It might be shocking to you, but human lives have a value. They have a comparative value (2 human lives are worth more than 1) and in some cases human lives even have monetary value (like when insurance companies estimate if they can afford covering that expensive threatment option). So if there is an action with two possible outcomes where if you do A then 1 person dies and if you do B then 10 persons die, then you'd be a retard or a sadistic psychopath to do B.
In this case it would be pertty trivial to create a tiny jammiong device and locate it in the roof of the car, right next to the head of the driver and calibrate it so that it would make it very hard to have a cell phone conversation within 20-30 cm of the device and SMS within 50 cm. Also make it automatically disengage as soon as airbags are deployed or when the car is still.
That would save millions of lives every year. And you still will be able to call 911, because in 99% of the cases when that is needed in the car, you are not driving anywhere.
Sure it is possible: after the voter has voted, he gets a receipt with a random number X on it, after the elections there is a tally sheet with a list of votes which basically says 'number X voted for candidate A'. From that tally anyone can count how many votes A got and check that their own vote was counted correctly. For plausible deniability after his vote, the voter can ask the ballot machine to print another hash receipt - a random hash receipt that would show up on the tally as voting for the candidate B (that the voter was payed to vote for) so that he can show that receipt to briber. Naturally before starting an election there would need to be a pool of hashes for all candidates - a set of fake initial votes, equal for all candidates so that there is a set of hashes to choose from if the first voter asks for a fake hash printout.
Let's see: * disabled people of all kinds, * sick, old and just tired people who want to vote from home instead of driving for half an hour and then standing in line for an hour * travelers who want to vote from wherever in the world they are * young people who don't like boring old voting stuff
In almost all of these cases in the US e-voting favors Democrats - young, educated, lazy, traveling. That is the reason there is a subversive trend to undermine it by creating very, very badly misdesigned e-voting machines.
Now if your country does not have that problem, you might be like Estonia - every citizen gets an ID card with a proper PGP-ish electronic signature in it and he can vote on a web site using that signature either in a voting booth or at home and later verify his vote with a hash on a tally. And that has been fully working for two elections already with no problems.
Serious research still needs much faster supercomputers than we have now. All kinds of science - from artificial intelligence to weather modeling to astrophysics to genetic research to nuclear simulations. Access to a powerful supercomputer is a major boon for academia in the country.
TSA increased security measures delay passenges all over the world. By a recent estimate the lost time is comparable to 100 human lifetimes every day. So, here we go - TSA extra security killed more people in the last 2 months than 9/11. And TSA is killing 3000 people a month, every month since 9/11. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
True, but if they want to sell phones into USA and Japanese markets, they must pay at least for those. I really wonder why people have not gone for that loophole yet?
From my Eastern EU perspective attendance (and performance) is easy to fix.
Make schools free, but mandatory. Make it mandatory for the student to finish school. If a student does not pass the test for at least 50% level in ALL classes, then he automatically stays in that class for the second year. Key tests are centralized and secret - every pupils of every school take the same test at the same time and all results are graded by teachers in other randomly chosen schools (to prevent cheating and grade boosting) the content of the tests is top secret so that no teacher can prepare their students specifically for that test. That is step one - establish a fair, but strict testing system that ensures that if a child is in a grade, he deserves to be there.
Every teacher must know all their students and take attendance every time. If a student is not in class, he must bring a doctors note or a parents note (if he is away less than 4 days in a row). If there is no excuse for being late, the parents are summoned to school so that they can excuse him or punish him at their choice. However if parents do not show up, then child protective services are engaged and child is removed from their parents for neglect and is forced to live at the school.
In any case everyone must be forced to go to school until they graduate for merit (or at least until they are 21 and declared mentally challenged). if you are too stupid to graduate from school, you are too stupid to drive, vote or take government office. One can regain those privileges by continuing his education (for free) until he graduates.
No home schooling, private schools must obey the same testing and attendance laws.
