Ultimately Elite 2 was a massive improvement over Elite and Elite 3 was more a refinement of Elite 2.
I take issue with that - they were dreadfully dull.
I spent many more hours playing the 8-bit, black and white (Electron version, less capable than the full BBC version), original Elite than I did both Frontier and First Encounters put together.
== Combat ==
Strict Newtonian mechanics does not make for an entertaining game. Even Braben acknowledges this on the Kickstarter page. Neither do laser weapons in a dogfight. In both games the combat boiled down to two ships desperately trying not to crash into each other while jousting like two marbles on the end of a rubber band.
Elite got away with this because you had to dogfight to bring your weapons to bear on your target ; even so, most of my fights in Elite were won at long range, picking off my targets when they were still a cluster of four pixels. Only groups of four or more ships were a challenge because it took the first three to overheat your laser, allowing the remainder to close on you. In a game with no dogfighting possible, hitscan weapons with a long range reduce the combat to exploding a pixel in the distance all the time.
Whichever ship had the most mass usually won, because they were tougher. Only the ships with enough mass for shields were viable combat vessels, because systems damage was only repairable in dock - and you could get systems damage from any hull damage. Systems damage was very bad - because the fly-by-wire couldn't compensate for thruster damage, and neither could the autopilot (if it wasn't damaged anyway). If your atmospheric shields were destroyed and your only option for refuelling was planetside - tough luck, you're dead.
The lack of in-flight repair made most of the fighter class vessels lousy for combat, because they had light hulls and no space for shields. What they were great for was evasion, because their high-G drive meant they could outrun anything with a slower drive. So until you built up enough capital the only viable way to play the game was to chicken out from as many fights as possible. Because you had no cargo space to speak of, you just ended up being a courier. Like the real world, the open world of Frontier was mostly closed by your opportunities, until you were very rich.
== Navigation ==
The autopilot was terrible ; it used the puny front engine for deceleration, which makes sense if you wanted fuel economy, but not for best speed, where you want to be accelerating and decelerating all the way to your target at the most Gs you can pull. The autopilot was also great at crashing you into things and dreadful at piloting ships near planets, especially ones with strong gravity - you had to ascend on manual thrusters if you didn't want to be a smear on the runway. But it was all but essential to navigate anywhere. It was also trivially easy to destroy... and weighed a whole tonne, occupying a vast quantity of valuable hull space in the smaller ships, even though it should just have been a program for the onboard computer, given the ships were fly-by-wire anyway.
Having to budget your reaction mass was an interesting problem for some of the ships ; you ended up flying in on manual and using the autopilot for the final approach in the larger systems where the transit would drain your propellant reserves very rapidly otherwise.
The multiple-G acceleration available on most of the ships engines was totally outside the human experience and is something that requires extensive training for elite astronaut pilots to get used to, which was a problem for manual navigation and also the combat (above).
The more complex you make a system, the easier it is to make it fail.
Even if you managed to put in a 100% crackproof DRM system based on GPS, this makes the weapon useless - the opposition will just start jamming GPS signals.
I think it's you who has the problem, sir, although you both seem to be suffering from an inappropriately low level of social restraint. Whoops, so do I, I guess it's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Principle at work...
The poster who is annoyed by incorrect apostrophe usage is displaying traits that probably make him a good programmer or other engineer - attention to detail, and caring about correctness. He might have a few things to learn about social interaction, but in general I find that most people of this type can learn some simple rules to keep out of social trouble.
(I'm not saying the rules aren't complex, just that people of this type, myself included, are not disposed to learning all the complex heuristics and bodies of communal "knowledge" like which actor cheated on which actress, etc., that pass as "etiquette" these days).
Whereas you are just being an asshole, but alas, you don't seem to know it. I'm prepared to bet that the number of people who dislike you is *much* higher than you imagine it to be, and at least 2 higher today.
I can think of worse ways to get your sexual gratification. Not everyone has the option of a "healthy" sex life - whatever that means.
Let's suppose it means a mutually satisfying relationship between two monogamous consenting adults (for the purposes of illustration, I'm sure this is what you mean). What if your partner has a different (let's say, much lower) sexual appetite than you? What qualifies as the healthiest way to make up the difference - masturbation, having an affair with someone else, having an "open" relationship, voluntary chastity on your part?
