People driving the speed limit on open freeway often have many drivers passing them. This creates contention points in high-speed traffic, leading to a sharp increase in risk. In other words: if the traffic travels at 80mph, driving at the posted 55mph is forcing a dangerous condition.
Speed limits are not posted based on risk, but on zoning and road design. A two-lane undivided highway in a commercial zone is 30mph, even if that commercial zone has wide lanes, minimal traffic, wide shoulders, and no pedestrians because it's an urban sprawl area. Such roads are effectively equivalent to posted 45mph roads and, in the absence of a speed limit sign, a driver is reasonable to assume the posted speed is likely 45mph.
Conversely, the same speed limits are posted in dense pedestrian traffic areas. Two lane with roadside parking is considered wide enough to post 35mph-40mph in a commercial area; yet the amount of pedestrian traffic and drivers exiting the vehicle makes it dangerous to drive that fast.
I'm too busy looking for hazards to pay attention to the speed limit. I travel with the flow of traffic, or at a speed which seems comfortable in absence of other markings. I've had plenty of close calls at and below speed, from drivers trying to door my car to pedestrians surging out into the street; in many cases, the only thing that prevented some moron from becoming a human speed bump was me noticing the way he was moving while on the sidewalk, 10-15 seconds before he darted into the street. The same applies for people about to change lane without a signal, or run a stop sign: you can tell well in advance if you're paying attention, or you can eye your spedometer every 15 seconds and try to claim vehicular manslaughter doesn't apply to you because you were "driving safely".
This is what happens when you look up from your dash and realize the guy ahead of you is merging into your front fender.
Speed limits are overly conservative, and it is entirely possible to drive fast and drive safely. Risk increases, but driver ability modifies the risk. Good brakes are even more important in such situations.
I don't pay much attention to speed limits. The signs are posted miles apart and easy to miss; I drive with the flow of traffic, slowing down when there is additional risk. Additional risk includes traffic calming zones (whether zoned properly or not), e.g., residential areas with street parking and children, where risk is incredibly high--the proper way to drive these is slow, with your foot off the accelerator, prepared to brake. Other risks include commercial areas with lots of pedestrian traffic and street parking in general, where driving at-speed is fine; in these situations, you must search for hazards and prepare to steer or brake as needed to avoid them.
Driving analogies always show how terrible we are at driving. People care so much about the folks driving 40mph in a 30mph zone, but they don't care about the people cruising mindlessly while staring straight ahead and taking no notice of kids playing by the street, people preparing to exit parked cars, or other cars about to turn in front of them without looking for cross traffic. These are people who will be utterly surprised and incapable of reacting when someone's kid pops out from behind a car, or when a driver exits his vehicle 10 feet in front of them.
The summary suggests SSL is useful without a man-in-the-middle. SSL protects against eaves droppers on your network; but any eaves dropper can become a MITM. ARP cache poisoning is a common technique; on switched networks, you cannot eaves drop without ARP cache poisoning or ARP flooding. Hubbed networks are similarly easy: packet the target with IP=DEFAUTGATEWAY MAC=YOU and it will start addressing default gateway packets to you (routing works by putting the destination IP on a packet, but the default gateway's MAC on the frame; you enter the IP address of the router, and the OS runs an ARP request to find its MAC).
It's entirely unlikely that SSL does anything if there isn't a man in the middle.
Resources cost money because labor is required to make those resources. If the resources could be magicked up by a hand wave, they wouldn't be worth much.
Mining steel requires heavy machinery, fuel oil, and tons of manual labor. That machinery is made from steel and requires manual labor to ship and maintain. How much cheaper would steel be if you could just go to the mine, dig a hole with a shovel, and five minutes later have piles of steel nuggets to melt and forge? The steel industry would discount the labor of millions of miners.
Do you think someone just reaches down, pulls out a hamburger, and says, "Well I'll sell this for 75 cents to Wendy's"? People worked hard to raise those cows and grind that meat. You're paying for their labor.
