Yeah, I rarely use the/sarcasm tag, but it seemed necessary this time...
What I'm saying is that there are large portions of society that are essentially parasitic, feeding off of conflict and misery that could be avoided, but rather than fix the root cause problem, they band-aid it and profit. They have entrenched interests and will rigorously oppose anything that might fix the root cause problems, because that would put them out of a living - and for the people who say they could do something else... think, after you've built a 20+ year career in a field, if that field is suddenly made irrelevant by a structural change to society that eliminates the problem you have been salving for decades, would you really want to start over as best you can in "a related industry" - alongside all your displaced comrades who are flooding the market? You might do better starting over with "you want fries with that?"
So, in this case, sure credit card numbers could be harder to steal, but how many "honest, hardworking" people would that hurt? In a related topic, over half of credit defaults could be avoided by denying credit to the 1% least creditworthy applicants - but that will never happen because those are the people that banks make most of their profits from.
To me, a huge root cause of this crony capitalism is the creation of laws by lawyers. If we passed a law today that any person who sits for a bar exam, in any state or country, from January 1, 2015 forward shall ever-after be barred from holding public office, federal, state or local, in any legislative or executive capacity (let them be Judges), and also barred from lobbying for legislative change in any capacity - it's not as complete or perfect a solution as taking them all out and killing them tomorrow, but, I'd wager that by 2115, we would have significant structural improvements in the laws, tax codes, and many other aspects of society that have been jury-rigged by the lawyers to serve their own self-interests. Call it juris-legislative separation - the modern extension of separation of church and state.
I know a high level engineer / manager in this State's largest electric utility who had a serious MJ usage habit, for decades, and he was more competent in his job than most. The main problem he had was keeping the habit hidden from people who didn't approve of it.
I was referring to being imprisoned for LSD usage. You, sir, have obviously been very discrete and careful for the past 16 years (assuming your post is truthful), but in certain states, based on your words, the local sheriff could order a posse to your house, strip you away from your job and family and have you sent to prison for many years - and the Judge would be powerless to help you, regardless of your positive standing in the community.
I know more than one car owner who: a) did no harm to anyone, nor anything besides their vehicle and a tree, and b) were very happy to NOT have 911 called when their airbag deployed, and c) were not doing anything illegal, immoral or unethical at the time.
My first (and only) one car accident was very similar, I would have been 100% better off to push the vehicle to a side street and call a tow-truck, but, silly 16 year old me, I called the highway patrol.
But, is it the THC, or the lack of social support and constant surreptitious activity required to obtain and use pot that leads to earlier onset?
Put another way, would the same thing have been found in a study of alcohol use during prohibition? Or, will the same study replicated today in Colorado, have different findings?
Take a look around, what's the ratio of homeland security and related support personnel to actual terrorists?
In the 1930's we could build parks and clean up highways to get people working...
Fraud investigators, prosecution and defense attorneys, security firms, etc. don't want the disruption of having their life-long careers de-valued. They're honest, hardworking people, why should they be hurt? The defrauded are (mostly) made whole by the operation of the system, the "guilty" are punished - why should that change?/sarcasm
1 million lawyers at the bottom of the ocean is only a good start, but I doubt I'll ever see the day we even put 100,000 lawyers out of work with a piece of legislation.
I don't actually think the NSA was "off base" but I do think they were/are "out of control" - meaning: I don't necessarily disagree with what they did, but I do disagree with them doing it without the oversight and control that is supposed to be in place.
If the NSA was transparent with the American people about what they are doing, and the American people could get behind the idea that it is a necessary and good thing to protect their self interests, then I support them going forward and collect all the data they can and using it to stop the real bad things from happening.
What everybody is worried about is "losing their privacy" so that all the laws that they break on a regular basis might get enforced on them. Right now I'm thinking of a particular gentleman who has never been arrested, has all his concealed carry permits and has weaponized all his vehicles and home as permitted by law, and also happens to drive while drinking from open containers that often contain alcohol. He's never been written up for anything worse than speeding, but if his privacy were breached, he might be prosecuted, jailed, and even lose his right to bear arms (which might bother him more than jail, to hear him talk about it.) With his privacy in-place, he can continue to be respectable and "never arrested" and look down his nose at those who have been arrested and jailed. There are many, many other ways people break the law every day that could be exposed by a shift in "privacy" and significantly change their future liberty.
The problem with the NSA doing what they did out of the chain of command is that they will come into possession of information that is potentially very valuable in the form of blackmail. I'm not saying that this did happen, but if it goes on long enough, it will, eventually, be determined, by the agency "out of control," that - in the name of national security - some people might need to be coerced to do something they might not do without the threat of releasing certain information. That kind of protection, I do not want.
