>this process will be overseen by David Kappos, the current director of the USPTO and formerly an attorney at IBM in charge of their heavy-handed patent strategy.
Looks like the deck is already stacked. Are there any companies or elected officials with significant political/financial capital aggressively campaigning for this? This movement needs a champion to make this topic relevant to bureacrats and I don't know if Stallman's the guy.
Well you can't get divorced if you can't find a wife! I kid. I kid.
But engineers strike a good balance of time at home and financial compensation. If you're making much more than a decent engineer, you're probably a senior exec, lawyer, or business owner with not enough time for the wife. Don't have any data to back this up, but just my suspicion.
If you're making much less than an engineer, you may run into money problems which is a leading cause of divorce.
It can be a problem because you use your favourite language/tools over and over to be productive, but then you look up and ten years have passed and your skills are no longer marketable.
This is easier to see in the older generation - I have the pleasure of knowing some totally top-class programmers who have happened to spend their whole career writing FORTRAN. Would any of you guys hire them? No, you want the RoR kids, not surprisingly.
Like everything else in in life, there is a Middle Way. Don't have new-shiny ADHD, but try and tick over a new language or technology every few years.
For a while I thought Google would be sweeping this under the rug.
Great call on Khan Academy.
But the $1M spent on schweeb could have done more good elsewhere. Nobody wants to go pedaling upside down on a suspended monorail. The bicycle has solved this problem pretty elegantly.
Oh really? I do. I ride a bike 3 miles to work every day through Cambridge MA. This Shweeb idea would solve the weather problem, as well as the unshakable "oh god I'm going to die" feeling (since cycling with cars around is pretty damn dangerous), and probably be faster to boot.
Yeah, here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhxVtUFZVzk) they claim 2x the efficiency of bicycling, thanks to aerodynamics. There are some serious logistical challenges - e.g. to address the problem of slow people & free riders you might have to detect and incentivize/reward contributing (human) power to the system.
But the low-weight, self-powered approach means it's probably the lowest-cost system to mount above the current din of street life, which could end up being a big benefit.
I'd file it under strange/interesting, rather than crazy/ridiculous
I think the worst problem is breakdowns. Given a bunch of complicated mechanical devices zooming around the place all day long being pedaled by people with no incentive to be careful, how often is one going to get jammed? I'd say pretty often. And then your entire line is filled with angry commuters dangling in plastic tubes above the ground while you have to go get a crane to fix it.
Still, a small-scale deployment might work. I can imagine it on a university campus. I can't imagine any city installing it, simply because there are too many voters who would say "damned if I'm going to get into a little plastic tube and pedal while everybody looks at my legs".
I don't think breakdowns would be much of an issue, for one they aren't complicated mechanical devices in the slightest, they seem to be even more minimal than a bicycle.
The difference between waiting a couple of hours for a crane one day every few months, seems like a good tradeoff against sitting in gridlock everyday or the risk of being run down by a car imho.
But yes I agree that humans are not rational and would not do it for petty reasons. Can easily solve the 'look at my legs' problem with opaque tubes :P
Regarding the NSA, "who knows", it's not worth any time to speculate. I tend to think the answer here is "no", but not because of any fundamental problem with the algorithms TC uses; rather, I assume there's a small battery of implementation errors NSA can exploit that private industry hasn't yet independently discovered.
Fortunately for our collective sanity, if it is the case that NSA has (several times over) the moral equivalent of the "stack overflow" for cryptosystems, there is nothing we can do about it, and there's no point wanking over alternatives that might foil them.
Regarding the FBI, "almost certainly yes", assuming you use it properly (in particular, by using strong secrets). Consider that any vulnerability in the crypto stack Truecrypt uses would have far too much value to be wasted on conventional domestic law enforcement. Consider also that unlike state secrets, domestic law enforcement uses a crypto stack that is the same or strictly weaker than Truecrypt.
You need to add "assuming you are willing to go to jail" because a warrant can compel you to disclose your password, and if you refuse you'll be jailed for contempt of court.
That'd be thrown out of courts as a violation of your 5th Amend. rights. At least here in the states, in the UK crypto keys can be requisitioned with the penalty of jail time if refused.
