The transplant list is based on medical necessity and the likelihood of survival (e.g. if someone is still drinking they won't get a liver). Being rich doesn't change that. What does change is, if you have access to a private jet, you can be placed on the transplant list in a very wide area. A poor person might just be able to get to a single city within a few hours, but Steve Jobs could probably be anywhere in a ten state region in the same amount of time. If he didn't get that liver, the next person would've needed it a bit less, or it might have even gone to waste.
I was just about to pop in and say that. Plausible deniability is the only sane choice for this environment. It basically doesn't matter to you if your encryption is never broken if they just take that as an admission of guilt.
IMHO, the way to go would be an android phone with an extra/data/ partition that's encrypted, and swap them out using the terminal. Be sure to use a strong screen lock (i.e. a long password or very long series of numbers, no patterns). That way, you have a benign/data for investigators, you get *everything* (i.e. thumbnails, logs, etc.) encrypted, and if they question you about the partition you can feign ignorance and claim that it must be a corrupted flash chip. All that said, I'm not sure how technically feasible this is, but it seems straight-forward enough with root access and some familiarity with the Linux terminal.
What's an even bigger concern is that when an SSD fails, your whole disk is still available read-only. I've got one sitting around like that, and have been too lazy to physically destroy it (none of the data is sensitive). What I should have done is just turn it into super-fast installation media for a few versions of Windows, but I wasn't thinking at the time.
Of course, that failure model is a *feature* of SSDs. With a HDD, the drive just randomly fails someday, and you lose the ability to read, write, or securely erase data. If you have sensitive data, it shouldn't be stored on any media unless it's encrypted or physically/remotely secure and will be throughly destroyed when it dies. That's common sense. Blocks being difficult to securely erase due to wear leveling and such doesn't change that.
Martial Arts aren't everything a girl needs to deter a rapist. Since you generally can't tell by looking that she has studied them, the primary purpose is to deter her acquaintances from even attempting it. If that doesn't work, then the rapist is going to have a few injuries that should help in identifying him, and basically invalidate any arguments that it was consensual. It's a last line defense, and obviously isn't going to work in all cases. The point is to make the whole prospect as risky and impractical as possible. Plus, if rape truly is a power thing, then most rapists probably lack the confidence to attack someone who they could potentially lose to.
As for your first point, that's not true for hardly any attack. Most criminals aren't prepared to actually kill someone. For those that are, if nobody resists then there's no deterrent. And it's a slippery slope. By the same logic you should be encouraging the victim to comply, make their attacker as happy as possible, and not report the crime for fear of retaliation. Plus I'd imagine the psychological damage of the cowardly approach is far more devastating than the physical damage for most who resist. (Note: I'm not talking about checkmate-type situations.)
Out of curiosity, why are you still opt'd into the application platform? It seems simpler to just opt out so that no application can tell you exist, so you don't get notifications from them and they can't leech the information your friends can see...
That'd probably fall under "Malicious hacker No. 7: Rogue hackers". I really want to disagree with the statement "they aren't about to disrupt the Internet and business as we know it", because that's exactly what used to happen. Sadly, I don't think I've seen much evidence for this group's competence as of late.
I say "sadly" for a couple reasons. First, I like to believe that self taught amateurs can do amazing things, good or evil. And second, people take security more seriously when worms take out parts of the internet and viruses flash your BIOS. The current lineup of malware is pathetic compared to the malware of old. Kinda like the difference between yearly influenza and the 1918 flu.
If privacy were gone then everyone would know everything about everyone. That's not the case, so privacy is alive and well. If you don't want it, that's fine, but why should I surrender as much of it as people will take?
Security is a process, not a product. There are no "decent" AV products, if by decent you mean will prevent a standard, internet-connected Windows computer from getting viruses/malware. Detection rates for zero-day attacks seems to be, at best, 62%. Installing an antivirus and thinking you're 100% protected against viruses is delusional.
Furthermore, these are ambulance dispatch computers. The operators are not your typical slashdotter that can spot potential malware and avoid installing it. They also, given the random nature of emergency medicine, have a lot of freetime in which they likely entertain themselves using these computers while waiting on someone to need an ambulance. I suppose one could have separate networks and computers for mission-critical applications, but is that really the best way to spend healthcare dollars?
