When we're discussing a time span of a hundred years, maybe 16 years is not enough for the "novelty" factor to wear off. Computers certainly weren't widespread, and only experts had access to them.
By your idiotic logic, you can't be an expert on the French revolution unless you were alive in 1789...
I meant 500 experiments on the ISS - but even looking at your list, isn't that a perfect example of incremental science? Mapping, more mapping, more detail. Better resolution of the Hubble constant. Some more probes (technology that dates back to Voyager). The Mars rovers don't have any technology that wasn't around in the 80's. Nothing wrong with any of this, but it's the clean up work that happens in dull periods. Contrast that with the 50 year period going from the development of the modern rocket to landing on the moon. With the first artificial satellites going up along there.
If someone in the early 70's had seen your list, they would have laughed and said "that's it"? By now we were supposed to have permanent settlements on the Mars and moon, space elevators, Bussard ramjets, exotic matter factories, mineral harvesting in space. We were supposed to be comfortable operating in the asteroid belt. On the other hand, everyone knew we were going to find extra-stellar planets. The math dictated it. Actually finding them was tidying up loose ends. And dark matter is the new ether - it's so obvious until one day it's not. This isn't any sort of "golden" age. We still don't even have a viable candidate for a unified theory, and everything since Einstein and Dirac have been increasingly wild attempts to get equations to balance.
So what's NASA going to do with more money? Throw bigger and bigger mirrors into orbit? Create another boondoggle like the shuttle, which was supposed to be a "cheap" launch vehicle? That's all old science. Show me something new.
Look at your list of projects. If those were Kickstarter projects, how many lay people would throw their own money in?
"If I had money, I would do great things", is how a bureaucrat thinks. Someone without vision does not suddenly develop it when they win the lottery.
An explorer on the other hand, has a vision first, and then moves heaven and earth to make it a reality. If we gave NASA serious money, they'd spend about half of it on toner for their printers, and for new conference rooms and educational programs. Giving NASA more money will mean more incremental science, more staid experiments in low earth orbit, more refinements of the measurement of background radiation. You can rest assured they will not risk one penny on something that could blow up on them.
We don't need that. We're tired of that. The space program should be run out of trailers in the desert in Texas, not air conditioned offices in Washington. We need the PhD who has a model of a space elevator in his basement and is raising $50 at a time on Kickstarter to take it to the next level. Would you donate your own money on Kickstarter to a single project that NASA is running? Hell no. Neither would I. Neither would my neighbor Bob.
How exactly is James Webb going to "change our world view"? Nicer pictures of galaxies? Big fucking deal. The moon landing united an entire nation because it was so audacious in its thinking. Now all we do is sit back and take pictures of space. It might change the world view of some physicists, for whom it is a jobs program. Bob next door probably isn't too excited about his money going towards it after putting up drywall all day. A space elevator? That's something Bob can get interested in. Vision is something almost all Americans appreciate, even in this day and age.
Fuck NASA. Come up with something that shows you have balls, then you can have my money.
They're doing busy work. If you want to be in space exploration, you need to be bold. Their probe technology is from the 1970s, and the ISS is a solution in search of a problem. Look at a list of the last 500 experiments conducted there, and try to find one that someone will care about in 100 years. Now compare that with the massive balls it took to land people on the moon, when computers were still a novelty.
James Webb. Great. Another fucking telescope, like we don't have enough of those already. I guess it's a good way to spend a few billion if you're close to retirement and you don't want to risk anyone dying on your shift. But like I said, we need to keep those glossy color brochures coming, and that doesn't happen without good optics.
You want to know how you figure out how well people can survive in space? You don't build a $20 gazillion boondoggle and do experiments for 10 years. You send people into space and see what happens to them. Without typing up 2,000 pages of composite risk management paperwork.
I don't know what NASA actually does besides print shiny brochures and give tours to kids. We landed on the moon in 1969, before I was born. If we look at the progress made since that time, NASA has been a failure by any objective standard. In the 90's there was at least some marginal progress - Chandra, Mars rover, and so on. Now all they do is marketing. Oh wait, plus important "science" - like how fruit flies fuck in low earth orbit.
