If shares can only change hands every quarter, then I can't even *attempt* to liquidate until the next trading window rolls around.
I don't really have any objection to shares changing hands at any time. I just object to the idea that there needs to be any sort of 'market' except every three months. There's a difference between someone selling a used car and a car dealership.
But as I said, it is entirely likely that certain financial institutes would set up the ability to get a loan with the stock as collateral, which would let people functionally 'sell' their stock early.
The point here is that shares can fit into a spectrum of asset liquidity that can range from cash to shares, to property to term deposits, etc. In that context, I don't think daily trading needs any special justification.
It does if it expects any sort of reduced tax rate. If it's an 'investment that helps the economy', sure. But otherwise it's just winnings at a casino, and the gamblers should be expected to pay income tax on all their winnings.
And not just their 'end of year profits' either. If they lose $500 one day, and win $500 the next, that's $500 they should owe taxes on, just like how gambling winnings work. They earned $500, they should pay income taxes on $500.
Instead, we're quibbling over a fractional percent tax. Admittedly, it would be on the entire transaction, not just gains, but it's still a fuckload less than paying 30% income tax on each gain, not offset by loses.
It's downright amazing how every dime the rich and corporations lose somehow manages to count against their gains with regard to how much income tax they pay, but somehow that doesn't work for anyone else.
Someone's going to have to explain why exactly a stock market investment should be liquidatable on a daily basis, whereas, for example, investing in CD or property or comic books or whatever isn't set up that way. If the stock market is actually an investment as it is claimed to be, and not the casino it appears to be, then, like any other investment, sometimes investors can't instantly liquidate their investment.
This is normally pretty accepted. You put your money anywhere where it's not in the form of actual 'money', it could take a bit to get at it.
However, I actually don't have a problem with any sort of individual sales between the quarters. I just rather think we shouldn't operate an entire stock market for that purpose. It should be some rare thing, with some sort of penalties.
Or, hell, disallow it, and if the stock owner has an emergency, well, he can simply get a loan with it as collateral. I'm sure some banks would be willing to rate stock and take it collateral.
Yes, I'm aware this opens the loophole of banks essentially operating their own stock exchange by selling those loans...OTOH, go ahead and ask me if I think banks should be allowed to sell loans they make, or if I think disallowing that would fix another problem with our economy.;)
We allow way too much shit that is essentially 'let's move imaginary things, or things that have been totally disconnected from their actual meanings, around randomly, while their value goes up and down, and make money from poor suckers who guess wrong on that', none of which adds a single dime of actual wealth and serves no purpose at all. And because of shitty interest rates, there's no actual other investment opportunities.
Fuck that. If the financial giants want to gamble with their impossible amounts of money, they know where to find the goddamn casinos. Leave the economy out of it.
I once did the math on the 'we should use charity' more. Not for poverty in general, but the idiotic Republican 'People should go to charity for health care'. But let me quickly do it for poverty. All charitable giving in the US totals $300 billion a year.
If we were direct every dime to the poor(1), that's $6250 yearly for every poor person.
That's, uh, only twice what the average yearly utility bill is. It's between 150%-200% the average food budget for poor people.
All in all, the math works out better than the health care one (Which is just flatly impossible for charity to pay for.), but it's still not very good. Raising people's income by $6250 would probably move 20% of the people out of poverty for that year, but it's not really any sort of long-term solution.
1) And, I must point out, a lot of that already goes to the poor, so cannot really be 'directed' there. This analysis shuts down all soup kitchens and thrift stores and homeless shelters and free clinics and stuff, turning it all into cash. So all of the very poor would end up much worse off. $6250 in their pocket probably cannot pay for a roof over their head...and if it does, they'll have a nice quiet and empty house without power or food.
Except they're talking about investment tax, you fucktard. Which is aimed directly at people who already have a lot of money, not people with extra income.
People who actually are out there accomplishing things do not care about taxes on stock transactions, because they do not attempt to make money off the stock market. People who make actual investments, like Gates and Buffet, do try to make money off the stock market, and hence will be slightly hurt by this. Although they make actual long-term investments, and hence won't be hurt by the tax anywhere near as much as the people who buy stock one second and sell it half a second later.
This is one of the closest things to a wealth tax that has ever been proposed, you idiot. It's a tax on people fucking around in the stock market. (Not actually investing, fucking around.)
Uh, no. That's stupid. As the other post pointed out, that would result in people getting kicked out on the street when their parents died. He mentioned minors, which is bad enough, but I think we can agree that perhaps some college kid living at home should get to keep a house over his head if his parents die.
Or, heck, in states without automatic joint property laws, if someone bought a house, got married, and then died...now the spouse has no property.
A better idea would be something like 100% over $1,000,000, including property. Or maybe you can give $500,000 each to any immediately family member (children, spouse, siblings, parents), plus three more people.
And you're otherwise restrict to $10,000, which you can give to as many people as you want. Actually, there already is a yearly limit under which gifts are not taxed, either $5000 or $10,000, I forget. So at death we could just pretend they get 'one more year'.
Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure we need to worry about any of that. If we just restrict each individual person to getting $500,000, that would probably be enough by itself. It's not really 'How much they give away.', it's more 'How much one person gets.'. If some billionaire gives a half a million dollars to 2000 people, well, the loss of tax revenue sucks, but we've stopped the 'money never leaves the family' problem. (Barring illegal stuff like 'I'll get a hundred friends, give them each $500,000, and they'll then hand 90% of that money over to my son.')
HFT trading might help market liquidity in the second range...but no one needs that. People can wait five fucking minutes to sell their stock.
HFT sucks money out of the market, and it 'gives' the utterly pointless ability to have infinite liquidity. 'Investments' do not need to be faster to get money out of than a fucking checking acount. That's not an 'investment'.
I had to google to find out what the fuck a 'position trader' was.
Apparently, guys like Soros make money by purchasing the stock of companies, and then hoping that stock will go up over the next several years! Oh noes! This must be stamped out immediately!
Here's a hint for everyone else: When someone says 'position trader', they mean actual investors in things. They mean what normal people think the stock market is for, 'investing in a company', and they mean every single 401k. People who say 'I think this company will do better than inflation this year, so I will purchase their stock.'(1)
As opposed to the HFT or even the day traders who are attempting to make money from market manipulations and randomness. And screw up the market for actual investments.
Heaven forbid we help out 'position' traders, you know, the people actually taking and holding long-term market positions, at the expense of the 'making money from random fluctuation' traders.
A complaint about that Soros is a 'position trader' is rather akin to pointing out that people in favor of laws against mugging people are not, themselves, muggers, and are often in fact mugging victims. And the laws they're promoting would result in them having more money and muggers having less.
Uh, yeah. We sorta already knew that, but thanks.
