to the feds, and maybe to your local city. You need to spend the time on the paperwork, and sometimes a mid-year surprise payment (like at June 30) will trigger penalties for failure to pay quarterly taxes.
That last one bit me when I was let go from my last job. I had a pile of options that were bought back, I had a sudden influx of taxable income. I spend most of the year unemployed, but when I filed my taxes I wound up having to spend a lot of time explaining to the friendly IRS that I had no way of predicting I was going to be fired and thus no way of knowing I was going to need to pay estimated taxes in the quarter before the actual yearly filing date. It took a lot of my time getting this straightened out. Time an OS developer might want to use to develop software, and a cost of getting "free money" that you've forgotten to include in your "extra dollar" calculations.
And then, now there is a company out there that has an official receipt for money in exchange for "support". Hey, we need these things included in your software. We're paying for support...
Imagine the one landing at San Francisco had been automated...
You do realize that even with automated landings the pilots are paying especially close attention and are ready to step in at a moment's notice? The crew and aircraft both have rigorous certification requirements before they can do this under instrument conditions (and probably visual, as well). They aren't reading a book or looking at the scenery go by or any of the other mundane tasks that automated car proponents are telling us we'll be able to do while our magical cars drive us where we want to go. They aren't even allowed to chat about non-flight-related matters during sterile cockpit times, which "approach and landing" are. And yet you think we'd be so much safer if landings were automated?
We have had semi-automated and automated railway systems for decades.
And we've had failures of those systems that have resulted in deaths. Even in a system where all the cars are connected together so they all either stop or go at the same time, and where different trains have separation based on time and are monitored by a master control system. Sometimes the monitoring system fails and instead of everyone stopping, nobody stops except the train that is run into by the following one.
You need to read Risks Digest more often, if you aren't already. You'd lose your belief that 'fail safe' really is the golden solution were you to do so.
I'm considering it but the friends that could technically do it may not care.
You can do a lot to reduce their ability for traffic analysis if you just start sending encrypted messages on a regular basis. Your friends don't even have to be able to decrypt them, it's the traffic on the wire they're analyzing. I.e., if you send 19 meaningless encrypted emails a day for six months, then when you start sending 19 real encrypted emails a day the pattern will have already been established. They may have spent the time breaking some of your email the first month, but after a while you'll be lower on the suspect list than someone who just started sending encrypted emails and your sudden use of encryption to send sensitive information won't raise a red flag bringing you back into focus.
They also use gmail for their mail, which even encrypted and pre-Snoden, I've not trusted much.
Properly encrypted, Google will get nothing from an email that passes through their system. If you're scared even when using encryption, you need to use better encryption. Maybe change from ROT13 to... ROT26?
But again, it still depends on the bits being "random enough". What that is varies by circumstance.
One of the other similar non-OTP methods of encoding a message is called a book code. A text message becomes a string of numbers giving page/line/word numbers of the desired cleartext word. The "shared key" is the knowledge of what book is being used. Since the same word can almost always be encoded as a different number set each time it appears, and the message can contain any number of nulls, this code is reasonably hard to break. Nobody would dare claim that the key is anything close to random, yet the code is effective.
The wifi is on a small add-in board, but not the antenna. The antenna is in the display frame around the screen. There is a cable connecting the board to it. Cut that cable and presto, no wifi.
Why yes, there is, in addition to the small WiFi board, a magic djin living in the computer who uses the installed antenna to transmit magic pixie signals to the NSA using the closest satellite/Wendy's drive up order board/RFID reader/embedded traffic light sensor. It is much more efficient and betterer to cause permanent damage to a computer to prevent this signal from being transmitted than to just remove the board that creates the real WiFi signal so it can be replaced later if necessary and help maintain whatever resale value the computer has.
You realize you're now inventing problems that don't exist, just so you have something imaginary to complain about, right?
You realize I quoted someone else who was talking of the wonderful world we'll be living in when cars all move "in unison" from a traffic light, right? I didn't create the problem, I pointed it out.