I've been a CEO at one point in my life; however, this understanding comes from both line management at a Wendy's and basic economics. You want to understand how much labor really costs? Grow one square meter of amaranth wheat, harvest it, winnow it, grind it, then make some bread.
Packing, made of boxes assembled from material harvested by humans paid a wage, run through machines built by humans paid a wage and powered by fuel harvested by humans paid a wage.
Shipping, carried out by humans paid a wage, using trucks built by humans paid a wage out of material mined by humans paid a wage, using tools built by humans paid a wage and powered with fuel by humans paid a wage--the same fuel that runs the truck, sometimes.
Advertising, designed by humans paid a wage, produced on machines built and powered by the labor of humans paid wages, and broadcast over infrastructure maintained and regulated by humans paid wages, built of material mined and formed by humans paid wages.
Nearly 100% of the cost of goods sold is wages. Stuff is expensive because it requires labor; additional price increases are marginal profits, known as economic rent. Price minus cost gives marginal profits.
This is a long discussion, and I retype it from concept each time. It's luck if it's messy or clear. I suggest you get some good whiskey for this one.
Many have proposed a Universal Basic Income, or UBI. I find the concept incredible, and have refined an entire welfare policy based on UBI. UBI itself is a component of a good system, as are taxes and government services: implementation makes or breaks the system.
I assume we cannot reasonably change human nature: humans are greedy, lazy, power-hungry creatures, and our ideals will not remove this from society. With that assumption, I also assume that human greed carries stability: anything that works because humans are greedy will continue to work, and anything that human greed harms will eventually fail.
UBI as a flat system provides an identical income to a subset of the population. In my system, it's untaxed income for everyone over the age of 18. Human greed views the unemployed as a crop of available income: businesses, run by humans, will see the poor as a guaranteed source of money.
The poor require housing, food, and other basic needs. In 2014, a half-studio (6x9 bedroom, 10x9 sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, total 224sqft) is profitable at $300/mo rent. With a $10,000/year basic income providing $833/mo, this leaves $533/mo for other needs. That itself covers HUD assistance, WIC, and food stamps. Collection of basic income into retirement replaces social security and government pensions, although the change-over is non-trivial (you can't simply drop these systems, as people currently collecting or soon to collect are ethically owed that money, and economically may not readily adapt).
The above shows a basic income creates a market to provide a social safety net. It is not policy. Below, I describe the policy and how minimum wage fits in.
The policy is simple. All income is taxed for UBI at a fixed, flat percentage. The poorest of poor and the richest of rich pay about 15% into UBI. If the rich collect all the money and the middle class shrinks, the percentage collected remains the same; likewise, if the middle class grows, their income is taxed the same to support UBI. This makes UBI durable.
About the percentage: it has an operating range. Too low and UBI fails in bad economic times; too high, and UBI causes hyperinflation. A UBI entirely too high begins to discourage work, as it requires heavy effort to get a return on quality-of-life; but the hyperinflation issue kicks in before this, so labor disincentives are not a risk. I previously computed a value of 18% in 2012, but that was high; even 14% leaves leeway in 2012, and I likely overestimate the costs of housing.
UBI compares to current welfare favorably: Welfare excluding medicare and medicaid made up 25% of the total personal income in 2012. This includes HUD, food and family services (food stamps, WIC), unemployment, and retirement services (social security, government pensions). UBI addresses the same problems these address, but at a lower tax rate. It ignores the distribution of wealth, tracks inflation, and produces no additional load with increasing welfare need: UBI is 100% saturated, and does not take on more beneficiaries with decreases in employment.
UBI also replaces minimum wage. Minimum wage purports to establish a basic standard of living; it does this only for those who work. UBI replaces all welfare systems, but remains regardless of income; unemployment, WIC, HUD, and other welfare end when a beneficiary no longer qualifies. For unemployment, this is as simple as getting a job, effectively making said job worth its wage minus unemployment: collecting $10.25/hr * 40hr on unemployment means your new $10.50/hr job only really pays $0.25/hr, compared to not taking the offer.
