If the bank still has network access to the ATM, then the bank could configure the machine to have no access until such access is authorized, remotely, for a given time window, with an expiring password that the service technician could even write on the top of their workorder form, as once it's entered, it's gone. That would prohibit illicit crews from gaining access without having someone inside the company assisting.
Alternately, require the sensors indicating that the machine has been properly opened into service configuration before releasing control. Since such a configuration would probably give the in-person attacker direct access to the money stored in the machine, there would be little reason to continue with an electronic attack, as opposed to drilling through or breaking through a panel now to get at a port, which doesn't expose the money.
How about understanding the guy with the stutter? The guy that doesn't move his jaw so his consonants are almost imperceptible? The Scot? The Cajun? The Bostonian? The Puerto Rican? The Jamacian?
You just eliminated the upper middle class from making any stock investments.
Either you have no idea how tax brackets work, or else you didn't read my post thoroughly.
I set the scenario for new tax brackets, and my example of a 90% bracket starts a $5,000,001 in income and above. That doesn't mean that all if your income is taxed at 90%, it means that all income above $5,000,000 is taxed at 90%.
If $5,000,000 is your idea of upper-middle class, then I really don't know what to say. I tend to transition out of upper-middle class into wealthy somewhere in the annual income of $200,000 to $500,000 per household range, depending on the cost of living in one's area.
The difference is, the difficulty level to cross that river is small. The difficulty in building a permanent method by which to cross that river is small, but a little harder. The difficulty in crossing that sea is even harder. The difficulty in crossing that ocean is even harder still, and the first sailors didn't truly know what they'd have to face when they got there, but at least they could breathe the water and could attempt to fish for food from the sea.
Someone wishing to go to Mars cannot rely on nontechnological means of sustaining life. There is no air to breathe, no food to scavenge or forage for, and no water to drink. Breathable air has to be made from ingredients on the ground. Water has to be processed from ice or made from components of the Martian atmosphere. Food has to be grown in soil that might not even be able to sustain crops.
This isn't Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. As good as those books are, they're not science, they're not even really hard science fiction. They're the stories of characters, fictional creations that receive fictional macguffins to help with their fictional plot advances. I really enjoyed those books, but I do not in any way consider anything after the first couple of chapters to be worth thinking about in a real Mars mission. The ability to deploy, in advance, small, launchable factories designed to create breathable air and drinkable water are one thing, the ability to collect all of that infrastructure into one place and to keep it functioning is an entirely different story, and remember, in the books, the project had the support of both the American and the Russian governments. Not simply a couple of guys. Can't hold a bake-sale to buy a bomber.
Do you remember The Simpsons episode, "Marge vs. the Monorail," where they had a song-and-dance routine about monorails and the town bought one, and it didn't work? Well, that single episode of popular television has set back monorails to this day, even though when they've been installed (Disney parks the sizes of small cities, Seattle, Las Vegas, as examples) they've been incredibly well received and have been very cost effective to operate. This program, should it get into the popular culture before it fails, will do the exact same thing to space exploration.
The shoestring budget they'll get out of crowdsourcing and a TV show will launch people into space just long enough to kill them.
I don't think it'll even get them that far. There's the aspect of having a man-rated craft, a man-rated booster, and a man-rated habitat to deploy once getting there. If these three things aren't met then they can't even launch.
You know why military contractors don't usually change products, even when they're obsolete? Because it costs a lot of money to re-certify those products, especially things with life-support or energetic applications. You can't change even something as trivial as going from an SAE thread pattern on a hole drilled in a mounting ear to a metric thread pattern without re-qualifying, if that hole was provided pre-tapped. There are old products that have been granted exemptions to environmental law specifically because it's less costly to pay the environmental waiver than it is to qualify a new material or process that isn't bad for the environment.
If they can't demonstrate that they can launch a crew, convey them to their destination, and provide them with some form of functional shelter then they will never get off the ground.
Government is a function of the society, not necessarily there for the benefit of all.