Money should go to Inspiration Mars or SpaceX. NASA is where dreams go to die.
... wait, let me start over. What I really meant to say was:
Dear Shitbags,
You might have noticed that your latest approval rating is 10%. This is a good example of why that has come to pass. When you repeatedly, emphatically state that every request for information goes through a judge, a sane individual does not assume that a single request consists of THREE TRILLION FUCKING PIECES OF DATA COVERING THE ENTIRE FUCKING US POPULATION.
You are cretins. I would feel more comfortable if Snowden was on the intelligence committee than any single one of you idiots.
I mean, come on, she was just a ballerina/dancer in Hawaii, what did she have to hide from the NSA? Sure, her boyfriend Edward Snowden was involved in government affairs, but just one of a gazillion contractors.
Maybe Fermat's actual "proof in the margin" was using Beal's conjecture, and FLT was just what was more aesthetic to him.
Remember that the special case is not always solved before the more general one. Poincare was a famous unsolved problem, but Perelman actually solved the Thurston Geometrization Conjecture which was significantly more general. Poincare was just a special case of Thurston.
Agreed. This question is along the lines of "how do I surgically repair an aortic dissection?". If you are unable to do the research on your own, and come up with the best fit for your scenario, you don't have a prayer of being technically competent enough to survive the implementation phase.
There is nothing wrong with choosing an older tool because it does the better job. But claiming to have an emotional attachment to it is attention mongering. This guy is just a technological hipster - he's using Lynx to be different. He probably can' t bear to be separated from his straight razor or manual typewriter either.
It is insane to think that a 24 year old somehow grew up with Lynx and just doesn't want to change, unless this narrative involves a village in Somalia or something. We're supposed to be in awe of how special he is, but as someone who actually used Lynx when it was the only game in town, all I have to say is "get a fucking life".
I have no problem with him requiring his sales people to know how to program.
But when you come by looking to sell ads for our hospital, you need to demonstrate knowledge of least a couple of basic surgical procedures. Someone who doesn't understand surgery shouldn't be making ads for us. You don't need to be able to fix an aortic dissection on your own, but you should at least know what instruments to use, and the overall procedure.
You seem to have absolutely no clue as to how real companies operate. We might have acquired 4 different apps through acquisition in a single year. And you are incredibly naive if you think an "app" just means some legacy accounting package. An "app" can be the driver package and software that runs a $120,000 electron microscope. If you really think IT is going to tell R&D to chuck their electron microscope because Microsoft isn't making enough money on the patches for the $500 PC that runs it, you might want to think of a career outside IT. Crap, we have $12,000 embossing machines that only run with DOS software.
Your attitude is what we see from recent grads with absolutely no experience. Yes, all this makes sense in a classroom, but the real world is quite messy...
I evaluated the Surface Pro last month. We got a keyboard with it which I put in my office cabinet. It's still sitting there. I have a choice at work of what tablet I want to use, since I'm the product evaluator for that category. Right now I have an iPad, several different Androids, the RT (yuk), and this Surface Pro.
The keyboard just isn't that big a deal to me. The one that comes with it is nice in that it magnetically latches, but in terms of actual typing it's slower than a $7 generic one from Micro Center.
The reason I carry the Surface Pro is because my Windows software will run on it. Plus, it's got a USB port. If I care that much I'll just steal a full keyboard off someone's desk and plug it into the tablet. I'm in a corporate environment, it's not like USB keyboards are hard to come by. Crap, I keep one in my car...
Does GM feels threatened by people who build cars in their garage from kits?
A 3D printed pistol is a great novelty item, but what are you really going to use it for? In a self defense situation, are you going to trust a weapon that's never been fired before? I ran about 300 rounds through my new Sig P226 before I was comfortable believing that I could hit what I was aiming at.
