Maybe the GP made the mistake of reading the story title? You can
sort of begin to see a hint there how cooperating with Cisco might not
always produce the results you wanted. The GP is spared from going to
room 101 -- this time.
Anyhow, from my limited understanding, Cisco claimed that the
exploit had already been patched since April, the patch supplied to
customers and they deny that it was ever anything approaching a
critical issue. The civil charges were settled, supposedly. So,
then, if the original complaint was satisfied, who is the damaged
party that they are investigating him on behalf of?
Tick. Tock. But wait... the plot thickens.
Quoting him from the wired article:
"I was really mad at ISS before and now I'm extremely
disappointed," Lynn told Wired News. "At this point, they're just
trying to milk it for punitive damages. We already had a standing
agreement, and now they're trying to attack me in some other way."
Extremely disappointed? Didn't he mean to say double-plus
unappointed? That is, if he actually exists. I did not claim that he
ever existed, by the way, just in case all archives of his existence
suddenly disappear.
You've probably noticed that sometimes politicians wear so much makeup that their robot double would already look indistinguishable from them at a distance. Would a robot giving a speech at a political convention come across as being more intelligent than the real person, less intelligent, or the same? I don't think the audience would be able to tell the difference, especially after their hangovers.
The next question is, if the robots are smarter than the politicians, are these robots going to be our new overlords?
As I see it, non-compete would only be fair if it could be applied to the employer as well as the employee.
Since it can't be applied symmetrically (e.g. you can't tell M$ not to compete with the guy after the guy leaves), then it is a lopsided contract. He may leave and start an effort that will create a market that M$ may want to enter someday, no holds barred.
Contracts are already too huge and cumbersome. Judges need to strike down as many of these CYA provisions as possible so that employees can get a contract in their hands that they can actually read.
Very insightful. We are being shoved into a world where we are
obligated to be transparent, but where criminals and savvy businesses
can be a bit less so. Thus, if obscurity can be thought of as a
"munition," we are being denied the ability to bear that arm anymore,
leaving us vulnerable, and with no way back to our simple past.
Having said that, and assuming most of your neighbors are still
honest, what other "arms" are we still left with? Trying to embrace
openness as both the problem and the solution, I've been thinking of
streaming my own camera output to neighbors, for example. Just as you
implied, there are diminishing returns with this. While it may not
prevent a burglary (unless the thief suspects you have cameras), it
may help track down who did it after the fact. Of course, it isn't
guaranteed that the authorities would use your "not invented here"
data to track down the criminal, and in fact, the way they operate may
oblige them to do nothing at all in order to preserve their own "means
and methods"...in obscurity. In the worst case, this may grow to a
"trust gridlock" that helps no one (see: prisoner's dilemma).
As you said, great power does imply great responsibility, and the
more power people grab for themselves, the more things people will
blame them for, justified or unjustified.
Nope, it isn't paranoid, it's a prediction based on past abuses.
That the spam and popups exploits exist is a fact, backed up by hard
evidence. The RFCs are still available for anyone to read who has
basic googling skills.
In turn, where is your link? Where is your
reference to industry standards? You provide no evidence to back up
your claim, only blind observations based on hopes that the vendors
won't use their newfound level of control to screw you with.
And... I didn't say TCP was going to be rewritten, so you're just
knocking down a straw dummy there. A vendor "trusted" system
can prevent a non-vendor IP stack from starting on your machine in the
first place (if they want to...) The gatekeeping doesn't even need to
be on the router in order to "inconvenience" you. You're having to
cede total control of your system to an absolute stranger. How
convenient is that?
you'll only be "convenienced" by DRM if you use DRM applications, which I do not do and never will...
So you're claiming that the big bucks spent on TCG/DRM compliance will be recovered from someone else, but not you, because you will not be using DRM apps. And what do you do if your current apps (e.g. internet connection, IP stack, etc.) no longer start on such a computer ("update needed..."), and the only alternative is a DRM app? What if the only firewall that will run is one that monitors and records all of your internet accesses for marketing purposes? Do you really think they will not try to use this tight level of control to pull out from you whatever they can?
...a little investigation will show...
So you have a link proving that this unprecedented new level of micro-management of your computing activities is impossible to abuse to constrain your current computing activities? You are basically trusting that it won't be abused.
These days, you have to read more than the technical spec, you have to predict what the usual EULA-crafting suitwankers are going to use it for. If the market will bear it, they will use it. Case in point: there was no mention of spam in the original RFCs but that didn't mean that the opportunity to spam you wasn't allowed by the spec.
