Never mind the fact that it's about 1000x simpler to create a gun-type bomb with Uranium rather than creating an uber-complex implosion device.
However, gun-type bombs are large and heavy. Unless you can afford a fleet of very stout delivery vehicles (B-52 class), they are useless for a tit-for-tat strategy. Plutonium bombs have a very high start-up expense, but ongoing costs for assured delivery are low.
The official position of the US Government is that breeder reactors are a potential threat. Bad Guys(TM) might get ahold of fissible materials bound for reprocessing, and THEN where would we be, hmm?
No, the official position of the U.S. government is that breeder reactors are very much needed for strategic security, both energy independence and defense. They just can't say it out loud because certain diplomatic sectors are still reeling from Jimmy Carter's legacy of national self-flagellation, a legacy that is increasingly unpopular in an era of $100/barrel oil and global warming hysteria.
The reason I ask that, is that FLOSS is a very large community, full of talent and skill. I find it hard to believe you could find "no one" to support your stuff.. unless you were looking for the lowest end pay scale to match.
They could also have been resume-filtering for an exact match to their platforms (X years of A, Y years of C, etc.) instead of searching for someone who can pick up anything quickly.
If someone wants to do something, they're going to find a way.
Provided they are skilled, lucky, a good strategist, well funded, cool under pressure, and so forth. Invalidate any one of those prerequisites and you stop a significant fraction of attacks, saving lives and money. Security need not be 100% flawless to be profitable.
The market value of my stock and options currently equals two years of my salary, and that is with the price being hammered by distressed institutional investors. If I help deliver new products that impress investors, it goes straight to my personal bottom line.
They can lose their job, and they can get another one.
Not with a bad reference, or termination-for-mistake on the resume.
Employees... get no decisions, and they aren't responsible for their actions.
Somebody should tell that to the scientists and engineers I work with, who have been known to invent new lines of business and start spin-off companies.
The real culprits are people who buy loans without any care for whether the debtors can make the payments.
Not exactly. A lot of the MBSes were rated as investment grade by the ratings agencies, who share a lot of the blame. The MBS purchasers' mistake was to buy something that was too good to be true. When you're playing poker and you cannot figure out who the mark is, you're the mark.
Inflation is low, Unemployment is low, GDP growth is ok.
Inflation has been roaring during the past decade, but masked by cheap imports and temporary absorption of the money used to pay for those cheap goods.
True unemployment is sky high, around 50% by historical metrics. The government unemployment numbers were redefined to ignore people are barred by law from employment and people who are unable to find employment. The government has also ratcheted up efforts to legally ban more people from employment.
GDP growth has likely been stagnant or recessionary, but masked by the enormous churn in the financial and construction industries.
How has the presence of massively cheaper goods and labor made us worse off?
Many Americans lack the IQ needed for intellectual jobs, but have more than enough willpower, dexterity, and social skills to be useful. When their jobs are shipped to foreign countries, they are reduced to a combination helpless dependency and pointless make-work. This is dangerously corrosive to the great strengths of American culture.
Regarding commerce Euroization: I hear this nightmare scenario all the time, and I don't see the problem with it. The US will lose a couple billion dollars in seniorage revenue, and it will be somewhat harder to finance debt. I actually see this as a positive move.
You are failing to consider eurodollars: US dollars lent out by foreign organizations at extremely high reserve ratios. It would not take much market panic** to cause a liquidity crunch. The Fed could not tide over the institutions that wrote eurodollar contracts because they are foreign, and the local central banks cannot help because the contracts are denominated in non-local currency. Rock, meet hard place. The high leverage also means the Fed doesn't have to work as hard to affect the money supply, making money supply operations less painful to Americans.
**I wonder how many eurodollars were spent on purchasing low-quality US mortgage-backed securities? Human folly being what it is, I'd expect rather more than is comfortable.
To whitewash these issues, the Fed decided to stop reporting M3 in November 2005. (M3 was the only money supply measure that included eurodollars.) They read the writing on the wall two years ago.
Do you really want to go back to the day where you have to start over again when you made a mistake in one of the boxes?
You apparently really want to harness yourself to paper pulp and simulacra thereof.
Just the other day I used PDF to sign two legal documents (forms) with my certified electronic signature.
Public key cryptography and digital escrow agents are general purpose. There is no call to lock yourself in to a particular vendor's revenue stream.
