And yet, presumably, you've put your trust in a book and teachings written (and translated) by a bunch of people? Maybe I've totally misjudged you and you've gone through a Kantian self-discovery of religious ideals, but most religious people trust a book that was put together by humans over the last couple millennia, or in some cases since the 1950's.
Plenty of people have used calculus and other mathematical discoveries as examples of things that would have been greatly harmful to society if they had been patented. But something directly relevant to the discussion is the P ?= NP question. Suppose that someone developed an algorithm tomorrow that solved NP problems in P time, and patented it. Suddenly, one entity would have effectively complete control over many aspects of society. Not only would they be the only entity who could effortlessly break any encryption scheme, but they could also solve almost all the hard problems of physics simulation, including simulating nuclear weapons or global weather patterns or the future positions of solar system bodies, including asteroids or comets that could potentially impact the Earth. Obviously the governments of the world would step in and quickly violate the patent for themselves and start throwing everyone who used Tor or freenet in jail, but where would that leave the rest of the normal people in the world? This is a completely theoretical argument, but it underscores what the belief in the patent system means; that any advancement, no matter how big or small, is worth locking up for only a few individuals to enjoy regardless of the relative costs or benefits involved in creating the advancement or using it, or the power that it can give individuals over everyone else.
Despite the fact that the governments of the U.S. and U.K. had independently discovered public key cryptography and very similar methods to RSA beforehand, but kept it classified? To me, that sounds like an argument against patents (and against classifying useful cryptography)...
This doesn't have much to do with patents, but rather war. If there hadn't been a world war, then Congress would simply have waited an additional 5 years for the patents to expire.
If a situation is hindering progress in a war to the extent that Congress has to get involved, then that situation may very well be a legitimate problem for everyone else, too. And look at the outcome; did the Wright brothers make any more money than they would have if they just stated selling their planes on a free market? Sometimes society simply can't achieve the ideals that it aspires to, and ends up doing more harm than if it was simply more pragmatic. Currently, there's a similar problem with health care. The situation is that drug patents raise the cost of simple and effective treatments to astronomical levels, denying knows, effective treatment to a majority of the world's population, even though it's relatively cheap to actually manufacture the drugs themselves. In both cases, people are actually dying because of the existence of patent law, balanced against the profits that can be made by a select few (and probably none of the actual inventors; drug patents are held by the large corporations and not individuals).
What if your competitor hires a computer scientist who says "Oh, this program appears to have a faster sort than our software, let me think for a while and see if I can come up with a faster sort for you" and happens to discover the very same algorithm? You can't prove that they reverse engineered it, and they can't prove that they didn't, but the actual reality (since this is a hypothetical situation) is that the other computer scientist discovered the exact same algorithm that you did. Now, should that scientist be prevented from plying his trade and being paid for it even though he or she is clearly just as capable and imaginative as you?
Unless your argument is that independent discovery of innovations is absolutely prohibited by the laws of physics, this pokes a hole in your idea of why patents are a good idea.
Take quicksort for example. Sorting data has nothing to do with mathematics
Let L be an ordered list of elements, such that for any pair of elements a and b from L, the binary relation a <= b is defined. The function Q(L) has as its domain domain the set of all finite lists, L, having length S(L) which is an integer equal to the number of elements in the list, and the range of Q(L) is the set of all permutations of the list L. The value of Q(L) where S(L) <= 1 is L. The definition of Q(L) where S(L)>1 is as follows: Select an element p from the list L, and partition the elements of L into two lists, L1 and L2, such that the element p and all elements, e, from L where (e <= p) are in the list L1, and all other elements are in the list L2. The value of Q(L) is equal to the list formed by the in-order elements of L1 followed by the in-order elements of L2. For all L, the permutation Q(L) has the property that if a and b are elements of L, then if a comes before b in the list, then a <= b.
I dare you to find another algorithm that you think is non-mathematical.
That monopoly has been earned and the government is simply enforcing it. It's earned based on the fact the inventor has full rights to profit from the invention and others don't, at least not without permission. It doesn't have to be a monopoly, though. If anyone pays licensing fees to the company owning the invention, it can use the invention.
