"He would have been able to get the first burst of energy, but he would have sunk (in an ocean) after that."
Hey, if the Flash is circling the globe in 80 seconds, he doesn't need to worry about sinking -- his biggest concern would be how to keep from flying into space.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco and San Jose's TiVo Inc. , Sonicblue's main competitor in the digital video recorder market, rushed to Sonicblue's defense, saying the order could prove a setback to consumer rights and could have a chilling effect on new technology.
It definitely sounds as if TiVo is aware of the gravity of the situation.
Screwed? Maybe, but in his mind, screwed == showing remorse in front of a judge + probation + community service. I don't think he's "screwed", even now. I'm betting that Jerome doesn't spend more than a few months total time in jail, unless decides to reoffend after he is released.
Rice is a low protein food, and, more importantly, doesn't contain the full set of proteins the body needs. 30 servings of rice per day won't sustain your health nearly as well as 10 servings of rice and 10 servings of legumes, nuts, or meat, especially if you're doing anything physical. Also, rice is not particularly dense in vitamins, and, again, does not provide the body with a full set.
On the last Survivor series, rice was basically all the contestants had to eat for a long time. Then when two of them went into town to barter supplies, what did they come back with? Cookies -- empty calories! That was disappointing.
I can give you one better than 867-5309. There was a song by Sugarloaf called "Don't Call Us We'll Call You" (1975) in which they actually play the recorded, long distance, touchtone, telephone number of a record executive who had rejected them earlier. IIRC, the executive had to change his number shortly after the song became popular.
5000 instances of sprintf doesn't sound like a program written by a small team. It sounds like a large, legacy app, with (in my experience) generations of coders, many of whom are no longer with the company for a good reason. You didn't say 50 apps with 100 sprintf's each. I love code cleanup, but I know my limits. I realize the sprintf density may vary from field to field, but hearing the number 5000 will make most people think twice.
Grep your company's repository for sprintfs. 5000 in one app? Not bloody likely.
>... even a program that called it 5000 times would be easy to clean up.
No, it wouldn't. If your C code used sprintf 5000 times, you would find plenty of places where buf is passed in as an argument so that 'n' is not locally known. Rewriting 5000 instances of sprintf and then testing the code paths in a program that used sprintf 5000 times sounds like a big job for little gain. Most sprintf instances are not potential buffer overflows, and there are plenty of other dangerous functions to worry about.
Re:Congratulations to whoever did this
on
Bobby Fischer Online?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's a joke, right? The program played chess; it was the operator who answered Nigel's questions.
As the rate of free compensations / attention gets high enough, professional comp-scummers will start to multiply, and a whole economy based on how to grab free cash and merchandise without actually buying into the system will spring up. Advertisers may try to invent a scum-proof system, but at some level of compensation, it'll be feasible for people to work around the system's safeguards. I would welcome the opportunity to invent (open-source) scum-bots to grab some free cash if the potential gains were high enough. So would a lot of people. The result of such activity? Eyeballs will become devalued, and the compensation level will drop back down to a level at which making a living by cheating the system would actually take work.
Making the good characters blond and fair-skinned is called Disney-fication. It may be a minor point, but it makes you wonder what else has been mangled. Are there any Phil Collins songs in the soundtrack?
As someone else pointed out, RSA is based on the prime factorization problem, not the discrete log problem. Diffie-Hellman and ElGamal are two public key systems based on discrete logarithms.
> How does a new influx of internet users change anything?
As Katz points out, they're not just any users, they're:
"... Americans over 55 years old with working-class incomes, older members of minority groups, blue-collar workers, and people with decidedly non-tech interests and backgrounds... 'increasingly like the folks who cruise your local Wal-Mart.'"
In other words, the new users fit the target demographic of sweepstakes, state lotteries, and other predatory get-rich-quick scams. And, as Katz states, "they're thundering online in amazing numbers." It doesn't take a PhD in economics to see how this will affect the tech slump. When you think about it, that makes the article's title, "So Long, Digerati: The Vanishing Digital Divide," seem pretty ironic, given the not-so-egalitarian subtext of, "There's a sucker born every minute."
