Put a file with certain name string into the documents directory of every computer at risk, at install time. Make it read-only. Periodically and frequently search P2P networks for that file name. Matches automatically identify a computer at risk. File can contain a substring identifying the owner of the computer, to automatically send him a warning.
Blanket bans are difficult to enforce. Such early warning will instead shrink the window of opportunity for the adversaries.
Overturning bad laws costs substantial effort and a lot of time, and even if you manage to succeed with one, you still have a plethora of bad laws remaining. Such proposal would make perfect sense if life was of an unlimited length. Given its shortness, however, low-profile low-risk disobedience offers higher return on investment in many cases.
Things like e.g. an appearance of a phenomenon in a movie may be significant for anchoring the phenomenon in the context of popular culture.
The number of such references can quite quickly reach the point of diminishing returns, but I consider a sane amount of such to be useful, especially for people from the outside of the given popular-culture subset (e.g. non-Americans).
We need a reasonable compromise between quality and quantity. Either alone is not sufficient without the other.
Trivia is in many contexts often helpful to assess the pop-culture references to the item itself, hinting at its perceived importance in wider context. Bits are cheap.
The often neglected factor in the surrender of Japan was Russia. The US did not want Stalin to come late and get a piece of the cake, so a hasty end had to be made and the Bombs fell. History books often omit this.
Sometimes you have to fit more text into a length-limited SMS message than conventional language allows. Use of heavy shorting, even dropping spaces and articles where it does not introduce ambiguity, is a viable option there.
A dummy can be crafted with a required heating. Just put some heating cable in, power it from the car power supply. Military dummy vehicles do it for decades already.
What "no achievement"? Couple orbital measurements, check. Test of viability of the technology for orbital flight, check. Measurement of trajectory decay of an object at low Earth orbit, check. Triggering the Sputnik Crisis, leading to creation of ARPA and indirectly the Internet, check. Slashdot itself is a child of Sputnik.
Some Chinese reentry vehicles had ablative shields made of oak wood. No joking.
It actually works. Wood is a poor thermal conductor, so it protects the underlying materials. It has decent mechanical properties to withstand the load. It chars on the surface, slowing down the burn rate. A block of wood can stay mechanically sound in the middle of a fire for quite a while, and the hot phase of the reentry does not take that long.
A bit more engineering is required. First, lighten up the construction, improve aerodynamics. Computer modeling could help here how to reengineer the shape without compromising the appearance too much. The cross-section of the airfoils needs to be altered to provide lift; alternatively the slightly adjusted shape of the hull can be exploited as a form of lifting body design. The rocket engines could be replaced with smallish jet engines, and suitable guidance system added, whether automated via GPS or inertial, or TV-based remote control.
Then the thing will be not just amazingly pretty, but damn seriously COOL.
Hush. Don't give them ideas. One gets reminded of Romanian state police keeping records of "fingerprints" of individual typewriters during the Ceaucescu reign.
The individual sensitivity tolerances of the CMOS sensor pixels can be used as a kind of a watermark. They are luckily not being recorded and paired with the identity of the camera owner. Yet.
Such solution would also effectively disallow open-firmware cameras (and open-firmware cellphones with such cameras), turning them into instruments of crime because of intentionally allowing the users to take illegal unregistered photographs.
Terrorism is vastly overblown. You are more likely to die in a crash on the way to/from work, or to croak because of a doctor's error, than to come into mere visual contact with a live terrorist. Therefore the claim is relevant to general risks we all are facing.
Why the panic then? Why should a minuscule risk be more important than more real, more probable ones? Sorry, but I will not be afraid of bogeymen despite your government's wishes, and you shouldn't be as well. Refuse to be terrorized.
You may like to read "Beyond Fear" by Bruce Schneier. Then you may wake up.
If it is not unethical for the store to prevent writing down prices or other information, then it is not unethical for the customers to use concealed recording devices to note down the info. A MP3 player in one's pocket set to record, and mumbling the information for oneself, will do the job nicely.
Business is war. Without complete information available to the customer, it is not a capitalism, it is a scam.
Any measure that allows finding/comparing the real prices of the vendors is ethical by definition.
What's wrong with heroin? Many terminal cancer patients would love some. However because of inane politics they get only stuff that sometimes does not work for them anymore.
One day people will wake up and hang the politicians.
From the point of view of the company, the work done is the important part and the rest is fairly irrelevant. Face it, people are not robots that you can program for one task and only that task and then dispose of when you don't need them anymore. Treat people nicely, let them do what they want when there's lighter load time, and they will be more willing to check mail from home or stay overtime when the need appears. Nice treatment works both ways. Which is difficult to understand for people with a beancounter mentality.
