... they are collecting taxes from customers and pocketing the money instead of turning it in to their state or local government.
The money they are pocketing is intended to pay for schools, police, fire, roads, and other state and local services. Everybody else has to pay increased taxes to make up for their fraud.
They interviewed some No-Fly-List people on TV. One (I think it was the mother of the 8-year-old) said she tips a skycap to get their boarding passes and doing that avoids the problem. IIRC, another said he adds his middle initial and gets through. IIRC a third did a similar minor tweak to his name and avoids the problem.
Apparently, the list is being used stupidly and simple things that fool the stupidity work to bypass it.
Re:So most companies are like Lake Woebegone...
on
Subject to Change
·
· Score: 1
My full quote is "... where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average".
If you consider the quote from the article you realize that NO companies are below average. To be statistically more precise, the absolutely amazing and mathematically prestidigitating fact is that no companies are below the median (50th percentile).
The one thing I left out of my comment was this:-)
So most companies are like Lake Woebegone...
on
Subject to Change
·
· Score: 1
Just remember that this happened in Frederick County. It would be consistent with some of their other positions if leading politicians there took the view that you shouldn't need a warrant unless you have something to hide. The library director was probably just protecting his job.
If you think speculators are not causing the problem, then please explain why was there a letter signed by many airline CEO's who DO take delivery of the commodity stating that speculation was at the root of the problem and asking that it be curbed.
Airline CEOs want gas NOW. And they are having to pay what speculators are thinking its going to be worth next month.
Airline CEO's participate in the futures market as consumers of the commodity. They want to lock in future prices to the extent they can. Southwest has done a great job on that. They were able to do it largely because they had the cash. BTW, they also signed the letter.
The letter said that a major problem in the oil futures market is due to removal of limitations on speculator positions (of the kind that are imposed on other commodities). The limits are imposed to prevent a speculator from cornering the market to the detriment of real producers and consumers of the commodity. Guess who snuck into legislation the provision that prohibited the CFTC from imposing the position limits on energy. Why, it was Senator Phil Gramm, who recently called us a nation of whiners.
Commodity traders CANNOT affect long term oil prices if there is no problems with supply. The reason is if you buy oil, you have to take delivery of that oil.
WRONG! Speculators are people who trade but don't produce the commodity or take delivery of it. Speculators positions in a commodity can be many, many times the actual supply and demand of the commodity. If you think speculators are not causing the problem, then please explain why was there a letter signed by many airline CEO's who DO take delivery of the commodity stating that speculation was at the root of the problem and asking that it be curbed.
I run all my systems dual/multi boot with Windows and Linux (often more than one version, e.g., both Centos and Ubuntu). I keep a Windows partition because I occasionally find it useful. I usually squash the Windows partition down to about a quarter or less of the hard drive. That was easy to do with XP and either Partition Magic or its open source equivalents.
Vista does its own partition management (similar to Linux LVM) but limits the reduction in its partition to 50%.
I wouldn't mind getting Vista pre-loaded if the partition was sized to a quarter of the drive (allowing me to further reduce it as low as 12.5%). Dell offered custom partitioning at one time but no longer offers it. When I asked about that for a laptop, they suggested buying Ubuntu preloaded, which they offer on only two laptops.
I would much prefer having an option for Linux pre-loaded on everything. I'm equally concerned about issues like HP voiding the warranty on machines where the user has repartitioned and loaded Linux.
Perhaps customer resistance to the demise of XP will push PC makers to include pre-loaded Linux as an option.
It's not a sideshow. It's a question of allowing the three branches of government to work as intended. Removing the courts from the process with regards to past misdeeds is a huge deal. Obama is just afraid to look weak on terrorism. He's too busy pandering to Bush's core to take a principled stand.
The courts were not actually removed. The major misdeeds were on the part of the administration, for which Bush should be impeached (but won't be).
The telcos have to go before a judge and prove that they were told that what they were being asked to do was legal. You can argue about the fact that the Justice Department was politicized and would say that anything illegal was legal if Bush wanted to do it. That gets into the whole mess about claims of executive privilege, the US Attorney firings, the Siegelman case, and a lot of other stuff. Those are more grounds for the impeachment that won't happen. The telcos will be able to produce the evidence they were told it was legal.
BTW, because of CALEA, the telcos were probably between a rock and a hard place.