So explain to me how DRM is going to inconvenience me?
These companies have just spent millions or billions developing DRM and TC technologies. On motherboard chipsets, network cards, video cards, sound standards, drivers, bioses, a zillion things. They are not charities, so they will be passing these costs to the consumer one way or the other. I leave it to your imagination to figure out how they will recover these costs...
So, maybe you shouldn't be asking how it's going to inconvenience you, as much as how you will be convenienced, how your life will be improved by them (IMHO).
What do you or I get out of it? If it's for someone else, why are we going to be paying for this extra stuff?
The wikipedia article for it says that even Earth sediments can be considered "regolith," apparently without consideration to the exact contents. The definitions vary pretty widely from one source to another though, check out this link.
Mutations occur, and when they occur in parallel for members of the same species, and those mutations survive into succeeding generations, you achieve speciation. End of story. What am I missing?
Not much, as it wasn't intended to be a major switch in the theory, just a way of explaining what happens at the point of divergence in detail. Mutations occur to the point that one species becomes two, and can no longer interbreed. Once that happens, what this study shows is that there is a relatively quick and predictable process called "reinforcement" whereby two species (of butterfly) even begin to look different.
There's no mystery here -- if a butterfly of one species tries to interbreed with a butterfly of a newly mutated species, both butterflies waste their time and possibly do not produce offspring as a result. Thus, the only butterflies that survive to produce offspring are the ones that correctly choose the members of their own species. Since for the moment both species look identical, only 50% of the breeding attempts will be effective. Thus, any wing pattern that accentuates or exaggerates the difference between the species becomes a trait, that if successfully recognized by the butterflies as "their" trait, works to greatly increase the chances of breeding success. The result is that you can end up with two species with vastly different wing patterns within a very short period of time, so short in fact that it would probably not have a chance to make it into the fossil record easily. This helps to predict that we should probably not expect smooth transitions (or "missing links") in the fossil record, in general, because sometimes there won't be any.
Why do butterflies have so many pretty wing designs? Now you know.
"laws" determined from observations tend to be followed more
That would be great if all of the 7 were of that type, but they're not. If they're not all natural laws, they maybe they should be called the "7 points of corporate emphasis for snowing the public into believing we're not evil and not getting burned later by an overly greedy identity policy today, which we can change tomorrow with nobody noticing."
Secondly, you cite the law of inertia as an example of a law based on an observation, but we have no choice but to follow Newton's laws of motion. In the case of this proclamation, "authorities" will either heed the observation or they won't. My prediction? They won't, because it is just a voluntary thing.
Some of us are beginning to suspect that their research group is their PR department. It's hopelessly shallow. If you don't believe me, see if you don't agree with the following illustration:
Speaker: "Hear ye, hear ye!"
Speaker: "Bow down unworthy mortals, for the High Priest cometh
down from the High Ivory Tower with The Tablets from the Central
Source of All Insight And Authority to deliver the 7 Perfect and Final
Laws of Identity upon thee. In his Infinite Grace, he is allowing
thee to see the content of the Tablets this time, that ye may
experience wonderment at his Great Wisdom, and that he may not have to
smite the tablets like last time, because of his..., er, your
Foolish Ignorance."
Audience (bowing): "*Gasp* How merciful and generous. Praised be
the Infallible Lawgiver!"
Speaker: "The first Law, is that the Anointed Keyholders may only
reveal thy Identity with thine own consent. Is that clear?"
Audience: "Yes, Lord, we did click the Yes on every one of
the 200 page Prophets' EULAs, as usual you have our True Consent. We
all read every word of the Prophets, especially the part in ALL
CAPS, we promise... (Including the part that no one is liable if the
software fails utterly and our identities are revealed to the Anointed
Vendors and the Anointed Advertisers withal, but that would
never happen for ye and your Prophets are the Most Perfect High
Experts of Security and therefore the Chosen Ones for us to Trust...)
Yep, every bit of it.
Speaker: "Very well. The second Law, is that the Solution which
discloses the least amount of identifying information and best
limits its use is the... uh... most stable long term Solution!"
Audience: "All hail the Great Wisdom! All hail the Long Term Solution."
Child: "Hey wait, that's not a Law!"
Child: "It's not even a bluddy requirement -- or a recommendation!
It has been reduced to a lame observation! No one will be held to
follow a mere observation."
Woman: "Yea, some Law that is."
Old Woman: "Who hath edited the Second Law? Mayhaps an marketing
devil hath possessed it."