So what happens if more than one person "earns" the right to profit from the same invention? Or do you contend that simultaneous or independent discovery of an innovation is absolutely impossible?
I can draw a simple line between discovery and inventions; when more than a few people have a reasonable chance of discovering an innovation, then it's a discovery. Otherwise, it's an invention. The reasoning is clear; if only one person can create a particular invention, then they may have some property claim to it. If more than one person can reasonably be expected to discover the same innovation, giving only one of those people exclusive ownership of the idea and implementation of that idea is unfair, even if it's for a limited time, and even if they filed a bunch of paperwork claiming they were first. Often an innovation isn't obvious until a particular problem necessitating the innovation is encountered. Not everyone capable of discovering that innovation is guaranteed to encounter the same problem at the same time, so it's basically a result of dumb luck that one of them will discover the innovation first. Patent law is supposed to recognize this concept by denying patents that would be obvious to a person trained in the art of the particular innovation's nature. The problem is that the (U.S. at least) patent office almost never applies this doctrine realistically, and continues to grant patents for "some decades-old business practice + The Internet" or even the wheel in Australia. The way I see it, even if only two smart people could realistically invent something, granting an exclusive right to one of them unduly reduces the rights of the other.
My basic argument against patents has always been that with 6 billion people on earth, it almost always benefits more people to allow the completely free exchange of ideas. As you mentioned, there are many things that "you'd never think of in a million years", but those same things might be completely obvious to a very smart person. The problem with patents is when a novel, useful innovation is completely obvious to at least *two* smart people; at that point the patent system is broken. Simply because one of those people filed a bunch of annoying paperwork first shouldn't prevent the other person from using that idea in any way that they desire, including sharing it with the entire world for free. The exclusivity of ideas has to actually have some basis in fact for it to be applied in law, and I don't think there are very many ideas that are truly unique to a single individual. Patents, if they exist, should be treated much more like copyrights. In strict legal theory, this is true, and a patent is only infringed if every claim of the patent is found to be infringed by another invention. Unfortunately, simply the threat of legal action is often enough to stifle innovation. It's much like if Disney had obtained a copyright on "cartoon animals" or "animated fairytales" and could happily sue any other company producing ideas that fit within those broad categories. Most patents are issued in similarly over-broad terms, and that is the heart of the problem. The other problem is that the business model of R&D, creation, profit is going the way of the music industry. With rapid prototyping, computer simulation, and cheaper CNC machines, the cost to develop new innovations is being decreased dramatically. Does it really make sense to issue a 25 year patent for a new widget that was drawn up in autocad in a week, stress tested with finite element analysis for another week, and then popped out of a rapid prototyper the next day and tested and finally sent to production on a CNC machine at the end of the month? If nothing else, the length of patents should at least reflect the realities of a free market with amazing new tools for rapidly creating new inventions. Often, people don't even realize they need something until they encounter a problem, and at that point it is pretty obvious how to solve it. Just because someone had the same problem within the last 25 years should not give them an exclusive right to the solution.
There's a problem with lumping people into an IT department if there's no clear definition of what information (and what technology) should fall under that definition. I picked some stupidly extreme examples to demonstrate, but the point is still valid.
If cable TV doesn't process information and therefore doesn't fall under IT, then why do dumb terminals, printers, faxes, and phones usually fall under IT? Why doesn't the cable TV repair person work in the same department as the support person who plugs network cables and PC power cords back into the wall and the guy who plugs a computer into the ODB-2 port to check a car's emissions controls?
The problem is that trying to talk to "IT" for every technology related problem becomes a headache of assigning problems at the top of a pyramid and letting them trickle down to the people who can actually fix them, who then have to work their way back up the support tree when they're finished. It's inefficient for everyone concerned. It makes much more sense to explicitly define separate areas of support for different bits of technology and give those areas different names.