Corporations are definitely not there for the benefit of all. They're there for the benefit of those that own the corporation. That said, corporations that appear altruistic are such because their owners derive a benefit in the form of endorphins for the feeling that they're good people doing good things, while in reality it's very likely that they're simply willing to take less personal profit from the sum of their collective endeavors and interests. Should those people stop feeling like they're doing good, they may end the corporation or change its nature, so that it is no longer exhibiting altruistic appearances.
Greed cannot be eliminated from a society. The Soviets failed in large part because of this, they couldn't eliminate social stratification because when it finally came down to it, every individual is selfish as a survival trait and there's not a lot of reason to voluntarily give up advantages or resources that one has acquired.
I don't think that it's possible to eliminate greed or self-interest, that's completely against the nature of self-preservation. What I do think needs to happen is to put a dampener on how far one can go. During the Eisenhower administration the tax rate on the uppermost bracket of incomes was 91%. Ninety one friggin' precent. Yet, there were still obscenely wealthy people. It's time to define new upper income brackets. I don't have a problem with someone's five-million-and-oneth dollar being taxed at 90%.
If one modifies the tax code to make capital gains on investments count as income just like working for that income as wages is taxed, and then sets high tax rates on high incomes, I expect that a lot of the closing-for-profit types of schemes will curtail. If it's not profitable to buy a business to then dismantle it because one doesn't personally see the profits, then it's logical to see that less of it will happen.
Yeah, I forgot about that. I had ducked 100% into Linux for about five years and hadn't had to contend with that era of stupidity.
Had that new laptop not had problems with Linux (the clock would advance strangely and inconsistently, which broke just about everything attempting to run eventually) I probably wouldn't have fallen back into the MS path of least resistance.
To put this into a car analogy, electric cars don't need to surpass ICE cars in every conceivable scenario to make one worth buying for a given individual.
No, but to expand on your car analogy, they have to be able to meet certain minimum standards and customer requirements.
And dropping out of analogy, the hypothetical courtroom automatic stenographer would probably have it easiest, as the rules of the court dictate that only one person may speak at a time, and most courts have individual microphones for every speaking party for acoustically recording the proceedings anyway. The same cannot be said for the dinner table.
Even the most rudimentary system for sampling several participants would cost hundreds of dollars. A half-way accurate comparison would be the equipment needed to record a drum-set, with individual microphones for each drum, cymbal, and accessory, and a processor that monitors line-levels and individually records each input separately. Replace the function of recording each input and turn it into processing each input for discrete words, and only then are you even getting to the hard part, interpreting what the sounds actually are.
The low-end equipment to record drums is hundreds of dollars. High end equipment to do the same thing costs thousands of dollars. Now tack on the cost of the processing side, and you're probably at tens of thousands of dollars. Just to attempt to participate in a large group conversation as opposed to small-party conversation where polite participants will probably work to simplify the flow of conversation to allow the impaired individual to participate.
A friend of mine in a social club has a son with some form of developmental disability. I've heard that it's Aspergers, but I'm not entirely certain as many of the traits commonly associated with Aspergers don't seem to manifest with him. When he's party to our conversations we modify our conversation to accommodate him. We attempt to avoid speaking over each other or over him, and we increase the amount of time that one considers a pause by a given speaker, so that we don't interrupt him while he's talking.
If we had a substantially hearing-impaired member, we would probably modify our conversations accordingly, slowing our speech enough that lips could be read, attempting to avoid talking over each other, and attempting to keep our faces oriented to where the individual could see those faces. Given the nature of our vocabulary in this social setting (a speculative fiction group) it would be highly unlikely that a speech-to-text system would correctly interpret any of the truly important words in the conversation anyway, so such a system would be useless.
There's a reason why radio personalities often sound similar, they have excessively good diction to excess. Even shock-jocks and others that seem counter-culture or edgy must have excellent verbal communications skills in order to work in that industry; they have to overcome the problem of communicating when the listener cannot read their lips. Vowel sounds and other 'long' sounds are easy to make out, but the staccato consonants are what give meaning to the sounds, and lots of lazy speakers under-emphasize their consonants and yet get upset when people ask them to repeat themselves.
