It is also common in most Linux distros to store SSH private keys in ~/.ssh, which -- given you need root to read the wifi passwords -- can be accessed just as easily. Access credentials have to be stored in the clear somewhere on a live machine -- in memory during connect if nowhere else. Once you root the box, you get everything.
Of the untold numbers of spooks working in / for NSA, Ed Snowden is the only one who has the conscience and the courage to reveal the dastardly unconstitutional secrets of the NSA.
Actually, two other guys did; William Binney and Thomas Drake. Unfortunately, they went through official channels, so they got harrassed and prosecuted by the government, and without the massive trove of documents Snowden exfiltrated, they were ignored and marginalized by the major media. Their experience is what convinced Snowden that he had no choice but to go outside.
"I think there's an English word that describes selling American secrets to another government, and I do think it's treason,"
Fascinating, but irrelevant. How about a word that describes giving NSA secrets to the sovereigns (We The People) of the United States, when those secrets expose violations of The Constitution? I'd use "whistleblowing", something the POTUS promised to protect when he asked us to vote for him.
"we do need the tools to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to the nation and its allies."
Ahh, good, something we can agree on. You should have those tools. And you do have them, even without the dragnets. Here's how they work:
1. Pick the person who you believe wishes to do harm to the nation and its allies. 2. Start collecting surveillance. 3. Present to an appropriately skeptical judge the reasons that you believe that person wishes to do harm to the nation and its allies. 4. The judge will decide whether your evidence amounts to reasonable suspicion. 5. As long as the judge agrees, you can continue the surveillance.
It's a pretty cool system, really. It ensures that you get the surveillance on people who really do appear to be up to something, while protecting the vast majority of people who are innocent.
I've got to admit, I had a fairly shallow perception of your views early on, and you have shown me more depth and a different angle than I was expecting. I can't say I entirely agree with you, but you have made me reconsider my initial impressions.
Corporate taxes are ultimately passed on and paid by those who do business with the corporation.
See tax incidence. Corporate taxes fall, in part, on the stockholders in the form of reduced capital gains. Those stockholders may be overseas. In a purely domestic company (one which has all operations, employment, inputs, and sales inside the nation) that is publicly traded, the only way to export any of the tax burden is through corporate taxes. That's what makes corporate taxes attractive from a nationalistic policy perspective; they are one of the most effective policy tools for reducing the portion of the domestic budget that must come out of the GDP.
I'm not arguing good versus bad with you (I actually lean toward eliminating corporate taxation, but for reasons different from yours). I'm passing on inforrmation you pick up when you study public finance in college.
A better solution would be for Italy to simply lower their taxes until it did NOT make business sense to go through such contortions to avoid them anymore.
The reason corporate taxes make sense, ultimately (in a purely nationalist sense), is to export a portion of your tax base. Take the United States as an example: Suppose a pure US-based company that is publicly traded; all its payroll taxes and all the income taxes of its employees come out of US pockets. The capital gains taxes that we collect are only on US-based stockholders. But the corporate taxes, those come out of all stockholders -- whether they are US-based or abroad. Corporate taxes are the most effective way to export our tax burden.
So that's the nationalist reason to have corporate taxes. The alternative is for domestic taxes to be higher. So if you just hate those nasty taxes, you should be in favor of domestic corporate taxation in whatever country you live -- it's the most effective way to shift your government budget service off-shore.
Not that I fully support that view from a global economist perspective, but you sound like one of those "Taxes are bad!" people; I thought you might want to know how corporate taxes in your nation actually reduce the portion of the total tax bill that you and your fellow citizens have to pay.
There is no "right" to use the govt to force one group of people to economically support another group.
That is a tricky hypothesis, because it implies that government force in an economic context equals one group supporting another group. Not always the case. When laissez-faire does not result in long-run GDP growth rate maximization relative to a well regulated market, it is the laissez-faire case that is more accurately described as one group economically supporting another.