Child 2: "The Tablets, they have no clothes!"
Audience: *up in arms* "Quiet the wayward creature! It speaketh
Lies. Quiet, ye fools. Know ye not the High Wisdom of the Experts?
Who brought womenfolk unto this gathering?"
Man: "Hey wait, who hath allowed the Vendors into the Temple of
the Legislature to make Laws unto themselves?"
Speaker: "Uh, I must be going now, for behold, the Unholy Pager hath
sounded." *runs away*
You could have robots blast out the tunnels with shaped charges, then
just inflate liners made of Kevlar or some other strong material. The
hardest part would be the airlock.
A sufficiently sized industrial laser can carve through rock, provided
you have a reasonable strategy for cooling it and aiming it. You
wouldn't even have to land it on the moon, it could do all of the
digging from orbit prior to the robots arriving there.
You could carve out the outline of a room in the regolith with enough space for the kevlar habitat, ramps, hallways and such.
Next, you would carve cross-cut slices into it in small enough
sections that they can simply be pulled out by robots or people. You
would need to carve at some diagonal angles to sever the pieces from
the bottom, and there will be some pieces there that you just won't be
able to pull out, so the very bottom is simply filled back in with
dirt so that there are no jagged edges pointing up.
Once all of the larger pieces are moved to the periphery, the
surrounding area is melted into a glassy surface. This solves the
dust problem -- for the moment.
The people arrive with their habitat and plop it into the room
container. Of course, the location will still need to be a place that
is shielded from direct sunlight. At some point, a way of building a roof over it with
the left over fragments might allow further flexibility as far as the
location is concerned.
If you're holding data for someone that you don't know what it is or how to decrypt it, you will be perceived as an accomplice
That essentially allows them to take you in whenever they want, as long as there is something called "data" in your possession.
Let me explain...
Suppose your friend Terry R. Ist offers "I'll let you borrow a music CD from my collection if you let me borrow one of yours."
"Okay," it sounds reasonable to you and you pick out a disk.
Now suppose the disk contains data Terry didn't tell you about. You enjoy the music on the disk but don't notice the data is even there because your CD player automatically skips over that track.
Then, the authorities (or the rather less authorized authorities,
as the case may be...) come in to your place and find this disk, get
in a huff and then demand something called the "decryption key" from
you. They may question, pressure, shout, torture and jail you, but,
of course, they will not extract it, as you couldn't possibly know it,
and may not know what decryption is, for that matter, as you may not
even own a computer.
So, even if you are a perfectly innocent person, it sounds like you
would still have to worry about whether you will get that unwelcome
knock on the door.
A new breed of search will need to be able to cut through the crap better.
Actually, I think it would be great if google would just allow more search terms to be supplied. I usually use a lot of minus terms to try and filter out the junk, and run into the maximum pretty quickly.
For instance, if all of the undesired sites shared one phrase, say, "search categories" then it would be easy enough to blow them away by putting a -"search categories" on the search line. Not much chance that the uninteresting sites will want to include an obvious "this site sucks" keyword target though, once they learn that people are avoiding it.
I guess another way to solve this is that all
decent sites could get together and decide to use a positive keyword, like say:
"unfescennine" or
"creative commons license" or
"non-profit site" or
"all code is licensed under the GPL"
...and include that on their pages. If enough sites were clued in to this idea, you could get search results that would then only include the "decent" sites.
That would work for a little while until the ad sites get wise to the trick and begin to use that keyword themselves (won't their lawyers be surprised someday if they mindlessly use the last one...)
Should a keyword change be necessary, coordinating it amongst the "good" sites would be a nightmare, though.
Hmm, maybe a better solution is just to participate in GPU, a distributed community-run GPL search engine. I've never used it, so I can't vouch for the performance, but at least you have a chance to modify the search algorithm itself.
Generally, you do need to "throw stuff out the back." Solar electric merely refers to the fact that solar power is used to energize particles so that they shoot out the back at a very high speed. The extra high speed they shoot out means that you can use a lot less propellant mass in order to provide a bit of forward momentum to the rest of the craft.
And to add insult to injury, there was a story in January about region coding of ink cartridges. So, I wouldn't welcome our cheaper cartridge overlords just yet.
not so good fo return trade if you're ripping them open
Rip them open? All you need is an ordinary cargo door with a wide enough opening, some cranes, and containers that will fit through the cargo hold. They don't have to be large domes as you assumed. You would only rip it open to install a cargo door if it didn't already have one.
