From reading the descriptions on the sync site... no. Anyone with the key can access the files. This provides some security, but it is pretty brittle. As long as everyone using it understands the level of security that should be applied to that key. i.e. anyone who steals the key can access the files. So, for example, never send the key over email.

This seems like a reasonable solution for either just syncing personal files, where one individual has control of the key(s). Or syncing among a small technical group where everyone understands the relevance of the security of the key(s). Or syncing low-risk files among a less formal group. So it provides "some security" but you shouldn't really call it "secure", where "secure" would be per-user authenticated based on unique, private credentials for each user that they will not, in practice, give to others.

Seems like crossing the border with no information in your possession is the only reasonable way to go.

I had a friend mention recently that at NASA you can't take your laptop overseas (or maybe it was just to China), they give you a blank ipad when you leave and then you give it back and they wipe it when you get back. Assuming that you wait until you are in-country to start using the ipad this means you would cross the border with no information on you subject to search. It seems like with the "consent" requirement you could get away with refusing to sign into your email from a device that isn't yours if you cite company policy.

And to add to your list: if you work at any educational institution, the federal laws on student data privacy are such that you would be violating them with this kind of open-ended access as well.

No - the plane is safe even if the battery catches fire. My understanding of the comment is that safe failure is the result of the change in design. With the previous design, battery failure by fire could endanger the aircraft. With the new design battery failure by fire does not endanger the aircraft. This is how subsystem failure is managed in aircraft. Whether or not a failure endangers the craft has huge implications for how its safety is evaluated.

Did you somehow miss the fact that Apple broke the status quo that you just mentioned by refusing to sign cross-licensing agreements? And if you think that one-click would have passed muster as a patent in the '80s you also slept through the transition from when method patents were not allowed to the current condition where they are. Just because it was bad before doesn't mean it can't get worse.

Put your strawman away. Hoarding cash and saving are not the same thing. Currency is for providing efficiency of exchanging goods and services, not for long-term storage of capital. That's why it's called currency!

Individuals have a choice to save via investment (keeping capital in the economy) or via hoarding currency (keeping capital out of the economy). Beyond a certain amount liquidity buffer, widespread "saving" in the form of hoarding cash is a good way to destroy an economy by breaking the assumptions that everyone uses to fairly exchange goods and services using currency. A mildly inflationary currency is a stable currency because it discourages it being used for something other than currency, i.e. long-term storage of capital. You are arguing that zero inflation is enough to maintain a stable currency. You are wrong. We tried that, it didn't work.

Coming back to bitcoin. Bitcoin is a perfectly reasonable exchange currency for small transactions. i.e. you convert money to bitcoin then back out again. This is because its short-term value is fairly predictable and low-risk. However its long-term value is completely uncontrolled because there are so many unknown hoarders. And this problem will just get worse.

Bitcoin will probably last another few years and then it will choke on its own deflation. i.e. bitcoins will become so valuable that none of them will be in circulation. The hilarious thing is you will probably see this as a the success of bitcoin! Look how valuable they are! But it will have been a total failure as a currency. Thankfully anyone with some good sense sees this coming a mile away and nobody is likely to die as a result. (you know people die when large economies break right? This is not a game.)

Of course the hilarity (i.e. stupidity) ensues when "how things were before" is just something made-up that never actually existed. Or it is something that was changed precisely because it was a provably terrible way of doing things. The problem with a lot of politics in the US, especially on the conservative side, is that it has become disconnected from reality. If a "conservative" allows someone else to define "how things were" then they are just a pawn to be manipulated. Progressives (that is the more appropriate term in this context) have reality issues too, i.e. thinking something will work better just because it is "new", but that seems a lot less of a problem right now. Progressives seem to have their hands full just keeping Bad Stuff (like invading other countries) from happening.

Just to be clear, this is NOT "software as a service". SAAS is where they pay you to use the software (for example through a web interface) but they do not get either the compiled code or source code. You are working as a contract developer. In copyright terms it is a "work for hire."

I agree that use of GPL completely depends on how the payment-for-work model for a given piece of software works. If one's revenue depends on artificial scarcity, GPL is not really viable as its intention is to remove artificial scarcity.

Honest questions here:

Does this mean it stores the secrets on the SIM card because it is hardened? or it uses the existing keys/etc in the sim card? (I don't even know if the former is possible.) Is there no other hardened storage on a smartphone?