Not exactly. There can be patterns in the bit representations of irrational numbers. Take pi and zero out every 10th binary digit. This is irrational, yet it has a pattern.
You probably realize that your conclusion is too weak. The probability of finding a counterexample beyond 10^15 decreases so rapidly for every number searched that given a "random" distribution you will not, with almost complete certainty, _ever_ find a counterexample beyond 10^15.
Asymptotically, your probability is e^(-2n/(log n)/(log n)). The chance of finding a counterexample beyond 10^15 is less than the limit as (N -> infinity) of the integral from (10^15 to N) of e^(-2x/(log x)/(log x)) dx. Since this is hard to integrate, take a simple function that dominates it beyond 10^15, such as:
The integral of this for x between 10^15 and infinity, if my scribblings are correct, is 10^(-4*10^11) * 2 * 10^7.5 = 10^(-3.99999999992 * 10^11). In other words, the odds are worse than 10^(100000000000) to 1 against finding a counterexample beyond 10^15 (or beyond 10^11, for that matter).
Without boycotts and media muck-raking, corporations are, indeed, obligated to perform whatever atrocities are necessary in order to maximize profit and future profit for their shareholders. This is why it is extremely important that we continue the boycott en masse. It is one of the few ways that we can collectively speak out against behavior that we see as wrong. This is why some of us boycotted companies like Nike or Nestle who caused suffering in the third world. If you feel a company is acting irresponsibly, you must avoid its products.
Of course, there is more than just negative reinforcement. I am protesting the present computer patent law system; I have no real grudge against Amazon. If Bezos promptly does the right thing, I will not only resume buying from Amazon, but I will visit their site even more frequently, to more than make up for my current boycott. By rewarding good companies while we punish irresponsible ones, we make our actions speak that much louder.
Surely, they recognize the long-term importance of maintaining a thriving open source community. A statement from RedHat or VALinux would give our efforts a great deal of validity to the public and politicians. If the distributors abandon their roots, they will eventually wither and die.
If you're a fan of Microsoft, then sure, the rebate might not be worth it. But if you dislike Microsoft, Office Max, and Packard Bell equally, then you might as well take advantage of it. Say you spend $421.95 for MSN plus a $400 computer that costs $200 in parts and labor, and get a $400 rebate. You are getting a computer that costs (Microsoft + Office Max + Packard Bell) $200 for $21.95. The trio, as a group, is losing $178.05. How the money changes hands within this group is not your responsibility.
Besides, super-rebates like this are the essence of marketing hype. As long as this tactic is profitable, big companies with deep pockets will have a huge advantages over smaller companies who may have more quality products. One way to discourage this practice is to take a bite out of the profits of the tactic by using loopholes like this. If you care about quality products, taking advantage of this promotion is a moral imperative. Do give your money to people like this, please.
Spelling responses to flamebait are off-topic noise. One doesn't respond to flamebait, one waits for someone to moderate it down. The moderation was correct, IMO; chalk your 0 up as a learning experience.
obDVD: My plane got in around 9, I took transit to the courthouse, didn't see anybunny protesting, figured nothing interesting was going on, and left to go to work. I'll be there on Jan 14 if I can find you guys.
Here's an idea: Instead of launching destructive macro viruses, virus-writers should write ones that write the controversial source code to an obscure directory, replicate, and then vanish.
On the other hand, wouldn't you say that the lack of a published CI in the article is somewhat telling? You would expect that a good scientific magazine would print a 98 or a 99 if it occurred, right?
The SD for the difference of the means in an 8 vs. 8 test would be approximately half the SD of the standard population's SD, but large CI's ranges for the test will be increasingly greater than half of the same CI for the population because we are dealing with a T-distribution. It will take more than 2.5 SD's for a 99% CI. But you're right; we're just guessing here.
Another question one might ask is, how many similar tests have been run with no good results, and also, how many similar, plausible correlations were being looked for in the same test? So we may have gotten a 98% likelihood of significance. What if we were measuring 5 variables, any one of which might have independently shown significance but didn't? What if 10 similar tests have been tried by other teams around the world, none of which reported any good results? That's 50 measurements, and it's quite plausible for the null-hypothesis to randomly generate a 98% once in 50 attempts.