If there is any failure of the branches to work as intended it is the failure to impeach Bush and Cheney, not letting the telcos off the hook. Besides, the main purpose of civilly suing the telcos was to find out what was happening, and the article gives us a pretty good idea.
Are you just reporting on something that you read, or are you seriously trying to imply that it's a good thing to make it possible for the government to get a number of wire tap warrants so large that it is currently intractable due to a shortage of wrists and opposable thumbs?
The problem is that everyone is focused on the sideshow of telecom immunity and nobody has discussed the core issues. FISA was enacted in the 1970's. New technology created issues with FISA.
Nobody talks about the real issues, that have to do with automated wiretapping that includes massive scanning of conversations and selection of a smaller number to be monitored. Except for the analysis in the article, this has not been discussed. The analysis in the article is the best we have to go on.
Based on the article, the core issue in the new bill was to somehow bring this technology under FISA Court supervision. The discussion of Obama's vote needs to be put in the light of what we think is the underlying technology and whether the bill is good or bad in that context.
If the wiretap warrant issue is intractable, how do you bring the technology under court supervision? My guess is that the bill is designed to have the court approve the sampling criteria that trigger detailed monitoring and require individual warrants only for the detailed monitoring. I haven't looked at the details, but this is what the discussion should address.
If we assume that article has correctly identified what was happening, the core issue becomes how to get massive, automated wiretapping under judicial control. The article states that there aren't enough judges to process all the warrants needed under the old FISA law using the new technology. So instead of fixing the law, the administration ignored it. Bush and Cheney should be impeached over this, but that isn't going to happen.
A major purpose of the telecom lawsuits was to get discovery going and find out what was happening. The investigation ordered by the new law is also supposed to do that. However, if the article is right we know what was happening. Enough was said publicly about a variety of matters for the author of the article to figure out the underlying technology.
Let's give Obama credit for focusing on the core issues and working to get them fixed. If he gave on the immunity sideshow, that's just part of the imperfection that he said was there in the compromise.
A few years ago, when the whole warrantless wiretapping issue broke, Slashdot posted an article speculating on what was going on. The author looked at the public statements, developed a technical conjecture of what was probably happening, showed that the public statements correlated with the technical conjecture, and talked about the implications.
IIRC, the article suggested that a system called Echelon, that had been deployed outside the US, had been deployed inside the US. Echelon was rumored to contain technology that sampled all voice conversations in a telephone system for certain words/phrases and decided to listen more closely to ones that triggered certain criteria.
IIRC, the article then pointed out that if done within the US and thus requiring a warrant for each instance of listening, there were not enough personnel in the entire US judicial system to process all the warrants that would be needed.
That is likely to be the context for what this is all about. It may well be a very difficult call. Also, the entire debate has taken place without this information publicly on the table, even on a basis of taking the speculation as an assumption by those debating the issue.
If you think about the issue in these terms, the telecom immunity becomes somewhat of a sideshow and the imposition of judicial oversight on the criteria for further listening becomes the most critical aspect. An important purpose of the telecom immunity lawsuits was to find out what was happening. I think the article provides us an educated guess, and that the debate can become an informed one and not just an argument in the dark about principles without an understanding of the underlying technology.
Nice that Linux is now on their radar screen. I hope they include several CD's to avoid the need for broadband downloads, including Universe and Multiverse.
However, it would be much better if they offered the choice of Ubuntu LTS pre-installed on PC's and laptops. Especially since all they offer now is Vista and it is such a disaster.
I could buy a system pre-loaded with XP and repartition to squash the XP down to less than a quarter of the drive (for the rare occasions when I need to use Windows). I could then load Linux on the freed-up space. Vista limits the reduction to 50%, which is not enough. I don't want to waste that much of my drive. Pre-loaded Ubuntu would solve the problem of making my primary OS Linux.
I hope they sell a gazillion copies of Ubuntu and decide to go a step further and offer it pre-loaded.
The abundance concern of the telcos is a manifestation of Googin's Law, enunciated by Roxanne Googin, editor of a telecom-related newsletter. She stated that broadband (from an investor perspective) will either be a valuable monopoly or a worthless commodity.
The marginal cost of additional bandwidth is near zero. According to basic economics, the price should equal the marginal cost. That is the "worthless commodity" part. However, if there is a single monopoly owner who can play games and charge whatever they want for whatever they decide to provide, that is the "valuable monopoly."
