I have actually considered the truecrypt container backup but I was unclear that Backblaze supported incremental backups. I was under the impression that each time a file is backed up the entire file is re-uploaded. Is a diff process used instead rather than re-uploading 1Gb every time a text file within the truecrypt container is changed? How do you handle the issue that many truecrypt volumes do not update their access and modified timestamps on files to be aware that changes have been made?
Thanks for all the responses to this post. While your drive observations are perhaps unique to your setup they still have information to offer the rest of us.
Exactly so! Green Day claims to be so socially progressive but here they are waiting to collect $80,000 for one song from a mother of four. What a bunch of hypocrites. Unless someone challenges them on this nothing is going to happen. Does anyone know of a way to directly impact these bands?
I suggest flooding their myspace pages with questions about why they are supporting this decision as well as the broader RIAA actions (who they have actively supported). (If they aren't vocally against it, they they are for it)
How about anything else? Something more public? Maybe trying to get a major media outlet to interview these bands about this decision? They are a bunch of cowards hiding behind the RIAA; the human faces behind the corporate mask. Our agressive response to this really should be in raising ire against these bands. Someone please tell me that I'm not hopelessly naive in thinking these bands can't possibly want actions like this to continue.
No, a tax credit reduces your total tax burden off the top, and if it is more than your total tax burden then you DO get that cash back. The catch is that you have to have spent at least the same amount on college that year, so what's happening is that college becomes free for the first $4,000 annually if you are willing to do some community service in exchange. I would have been doing it if I'd had the opportunity.
Total BS! Again, look at all the comments here. Women start disrespecting their husbands exactly because of this "I'm helpless you do it" attitude. Think about it, once kids come along, that helpless husband is just in the way and a source of huge frustration. Here's a tip:
Develop a hard spine to go along with that other occasionally rigid member and she'll love you much more for it.
Besides, some women LIKE for you to pick it out. My wife is thrilled with her ring many years after I picked it out for her, precisely because I did pick it out for her.
Stay away from those biznatches who want to control every aspect of life, you will be living through a spineless hell for the rest of yours if you marry one. (sorry slashdotters, it sounds like a lot of you are stuck in these situations)
And yet, while I have never ever had any trouble whatsoever from insertion of windows CD to complete functional install (hardware failures aside). I still have yet to successfully install a linux distro without at least a week's worth of reading FAQ's, tweaking, re-installations, and overall total frustration, starting with Redhat 6 in '99 right up to Gutsy a few months ago.
The philosohpy behind linux doesn't seem to be capable of building a unified solution which will work in all cases because linux is as much an ideology as it is an engineering triumph, and all too often ideology trumps both functionality and utility. Orthodoxy doth not a bridge make. Thankfully Ubuntu seems to understand this model more and more, but nobody really has embraced the idea that to be truely functional Linux must abandon dogma for practicality.
Sorry dude, very long day and I sucumbed to internet asshole syndrome. Seriously, sorry. I stand very corrected.
Regards cryptography, yeah I did botch that point regarding obscurity, and I wasn't aware of the specific protocols followed at a CA. But here's the thing: it wouldn't be CA's doing this, it would be medical device firms for whom security is a "feature". And instead of revoking a CA key (which I understand would cause a large degree of chaos, but I would, perhaps wrongly, assume there is a mechanism for this as well?) you get to dig these pacemakers out of peoples bodies and I guaranty you that some of them will die as a result.
Regarding, "hard to obtain cards", I mean that if you want to make it such that only a few people can use them, they must by definition be hard to obtain. Not letting the surgeon into the OR because he forgot his ID is moronic, everyone knows him, but not so with a security ID, bringing huge risks for not carrying it with you. Suffice to say that leaving it at the hospital would not be a tenable solution for any physician who will be ID'd by this thing. If you lose it when your wallet gets stolen, it cannot be revoked in any meaningful way. So ultimately, this security ID is just a barrier to access and ID for pointing fingers.
Since these cards could be trivially stolen and are unrevokable from the standpoint of an implanted device, lets forget the pointing fingers part, since they cannot guarantee identy.
Now this whole thing is just a barrier to access via key exchange. Every manufacturer will have a different key as well as interogation protocols, which alone constitute a large barrier to attack but are closer akin to DRM.
So, today's attacker could either: a) reverse engineer the whole thing from scratch and try to implement that at remote distances via observing an interogator and device interacting b) reverse engineer the interrogator and simply modify its wireless mechanisms to work over high power over longer distances.
If I was an attacker I would choose b.
This schema doesn't change at all once public key crypto has entered the fray. You still need to RE the interrogator communication path, but now the interrogator requires you to insert your ID card. Simple: just steal any cardiologists ID card, probably at the same time that you steal his interrogator. You're already killing your target, one more surely couldn't hurt. Done. The only change between yesterday and today is that now a cardiologist is dead (or just pickpocketed) too.