Why in the name of God does the teacher not know everyone in their class? Even if teachers change often it is pretty easy to take attendance - count people in class and if there is someone missing ask, who it is. If the pupils do not cooperate - then do a full and boring roll call. But really in 99% of cases the teacher should be able to just glance at the class and tell who is not present right away!
Imagine party A plans to make a law that would tax the ultra-wealthy more and give some tax breaks to middle and low income earners, but party B would like to do the opposite.
A few hundred millionaires can easily communicate and coordinate to make a company and write a 5 million USD check each to campaign against party A so that the law is stopped, because they know that this is less than half of what this law will cost them each year. And they can easily afford doing that.
The couple hundred million people with low to medium income on the other hand have it much harder to organize and can't really afford to make companies or donate much to politics, because they need to put food on the table.
Citizen United ruling makes it possible for a few hundred millionaires to out-spend and out-campaign the few hundred million other people. It allows 0.01% of people the power to freely and anonymously manipulate and basically buy the political process against the interests of the overwhelming majority of 99.99% of the population. That is NOT right.
Yes, and still there are limits to individual contribution to such PACs and requirements of transparency from them. Which do not exist for other businesses. If I donate money to a specific PAC, it is reasonable to expect that it is my wish that this PAC spends this money furthering its political agenda.
However, if I go and eat at MacDonalds, it does NOT mean that I have now expressed a wish for the board of MacDonalds to spend the profit they gained from me on their personal political agenda.
Money is not speech. Contribution of money to political purposes is very restricted.
You can speak all you want, but you can not use more money to do the speaking than allowed by the limits. And it is kinda hard for a corporation to do much speaking in the 2500$ allowed. And so it should have stayed.
AFAIK this might actually improve on the segmentation, because with 3.0 Google expressly forbids/discourages extensive customisations (like HTC Sence), partially because upgrading those customizations to need Android versions for all the phones is the major reason why it takes so long for phones to get new Android versions.
So here is hoping that once you get 3.0 after that all further upgrades would be nearly simultaneous for all devices.
The problem with having the extra engine and transmission parts is that it complicates the design, which drives up the cost of the car and cost and complexity of maintenance on that car. It would have been much better if they would have made it a straight and simple serial hybrid that got 10-15% less efficiency, but cost 10k less and was much easier to service and find spare parts for.
Actually if you read the source, these decoys are meant primarily for military exercises - so that your troops can be trained to seek and destroy targets that look as real as possible both in natural light and in infrared and on the radar.
You can do all kinds of things with that, for example - make 10 rocket launchers and heat up only a few of them when the attackers approach: the attacking pilots must observe the heat signature of the targets and deduce which targets are battle ready and which have already fired their payload and then destroy first the rocket launchers that have not launched their missile and might do it soon.
Government does NOT benefit. The beneficiaries are lawyers and (for a very tiny part) the judiciary. But the actual government (the executive) has nothing to gain from this.
I would say WoW is an exception to this, because the expansions basically reinvent the game every two years, especially this one that fully refactors the initial leveling experience as well as adding the new content at the top.
Sore, go inspire some rapists not to rape and some bank robbers not to rob banks. And while you are at this, could you also inspire some politicians not to take bribes? kthxbye
In other news - anti-robbery laws that just came into effect will make streets more dangerous! Before it was perfectly legal to come up to a strange on the road, show him a knife and pick their pockets for that few buck that you were short for a latte, not that robbing people has become illegal the criminals have become more aggressive, they put socks on their heads and run around with sharp knifes, also they often take all your money because the act of robbing someone now has become a dangerous thing for them to do. Also many states are consearned that now that robbery is considered a crime the crime rates will go up and will thus spoil their national statistics which is the last thing they need in an election year.
You cann't force people to want to sacrifices something for their freedom.
If a person does not want to be free and is happy with his computer being a jail for his thoughts, then he can happily buy an iPad or a Win7 laptop and be with it. If, however, a person does want freedom and is prepared to sacrifice something for it (time, more limited features,...) then he is already prepared to do what is required to get a Linux desktop up and running. And such a feat requires less and less sacrifice and provides more and more benefit with every passing year.
