Add two new headers, both random strings. One as ID for the message, the other the ID of the parent message. This would allow email clients to understand the relationships between messages – eliminating at a stroke (1) the ugly "Re: " in the subject, (2) the messy compounded quoting at the bottom of emails, and (3) the "possibly a reply to..." nonsense in certain email archiving software.
It's so obvious that I don't understand why it hasn't been done already. Perhaps I'm missing something.
The solution to the password non-problem is obvious. I worked it out it years ago and never looked back.
1. Think of a hash which turns two letters into 6-letters-plus-2-numbers (use alphabet position for the numbers)
2. Use it to encode the first two letters of the site or app name
That's it. You get a different non-alphabet password for every site or app, and you'll never forget anything if you remember the hash. Why the hell are we having this debate? We should just get on with it and evangelize for this technique. It's easy and failproof. The only hard bit is learning the number-correspondence of letters, but even just using a favorite number instead the solution is somewhat secure.
Well, I see that I'm outvoted by incurable, irrational techno-utopians.
I too am optimistic, as it happens. But only cautiously so – not recklessly, like you people are. Given humanity's past, there is no reason to believe that we can't rise to the current environmental challenge. But we're taking our time seeing the problem, as evidenced by this frivolous chat about mining asteroids. Right now the world a half-century hence is looking a scary place, and even in the best-case scenario a lot of permanent damage is going to be done to the biosphere. If and when we solve this problem – mitigating the effects of consumption rather than finding resources for more of it – then we can perhaps start thinking about mining asteroids. Until that point, you are putting the cart before the horse.
I have a strange feeling you don't even know what I'm talking about, that we're not even on the same page here. That's sad, because I'm talking hard science, and the solutions will come largely from hard science too. They include energy tech, biotech and all kinds of innovation in farming, town-planning and architecture. They don't include mining asteroids.
Why does the bulk of humanity always have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future?
Your "future" seems to be somewhere around 1970. Today's challenge is not how to find and use ever more resources, it is how to use and re-use the existing ones without making the planet unliveable. Given the current context of impending climatic and ecosystem breakdown, mining asteroids is nothing but an outrageous red herring.
I continue to be astounded by the number of "technologists" in this forum who appear stuck in an almost Soviet mindset of science, where the future is all mining and flying cars and space exploration. It's as if you haven't noticed the last 30 years of scientific advance and all the new constraints that humanity must now work within.
If "we were all completely open about everything we have done that directly affected at least one other human" (and that definition leaves few deeds uncounted) then there might indeed be little war. There would be fascism instead, because information is power.
Transparency begets freedom when applied to those in power. When applied to private citizens, it destroys freedom. This is the nuance that some transparency absolutists have yet to understand.
What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey
