The initial crop of people are volunteers.

Any subsequent generations are effectively prisoners in an ark. They may not LIKE the fact they are on an ark. They may not want to go ahead with a eugenics program or even participate in this whole mission. They may even want to turn the ship around or just tune out and do SFA while the 'volunteers' do the work.

It's going to be messy. The series 'The 100' on Netflix appears to be exploring a similar sort of situation. The initial show premise involves a pre-series nuke war, space stations of Earth survive and conglomerate to produce the Ark, plan to wait a few hundred years to return to earth, 100 years short they discover a critical problem with carbon scrubbers that will take 6 months to fix but life support will break down in 100.... and they've already had to start putting lots of people in detention because they a) have too many people by reproduction and b) they have people who don't feel like they owe the system anything. It's an interesting study in exactly how draconian people on these sorts of space missions may have to become to maintain order and deal with crises like overpopulation.

 

So you are comparing lifetime expenditures on various coin-op video games over years of time versus single limited-duration expenditures in a single game app? Seems a bit like comparing apples and oranges.

I probably spent a few hundred dollars in coin machines in my lifetime. I never spend more than about $10-15 in one place (even at my most excessive which was university and John Elway's Football or MLB baseball).

And I can only imagine spending $10K a month if I had more money than I needed and if so, I am quite sure that money could be deployed in a more worthwhile fashion.

The world has finite resources. People's access to them often has little to do with how well they will be expended. (Yes, there's a judgment of value inherent in that statement.)

Well, your point is perhaps accurate.

Still, with what can be done in the world with $10,000, anyone dropping $10,000/month on a virtual product in a game strikes me as wasteful and has an odd sense of the value of money and its uses.

That is, of course, just an opinion, not an assumption.

And why resort to insults and foul language? What did that add to your post?

This kind of chip has been designed. I am not quite sure if it has been produced, but if the people I know in the industry have a design sitting on the drawing board that they feel can be sold with a complete CA authority in it without fear of any tampering, then it is possible.

There are lots of different anti-tamper vectors you need to cover, but the truth is the tech exists to make it a really hard challenge for anyone, even a big agency. Of course, any backdooring in the software or hardware renders these protections rather moot.

Why do you suspect only apple has this software and can deploy it?

The latest exploit *we know of* made apple's update vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. If that's the case, then any OS module could be overwritten to introduce a backdoor, apps could be introduced which had backdoors, etc.

Beyond that, the 256 bit key is only as good as the RNG that cranked it out. That might or might not be a bulletproof one depending on where they got their key generation algorithm and implementation and what sources of entropy it uses to generate random numbers.

If Apple can do it, someone else can figure out how to. If the NSA can't keep its secrets and programs hidden in-house, what makes you think Apple can over the longer term? Or even has, for all you know?

There are many ways to make the memory inside it proof against intrusion.

I know of a company with a chip design that includes a mesh and a vacuum compartment. The mesh can detect electrical, thermal, or physical intrusions. The vacuum compartment, if breached, is another way of telling someone is trying to access the physical memory substrate. There's also some other detection mechanisms as well. All of them zeroize the memory well enough to prevent anyone getting anything useful off of it.

This sort of tech can also protect sea-of-gates style arrays in which code execution can live.

Although I generally agree with your thesis, I will point out those 'leaps' can be painful. The longer we can fight the slide towards statist or authoritarian rule, the longer we can make at least some progress before things get bad enough to need a bloody revolt.

So, keeping the slope of the decline as close to flat as we can by fighting attempts to hobble democracy still matters.

I do find it interesting that if you read the classics, you'll see Greeks and Romans arguing many of the issues of governance we face today. (Just further proof your thesis is spot-on.)

Also note that not all laser pointers are the same. The little laser pointer you play with your cat is available in much larger versions with a much stronger emitter. Those can do lasting eye damage fairly fast.

What's a pilot's eyesight worth? I'd say millions, given a lost career at the annual pay rate of a multi-engine Airline Transport Pilot's salary, not counting the human cost. So if people can cause this sort of damage with these pointers, why is it not worth pursuing?

I'm all for hardening up the planes with appropriate countermeasures.