Because UBI remains when working, lower wages are attractive and effective. UBI at $10,000/year is roughly $4.80/hr untaxed or, assuming 10% income tax and the 15% UBI, a $6.40/hr wage. An additional $5/hr
They were Android users, and sought something better. Everyone talking about iPhone. They love the shiny... but in a few months' time, many of them will switch back.
You can graduate from any IT field into IT Project Management if that's your bag. Just get the latest (ALWAYS the latest) PMBOK, some supplemental material (Tres Roeder's book, for example), and take a course and a test.
Your experience may lend itself to risk management, especially if you did computer security. Infosec doesn't automatically make you good at risk management, but it does give you a lot of functional knowledge. Grab a Project Management Practice Standard for Project Risk Management, grab some books about Operational Risk Management, do some other studies. It's not about eliminating risk, but rather analyzing and understanding risk. You apply your risk appetite to risk, then decide which risks to accept and which to mitigate or reject entirely, and how to do so.
Both of these benefit from knowing something about your subject matter. A good PM can run a project on anything; but a good PM also knows he's much more effective running a project centered around subject matter he's personally familiar with. Likewise, risk management is much easier when you can understand the shit you're trying to analyze, along with why certain actions are risky.
This looks like something out of Sci-Fi. In The Gap Cycle, there's the use of specifically harmonized crystals that can resonate across a limited distance. In one instance, that distance is 3.4 light years due to inability to make the crystals more perfect than that with current technology. It's so hard to do that they just use gap courier drones, which drop into tach and make several consecutive multi-light-year jumps over the course of a few hours to send messages thousands of light years.
You have no liability for using OpenSSL. That it was affected by a bug does not put you at legal risk, as it is a reasonable product decision.
If you had used JerrysSSLMadeInMyBasementAsACollegeProject, and it was found vulnerable, and you leaked personal information, a court would likely find you negligent. Of consideration would be an analysis of the product on the face: if it looks like a Geocities site done in FrontPage and says "I made this SSL implementation as a college project", you are negligent. If it boasts tons of security research and explanations on why this is much more secure and reliable and resistant to attack and programming bugs than other SSL libraries, you could be found not-negligent.
Liability doesn't mean shit went wrong and you're responsible; it means shit went wrong and you did something any sane person would know not to do. Enterprise would not be liable for personal injury caused by Toyota Priuses in their fleet if the court case found that Enterprise maintained the cars properly and discovered that Priuses had an inherent issue: Toyota is a respected brand and, until the Prius issue was discovered, the Prius was considered a safe car. Once the issue was discovered, Enterprise would have to send them for recall, after which they could issue Priuses again without exposing themselves to liability from Prius manufacturer defects.
TrueCrypt is well-known and respected as a secure product. As long as nobody tells you not to use it, it's reasonable to use it to secure data. If a serious TrueCrypt security flaw comes out and you deploy new TrueCrypt installations knowing the flaw won't be fixed, you're negligent and liable--as TrueCrypt is now out of maintenance forever, migrating onto TrueCrypt would now be considered negligent and carry liability.
Getting Linux to boot from anything it can mount is easy. You put the kernel and initrd onto an unencrypted/boot partition, which is loaded by grub. The kernel comes up, asks the user for the key (USB, password, whatever), mounts the volume, pivot_root/initrd/dev/mapper/root, and continues.
I would just use electrician's pliers to yank someone's front teeth out, then tell them they're lying, then continue the torture for a few days. If they don't break, they don't have anything; if they do have something, they'll break.
When faced with plausible deniability, replace the rubber hose with bamboo and scourge.
TrueCrypt has been considered safe by a large body of people, and thus is reasonable to use for general self-driven risk management. For external RM, you ask your client: the government, the organization whose data you're protecting, etc., will have their own opinion to share if you suggest TrueCrypt as your encryption solution.
