Quite a few of the 'security' arrangements in financial areas make it abundantly clear that they suck because you don't really matter (this goes triple or worse for anything involving credit reports).

That said, RSA-fobs(or house-branded devices based on the same system) aren't actually something that would be trivial to share between organizations.

The RSA fob works because it is initialized with a given seed value at a given time. Every minute it performs a hash operation that provides enough output for the on screen numeric sequence along with the input for the next hash operation(if memory serves, it is reasonably well established that it is either impossible or computationally impractical to derive the internal state from knowledge of the screen output alone, even if you have many samples).

In order to enroll a fob in your authentication system, your auth server needs to know the seed and the initialization time. It can then run N rounds of the algorithm(based on the amount of time between initialization time and current time) and determine what should be displayed on the screen(sometimes allowing for a few minutes of slip, depending on how accurate the RTCs are believed to be), If you want Company B to use Company A's token, either Company B needs to pass every auth request to Company A for processing, and accept the result, or Company A actually has to send Company B the seed an initialization time for your fob(an operation that opens up certain obvious security concerns).

The RSA fobs are pretty cute(if it weren't for the fact that RSA stores all the seed values and times, and managed to get them stolen at least once), in that they require absolutely no communication between the fob and the auth server, ever; but they do suffer from the weakness that the data needed to validate a fob are also the data sufficient to clone a fob, which makes sharing a single fob between multiple entities pretty awkward.

I'm going to go with "No, and Yes".

Unfortunately, US law is absurdly unfavorable to we 'the people' knowing what is actually done in our name (it's difficult enough that there's so damn much of it; but it's also deliberately obfuscated and/or hidden in assorted vital areas).

However, this guy just oozes crackpot. Nobody with a rather histrionic CV? Check. Legalbabble slurry of novel legal theories designed to dodge basic problems like "standing" and "even if Snowden is totally screwed, it's not obvious why that would make it illegal to make a movie about him". Check.

Didn't you get the memo, citizen? "the American People" (Like "The Troops") aren't something you actually listen to in order to represent the will of. Rather, they are an additional decoration to be wrapped around the will of some asshole who allegedly understands them better than they understand themselves, typically in a manner (coincidentially, of course) highly convenient to their own interests.

It's basically the American version of 'dictatorship of the proletariat'(where you had a dictatorship that was 'of the proletariat' only in the sense that it allegedly served the interests of that group; not in that it bothered to actually consult them).

I'd be quite interested to hear otherwise(I love a good tale of skullduggery to go with my economic history); but my readings (admittedly limited) in the area never turned up any cool cartels, monopoly agreements, sabotage, etc, just plain old competition on price, capital costs, and gradual refinements of technology:

The scheme sounds pretty goofy; but if you have plenty of potable fresh water lakes around and labor costs are manageable, you can produce a lot of ice for little more than the cost of cutting and transport. By contrast, the early ammonia chiller systems were not cheap equipment, industrial sized, toxic gas leaks(remember 'ammonia' as purchased for household use is ~5% real ammonia in water; exposure to real ammonia will turn the fluid in your eyes and lungs into something resembling that, or stronger...), required considerable energy to run, etc.

A combination of refined technology(better seals, harder wearing parts, more efficient designs, cheaper electrical or coal power, etc.) and pollution of lakes near northern population centers increased the cost of natural ice and decreased the cost of manufactured ice, gradually tilting the balance.

Once superior refrigerants were developed(less, or nontoxic, mostly) and high-reliability sealed compressors became available, miniaturization of refrigeration down to residential, train-car, truck, etc. scales became possible, and demand for big chunks of manufactured ice gradually declined.

Again, if you know better, I'd love a juicy story; but it has always been told to me as a fairly straightforward(if counter-intuitive, given today's technology) replacement of one tech by another.

It might simply have been an economic matter: nothing magic about electricity as the input for driving a compressor (and, indeed, the form of refrigeration that does require electricity is peltiers, which are confined to a niche by how much they suck unless you simply can't have any moving parts); but "parts of Wales with erratic electricity" aren't necessarily a sufficiently commanding market to drive the development, and mass production, of a dual electrical/combustion engine or electrical/belt-connection system. Dry ice, by contrast, is relatively cheap to produce if there's enough of a market within shipping distance, dead simple to store, and quite trivial to use to keep an electrical refrigerator cabinet cool when the electrically driven heat pump isn't operating.

A great many things are possible; but without serious DIY-fu, substantial money, or mass production, fewer things are readily available. In that context, supplementary dry ice(possibly distributed using the very same hardware, dealers, and routes that had previously carried water ice for iceboxes), would have been a cheap, trivially interoperable, augmentation to mass-market electric-only refrigerators.

