driving while texting should be treated the same as driving with blood alcohol over the limit
Bad idea, read below:
Red light turns green. Cellphone goes in pocket, or in my case, dropped into convenient cupholder, until next red light. I use my phone all the time "while driving" for some strange definition of "driving" with no impact on my driving skills, perfectly safe for the general public. At 0 MPH the driving workload on a driver is really quite low.
Red light turns green. My blood alcohol content was 0.3% when the light was red, now that its green, its 0.3%. This results in a huge danger to public.
Another interesting comparison is you can only ticket people for texting (aka voicemail, or gps, or anything else) at a red light because otherwise its too hard to catch them doing it. But drunks can mostly only be detected while the car is moving, unless they're vomiting out the window or something. So the only texters who will ever get punished are the safe ones, in comparison to the drunks who get punished are the dangerous ones.
I've had weirdos yell at me about "my texting is going to kill people" for checking my phone's GPS and voicemails while waiting at a red light. People with strong opinions about this make no sense at all.
These same teens/people will likely have something else that causes their accident if not texting.
However it won't be an easily tracked metric. Public outrage is directly proportional to ease of reporting numbers, not actual danger or risk.
From personal experience children in a car seat are by far the most distracting thing you can have in a car. Even "girlfriend in a skimpy outfit" is not as distracting.
Another automotive killer is travel. Simply make it illegal to operate a motor vehicle more than 50 miles from county of registration and that alone will cut accident rates by a considerable amount.
My car has a nanny for the built-in GPS map. You can't do anything while you're driving. even at 2 MPH which means you have to pull over just to select a different destination.
Of course, someone hacked the somnabitch and normal usage is re-enabled. I don't see a point to trying to nanny bad drivers. They suck no matter what you do.
This is my number one reason not to waste money on a built in GPS system in my car. I'm old enough that my wife used to use "paper maps" like ink on cellulose, then we used a hand held GPS, and now android phone with google navigation app. If I had a built in GPS system, I would not be able to use it, and my wife would have to go back to paper maps. So I'm paying thousands of dollars for an option that does... nothing. They could make more profit by shipping a paver brick.
The number two reason is I can afford it but I'm too stubborn to pay thousands for a factory option when I can buy a handheld GPS for a hundred with 48 hours of battery, or just use my phone for a couple hours until the battery dies (at which point I need to plug it in)
A speed cut-out for a GPS is a technology destroyer. It would be simpler for everyone for the FCC to stop granting a license to import. Which is too bad, GPS is kind of handy.
The other thing I've never understood is if 10 people get killed by people Fing around with a GPS, that is a national call to action. But if 100 people get killed by people Fing around with paper maps, eh, thats just business, thats how it goes, too bad so sad. I'm not sure destroying GPS as a usable technology is worth killing 90 additional people or nine-tupling the "navigational death toll", but it seems almost inevitable at this point.
My 300 AUD eeepc... maybe this will show up as an application for cheap netbooks.
It showed up years ago. The term you don't know to google for is "android x86 project". I've been running android on my old eee netbook for quite awhile. Its free and I'd strongly suggest everyone give it a try.
Android makes a better netbook OS than either the preinstalled linux it came with, the full Debian install I did, or windows.
Android with keyboard and touchpad is much faster to use than android with touch screen. I never learned all the multitouch stuff so I'm not missing anything.
One thing I don't like is android x86 burns battery about as bad as any other OS. For whatever weird reason I subconsciously thought it would run for 12 hours like my phone, but it doesn't. Its not any worse than any other linux install, but not any better.
A lot of companies are complaining that they just can't find good tech folks...
... for $10/hr no benefits, or mandatory 80 hour per week overtime, or intern unpaid jobs, or "pay you in shares" startups, or ridiculously over specified.
Pay in peanuts, you get monkeys.
I see no evidence of an actual shortage.
I know its discouraging, but just trying to keep it real. Its not 1999 all over again. Or even 2004.
