Not all teachers. I remember that in one course we had a long discussion about the history of religious genocide in the Bible. But my teacher on this was a theological history teacher. It was a fascinating course: the concepts of a "promised land", a "manifest destiny", and "the divine right of kings" all were examined. I do believe it helped prevent their getting tenure, but the material was fascinating.
F-35's are not for "major wars". It's bleeding edge, horribly expensive multi-role aircraft that does none of the roles well. The ill-founded claims by its manufacturers that it is "eight times more effective in air-to-ground combat" is pointless since it is almost 10 times as expensive to build and operate as a more specifically ground combat focused aircraft. The "build a core design and bolt on different components for different roles" has led to a variety of tragic design flaws that have been incredibly expensive to address for all its different variations. It's also a complete maintenance nightmare: the redesigns needed to reduce the weight, after it was enlarged to hold more weapons and provide larger engines, has led to customized parts that no one else uses, on the very edge of the strength/weight tradeoff to keep the weight down. So they fail, frequently, and are very expensive to replace. When confronted with various design flaws, such as the extremely por cockpit visibility leading to trivial destruction by cheaper aircraft in combat, Boing's suggestion that "that pilots worried about being shot down should fly cargo aircraft instead"
There is no chance that this aircraft will have the reliability and longevity of many existing models of current US aircraft, which means incredible ongoing costs in repairing and replacing expensive aircraft that can never be used at their full capabilities_. They are displacing budgets for manpower (needed for ground warfare and holding territory, as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan), supply craft (for keeping troops and warcraft supplied), base maintenance (to train and equip men and machines), and drones (which are far cheaper and more effective than modern aircraft at targeteed strikes). The best thing that could happen for the US milatary with this aircraft is to pull the plug on it _now_, throw 1/3 of money into a rebuild and oversupply of more conventional aircraft, use 1/3 the budget to build newer, more specifically suited aircraft for each military branch instead of a Swiss Army Aircraft, and use the remaining 1/3 for manpower support. America is short on the ground troops and personnel to run the several occupying wars we're in the midst of.
No, but it's correlation, not direct causation. The rapid development common to startups often leads to poor security. Approaches like "if someone can access our machines, we have much bigger problems" lead to storing passwords in plain text, sharing accounts, making the "root" password "root", storing mysql passwords on the monitoring server, and other unfortunate errors. Another month making a project secure, really reviewing the vulnerabilities and updating core components, is time to market being lost. So it's very rare in the early "get market growth first before someone else can outgrow us and capture the market" phase.
My work is often with slightly more mature environments, where people will be working there next year or 5 years from now, and don't want to suffer exactly this kind of disaster. So I get to see a lot of the cost of cleaning up and re-educating personnel about the risks of this kind of carelessness.
> so spying on them would likely be a major problem
With the current NSA guidelines, as revealed by Edward Snowden's revelations, any communications with foreign nationals would automatically be susceptible to monitoring. So it's certainly a common practice with the pervasive, wholesale telephone and email monitoring currently in place: Congress is _expected_ to speak with foreign governments as part of diplomacy, trade agreements, investigating treaties. and on behalf of foreign families of their constituents.
Whether more targeted monitoring of Congress is done by the NSA is another matter. The NSA's charter specifically forbids them from domestic intelligence, that's the role of the FBI. And for human assets in foreign intelligence, not direct communications monitoring, that's the CIA. But of course, with the new "Homeland Security" overseeing all the group's efforts, the lines have become not only blurred but deliberately concealed. When the responsibilities are deliberately overlapped and merged "to aid communication", it puts the tools of one group for specific uses in the hands of their supervisors who may have quite different agendas or guidelines. I'd look very, very carefully look at "Homeland Security", at the people who are expecte merge and organize the data and precisely what they are ordering or being allowed access to.
They've managed to keep out of most of this NSA exposure. But as an "organizing" agency for all the other departments, they're in a very dangerous position to weave those threads together into a much tighter cocoon of monitoring at every level.
Then they are not, and will not be, "properly secured". I've encountered far, far, far too many environments that run absolutely critical business and engineering software on old XP systems without support, with no active virus protection, and rely on "we trust the people we work with" to protect their internal network from worms, trojans, and viruses infesting the rest of the hosts on their network. I'm only very, very rarely allowed to help clean up such messes, but these hosts are almost _inevitably_ infested when I review them. And too often, there's not even disk space or capacity left to _install_ anti-virus software or robust backup tools.