When I was a child I was in a professional choir. We were taught exactly that, to downplay non-vowel long sounds (the 'th' sound, the 's' sound, the 'l' sound, probably some others) and to over-emphasize hard consonants like 't', 'd', 'p', 'b', 'k', etc. This training apparently stuck with me; it's extremely rare that I'm asked to repeat myself.
I have read on them, actually. I figured the "Say it ain't so" would have conveyed the sarcasm of the previous paragraph.
I like optical scan, where the voter draws a line between arrowheads next to the name of the candidate or their position on the question. I like it because it can be machine-counted for speed, and can be human-counted when there's a dispute or an automatic-recount based on the closeness of an election. It is, by default, its own paper trail.
I think the character most commonly displayed on mine is the semicolon. For whatever reason, the systems in use in this city seem to LOVE the semicolon. I don't even know what that's an option, it'd make more sense for them to drop punctuation entirely and solely concentrate on the 26 letters if the machine continues to default to using punctuation characters instead.
I have a suggestion of a test for you, to demonstrate why it's impractical at absolute best.
Take ten or so friends to a restaurant. It can be that you're the only patrons there so it's relatively quiet, that's fine. Seat everyone along two sides of a long table, and put a person at each end. Seat yourself in the middle of one of the long sides. Now, as your party is served, attempt to pay attention to all of the conversation going on among the friends. You'll probably find that the friends break into three or four distinct conversations, with some people floating between conversations depending on what's being talked about. Now, in turn, try to focus on or participate in every distinct conversation at the table.
Even as someone with good hearing, this will be a difficult task. With at few as four people it's possible to have two distinct conversations going on in parallel, and with six people it's almost guaranteed to have at least some moments with two simultaneous conversations.
Unless a family operates their dinners with parliamentary rules for who has the floor, it would be almost impossible for software to successfully monitor and differentiate so many speakers, even if the hardware were ideally installed so that each individual speaker could be individually sampled. Fully able-bodied humans struggle with this with years of experience in attempting to sort through the chatter, I don't see how software is going to make it work, and I also don't see how the hearing-impaired individual is going to be able to read to keep up with that many conversations simultaneously in order to really enjoy the experience, while eating.
...because if there were, it'd be put into immediate use for TV closed captioning for live programs, for live presentations with a text crawl at the podium of the speaker, and in courtrooms, replacing the stenographer.
That said, there are companies working on it, like Dragon, but they're not there yet, and when they get closer, they won't be cheap.
You mean, the trick I use on the computers I support, by password-protecting the BIOSes and restricting boot to the fixed disk only, a trick that I've used for about twenty years, was ignored on commercial-grade equipment that's responsible for the basic security of our form of government and of our financial system?
I think that it's stupid to allow the USB port to do anything more than provide a Human Interface Device level of access to the OS unless credentials are entered in to the machine to enable those features.
Or, in layman's terms, AT BEST the USB port should only work for a keyboard interface as a prompt for a password until the operator is authenticated.
It's CRIMINALLY STUPID for the USB port to provide any other kind of access by default. It should not give the OS kernel access to media plugged into it. It should CERTAINLY not automatically engage media plugged into it to read it. Arguably, it shouldn't do ANYTHING even with a keyboard plugged in until the technician servicing the machine has otherwise entered passwords, like on an internal keypad.
I once read that Republicans used Dial more than two to one over normal people. You are right that it should die, but it probably won't because they have too muhc influence in the government.
You can have my soap when you pry it from my cold, dead, wet hand?
Straw that broke the camel's back for me was several hours of CSI on Spike TV every weekday after work. While not reality-TV crap, it certainly wasn't high-art, and after a few weeks when they started repeating episodes that I'd already seen I realized I needed help.
I watched an episode of Law and Order: SVU the other night, and after I realized that it was loaded with assumptions that I couldn't suspend disbelief I started noting them... 1) cell phone whose battery lasts too long, 2) bad guy that happens to have a conveniently located closed store in New York City that belonged to his father, 3) hacked cellular network that has a "virus" that the bad guy installed to obscure his phone calls to traces, 4) bad guy doesn't notice his missing cell phone for the day despite having an underage kidnap victim in the closed store, 5) cops know that closed store that closed many years ago was an electronics store and somehow conclude that deceased owner's son is some kind of genius hacker because his dad repaired broken televisions, 6) the cops showing up after the bad guy has buried the kidnap victim alive, but still manage to get her out of the ground without hitting her with a shovel and without her having suffocated or been crushed to death...