Until the free PDF readers include these critical workflow features they are not fit for any serious environment.
Serious digital contract environments, such as Fedwire, use formats that are simple, heavily reviewed, and verifiable by direct personal inspection of the raw protocol data.
And that does NOT describe the Adobe cesspool: huge, complicated, hellishly buggy, and with a specification that constantly changes for the sole purpose of keeping their customers paying $$$ on an upgrade treadmill. Adobe products also tend to be infested with Javascript, which makes it trivial to create a document that changes the displayed contents once a chosen date has passed; a cleverer forger can use subtle bugs and version differences to this end even if Javascript is disabled. With such a flawed product, the counterparty (or their hired gun) can cause all sorts of mischief.
Oh, and of course Adobe intends that their products run on Windows machines that promiscuously use the public Internet, so security is already a lost cause.
For important contracts, you either have to use paper, or you have to use a simple digital format that you can personally verify. I recommend 80-column ASCII plain text.
You can't magically design a machine that's picking up miniscule electrical currents like this and have it unaffected when some idiot brings in a portable radio transceiver and cranks it up nearby while they tell their wife what they want for dinner.
Indeed. It takes a competent electrical engineer, not a sorcerer.
Say you have an ECG machine. It's hooked up via sticky contact pads to your chest and is measuring the delicate flickerings of life in your body. It's doing this because it's trying to spot the *tiny* irregularities that could indicate Bad Things.
An ECG typically gets a few millivolts to work with, which ain't that tiny.
And sticky pads dripping with electrolyte? Such luxury. The last ECG design I helped on had dry metal pads, for the convenience of Joe Sixpack. The source impedance was... high. I think they finally went with instructions to moisten the skin.
As I type, I'm within 30 feet of a ward full of such machines, and maybe a couple of hundred yards from the EEG devices that measure the brain's electrical activity. As we're testing today, I can wave my phone around and I can watch the interference it causes on the data being captured.
That's just sad. I bet they are prone to having static electricity blow out their input amplifiers too. Defects like this could have been prevented by decent engineering.
P.S. I have seen medical equipment so badly designed that radio waves would blow away the digital circuits. The situation is just pathetic.
Nah. Connect the phone antenna to a motion-controlled directional antenna. Have it switch back and forth between distant cell towers. Laugh maniacally when the cops' next phone bill is delivered in a shoebox, with NZ$92,000 in roaming charges.
No, magnetic coercion is reasonably predictable. The laws of physics do, in fact, work.
You are looking at imprecise data and trying to figure out what was there.... Just because the technician assumes a string of bits corresponds to a given waveform, doesn't mean they are right.
Hard drive data includes two layers of redundancy, a DC-cancelling code and a comprehensive error-correction code. If the values of both of those are consistent with the extracted data, then it is overwhelmingly likely to be the original data.
Any competent defense attorney would tear such a thing apart.
Not at all. Flimsy evidence is often used to narrow the search for ironclad evidence. For example, suppose a bank account number is recovered, debits from the account are traced and found to have paid for extensive remodeling of the defendants house, and credits are traced and found to have come from the defendant's former business partner who is currently on the lam for tax fraud. Whoops. The jury simply won't care that the account number could have been unreliable.
2) The amount of data on a modern hard drive is staggering, and the encoding extremely complicated. To try and do something like this, even for one level, could take months if not more, and that's assuming you had a streamlined process down.
There are data recovery firms that routinely suck data off of mangled hard drives. Recovering overwritten data would not be much more work.
... higher energy photons arrived later... There is no even remotely conventional way to explain such a result.
Hold yer horses!
In classical physics, the speed of light is a derived quantity: c = 1 / sqrt(epsilon * mu). Epsilon is the electrical permittivity of the vacuum, the degree to which an electric charge induces dipoles in (polarizes) the vacuum. Mu is the magnetic permeability, which arises from the geometrical effects of the Lorentz transform for particles in relative motion.**
As a geometrical quantity, mu will have the same value wherever space is reasonably flat. But epsilon? If you take the Feynman approach, how much a photon polarizes the vacuum depends on how much energy it can put into prying apart pairs of virtual particles. The higher the energy, the heavier the virtual particles the photon gets to interact with. Well the photons in this research have an assload of energy, 1000 GeV in the upper band. The rest energy of a molecule of methane is 15 GeV, so these suckers are not just gently poking at one virtual electron-positron pair, they're breaking out the test tubes and doing some virtual chemistry! The impressive thing is that the slow down factor is only 1e-14. Thanks to a horde of conservation laws, prying an atom of iron out of the aether is harder than it looks.