Sounds right to me... if you want to go all conspiracy theory on it, they may have known about the earlier breaches which would have made them look really bad and engineered the last one as a sort of shock and awe pity PR move to cover their incompetence.
I interviewed at a "secure credit card transaction software" company, they were struggling to find competent programmers, no surprise since they pay their top guy 1/2 of what I make as a medical device software engineer. I doubt they are all such shoe-string operations, but as it is, they struggle to do things like validate billing zip codes. Have you ever miskeyed your zip code at a POS? I have a few times, sometimes it rejects the transaction, sometimes not.
Upgrade of the infrastructure to work on secure keys kept in tamper _resistant_ chips on the cards, while entirely possible, even simple, from a technical perspective, would involve the creation of thousands of new jobs, and destruction of thousands more. it becomes a political issue, and is unlikely to move forward without national level political (legislative) backing / mandate. That will take time - decades, unless real harm comes to enough people who matter to the legislators. It doesn't help that the legislators can understand how the current system works, and probably don't understand how a secure key is actually better.
The plastic number embossed on the card is a mimic of the routing and account numbers printed on the face of paper checks - it's an honor system, enforced by threat of criminal punishment. It's impressive how well it works with the massive international use of credit cards to transfer money.
There have been scofflaws since the days of hanging pickpockets, and there will continue to be even after credit cards become more technically secure.
Starting with OBDII you should be a little suspicious. OBDIII was outright intrusive and got blocked, but non-standard monitoring has proliferated since then.
What you should be vigilant for are mandatory updating requirements, either buyback of "the old clunkers", or mandatory installation of "safety and environmental monitoring devices." If you think that won't happen, look at trends in personal liberty over the last 20 years, and remind your elected representatives what you want, and don't want, frequently.
I believe the magnets could be called a "rare commodity" - something that we should probably be buying from overseas in bulk to help keep it expensive for everyone else. There are U.S. sources, but why use up those when you can reduce other countries' supply instead?
I don't know how true this is/was, but I read a story about the Soviets sourcing natural gas pumping systems from the U.S. (potentially stealing, not sure...) anyway, U.S. intelligence got wind of it and planted malicious control software in the systems - made a big, expensive boom.
This was "Cold War" stuff, we have too much active trade with China to be doing stuff to actively hurt them.
China went to strong population control in 1978, most other non-African countries seem to be achieving a measure of growth reduction without strong direct policies:
If (when?) the machines construct and service themselves, they can mine the raw materials, build the roads, and the solar cells / wind farms / hydro dams, and the houses. Seeds and (sustainable) fertilizer are a byproduct of farming, not a product that mysteriously appears on store shelves. Full automation including automated manufacture and maintenance of the machines may look "far fetched" in 2014, but so much that is common today was beyond far fetched in 1914.
I don't see an inherent limit on "the rise of the machines" the way there is a limit on getting product into stores, or vehicles on the road, or in the air. The technology continues to be developed to make existing processes more efficient and profitable, it has strong backing and little to restrict its development.
There are, of course, a few bad paths this can take, Skynet for one, and monopoly human control of the machines for another. There are inherent limits to energy and food production, and therefore population. Strikes and labor disputes and power struggles can be put down with appeasement (providing all the food, shelter and entertainment the population needs), but only up to a certain population density. I'm afraid we may already have too many people on this planet for a long-term (millenia) sustainability.
Dangle some kind of carrot to the investors where they see a potential 100x ROI within 5 years, the money will pour in.
Open ROS isn't the impediment, lockout from the infrastructure is. Drones can't fly, automated vehicles can't use the road, and anything that moves "by itself" makes its owner liable for death and/or dismemberment of any depressed psycho that throws themselves infront of the machine.
More "open" cultures (like Australia, surprisingly) are going to eat the U.S.'s lunch by letting their domestic drone (and other robotics) developers practice without huge bureaucratic roadblocks.
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Yeah, I rarely use the /sarcasm tag, but it seemed necessary this time...
What I'm saying is that there are large portions of society that are essentially parasitic, feeding off of conflict and misery that could be avoided, but rather than fix the root cause problem, they band-aid it and profit. They have entrenched interests and will rigorously oppose anything that might fix the root cause problems, because that would put them out of a living - and for the people who say they could do something else... think, after you've built a 20+ year career in a field, if that field is suddenly made irrelevant by a structural change to society that eliminates the problem you have been salving for decades, would you really want to start over as best you can in "a related industry" - alongside all your displaced comrades who are flooding the market? You might do better starting over with "you want fries with that?"