It was just too much. It also reaffirmed to me how bad TV can get.
Blowing the whistle only works when telling people that don't already know, and arguably aren't technically cleared to have such knowledge, as those that have clearance can't say anything even if they're told by a whistleblower, as it would spell an end to their clearance and probably their job, or in the case of an elected official, an end to their effectiveness at their job.
I wonder, sometimes, how much less safe we'd really, actually be if the NSA or a like-organization didn't exist, or at least didn't get access to anything domestically without explicit court order. My guess is that it wouldn't be much, especially since for most cases of terrorism that have been launched from within the US (9/11, Tsasrnaev, Oklahoma City) have seemingly gone off without having triggered a response, especially considering that there was evidence of something being planned from the start that was brought to attention.
I do not think that we are a whole lot safer on account of the NSA. As such, I don't think that the NSA's mission to collect information on Americans can even be justified by a safety argument.
...and really don't miss it. We've found that there are so many free options that it doesn't really make sense to pay for TV, especially when there are repositories with large numbers of episodes available, legally, completely free with no ads, and there are other repositories like Crackle with lots of movies and TV shows free with the caveat of having to sit through an ad every little bit.
Last time we had cable, there were ads that we had to sit through. If I'm going to have to see ads, I don't want to pay out-of-pocket for the content.
Best part is, it's easier to turn off the damn TV to go outside or to go do something else when one isn't paying for it and isn't so dependent on a set schedule.
Exclusive because SpaceX might need to make modifications to facilitate their use of the pad, which would mean that a lack of exclusivity would increase operational costs as modifications would be continually necessary for every type of vehicle to use the pad.
It's not like SpaceX has a 99 year lease on the pad, and if serious competition develops then it's very likely that the next time the contract comes up for negotiation it'll be changed.
Slashdot Mirror
If the bank still has network access to the ATM, then the bank could configure the machine to have no access until such access is authorized, remotely, for a given time window, with an expiring password that the service technician could even write on the top of their workorder form, as once it's entered, it's gone. That would prohibit illicit crews from gaining access without having someone inside the company assisting.
Alternately, require the sensors indicating that the machine has been properly opened into service configuration before releasing control. Since such a configuration would probably give the in-person attacker direct access to the money stored in the machine, there would be little reason to continue with an electronic attack, as opposed to drilling through or breaking through a panel now to get at a port, which doesn't expose the money.
To add to your argument, I expect that Good Morning America and other national-level programs could afford to pay the live professional stenographer.
How about understanding the guy with the stutter? The guy that doesn't move his jaw so his consonants are almost imperceptible? The Scot? The Cajun? The Bostonian? The Puerto Rican? The Jamacian?
Either you have no idea how tax brackets work, or else you didn't read my post thoroughly.
I set the scenario for new tax brackets, and my example of a 90% bracket starts a $5,000,001 in income and above. That doesn't mean that all if your income is taxed at 90%, it means that all income above $5,000,000 is taxed at 90%.
If $5,000,000 is your idea of upper-middle class, then I really don't know what to say. I tend to transition out of upper-middle class into wealthy somewhere in the annual income of $200,000 to $500,000 per household range, depending on the cost of living in one's area.
The difference is, the difficulty level to cross that river is small. The difficulty in building a permanent method by which to cross that river is small, but a little harder. The difficulty in crossing that sea is even harder. The difficulty in crossing that ocean is even harder still, and the first sailors didn't truly know what they'd have to face when they got there, but at least they could breathe the water and could attempt to fish for food from the sea.
Someone wishing to go to Mars cannot rely on nontechnological means of sustaining life. There is no air to breathe, no food to scavenge or forage for, and no water to drink. Breathable air has to be made from ingredients on the ground. Water has to be processed from ice or made from components of the Martian atmosphere. Food has to be grown in soil that might not even be able to sustain crops.