With enough cranes, unloading the beast could actually go faster than draining it, and each sphere could be ready for transport on top of a truck without having to unseal the liquid at all. The ship could then go on its way without sitting at port for a long time.
how do you effeciently [sic] ship the gas from such a remote location?
Same way you ship oil from a remote location -- using supertankers. You might even be able to use some of the capacity of these tankers on the trip back to the source of the oil, instead of sending them back empty. Then they could deliver the hydrogen to various ports along the way, or back to the source of the oil, which could use the hydrogen to run a power plant that produces much needed clean water as the primary side benefit.
There are some engineering issues to work out, obviously, but it could be done, even if the tanker had to be filled with aluminum spheres of pressurized liquid hydrogen.
They went out of their way to convince a whole crop of companies to drop their own 64-bit products and gear up to support the Itanic
Everyone stopped buying the existing big iron and waited for this phenomenal thing... and waited, and waited...
Rather than lower expectations, they drummed up EPIC further as the future of computing, in no uncertain terms. "Step aside RISC, EPIC is here."
Someone insisted on backward compatibility to x86, which ate up valuable real estate on the chip and made the first version even slower (tell me that wasn't a marketing decision!)
Rather than brag as early as possible about the amazing performance, they guarded initial performance figures with tight secrecy, which seemed a bit odd and only made people more curious.
Of course, when they finally released it, it was nowhere near the expectations that had been set for it, and in fact was slower than even non-server processors.
The overall effect was a loss of credibility, and that a number of hardware companies were either weakened or went under. So don't be surprised if the Itanic gets some derision.
all of the things you mention are impossible because of our extremely minimalist design
Well, yes, it would have to be. The business as well...
If your end user devices can be proven not to be storing any biometric data at all, and if one could determine from the source code that it isn't sending raw biometrics out, then it stands a better chance. (That brings it up a notch from snowball's chance to sugary-ice-cone chance...)
I still wouldn't use it or feel better protected by it. Rather, I would think that despite all of your assurances that there would be a keylogger type of device in it.
But don't see that as a request to post more details. If you thought I was curious about your specific product or service you were way off. It's like examining a pair of handcuffs to see which ones I'd like to wear.
First of all let me congratulate you for trying to put a bit more
thought into what you are doing, than, say, any major electronic
voting machine company did. But, I still think you will be doing your
customers a disservice in the long run, whatever benefits they may
derive in the short run.
Rant: It doesn't do me any good to tell you to abandon what you're
doing, because I know that the only thing that will happen is that a
less ethically constrained individual will just take your place,
whether at your company or at one of the IP-farms, and then it will be
implemented even less competently. I realize this idea simply won't
be prevented from happening while there is a mindless sheep herd of IP
lawyers who all smell taller grass in another field guiding this
ouija-board mental process along.
We have a fancy trick where there is no way that you
can get someone's iris if you know their account, and there is no way
you can get their account if you know their iris
Online ad/marketing/spyware companies also know a fancy trick
called database merging. That is, one company says to you "we only
want to buy the accounts and addresses for a mass mailing." Then, a
separate company says to you "we only want the names and the iris scan
data for our online purchases." You deal with both, happy that no one
person has been given the farm. Then, of course they meet up with
each other and agree to merge the data and share the results. They
may be able to match the data based on some key you are not aware of.
Even if you provide a secure service in the beginning and you are
able to run it properly for a while, the next person who (purchases
and/or) runs the company may not have your idealistic goals in mind at
all, and in trying to squeeze more profit out of it will end up
cutting out the clueful part of the tech staff, destroying the identities
of the clientele, and basically running things as incompetently and
abusively as most major companies do now, except with the added damage
that they are figuratively holding some people by the eyeballs.
(Reminds me of "A Clockwork Orange." It won't help in the long run
because you're not taking the entirety of human nature into account.)
Even if you have a thousand obscure tricks I still think that
people's iris-scan data streams will be intercepted or spoofed and
become public information in spite of your best efforts to prevent it.
Once biometric data is public, a biometric measurement is no longer
of value as a guarantor of identity because at that point anyone else
could be sending it down the wire.
Then, rather than learn their lesson, the IP-lawyer-drones will
scurry off and repeat the same mistake on another part of the body,
probably the inside of the colon at some point...
