Well, robbery would be a bit tougher than general mayhem. In the foreseeable future you'd probably need a human in the loop, for example to confirm that the victim actually complied with the order to "put ALL the money in the bag." Still that would remove the perpetrator from the scene of the crime. If there were an open or hackable wi-fi access point nearby it'd be tricky to hunt him down.

This kind of remote controlled drone mediated crime is very feasible now. It wouldn't take much technical savvy to figure out how to mount a shotgun shell on a quadcopter and fly it to a particular victim (if you have one). That's a lot less sophisticated than stuff terrorists do already; anyone with moderate technical aptitude could do it with off-the-shelf components. I'm sure we'll see our first non-state-actor controlled drone assassination in the next couple of years. Or maybe a hacktivist will detonate a party popper on the President or something like that.

Within our lifetime it'll surely be feasible for ordinary hackers to build autonomous systems that could fly into a general area and hunt down a particular victim using facial recognition. People have experimented with facial recognition with SBCs like the Raspberry Pi already.

You can forbid states from doing this all you want, but as technology advances the technology to do this won't be exotic. It'll be commonplace stuff used for work and even recreation.

Not necessarily a tyrant. Any psychopath with money.

The technical problems you mention have obvious solutions.

Not enough roof space on a high-rise to supply power to all of its residents? No problem, just put the solar panels somewhere else instead. Wires make it easy to move electricity from one place to another.

Need more power when the sun isn't shining? That's a bit more expensive to solve, but the solution is obvious -- generate excess power in advance and store it in batteries, so that it is available when you need it. The cell phone, laptop, tablet, and electric car markets are all driving the costs of battery storage down to the point where this will soon be economical to do at scale.

193 square miles is 0.006% of the surface area of the United States.

Or, if we wanted to only put the solar panels on existing residential roofs -- there are currently about 6184 square miles of residential roof space in the USA. (ref)

They aren't exactly the same, because interstitial ads aren't just obtrustive, they're interfering. You can't simply mentally resolve to ignore them; if you want to continue you've got to either follow the ad or find a way to dismiss it. This presents the user with a Hobson's Choice: physically respond to the ad, or go back.

A lot depends on how motivated you are to get at the content. If it's something you've clicked out of idle curiosity, you'll back away. If it's something you really want to see you'll fight your way through. Since so much traffic on the Internet is driven by idle curiosity, the 69% figure doesn't surprise me at all. What would be interesting is to disaggregate that figure by types of target content.

yet most people somehow attribute to "whore" a worse meaning

Somehow?

Our market-value vigilance over who is zooming whom dates back a good six-million years.

Nowadays we get more upset when someone unworthy buys a home on our street, but the underlying sentiments were once the same.

This modern "whore" make-over as a small proprietor with high integrity is primarily a byproduct of dense urbanization, where there's an infinite number of fish in the sea to whitewash our old instincts—instincts pre-dating fire, language, cities, and agriculture.

"Somehow" you sound like you just fell off the turnip truck, five minutes ago.

That is, the Australian government has $498 billion to spend on whatever, but Walmart gives most of its $468 billion on suppliers.

That's the least comprehension of "whatever" I've ever seen. But you're not first. It's a 100,000-way tie.

The vast majority of government expenditures are written into law, and the benefits go right back to the same people who provided the revenues. A government enjoys great discretion in how it expends, but not much discretion at all concerning what it expends upon.

Certainly in the circular flow, the government's "friends" skim a lot of cream. And why shouldn't they? They're all upstanding businessmen (and businesswomen) engaged in the profit motive, possessed of the oldest, most conservative, barnyard business model:

1) Pick winning horse.
2) Milk cow.

No, you have Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail, so I think consider the source is alive and well.

She's the Alfred E. Neuman of why the bees collapsed in the first place. What, me worry?

In this very article, she's right up there with Ronald Reagan saying "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do."

Do trees pollute the atmosphere?

In hot weather, trees release volatile organic hydrocarbons including terpenes and isoprenes - two molecules linked to photochemical smog. In very hot weather, the production of these begins to accelerate.

True, but it's all part of a long-term biological equilibrium that didn't seem horrible until after industrial-scale human pollution was added to the mix as a driving factor. I don't recall Cicero damning the trees.

Here's Wente:

The biggest threats to bees appear to be natural pathogens and varroa mites.

Once again, natural pathogens which the bees have presumably been contending with for thousands of years. I also don't recall Cicero orating on missing bees, or Shelley's ode to a collapsed colony.

If there was a forcing factor, it was probably the dang pesticide, which after all was explicitly designed to kill insects, selectively if possible, but that might be easier said that done.

Her entire piece is written in distractor mode, touching on who is cranky with whom laced with speculation about nefarious or misguided agendas, while she can't even bother herself to distinguish (possible) industrial forcing terms from established biological baselines.

