That your rebuttal is purely ad hominem in the truest sense of the word just shows how big of a useful idiot you are.
That you seem to think it's ad-hominem is telling.
Mother Jones is about as far from an unbiased source as you could have found anywhere. That's not ad-homimem; it bears directly on the quality of your argument.
The "official" argument was that 1979 was about when the satellite record started. But now they're largely just leaving the satellite data out, because it doesn't support their models... which means their excuse for starting in 1979 is also out the window.
You deniers have got to stop using that one.
By now, we've all figured out that any mention of 1998 is just cherry-picking at its worst.
All you do is identify yourself as a zero-knowledge shill that should be ignored.
Amazing. You reply as Anonymous Coward, to someone who was making the case for repeatable peer-reviewed science, with an accusation that using 1998 is cherry picking, and cite Mother Jones??? Are you for real?
I've got news for you: your precious warmism sources consistently start THEIR charts in 1979, and if that isn't cherry-picking, nothing is.
The pot calling the kettle black. Actually, it doesn't even deserve that.
We have agreed on many issues and also disagreed on many.
Most people that have an opinion feel the opposite.
I'm not sure that's true. Being from an area where judges are elected, and where government officials have been notoriously corrupt when it comes to appointments, I would have to take the "elected" side.
Of course, all of the "nullification" laws get thrown out by the courts, but it gives the state legislatures a chance to grandstand for their dumber voters.
You are obviously completely ignorant of the history of your own country. No, they seldom if ever get thrown out. Because in most cases they are perfectly legal.
Do you see state medical marijuana laws being thrown out, even though they are directly contrary to Federal law? No, you don't. Why not? Because the Federal law is unconstitutional and the States and Feds both know it.
In response, the Feds are finally caving in to State pressure, and backing off. Two bills have been introduced in Congress to repeal Federal marijuana laws.
Nullification has a long and SUCCESSFUL history in the United States.
If you didn't notice any of the hundreds of good effects of ACA, perhaps silence is best.
It's not a matter of not noticing. It's a matter of balancing the good effects against the bad. Too many people see ONLY the good intent, and wear blinders when it comes to the bad effects or unintended consequences. ACA has had some enormous bad effects, and the potential for others is even more enormous.
Not to mention the government already illegally ignoring its own HIPAA laws, and in fact violating the actual ACA itself. I could go on for a long time.
Apple's not a party to the agreement though, are they? This isn't a criminal matter, so it's not like they can be co-conspirators in causing damages to the claimants.
IANAL, so I'm probably not the one to ask about this. I could speculate that maybe the state is attempting to get Apple for conspiracy to violate its contract laws or something. I really don't know.
Please read further up. It was the same researcher who read (and later cloned) passport RFID chips in San Francisco from 30 feet away in his car. His name is Christopher Paget. You can Google it.
NFC payment credentials were snarfed from cell phones with NFC turned on, and no transaction was necessary.
But you'd have to be at least an amateur mechanic to do that, just as you have to have a rooted and unlocked Android phone, and actually a bit of experience, to do the other.
Saying NFC has been "cracked" is like saying that ethernet has been "cracked". It doesn't make any sense. NFC is just a transport layer, it doesn't have any encryption or security at all. You have to build that in at the application level that uses NFC to transfer its data.
You're being too literal. We all know what we're discussing here, and that's the use of NFC for making electronic payments. Agreed, it was the NFC payment system that was cracked, but I felt that pretty much went without saying.
NFC payment cards are secure.
NFC payment cards can only be counted on to be secure ONCE. You're talking to somebody who knows a little bit about security here. Any transactions that take place via RF can be intercepted. And they can be intercepted from essentially any distance; the only limitation is the hardware available.
Obviously, it is the nature of the data exchange which must be secure, but I repeat: so far they haven't been. As I stated way back up the comment chain, Apple may have solved that particular problem. What I have been saying is that if so, they're the first.
But overall, the government hasn't done (and realistically, can't do) a damned thing to substantially interfere with the core functionality of BitCoin.
I didn't say they could or did. I wrote they "meddled". And they did.
They've tried to regulate it, they've helped to try to commoditize it and make it available on Wall Street, they've developed methods to track the chain of exchange, etc.
While they may not be able to do too much, they HAVE already meddled. And they were assisted in meddling by the development of exchanges, which weren't really part of the whole intended Bitcoin ecosphere. They probably should have been foreseen, but they weren't part of the originally intended use of Bitcoin.