And there is the critical assumption: that it is possible to meaningfully change the internal state of a pacemaker/defibrilator from a distance. I would posit, perhaps wrongly, that it would be VERY difficult to send a signal remotely into a pacemaker. Interrogatogators must be placed directly on the chest since the pacemakers are so insensitive, and my understanding is that most pacemakers actually reqire the physical presence of a small magnet in a very specific location on the patient's chest (not the deactivation magnet mind you) to even turn on their reciever, thus any attacker would have to place a magnet on the victim's chest for about a minute or two while this very low bandwidth communication is going on from 200' away. Is it starting to sound silly yet?
If your goal as a troublemaker is to disable pacemakers as an act of mass terrorism, there are much easier ways than this, so that issue is not really a concern. If your goal is to take out a specific target, ok, maybe, but just putting in the authorization magnet as above should be more than enough to stop that sort of attack. Even if communications could be perfectly secured, think that someone willing to put this much effort into killing you will very easily find another way to do it if they were denied this one.
Thus, from a cost-benifit or number-needed-to-treat point of view encrypting these communications gets horribly low marks. From the added cost of implementation and key maintenance t
You sir, are a moron.
You suggest:
1) Requiring doctors to carry smart cards with encryption data
2) Requiring doctors to keep said cards with "the morphine" (showing you have never seen how a hospital manages secure resources)
3) Said hideously rare and necessarily hard to obtain cards would be required to save a life in dire emergent situations.
This shows:
1) You have never seen how an emergency room or hospital inpatient floor works.
2) You have no idea how a pacemaker interrogator works.
Furthermore, you suggest:
1) A hideously complex encryption system based on ONE point of weakness: the manufacture's private key.
2) You KNOW this is a weak point by your suggestion of "armed guards" (where should they be? in yur hard drivez guardin' your bites?)
Therefore:
1) You have suggested a security by obscurity scheme which even the RIAA is learning just doesn't work.
2) You have definitively solved a "hard" problem in a field of experience vastly different from your own by applying your specific brand of expertise without any form of intellectual humility.
Which shows:
You're a slashdotter alright.
I also stipulate:
Due to your heinous disregard of human life in your brash search for security, and disregard of other peoples input on this forum, as priorly asserted: You sir, are a moron.
Leave no evidence? These things have year long log files of everything they do and is done to them.
The FIRST thing a medical examiner would do is interrogate the pacemaker and find out why it stopped. This technique is closer to a sniper rifle: everybody would know the guy got murdered, they just wouldn't know who did it.
In the US we don't have a national ID system, and we didn't in 1938 either. But that didn't stop the Japanese internment. Nor did it stop the government from rapidly creating a monstrosity of a system which indexed all possible threats to the government living on American soil from 1939 to 1978.
That was in 1938 when everything was still pen and paper and the government couldn't just pressure any given large corporation for their database of information. Its really silly to assume that something like that couldn't easily happen today, if its not already happening. Yes, having a federal unique identifier for everyone would make illegal persecution easier, but it would not make it much easier. At most it would hasten any coming storm by a matter of a few days, and by that point the people are either going to rise up or just take it anyways.
So bring on my national ID: I'd love to have my life's history of medical records easily accessed and quickly prove that I'm an American citizen at the airport. Just make the central database contain only my index number, name, birthday and biometric verification data (fingerprint, signature, retina, etc, with allowances to grow with innovation), but absolutely nothing else, not even gender. Then let every branch of federal and state government keep its own database using my index number as the indexing key. That alone ought to keep enough confusion in the system to kneecap any clandestine manhunts to only what is going on today. Then let there also be thick legislated walls of non-interoperability between those databases and mandated non-public access with both carrying penalties of capital treason for misuse for everyone involved from bottom to top. Finally let every citizen be able to fully view and even challenge their own entries from every branch of government. Ideally I would like to see this implemented in the form of a constitutional amendment so that any given congress can't tinker with the system just because their party got majority this year, but that may be overboard.
Corportate abuses can easily be fixed with legislation, i.e.: criminally enforced non-descrimination based on health records with extremely stiff penalties (say $5 mil + annual inflation per abuse).
My point is simply this: Every single government on this planet is capable of massive abuses. It doesn't matter what tools are available to it, the abuses will happen if they are allowed to happen. Thus, for every citizen, the price of liberty truly is eternal vigilance.
Yeah, its amazing that people with no background in a given field can speak 'authoratatively' and with zero humility regarding subjects that even best of the field have no clear answers.
As you say, this is slashdot, but I think its pretty common in the general population as well. I have a good friend that is bossing around her child's psychiatrist about which meds her kid should be on. She doesn't trust his judgement at all, and she regularly tweaks his polypharmacy for obtuse reasons. Unfortunately, I could fit all of her factual information about pharmacology onto a postit note, and most likely her efforts will be detrimental to her child. You see this over and over.
My personal feeling that that its so easy to get snippets of expert information on the internet that people then feel themselves to be 'experts'. At least in the medical realm, wikipedia, et. al., contains very little in terms of balancing information, controversies, or stylistic technique. Whats more the subjects are so vast its simply not possible to. There is a reason that anybody treating patients will have trained in medicine for a minimum of 7 years.