Linux is not useless of dying. It is liberating peoples minds one by one, when these people prove with action that they deserve their freedom.
You fill the whole hard drive with garbage - all 1 Tb of the drive is completely random. No you create 20 encrypted partitions on that drive: with no headers, no partition table, random offsets, semirandom size, the random partitions take up barely 700 Gb all together. 2-3 partitions are designated decoys - they are large and contain ebarassing and private data, but nothing criminally incriminating or trully secret. If you are ever questioned you (after much negotiation) give the offsets, algorythms and passwords to the decoy partitions and say that the rest of the drive is just random noise you made to hide these 3 partitions. Disk space is cheap you did not need so much yet and you planned to use more of it later as needed.
The question is if NSA can tell or prove that there is more decryptable information on that drive besides the parts that you already told them about?
It's called "government regulation". It actually works outside the United States of corporAtions. FCC can not stop Comcast, because Comcast paid lobbyists who paid congressmen to remove any punishing powers from FCC before it even got them. In any normal country, if the cable operators would be doing to Internet what they are doing now in the US the government would step in and either fine them obsene amounts of money (not a million, but something like 10% of their income until they fix the problem) or just take them over and split up the monopolistic companies. So that the ISPs would not be allowed to do any other business but to only be dumb pipes selling guaranteed-minimum bandwidth slices to all willing customers (no bandwith, only speeds). And force all companies that put wires into peoples homes (telefone, cable, electrical,...) to give access to such wires to any other company that the customer wants, so that you control the last mile and not the company that brings you a service over it.
It has been done all over the world and it works pretty well.
That is not correct. The service is actually adretised as '1 Mbit/s' or '10 Mbit/s' service and in such case it is reasonable to expect that I should be able to get what I paid for - such as 1 Mbit per second for the whole duration of the contract (and the 128 Kbit upload too).
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It might be shocking to you, but human lives have a value. They have a comparative value (2 human lives are worth more than 1) and in some cases human lives even have monetary value (like when insurance companies estimate if they can afford covering that expensive threatment option). So if there is an action with two possible outcomes where if you do A then 1 person dies and if you do B then 10 persons die, then you'd be a retard or a sadistic psychopath to do B.
In this case it would be pertty trivial to create a tiny jammiong device and locate it in the roof of the car, right next to the head of the driver and calibrate it so that it would make it very hard to have a cell phone conversation within 20-30 cm of the device and SMS within 50 cm. Also make it automatically disengage as soon as airbags are deployed or when the car is still.
That would save millions of lives every year. And you still will be able to call 911, because in 99% of the cases when that is needed in the car, you are not driving anywhere.
Sure it is possible: after the voter has voted, he gets a receipt with a random number X on it, after the elections there is a tally sheet with a list of votes which basically says 'number X voted for candidate A'. From that tally anyone can count how many votes A got and check that their own vote was counted correctly. For plausible deniability after his vote, the voter can ask the ballot machine to print another hash receipt - a random hash receipt that would show up on the tally as voting for the candidate B (that the voter was payed to vote for) so that he can show that receipt to briber. Naturally before starting an election there would need to be a pool of hashes for all candidates - a set of fake initial votes, equal for all candidates so that there is a set of hashes to choose from if the first voter asks for a fake hash printout.
Let's see:
* disabled people of all kinds,
* sick, old and just tired people who want to vote from home instead of driving for half an hour and then standing in line for an hour
* travelers who want to vote from wherever in the world they are
* young people who don't like boring old voting stuff
In almost all of these cases in the US e-voting favors Democrats - young, educated, lazy, traveling. That is the reason there is a subversive trend to undermine it by creating very, very badly misdesigned e-voting machines.
Now if your country does not have that problem, you might be like Estonia - every citizen gets an ID card with a proper PGP-ish electronic signature in it and he can vote on a web site using that signature either in a voting booth or at home and later verify his vote with a hash on a tally. And that has been fully working for two elections already with no problems.