Eh it was back in the 2000s when I was still young and posting on Craigslist looking for women. Just after I'd gotten over the shock of being hit on by dudes twice my age. I was like, "Oh, another old man. Go away old man." and it turned into an angry old man rant at me. I basically deconstructed his arguments, pointed out inconsistencies, and told him that he's old and stupid and lives in an imaginary world; it was good practice dealing with idiots.
If this guy had been gay he would have hated men that did not want to sleep with him.
I had a 50-ish year old dude call me an arrogant little twatwaddle for thinking I wouldn't enjoy him giving me a blowjob. He said he's been suckin' off straight dudes since high school or some stupid thing so he knows I'm just being a prick.
He told me age brings experience and understanding. I told him age makes him old; understanding comes from correctly interpreting experience, up to and including knowing its boundaries. He wrote back a hilarious 4 page single-paragraph rant.
There was a time when I felt it was inappropriate to consider myself superior in earnest. Eventually I realized it's important to know where you stand, and where you don't; refusing to acknowledge the truth is always ignorance.
Scientifically, selection of genetic traits over generations based on fitness or utility is a theory with strong supporting evidence. It's also known that many animal cells--including humans--have receptors which accept messenger proteins to indicate a need, causing changes in gene expression and even permanent alteration of DNA.
That is to say: the brain can decide to recode your DNA. It can decide to create new DNA for new purpose. This can, hypothetically, occur in the gonads, upgrading sex cells. Selection can occur during life.
The evidence for that is weak. Such a theory, however, would suggest different than the current theory. The current theory suggests that a certain adaptation occurs as random variation or mutation and, if advantageous, improves the chances of reproduction. This theory suggests that such traits may pass on and remain dormant, and then express themselves due to environmental pressures on the living being--that evolution is an environmental adaptation to some degree, not simply a matter of selection pressure.
It also makes possible--but extremely unlikely--that such adaptations could come from subconscious impulses, and so a woman could desire a slimmer figure or bigger breasts, and pass such traits to her daughter. This would explain why the physical statures of humans continue to change and evolve even in a world where nearly everyone breeds effectively (the theory that humans are still actively evolving is considered valid, but the environment doesn't supply selective pressure to cull off parts of the population while allowing other parts to breed as quickly as would explain it).
You called something a fact which is a theory. A very good, strongly supported theory which may indeed be factual; but it's a scientific theory.
A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method, and repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation.
If it appears to be a fact, it's a currently-valid scientific theory. We try to gather supporting evidence, but also look for inconsistencies. That means, yes, we're always looking for inconsistencies in evolutionary theory.
Evolution inadequately explains the origin of species: we have theories about earth life coming from space, about random assembly from lightning and methane, and other shit. All the theories about how life actually formed are weak--much weaker than selection pressure in an established system. For example: multi-cellular animal life tends to require cardiovascular systems, which are heavily complex and don't provide an advantage until they're complete--and it's a big step between "heart and veins" and "complete".
To correct this inadequacy, we're constantly looking for more evidence: missing link species, meteor strikes (because space bacteria would immediately simplify how Earth developed life), experiments re-creating the primordial conditions (generating life in lab would tell us that's a real thing), and so on. We may eventually find evidence of divine intervention, and then later trace that back to the evolution of consciousness in the hot universe (when expansion began, photons had more mass than protons because they had more energy) due to some strange quantum effects, and then discover the existence of non-physical energy-based life, and find out we were engineered by an intelligent species in a dying universe so that life could survive in the new, cold universe.
This is why everything is a scientific theory. To claim anything is a scientific fact is to show a lack of understanding of basic science.
Slashdot Mirror
And your insurance company thinks driving slow is dangerous.
Wrong.
People driving the speed limit on open freeway often have many drivers passing them. This creates contention points in high-speed traffic, leading to a sharp increase in risk. In other words: if the traffic travels at 80mph, driving at the posted 55mph is forcing a dangerous condition.
