AP has to do this. This is what is killing newspapers. If you want real news, you will need to pay.
And by doing this they will finish off AP. They've already gone bankrupt once. Now they can do it again, but for good this time.
As for "real news", that hasn't been coming out of the print and broadcast media for some time. It's been weighted, biased, and outright faked to promote political and economic agendas. The contrast with what's available on the internet absent the gatekeepers has been pulling the new generation of readers away from them (along with a trickle of the old). And the contrast became so obvious and blatant in the last election cycle that even the older generation is deserting their product in droves.
Next stop, minimum payments for news on all major sites that use AP news stories.
More like: Next stop, all major sites drop AP for some other news syndication operation (perhaps even creating their own). Let's see AP make up the lost revenue (and what content they get from the sites) from the print and broadcast media. B-)
The classic mistake is to chase the slow dimes and lose the fast nickels. Looks like it's AP's turn to make it.
... with an intense enough fire whole portions (e.g. branches, trunks etc) explode -- not just the capsules.
Sorry I wasn't clear. Yes: The the sap boils, causing the tree to explode, scattering the seeds as shrapnel into the fire-cleared surroundings. Much easier than getting a koala or a bird to tote 'em.
But fires are still not all that common. So (unlike fire climax pines) the tree only packages some of its seeds for ballistic distribution and fire survival.
Why was this not modded 'funny'? Some people might think he's actually posting a criticism of Ubuntu, instead of making fun of their naming choice.
Actually I was making fun of the quote of the Ubuntu project's own posting making fun of its own naming scheme. B-)
The trouble with doing nerd deadpan humor (even when you add a map-territory confusion between project names and the things they're named after) is that it is often taken seriously. However, in this case it looks like the supporting stuff about eucalyptus trees attracted the moderators' attention more than the joke.
Oh, well. Trying for "funny" and getting "interesting" seems to be my personal slashdot curse. B-)
... is that it scatters its seeds by explosion, into the remains of a forest fire (which it promotes via its extremely flammable sap and the tinder pile of leaves and shed bark it creates around itself - apparently "in the hope of" getting the fire started B-) ). A row of eucalyptus trees during a fire can become the equivalent of a walking artillery barrage targeting a fuel dump.
So I certainly wouldn't want to compute on a eucalyptus cluster - even if it is a "cloud" floating far away (like over the Berkeley Hills - high enough to be visible from I5 north of Sacramento). I'd worry about it taking out the data center and my data with it and "distributing" it up to the tropopause and onward with the prevailing wind.
As for my laptop, no WAY I'll install any eucalyptus package on that. It's got enough problem with those lithium batteries with the energy density of a hand grenade without adding something more with the energy density of napalm.
= = = =
And I thought Ubuntu had an unfortunate choice of names. Good grief!
What about a hack to swap the text on "I agree" and "Cancel?"
Sounds like another circumvention to me. It would be hard to claim that the intent wasn't to defraud, since it's clear the vendor intended the "accept" button to indicate acceptance.
And the ubiquitous bit that says "If any part clause is deemed invalid, only that clause is invalid" as applied to the "MUST AGREE BEFORE INSTALLING. IF YOU DON'T AGREE, RETURN FOR REFUND" bit when they won't give you a refund.
An interesting argument. It might fly for another reason: The failure to give a refund might invalidate the whole contract due to a failure to perform on the vendor's part.
If the vendor put the text up in an editable box that accepted the agreement after the text was edited to strike offensive portions it could be argued that the vendor had explicitly allowed you to amend your agreement and had thus agreed to your amendments.
But having to hack the code to alter the agreement, or turning off the screen, IMHO wouldn't cut it any better than the cat-clicked-my-homework device.
If you set up a device to automatically agree to a license without you fully reading it, you've still manifested an intent to accept the terms, whatever they may be.
Looks more to me like you've manifested an intent to defraud, obtaining the use of the software and its benefits without holding up your end of the ELUA's alleged bargain.
