I'd move to another country if I knew of any better ones out there You might consider one of the Caribbean countries (e.g. Trinidad & Tobago) -- it will probably take them most of our lifetime to get to the sorry state of affairs we see in much of the so-called "civilized" world.
On the downside, though, you will find more crime (at least compared to where I am living) and the health services may be somewhat lacking compared to what the USA can provide.
I cannot see, why the British police & government do not get it over with once and for all: Give everybody an RFID implant, make sure you cannot go anywhere in public without being traced, keep the records forever, make them available to any (semi-)governmental institution including the police and MI5 -- remembering that they will keep your data safe.
No need for beating around the bush and small steps in the direction of total surveillance.
It is just like removing a plaster, do it swiftly and the pain will soon be forgotten!
Honestly...
PS: It will, of course, due to fact that crimes could be committed by foreigners, be mandatory for people visiting England to have an implant too, maybe just a temporary one that is removed at the border. Naturally, nobody in their right mind would object to that.
One problem with Wikipedia is the editing and reediting of articles -- often amounting to the ridiculous like when two parties fight for different perspectives.
Another problem with Wikipedia is the lack of authority -- well, maybe not always lack of authority as such but lack of ability to confirm the authority. You do not need authority to change an article.
I do not see how Google's system changes any of that.
Where are the peer reviews? Where are the bona fide subject matter expert moderators?
Until those problems are solved, any publicly edited information will be of dubious value. (Before you start flaming me: I am aware that experts are not necessarily right but at least they could (and should) be selected for their credibility in the societies of their field.)
I find a general tendency today towards KICS (Keep It Complex, Stupid) programming instead of KISS. This means that people have modules with tens (or, shudder, hundreds) of thousands of lines of code, which are hard to maintain (an average programmer can probably handle a few thousands lines of code in her head, if that much) and even harder to test/debug.
I personally try to make my programs very modular, where the modules are simple, single-function and testable. I do put a lot of thought into planning ahead and designing the module interfaces so I rarely have to change the interface specifications during the project. And I put comments into the programs, often way above the norm, in fact, some of my code could be read and understood completely just by reading the comments. Waste of time, some would say, but I like it.
To be slightly more specific about the modularity:
Simple means small and relatively linear, i.e. as little convoluted code as possible.
Single-function means, well, that it performs only a single function. In the program I may have a general formatting module that can format dates, strings and numbers, depending a bit on the complexity of each type of formatting, I might choose to have further modules that each handle one type, i.e. a date-formatting module, a string-formatting module and a number-formatting module.
Testable means that each and every module can be tested independently, which normally implies no side-effects (not an absolute demand, though). I always write a test section for each module and make the tests cover as many parts of the code as possible (hopefully all sections of the code, but for slightly complex modules this may be infeasible or even impossible).
By sticking to these rules and by documenting the code thoroughly, coding does not have to be too difficult.
These rules/principles, I know, are part of some of the major design methodologies, but you do not have to make it more fancy than this to make it work.
The above principles are very hard to retrofit into existing (legacy?) code that was not built this way, but extensions could still be made in a modular way that, if not to the letter, then in principle, adheres to the rules.
I may have gotten this wrong, but to me it seems simple to secure E-mail without changing the current method drastically.
First I must look at the types of E-mail I receive (more precisely, who I receive E-mail from):
1. Friends and family
2. Friends of friends and family
3. Businesses I know
4. Mailing lists
5. Spammers
For businesses there are another two categories:
6. Customers
7. Potential customers
It must be possible to find a simple way to create a digital signature without making it rocket science, which is an underlying assumption of my suggestion.
Similarly, it must be possible to disseminate a digital signature to potential recipients in an easy way, a scheme like tinyurl springs to mind -- or any of the other publicly available, free "certificate authorities" (CAs). I submit the public part of my signature to tinysig or whatever it is called and tell my friends and family about it.
Businesses would probably register their signatures with the "official" CAs (but could use tinysig as well) and display proper links to them on their websites -- as could plain people with homepages. I would suggest something on the form of pubsig://tinysig.com/al1ga2r and pubsig://thawte.com/BigCorporation/12437265190. Those links would return a public signature id, which would go directly to the E-mail program for storage, much like the mailto: does for automatically opening a new E-mail.
1. Friends and family would give you their tinysig signature, which you quickly incorporated into your E-mail program. The E-mail program disseminates it to whatever server(s) it collects mail from.
2. Friends of friends and family would ask your common connection to forward their tinysig signature.
3. Businesses I know would either provide me with links directly (i.e. by phone or mail) or through their websites.
4. Mailing lists would provide their signature ID when you subscribe to the list.
5. Spammers... Well, tough luck, unless you are of category 1 through 4, of course.
6. Customers of businesses should probably provide their public signature ID to the business if they want them to receive their mail, but otherwise the business could open for specific E-mail adresses like current whitelists in current spam filters.