Unless you're unusually gifted, you're probably learning new things, and thinking, a somewhat more slowly than you were when you were 25.
Only in a law of averages. My observations of old people are they either give up intentionally, the brain freezes up, and they're hopeless, or they keep using the brain and they're more focused than a 20-something. It seems much like muscle mass and health in general as people age.
The percentage of those who give up in a population increases pretty much linear with age. Look out for the ancient wizard, those guys tend to have scary elite skills. Unless they gave up on tech and went into soft skills and are there just because of schmooze power, the schmooze guys tend toward being a laughingstock.
People tend to romanticize their youth a bit. At 25 I was trying to date the intern, had no idea what was going on although I thought I was an expert, still wasted time occasionally drinking, basically was an idiot with a huge surplus of energy and motivation. Which is all SOME jobs need, but most need actual skill.
1) Do something completely non-tech like management training and find something in at a tech company. Or accounting.
2) Do what you find interesting (I'm learning Scala by doing Project Euler tasks, because I want to. No other reason). You're asking/. so I'm guessing you don't want to do anything in tech. Which is fine. You may never find a job in the field. Assuming you're in the US, there are fewer employed full time workers every year so you may never have another job, at all. But at least you'll get a cool class.
3) Find where you want to work, figure out what they use in IT, and learn it to get in. So you wanna get in on the bubble (admittedly probably too late) so you figure out what groupon or facebook uses in your field, learn those topics, get into the bubble, or whatever. It seems we're headed into another downswing of the 2nd great depression. I'd look for a relatively stable employer, like a hospital?
4) Figure out where you want to work, figure out what entry level jobs they hire (unfortunately probably low pay), and learn a new skill in a new career.
5) Retire? My dad retired from full time 9-5 work in his 50s and consulted, but was mostly retired. Your previous employers may not need you 40 hours per week, but they may need you for 8 hours a week, or perhaps during busy times. Who's to say you're not doing your own startup or small business while retired? A decade or so ago, retired people looking to earn a buck used their domain specific skills to run a ebay store, worked for my dad. I guess that opportunity has been destroyed but there is probably something out there. Is gold farmer still a valid mode of employment?
One of the webcam models works well with kids because its cheap and displays on a big monitor, so you can look at stuff together. Some of the better ones show up as if they're normal webcams so you can have some weird internet chats with friends and family (G+ hangouts?) "Hey grandma, look at this giant ant leg" etc.
The other alternative is ebay. A kid is much better off with a worn out but "real" microscope that's probably cheaper than a hunk of Chinese plastic anyway. Some people are weirdly proud of being completely mechanically inept... they are a bad target market for used scopes.
Another alternative is new chinese steel. At a place like lwscientific.com you can spend about the cost of a good video card and get a new, "real" student grade scope that'll last forever.
Absolute worst case scenario is a cheap hunk of Chinese plastic with "900x" magnification listed on the box right next to ridiculous artists interpretations and electron microscope images. Oddly enough the marketing is just about as misleading and poor for other optical devices like telescopes.
You mentioned "parameciums". Its easy to find samples of plain ole dirt, grass leaves, etc. If you want "real prepared slides of weird or interesting organisms", go somewhere like carolina.com, "life sciences" "microscope slides". Note that a good prepared, preserved, stained slide is gonna be like $5 per slide. There are somewhat dodgier suppliers at a somewhat lower cost, but not as cheap as you'd think. On the other hand, my kids find it infinitely more interesting to run around in the yard, pick something up off the ground, and look at it under the 'scope.
Maybe the best place to start a kid with microscopes is a hand held magnifying glass. Much as you're supposed to "do astronomy" by starting with eyes first, then binocs, then get a scope...
I have no financial connection with any of the above other than spending money on stuff like this.
and we've done nothing but return to our current state.