1) A 'position' also includes the idea that the stock might go down, so this also includes people who short stock long-term. Those people sometimes get a bad rap, but in reality people are needed to go short on stock so that other people can go long. Long-term shorts are not the problem, it's crap like HFT making a millisecond shorts in advance of someone selling a bunch of stock that are the problem.
There are company earning reports that come out once a quarter. A few days after that, everyone should have the chance to bid on an investment in that company until the next quarter. All these bids should be resolved at the same time, and the people who wanted out get out, and the people who wanted in get in, for another three months. (And shortly after that, all the investors for the last quarter should get their dividend checks sent out, if there was profit.)
There is absolutely no point to operating this idiotic 'stock market' day to day and letting people own parts of corporations for seconds at a time. Or even for a day or a week. It doesn't accomplish anything.
Make it where people have to sit down and invest in corporations.
Yeah, I'm baffled by this too. I don't understand the concept of 'We're going to make Android tablets, call them ereaders, and then have people who actually want tablets to buy them and turn them into tablets.'
If you want a tablet buy an actual tablet. If you want an ereader, as in, a device you use to read on, you probably want eInk, so buy one of those. If you are willing to settle for reading on LED, and want a tablet, buy a tablet and download the frickin Android or iOS reader app that I'm sure your ebook seller offers.
I have a Nook STR, which I rooted for a better reader app (Serious, it came with perhaps the worse organizational abilities ever. You can't sort by series.) and threw Suduko and a web browser and offline wikipedia on, but I'm under no delusion it's a tablet.
There's some sort of mental branding issue going on with people thinking 'It's a super-ereader!'. Uh, no. It's an expensive and locked-down Android tablet. Ereaders are a specific subset of tablets that have eInk to help them do one thing well. And I'm not criticizing that idea, like I said, I have one!
But removing that one thing and keeping the limited functionality makes 'color ereaders' a worse deal when compared to actual tablets. It's really sort of stupid people that buy those.
P.S. The Nooks actually have microSD slots, even the eInk ones. It's just Amazon that's dumb enough to leave those off. Also, B&N doesn't seem to give a damn about rooting them, considering they'll boot off said SD card if you put a boot image on it....you don't really have to 'hack' anything.
That's what 'side-load' means. The Nook presents itself as a USB device, and you copy stuff to it. Usually using something like Calibre. Or you put it on an microSD card and stick that in. These even works for DRM stuff, like the Overdrive.com lending library system that many public libraries use.
Of course, with the Nook Color, I suspect you can download stuff directly off the internet also. (I just have the Nook STR, which does not have a web browser or anything but an ereader app until rooted.) But you probably can't download the DRM-protected library books without rooting...those need Adobe Digital Edition to download, so you'd need to root and install the Android app for that. (Once you have such a file, it works fine on the Nook...you just can't get it without Adobe software. Stupid, I know.) Or just side-load from your PC.
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, anyway. Are you asking if the Nook proxies all wifi internet connections to B&N servers? Well, no, that would be crazy. Yes, I know Amazon's doing it...that does not make it less crazy.
The old 3G Nooks, of course, when using 3G, could only reach B&N over it, they weren't going to let you use the internet connection they paid the fees on for anything but buy books. But 3G-enabled Nooks are no longer sold. (Because that entire idea was stupid. 'OMG, I have to buy a book right now. I can't wait until I find a wifi connection!' Man, in my day, I remember when we had to find bookstores to buy books.)
I've heard that theory also, and I'll buy that for respiratory allergies. I used to believe it for food, but it doesn't make much sense.
The problem is that food allergies don't really work that way. Food allergies start with an inability to digest the food. Someone who is allergic to peanuts cannot break down certain proteins in the peanuts.
Those proteins in a case of peanut allergies get tagged by the immune system and attacked to the point you can die. Whereas gluten intolerance is a minor allergic reaction. And lactose intolerance, does not get attacked at all, producing digestive problems, but generally no actual 'allergic reaction'.
I.e., food allergies are attacking 'left over' proteins that shouldn't be there anyway, but for some reason we were unable to digest. Pretty much all problems with eating any food comes from the inability to digest it, and it's only on top of that that allergic reactions happens. (There are some exceptions...for example, it's possible to be allergic to pollen so much you have an allergic reaction to certain uncooked fruits in your mouth. But generally lack of digestion is the reason.)
And it's hard to see how any sort of 'hyper-sanitized' environment could make people unable to digest specific proteins.
Now, it's entirely possible that for some reason a good portion of humanity is, and has always been, unable to digest random things, and it's just recently, due to environmental lack of other allergies, that the allergic reaction just started. But that seems kinda weird to me.
I really think it's the other way around...undigested nut proteins have always been really dangerous for us...it's just we used to pretty much always digest them correctly.
Actually, that would be pretty easy to test. Find a guy who isn't allergic, and figure out a way to block the digestion of those proteins, and see what happens. Or put the proteins in at a later point in the cycle. I wonder if anyone's ever done it.
Gluten sensitivities is hypothetically possible. It's almost never bad enough to actually kill people, so it could be something like sickle-cell disease...something that makes sense in certain circumstances, but not now. And it could have been easily not diagnosed ever...there have always been sickly people.
Same thing with dairy intolerance...that doesn't kill you either, and there are cultures that don't really drink dairy as adults, so there'd be no evolutionary reason not to have that.
So those are like the genetic predilection to breast cancer, or heart disease that kills people in their 40s...as long as it don't kill you before you reproduce, well, those genes are sucky, but we can see why evolution didn't take care of them.
The nut allergies, though, are pretty much impossible. Genes causing people, especially children, to fall over and die when exposed to nuts cannot possibly be widespread in humanity. That is completely insane. It's like being allergic to water.(1) It's clearly some sort of genetic mutation or defect or outside disease, and not actually a normal combination of genes from their ancestors.
I'm talking actual nuts, not peanuts. Peanuts just make a microscopic amount more sense, as they are 'new world' only and thus the vast majority of the planet's ancestors have only been eating them for 300 years or so. But, still, peanut allergies don't make a lot of sense either.
Or, to put it another way, there's no apparent reason why the average level of 'deathly allergic reaction to common things' could possibly increase from generation to generation. In fact, it should decrease, as people, you know, die from them before they can have kids.
As opposed to diseases that still let you reproduce, which should remain the same level, or even get 'more common' as we diagnose things better. Which is what some people think is going on with autism, and gluten allergies, and I'd agree, except that I'm also seeing it happen in things like deathly nut allergies that couldn't possibly have been 'misdiagnosed' in the past.
I'm finding it suspicious that we started pumping the world full of carcinogens, and suddenly we're find a huge increase in diseases that can be attributed to genetic defects or to developmental issues. (I'm looking at you, dioxins.) Either basic evolution decided to take a holiday, or we've managed to increase the background level of 'stuff that fucks with us'.