None of them are ideal. People with children and a sense of responsibility to them, and a sexually inactive spouse with conservative views, are faced with a quandary. They either suppress their urges, which is stressful and unhealthy, have an affair, which is likely to get them divorced and separated from their children, or they can masturbate, which is usually made easier if not more satisfying by porn.
Or alternately what if you just can't get laid via normal means? Maybe you have a deformity or other medical condition that precludes you forming healthy sexual relationships. Maybe you're working three jobs and just don't have the time to form personal relationships.
Sure, it's the sexual equivalent of junk food, but it's arguably healthier than denying your urges until you end up suffering from some stress related disease, or acting out sexually in a way that is actually harmful rather than just embarrassing and sordid. The pent-up denial of sexual urges is likely what leads to such high rates of child molestation amongst the priesthood - along with the Catholic guilt about sex probably convincing them that the priesthood is the cure for having a "shameful" sex drive in the first place.
For the record I think a healthy sex life is whatever makes you content and doesn't harm anyone - use contraception, find partners that you enjoy, and form the best relationship you can with them. Whatever you do is your own business.
Paper voting is simple enough that any person with a basic education can understand the basic methods of fraud and keep their eye out for them.
Because people are involved in every stage of the process, rather than just vote collection and acting on the tally, there are more opportunities to spot any fraud going on.
Electronic voting is understood by a much smaller fraction of the population, and those people are unlikely to be permitted to be involved in the process to the same level that a ballot counter is. No voting station is going to allow a patriotic engineer the opportunity to rummage around in the innards of the voting machine, for precisely the same reason - they fear that because they don't understand the technology inside, fraud may be perpetrated.
You can talk about open standards all you like - but they are inherently much more closed than a paper ballot by their very nature, because only a small percentage of the population are equipped to audit them.
I myself was quite keen on electronic voting systems for a while, but this was just because I was geeking out over the neat technology, particularly the cryptography. Then I realised that for all the same reasons I keep my job - people rely on me, because I'm "the guy" that understands particular technologies - there is no place for high technology in important, large grained voting.
Alcohol takes time, effort, and skill to produce, especially in a palatable form. While this is not illegal, it's too much effort for most people. Distillation without a license is illegal in many jurisdictions.
Tobacco is incredibly finicky to grow, only grows in certain conditions, and has to be cared for and stored and prepared properly.
Marijuana grows like a weed, in a window box. Of course Big T and Big A don't want it legal ; it would seriously eat into their market.
Rockets have *terrible* specific impulse, around 450s for a complex bi-propellant liquid rocket, and 250s for the stable, reliable solid rockets.
Ion engines have specific impulse up in the thousands to tens of thousands of seconds.
Rockets have a lot more thrust per unit of engine mass, but getting enough propellent up there to give an asteroid sufficient delta-V would be all but impossible - for every big-ass rocket, you'd need a 10x bigger assed rocket to get it there in the first place.
.. and then you commit your changes and everyone wants to kill you. You just broke all their patches.
There have been various proposals for an IDE that stores the sources as a raw format that has no formatting, and you apply the formatting in the view, but they obviously have the disadvantage of not working with a plain text editor, needing a special IDE, probably a special version control system as well.
Having a consistent style means that you don't end up in the situation we are, where we have several patches that are probably a days work to merge with the main line, not because our patches are large, but because some bonehead decided it would be good to run an automated code reformatter on his source tree.
This not only reformatted everything to a style that no-one else on the project uses, but re-sorted all the fields and methods in the source files affected. This made everyone elses copy of the source conflict violently with essentially every change made in the reformatted files, giving everyone else the headache of re-implementing their patches.
Peoples edits continue to make the format of these files a mess because they are indented in a way that's inconsistent with the source.
Alas, we can't undo these patches because the bonehead is the lead developer. But catering to prima-donnas means more work for everyone else.
Despite the fact that it's a larger target market....
I'm willing to bet that all the people who profess not to think with their dicks, at least allow their dicks to subconsciously influence them.