**Conventionally, the unconstrained part of c is rolled into epsilon, while mu is just a conversion coefficient to turn space-time units into electromagnetic units, which is why it has the rigged-looking value of mu = 4×pi×10e-7 H/m.
Funny, I've been testing this stuff for the last 28 years.
You can't test in information security. It has to be done by design and analysis, at all levels of abstraction, from metastable digital latches to number theory.
Anyhow, since no one has been able to get into any of my systems yet, the score is still 1x0
U.S. Medicare efficient? It rations mercilessly, pays so little that many people cannot get care even though it is "free", and spends money in isolation from personal economic consequences. The doctor contracts also have a Mob provision that makes it very hard to leave the Medicare "family" once you do a job for them.
Anyone who thinks that having a single system could possibly generate MORE bureaucracy than our existing private health care system has obviously never worked in health care.
And anyone who thinks they know bureaucratic red tape has never worked with government agencies that have a statutory monopoly. Single payer would be like getting health care from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Incidentally, one of the big problems with the existing system is that the GOVERNMENT only pays for a third of your insurance if it comes from an employer. Competition is drastically curtailed because important business relationships cannot be quickly changed. For many people, changing spouses is easier and cheaper than changing health insurance underwriters. Yet another reason to abolish that antique law.
It isn't just that demand is large compared to resources, it is so large that it cannot be reasonably measured. If you offered most people free unlimited priority access to a hospital the size of the Moon, they would still want more. After all, hospitals don't discover drugs. At the very least they would also need their own personal pharma industry, based entirely on treating their diseases. Oh, and their own personal massage therapist who spent the last 30 years studying at some obscure mountain temple in Tibet.
What would happen if a fabulously rich American industrialist decided to fix up Somalia and run it as a free market? If he bought native $PRODUCT, the Western opinion movers would decry it as Blood $PRODUCT and embargo it. If he hired people and put them together on useful projects, he would be called an exploiter; the projects, sweatshops. If he put in a sensible government, it would be called a colonial puppet regime.
What Somalia has is a siege. Western intelligentsia has pretty much blockaded Africa. After the example of Rhodesia, renamed Zimbabwe when the light of civilization was doused and Mugabe's "fair" non-colonial government installed with the full support of Washington D.C., most of Africa is a business no-go zone.
As far as I'm concerned, if you believe that you, a healthy person, should not be responsible for paying into a system that gives care to a less wealthy unhealthy person, you have a fucked up, un-American world view.
The demand for medical care is almost infinite. This is not a hypothesis or an ideology, it is an observed fact.
Therefore if you pay for a medical dole using a finite pool of money, there will be rationing. If humans apply good judgement to rationing decisions, the answer will not always be the same. Demagogues will call this unfair: decisions by local democracies will be derided as a ZIP code lottery, professional judgment by doctors will be considered hogging the budget. Therefore rationing decisions will come to be made by flow charts written by a bureaucracy, without regard to economic results, pain, suffering, family disruption, and so forth. Again, this is not a guess or a political position, it is a fact that has been observed every time a medical dole has been tried on a large scale with social "fairness" as its primary goal.
In such a system, in the interests of "fairness", the bureaucracy will become ever larger and more controlling. Eventually it will become both the largest line item on the budget and immersed in its own internal politics. Again, this is an observed fact. One need look no further than the bureaucrat-politician-and-protocolist to doctor-and-nurse ratio of Britain's NHS.
You don't have to be a bible believer to know that if you want to pull the heaviest loads, you hook up the strongest horses.
Treating free men as beasts to be harnessed has never worked out well, though it has often been tried, you Stalinist pinhead.
That's why the rich pay a greater share of their wealth in taxes (or are supposed to).
Not when it comes to U.S. health care, they don't. Fully one third of their posh health insurance is paid for by the U.S. Treasury, which funds this enormous give-away entirely by increased taxes on the uninsured. The extra money also drives up health care costs, which is a further burden on the uninsured.
When people like me say everybody should have to personally pay the full cost of their own health care even if they have to die, this is what we're talking about. People like you are simply ignore this point, and whitewash it as "un-American" malice.
The dual economic crises of the "sub-prime" credit market and runaway health care are exposing the fundamental weakness in Milton Friedman's theory of the so-called "free market".