This isn't Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. As good as those books are, they're not science, they're not even really hard science fiction. They're the stories of characters, fictional creations that receive fictional macguffins to help with their fictional plot advances. I really enjoyed those books, but I do not in any way consider anything after the first couple of chapters to be worth thinking about in a real Mars mission. The ability to deploy, in advance, small, launchable factories designed to create breathable air and drinkable water are one thing, the ability to collect all of that infrastructure into one place and to keep it functioning is an entirely different story, and remember, in the books, the project had the support of both the American and the Russian governments. Not simply a couple of guys. Can't hold a bake-sale to buy a bomber.
Do you remember The Simpsons episode, "Marge vs. the Monorail," where they had a song-and-dance routine about monorails and the town bought one, and it didn't work? Well, that single episode of popular television has set back monorails to this day, even though when they've been installed (Disney parks the sizes of small cities, Seattle, Las Vegas, as examples) they've been incredibly well received and have been very cost effective to operate. This program, should it get into the popular culture before it fails, will do the exact same thing to space exploration.
I don't think it'll even get them that far. There's the aspect of having a man-rated craft, a man-rated booster, and a man-rated habitat to deploy once getting there. If these three things aren't met then they can't even launch.
You know why military contractors don't usually change products, even when they're obsolete? Because it costs a lot of money to re-certify those products, especially things with life-support or energetic applications. You can't change even something as trivial as going from an SAE thread pattern on a hole drilled in a mounting ear to a metric thread pattern without re-qualifying, if that hole was provided pre-tapped. There are old products that have been granted exemptions to environmental law specifically because it's less costly to pay the environmental waiver than it is to qualify a new material or process that isn't bad for the environment.
If they can't demonstrate that they can launch a crew, convey them to their destination, and provide them with some form of functional shelter then they will never get off the ground.
Government is a function of the society, not necessarily there for the benefit of all.
Corporations are definitely not there for the benefit of all. They're there for the benefit of those that own the corporation. That said, corporations that appear altruistic are such because their owners derive a benefit in the form of endorphins for the feeling that they're good people doing good things, while in reality it's very likely that they're simply willing to take less personal profit from the sum of their collective endeavors and interests. Should those people stop feeling like they're doing good, they may end the corporation or change its nature, so that it is no longer exhibiting altruistic appearances.
Greed cannot be eliminated from a society. The Soviets failed in large part because of this, they couldn't eliminate social stratification because when it finally came down to it, every individual is selfish as a survival trait and there's not a lot of reason to voluntarily give up advantages or resources that one has acquired.
I don't think that it's possible to eliminate greed or self-interest, that's completely against the nature of self-preservation. What I do think needs to happen is to put a dampener on how far one can go. During the Eisenhower administration the tax rate on the uppermost bracket of incomes was 91%. Ninety one friggin' precent. Yet, there were still obscenely wealthy people. It's time to define new upper income brackets. I don't have a problem with someone's five-million-and-oneth dollar being taxed at 90%.
If one modifies the tax code to make capital gains on investments count as income just like working for that income as wages is taxed, and then sets high tax rates on high incomes, I expect that a lot of the closing-for-profit types of schemes will curtail. If it's not profitable to buy a business to then dismantle it because one doesn't personally see the profits, then it's logical to see that less of it will happen.
Yeah, I forgot about that. I had ducked 100% into Linux for about five years and hadn't had to contend with that era of stupidity.
Had that new laptop not had problems with Linux (the clock would advance strangely and inconsistently, which broke just about everything attempting to run eventually) I probably wouldn't have fallen back into the MS path of least resistance.
No, but to expand on your car analogy, they have to be able to meet certain minimum standards and customer requirements.
And dropping out of analogy, the hypothetical courtroom automatic stenographer would probably have it easiest, as the rules of the court dictate that only one person may speak at a time, and most courts have individual microphones for every speaking party for acoustically recording the proceedings anyway. The same cannot be said for the dinner table.
