Sure, but you can ONLY use it while it is under your control if the embedded keys cannot be extracted.

If they can, then you can duplicate the key and return the original, perhaps undetected. That gives you the ability to retain access to whatever was secured.

There is definitely value in tamper-resistant key vaults.

There is a really simple solution to this. Allow users to set their own QoS rules, and the ISPs respect them, and can charge a different rate for different levels of service.

So, if you just want your SYNs prioritized it isn't a problem, and it probably won't cost you much. If you want your bittorrent traffic prioritized, that also isn't a problem, and it will cost you a fortune.

If everybody tried to ship all their mail/etc FedEx priority overnight FedEx would grind to a halt for months until they scaled up. It isn't a problem, and there are no limitations on what can be sent priority overnight, but people regulate themselves because most will not pay $70 to ship something when the $7 service that takes 2 days longer is good enough.

No argument there. However, project management and diagramming on a whiteboard remotely are really two different problems.

That wouldn't work for a realtime meeting (think webex/etc). Also, if it only prints then you end up digitizing that and looking at it on a screen, which might or might not be readable.

One challenge with replacing whiteboards is just how much info you can present. If you're working close to it you could be writing on post-its/etc and it could be the equivalent of 30+pages of content on regular paper. Short of having ubiquitous 2m monitors I'm not sure if you'll ever completely replace them.

Yes and no. What I struggle with is the fact that most of the teams I work with are global in scale, and thus the whiteboard just doesn't work, and I've yet to find a really good alternative. Whiteboards also are not self-documenting. I've literally snapped photos of them with my cell phone and then I have to try to scroll around them on a tiny monitor (even on a PC).

I'm not sure whether Microsoft has a compelling solution to this problem, but I'm willing to buy into the argument that whiteboards are non-ideal in a lot of situations.

Now, in a traditional classroom with a teacher and 25 kids watching them lecture in a single room, I think the whiteboard works just fine. I do realize that is the focus of this discussion.

TBH, whiteboards are pretty limiting in modern business settings these days. I love and hate them.

I love them because they really are the best medium for getting the job done.

I hate them because in a typical meeting only 10% of the participants can see the whiteboard, and we don't have many electronic alternatives that don't suck.

A good solution for students that actually works when viewed remotely would probably be something that would take off in the large business world.

Young men would buy expensive custom sound/entertainment systems for mediocre cars when I was a lad, but they would stop well before 30. This was not a generational thing then and it isn't one now.

Young people (under 25) as a rule feel they should be provided quality entertainment while driving. Less young people (over 25) don't. I for instance have a 6 stack CD player full of shitty Chinese pop songs that I don't particularly like, but really I don't care.

Indeed, the NTSB has in the past discouraged rushes to prosecution. Our standard justice system is outstanding at thoroughly punishing people anytime something goes wrong (regardless of whether they could have done much about it happening). It is less good at actually fixing problems so that they don't happen over and over again. The NTSB tends to take a longer view and they're less interested in whether one train engineer goes to jail than why we have a system where a single delinquent engineer can kill a whole bunch of people. That kind of distinction is why aircraft are so much safer than cars. With a car crash we throw the drunk in jail. With a plane crash we ask how it was that a drunk even was able to get behind the controls, and thus we don't really have drunks flying planes because there are so many places they'd get caught along the way that it just doesn't happen. The former approach leads to lots of satisfied families who can watch their loved one's killer rot in jail, while the latter approach avoids having victims in the first place.

Well, to the degree that this is the case within a particular state, they certainly are sounding like hypocrites!

Well, the legal reason is that the US government is Federal, and the state governments typically are unitary.

That is, under the US constitution, the states have a limited degree of sovereignty. However, under state constitutions the local governments typically do not have any sovereignty.

That is why states can and do charter and abolish local governments as the need arises. If your school district has an abysmal educational record, your governor can appoint somebody to come in and basically run the district. They'll listen to the locally-elected school board, but ultimately they are a dictator accountable only to the state. Your only recourse is to go to the state government for relief if you don't like it. In contrast, the President of the US cannot do the same thing with a local school district. At most he can withold Federal funding, though in reality this is a pretty big stick.

That's the reason for the situation as it stands, and it has its roots in the history at the founding of the US. Before the US Constitution there were the Articles of Confederation, and under that charter the US government was even weaker - it had no real sovereignty of its own and was a bit like the UN.

This is in contrast with how most nations function. Most governments are unitary in design. The PM of the UK can in theory fire a random teacher in a random elementary school, since ultimately the whole chain of command reports up to them. In practice they usually have local councils/etc, but typically there is no true sovereignty other than in the sense that the national government imposes rules upon itself.

Seemingly for the same reason that asian or any other immigrants get the other side of the stick. Somebody who I had nothing to do with did something good/bad to somebody else I had nothing to do with, and I feel the consequences. It really doesn't make sense, and this is just one case of it.

Which *I* control.

Even if the "Smart" tv were open to modify I wouldn't buy it. I *like* the display and the cpu being in different boxes.

The TV needs to show me a decent watchable image.
The htpc needs to fetch the video and turn it into something the TV can show me. With some pretty htpc skin if I want it.

If I want some new feature or to use some new codec that needs a bigger cpu I can get a 'new' $100-200 junkpile computer.
That seems to be plenty to watch tv do low end web & email stuff from 10 feet away. You know--a smart TV.

http://popehat.com/2009/01/06/...

And decided to make a factory out of his one-man operation.

Hey, maybe he'll sue them for infringing on his copyrighted business model.

Ok, I'll clarify my statement - it is hard to manage an illicit supply chain in competition with a legitimate supply chain for the same commodity.

If I want to sell TVs stolen from trucks, I have to compete with every Walmart and Best Buy in the country.

If I want to sell cocaine, I only have to compete with somebody else who had to go through the same difficulties in getting their product onto the streets as I did.

Manufacturers are a lot more connected to their customers these days. If I buy a stolen iPhone and try to activate it, either it won't work, or I end up providing data to the manufacturer which makes it easier for them to figure out who stole it in the first place. If I buy a stolen Blu Ray player then the next time it phones home for its online features the manufacturer gets data that they can use to figure out who stole it. If I buy an expensive widget, there is a decent chance I'll end up registering it on some website for one reason or another.

I'm not saying that it is impossible to fence stolen goods - it just is a lot harder than it probably used to be. I only see that trend continuing.

The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.

What do you mean by inadequately configurable? There's usually an option to disable while typing somewhere.

It's there. It's on. Didn't help. Don't know if it's that Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't support it properly on these two machines or if it doesn't do the job I want done.

What I'm looking for is NOT there: A threshold level for touch sensitivity. If you're going to put a BIG touchpad on a laptop's palm rest, you need to either put it where the palms won't brush it, or you need to make it possible to turn down the sensitivity so that a feather-light brushing of the pad doesn't register as a mouse motion or button click.

Two different manufacturers (Lenovo and Toshiba) have used exactly the same layout, and exactly the same hair trigger, non-adjustable, touchpad sensitivity. (Also exactly the same sort of wafer-thin flat tile keys, which is how we got into this digression.)