If you're fine with exploiting glitches in a game, just enter debug mode to jump to the end "You Win" sequence for a 2 second speedrun for games with such a feature. The entire point, IMHO, is to demonstrate the skill of the player, not the ability to cheat. That's like receiving a trophy by physically stealing it rather than winning an event, it's missing the point of the accomplishment.
So... rich people don't pay taxes on money they don't buy tangible goods with? Say you're taxing stock purchases at 10%, with a 30% income tax:
John earns $100, so $70 left after taxes. He's able to buy $63 of stock with it. He sells that stock, and is able to buy something worth $56.7. So, rather than paying 37% tax, like the person who doesn't buy stocks, he pays 43.3% tax. Now, suppose that $63 worth of stock changes ownership a total of ten times, that's $70 in tax revenue on $63 dollars worth of stock. I doubt that's even a stable system, since it seems like it'd asymptotically approach the government having all of the money.
Back in the middle ages you could say anything you wanted about the king, if you were prepared for the consequences. I don't think many would call that freedom of speech. Censorship doesn't need to take place before something is said, removing a person after they say something still qualifies. The term applies equally to preventing a book from being published or burning it afterwards.
Actually, when dealing with vaccines, quality of life is quantified and fairly objective. The term is "Quality-Adjusted Life Year. Life-years are measured, so a young child dying has more bearing than an elderly person, and the quality of each year is measured from zero (dead) to one (perfectly healthy). Technically, the range is a bit beyond that, as certain impairments are weighted as negative numbers, i.e. worse than death.
Being subjective doesn't get you anywhere. If there are only enough healthcare dollars to save Frank xor Joe, then you need objective criteria for determining which you save. Frank doesn't get to die just because he isn't "enjoying life" enough. Discounting life based on perceived quality is exactly what we do. Take the terminal cancer patient for example. We could let them die in as little pain as possible when the usual treatment options fail, or we could perform CPR until every rib is broken and defibrillate until their chest is burnt leather, from the reasoning that, even in their pain-filled non-communicative state, we can't make judgments of their quality of life.
Perhaps it causes people to be less observant, louder and ruder... OTOH, I think it's more likely the brain doesn't rely on functioning in a Faraday cage since having a seizure every thunderstorm would be a massive disadvantage back when our ancestors were running through the African Savannah...
There's also the trend that the more you watch/read/listen to a certain type of entertainment, the bigger fan you are. Bigger fans spend more money. IOW, even if you don't buy the box set of the series you just downloaded, you're far more likely to buy the sequel, or another series in the same genre.
This seems like something the tenth amendment ought to cover. Or at least the convoluted explanation of how the interstate commerce clause applies should prove entertaining...
Well, you could setup a filter in GMail to mark anything going to your 'real' address as spam, and only place certain whitelisted plus addresses in the inbox.
If "any of us could" make a fatal mistake, then any of us will. If we ridicule stupid decisions we'll laugh aloud while making a mental note to not be stupid. Few people are callous enough to ridicule a person's death in front of anyone who who was emotionally attached to them, but for the people we aren't attached to, IMHO, it's fine to laugh. It's what separates their tragic death from the tragic but unavoidable ones, which makes it more likely we'll learn from their folly. Plus nobody has the emotional capacity (or time) to sincerely grieve the loss of every person (2 per second, last I heard), nor is it a healthy way to live your life.
Facebook's penetrance is such that they almost certainly have compiled and cross-referenced information about you from your friends. By making an account you can see that data, and control it to an extent. Not being on Facebook in a true sense is probably only possible for a schizoid.
Make data session only by default, perhaps even limited to a specific tab and its children. Disallow third party cookies and scripts. Stop sending the referrer, user_agent, and plug-in information.
90 - 95% of websites work absolutely fine with these settings, while it becomes difficult to track a user across webpages or browser sessions, even via PanOptiClick methods. The problem is that 5 - 10% of websites are written by morons who code by the "works for me" method rather than understanding standards.
For example, my bank's website tries to specifically identify visitor browsers by hardcoding a list of every browser known to the developer. If you don't send a user_agent header (optional by spec), then the javascript code assumes you have javascript disabled, opens a javascript alert informing you to enable it, and does a javascript redirection to their FAQ. (Yet, for some reason, I rely on said programmer to defend against cross site scripting attacks.) Wikipedia's search assumes that you're a script, and some websites give a 500 error on any page load (usually a null pointer exception).