Whether you go with Truecrypt, LUKS, or some other solution, encrypt the entire main hard disk/SSD/flash drive. Theft, loss, or breakage is an obvious possibility when traveling around a foreign country for an extended period of time, and you'll feel better knowing that if you lose control of your netbook's storage device for any reason, that there's no way anyone can get your passwords or financial info from it, even if if breaks and someone dumpster dives for it. Make sure the swap file or partition is encrypted, too.
I doubt DNSSEC will be widely available before your trip, but if you can find a service that will provide it to you, use it. Never trust new SSL certificates while you are on your trip. If you visit sites with self-signed certificates, get them all trusted by your browser before you leave. I've seen a few anecdotal reports from people who complain that their bank suddenly begins asking them to a trust a new SSL certificate (which is a bad sign in the first place, since it should be trusted by one of the built-in CAs) when they were using a particular free wireless hot spot that was apparently trying to spoof SSL certificates for phishing. Make sure none of your netbook software is vulnerable to the null-prefix attack on SSL certificates. Watch out for shoulder-surfers when using your banking/financial sites. Use full HTTPS URLs when accessing sites, e.g. "https://www.bank.com" and bookmark them to avoid simple mistakes like typing "bank.com" in a browser, getting a poisoned DNS record for an attacker's site that is then fetched via HTTP and begins a man-in-the-middle attack on you.
Don't install new software unless you can be absolutely certain that it hasn't been modified during download. If you use Windows, about the best you can do is only download software over HTTPS and then check the md5sum if it's also published via HTTPS. AFAIK, Windows Update and the Firefox automatic-update process are secure. Most Linux package managers use PGP keys to verify packages downloaded from repositories, so if you use Linux on your netbook make sure you have all the PGP keys of the repositories you are going to use installed before you leave for your trip. Bring a fresh copy of the installation media (including necessary drivers and the latest version of Firefox) for the netbook, just in case the OS does get compromised or corrupted for some reason and you have to start from scratch. If you have anything you can't stand losing, back it up to an online service whenever you have the chance. Make sure those backups are encrypted.
Beware of drive-by installs of malware from MITM (man in the middle) modified HTTP sites. Avoid enabling flash, if you can, considering that every few months there's a new remotely exploitable hole found in it. Ad, javascript and flash blockers would be a good idea for all but trusted sites. If you think your email should be private, use PGP/gpg. If you think your email should be semi-private (e.g. the local ISP/hot spot can't read it, but just about anyone else could if they wanted), use webmail over HTTPS. Occasionally check major security sites in case a new zero-day exploit comes out that your software/OS is vulnerable to.
A remote hosted VPN that others suggested will be useful for pretending that your netbook is connected to the Internet in a country of your choosing. DNS might be a little more trustworthy over a VPN, but attacks can be staged against the box running your VPN, too. There are some poorly designed "secure" sites that download some content (images, scripts, flash, who knows) over HTTP instead of HTTPS, and a VPN can protect you from locally injected attacks against those broken sites. Beware of HTTP pages that submit login credentials via javascript or a form to an HTTPS page; the HTTP site can be modified in transit to submit the credentials to an attacker. The more popular and valuable a site is, the more likely there is some scumbag running an attack for it on their free wireless, so double check the SSL protection
If you google the subject, you'll find several projects that implement type safety, termination, and correctness proofs at the assembly language level. The proofs are more complex and sometimes limit the allowed instructions to a subset of the original machine language, but in theory it is possible to prove just about any property about any arbitrary machine code program, given a suitable model of the hardware and OS and a trusted proof verifier.
Once again, that's a function of the language and the facilities it provides. If your language doesn't give you pointers, you can't "diddle... pointers", can you?
There is a published exploit of the Java virtual machine relying on the eventual flipping of a single bit of RAM (cosmic rays are apparently the most common source) to turn a safe data structure into a manipulable pointer to all of RAM. If you do not type check the machine code before you run it, the language it was compiled from will not protect you from compiler bugs or malicious machine code that breaks the type safety model.
No matter how you twist it, all of the jobs you list deal with technology that processes information, or "information technology" if you will.
