Not at all. BankID, the dominant form of bank-authenthication in Norway issues OTP-calculators to everyone, including average private people with a perfectly ordinary account.

As an alternative, they have a solution where the SIM-card in your mobile-phone is used by an app to authenthicate you.

In both cases the same thing is true: logging in to your bank requires knowledge of your passphrase -- but *also* physical possession of a object - so a phisher would need to get both somehow, in order to be able to impresonate you.

It might not make phishing impossible, but it does make it a lot more difficult.

What gets me, is that this has been known "forever", aslong as there's been a solid theory of capitalism, atleast.

The solution, of course, is to set a fair price on the externalities. What that price is, and how to practically evaluate, collect and distribute that money, is a difficult problem, however notice that even if the money is collected in a highly inefficient manner, it is still frequently better than the alternative.

If you want to do something that gains you $50M while costing every human being $0.05 - then the overall loss is $300M. If there was a tax on your pollution to the tune of $250M, then you'd conclude it's not worth it since the taxes are higher than your gains.

In this case, no taxes are collected, and no deal is made - but nevertheless the tax-code was useful: it prevented $300M worth of harm from taking place.

Notice that even mostly-squandered taxes is a win from the perspective of everyone-but-you.

Let's say instead you want to do something that gains you $100M, while costing the rest of humanity $25M. We tax your activity at $50M, and the inefficiency of bureacracy means half of the collected taxes are completely wasted.

End result: With the tax you gain $50M and everyone else breaks even. Without the tax, you gain $100M, and everyone else is down $25M. -- thus the tax, despite being 50% wasteful, is a net-gain for everyone except you.

Of course we do ! Any savings from cheaper power goes directly into your pocket, while the extenal costs are shared with 7 billion people.

That's the problem with externalities. If I can make a deal that is a win of $10 million for me -- but that cauces a loss of $0.05 for every human being on the planet, then it's a huge win for me, so barring laws stopping me, I'll likely say yes. Meanwhile, the deal creates $10M of value, and does $350M worth of damage, thus for humanity as a whole, the deal is a huge loss.

Externalities is one of the biggest problems with capitalism. It explains why rational players can end up making decisions that are a net loss overall.

Yes, but the FIDE-incident seems to be the only one mentioned there where a serious attempt was undertaken to develop a communication-protocol designed to be non-noticeable.

They should ask stage magicians or "psychics" about it, it's *really* hard to notice that someone is receiving information from a random person among the spectators if the signaling is subtle enough.

Perhaps this happens all the time -- it's just that when it's reasonably well-done, it's seldom discovered.

Yes, we've been lucky. There's been quite a few incredibly close calls.

It's just that 99.35% is such a insanely high score. In the 70 years it's been maintained, it's never been lower than 11:43, i.e. 98.9%

This pretty clearly indicates that the scale isn't 0 to midnight, the actual scale they actually use, instead, is something like 11:40 to 12:00, thus our current score is 75% on the actually used scale.

It's all "think of a number you like" anyway. You choose 8000 - but why ? We're talking "doomsday" here, and humanity hasn't been capable of creating doomsday for more than 70 years.

The doomsday clock is maintained since 1947 - by the bulletin of the atomic scientists board -- this too clearly implies that they're primarily dealing with nuclear apocalypse type doomsday, so 70 years is clearly the right timeframe.

5 minutes to midnight on a 70-year-timeframe would mean that they expect there to be a greater than 50% chance of doomsday in the next half year.

My first thought was that it's not sufficient to search the -contestants- when there's spectators present, any of whom may be conspiring with the contestant. It's not as if having a "spectator" make barely-perceptible signalling in order to communicate information to a player is a new way of cheating.

At a guess, spectators could freely have any kind of comms-gear whatsoever. This hardly qualifies as "a mystery"

Personally, I think they should use math. If a reviewer reviews 50 video-games in a year on a 1-10 scale, insist that the rankings follow a bell-curve.

Or simple ask them to -sort- the games according to quality, rather than score them.

True, but there's 1440 minutes in a day, so five minutes to midnight is 99.35% which is a insanely high score.

Basically, by using a clock they claim to be using a 0-1440 scale and that the present value is 1435, but in actual reality, they're only using the last ten minutes of that scale, so the actual scale is 0-10 with a current value of 5.

The problem goes even deeper than that: Large parts of the conservative right-wing religious voting-block has fundamental problems with *reality* as opposed to fiction.

Reality demonstrates clearly that their recommended policies (restrict access to information, abstinence-only, shame, restrictions on access to contraceptives...) do not work, and infact result in more teenage-pregnancies, and more abortions - the precise opposite of the result they claim to want.

Meanwhile free condoms, open and honest sex-ed, the pill for any female over 13 who wants it, and a culture where teenage sexuality is (by most anyway) an *accepted* part of growing up, demonstrably works.

The latter is important: If teenagers need to *fear* the reactions of their parents if they notice contraceptives - how likely are they to have condoms available ?

My (then) boyfriend started sleeping over when I was 15. My parents reaction to the start of our sexual relationship can be summarized as "I guess it's not needed to put out an extra mattress for when X sleeps over anymore huh ? Would you like me to arrange for a pill-prescription for you, or have you taken care of it?"

Moral Panic is just that: panic.

No. No.

Glad to clear that up for you.

This thing is *also* not capable of hitting anything with reasonable precision, thus even if the answer to the previous two where "yes" it'd still not hit a barn without being lanuched inside it.

With cheap and guilt-free access to contraception that happens seldom, where anti-choicers don't run amok, there's also the option of abortion for the rare cases where birth-control fails. In contrast "purity balls" and bullshit like that don't work. USA is the outlier among first-world nations:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_tee_pre_sha-health-teenage-pregnancy-share

In USA, 22% of all 20-year-old females have given birth. The equivalent rate for Japan and Sweden are 2% and 3%. (and atleast for Sweden, most of -those- are conservative religious folks - drop that nonsense and the risk drops to sub-1% which is, if not ignorable, then atleast not a major reason for population-growth.

"purpose" ? Whose purpose ? Surely you're not implying that nature as such has a purpose ?

Sure they are ! If the projects are talked about at all, they miss deadlines more commonly than not.

When was the Dreamliner *supposed* to have it's first flight ? When where the first 20 supposed to be delivered ? When should the F35 be operational ? How many planes should be delivered by 2015. What should each plane cost ?

Projects take longer, cost more, and deliver less than hoped for. This happens regularly, indeed it's much more common than the opposite of a project that's completed before deadline, with more than promised features, under budget.

Anyone who's ever renovated a kitchen knows this. It's not news.

That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. No production isn't generally linear: it is generally *sub*linear.

Making 1000 of something, generally costs LESS than 4 times the price of 250 of the thing, not *more* than 4 times.

It's true that making 10000 in an efficient will likely take longer than making 250 - because the more efficient production requires a longer and more complicated setup-phase, but there's no problem putting this in the kickstarter-description: "The first batch will be 250 items, if we get more backers, then we'll make additional batches as required ..... "