Alex (if that's your real name) how much are you going to charge if a company like, say, Gator/Claria/MS, makes an offer you can't refuse for direct access to the iris scan data of each of your vict^H^H^H^Hcustomers? Even if you refuse to sell this, note that they could still get it through the lawsuit, bankruptcy, buyout trick, or even possibly eminent domain in some dark, not-so-distant future, since data can be considered property.
Eventually, a person's iris scan data will be as ubiquitous and purchaseable as any other id number that you can't retract once you give it out for a transaction, if you ever make the mistake of giving it out. The only difference is it will be a bigger number, and one that anyone can grab off of you on the street.
"Hey look!"
You turn your head to look, and to your surprise a stranger takes a picture of your iris at point blank range and then runs off. You think "WTF?" and move along. The next day, all of your money is gone, you are accused of posting libelous stuff, etc.
Rather than wipe it all out, you could try moving the daily stuff over to weekly if you're not adding new stuff to your system every day (most of us do not).
Also, most people can probably get away with disabling a lot of daemons/services. Disable them 1 at a time at all runlevels and run your favorite software. Not affected? Disable the next one...
Still, all of that stuff put together is actually just a tiny drop in the bucket (to the point of being a red herring) compared with some of the gfx related libraries. We're talking bizarrely, inexplicably, abusively HUGE. If you want to be totally sickened by the bloat, do a "ps aux" and look at the size of some of the processes, and tell me why you need 40 Megs for a panel (or somesuch).
Slashdot Mirror
True, but you have to take into account that some of these tools are getting smarter and smarter every time.
I just ran Auditor on my system the other day, and while it didn't find any problems with my firewall, it was able to:
So, when I clicked "yes" when it asked me if I wanted to correct the situation, it simply moved the offending pictures to Liz' desktop. Three birds...
Maybe the GP made the mistake of reading the story title? You can sort of begin to see a hint there how cooperating with Cisco might not always produce the results you wanted. The GP is spared from going to room 101 -- this time.
Anyhow, from my limited understanding, Cisco claimed that the exploit had already been patched since April, the patch supplied to customers and they deny that it was ever anything approaching a critical issue. The civil charges were settled, supposedly. So, then, if the original complaint was satisfied, who is the damaged party that they are investigating him on behalf of? Tick. Tock. But wait... the plot thickens.
Quoting him from the wired article:
Extremely disappointed? Didn't he mean to say double-plus unappointed? That is, if he actually exists. I did not claim that he ever existed, by the way, just in case all archives of his existence suddenly disappear.
There's more to it than that.
You've probably noticed that sometimes politicians wear so much makeup that their robot double would already look indistinguishable from them at a distance. Would a robot giving a speech at a political convention come across as being more intelligent than the real person, less intelligent, or the same? I don't think the audience would be able to tell the difference, especially after their hangovers.
The next question is, if the robots are smarter than the politicians, are these robots going to be our new overlords?
As I see it, non-compete would only be fair if it could be applied to the employer as well as the employee.
Since it can't be applied symmetrically (e.g. you can't tell M$ not to compete with the guy after the guy leaves), then it is a lopsided contract. He may leave and start an effort that will create a market that M$ may want to enter someday, no holds barred.
Contracts are already too huge and cumbersome. Judges need to strike down as many of these CYA provisions as possible so that employees can get a contract in their hands that they can actually read.
Very insightful. We are being shoved into a world where we are obligated to be transparent, but where criminals and savvy businesses can be a bit less so. Thus, if obscurity can be thought of as a "munition," we are being denied the ability to bear that arm anymore, leaving us vulnerable, and with no way back to our simple past.
Having said that, and assuming most of your neighbors are still honest, what other "arms" are we still left with? Trying to embrace openness as both the problem and the solution, I've been thinking of streaming my own camera output to neighbors, for example. Just as you implied, there are diminishing returns with this. While it may not prevent a burglary (unless the thief suspects you have cameras), it may help track down who did it after the fact. Of course, it isn't guaranteed that the authorities would use your "not invented here" data to track down the criminal, and in fact, the way they operate may oblige them to do nothing at all in order to preserve their own "means and methods" ...in obscurity. In the worst case, this may grow to a
"trust gridlock" that helps no one (see: prisoner's dilemma).
As you said, great power does imply great responsibility, and the more power people grab for themselves, the more things people will blame them for, justified or unjustified.
Nope, it isn't paranoid, it's a prediction based on past abuses. That the spam and popups exploits exist is a fact, backed up by hard evidence. The RFCs are still available for anyone to read who has basic googling skills.
In turn, where is your link? Where is your reference to industry standards? You provide no evidence to back up your claim, only blind observations based on hopes that the vendors won't use their newfound level of control to screw you with.