Speed limits are not posted based on risk, but on zoning and road design. A two-lane undivided highway in a commercial zone is 30mph, even if that commercial zone has wide lanes, minimal traffic, wide shoulders, and no pedestrians because it's an urban sprawl area. Such roads are effectively equivalent to posted 45mph roads and, in the absence of a speed limit sign, a driver is reasonable to assume the posted speed is likely 45mph.
Conversely, the same speed limits are posted in dense pedestrian traffic areas. Two lane with roadside parking is considered wide enough to post 35mph-40mph in a commercial area; yet the amount of pedestrian traffic and drivers exiting the vehicle makes it dangerous to drive that fast.
I'm too busy looking for hazards to pay attention to the speed limit. I travel with the flow of traffic, or at a speed which seems comfortable in absence of other markings. I've had plenty of close calls at and below speed, from drivers trying to door my car to pedestrians surging out into the street; in many cases, the only thing that prevented some moron from becoming a human speed bump was me noticing the way he was moving while on the sidewalk, 10-15 seconds before he darted into the street. The same applies for people about to change lane without a signal, or run a stop sign: you can tell well in advance if you're paying attention, or you can eye your spedometer every 15 seconds and try to claim vehicular manslaughter doesn't apply to you because you were "driving safely".
This is what happens when you look up from your dash and realize the guy ahead of you is merging into your front fender.
Speed limits are overly conservative, and it is entirely possible to drive fast and drive safely. Risk increases, but driver ability modifies the risk. Good brakes are even more important in such situations.
I don't pay much attention to speed limits. The signs are posted miles apart and easy to miss; I drive with the flow of traffic, slowing down when there is additional risk. Additional risk includes traffic calming zones (whether zoned properly or not), e.g., residential areas with street parking and children, where risk is incredibly high--the proper way to drive these is slow, with your foot off the accelerator, prepared to brake. Other risks include commercial areas with lots of pedestrian traffic and street parking in general, where driving at-speed is fine; in these situations, you must search for hazards and prepare to steer or brake as needed to avoid them.
Driving analogies always show how terrible we are at driving. People care so much about the folks driving 40mph in a 30mph zone, but they don't care about the people cruising mindlessly while staring straight ahead and taking no notice of kids playing by the street, people preparing to exit parked cars, or other cars about to turn in front of them without looking for cross traffic. These are people who will be utterly surprised and incapable of reacting when someone's kid pops out from behind a car, or when a driver exits his vehicle 10 feet in front of them.
The summary is actually ridiculous.
The summary suggests SSL is useful without a man-in-the-middle. SSL protects against eaves droppers on your network; but any eaves dropper can become a MITM. ARP cache poisoning is a common technique; on switched networks, you cannot eaves drop without ARP cache poisoning or ARP flooding. Hubbed networks are similarly easy: packet the target with IP=DEFAUTGATEWAY MAC=YOU and it will start addressing default gateway packets to you (routing works by putting the destination IP on a packet, but the default gateway's MAC on the frame; you enter the IP address of the router, and the OS runs an ARP request to find its MAC).
It's entirely unlikely that SSL does anything if there isn't a man in the middle.
Resources cost money because labor is required to make those resources. If the resources could be magicked up by a hand wave, they wouldn't be worth much.
Mining steel requires heavy machinery, fuel oil, and tons of manual labor. That machinery is made from steel and requires manual labor to ship and maintain. How much cheaper would steel be if you could just go to the mine, dig a hole with a shovel, and five minutes later have piles of steel nuggets to melt and forge? The steel industry would discount the labor of millions of miners.
Do you think someone just reaches down, pulls out a hamburger, and says, "Well I'll sell this for 75 cents to Wendy's"? People worked hard to raise those cows and grind that meat. You're paying for their labor.
I've been a CEO at one point in my life; however, this understanding comes from both line management at a Wendy's and basic economics. You want to understand how much labor really costs? Grow one square meter of amaranth wheat, harvest it, winnow it, grind it, then make some bread.