One of the problems is that if I have two banks (or others) I'd prefer to use different authentication tokens for each. But if both of them authenticate from the same sim card....

I think that you are wrong. Given the nature of the study, I am inclined to believe that when they say "we know that disadvantaged students perform more poorly..." that they know this for real i.e they have the statistics to back it up. The point is that the simple fractions of disadvantaged students doesn't quite work the way you might expect.

Um. That's what happens now -- you can homeschool, which just has various curriculum and testing requirements. But those requirements have to be implemented in some way. If nobody is managing your homeschooling, you are required to at least *be* somewhere that will manage your schooling. You simply have this mistaken belief that testing for competency is "easy" and would work fine. We have trouble even doing this properly in schools.

And what's with this "schools are paid by the class hour" crap. That kind of metric is commonly used for discussing school budgets, but it is by no means uniform enough to be even a useful standard let alone some kind of implied universal requirement.

You're not allowed to make napalm as a hobby because it's too dangerous to your neighbor, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to have unsecured assault rifles with high-capacity magazines in your house because it is too dangerous to your neighbor.

One role of law is to set accepted practice. Ownership and storage of military-grade weapons should be subject to licensing, required standard practice, and inspection for purposes of public safety. Otherwise its not the "militia" that's "well-regulated" it's the kids and the crazies.

My question is -- why not target touchscreen desktops? There's already a feature-restricted linux variant for tablets - it's called Android. It would be more efficient in terms of resources to build an open-only non-spyware Android variant than to build something open from scratch.

I think we should target 3 user experiences -- fixed-screen + keyboard + mouse/trackball (current desktops/laptops) -- (handheld) touchscreen only (current tablets) -- fixed-touchscreen + keyboard.

But as he said -- it may just be the influence that grows. Nominally someone could create a currency that works like bitcoin but has the same inflation properties as targeted by the central banks (3%/year). This may be possible to do on top of bitcoin's own proof-of-work stream. Bitcoin itself couldn't do this because the early adopter advantage (that makes it scam-like) was necessary to get it started. But now that the system has proved some of its worth, something else could build on it.

My impression from the previous discussion on this was that helium shortage is a fictional crisis. Medical usages don't do helium recovery, which is where most of the loss occurs. Also the main source of helium - as a by-product of natural gas extraction - just vents most of it because its not worth capturing it. So complaining about "misuse" is nonsense. If one is really worried about a helium shortage one should be pushing for recovery in its biggest usage context and stockpiling. Neither of these are being discussed, so apparently this isn't actually serious.

My question is why is this not just a demonstration that citation optimization works as expected? They say that resubmission is dominated by a flow from high-impact to low-impact journals. i.e. people submit their paper to the highest impact journal they think the "might" be able to get it into, and then resubmit to lower ones until it gets accepted. This means the scientists are using resubmissions to actively attempt to increase their citation count by getting their paper into the highest impact journal possible. So of course citation rates are higher for resubmitted papers, because resubmitted papers are the ones being subject to this optimization process.

While this is majorly labor-intensive on the reviewer side, it is a decently useful practice in a large field like biology, since it will help insure that "important" results receive a lot of visibility. High-impact journals are nominally high-impact because the community treats them that way. More people read & cite them, so people try to get their stuff in there first and then go to other journals.

I would also note that this study itself is an example of the distorting side-effects this process can have. These guys don't give the above very reasonable explanation for their results, and precisely because of their poor analysis, it is an "interesting puzzle" and gets into a high-impact journal (science in this case). Of course if they'd just done their analysis properly, it would be a completely uninteresting result, and not make it into the high-impact journal. Insane isn't it. That's scientific publication today. Science and nature tend to contain things that are speculative, inconclusive, or plain wrong because knowing the answer is boring.

By the way science and nature are run more like magazines than journals. Most journals don't have an "interesting" cut, just "useful to others, not done before, and done properly". Both science and nature will actually relax the "done properly" part if it is "interesting" enough. This isn't necessarily bad science, it just means that both the proposal of a hypothesis and its falsification are published separately. Nominally this is good for high-profile questions. The problem is that many people don't realize this and often the the proposal of the hypothesis is much "higher-impact" than its falsification!