For example, one of the fundamental ideas behind bitcoin (and one of its touted advantages) was that exchanging them would essentially be free, with bitcoin mining operations taking up the burden of most of the number crunching cost. But exchanges subverted this idea, and started charging for exchange.
That's getting a bit away from government, but the point is: that's the way government wants it to work. Not the designer(s) of bitcoin.
It would simply shift the balance of services provided from a bloated federal government back to the state & local level, where they belong and people have more opportunity to provide input.
Correction: It IS shifting services back to state and local level. The number of State bills to nullify overreaching Federal laws just so far this year is amazing. Many of them passed. And it's only just now really getting started.
Check out TenthAmendmentCenter.com's bill tracking pages if you haven't already.
While I don't disagree with much of what you say, the iCar would still need to be fueled by stations that are licensed by Apple.
Having said that: while the other cars break down and the manufacturers say "too bad, just get a new one", the iCar will just keep chugging away at its less-then-Formula-I pace, and may even get an upgrade.
First people complain about not poaching
Now they complain when they do poach.
That's completely out of context. They're two completely different matters, and one is a matter of (largely) Federal law, the other of State law.
Anti-poaching agreements like the one Apple had with other Silicon Valley companies, and other anti-poaching agreements between companies violate Federal antitrust laws, because they are essentially commercial agreements to not compete. Some States have laws similar to the Federal laws in that regard.
Non-disclosure and non-compete agreements between company and employee are a completely different matter. This is a matter of contract and the laws vary from state to state. In a state with laws that allow them, taking a job somewhere else and spreading the "trade secrets" you learned at your other job is a pretty serious violation.
California and some other states do not allow non-compete agreements between employee and employer at all. They pay the employees enough to stay, or tough luck. They may allow non-disclosure agreements, though, which again is a different thing.
There is actually a slim chance that there would be competition between payment systems besides just how many "cashbonus buckbacks" a particular provider can confuse you into thinking are valuable.
The potential down side is far bigger than any potential benefit. One of the whole reasons for the existence of Bitcoin was that transactions were supposed to be hard to track, just like cash. That didn't prove out to be true but it was the idea.
If currency ever becomes all-electronic, and/or under the thumb of government, you can kiss any freedom you once had goodbye. It's such a very bad idea I don't know where to begin.
On the play store, every google app (and several others) require the ability to record audio and video without your consent
No, they don't. They require your explicit consent before installing. Don't you read the damn warnings?
and unlike iOS, you can't adjust the privacy app by app, permission by permission. We all know iOS isn't perfect, but they are way ahead of Google on privacy.
Well, sort of. I wouldn't say that iOS was "ahead of Google on privacy". Rather, Google is way ahead of iOS on intrusion. Don't for a minute think the inability to set these permissions was accidental.
Granted, iOS is better than Google products for privacy. On the other hand, a lot of the "control" over privacy in Apple products is directly in the hands of Apple, and there is no guarantee Apple will stay friendly.
Apple can get away with securing NFC payments because there is a processor on both ends. The reason you can't secure an NFC card, is that you can't generate enough power using an antenna to power up a chip which can do crypto.
NO.
NFC was first cracked on cell phones. In fact it was cracked on some of the first cell phones to include it. It wasn't even common yet. Which made me wonder why the other manufacturers went ahead with it. It was already broken.
Researchers were able to snarf NFC credentials from cell phones from several feet away, using concealed body-worn equipment that only cost a few hundred $. And it only required that NFC was turned on; no transaction was required.
I have not turned the NFC on my cell phone on even once, and don't plan to.
In case you want to look it up, the researcher's name was Christopher something. He's the same guy who read RFIDs from passports from his car, 30 feet away. And later used the data to clone them.
Even if we could fix the patent system to stop allowing for bad patents to be created someone would have to go through and challenge all the existing shitty ones.
That's really beside the point, as they would have to do that no matter what else you did.
What we really need to do is sit down and talk about whether we merely need to stop abuses of the patent system, or need to scrap it altogether and in the meantime do what we can to stop the most egregous abuses of the system.
I disagree. Historically, our patent system worked very well. The vast majority of patent abuse and trolling has been relatively recent, and in fact was nowhere near this level 20 years ago. The problems have gone hand-in-hand with the recent crony capitalism and government revolving doors. That is, I suspect they share the same root causes.
When something works pretty much fine for 200 years, then doesn't work good for 20 years, it isn't very helpful to ask what's wrong with the system that worked RIGHT for all that time. Rather, the thing to do is ask what went WRONG in recent years.
Hint: it wasn't "the system". The system is pretty much the same as it has always been.