I really enjoyed seeing the Linux / Mac / PC adverts that Novell did, not least because they included an attractive, seemingly intelligent, stylish woman. Yes, the message was intellectually good. But I enjoyed the attractive woman too.
It has to be tastefully done, or people who are aware that they enjoy attractive females will just get disgruntled for being manipulated. But a good message delivered by an attractive messenger is a potent combination, even if you know full well what they are doing.
This article links at least 7 ; one of which I donate to, and one of which is such a fixture in British life that "the Oxfam Shop" is synonymous with charity retail.
VNC and RDP are horrible kludges and perform like crap.
I'll give you VNC, but RDP? I barely notice that I'm using a remote desktop, I get sound transmission if I want, access to my client machine file system with no special effort. The only thing that comes close to RDP is NX, and NX is worlds better than vanilla X11.
The only things that could improve about it is
* Clipboard support, and I think that's mostly the fault of Office and it's fancy-schmancy OLE clipboard objects. * Multi monitor support. Which is supported in Windows 7. A shame we still use XP.
Most of my Windows usage is through RDP, and not just server admin, and the only things that annoy me are the (minor) shortcomings of the Linux rdesktop client. RDP might be a horrible kludge inside, but it still works really well.
I run precisely 2 apps over network X, and I only do that because they have insanely complex configuration, and a GUI that makes it easier to work with. They both chug like Thomas the Tank Engine, even over a LAN.
Agreed ; it's slow, even over a LAN. It's fine as a stop-gap measure (like for VirtualBox, where the GUI VM configurator is is much easier to use than the command line), but it chugs.
For serious remote desktop usage on Linux, the only thing I've tried that's actually any good is NX, although that is the only thing I've tried. Microsoft's RDP protocol is excellent. NX is the only thing that comes close to it.
I suppose I might be making some mistake with how I've got it set up, but I've never seen applications run over ssh -X perform any other way but clunky and slow.
Build a huge-assed jojoba farm in the desert. It produces hydrocarbon oils from solar power and the best part is the equipment is self-assembling and self-replicating.
The one thing we're going to need in any of these endeavours is scale, and nothing does scale like biology. We just need to devote our attention to giving it enough help.
The problem being that gardening isn't sexy new technology that you can print headlines about and make profits from patenting.
I have an even better way to clean CO2 from the air. The equipment incorporates a solar collector and storage cells and can be maintained by relatively low-skilled labour.
The carbon gathering process is facilitated by some incredibly sophisticated enzymatic chemistry and electronic nanotechnology, and can be made to produce a variety of storage substrates of different densities and molecular chain weights and structures.
The best bit is that this equipment is self-replicating, provides food for the workers maintaining it, and even comes in a variety of colours and flavours.
A quote from a professor comparing the retail price of a CD when they were invented, to the stamping cost of a CD today, in order to illustrate improvements in efficiency in a physical process.
One is something that someone made up because they thought it was what people would swallow. Rather like the claims in this article that this is an important technology for the energy crisis.
It's a useful excuse to delay research into electric vehicles and prolong the fossil fuel economy.
Most people have dreadful upload rates anyway ; the asymmetric connections we receive are very much tailored for us to be consumers, not servers.
I'll lay dollars to donuts that it doesn't upload what you record - they just have a master server which records *everything* and your Boxee just sets a row in a database that tells it what you asked it to record. This way they can offer "unlimited" storage - they just retain a single copy of each program that users record, and look to see whether they should offer it to you based on what you "recorded".
No doubt they hope this gets around the legal limitations that have been cropping up recently with other parties offering store-and-forward services.
TrueCrypt offers this feature ; you back up the key block (which at that time has a password known to the administrator), and just restore it in the event of a user password loss incident. It even has the appropriate UI to let you do it.
The commercial product we've used implements this feature by storing redundant key blocks encrypted with the administrators password, which is much less secure - once you know that password, you can access the files on any system.
The other method of key recovery it supports is giving the users access to the key escrow server online, where they can answer a "security question" and receive some kind of backup hash or password for a redundant key block.. for which they need a working system. Which they don't have, because they're locked out, so they have to collar a colleague and monopolize their system for 5 minutes. Which favours the poor IT department, not having to actually do their job, but is probably an overall saving in time - the last resort is that someone cooks a recovery floppy (! no USB option !) and visits your machine personally (with a USB floppy drive, of course, because none of our machines have one any more).