So you think that automatic cars will be more susceptible to rear-end collisions than human-driven cars?
What a pity that I didn't actually say that, otherwise your rather long response might have been insightful.
So, in summary, the objection you raise concerns a technical problem with a technical solution,
Which will include programming such that all cars don't move ahead in unison from a stoplight, which is the grand and glorious vision of the person I was responding to. Because you fabricated what you replied to, you missed the revelation that you actually agree with me.
Maybe I missed the morning news, but I'm not sure what you're saying there.
I'm saying that finding a common set of suitably pseudo-random bits to use as a one-time-pad is rather trivial -- an MP3 (at least the bits that are the compressed data and not the text tags), a wav file from a commercial audio CD track, the jpeg image from an online newspaper, etc. And that you can display irony by using something the NSA itself produces (which of course there is no real podcast by that name or source, but irony needs not be factual to be irony) such as from here. You just have to agree ahead of time what to use.
Banks were not forced to make bad loans. The various incentive programs still required the borrower to pass through the bank's lending criteria before making a loan.
And those lending criteria were under government scrutiny to prevent any suspicion of the awful problem of "redlining". Why, it's just awful that a bank might think that certain low-rent, low property-value neighborhoods just might have and attract a large percentage of, can I use the word safely?, poor people who really couldn't afford a loan? When the government is scrutinizing your lending reports and might see that you don't have the same percentage of approved loans from area A that you do from area B, your "lending criteria" tend to be less strict. Your lending criteria adjust to meet the demands of the regulators or you go out of business. You want to expand your bank and put a new branch somewhere? Make sure the regulators are happy with your loan statistics or you don't get to.
Couple that with the mantra of the time that "home ownership is a right" and that everyone should be able to afford one.
I got my home loan during that boom time. I remember the nonsense that was being accepted as qualification for a loan. It wasn't quite as loose as "if you've ever seen a $5 bill sometime in your life you're qualified", but it wasn't far from it. ARMs were being pushed so that people who couldn't afford a mortgage at fixed rates could still get a loan. I took one look at the ARM information and thought "what moron would accept this?"* And today we have people in ads for credit counseling services crying that "we couldn't afford the balloon". You couldn't afford the loan at a fixed rate, why should you have thought that you could afford the balloon you knew was coming? But you wanted a house you knew you weren't going to be able to pay for in the long run, and the bank wanted to make a loan so that its statistics looked good. Everyone was motivated to make the deal -- based on government regulation.
Now, nobody had any guns drawn, but I'd still say that the regulations forced the banks to make bad loans. Yes, the banks could have refused and faced huge penalties from government regulators, I guess. You're right after all. No bank was forced to make a bad loan. But then, no borrower was forced to accept an ARM, and no borrower was forced to try buying a home they couldn't pay for, either.
* ARMs were a great way of creating a transient population, or serving an existing one. I live in a college town. The sales pitch was "if you are going to move in the next five years anyway, an ARM with a balloon five years from now is perfect for you..." But for people who intend on staying past the balloon, it sucks really bad.
The bank got paid back long before the loan went bad. That removed the bank's incentive to not make bad loans.
If there was no incentive for the banks to make bad loans they wouldn't have made them. The government regulators in their zeal to end any hint of discrimination in the marketplace created that incentive, even when the discrimination was based on "will you be able to pay the loan"? Then someone else bought the loans. They weren't forced to do that.
In the long run, the obvious consequences of making bad loans took place. Even when the bubble was bursting, Dodd and Frank denied the problem, because they knew it was a natural result of their meddling in the markets. Whether it was a lot of small banks going under because they kept the bad paper, or a few large ones because they bought it from the others, the end result was still a burst bubble and a lot of people who got caught being unable to pay for the home they thought was their right. And a lot of people who were smart enough not to try buying something they couldn't afford were stuck paying for the others whose eyes were bigger than their fiscal stomach. You're welcome, by the way.
but you ignore massive amounts of evidence that this pure free market capitalism has been causing strife and economic ruination since the 70's.