1) Incidentally, some people are allergic to water on their skin. That, obviously, is not very common. (And no one's allergic to drinking water.)
I have to agree with you. People (Of all ages) have a higher rate of cancer than seen before, and children have a higher rate of genetic defects.
Not just autism, but I'm convince stuff like the impossibly common nut allergy. Where the hell did that come from? That's insane. The human race used to live on nuts! And unlike autism, there's no way that could have just been 'undiagnosed'. No, super-allergies have to be some sort of very slight genetic defect.
Well, it's pretty simply to add it up. Environmental toxins cause genetic alterations in cells. Which then either causes cancer in that person, or if it hits the reproductive system, causes genetic defects in the kids.
While you are correct about genetic defects, it is entirely possible for radiation to cause genetic defects. That's essentially what cancer is, after all. (The cells are genetically defective and will not stop replicating. In fact, cancer usually requires two genetic defects, one to make it run wild, and one to cut off the self-destruct that's supposed to trigger when it does.) As a child's mind is still developing, any sort of genetic change could get replicated enough to cause damage.
However, there's no process in which radiation from watching TV could cause any sort of autism-specific genetic damage at above normal-rate while not also causing massive amounts of cancer in, essentially, everyone. I.e., I think we would have noticed if the entire human race was sitting in front of an open nuclear reactor at some point.(1)
However, you're entirely right. Autism is often diagnosed (And always could have been diagnosed, except the parents either were ignorant of how development is supposed to go, or deliberately ignoring the signs.) long before any 'video games'. To quote wikipedia 'Onset must be prior to age three'. No one is fricking spending hours playing video games before age three.
As genetic testing can identify the genetic cause of 40% of current diagnoses of autism, it seems fairly clear we should stop trying to blame 'stuff that happens to kids', and instead urge that all autistic people get genetically sequenced, so we can identify the rest of the genetic issues that can cause autism. And at some point, we can work on a cure. (Genetic defect does not mean 'can only be cured via genetic manipulation'. Perhaps they are missing a specific enzyme somewhere, which can be provided artificially.)
Also, it is entirely possible that some autism is environmental. But it's not any of the obvious stupid things that people think it is, and if it is environmental it is probably, like you say, environmental to the mother, as that's really when mental development starts. (And I have to suspect that such environmental causes are less than 5%.)
1) This is a really good way to shut down the idiots who think correlation equal causality idiots. Ask them 'If X did Y via the process you say, shouldn't that process have resulted in a lot of Z'. I.e., if vaccines cause mercury poisoning cause autism, shouldn't that mercury have caused these other problems also?
Well, yeah, obviously that's why they did it, but there are always idiots who argue about why political decisions happened, even if the record is very clear.
But regardless of what nonsensical reasons people try to attribute to the Iraqi government instead of the actual one, the fact is they did decide that, and did tell us, and we've known for years, is pretty indisputable, no matter how much stupid people have.
I'm a little concerned with all the people who don't have authorized access to family member's safety deposit boxes.
I guess there's a reason if there's jewels or something in it, but the way it works in my family is that there is one safety deposit box rented, and everyone sticks all their birth certificates and deeds and whatnot in there, and I trust my brother isn't going to steal mine. When 'your' branch of the family gets big enough, you fork off and get your own.
It's probably not a bad idea to stick an envelope in there with my Lastpass master password in there, along with instructions for what needs dealing with. (Although I really have no auctions or anything that would need immediate attention.)
A lot of people are crazy overthinking this. What the hell sort of password do you want to give out on your death, but somehow think the police will come along and subpoena? The police are not going to subpoena your frickin ebay password. If they want into ebay and have a warrant, they'll ask ebay.
It's one thing to say 'I'm encrypting my drive so the police can't poke around in customs without a good reason', it's another to try to keep them out when they have an actual warrant.
And, heck, do that if you want, I have no problem with that either. But might I suggest that you people who are apparently operating things that you don't want the police to know about don't bequest that on your unknowing family? Because, um, they might not want it.
Why so complicated? Isn't there an extradition treaty between the us and the uk as well?
Because he's a Commonwealth citizen (He's Australian.) and the UK has a pretty strong resistance against turning Commonwealth citizens over for political reasons, even to the US.
Whereas he's not a Swedish citizen, and Sweden could care less about him.
Hence this rather convoluted path of getting him to Sweden on a rather thin sex crime, and then, regardless of how that plays out, turning him over to the US.
And considering the US has kidnapped people without government permission (Just ask Germany), there's a concern that even if Sweden agrees to 'release' him onto their street, he will then mysteriously vanish five minutes later. No one needs to agree any 'formal' extradition, all it requires is the Swedes don't investigate that kidnapping too closely.
Sweden could easily fix all this by simply guaranteeing that Assange will be returned to the UK regardless. I.e, if they decide not to try him, they return him, if they do and he's innocent, they return him, if they do and he's guilty, he serves out his sentence and they return him. Very simple.
They have conspicuously failed to agree with this, despite such a thing actually being fairly common in extradition requests where there is concerns someone is being extradited to be turned over to yet another country.
Yeah, but you'll never know this in the US, where apparently Obama is pulling out of Iraq. Both the left and the right seem to think this is true (For better or for worse), and it's rather astonishing the level of ignorance the media is promoting on this issue.
Guys, we got kicked out of Iraq at the end of 2011 in 2008.(1) Under Bush. Neither he nor Obama 'decided' to leave. The deadline has been Dec 31, 2011 for years. This is not some debatable fact. Yes, Obama campaigned on getting us out, but, um, he didn't voluntarily do that.
I've had like a dozen people present their opinion to be, about how Obama 'ending the war' is right, or wrong, or how Bush deserves credit, or whatever. And each time I just want to shake them and say 'Are you a total idiot? Iraq ended the war.'.
Iraq probably did this almost certainly because they got tired of our bullshit routine of killing civilians and then lying about it, but that is a debatable opinion. But it is indisputable that they did end it, not us. They held a vote, told us to leave by 2011, we asked them to reconsider, they did not.
1) Yes, I'm aware that, technically, troops can stay, and it's only immunity that's being revoked...but without immunity, no one can actually 'fight a war' in any sense, because they can't legally kill people, or detain people, or anything, without getting hauled into Iraqi court. So Obama has four choices for the troops: a) bring them home, b) pay them to stand around doing nothing, c) have them continue what they're doing, then get locked in Iraqi prisons, d) have them continue what they're doing, then fight off the police and military sent to arrest them, aka, declare war on Iraq.
If they wished, Israelis were perfectly entitled to keep conquered territories during the Six days war. They were responding to an agression and an attempt to undermine the integrity of its territory.
Uh, not under any international law, no.
But perhaps more to the point, if they wish to extend their country to include Palestine, ha. You go right ahead and tell them to do that.