An example of an unregulated market distortion resulting in one group economically supporting another is pharmaceuticals. Aggregate customer demand is highly inelastic (price tolerant), time sensitive, and poorly informed. The profit maximizing behavior for the pharmaceutical industry is to misrepresent the product and collude to raise prices. Government regulation forbidding such misrepresentation and price fixing increases market efficiency and hence increases long-run GDP growth. The relative increase in long-run GDP growth under the regulated market case is the measure of reduction in the incidence of sick people economically supporting pharmaceutical stockholders under the laissez-faire case.
That is just one example, there are many cases where a well regulated market results in faster sustainable GDP growth than does laissez-faire. In such instances, the long-run outcome for all market segments is greater in the long-run under the well-regulated case, and hence laissez-faire is nothing short of theft.
"I would argue that what effectiveness we have seen to date is totally irrelevant to how effective it might be in the future," he said. "This program, 215, has the ability to stop the next 9/11 and if you added emails in there it would make it even more effective. Had it been in place in 2000 and 2001, I think that probably 9/11 would not have happened."'
OK, let's take your utterly preposterous claim at face value. Let's say that this program would have prevented 9/11, and would prevent another 9/11 tomorrow, and has done fuck-all in between. That means we'd save 3,000 American lives every 12 years. Call it 3,600 to make the math easy. That's 300 lives per year. Against the 4th amendment. How does that price measure up against some of our other freedoms?
With the possible exception of tobacco, I support the retention of all those rights. Three hundred per year for The Fourth Amendment (and the chilling effect on The First)? Even if his preposterous supposition were true, it would be a bargain at ten times the price compared to some of the other rights we hold dear.
The sum of money does seem low, but when an agency like the NSA comes calling, I have a feeling that it they make you a proposal you cannot refuse.
For putting it in, fine. But you don't take the blood money then claim you had no choice. Comply if you have no alternative, but once you take payment from a traitor you are the enemy.
Snowden's justification for his actions fall short of what a person truly concerned about civil liberties would have done. If I'm going to denounce my government's actions, I want the police to come. I want to be arrested, charged, and put on trial.
Two people prior to Snowden trusted the system, went through the official channels, and faced the music; William Binney and Thomas Drake. They were harrassed and prosecuted by the executive, marginalized and ignored by the major media. Their most significant achievement was making it clear to Snowden that he could not trust our legal system to seek truth and justice nor the old guard of the fourth estate to do its investigative duty.
I think we will see this feature enabled on later Android versions when they get to finish it and find ways to make old applications not crash when permissions are removed.
It is already known how to enable it without crashing the applications; return fake data. The cause of the app failure is not returning any data. There is a tool for returning fake data, which I think was briefly included in CyanogenMod. It causes apps that rely on the data for their revenue stream to continue operating without getting their payment (clean, marketable data). It was decided that tricking apps into operating was, in one way of thinking, using the software without the informed consent of the programmer -- something akin to misappropration -- and so it was removed.
You may not agree with that perspective, but it is the issue that Google is wrestling with: Should they facilitate the ability to prevent apps from knowing that they are not getting the clean data that they currently take as payment for producing the app?
In my opinion, our current standards for acquiring such data are extremely shady, relying heavily on a consumer base that is deeply misinformed of the extent of the surveillance and the risks the data stores pose. Where the balance of good lies between surveillance and countermeasures is hard to tell; it could be that subverting the datastream is pro-social in the long run -- but that is not the side on which Google's bread is buttered. They have a strong motive to see things from the app developers / watchers / revenue stream point of view. A great deal of money flows to Google from informed, uninformed, and misinformed consent to surveillance.
If I am Netflix, Google/YouTube, Amazon, etc. and an ISP comes to me asking for money for preferential treatment, I would just say: "Pay me $1/subscriber, or I will block your users from my site--you know, just like how you pay ESPN for their content..." I find it hard to believe these sites need ISPs more than ISPs need these sites.