When I can, I do my best to get disk images of such systems and get them into virtualization so that backup can be done from a disk image layer. But such concerns are often considered "off-task", and the critical risks are left in place. Such environments are almost inevitably a sign that this environment is going to fail catastrophically in the next 2 years, and we'll have to spend time doing "Cover Your Ass" work to show that we did, indeed, do everything possible to protect the environment. But the partner or client has _elected_ not to fix the problem.
The people who are most unhappy about the situation, but manage to get work done anyway, are often good candidates to help find new work elsewhere. That has to be done very, very, very discreetly, ideally with the cooperation of their managers.
It's all relative. Remember that the American colonists under George III were also involved in genocidal land grabs against the Native Americans. They had little moral high ground to call on, _without_ calling on the god-given rights of kings and governments and "civilized people" to support their behavior.
It's also unclear, this far away, how much of George III's tyranny was "George", how much was his madness in his later life, and how much was the massive and necessary bureaucracy to run such a broad, growing empire.
Then you don't regularly communicate with remote git, Subversion, CVS, FTP SFTP, FTPS, or HTTPS websites with passwords. Even SSH and SSL key management is vastly improved by having some kind of graceful keychain to unlock, and release, keys as needed. The command line tools are too awkward, even for me, to consistently handle them across a wide range of application I might use in a day.
> the reason you are still single is because you have unrealistically high opinion of your own charm
As opposed to " the reason you are still single is because you don't try"? Arrogance, which is what you're describing, can actually help. It can provide the confidence to actually ask out potential dates, to believe that you're worth spending time with, and get you past failures. Never trying is guaranteed failure, and it's too common.
It makes complete sense for the families of DC middle management, for the children of federal employees and lobbyists and military families with college age kids.
There's a much lighter, working space suit design that's been available for years, and has been repeatedly redesigned. It's called a "skin suit". Essentially a wetsuit with a helmet, the suit relies on the astronaut's own skin as part of its structure holding in the astronaut's body fluids. Air, or oxygen, released into the helmet passes down the suits structure and through the astronaut, themselves, and slowly leaks out the slightly porous material. This avoids the mechanical pressurizaiton problems of providing air at enough pressure to breathe, but dealing with the pressure throughout the enite surace of the suit. It also providing critical cooling for most space suit use. It does consume air or oxygen in use, but the mass lost in days of use is quite modest compared to the mass, difficulty of use, complexity, and mechanical fragility of the heavy and overbuilt modern space suits.
> 3rd party security products have trust issues as well. They junk up a user's computer with crapware,
Many do, and it's a very real problem with many security products. I've had good success with Nod32 and Nod64 for Windows. It's relatively ilightweight, more thorough than MSE, and has a proven track record among my colleagues of of not breaking critical applications.
> This is naive and illogical. I suppose you think the first suicide came after the invention of the firearm?
Suicides are often "cries for help". That's why so many suicides fail. When that "cry for help" involves a firearm, there is much less opportunity to get treatment and possibly recover. Whether a suicidal person without a firearm will then try, and succeed, with other tools becomes a fascinating question worthy of some serious investigation. But it's not a "given" that reducing availability of firearms will not help reduce the suicide rate.
Goodness. I make a fair bit of my salary from environments where people have such casual attitudes to security, and install a single tool as a "fixed all my problems".
Good security takes layers. Robust backups, proven recovery or rebuild procedures, good practices for sanitizing incoming data, procedures to transfer sensitive data securely, and ways to safely store seldom used passwords are all subjects requiring thought and consistency. Schedule some time with your parents to walk though their usage patterns with them, to help them have backup practices and recover procedures they can work with. Work with them on sound password practices.
Too many people, and companies, have too many environments where a single "fix" has been applied and all the other risks ignored. Too many such environments have one "fix" applied in one place, and another "fix" applied elsewhere, which between them make the environment twice as vulnerable because they leave a commonly used escalation path, being probed by script kiddies all the time.