Serious research still needs much faster supercomputers than we have now. All kinds of science - from artificial intelligence to weather modeling to astrophysics to genetic research to nuclear simulations. Access to a powerful supercomputer is a major boon for academia in the country.
TSA increased security measures delay passenges all over the world. By a recent estimate the lost time is comparable to 100 human lifetimes every day. So, here we go - TSA extra security killed more people in the last 2 months than 9/11. And TSA is killing 3000 people a month, every month since 9/11. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
True, but if they want to sell phones into USA and Japanese markets, they must pay at least for those. I really wonder why people have not gone for that loophole yet?
From my Eastern EU perspective attendance (and performance) is easy to fix.
Make schools free, but mandatory. Make it mandatory for the student to finish school. If a student does not pass the test for at least 50% level in ALL classes, then he automatically stays in that class for the second year. Key tests are centralized and secret - every pupils of every school take the same test at the same time and all results are graded by teachers in other randomly chosen schools (to prevent cheating and grade boosting) the content of the tests is top secret so that no teacher can prepare their students specifically for that test. That is step one - establish a fair, but strict testing system that ensures that if a child is in a grade, he deserves to be there.
Every teacher must know all their students and take attendance every time. If a student is not in class, he must bring a doctors note or a parents note (if he is away less than 4 days in a row). If there is no excuse for being late, the parents are summoned to school so that they can excuse him or punish him at their choice. However if parents do not show up, then child protective services are engaged and child is removed from their parents for neglect and is forced to live at the school.
In any case everyone must be forced to go to school until they graduate for merit (or at least until they are 21 and declared mentally challenged). if you are too stupid to graduate from school, you are too stupid to drive, vote or take government office. One can regain those privileges by continuing his education (for free) until he graduates.
No home schooling, private schools must obey the same testing and attendance laws.
Why in the name of God does the teacher not know everyone in their class? Even if teachers change often it is pretty easy to take attendance - count people in class and if there is someone missing ask, who it is. If the pupils do not cooperate - then do a full and boring roll call. But really in 99% of cases the teacher should be able to just glance at the class and tell who is not present right away!
It is actually all about money.
Imagine party A plans to make a law that would tax the ultra-wealthy more and give some tax breaks to middle and low income earners, but party B would like to do the opposite.
A few hundred millionaires can easily communicate and coordinate to make a company and write a 5 million USD check each to campaign against party A so that the law is stopped, because they know that this is less than half of what this law will cost them each year. And they can easily afford doing that.
The couple hundred million people with low to medium income on the other hand have it much harder to organize and can't really afford to make companies or donate much to politics, because they need to put food on the table.
Citizen United ruling makes it possible for a few hundred millionaires to out-spend and out-campaign the few hundred million other people. It allows 0.01% of people the power to freely and anonymously manipulate and basically buy the political process against the interests of the overwhelming majority of 99.99% of the population. That is NOT right.
Yes, and still there are limits to individual contribution to such PACs and requirements of transparency from them. Which do not exist for other businesses. If I donate money to a specific PAC, it is reasonable to expect that it is my wish that this PAC spends this money furthering its political agenda.
However, if I go and eat at MacDonalds, it does NOT mean that I have now expressed a wish for the board of MacDonalds to spend the profit they gained from me on their personal political agenda.
Money is not speech. Contribution of money to political purposes is very restricted.
You can speak all you want, but you can not use more money to do the speaking than allowed by the limits. And it is kinda hard for a corporation to do much speaking in the 2500$ allowed. And so it should have stayed.
Don't forget the firefighting and police, military and jails. ;)
There is plenty of recent evidence of how lax, dangerous and useless these systems become when they are given over to private for-profit corporations.
AFAIK this might actually improve on the segmentation, because with 3.0 Google expressly forbids/discourages extensive customisations (like HTC Sence), partially because upgrading those customizations to need Android versions for all the phones is the major reason why it takes so long for phones to get new Android versions.
So here is hoping that once you get 3.0 after that all further upgrades would be nearly simultaneous for all devices.