There is no pure free market capitalism.
Just for one example, it was the deregulation of the housing and mortgage industry that allowed "free market" to destroy the economy in 2008.
No, it was the regulation of the home loan "industry" that created the problem that anyone with any sense could have seen coming. When you force banks to make bad loans, those bad loans have to go somewhere. When people with as much access to information as Dodd and Frank keep claiming there is no problem and keep stonewalling any regulation that would have helped prevent the collapse, you have to wonder why.
Competition and free markets are also the cause of much evil in the world today.
No, abuse of power is the cause of much evil in the world today. There are no truly free markets, so that can't be the excuse. Perhaps if the markets were freer and legislation and external control wasn't being applied to turn the market into a political and social tool for power. You know, like if banking regulations didn't force banks to make home loans to people who couldn't afford them if they wanted to avoid lawsuits over potential redlining, then maybe the banks wouldn't have had so much bad paper to find some way of dealing with. You know, just a thought.
"Life is a journey, yes, but actually making the journey is a waste of time that can be better spent doing something else."
Like I said, it is a waste of time trying to explain one side to the other. Those who think driving is a waste of time have already defined their priorities and pitched their tents in the "destination now, please" camp. It's almost circular reasoning. "I do not think there is any value in the experience of going between points A and B, therefore there cannot possibly be any value in the experience of going between points A and B for either you or me."
Every car moving forward in unison at a stoplight won't happen until all the cars are automated, but the automated cars will certainly be able to accelerate just as quickly as a human when the car in front of them starts moving forward.
This is such a wonderful argument... against automated cars.
Stopping distance is proportional to the speed of the vehicle. The distance between you and the vehicle in front of you therefore needs to increase as the speed of your vehicle increases. Imagine a row of automated cars, all accelerating in unison from a traffic light. Somewhere down the street they'll all be going at 30MPH, and all still be separated by 3 feet. Very nice! Automation rocks. See how efficiently the traffic is moving. See all the happy smiling people in the automated cars, applying lipstick or shaving or reading books on their way to work.
Then someone steps into the street unexpectedly and the first car in the line has to brake suddenly. Bang! Bang! Bang! Hear the sound of multiple rear end collisions.
The automation software has capacity to "see ahead", so to speak, and can and should get the vehicle into a safe state when it looks like a handover is inevitable.
You are sitting there watching a movie as your car drives you down the street. A child pops out from between parked cars and... your automation software had no way of "seeing ahead" that this would happen. The best it can do is sense something in the road and slam on the brakes. The car behind you... has no way of "seeing ahead" that your car would slam on the brakes.
But wait, it was only a dog. The choice of running over a dog versus creating a collision with the car behind you (and the one behind it...) a human could make. What will your automation software do?
The split second taking over of a wheel is your fantasy, it's basically impossible unless you're paying full attention the entire time - at that point you might as well drive the car anyway, why bother with automation.
You've just made the best argument so far why automated cars shouldn't be allowed on the streets. You have to pay attention so you can take over in case of trouble anyway, why bother with the automation?
Imagine the flight into the Hudson had the system been automated. Sully sitting there reading a book while the plane slammed into the ground. Yes, pilots are paying a lot of attention during takeoff and landing because those times are the most hazardous. They are the most hazardous because they involve a piece of machinery with human life at stake traveling at reasonable rates of speed close to the ground and other large immovable objects. As a pilot, I can tell you I concentrate the most during landing and takeoff not because the lives of any passengers are in my hands, but because I will be the first one at the scene of the crash and I value my life.
So, why is your car, containing you, moving at a reasonable rate of speed close to the ground and other large immovable (and many moving) objects really that different?
You simply have zero clue what you're talking about.
Anyone who thinks that human-created automated driving systems will be perfect and never require instant human attention to avert disaster is the one with zero clue.
You've just demonstrated the difference I wrote about. Trying to explain one side to the other is a waste of time. Let's just leave it at, you not wanting to have to pay attention to anything while something drives you somewhere isn't sufficient reason to take that from other people.