And now you are trying to whitewash a strength as a weakness. Free markets work by teaching unbiased object lessons to the participants. The invisible hand does not care whether you are black or white, how good of a nanny your parents could afford, whether you have a strict neighborhood association, or any other claptrap. Sometimes the lessons hurt, but if you want to run you have to expect a few skinned knees. (Remember than the sub-prime mortgage "crisis" amounts to a percent or three of GDP for a single year.)
Why not have the Fire and Police Dept provide services based on the victim's ability to pay? Because that's not the way we do things in a great, rich nation.
Have you been living under a rock? Compare the police response in Compton with that in Menlo Park with that in a small Alaska town. Civil services most certainly are based on ability to pay.
We don't allow the Fire or Police Dept to base their service model on profits, so why medicine?
Spoken like someone who has never gotten a bill from either a fire department or an ambulance service.
What's to stop someone from reading in one of the WORM tapes, modifying the log file data and then writing it back to another blank WORM tape and claiming it's the unaltered tape?
The cryptographic checksums escrowed elsewhere, perhaps even printed in a newspaper classified for good measure.
Only monopolies can afford pure-research laboratories.
What about the blue LEDs and violet solid-state lasers invented by Shuji Nakamura of Nichia, a company that was hardly a monopoly colossus astride the world?
Plenty of folks in industry do basic research. I should know, I help build their research tools, and help turn their discoveries into products. It isn't somehow polluted or cheating just because they hope it is useful, and know how to actually make it worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
However, gun-type bombs are large and heavy. Unless you can afford a fleet of very stout delivery vehicles (B-52 class), they are useless for a tit-for-tat strategy. Plutonium bombs have a very high start-up expense, but ongoing costs for assured delivery are low.
No, the official position of the U.S. government is that breeder reactors are very much needed for strategic security, both energy independence and defense. They just can't say it out loud because certain diplomatic sectors are still reeling from Jimmy Carter's legacy of national self-flagellation, a legacy that is increasingly unpopular in an era of $100/barrel oil and global warming hysteria.
No, CT scanning could probably be done cheaply enough. The real problem is that CT scanners are unavoidably huge, and airports are already cramped.
They could also have been resume-filtering for an exact match to their platforms (X years of A, Y years of C, etc.) instead of searching for someone who can pick up anything quickly.
Provided they are skilled, lucky, a good strategist, well funded, cool under pressure, and so forth. Invalidate any one of those prerequisites and you stop a significant fraction of attacks, saving lives and money. Security need not be 100% flawless to be profitable.
Thanks for the link. I think.
Mushrooms?
Oh. I thought he was bragging about having a wife.
The only meaningful professional references come from colleagues. They need not even give a bad reference; damning with faint praise suffices.
The market value of my stock and options currently equals two years of my salary, and that is with the price being hammered by distressed institutional investors. If I help deliver new products that impress investors, it goes straight to my personal bottom line.
Not with a bad reference, or termination-for-mistake on the resume.
Somebody should tell that to the scientists and engineers I work with, who have been known to invent new lines of business and start spin-off companies.
Not exactly. A lot of the MBSes were rated as investment grade by the ratings agencies, who share a lot of the blame. The MBS purchasers' mistake was to buy something that was too good to be true. When you're playing poker and you cannot figure out who the mark is, you're the mark.
Inflation has been roaring during the past decade, but masked by cheap imports and temporary absorption of the money used to pay for those cheap goods.
True unemployment is sky high, around 50% by historical metrics. The government unemployment numbers were redefined to ignore people are barred by law from employment and people who are unable to find employment. The government has also ratcheted up efforts to legally ban more people from employment.
GDP growth has likely been stagnant or recessionary, but masked by the enormous churn in the financial and construction industries.
Many Americans lack the IQ needed for intellectual jobs, but have more than enough willpower, dexterity, and social skills to be useful. When their jobs are shipped to foreign countries, they are reduced to a combination helpless dependency and pointless make-work. This is dangerously corrosive to the great strengths of American culture.
You are failing to consider eurodollars: US dollars lent out by foreign organizations at extremely high reserve ratios. It would not take much market panic** to cause a liquidity crunch. The Fed could not tide over the institutions that wrote eurodollar contracts because they are foreign, and the local central banks cannot help because the contracts are denominated in non-local currency. Rock, meet hard place. The high leverage also means the Fed doesn't have to work as hard to affect the money supply, making money supply operations less painful to Americans.
