MikeNomad's comments

Seriosly, some of that was pretty funny...

At a superficial level, I think I would notice extra chips/wiring/HD showing up on a naked Mo-board.

Going further, as you wish to approach this in pseudo-apsolutist terms, GOV would simply choke on any effort to go _that_ far. Be it the Hardware Effort or the Software/Data Collection and Processing Effort (times many many millions), they would gag on The Spew. Yes, no encryption protects data for ever, blah blah. Good Encryption and other impediments just makes persuit/enforcement not worth the effort [insert THX-1138 reference and every real-world example of governments failing to absolutely control their populace here].

And since I am willing to talk in Absolute Terms, GOV is lousy at math. They may know something about Social Psychology, Propaganda, et al, but the Citizenry has both the guns and the numbers.

And I thought I am cynical enough to no longer be surprised by GOV's process to circumvent the Constitution and make nineteen eighty-four the reality. I was wrong.

As a long-time IT Guy who has grown tired and disgusted with GOV's fascist, class-war behavior, with this court decision I say to them:

Bring. It. The. FSCK. On.

While maintaining an air-gapped rig is a PITA, I can do that.

While conducting my Connected Life via a live image, removable-media-based system is a PITA, I can do that as well.

While good encryption slathered on everything is annoying, it is doable.

BTW, GOV... As long as you are connected to a network, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy;

Expect your thoughts and beliefs laid bare; your plans to be known by others sooner, rather than later; your secrets to be learned by all;

You want to see what Cyber Warfare _truly_ looks like?

You can't handle the truth.

And from my perspective, they don't care. While part of the EU, GB has yet to move off the GBP for the Euro.

Also, it looks like Brexit will kill the LSE-DB merger. With LSE slated to be the lesser partner, I doubt the move would have been in GB's best interest.

Ugh. Should read, "One semester I told my students at the beginning of the semester..." Sorry.

When I first started teaching (university level), trying to come up with what I thought would be acurate grades would keep me awake most nights.

Asking fellow faculty revealed that they too had wrestled with the same problem, they developed a "feel" for what was right, and that they had simply accepted it as a pain point.

I refused to accept that. One semester I told them at the beginning of the semester that they were competing against their classmates. I was not setting upper and lower bounds for grades, their classmates were.

I used the full range of grades (A+ to F), and when I tabbed the grade distribution, the results freaked me out: It was an almost perfect bell curve. I decided to use the method again the following semester. Same results. I did it again the following semester. Same results again. I then permanently adopted the method.

Other results included the, "Why didn't I get an "A" on Project/Paper X" drama during office hours dropping off to nothing;

Student's were much more comfortable knowing they were competing against their classmates, rather than trying to "figure out" their professor;

My Teacher Evaluation scores didn't change across my changing grading methods;

My stress level went _way_ down, and allowed me to better concentrate on creating and delivering content.

Exactly. And when FeeBees "ask" it is, ultimately, at the point of a gun.

Yes, but it would violate HN policy/use guidelines...

Good Grief. For a lot less than an F-35 program, they could install a TSM rig, with off sight backup.

Ours (at a state university) deals with petabytes of data. We've had to escalate to IBM's Tier 3 support a couple of times over the past decade, but we have never lost a file.

Shouldn't the year the article was written (2014) be included in the title?

That is exactly what I had in mind re: my original comment. Seeing from other comments there would be an earnings threshold. That, to me, is not "unconditional."

I'm probably running afoul of language/translation shear...

Not happy with the headline. They voted no for an "unconditional" basic income. I think that is a huge difference, especially when a majority of the voters also want immigration reform.

Looks like something of an update to Stephenson's Mother Earth, Mother Board (and way overdue). Hoping the arstechnica article is as good.

Cash is not going away anytime soon for at least a couple of reasons: Trust (Account Overloards say I have 100 USD in my account when I actually have 1,000), and cash is a very handy debt instrument for the issuer.

(and)

FDR did not take the US off the gold standard, he outlawed private ownership of gold. Nixon took the US off the gold standard in the early 70s.

If you want to watch the sausage being made in real-time, there are a couple of channels of C-SPAN.

In other words, Bob is not a Prophet. Bob is the Profit Margin.

Cheers to the Newlyweds. May their pasta bowl never be empty.

Corpratists.

Sigh. No, I did not suggest that all other initiatives should be put on hold. The pivot, fulcrum, etc. for my comment was the use of the word "audacious" in the article title. Since the use of brevity has... muddied the waters:

I don't think the deployment of yet another digital payment method that allows for the highly centralized storage of personal information, in a country that does not yet have enough toilets (yes, there is an initiative under way) or reasonable access to fresh water, qualifies as audacious.

I suppose I may have pulled up short on the Audacity Scale by copping low with sewage and water, instead of mentioning crime and air pollution.

Of course, YMMV.

Audacious plan? That would be getting their 1.2 Billion people reasonable access to fresh water and indoor plumbing.

I find this data breach staggering. With your friend's comment, clearly there is a cultural vector I am completely missing.

Also, please expand on their comment re: the event helping a particular candidate. I don't understand how this incident favors / helps a particular candidate over another.

Simplify filing? How about going back to not taxing wages, and for those that would still have to file, simply input the info directly on the IRS website?