That is precisely what will happen next. Of course, only the big players will have the guns to show down the ISPs; presto -- the big players will get best QoS and the indies will all have to pay or be put in the slow lane. One more hobble on small businesses and independent media; a bit less oxygen for disruptive competition.
The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom,... He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail.
I think that is the core difficulty in advancing the use of F/LOSS (in the US at least). We are so culturally indoctrinated to see money, and the single-minded pursuit of it, as the measure of success that it is institutionally difficult to grasp sacrificing money in the short run for freedom; regardless of the impact on our bottom line, society, or the larger economy in the long run. The American mindset believes freedom is good in theory, but fails to see that economic success is coupled to choosing freedom -- in a broader sense than the freedom to screw your putative customers -- over short-run revenue.
Wow, those are some seriously run-on sentences. Bite me,... ummm, Sklansky and Malmuth?... Case and Shiller?... Black and Scholes?... Ah, yes, I remember! Strunk and White! That's it. What was I talking about?
Yeah it sucks that only McDonalds can sell fast food on the Olympics venue, but can you really blame them for kicking out Joe the hot dog stand vendor? They paid the IOC huge bucks to become the official exclusive food sponsor.
That seems like asking whether we can really blame the RIAA for pursuing massive infringement penalties; after all, they paid Congress huge bucks to write the ridiculous laws.
Yes, you can blame McDonald's, and the RIAA, and Congress, and the IOC. They are all despots abusing power to misappropriate money.
How about offshoring their profits by paying massive "licensing fees" to empty offices in the Barbados so they don't have to chip in their share of taxes to support the economic system they bleed dry? ('course, this hardly sets them apart from any of the Fortune 500)
Just remember one thing about Atlas Shrugged: As mentioned in the preface, it's not about men as they are, it's men as they should be.
Interesting -- seems like under the premise "men as they should be", everything from pure socialism to pure laissez-faire, or from pure anarchy to pure autarchy, would work. Any system works if the actors are perfectly informed and benevolent.
Question 1: You see 5 pennies, the total in the cup is 6, so the missing part is 1 (penny). How hard can that possibly be?
Hard enough that you got it wrong. If you know that the outcome is six pennies in a cup, and you start with five pennies, the number of missing things is 2; one penny and one cup.
Not that I think this is any worse than when I was young. I remember having strenuous arguments about questions like these from my earliest years. Led to a deeply ingrained distrust of authority.
Hmmm, which I see as a good thing, so I guess I approve of these crappy tests.:)
Frankly, such a disposition on the part of the NSA is reasonable and shows to me the taxpayer that they are at least trying to do their job, even if the methods aren't reasonable for the average or the peoples of interest.
Similarly, understanding the development of the human genome, it is reasonable for 22 year olds to want to sleep with 17 year olds. Being good members of society, however, they do not. It is that restraint of our baser instincts in service of the common good that elevates us above the animals. The NSA has lost that restraint.
That guy exercised the *shit* out of his second amendment rights.
Seems you haven't read the amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
There are many who debate the nature of the right it does recognize, but few, if any, would argue that it documents a right to discharge their firearms in such a manner.
You might be referring to The Declaration, which does encumber citizens with a duty to use their arms in certain circumstances -- the reason the second exists -- but without a credible report of his motive, that angle is as yet unsupported (and I find it highly doubtful a priori).
Let's be honest, the outrage is simply the fact that the drawbacks of solar are being promulgated.
That is not honest. My displeasure with this is that they are funding intentional misrepresentation of solar. If the objective of 60 Plus were a more informed electorate, I would have no problem with it. It is not. Their approach is to distort perception in favor of a given viewpoint, because they know that is more cost effective than developing objectively informed skepticism. The problem is the propaganda, not the information.
Would these same politicians be outraged if this money went to a pro-solar entity?
I think you don't live in Arizona. We don't have a whole lot of political appointees with left-wing axes to grind. Ones that do don't have very long careers 'round these parts. What we do have is a lot of cranky old folks who don't like corruption.