Courts have methods for dealing with THAT, too. Starting with holding you to your end of the contract and escalating drastically from there.
Tell them that your cat clicked the agreement on a device you built for the purpose and you're convicted from your own mouth.
(Of course IANAL and the legal system is FULL of surprises, even for people who AAL.)
Once the grants start going out, that site will even have every last contractor, what's going to what congressional district for what projects in that district, and on and on.
And they promise you that - just like Obama promised that you'd have five days to read the bill online before he signed it. Or a bunch of other promises that didn't get met.
Looks to me like more government "picking of winners" and "handing out government money to their cronies". This suppresses any competitive technology developed (or no longer being developed) by people who have to come up with their own funding and then bring it to market in competition with the subsidized stuff.
Let the market pick the winners. It might not be the BEST technology. But it will be a GOOD one.
In a recent posting I pointed out how fingerprint and retinal scanners could be fooled.
An AC followed up claiming that "devices designed for actual security" also checked "biological signatures" to avoid being fooled by static images, fake fingerprints, and the like.
I responded that security vendors have a long history of claiming their stuff is testing for much more than it actually is, counting on this to deter attempts to actually break it. I expected that, as past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior, it would be reasonable to expect that this is also true of the "biometric" security measures currently sold to both the public and the government.
I'd say this puts the lie to any "biological signature" claim for at least this face recognition product, doesn't it?
... emit recognizable signals. You can bet that the Secret Service (or their friends at the FCC) have equipment in the President's vicinity listening for such signatures.
... the driver simply turned on his cell phone and threw it in the luggage bin of a Greyhound bus. The cops were hundereds of miles off course by the time they found out.
I think that may be unrealistic. Last time I looked (a LONG time ago) the luggage bin of a greyhound bus appeared to be a pretty good Faraday cage.
Basic concept is good though. (Yes they can and do hunt down federal fugitives, serial killers, and the like by tracking the cellphone location when it's just turned on.) Just don't turn it on and throw it in a sealed metal box: They'll zero in on where you turned it on and go from there.
The trick was also used in The Da Vinci Code, where the lead finds the tracking device and drops it onto a passing garbage truck. This is followed by a Keystone Cops / O. J. Simpson style car chase of the truck.
Unless I've misread it, TFA's definition of "size" for a filesystem is "how many distinct external/kernel subroutines does it call?"
That seems to be a very strange metric. Seems to me that a well-designed filesystem will have little code and make extensive (re)use of well-defined services elsewhere (rather than reinventing those wheels). This "slims" the filesystem's own unique code down to its own core functionality.
Now maybe, if the functions are hooks in the OS for the filesystem, a larger number of them implies a poorer abstraction boundary. But it's not clear to me, absent more explanation, that this is what TFA is claiming.
I want to see if the secret B.O.R. gives you the right to not be made to feel bad by someones free speech.
You misunderstand both the Bill of Rights and Free Speech.
First: The Bill of Rights is a set of limits on government and its officials, not on other people. (And it solely recognizes preexisting rights and warns the government to not to try to take them away, rather than creating them.)
Second: The right to free speech that the Bill of Rights recognizes is a right to not be blocked in advance, not a right to be immune from a claim for restitution for any damages or losses to others that your speech caused.
Just as the right to bear arms isn't a right to shoot innocent parties without expectation of punishment and the right to free exercise of religion isn't a right to perform human sacrifice of unwilling victims, the right to free speech isn't a right to destroy someone else's valuable reputation with lies without having to pay him for the damage you caused.
(It IS a right to destroy his valuable but UNEARNED reputation with TRUTH. In the United States truth is an absolute defense against claims of defamation. But you'd better be prepared to back up your claims - in a civil court, where the standard is "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond reasonable doubt".)
If you're going to invest in ammo, do it NOW. Then store it in a "safe state" where it will remain legal while this gets sorted out:
Several states have legislation in progress that, if passed (and upheld), would require ammo to have the equivalent of serial numbers - and ammo without it to be destroyed. All purchasers would go into a database along with the serial numbers.
