I was one of the leading team members at System Development Corporation (SDC) in the 1970's on various secure operating system and secure networking projects for various US and UK governmental bodies.

Some of that work was classified, much was not.

In late 1974 David Kaufman and I were working on network security, particularly on the then monolithic TCP (there was at that time no formalized underlying datagram IP layer.) Among other things we were designing and building a multi-level secure nework, with multi-level verifiied secure switches/routers, for a goverment agency.

In our work we split an encrypted datagram layer off from the underside of TCP. Because of nature of packet ordering, packet loss, retransmissions, as well as aspects of various security algorithms this was not as straightforward as one might think.

What we came up with was a precursor to what are today encrypted VLANS, IPSEC, and key distribution infrastructures.

However, we were not able to publish our work widely. In fact now, 40 years later, there is scarcely anything visible on the public web. Even our work that was published via the then National Bureal of Standards (now NIST) is not easily found. (I have been searching for years for a copy of some work I did on debugging hooks for secure operating systems.)

We also worked on things like capability based computers and operating systems with formal verfication of security properties. During that time I designed and wrote what is aguably the first formally verified secure operating system.) That work, also, tends to remain hard to find.

Vint Cerf was a consultant to our group. He helped. But the major thrust and principle design work was done by our team at SDC.

The US Dept of Defense (which includes several agencies) funded much of this work - and really helped move things along - but their institutional resistence to wide publication meant that many of the ideas and implementations we did in the mid 1970's were invisible to most of the world until they were re-invented decades later.

I actually did something like this with my local AAA office. It worked, in a way.

My home phone number is one digit off from that of a popular local towing company. One particular night dispatcher at AAA had a bad habit of misdialing, and no amount of reminding or "educating" or calling her boss in the morning would get her to stop. So I sent an official-looking sales letter to the office manager advertising my new 24/7 dispatch dispatch service. "Best of all, there's nothing to sign! Just call us any time at xxx-xxx-xxxx, which is actually not the towing company. We'll handle the rest and bill you later!" Etc., etc.

That's right, a dispatch dispatch service. For only $500 per call, I will take down all the information about your stranded AAA member, make and model of car, location, that sort of thing, and then call the actual towing company for you. The next time my little friend called, I logged all the information, thanked her, and passed along all the information to the towing company as promised.

A few days later, their accounts payable person called about this invoice for $500. I explained the nature of my service and said "we" were very happy that AAA chose us for their dispatch dispatch needs. They never paid the invoice, and I never heard back again from accounts payable, but I also never got called again by my little friend either.

True story.

I hope Simmons is consulting with an attorney to consider his options. It might also be worth a criminal complaint.

The most common response to "Officer, am I under arrest or am I free to go?" is some variation on "Just get out of here, asshole." If they had enough evidence to arrest you they would have by then.

Other important key phrases:

• "I do not consent to any search."
• "Am I under arrest, or am I free to go?"

Notably, Feinstein didn't swear an oath to protect us from bombs and terrorists. She swore to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution.

How the hell is this protecting the Constitution?

If you look and act like Guo, and you don't know what you're doing, you lose.

What he's saying is that if you don't look and act like him, you often don't even get the chance to try. You lose before anyone gets to see what you know.

It's not an all-or-nothing thing, but it's probably accurate that if you're a white or Asian dude of a certain age, people are willing to give you a shot that they won't necessarily give to others. That's the privilege.

Wait, so now the law is that colluding to reduce workers' wages is only illegal if there's no possible way around the collusion?

That's new information. Thanks.

I'd like to see H1B's cut back or eliminated along with easier availability of Green Cards. I don't mind competing with foreigners for jobs in the U.S., but I do mind competing with foreigners who are in a weak bargaining position that hurts all of us.

Which was probably overly generous to them. You can't seriously tell me that all of the thousands of little organizations with variations of "tea party" in their names were all compliant with their tax-exempt status. Even in the absence of a deliberate overarching strategy to break the law, people just aren't that good at following rules when they're not expecting special scrutiny.

If we can solve the problem of "how the hell do people get income to live on if nobody really needs to work?" then the problem of "what the hell will everyone do with all that free time?" should be pretty easy. I imagine there will be a lot of competitive self-improvement projects, such as trying to be the best-sculpted person at the gym; a lot of mediocre music being played because it's fun; some really outstanding home gardens; and, well, probably a lot of people spending all their time on sex and drugs.

However, one thing you can never fully mitigate is the cost of real estate. There's only so much land area on the planet, and some of it is much more valuable than other parts.

Thus, Georgism.

Bingo. The thing that everyone forgets about "the Singularity" is that who owns the magic machines really matters.

University of Chicago.

That's because they're not paying the full costs of the damage they allow through poor security practices. If they reimbursed you and me a millions of other people for our time and effort to clean up their mess, it wouldn't be cheaper than solving the problem.