In most cases, we could reduce environmental impact much more per dollar by investing in energy efficiency rather than solar.
You say that as though we should be spending money there instead of solar. That is a false dichotomy. We already do invest in efficiency programs; Energy Star, insulation programs, CFL and now LED stimulus, and many more. Solar is another path to future energy solutions. Funding only efficiency would be as stupid as your false implication that we are only funding solar.
Most residential solar units are installed by wealthier Americans who are taking advantage of huge tax incentives.
Solar installs are expensive, and the only way to get close to cost effective is to do a large scale install. Most of the taxpayer subsidized installs are going in on schools, libraries, and other public facilities, not rich people's houses. It's even happening right here in El Mirage, a heavily blue collar area.
Residential installs are happening here as well, though they are more common in wealthier neighborhoods. That is not because the rich are being targetted with huge tax incentives -- the tax incentives involved are a small portion of the total install cost. It is because the up-front cost of a solar install that is large enough to make sense is enormous. Economies of scale, not targeting of the rich, is what dictates that the people most able to foot the majority of the bill (with a small boost from tax incentives) to get us over the startup hurdles are the wealthy.
Slashdot Mirror
It is also common in most Linux distros to store SSH private keys in ~/.ssh, which -- given you need root to read the wifi passwords -- can be accessed just as easily. Access credentials have to be stored in the clear somewhere on a live machine -- in memory during connect if nowhere else. Once you root the box, you get everything.
'I really don't know what problem we're trying to solve by changing how we do this,' he said.
We know you don't, pudding. Now go sit down and be quiet.
Of the untold numbers of spooks working in / for NSA, Ed Snowden is the only one who has the conscience and the courage to reveal the dastardly unconstitutional secrets of the NSA.
Actually, two other guys did; William Binney and Thomas Drake. Unfortunately, they went through official channels, so they got harrassed and prosecuted by the government, and without the massive trove of documents Snowden exfiltrated, they were ignored and marginalized by the major media. Their experience is what convinced Snowden that he had no choice but to go outside.
"I think there's an English word that describes selling American secrets to another government, and I do think it's treason,"
Fascinating, but irrelevant. How about a word that describes giving NSA secrets to the sovereigns (We The People) of the United States, when those secrets expose violations of The Constitution? I'd use "whistleblowing", something the POTUS promised to protect when he asked us to vote for him.
"we do need the tools to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to the nation and its allies."
Ahh, good, something we can agree on. You should have those tools. And you do have them, even without the dragnets. Here's how they work:
1. Pick the person who you believe wishes to do harm to the nation and its allies.
2. Start collecting surveillance.
3. Present to an appropriately skeptical judge the reasons that you believe that person wishes to do harm to the nation and its allies.
4. The judge will decide whether your evidence amounts to reasonable suspicion.
5. As long as the judge agrees, you can continue the surveillance.
It's a pretty cool system, really. It ensures that you get the surveillance on people who really do appear to be up to something, while protecting the vast majority of people who are innocent.
I've got to admit, I had a fairly shallow perception of your views early on, and you have shown me more depth and a different angle than I was expecting. I can't say I entirely agree with you, but you have made me reconsider my initial impressions.
Corporate taxes are ultimately passed on and paid by those who do business with the corporation.
See tax incidence. Corporate taxes fall, in part, on the stockholders in the form of reduced capital gains. Those stockholders may be overseas. In a purely domestic company (one which has all operations, employment, inputs, and sales inside the nation) that is publicly traded, the only way to export any of the tax burden is through corporate taxes. That's what makes corporate taxes attractive from a nationalistic policy perspective; they are one of the most effective policy tools for reducing the portion of the domestic budget that must come out of the GDP.
I'm not arguing good versus bad with you (I actually lean toward eliminating corporate taxation, but for reasons different from yours). I'm passing on inforrmation you pick up when you study public finance in college.