Yes, indeed, consider the source.

You are conflating a world that is becoming warmer with a world that just *is* warmer. It may be true (I take no position) that a world that is 4-5 C warmer is better for certain classes of poor people (e.g., subsistence farmers). But a world that is changing rapidly is a calimity to poor people tied to the land, especially in a modern world with national boundaries and private property where you just can't pick up and move like our paleolithic ancestors would have.

Of course in a non-corporate/general-email environment, all of those things won't happen (or at least, not all at the same time), so there is a big chicken-and-egg problem if we require all of that. Fortunately, I don't think we need to require all of that.

I don't think it is necessary to rely on an unauthenticated message being invalid. An unauthenticated message is just that -- unauthenticated. It might be valid or invalid. If it's something important, the "unauthenticated" flag is an indication to the user that he should verify the message's authenticity using other means (e.g. by calling the boss and asking him about it).

You wouldn't ignore it, you'd call the boss (or email him) and ask him if he really send the message you received.

And hopefully the boss would almost never "forget" to sign an email, because all of his emails would be automatically signed simply as part of the act of sending them from his regular email account.

True, you can't fix stupid. But you can at least make it easier for people to see a difference between a known-authentic email and an email of unproven origin.

It seems like relying solely on peoples' good judgement to figure out which emails are legitimate vs which ones are phishing spam (or worse, spear-phishing spam) is asking for trouble.

I can imagine email service providers using cryptographic signing techniques to assist the email client in reliably identifying which emails are definitely coming from their boss (or at least, from their boss's legitimate email account) vs which ones are unauthenticated and could have been written by anyone.

With that implemented, after a few weeks people would grow used to seeing the happy green "sender authenticated" sign at the top of each email from their boss, and if an email came in purporting to be from the boss, but with a big angry red "WARNING -- UNAUTHENTICATED MESSAGE -- MAY BE FRAUDULENT" (or whatever) sign at the top, they'd be less likely to hand over the company jewels without first confirming the email's validity.

Does something like this exist? If so, it seems like it's not widely used. If GMail/hotmail/yahoo could agree on a method and then start implementing it by default, I think that would go a long way towards reducing the effectiveness of email phishing attacks.

The GPL style started having fights in the early 1980s as soon as it came into existence.

You think a license invented with the express agenda to become the one true license might spark controversy right at the outset? Who would have guessed?

I've always liked the GPL (v3 not as much). And I've always hated the notion that it was anything more just another license.

The reality is that others might choose to behave in thousands of different ways, the vast majority of which should be none of my business.

The art of regulation is to limit specific freedoms in order to grease other freedoms. In a free market economy, the principle purpose of (good) regulation is to ensure that ever venture has a graceful failure mode (i.e. that a bad aftermath of bad decision making doesn't effectively socialize risk). The secret of the free market is the graceful failure mode. Nice try, GreedCorp, sorry it didn't work out for you, please play again (uh, no, we're not dipping into the public purse to clean up your mess, but we will be pursuing your former stakeholders to accomplish the same.).

I swing towards a libertarian position on the issue of the GPL. I don't see any necessary reason to inflate the concept of "freedom" to include this additional public good.

Futhermore, the concept of "software" as distinct from other forms of property never worked for me. Information is a spectrum for all of us, from the most personal to the least personal. Software lives all across that spectrum.

Footnote

90% of everything is crap. Regulation is no different, here. The problem is that bad regulation has the power of law, and is a harder class of crap to prudently ignore.

What needs to happen politically is that regulation needs to have a test suite. When regulation starts to fail items in the test suite, the courts should become leery about imposing sanctions. The constitution (in countries who pay any attention to the ones they have) already functions as a kind of last-resort test suite, but I think we can do better.

In fact, perhaps legislation should begin by writing the test suite before they write the legislation itself. Even better if there is a separation of electoral term.

The unofficial official FreeBSD security posture: two layers, where the outer layer has a singular purpose in life.

Protecting sshd using spiped

Like many system administrators, I used to restrict access to port tcp/22 on most of my servers based on source IP address; this provided some protection from "zero-day" exploits against OpenSSH, as well as eliminating the annoying "log spam" caused by brute force attacks. This worked fine as long as I always connected from the same location, but heading off to conferences meant that I needed to either tunnel SSH connections over other SSH connections or make temporary changes to my firewall rules.

Which leads me to a question... if Intel were to one day do away with its old-timey segmented memory modes and what not, would anybody notice?

I'm a little surprised they haven't done so already. Even if the extra transistors required to support that aren't significant, there is still the matter of having to test, verify, and support all 27 different layers of compatibility for every CPU model they come out with. It seems like it would be a pain to do all that if nobody is using that functionality anyway.

They still let people use their brains at your work, eh? No such luck at my company, they threw all of those out years ago when they upgraded to PowerPoint.