The Apple review process is closed, but I'm fairly sure they don't examine machine code to determine exactly what each line of code does. Even if they looked at source, obfuscated code can hide a payload. Delivery of data to a third party is easier to detect, but if you use some stegonography to conceal illegitimate data with legitimate data then it'd take some very close analysis to detect it.
That's only about equivalent to an 80-bit symmetric key. Back in 2003, RSA itself predicted that RSA1024 would only hold until approximately 2006 - 2010, though we're a bit behind that as the largest key thus factored (by civilians) is RSA768.
There are also other attacks, such as exploiting the probabilistic primality tests used in key generation, and hash collisions with the MD5 or SHA1 hashes used for key signing on OMAP hardware.
In America, the "filthy rich" pay most of the income taxes (and presumably sales tax as well). The top 1% pay 38%, the top 5% pay 59%, the top 10% pay 70%.
As for wasting money, I have little doubt that governments are inherently wasteful. That said, some are much better than others. Ranking the "very highly developed nations" by percent of GDP collected in taxes divided by the human development index squared reveals striking differences. Hong Kong and Singapore have very low tax rates, so they easily come out on top (outliers?), but the rest are clustered together starting with the US (HDI.902, Tax 28.2%), Australia (.937, 30.5%), Japan (.884, 27.4%), Switzerland (.874, 30.1%), Canada (.888, 33.4%), and Ireland (.895, 34%). Here's a graph for those who would rather see a raw scatterplot rather than my data manipulations.
A lot of people use it as a telephone directory. It's quite helpful when you work with different people every few weeks and need to contact the other members of your team. OTOH, while I have my general location in Facebook, I don't quite see the benefit of putting a street address up. Some people might use it for driving navigation, but I figure I'd prefer people to call and ask for my address before they drop by.
61,000 square miles of roads and parking lots have been paved in the US. That's 1.6% of the total area, including Alaska, and not counting rooftops and such. Somehow, I suspect that this global trend might have an effect on albedo...
But I guess that's just magical thinking. Anthropogenic CO2 is solely to blame for climate change, and simply decreasing the rate of CO2 emissions to historic levels (i.e. where pCO2 will still be increasing) will stop the positive feedback loops that caused the cyclic nature of climate in Earth's history.
Slashdot Mirror
The transplant list is based on medical necessity and the likelihood of survival (e.g. if someone is still drinking they won't get a liver). Being rich doesn't change that. What does change is, if you have access to a private jet, you can be placed on the transplant list in a very wide area. A poor person might just be able to get to a single city within a few hours, but Steve Jobs could probably be anywhere in a ten state region in the same amount of time. If he didn't get that liver, the next person would've needed it a bit less, or it might have even gone to waste.
I was just about to pop in and say that. Plausible deniability is the only sane choice for this environment. It basically doesn't matter to you if your encryption is never broken if they just take that as an admission of guilt.
/data/ partition that's encrypted, and swap them out using the terminal. Be sure to use a strong screen lock (i.e. a long password or very long series of numbers, no patterns). That way, you have a benign /data for investigators, you get *everything* (i.e. thumbnails, logs, etc.) encrypted, and if they question you about the partition you can feign ignorance and claim that it must be a corrupted flash chip. All that said, I'm not sure how technically feasible this is, but it seems straight-forward enough with root access and some familiarity with the Linux terminal.
IMHO, the way to go would be an android phone with an extra
What's an even bigger concern is that when an SSD fails, your whole disk is still available read-only. I've got one sitting around like that, and have been too lazy to physically destroy it (none of the data is sensitive). What I should have done is just turn it into super-fast installation media for a few versions of Windows, but I wasn't thinking at the time.
Of course, that failure model is a *feature* of SSDs. With a HDD, the drive just randomly fails someday, and you lose the ability to read, write, or securely erase data. If you have sensitive data, it shouldn't be stored on any media unless it's encrypted or physically/remotely secure and will be throughly destroyed when it dies. That's common sense. Blocks being difficult to securely erase due to wear leveling and such doesn't change that.
Martial Arts aren't everything a girl needs to deter a rapist. Since you generally can't tell by looking that she has studied them, the primary purpose is to deter her acquaintances from even attempting it. If that doesn't work, then the rapist is going to have a few injuries that should help in identifying him, and basically invalidate any arguments that it was consensual. It's a last line defense, and obviously isn't going to work in all cases. The point is to make the whole prospect as risky and impractical as possible. Plus, if rape truly is a power thing, then most rapists probably lack the confidence to attack someone who they could potentially lose to.