I believe some rulings support that view, but others have disagreed. It might depend on the judge/district and I don't think it's ever been considered by the Supreme Court.
Probably. As far as anybody knows, the FBI and NSA are on the same level of cryptography technology as the rest of the world is. AES and SHA-1 are currently the national standards for encryption and secure hashing. AES is what TrueCrypt uses (as do most SSL connections and WPA/WPA2 connections).
There are some things to keep in mind though:
Fine print: As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it's possible to extract encryption keys from RAM even if the computer has been (very... within several minutes) recently shut down.
More fine print: Pick a weak passphrase, and you may be shit-outta-luck. Also, brute forcing for passphrases up to a certain complexity is viable.
Tin foil hat: A conspiracy theorist may assert that the feds are far ahead of academia when it comes to cryptography, as was likely the case several decades ago (see the history of DES). I'm not sure that I believe that, because cryptography has a huge place in academia now, worldwide. It's possible, but I doubt they've broken AES.
The FBI and NSA are two very, very different organizations. NSA is a feeder for software security talent in private industry. I have never even heard of someone coming out of the FBI knowing how to break into a computer. NSA people want to leave the agency to write a string of journal articles or to make a couple million bucks. FBI people want to leave the bureau to become Assistant District Attorneys. Infosec literacy in the FBI boils down to knowing how to use EnCase.
I responded to this same comment with more details that I won't repeat, but, with respect, I'd suggest not taking seriously the crypto insights of someone who equates these two agencies.
The fact that only one organization in the US Government is likely to be able to break your disk encryption isn't a moot point, because that one organization is extremely unlikely to harass a US citizen; forget the law, the simple incentives are all wrong.
Earlier this summer, there was news that the FBI was trying to help the Brazilian government access data related to a financial crime of some sort. TrueCrypt was the method used and it (supposedly) thwarted the FBI's efforts. Just google "fbi truecrypt" for the sources.
But here's the thing... I'm not paranoid in the style of "The Lone Gunmen," but this news never quite passed the sniff test. I find it difficult to believe that if the FBI was unable to crack a TrueCrypt volume that they'd let that particular cat out of the bag.
I conclude two possible motives: 1) Subterfuge to get people feeling "safe" with a method that can be broken; or 2) Demonization of strong crypto in the media as a prelude to criminalizing its use (or at least the refusal to hand over keys, as in the UK).
Quite a bit of it has to do with YC and the tech community buzz and implicit validation. The founder of HipMunk mentioned that CNN contacted him out of the blue within a day after they launched.
If it was the same product done outside YC I don't think they would have got CNN coverage, at least not this soon.
Aye, YC is probably one of the strongest startup-related brands these days. It's shocking to see how well people respond to my relationship to YC these days. Back when Steve & I started reddit, we had to explain to nearly everyone just what "Y Combinator" was all about. The association really is validating in a lot of ways -- but every day it becomes even more important to keep up the brand's value.
(Full-disclosure: I'm a new employee at YC - Ambassador to the East)
An address as entered from left-to-right goes from the very specific to the general. Therefore all the api calls and screen updating you make are completely irrelevant until I type in my city half -way through.
google maps on my android phone does this type of instant-search recommendation and i always thought it was stupid, too. i just typed in "1218" on it and it's trying to recommend me "1218 grand-saconnex, switzerland" (i live in the united states).
if it's going to do search recommendations, it should at least do a regional geo-ip/gps lookup and offer suggestions i'd probably be driving to.
That is possible, but when I was making this, I didn't want to use server-side technologies (php) because I wanted it to stay fast, which would have been necessary to determine your approximate location and get the GeoID prior to page generation.
It is easily possible, however, it just would have been soooo slow in comparison.
Then don't use php... It's possible to grab user location via javascript, the client just needs a compatible browser. I'd say judging by the people who would stumble upon your project more than half would have a browser capable of grabbing location via javascript.
I only typed in my house number and 2/3 of my road and got the QUERY_LIMIT, but the result was correct with no City or State. I do live on a road with a very unique name though.
Looks like the deck is already stacked. Are there any companies or elected officials with significant political/financial capital aggressively campaigning for this? This movement needs a champion to make this topic relevant to bureacrats and I don't know if Stallman's the guy.