The problem with having the extra engine and transmission parts is that it complicates the design, which drives up the cost of the car and cost and complexity of maintenance on that car. It would have been much better if they would have made it a straight and simple serial hybrid that got 10-15% less efficiency, but cost 10k less and was much easier to service and find spare parts for.
Actually if you read the source, these decoys are meant primarily for military exercises - so that your troops can be trained to seek and destroy targets that look as real as possible both in natural light and in infrared and on the radar.
You can do all kinds of things with that, for example - make 10 rocket launchers and heat up only a few of them when the attackers approach: the attacking pilots must observe the heat signature of the targets and deduce which targets are battle ready and which have already fired their payload and then destroy first the rocket launchers that have not launched their missile and might do it soon.
Government does NOT benefit. The beneficiaries are lawyers and (for a very tiny part) the judiciary. But the actual government (the executive) has nothing to gain from this.
I would say WoW is an exception to this, because the expansions basically reinvent the game every two years, especially this one that fully refactors the initial leveling experience as well as adding the new content at the top.
There is one on n900 - it measures how high can you throw you n900 and how high is the drop, using the timer and accelerometer.
Sore, go inspire some rapists not to rape and some bank robbers not to rob banks. And while you are at this, could you also inspire some politicians not to take bribes? kthxbye
In other news - anti-robbery laws that just came into effect will make streets more dangerous! Before it was perfectly legal to come up to a strange on the road, show him a knife and pick their pockets for that few buck that you were short for a latte, not that robbing people has become illegal the criminals have become more aggressive, they put socks on their heads and run around with sharp knifes, also they often take all your money because the act of robbing someone now has become a dangerous thing for them to do. Also many states are consearned that now that robbery is considered a crime the crime rates will go up and will thus spoil their national statistics which is the last thing they need in an election year.
Then watch you some Braniacs. Much more science and much more fun.
You cann't force people to want to sacrifices something for their freedom.
If a person does not want to be free and is happy with his computer being a jail for his thoughts, then he can happily buy an iPad or a Win7 laptop and be with it. If, however, a person does want freedom and is prepared to sacrifice something for it (time, more limited features, ...) then he is already prepared to do what is required to get a Linux desktop up and running. And such a feat requires less and less sacrifice and provides more and more benefit with every passing year.
Linux is not useless of dying. It is liberating peoples minds one by one, when these people prove with action that they deserve their freedom.
You fill the whole hard drive with garbage - all 1 Tb of the drive is completely random. No you create 20 encrypted partitions on that drive: with no headers, no partition table, random offsets, semirandom size, the random partitions take up barely 700 Gb all together. 2-3 partitions are designated decoys - they are large and contain ebarassing and private data, but nothing criminally incriminating or trully secret. If you are ever questioned you (after much negotiation) give the offsets, algorythms and passwords to the decoy partitions and say that the rest of the drive is just random noise you made to hide these 3 partitions. Disk space is cheap you did not need so much yet and you planned to use more of it later as needed.
The question is if NSA can tell or prove that there is more decryptable information on that drive besides the parts that you already told them about?
It's called "government regulation". It actually works outside the United States of corporAtions. FCC can not stop Comcast, because Comcast paid lobbyists who paid congressmen to remove any punishing powers from FCC before it even got them. In any normal country, if the cable operators would be doing to Internet what they are doing now in the US the government would step in and either fine them obsene amounts of money (not a million, but something like 10% of their income until they fix the problem) or just take them over and split up the monopolistic companies. So that the ISPs would not be allowed to do any other business but to only be dumb pipes selling guaranteed-minimum bandwidth slices to all willing customers (no bandwith, only speeds). And force all companies that put wires into peoples homes (telefone, cable, electrical, ...) to give access to such wires to any other company that the customer wants, so that you control the last mile and not the company that brings you a service over it.
It has been done all over the world and it works pretty well.
That is not correct. The service is actually adretised as '1 Mbit/s' or '10 Mbit/s' service and in such case it is reasonable to expect that I should be able to get what I paid for - such as 1 Mbit per second for the whole duration of the contract (and the 128 Kbit upload too).
Swifter, no swifting!!!