Yes, 802.1q trunking and VLANs and all that work great in theory, but every other week and twice when Defcon is in town, some attack emerges that bypasses all that security. The military cannot take that risk. A secret network will be air gapped completely from non-classified ones, so that no matter what hole you find in the protocol or router firmware, you cannot get to the segregated network without physically running a cable. That is the only way to get acceptable separation and security.
VLAN configuration is nowhere near as simple as you are making it. You will still have the issue that many computers need to talk to the diagnostics computer, and also to the Internet. There is no way a small business would want to maintain that level of network security.
It is not easy to segregate networks like this. Remember that the receptionist might need the reservations app, and will probably need Internet access as well. So you're looking at two separate computers on his or her desk. Same with some of the accounting people - they still need to pull documents from the web.
The military already does this. It's common to have three different computers with different security levels on one desk, all of them air gapped from each other. But you're looking at three switches, three sets of cables to run, and so on. It's a lot of work even for an organization the size of the US Army, so it would not be feasible for a small practice.
The tablet idea is being floated around - but if we did it within the next couple of years, why on Earth would we pick iPad or Android rather than Surface Pro? I have a Surface Pro on my desk right now that I'm evaluating. It works not only with my USB sticks, but with a 1-wire sensor and a portable printer. And it runs Office 2010 so I can run the insane Excel spreadsheets that we routinely come across. Sure, it's $900, but my office chair literally cost more than that, so it's not like we're going to try to save $400 on tablet costs and put in hundreds of more hours in tech labor.
Long term, there's no way to know. Yes, the same argument was made for VMS. You know what else it was made for? Unix. There's no way to pick winners and losers that far out in advance.
This is not strictly true. The reason for keeping it around is that people like me get to leave at 5pm and do things besides messing with computers.
When we get a new PC in, it takes all of 20 minutes for us to load on a custom image with our network specific settings. Maybe another 15 minutes for Office, Adobe Pro, antivirus, and all the utilities that are installed by default. Applications like Photoshop or AutoCAD might take 10 minutes each. All this is fully automated, an 8th grader would be able to do it once we showed them how the management tools work. And it's over a 1G Ethernet link, so it's fast.
Contrast that to when we get a new iPad in. No PXE booting, no easy configuration through the network. No management tools that are worth a tin shit. I have to physically enter all that information in. Can't even swap in a replicated hard drive since it can't be taken apart. Loading from a USB stick? Hahah... No we have to go through the "cloud" for everything.
This isn't inertia. This is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I do this for a living and have to stay late when things change. Chasing the new shiny from Apple isn't as important to me as getting home in time to get a motorcycle ride in. When the CIO asks me about Windows 8, I just say "let's wait for a start button".
From an enterprise viewpoint this looks very different. Right now I am in the middle of our Windows XP to Windows 7 migration. We skipped Vista entirely - when users asked for it, we told them "we don't have the time".
Same thing all over again. It's great that your aunt has a new smartphone that does everything, and she thinks that's the wave of the future. But I have legacy code, ODBC connections, custom written drivers, and automated patching to worry about. Not to even mention bare metal imaging, inventory agents, or the thousands of lines of old batch files that glue things together. About 90% of the enterprise IT guys have told Microsoft "we'll wait for the next bus". What they're doing right now is putting together the next bus. I'm certainly in no hurry, it will be 2014 before we even think of how we're going to implement Win8.
I can cruise on Win7 until 2017. Microsoft is still getting our software assurance money if we upgrade or stay with WinXP. No one's in any hurry right now.
Sorry for the duplication, but you are misunderstanding how key splitting works. The key is split into say 7 parts, and out of those, any combination of 4 parts have to be present for the original to be recovered. In that case, hypothetically - you, your girlfriend, your dentist, the janitor at work, and your drinking buddy would have to die at the same time for the key to be permanently lost. The people entrusted with the parts should not be in the same circle, both for security and to make sure a common accident does not cause exactly this problem.
For this particular scenario you would certainly want key splitting. Remember that this is for your death, and that it is quite feasible that you and your girlfriend die in the same car accident. Or that there is workplace accident that kills your buddy along with you. The 4/5 is arbitrary - that is what works for me. But even 4/7 might be feasible. The important part is that the key holders are unlikely to collude, or to be identified and coerced without your knowledge.