"Major corporations promised me this boot process is crypto secured, so we don't waste money on anti-virus anymore"
"Yeah, I know his isn't mil-spec hardware, but this is a secure boot system so it must be safe for our 3rd world country"
"So its a life and safety critical controller, so we're using more expensive secure boot hardware instead of cheaper non-secure boot. Oh we just wasted an extra $10 times one million production run, whoops, well I'm sure the CEO won't mind the extra expense"
The amount of personal time you get from instructors for $100 is at most a few hours. For some students, that's enough. For most, it isn't.
I'd strongly disagree with "most". 200 students and one hour of office hours and the guy doesn't speak english anyway is not an unusual situation.
There is nothing wrong with people who have learning problems going to special schools that cost $50K/yr and everyone else goes to the $50/yr school.
The purpose of higher ed is not to hold your hand like a kindergartner anyway, its to teach you how to teach yourself. Look at the environment you'll be in when you graduate.
I used their PDA in the 90s to keep track of everything, and the software to sync with the desktop was glorious and everything Just Worked.
Four steps to the death of PALM:
1) Then everyone and their mother started computerized and later online address books and none every worked really well to sync with Palm PDA devices. Close sometimes, but never perfect. The only software that ever really worked perfectly to sync a palm was palms own software. 2) "smartphones" came along and theirs was pretty much a super expensive dog. Of course, all smartphones were like that until the iphone. 3) Sony made a better licensed Palm PDAs than Palm. Loved my Clie until the battery died and it started going bonkers. Sony's licensed Palm-like PDAs smashed Palm's PDA market, then Sony exited the market (WTF) 4) So my clie is finally dead after years of faithful service, I'm not using my execrable unsync-able dumb phone, I'm not paying $120/month contract for a smartphone, what to do? Ah a ipod touch. Near perfection as a PDA for only $186 or whatever it was. Ipod touch in left pocket and $8/month pay as I go dumbphone in right pocket was almost paradise, until I got into the republic wireless $20/mo beta which is, in fact, paradise.
For kids who don't know what a PDA is/was, its basically was a smartphone that can't make phone calls. Since I almost never talk on my current phone (only a couple minutes in the last 6 months, seriously), its basically a PDA anyway.
They hit the ball out of the park with the Palm III back in 97, and they couldn't shake off the success. That's why everything they did, right up till the '10s, was right outta the 90s. Palm is like the middle aged person reminiscing about how high school was the pinnacle of their existence and not doing anything since then, while everyone else passes them by.
I think HP collects dying hardware companies for some voodoo ritual. Maybe they make $20K/gallon printer ink using dying companies "red ink". Why else would they buy Compaq (which held DEC) and 3com and Apollo and Convex and Palm and...
Fortunately, FBI agents apparently were more reasonable even during the Cold War than they are in the War on Terrorism, because he'd probably be in jail for that prank today.
Its not so complicated as an individual's judgment call, its simpler; back then we were the good guys. Not so much now.
My guess is someone who took his extremely famous introduction to physics course, the one he made textbooks out of, did not get the grade he felt he deserved... And its redacted because he was somebody important's son, etc.
The weird part of it is his life was much more classified when he was young. All his anecdotes about the Manhattan project, etc. Once he got older, there's not much he can do... directly.
On the other hand, numerous students of his probably went on to some interesting projects, and maybe he was politically advising them in addition to academically advising them...
I predict a epic fail. Lots of discussion about morality and ethics of downloading / sharing by country, no discussion about availability in the marketplace.
A lot more chopsticks are sold in.jp and.cn than in.se or.fr. That doesn't mean the people in.jp rarely pirate chopsticks and everyone in.fr prints stolen 3-d printer copies of chopsticks or relies on gray market imported chopsticks. I'm guessing that most of the online available music appeals to.us and by extension (since their govt is just a lapdog of the us, etc etc) the music appeals to.ca. On the other hand Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chix don't sell so well in Paris.
Oh how about this political attack - I predict the key used for all Chinese military cyberwarfare will be the Lenovo key.
Another "fun" thing to think about - what happens during bankruptcy, purchasing, downsizing, etc? Who owns Gateway now, or rephrased, who owns Gateway's key? If you want a legit key, the best way might be to legit buy it.