And you may have fewer issues retaining the productive employers. Nobody but a nazi wants to work for nazis.
Both the propane blowtorch and the wood stove rely on the cooperation of the operator, therefore dependent on his/her physical presence and ability to have the five minutes needed. While breaking a glass and pressing a button when the jackbooted ones are kicking in the door, or even just not doing anything and let them trip the fuse themselves, is much more feasible in a crisis situation.
The thermite-based rig can be designed to be tamper-resistant, and to fire when an unauthorized attempt to open it or to remove it from its designated position is detected, a duress button is pressed, or other arbitrary condition is detected.
The same can be achieved without fire, with an encrypted filesystem with a key in SRAM, zeroized in case of tampering or duress. The key store can be connected to the system SMBUS (which is I2C with some minor protocol extensions), which can be accessed either on the motherboard connector, or, if not, on the DIMM socket.
Slashdot Mirror
Blanket bans are difficult to enforce. Such early warning will instead shrink the window of opportunity for the adversaries.
Could be even sold as a commercial service.
Overturning bad laws costs substantial effort and a lot of time, and even if you manage to succeed with one, you still have a plethora of bad laws remaining. Such proposal would make perfect sense if life was of an unlimited length. Given its shortness, however, low-profile low-risk disobedience offers higher return on investment in many cases.
If the glasses will be able to filter out advertising, could be worth the effort.
The number of such references can quite quickly reach the point of diminishing returns, but I consider a sane amount of such to be useful, especially for people from the outside of the given popular-culture subset (e.g. non-Americans).
We need a reasonable compromise between quality and quantity. Either alone is not sufficient without the other.
Good job. Deletionists do more harm than good. Please continue.
But then, I am a hardcore inclusionist.
The often neglected factor in the surrender of Japan was Russia. The US did not want Stalin to come late and get a piece of the cake, so a hasty end had to be made and the Bombs fell. History books often omit this.
Sometimes you have to fit more text into a length-limited SMS message than conventional language allows. Use of heavy shorting, even dropping spaces and articles where it does not introduce ambiguity, is a viable option there.
A dummy can be crafted with a required heating. Just put some heating cable in, power it from the car power supply. Military dummy vehicles do it for decades already.
What "no achievement"? Couple orbital measurements, check. Test of viability of the technology for orbital flight, check. Measurement of trajectory decay of an object at low Earth orbit, check. Triggering the Sputnik Crisis, leading to creation of ARPA and indirectly the Internet, check. Slashdot itself is a child of Sputnik.
VxWorks, what else? It's already space-probed.
It actually works. Wood is a poor thermal conductor, so it protects the underlying materials. It has decent mechanical properties to withstand the load. It chars on the surface, slowing down the burn rate. A block of wood can stay mechanically sound in the middle of a fire for quite a while, and the hot phase of the reentry does not take that long.
It does not count unless you strap rockets to it.
Then the thing will be not just amazingly pretty, but damn seriously COOL.
The individual sensitivity tolerances of the CMOS sensor pixels can be used as a kind of a watermark. They are luckily not being recorded and paired with the identity of the camera owner. Yet.
Such solution would also effectively disallow open-firmware cameras (and open-firmware cellphones with such cameras), turning them into instruments of crime because of intentionally allowing the users to take illegal unregistered photographs.
You must like being interrogated, don't you?
Why the panic then? Why should a minuscule risk be more important than more real, more probable ones? Sorry, but I will not be afraid of bogeymen despite your government's wishes, and you shouldn't be as well. Refuse to be terrorized.
You may like to read "Beyond Fear" by Bruce Schneier. Then you may wake up.
Business is war. Without complete information available to the customer, it is not a capitalism, it is a scam.
Any measure that allows finding/comparing the real prices of the vendors is ethical by definition.
A redshirt in any other uniform color would die as easy.
Already happened. No fancier delivery system than a ricin-soaked pellet shot from an umbrella was used, though.
One day people will wake up and hang the politicians.
And you may have fewer issues retaining the productive employers. Nobody but a nazi wants to work for nazis.
Then reshuffle the layout a bit. Problem solved.
And the pirates will be affected only until somebody finds that one conditional jump instruction it all hangs on.
The thermite-based rig can be designed to be tamper-resistant, and to fire when an unauthorized attempt to open it or to remove it from its designated position is detected, a duress button is pressed, or other arbitrary condition is detected.
The same can be achieved without fire, with an encrypted filesystem with a key in SRAM, zeroized in case of tampering or duress. The key store can be connected to the system SMBUS (which is I2C with some minor protocol extensions), which can be accessed either on the motherboard connector, or, if not, on the DIMM socket.