... in a manner of speaking. This is a well known problem in crypto.
My way: all of my passwords and secret documents are in an encrypted folder which I update along with my will. Included are final farewells, secrets, where the bodies are buried, and so on. The key is split (look up PKI key splitting) into 5 parts. My girlfriend, father, buddy at work, and two of my friends each have a part. For security reasons, those are just examples. Four of those parts together are required to unlock. At my death each one turns in their part to the executor of my will who already has instructions on how to get it put together.
It is not a good idea to naively split a 10 char password into two 5 char pieces, and assume that brute force will be necessary to guess one of those parts. That is a very dangerous assumption if you are not an expert with the particular algorithms used.
Wow - seven whole LED's worth of information. And no camera? You might want to set your sights a tad higher... or figure out what Google Glass actually does...
Your mentality is that of an Apple consumer, not that of an inventor. You tell the corporations "tell me how I should use your product". My crowd tells them "show me what your product does, I'll decide if I have a use for it". In my world, iPads are complete crap - they're an appliance for Grandma that I can't connect my 1-wire scanner to, because it doesn't even have a USB port. On the other hand, an Arduino or cheap 3-D printer is a godsend. Google Glass is meant for me, not for you.
As soon as Glass hits a good price point and works with QR codes, that's my next inventory solution. Put on your glasses and look at the QR code on a server, get a readout of what it is and who the point of contact is. Oh wait, your glasses just popped up the status from the SQL database "DO NOT POWER DOWN, LARGE UPDATE IN PROGRESS". Or when maintenance looks at the QR code on an HVAC controller, it pops up the web page to access it.
You have no imagination, that's why you don't understand that this is just the first step to the rig in "Virtual Light" (fingers eagerly crossed). It has been so long since a large company did innovation for the sake of innovation, that nowadays it's an alien concept.
Slashdot Mirror
Nitpick much?
When we're discussing a time span of a hundred years, maybe 16 years is not enough for the "novelty" factor to wear off. Computers certainly weren't widespread, and only experts had access to them.
By your idiotic logic, you can't be an expert on the French revolution unless you were alive in 1789...
I meant 500 experiments on the ISS - but even looking at your list, isn't that a perfect example of incremental science? Mapping, more mapping, more detail. Better resolution of the Hubble constant. Some more probes (technology that dates back to Voyager). The Mars rovers don't have any technology that wasn't around in the 80's. Nothing wrong with any of this, but it's the clean up work that happens in dull periods. Contrast that with the 50 year period going from the development of the modern rocket to landing on the moon. With the first artificial satellites going up along there.
If someone in the early 70's had seen your list, they would have laughed and said "that's it"? By now we were supposed to have permanent settlements on the Mars and moon, space elevators, Bussard ramjets, exotic matter factories, mineral harvesting in space. We were supposed to be comfortable operating in the asteroid belt. On the other hand, everyone knew we were going to find extra-stellar planets. The math dictated it. Actually finding them was tidying up loose ends. And dark matter is the new ether - it's so obvious until one day it's not. This isn't any sort of "golden" age. We still don't even have a viable candidate for a unified theory, and everything since Einstein and Dirac have been increasingly wild attempts to get equations to balance.
So what's NASA going to do with more money? Throw bigger and bigger mirrors into orbit? Create another boondoggle like the shuttle, which was supposed to be a "cheap" launch vehicle? That's all old science. Show me something new.
Look at your list of projects. If those were Kickstarter projects, how many lay people would throw their own money in?
No. A thousand times, no.
"If I had money, I would do great things", is how a bureaucrat thinks. Someone without vision does not suddenly develop it when they win the lottery.
An explorer on the other hand, has a vision first, and then moves heaven and earth to make it a reality. If we gave NASA serious money, they'd spend about half of it on toner for their printers, and for new conference rooms and educational programs. Giving NASA more money will mean more incremental science, more staid experiments in low earth orbit, more refinements of the measurement of background radiation. You can rest assured they will not risk one penny on something that could blow up on them.