I think its an American cultural phenonomon: most people just don't trust experts, they only trust themselves. Its why people are afraid to fly when they're more likely to die in a car. Its why we don't have nuclear power but the French and Japanese rely on it. My personal feeling is that its a secondary consequense of "American Individualism". But hey, I'm no expert.
Perhaps you could try being intellectually honest. That is unless your anti-religious zeal has blinded you to the level of intolerance and hatred you've been spewing around this article with your many posts.
Of course atheism is a religion, it is a system of belief about the supernatural nature (or lack there of) of this universe. It's the null religion. Do you believe that zero is not a number? Or perhaps that a null pointer isn't a pointer at all? Come on now. If it isn't a relgion is it a taco? I think it fits the former definition better.
I believe the GP post was referring to "new" in the sense that many scientists today ascribe to atheism, which distinctly wasn't the case 200 years ago, not that atheism is a brilliant new construction of the modern mind.
Counting by machine is just as falible as human counting, simply because you have humans feeding the machine. Also, there is blood. Everywhere. Especially in big surgeries. Blood gets in the way of eyeballs seeing things, I'm fairly certain that this would hold true for a UPC scanner.
I would trust a mechanical engineer to count the number of widgets my factory produced per $ or per hour. I would trust a statistician to count the number of republicans in california. I would trust a child to count the number of envelopes in the mailbox. I would trust a pathologist to count the number of tumor cells in a blood sample.
Do you see how "counting" can be a specialized task? What do you do? Are you a programmer? For goodness sake, all you have to do is write little letters on the screen, how can you not get that right? Even a 2 year old can do that? Maybe we should hire people in africa to count the number of semicolons you used. Does that make sense to you? Neither does having a machine in the operating room to count sponges. End of story.
Well, the going rate for an emergent appendectomy (patient will likely die without surgery) is about $200.00 to $400.00, less taxes, in take home pay for the surgeon, who is in all likelyhood staying up all night that night so he or she can save a few lives. Now lets say that, sadly enough, appendix has already burst by the time the patient is in the operating room, and the patient ends up dying. Even if nothing was done wrong, the surgeon could be on the recieving end of a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
Does that seem equitable? Thats like saying BestBuy sold you a lottery ticket that you didn't win, so you get to keep their store and all the merchandise therein. How is that fair?
What's more, The patient may be charged a huge wad of cash, but the above figure is all the surgeon is going to see. But strangely, only the surgeon will be held liable for damages in court.
You tell me, does that make any sense to you? That's why we call it a messed up tort system.
How about crappy internet support? Running the Gutsy LiveCD I couldn't download faster than 4kb/sec off of a connection I am regularly able to get over 1200kb/sec with XP. Mind you this isn't wireless, this is a wired connection. I couldn't manage to update the system in less than 4 hours, so I gave up. Appearantly this is a "quirk" in IPv6 implementation that firefox and everything else screw up, so the Ubuntu folks don't feel that its their problem, rather it is a problem with virtually every piece of software that runs on Gutsy. At least that's my understanding. Either way, I couln't get it working at all.
So I guess Kodak, Ford, Intel, etc. even in their humble beginnings were Evil simply because they didn't share their basic research? Wrong.
Repeat after me: Corporations != Academia Corporations != Academia
Corporations, who put their own $$$ on the line to inovate must realize a profit to recoup research costs at the bare minimum.
When You put down the green to finance farming millions of acres you can do whatever you want with the research. Heaven help you if you took out a loan for that money and then give away your research.
Bullshit. If organ donation is mandatory then all I have to do is find somebody that is a good match for me and kill him. If I'm at the top of the list I win and so do several others. Even if I go to jail for a while, at least I'll be alive. So help me, if that world comes about I hope you and the people who promote it are the first ones against the wall.
Its all well and good to hold your own opinions but have a fucking heart. Having a loved one die is #3 on the list of most stressful things in this life. Do you know what #1 is? Having to choosing to remove a loved one from life support, specifically when its not clear cut. And a significant portion of the population feel that way about organ donation. You win the most callous jackass of the month prize. (BTW - having a spouse commit suicide is #2. These ranks are from a peer reviewed medical ethics journal circa 1992. Sorry, I don't recall the exact reference.)
There are some people who feel that the body is perfectly equivalent to the person who just resided in it. For them stealing the person's organs is like stealing their soul. Would you like me to steal your mom's soul? How about just a piece? If you really are just a materialist then how about 1 cubic inch of her still living brain, your choice which cubic inch. (sorry to be so graphic but the point must be made)
Truly, organ donation is a miracle of modern science and the population needs to be educated about it, but it must always be a choice. The Red Cross really messed up for this guy, he should not have been pressured and badgered, and he certainly should not have to defend his choice to people like you. In an ideal world the choice of what to do with your remaining highly organized hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen after the ineffable sweet glory of consciousness has faded should be up to you. But in a world where death does not ordain to notify us in advance that is not always possible. Forcing a loved one who is in the most acute stages of grief to voluntarily commit an act of unspeakable instinctual horror isn't kind or fair, but it is often a necessary thing and so should be undertaken with exquisite care and sensitivity.