Of course that's constitutionally problematic - especially the destruction of existing ammo part. But ammo will get hard to buy (above ground) in any state that passes this until it gets sorted out by the courts (by which time you might have needed to have it) and you don't want to be the test case.
Despite the doomsayers, counting on the economy turning around by 2010 is a pretty safe bet.
Nope. Very bad bet.
If it were just a housing bubble it would have been a couple years of recession and we'd be coming out of it about then. The people and institutions who wrote bad mortgages and the people who bought houses too high would be hurt or bankrupted, the housing prices would drop to something sane, construction would slow (or stop for a while) until the unsold inventory and foreclosures had been sold off (or destroyed by neglect or arson for insurance) then pick up, and the capital now tied up in housing construction would be moved (again at a reduced price) to other productive uses. We're seeing a bit of that now.
This time they "securitized" the bum mortgages and "bought insurance" - "credit default swaps" - to the tune of MORE than the Gross World Product, in order to get multi-A ratings on the paper backed by baskets of subprime mortgages. When the housing prices started down a bunch of people defaulted all at once. So those who "wrote the insurance" had to dump a whole bunch of commodities on the market (depressing the prices further) to raise funds to "pay off the insurance". Thus when "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded" there was a lot of collateral damage in other markets. But that also would have sorted itself out after a couple years.
Unfortunately, the governments of the world, especially that of the United States, decided to try to "fix the problem". And now they're replicating EXACTLY the class of mistakes that turned a similar recession into the Great Depression - but more extremely, more rapidly, and without the safety net of the gold standard. The result, IMHO, is that we're probably in for a depression that will make the '30s look mild and short. And hyperinflation seems far more likely than not.
Thus my sigline.
As I see it, too much has been done ALREADY for a proper recovery to get started around 2010. (For starters, we're only about halfway through the underlying housing market collapse: The subprimes are largely crunched. But the teaser rates on a lot of other mortgages are expiring and even the government's billions of unbacked paper can't push the interest rate down far enough to save them - just to stretch out the agony.)
If Intel is betting the farm on a hi-tech recovery in 2010, somebody else will probably own the farm in 2011.
Except that devices that are designed for actual security also measure biological signatures, such as a realistic rate pulse and blood oxygen levels.
Does that include the inexpensive fingerprint scanners on laptops?
Given that retinal scanners are optical I bet one could come up with a hack to fool 'em even if they're doing such a lifesign scan.
Or CLAIMING to do it. In my last few decades I've seen a LOT of "security" stuff that doesn't do anything near what it is hyped to do. (My awakening came when the US government decided to counterfeit its own silver coins with the clad-copper "peanut-butter sandwich" models. Coin accept mechanisms for vending machines were claimed to have an alloy-conductivity test - rolling the coin past a magnet - that you'd have to be more conductive than copper to pass. But they swallowed them just fine with no tuning. Apparently the magnet was really just to catch steel disks and fool the customers.)
When you're talking deployment to all computer-contacting employees of a large company that is not doing highly-classified research for the government you're talking a budget that doesn't cover putting the truly fancy and high-tech devices everywhere.
- Get a print on something.
- "Develop" it to get a computer image of the print.
- Fabricate a fake finger from the image any of several ways.
One example:
- Etch it into a printed circuit board (using a printer and a Radio Shack grade PC board etching kit.)
- Cast a fake fingertip on the printed circuit. (Gelatin works for a few-shot prosthetic fingerpint. I think silicon caulk works too if you first lightly oil the PC board to keep it from sticking. Etc.)
Should be similarly easy to make a fake for a retinal scanner from a retinal scan, which is strictly an optic device. (I'd start with a disposable camera for the holder.) Ditto iris scan.
I'd [...] like to see a policy that [also directs] development done for any government [to be released] as open source [...]. This would [...] drastically reduce the cost for local governments because it would allow applications written for one city/state/country to be used and adopted [and adapted, rather than rewritten from scratch] by other[s].
YES! Great idea.