A better solution would be for Italy to simply lower their taxes until it did NOT make business sense to go through such contortions to avoid them anymore.
The reason corporate taxes make sense, ultimately (in a purely nationalist sense), is to export a portion of your tax base. Take the United States as an example: Suppose a pure US-based company that is publicly traded; all its payroll taxes and all the income taxes of its employees come out of US pockets. The capital gains taxes that we collect are only on US-based stockholders. But the corporate taxes, those come out of all stockholders -- whether they are US-based or abroad. Corporate taxes are the most effective way to export our tax burden.
So that's the nationalist reason to have corporate taxes. The alternative is for domestic taxes to be higher. So if you just hate those nasty taxes, you should be in favor of domestic corporate taxation in whatever country you live -- it's the most effective way to shift your government budget service off-shore.
Not that I fully support that view from a global economist perspective, but you sound like one of those "Taxes are bad!" people; I thought you might want to know how corporate taxes in your nation actually reduce the portion of the total tax bill that you and your fellow citizens have to pay.
There is no "right" to use the govt to force one group of people to economically support another group.
That is a tricky hypothesis, because it implies that government force in an economic context equals one group supporting another group. Not always the case. When laissez-faire does not result in long-run GDP growth rate maximization relative to a well regulated market, it is the laissez-faire case that is more accurately described as one group economically supporting another.
An example of an unregulated market distortion resulting in one group economically supporting another is pharmaceuticals. Aggregate customer demand is highly inelastic (price tolerant), time sensitive, and poorly informed. The profit maximizing behavior for the pharmaceutical industry is to misrepresent the product and collude to raise prices. Government regulation forbidding such misrepresentation and price fixing increases market efficiency and hence increases long-run GDP growth. The relative increase in long-run GDP growth under the regulated market case is the measure of reduction in the incidence of sick people economically supporting pharmaceutical stockholders under the laissez-faire case.
That is just one example, there are many cases where a well regulated market results in faster sustainable GDP growth than does laissez-faire. In such instances, the long-run outcome for all market segments is greater in the long-run under the well-regulated case, and hence laissez-faire is nothing short of theft.
"I would argue that what effectiveness we have seen to date is totally irrelevant to how effective it might be in the future," he said. "This program, 215, has the ability to stop the next 9/11 and if you added emails in there it would make it even more effective. Had it been in place in 2000 and 2001, I think that probably 9/11 would not have happened."'
OK, let's take your utterly preposterous claim at face value. Let's say that this program would have prevented 9/11, and would prevent another 9/11 tomorrow, and has done fuck-all in between. That means we'd save 3,000 American lives every 12 years. Call it 3,600 to make the math easy. That's 300 lives per year. Against the 4th amendment. How does that price measure up against some of our other freedoms?
To retain the right to drive automobiles, we spend 34,000 lives per year.
To retain the right to drink alcohol, we spend 34,000 to 75,000 lives per year (depending on how you count alcohol-related accidents).
To retain the right to use tobacco, we spend 440,000 lives per year.
To retain the second amendment, we spend 30,000 lives per year.
To retain the right to be obese, we spend 300,000 lives per year.
With the possible exception of tobacco, I support the retention of all those rights. Three hundred per year for The Fourth Amendment (and the chilling effect on The First)? Even if his preposterous supposition were true, it would be a bargain at ten times the price compared to some of the other rights we hold dear.
The sum of money does seem low, but when an agency like the NSA comes calling, I have a feeling that it they make you a proposal you cannot refuse.
For putting it in, fine. But you don't take the blood money then claim you had no choice. Comply if you have no alternative, but once you take payment from a traitor you are the enemy.
[Google] wants you to have the ability to make the choice not to provide your data. To anyone, if that's what you want.
So why did they cut the Android privacy tool? When will it be restored?
Why did they subvert the Safari privacy preference?
Why do they use supercookies when the most probable intent of a person with cookies disabled is to not be tracked?