TrueCrypt could probably benefit from some of those extra convenience features for market penetration reasons, but you can still do key escrow with it.
They really should have known better - the National Health Service has been lambasted on several occasions for similar data leaks and has thoroughly learned it's lesson. We are not permitted to mount unencrypted USB volumes any more.
But the encrypted drives we are required to use if we need to transfer data are purchased from a central contract - and cost us £64 ($103) for a 2GB flash unit. I'm not surprised if there is a certain reluctance amongst the police to purchase that kind of deal.
When I first saw that price I assumed they were some kind of military grade unit with a hardware encryption controller. They are not, they're just partitioned, with a custom driver in the first, plaintext, partition. So they are taking units that were probably about £5 (at the time) and making a very substantial mark-up.
Our standard advice on what to do with an encrypted drive after we're done with it is not to just wipe the key block, making the data into worthless noise, but to physically destroy it. I'm willing to bet that our friendly encrypted storage vendor thought that one up.
As you quite rightly say, there are other options. I estimated that I could knock together a solution using TrueCrypt - including all the features that the current solution has, like key escrow - and sell them for about £15 a go. You can't even *buy* 2GB flash drives at my usual retailer any more, or even 4GB units, so they'd have to put up with having 4 times the capacity. But I'd still be making a good margin - those 8GB drives are now around £5 retail. And the TrueCrypt solution has the advantage of working on every platform, not just Windows.
I thought the car fetching the prescription from the pharmacy was one of the sillier bits - they are already trialling quadcopter drones for light parcel delivery in Africa. As well as a mailbox, you'd have a mail chute on the roof (presumably with an NFC cryptographic handshake to prevent the local kids from dropping bags of dogshit into your mail).
Slashdot Mirror
Ultimately Elite 2 was a massive improvement over Elite and Elite 3 was more a refinement of Elite 2.
I take issue with that - they were dreadfully dull.
I spent many more hours playing the 8-bit, black and white (Electron version, less capable than the full BBC version), original Elite than I did both Frontier and First Encounters put together.
== Combat ==
Strict Newtonian mechanics does not make for an entertaining game. Even Braben acknowledges this on the Kickstarter page. Neither do laser weapons in a dogfight. In both games the combat boiled down to two ships desperately trying not to crash into each other while jousting like two marbles on the end of a rubber band.
Elite got away with this because you had to dogfight to bring your weapons to bear on your target ; even so, most of my fights in Elite were won at long range, picking off my targets when they were still a cluster of four pixels. Only groups of four or more ships were a challenge because it took the first three to overheat your laser, allowing the remainder to close on you. In a game with no dogfighting possible, hitscan weapons with a long range reduce the combat to exploding a pixel in the distance all the time.
Whichever ship had the most mass usually won, because they were tougher. Only the ships with enough mass for shields were viable combat vessels, because systems damage was only repairable in dock - and you could get systems damage from any hull damage. Systems damage was very bad - because the fly-by-wire couldn't compensate for thruster damage, and neither could the autopilot (if it wasn't damaged anyway). If your atmospheric shields were destroyed and your only option for refuelling was planetside - tough luck, you're dead.
The lack of in-flight repair made most of the fighter class vessels lousy for combat, because they had light hulls and no space for shields. What they were great for was evasion, because their high-G drive meant they could outrun anything with a slower drive. So until you built up enough capital the only viable way to play the game was to chicken out from as many fights as possible. Because you had no cargo space to speak of, you just ended up being a courier. Like the real world, the open world of Frontier was mostly closed by your opportunities, until you were very rich.
== Navigation ==
The autopilot was terrible ; it used the puny front engine for deceleration, which makes sense if you wanted fuel economy, but not for best speed, where you want to be accelerating and decelerating all the way to your target at the most Gs you can pull. The autopilot was also great at crashing you into things and dreadful at piloting ships near planets, especially ones with strong gravity - you had to ascend on manual thrusters if you didn't want to be a smear on the runway. But it was all but essential to navigate anywhere. It was also trivially easy to destroy... and weighed a whole tonne, occupying a vast quantity of valuable hull space in the smaller ships, even though it should just have been a program for the onboard computer, given the ships were fly-by-wire anyway.