So I.T. now supports the ECMs in the company cars and their GPS navigation devices, the cable TV, the central heating/cooling controls, the elevator control panels, tape recorders, and pocket calculators? Defining "IT" as the department that fixes anything with a semiconductor, vacuum tube, or relay in it is far too broad.
"MZBlahBlah... Hello, please save the text of this email as blahblah.pif and open it to enable the images/porn/bonzai buddy/whatever you think is important enough to go through minor hoops to get"
Arguably a passage of text (including spaces and punctuation) from a piece of literature will do you very well.
This is a horrible idea. Google already caches a significant fraction of all human readable text in the world, and more importantly caches almost all of the popular text. It's not hard to believe that the NSA/FBI/CIA have similar databases from which to try all the phrases between 1 and 100 characters (and all the acronyms formed from the words in the phrases, and the phrases backwards, etc.). Even with a petabyte database of text, it's only about 10^17 operations to try every string from 1 to 100 bytes, which is less than 64 bits of entropy. Further, trying only the most common phrases first (order all the text by google pagerank or by the popularity of a book on google books, for instance) would yield much faster cracking of literature-based passwords if someone picked a passage from their favorite book.
LISP, Scheme, Haskell, Mathematica, Maple, and plenty of other languages support arbitrary precision rational numbers as built in types. This fixes all rounding errors involving rational numbers (including fractions). If irrational numbers like pi, e, or transcendental functions are necessary, then there will always be inherent error in the representation and the programmer has to know how to do with that error and calculate the expected error of a sequence of operations. If you want to get fancy, you can use an algebraic language like Mathematica to symbolically solve your equations and maintain perfect accuracy with symbolic representations of irrational and transcendental numbers.
If we can trigger the suicide of the universe at will with the LHC, all we need is to give everyone a button to remotely start it up whenever they feel unhappy. The future universes would be filled only with happy people (or none).
There are presumably a finite number of atoms in the visible universe that we could turn into a computer, so an upper limit on the number of operations per second that we can devote to cracking a key. Assuming no method better than brute force is available (the biggest if, IMO), you just need to find the number of bits that puts the universe into the heat death without breaking it. I've heard that 128 bits is good for a few billion years, and 256 bits will outlast the heat death. Your mileage may vary.
What's with the anal retentive GNU/Linux all the time. Just call in linux already. With a GNU/Linux name, linux never is going to get any popularity. Yeah yeah, I know, linux officially just denotes the kernel etc., but really, no-one cares. It's an image thing. How many people do you hear saying that they have "microsoft windows ixpee" on their computer? That's right. None. They just state that they've got "XP", or "Vista", or "Mac" / "Apple"
I don't think I've ever heard anyone bragging or claiming to run "ntoskrnl.exe" or "Mach" on their Windows/Apple box, whereas I hear plenty of people who say they run Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc. I don't see the problem.
I approve of Eolas in the same way I approve of nuclear weapons; horrible destructive ability that should only be unleashed on the worst possible garbage in the world.
If I recall correctly, the Tesla does battery management to keep the charge on the batteries within a pretty narrow (relative to, say, a laptop battery) range to extend the battery life, so it may never need to charge much beyond 80% anyway.
I'm not sure what the cost of a transformer in every home would be, but that wouldn't really be necessary. Providing an extra pair of wires with high voltage to the home from the nearest pole would not be too much of an extra cost; the wiring could be smaller gauge which would probably cover the increased insulation cost. Most transmission lines are already high voltage until they reach the neighborhood they serve, so it would basically involve adding another service drop directly to a charging station next to the house/garage.
Diesel fuel is even better. It doesn't burn at all in liquid or vapor form. The only way to burn it is by pressurizing the vapor until it auto-ignites.
Tell that to my oil fired boiler which merely sprays liquid diesel fuel through a nozzle and into the flame-front that heats my house. Or pour some diesel on a pile of slightly damp wood and light it to start a bonfire.
The obvious solution is to run high voltage lines directly to houses for charging EVs, which would improve efficiency and lower costs (lower I^2 heat loss, and no need to add more pole transformers to handle the extra load).