Whatever the statistics come up with, the results will need to be reproduced in order to establish validity. I'd guess that securing further grant money is a primary reason for the press release.
The text may not be intentionally racist, but it is divisive in that it subtly reinforces stereotypes. The author of the article loses credibility as he rants on, but that doesn't invalidate his concerns that the game may promote racism in some people.
The at-risk segment of society does not include most members of/.. Most of us, while we sometimes employ stereotypes, do not classify people primarily with generalizations. On the other hand, there are many people who do engage in groupthinking, people who identify themselves and others primarily by race, nationality, religion, or operating system. They are not what you would call xenophobic or racist, but they are generally going to be more impressionable than those of us who have evolved beyond this. This mentality is prevalent among the young (pre-high school), especially if they have been not been exposed to other races or cultures yet. A game like this is not going to turn kids into racists, but it can have a negative effect. I see nothing wrong with bringing this to light.
I have a graduate degree in mathematics, a background in numerical analysis, and I've worked as a programmer and scientist for years in a quantitative science department. Let me pose a random scientific-programming example so that non-scientists can have something to chew on.
Suppose you want to maximize a function of n variables, where the function is too difficult to differentiate (usually much too difficult). You have transformed these variables to be as nice as possible. Basically, to find the maximum, you will begin a search at some predefined point in n-space (or k predefined points, doing k separate runs). You iteratively attempt to increase the function's value at these points. In each iteration, you might take small pertubations in each direction to try to estimate a gradient. After determining the local topography, you then move your point in that direction, taking a small step, a large step, or maybe a random jump, depending on previous movements or the state of your algorithm. In the end, you will arrive at a local maximum, an inflection, or a boundary. You hope that this is the true maximum for your domain, but the best you can hope for is a heuristic solution.
This sort of problem, depending on the function topography, tends to be very... fragile. If you modify your methodology, changing the step sizes or the state criteria, for instance, you will probably change the final local maximum, and then your results will be unreproducible, and much of your statistic analysis goes out the window. Worse, you don't even have to touch the methodology. Change the order of seemingly commutative arithmetic operations and your LHS differs slightly due to different roundoff errors, which (in 64-bits, but probably in 80-bits, too) all too often results in a different local maximum, even for problems that aren't particularly ill-conditioned.
While many tweakers will be careful to leave mathematical algorithms intact, many others just won't think about this sort of thing, and will poison any data pools their results are aggregated into.
This said, let me say that there are a _lot_ of scientists who are truly bad programmers, and all too often these people think they are hot stuff. They write brittle, monolithic, error-ridden pieces of garbage that are just painful to apprehend, with plenty of hidden bugs just sitting there. Ugh. An acid test to weed these people out might be, "What do you think of _Numerical Recipes in C_?" If you come from a scientific background and want a good programming job, I think you have to prove yourself, since industry is well-aware of the Numerical Recipes scientist archetype.
Chances are, the SETI code is at least somewhat ugly, and can really be improved for future releases by open source. NO modifications should be made on an ongoing experiment, but that doesn't rule out an open source next version, with the active communtity serving as alpha/beta testers. There is a lot of interest and a lot of talent out here. All it takes is some openness and sme good management on SETI's part, right?
And really you're targeting Washington State legislators' integrity based on your own contempt for Microsoft. Face it, every state has its share of conservative representatives who cater to large businesses. Representing one's constituency is part of a congressman's job, and if M$ gets special attention due to its economic effects, it is justified by the number of people who are employed directly or indirectly by the company. The political climate of the area seems to me to be pretty homogeneous.
To take a particularly conservative example, Senator Slade Gorton doesn't just represent M$ over its competitors, he also represents Boeing over their competitors, logging and farming over and enviromental interests, state fishing over tribal interests. Basically, he's a right-wing fucker; my point is that he's a right-wing fucker across the board, not just a right-wing Microsoft fucker (fuckee?). When it comes down to it, he gets things done for Washington State, and I suppose that's why he continues to win elections.