Does Google really hold the right to choose privacy sacred? Or do they serve other masters first? Know them by their actions, not their words.
Snowden's justification for his actions fall short of what a person truly concerned about civil liberties would have done. If I'm going to denounce my government's actions, I want the police to come. I want to be arrested, charged, and put on trial.
Two people prior to Snowden trusted the system, went through the official channels, and faced the music; William Binney and Thomas Drake. They were harrassed and prosecuted by the executive, marginalized and ignored by the major media. Their most significant achievement was making it clear to Snowden that he could not trust our legal system to seek truth and justice nor the old guard of the fourth estate to do its investigative duty.
I think we will see this feature enabled on later Android versions when they get to finish it and find ways to make old applications not crash when permissions are removed.
It is already known how to enable it without crashing the applications; return fake data. The cause of the app failure is not returning any data. There is a tool for returning fake data, which I think was briefly included in CyanogenMod. It causes apps that rely on the data for their revenue stream to continue operating without getting their payment (clean, marketable data). It was decided that tricking apps into operating was, in one way of thinking, using the software without the informed consent of the programmer -- something akin to misappropration -- and so it was removed.
You may not agree with that perspective, but it is the issue that Google is wrestling with: Should they facilitate the ability to prevent apps from knowing that they are not getting the clean data that they currently take as payment for producing the app?
In my opinion, our current standards for acquiring such data are extremely shady, relying heavily on a consumer base that is deeply misinformed of the extent of the surveillance and the risks the data stores pose. Where the balance of good lies between surveillance and countermeasures is hard to tell; it could be that subverting the datastream is pro-social in the long run -- but that is not the side on which Google's bread is buttered. They have a strong motive to see things from the app developers / watchers / revenue stream point of view. A great deal of money flows to Google from informed, uninformed, and misinformed consent to surveillance.
People confuse two groups: atheist and anti theist,
Don't forget antithesists, who believe in arguing about everything.
If I am Netflix, Google/YouTube, Amazon, etc. and an ISP comes to me asking for money for preferential treatment, I would just say: "Pay me $1/subscriber, or I will block your users from my site--you know, just like how you pay ESPN for their content..." I find it hard to believe these sites need ISPs more than ISPs need these sites.
That is precisely what will happen next. Of course, only the big players will have the guns to show down the ISPs; presto -- the big players will get best QoS and the indies will all have to pay or be put in the slow lane. One more hobble on small businesses and independent media; a bit less oxygen for disruptive competition.
The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, ... He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail.
I think that is the core difficulty in advancing the use of F/LOSS (in the US at least). We are so culturally indoctrinated to see money, and the single-minded pursuit of it, as the measure of success that it is institutionally difficult to grasp sacrificing money in the short run for freedom; regardless of the impact on our bottom line, society, or the larger economy in the long run. The American mindset believes freedom is good in theory, but fails to see that economic success is coupled to choosing freedom -- in a broader sense than the freedom to screw your putative customers -- over short-run revenue.
Wow, those are some seriously run-on sentences. Bite me, ... ummm, Sklansky and Malmuth? ... Case and Shiller? ... Black and Scholes? ... Ah, yes, I remember! Strunk and White! That's it. What was I talking about?
They were deliberately and knowingly sharing those files.
The "knowingly" part is the only question in my mind. From TFP:
had either inadvertently, or otherwise, made the information available for public download on a P2P network
"Inadvertently" is a big word. Does the same apply if there is a crack in your curtains through which the papers in your home can be seen? Or, as others have pointed out, does the same apply when a well-connected corporation inadvertently exposes their data to the public?
Yeah it sucks that only McDonalds can sell fast food on the Olympics venue, but can you really blame them for kicking out Joe the hot dog stand vendor? They paid the IOC huge bucks to become the official exclusive food sponsor.
That seems like asking whether we can really blame the RIAA for pursuing massive infringement penalties; after all, they paid Congress huge bucks to write the ridiculous laws.