Packing, made of boxes assembled from material harvested by humans paid a wage, run through machines built by humans paid a wage and powered by fuel harvested by humans paid a wage.
Shipping, carried out by humans paid a wage, using trucks built by humans paid a wage out of material mined by humans paid a wage, using tools built by humans paid a wage and powered with fuel by humans paid a wage--the same fuel that runs the truck, sometimes.
Advertising, designed by humans paid a wage, produced on machines built and powered by the labor of humans paid wages, and broadcast over infrastructure maintained and regulated by humans paid wages, built of material mined and formed by humans paid wages.
Nearly 100% of the cost of goods sold is wages. Stuff is expensive because it requires labor; additional price increases are marginal profits, known as economic rent. Price minus cost gives marginal profits.
Is gun, Comrade. Is not safe.
This is a long discussion, and I retype it from concept each time. It's luck if it's messy or clear. I suggest you get some good whiskey for this one.
Many have proposed a Universal Basic Income, or UBI. I find the concept incredible, and have refined an entire welfare policy based on UBI. UBI itself is a component of a good system, as are taxes and government services: implementation makes or breaks the system.
I assume we cannot reasonably change human nature: humans are greedy, lazy, power-hungry creatures, and our ideals will not remove this from society. With that assumption, I also assume that human greed carries stability: anything that works because humans are greedy will continue to work, and anything that human greed harms will eventually fail.
UBI as a flat system provides an identical income to a subset of the population. In my system, it's untaxed income for everyone over the age of 18. Human greed views the unemployed as a crop of available income: businesses, run by humans, will see the poor as a guaranteed source of money.
The poor require housing, food, and other basic needs. In 2014, a half-studio (6x9 bedroom, 10x9 sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, total 224sqft) is profitable at $300/mo rent. With a $10,000/year basic income providing $833/mo, this leaves $533/mo for other needs. That itself covers HUD assistance, WIC, and food stamps. Collection of basic income into retirement replaces social security and government pensions, although the change-over is non-trivial (you can't simply drop these systems, as people currently collecting or soon to collect are ethically owed that money, and economically may not readily adapt).
The above shows a basic income creates a market to provide a social safety net. It is not policy. Below, I describe the policy and how minimum wage fits in.
The policy is simple. All income is taxed for UBI at a fixed, flat percentage. The poorest of poor and the richest of rich pay about 15% into UBI. If the rich collect all the money and the middle class shrinks, the percentage collected remains the same; likewise, if the middle class grows, their income is taxed the same to support UBI. This makes UBI durable.
About the percentage: it has an operating range. Too low and UBI fails in bad economic times; too high, and UBI causes hyperinflation. A UBI entirely too high begins to discourage work, as it requires heavy effort to get a return on quality-of-life; but the hyperinflation issue kicks in before this, so labor disincentives are not a risk. I previously computed a value of 18% in 2012, but that was high; even 14% leaves leeway in 2012, and I likely overestimate the costs of housing.
UBI compares to current welfare favorably: Welfare excluding medicare and medicaid made up 25% of the total personal income in 2012. This includes HUD, food and family services (food stamps, WIC), unemployment, and retirement services (social security, government pensions). UBI addresses the same problems these address, but at a lower tax rate. It ignores the distribution of wealth, tracks inflation, and produces no additional load with increasing welfare need: UBI is 100% saturated, and does not take on more beneficiaries with decreases in employment.
UBI also replaces minimum wage. Minimum wage purports to establish a basic standard of living; it does this only for those who work. UBI replaces all welfare systems, but remains regardless of income; unemployment, WIC, HUD, and other welfare end when a beneficiary no longer qualifies. For unemployment, this is as simple as getting a job, effectively making said job worth its wage minus unemployment: collecting $10.25/hr * 40hr on unemployment means your new $10.50/hr job only really pays $0.25/hr, compared to not taking the offer.