Refusing organ donation is distinctly not tantamout to murder. If it is for you then I hope to whatever you believe in that you donate blood every 6 weeks or platelets every 2 weeks, sperm/ova at every chance you get and are registered at the National Marrow Donor Program http://www.marrow.org/ at the very least. After all its just spare biological material you're not going to use, right?
I can barely get my camera to sync with my computer with a wire, as it is I just yank the SD. Good luck getting software to make it wireless now.
If someone is willing to violate my personal space and physically take my stuff, I might suggest stalking my filing cabinet instead.
It never moves and has way more juicy data than my latest vacation photos and lunch planning.
Holy crap dude, you just won the asshat of the year prize. Do you have any idea of the magnitude, delicacy, or importance of the data you're talking about? To say nothing of the needed precision when scanning.
"I scanzord 90 filing cabinets of paper into teh computerz"
You know what, I used to launch model rockets. Its really easy to make stuff go up. Just buy the kit, attach a little engine and off it goes. $30 easy! Freakin NASA I bet they're spending all of our tax dollars on pr0n.
"cheapish 20megapixel camera" - Ever hear of the Hubble? I hear people like it for more than those weird nebulae pictures. I guess we should have just given one of those astronuts a Nikkon and let him go to town. Much cheaper.
And I guess we should use lossy compression, its just empty space out there right? I bet we could get the infinite sky down to a couple hundred GB. (JPEG, its for astronomy too!)
Truely he was the best of the best. An incredible educator who has impacted so many of our lives in so many ways. Between his TV show and "Mr. Wizard's Supermarket Sience" book he gave me my first tastes of just how amazing the natural universe world really is and how much we don't know.
For so many of us he really was an inspiration. For a long time I was thinking "what would Mr. Wizard do.":-)
Politicans can make laws, presidents can declare war, but the most powerful are the educators who shape our children. Truely Don Herbert was among the finest and most influential that I have ever had the pleasure of learning from.
Favorite Demonstations: Surface Tension (putting his hand into an aquarium full of water and having it come out dry), Chain Reaction Mouse Traps, Hot & Cold water sensory equilibration (hand in hot water to warm = feels cold, hand in cold water to same warm = feels hot), burning sugar with an oxidizer, black and silver painted cans crushed by sunlight, cooking a steak with the waste heat from a cars engine.
My mom's least favorite: sucking an egg into a jar with a match (I always ended up accidentally dropping the egg on the floor), Baking soda + vinegar rocket,
To the family of Mr. Herbert: truely you do not grieve his passing alone.
Sony, who has in part championed DRM and even installed rootkits to protect their IP now blatantly appropriates someone else's without even so much as a letter asking permission?! Even if you don't belive in copyrights of likeness, Sony clearly does.
I'd love to used Linux as a desktop. I just need a little help.
I even enjoy spending time tweaking my desktop computer, from back in the days when memory came in 16k chips, IRQs had to be tediously managed, and squeezing every drop out of 640k was fun. But try as I might I have yet to get a stable, visually appealing, or useful version of linux on any of my previous 3 computers. Why? Because I can't even get a minimally functional system running, and give up before I get to the tweaking stage.
Major problems I encountered which I spend more than 1/2 an hour working on each: picking a distro, much harder than you think for the non-initiate. KDE vs Gnome? Utterly crappy (ie Mac 6) video support without special do-it-get-it-complile-it yourself drivers. Can't install video drivers, I didn't install gcc (silly me). Can't install video drivers, I'm missing some contingencies. Can't install video drivers, I didn't install the source code for the kernel (silly me). Multiple conflicting versions of drivers and conflicting advice about which one to use. Multiple conflicting instructions on how to install said video drivers. Video driver installer has reams of text output, some of which are error messages. Based on more advice, appearantly these error messages may or may not be normal and may or may not be why I never got good video output. My sound card stopped working. I still don't know why.
Valuing my time at a paltry $50 an hour, I could have easily bought a newer better system with WinXP on it and then taken my wife out to dinner with the remainder.
If anyone can recommend a distro that will run, out-of-box, on my Dell e1505 with an ATI x1400 graphics card and Creative Audigy soundcard, then I promise you I will excitedly hunt it down and intall it, I really do want to switch to linux, the visuals I've seen other users have is incredible.
Unfortunately the fact that I have to ask such a question really shows how linux in general is completly unprepared for the desktop market. Prove me wrong and recommend a distro.
PS - please, no berating, calling-of-noob'ing, or general fun making at my expense. I really honestly do want help, and Linux people have tried to help me in these ways before. (they haven't proven helpful yet)
Slashdot Mirror
I have actually considered the truecrypt container backup but I was unclear that Backblaze supported incremental backups. I was under the impression that each time a file is backed up the entire file is re-uploaded. Is a diff process used instead rather than re-uploading 1Gb every time a text file within the truecrypt container is changed? How do you handle the issue that many truecrypt volumes do not update their access and modified timestamps on files to be aware that changes have been made?