We don't need that. We're tired of that. The space program should be run out of trailers in the desert in Texas, not air conditioned offices in Washington. We need the PhD who has a model of a space elevator in his basement and is raising $50 at a time on Kickstarter to take it to the next level. Would you donate your own money on Kickstarter to a single project that NASA is running? Hell no. Neither would I. Neither would my neighbor Bob.
How exactly is James Webb going to "change our world view"? Nicer pictures of galaxies? Big fucking deal. The moon landing united an entire nation because it was so audacious in its thinking. Now all we do is sit back and take pictures of space. It might change the world view of some physicists, for whom it is a jobs program. Bob next door probably isn't too excited about his money going towards it after putting up drywall all day. A space elevator? That's something Bob can get interested in. Vision is something almost all Americans appreciate, even in this day and age.
Fuck NASA. Come up with something that shows you have balls, then you can have my money.
They're doing busy work. If you want to be in space exploration, you need to be bold. Their probe technology is from the 1970s, and the ISS is a solution in search of a problem. Look at a list of the last 500 experiments conducted there, and try to find one that someone will care about in 100 years. Now compare that with the massive balls it took to land people on the moon, when computers were still a novelty.
James Webb. Great. Another fucking telescope, like we don't have enough of those already. I guess it's a good way to spend a few billion if you're close to retirement and you don't want to risk anyone dying on your shift. But like I said, we need to keep those glossy color brochures coming, and that doesn't happen without good optics.
You want to know how you figure out how well people can survive in space? You don't build a $20 gazillion boondoggle and do experiments for 10 years. You send people into space and see what happens to them. Without typing up 2,000 pages of composite risk management paperwork.
I don't know what NASA actually does besides print shiny brochures and give tours to kids. We landed on the moon in 1969, before I was born. If we look at the progress made since that time, NASA has been a failure by any objective standard. In the 90's there was at least some marginal progress - Chandra, Mars rover, and so on. Now all they do is marketing. Oh wait, plus important "science" - like how fruit flies fuck in low earth orbit.
Money should go to Inspiration Mars or SpaceX. NASA is where dreams go to die.
... wait, let me start over. What I really meant to say was:
Dear Shitbags,
You might have noticed that your latest approval rating is 10%. This is a good example of why that has come to pass. When you repeatedly, emphatically state that every request for information goes through a judge, a sane individual does not assume that a single request consists of THREE TRILLION FUCKING PIECES OF DATA COVERING THE ENTIRE FUCKING US POPULATION.
You are cretins. I would feel more comfortable if Snowden was on the intelligence committee than any single one of you idiots.
I mean, come on, she was just a ballerina/dancer in Hawaii, what did she have to hide from the NSA? Sure, her boyfriend Edward Snowden was involved in government affairs, but just one of a gazillion contractors.
Maybe Fermat's actual "proof in the margin" was using Beal's conjecture, and FLT was just what was more aesthetic to him.
Remember that the special case is not always solved before the more general one. Poincare was a famous unsolved problem, but Perelman actually solved the Thurston Geometrization Conjecture which was significantly more general. Poincare was just a special case of Thurston.
Agreed. This question is along the lines of "how do I surgically repair an aortic dissection?". If you are unable to do the research on your own, and come up with the best fit for your scenario, you don't have a prayer of being technically competent enough to survive the implementation phase.
There is nothing wrong with choosing an older tool because it does the better job. But claiming to have an emotional attachment to it is attention mongering. This guy is just a technological hipster - he's using Lynx to be different. He probably can' t bear to be separated from his straight razor or manual typewriter either.
It is insane to think that a 24 year old somehow grew up with Lynx and just doesn't want to change, unless this narrative involves a village in Somalia or something. We're supposed to be in awe of how special he is, but as someone who actually used Lynx when it was the only game in town, all I have to say is "get a fucking life".
I have no problem with him requiring his sales people to know how to program.
