Comment Re:It freakin' works fine (Score 1) 928
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...and certainly cannot be done with a USB stick anywhere on your person.
I'm not sure you have seen the smallest USB drives out there. Some are about the size and thickness of the SIM card in your phone. Imagine something near the thickness of a business card and about the same dimensions as the silver end of a USB cable.
I can think of several places to hide this that won't be searched: Inside a belt, inside a wallet, behind your belt buckle, under your watch, against the inside of wide glasses, behind your ear with long hair, under a bra strap, hollowed-out coin, inside a key fob, inside a neck lanyard, inside any book or paper tablet, inside a pen, cigarette lighter, large fingernail clippers, pocket knife, or inside a spring-wound retrieval on an ID holder. Not to mention shoes, hats, gloves, jackets, scarfs, canes, nor jewelry.
There is no fail-safe way to keep something so small out of a secure area which is why they continue to epoxy USB ports, disable mounting external storage, and implement "no lone zone" procedures.
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What are all these 'Executive Orders'?
That question could have been answered faster with a Google search than it took you to type it.
Is the USA a dictatorship run by the President, or a democracy run by Congress, or a schizophrenic mixup?
That is a much more open-ended question and you will find all sorts of theories on the inter-tubes that will attempt to sway you to their particular world view. Good luck making sense of the cacophony of opinions you will find.
The short answer: This Executive Order is instructions to the executive branch (people that work for him) to ask for more secure forms of ID before giving them money or personal information.
“There may well come a time when government decides it’s had enough and it’s not getting enough help from those main companies that control the way we use the internet – they’re not getting enough help from them, so they’re going to start imposing regulations, imposing a code of conduct about the way people may be allowed to operated on the internet,” Fife says.
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Switching power regulators can be tricky, and they certainly are at the voltages (very low) and currents (very high) we are talking about here.
Citation?
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I gather however that this is plain incompetence (Dunning-Kruger-Type) with regards to the voltage regulators. Switching voltage regulation is really hard to do right unless you over-engineer seriously. You can get all sorts of bizarre effects, including a puff of smoke.
I appreciate the irony of you mentioning the Dunning-Kruger syndrome with your statement. Switching voltage regulation has been around for over 30 years and isn't much of a mystery. Since the early motherboards started reducing voltages from 5v down to 3.3v (and below), every motherboard has had on-board voltage regulation. It's hard to believe that something as fundamental as a switching regulator would suddenly exceed the engineering skill of the motherboard designers.
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"I don't believe in sweeping social change being manifested by one person, unless he has an atomic weapon." -- Howard Chaykin