Thanks for all the responses to this post. While your drive observations are perhaps unique to your setup they still have information to offer the rest of us.
Exactly so! Green Day claims to be so socially progressive but here they are waiting to collect $80,000 for one song from a mother of four. What a bunch of hypocrites. Unless someone challenges them on this nothing is going to happen. Does anyone know of a way to directly impact these bands?
I suggest flooding their myspace pages with questions about why they are supporting this decision as well as the broader RIAA actions (who they have actively supported). (If they aren't vocally against it, they they are for it)
How about anything else? Something more public? Maybe trying to get a major media outlet to interview these bands about this decision? They are a bunch of cowards hiding behind the RIAA; the human faces behind the corporate mask. Our agressive response to this really should be in raising ire against these bands. Someone please tell me that I'm not hopelessly naive in thinking these bands can't possibly want actions like this to continue.
No, a tax credit reduces your total tax burden off the top, and if it is more than your total tax burden then you DO get that cash back. The catch is that you have to have spent at least the same amount on college that year, so what's happening is that college becomes free for the first $4,000 annually if you are willing to do some community service in exchange. I would have been doing it if I'd had the opportunity.
Total BS! Again, look at all the comments here. Women start disrespecting their husbands exactly because of this "I'm helpless you do it" attitude. Think about it, once kids come along, that helpless husband is just in the way and a source of huge frustration. Here's a tip:
Develop a hard spine to go along with that other occasionally rigid member and she'll love you much more for it.
Besides, some women LIKE for you to pick it out. My wife is thrilled with her ring many years after I picked it out for her, precisely because I did pick it out for her.
Stay away from those biznatches who want to control every aspect of life, you will be living through a spineless hell for the rest of yours if you marry one. (sorry slashdotters, it sounds like a lot of you are stuck in these situations)
And yet, while I have never ever had any trouble whatsoever from insertion of windows CD to complete functional install (hardware failures aside).
I still have yet to successfully install a linux distro without at least a week's worth of reading FAQ's, tweaking, re-installations, and overall total frustration, starting with Redhat 6 in '99 right up to Gutsy a few months ago.
The philosohpy behind linux doesn't seem to be capable of building a unified solution which will work in all cases because linux is as much an ideology as it is an engineering triumph, and all too often ideology trumps both functionality and utility. Orthodoxy doth not a bridge make. Thankfully Ubuntu seems to understand this model more and more, but nobody really has embraced the idea that to be truely functional Linux must abandon dogma for practicality.
Sorry dude, very long day and I sucumbed to internet asshole syndrome. Seriously, sorry. I stand very corrected.
Regards cryptography, yeah I did botch that point regarding obscurity, and I wasn't aware of the specific protocols followed at a CA. But here's the thing: it wouldn't be CA's doing this, it would be medical device firms for whom security is a "feature". And instead of revoking a CA key (which I understand would cause a large degree of chaos, but I would, perhaps wrongly, assume there is a mechanism for this as well?) you get to dig these pacemakers out of peoples bodies and I guaranty you that some of them will die as a result.
Regarding, "hard to obtain cards", I mean that if you want to make it such that only a few people can use them, they must by definition be hard to obtain. Not letting the surgeon into the OR because he forgot his ID is moronic, everyone knows him, but not so with a security ID, bringing huge risks for not carrying it with you. Suffice to say that leaving it at the hospital would not be a tenable solution for any physician who will be ID'd by this thing. If you lose it when your wallet gets stolen, it cannot be revoked in any meaningful way. So ultimately, this security ID is just a barrier to access and ID for pointing fingers.
Since these cards could be trivially stolen and are unrevokable from the standpoint of an implanted device, lets forget the pointing fingers part, since they cannot guarantee identy.
Now this whole thing is just a barrier to access via key exchange. Every manufacturer will have a different key as well as interogation protocols, which alone constitute a large barrier to attack but are closer akin to DRM.
So, today's attacker could either:
a) reverse engineer the whole thing from scratch and try to implement that at remote distances via observing an interogator and device interacting
b) reverse engineer the interrogator and simply modify its wireless mechanisms to work over high power over longer distances.
If I was an attacker I would choose b.
This schema doesn't change at all once public key crypto has entered the fray. You still need to RE the interrogator communication path, but now the interrogator requires you to insert your ID card. Simple: just steal any cardiologists ID card, probably at the same time that you steal his interrogator. You're already killing your target, one more surely couldn't hurt. Done. The only change between yesterday and today is that now a cardiologist is dead (or just pickpocketed) too.
And there is the critical assumption: that it is possible to meaningfully change the internal state of a pacemaker/defibrilator from a distance. I would posit, perhaps wrongly, that it would be VERY difficult to send a signal remotely into a pacemaker. Interrogatogators must be placed directly on the chest since the pacemakers are so insensitive, and my understanding is that most pacemakers actually reqire the physical presence of a small magnet in a very specific location on the patient's chest (not the deactivation magnet mind you) to even turn on their reciever, thus any attacker would have to place a magnet on the victim's chest for about a minute or two while this very low bandwidth communication is going on from 200' away. Is it starting to sound silly yet?