But when you come by looking to sell ads for our hospital, you need to demonstrate knowledge of least a couple of basic surgical procedures. Someone who doesn't understand surgery shouldn't be making ads for us. You don't need to be able to fix an aortic dissection on your own, but you should at least know what instruments to use, and the overall procedure.
You seem to have absolutely no clue as to how real companies operate. We might have acquired 4 different apps through acquisition in a single year. And you are incredibly naive if you think an "app" just means some legacy accounting package. An "app" can be the driver package and software that runs a $120,000 electron microscope. If you really think IT is going to tell R&D to chuck their electron microscope because Microsoft isn't making enough money on the patches for the $500 PC that runs it, you might want to think of a career outside IT. Crap, we have $12,000 embossing machines that only run with DOS software.
Your attitude is what we see from recent grads with absolutely no experience. Yes, all this makes sense in a classroom, but the real world is quite messy...
... generally I don't lug it around.
I evaluated the Surface Pro last month. We got a keyboard with it which I put in my office cabinet. It's still sitting there. I have a choice at work of what tablet I want to use, since I'm the product evaluator for that category. Right now I have an iPad, several different Androids, the RT (yuk), and this Surface Pro.
The keyboard just isn't that big a deal to me. The one that comes with it is nice in that it magnetically latches, but in terms of actual typing it's slower than a $7 generic one from Micro Center.
The reason I carry the Surface Pro is because my Windows software will run on it. Plus, it's got a USB port. If I care that much I'll just steal a full keyboard off someone's desk and plug it into the tablet. I'm in a corporate environment, it's not like USB keyboards are hard to come by. Crap, I keep one in my car...
Does GM feels threatened by people who build cars in their garage from kits?
A 3D printed pistol is a great novelty item, but what are you really going to use it for? In a self defense situation, are you going to trust a weapon that's never been fired before? I ran about 300 rounds through my new Sig P226 before I was comfortable believing that I could hit what I was aiming at.
Yes, 802.1q trunking and VLANs and all that work great in theory, but every other week and twice when Defcon is in town, some attack emerges that bypasses all that security. The military cannot take that risk. A secret network will be air gapped completely from non-classified ones, so that no matter what hole you find in the protocol or router firmware, you cannot get to the segregated network without physically running a cable. That is the only way to get acceptable separation and security.
VLAN configuration is nowhere near as simple as you are making it. You will still have the issue that many computers need to talk to the diagnostics computer, and also to the Internet. There is no way a small business would want to maintain that level of network security.
It is not easy to segregate networks like this. Remember that the receptionist might need the reservations app, and will probably need Internet access as well. So you're looking at two separate computers on his or her desk. Same with some of the accounting people - they still need to pull documents from the web.
The military already does this. It's common to have three different computers with different security levels on one desk, all of them air gapped from each other. But you're looking at three switches, three sets of cables to run, and so on. It's a lot of work even for an organization the size of the US Army, so it would not be feasible for a small practice.
The tablet idea is being floated around - but if we did it within the next couple of years, why on Earth would we pick iPad or Android rather than Surface Pro? I have a Surface Pro on my desk right now that I'm evaluating. It works not only with my USB sticks, but with a 1-wire sensor and a portable printer. And it runs Office 2010 so I can run the insane Excel spreadsheets that we routinely come across. Sure, it's $900, but my office chair literally cost more than that, so it's not like we're going to try to save $400 on tablet costs and put in hundreds of more hours in tech labor.
Long term, there's no way to know. Yes, the same argument was made for VMS. You know what else it was made for? Unix. There's no way to pick winners and losers that far out in advance.
This is not strictly true. The reason for keeping it around is that people like me get to leave at 5pm and do things besides messing with computers.
When we get a new PC in, it takes all of 20 minutes for us to load on a custom image with our network specific settings. Maybe another 15 minutes for Office, Adobe Pro, antivirus, and all the utilities that are installed by default. Applications like Photoshop or AutoCAD might take 10 minutes each. All this is fully automated, an 8th grader would be able to do it once we showed them how the management tools work. And it's over a 1G Ethernet link, so it's fast.
