AretNCarlsen

Or even on the first page. (I notice because I always get to HN this way. Today is the first time I have ever seen it below #1 or #2.)

Just like I do when I want a sandwich.

This particular situation is more nuanced than the usual profit-from-the-poor story. Every bank and credit union receives these fees, and in the case of not-for-profit credit unions, the interchange fees truly support[ed] "free checking" accounts. Whereas merchants can lower their prices to pass the money back to the consumers (but won't), banks, conversely, have nowhere to recoup their losses except to charge the debit card users. I would rather see an honest fee like this than watch as overdraft penalties are raised to cover the lost revenue.

In the vein of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", no teacher ever got fired for storing all of their students' data locally, whether on a personal PC or a physical gradebook. I have worked with businesses that do not want to store data in the cloud (Amazon, Salesforce, etc) if the data is at all confidential. They have a point: the risks of local data storage are serious but intuitive, whereas the average person has only your word regarding the safety of the cloud. And teachers, like doctors and bankers, have auditors that they would have to persuade to accept the new technology.

I would not be surprised if the post mortem reveals that some teachers brought this app up with their administrators, who responded, "That app would be handy for you, but if there is theft or corruption of your students' data, how would we defend ourselves in the ensuing lawsuits? 'The developer seemed reliable?'"

I'll bet that you're thinking that this will have to wait a decade or two, until every car on the road has a new generation of computers installed. Look up a Mercedes product called Distronics Plus and a company called Autoliv. These guys are already mounting stereo cameras and long-wavelength IR (heat) cameras on production luxury cars to detect turn signals, pedestrians, and license plates of other cars. When 50% of cars have radars linked to their cruise control, it's a matter of iteration to let them share data, then to characterize the remaining vehicles on the road based on the aggregate observational data.

Your '95 Civic may not be announcing its velocity, but when the car behind you and the car in front of you have both read your license plate and agree on your speed, you may as well be.

What's to stop someone from spoofing your bank site while you're on the free wifi at Starbucks? I can imagine an aftermarket module designed to do just that, so free wifi is clearly not viable.

In practice, they'll implement encryption and authentication, then make it a federal crime to mess with it.

Yes, and "if Captain Sully had been flying an Airbus he would have crashed because they don't allow manual control". The objective is to reduce the total number of crashes, even if that means that you feel like you have less control of when you do crash.

I am extremely surprised that cloud servers did not play a bigger part here. This Is What They're Perfect For: renting the equivalent of enormous datacenters for a brief period without much notice or prior/post capital investment. Password/hash cracking has always struck me as the archetypal use of Amazon/Rackspace/Linode/etc.

To beat the old drum: Email isn't intended to be secure anyway. Relying on email addresses to maintain privacy and authenticity is like relying on Caller ID to verify callers' identities. (See spoofcard.com.)

Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt. Or, encrypt.

> "He's not a scientist"

Ironically, the OP didn't say anything nearly so insulting.

"[I]f you have people imagine the water going into an underground aquifer, for example, and then sitting there for 10 years, the water becomes much more palatable to the public. It budges even those most unwilling to drink the water. ... 'When you do introduce a river or even groundwater ... you run the risk of deteriorating the water that's been treated. You can make the water quality worse.'"

I am singularly amused at the possibility of contaminating treated post-sewage water with river water, resulting in a medically less safe but socially more acceptable water supply. The results of a public vote (as to whether to mix river water with the treated water) would at least tell us who needs to be mailed a printed copy of lesswrong.com.