7. Potential customers... well, if you want new customers, you should probably expect a certain amount of spam, shouldn't you?
This suggestion could easily be grafted on to current, prevalent E-mail protocols, i.e. SMTP/ESMTP, POP and IMAP, and I am sure it would reduce the problem quite substantially and (provided the signatures are properly generated) be rather safe from crackers/hackers and spammers.
Big E-mail providers like Yahoo, Hotmail, G-mail and the like, would certainly have to incorporate it into their systems for this to work properly, but again, it is not too difficult.
Please bear with me if this is not thought through properly, but I have a plane to catch.
I am all pro-privacy, but the idea of using broadcasts to get infected people to identify themselves will just not work for several reasons.
Let us say that you are a Chinese with virtually zero knowledge of English and visit USA for a quick holiday. You happen to come from an infected area and may be infected without your knowledge. What are the chances that you watch the English news and understand that the information provided apply to you?
Slim, I'd say.
With proper contact information, though, you could hopefully be found and your whereabouts tracked to identify possible infection patterns.
It seems, though, that they do not collect the necessary information about you as you do not have to specify a current address when entering the country, thus making it difficult to track your whereabouts.
There is another problem with this scheme and that is the problem of actually finding the people you have been in contact with. An example: You boarded a sightseeing bus and had a nice conversation with a Chinese couple from Pittsburgh that just happened to be on the same bus. You ate in this nice restaurant somewhere downtown, although you have got no clue as to its name and location as you could not read the signs, you just entered the first that took your fancy.
My question is: Is this measure really going to make a difference?
Is this really what we, the people, want? A society where the police and the government monitors our every little move in the hopes to stave off some crime? Should we not be concerned about the potential abuse or overzealous use of such systems?
If extensive monitoring is really the goal, why not implant a small RFID tag into everybody at birth (and retrofit the rest of the population) and have corresponding readers everywhere? Especially at every entrance to offices, shops and private homes.
Such a system would enable the police to know the whereabouts of everybody at any time and would thus really help stop crime.
A Police Officer, "We would like to question you about the untimely death of Justine Aphtermath as you were in her house with three other suspects on the evening of her murder."
Another Police Officer, "You are under arrest for suspected terrorism, sir, as you were in the same apartment as three known Al Qaeida sympathizers for three hours last Saturday evening!"
A letter from The Police: You are hereby fined £100 for littering on Meander Close, Friday 4 November 2005 at 2101 hours. The act was caught on CCTV and your ID scanned by the reader.
Another letter from The Police: Our scanners showed you were a front seat passenger in the Trabant, license number AA 00, owned by Mr. Phastcar, when the car last Thursday on three separate occasions exceeded the speed limits. As it is an offence not to prevent drivers from speeding, you are hereby fined three times £50.
Helpful Police Officer on the phone, "Mr. Abercrombie gone missing -- just a moment, Mrs. Abercrombie, while I check our system... Ah, did you perchance check Miss Phinnaggle's apartment?"
The list is endless and the advantages obvious, so why not take the ultimate step now?
I think the discussion about and measures against terrorism are quite out of proportion. Of course we should protect ourselves against attacks, but we must find a middle ground and not go totally overboard.
According to National Statistics (the UK statistics bureau), the rate of road deaths in UK is 6.1 per 100,000 inhabitants (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/ssdataset.a sp?vlnk=7254), which is equivalent to more than 3,500 a year... every year!
The equivalent rate for Sweden is... 1.1 per 100,000 inhabitants! If UK, by working really hard on road safety, could achieve similar numbers, it would reduce the amount of road deaths to less than 700 a year. Or a reduction of almost 3,000 a year! How about that?
Add to that the number of homicides (more than 700 a year in the period from 1998 to 2000), and our fear of terrorism seems rather out of proportion, doesn't it?
One thing is detention for a short period if you look like a suspect -- but searching a house without a warrant, that is a real violation of your privacy!
I invent something, let's just call it the Dribblecatcher.
I go through lots of research to make sure it is unique, not infringing on other patents and that it has all the qualities demanded of a patent.
I patent it, start production and sell a good number, almost ready to make a profit on my substantial investments... when Big Bad Company Ltd. introduces their product, the Droolstopper, which clearly infringes on my patent.
I get my lawyer (I cannot afford more than one, so it isn't "lawyers") to write Big Bad to stop them from selling the infringing product. Their lawyers reply that they have no intention of stopping a lucrative business and that they'll rather see me in court.