Particularly handy since(as long as you are in an environment well ventilated enough not to suffocate) it's an effectively zero-residue option. In practice you'll get a little condensation; but far less messy than water ice. Plus, it 'stores' well, since, if need be, you can generate it by allowing CO2 compressed in a cylinder to expand rapidly. My understanding is that shipping it ready-made and insulated, and accepting a little loss, is more cost effective in areas with good infrastructure; but making it right out of the gas cylinder isn't hard, and those things last for ages so long as you don't do anything stupid to damage them.

Man, you geeks are always making this difficult. Just solve it the easy way: Don't give all the users all the features they want, that would confuse them(as you said). Just give all the users all the features that I want. Much less confusing, and I'm happy!

I suspect that it's a combination of two things: In Ye Distante Past, the 140 character limit was hard and fast because SMS is inflexible like that. Since that time, any SMS-related limitations have become somewhere between effectively obsolete and laughably irrelevant; but (given the absolute profusion of make-noise-on-the-internet services with which they compete) Twitter is loath to do anything that makes them less distinctive, and their somewhat tenuous claim to survivability, much less value, that much less evident.

Had twitter been designed from the ground up as a fully capable platform; but with a 'brevity is the soul of wit' house rule, it might well be as you suggest(at least until some agonizing trend of using metadata stuffing to produce paragraph-length word soup tweets hit the system); but it wasn't. It was designed as just plain less capable, to interact with a just plain less capable technology, and has since had surprisingly good luck with how much people like the (now architecturally irrelevant) limits.

Shhh. Don't let the secret out. Our entire 'digital economy' consists of re-implementing concepts from 1975-1995(approximately) either on mobile phones, in HTML/JS, or both, and then snorting the VC money. We can't let them know that.

So, according to the story, 'every employee' receives the cards, for distribution to 'any customer with cable or internet trouble'. Do remind me, then, of what advantage these cards have over the ordinary support apparatus (allegedly) handling customers who are having issues?

Either the story is BS, and the cards are in fact better than being stuck in phone-drone hell; or the cards are BS, and nothing more than an informational tool to see what comcast employee ended up referring you to the same quagmire that everyone wanders through. Decisions, decisions.

If you pick your location right, the same is true of various terrestrial locations ( if you know how to work the 'development incentives' game your tax rate can easily approach zero, and insure vs. self-insure is mostly a question of cost effectiveness for everyone except those who simply couldn't afford the latter.) That's honestly why it's a bit surprising to see Thiel hanging out with these guys.

If you have interests in some industry with brutal externalities(extraction industries, some chemical synthesis and heavy industrial processes, certain types of power generation, among others) there's a strong pragmatic logic to being a 'libertarian' at least where the EPA is concerned. If you are basically small-time, and don't have access to most of the best just-not-actually-paying-many-taxes strategies, there's a certain ideological and pragmatic attraction to libertarianism. Somebody playing at Thiel's level, though, could likely do better by making government work for him, rather than by fretting about its heavy hand. Must be a hobby, I suppose.

The guy who tripped over the modem's power cord? There can't be that much blame to go around when a network that size drops dead.

It also ignores the (not exactly minor) problem that, as their owners can attest, a boat is a hole in the water into which one pours money.

There are some commercially viable things done on boats (fishing, offshore drilling, etc.) and some recreational ones; but few things done on land get cheaper when done on water; unless you have in mind some straw man comparison between costs in some ultra high end urban center and the scungiest refurbed cargo ship you can get your hands on.

They are welcome to try, of course, it's their money; but I've yet to see a 'seasteading' plan that doesn't appear to be a fairly uncomfortable yacht club.

The harvesting and storage of naturally occurring ice was so successful that, for a somewhat surprising amount of time, it made manufactured ice uneconomic and, for an even longer period, on-site refrigeration hardware a very niche item(even after ice manufactured on large scale ammonia based systems replaced harvested ice, it still fed the same local market of that natural ice deliveries had).

If memory serves, the scale and efficiency of the industry was such that Australia ended up with the first adoption of a refrigeration system on a commercial scale because it was one of the few places that had the necessary technology but lacked a frozen pond without about a zillion miles. The thermodynamics and the necessary hardware were more or less familiar to any region with an enthusiasm for steam power; but the economics just didn't work out.

Well kid, I'll try to put this in terms that you understand: Imagine that this rock here is your 'build plate', except that it already has some hardened gunk on it from where the filament had a bubble in it and your last project kind of got fucked up while you weren't watching it.

Now, this other rock, hold it in your hand and move your arm stiffly, like it's controlled by a couple of cheap servos. That's going to be your 'extruder'; but imagine for a minute that this extruder is like a 'negative extruder' that subtracts material by, um, extruding antifilament or something.

Ok, now just start mumbling g-code under your breath really fast and bash the 'extruder' into the 'build plate' until all the hardened gunk covering the shape you wanted has been removed from the extruder. That's pretty much all there is to it...