Having to budget your reaction mass was an interesting problem for some of the ships ; you ended up flying in on manual and using the autopilot for the final approach in the larger systems where the transit would drain your propellant reserves very rapidly otherwise.
The multiple-G acceleration available on most of the ships engines was totally outside the human experience and is something that requires extensive training for elite astronaut pilots to get used to, which was a problem for manual navigation and also the combat (above).
The more complex you make a system, the easier it is to make it fail.
Even if you managed to put in a 100% crackproof DRM system based on GPS, this makes the weapon useless - the opposition will just start jamming GPS signals.
I think it's you who has the problem, sir, although you both seem to be suffering from an inappropriately low level of social restraint. Whoops, so do I, I guess it's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Principle at work...
The poster who is annoyed by incorrect apostrophe usage is displaying traits that probably make him a good programmer or other engineer - attention to detail, and caring about correctness. He might have a few things to learn about social interaction, but in general I find that most people of this type can learn some simple rules to keep out of social trouble.
(I'm not saying the rules aren't complex, just that people of this type, myself included, are not disposed to learning all the complex heuristics and bodies of communal "knowledge" like which actor cheated on which actress, etc., that pass as "etiquette" these days).
Whereas you are just being an asshole, but alas, you don't seem to know it. I'm prepared to bet that the number of people who dislike you is *much* higher than you imagine it to be, and at least 2 higher today.
I can think of worse ways to get your sexual gratification. Not everyone has the option of a "healthy" sex life - whatever that means.
Let's suppose it means a mutually satisfying relationship between two monogamous consenting adults (for the purposes of illustration, I'm sure this is what you mean). What if your partner has a different (let's say, much lower) sexual appetite than you? What qualifies as the healthiest way to make up the difference - masturbation, having an affair with someone else, having an "open" relationship, voluntary chastity on your part?
None of them are ideal. People with children and a sense of responsibility to them, and a sexually inactive spouse with conservative views, are faced with a quandary. They either suppress their urges, which is stressful and unhealthy, have an affair, which is likely to get them divorced and separated from their children, or they can masturbate, which is usually made easier if not more satisfying by porn.
Or alternately what if you just can't get laid via normal means? Maybe you have a deformity or other medical condition that precludes you forming healthy sexual relationships. Maybe you're working three jobs and just don't have the time to form personal relationships.
Sure, it's the sexual equivalent of junk food, but it's arguably healthier than denying your urges until you end up suffering from some stress related disease, or acting out sexually in a way that is actually harmful rather than just embarrassing and sordid. The pent-up denial of sexual urges is likely what leads to such high rates of child molestation amongst the priesthood - along with the Catholic guilt about sex probably convincing them that the priesthood is the cure for having a "shameful" sex drive in the first place.
For the record I think a healthy sex life is whatever makes you content and doesn't harm anyone - use contraception, find partners that you enjoy, and form the best relationship you can with them. Whatever you do is your own business.
Isn't the "punched hole" thing just a cue marker for the projectionist to start another reel?
Paper voting is simple enough that any person with a basic education can understand the basic methods of fraud and keep their eye out for them.
Because people are involved in every stage of the process, rather than just vote collection and acting on the tally, there are more opportunities to spot any fraud going on.
Electronic voting is understood by a much smaller fraction of the population, and those people are unlikely to be permitted to be involved in the process to the same level that a ballot counter is. No voting station is going to allow a patriotic engineer the opportunity to rummage around in the innards of the voting machine, for precisely the same reason - they fear that because they don't understand the technology inside, fraud may be perpetrated.
You can talk about open standards all you like - but they are inherently much more closed than a paper ballot by their very nature, because only a small percentage of the population are equipped to audit them.
I myself was quite keen on electronic voting systems for a while, but this was just because I was geeking out over the neat technology, particularly the cryptography. Then I realised that for all the same reasons I keep my job - people rely on me, because I'm "the guy" that understands particular technologies - there is no place for high technology in important, large grained voting.
Corporations don't want competition.