And... I didn't say TCP was going to be rewritten, so you're just knocking down a straw dummy there. A vendor "trusted" system can prevent a non-vendor IP stack from starting on your machine in the first place (if they want to...) The gatekeeping doesn't even need to be on the router in order to "inconvenience" you. You're having to cede total control of your system to an absolute stranger. How convenient is that?
So you're claiming that the big bucks spent on TCG/DRM compliance will be recovered from someone else, but not you, because you will not be using DRM apps. And what do you do if your current apps (e.g. internet connection, IP stack, etc.) no longer start on such a computer ("update needed..."), and the only alternative is a DRM app? What if the only firewall that will run is one that monitors and records all of your internet accesses for marketing purposes? Do you really think they will not try to use this tight level of control to pull out from you whatever they can?
So you have a link proving that this unprecedented new level of micro-management of your computing activities is impossible to abuse to constrain your current computing activities? You are basically trusting that it won't be abused.
These days, you have to read more than the technical spec, you have to predict what the usual EULA-crafting suitwankers are going to use it for. If the market will bear it, they will use it. Case in point: there was no mention of spam in the original RFCs but that didn't mean that the opportunity to spam you wasn't allowed by the spec.
These companies have just spent millions or billions developing DRM and TC technologies. On motherboard chipsets, network cards, video cards, sound standards, drivers, bioses, a zillion things. They are not charities, so they will be passing these costs to the consumer one way or the other. I leave it to your imagination to figure out how they will recover these costs...
So, maybe you shouldn't be asking how it's going to inconvenience you, as much as how you will be convenienced, how your life will be improved by them (IMHO).
What do you or I get out of it? If it's for someone else, why are we going to be paying for this extra stuff?
The wikipedia article for it says that even Earth sediments can be considered "regolith," apparently without consideration to the exact contents. The definitions vary pretty widely from one source to another though, check out this link.
Not much, as it wasn't intended to be a major switch in the theory, just a way of explaining what happens at the point of divergence in detail. Mutations occur to the point that one species becomes two, and can no longer interbreed. Once that happens, what this study shows is that there is a relatively quick and predictable process called "reinforcement" whereby two species (of butterfly) even begin to look different.
There's no mystery here -- if a butterfly of one species tries to interbreed with a butterfly of a newly mutated species, both butterflies waste their time and possibly do not produce offspring as a result. Thus, the only butterflies that survive to produce offspring are the ones that correctly choose the members of their own species. Since for the moment both species look identical, only 50% of the breeding attempts will be effective. Thus, any wing pattern that accentuates or exaggerates the difference between the species becomes a trait, that if successfully recognized by the butterflies as "their" trait, works to greatly increase the chances of breeding success. The result is that you can end up with two species with vastly different wing patterns within a very short period of time, so short in fact that it would probably not have a chance to make it into the fossil record easily. This helps to predict that we should probably not expect smooth transitions (or "missing links") in the fossil record, in general, because sometimes there won't be any.
Why do butterflies have so many pretty wing designs? Now you know.
That would be great if all of the 7 were of that type, but they're not. If they're not all natural laws, they maybe they should be called the "7 points of corporate emphasis for snowing the public into believing we're not evil and not getting burned later by an overly greedy identity policy today, which we can change tomorrow with nobody noticing."
Secondly, you cite the law of inertia as an example of a law based on an observation, but we have no choice but to follow Newton's laws of motion. In the case of this proclamation, "authorities" will either heed the observation or they won't. My prediction? They won't, because it is just a voluntary thing.
Some of us are beginning to suspect that their research group is their PR department. It's hopelessly shallow. If you don't believe me, see if you don't agree with the following illustration:
Speaker: "Hear ye, hear ye!"
Speaker: "Bow down unworthy mortals, for the High Priest cometh down from the High Ivory Tower with The Tablets from the Central Source of All Insight And Authority to deliver the 7 Perfect and Final Laws of Identity upon thee. In his Infinite Grace, he is allowing thee to see the content of the Tablets this time, that ye may experience wonderment at his Great Wisdom, and that he may not have to smite the tablets like last time, because of his..., er, your Foolish Ignorance."
Audience (bowing): "*Gasp* How merciful and generous. Praised be the Infallible Lawgiver!"
Speaker: "The first Law, is that the Anointed Keyholders may only reveal thy Identity with thine own consent. Is that clear?"