You clearly seem to be in one of the camps but your post has contained no substance whatsoever other than conveying unsupported second hand sentiment (again with no specifics) and no direct experience.
Your ASSUMPTIONS are unwarranted. I held off on taking the plunge into Node.js because I was already busy elsewhere, and suspected it was a fad. But I know people who have. I have simply reported what they have said to me. I was willing to adopt it, if it proved out.
You can doubt that however much you like, but you have absolutely zero evidence on which to base your comment. Except, apparently, your own twist on what you think I implied. I stated myself, quite clearly, that I did not have personal experience with it and was only reporting what I'd heard from others.
And based on the same lack of evidence, I could just as easily suspect that you're a shill for Node.js who is trying to downplay perceived criticism.
Even if C&P isn't secure. That's what I was afraid of.
You missed part of what GP implied here. It ISN'T secure, and yes the banks HAVE hushed it up. When that didn't work very well, they tried shifting the responsibility.
They do have known vulnerabilities which have been exploited by fraudsters for years. It might be a while before U.S. fraudsters catch on to the new tricks, but you can count on that being a short time indeed. All they have to do is buy the information if they don't want to figure it out themselves.
I've already got two, both of which I acquired this week after switching from a card that yielded a lower cash back reward percentage. Neither have a contactless component (which I assume means some kind of RFID/NFC chip.)
What that guy said: it's not contactless. It has contacts which look kind of like those on the back of a SIM card.
Further, you DON'T WANT it to operate by NFC, or anything RF for that matter. RFID, NFC, and other RF technologies have all been broken for some years now. I can't imagine what Apple is thinking, with its Apple Pay, but maybe they think they've gotten around the security holes in NFC. Remains to be seen.
That being said, chip-and-pin also has known vulnerabilities, and isn't that damn much more secure than magnetic stripes. They've been compromised in UK for years, and though the banks have tried to play hushup about that, it's well known among those who pay attention to security news.
Slashdot Mirror
That your rebuttal is purely ad hominem in the truest sense of the word just shows how big of a useful idiot you are.
That you seem to think it's ad-hominem is telling.
Mother Jones is about as far from an unbiased source as you could have found anywhere. That's not ad-homimem; it bears directly on the quality of your argument.
That many official published charts of "warming" temperature started in 1979 is an objective fact.
The "official" argument was that 1979 was about when the satellite record started. But now they're largely just leaving the satellite data out, because it doesn't support their models... which means their excuse for starting in 1979 is also out the window.
None of that had ANYTHING to do with ad-hominem.
I repeat: the pot calling the kettle black.
You deniers have got to stop using that one. By now, we've all figured out that any mention of 1998 is just cherry-picking at its worst. All you do is identify yourself as a zero-knowledge shill that should be ignored.
Amazing. You reply as Anonymous Coward, to someone who was making the case for repeatable peer-reviewed science, with an accusation that using 1998 is cherry picking, and cite Mother Jones??? Are you for real?
I've got news for you: your precious warmism sources consistently start THEIR charts in 1979, and if that isn't cherry-picking, nothing is.
The pot calling the kettle black. Actually, it doesn't even deserve that.
Most people that have an opinion feel the opposite.
I'm not sure that's true. Being from an area where judges are elected, and where government officials have been notoriously corrupt when it comes to appointments, I would have to take the "elected" side.
But I admit that's just my own anecdote.
Of course, all of the "nullification" laws get thrown out by the courts, but it gives the state legislatures a chance to grandstand for their dumber voters.
You are obviously completely ignorant of the history of your own country. No, they seldom if ever get thrown out. Because in most cases they are perfectly legal.
Do you see state medical marijuana laws being thrown out, even though they are directly contrary to Federal law? No, you don't. Why not? Because the Federal law is unconstitutional and the States and Feds both know it.
In response, the Feds are finally caving in to State pressure, and backing off. Two bills have been introduced in Congress to repeal Federal marijuana laws.
Nullification has a long and SUCCESSFUL history in the United States.
If you didn't notice any of the hundreds of good effects of ACA, perhaps silence is best.
It's not a matter of not noticing. It's a matter of balancing the good effects against the bad. Too many people see ONLY the good intent, and wear blinders when it comes to the bad effects or unintended consequences. ACA has had some enormous bad effects, and the potential for others is even more enormous.
Not to mention the government already illegally ignoring its own HIPAA laws, and in fact violating the actual ACA itself. I could go on for a long time.
Apple's not a party to the agreement though, are they? This isn't a criminal matter, so it's not like they can be co-conspirators in causing damages to the claimants.
