Re: 1966 and all that
The Royal Navy's job is to defend the MoD
The MoD's job is to defend BAe
21278 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
Couldn't we supply electricity directly to the cars and avoid the deficiencies of battery technology?
A slot down the middle of each lane could be lined with metal strips and have a small metal brush on the front of a car. The cars could be made autonomous by a series of small boys alongside the road with triggers.
It's more like saying that someone on the street asked you to take a parcel and leave it in the CEOs office
Except with email we expect each employee to accept random packages from strangers at their desks all day to do their job.
If you were on an assembly line for a car and all the parts arrived by different courier dozens of times a day directly to you by-passing security. And it is your responsibility to check that piston rods were ok if sent by "safe-courier" while "safe-courrier" are crooks and then to check that the person in fedex uniform isn't a North Korean spy.
I see - so instead of the computer thinking "why is a pdf attachment to an email fetching an exe from the internet and then rewriting all the user's files.
It's safer for the user to think. Mmm Jones does work in accounts and has sent me an email asking me to check this invoice but perhaps I will call him first on a secure phone line (after checking it really is him by asking him what we did at the office party I will then consider reading the email.
Unless of course that's what he want's me to do - in which case I must drink from the goblet in front of me, but he already knows that so .... (sorry might have gone off-track)
Seriously - why should it ever be a user's job to protect the company from this?
It's like saying we delivered some coffee in the break room - some of it contains anthrax, users should exercise caution.
If your system allows harmful attachments in or allows damage when they are opened - it isn't the users fault. Especially if you constantly email company documents that demand permission to run macros when they are opened.
The same applies to US and UK companies except with the extra bit about the law being secret.
The question you have to ask yourself is, who do you need protecting against - the USA/UK government or the FSB?
If you are anti-governmental organisation eg. Greenpeace, black-lives-matter, Boris's election campaign, etc then use the one owned by the FSB. If you are a Russian target eg. Boeing/Lockheed - use the one owned by the NSA. If you are BAe you are out of luck
You are right, without competition they would make massive really really fat profits.
So far neither ULA nor Arianespace have managed to make much in the way of profits.
With no competition you can ask for big government subsidies, so prices stay high, so there is no demand, so you need to ask for big government subsidies ....
If you drop the price of getting to orbit by a factor of 10 the increased market means you make more money than a handful of government contracts for your monopoly service - even with competitors.
Sometimes stupidity helps.
We went from a simple "drop paper ticket into box by driver" to a super-cyber electronic transit system.
It would save $3M/year on fare dodging and be outsourced to a private company, and only ended up costing $50M more to install than they claimed and about $20M/year more to operate.
It also required a GPS signal and data link when you tapped in or out at the start/end of the journey. - to work out the fare. Which in the underground bus station only took a minute or so - for each passenger on a 100seat bendy bus.
The solution was to make the entire system a single zone, priced at the old rate for the shortest journey. The rationale = the loss in revenue was less than the cost of operating the new system, - so a saving !
Because there are lots of jurisdictions that would tell a US warrant to go fsck itself especially if it meant they became a global cloud data center - center.
Or I could have the data hop around different foreign sites every night, or I could split archived data across different countries to make it almost impossible to work out what warrants where needed
No Microsoft deliberately made their Eu subsidiaries separate to meet Eu law.
This is data held by Google for a US customer but it happens to be sitting on a foreign server.
Much as I hate to side with the DOJ in this case (unlike MSFT) they have a point.
If a US company eg. Enron / Bernie Madoff / Lehman Bros was allowed to work only with cloud data held remotely then they could tell any US agency with a US warrant or a freedom of information to get lost.
Any large US company would be totally above the law.