**I wonder how many eurodollars were spent on purchasing low-quality US mortgage-backed securities? Human folly being what it is, I'd expect rather more than is comfortable.
To whitewash these issues, the Fed decided to stop reporting M3 in November 2005. (M3 was the only money supply measure that included eurodollars.) They read the writing on the wall two years ago.
You apparently really want to harness yourself to paper pulp and simulacra thereof.
Public key cryptography and digital escrow agents are general purpose. There is no call to lock yourself in to a particular vendor's revenue stream.
Serious digital contract environments, such as Fedwire, use formats that are simple, heavily reviewed, and verifiable by direct personal inspection of the raw protocol data.
And that does NOT describe the Adobe cesspool: huge, complicated, hellishly buggy, and with a specification that constantly changes for the sole purpose of keeping their customers paying $$$ on an upgrade treadmill. Adobe products also tend to be infested with Javascript, which makes it trivial to create a document that changes the displayed contents once a chosen date has passed; a cleverer forger can use subtle bugs and version differences to this end even if Javascript is disabled. With such a flawed product, the counterparty (or their hired gun) can cause all sorts of mischief.
Oh, and of course Adobe intends that their products run on Windows machines that promiscuously use the public Internet, so security is already a lost cause.
For important contracts, you either have to use paper, or you have to use a simple digital format that you can personally verify. I recommend 80-column ASCII plain text.
Indeed. It takes a competent electrical engineer, not a sorcerer.
An ECG typically gets a few millivolts to work with, which ain't that tiny.
And sticky pads dripping with electrolyte? Such luxury. The last ECG design I helped on had dry metal pads, for the convenience of Joe Sixpack. The source impedance was ... high. I think they finally went with instructions to moisten the skin.
That's just sad. I bet they are prone to having static electricity blow out their input amplifiers too. Defects like this could have been prevented by decent engineering.
P.S. I have seen medical equipment so badly designed that radio waves would blow away the digital circuits. The situation is just pathetic.
Nah. Connect the phone antenna to a motion-controlled directional antenna. Have it switch back and forth between distant cell towers. Laugh maniacally when the cops' next phone bill is delivered in a shoebox, with NZ$92,000 in roaming charges.
No, magnetic coercion is reasonably predictable. The laws of physics do, in fact, work.
Hard drive data includes two layers of redundancy, a DC-cancelling code and a comprehensive error-correction code. If the values of both of those are consistent with the extracted data, then it is overwhelmingly likely to be the original data.
Not at all. Flimsy evidence is often used to narrow the search for ironclad evidence. For example, suppose a bank account number is recovered, debits from the account are traced and found to have paid for extensive remodeling of the defendants house, and credits are traced and found to have come from the defendant's former business partner who is currently on the lam for tax fraud. Whoops. The jury simply won't care that the account number could have been unreliable.
There are data recovery firms that routinely suck data off of mangled hard drives. Recovering overwritten data would not be much more work.
Hold yer horses!
In classical physics, the speed of light is a derived quantity: c = 1 / sqrt(epsilon * mu). Epsilon is the electrical permittivity of the vacuum, the degree to which an electric charge induces dipoles in (polarizes) the vacuum. Mu is the magnetic permeability, which arises from the geometrical effects of the Lorentz transform for particles in relative motion.**
As a geometrical quantity, mu will have the same value wherever space is reasonably flat. But epsilon? If you take the Feynman approach, how much a photon polarizes the vacuum depends on how much energy it can put into prying apart pairs of virtual particles. The higher the energy, the heavier the virtual particles the photon gets to interact with. Well the photons in this research have an assload of energy, 1000 GeV in the upper band. The rest energy of a molecule of methane is 15 GeV, so these suckers are not just gently poking at one virtual electron-positron pair, they're breaking out the test tubes and doing some virtual chemistry! The impressive thing is that the slow down factor is only 1e-14. Thanks to a horde of conservation laws, prying an atom of iron out of the aether is harder than it looks.
**Conventionally, the unconstrained part of c is rolled into epsilon, while mu is just a conversion coefficient to turn space-time units into electromagnetic units, which is why it has the rigged-looking value of mu = 4×pi×10e-7 H/m.
You can't test in information security. It has to be done by design and analysis, at all levels of abstraction, from metastable digital latches to number theory.