Don't think that the congressmen around the country who go after Microsoft are doing so because they care about quality software. They are doing this because they've been told it will benefit their state's businesses. If their state's businesses happened to be large and predatory, they would still represent their interests to the best of their abilities, kickbacks or no. Each side represents its own.
As stated, I believe that a secondary means of authentication is legally required by personnel when transmitting sensitive information. This can be keycard, biometrics, or whatever. The HIPAA requirements will be very gradually enforced, in order to give health organizations time to tackle the often massive changes needed to make their systems HIPAA-compliant.
Regarding someone's remark about sending biometric information unencrypted: That would definitely be a stupid use of biometrics; sending authentication information in the clear is a violation of HIPAA standards. Biometrics does not obviate the need for a basic encryption infrastructure, whether it is built on PKI, Kerb V, or whatever. It would probably be a secondary mechanism on top of cards or passwords, with information sent only after symmetric-encryption communication has been established. I don't think biometrics can be used as a sole means of authentication.
Some of my coworkers were examining the encrypted E-mail problem for a more managable set of users -- medical personnel only, for several hospitals. One law, I think also part of HIPAA, states that the IS departments cannot manage be the central key authorities; these have to be run by a third party. We looked at PGP, and we looked at the SMIME variants. The latter, IIRC, suffers from from a recent Netscape/Microsoft implementation divergence making the one's keys incompatible with the other's (how surprising!). I think it was a hassle finding a vendor who wanted to manage PGP private keys for our heterogeneous systems (different browsers, several different platforms). Then you have the doctors to deal with, who do not take kindly to any added complexity to the system, no matter how minor. It is difficult to force them to use a new tool that provides no perceptible benefit to them.
You should definitely make sure that you know precisely what the legal requirements of your company are, and approximately when these requirements will be enforced. Make them aware of the laws and they will be more responsive to your proposals.
Slashdot Mirror
"He would have been able to get the first burst of energy, but he would have sunk (in an ocean) after that."
Hey, if the Flash is circling the globe in 80 seconds, he doesn't need to worry about sinking -- his biggest concern would be how to keep from flying into space.
The first article states:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco and San Jose's TiVo Inc. , Sonicblue's main competitor in the digital video recorder market, rushed to Sonicblue's defense, saying the order could prove a setback to consumer rights and could have a chilling effect on new technology.
It definitely sounds as if TiVo is aware of the gravity of the situation.
Screwed? Maybe, but in his mind, screwed == showing remorse in front of a judge + probation + community service. I don't think he's "screwed", even now. I'm betting that Jerome doesn't spend more than a few months total time in jail, unless decides to reoffend after he is released.
Rice is a low protein food, and, more importantly, doesn't contain the full set of proteins the body needs. 30 servings of rice per day won't sustain your health nearly as well as 10 servings of rice and 10 servings of legumes, nuts, or meat, especially if you're doing anything physical. Also, rice is not particularly dense in vitamins, and, again, does not provide the body with a full set.
On the last Survivor series, rice was basically all the contestants had to eat for a long time. Then when two of them went into town to barter supplies, what did they come back with? Cookies -- empty calories! That was disappointing.
I can give you one better than 867-5309. There was a song by Sugarloaf called "Don't Call Us We'll Call You" (1975) in which they actually play the recorded, long distance, touchtone, telephone number of a record executive who had rejected them earlier. IIRC, the executive had to change his number shortly after the song became popular.
5000 instances of sprintf doesn't sound like a program written by a small team. It sounds like a large, legacy app, with (in my experience) generations of coders, many of whom are no longer with the company for a good reason. You didn't say 50 apps with 100 sprintf's each. I love code cleanup, but I know my limits. I realize the sprintf density may vary from field to field, but hearing the number 5000 will make most people think twice.
Grep your company's repository for sprintfs. 5000 in one app? Not bloody likely.
> ... even a program that called it 5000 times would be easy to clean up.