There are attacks other than mathematical or algorithmic.
Financial? somebody@something.ru offers $100K to someone at microsoft.com who is being outsourced to India to... plus or minus an order, or two, of magnitude.
Religious/political? Somebody of a certain religious persuasion is contacted by a guy on line who convinces him that the only way to save *.il from a second holocaust is to provide the secret signing key to enable the stealthy deployment of stuxnet 2.0 to really shut down the iranian nuke program this time. Of course the guy doing the convincing is secretly J Random Malware Author, whoops. Or maybe he really is from *.il and he really is preventing a nuclear holocaust using the key, but his kid / coworker / ex wife / competitor / guy trying to set him up to take the fall / something else releases the key to the public. Or he just loses the thumbdrive with the key. Or the story for plausible deniability, is he loses the thumbdrive containing the key and another dude just happened to find it, although in reality it was all scripted out.
You trust *.microsoft.com to keep it safe, well that's a little optimistic of you, but whatever. The problem is the random collection of "friends of microsoft" in the govt and govt contractors trying to write undetectable cyberwarfare software. So now you have to trust all of *.mil and quite a bit of *.com not to screw up.
What are you going to do with millions of password hashes, even without usernames none the less?
I've occasionally daydreamed a fun academic paper would be to collect sets of password hashes, rub them up against a rainbow table, and make graphs and correlations and wild assumptions about the correlation coeff of IQ and rate of easily cracked pwd vs site etc etc. Sounds like fun so its probably been done before.
Just like Shakespeare is better when read in the original klingon, thats funnier in the original TDWTF... the password is hunter fourty two pound... No not the octothorpe sign, pound sign!
Slashdot Mirror
driving while texting should be treated the same as driving with blood alcohol over the limit
Bad idea, read below:
Red light turns green. Cellphone goes in pocket, or in my case, dropped into convenient cupholder, until next red light. I use my phone all the time "while driving" for some strange definition of "driving" with no impact on my driving skills, perfectly safe for the general public. At 0 MPH the driving workload on a driver is really quite low.
Red light turns green. My blood alcohol content was 0.3% when the light was red, now that its green, its 0.3%. This results in a huge danger to public.
Another interesting comparison is you can only ticket people for texting (aka voicemail, or gps, or anything else) at a red light because otherwise its too hard to catch them doing it. But drunks can mostly only be detected while the car is moving, unless they're vomiting out the window or something. So the only texters who will ever get punished are the safe ones, in comparison to the drunks who get punished are the dangerous ones.
I've had weirdos yell at me about "my texting is going to kill people" for checking my phone's GPS and voicemails while waiting at a red light. People with strong opinions about this make no sense at all.
These same teens/people will likely have something else that causes their accident if not texting.
However it won't be an easily tracked metric. Public outrage is directly proportional to ease of reporting numbers, not actual danger or risk.
From personal experience children in a car seat are by far the most distracting thing you can have in a car. Even "girlfriend in a skimpy outfit" is not as distracting.
Another automotive killer is travel. Simply make it illegal to operate a motor vehicle more than 50 miles from county of registration and that alone will cut accident rates by a considerable amount.
My car has a nanny for the built-in GPS map. You can't do anything while you're driving. even at 2 MPH which means you have to pull over just to select a different destination.
Of course, someone hacked the somnabitch and normal usage is re-enabled. I don't see a point to trying to nanny bad drivers. They suck no matter what you do.
This is my number one reason not to waste money on a built in GPS system in my car. I'm old enough that my wife used to use "paper maps" like ink on cellulose, then we used a hand held GPS, and now android phone with google navigation app. If I had a built in GPS system, I would not be able to use it, and my wife would have to go back to paper maps. So I'm paying thousands of dollars for an option that does ... nothing. They could make more profit by shipping a paver brick.