I'd expect it to become swifter for "established" patent holders to get their patents approved, while individual patent holders get left out in the cold. It has been burdensome for professionals like her, and there may be some collateral benefit to smaller companies and individuals.
But the patent system is fundamentally overwhelmed and burdened, now, by software patents. Abandoning those would eliminate jobs for many patent lawyers, but would shorten time to market and free up developers to use well-known tools for which patents should _never_ have been granted. And it's become increasingly burdensome for international business to deal with patent law in different nations, also burdening American competitiveness.
This is an ongoing problem for my work. People who refuse to write changelogs often say "read the code, becuase they documentation can be wrong". What I've found is that if their documentation is that wrong, their code is usually even worse. Just reading what the code does will force you to replicate fundamental errors, to preserve unstated API's. In such cases, the change logs or revision history are invaluable, to expose why particular features were altered and when and by _whom_.
If software hs good git logs, or other change control logs, a pointer to those rather than explicit change logs is often enough for my work. But the change logs of packaging systems, such as.deb or.rpm, can provide invaluable information about the changes in the packaging. And the _packaging_ is often not in a public git repository.
Until the fifth year, at which time they'd better have the papers ready for the performance review and any discussion of tenure track. So I'm afraid that's not a really meaningful exemption unless that professor has no plans for tenure track. It can even be worse. I've seen very gifted professors rejected for tenure, not because their research was not meaningful, but because their teaching was _so good_ that it frightened the existing staff into thinking that they'd have more expected of them. In one case, an intern at work asked me to help. I read the research papers: they were solid work, and far more clear than most other papers I'd seen in the field. Helping was politically awkward, and disenchanted me with a great deal of tenure evaluations. I do believe I did manage to help: partly by discussing the technical implications of the work with several of his reviewers, and partly by introducing him socially to the secretaries of the most recalcitrant professors. It's _amazing_ how much those secretaries control the information flow to and from their employers.
The apportionment of credit for academic papers is rife with both confusion and abuse. The need for citable publications is so large that people who had no meaningful involvement with a project are being listed as authors, to protect their academic careers. Other students or technical staff who collaborate extensively are ignored in favor of tenure track staff, to help reach their required number of publications. I'm afraid that the result is often "co-authors" who have no idea what the original research established, or how. I've even seen listing someone as a "co-author" used to prevent them from publicly disagreeing with the results. The "co-author" status is, I'm afraid, may never have been a reasonable way to measure research publication due to frequent abuses.
4 scientific papers in 5 years is a tremendous rate for more physical sciences. It's possible, in my observation, to have have a few basically "filler" papers in progress while the genuinely interesting or illuminating paper is published. But effectively publishing one significant paper a year, accepted to reputable journals, is a tremendous amount of work in most fields such as chemistry, physics, or engineering. Social science papers can publish analyses of analyses of analyses as "new" publichations, and have been doing so for decades. But in sciences where you have to actually collect raw data, it's very frequent publication.
I must say, sir or madam: that the idea of never doing genuine software updates is nonsensical. I deal weekly with the extensive pain of supporting newer versions of software in older operating systems, typically in Linux. Newer features of core components often rely on newer features of other components, while other installed components rely specifically on the _older_ versions of the core components. Resolving that dependency hell is a a very time time consuming, and expensive process, It helps pay my salary, but often it's simpler to do a forklift upgrade of the while system and forward port any critical missing components.
Is the upgrade path abused and over-used? Often, yes. But that doesn't mean it's automatically useless or meaningless.
Many of the asylums were horrible and without hope, due to longstanding medical orders for which there was no effective treatment. The advent of effective psychopharmacology changed that: people with bipolar depression, for example, devastating post-traumatic stress based depression,, devastating post-trautmatic stress, and numerous other problems became treatable and could be treated as outpatients or with short stays to stabilize their medication, then released. Care really did improve in the 1960's and early 1970's, when the psychoactive medications were better understood and seized upon with great joy by doctors and patients who'd before felt quite hopeless. Unfortunately, this became coupled with cost-saving "return to the community" programs and policies, and we wound up with _enormous_ numbers of ill people who could not safely live on their own, turned out without structure to remember to take their medication by themselves.