No, it wouldn't. If your C code used sprintf 5000 times, you would find plenty of places where buf is passed in as an argument so that 'n' is not locally known. Rewriting 5000 instances of sprintf and then testing the code paths in a program that used sprintf 5000 times sounds like a big job for little gain. Most sprintf instances are not potential buffer overflows, and there are plenty of other dangerous functions to worry about.
That's a joke, right? The program played chess; it was the operator who answered Nigel's questions.
As the rate of free compensations / attention gets high enough, professional comp-scummers will start to multiply, and a whole economy based on how to grab free cash and merchandise without actually buying into the system will spring up. Advertisers may try to invent a scum-proof system, but at some level of compensation, it'll be feasible for people to work around the system's safeguards. I would welcome the opportunity to invent (open-source) scum-bots to grab some free cash if the potential gains were high enough. So would a lot of people. The result of such activity? Eyeballs will become devalued, and the compensation level will drop back down to a level at which making a living by cheating the system would actually take work.
I was just thinking of something similar, except the irradiation would be SW controlled, to zap the organisms for 30 seconds or so.
Making the good characters blond and fair-skinned is called Disney-fication. It may be a minor point, but it makes you wonder what else has been mangled. Are there any Phil Collins songs in the soundtrack?
As someone else pointed out, RSA is based on the prime factorization problem, not the discrete log problem. Diffie-Hellman and ElGamal are two public key systems based on discrete logarithms.
> How does a new influx of internet users change anything?
... 'increasingly like the folks who cruise your local Wal-Mart.'"
As Katz points out, they're not just any users, they're:
"... Americans over 55 years old with working-class incomes, older members of minority groups, blue-collar workers, and people with decidedly non-tech interests and backgrounds
In other words, the new users fit the target demographic of sweepstakes, state lotteries, and other predatory get-rich-quick scams. And, as Katz states, "they're thundering online in amazing numbers." It doesn't take a PhD in economics to see how this will affect the tech slump. When you think about it, that makes the article's title, "So Long, Digerati: The Vanishing Digital Divide," seem pretty ironic, given the not-so-egalitarian subtext of, "There's a sucker born every minute."
Not exactly. There can be patterns in the bit representations of irrational numbers. Take pi and zero out every 10th binary digit. This is irrational, yet it has a pattern.
You probably realize that your conclusion is too weak. The probability of finding a counterexample beyond 10^15 decreases so rapidly for every number searched that given a "random" distribution you will not, with almost complete certainty, _ever_ find a counterexample beyond 10^15.
Asymptotically, your probability is e^(-2n/(log n)/(log n)). The chance of finding a counterexample beyond 10^15 is less than the limit as (N -> infinity) of the integral from (10^15 to N) of e^(-2x/(log x)/(log x)) dx. Since this is hard to integrate, take a simple function that dominates it beyond 10^15, such as:
10^(-4 * 10^11) * (e^(-sqrt(x))) * 2 * 10^7.5) / e^(-10^7.5) / ( 2 * sqrt(x)).
The integral of this for x between 10^15 and infinity, if my scribblings are correct, is 10^(-4*10^11) * 2 * 10^7.5 = 10^(-3.99999999992 * 10^11). In other words, the odds are worse than 10^(100000000000) to 1 against finding a counterexample beyond 10^15 (or beyond 10^11, for that matter).
Without boycotts and media muck-raking, corporations are, indeed, obligated to perform whatever atrocities are necessary in order to maximize profit and future profit for their shareholders. This is why it is extremely important that we continue the boycott en masse. It is one of the few ways that we can collectively speak out against behavior that we see as wrong. This is why some of us boycotted companies like Nike or Nestle who caused suffering in the third world. If you feel a company is acting irresponsibly, you must avoid its products.
Of course, there is more than just negative reinforcement. I am protesting the present computer patent law system; I have no real grudge against Amazon. If Bezos promptly does the right thing, I will not only resume buying from Amazon, but I will visit their site even more frequently, to more than make up for my current boycott. By rewarding good companies while we punish irresponsible ones, we make our actions speak that much louder.
Surely, they recognize the long-term importance of maintaining a thriving open source community. A statement from RedHat or VALinux would give our efforts a great deal of validity to the public and politicians. If the distributors abandon their roots, they will eventually wither and die.