Administrators of government departments which are strapped for cash like to spend what they do have on their people rather than vendors. This:
- gives them a financial incentive (which snowballs as more sites adopt it and more code is released),
- improves the survivability of the digital records,
- creates more opportunity for transparency in government operation, and
- can lead to painless improvements in standardization of processes and procedures among government departments (and thus increase the ability of workers leaving one government site to find work at another).
Technology investments must be made based on total cost of ownership...
Thus the advertising and planted article campaigns claiming lower total cost of ownership than Linux.
Open [...] specifications are often less costly to acquire, develop and maintain and do not result in vendor lock-in.
Thus the move to obtain standards-organization approval for a "standard" document format based on their word processor - which was unclear enough to make it impossible to write code to handle the format based solely on the standard and flexible enough to allow them to modify and sabotage the format if anybody got close.
Looks like the wording of that document drove their strategy for fighting the move to open source.
At the moment the various factions of Islam apparently total to more than essentially any other coalition with a common/compatible idea of what "the law" should require and prohibit.
(Granted there are disagreements on details among the factions - some of them major. But there are also great swaths of common ground.)
Unfortunately we don't have interstellar capability yet or any sign that there is a way around the speed of light. We're stuck in this solar system for the time being. Our radio signals will propagate no faster than c and our probes, once we make them, will be slower (at least for the foreseeable future.)
Round-trip talk time is two years per light-year.
Listening where we are can be done now. No wait for our signal to propagate to them, and their signal (if present) has already propagated to us.
Unfortunately, if they were also essentially spread-spectrum-only emitters by the time the stuff going by us now was sent, we're hosed. B-( Or at least we'll have to modify our filters to look for efficient-modulation signatures.
Slashdot Mirror
AP has to do this. This is what is killing newspapers. If you want real news, you will need to pay.
And by doing this they will finish off AP. They've already gone bankrupt once. Now they can do it again, but for good this time.
As for "real news", that hasn't been coming out of the print and broadcast media for some time. It's been weighted, biased, and outright faked to promote political and economic agendas. The contrast with what's available on the internet absent the gatekeepers has been pulling the new generation of readers away from them (along with a trickle of the old). And the contrast became so obvious and blatant in the last election cycle that even the older generation is deserting their product in droves.
Next stop, minimum payments for news on all major sites that use AP news stories.
More like: Next stop, all major sites drop AP for some other news syndication operation (perhaps even creating their own). Let's see AP make up the lost revenue (and what content they get from the sites) from the print and broadcast media. B-)
The classic mistake is to chase the slow dimes and lose the fast nickels. Looks like it's AP's turn to make it.
... with an intense enough fire whole portions (e.g. branches, trunks etc) explode -- not just the capsules.
Sorry I wasn't clear. Yes: The the sap boils, causing the tree to explode, scattering the seeds as shrapnel into the fire-cleared surroundings. Much easier than getting a koala or a bird to tote 'em.
But fires are still not all that common. So (unlike fire climax pines) the tree only packages some of its seeds for ballistic distribution and fire survival.
Why was this not modded 'funny'? Some people might think he's actually posting a criticism of Ubuntu, instead of making fun of their naming choice.
Actually I was making fun of the quote of the Ubuntu project's own posting making fun of its own naming scheme. B-)
The trouble with doing nerd deadpan humor (even when you add a map-territory confusion between project names and the things they're named after) is that it is often taken seriously. However, in this case it looks like the supporting stuff about eucalyptus trees attracted the moderators' attention more than the joke.
Oh, well. Trying for "funny" and getting "interesting" seems to be my personal slashdot curse. B-)
... is that it scatters its seeds by explosion, into the remains of a forest fire (which it promotes via its extremely flammable sap and the tinder pile of leaves and shed bark it creates around itself - apparently "in the hope of" getting the fire started B-) ). A row of eucalyptus trees during a fire can become the equivalent of a walking artillery barrage targeting a fuel dump.