Audience: "Yes, Lord, we did click the Yes on every one of the 200 page Prophets' EULAs, as usual you have our True Consent. We all read every word of the Prophets, especially the part in ALL CAPS, we promise... (Including the part that no one is liable if the software fails utterly and our identities are revealed to the Anointed Vendors and the Anointed Advertisers withal, but that would never happen for ye and your Prophets are the Most Perfect High Experts of Security and therefore the Chosen Ones for us to Trust...) Yep, every bit of it.
Speaker: "Very well. The second Law, is that the Solution which discloses the least amount of identifying information and best limits its use is the... uh... most stable long term Solution!"
Audience: "All hail the Great Wisdom! All hail the Long Term Solution."
Child: "Hey wait, that's not a Law!"
Child: "It's not even a bluddy requirement -- or a recommendation! It has been reduced to a lame observation! No one will be held to follow a mere observation."
Woman: "Yea, some Law that is."
Old Woman: "Who hath edited the Second Law? Mayhaps an marketing devil hath possessed it."
Child 2: "The Tablets, they have no clothes!"
Audience: *up in arms* "Quiet the wayward creature! It speaketh Lies. Quiet, ye fools. Know ye not the High Wisdom of the Experts? Who brought womenfolk unto this gathering?"
Man: "Hey wait, who hath allowed the Vendors into the Temple of the Legislature to make Laws unto themselves?"
Speaker: "Uh, I must be going now, for behold, the Unholy Pager hath sounded." *runs away*
A sufficiently sized industrial laser can carve through rock, provided you have a reasonable strategy for cooling it and aiming it. You wouldn't even have to land it on the moon, it could do all of the digging from orbit prior to the robots arriving there.
You could carve out the outline of a room in the regolith with enough space for the kevlar habitat, ramps, hallways and such. Next, you would carve cross-cut slices into it in small enough sections that they can simply be pulled out by robots or people. You would need to carve at some diagonal angles to sever the pieces from the bottom, and there will be some pieces there that you just won't be able to pull out, so the very bottom is simply filled back in with dirt so that there are no jagged edges pointing up.
Once all of the larger pieces are moved to the periphery, the surrounding area is melted into a glassy surface. This solves the dust problem -- for the moment.
The people arrive with their habitat and plop it into the room container. Of course, the location will still need to be a place that is shielded from direct sunlight. At some point, a way of building a roof over it with the left over fragments might allow further flexibility as far as the location is concerned.
That essentially allows them to take you in whenever they want, as long as there is something called "data" in your possession.
Let me explain...
Suppose your friend Terry R. Ist offers "I'll let you borrow a music CD from my collection if you let me borrow one of yours."
"Okay," it sounds reasonable to you and you pick out a disk.
Now suppose the disk contains data Terry didn't tell you about. You enjoy the music on the disk but don't notice the data is even there because your CD player automatically skips over that track.
Then, the authorities (or the rather less authorized authorities, as the case may be...) come in to your place and find this disk, get in a huff and then demand something called the "decryption key" from you. They may question, pressure, shout, torture and jail you, but, of course, they will not extract it, as you couldn't possibly know it, and may not know what decryption is, for that matter, as you may not even own a computer.
So, even if you are a perfectly innocent person, it sounds like you would still have to worry about whether you will get that unwelcome knock on the door.
Actually, I think it would be great if google would just allow more search terms to be supplied. I usually use a lot of minus terms to try and filter out the junk, and run into the maximum pretty quickly.
For instance, if all of the undesired sites shared one phrase, say, "search categories" then it would be easy enough to blow them away by putting a -"search categories" on the search line. Not much chance that the uninteresting sites will want to include an obvious "this site sucks" keyword target though, once they learn that people are avoiding it.
I guess another way to solve this is that all decent sites could get together and decide to use a positive keyword, like say:
- "unfescennine" or
- "creative commons license" or
- "non-profit site" or
- "all code is licensed under the GPL"
...and include that on their pages. If enough sites were clued in to this idea, you could get search results that would then only include the "decent" sites.That would work for a little while until the ad sites get wise to the trick and begin to use that keyword themselves (won't their lawyers be surprised someday if they mindlessly use the last one...)
Should a keyword change be necessary, coordinating it amongst the "good" sites would be a nightmare, though.
Hmm, maybe a better solution is just to participate in GPU, a distributed community-run GPL search engine. I've never used it, so I can't vouch for the performance, but at least you have a chance to modify the search algorithm itself.
At least it didn't pass unanimously, with no debate, in the middle of the night and with the Congress out of session.