Right now, we are in the valuable monopoly situation. Speeds are dumbed down (real broadband starts around 500 Mbps bidirectional, chips now in systems can support 1 Gbps). Cable TV providers use the rationale of limited bandwidth to choose the channels they provide and play games with tiers.
This situation is causing the US to fall behind in worldwide competitiveness.
We need to make bandwidth a worthless commodity. That may mean end-user ownership or municipal involvement. Our innovative birthright should not belong to the telcos.
To use a military axiom: The commander is responsible for everything the command does or fails to do.
He is the most powerful person in the company. They are producing crap because of his policies and directions. If he wanted to stop producing crap, the place to have started was with the policies and directions he gave his company. Everything else flowed from that.
How about a CD or DVD as a pad? Use a pseudo-random number generator as an increment for the next digit in the pad.
So the key may be based on a song, a movie, a you-tube video or even a Windows install disk. The pad would be generated by taking samples from pseudo-random places on the source file. The proper random number generator is the digitized output of a noise source, such as the electric arc of a welding machine. The output of a pseudo-random number generator is breakable. It isn't really random.
Unbreakable encryption was invented by the US Army Signal Service in 1917. It is called the "one time pad". The encryption key is random and is as long as the message. The encryption is unbreakable as long as each key is used only once.
The drawback of a one-time pad system is the logistics of transporting the keys and having only two copies, that are destroyed after they are used.
Roosevelt and Churchill had transatlantic voice conversations during World War II that were encrypted using one-time pad technology. The conversations would remain unbreakable even if recordings of the radio transmissions were available today.
The current corporate governance situation began with the "shareholder rights" movement that started in the 1980's. That movement was fostered by corporate raiders who had no long term interest in the corporations they attacked. They wanted to get in, make a quick profit, and get out.
The movement was focused on disregarding the rights and interests of the non-shareholding stakeholders in a corporation -- the communities in which they operate, their employees, their customers, those affected by their impacts on the environment and markets, and possibly others.
Those rights and interests had previously been protected by unwritten understandings, the so-called "social compact". The shareholder rights movement effectively broke the social compact because there was no legally-enforceable impediment to their doing so.
The way to fix this is to restore the social compact and protect the interests of non-shareholder stakeholders by law, regulation, or contract. This means restoring the power of unions, strengthening regulation of markets, and providing safeguards for the interests of communities, especially those that provide benefits to corporations without written agreements reflecting the reciprocal obligations of those corporations.
Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially. Didn't Microsoft have a major issue a few years ago with people who were actually employees not being categorized as employees and not being adequately compensated? It seemed at the time that only a fraction of Microsoft's developers were being rewarded financially.
In the mid 1970's I took a painting class that I attended for several years. Photomicrographs became one of my favorite sources of ideas for painting.
Aviation Week had published a photomicrograph of a moon rock. Except for being in black and white, it looked like modern art, so I did a painting based on its characteristics, adding color. I later bought a book that had photomicrographs of minerals. I used some of the pictures in that book the same way.
There are other things that can be used. I once took part of an election district map and made a painting that looks somewhat like the design for a stained glass window.
You would be amazed at the number of things that can provide ideas for modern art.
IETF requires demonstrated interoperability using prototype reference implementations before they will adopt a standard.
ISO generally first adopts standards, then waits for people to prototype implementations and discover the bugs in the standard (unless someone walks in with existing technology and asks for it to be standardized). When people start reporting that aspects of the standard can't be implemented, ISO works on fixing it.
After ISO adopted the Open System Interconnection (OSI) standards, they had to set up "implementers' workshops" to figure out how to make their newly adopted standards workable. (The OSI standards are the 7-layer reference model and related protocol suite that were pushed aside by the Internet protocol suite, a.k.a TCP/IP. Many OSI protocols were never fully implemented or never made to work.)
The workshops met (one was sponsored by NIST) and produced a lot of documents on things that needed to be done to make OSI work. When the Clinton/Gore administration came into office, they killed US government support for the OSI protocols and told its agencies to use the Internet protocols.
The 10 Gb Ethernet standard has been out there for several years now. IEEE-USA has had a position statement for at least two or three years advocating implementation of gigabit speed, bidirectional, broadband technology in the US. Other countries are implementing this technology for reasons of competitiveness and because it is feasible with current technology. Note that the communications chips in newer PC's are gigabit capable.