Frankly, being a bit mean, I'd be okay with a back-trace and counter-measure system... but then I'm a big believer in the effect of effective self-defense. Yes, deterrence from splattering one idiot may not stop every idiot. But it will have stopped that idiot. Even if all it did was lase them back with a strong laser pointer.... (okay that's a bad idea and I know it, but I hate the attitude that some people have that these kind of crappy pranks are somehow okay for kids to be pulling (or adults)... stupidity SHOULD be painful....)

That would depend whether that distraction, piled on top of perhaps many others occurring at the same time, led to some important fact being overlooked...

The PD, by the way, will follow up on snowballs. People have been killed from snowballs (or ice) hurled from overpasses causing car accidents on major thoroughfares. That in fact IS worth prosecuting. That is REAL harm.

Also, red herring comparison in the sense that the average pilot of an airliner having a mishap means way more involved parties than just himself or himself and a couple of friends/relatives as is the car case. It can involve hundreds of people. If you were wanting to compare packed buses and snowball/rock chuckers or tanker tractor trailer combos, then maybe you'd be closer to an accurate comparison.

Probably until at least 2001-2002, the a large federal police force's main communications gateways were running OS/2 Warp Connect. Why? It was pretty robust (as long as you didn't use HPFS which didn't behave well in a machine crash as far as preserving open files).

I liked OS/2. It's a real pity IBM marketed Windows 3.1 and later 95 with its IBM desktops when OS/2 was a) available, b) more capable, and c) better thought out. The triumph of marketing over quality (much like the ancient Beta vs. VHS battle).

Remember Independence Day?

Sorry for the unpleasant mental bleach moment, but that is the logical follow up to this post about Roswell and Linux.

In the Nehterlands, in the early 2000s, they had an online commerce system that works as follows:

You have a credit card. It has a number.
You want to buy something online. Your vendor, after your cart is totalled, gives you an amount and a vendor code.
You go to your bank's website in your browser. You access your credit card account. You create a payment by entering the vendor code and total. A one-time code is generated that you copy and paste into the vendor's payment form.

This means:
a) The vendor NEVER has your CC number (so can't lose it)
b) The vendor can only charge ONCE against that number
c) The vendor gets paid, your data stays secure

WHERE IS THIS SYSTEM IN NORTH AMERICA?

WHY DO WE KEEP HAVING TO GIVE CC NUMBERS TO VENDORS?

Our banks aren't catching up because they couldn't catch a clue to save their lives.

I once had a friend have fraudulent charges on his CC. He went through the process do get them acknowledged with his CC company and written off. He asked when he'd get a new card with a new CC number. They weren't planning on sending him one. Yes, you heard me....

He asked them to kindly assign him a new number and send him another. They countered with the fact that he could just sign off any other bogus charges and they'd make them go away.

And you wonder where 18% interest rates come from?

Our banks are absolutely hopeless when it comes to innovating or even catching up with what the rest of hte world has been doing forever.

The chip and pin is slightly better (in prevention, but not in dealing with a breach) than the signature. Harder to argue later with your CC company thought because you can't argue 'well, that is clearly NOT my signature you have on file!'.... they'll just say 'they had your pin and chip, so too bad, so sad, you are liable....'.

One time numbers are the way to go for online transactions. I'm not sure what cure there is for CC used at brick and mortar outlets other than DON"T DO IT.

It's more complicated than that.

You've got good cops.
You've got bad cops who will engage in criminality for personal gain.
You've got decent cops who still cover for a fellow blue brother by reflex.
You've got so-so cops that might do some not so hot things but not stand for others.
You've got a lot of peer pressure within PDs.
You've got political cops and police agencies who have goals not related to the individual street officer.
You've got an IT infrastructure that cannot keep national secrets (NSA/Snowden) and now you've got poorly funded local cops wanting biometric data they cannot a guarantee secure.

So, there's lots of ways this sort of thing can go badly wrong, counting various agencies and involved parties with self-interest that might not align with citizen interest. Then you've got all the accidents, incompetence, short IT budgets, poor IT practices...and so you'e got lots of accidental ways things can go bad.

How does it help to know that?

Even if 90% of refusals are from drunkards and stoners (doubtful, enough people dislike it on principle), how does that allow the police or anybody to make different decisions? No legitimate way I can see.

Please clarify how any such statistical knowledge would permit any change in police procedure without violating the US Constitution?

Yes, because you can trust the police and the government never to abuse data or leak it to some other agency that will....

Eh? What?