Now the question is, is Israel planning on letting their new citizens vote or own property or move freely around the rest of the country, or are they going to keep more than half their population in ghettos with no rights at all?
I find people who think they're 'pro-Israel' because 'Israel can annex Palestine' utterly hilariously uninformed. Are you unaware that's what a few Palestine leaders have been yelling for for decades, and it's Israel who has rightly noticed that such a thing would functionally turn their country over to the Palestinians who outnumber them. A democratic One-State solution would essentially destroy Israel politics and government.
Or is it your theory that, once conquered, people in that territory can be kept with no rights, forever? That there's no such thing as self-determination if an ancestor ever lost a war? That the US could go into Germany right now and start smashing things up?
And, hell, that's not even right. Palestine didn't even lose a war. They didn't exist at the time. A war was fought through that territory by its neighbors. What you're asserting is that the US has a right to territory it conquered from Germany in France.
It's frankly astonishing how every time anyone mentions Israel here, the same uninformed idiots show up. 'Israel won Palestine fair and square, herp-derp, that means they own their ass forever.'
And while the registrar would 'sign' the keys, it wouldn't be a process like currently works. No one needs to send anything in and get it emailed back. DNSSEC is supposed to be completely automatic. And the internet is implementing DNSSEC anyway, because of other security issues.
So once that's in place, you would just log into your registrar and paste in a copy of your public key into the host management area, or you'd point BIND at a copy of your public key, or whatever. That's it. The key actually used by the web server is not signed by anyone, it's just confirmed to be correct via that secured DNS record.
And, hell, letting people secure sites without CA signing would be a great way to force registrars to get off their ass and implement DNSSEC, or risk customers moving elsewhere.
And, oh, hey, fun fact. This would have taken care of the stupid one IP per SSL site problem without worrying about that non-implemented new thing. How? Easy. People running web server could just make a single SSL cert that covers *, and then put it as the key to every domain they have. In fact, I don't see why that wouldn't be the standard anyway.
Instead? A completely nonsensical system, where J. Random Company is randomly allowed to issue certs for everyone in existence.
I don't think you quite understand what following someone to the grave means. Following someone to the grave means following them until they die, and then that following ending with their death. You have followed them until you reach their grave, at which point there is no more following. (Because, duh, they've stopped moving. You cannot follow people who are standing still.)
How the following then ends can vary. Perhaps the follower also dies, or perhaps they just stop following and go do something else. In the case of debts, they get forgiven.
This is a little confusing because of the use of 'follow someone to the grave' can include 'and they metaphorically stayed at the grave'. (Aka, died.) But it doesn't have to.
Something continuing to follow a person after they die (presumably metaphorically, like a rumor) would be following them past the grave, or beyond the grave, although neither are common expressions.
It's like if someone wanted to be able to prove they owned a car, they had to print up a piece of paper that said they owned it, and then go to a random 'Car Authorities' and have them stamp it.. The CA would then call up the DNS, I mean the DMV, ask for that car owner's mailing address, and mail the paper to them.
Occasionally, someone forges a stamp, or slips an extra stamp into the 'list of acceptable stamps' that people check again, or sneaks into a CA at night and use their stamp, or exploits a security issue at the DMV's address checking, or steal the mail, or a government takes over the CA, etc, etc. And everyone gasps in horror, because no one has actually looked at the system and said 'Hey, wait, if the DMV knows who owns what cars, why the fuck aren't they stamping those pieces of paper?'
It is, frankly, a little astonishing how utterly stupid and nonsensical the entire idea of SSL signing as a business is. I'm sorry, when it was being invented, someone should have looked around and said 'Wait, what are we trying to do again? We already have a system for the actual domain owner to be looked up...it's called DNS. It already exists. Granted it's insecure, but wouldn't it make more sense to come up with a secure way of getting the cert info to people, instead of all this other nonsense?'
If people still want to operate signing agencies to confirm who the owner of the domain is, whatever. Although such a thing does not, and has never, required SSL at all. (Although obviously SSL is required to assure that you're talking to whoever the owner is.) It just requires a database somewhere. And I'm not sure letting random third parties put such things in that database makes sense.
It might make more sense to have, for example, a 'United States Bank' database that the Federal Reserve Board runs or something, keeping track of a domain name for every banks, which it gives out to browser manufacturers. And customers could be taught that their bank should say 'BANK' next to the URL.
The way it is now is utter nonsense. We have a system that's piss-poor at verifying that you are talking to the legit owner of a domain (Because the security of the system depends on utterly random third parties.) and has been extended to cover who the owner is, which it isn't very good at either.
Basically, with DNSSEC, DNS cannot be tampered with. All you have to is have the DNS then itself provide the cert, which the registrar then signs.
Basically, instead of having to send a CA our public key, and having them sign it and email it back, we just use the existing fact that, under DNSSEC, DNS records are signed, and stick so we just our public key in there. And unsigned keys can be checked there. Actually, it might be smart to have a specific mark on those keys, saying 'Check against DNS'.
This requires DNSSEC to actually roll out everywhere, of course, and requires client support. (And it requires DNS server support if we're actually going to use CERT records, but instead it could be something like SPF does...just use specially marked TXT records, and maybe just use the key fingerprint instead of the entire key.)
This actually has advantages over the current system. For example, it's trivial to revoke keys, whereas now, not so much. Domain owners can even 'revoke' keys they don't know about, like when they buy a name from someone else who still has SSL keys for it. The rules is: Whatever key is in the DNS work, if there's a security issue, just take that key out, put a different one in.
Of course, for a while, both DNS keys and CA keys would need to both work, but I actually think that, at some point, we should stop letting random frickin third parties in Belgium or Korea or wherever decide who is authorized to run an encrypted version of our domain name. The only person who is authorized to talk about what my domains are doing is my registrar and anyone they've delegated to! But certs could still be signed on top of that, to certify stuff like mailing addresses and company names and stuff. (Aka, the 'domain verification' signing would still be useful.)
Uh, there is a trivial way to decentralize SSL now that we've got signed DNSSEC working. Simply put the SSL fingerprint (Or even the entire public key) in a DNS record, which is then, along with the rest of the DNS records, signed by the DNS server.
Look, it is magic, and just as secure as before. (Because, frankly, if you have access enough to their DNS registrar to alter records, you can secretly point their mail at you long enough to grab a signed SSL key.)
This puts 'I can prove I own this domain name' back into the system that actually exists to keep track of who owns what name, DNS. What a strange and odd idea.
Oh, and as an added bonus, it lets people who have purchased domain names from others remove all previously authorized SSL keys, which there is currently no way to do. (Unless you can somehow telepathically deduce every single cert they might have issued and make them revoke them.)
Likewise, it allows for actual working certificate revocation, which right now works in theory but is utterly broken.
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If shares can only change hands every quarter, then I can't even *attempt* to liquidate until the next trading window rolls around.