Yes, you can blame McDonald's, and the RIAA, and Congress, and the IOC. They are all despots abusing power to misappropriate money.
Excellent post.
Anything else that we should educate people on?
How about offshoring their profits by paying massive "licensing fees" to empty offices in the Barbados so they don't have to chip in their share of taxes to support the economic system they bleed dry? ('course, this hardly sets them apart from any of the Fortune 500)
Just remember one thing about Atlas Shrugged: As mentioned in the preface, it's not about men as they are, it's men as they should be.
Interesting -- seems like under the premise "men as they should be", everything from pure socialism to pure laissez-faire, or from pure anarchy to pure autarchy, would work. Any system works if the actors are perfectly informed and benevolent.
Question 1: You see 5 pennies, the total in the cup is 6, so the missing part is 1 (penny). How hard can that possibly be?
Hard enough that you got it wrong. If you know that the outcome is six pennies in a cup, and you start with five pennies, the number of missing things is 2; one penny and one cup.
Not that I think this is any worse than when I was young. I remember having strenuous arguments about questions like these from my earliest years. Led to a deeply ingrained distrust of authority.
Hmmm, which I see as a good thing, so I guess I approve of these crappy tests. :)
Frankly, such a disposition on the part of the NSA is reasonable and shows to me the taxpayer that they are at least trying to do their job, even if the methods aren't reasonable for the average or the peoples of interest.
Similarly, understanding the development of the human genome, it is reasonable for 22 year olds to want to sleep with 17 year olds. Being good members of society, however, they do not. It is that restraint of our baser instincts in service of the common good that elevates us above the animals. The NSA has lost that restraint.
That guy exercised the *shit* out of his second amendment rights.
Seems you haven't read the amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
There are many who debate the nature of the right it does recognize, but few, if any, would argue that it documents a right to discharge their firearms in such a manner.
You might be referring to The Declaration, which does encumber citizens with a duty to use their arms in certain circumstances -- the reason the second exists -- but without a credible report of his motive, that angle is as yet unsupported (and I find it highly doubtful a priori).
Let's be honest, the outrage is simply the fact that the drawbacks of solar are being promulgated.
That is not honest. My displeasure with this is that they are funding intentional misrepresentation of solar. If the objective of 60 Plus were a more informed electorate, I would have no problem with it. It is not. Their approach is to distort perception in favor of a given viewpoint, because they know that is more cost effective than developing objectively informed skepticism. The problem is the propaganda, not the information.
Would these same politicians be outraged if this money went to a pro-solar entity?
I think you don't live in Arizona. We don't have a whole lot of political appointees with left-wing axes to grind. Ones that do don't have very long careers 'round these parts. What we do have is a lot of cranky old folks who don't like corruption.
In most cases, we could reduce environmental impact much more per dollar by investing in energy efficiency rather than solar.
You say that as though we should be spending money there instead of solar. That is a false dichotomy. We already do invest in efficiency programs; Energy Star, insulation programs, CFL and now LED stimulus, and many more. Solar is another path to future energy solutions. Funding only efficiency would be as stupid as your false implication that we are only funding solar.
Most residential solar units are installed by wealthier Americans who are taking advantage of huge tax incentives.
Solar installs are expensive, and the only way to get close to cost effective is to do a large scale install. Most of the taxpayer subsidized installs are going in on schools, libraries, and other public facilities, not rich people's houses. It's even happening right here in El Mirage, a heavily blue collar area.
Residential installs are happening here as well, though they are more common in wealthier neighborhoods. That is not because the rich are being targetted with huge tax incentives -- the tax incentives involved are a small portion of the total install cost. It is because the up-front cost of a solar install that is large enough to make sense is enormous. Economies of scale, not targeting of the rich, is what dictates that the people most able to foot the majority of the bill (with a small boost from tax incentives) to get us over the startup hurdles are the wealthy.
Or, more succinctly: You are a shill. Bugger off.