The number two reason is I can afford it but I'm too stubborn to pay thousands for a factory option when I can buy a handheld GPS for a hundred with 48 hours of battery, or just use my phone for a couple hours until the battery dies (at which point I need to plug it in)
A speed cut-out for a GPS is a technology destroyer. It would be simpler for everyone for the FCC to stop granting a license to import. Which is too bad, GPS is kind of handy.
The other thing I've never understood is if 10 people get killed by people Fing around with a GPS, that is a national call to action. But if 100 people get killed by people Fing around with paper maps, eh, thats just business, thats how it goes, too bad so sad. I'm not sure destroying GPS as a usable technology is worth killing 90 additional people or nine-tupling the "navigational death toll", but it seems almost inevitable at this point.
Then there's the reverse of that concept, installing android on commodity x86 hardware
http://www.android-x86.org/
My 300 AUD eeepc ... maybe this will show up as an application for cheap netbooks.
It showed up years ago. The term you don't know to google for is "android x86 project". I've been running android on my old eee netbook for quite awhile. Its free and I'd strongly suggest everyone give it a try.
Android makes a better netbook OS than either the preinstalled linux it came with, the full Debian install I did, or windows.
Android with keyboard and touchpad is much faster to use than android with touch screen. I never learned all the multitouch stuff so I'm not missing anything.
One thing I don't like is android x86 burns battery about as bad as any other OS. For whatever weird reason I subconsciously thought it would run for 12 hours like my phone, but it doesn't. Its not any worse than any other linux install, but not any better.
A lot of companies are complaining that they just can't find good tech folks ...
... for $10/hr no benefits, or mandatory 80 hour per week overtime, or intern unpaid jobs, or "pay you in shares" startups, or ridiculously over specified.
Pay in peanuts, you get monkeys.
I see no evidence of an actual shortage.
I know its discouraging, but just trying to keep it real. Its not 1999 all over again. Or even 2004.
Unless you're unusually gifted, you're probably learning new things, and thinking, a somewhat more slowly than you were when you were 25.
Only in a law of averages. My observations of old people are they either give up intentionally, the brain freezes up, and they're hopeless, or they keep using the brain and they're more focused than a 20-something. It seems much like muscle mass and health in general as people age.
The percentage of those who give up in a population increases pretty much linear with age. Look out for the ancient wizard, those guys tend to have scary elite skills. Unless they gave up on tech and went into soft skills and are there just because of schmooze power, the schmooze guys tend toward being a laughingstock.
People tend to romanticize their youth a bit. At 25 I was trying to date the intern, had no idea what was going on although I thought I was an expert, still wasted time occasionally drinking, basically was an idiot with a huge surplus of energy and motivation. Which is all SOME jobs need, but most need actual skill.
Either
1) Do something completely non-tech like management training and find something in at a tech company. Or accounting.
2) Do what you find interesting (I'm learning Scala by doing Project Euler tasks, because I want to. No other reason). You're asking /. so I'm guessing you don't want to do anything in tech. Which is fine. You may never find a job in the field. Assuming you're in the US, there are fewer employed full time workers every year so you may never have another job, at all. But at least you'll get a cool class.
3) Find where you want to work, figure out what they use in IT, and learn it to get in. So you wanna get in on the bubble (admittedly probably too late) so you figure out what groupon or facebook uses in your field, learn those topics, get into the bubble, or whatever. It seems we're headed into another downswing of the 2nd great depression. I'd look for a relatively stable employer, like a hospital?
4) Figure out where you want to work, figure out what entry level jobs they hire (unfortunately probably low pay), and learn a new skill in a new career.
5) Retire? My dad retired from full time 9-5 work in his 50s and consulted, but was mostly retired. Your previous employers may not need you 40 hours per week, but they may need you for 8 hours a week, or perhaps during busy times. Who's to say you're not doing your own startup or small business while retired? A decade or so ago, retired people looking to earn a buck used their domain specific skills to run a ebay store, worked for my dad. I guess that opportunity has been destroyed but there is probably something out there. Is gold farmer still a valid mode of employment?