I don't really have any objection to shares changing hands at any time. I just object to the idea that there needs to be any sort of 'market' except every three months. There's a difference between someone selling a used car and a car dealership.
But as I said, it is entirely likely that certain financial institutes would set up the ability to get a loan with the stock as collateral, which would let people functionally 'sell' their stock early.
The point here is that shares can fit into a spectrum of asset liquidity that can range from cash to shares, to property to term deposits, etc. In that context, I don't think daily trading needs any special justification.
It does if it expects any sort of reduced tax rate. If it's an 'investment that helps the economy', sure. But otherwise it's just winnings at a casino, and the gamblers should be expected to pay income tax on all their winnings.
And not just their 'end of year profits' either. If they lose $500 one day, and win $500 the next, that's $500 they should owe taxes on, just like how gambling winnings work. They earned $500, they should pay income taxes on $500.
Instead, we're quibbling over a fractional percent tax. Admittedly, it would be on the entire transaction, not just gains, but it's still a fuckload less than paying 30% income tax on each gain, not offset by loses.
It's downright amazing how every dime the rich and corporations lose somehow manages to count against their gains with regard to how much income tax they pay, but somehow that doesn't work for anyone else.
Someone's going to have to explain why exactly a stock market investment should be liquidatable on a daily basis, whereas, for example, investing in CD or property or comic books or whatever isn't set up that way. If the stock market is actually an investment as it is claimed to be, and not the casino it appears to be, then, like any other investment, sometimes investors can't instantly liquidate their investment.
This is normally pretty accepted. You put your money anywhere where it's not in the form of actual 'money', it could take a bit to get at it.
However, I actually don't have a problem with any sort of individual sales between the quarters. I just rather think we shouldn't operate an entire stock market for that purpose. It should be some rare thing, with some sort of penalties.
Or, hell, disallow it, and if the stock owner has an emergency, well, he can simply get a loan with it as collateral. I'm sure some banks would be willing to rate stock and take it collateral.
Yes, I'm aware this opens the loophole of banks essentially operating their own stock exchange by selling those loans...OTOH, go ahead and ask me if I think banks should be allowed to sell loans they make, or if I think disallowing that would fix another problem with our economy. ;)
We allow way too much shit that is essentially 'let's move imaginary things, or things that have been totally disconnected from their actual meanings, around randomly, while their value goes up and down, and make money from poor suckers who guess wrong on that', none of which adds a single dime of actual wealth and serves no purpose at all. And because of shitty interest rates, there's no actual other investment opportunities.
Fuck that. If the financial giants want to gamble with their impossible amounts of money, they know where to find the goddamn casinos. Leave the economy out of it.
I once did the math on the 'we should use charity' more. Not for poverty in general, but the idiotic Republican 'People should go to charity for health care'. But let me quickly do it for poverty. All charitable giving in the US totals $300 billion a year.
If we were direct every dime to the poor(1), that's $6250 yearly for every poor person.
That's, uh, only twice what the average yearly utility bill is. It's between 150%-200% the average food budget for poor people.
All in all, the math works out better than the health care one (Which is just flatly impossible for charity to pay for.), but it's still not very good. Raising people's income by $6250 would probably move 20% of the people out of poverty for that year, but it's not really any sort of long-term solution.
1) And, I must point out, a lot of that already goes to the poor, so cannot really be 'directed' there. This analysis shuts down all soup kitchens and thrift stores and homeless shelters and free clinics and stuff, turning it all into cash. So all of the very poor would end up much worse off. $6250 in their pocket probably cannot pay for a roof over their head...and if it does, they'll have a nice quiet and empty house without power or food.
Except they're talking about investment tax, you fucktard. Which is aimed directly at people who already have a lot of money, not people with extra income.
People who actually are out there accomplishing things do not care about taxes on stock transactions, because they do not attempt to make money off the stock market. People who make actual investments, like Gates and Buffet, do try to make money off the stock market, and hence will be slightly hurt by this. Although they make actual long-term investments, and hence won't be hurt by the tax anywhere near as much as the people who buy stock one second and sell it half a second later.
This is one of the closest things to a wealth tax that has ever been proposed, you idiot. It's a tax on people fucking around in the stock market. (Not actually investing, fucking around.)
Uh, no. That's stupid. As the other post pointed out, that would result in people getting kicked out on the street when their parents died. He mentioned minors, which is bad enough, but I think we can agree that perhaps some college kid living at home should get to keep a house over his head if his parents die.
Or, heck, in states without automatic joint property laws, if someone bought a house, got married, and then died...now the spouse has no property.
A better idea would be something like 100% over $1,000,000, including property. Or maybe you can give $500,000 each to any immediately family member (children, spouse, siblings, parents), plus three more people.
And you're otherwise restrict to $10,000, which you can give to as many people as you want. Actually, there already is a yearly limit under which gifts are not taxed, either $5000 or $10,000, I forget. So at death we could just pretend they get 'one more year'.
Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure we need to worry about any of that. If we just restrict each individual person to getting $500,000, that would probably be enough by itself. It's not really 'How much they give away.', it's more 'How much one person gets.'. If some billionaire gives a half a million dollars to 2000 people, well, the loss of tax revenue sucks, but we've stopped the 'money never leaves the family' problem. (Barring illegal stuff like 'I'll get a hundred friends, give them each $500,000, and they'll then hand 90% of that money over to my son.')
Erm, you're an idiot.
HFT trading might help market liquidity in the second range...but no one needs that. People can wait five fucking minutes to sell their stock.
HFT sucks money out of the market, and it 'gives' the utterly pointless ability to have infinite liquidity. 'Investments' do not need to be faster to get money out of than a fucking checking acount. That's not an 'investment'.
I had to google to find out what the fuck a 'position trader' was.
Apparently, guys like Soros make money by purchasing the stock of companies, and then hoping that stock will go up over the next several years! Oh noes! This must be stamped out immediately!
Here's a hint for everyone else: When someone says 'position trader', they mean actual investors in things. They mean what normal people think the stock market is for, 'investing in a company', and they mean every single 401k. People who say 'I think this company will do better than inflation this year, so I will purchase their stock.'(1)
As opposed to the HFT or even the day traders who are attempting to make money from market manipulations and randomness. And screw up the market for actual investments.
Heaven forbid we help out 'position' traders, you know, the people actually taking and holding long-term market positions, at the expense of the 'making money from random fluctuation' traders.
A complaint about that Soros is a 'position trader' is rather akin to pointing out that people in favor of laws against mugging people are not, themselves, muggers, and are often in fact mugging victims. And the laws they're promoting would result in them having more money and muggers having less.
Uh, yeah. We sorta already knew that, but thanks.