Because UBI remains when working, lower wages are attractive and effective. UBI at $10,000/year is roughly $4.80/hr untaxed or, assuming 10% income tax and the 15% UBI, a $6.40/hr wage. An additional $5/hr
They were Android users, and sought something better. Everyone talking about iPhone. They love the shiny... but in a few months' time, many of them will switch back.
Uh. Nearly 100% of the cost of goods sold is wages.
Minimum wage should be repealed. It and our entire welfare system are, together, a broken system.
Slashdot keeps forwarding me to activeplayer.us, which tries to drive-by-download an installer. It looks like Adobe's FlashPlayer site.
You can graduate from any IT field into IT Project Management if that's your bag. Just get the latest (ALWAYS the latest) PMBOK, some supplemental material (Tres Roeder's book, for example), and take a course and a test.
Your experience may lend itself to risk management, especially if you did computer security. Infosec doesn't automatically make you good at risk management, but it does give you a lot of functional knowledge. Grab a Project Management Practice Standard for Project Risk Management, grab some books about Operational Risk Management, do some other studies. It's not about eliminating risk, but rather analyzing and understanding risk. You apply your risk appetite to risk, then decide which risks to accept and which to mitigate or reject entirely, and how to do so.
Both of these benefit from knowing something about your subject matter. A good PM can run a project on anything; but a good PM also knows he's much more effective running a project centered around subject matter he's personally familiar with. Likewise, risk management is much easier when you can understand the shit you're trying to analyze, along with why certain actions are risky.
This looks like something out of Sci-Fi. In The Gap Cycle, there's the use of specifically harmonized crystals that can resonate across a limited distance. In one instance, that distance is 3.4 light years due to inability to make the crystals more perfect than that with current technology. It's so hard to do that they just use gap courier drones, which drop into tach and make several consecutive multi-light-year jumps over the course of a few hours to send messages thousands of light years.
That's what Ray Bradbury said.
You have no liability for using OpenSSL. That it was affected by a bug does not put you at legal risk, as it is a reasonable product decision.
If you had used JerrysSSLMadeInMyBasementAsACollegeProject, and it was found vulnerable, and you leaked personal information, a court would likely find you negligent. Of consideration would be an analysis of the product on the face: if it looks like a Geocities site done in FrontPage and says "I made this SSL implementation as a college project", you are negligent. If it boasts tons of security research and explanations on why this is much more secure and reliable and resistant to attack and programming bugs than other SSL libraries, you could be found not-negligent.
Liability doesn't mean shit went wrong and you're responsible; it means shit went wrong and you did something any sane person would know not to do. Enterprise would not be liable for personal injury caused by Toyota Priuses in their fleet if the court case found that Enterprise maintained the cars properly and discovered that Priuses had an inherent issue: Toyota is a respected brand and, until the Prius issue was discovered, the Prius was considered a safe car. Once the issue was discovered, Enterprise would have to send them for recall, after which they could issue Priuses again without exposing themselves to liability from Prius manufacturer defects.
TrueCrypt is well-known and respected as a secure product. As long as nobody tells you not to use it, it's reasonable to use it to secure data. If a serious TrueCrypt security flaw comes out and you deploy new TrueCrypt installations knowing the flaw won't be fixed, you're negligent and liable--as TrueCrypt is now out of maintenance forever, migrating onto TrueCrypt would now be considered negligent and carry liability.
Getting Linux to boot from anything it can mount is easy. You put the kernel and initrd onto an unencrypted /boot partition, which is loaded by grub. The kernel comes up, asks the user for the key (USB, password, whatever), mounts the volume, pivot_root /initrd /dev/mapper/root, and continues.
I would just use electrician's pliers to yank someone's front teeth out, then tell them they're lying, then continue the torture for a few days. If they don't break, they don't have anything; if they do have something, they'll break.
When faced with plausible deniability, replace the rubber hose with bamboo and scourge.