Now, I could go to court, but I would only be able to sustain the expenses for a very short time and thus have no real choice but letting Big Bad go on with their business.
Then suddenly this letter drops in, "Your product, the Dribblecatcher, infringes on our patent for droplet recovery, US 1234..... Please refrain from further sales and marketing of said product and furthermore please pay us $xxxxxxx for the improper use. We reserve the right to seek damages, etc..."
Even the best effort on my part to find the above patent has failed and my business is in shambles because of an unscrupulous, big competitor and a "hidden" patent.
What do I do? (Apart from crying myself to sleep every night.)
Slashdot Mirror
On the downside, though, you will find more crime (at least compared to where I am living) and the health services may be somewhat lacking compared to what the USA can provide.
I cannot see, why the British police & government do not get it over with once and for all: Give everybody an RFID implant, make sure you cannot go anywhere in public without being traced, keep the records forever, make them available to any (semi-)governmental institution including the police and MI5 -- remembering that they will keep your data safe.
...
No need for beating around the bush and small steps in the direction of total surveillance.
It is just like removing a plaster, do it swiftly and the pain will soon be forgotten!
Honestly
PS: It will, of course, due to fact that crimes could be committed by foreigners, be mandatory for people visiting England to have an implant too, maybe just a temporary one that is removed at the border. Naturally, nobody in their right mind would object to that.
One problem with Wikipedia is the editing and reediting of articles -- often amounting to the ridiculous like when two parties fight for different perspectives.
Another problem with Wikipedia is the lack of authority -- well, maybe not always lack of authority as such but lack of ability to confirm the authority. You do not need authority to change an article.
I do not see how Google's system changes any of that.
Where are the peer reviews? Where are the bona fide subject matter expert moderators?
Until those problems are solved, any publicly edited information will be of dubious value. (Before you start flaming me: I am aware that experts are not necessarily right but at least they could (and should) be selected for their credibility in the societies of their field.)
Santa Claus exists, I have met him several times. He's a really nice guy. And he is definitely not a front for the Toy Manufacturers' Association.
- Testable means that each and every module can be tested independently, which normally implies no side-effects (not an absolute demand, though). I always write a test section for each module and make the tests cover as many parts of the code as possible (hopefully all sections of the code, but for slightly complex modules this may be infeasible or even impossible).
By sticking to these rules and by documenting the code thoroughly, coding does not have to be too difficult. These rules/principles, I know, are part of some of the major design methodologies, but you do not have to make it more fancy than this to make it work. The above principles are very hard to retrofit into existing (legacy?) code that was not built this way, but extensions could still be made in a modular way that, if not to the letter, then in principle, adheres to the rules.... by all the stamps for my E-mails.
I may have gotten this wrong, but to me it seems simple to secure E-mail without changing the current method drastically.
... Well, tough luck, unless you are of category 1 through 4, of course.
... well, if you want new customers, you should probably expect a certain amount of spam, shouldn't you?
First I must look at the types of E-mail I receive (more precisely, who I receive E-mail from):
1. Friends and family
2. Friends of friends and family
3. Businesses I know
4. Mailing lists
5. Spammers
For businesses there are another two categories:
6. Customers
7. Potential customers
It must be possible to find a simple way to create a digital signature without making it rocket science, which is an underlying assumption of my suggestion.
Similarly, it must be possible to disseminate a digital signature to potential recipients in an easy way, a scheme like tinyurl springs to mind -- or any of the other publicly available, free "certificate authorities" (CAs). I submit the public part of my signature to tinysig or whatever it is called and tell my friends and family about it.
Businesses would probably register their signatures with the "official" CAs (but could use tinysig as well) and display proper links to them on their websites -- as could plain people with homepages. I would suggest something on the form of pubsig://tinysig.com/al1ga2r and pubsig://thawte.com/BigCorporation/12437265190. Those links would return a public signature id, which would go directly to the E-mail program for storage, much like the mailto: does for automatically opening a new E-mail.
1. Friends and family would give you their tinysig signature, which you quickly incorporated into your E-mail program. The E-mail program disseminates it to whatever server(s) it collects mail from.
2. Friends of friends and family would ask your common connection to forward their tinysig signature.
3. Businesses I know would either provide me with links directly (i.e. by phone or mail) or through their websites.
4. Mailing lists would provide their signature ID when you subscribe to the list.
5. Spammers
6. Customers of businesses should probably provide their public signature ID to the business if they want them to receive their mail, but otherwise the business could open for specific E-mail adresses like current whitelists in current spam filters.
7. Potential customers
This suggestion could easily be grafted on to current, prevalent E-mail protocols, i.e. SMTP/ESMTP, POP and IMAP, and I am sure it would reduce the problem quite substantially and (provided the signatures are properly generated) be rather safe from crackers/hackers and spammers.
