Actually, that is a good idea. BUT, you have to have vetted signers.

Seriously, we read many stories here in which big deals are made of them, but as soon as I check that it has lead by Chinese Academicians (even if they are now working in the USA), I discount it. WHy? Because over and over, I see fraud in the publications, and here, I notice that many of these stories are being pushed by ACs. In a nutshell, these ppl are putting together fraudulent publications (generally, leaving out the negatives that they came across), and then marketing them to make themselves look good.

Yes, some of you will scream that I am racists, and yet, over and over and over, this occurs.

Keep telling yourself that...

They will only do good with their new ultimate power! Nobody in history has ever abused their power...

There aren't that many quality goods and services to spend your ransom money on in prison -- my understanding is that the selection is mainly limited to cigarettes, cell phones, drugs, and "protection".

Hint: Dr. Spencer is as qualified as anyone to evaluate the science. His plots are displaying publicly available data. Do you have any actual basis for disputing the plots? Citation please...

Really? So, who do you consider the defenders of global freedom and privacy? Russia and China?

That is easy, when you flash the firmware on many of the high security types of systems it increments a counter when the bootloader loads the new firmware. they simply look at the counter and see if it matched the last time it was in for an update or was reported on the last update.

It's as simple as a small cheap i2C eeprom hidden away on the system that is not easily read from the running OS. the hacker would haveto disassemble the system hardware and basically reverse engineer the board to discover it. I have seen them hidden under other chips to save board space, but doing that would hide it from most hackers.

Or Ubuntu and other popular distro to do something like this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/148440

Then it's normal for people to have encrypted stuff on their drives that they can't decrypt. And thus a "reasonable man" could not be expected to be able to decrypt such stuff even if he cooperated fully. They could be using full disk crypto with an encrypted container file that they can't decrypt. They can decrypt the first but not the second (or maybe they can - it becomes harder to tell :) ).

But once a popular OS has stuff like this by default, it's much easier for the defence to argue that you can't do it.

Of course in this case - the guy has been supplying wrong passwords, so unless you can show it was out of desperation and/or due to duress, he'd still be in trouble.

Actually most of America would applaud the SWAT team entering banks with shotguns and tasers.

Listening to an investment banker on the floor screaming "dont taze me bro" would pretty much make every single person on the planet smile at the same time. It would cause world peace and make cold fusion work.

Sometimes people take turns driving the same car - maybe even on the same day as part of the same journey (road trip).

Not always easy to remember who was driving at the time in question especially if they only send the stuff months later.

Far more OI, better all the way around.

https://www.olimex.com/Product...

Correcting myself:
Tepco itself has estimated a damage of $137 billion, see http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-07/fukushima-137-billion-cost-has-tepco-seeking-more-aid.html

Considering the low probability of a serious reactor accident, individual utility companies might bet on not having one in their powerplants and have no insurance unless it is mandatory, like compulsory vehicle insurance.

Set the minimum coverage to something that would cover Fukujima (estimated $100B) and there is your market-based solution ;-)

It's the wrong approach if you just want a prosthetic memory to help people remember stuff.

To have a prosthetic memory what you need is a computer that can remember stuff - video, audio, photos, text etc. Preferably wearable. Then what you need is to attach a device to appropriate parts of your brain that reads thought patterns that are distinctive depending on what you are thinking (elephants, purple etc). The device does NOT have to decipher or understand what you are thinking. All it needs to do is associate the stuff to be stored/recalled or even _commands_ with the thought pattern(s) you choose for it. I call these thought macros. See also: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3478821&cid=42956909

So you capture a video/audio/picture then you assign it a thought, or "current state" of mind. If you even have difficulty rethinking[1] a thought pattern, you could search by context and time (what I stored some time ago while at home).

There may need to be training phases like in speech recognition, and it's likely to work better with some people than others.

[1] The approach the military is taking would still have problems if people can't even remember that they are supposed to remember something- so whichever approach you'd need the ability to set up "prompts" based on time and context (and brain patterns).

I believe our technology is very very far from the state where you can drop in a memory device with memories already preloaded in, and which people can use to "remember that they are to remember something" (and even if we did, it would be scary and I won't want to have it).

Because there's evidence that memories are stored differently on different people's brains - some people have a halle berry neuron: http://www.caltech.edu/content/single-cell-recognition-halle-berry-brain-cell
http://phys.org/news4703.html
Seems to me to be a bit like a Bingo hall where a neuron yells bingo when it recognizes what the "announcer reads out". And the thing is those neurons aren't in the same place for everyone, they might not even be present for everyone, and one neuron might yell bingo for slightly different things (in one person they might have a neuron that goes bingo for Jennifer Aniston when it sees Jennifer Aniston + Brad Pitt, in another person it might not go bingo for the couple).

Which is also why I think that it's delusional for people to believe we'd soon be able to transfer our minds to other machines. You can transfer something, but it'll be far from everything.

First off, I said equal or exceed HVAC usage. so, yes, an averge. And yeah, we need yearly
But the idea is to get builders to change how they build. Better insulation in homes. Use aerogel in windows. Fewer Windows. Likewise, geo-thermal HVAC is IDEAL for most new buildings, which really allows for low energy usage.
And yes, if you live in the northwest, then these are all things that you will want. That way, a minimum amount of solar panels will equal your annual HVAC.