So I certainly wouldn't want to compute on a eucalyptus cluster - even if it is a "cloud" floating far away (like over the Berkeley Hills - high enough to be visible from I5 north of Sacramento). I'd worry about it taking out the data center and my data with it and "distributing" it up to the tropopause and onward with the prevailing wind.
As for my laptop, no WAY I'll install any eucalyptus package on that. It's got enough problem with those lithium batteries with the energy density of a hand grenade without adding something more with the energy density of napalm.
= = = =
And I thought Ubuntu had an unfortunate choice of names. Good grief!
What about a hack to swap the text on "I agree" and "Cancel?"
Sounds like another circumvention to me. It would be hard to claim that the intent wasn't to defraud, since it's clear the vendor intended the "accept" button to indicate acceptance.
And the ubiquitous bit that says "If any part clause is deemed invalid, only that clause is invalid" as applied to the "MUST AGREE BEFORE INSTALLING. IF YOU DON'T AGREE, RETURN FOR REFUND" bit when they won't give you a refund.
An interesting argument. It might fly for another reason: The failure to give a refund might invalidate the whole contract due to a failure to perform on the vendor's part.
Do you honestly believe that the "It wasn't me, it was the gloves" defense would hold up in court?!
"If the glove doesn't fit you must acquit"?
Then you can claim that either Schroedinger accepted the agreement, or the software company killed your cat.
But it will be hard to claim it with any certainty.
If the vendor put the text up in an editable box that accepted the agreement after the text was edited to strike offensive portions it could be argued that the vendor had explicitly allowed you to amend your agreement and had thus agreed to your amendments.
But having to hack the code to alter the agreement, or turning off the screen, IMHO wouldn't cut it any better than the cat-clicked-my-homework device.
If you set up a device to automatically agree to a license without you fully reading it, you've still manifested an intent to accept the terms, whatever they may be.
Looks more to me like you've manifested an intent to defraud, obtaining the use of the software and its benefits without holding up your end of the ELUA's alleged bargain.
Courts have methods for dealing with THAT, too. Starting with holding you to your end of the contract and escalating drastically from there.
Tell them that your cat clicked the agreement on a device you built for the purpose and you're convicted from your own mouth.
(Of course IANAL and the legal system is FULL of surprises, even for people who AAL.)
Once the grants start going out, that site will even have every last contractor, what's going to what congressional district for what projects in that district, and on and on.
And they promise you that - just like Obama promised that you'd have five days to read the bill online before he signed it. Or a bunch of other promises that didn't get met.
Looks to me like more government "picking of winners" and "handing out government money to their cronies". This suppresses any competitive technology developed (or no longer being developed) by people who have to come up with their own funding and then bring it to market in competition with the subsidized stuff.
Let the market pick the winners. It might not be the BEST technology. But it will be a GOOD one.
In a recent posting I pointed out how fingerprint and retinal scanners could be fooled.
An AC followed up claiming that "devices designed for actual security" also checked "biological signatures" to avoid being fooled by static images, fake fingerprints, and the like.
I responded that security vendors have a long history of claiming their stuff is testing for much more than it actually is, counting on this to deter attempts to actually break it. I expected that, as past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior, it would be reasonable to expect that this is also true of the "biometric" security measures currently sold to both the public and the government.
I'd say this puts the lie to any "biological signature" claim for at least this face recognition product, doesn't it?
... emit recognizable signals. You can bet that the Secret Service (or their friends at the FCC) have equipment in the President's vicinity listening for such signatures.
... the driver simply turned on his cell phone and threw it in the luggage bin of a Greyhound bus. The cops were hundereds of miles off course by the time they found out.
I think that may be unrealistic. Last time I looked (a LONG time ago) the luggage bin of a greyhound bus appeared to be a pretty good Faraday cage.
Basic concept is good though. (Yes they can and do hunt down federal fugitives, serial killers, and the like by tracking the cellphone location when it's just turned on.) Just don't turn it on and throw it in a sealed metal box: They'll zero in on where you turned it on and go from there.