Contrast that to when we get a new iPad in. No PXE booting, no easy configuration through the network. No management tools that are worth a tin shit. I have to physically enter all that information in. Can't even swap in a replicated hard drive since it can't be taken apart. Loading from a USB stick? Hahah... No we have to go through the "cloud" for everything.
This isn't inertia. This is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I do this for a living and have to stay late when things change. Chasing the new shiny from Apple isn't as important to me as getting home in time to get a motorcycle ride in. When the CIO asks me about Windows 8, I just say "let's wait for a start button".
From an enterprise viewpoint this looks very different. Right now I am in the middle of our Windows XP to Windows 7 migration. We skipped Vista entirely - when users asked for it, we told them "we don't have the time".
Same thing all over again. It's great that your aunt has a new smartphone that does everything, and she thinks that's the wave of the future. But I have legacy code, ODBC connections, custom written drivers, and automated patching to worry about. Not to even mention bare metal imaging, inventory agents, or the thousands of lines of old batch files that glue things together. About 90% of the enterprise IT guys have told Microsoft "we'll wait for the next bus". What they're doing right now is putting together the next bus. I'm certainly in no hurry, it will be 2014 before we even think of how we're going to implement Win8.
I can cruise on Win7 until 2017. Microsoft is still getting our software assurance money if we upgrade or stay with WinXP. No one's in any hurry right now.
Sorry for the duplication, but you are misunderstanding how key splitting works. The key is split into say 7 parts, and out of those, any combination of 4 parts have to be present for the original to be recovered. In that case, hypothetically - you, your girlfriend, your dentist, the janitor at work, and your drinking buddy would have to die at the same time for the key to be permanently lost. The people entrusted with the parts should not be in the same circle, both for security and to make sure a common accident does not cause exactly this problem.
For this particular scenario you would certainly want key splitting. Remember that this is for your death, and that it is quite feasible that you and your girlfriend die in the same car accident. Or that there is workplace accident that kills your buddy along with you. The 4/5 is arbitrary - that is what works for me. But even 4/7 might be feasible. The important part is that the key holders are unlikely to collude, or to be identified and coerced without your knowledge.
... in a manner of speaking. This is a well known problem in crypto.
My way: all of my passwords and secret documents are in an encrypted folder which I update along with my will. Included are final farewells, secrets, where the bodies are buried, and so on. The key is split (look up PKI key splitting) into 5 parts. My girlfriend, father, buddy at work, and two of my friends each have a part. For security reasons, those are just examples. Four of those parts together are required to unlock. At my death each one turns in their part to the executor of my will who already has instructions on how to get it put together.
It is not a good idea to naively split a 10 char password into two 5 char pieces, and assume that brute force will be necessary to guess one of those parts. That is a very dangerous assumption if you are not an expert with the particular algorithms used.
Wow - seven whole LED's worth of information. And no camera? You might want to set your sights a tad higher... or figure out what Google Glass actually does...
Your mentality is that of an Apple consumer, not that of an inventor. You tell the corporations "tell me how I should use your product". My crowd tells them "show me what your product does, I'll decide if I have a use for it". In my world, iPads are complete crap - they're an appliance for Grandma that I can't connect my 1-wire scanner to, because it doesn't even have a USB port. On the other hand, an Arduino or cheap 3-D printer is a godsend. Google Glass is meant for me, not for you.
As soon as Glass hits a good price point and works with QR codes, that's my next inventory solution. Put on your glasses and look at the QR code on a server, get a readout of what it is and who the point of contact is. Oh wait, your glasses just popped up the status from the SQL database "DO NOT POWER DOWN, LARGE UPDATE IN PROGRESS". Or when maintenance looks at the QR code on an HVAC controller, it pops up the web page to access it.
You have no imagination, that's why you don't understand that this is just the first step to the rig in "Virtual Light" (fingers eagerly crossed). It has been so long since a large company did innovation for the sake of innovation, that nowadays it's an alien concept.
No, no, no... you misunderstand...
I'm not looking to get out of trouble. I just want something to laugh about while they're doing the waterboarding...