Even the most rudimentary system for sampling several participants would cost hundreds of dollars. A half-way accurate comparison would be the equipment needed to record a drum-set, with individual microphones for each drum, cymbal, and accessory, and a processor that monitors line-levels and individually records each input separately. Replace the function of recording each input and turn it into processing each input for discrete words, and only then are you even getting to the hard part, interpreting what the sounds actually are.
The low-end equipment to record drums is hundreds of dollars. High end equipment to do the same thing costs thousands of dollars. Now tack on the cost of the processing side, and you're probably at tens of thousands of dollars. Just to attempt to participate in a large group conversation as opposed to small-party conversation where polite participants will probably work to simplify the flow of conversation to allow the impaired individual to participate.
A friend of mine in a social club has a son with some form of developmental disability. I've heard that it's Aspergers, but I'm not entirely certain as many of the traits commonly associated with Aspergers don't seem to manifest with him. When he's party to our conversations we modify our conversation to accommodate him. We attempt to avoid speaking over each other or over him, and we increase the amount of time that one considers a pause by a given speaker, so that we don't interrupt him while he's talking.
If we had a substantially hearing-impaired member, we would probably modify our conversations accordingly, slowing our speech enough that lips could be read, attempting to avoid talking over each other, and attempting to keep our faces oriented to where the individual could see those faces. Given the nature of our vocabulary in this social setting (a speculative fiction group) it would be highly unlikely that a speech-to-text system would correctly interpret any of the truly important words in the conversation anyway, so such a system would be useless.
Mmmhmm...
There's a reason why radio personalities often sound similar, they have excessively good diction to excess. Even shock-jocks and others that seem counter-culture or edgy must have excellent verbal communications skills in order to work in that industry; they have to overcome the problem of communicating when the listener cannot read their lips. Vowel sounds and other 'long' sounds are easy to make out, but the staccato consonants are what give meaning to the sounds, and lots of lazy speakers under-emphasize their consonants and yet get upset when people ask them to repeat themselves.
When I was a child I was in a professional choir. We were taught exactly that, to downplay non-vowel long sounds (the 'th' sound, the 's' sound, the 'l' sound, probably some others) and to over-emphasize hard consonants like 't', 'd', 'p', 'b', 'k', etc. This training apparently stuck with me; it's extremely rare that I'm asked to repeat myself.
I have read on them, actually. I figured the "Say it ain't so" would have conveyed the sarcasm of the previous paragraph.
I like optical scan, where the voter draws a line between arrowheads next to the name of the candidate or their position on the question. I like it because it can be machine-counted for speed, and can be human-counted when there's a dispute or an automatic-recount based on the closeness of an election. It is, by default, its own paper trail.
I think the character most commonly displayed on mine is the semicolon. For whatever reason, the systems in use in this city seem to LOVE the semicolon. I don't even know what that's an option, it'd make more sense for them to drop punctuation entirely and solely concentrate on the 26 letters if the machine continues to default to using punctuation characters instead.
Like I said, AT BEST, and why I suggested the internal keypad.
I have a suggestion of a test for you, to demonstrate why it's impractical at absolute best.
Take ten or so friends to a restaurant. It can be that you're the only patrons there so it's relatively quiet, that's fine. Seat everyone along two sides of a long table, and put a person at each end. Seat yourself in the middle of one of the long sides. Now, as your party is served, attempt to pay attention to all of the conversation going on among the friends. You'll probably find that the friends break into three or four distinct conversations, with some people floating between conversations depending on what's being talked about. Now, in turn, try to focus on or participate in every distinct conversation at the table.
Even as someone with good hearing, this will be a difficult task. With at few as four people it's possible to have two distinct conversations going on in parallel, and with six people it's almost guaranteed to have at least some moments with two simultaneous conversations.
Unless a family operates their dinners with parliamentary rules for who has the floor, it would be almost impossible for software to successfully monitor and differentiate so many speakers, even if the hardware were ideally installed so that each individual speaker could be individually sampled. Fully able-bodied humans struggle with this with years of experience in attempting to sort through the chatter, I don't see how software is going to make it work, and I also don't see how the hearing-impaired individual is going to be able to read to keep up with that many conversations simultaneously in order to really enjoy the experience, while eating.
Based on what I get on my TV when I press the Mute button, they really shouldn't be...