If your goal as a troublemaker is to disable pacemakers as an act of mass terrorism, there are much easier ways than this, so that issue is not really a concern. If your goal is to take out a specific target, ok, maybe, but just putting in the authorization magnet as above should be more than enough to stop that sort of attack. Even if communications could be perfectly secured, think that someone willing to put this much effort into killing you will very easily find another way to do it if they were denied this one.
Thus, from a cost-benifit or number-needed-to-treat point of view encrypting these communications gets horribly low marks. From the added cost of implementation and key maintenance t
You sir, are a moron. You suggest: 1) Requiring doctors to carry smart cards with encryption data 2) Requiring doctors to keep said cards with "the morphine" (showing you have never seen how a hospital manages secure resources) 3) Said hideously rare and necessarily hard to obtain cards would be required to save a life in dire emergent situations. This shows: 1) You have never seen how an emergency room or hospital inpatient floor works. 2) You have no idea how a pacemaker interrogator works. Furthermore, you suggest: 1) A hideously complex encryption system based on ONE point of weakness: the manufacture's private key. 2) You KNOW this is a weak point by your suggestion of "armed guards" (where should they be? in yur hard drivez guardin' your bites?) Therefore: 1) You have suggested a security by obscurity scheme which even the RIAA is learning just doesn't work. 2) You have definitively solved a "hard" problem in a field of experience vastly different from your own by applying your specific brand of expertise without any form of intellectual humility. Which shows: You're a slashdotter alright. I also stipulate: Due to your heinous disregard of human life in your brash search for security, and disregard of other peoples input on this forum, as priorly asserted: You sir, are a moron.
Leave no evidence? These things have year long log files of everything they do and is done to them.
The FIRST thing a medical examiner would do is interrogate the pacemaker and find out why it stopped. This technique is closer to a sniper rifle: everybody would know the guy got murdered, they just wouldn't know who did it.
In the US we don't have a national ID system, and we didn't in 1938 either. But that didn't stop the Japanese internment. Nor did it stop the government from rapidly creating a monstrosity of a system which indexed all possible threats to the government living on American soil from 1939 to 1978.
That was in 1938 when everything was still pen and paper and the government couldn't just pressure any given large corporation for their database of information. Its really silly to assume that something like that couldn't easily happen today, if its not already happening. Yes, having a federal unique identifier for everyone would make illegal persecution easier, but it would not make it much easier. At most it would hasten any coming storm by a matter of a few days, and by that point the people are either going to rise up or just take it anyways.
So bring on my national ID: I'd love to have my life's history of medical records easily accessed and quickly prove that I'm an American citizen at the airport. Just make the central database contain only my index number, name, birthday and biometric verification data (fingerprint, signature, retina, etc, with allowances to grow with innovation), but absolutely nothing else, not even gender. Then let every branch of federal and state government keep its own database using my index number as the indexing key. That alone ought to keep enough confusion in the system to kneecap any clandestine manhunts to only what is going on today. Then let there also be thick legislated walls of non-interoperability between those databases and mandated non-public access with both carrying penalties of capital treason for misuse for everyone involved from bottom to top. Finally let every citizen be able to fully view and even challenge their own entries from every branch of government. Ideally I would like to see this implemented in the form of a constitutional amendment so that any given congress can't tinker with the system just because their party got majority this year, but that may be overboard.
Corportate abuses can easily be fixed with legislation, i.e.: criminally enforced non-descrimination based on health records with extremely stiff penalties (say $5 mil + annual inflation per abuse).
My point is simply this: Every single government on this planet is capable of massive abuses. It doesn't matter what tools are available to it, the abuses will happen if they are allowed to happen. Thus, for every citizen, the price of liberty truly is eternal vigilance.
Yeah, its amazing that people with no background in a given field can speak 'authoratatively' and with zero humility regarding subjects that even best of the field have no clear answers.
As you say, this is slashdot, but I think its pretty common in the general population as well. I have a good friend that is bossing around her child's psychiatrist about which meds her kid should be on. She doesn't trust his judgement at all, and she regularly tweaks his polypharmacy for obtuse reasons. Unfortunately, I could fit all of her factual information about pharmacology onto a postit note, and most likely her efforts will be detrimental to her child. You see this over and over.
My personal feeling that that its so easy to get snippets of expert information on the internet that people then feel themselves to be 'experts'. At least in the medical realm, wikipedia, et. al., contains very little in terms of balancing information, controversies, or stylistic technique. Whats more the subjects are so vast its simply not possible to. There is a reason that anybody treating patients will have trained in medicine for a minimum of 7 years.
I think its an American cultural phenonomon: most people just don't trust experts, they only trust themselves. Its why people are afraid to fly when they're more likely to die in a car. Its why we don't have nuclear power but the French and Japanese rely on it. My personal feeling is that its a secondary consequense of "American Individualism". But hey, I'm no expert.