1) A 'position' also includes the idea that the stock might go down, so this also includes people who short stock long-term. Those people sometimes get a bad rap, but in reality people are needed to go short on stock so that other people can go long. Long-term shorts are not the problem, it's crap like HFT making a millisecond shorts in advance of someone selling a bunch of stock that are the problem.
What I think is: Fuck the stock 'market'.
There are company earning reports that come out once a quarter. A few days after that, everyone should have the chance to bid on an investment in that company until the next quarter. All these bids should be resolved at the same time, and the people who wanted out get out, and the people who wanted in get in, for another three months. (And shortly after that, all the investors for the last quarter should get their dividend checks sent out, if there was profit.)
There is absolutely no point to operating this idiotic 'stock market' day to day and letting people own parts of corporations for seconds at a time. Or even for a day or a week. It doesn't accomplish anything.
Make it where people have to sit down and invest in corporations.
Yeah, I'm baffled by this too. I don't understand the concept of 'We're going to make Android tablets, call them ereaders, and then have people who actually want tablets to buy them and turn them into tablets.'
If you want a tablet buy an actual tablet. If you want an ereader, as in, a device you use to read on, you probably want eInk, so buy one of those. If you are willing to settle for reading on LED, and want a tablet, buy a tablet and download the frickin Android or iOS reader app that I'm sure your ebook seller offers.
I have a Nook STR, which I rooted for a better reader app (Serious, it came with perhaps the worse organizational abilities ever. You can't sort by series.) and threw Suduko and a web browser and offline wikipedia on, but I'm under no delusion it's a tablet.
There's some sort of mental branding issue going on with people thinking 'It's a super-ereader!'. Uh, no. It's an expensive and locked-down Android tablet. Ereaders are a specific subset of tablets that have eInk to help them do one thing well. And I'm not criticizing that idea, like I said, I have one!
But removing that one thing and keeping the limited functionality makes 'color ereaders' a worse deal when compared to actual tablets. It's really sort of stupid people that buy those.
P.S. The Nooks actually have microSD slots, even the eInk ones. It's just Amazon that's dumb enough to leave those off. Also, B&N doesn't seem to give a damn about rooting them, considering they'll boot off said SD card if you put a boot image on it....you don't really have to 'hack' anything.
That's what 'side-load' means. The Nook presents itself as a USB device, and you copy stuff to it. Usually using something like Calibre. Or you put it on an microSD card and stick that in. These even works for DRM stuff, like the Overdrive.com lending library system that many public libraries use.
Of course, with the Nook Color, I suspect you can download stuff directly off the internet also. (I just have the Nook STR, which does not have a web browser or anything but an ereader app until rooted.) But you probably can't download the DRM-protected library books without rooting...those need Adobe Digital Edition to download, so you'd need to root and install the Android app for that. (Once you have such a file, it works fine on the Nook...you just can't get it without Adobe software. Stupid, I know.) Or just side-load from your PC.
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, anyway. Are you asking if the Nook proxies all wifi internet connections to B&N servers? Well, no, that would be crazy. Yes, I know Amazon's doing it...that does not make it less crazy.
The old 3G Nooks, of course, when using 3G, could only reach B&N over it, they weren't going to let you use the internet connection they paid the fees on for anything but buy books. But 3G-enabled Nooks are no longer sold. (Because that entire idea was stupid. 'OMG, I have to buy a book right now. I can't wait until I find a wifi connection!' Man, in my day, I remember when we had to find bookstores to buy books.)
I've heard that theory also, and I'll buy that for respiratory allergies. I used to believe it for food, but it doesn't make much sense.
The problem is that food allergies don't really work that way. Food allergies start with an inability to digest the food. Someone who is allergic to peanuts cannot break down certain proteins in the peanuts.
Those proteins in a case of peanut allergies get tagged by the immune system and attacked to the point you can die. Whereas gluten intolerance is a minor allergic reaction. And lactose intolerance, does not get attacked at all, producing digestive problems, but generally no actual 'allergic reaction'.
I.e., food allergies are attacking 'left over' proteins that shouldn't be there anyway, but for some reason we were unable to digest. Pretty much all problems with eating any food comes from the inability to digest it, and it's only on top of that that allergic reactions happens. (There are some exceptions...for example, it's possible to be allergic to pollen so much you have an allergic reaction to certain uncooked fruits in your mouth. But generally lack of digestion is the reason.)
And it's hard to see how any sort of 'hyper-sanitized' environment could make people unable to digest specific proteins.
Now, it's entirely possible that for some reason a good portion of humanity is, and has always been, unable to digest random things, and it's just recently, due to environmental lack of other allergies, that the allergic reaction just started. But that seems kinda weird to me.
I really think it's the other way around...undigested nut proteins have always been really dangerous for us...it's just we used to pretty much always digest them correctly.
Actually, that would be pretty easy to test. Find a guy who isn't allergic, and figure out a way to block the digestion of those proteins, and see what happens. Or put the proteins in at a later point in the cycle. I wonder if anyone's ever done it.
Gluten sensitivities is hypothetically possible. It's almost never bad enough to actually kill people, so it could be something like sickle-cell disease...something that makes sense in certain circumstances, but not now. And it could have been easily not diagnosed ever...there have always been sickly people.
Same thing with dairy intolerance...that doesn't kill you either, and there are cultures that don't really drink dairy as adults, so there'd be no evolutionary reason not to have that.
So those are like the genetic predilection to breast cancer, or heart disease that kills people in their 40s...as long as it don't kill you before you reproduce, well, those genes are sucky, but we can see why evolution didn't take care of them.
The nut allergies, though, are pretty much impossible. Genes causing people, especially children, to fall over and die when exposed to nuts cannot possibly be widespread in humanity. That is completely insane. It's like being allergic to water.(1) It's clearly some sort of genetic mutation or defect or outside disease, and not actually a normal combination of genes from their ancestors.
I'm talking actual nuts, not peanuts. Peanuts just make a microscopic amount more sense, as they are 'new world' only and thus the vast majority of the planet's ancestors have only been eating them for 300 years or so. But, still, peanut allergies don't make a lot of sense either.
Or, to put it another way, there's no apparent reason why the average level of 'deathly allergic reaction to common things' could possibly increase from generation to generation. In fact, it should decrease, as people, you know, die from them before they can have kids.
As opposed to diseases that still let you reproduce, which should remain the same level, or even get 'more common' as we diagnose things better. Which is what some people think is going on with autism, and gluten allergies, and I'd agree, except that I'm also seeing it happen in things like deathly nut allergies that couldn't possibly have been 'misdiagnosed' in the past.
I'm finding it suspicious that we started pumping the world full of carcinogens, and suddenly we're find a huge increase in diseases that can be attributed to genetic defects or to developmental issues. (I'm looking at you, dioxins.) Either basic evolution decided to take a holiday, or we've managed to increase the background level of 'stuff that fucks with us'.