...because if there were, it'd be put into immediate use for TV closed captioning for live programs, for live presentations with a text crawl at the podium of the speaker, and in courtrooms, replacing the stenographer.
That said, there are companies working on it, like Dragon, but they're not there yet, and when they get closer, they won't be cheap.
TL;DR If it existed we'd be using it already.
You mean, the trick I use on the computers I support, by password-protecting the BIOSes and restricting boot to the fixed disk only, a trick that I've used for about twenty years, was ignored on commercial-grade equipment that's responsible for the basic security of our form of government and of our financial system?
Say it ain't so...
I think that it's stupid to allow the USB port to do anything more than provide a Human Interface Device level of access to the OS unless credentials are entered in to the machine to enable those features.
Or, in layman's terms, AT BEST the USB port should only work for a keyboard interface as a prompt for a password until the operator is authenticated.
It's CRIMINALLY STUPID for the USB port to provide any other kind of access by default. It should not give the OS kernel access to media plugged into it. It should CERTAINLY not automatically engage media plugged into it to read it. Arguably, it shouldn't do ANYTHING even with a keyboard plugged in until the technician servicing the machine has otherwise entered passwords, like on an internal keypad.
You can have my soap when you pry it from my cold, dead, wet hand?
I see we have a Thomas Pynchon fan here...
Franklin W. Dixon?
Straw that broke the camel's back for me was several hours of CSI on Spike TV every weekday after work. While not reality-TV crap, it certainly wasn't high-art, and after a few weeks when they started repeating episodes that I'd already seen I realized I needed help.
I watched an episode of Law and Order: SVU the other night, and after I realized that it was loaded with assumptions that I couldn't suspend disbelief I started noting them... 1) cell phone whose battery lasts too long, 2) bad guy that happens to have a conveniently located closed store in New York City that belonged to his father, 3) hacked cellular network that has a "virus" that the bad guy installed to obscure his phone calls to traces, 4) bad guy doesn't notice his missing cell phone for the day despite having an underage kidnap victim in the closed store, 5) cops know that closed store that closed many years ago was an electronics store and somehow conclude that deceased owner's son is some kind of genius hacker because his dad repaired broken televisions, 6) the cops showing up after the bad guy has buried the kidnap victim alive, but still manage to get her out of the ground without hitting her with a shovel and without her having suffocated or been crushed to death...
It was just too much. It also reaffirmed to me how bad TV can get.
Blowing the whistle only works when telling people that don't already know, and arguably aren't technically cleared to have such knowledge, as those that have clearance can't say anything even if they're told by a whistleblower, as it would spell an end to their clearance and probably their job, or in the case of an elected official, an end to their effectiveness at their job.
I wonder, sometimes, how much less safe we'd really, actually be if the NSA or a like-organization didn't exist, or at least didn't get access to anything domestically without explicit court order. My guess is that it wouldn't be much, especially since for most cases of terrorism that have been launched from within the US (9/11, Tsasrnaev, Oklahoma City) have seemingly gone off without having triggered a response, especially considering that there was evidence of something being planned from the start that was brought to attention.
I do not think that we are a whole lot safer on account of the NSA. As such, I don't think that the NSA's mission to collect information on Americans can even be justified by a safety argument.
...and really don't miss it. We've found that there are so many free options that it doesn't really make sense to pay for TV, especially when there are repositories with large numbers of episodes available, legally, completely free with no ads, and there are other repositories like Crackle with lots of movies and TV shows free with the caveat of having to sit through an ad every little bit.
Last time we had cable, there were ads that we had to sit through. If I'm going to have to see ads, I don't want to pay out-of-pocket for the content.
Best part is, it's easier to turn off the damn TV to go outside or to go do something else when one isn't paying for it and isn't so dependent on a set schedule.
Exclusive because SpaceX might need to make modifications to facilitate their use of the pad, which would mean that a lack of exclusivity would increase operational costs as modifications would be continually necessary for every type of vehicle to use the pad.
It's not like SpaceX has a 99 year lease on the pad, and if serious competition develops then it's very likely that the next time the contract comes up for negotiation it'll be changed.