Perhaps you could try being intellectually honest. That is unless your anti-religious zeal has blinded you to the level of intolerance and hatred you've been spewing around this article with your many posts.
Of course atheism is a religion, it is a system of belief about the supernatural nature (or lack there of) of this universe. It's the null religion. Do you believe that zero is not a number? Or perhaps that a null pointer isn't a pointer at all? Come on now. If it isn't a relgion is it a taco? I think it fits the former definition better.
I believe the GP post was referring to "new" in the sense that many scientists today ascribe to atheism, which distinctly wasn't the case 200 years ago, not that atheism is a brilliant new construction of the modern mind.
If the button exists, it will always be pressed.
No. No. No. Its not arrogance, its "experience".
Counting by machine is just as falible as human counting, simply because you have humans feeding the machine. Also, there is blood. Everywhere. Especially in big surgeries. Blood gets in the way of eyeballs seeing things, I'm fairly certain that this would hold true for a UPC scanner.
I would trust a mechanical engineer to count the number of widgets my factory produced per $ or per hour.
I would trust a statistician to count the number of republicans in california.
I would trust a child to count the number of envelopes in the mailbox.
I would trust a pathologist to count the number of tumor cells in a blood sample.
Do you see how "counting" can be a specialized task? What do you do? Are you a programmer? For goodness sake, all you have to do is write little letters on the screen, how can you not get that right? Even a 2 year old can do that? Maybe we should hire people in africa to count the number of semicolons you used. Does that make sense to you? Neither does having a machine in the operating room to count sponges. End of story.
You really want to autoclave a piece of gauze?
"Nurse, can I have another 4x4, this one still has some (now sterile!) tumor in it."
Well, the going rate for an emergent appendectomy (patient will likely die without surgery) is about $200.00 to $400.00, less taxes, in take home pay for the surgeon, who is in all likelyhood staying up all night that night so he or she can save a few lives. Now lets say that, sadly enough, appendix has already burst by the time the patient is in the operating room, and the patient ends up dying. Even if nothing was done wrong, the surgeon could be on the recieving end of a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
Does that seem equitable? Thats like saying BestBuy sold you a lottery ticket that you didn't win, so you get to keep their store and all the merchandise therein. How is that fair?
What's more, The patient may be charged a huge wad of cash, but the above figure is all the surgeon is going to see. But strangely, only the surgeon will be held liable for damages in court.
You tell me, does that make any sense to you? That's why we call it a messed up tort system.
How about crappy internet support?
Running the Gutsy LiveCD I couldn't download faster than 4kb/sec off of a connection I am regularly able to get over 1200kb/sec with XP. Mind you this isn't wireless, this is a wired connection. I couldn't manage to update the system in less than 4 hours, so I gave up.
Appearantly this is a "quirk" in IPv6 implementation that firefox and everything else screw up, so the Ubuntu folks don't feel that its their problem, rather it is a problem with virtually every piece of software that runs on Gutsy. At least that's my understanding. Either way, I couln't get it working at all.
Ready for prime time my fanny.
So I guess Kodak, Ford, Intel, etc. even in their humble beginnings were Evil simply because they didn't share their basic research? Wrong.
Repeat after me:
Corporations != Academia
Corporations != Academia
Corporations, who put their own $$$ on the line to inovate must realize a profit to recoup research costs at the bare minimum.
When You put down the green to finance farming millions of acres you can do whatever you want with the research. Heaven help you if you took out a loan for that money and then give away your research.
Goodbye sweet karma, but here goes.
Bullshit. If organ donation is mandatory then all I have to do is find somebody that is a good match for me and kill him. If I'm at the top of the list I win and so do several others. Even if I go to jail for a while, at least I'll be alive. So help me, if that world comes about I hope you and the people who promote it are the first ones against the wall.
Its all well and good to hold your own opinions but have a fucking heart. Having a loved one die is #3 on the list of most stressful things in this life. Do you know what #1 is? Having to choosing to remove a loved one from life support, specifically when its not clear cut. And a significant portion of the population feel that way about organ donation. You win the most callous jackass of the month prize. (BTW - having a spouse commit suicide is #2. These ranks are from a peer reviewed medical ethics journal circa 1992. Sorry, I don't recall the exact reference.)
There are some people who feel that the body is perfectly equivalent to the person who just resided in it. For them stealing the person's organs is like stealing their soul. Would you like me to steal your mom's soul? How about just a piece? If you really are just a materialist then how about 1 cubic inch of her still living brain, your choice which cubic inch. (sorry to be so graphic but the point must be made)
Truly, organ donation is a miracle of modern science and the population needs to be educated about it, but it must always be a choice. The Red Cross really messed up for this guy, he should not have been pressured and badgered, and he certainly should not have to defend his choice to people like you. In an ideal world the choice of what to do with your remaining highly organized hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen after the ineffable sweet glory of consciousness has faded should be up to you. But in a world where death does not ordain to notify us in advance that is not always possible. Forcing a loved one who is in the most acute stages of grief to voluntarily commit an act of unspeakable instinctual horror isn't kind or fair, but it is often a necessary thing and so should be undertaken with exquisite care and sensitivity.