1) Incidentally, some people are allergic to water on their skin. That, obviously, is not very common. (And no one's allergic to drinking water.)
I have to agree with you. People (Of all ages) have a higher rate of cancer than seen before, and children have a higher rate of genetic defects.
Not just autism, but I'm convince stuff like the impossibly common nut allergy. Where the hell did that come from? That's insane. The human race used to live on nuts! And unlike autism, there's no way that could have just been 'undiagnosed'. No, super-allergies have to be some sort of very slight genetic defect.
Well, it's pretty simply to add it up. Environmental toxins cause genetic alterations in cells. Which then either causes cancer in that person, or if it hits the reproductive system, causes genetic defects in the kids.
While you are correct about genetic defects, it is entirely possible for radiation to cause genetic defects. That's essentially what cancer is, after all. (The cells are genetically defective and will not stop replicating. In fact, cancer usually requires two genetic defects, one to make it run wild, and one to cut off the self-destruct that's supposed to trigger when it does.) As a child's mind is still developing, any sort of genetic change could get replicated enough to cause damage.
However, there's no process in which radiation from watching TV could cause any sort of autism-specific genetic damage at above normal-rate while not also causing massive amounts of cancer in, essentially, everyone. I.e., I think we would have noticed if the entire human race was sitting in front of an open nuclear reactor at some point.(1)
However, you're entirely right. Autism is often diagnosed (And always could have been diagnosed, except the parents either were ignorant of how development is supposed to go, or deliberately ignoring the signs.) long before any 'video games'. To quote wikipedia 'Onset must be prior to age three'. No one is fricking spending hours playing video games before age three.
As genetic testing can identify the genetic cause of 40% of current diagnoses of autism, it seems fairly clear we should stop trying to blame 'stuff that happens to kids', and instead urge that all autistic people get genetically sequenced, so we can identify the rest of the genetic issues that can cause autism. And at some point, we can work on a cure. (Genetic defect does not mean 'can only be cured via genetic manipulation'. Perhaps they are missing a specific enzyme somewhere, which can be provided artificially.)
Also, it is entirely possible that some autism is environmental. But it's not any of the obvious stupid things that people think it is, and if it is environmental it is probably, like you say, environmental to the mother, as that's really when mental development starts. (And I have to suspect that such environmental causes are less than 5%.)
1) This is a really good way to shut down the idiots who think correlation equal causality idiots. Ask them 'If X did Y via the process you say, shouldn't that process have resulted in a lot of Z'. I.e., if vaccines cause mercury poisoning cause autism, shouldn't that mercury have caused these other problems also?
Well, yeah, obviously that's why they did it, but there are always idiots who argue about why political decisions happened, even if the record is very clear.
But regardless of what nonsensical reasons people try to attribute to the Iraqi government instead of the actual one, the fact is they did decide that, and did tell us, and we've known for years, is pretty indisputable, no matter how much stupid people have.
I'm a little concerned with all the people who don't have authorized access to family member's safety deposit boxes.
I guess there's a reason if there's jewels or something in it, but the way it works in my family is that there is one safety deposit box rented, and everyone sticks all their birth certificates and deeds and whatnot in there, and I trust my brother isn't going to steal mine. When 'your' branch of the family gets big enough, you fork off and get your own.
It's probably not a bad idea to stick an envelope in there with my Lastpass master password in there, along with instructions for what needs dealing with. (Although I really have no auctions or anything that would need immediate attention.)
A lot of people are crazy overthinking this. What the hell sort of password do you want to give out on your death, but somehow think the police will come along and subpoena? The police are not going to subpoena your frickin ebay password. If they want into ebay and have a warrant, they'll ask ebay.
It's one thing to say 'I'm encrypting my drive so the police can't poke around in customs without a good reason', it's another to try to keep them out when they have an actual warrant.
And, heck, do that if you want, I have no problem with that either. But might I suggest that you people who are apparently operating things that you don't want the police to know about don't bequest that on your unknowing family? Because, um, they might not want it.
Why so complicated? Isn't there an extradition treaty between the us and the uk as well?
Because he's a Commonwealth citizen (He's Australian.) and the UK has a pretty strong resistance against turning Commonwealth citizens over for political reasons, even to the US.
Whereas he's not a Swedish citizen, and Sweden could care less about him.
Hence this rather convoluted path of getting him to Sweden on a rather thin sex crime, and then, regardless of how that plays out, turning him over to the US.
And considering the US has kidnapped people without government permission (Just ask Germany), there's a concern that even if Sweden agrees to 'release' him onto their street, he will then mysteriously vanish five minutes later. No one needs to agree any 'formal' extradition, all it requires is the Swedes don't investigate that kidnapping too closely.
Sweden could easily fix all this by simply guaranteeing that Assange will be returned to the UK regardless. I.e, if they decide not to try him, they return him, if they do and he's innocent, they return him, if they do and he's guilty, he serves out his sentence and they return him. Very simple.
They have conspicuously failed to agree with this, despite such a thing actually being fairly common in extradition requests where there is concerns someone is being extradited to be turned over to yet another country.
Innocent of what? He hasn't even been charged with anything.
Yeah, but you'll never know this in the US, where apparently Obama is pulling out of Iraq. Both the left and the right seem to think this is true (For better or for worse), and it's rather astonishing the level of ignorance the media is promoting on this issue.
Guys, we got kicked out of Iraq at the end of 2011 in 2008.(1) Under Bush. Neither he nor Obama 'decided' to leave. The deadline has been Dec 31, 2011 for years. This is not some debatable fact. Yes, Obama campaigned on getting us out, but, um, he didn't voluntarily do that.
I've had like a dozen people present their opinion to be, about how Obama 'ending the war' is right, or wrong, or how Bush deserves credit, or whatever. And each time I just want to shake them and say 'Are you a total idiot? Iraq ended the war.'.
Iraq probably did this almost certainly because they got tired of our bullshit routine of killing civilians and then lying about it, but that is a debatable opinion. But it is indisputable that they did end it, not us. They held a vote, told us to leave by 2011, we asked them to reconsider, they did not.
1) Yes, I'm aware that, technically, troops can stay, and it's only immunity that's being revoked...but without immunity, no one can actually 'fight a war' in any sense, because they can't legally kill people, or detain people, or anything, without getting hauled into Iraqi court. So Obama has four choices for the troops: a) bring them home, b) pay them to stand around doing nothing, c) have them continue what they're doing, then get locked in Iraqi prisons, d) have them continue what they're doing, then fight off the police and military sent to arrest them, aka, declare war on Iraq.
If they wished, Israelis were perfectly entitled to keep conquered territories during the Six days war. They were responding to an agression and an attempt to undermine the integrity of its territory.
Uh, not under any international law, no.
But perhaps more to the point, if they wish to extend their country to include Palestine, ha. You go right ahead and tell them to do that.
