Comment Re:It's finally time (Score 2, Insightful) 314
My point was to show there are many options between "everything" and "nothing" provided by the state. I don't really care to discuss it further.
(PS "counselling" is correct English.)
My point was to show there are many options between "everything" and "nothing" provided by the state. I don't really care to discuss it further.
(PS "counselling" is correct English.)
Dental health is a service provided by people who spend money to outfit dental clinics. Same as medical professionals. As such, the market dictates the availability and costs.
Fire fighting service is [etc, etc].
It's amazing to me the number of people who think the government, who can't seem to run anything well,
That's a very American viewpoint. In other countries, government functions well. In others, it does well with some things, and badly at others.
Why should I have pay for someone to have a pretty smile??
Because they'll pay for you to have something you'd argue isn't essential, like fire protection, food safety, fertility treatments, counselling, etc.
Cataract surgery isn't covered until it affects ones ability to drive, not because someone just wants to see better.
My grandma is booked for cataract surgery in May. She's still OK to drive, the medical benefit is currently justified for her mental health (she's lost confidence with worsening sight). It's free on the NHS.
Brands available in Britain (see here etc) list "maltodextrin". That's a polymer of 3-20 glucoses, and I'd guess at the higher end since only some of the mass is included in the "of which sugars" on the nutrition information.
Is that really much different than starch?
(The purpose is simply to dilute the über-sweet Stevia powder so you can use reasonable amounts.)
For comparison, Tesco give the RDA of carbohydrate and sugar: http://www.tesco.com/groceries...
330ml of Coca Cola contains:
* Carbohydrate 35g, 13% RDA
* of which sugars 35g, 39% RDA
Surprisingly, the can itself only shows the "sugars" value and RDA. (In Britain, the supermarkets are much better at promoting these values, since their store-branded products are usually better -- probably because they have more flexibility to change the recipe.)
And I'll add, if it's your idea to create an anonymous but secure connection using PKI to send your biometric identity, that's no better than a password. Infact, it's worse than a password, because (as was the original point), all it takes is your super secret biometric identity to be compromised once, at which point your screwed.
Yes, but how do you validate that the public key I send you is actually my public key? You have to already have it or it has to be stores somewhere that the other party trusts, bringing us right back to our original problem.
PKI lets two parties communicate securely without having ever spoken, and it lets one party validate that something was actually sent by another party _if they have the other parties public key and can trust it_.
Biometrics doesn't add anything useful to this equation that I see. Sure you can use some biometric information as a private key and generate a public key, but what does that give you over using some random number to generate a public key. It still comes down to the party at the other end having that public key and being reasonably sure it's yours.
The USPS has been using automated systems of sorting mail for decades. It's why mail across town goes to a consolidated center (perhaps halfway across the state) first for sorting into carrier routes and has been for decades.
That Homeland Security want to capture this information - which has long been determined to accessible (the original pen-trace) isn't surprising at all.
And they only have to photograph/image the ones that the machines can't read. It's only surprising to people who drink the conservative kool-aide that government can't do anything right.
There are four things government is in a position to do better than anyone else: military defense, law enforcement, public works, and the erosion of liberty.
Sure, but how do they apply to confirming an identity and not a capability.
Maybe I'm too thick to get it, but I can't see how say, a bank, can validate that you are who you say you are without at least knowing _something_ about you that you can than verify through whatever means.
Right, but there has to be a public key involved at some point.
meaning it has to be activated by your particular stomach in order for the challenge to be accepted in the first place
As with DRM, if the thing that decides if you are valid can be in your hands (so to speak), you may as well assume it will be compromised.
There's no way I can think of to pass on a piece of information describing yourself to another party without that party having to know that information already to validate it, and if they do, it can be stolen and replayed.
I can kinda see the appeal of an implanted device, but yeah, there's no reason such a system couldn't be a fob you carry around with you (or somewhat unfortunately more likely, baked into your phone).
Assuming it was based on current public key encryption, even if broken an attacker would still need to harvest private keys from users to make use of it. That's gonna require special equipment (portable reader of some kind) and time.
Sure, damage would be done, but it wouldn't be the apocalypse. I suspect you'd see less impact than you do with current CC theft. AES being broken would be a far bigger deal on the internet where it would be much easier to apply the attack in a wide spread manner.
The problem with this, and biometrics in general, is that there is only one you.
You can't revoke your "vein pattern" any more than you can revoke your fingerprint. Using your same biometric information for everything has the same pitfalls as using the same password for everything, and you are just one sketchy gas station away from someone getting a copy.
If you are going to implant something, why not implant a challenge/response system with a public/private key and strong cryptography, like you know, we've been doing on the internet with a good amount of success. A random very large number is just as good as any biometric information, and at least you can change it.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