So, in this case, sure credit card numbers could be harder to steal, but how many "honest, hardworking" people would that hurt? In a related topic, over half of credit defaults could be avoided by denying credit to the 1% least creditworthy applicants - but that will never happen because those are the people that banks make most of their profits from.
To me, a huge root cause of this crony capitalism is the creation of laws by lawyers. If we passed a law today that any person who sits for a bar exam, in any state or country, from January 1, 2015 forward shall ever-after be barred from holding public office, federal, state or local, in any legislative or executive capacity (let them be Judges), and also barred from lobbying for legislative change in any capacity - it's not as complete or perfect a solution as taking them all out and killing them tomorrow, but, I'd wager that by 2115, we would have significant structural improvements in the laws, tax codes, and many other aspects of society that have been jury-rigged by the lawyers to serve their own self-interests. Call it juris-legislative separation - the modern extension of separation of church and state.
I know a high level engineer / manager in this State's largest electric utility who had a serious MJ usage habit, for decades, and he was more competent in his job than most. The main problem he had was keeping the habit hidden from people who didn't approve of it.
I was referring to being imprisoned for LSD usage. You, sir, have obviously been very discrete and careful for the past 16 years (assuming your post is truthful), but in certain states, based on your words, the local sheriff could order a posse to your house, strip you away from your job and family and have you sent to prison for many years - and the Judge would be powerless to help you, regardless of your positive standing in the community.
I'd hardly call that "safe."
I know more than one car owner who: a) did no harm to anyone, nor anything besides their vehicle and a tree, and b) were very happy to NOT have 911 called when their airbag deployed, and c) were not doing anything illegal, immoral or unethical at the time.
My first (and only) one car accident was very similar, I would have been 100% better off to push the vehicle to a side street and call a tow-truck, but, silly 16 year old me, I called the highway patrol.
I could also have said "safe possession limit."
The point being, society's laws make the drug dangerous, regardless of the physical / biological danger of the drug.
There is never certainty for causation, only coincidence in correlation - collect enough coincidences and even critics concede and concur.
Climate deniers aren't the only ones who cherry-pick "scientific studies" for publicity campaigns.
There certainly wasn't a "safe use level" of LSD - just ask the Dead Heads serving mandatory minimum sentences.
But, is it the THC, or the lack of social support and constant surreptitious activity required to obtain and use pot that leads to earlier onset?
Put another way, would the same thing have been found in a study of alcohol use during prohibition? Or, will the same study replicated today in Colorado, have different findings?
Perhaps they became paranoid because "the man" was really out to get them.
Take a look around, what's the ratio of homeland security and related support personnel to actual terrorists?
In the 1930's we could build parks and clean up highways to get people working...
Fraud investigators, prosecution and defense attorneys, security firms, etc. don't want the disruption of having their life-long careers de-valued. They're honest, hardworking people, why should they be hurt? The defrauded are (mostly) made whole by the operation of the system, the "guilty" are punished - why should that change? /sarcasm
1 million lawyers at the bottom of the ocean is only a good start, but I doubt I'll ever see the day we even put 100,000 lawyers out of work with a piece of legislation.
I don't actually think the NSA was "off base" but I do think they were/are "out of control" - meaning: I don't necessarily disagree with what they did, but I do disagree with them doing it without the oversight and control that is supposed to be in place.
If the NSA was transparent with the American people about what they are doing, and the American people could get behind the idea that it is a necessary and good thing to protect their self interests, then I support them going forward and collect all the data they can and using it to stop the real bad things from happening.
What everybody is worried about is "losing their privacy" so that all the laws that they break on a regular basis might get enforced on them. Right now I'm thinking of a particular gentleman who has never been arrested, has all his concealed carry permits and has weaponized all his vehicles and home as permitted by law, and also happens to drive while drinking from open containers that often contain alcohol. He's never been written up for anything worse than speeding, but if his privacy were breached, he might be prosecuted, jailed, and even lose his right to bear arms (which might bother him more than jail, to hear him talk about it.) With his privacy in-place, he can continue to be respectable and "never arrested" and look down his nose at those who have been arrested and jailed. There are many, many other ways people break the law every day that could be exposed by a shift in "privacy" and significantly change their future liberty.
The problem with the NSA doing what they did out of the chain of command is that they will come into possession of information that is potentially very valuable in the form of blackmail. I'm not saying that this did happen, but if it goes on long enough, it will, eventually, be determined, by the agency "out of control," that - in the name of national security - some people might need to be coerced to do something they might not do without the threat of releasing certain information. That kind of protection, I do not want.