One of the webcam models works well with kids because its cheap and displays on a big monitor, so you can look at stuff together. Some of the better ones show up as if they're normal webcams so you can have some weird internet chats with friends and family (G+ hangouts?) "Hey grandma, look at this giant ant leg" etc.
The other alternative is ebay. A kid is much better off with a worn out but "real" microscope that's probably cheaper than a hunk of Chinese plastic anyway. Some people are weirdly proud of being completely mechanically inept... they are a bad target market for used scopes.
Another alternative is new chinese steel. At a place like lwscientific.com you can spend about the cost of a good video card and get a new, "real" student grade scope that'll last forever.
Absolute worst case scenario is a cheap hunk of Chinese plastic with "900x" magnification listed on the box right next to ridiculous artists interpretations and electron microscope images. Oddly enough the marketing is just about as misleading and poor for other optical devices like telescopes.
You mentioned "parameciums". Its easy to find samples of plain ole dirt, grass leaves, etc. If you want "real prepared slides of weird or interesting organisms", go somewhere like carolina.com, "life sciences" "microscope slides". Note that a good prepared, preserved, stained slide is gonna be like $5 per slide. There are somewhat dodgier suppliers at a somewhat lower cost, but not as cheap as you'd think. On the other hand, my kids find it infinitely more interesting to run around in the yard, pick something up off the ground, and look at it under the 'scope.
Maybe the best place to start a kid with microscopes is a hand held magnifying glass. Much as you're supposed to "do astronomy" by starting with eyes first, then binocs, then get a scope...
I have no financial connection with any of the above other than spending money on stuff like this.
Much better analogy would be he keeps his stuff but copies must be freely redistributed with the source.
and we've done nothing but return to our current state.
"Major corporations promised me this boot process is crypto secured, so we don't waste money on anti-virus anymore"
"Yeah, I know his isn't mil-spec hardware, but this is a secure boot system so it must be safe for our 3rd world country"
"So its a life and safety critical controller, so we're using more expensive secure boot hardware instead of cheaper non-secure boot. Oh we just wasted an extra $10 times one million production run, whoops, well I'm sure the CEO won't mind the extra expense"
The amount of personal time you get from instructors for $100 is at most a few hours. For some students, that's enough. For most, it isn't.
I'd strongly disagree with "most". 200 students and one hour of office hours and the guy doesn't speak english anyway is not an unusual situation.
There is nothing wrong with people who have learning problems going to special schools that cost $50K/yr and everyone else goes to the $50/yr school.
The purpose of higher ed is not to hold your hand like a kindergartner anyway, its to teach you how to teach yourself. Look at the environment you'll be in when you graduate.
Let this be a lesson that new technology is supposed to be rolled out in pr0n first not twitchy action games.
Yeah I was surprised at that, more traditionally you'd expect HP would wait until after the IPv6 transition.
They died when "smart" phones got popular
I used their PDA in the 90s to keep track of everything, and the software to sync with the desktop was glorious and everything Just Worked.
Four steps to the death of PALM:
1) Then everyone and their mother started computerized and later online address books and none every worked really well to sync with Palm PDA devices. Close sometimes, but never perfect. The only software that ever really worked perfectly to sync a palm was palms own software.
2) "smartphones" came along and theirs was pretty much a super expensive dog. Of course, all smartphones were like that until the iphone.
3) Sony made a better licensed Palm PDAs than Palm. Loved my Clie until the battery died and it started going bonkers. Sony's licensed Palm-like PDAs smashed Palm's PDA market, then Sony exited the market (WTF)
4) So my clie is finally dead after years of faithful service, I'm not using my execrable unsync-able dumb phone, I'm not paying $120/month contract for a smartphone, what to do? Ah a ipod touch. Near perfection as a PDA for only $186 or whatever it was. Ipod touch in left pocket and $8/month pay as I go dumbphone in right pocket was almost paradise, until I got into the republic wireless $20/mo beta which is, in fact, paradise.