As for your first point, that's not true for hardly any attack. Most criminals aren't prepared to actually kill someone. For those that are, if nobody resists then there's no deterrent. And it's a slippery slope. By the same logic you should be encouraging the victim to comply, make their attacker as happy as possible, and not report the crime for fear of retaliation. Plus I'd imagine the psychological damage of the cowardly approach is far more devastating than the physical damage for most who resist. (Note: I'm not talking about checkmate-type situations.)
Out of curiosity, why are you still opt'd into the application platform? It seems simpler to just opt out so that no application can tell you exist, so you don't get notifications from them and they can't leech the information your friends can see...
That'd probably fall under "Malicious hacker No. 7: Rogue hackers". I really want to disagree with the statement "they aren't about to disrupt the Internet and business as we know it", because that's exactly what used to happen. Sadly, I don't think I've seen much evidence for this group's competence as of late.
I say "sadly" for a couple reasons. First, I like to believe that self taught amateurs can do amazing things, good or evil. And second, people take security more seriously when worms take out parts of the internet and viruses flash your BIOS. The current lineup of malware is pathetic compared to the malware of old. Kinda like the difference between yearly influenza and the 1918 flu.
If privacy were gone then everyone would know everything about everyone. That's not the case, so privacy is alive and well. If you don't want it, that's fine, but why should I surrender as much of it as people will take?
Security is a process, not a product. There are no "decent" AV products, if by decent you mean will prevent a standard, internet-connected Windows computer from getting viruses/malware. Detection rates for zero-day attacks seems to be, at best, 62%. Installing an antivirus and thinking you're 100% protected against viruses is delusional.
Furthermore, these are ambulance dispatch computers. The operators are not your typical slashdotter that can spot potential malware and avoid installing it. They also, given the random nature of emergency medicine, have a lot of freetime in which they likely entertain themselves using these computers while waiting on someone to need an ambulance. I suppose one could have separate networks and computers for mission-critical applications, but is that really the best way to spend healthcare dollars?
If you're fine with exploiting glitches in a game, just enter debug mode to jump to the end "You Win" sequence for a 2 second speedrun for games with such a feature. The entire point, IMHO, is to demonstrate the skill of the player, not the ability to cheat. That's like receiving a trophy by physically stealing it rather than winning an event, it's missing the point of the accomplishment.
So... rich people don't pay taxes on money they don't buy tangible goods with? Say you're taxing stock purchases at 10%, with a 30% income tax:
John earns $100, so $70 left after taxes. He's able to buy $63 of stock with it. He sells that stock, and is able to buy something worth $56.7. So, rather than paying 37% tax, like the person who doesn't buy stocks, he pays 43.3% tax. Now, suppose that $63 worth of stock changes ownership a total of ten times, that's $70 in tax revenue on $63 dollars worth of stock. I doubt that's even a stable system, since it seems like it'd asymptotically approach the government having all of the money.
Back in the middle ages you could say anything you wanted about the king, if you were prepared for the consequences. I don't think many would call that freedom of speech. Censorship doesn't need to take place before something is said, removing a person after they say something still qualifies. The term applies equally to preventing a book from being published or burning it afterwards.
Actually, when dealing with vaccines, quality of life is quantified and fairly objective. The term is "Quality-Adjusted Life Year. Life-years are measured, so a young child dying has more bearing than an elderly person, and the quality of each year is measured from zero (dead) to one (perfectly healthy). Technically, the range is a bit beyond that, as certain impairments are weighted as negative numbers, i.e. worse than death.
Being subjective doesn't get you anywhere. If there are only enough healthcare dollars to save Frank xor Joe, then you need objective criteria for determining which you save. Frank doesn't get to die just because he isn't "enjoying life" enough. Discounting life based on perceived quality is exactly what we do. Take the terminal cancer patient for example. We could let them die in as little pain as possible when the usual treatment options fail, or we could perform CPR until every rib is broken and defibrillate until their chest is burnt leather, from the reasoning that, even in their pain-filled non-communicative state, we can't make judgments of their quality of life.
Perhaps it causes people to be less observant, louder and ruder... OTOH, I think it's more likely the brain doesn't rely on functioning in a Faraday cage since having a seizure every thunderstorm would be a massive disadvantage back when our ancestors were running through the African Savannah...