TrueCrypt has been considered safe by a large body of people, and thus is reasonable to use for general self-driven risk management. For external RM, you ask your client: the government, the organization whose data you're protecting, etc., will have their own opinion to share if you suggest TrueCrypt as your encryption solution.
Eh it was back in the 2000s when I was still young and posting on Craigslist looking for women. Just after I'd gotten over the shock of being hit on by dudes twice my age. I was like, "Oh, another old man. Go away old man." and it turned into an angry old man rant at me. I basically deconstructed his arguments, pointed out inconsistencies, and told him that he's old and stupid and lives in an imaginary world; it was good practice dealing with idiots.
If this guy had been gay he would have hated men that did not want to sleep with him.
I had a 50-ish year old dude call me an arrogant little twatwaddle for thinking I wouldn't enjoy him giving me a blowjob. He said he's been suckin' off straight dudes since high school or some stupid thing so he knows I'm just being a prick.
He told me age brings experience and understanding. I told him age makes him old; understanding comes from correctly interpreting experience, up to and including knowing its boundaries. He wrote back a hilarious 4 page single-paragraph rant.
There was a time when I felt it was inappropriate to consider myself superior in earnest. Eventually I realized it's important to know where you stand, and where you don't; refusing to acknowledge the truth is always ignorance.
Scientifically, selection of genetic traits over generations based on fitness or utility is a theory with strong supporting evidence. It's also known that many animal cells--including humans--have receptors which accept messenger proteins to indicate a need, causing changes in gene expression and even permanent alteration of DNA.
That is to say: the brain can decide to recode your DNA. It can decide to create new DNA for new purpose. This can, hypothetically, occur in the gonads, upgrading sex cells. Selection can occur during life.
The evidence for that is weak. Such a theory, however, would suggest different than the current theory. The current theory suggests that a certain adaptation occurs as random variation or mutation and, if advantageous, improves the chances of reproduction. This theory suggests that such traits may pass on and remain dormant, and then express themselves due to environmental pressures on the living being--that evolution is an environmental adaptation to some degree, not simply a matter of selection pressure.
It also makes possible--but extremely unlikely--that such adaptations could come from subconscious impulses, and so a woman could desire a slimmer figure or bigger breasts, and pass such traits to her daughter. This would explain why the physical statures of humans continue to change and evolve even in a world where nearly everyone breeds effectively (the theory that humans are still actively evolving is considered valid, but the environment doesn't supply selective pressure to cull off parts of the population while allowing other parts to breed as quickly as would explain it).
You called something a fact which is a theory. A very good, strongly supported theory which may indeed be factual; but it's a scientific theory.
My reading comprehension sucks.
A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method, and repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation.
If it appears to be a fact, it's a currently-valid scientific theory. We try to gather supporting evidence, but also look for inconsistencies. That means, yes, we're always looking for inconsistencies in evolutionary theory.
Evolution inadequately explains the origin of species: we have theories about earth life coming from space, about random assembly from lightning and methane, and other shit. All the theories about how life actually formed are weak--much weaker than selection pressure in an established system. For example: multi-cellular animal life tends to require cardiovascular systems, which are heavily complex and don't provide an advantage until they're complete--and it's a big step between "heart and veins" and "complete".
To correct this inadequacy, we're constantly looking for more evidence: missing link species, meteor strikes (because space bacteria would immediately simplify how Earth developed life), experiments re-creating the primordial conditions (generating life in lab would tell us that's a real thing), and so on. We may eventually find evidence of divine intervention, and then later trace that back to the evolution of consciousness in the hot universe (when expansion began, photons had more mass than protons because they had more energy) due to some strange quantum effects, and then discover the existence of non-physical energy-based life, and find out we were engineered by an intelligent species in a dying universe so that life could survive in the new, cold universe.
This is why everything is a scientific theory. To claim anything is a scientific fact is to show a lack of understanding of basic science.
It's all really due to the effects of gravity and acceleration on radioactive decay, but people think it's due to time dilation.