You're not making sense.
If you're a fan of Microsoft, then sure, the rebate might not be worth it. But if you dislike Microsoft, Office Max, and Packard Bell equally, then you might as well take advantage of it. Say you spend $421.95 for MSN plus a $400 computer that costs $200 in parts and labor, and get a $400 rebate. You are getting a computer that costs (Microsoft + Office Max + Packard Bell) $200 for $21.95. The trio, as a group, is losing $178.05. How the money changes hands within this group is not your responsibility.
Besides, super-rebates like this are the essence of marketing hype. As long as this tactic is profitable, big companies with deep pockets will have a huge advantages over smaller companies who may have more quality products. One way to discourage this practice is to take a bite out of the profits of the tactic by using loopholes like this. If you care about quality products, taking advantage of this promotion is a moral imperative. Do give your money to people like this, please.
Spelling responses to flamebait are off-topic noise. One doesn't respond to flamebait, one waits for someone to moderate it down. The moderation was correct, IMO; chalk your 0 up as a learning experience.
obDVD: My plane got in around 9, I took transit to the courthouse, didn't see anybunny protesting, figured nothing interesting was going on, and left to go to work. I'll be there on Jan 14 if I can find you guys.
Here's an idea: Instead of launching destructive macro viruses, virus-writers should write ones that write the controversial source code to an obscure directory, replicate, and then vanish.
On the other hand, wouldn't you say that the lack of a published CI in the article is somewhat telling? You would expect that a good scientific magazine would print a 98 or a 99 if it occurred, right?
The SD for the difference of the means in an 8 vs. 8 test would be approximately half the SD of the standard population's SD, but large CI's ranges for the test will be increasingly greater than half of the same CI for the population because we are dealing with a T-distribution. It will take more than 2.5 SD's for a 99% CI. But you're right; we're just guessing here.
Another question one might ask is, how many similar tests have been run with no good results, and also, how many similar, plausible correlations were being looked for in the same test? So we may have gotten a 98% likelihood of significance. What if we were measuring 5 variables, any one of which might have independently shown significance but didn't? What if 10 similar tests have been tried by other teams around the world, none of which reported any good results? That's 50 measurements, and it's quite plausible for the null-hypothesis to randomly generate a 98% once in 50 attempts.
Whatever the statistics come up with, the results will need to be reproduced in order to establish validity. I'd guess that securing further grant money is a primary reason for the press release.
The text may not be intentionally racist, but it is divisive in that it subtly reinforces stereotypes. The author of the article loses credibility as he rants on, but that doesn't invalidate his concerns that the game may promote racism in some people.
/.. Most of us, while we sometimes employ stereotypes, do not classify people primarily with generalizations. On the other hand, there are many people who do engage in groupthinking, people who identify themselves and others primarily by race, nationality, religion, or operating system. They are not what you would call xenophobic or racist, but they are generally going to be more impressionable than those of us who have evolved beyond this. This mentality is prevalent among the young (pre-high school), especially if they have been not been exposed to other races or cultures yet. A game like this is not going to turn kids into racists, but it can have a negative effect. I see nothing wrong with bringing this to light.
The at-risk segment of society does not include most members of
I have a graduate degree in mathematics, a background in numerical analysis, and I've worked as a programmer and scientist for years in a quantitative science department. Let me pose a random scientific-programming example so that non-scientists can have something to chew on.
... fragile. If you modify your methodology, changing the step sizes or the state criteria, for instance, you will probably change the final local maximum, and then your results will be unreproducible, and much of your statistic analysis goes out the window. Worse, you don't even have to touch the methodology. Change the order of seemingly commutative arithmetic operations and your LHS differs slightly due to different roundoff errors, which (in 64-bits, but probably in 80-bits, too) all too often results in a different local maximum, even for problems that aren't particularly ill-conditioned.