What you want you can buy -- hire someone to drive you. What you want to take from others cannot be recovered. Once automated roads become the law, you won't be allowed to drive yourself. Manual driving won't fit with automated cars. The automated cars won't know what to expect from human drivers. Mixing the two is a recipe for disaster.
I can't relate to people who wouldn't want a self-driving car.
Perhaps this is the most applicable place for this philosophical comment: for some people life is a destination, for others it is a journey. You value the end result; others value the process of getting there. You would prefer a radio out of a box; others like the kit (Heath, we miss 'ya).
Any sentence that begins with "The UN doesn't have an agenda..." is patently absurd.
Any reader who stops after 6 words in a compound sentence is patently absurd, and anyone who reads what I wrote and comes away with the idea I said that the UN has no agenda is insane or illiterate or both.
but if you actually want to solve the problem, the care of both parties is equally important.
No, the care of both parties is not equally important. The victim did not choose to be one, he deserves much more concern than the person who made the decisions that led up to the problem. Yes, some people care so little for others that teaching them a well-paying craft and then turning them loose won't prevent them from doing it again. Those people need to be put someplace with others like them and kept away from their potential victims, and those are the prisons in the US that this discussion is about. Maximum security to keep them from killing each other and the guards, or the person who ratted them out and testified against them -- also known as "the victim".
In other words, a slap on the wrist and a strong scolding won't "solve the problem", and saying that the concern for the criminal is as important as the concern for the victim is just insulting to the victims.
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There is no real way for an individual to know if the receiver is driving.
Of course there is. "Hey Bob, I'm going to be driving my kid back to Uni this afternoon and I'd like you to keep an eye on the ManU football match for me, ok?" You know he's driving, he TOLD YOU.
But the cell provider knows - it has GPS data or data of towers being used.
Wrong again. GPS/cell site data cannot tell him someone is driving. It only tells the cell provider where he is.
His point is that the sender may know someone is driving but expect that driver to show reasonable judgement before reading or responding. Simply knowing someone is driving shouldn't hold the sender liable.
I think that's why the following was included in the summary:
So not "if the sender knows the recipient is driving", but a much more stringent "knows the driver will view the text".
For example, you know your friend is a Manchester United fanatic and he's missing the match because he's driving his kid back to Uni. You text him with the subject "ManU match status" or simply "GOOOOOOOOOOOAL!". You can be pretty sure he's going to read it right away. In fact, your motive in texting in the first place is to keep him up to date on the match.
My wife sends me text messages frequently while I'm driving, but that doesn't mean I whip out my phone to check it immediately upon alert.
Then since she would know this, she's not liable.
This isn't much different than other laws. A bartender can be liable if he serves a patron who is obviously drunk and has reason to believe that the patron will attempt to drive. We've got a case in court here where not only the last bartender to serve a guy who caused a fatal crash is being sued, but the bartender at the bar the guy was at before the last bar. And both bartenders correctly refused to serve him. That's why he got in his car and drove away.
So because the car's going to follow the law, you're upset?
The quickest way to create a traffic jam and an immense road hazard is to follow every driving law to the letter.
In the past, truck drivers have done this when they want to make a statement about a new law they don't like. All it takes is one for each lane. Each truck going exactly the truck speed limit (often lower than auto). The backup goes for miles. Even if they obey a law that prohibits trucks in the left-most lane of a more than 2 lane freeway, it still blocks traffic quite well.
If every autodrive car follows the laws to the letter, there will be no increase in traffic capacity. They'll all be going the same speed, and since they aren't passing, they'll all be in the right lane. Plenty of room for real drivers to play.
Now, the question is, will they all be obeying the laws? Will each vehicle computer do an analysis on its own driving ability and the outside conditions and determine the maximum safe speed? Will this become a sales point? "Our cars are safer than brand X at higher speeds under the same conditions, so you'll get where you want to go faster?"
My suggestions, having never done this - you need actual human contacts set up in advance who believe your story.
