Actually the Nokia 770 was a phenomenal success, despite not being advertised. It spawned 5 successors and the line was only cancelled when Nokia was Elopped. Even then the single remaining product was outselling all of their Windows products despite being only offered in selected markets.

It was the first, and unfortunately the last, mobile device that was actually useful. It was the closest thing to a portable computer you could get.

Actually scratch that, the protocol feature is not suitable for adding noise since it's like a ping. You send some data and it comes back verbatim... that's trivial to filter out as an attacker.

In his paper he admits that no data is necessary.

But wouldn't it make a lot more sense to do this on the application side? There you can easily just add "noise" in any way you want.

I mean keep alive is already done by TCP, a keep alive doesn't need data. Why did this even get into the standard?

It seems like the only purpose for this code was for Robin S. to erect a monument for himself. Again why did this get into the standard?

Every hypothesis is "an assumption". But some stand up to scrutiny and offer a lot of explanatory value.

As for evolution, what you said isn't heresy - it's a claim that you didn't try to back up.

That's one spin you could put on it.

Another choice is "How is a country full of people that believe nonsense going to survive the 21st Century?"

I guess that means I'm not a Slashdotter, because I don't believe any of those things exist (or are possible).

(Too bad...)

You're trying to pee in the punch with a "both sides do it" argument. The not-so-subtle difference is that "the left" doesn't deny that nuclear power and GM foods exist. To paraphrase the famous saying, everyone is entitled to their own policy opinions, but not to their own realities.

But then the Republicans aren't generally as bad as they get a rap for. Their only substantial reality-denying party positions are on evolution and global warming, and both of those are for easily understandable political reasons (the former too keep the dwindling numbers of the faithful faithful, the latter to please their corporate masters).

Like Prolog, where anything you can't prove is taken to be false?

Yeah, they would have gotten so much better a deal on gay rights if they had supported McCain & Palin.

Is there any empirical evidence that information can't be destroyed?

If not, what would be the consequences of just ditching the law(?) that creates the paradox?

I mean paper doesn't have to be inefficient, in fact it rarely is since paper based workflows are often optimized. Everybody working with paper understands the process and can therefore come up with ways to optimize it.
I once worked at a hospital which had paper files. It makes sense since the documents in there can be in a lot of different types. The process of dealing with it was rather efficient on the paper side, you had some numbers and got the file with that number from a cabinet. The actual bottleneck was the computer based indexing system. We had something similar to E-Mail called "Outlook/Exchange". We ended up printing out those pseudo E-Mails, looking up each number individually in the indexing system, and writing the number of the file next to it. There was no way of sorting the entries to be able to reach them efficiently, nor was the system well designed. (it had SQL injection bugs!)
This is just one example of how badly designed computer based workflows can be.

Then there is the other point of governments being supposedly less efficient than companies. I have no idea where that idea comes from. I have 2 retirement funds, one run by a private company, the other one run by the government. While the government one manages to pay out millions of pensions every month and flawlessly adapts to any changes in my life, the private one can't even get a simple address change right, twice in a row!

Why should companies change? Companies mainly act to self-preserve. Any change is not just constructive, but also destructive. For a company to change it would need to have a vital reason, without that reason it cannot change.
Some people claim that there is the magic hand of the market which will somehow fix the problem though something called "competition". Those people go on citing exotic areas where their dogma actually worked and there was competition. However look around you. Go to an electronics store with a list of brands that come from the same manufacturer and then look at how many different prices exactly the same product gets sold. If there was competition, everyone would buy the cheapest of the otherwise identical products. There is no competition on many markets.

And if they can get the data, there's no expectation of privacy.

Circular reasoning at its best.

Don't you know you have to use monkeys if you want to type Shakespeare?

But neither party is interested in ending the intrusive, ineffective "War on Drugs".