The results have been predictable: numerous confused, somewhat insane people were left without the help they needed because their smaller, modern, fragmented families could not possibly fill in the gap of providing residential care. When coupled with the strain on the prison systems from the "war on drugs", the threshold for providing residential care has been raised so high that facilities willing to work with modest mental disorders have been overwhelmed by even more profound cases, an. And the quality of care for both has dropped, harshly.
I'm afraid that I'm old enough to know relatives and colleagues with such members. When their need for treatment leads them to self-medicate with illegal drugs, they then wind up snared in the "war on drugs" and "zero tolerance" policies, and become even more difficult to help.
They're not very expensive, you can get a workable one for $10. But looking at the insides of a few readers for hacking reviews, the cheap antenna is fairly bulky. It's typically a coil of wire, several inches wide. Finding space for that inside a normal laptop is feasible, I'd assume it can be built into the case itself, for example. But every time you introduce bulky components in a laptop, you introduce additional expense. Also, like wifi, they consume some power, so a contact sensor to read only when the device is present is additional work and expense.
It does raise the interesting idea of having an RFID reader built into your laptop for security scanning of _other_ people's RFID keys. Coupled with the very poor security of these devices, it raises the possibility of using the RFID reader in my laptop to scan the RFID keys on your person, such as your laptop RFID key or your passport key, and do relatively easy identity theft. Examine some of the articles on cracking, or cloning, RFID passport keys to learn more about the vulnerabilities.
Many security projects have also been deliberately crippled by cooperation with US export encryption regulations, and by the laws concerning suveillance capability for audio communications. These laws require "law enforcement" access to the communications. While Tor might skirt these regulations as not serving text, many fundamental encryption and anonymization technologies would directly block such monitoring.
I can confirm that "valid work permit" includes verifiable citizens. There's a particular federal form, the I-9, available at http://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/form/i-9.pdf, that details the identification needed to verify legal employability. Proof of citizenship is one of the acceptable types of proof.
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Not all teachers. I remember that in one course we had a long discussion about the history of religious genocide in the Bible. But my teacher on this was a theological history teacher. It was a fascinating course: the concepts of a "promised land", a "manifest destiny", and "the divine right of kings" all were examined. I do believe it helped prevent their getting tenure, but the material was fascinating.
F-35's are not for "major wars". It's bleeding edge, horribly expensive multi-role aircraft that does none of the roles well. The ill-founded claims by its manufacturers that it is "eight times more effective in air-to-ground combat" is pointless since it is almost 10 times as expensive to build and operate as a more specifically ground combat focused aircraft. The "build a core design and bolt on different components for different roles" has led to a variety of tragic design flaws that have been incredibly expensive to address for all its different variations. It's also a complete maintenance nightmare: the redesigns needed to reduce the weight, after it was enlarged to hold more weapons and provide larger engines, has led to customized parts that no one else uses, on the very edge of the strength/weight tradeoff to keep the weight down. So they fail, frequently, and are very expensive to replace. When confronted with various design flaws, such as the extremely por cockpit visibility leading to trivial destruction by cheaper aircraft in combat, Boing's suggestion that "that pilots worried about being shot down should fly cargo aircraft instead"
There is no chance that this aircraft will have the reliability and longevity of many existing models of current US aircraft, which means incredible ongoing costs in repairing and replacing expensive aircraft that can never be used at their full capabilities_. They are displacing budgets for manpower (needed for ground warfare and holding territory, as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan), supply craft (for keeping troops and warcraft supplied), base maintenance (to train and equip men and machines), and drones (which are far cheaper and more effective than modern aircraft at targeteed strikes). The best thing that could happen for the US milatary with this aircraft is to pull the plug on it _now_, throw 1/3 of money into a rebuild and oversupply of more conventional aircraft, use 1/3 the budget to build newer, more specifically suited aircraft for each military branch instead of a Swiss Army Aircraft, and use the remaining 1/3 for manpower support. America is short on the ground troops and personnel to run the several occupying wars we're in the midst of.
No, but it's correlation, not direct causation. The rapid development common to startups often leads to poor security. Approaches like "if someone can access our machines, we have much bigger problems" lead to storing passwords in plain text, sharing accounts, making the "root" password "root", storing mysql passwords on the monitoring server, and other unfortunate errors. Another month making a project secure, really reviewing the vulnerabilities and updating core components, is time to market being lost. So it's very rare in the early "get market growth first before someone else can outgrow us and capture the market" phase.