No, more important is being honest. Asking for a receipt that isn't honest is trying to push your corporate shady ethics off on an OS developer. It's not much different than going to bar for a "business meeting" and buying rounds until everyone is sloshed, and then asking the bar for a receipt that says you bought dinner because your corporate policy won't reimburse for liquor.
If they'd asked for a receipt that said "donation" instead of "services rendered: support", the chances are better the offer wouldn't have been viewed as a scam. As it was, it was a scam -- scamming the company auditors into thinking an expense was a valid expense and not a voluntary handout. From the description of the issue ("an underspend") it sounds like there was a contract from an outside party that still had money left over, and instead of saying "it didn't cost us the full amount to do the work for you, you don't have to pay it all", they decided to pad the expenses with a few donations. We don't know for sure, but that's the impression I get.
They need to understand how businesses work (it sounds stupid to people outside of large companies that budgets go away if you don't spend them,
I think most of them understand how business works, know that asking for a phony receipt is unethical, and know that accepting a large cash donation from a corporate vendor will create tax implications that they may not want to deal with. Every year I have to deal with a self-employment schedule C (IIRC) that I'd rather not have to deal with, all because some money I make comes in as royalties instead of in my normal paycheck. It makes my taxes much more complicated than I'd like them to be. Especially if you're talking about a group of developers and expecting one of them to accept the money (and tax liability) for money that they'll all benefit from. I mean, you only need to be paying a 10% tax rate and have ten developers to share the donation for it to be a loss for whoever accepts the money.
Just like Warren Buffet says (paraphrased), just because you'll have to pay tax on it, doesn't make anyone stop trying to earn an extra dollar.... except apparently you.
But paying tax so you can earn nothing more is often a reason not to earn more.
Some company with a few extra bucks wants to "donate" money to you in exchange for "services". Since you weren't before, you now need to become a business and start paying self-employment taxes. And taxes on income. To the state, to the feds, and maybe to your local city. You need to spend the time on the paperwork, and sometimes a mid-year surprise payment (like at June 30) will trigger penalties for failure to pay quarterly taxes.
That last one bit me when I was let go from my last job. I had a pile of options that were bought back, I had a sudden influx of taxable income. I spend most of the year unemployed, but when I filed my taxes I wound up having to spend a lot of time explaining to the friendly IRS that I had no way of predicting I was going to be fired and thus no way of knowing I was going to need to pay estimated taxes in the quarter before the actual yearly filing date. It took a lot of my time getting this straightened out. Time an OS developer might want to use to develop software, and a cost of getting "free money" that you've forgotten to include in your "extra dollar" calculations.
And then, now there is a company out there that has an official receipt for money in exchange for "support". Hey, we need these things included in your software. We're paying for support ...
Imagine the one landing at San Francisco had been automated...
You do realize that even with automated landings the pilots are paying especially close attention and are ready to step in at a moment's notice? The crew and aircraft both have rigorous certification requirements before they can do this under instrument conditions (and probably visual, as well). They aren't reading a book or looking at the scenery go by or any of the other mundane tasks that automated car proponents are telling us we'll be able to do while our magical cars drive us where we want to go. They aren't even allowed to chat about non-flight-related matters during sterile cockpit times, which "approach and landing" are. And yet you think we'd be so much safer if landings were automated?
We have had semi-automated and automated railway systems for decades.
And we've had failures of those systems that have resulted in deaths. Even in a system where all the cars are connected together so they all either stop or go at the same time, and where different trains have separation based on time and are monitored by a master control system. Sometimes the monitoring system fails and instead of everyone stopping, nobody stops except the train that is run into by the following one.
You need to read Risks Digest more often, if you aren't already. You'd lose your belief that 'fail safe' really is the golden solution were you to do so.
I'm considering it but the friends that could technically do it may not care.