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And yet, presumably, you've put your trust in a book and teachings written (and translated) by a bunch of people? Maybe I've totally misjudged you and you've gone through a Kantian self-discovery of religious ideals, but most religious people trust a book that was put together by humans over the last couple millennia, or in some cases since the 1950's.
Plenty of people have used calculus and other mathematical discoveries as examples of things that would have been greatly harmful to society if they had been patented. But something directly relevant to the discussion is the P ?= NP question. Suppose that someone developed an algorithm tomorrow that solved NP problems in P time, and patented it. Suddenly, one entity would have effectively complete control over many aspects of society. Not only would they be the only entity who could effortlessly break any encryption scheme, but they could also solve almost all the hard problems of physics simulation, including simulating nuclear weapons or global weather patterns or the future positions of solar system bodies, including asteroids or comets that could potentially impact the Earth. Obviously the governments of the world would step in and quickly violate the patent for themselves and start throwing everyone who used Tor or freenet in jail, but where would that leave the rest of the normal people in the world? This is a completely theoretical argument, but it underscores what the belief in the patent system means; that any advancement, no matter how big or small, is worth locking up for only a few individuals to enjoy regardless of the relative costs or benefits involved in creating the advancement or using it, or the power that it can give individuals over everyone else.
Despite the fact that the governments of the U.S. and U.K. had independently discovered public key cryptography and very similar methods to RSA beforehand, but kept it classified? To me, that sounds like an argument against patents (and against classifying useful cryptography)...
This doesn't have much to do with patents, but rather war. If there hadn't been a world war, then Congress would simply have waited an additional 5 years for the patents to expire.
If a situation is hindering progress in a war to the extent that Congress has to get involved, then that situation may very well be a legitimate problem for everyone else, too. And look at the outcome; did the Wright brothers make any more money than they would have if they just stated selling their planes on a free market? Sometimes society simply can't achieve the ideals that it aspires to, and ends up doing more harm than if it was simply more pragmatic. Currently, there's a similar problem with health care. The situation is that drug patents raise the cost of simple and effective treatments to astronomical levels, denying knows, effective treatment to a majority of the world's population, even though it's relatively cheap to actually manufacture the drugs themselves. In both cases, people are actually dying because of the existence of patent law, balanced against the profits that can be made by a select few (and probably none of the actual inventors; drug patents are held by the large corporations and not individuals).
What if your competitor hires a computer scientist who says "Oh, this program appears to have a faster sort than our software, let me think for a while and see if I can come up with a faster sort for you" and happens to discover the very same algorithm? You can't prove that they reverse engineered it, and they can't prove that they didn't, but the actual reality (since this is a hypothetical situation) is that the other computer scientist discovered the exact same algorithm that you did. Now, should that scientist be prevented from plying his trade and being paid for it even though he or she is clearly just as capable and imaginative as you?
Unless your argument is that independent discovery of innovations is absolutely prohibited by the laws of physics, this pokes a hole in your idea of why patents are a good idea.
Take quicksort for example. Sorting data has nothing to do with mathematics
Let L be an ordered list of elements, such that for any pair of elements a and b from L, the binary relation a <= b is defined. The function Q(L) has as its domain domain the set of all finite lists, L, having length S(L) which is an integer equal to the number of elements in the list, and the range of Q(L) is the set of all permutations of the list L. The value of Q(L) where S(L) <= 1 is L. The definition of Q(L) where S(L)>1 is as follows: Select an element p from the list L, and partition the elements of L into two lists, L1 and L2, such that the element p and all elements, e, from L where (e <= p) are in the list L1, and all other elements are in the list L2. The value of Q(L) is equal to the list formed by the in-order elements of L1 followed by the in-order elements of L2. For all L, the permutation Q(L) has the property that if a and b are elements of L, then if a comes before b in the list, then a <= b.
I dare you to find another algorithm that you think is non-mathematical.
That monopoly has been earned and the government is simply enforcing it. It's earned based on the fact the inventor has full rights to profit from the invention and others don't, at least not without permission. It doesn't have to be a monopoly, though. If anyone pays licensing fees to the company owning the invention, it can use the invention.