My work is often with slightly more mature environments, where people will be working there next year or 5 years from now, and don't want to suffer exactly this kind of disaster. So I get to see a lot of the cost of cleaning up and re-educating personnel about the risks of this kind of carelessness.
> so spying on them would likely be a major problem
With the current NSA guidelines, as revealed by Edward Snowden's revelations, any communications with foreign nationals would automatically be susceptible to monitoring. So it's certainly a common practice with the pervasive, wholesale telephone and email monitoring currently in place: Congress is _expected_ to speak with foreign governments as part of diplomacy, trade agreements, investigating treaties. and on behalf of foreign families of their constituents.
Whether more targeted monitoring of Congress is done by the NSA is another matter. The NSA's charter specifically forbids them from domestic intelligence, that's the role of the FBI. And for human assets in foreign intelligence, not direct communications monitoring, that's the CIA. But of course, with the new "Homeland Security" overseeing all the group's efforts, the lines have become not only blurred but deliberately concealed. When the responsibilities are deliberately overlapped and merged "to aid communication", it puts the tools of one group for specific uses in the hands of their supervisors who may have quite different agendas or guidelines. I'd look very, very carefully look at "Homeland Security", at the people who are expecte merge and organize the data and precisely what they are ordering or being allowed access to.
They've managed to keep out of most of this NSA exposure. But as an "organizing" agency for all the other departments, they're in a very dangerous position to weave those threads together into a much tighter cocoon of monitoring at every level.
Then they are not, and will not be, "properly secured". I've encountered far, far, far too many environments that run absolutely critical business and engineering software on old XP systems without support, with no active virus protection, and rely on "we trust the people we work with" to protect their internal network from worms, trojans, and viruses infesting the rest of the hosts on their network. I'm only very, very rarely allowed to help clean up such messes, but these hosts are almost _inevitably_ infested when I review them. And too often, there's not even disk space or capacity left to _install_ anti-virus software or robust backup tools.
When I can, I do my best to get disk images of such systems and get them into virtualization so that backup can be done from a disk image layer. But such concerns are often considered "off-task", and the critical risks are left in place. Such environments are almost inevitably a sign that this environment is going to fail catastrophically in the next 2 years, and we'll have to spend time doing "Cover Your Ass" work to show that we did, indeed, do everything possible to protect the environment. But the partner or client has _elected_ not to fix the problem.
The people who are most unhappy about the situation, but manage to get work done anyway, are often good candidates to help find new work elsewhere. That has to be done very, very, very discreetly, ideally with the cooperation of their managers.
It's all relative. Remember that the American colonists under George III were also involved in genocidal land grabs against the Native Americans. They had little moral high ground to call on, _without_ calling on the god-given rights of kings and governments and "civilized people" to support their behavior.
It's also unclear, this far away, how much of George III's tyranny was "George", how much was his madness in his later life, and how much was the massive and necessary bureaucracy to run such a broad, growing empire.
Then you don't regularly communicate with remote git, Subversion, CVS, FTP SFTP, FTPS, or HTTPS websites with passwords. Even SSH and SSL key management is vastly improved by having some kind of graceful keychain to unlock, and release, keys as needed. The command line tools are too awkward, even for me, to consistently handle them across a wide range of application I might use in a day.
> the reason you are still single is because you have unrealistically high opinion of your own charm
As opposed to " the reason you are still single is because you don't try"? Arrogance, which is what you're describing, can actually help. It can provide the confidence to actually ask out potential dates, to believe that you're worth spending time with, and get you past failures. Never trying is guaranteed failure, and it's too common.
It makes complete sense for the families of DC middle management, for the children of federal employees and lobbyists and military families with college age kids.
I hear Edward Snowden is looking for a job.
Oh. Oh my. I'd never actually seen that. That was one of the scariest YouTube videos I'e ever seen.