You can do a lot to reduce their ability for traffic analysis if you just start sending encrypted messages on a regular basis. Your friends don't even have to be able to decrypt them, it's the traffic on the wire they're analyzing. I.e., if you send 19 meaningless encrypted emails a day for six months, then when you start sending 19 real encrypted emails a day the pattern will have already been established. They may have spent the time breaking some of your email the first month, but after a while you'll be lower on the suspect list than someone who just started sending encrypted emails and your sudden use of encryption to send sensitive information won't raise a red flag bringing you back into focus.
They also use gmail for their mail, which even encrypted and pre-Snoden, I've not trusted much.
Properly encrypted, Google will get nothing from an email that passes through their system. If you're scared even when using encryption, you need to use better encryption. Maybe change from ROT13 to ... ROT26?
But again, it still depends on the bits being "random enough". What that is varies by circumstance.
One of the other similar non-OTP methods of encoding a message is called a book code. A text message becomes a string of numbers giving page/line/word numbers of the desired cleartext word. The "shared key" is the knowledge of what book is being used. Since the same word can almost always be encoded as a different number set each time it appears, and the message can contain any number of nulls, this code is reasonably hard to break. Nobody would dare claim that the key is anything close to random, yet the code is effective.
The wifi is on a small add-in board, but not the antenna. The antenna is in the display frame around the screen. There is a cable connecting the board to it. Cut that cable and presto, no wifi.
Why yes, there is, in addition to the small WiFi board, a magic djin living in the computer who uses the installed antenna to transmit magic pixie signals to the NSA using the closest satellite/Wendy's drive up order board/RFID reader/embedded traffic light sensor. It is much more efficient and betterer to cause permanent damage to a computer to prevent this signal from being transmitted than to just remove the board that creates the real WiFi signal so it can be replaced later if necessary and help maintain whatever resale value the computer has.
You realize you're now inventing problems that don't exist, just so you have something imaginary to complain about, right?
You realize I quoted someone else who was talking of the wonderful world we'll be living in when cars all move "in unison" from a traffic light, right? I didn't create the problem, I pointed it out.
So you think that automatic cars will be more susceptible to rear-end collisions than human-driven cars?
What a pity that I didn't actually say that, otherwise your rather long response might have been insightful.
So, in summary, the objection you raise concerns a technical problem with a technical solution,
Which will include programming such that all cars don't move ahead in unison from a stoplight, which is the grand and glorious vision of the person I was responding to. Because you fabricated what you replied to, you missed the revelation that you actually agree with me.
Maybe I missed the morning news, but I'm not sure what you're saying there.
I'm saying that finding a common set of suitably pseudo-random bits to use as a one-time-pad is rather trivial -- an MP3 (at least the bits that are the compressed data and not the text tags), a wav file from a commercial audio CD track, the jpeg image from an online newspaper, etc. And that you can display irony by using something the NSA itself produces (which of course there is no real podcast by that name or source, but irony needs not be factual to be irony) such as from here. You just have to agree ahead of time what to use.
The truth is, Snowden's info isn't actually revealing of any *new* info, only operational details of already-reported on programs...
Our local senator is one of the ones who has been hinting to us that this is going on since early this year. He couldn't tell us what it was, but ...
He also didn't think it was enough of a problem to bother trying to stop it.
It is ridiculously easy to agree on continuously changing keys for one-time-pad encryption. All you need is a bit of imagination.
"The one-time-pad is the binary from the current 'This Week in the NSA' podcast."
Open up the laptop and remove the wifi antenna
On most of the Dell systems I've dealt with over the last few years, the WiFi is on a small add-in board.
Or you can just operate in a Faraday cage and avoid Tempest and WiFi and Bluetooth and all kinds of issues at the same time.
Banks were not forced to make bad loans. The various incentive programs still required the borrower to pass through the bank's lending criteria before making a loan.
And those lending criteria were under government scrutiny to prevent any suspicion of the awful problem of "redlining". Why, it's just awful that a bank might think that certain low-rent, low property-value neighborhoods just might have and attract a large percentage of, can I use the word safely?, poor people who really couldn't afford a loan? When the government is scrutinizing your lending reports and might see that you don't have the same percentage of approved loans from area A that you do from area B, your "lending criteria" tend to be less strict. Your lending criteria adjust to meet the demands of the regulators or you go out of business. You want to expand your bank and put a new branch somewhere? Make sure the regulators are happy with your loan statistics or you don't get to.
