The article hints that this tech is published but not patented. Way to go!

If true we can expect many implementations in record time, lots of manufacturers trying out variations and producing affordable products.

On the other hand, if they set huge license fees on the patent it is highly likely that the only licensees will fail to produce a successfull product, and at best it becomes a niche feature for systems where it has exceptional value. For spacecraft that cannot be repaired the value is huge, for your cellphone it is a nice but marginally valuable feature.

TOR is the next step of escalation. The cyberwar arms race has been going on for a long time, and it's it's not just governments.

Horse (& cow) traders in the Midwest caused a surge of demand for cell phone encryption in the early 90's when news of how easily one could tap FM cell calls got out. The FCC's stand was that they were secure because listening in was illegal, even if the needed equipment was sold at Radio Shack.

With the swing to digital, the quality of analog electronics (like amplifiers, detectors, and rf modulators) seems to have declined. Analog devices used to contain adjustable coils, capacitors, and pots to match resonant frequencies in those assemblies, and the alignment procedures set them to precision far beyond the purchasable steps. Depending on the situation and the skill of the tech this might just require a plastic screwdriver, or also scopes, signal generators and/or frequency counters.

Because components drift with time, loss of output or sensitivity was common with age and curable with redoing the alignment. The symptoms he describes fit.

Actually, our territory runs from Norway to Russia, and despite discrimination that made my grandparents pass for Finns there are really quite a few of us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_people

Beware our drums!

Is your cultural heritage Saami, and has that culture had any influence on your development efforts?

You can't really reach a consensus on many issues when such differences exist. Democracy makes the Majority "right" so it is important not to let their views go unchallenged.

I have an intuitive feel that there is something wrong about price discrimination, but cannot justify it intellectually. I think it comes down to a sense that I should fight for a better price if it is achievable.

Given that the owner of a product should have the choice to sell or not in any particular circumstance there is nothing wrong with price descrimination. Wrongfull motives on the part of the seller (we don't serve your kind here) are an exception.

But I also see nothing wrong in taking advantage of that descrimination to get the lower price, even if it defeats the seller's intent. Deleting cookies, dressing down to buy a car, going to a store in a different neighborhood all are perfectly ok with me. I am not so sure about outright lies (my son is only 5) but YMMV.

I thought it is currently considered best practice to move ssh to some other port on any Internet connection.

Mechanical and civil engineering need a lot of processing power to optimize designs and analyze them for safety. That's all good work.

Siesmography data needs lots of analysis to see what is underground, that's useful work even if the mining and drilling corporations are mostly pretty bad. Fact is most private enterprises choose profits over ethics, unless they see a long term cost from the unethical behavior.

Management jobs get paid more to motivate them to do what the higher bosses want, which is often different than the right thing. If you do that for a while you will gain pay grade. When a situation comes up that seem worth it to you, do the right thing. If it is really the right thing, you're unlikely to get fired. You are likely to find your self back in a technical job with more pay.

I have spent years alternating between tech and mgmt roles ratcheting my salary up. Reorganizations and ownership changes make for great opportunities.

A couple decades ago, the US security agencies pushed hard for the industry to standardize on a encryption chip that allowed legal wiretaps. Unfortunately, it wasn't as secure as they thought and actually allowed rather easy decryption.

Of course, that was due to stupidity, not malice.

The studio was the setting for the Broadway play "Million dollar quartet" which offered a nice re-imagining of what it was like there, as well as some classic music.

Lots of companies make requests like this, or more benign looking stuff like asking that you donate to particular causes and telling someone so the company can effectively claim credit for your donation. The request is cheap and might give the company something it values.

But if it values you as an employee, the companies' request will be polite and ignoring it, or refusing politely, will have little or no impact on your pay or retention. Making a big stink about it, tho, will hurt your future unless it was already controversial in the executive suite.

It is all about fitting in with the culture, and few companies have a consistent one across engineering, marketing, and finance. If they did, Dilbert could never have succeeded.

I used to keep bees, but after the FDA approved this class of insecticides (~2004) none of my colonies made it over the winter. The law is that bee-lethal insecticides cannot be used where bees are present, but FDA made an exception for these "systemic insecticides" despite documented evidence of bee harm. I learned about this by 2006 and believe one of my neighbors was an early adopter of this bee poison. I am still waiting for FDA to reverse this approval.

CCD started getting press soon after, as beekeeping started to dwindle. The cause was controversial, because it wasn't a simple poisoning; the affected bees just disappeared from the hive. The history, and FDA test documents, we're really pretty clear. Bayer and other manufacturers have fought long and hard to keep selling their poison. This study is just one more in a long series. Sometimes they get coverage, usually not.

The /. comments are interesting, because HFCS has little to do with the story. Bees get the insecticide from nectar and pollen from dosed plants, including fruit trees, that circulate it throughout their system. The test added the insecticide to the HFCS that the bees were being fed, and the authors commented on the difficulty of measuring its concentration in the syrup and speculated on the amount in commercially available corn syrup. The GMO corn doesn't seem to actually have anything to do with the story. I am amused that an issue that is important to me is getting so much play for the worst of reasons.