Generally, you do need to "throw stuff out the back." Solar electric merely refers to the fact that solar power is used to energize particles so that they shoot out the back at a very high speed. The extra high speed they shoot out means that you can use a lot less propellant mass in order to provide a bit of forward momentum to the rest of the craft.
This link provides more details.
And to add insult to injury, there was a story in January about region coding of ink cartridges. So, I wouldn't welcome our cheaper cartridge overlords just yet.
Rip them open? All you need is an ordinary cargo door with a wide enough opening, some cranes, and containers that will fit through the cargo hold. They don't have to be large domes as you assumed. You would only rip it open to install a cargo door if it didn't already have one.
With enough cranes, unloading the beast could actually go faster than draining it, and each sphere could be ready for transport on top of a truck without having to unseal the liquid at all. The ship could then go on its way without sitting at port for a long time.
Same way you ship oil from a remote location -- using supertankers. You might even be able to use some of the capacity of these tankers on the trip back to the source of the oil, instead of sending them back empty. Then they could deliver the hydrogen to various ports along the way, or back to the source of the oil, which could use the hydrogen to run a power plant that produces much needed clean water as the primary side benefit.
There are some engineering issues to work out, obviously, but it could be done, even if the tanker had to be filled with aluminum spheres of pressurized liquid hydrogen.
Everything you said, plus:
The overall effect was a loss of credibility, and that a number of hardware companies were either weakened or went under. So don't be surprised if the Itanic gets some derision.
Well, yes, it would have to be. The business as well...
If your end user devices can be proven not to be storing any biometric data at all, and if one could determine from the source code that it isn't sending raw biometrics out, then it stands a better chance. (That brings it up a notch from snowball's chance to sugary-ice-cone chance...)
I still wouldn't use it or feel better protected by it. Rather, I would think that despite all of your assurances that there would be a keylogger type of device in it.
But don't see that as a request to post more details. If you thought I was curious about your specific product or service you were way off. It's like examining a pair of handcuffs to see which ones I'd like to wear.
First of all let me congratulate you for trying to put a bit more thought into what you are doing, than, say, any major electronic voting machine company did. But, I still think you will be doing your customers a disservice in the long run, whatever benefits they may derive in the short run.
Rant: It doesn't do me any good to tell you to abandon what you're doing, because I know that the only thing that will happen is that a less ethically constrained individual will just take your place, whether at your company or at one of the IP-farms, and then it will be implemented even less competently. I realize this idea simply won't be prevented from happening while there is a mindless sheep herd of IP lawyers who all smell taller grass in another field guiding this ouija-board mental process along.
Even if you have a thousand obscure tricks I still think that people's iris-scan data streams will be intercepted or spoofed and become public information in spite of your best efforts to prevent it.
Once biometric data is public, a biometric measurement is no longer of value as a guarantor of identity because at that point anyone else could be sending it down the wire.
Then, rather than learn their lesson, the IP-lawyer-drones will scurry off and repeat the same mistake on another part of the body, probably the inside of the colon at some point...
Alex (if that's your real name) how much are you going to charge if a company like, say, Gator/Claria/MS, makes an offer you can't refuse for direct access to the iris scan data of each of your vict^H^H^H^Hcustomers? Even if you refuse to sell this, note that they could still get it through the lawsuit, bankruptcy, buyout trick, or even possibly eminent domain in some dark, not-so-distant future, since data can be considered property.
Eventually, a person's iris scan data will be as ubiquitous and purchaseable as any other id number that you can't retract once you give it out for a transaction, if you ever make the mistake of giving it out. The only difference is it will be a bigger number, and one that anyone can grab off of you on the street.
"Hey look!"
You turn your head to look, and to your surprise a stranger takes a picture of your iris at point blank range and then runs off. You think "WTF?" and move along. The next day, all of your money is gone, you are accused of posting libelous stuff, etc.
Rather than wipe it all out, you could try moving the daily stuff over to weekly if you're not adding new stuff to your system every day (most of us do not).
Also, most people can probably get away with disabling a lot of daemons/services. Disable them 1 at a time at all runlevels and run your favorite software. Not affected? Disable the next one...
Still, all of that stuff put together is actually just a tiny drop in the bucket (to the point of being a red herring) compared with some of the gfx related libraries. We're talking bizarrely, inexplicably, abusively HUGE. If you want to be totally sickened by the bloat, do a "ps aux" and look at the size of some of the processes, and tell me why you need 40 Megs for a panel (or somesuch).