Sounds right to me... if you want to go all conspiracy theory on it, they may have known about the earlier breaches which would have made them look really bad and engineered the last one as a sort of shock and awe pity PR move to cover their incompetence.
Having the police stake out a gas station for several hours will cost more than the company is losing in theft.
If you really want to lose money, catch those two criminals, prosecute them and put them in jail for 5 years - now you've cost the taxpayers $1M+.
Fraud is a business, billions are made annually by people who protect, prosecute and defend against fraud.
If you suddenly cut fraud by 50%, lots of honest people would be hurt.
I interviewed at a "secure credit card transaction software" company, they were struggling to find competent programmers, no surprise since they pay their top guy 1/2 of what I make as a medical device software engineer. I doubt they are all such shoe-string operations, but as it is, they struggle to do things like validate billing zip codes. Have you ever miskeyed your zip code at a POS? I have a few times, sometimes it rejects the transaction, sometimes not.
Upgrade of the infrastructure to work on secure keys kept in tamper _resistant_ chips on the cards, while entirely possible, even simple, from a technical perspective, would involve the creation of thousands of new jobs, and destruction of thousands more. it becomes a political issue, and is unlikely to move forward without national level political (legislative) backing / mandate. That will take time - decades, unless real harm comes to enough people who matter to the legislators. It doesn't help that the legislators can understand how the current system works, and probably don't understand how a secure key is actually better.
The plastic number embossed on the card is a mimic of the routing and account numbers printed on the face of paper checks - it's an honor system, enforced by threat of criminal punishment. It's impressive how well it works with the massive international use of credit cards to transfer money.
There have been scofflaws since the days of hanging pickpockets, and there will continue to be even after credit cards become more technically secure.
Starting with OBDII you should be a little suspicious. OBDIII was outright intrusive and got blocked, but non-standard monitoring has proliferated since then.
What you should be vigilant for are mandatory updating requirements, either buyback of "the old clunkers", or mandatory installation of "safety and environmental monitoring devices." If you think that won't happen, look at trends in personal liberty over the last 20 years, and remind your elected representatives what you want, and don't want, frequently.
I made a "hex editor" back in the '90s that worked with terminal commands like that for color, position, etc.
Worked great.
Only if you had the right terminal driver running.
Least portable thing I've ever put that much work into.
Can you say "Epic Troll"?
Mission accomplished.
If it's in the standard, it should (slowly) become available on any capable platform.
Write once, run anywhere? Qt doesn't get out much beyond Win/Lin/Mac.
I believe the magnets could be called a "rare commodity" - something that we should probably be buying from overseas in bulk to help keep it expensive for everyone else. There are U.S. sources, but why use up those when you can reduce other countries' supply instead?
I don't know how true this is/was, but I read a story about the Soviets sourcing natural gas pumping systems from the U.S. (potentially stealing, not sure...) anyway, U.S. intelligence got wind of it and planted malicious control software in the systems - made a big, expensive boom.
This was "Cold War" stuff, we have too much active trade with China to be doing stuff to actively hurt them.
China went to strong population control in 1978, most other non-African countries seem to be achieving a measure of growth reduction without strong direct policies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_control
If (when?) the machines construct and service themselves, they can mine the raw materials, build the roads, and the solar cells / wind farms / hydro dams, and the houses. Seeds and (sustainable) fertilizer are a byproduct of farming, not a product that mysteriously appears on store shelves. Full automation including automated manufacture and maintenance of the machines may look "far fetched" in 2014, but so much that is common today was beyond far fetched in 1914.
I don't see an inherent limit on "the rise of the machines" the way there is a limit on getting product into stores, or vehicles on the road, or in the air. The technology continues to be developed to make existing processes more efficient and profitable, it has strong backing and little to restrict its development.
There are, of course, a few bad paths this can take, Skynet for one, and monopoly human control of the machines for another. There are inherent limits to energy and food production, and therefore population. Strikes and labor disputes and power struggles can be put down with appeasement (providing all the food, shelter and entertainment the population needs), but only up to a certain population density. I'm afraid we may already have too many people on this planet for a long-term (millenia) sustainability.
Lack of funding is the root cause.
Dangle some kind of carrot to the investors where they see a potential 100x ROI within 5 years, the money will pour in.
Open ROS isn't the impediment, lockout from the infrastructure is. Drones can't fly, automated vehicles can't use the road, and anything that moves "by itself" makes its owner liable for death and/or dismemberment of any depressed psycho that throws themselves infront of the machine.
More "open" cultures (like Australia, surprisingly) are going to eat the U.S.'s lunch by letting their domestic drone (and other robotics) developers practice without huge bureaucratic roadblocks.