Big E-mail providers like Yahoo, Hotmail, G-mail and the like, would certainly have to incorporate it into their systems for this to work properly, but again, it is not too difficult.
Please bear with me if this is not thought through properly, but I have a plane to catch.
Let us say that you are a Chinese with virtually zero knowledge of English and visit USA for a quick holiday. You happen to come from an infected area and may be infected without your knowledge. What are the chances that you watch the English news and understand that the information provided apply to you?
Slim, I'd say.
With proper contact information, though, you could hopefully be found and your whereabouts tracked to identify possible infection patterns.
It seems, though, that they do not collect the necessary information about you as you do not have to specify a current address when entering the country, thus making it difficult to track your whereabouts.
There is another problem with this scheme and that is the problem of actually finding the people you have been in contact with. An example: You boarded a sightseeing bus and had a nice conversation with a Chinese couple from Pittsburgh that just happened to be on the same bus. You ate in this nice restaurant somewhere downtown, although you have got no clue as to its name and location as you could not read the signs, you just entered the first that took your fancy.
My question is: Is this measure really going to make a difference?
Is this really what we, the people, want? A society where the police and the government monitors our every little move in the hopes to stave off some crime? Should we not be concerned about the potential abuse or overzealous use of such systems?
If extensive monitoring is really the goal, why not implant a small RFID tag into everybody at birth (and retrofit the rest of the population) and have corresponding readers everywhere? Especially at every entrance to offices, shops and private homes.
Such a system would enable the police to know the whereabouts of everybody at any time and would thus really help stop crime.
A Police Officer, "We would like to question you about the untimely death of Justine Aphtermath as you were in her house with three other suspects on the evening of her murder."
Another Police Officer, "You are under arrest for suspected terrorism, sir, as you were in the same apartment as three known Al Qaeida sympathizers for three hours last Saturday evening!"
A letter from The Police: You are hereby fined £100 for littering on Meander Close, Friday 4 November 2005 at 2101 hours. The act was caught on CCTV and your ID scanned by the reader.
Another letter from The Police: Our scanners showed you were a front seat passenger in the Trabant, license number AA 00, owned by Mr. Phastcar, when the car last Thursday on three separate occasions exceeded the speed limits. As it is an offence not to prevent drivers from speeding, you are hereby fined three times £50.
Helpful Police Officer on the phone, "Mr. Abercrombie gone missing -- just a moment, Mrs. Abercrombie, while I check our system ... Ah, did you perchance check Miss Phinnaggle's apartment?"
The list is endless and the advantages obvious, so why not take the ultimate step now?
I think the discussion about and measures against terrorism are quite out of proportion. Of course we should protect ourselves against attacks, but we must find a middle ground and not go totally overboard.
According to National Statistics (the UK statistics bureau), the rate of road deaths in UK is 6.1 per 100,000 inhabitants (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/ssdataset.a sp?vlnk=7254), which is equivalent to more than 3,500 a year ... every year!
The equivalent rate for Sweden is ... 1.1 per 100,000 inhabitants! If UK, by working really hard on road safety, could achieve similar numbers, it would reduce the amount of road deaths to less than 700 a year. Or a reduction of almost 3,000 a year! How about that?
Add to that the number of homicides (more than 700 a year in the period from 1998 to 2000), and our fear of terrorism seems rather out of proportion, doesn't it?
One thing is detention for a short period if you look like a suspect -- but searching a house without a warrant, that is a real violation of your privacy!
I find patents quite scary!
I invent something, let's just call it the Dribblecatcher.
I go through lots of research to make sure it is unique, not infringing on other patents and that it has all the qualities demanded of a patent.
I patent it, start production and sell a good number, almost ready to make a profit on my substantial investments ... when Big Bad Company Ltd. introduces their product, the Droolstopper, which clearly infringes on my patent.
I get my lawyer (I cannot afford more than one, so it isn't "lawyers") to write Big Bad to stop them from selling the infringing product. Their lawyers reply that they have no intention of stopping a lucrative business and that they'll rather see me in court.
Now, I could go to court, but I would only be able to sustain the expenses for a very short time and thus have no real choice but letting Big Bad go on with their business.
Then suddenly this letter drops in, "Your product, the Dribblecatcher, infringes on our patent for droplet recovery, US 1234..... Please refrain from further sales and marketing of said product and furthermore please pay us $xxxxxxx for the improper use. We reserve the right to seek damages, etc ..."
Even the best effort on my part to find the above patent has failed and my business is in shambles because of an unscrupulous, big competitor and a "hidden" patent.
What do I do? (Apart from crying myself to sleep every night.)