So what happens if more than one person "earns" the right to profit from the same invention? Or do you contend that simultaneous or independent discovery of an innovation is absolutely impossible?
I can draw a simple line between discovery and inventions; when more than a few people have a reasonable chance of discovering an innovation, then it's a discovery. Otherwise, it's an invention. The reasoning is clear; if only one person can create a particular invention, then they may have some property claim to it. If more than one person can reasonably be expected to discover the same innovation, giving only one of those people exclusive ownership of the idea and implementation of that idea is unfair, even if it's for a limited time, and even if they filed a bunch of paperwork claiming they were first. Often an innovation isn't obvious until a particular problem necessitating the innovation is encountered. Not everyone capable of discovering that innovation is guaranteed to encounter the same problem at the same time, so it's basically a result of dumb luck that one of them will discover the innovation first. Patent law is supposed to recognize this concept by denying patents that would be obvious to a person trained in the art of the particular innovation's nature. The problem is that the (U.S. at least) patent office almost never applies this doctrine realistically, and continues to grant patents for "some decades-old business practice + The Internet" or even the wheel in Australia. The way I see it, even if only two smart people could realistically invent something, granting an exclusive right to one of them unduly reduces the rights of the other.
My basic argument against patents has always been that with 6 billion people on earth, it almost always benefits more people to allow the completely free exchange of ideas. As you mentioned, there are many things that "you'd never think of in a million years", but those same things might be completely obvious to a very smart person. The problem with patents is when a novel, useful innovation is completely obvious to at least *two* smart people; at that point the patent system is broken. Simply because one of those people filed a bunch of annoying paperwork first shouldn't prevent the other person from using that idea in any way that they desire, including sharing it with the entire world for free. The exclusivity of ideas has to actually have some basis in fact for it to be applied in law, and I don't think there are very many ideas that are truly unique to a single individual. Patents, if they exist, should be treated much more like copyrights. In strict legal theory, this is true, and a patent is only infringed if every claim of the patent is found to be infringed by another invention. Unfortunately, simply the threat of legal action is often enough to stifle innovation. It's much like if Disney had obtained a copyright on "cartoon animals" or "animated fairytales" and could happily sue any other company producing ideas that fit within those broad categories. Most patents are issued in similarly over-broad terms, and that is the heart of the problem. The other problem is that the business model of R&D, creation, profit is going the way of the music industry. With rapid prototyping, computer simulation, and cheaper CNC machines, the cost to develop new innovations is being decreased dramatically. Does it really make sense to issue a 25 year patent for a new widget that was drawn up in autocad in a week, stress tested with finite element analysis for another week, and then popped out of a rapid prototyper the next day and tested and finally sent to production on a CNC machine at the end of the month? If nothing else, the length of patents should at least reflect the realities of a free market with amazing new tools for rapidly creating new inventions. Often, people don't even realize they need something until they encounter a problem, and at that point it is pretty obvious how to solve it. Just because someone had the same problem within the last 25 years should not give them an exclusive right to the solution.
There's a problem with lumping people into an IT department if there's no clear definition of what information (and what technology) should fall under that definition. I picked some stupidly extreme examples to demonstrate, but the point is still valid.
If cable TV doesn't process information and therefore doesn't fall under IT, then why do dumb terminals, printers, faxes, and phones usually fall under IT? Why doesn't the cable TV repair person work in the same department as the support person who plugs network cables and PC power cords back into the wall and the guy who plugs a computer into the ODB-2 port to check a car's emissions controls?
The problem is that trying to talk to "IT" for every technology related problem becomes a headache of assigning problems at the top of a pyramid and letting them trickle down to the people who can actually fix them, who then have to work their way back up the support tree when they're finished. It's inefficient for everyone concerned. It makes much more sense to explicitly define separate areas of support for different bits of technology and give those areas different names.