In a way that you recognized.
Look, a levity canceling comment!
My money's on "vacuum cleaner".
U.S. Medicare efficient? It rations mercilessly, pays so little that many people cannot get care even though it is "free", and spends money in isolation from personal economic consequences. The doctor contracts also have a Mob provision that makes it very hard to leave the Medicare "family" once you do a job for them.
And anyone who thinks they know bureaucratic red tape has never worked with government agencies that have a statutory monopoly. Single payer would be like getting health care from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Incidentally, one of the big problems with the existing system is that the GOVERNMENT only pays for a third of your insurance if it comes from an employer. Competition is drastically curtailed because important business relationships cannot be quickly changed. For many people, changing spouses is easier and cheaper than changing health insurance underwriters. Yet another reason to abolish that antique law.
It isn't just that demand is large compared to resources, it is so large that it cannot be reasonably measured. If you offered most people free unlimited priority access to a hospital the size of the Moon, they would still want more. After all, hospitals don't discover drugs. At the very least they would also need their own personal pharma industry, based entirely on treating their diseases. Oh, and their own personal massage therapist who spent the last 30 years studying at some obscure mountain temple in Tibet.
Nope.
What would happen if a fabulously rich American industrialist decided to fix up Somalia and run it as a free market? If he bought native $PRODUCT, the Western opinion movers would decry it as Blood $PRODUCT and embargo it. If he hired people and put them together on useful projects, he would be called an exploiter; the projects, sweatshops. If he put in a sensible government, it would be called a colonial puppet regime.
What Somalia has is a siege. Western intelligentsia has pretty much blockaded Africa. After the example of Rhodesia, renamed Zimbabwe when the light of civilization was doused and Mugabe's "fair" non-colonial government installed with the full support of Washington D.C., most of Africa is a business no-go zone.
Don't be an idiot.
The demand for medical care is almost infinite. This is not a hypothesis or an ideology, it is an observed fact.
Therefore if you pay for a medical dole using a finite pool of money, there will be rationing. If humans apply good judgement to rationing decisions, the answer will not always be the same. Demagogues will call this unfair: decisions by local democracies will be derided as a ZIP code lottery, professional judgment by doctors will be considered hogging the budget. Therefore rationing decisions will come to be made by flow charts written by a bureaucracy, without regard to economic results, pain, suffering, family disruption, and so forth. Again, this is not a guess or a political position, it is a fact that has been observed every time a medical dole has been tried on a large scale with social "fairness" as its primary goal.
In such a system, in the interests of "fairness", the bureaucracy will become ever larger and more controlling. Eventually it will become both the largest line item on the budget and immersed in its own internal politics. Again, this is an observed fact. One need look no further than the bureaucrat-politician-and-protocolist to doctor-and-nurse ratio of Britain's NHS.
Treating free men as beasts to be harnessed has never worked out well, though it has often been tried, you Stalinist pinhead.
Not when it comes to U.S. health care, they don't. Fully one third of their posh health insurance is paid for by the U.S. Treasury, which funds this enormous give-away entirely by increased taxes on the uninsured. The extra money also drives up health care costs, which is a further burden on the uninsured.
When people like me say everybody should have to personally pay the full cost of their own health care even if they have to die, this is what we're talking about. People like you are simply ignore this point, and whitewash it as "un-American" malice.
And now you are trying to whitewash a strength as a weakness. Free markets work by teaching unbiased object lessons to the participants. The invisible hand does not care whether you are black or white, how good of a nanny your parents could afford, whether you have a strict neighborhood association, or any other claptrap. Sometimes the lessons hurt, but if you want to run you have to expect a few skinned knees. (Remember than the sub-prime mortgage "crisis" amounts to a percent or three of GDP for a single year.)
Have you been living under a rock? Compare the police response in Compton with that in Menlo Park with that in a small Alaska town. Civil services most certainly are based on ability to pay.
Spoken like someone who has never gotten a bill from either a fire department or an ambulance service.
The cryptographic checksums escrowed elsewhere, perhaps even printed in a newspaper classified for good measure.
What about the blue LEDs and violet solid-state lasers invented by Shuji Nakamura of Nichia, a company that was hardly a monopoly colossus astride the world?
Plenty of folks in industry do basic research. I should know, I help build their research tools, and help turn their discoveries into products. It isn't somehow polluted or cheating just because they hope it is useful, and know how to actually make it worthwhile.