Couple that with the mantra of the time that "home ownership is a right" and that everyone should be able to afford one.
I got my home loan during that boom time. I remember the nonsense that was being accepted as qualification for a loan. It wasn't quite as loose as "if you've ever seen a $5 bill sometime in your life you're qualified", but it wasn't far from it. ARMs were being pushed so that people who couldn't afford a mortgage at fixed rates could still get a loan. I took one look at the ARM information and thought "what moron would accept this?"* And today we have people in ads for credit counseling services crying that "we couldn't afford the balloon". You couldn't afford the loan at a fixed rate, why should you have thought that you could afford the balloon you knew was coming? But you wanted a house you knew you weren't going to be able to pay for in the long run, and the bank wanted to make a loan so that its statistics looked good. Everyone was motivated to make the deal -- based on government regulation.
Now, nobody had any guns drawn, but I'd still say that the regulations forced the banks to make bad loans. Yes, the banks could have refused and faced huge penalties from government regulators, I guess. You're right after all. No bank was forced to make a bad loan. But then, no borrower was forced to accept an ARM, and no borrower was forced to try buying a home they couldn't pay for, either.
* ARMs were a great way of creating a transient population, or serving an existing one. I live in a college town. The sales pitch was "if you are going to move in the next five years anyway, an ARM with a balloon five years from now is perfect for you..." But for people who intend on staying past the balloon, it sucks really bad.
The bank got paid back long before the loan went bad. That removed the bank's incentive to not make bad loans.
If there was no incentive for the banks to make bad loans they wouldn't have made them. The government regulators in their zeal to end any hint of discrimination in the marketplace created that incentive, even when the discrimination was based on "will you be able to pay the loan"? Then someone else bought the loans. They weren't forced to do that.
In the long run, the obvious consequences of making bad loans took place. Even when the bubble was bursting, Dodd and Frank denied the problem, because they knew it was a natural result of their meddling in the markets. Whether it was a lot of small banks going under because they kept the bad paper, or a few large ones because they bought it from the others, the end result was still a burst bubble and a lot of people who got caught being unable to pay for the home they thought was their right. And a lot of people who were smart enough not to try buying something they couldn't afford were stuck paying for the others whose eyes were bigger than their fiscal stomach. You're welcome, by the way.
but you ignore massive amounts of evidence that this pure free market capitalism has been causing strife and economic ruination since the 70's.
There is no pure free market capitalism.
Just for one example, it was the deregulation of the housing and mortgage industry that allowed "free market" to destroy the economy in 2008.
No, it was the regulation of the home loan "industry" that created the problem that anyone with any sense could have seen coming. When you force banks to make bad loans, those bad loans have to go somewhere. When people with as much access to information as Dodd and Frank keep claiming there is no problem and keep stonewalling any regulation that would have helped prevent the collapse, you have to wonder why.
Competition and free markets are also the cause of much evil in the world today.
No, abuse of power is the cause of much evil in the world today. There are no truly free markets, so that can't be the excuse. Perhaps if the markets were freer and legislation and external control wasn't being applied to turn the market into a political and social tool for power. You know, like if banking regulations didn't force banks to make home loans to people who couldn't afford them if they wanted to avoid lawsuits over potential redlining, then maybe the banks wouldn't have had so much bad paper to find some way of dealing with. You know, just a thought.
The car will maintain a distance you can set behind the car in front. ... But it sees motorcycles (and cows).
And just how far do you program your car to stay behind the cow ahead of you on the freeway?
"Life is a journey, yes, but actually making the journey is a waste of time that can be better spent doing something else." Like I said, it is a waste of time trying to explain one side to the other. Those who think driving is a waste of time have already defined their priorities and pitched their tents in the "destination now, please" camp. It's almost circular reasoning. "I do not think there is any value in the experience of going between points A and B, therefore there cannot possibly be any value in the experience of going between points A and B for either you or me."