Refusing organ donation is distinctly not tantamout to murder. If it is for you then I hope to whatever you believe in that you donate blood every 6 weeks or platelets every 2 weeks, sperm/ova at every chance you get and are registered at the National Marrow Donor Program http://www.marrow.org/ at the very least. After all its just spare biological material you're not going to use, right?
While she may feel empowered, I'm sure that with your 'two way street' she is also much more likely to end up dead.
Not only can her abuser track her, but so can the thugs he hires.
Bilateral empowerment tends to only benefit the powerful while giving the weak only the illusion of power.
If someone is willing to violate my personal space and physically take my stuff, I might suggest stalking my filing cabinet instead.
It never moves and has way more juicy data than my latest vacation photos and lunch planning.
Holy crap dude, you just won the asshat of the year prize. Do you have any idea of the magnitude, delicacy, or importance of the data you're talking about? To say nothing of the needed precision when scanning.
"I scanzord 90 filing cabinets of paper into teh computerz"
You know what, I used to launch model rockets. Its really easy to make stuff go up. Just buy the kit, attach a little engine and off it goes. $30 easy! Freakin NASA I bet they're spending all of our tax dollars on pr0n.
"cheapish 20megapixel camera" - Ever hear of the Hubble? I hear people like it for more than those weird nebulae pictures. I guess we should have just given one of those astronuts a Nikkon and let him go to town. Much cheaper.
And I guess we should use lossy compression, its just empty space out there right? I bet we could get the infinite sky down to a couple hundred GB. (JPEG, its for astronomy too!)
Truely he was the best of the best. An incredible educator who has impacted so many of our lives in so many ways. Between his TV show and "Mr. Wizard's Supermarket Sience" book he gave me my first tastes of just how amazing the natural universe world really is and how much we don't know.
:-)
For so many of us he really was an inspiration. For a long time I was thinking "what would Mr. Wizard do."
Politicans can make laws, presidents can declare war, but the most powerful are the educators who shape our children. Truely Don Herbert was among the finest and most influential that I have ever had the pleasure of learning from.
Favorite Demonstations: Surface Tension (putting his hand into an aquarium full of water and having it come out dry), Chain Reaction Mouse Traps, Hot & Cold water sensory equilibration (hand in hot water to warm = feels cold, hand in cold water to same warm = feels hot), burning sugar with an oxidizer, black and silver painted cans crushed by sunlight, cooking a steak with the waste heat from a cars engine.
My mom's least favorite: sucking an egg into a jar with a match (I always ended up accidentally dropping the egg on the floor), Baking soda + vinegar rocket,
To the family of Mr. Herbert: truely you do not grieve his passing alone.
This is exactly why the story is newsworthy.
Sony, who has in part championed DRM and even installed rootkits to protect their IP now blatantly appropriates someone else's without even so much as a letter asking permission?! Even if you don't belive in copyrights of likeness, Sony clearly does.
Thats the story.
I'd love to used Linux as a desktop. I just need a little help.
I even enjoy spending time tweaking my desktop computer, from back in the days when memory came in 16k chips, IRQs had to be tediously managed, and squeezing every drop out of 640k was fun. But try as I might I have yet to get a stable, visually appealing, or useful version of linux on any of my previous 3 computers. Why? Because I can't even get a minimally functional system running, and give up before I get to the tweaking stage.
Major problems I encountered which I spend more than 1/2 an hour working on each: picking a distro, much harder than you think for the non-initiate. KDE vs Gnome? Utterly crappy (ie Mac 6) video support without special do-it-get-it-complile-it yourself drivers. Can't install video drivers, I didn't install gcc (silly me). Can't install video drivers, I'm missing some contingencies. Can't install video drivers, I didn't install the source code for the kernel (silly me). Multiple conflicting versions of drivers and conflicting advice about which one to use. Multiple conflicting instructions on how to install said video drivers. Video driver installer has reams of text output, some of which are error messages. Based on more advice, appearantly these error messages may or may not be normal and may or may not be why I never got good video output. My sound card stopped working. I still don't know why.
Valuing my time at a paltry $50 an hour, I could have easily bought a newer better system with WinXP on it and then taken my wife out to dinner with the remainder.
If anyone can recommend a distro that will run, out-of-box, on my Dell e1505 with an ATI x1400 graphics card and Creative Audigy soundcard, then I promise you I will excitedly hunt it down and intall it, I really do want to switch to linux, the visuals I've seen other users have is incredible.
Unfortunately the fact that I have to ask such a question really shows how linux in general is completly unprepared for the desktop market. Prove me wrong and recommend a distro.
PS - please, no berating, calling-of-noob'ing, or general fun making at my expense. I really honestly do want help, and Linux people have tried to help me in these ways before. (they haven't proven helpful yet)
Open Source Authority = biggest oxymoron of the decade! :)