We need to do this to avoid becoming a third world telecommunications country, which is what we are on track for becoming. Companies like Verizon are offering dumbed down broadband, possibly for two reasons:
1. There is a "law" enunciated by Roxanne Googin, editor of a telecom newsletter, to the effect that broadband will either be a profitable monopoly (that the provider squeezes for all they can) or a "worthless commodity" (because the marginal cost and therefore the market price) approaches zero.
2. The providers want to couple broadband with entertainment. Gigabit, bidirectional broadband threatens the business models of the entertainment industry.
IEEE-USA has advocated separating content from carriage. This would make broadband providers common carriers. The user would negotiate content separately with content providers.
Trying to do it with BPL is a bad idea. BPL has three problems: interference, interference, and interference. Power engineers aren't accustomed to considering wavelength issues, because the wavelength at 60 Hz is thousands of miles. But at broadband frequencies the wavelength is a few feet. Any rusty attachment on a guy wire can become a source of intermodulation products that can then be radiated by the guy wire.
If you look at some application domains (and my example is the world of electric power), executives -- or even domain technical experts -- talk about doing things from a domain perspective. They often don't mention -- or seem to think about the fact -- that many of the things they are talking about are actually being implemented in information technology.
For example, very few of the reliability standards talk about the communications and computation that implement what the standard addresses. You have activities that can only be accomplished by remote control (implying data communications) but the only mention of communications in the standards is related to voice telephone procedures.
This can turn into a very serious blind spot. In electric power there is not only a wall between executives and IT, but another wall between IT and real-time operational control. I wouldn't be surprised to find the same thing in manufacturing companies.
At a meeting in a context unrelated to this discussion, someone pointed out that people who are good at math and science don't run for political office, and that perhaps their weakness at math and science is what got them into a field where running for political office is something people do. The same may apply to management. Some people go into management because they aren't good at technical work. Then the management culture gets ahold of them and they become uncomfortable with IT and IT people.
It is about time that computers and technology became core parts of a general education.
By analogy, if a kid started a fire playing with matches, this lawmaker would want to ban all sale or possession of matches by anyone.
How about a much more narrowly tailored law? For example, requiring that posters on web sites having a substantial part of their content devoted to information about minors or social networking by minors be required to register with accurate identifying information that can be revealed if a judge determines that bullying has taken place.
Slashdot Mirror
... they are collecting taxes from customers and pocketing the money instead of turning it in to their state or local government.
The money they are pocketing is intended to pay for schools, police, fire, roads, and other state and local services. Everybody else has to pay increased taxes to make up for their fraud.
I recall hearing that in an early instance of this scam the messages were sent by Pony Express.
They interviewed some No-Fly-List people on TV. One (I think it was the mother of the 8-year-old) said she tips a skycap to get their boarding passes and doing that avoids the problem. IIRC, another said he adds his middle initial and gets through. IIRC a third did a similar minor tweak to his name and avoids the problem.
Apparently, the list is being used stupidly and simple things that fool the stupidity work to bypass it.
My quote is from Garrison Keillor's description of Lake Woebegone on the radio program "Prairie Home Companion". (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Prairie_Home_Companion)
My full quote is "... where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average".
If you consider the quote from the article you realize that NO companies are below average. To be statistically more precise, the absolutely amazing and mathematically prestidigitating fact is that no companies are below the median (50th percentile).
The one thing I left out of my comment was this :-)
... where all the children are above average.
Just remember that this happened in Frederick County. It would be consistent with some of their other positions if leading politicians there took the view that you shouldn't need a warrant unless you have something to hide. The library director was probably just protecting his job.
If you think speculators are not causing the problem, then please explain why was there a letter signed by many airline CEO's who DO take delivery of the commodity stating that speculation was at the root of the problem and asking that it be curbed.
Airline CEOs want gas NOW. And they are having to pay what speculators are thinking its going to be worth next month.
Airline CEO's participate in the futures market as consumers of the commodity. They want to lock in future prices to the extent they can. Southwest has done a great job on that. They were able to do it largely because they had the cash. BTW, they also signed the letter.
The letter said that a major problem in the oil futures market is due to removal of limitations on speculator positions (of the kind that are imposed on other commodities). The limits are imposed to prevent a speculator from cornering the market to the detriment of real producers and consumers of the commodity. Guess who snuck into legislation the provision that prohibited the CFTC from imposing the position limits on energy. Why, it was Senator Phil Gramm, who recently called us a nation of whiners.