Every car moving forward in unison at a stoplight won't happen until all the cars are automated, but the automated cars will certainly be able to accelerate just as quickly as a human when the car in front of them starts moving forward.
This is such a wonderful argument ... against automated cars.
Stopping distance is proportional to the speed of the vehicle. The distance between you and the vehicle in front of you therefore needs to increase as the speed of your vehicle increases. Imagine a row of automated cars, all accelerating in unison from a traffic light. Somewhere down the street they'll all be going at 30MPH, and all still be separated by 3 feet. Very nice! Automation rocks. See how efficiently the traffic is moving. See all the happy smiling people in the automated cars, applying lipstick or shaving or reading books on their way to work.
Then someone steps into the street unexpectedly and the first car in the line has to brake suddenly. Bang! Bang! Bang! Hear the sound of multiple rear end collisions.
The automation software has capacity to "see ahead", so to speak, and can and should get the vehicle into a safe state when it looks like a handover is inevitable.
You are sitting there watching a movie as your car drives you down the street. A child pops out from between parked cars and ... your automation software had no way of "seeing ahead" that this would happen. The best it can do is sense something in the road and slam on the brakes. The car behind you ... has no way of "seeing ahead" that your car would slam on the brakes.
But wait, it was only a dog. The choice of running over a dog versus creating a collision with the car behind you (and the one behind it...) a human could make. What will your automation software do?
The split second taking over of a wheel is your fantasy, it's basically impossible unless you're paying full attention the entire time - at that point you might as well drive the car anyway, why bother with automation.
You've just made the best argument so far why automated cars shouldn't be allowed on the streets. You have to pay attention so you can take over in case of trouble anyway, why bother with the automation?
Imagine the flight into the Hudson had the system been automated. Sully sitting there reading a book while the plane slammed into the ground. Yes, pilots are paying a lot of attention during takeoff and landing because those times are the most hazardous. They are the most hazardous because they involve a piece of machinery with human life at stake traveling at reasonable rates of speed close to the ground and other large immovable objects. As a pilot, I can tell you I concentrate the most during landing and takeoff not because the lives of any passengers are in my hands, but because I will be the first one at the scene of the crash and I value my life.
So, why is your car, containing you, moving at a reasonable rate of speed close to the ground and other large immovable (and many moving) objects really that different?
You simply have zero clue what you're talking about.
Anyone who thinks that human-created automated driving systems will be perfect and never require instant human attention to avert disaster is the one with zero clue.
What you want you can buy -- hire someone to drive you. What you want to take from others cannot be recovered. Once automated roads become the law, you won't be allowed to drive yourself. Manual driving won't fit with automated cars. The automated cars won't know what to expect from human drivers. Mixing the two is a recipe for disaster.
I can't relate to people who wouldn't want a self-driving car.
Perhaps this is the most applicable place for this philosophical comment: for some people life is a destination, for others it is a journey. You value the end result; others value the process of getting there. You would prefer a radio out of a box; others like the kit (Heath, we miss 'ya).
Any sentence that begins with "The UN doesn't have an agenda ..." is patently absurd.
Any reader who stops after 6 words in a compound sentence is patently absurd, and anyone who reads what I wrote and comes away with the idea I said that the UN has no agenda is insane or illiterate or both.
but if you actually want to solve the problem, the care of both parties is equally important.
No, the care of both parties is not equally important. The victim did not choose to be one, he deserves much more concern than the person who made the decisions that led up to the problem. Yes, some people care so little for others that teaching them a well-paying craft and then turning them loose won't prevent them from doing it again. Those people need to be put someplace with others like them and kept away from their potential victims, and those are the prisons in the US that this discussion is about. Maximum security to keep them from killing each other and the guards, or the person who ratted them out and testified against them -- also known as "the victim".
In other words, a slap on the wrist and a strong scolding won't "solve the problem", and saying that the concern for the criminal is as important as the concern for the victim is just insulting to the victims.