Suppose you want to maximize a function of n variables, where the function is too difficult to differentiate (usually much too difficult). You have transformed these variables to be as nice as possible. Basically, to find the maximum, you will begin a search at some predefined point in n-space (or k predefined points, doing k separate runs). You iteratively attempt to increase the function's value at these points. In each iteration, you might take small pertubations in each direction to try to estimate a gradient. After determining the local topography, you then move your point in that direction, taking a small step, a large step, or maybe a random jump, depending on previous movements or the state of your algorithm. In the end, you will arrive at a local maximum, an inflection, or a boundary. You hope that this is the true maximum for your domain, but the best you can hope for is a heuristic solution.
This sort of problem, depending on the function topography, tends to be very
While many tweakers will be careful to leave mathematical algorithms intact, many others just won't think about this sort of thing, and will poison any data pools their results are aggregated into.
This said, let me say that there are a _lot_ of scientists who are truly bad programmers, and all too often these people think they are hot stuff. They write brittle, monolithic, error-ridden pieces of garbage that are just painful to apprehend, with plenty of hidden bugs just sitting there. Ugh. An acid test to weed these people out might be, "What do you think of _Numerical Recipes in C_?" If you come from a scientific background and want a good programming job, I think you have to prove yourself, since industry is well-aware of the Numerical Recipes scientist archetype.
Chances are, the SETI code is at least somewhat ugly, and can really be improved for future releases by open source. NO modifications should be made on an ongoing experiment, but that doesn't rule out an open source next version, with the active communtity serving as alpha/beta testers. There is a lot of interest and a lot of talent out here. All it takes is some openness and sme good management on SETI's part, right?
And really you're targeting Washington State legislators' integrity based on your own contempt for Microsoft. Face it, every state has its share of conservative representatives who cater to large businesses. Representing one's constituency is part of a congressman's job, and if M$ gets special attention due to its economic effects, it is justified by the number of people who are employed directly or indirectly by the company. The political climate of the area seems to me to be pretty homogeneous.
To take a particularly conservative example, Senator Slade Gorton doesn't just represent M$ over its competitors, he also represents Boeing over their competitors, logging and farming over and enviromental interests, state fishing over tribal interests. Basically, he's a right-wing fucker; my point is that he's a right-wing fucker across the board, not just a right-wing Microsoft fucker (fuckee?). When it comes down to it, he gets things done for Washington State, and I suppose that's why he continues to win elections.
Don't think that the congressmen around the country who go after Microsoft are doing so because they care about quality software. They are doing this because they've been told it will benefit their state's businesses. If their state's businesses happened to be large and predatory, they would still represent their interests to the best of their abilities, kickbacks or no. Each side represents its own.
As stated, I believe that a secondary means of authentication is legally required by personnel when transmitting sensitive information. This can be keycard, biometrics, or whatever. The HIPAA requirements will be very gradually enforced, in order to give health organizations time to tackle the often massive changes needed to make their systems HIPAA-compliant.
Regarding someone's remark about sending biometric information unencrypted: That would definitely be a stupid use of biometrics; sending authentication information in the clear is a violation of HIPAA standards. Biometrics does not obviate the need for a basic encryption infrastructure, whether it is built on PKI, Kerb V, or whatever. It would probably be a secondary mechanism on top of cards or passwords, with information sent only after symmetric-encryption communication has been established. I don't think biometrics can be used as a sole means of authentication.
Some of my coworkers were examining the encrypted E-mail problem for a more managable set of users -- medical personnel only, for several hospitals. One law, I think also part of HIPAA, states that the IS departments cannot manage be the central key authorities; these have to be run by a third party. We looked at PGP, and we looked at the SMIME variants. The latter, IIRC, suffers from from a recent Netscape/Microsoft implementation divergence making the one's keys incompatible with the other's (how surprising!). I think it was a hassle finding a vendor who wanted to manage PGP private keys for our heterogeneous systems (different browsers, several different platforms). Then you have the doctors to deal with, who do not take kindly to any added complexity to the system, no matter how minor. It is difficult to force them to use a new tool that provides no perceptible benefit to them.
You should definitely make sure that you know precisely what the legal requirements of your company are, and approximately when these requirements will be enforced. Make them aware of the laws and they will be more responsive to your proposals.