Commodity traders CANNOT affect long term oil prices if there is no problems with supply. The reason is if you buy oil, you have to take delivery of that oil.
WRONG! Speculators are people who trade but don't produce the commodity or take delivery of it. Speculators positions in a commodity can be many, many times the actual supply and demand of the commodity. If you think speculators are not causing the problem, then please explain why was there a letter signed by many airline CEO's who DO take delivery of the commodity stating that speculation was at the root of the problem and asking that it be curbed.
I run all my systems dual/multi boot with Windows and Linux (often more than one version, e.g., both Centos and Ubuntu). I keep a Windows partition because I occasionally find it useful. I usually squash the Windows partition down to about a quarter or less of the hard drive. That was easy to do with XP and either Partition Magic or its open source equivalents.
Vista does its own partition management (similar to Linux LVM) but limits the reduction in its partition to 50%.
I wouldn't mind getting Vista pre-loaded if the partition was sized to a quarter of the drive (allowing me to further reduce it as low as 12.5%). Dell offered custom partitioning at one time but no longer offers it. When I asked about that for a laptop, they suggested buying Ubuntu preloaded, which they offer on only two laptops.
I would much prefer having an option for Linux pre-loaded on everything. I'm equally concerned about issues like HP voiding the warranty on machines where the user has repartitioned and loaded Linux.
Perhaps customer resistance to the demise of XP will push PC makers to include pre-loaded Linux as an option.
If he gave on the immunity sideshow
It's not a sideshow. It's a question of allowing the three branches of government to work as intended. Removing the courts from the process with regards to past misdeeds is a huge deal. Obama is just afraid to look weak on terrorism. He's too busy pandering to Bush's core to take a principled stand.
The courts were not actually removed. The major misdeeds were on the part of the administration, for which Bush should be impeached (but won't be).
The telcos have to go before a judge and prove that they were told that what they were being asked to do was legal. You can argue about the fact that the Justice Department was politicized and would say that anything illegal was legal if Bush wanted to do it. That gets into the whole mess about claims of executive privilege, the US Attorney firings, the Siegelman case, and a lot of other stuff. Those are more grounds for the impeachment that won't happen. The telcos will be able to produce the evidence they were told it was legal.
BTW, because of CALEA, the telcos were probably between a rock and a hard place.
If there is any failure of the branches to work as intended it is the failure to impeach Bush and Cheney, not letting the telcos off the hook. Besides, the main purpose of civilly suing the telcos was to find out what was happening, and the article gives us a pretty good idea.
Are you just reporting on something that you read, or are you seriously trying to imply that it's a good thing to make it possible for the government to get a number of wire tap warrants so large that it is currently intractable due to a shortage of wrists and opposable thumbs?
The problem is that everyone is focused on the sideshow of telecom immunity and nobody has discussed the core issues. FISA was enacted in the 1970's. New technology created issues with FISA.
Nobody talks about the real issues, that have to do with automated wiretapping that includes massive scanning of conversations and selection of a smaller number to be monitored. Except for the analysis in the article, this has not been discussed. The analysis in the article is the best we have to go on.
Based on the article, the core issue in the new bill was to somehow bring this technology under FISA Court supervision. The discussion of Obama's vote needs to be put in the light of what we think is the underlying technology and whether the bill is good or bad in that context.
If the wiretap warrant issue is intractable, how do you bring the technology under court supervision? My guess is that the bill is designed to have the court approve the sampling criteria that trigger detailed monitoring and require individual warrants only for the detailed monitoring. I haven't looked at the details, but this is what the discussion should address.
Obama didn't cave on FISA. He just looked at the core issues.
Take a look at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808.html
If we assume that article has correctly identified what was happening, the core issue becomes how to get massive, automated wiretapping under judicial control. The article states that there aren't enough judges to process all the warrants needed under the old FISA law using the new technology. So instead of fixing the law, the administration ignored it. Bush and Cheney should be impeached over this, but that isn't going to happen.
A major purpose of the telecom lawsuits was to get discovery going and find out what was happening. The investigation ordered by the new law is also supposed to do that. However, if the article is right we know what was happening. Enough was said publicly about a variety of matters for the author of the article to figure out the underlying technology.
Let's give Obama credit for focusing on the core issues and working to get them fixed. If he gave on the immunity sideshow, that's just part of the imperfection that he said was there in the compromise.