The trick was also used in The Da Vinci Code, where the lead finds the tracking device and drops it onto a passing garbage truck. This is followed by a Keystone Cops / O. J. Simpson style car chase of the truck.
Unless I've misread it, TFA's definition of "size" for a filesystem is "how many distinct external/kernel subroutines does it call?"
That seems to be a very strange metric. Seems to me that a well-designed filesystem will have little code and make extensive (re)use of well-defined services elsewhere (rather than reinventing those wheels). This "slims" the filesystem's own unique code down to its own core functionality.
Now maybe, if the functions are hooks in the OS for the filesystem, a larger number of them implies a poorer abstraction boundary. But it's not clear to me, absent more explanation, that this is what TFA is claiming.
I want to see if the secret B.O.R. gives you the right to not be made to feel bad by someones free speech.
You misunderstand both the Bill of Rights and Free Speech.
First: The Bill of Rights is a set of limits on government and its officials, not on other people. (And it solely recognizes preexisting rights and warns the government to not to try to take them away, rather than creating them.)
Second: The right to free speech that the Bill of Rights recognizes is a right to not be blocked in advance, not a right to be immune from a claim for restitution for any damages or losses to others that your speech caused.
Just as the right to bear arms isn't a right to shoot innocent parties without expectation of punishment and the right to free exercise of religion isn't a right to perform human sacrifice of unwilling victims, the right to free speech isn't a right to destroy someone else's valuable reputation with lies without having to pay him for the damage you caused.
(It IS a right to destroy his valuable but UNEARNED reputation with TRUTH. In the United States truth is an absolute defense against claims of defamation. But you'd better be prepared to back up your claims - in a civil court, where the standard is "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond reasonable doubt".)
(And the obligatory IANAL.)
If you're going to invest in ammo, do it NOW. Then store it in a "safe state" where it will remain legal while this gets sorted out:
Several states have legislation in progress that, if passed (and upheld), would require ammo to have the equivalent of serial numbers - and ammo without it to be destroyed. All purchasers would go into a database along with the serial numbers.
Of course that's constitutionally problematic - especially the destruction of existing ammo part. But ammo will get hard to buy (above ground) in any state that passes this until it gets sorted out by the courts (by which time you might have needed to have it) and you don't want to be the test case.
Despite the doomsayers, counting on the economy turning around by 2010 is a pretty safe bet.
Nope. Very bad bet.
If it were just a housing bubble it would have been a couple years of recession and we'd be coming out of it about then. The people and institutions who wrote bad mortgages and the people who bought houses too high would be hurt or bankrupted, the housing prices would drop to something sane, construction would slow (or stop for a while) until the unsold inventory and foreclosures had been sold off (or destroyed by neglect or arson for insurance) then pick up, and the capital now tied up in housing construction would be moved (again at a reduced price) to other productive uses. We're seeing a bit of that now.
This time they "securitized" the bum mortgages and "bought insurance" - "credit default swaps" - to the tune of MORE than the Gross World Product, in order to get multi-A ratings on the paper backed by baskets of subprime mortgages. When the housing prices started down a bunch of people defaulted all at once. So those who "wrote the insurance" had to dump a whole bunch of commodities on the market (depressing the prices further) to raise funds to "pay off the insurance". Thus when "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded" there was a lot of collateral damage in other markets. But that also would have sorted itself out after a couple years.
Unfortunately, the governments of the world, especially that of the United States, decided to try to "fix the problem". And now they're replicating EXACTLY the class of mistakes that turned a similar recession into the Great Depression - but more extremely, more rapidly, and without the safety net of the gold standard. The result, IMHO, is that we're probably in for a depression that will make the '30s look mild and short. And hyperinflation seems far more likely than not.
Thus my sigline.
As I see it, too much has been done ALREADY for a proper recovery to get started around 2010. (For starters, we're only about halfway through the underlying housing market collapse: The subprimes are largely crunched. But the teaser rates on a lot of other mortgages are expiring and even the government's billions of unbacked paper can't push the interest rate down far enough to save them - just to stretch out the agony.)
