It ain't the hardware ... it's the people. Who maintains the hardware? Programs it all? Who maintains the networks? Who is charged with tracking what's working and what isn't? Who backs it up, and updates formats, and catalogs it, and indexes it, and tracks the changing methodologies used in the collection? Who translates the old code, and operating systems, and storage formats, and hardware, and whatever else?

Hardware's cheap ... people (especially those of the knowledgeable and reliable variety) aren't. Digital data archiving and warehousing for the long haul are well understood to be huge problems for which we haven't found a very good set of solutions.

Let me guess, you also run around the beach to scream and yell at small children for playing with plastic buckets in the water, because you fear that small child might actually empty all of earths oceans onto the land, right?

"If the NIST curves really are broken (as has been suggested for years), then most SSL connections might be too, amirite?"
No. SSL doesn't specify the method to produce random numbers. Why would it? The NIST method is very very slow, so I'd be surprised if any browsers or servers used it as the random number source.

Its only random if you aren't finding coincidences everywhere :)

their Allies must be other nation states? I figured they meant crony industrialists.

There are no coincidences:
"I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."
- Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst

Please, I think you mean Rufus.

Someone once said to that while people complain about the salaries of politicians, some of the states with the most blatant corruption are the ones that don't pay their politicians much....so they have to be wealthy or in some pockets; nobody else can take the job.

So what little reward? Clearly they are not looking tor people with much conscience. Conscience is a luxury of those who can afford it.

There is no environment to protect on the moon. It is dead, irradiated rocks and dirt, already pockmarked by billions of years of meteorite craters. Strip mine the hell out of it for whatever useful things we can find. Who the hell care what it _looks_ like?

It is lunacy like this that makes me realize that most "environmentalists" are really just anti-human.

Necron69

I know I'm not the first one to point this out here, but seriously, let me repeat this:

HOW CAN ANYBODY THROW AWAY HALF A MILLION TONS OF FOOD WHEN SO MANY HUMAN BEINGS ARE STARVING?

How have we - collectively - come to the point where this sort of things is acceptable? This is completely indecent, and someone in power should be shot over this.

Why the HELL would you want to AVOID a scramble for Lunar resources? This is something to actively encourage, to get some permanent human settlements off this rock.

Every man/country for themselves, and may the best and fastest effort win.

Necron69

actually 1984 and Brave new world are both amongst some of my favourite books of all time.

The thing I find interesting is to think about what Orwell would include today. I mean, he had no way to know that it would be possible for so few to do so much. Even his view screens that could not be turned off and acted as cameras.... envisioned a world where nobody knew if they were watching when. He never considered a world where that act doesn't require an active observer, a world where they can just always be recording and then go back and watch later. Such technology was too far out to even be a pipe dream.

Hell, 15 years ago people in the know talked about it like it was a pipe dream. I mean sure, we could envision it then, but, the data requirements for both movement and storage were impossible, only maybe as an outside chance, in the hands of a sophisticated group like the NSA, and even then likely more than they can handle.... and now....today.... we know its true.

Hell I remember people talking about TCP hijacking and types of MITM attacks that always ended with "yah maybe if you were the NSA and could be snooping on every backbone connection".... 15 years ago, that was fiction; but it had become imaginable.

I have to wonder what 1984 would include if it had been written in the 90s.

So after one or two generations of kids are born on moon colonies, do we get to call them mooninites or moonies?

> Tories bad, therefore Labour good, right?

Just as bad as the "GOP haters" here who criticize them for surveillance, then turn a blind eye when the dems do it. Remember Khrushchev: "Politicians are the same all over, they promise to build a bridge, even where there is no river" (only time politicians tell the truth is when criticizing politicians)

> while engaging in the statistically most dangerous everyday activity in the Western world

driving.

Except Kurgerands are not pure gold coins, they are coins with an oz of gold in them, but that gold is alloyed to make it less soft and more worthy of use in circulation (as $1000+ coins jingle around in many pockets)

I would think this gives you some more leeway when it comes to its properties, at least enough to fool many buyers.