Whether you go with Truecrypt, LUKS, or some other solution, encrypt the entire main hard disk/SSD/flash drive. Theft, loss, or breakage is an obvious possibility when traveling around a foreign country for an extended period of time, and you'll feel better knowing that if you lose control of your netbook's storage device for any reason, that there's no way anyone can get your passwords or financial info from it, even if if breaks and someone dumpster dives for it. Make sure the swap file or partition is encrypted, too.
I doubt DNSSEC will be widely available before your trip, but if you can find a service that will provide it to you, use it. Never trust new SSL certificates while you are on your trip. If you visit sites with self-signed certificates, get them all trusted by your browser before you leave. I've seen a few anecdotal reports from people who complain that their bank suddenly begins asking them to a trust a new SSL certificate (which is a bad sign in the first place, since it should be trusted by one of the built-in CAs) when they were using a particular free wireless hot spot that was apparently trying to spoof SSL certificates for phishing. Make sure none of your netbook software is vulnerable to the null-prefix attack on SSL certificates. Watch out for shoulder-surfers when using your banking/financial sites. Use full HTTPS URLs when accessing sites, e.g. "https://www.bank.com" and bookmark them to avoid simple mistakes like typing "bank.com" in a browser, getting a poisoned DNS record for an attacker's site that is then fetched via HTTP and begins a man-in-the-middle attack on you.
Don't install new software unless you can be absolutely certain that it hasn't been modified during download. If you use Windows, about the best you can do is only download software over HTTPS and then check the md5sum if it's also published via HTTPS. AFAIK, Windows Update and the Firefox automatic-update process are secure. Most Linux package managers use PGP keys to verify packages downloaded from repositories, so if you use Linux on your netbook make sure you have all the PGP keys of the repositories you are going to use installed before you leave for your trip. Bring a fresh copy of the installation media (including necessary drivers and the latest version of Firefox) for the netbook, just in case the OS does get compromised or corrupted for some reason and you have to start from scratch. If you have anything you can't stand losing, back it up to an online service whenever you have the chance. Make sure those backups are encrypted.
Beware of drive-by installs of malware from MITM (man in the middle) modified HTTP sites. Avoid enabling flash, if you can, considering that every few months there's a new remotely exploitable hole found in it. Ad, javascript and flash blockers would be a good idea for all but trusted sites. If you think your email should be private, use PGP/gpg. If you think your email should be semi-private (e.g. the local ISP/hot spot can't read it, but just about anyone else could if they wanted), use webmail over HTTPS. Occasionally check major security sites in case a new zero-day exploit comes out that your software/OS is vulnerable to.
A remote hosted VPN that others suggested will be useful for pretending that your netbook is connected to the Internet in a country of your choosing. DNS might be a little more trustworthy over a VPN, but attacks can be staged against the box running your VPN, too. There are some poorly designed "secure" sites that download some content (images, scripts, flash, who knows) over HTTP instead of HTTPS, and a VPN can protect you from locally injected attacks against those broken sites. Beware of HTTP pages that submit login credentials via javascript or a form to an HTTPS page; the HTTP site can be modified in transit to submit the credentials to an attacker. The more popular and valuable a site is, the more likely there is some scumbag running an attack for it on their free wireless, so double check the SSL protection
If you google the subject, you'll find several projects that implement type safety, termination, and correctness proofs at the assembly language level. The proofs are more complex and sometimes limit the allowed instructions to a subset of the original machine language, but in theory it is possible to prove just about any property about any arbitrary machine code program, given a suitable model of the hardware and OS and a trusted proof verifier.
Once again, that's a function of the language and the facilities it provides. If your language doesn't give you pointers, you can't "diddle ... pointers", can you?
There is a published exploit of the Java virtual machine relying on the eventual flipping of a single bit of RAM (cosmic rays are apparently the most common source) to turn a safe data structure into a manipulable pointer to all of RAM. If you do not type check the machine code before you run it, the language it was compiled from will not protect you from compiler bugs or malicious machine code that breaks the type safety model.
No matter how you twist it, all of the jobs you list deal with technology that processes information, or "information technology" if you will.