For kids who don't know what a PDA is/was, its basically was a smartphone that can't make phone calls. Since I almost never talk on my current phone (only a couple minutes in the last 6 months, seriously), its basically a PDA anyway.
They hit the ball out of the park with the Palm III back in 97, and they couldn't shake off the success. That's why everything they did, right up till the '10s, was right outta the 90s. Palm is like the middle aged person reminiscing about how high school was the pinnacle of their existence and not doing anything since then, while everyone else passes them by.
I think HP collects dying hardware companies for some voodoo ritual. Maybe they make $20K/gallon printer ink using dying companies "red ink". Why else would they buy Compaq (which held DEC) and 3com and Apollo and Convex and Palm and ...
Fortunately, FBI agents apparently were more reasonable even during the Cold War than they are in the War on Terrorism, because he'd probably be in jail for that prank today.
Its not so complicated as an individual's judgment call, its simpler; back then we were the good guys. Not so much now.
My guess is someone who took his extremely famous introduction to physics course, the one he made textbooks out of, did not get the grade he felt he deserved...
And its redacted because he was somebody important's son, etc.
The weird part of it is his life was much more classified when he was young. All his anecdotes about the Manhattan project, etc. ... directly.
Once he got older, there's not much he can do
On the other hand, numerous students of his probably went on to some interesting projects, and maybe he was politically advising them in addition to academically advising them...
I predict a epic fail. Lots of discussion about morality and ethics of downloading / sharing by country, no discussion about availability in the marketplace.
A lot more chopsticks are sold in .jp and .cn than in .se or .fr. That doesn't mean the people in .jp rarely pirate chopsticks and everyone in .fr prints stolen 3-d printer copies of chopsticks or relies on gray market imported chopsticks. I'm guessing that most of the online available music appeals to .us and by extension (since their govt is just a lapdog of the us, etc etc) the music appeals to .ca. On the other hand Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chix don't sell so well in Paris.
Oh how about this political attack - I predict the key used for all Chinese military cyberwarfare will be the Lenovo key.
Another "fun" thing to think about - what happens during bankruptcy, purchasing, downsizing, etc? Who owns Gateway now, or rephrased, who owns Gateway's key? If you want a legit key, the best way might be to legit buy it.
There are attacks other than mathematical or algorithmic.
Financial? somebody@something.ru offers $100K to someone at microsoft.com who is being outsourced to India to ... plus or minus an order, or two, of magnitude.
Religious/political? Somebody of a certain religious persuasion is contacted by a guy on line who convinces him that the only way to save *.il from a second holocaust is to provide the secret signing key to enable the stealthy deployment of stuxnet 2.0 to really shut down the iranian nuke program this time. Of course the guy doing the convincing is secretly J Random Malware Author, whoops. Or maybe he really is from *.il and he really is preventing a nuclear holocaust using the key, but his kid / coworker / ex wife / competitor / guy trying to set him up to take the fall / something else releases the key to the public. Or he just loses the thumbdrive with the key. Or the story for plausible deniability, is he loses the thumbdrive containing the key and another dude just happened to find it, although in reality it was all scripted out.
You trust *.microsoft.com to keep it safe, well that's a little optimistic of you, but whatever. The problem is the random collection of "friends of microsoft" in the govt and govt contractors trying to write undetectable cyberwarfare software. So now you have to trust all of *.mil and quite a bit of *.com not to screw up.
What are you going to do with millions of password hashes, even without usernames none the less?
I've occasionally daydreamed a fun academic paper would be to collect sets of password hashes, rub them up against a rainbow table, and make graphs and correlations and wild assumptions about the correlation coeff of IQ and rate of easily cracked pwd vs site etc etc. Sounds like fun so its probably been done before.
Just like Shakespeare is better when read in the original klingon, thats funnier in the original TDWTF ... the password is hunter fourty two pound... No not the octothorpe sign, pound sign!