IANAL, so I'm probably not the one to ask about this. I could speculate that maybe the state is attempting to get Apple for conspiracy to violate its contract laws or something. I really don't know.
Please read further up. It was the same researcher who read (and later cloned) passport RFID chips in San Francisco from 30 feet away in his car. His name is Christopher Paget. You can Google it.
NFC payment credentials were snarfed from cell phones with NFC turned on, and no transaction was necessary.
Federal judges are usually appointed for life.
No, that's a common misconception. According to the Constitution, Federal judges "... shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour..."
There's absolutely nothing in there about the appointments being for life.
But you'd have to be at least an amateur mechanic to do that, just as you have to have a rooted and unlocked Android phone, and actually a bit of experience, to do the other.
Saying NFC has been "cracked" is like saying that ethernet has been "cracked". It doesn't make any sense. NFC is just a transport layer, it doesn't have any encryption or security at all. You have to build that in at the application level that uses NFC to transfer its data.
You're being too literal. We all know what we're discussing here, and that's the use of NFC for making electronic payments. Agreed, it was the NFC payment system that was cracked, but I felt that pretty much went without saying.
NFC payment cards are secure.
NFC payment cards can only be counted on to be secure ONCE. You're talking to somebody who knows a little bit about security here. Any transactions that take place via RF can be intercepted. And they can be intercepted from essentially any distance; the only limitation is the hardware available.
Obviously, it is the nature of the data exchange which must be secure, but I repeat: so far they haven't been. As I stated way back up the comment chain, Apple may have solved that particular problem. What I have been saying is that if so, they're the first.
But overall, the government hasn't done (and realistically, can't do) a damned thing to substantially interfere with the core functionality of BitCoin.
I didn't say they could or did. I wrote they "meddled". And they did.
They've tried to regulate it, they've helped to try to commoditize it and make it available on Wall Street, they've developed methods to track the chain of exchange, etc.
While they may not be able to do too much, they HAVE already meddled. And they were assisted in meddling by the development of exchanges, which weren't really part of the whole intended Bitcoin ecosphere. They probably should have been foreseen, but they weren't part of the originally intended use of Bitcoin.
For example, one of the fundamental ideas behind bitcoin (and one of its touted advantages) was that exchanging them would essentially be free, with bitcoin mining operations taking up the burden of most of the number crunching cost. But exchanges subverted this idea, and started charging for exchange.
That's getting a bit away from government, but the point is: that's the way government wants it to work. Not the designer(s) of bitcoin.
It would simply shift the balance of services provided from a bloated federal government back to the state & local level, where they belong and people have more opportunity to provide input.
Correction: It IS shifting services back to state and local level. The number of State bills to nullify overreaching Federal laws just so far this year is amazing. Many of them passed. And it's only just now really getting started.
Check out TenthAmendmentCenter.com's bill tracking pages if you haven't already.
I'm tired of all this bad news about Obamacare. Could we maybe just all agree not to talk about it any more until there is some good news to report?
I, for one, do not want to take a lifetime vow of silence.
I figure a Fan Boy Response will be such....
While I don't disagree with much of what you say, the iCar would still need to be fueled by stations that are licensed by Apple.
Having said that: while the other cars break down and the manufacturers say "too bad, just get a new one", the iCar will just keep chugging away at its less-then-Formula-I pace, and may even get an upgrade.
First people complain about not poaching
Now they complain when they do poach.
That's completely out of context. They're two completely different matters, and one is a matter of (largely) Federal law, the other of State law.
Anti-poaching agreements like the one Apple had with other Silicon Valley companies, and other anti-poaching agreements between companies violate Federal antitrust laws, because they are essentially commercial agreements to not compete. Some States have laws similar to the Federal laws in that regard.
Non-disclosure and non-compete agreements between company and employee are a completely different matter. This is a matter of contract and the laws vary from state to state. In a state with laws that allow them, taking a job somewhere else and spreading the "trade secrets" you learned at your other job is a pretty serious violation.
California and some other states do not allow non-compete agreements between employee and employer at all. They pay the employees enough to stay, or tough luck. They may allow non-disclosure agreements, though, which again is a different thing.
Even if it's not a trap NOW, it could be made one at any time.
The flaw in their venture is the basic lack of understanding of the principle tenet of Bitcoin: it was supposed to be outside government meddling.
There. FTFY. The government has already meddled.
There is actually a slim chance that there would be competition between payment systems besides just how many "cashbonus buckbacks" a particular provider can confuse you into thinking are valuable.