A few years ago, when the whole warrantless wiretapping issue broke, Slashdot posted an article speculating on what was going on. The author looked at the public statements, developed a technical conjecture of what was probably happening, showed that the public statements correlated with the technical conjecture, and talked about the implications.
IIRC, the article suggested that a system called Echelon, that had been deployed outside the US, had been deployed inside the US. Echelon was rumored to contain technology that sampled all voice conversations in a telephone system for certain words/phrases and decided to listen more closely to ones that triggered certain criteria.
IIRC, the article then pointed out that if done within the US and thus requiring a warrant for each instance of listening, there were not enough personnel in the entire US judicial system to process all the warrants that would be needed.
That is likely to be the context for what this is all about. It may well be a very difficult call. Also, the entire debate has taken place without this information publicly on the table, even on a basis of taking the speculation as an assumption by those debating the issue.
If you think about the issue in these terms, the telecom immunity becomes somewhat of a sideshow and the imposition of judicial oversight on the criteria for further listening becomes the most critical aspect. An important purpose of the telecom immunity lawsuits was to find out what was happening. I think the article provides us an educated guess, and that the debate can become an informed one and not just an argument in the dark about principles without an understanding of the underlying technology.
Nice that Linux is now on their radar screen. I hope they include several CD's to avoid the need for broadband downloads, including Universe and Multiverse.
However, it would be much better if they offered the choice of Ubuntu LTS pre-installed on PC's and laptops. Especially since all they offer now is Vista and it is such a disaster.
I could buy a system pre-loaded with XP and repartition to squash the XP down to less than a quarter of the drive (for the rare occasions when I need to use Windows). I could then load Linux on the freed-up space. Vista limits the reduction to 50%, which is not enough. I don't want to waste that much of my drive. Pre-loaded Ubuntu would solve the problem of making my primary OS Linux.
I hope they sell a gazillion copies of Ubuntu and decide to go a step further and offer it pre-loaded.
The abundance concern of the telcos is a manifestation of Googin's Law, enunciated by Roxanne Googin, editor of a telecom-related newsletter. She stated that broadband (from an investor perspective) will either be a valuable monopoly or a worthless commodity.
The marginal cost of additional bandwidth is near zero. According to basic economics, the price should equal the marginal cost. That is the "worthless commodity" part. However, if there is a single monopoly owner who can play games and charge whatever they want for whatever they decide to provide, that is the "valuable monopoly."
Right now, we are in the valuable monopoly situation. Speeds are dumbed down (real broadband starts around 500 Mbps bidirectional, chips now in systems can support 1 Gbps). Cable TV providers use the rationale of limited bandwidth to choose the channels they provide and play games with tiers.
This situation is causing the US to fall behind in worldwide competitiveness.
We need to make bandwidth a worthless commodity. That may mean end-user ownership or municipal involvement. Our innovative birthright should not belong to the telcos.
... Bill Gates.
To use a military axiom: The commander is responsible for everything the command does or fails to do.
He is the most powerful person in the company. They are producing crap because of his policies and directions. If he wanted to stop producing crap, the place to have started was with the policies and directions he gave his company. Everything else flowed from that.
So the key may be based on a song, a movie, a you-tube video or even a Windows install disk. The pad would be generated by taking samples from pseudo-random places on the source file. The proper random number generator is the digitized output of a noise source, such as the electric arc of a welding machine. The output of a pseudo-random number generator is breakable. It isn't really random.
Unbreakable encryption was invented by the US Army Signal Service in 1917. It is called the "one time pad". The encryption key is random and is as long as the message. The encryption is unbreakable as long as each key is used only once.
The drawback of a one-time pad system is the logistics of transporting the keys and having only two copies, that are destroyed after they are used.
Roosevelt and Churchill had transatlantic voice conversations during World War II that were encrypted using one-time pad technology. The conversations would remain unbreakable even if recordings of the radio transmissions were available today.
The current corporate governance situation began with the "shareholder rights" movement that started in the 1980's. That movement was fostered by corporate raiders who had no long term interest in the corporations they attacked. They wanted to get in, make a quick profit, and get out.
The movement was focused on disregarding the rights and interests of the non-shareholding stakeholders in a corporation -- the communities in which they operate, their employees, their customers, those affected by their impacts on the environment and markets, and possibly others.
Those rights and interests had previously been protected by unwritten understandings, the so-called "social compact". The shareholder rights movement effectively broke the social compact because there was no legally-enforceable impediment to their doing so.
