History is not going to be kind to the only liberal democracy in the middle east?

Boy, your future sounds like a complete horror-show.

Totally. Because that's way more effective than keeping them ignorant, beating them over the head with a bible, and making them work in the fields and factories until they drop while being supervised and subjugated by an elite class chosen from the "nobility".

Oh, wait ...

1) Make a reality TV show: Vote Them Off The Planet
2) Vote people off the planet with one way and return categories. whether for real or not doesn't matter, but if for real you can have the option for people to only do the one way when they want to pay for the return leg.
3) Profit!

Personally I can't wait to hear from the Kazakhstani Prince and the $20 million dollars he's having trouble moving ....

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.

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.

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.

I don't see anything new or interesting in the articles to consider it a "discovery of a way" (e.g. http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Pag... )

In contrast this is a better article with more detail on how whales could _actually_ affect ecosystems significantly: http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
And that's a 4 year old article.

This might be one of those many flawed studies.

How many times did they shock themselves? If it was just once and then they sat there without doing it again then perhaps it was more of curiosity than not being able to be alone and deprived of stimuli.

Many people are very curious about stuff.

And some are stupid or rebellious - if you tell them don't push a button many of them will push the button without trying to find out why not e.g. they might ask "You mean this button?" and then push it...

No doubt planned by a guy with a cat in his lap, who likes to say "eeexcellent" a lot.

There was nothing far-fetched about the idea that the government was dong metadata analysis, or working with large corporations to access their data. Both of those things were pretty much an open "secret" well before Snowden leaked anything; he merely provided greater detail about the extent of those operations, and brought that information into the public consciousness.

Besides which, if your thought process goes along the lines of "these far-fetched things have happened, therefore all these other far-fetched things are probably true" .... you are not a rational person. People who think that way end up believing every goddamn conspiracy theory under the sun.

But that's why this "vulnerability" should be fixed:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu...

Imagine if by default if you don't uncheck a checkbox a popular distro has full disk encryption enabled and/or creates an encrypted container.

Then they can't use the "wrench" on everyone that happens to have that distro, because it really is very plausible that the person doesn't have the keys to the container.

As for the arguments against it - if you're in a country where they are still willing to use the "wrench" on someone who is likely to not have the keys, you're screwed already. In such countries if they're not happy with you, you're in big trouble whether you use crypto or not.

That's why the "bug" I submitted should be fixed: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu... ;)

That's why I have been proposing that for robot cars they also have cameras/sensors/radars/lidars at bumper height. It's often easier to spot (from a distance) people/animals obscured by vehicles from bumper level than it is to spot them from driver or roof level. But I'm no car or robot car engineer, so someone else will have to actually do it.

You might be able to do something like this for "kiddie" sensors mounted on bicycles/motorcycles, but given the front wheel of those vehicles is movable it's probably a bit trickier :).

Oh, irony.

See, a rational person would have looked at what's going and concluded that the NSA's position is "of course you're more likely to be an extremist" rather than "of course you must be an extremist". But self-styled "free-thinkers" such as yourself always seem to tend toward these extreme, paranoid views that barely resemble the actual situation. It's almost as if you tended towards extremism or something.

Read my sig, then try again. Thanks.