If Intel is betting the farm on a hi-tech recovery in 2010, somebody else will probably own the farm in 2011.
Except that devices that are designed for actual security also measure biological signatures, such as a realistic rate pulse and blood oxygen levels.
Does that include the inexpensive fingerprint scanners on laptops?
Given that retinal scanners are optical I bet one could come up with a hack to fool 'em even if they're doing such a lifesign scan.
Or CLAIMING to do it. In my last few decades I've seen a LOT of "security" stuff that doesn't do anything near what it is hyped to do. (My awakening came when the US government decided to counterfeit its own silver coins with the clad-copper "peanut-butter sandwich" models. Coin accept mechanisms for vending machines were claimed to have an alloy-conductivity test - rolling the coin past a magnet - that you'd have to be more conductive than copper to pass. But they swallowed them just fine with no tuning. Apparently the magnet was really just to catch steel disks and fool the customers.)
When you're talking deployment to all computer-contacting employees of a large company that is not doing highly-classified research for the government you're talking a budget that doesn't cover putting the truly fancy and high-tech devices everywhere.
eyeballs and fingers aren't that hard to remove
Fingerprints are even easier:
- Get a print on something.
- "Develop" it to get a computer image of the print.
- Fabricate a fake finger from the image any of several ways.
One example:
- Etch it into a printed circuit board (using a printer and a Radio Shack grade PC board etching kit.)
- Cast a fake fingertip on the printed circuit. (Gelatin works for a few-shot prosthetic fingerpint. I think silicon caulk works too if you first lightly oil the PC board to keep it from sticking. Etc.)
Should be similarly easy to make a fake for a retinal scanner from a retinal scan, which is strictly an optic device. (I'd start with a disposable camera for the holder.) Ditto iris scan.
I'd [...] like to see a policy that [also directs] development done for any government [to be released] as open source [...]. This would [...] drastically reduce the cost for local governments because it would allow applications written for one city/state/country to be used and adopted [and adapted, rather than rewritten from scratch] by other[s].
YES! Great idea.
Administrators of government departments which are strapped for cash like to spend what they do have on their people rather than vendors. This:
- gives them a financial incentive (which snowballs as more sites adopt it and more code is released),
- improves the survivability of the digital records,
- creates more opportunity for transparency in government operation, and
- can lead to painless improvements in standardization of processes and procedures among government departments (and thus increase the ability of workers leaving one government site to find work at another).
Technology investments must be made based on total cost of ownership ...
Thus the advertising and planted article campaigns claiming lower total cost of ownership than Linux.
Open [...] specifications are often less costly to acquire, develop and maintain and do not result in vendor lock-in.
Thus the move to obtain standards-organization approval for a "standard" document format based on their word processor - which was unclear enough to make it impossible to write code to handle the format based solely on the standard and flexible enough to allow them to modify and sabotage the format if anybody got close.
Looks like the wording of that document drove their strategy for fighting the move to open source.
The women who know where their men are are called widows.
Or stopped being lovers when they became wives.
... right away because they get their earliest warnings from honeypot machines and this one uses an offline vector.
... It's likely to be Sharia law.
At the moment the various factions of Islam apparently total to more than essentially any other coalition with a common/compatible idea of what "the law" should require and prohibit.
(Granted there are disagreements on details among the factions - some of them major. But there are also great swaths of common ground.)
Unfortunately we don't have interstellar capability yet or any sign that there is a way around the speed of light. We're stuck in this solar system for the time being. Our radio signals will propagate no faster than c and our probes, once we make them, will be slower (at least for the foreseeable future.)
Round-trip talk time is two years per light-year.
Listening where we are can be done now. No wait for our signal to propagate to them, and their signal (if present) has already propagated to us.
Unfortunately, if they were also essentially spread-spectrum-only emitters by the time the stuff going by us now was sent, we're hosed. B-( Or at least we'll have to modify our filters to look for efficient-modulation signatures.