When will those of us in the flyover states be able to buy our own armed drones?
Youtube is filled with entertaining videos of rednecks with guns and explosives. Armed drones would help take this to a whole new level. Think BattleBots with truly no holds barred.
Sure, there may be some people who would want to use these for illegal purposes, but think of all the benefits. Imagine a new service for stalking victims - counter-stalking drones, now with a "resolve" button.
(For the humor impaired, yes, I'm kidding)
Encryption is not a panacea.
I'm in full agreement that sensitive data should be encrypted, but I've seen too many cases where encryption (even bad encryption) is an excuse for lazy and bad security decisions.
SSN is a bad "secret" for anything, given how simple and ubiquitous it is. The idea that shared secrets establish identity has been wrong for many years and it's just going to keep getting worse until we, as consumers, can make companies leverage public key cryptography for authentication.
Policies that require encrypting SSN at rest and PII in transit usually results in a database table with:
Name
Address
Date_of_Birth
Encrypted_SSN
That sounds like a step in the right direction, unless you consider that how easy it is to decrypt the SSN. On my laptop, it takes 62 seconds to go through every possible SSN using a script that took me less than 60 seconds to write. Add some time for doing an encrypt operation and lookup for each possible value, but it's clearly possible to brute force the entire SSN range on any computer in a very short amount of time. Ultimately, once someone can get access to the data, they can easily generate every possible encrypted SSN and match up actual value to what's in the table.
Real world example:
Cox insisted on having my SSN to get internet service through them. The last 4 of the SSN is used to confirm the user on the web site. They insisted that storing SSN on the internet was safe because it's encrypted. They really want the SSN to be able to track you down if you don't pay and skip town. Most of their customers aren't going to argue with them because they hear that encryption is magic. I eventually convinced a supervisor that their security is a joke and we agreed that my SSN would be in their system as 3.14159265, without the decimal point.
When people believe that encryption makes their data safe, it allows people to decide to make riskier choices with where the data resides. Encryption is a step in the right direction, but it's just one piece of the security puzzle.
You took that seriously?
I was just making an absurd extension to the "give everyone free money" argument. This is all under a story about mass layoffs at IBM, so I figured trying to add some levity might help.
The income tax is a percentage of income paid to the government. If there was a "negative income tax" that would (mathematically) be money the government paid to the taxpayer(taxearner?). Math jokes aren't always funny, but when they have to be explained, all humor is completely lost.
As someone (often misattributed) once said: Democracy only works until people realize they can vote themselves more money.
Yes, it's too optimistic.
The people who are let go during mass layoffs aren't the visionary, brilliant and rich types. Those people can get another job easily, so there's no reason for them to stick around a soul sucking company they hate until they get laid off.
To found a company you need capital. Unless one or more of the founders is rich, that means convincing others you have something worth investing in.
How many of the people let go are going to work for free or cheap for a brand new startup?
What are they going to work on?
How is that product or service going to turn into a steady income stream?
Does IBM have anything worth a startup trying to beat them on?
A bunch of legacy applications that keep getting resold to new customers? There are none in a new startup.
IBM mainframes? Is there a market for a new mainframe manufacturer? And what's the barrier to entry to design, manufacture and market a new mainframe? I suspect not, but then I don't believe that the market for new IBM mainframes consists of anything but legacy IBM mainframe customers.
Project management? This is most of what IBM does. They get a contract to scope out a project that is never defined and therefore will never succeed or fail, but there's an amazing amount of billable hours in fluffing up the "no deliverables" that these projects could be shrunk to.
Most companies who want a project management circle jerk are perfectly capable of hiring a bunch of contractors and giving them no direction. There's no need for a startup to perform some role to get into that cash bonfire. IBM gets these contracts because people play golf and drink with other people, or they throw one of these engagements in with every product. You don't have to purchase a product, IBM will be happy to bill you for trying to sell you stuff you don't want.
Wouldn't a negative income tax be the government giving people free money based on how much money they made? That would make the $15/hr minimum wage people happy, just make the negative income tax 100%.
I would also like the government to give me 100% of my income as free money. When can we get this initiative on the ballot? Everyone will vote for it. There's no down side.
The singularity begins when Watson accepts a job at a company with a future.
Wolfram Alpha could benefit from Watson's pop culture expertise.
A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author. -- S. C. Johnson