There's also the trend that the more you watch/read/listen to a certain type of entertainment, the bigger fan you are. Bigger fans spend more money. IOW, even if you don't buy the box set of the series you just downloaded, you're far more likely to buy the sequel, or another series in the same genre.
This seems like something the tenth amendment ought to cover. Or at least the convoluted explanation of how the interstate commerce clause applies should prove entertaining...
Well, you could setup a filter in GMail to mark anything going to your 'real' address as spam, and only place certain whitelisted plus addresses in the inbox.
If "any of us could" make a fatal mistake, then any of us will. If we ridicule stupid decisions we'll laugh aloud while making a mental note to not be stupid. Few people are callous enough to ridicule a person's death in front of anyone who who was emotionally attached to them, but for the people we aren't attached to, IMHO, it's fine to laugh. It's what separates their tragic death from the tragic but unavoidable ones, which makes it more likely we'll learn from their folly. Plus nobody has the emotional capacity (or time) to sincerely grieve the loss of every person (2 per second, last I heard), nor is it a healthy way to live your life.
Like with most things, there's no simple technological solution to a social problem.
Facebook's penetrance is such that they almost certainly have compiled and cross-referenced information about you from your friends. By making an account you can see that data, and control it to an extent. Not being on Facebook in a true sense is probably only possible for a schizoid.
Make data session only by default, perhaps even limited to a specific tab and its children. Disallow third party cookies and scripts. Stop sending the referrer, user_agent, and plug-in information.
90 - 95% of websites work absolutely fine with these settings, while it becomes difficult to track a user across webpages or browser sessions, even via PanOptiClick methods. The problem is that 5 - 10% of websites are written by morons who code by the "works for me" method rather than understanding standards.
For example, my bank's website tries to specifically identify visitor browsers by hardcoding a list of every browser known to the developer. If you don't send a user_agent header (optional by spec), then the javascript code assumes you have javascript disabled, opens a javascript alert informing you to enable it, and does a javascript redirection to their FAQ. (Yet, for some reason, I rely on said programmer to defend against cross site scripting attacks.) Wikipedia's search assumes that you're a script, and some websites give a 500 error on any page load (usually a null pointer exception).
The Apple review process is closed, but I'm fairly sure they don't examine machine code to determine exactly what each line of code does. Even if they looked at source, obfuscated code can hide a payload. Delivery of data to a third party is easier to detect, but if you use some stegonography to conceal illegitimate data with legitimate data then it'd take some very close analysis to detect it.
That's only about equivalent to an 80-bit symmetric key. Back in 2003, RSA itself predicted that RSA1024 would only hold until approximately 2006 - 2010, though we're a bit behind that as the largest key thus factored (by civilians) is RSA768.
There are also other attacks, such as exploiting the probabilistic primality tests used in key generation, and hash collisions with the MD5 or SHA1 hashes used for key signing on OMAP hardware.
In America, the "filthy rich" pay most of the income taxes (and presumably sales tax as well). The top 1% pay 38%, the top 5% pay 59%, the top 10% pay 70%.
.902, Tax 28.2%), Australia (.937, 30.5%), Japan (.884, 27.4%), Switzerland (.874, 30.1%), Canada (.888, 33.4%), and Ireland (.895, 34%). Here's a graph for those who would rather see a raw scatterplot rather than my data manipulations.
As for wasting money, I have little doubt that governments are inherently wasteful. That said, some are much better than others. Ranking the "very highly developed nations" by percent of GDP collected in taxes divided by the human development index squared reveals striking differences. Hong Kong and Singapore have very low tax rates, so they easily come out on top (outliers?), but the rest are clustered together starting with the US (HDI
A lot of people use it as a telephone directory. It's quite helpful when you work with different people every few weeks and need to contact the other members of your team. OTOH, while I have my general location in Facebook, I don't quite see the benefit of putting a street address up. Some people might use it for driving navigation, but I figure I'd prefer people to call and ask for my address before they drop by.
61,000 square miles of roads and parking lots have been paved in the US. That's 1.6% of the total area, including Alaska, and not counting rooftops and such. Somehow, I suspect that this global trend might have an effect on albedo...
But I guess that's just magical thinking. Anthropogenic CO2 is solely to blame for climate change, and simply decreasing the rate of CO2 emissions to historic levels (i.e. where pCO2 will still be increasing) will stop the positive feedback loops that caused the cyclic nature of climate in Earth's history.