The potential down side is far bigger than any potential benefit. One of the whole reasons for the existence of Bitcoin was that transactions were supposed to be hard to track, just like cash. That didn't prove out to be true but it was the idea.
If currency ever becomes all-electronic, and/or under the thumb of government, you can kiss any freedom you once had goodbye. It's such a very bad idea I don't know where to begin.
On the play store, every google app (and several others) require the ability to record audio and video without your consent
No, they don't. They require your explicit consent before installing. Don't you read the damn warnings?
and unlike iOS, you can't adjust the privacy app by app, permission by permission. We all know iOS isn't perfect, but they are way ahead of Google on privacy.
Well, sort of. I wouldn't say that iOS was "ahead of Google on privacy". Rather, Google is way ahead of iOS on intrusion. Don't for a minute think the inability to set these permissions was accidental.
Granted, iOS is better than Google products for privacy. On the other hand, a lot of the "control" over privacy in Apple products is directly in the hands of Apple, and there is no guarantee Apple will stay friendly.
Apple can get away with securing NFC payments because there is a processor on both ends. The reason you can't secure an NFC card, is that you can't generate enough power using an antenna to power up a chip which can do crypto.
NO.
NFC was first cracked on cell phones. In fact it was cracked on some of the first cell phones to include it. It wasn't even common yet. Which made me wonder why the other manufacturers went ahead with it. It was already broken.
Researchers were able to snarf NFC credentials from cell phones from several feet away, using concealed body-worn equipment that only cost a few hundred $. And it only required that NFC was turned on; no transaction was required.
I have not turned the NFC on my cell phone on even once, and don't plan to.
In case you want to look it up, the researcher's name was Christopher something. He's the same guy who read RFIDs from passports from his car, 30 feet away. And later used the data to clone them.
Even if we could fix the patent system to stop allowing for bad patents to be created someone would have to go through and challenge all the existing shitty ones.
That's really beside the point, as they would have to do that no matter what else you did.
What we really need to do is sit down and talk about whether we merely need to stop abuses of the patent system, or need to scrap it altogether and in the meantime do what we can to stop the most egregous abuses of the system.
I disagree. Historically, our patent system worked very well. The vast majority of patent abuse and trolling has been relatively recent, and in fact was nowhere near this level 20 years ago. The problems have gone hand-in-hand with the recent crony capitalism and government revolving doors. That is, I suspect they share the same root causes.
When something works pretty much fine for 200 years, then doesn't work good for 20 years, it isn't very helpful to ask what's wrong with the system that worked RIGHT for all that time. Rather, the thing to do is ask what went WRONG in recent years.
Hint: it wasn't "the system". The system is pretty much the same as it has always been.
You clearly seem to be in one of the camps but your post has contained no substance whatsoever other than conveying unsupported second hand sentiment (again with no specifics) and no direct experience.
Your ASSUMPTIONS are unwarranted. I held off on taking the plunge into Node.js because I was already busy elsewhere, and suspected it was a fad. But I know people who have. I have simply reported what they have said to me. I was willing to adopt it, if it proved out.
You can doubt that however much you like, but you have absolutely zero evidence on which to base your comment. Except, apparently, your own twist on what you think I implied. I stated myself, quite clearly, that I did not have personal experience with it and was only reporting what I'd heard from others.
And based on the same lack of evidence, I could just as easily suspect that you're a shill for Node.js who is trying to downplay perceived criticism.
Even if C&P isn't secure. That's what I was afraid of.
You missed part of what GP implied here. It ISN'T secure, and yes the banks HAVE hushed it up. When that didn't work very well, they tried shifting the responsibility.
They do have known vulnerabilities which have been exploited by fraudsters for years. It might be a while before U.S. fraudsters catch on to the new tricks, but you can count on that being a short time indeed. All they have to do is buy the information if they don't want to figure it out themselves.
I've already got two, both of which I acquired this week after switching from a card that yielded a lower cash back reward percentage. Neither have a contactless component (which I assume means some kind of RFID/NFC chip.)
What that guy said: it's not contactless. It has contacts which look kind of like those on the back of a SIM card.
Further, you DON'T WANT it to operate by NFC, or anything RF for that matter. RFID, NFC, and other RF technologies have all been broken for some years now. I can't imagine what Apple is thinking, with its Apple Pay, but maybe they think they've gotten around the security holes in NFC. Remains to be seen.
That being said, chip-and-pin also has known vulnerabilities, and isn't that damn much more secure than magnetic stripes. They've been compromised in UK for years, and though the banks have tried to play hushup about that, it's well known among those who pay attention to security news.