So I.T. now supports the ECMs in the company cars and their GPS navigation devices, the cable TV, the central heating/cooling controls, the elevator control panels, tape recorders, and pocket calculators? Defining "IT" as the department that fixes anything with a semiconductor, vacuum tube, or relay in it is far too broad.
"MZBlahBlah... Hello, please save the text of this email as blahblah.pif and open it to enable the images/porn/bonzai buddy/whatever you think is important enough to go through minor hoops to get"
Arguably a passage of text (including spaces and punctuation) from a piece of literature will do you very well.
This is a horrible idea. Google already caches a significant fraction of all human readable text in the world, and more importantly caches almost all of the popular text. It's not hard to believe that the NSA/FBI/CIA have similar databases from which to try all the phrases between 1 and 100 characters (and all the acronyms formed from the words in the phrases, and the phrases backwards, etc.). Even with a petabyte database of text, it's only about 10^17 operations to try every string from 1 to 100 bytes, which is less than 64 bits of entropy. Further, trying only the most common phrases first (order all the text by google pagerank or by the popularity of a book on google books, for instance) would yield much faster cracking of literature-based passwords if someone picked a passage from their favorite book.
LISP, Scheme, Haskell, Mathematica, Maple, and plenty of other languages support arbitrary precision rational numbers as built in types. This fixes all rounding errors involving rational numbers (including fractions). If irrational numbers like pi, e, or transcendental functions are necessary, then there will always be inherent error in the representation and the programmer has to know how to do with that error and calculate the expected error of a sequence of operations. If you want to get fancy, you can use an algebraic language like Mathematica to symbolically solve your equations and maintain perfect accuracy with symbolic representations of irrational and transcendental numbers.
If we can trigger the suicide of the universe at will with the LHC, all we need is to give everyone a button to remotely start it up whenever they feel unhappy. The future universes would be filled only with happy people (or none).
There are presumably a finite number of atoms in the visible universe that we could turn into a computer, so an upper limit on the number of operations per second that we can devote to cracking a key. Assuming no method better than brute force is available (the biggest if, IMO), you just need to find the number of bits that puts the universe into the heat death without breaking it. I've heard that 128 bits is good for a few billion years, and 256 bits will outlast the heat death. Your mileage may vary.
It looks pretty plane to me.
What's with the anal retentive GNU/Linux all the time. Just call in linux already. With a GNU/Linux name, linux never is going to get any popularity. Yeah yeah, I know, linux officially just denotes the kernel etc., but really, no-one cares. It's an image thing. How many people do you hear saying that they have "microsoft windows ixpee" on their computer? That's right. None. They just state that they've got "XP", or "Vista", or "Mac" / "Apple"
I don't think I've ever heard anyone bragging or claiming to run "ntoskrnl.exe" or "Mach" on their Windows/Apple box, whereas I hear plenty of people who say they run Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc. I don't see the problem.
I approve of Eolas in the same way I approve of nuclear weapons; horrible destructive ability that should only be unleashed on the worst possible garbage in the world.
If I recall correctly, the Tesla does battery management to keep the charge on the batteries within a pretty narrow (relative to, say, a laptop battery) range to extend the battery life, so it may never need to charge much beyond 80% anyway.
I'm not sure what the cost of a transformer in every home would be, but that wouldn't really be necessary. Providing an extra pair of wires with high voltage to the home from the nearest pole would not be too much of an extra cost; the wiring could be smaller gauge which would probably cover the increased insulation cost. Most transmission lines are already high voltage until they reach the neighborhood they serve, so it would basically involve adding another service drop directly to a charging station next to the house/garage.
Diesel fuel is even better. It doesn't burn at all in liquid or vapor form. The only way to burn it is by pressurizing the vapor until it auto-ignites.
Tell that to my oil fired boiler which merely sprays liquid diesel fuel through a nozzle and into the flame-front that heats my house. Or pour some diesel on a pile of slightly damp wood and light it to start a bonfire.
The obvious solution is to run high voltage lines directly to houses for charging EVs, which would improve efficiency and lower costs (lower I^2 heat loss, and no need to add more pole transformers to handle the extra load).