Alcohol takes time, effort, and skill to produce, especially in a palatable form. While this is not illegal, it's too much effort for most people. Distillation without a license is illegal in many jurisdictions.
Tobacco is incredibly finicky to grow, only grows in certain conditions, and has to be cared for and stored and prepared properly.
Marijuana grows like a weed, in a window box. Of course Big T and Big A don't want it legal ; it would seriously eat into their market.
Rockets have *terrible* specific impulse, around 450s for a complex bi-propellant liquid rocket, and 250s for the stable, reliable solid rockets.
Ion engines have specific impulse up in the thousands to tens of thousands of seconds.
Rockets have a lot more thrust per unit of engine mass, but getting enough propellent up there to give an asteroid sufficient delta-V would be all but impossible - for every big-ass rocket, you'd need a 10x bigger assed rocket to get it there in the first place.
.. and then you commit your changes and everyone wants to kill you. You just broke all their patches.
There have been various proposals for an IDE that stores the sources as a raw format that has no formatting, and you apply the formatting in the view, but they obviously have the disadvantage of not working with a plain text editor, needing a special IDE, probably a special version control system as well.
Having a consistent style means that you don't end up in the situation we are, where we have several patches that are probably a days work to merge with the main line, not because our patches are large, but because some bonehead decided it would be good to run an automated code reformatter on his source tree.
This not only reformatted everything to a style that no-one else on the project uses, but re-sorted all the fields and methods in the source files affected. This made everyone elses copy of the source conflict violently with essentially every change made in the reformatted files, giving everyone else the headache of re-implementing their patches.
Peoples edits continue to make the format of these files a mess because they are indented in a way that's inconsistent with the source.
Alas, we can't undo these patches because the bonehead is the lead developer. But catering to prima-donnas means more work for everyone else.
Despite the fact that it's a larger target market ....
I'm willing to bet that all the people who profess not to think with their dicks, at least allow their dicks to subconsciously influence them.
I really enjoyed seeing the Linux / Mac / PC adverts that Novell did, not least because they included an attractive, seemingly intelligent, stylish woman. Yes, the message was intellectually good. But I enjoyed the attractive woman too.
It has to be tastefully done, or people who are aware that they enjoy attractive females will just get disgruntled for being manipulated. But a good message delivered by an attractive messenger is a potent combination, even if you know full well what they are doing.
This article links at least 7 ; one of which I donate to, and one of which is such a fixture in British life that "the Oxfam Shop" is synonymous with charity retail.
I'm gratified by how much the animation on their front page looks exactly like managing workspaces with Unity...
VNC and RDP are horrible kludges and perform like crap.
I'll give you VNC, but RDP? I barely notice that I'm using a remote desktop, I get sound transmission if I want, access to my client machine file system with no special effort. The only thing that comes close to RDP is NX, and NX is worlds better than vanilla X11.
The only things that could improve about it is
* Clipboard support, and I think that's mostly the fault of Office and it's fancy-schmancy OLE clipboard objects.
* Multi monitor support. Which is supported in Windows 7. A shame we still use XP.
Most of my Windows usage is through RDP, and not just server admin, and the only things that annoy me are the (minor) shortcomings of the Linux rdesktop client. RDP might be a horrible kludge inside, but it still works really well.
I run precisely 2 apps over network X, and I only do that because they have insanely complex configuration, and a GUI that makes it easier to work with. They both chug like Thomas the Tank Engine, even over a LAN.
Agreed ; it's slow, even over a LAN. It's fine as a stop-gap measure (like for VirtualBox, where the GUI VM configurator is is much easier to use than the command line), but it chugs.
For serious remote desktop usage on Linux, the only thing I've tried that's actually any good is NX, although that is the only thing I've tried. Microsoft's RDP protocol is excellent. NX is the only thing that comes close to it.
I suppose I might be making some mistake with how I've got it set up, but I've never seen applications run over ssh -X perform any other way but clunky and slow.
Build a huge-assed jojoba farm in the desert. It produces hydrocarbon oils from solar power and the best part is the equipment is self-assembling and self-replicating.
The one thing we're going to need in any of these endeavours is scale, and nothing does scale like biology. We just need to devote our attention to giving it enough help.
