The phrase, "finite limit" is grossly redundant. "Finite" simply means "unlimited". Indeed, both of these words are routinely overused, as there are few things in our world that can rightly be called infinite. (Cue lots of people quoting what Einstein supposedly said about stupidity, although to my mind it doesn't sound at all his style).
How long before legislators and the White House understand that this kind of restrictive export law simply handicaps US researchers and corporations? Competitors from other nations such as India and Russia get a significant advantage over their opposite numbers in the, er, Land of the Free.
After a quick scan of the comments, I didn't notice any mention of the privacy aspects. A tax on gasoline or other fuels is non-intrusive and barely noticeable: the cost of fuel is just that much higher. But to tax drivers by distance (also perhaps factoring in the weight and nature of their vehicles) requires the state to find out how far they have travelled, which probably requires either a "spy in the car" or detection and tracking of all vehicles on the roads.
From a civil liberties point of view, I would think the fuel tax is a far better solution. (Of course those who thrive on building civil service empires, and those who profit from selling government big computer systems, may disagree).
When the heat's on, you will see hyenas eat one another.
He should have held out for $2 million. Are constitutional rights so cheap nowadays that police can cheerfully violate them by the gross, and pay nothing more in compensation than the price of a second-hand car?
I'm British.
"It's a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models
Ha ha ha. He used the notorious passive voice: "have been found". I wonder why?
Clues:
1. Does not specify who did the finding.
2. Provides no link to any actual information.
Has it occurred to any of those witlings that people who are now "old folk" invented the computer, the network, the operating system, the Internet, and - marginally - the Web? (Sorry TBL!) Moreover, they are more likely to understand how those things work than younger people who simply take them for granted.
Lord Acton hit the nail on the head. 128 years ago he wrote that, ""Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Unfortunately, no one has ever devised a way of running societies without giving power to certain individuals. With a very small number of honourable exceptions (which prove the rule), that power has corrupted them. We see it around us almost every day, and the people who rise to control entire nation states display the corruption due to power in singularly pure and concentrated form.
The technicians working in the FBI labs had a very limited form of power, but within that particular domain their sway was almost unchallenged. What expert would dispute the word of the mighty FBI, what lawyer would challenge it, what judge or jury would not be impressed by it? And the technicians' bosses had more power, which was assuredly focused on the important task of getting convictions. I rather doubt that any lab technician at the FBI ever got much career advancement out of frequently discrediting prosecution evidence. Every bureaucratic organization measures itself according to a limited set of drastically oversimplified metrics, and conviction rate is an important metric for any law-enforcement organization. The higher up the tree you go, the greater the desire for more convictions, and the less the concern for whether they are justified or not.
"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters".
- Aldous Huxley
No, thought not. IMHO a classic - almost, in fact, the canonical - example of boring technology that's good because it's boring. Look at all the criticisms of Ada, and you will find that most of them boil down to, "It's not so much fun and doesn't make me feel so good". But that depends on what makes you feel good. As many qualified people have remarked, if you are flying in an airliner you really want the avionics to be written in Ada, not C++ or Ruby or Python. Why? Because you're a lot more likely to survive. Almost unbelievably, it boils down to a matter of professional pride. What gives you a warm feeling - coding something marvellously clever that you yourself won't understand in three weeks, or creating something that works reliably and does exactly the job it was meant to do? One is an amateur attitude, the other is a professional attitude.
"...to get to outlook THAT way would take centuries even on the fastest computers we have".
Which would still be FAR FAR TOO SOON.
"How can a government department concerned with security not get this sort of thing right?"
Very funny.
When did a government department of any kind ever get anything right? Especially when it concerns computers. Triply when it concerns security. See for example:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
etc., etc. passim.
The truth of the matter is that politicians and civil servants tend to be highly non-technical, and very much focused on high-sounding (but misleading) talk. This is the exact opposite of the attitude you need to accomplish anything with computers. But they are also very arrogant, and committed to the belief that - since they don't understand computers - programming and the like must be extremely easy.
Sounds like an imitation of the Inspector Morse episode "Masonic Mysteries", in which a criminal whom Morse has had imprisoned pulls a similar trick. And then the fun begins!
(known to the Christian churches as "The Apostate" because he tried to restore the official religion of Greece and Rome for the previous thousand years).
Educated, cultured, humane, civilized: along with Marcus Aurelius, a living proof that near-absolute power does not always have to corrupt absolutely. Sadly, he was murdered by Christians to prove that their religion (which mandates peace, forgiveness, and non-violence) was better than his.
Indeed. While technically stars beyond any doubt, they aren't exactly the kind of stars we are looking for at the moment. (IMHO).
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