The way to fix this is to restore the social compact and protect the interests of non-shareholder stakeholders by law, regulation, or contract. This means restoring the power of unions, strengthening regulation of markets, and providing safeguards for the interests of communities, especially those that provide benefits to corporations without written agreements reflecting the reciprocal obligations of those corporations.
In the mid 1970's I took a painting class that I attended for several years. Photomicrographs became one of my favorite sources of ideas for painting.
Aviation Week had published a photomicrograph of a moon rock. Except for being in black and white, it looked like modern art, so I did a painting based on its characteristics, adding color. I later bought a book that had photomicrographs of minerals. I used some of the pictures in that book the same way.
There are other things that can be used. I once took part of an election district map and made a painting that looks somewhat like the design for a stained glass window.
You would be amazed at the number of things that can provide ideas for modern art.
IETF requires demonstrated interoperability using prototype reference implementations before they will adopt a standard.
ISO generally first adopts standards, then waits for people to prototype implementations and discover the bugs in the standard (unless someone walks in with existing technology and asks for it to be standardized). When people start reporting that aspects of the standard can't be implemented, ISO works on fixing it.
After ISO adopted the Open System Interconnection (OSI) standards, they had to set up "implementers' workshops" to figure out how to make their newly adopted standards workable. (The OSI standards are the 7-layer reference model and related protocol suite that were pushed aside by the Internet protocol suite, a.k.a TCP/IP. Many OSI protocols were never fully implemented or never made to work.)
The workshops met (one was sponsored by NIST) and produced a lot of documents on things that needed to be done to make OSI work. When the Clinton/Gore administration came into office, they killed US government support for the OSI protocols and told its agencies to use the Internet protocols.
The 10 Gb Ethernet standard has been out there for several years now. IEEE-USA has had a position statement for at least two or three years advocating implementation of gigabit speed, bidirectional, broadband technology in the US. Other countries are implementing this technology for reasons of competitiveness and because it is feasible with current technology. Note that the communications chips in newer PC's are gigabit capable.
We need to do this to avoid becoming a third world telecommunications country, which is what we are on track for becoming. Companies like Verizon are offering dumbed down broadband, possibly for two reasons:
1. There is a "law" enunciated by Roxanne Googin, editor of a telecom newsletter, to the effect that broadband will either be a profitable monopoly (that the provider squeezes for all they can) or a "worthless commodity" (because the marginal cost and therefore the market price) approaches zero.
2. The providers want to couple broadband with entertainment. Gigabit, bidirectional broadband threatens the business models of the entertainment industry.
IEEE-USA has advocated separating content from carriage. This would make broadband providers common carriers. The user would negotiate content separately with content providers.
Trying to do it with BPL is a bad idea. BPL has three problems: interference, interference, and interference. Power engineers aren't accustomed to considering wavelength issues, because the wavelength at 60 Hz is thousands of miles. But at broadband frequencies the wavelength is a few feet. Any rusty attachment on a guy wire can become a source of intermodulation products that can then be radiated by the guy wire.
If you look at some application domains (and my example is the world of electric power), executives -- or even domain technical experts -- talk about doing things from a domain perspective. They often don't mention -- or seem to think about the fact -- that many of the things they are talking about are actually being implemented in information technology.
For example, very few of the reliability standards talk about the communications and computation that implement what the standard addresses. You have activities that can only be accomplished by remote control (implying data communications) but the only mention of communications in the standards is related to voice telephone procedures.
This can turn into a very serious blind spot. In electric power there is not only a wall between executives and IT, but another wall between IT and real-time operational control. I wouldn't be surprised to find the same thing in manufacturing companies.
At a meeting in a context unrelated to this discussion, someone pointed out that people who are good at math and science don't run for political office, and that perhaps their weakness at math and science is what got them into a field where running for political office is something people do. The same may apply to management. Some people go into management because they aren't good at technical work. Then the management culture gets ahold of them and they become uncomfortable with IT and IT people.
It is about time that computers and technology became core parts of a general education.
By analogy, if a kid started a fire playing with matches, this lawmaker would want to ban all sale or possession of matches by anyone.
How about a much more narrowly tailored law? For example, requiring that posters on web sites having a substantial part of their content devoted to information about minors or social networking by minors be required to register with accurate identifying information that can be revealed if a judge determines that bullying has taken place.