There's a much lighter, working space suit design that's been available for years, and has been repeatedly redesigned. It's called a "skin suit". Essentially a wetsuit with a helmet, the suit relies on the astronaut's own skin as part of its structure holding in the astronaut's body fluids. Air, or oxygen, released into the helmet passes down the suits structure and through the astronaut, themselves, and slowly leaks out the slightly porous material. This avoids the mechanical pressurizaiton problems of providing air at enough pressure to breathe, but dealing with the pressure throughout the enite surace of the suit. It also providing critical cooling for most space suit use. It does consume air or oxygen in use, but the mass lost in days of use is quite modest compared to the mass, difficulty of use, complexity, and mechanical fragility of the heavy and overbuilt modern space suits.
An example can be seen at http://spaceindustrynews.com/mits-next-mars-space-suit/, The technology has worked since the 1960's, when Paul Webb originally designed it.
> 3rd party security products have trust issues as well. They junk up a user's computer with crapware,
Many do, and it's a very real problem with many security products. I've had good success with Nod32 and Nod64 for Windows. It's relatively ilightweight, more thorough than MSE, and has a proven track record among my colleagues of of not breaking critical applications.
> This is naive and illogical. I suppose you think the first suicide came after the invention of the firearm?
Suicides are often "cries for help". That's why so many suicides fail. When that "cry for help" involves a firearm, there is much less opportunity to get treatment and possibly recover. Whether a suicidal person without a firearm will then try, and succeed, with other tools becomes a fascinating question worthy of some serious investigation. But it's not a "given" that reducing availability of firearms will not help reduce the suicide rate.
Goodness. I make a fair bit of my salary from environments where people have such casual attitudes to security, and install a single tool as a "fixed all my problems".
Good security takes layers. Robust backups, proven recovery or rebuild procedures, good practices for sanitizing incoming data, procedures to transfer sensitive data securely, and ways to safely store seldom used passwords are all subjects requiring thought and consistency. Schedule some time with your parents to walk though their usage patterns with them, to help them have backup practices and recover procedures they can work with. Work with them on sound password practices.
Too many people, and companies, have too many environments where a single "fix" has been applied and all the other risks ignored. Too many such environments have one "fix" applied in one place, and another "fix" applied elsewhere, which between them make the environment twice as vulnerable because they leave a commonly used escalation path, being probed by script kiddies all the time.
I'd expect it to become swifter for "established" patent holders to get their patents approved, while individual patent holders get left out in the cold. It has been burdensome for professionals like her, and there may be some collateral benefit to smaller companies and individuals.
But the patent system is fundamentally overwhelmed and burdened, now, by software patents. Abandoning those would eliminate jobs for many patent lawyers, but would shorten time to market and free up developers to use well-known tools for which patents should _never_ have been granted. And it's become increasingly burdensome for international business to deal with patent law in different nations, also burdening American competitiveness.
This is an ongoing problem for my work. People who refuse to write changelogs often say "read the code, becuase they documentation can be wrong". What I've found is that if their documentation is that wrong, their code is usually even worse. Just reading what the code does will force you to replicate fundamental errors, to preserve unstated API's. In such cases, the change logs or revision history are invaluable, to expose why particular features were altered and when and by _whom_.
If software hs good git logs, or other change control logs, a pointer to those rather than explicit change logs is often enough for my work. But the change logs of packaging systems, such as .deb or .rpm, can provide invaluable information about the changes in the packaging. And the _packaging_ is often not in a public git repository.
I'm afraid the SUV does make the college student safer. There was a good Consumer Reports article on it:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/05/suvs-are-safer-than-cars-in-front-crashes-but-there-is-more-to-the-story/index.htm
Until the fifth year, at which time they'd better have the papers ready for the performance review and any discussion of tenure track. So I'm afraid that's not a really meaningful exemption unless that professor has no plans for tenure track. It can even be worse. I've seen very gifted professors rejected for tenure, not because their research was not meaningful, but because their teaching was _so good_ that it frightened the existing staff into thinking that they'd have more expected of them. In one case, an intern at work asked me to help. I read the research papers: they were solid work, and far more clear than most other papers I'd seen in the field. Helping was politically awkward, and disenchanted me with a great deal of tenure evaluations. I do believe I did manage to help: partly by discussing the technical implications of the work with several of his reviewers, and partly by introducing him socially to the secretaries of the most recalcitrant professors. It's _amazing_ how much those secretaries control the information flow to and from their employers.