The problem being that gardening isn't sexy new technology that you can print headlines about and make profits from patenting.
I have an even better way to clean CO2 from the air. The equipment incorporates a solar collector and storage cells and can be maintained by relatively low-skilled labour.
The carbon gathering process is facilitated by some incredibly sophisticated enzymatic chemistry and electronic nanotechnology, and can be made to produce a variety of storage substrates of different densities and molecular chain weights and structures.
The best bit is that this equipment is self-replicating, provides food for the workers maintaining it, and even comes in a variety of colours and flavours.
A quote from a professor comparing the retail price of a CD when they were invented, to the stamping cost of a CD today, in order to illustrate improvements in efficiency in a physical process.
One is something that someone made up because they thought it was what people would swallow. Rather like the claims in this article that this is an important technology for the energy crisis.
It's a useful excuse to delay research into electric vehicles and prolong the fossil fuel economy.
Most people have dreadful upload rates anyway ; the asymmetric connections we receive are very much tailored for us to be consumers, not servers.
I'll lay dollars to donuts that it doesn't upload what you record - they just have a master server which records *everything* and your Boxee just sets a row in a database that tells it what you asked it to record. This way they can offer "unlimited" storage - they just retain a single copy of each program that users record, and look to see whether they should offer it to you based on what you "recorded".
No doubt they hope this gets around the legal limitations that have been cropping up recently with other parties offering store-and-forward services.
This is what it is anyway - it's the optical sensor from a mouse, strapped to a finger. Big deal.
TrueCrypt offers this feature ; you back up the key block (which at that time has a password known to the administrator), and just restore it in the event of a user password loss incident. It even has the appropriate UI to let you do it.
The commercial product we've used implements this feature by storing redundant key blocks encrypted with the administrators password, which is much less secure - once you know that password, you can access the files on any system.
The other method of key recovery it supports is giving the users access to the key escrow server online, where they can answer a "security question" and receive some kind of backup hash or password for a redundant key block .. for which they need a working system. Which they don't have, because they're locked out, so they have to collar a colleague and monopolize their system for 5 minutes. Which favours the poor IT department, not having to actually do their job, but is probably an overall saving in time - the last resort is that someone cooks a recovery floppy (! no USB option !) and visits your machine personally (with a USB floppy drive, of course, because none of our machines have one any more).
TrueCrypt could probably benefit from some of those extra convenience features for market penetration reasons, but you can still do key escrow with it.
They really should have known better - the National Health Service has been lambasted on several occasions for similar data leaks and has thoroughly learned it's lesson. We are not permitted to mount unencrypted USB volumes any more.
But the encrypted drives we are required to use if we need to transfer data are purchased from a central contract - and cost us £64 ($103) for a 2GB flash unit. I'm not surprised if there is a certain reluctance amongst the police to purchase that kind of deal.
When I first saw that price I assumed they were some kind of military grade unit with a hardware encryption controller. They are not, they're just partitioned, with a custom driver in the first, plaintext, partition. So they are taking units that were probably about £5 (at the time) and making a very substantial mark-up.
Our standard advice on what to do with an encrypted drive after we're done with it is not to just wipe the key block, making the data into worthless noise, but to physically destroy it. I'm willing to bet that our friendly encrypted storage vendor thought that one up.
As you quite rightly say, there are other options. I estimated that I could knock together a solution using TrueCrypt - including all the features that the current solution has, like key escrow - and sell them for about £15 a go. You can't even *buy* 2GB flash drives at my usual retailer any more, or even 4GB units, so they'd have to put up with having 4 times the capacity. But I'd still be making a good margin - those 8GB drives are now around £5 retail. And the TrueCrypt solution has the advantage of working on every platform, not just Windows.
Steve? Is that you? We've talked about this. You need to take your medication *regularly*.
£ - oooh, yes, it does now.
I thought the car fetching the prescription from the pharmacy was one of the sillier bits - they are already trialling quadcopter drones for light parcel delivery in Africa. As well as a mailbox, you'd have a mail chute on the roof (presumably with an NFC cryptographic handshake to prevent the local kids from dropping bags of dogshit into your mail).