Now the question is, is Israel planning on letting their new citizens vote or own property or move freely around the rest of the country, or are they going to keep more than half their population in ghettos with no rights at all?
I find people who think they're 'pro-Israel' because 'Israel can annex Palestine' utterly hilariously uninformed. Are you unaware that's what a few Palestine leaders have been yelling for for decades, and it's Israel who has rightly noticed that such a thing would functionally turn their country over to the Palestinians who outnumber them. A democratic One-State solution would essentially destroy Israel politics and government.
Or is it your theory that, once conquered, people in that territory can be kept with no rights, forever? That there's no such thing as self-determination if an ancestor ever lost a war? That the US could go into Germany right now and start smashing things up?
And, hell, that's not even right. Palestine didn't even lose a war. They didn't exist at the time. A war was fought through that territory by its neighbors. What you're asserting is that the US has a right to territory it conquered from Germany in France.
It's frankly astonishing how every time anyone mentions Israel here, the same uninformed idiots show up. 'Israel won Palestine fair and square, herp-derp, that means they own their ass forever.'
And while the registrar would 'sign' the keys, it wouldn't be a process like currently works. No one needs to send anything in and get it emailed back. DNSSEC is supposed to be completely automatic. And the internet is implementing DNSSEC anyway, because of other security issues.
So once that's in place, you would just log into your registrar and paste in a copy of your public key into the host management area, or you'd point BIND at a copy of your public key, or whatever. That's it. The key actually used by the web server is not signed by anyone, it's just confirmed to be correct via that secured DNS record.
And, hell, letting people secure sites without CA signing would be a great way to force registrars to get off their ass and implement DNSSEC, or risk customers moving elsewhere.
And, oh, hey, fun fact. This would have taken care of the stupid one IP per SSL site problem without worrying about that non-implemented new thing. How? Easy. People running web server could just make a single SSL cert that covers *, and then put it as the key to every domain they have. In fact, I don't see why that wouldn't be the standard anyway.
Instead? A completely nonsensical system, where J. Random Company is randomly allowed to issue certs for everyone in existence.
I don't think you quite understand what following someone to the grave means. Following someone to the grave means following them until they die, and then that following ending with their death. You have followed them until you reach their grave, at which point there is no more following. (Because, duh, they've stopped moving. You cannot follow people who are standing still.)
How the following then ends can vary. Perhaps the follower also dies, or perhaps they just stop following and go do something else. In the case of debts, they get forgiven.
This is a little confusing because of the use of 'follow someone to the grave' can include 'and they metaphorically stayed at the grave'. (Aka, died.) But it doesn't have to.
Something continuing to follow a person after they die (presumably metaphorically, like a rumor) would be following them past the grave, or beyond the grave, although neither are common expressions.
I find the way it works now completely absurd.
It's like if someone wanted to be able to prove they owned a car, they had to print up a piece of paper that said they owned it, and then go to a random 'Car Authorities' and have them stamp it.. The CA would then call up the DNS, I mean the DMV, ask for that car owner's mailing address, and mail the paper to them.
Occasionally, someone forges a stamp, or slips an extra stamp into the 'list of acceptable stamps' that people check again, or sneaks into a CA at night and use their stamp, or exploits a security issue at the DMV's address checking, or steal the mail, or a government takes over the CA, etc, etc. And everyone gasps in horror, because no one has actually looked at the system and said 'Hey, wait, if the DMV knows who owns what cars, why the fuck aren't they stamping those pieces of paper?'
It is, frankly, a little astonishing how utterly stupid and nonsensical the entire idea of SSL signing as a business is. I'm sorry, when it was being invented, someone should have looked around and said 'Wait, what are we trying to do again? We already have a system for the actual domain owner to be looked up...it's called DNS. It already exists. Granted it's insecure, but wouldn't it make more sense to come up with a secure way of getting the cert info to people, instead of all this other nonsense?'
If people still want to operate signing agencies to confirm who the owner of the domain is, whatever. Although such a thing does not, and has never, required SSL at all. (Although obviously SSL is required to assure that you're talking to whoever the owner is.) It just requires a database somewhere. And I'm not sure letting random third parties put such things in that database makes sense.
It might make more sense to have, for example, a 'United States Bank' database that the Federal Reserve Board runs or something, keeping track of a domain name for every banks, which it gives out to browser manufacturers. And customers could be taught that their bank should say 'BANK' next to the URL.
The way it is now is utter nonsense. We have a system that's piss-poor at verifying that you are talking to the legit owner of a domain (Because the security of the system depends on utterly random third parties.) and has been extended to cover who the owner is, which it isn't very good at either.
It's discussed here.
Basically, with DNSSEC, DNS cannot be tampered with. All you have to is have the DNS then itself provide the cert, which the registrar then signs.
Basically, instead of having to send a CA our public key, and having them sign it and email it back, we just use the existing fact that, under DNSSEC, DNS records are signed, and stick so we just our public key in there. And unsigned keys can be checked there. Actually, it might be smart to have a specific mark on those keys, saying 'Check against DNS'.
This requires DNSSEC to actually roll out everywhere, of course, and requires client support. (And it requires DNS server support if we're actually going to use CERT records, but instead it could be something like SPF does...just use specially marked TXT records, and maybe just use the key fingerprint instead of the entire key.)
This actually has advantages over the current system. For example, it's trivial to revoke keys, whereas now, not so much. Domain owners can even 'revoke' keys they don't know about, like when they buy a name from someone else who still has SSL keys for it. The rules is: Whatever key is in the DNS work, if there's a security issue, just take that key out, put a different one in.
Of course, for a while, both DNS keys and CA keys would need to both work, but I actually think that, at some point, we should stop letting random frickin third parties in Belgium or Korea or wherever decide who is authorized to run an encrypted version of our domain name. The only person who is authorized to talk about what my domains are doing is my registrar and anyone they've delegated to! But certs could still be signed on top of that, to certify stuff like mailing addresses and company names and stuff. (Aka, the 'domain verification' signing would still be useful.)
Uh, there is a trivial way to decentralize SSL now that we've got signed DNSSEC working. Simply put the SSL fingerprint (Or even the entire public key) in a DNS record, which is then, along with the rest of the DNS records, signed by the DNS server.
Look, it is magic, and just as secure as before. (Because, frankly, if you have access enough to their DNS registrar to alter records, you can secretly point their mail at you long enough to grab a signed SSL key.)
This puts 'I can prove I own this domain name' back into the system that actually exists to keep track of who owns what name, DNS. What a strange and odd idea.
Oh, and as an added bonus, it lets people who have purchased domain names from others remove all previously authorized SSL keys, which there is currently no way to do. (Unless you can somehow telepathically deduce every single cert they might have issued and make them revoke them.)
Likewise, it allows for actual working certificate revocation, which right now works in theory but is utterly broken.