The apportionment of credit for academic papers is rife with both confusion and abuse. The need for citable publications is so large that people who had no meaningful involvement with a project are being listed as authors, to protect their academic careers. Other students or technical staff who collaborate extensively are ignored in favor of tenure track staff, to help reach their required number of publications. I'm afraid that the result is often "co-authors" who have no idea what the original research established, or how. I've even seen listing someone as a "co-author" used to prevent them from publicly disagreeing with the results. The "co-author" status is, I'm afraid, may never have been a reasonable way to measure research publication due to frequent abuses.
4 scientific papers in 5 years is a tremendous rate for more physical sciences. It's possible, in my observation, to have have a few basically "filler" papers in progress while the genuinely interesting or illuminating paper is published. But effectively publishing one significant paper a year, accepted to reputable journals, is a tremendous amount of work in most fields such as chemistry, physics, or engineering. Social science papers can publish analyses of analyses of analyses as "new" publichations, and have been doing so for decades. But in sciences where you have to actually collect raw data, it's very frequent publication.
I must say, sir or madam: that the idea of never doing genuine software updates is nonsensical. I deal weekly with the extensive pain of supporting newer versions of software in older operating systems, typically in Linux. Newer features of core components often rely on newer features of other components, while other installed components rely specifically on the _older_ versions of the core components. Resolving that dependency hell is a a very time time consuming, and expensive process, It helps pay my salary, but often it's simpler to do a forklift upgrade of the while system and forward port any critical missing components.
Is the upgrade path abused and over-used? Often, yes. But that doesn't mean it's automatically useless or meaningless.
Many of the asylums were horrible and without hope, due to longstanding medical orders for which there was no effective treatment. The advent of effective psychopharmacology changed that: people with bipolar depression, for example, devastating post-traumatic stress based depression,, devastating post-trautmatic stress, and numerous other problems became treatable and could be treated as outpatients or with short stays to stabilize their medication, then released. Care really did improve in the 1960's and early 1970's, when the psychoactive medications were better understood and seized upon with great joy by doctors and patients who'd before felt quite hopeless. Unfortunately, this became coupled with cost-saving "return to the community" programs and policies, and we wound up with _enormous_ numbers of ill people who could not safely live on their own, turned out without structure to remember to take their medication by themselves.
The results have been predictable: numerous confused, somewhat insane people were left without the help they needed because their smaller, modern, fragmented families could not possibly fill in the gap of providing residential care. When coupled with the strain on the prison systems from the "war on drugs", the threshold for providing residential care has been raised so high that facilities willing to work with modest mental disorders have been overwhelmed by even more profound cases, an. And the quality of care for both has dropped, harshly.
I'm afraid that I'm old enough to know relatives and colleagues with such members. When their need for treatment leads them to self-medicate with illegal drugs, they then wind up snared in the "war on drugs" and "zero tolerance" policies, and become even more difficult to help.
They're not very expensive, you can get a workable one for $10. But looking at the insides of a few readers for hacking reviews, the cheap antenna is fairly bulky. It's typically a coil of wire, several inches wide. Finding space for that inside a normal laptop is feasible, I'd assume it can be built into the case itself, for example. But every time you introduce bulky components in a laptop, you introduce additional expense. Also, like wifi, they consume some power, so a contact sensor to read only when the device is present is additional work and expense.
It does raise the interesting idea of having an RFID reader built into your laptop for security scanning of _other_ people's RFID keys. Coupled with the very poor security of these devices, it raises the possibility of using the RFID reader in my laptop to scan the RFID keys on your person, such as your laptop RFID key or your passport key, and do relatively easy identity theft. Examine some of the articles on cracking, or cloning, RFID passport keys to learn more about the vulnerabilities.
Many security projects have also been deliberately crippled by cooperation with US export encryption regulations, and by the laws concerning suveillance capability for audio communications. These laws require "law enforcement" access to the communications. While Tor might skirt these regulations as not serving text, many fundamental encryption and anonymization technologies would directly block such monitoring.
I can confirm that "valid work permit" includes verifiable citizens. There's a particular federal form, the I-9, available at http://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/form/i-9.pdf, that details the identification needed to verify legal employability. Proof of citizenship is one of the acceptable types of proof.