Handling cash as a merchant does not entail fees, per se, but it does entail costs. At a low end, bank deposits must be done, and that requires sending someone to the bank, diverting them from potentially better uses of their time and opens the possibility of robbery. At a high end, one might perform deposits using armored trucks, the services of which cost money. There's also the cost of securely storing the money in either a reinforced register or a safe, both of which cost money and are still subject to theft, and in some cases guards must be employed.
Remember that Spirit and Opportunity were expected to operate for at least 90 days. There's the conservative estimate for how long something should last, and there's how long it actually lasts after the mission starts.
There is work being done on the maintainable infrastructure, but it's mostly being done by private companies like Bigelow.
Ever walk up to a store where there's an armored truck idling outside? The crew is armed, and that's because the trucks are targets, with an attempt against them every so often. You don't see remotely that level of physical security involved with credit card transactions. Look at the marijuana stores in Colorado and Washington that have trouble getting bank accounts and consider the risks involved with all-cash transactions.
Your compromises almost exactly match mine (I wasn't lucky enough to be part of the Target breach, but it did happen with a small restaurant), and my wife was affected by the OPM breach. You can get your money back from credit card fraud, and for most people, the OPM hack was an inconvenience and some free credit monitoring. Security in general does have to get better, but it's still a far cry from the risks associated with carrying cash. Once cash is gone, it's gone. Maybe you get something back if you have insurance, but you're paying for that along the way.
Using an ATM card isn't any safer, with robberies involving forced ATM withdrawals happening frequently. Fraudulent activity is covered by banking regulations and FDIC insurance.
It's a different risk profile, but that does not necessarily mean more risk. In this case, the screen scraper app is going to hit far fewer users of the ATM than the card skimmer would, and it would probably be discovered quickly as the codes generated by an authorized user were used elsewhere and the user noticed money missing. Preventing this becomes fairly simple: make the code only work within some specific time and distance of where it was generated. If it has to be used within ten minutes and five miles of being generated, it's much harder to use even if the phone is compromised. If it's not used, it become invalid and has to be regenerated.
The phones are cheap, plans are prepaid (and cheap), it's safer than carrying cash, and the mobile networks are ubiquitous. While the US has only recently been getting on board with transferring money by phones, much of Africa has been doing it for years.
Example: A Samsung Note 2 (not the latest and greatest, but still a decent phone) from Jumia Kenya is 550 Kenyan shillings. According to xe.com, that's about US$5.39, based on an exchange rate of about 102 Ksh to the US dollar.
Being poor doesn't mean being disconnected. Poverty hasn't been a barrier to mobile phone use in other parts of the world for many years. Even in Afghanistan, cell phone towers are common even in the remote regions, because they get used.
The banking apps I have on my phone don't allow persistent login, and automatically log out after a certain period of time without activity (and it's not very long). Someone would have to swipe the phone while it's logged in and continue performing activity within the app along the way to the ATM for that to work. It's not impossible, but it makes for a targeted attack, which lowers the odds of it happening.
Pro athletes being barred from the Olympics hasn't been a thing for many years, and the early requirement for amateur status is alleged to have kept the competition among the wealthy (or at least those sponsored by the wealthy), as the poor couldn't afford the time off of work to train, especially when the modern Olympics began and work days and weeks were very long.
It was common early on until people (rightfully) started getting concerned about the possibility of device tracking, and it's probably still used in some devices. By the time it started getting implemented at any real scale, privacy extensions became the norm.
The concept has been extended to other areas, too. Apple added it to iOS MAC addressing for hotspot detection (though the real MAC address is used for the actual connection), and the concept has been proposed for IEEE adoption in the 802.11 spec except that each connection would get a random MAC address, too. The concern is exactly the same: the ease of tracking people through unique identifiers they carry with them wherever they go.
They did away with private addressing (site-local) "because it breaks the openness of the internet and firewalls". Tell that one to someone who's seen hackers use a Java-based PS2 Video broadcasting software to send files across the internet. Lets automatically use public addresses on air-gapped networks.
RFC 1918 addresses were a kludgy solution to problematic address assignment early on, and a recognition that the IPv4 address space was too finite for even the conservative growth forecasts of the time. Its use as a security feature has created a long-running debate about whether it really is a security feature (it's not, though it has some beneficial side effects). Even with that ugly history, IPv6 does include private addressing options in the form of Unique Local IPv6 Unicast Addresses (RFC 4193), and are within the address space fc00::/7, though only fd00::/8 is really designed for internal networking use at this point. Use of Unique Local Addressing is discouraged for networks connected to the Internet in favor of real firewalls.
The standard has changed so many times in the last 10 years nobody can comprehend it; every book has a different set of material on it, every programmer has set their infrastructure up differently.
This is a running problem, but things have stabilized over the last few years as larger implementations have been rolled out, which have resulted in significant synchronizations between different groups. Documentation still requires a lot of work, and there's some horrifically bad stuff out there from more than a decade ago, but it's getting better.
They did away with IPV4's simplistic subnetting and supernetting, and introduced EUI-64 addressing which can track devices as they move from network to network. Marketing companies like Google and Microsoft were helping to write the standard.
EUI-64 hasn't been the default method of assigning the addresses for several years now, with privacy extensions (RFC 4941) taking precedence. At least since Windows 7 (and maybe Vista), Windows has used randomly generated temporary addresses that are regenerated regularly. Once an address is no longer needed (no existing connections, no listeners, etc.), it's dropped completely. A computer may have several IPv6 addresses at one time for this reason: my primary Windows system currently has eight addresses, six of them deprecated, and none an EUI-64 address. EUI-64 addressing can be enabled, but it's not the default.
Apple also generates temporary addresses, though it also uses an EUI-64 address. However, the temporary address is the preferred one, and the one that's used for initiating outbound connections. Same thing happens with Linux, at least with Debian 8, and I believe iOS and Android do the same thing. (My iPhone running v9.2 does, anyway.)
Very Few large deployments.
Slowly changing. Comcast has one of the biggest IPv6 rollouts in place, and AT&T also has it widespread. Google claims that 10% of its global traffic and 23% of US traffic comes from native IPv6 sources. There's still plenty of room to grow, but it won't be too much longer until we're at a tipping point.
The Good:
Better for networks with large numbers of hosts: Usually you don't make a broadcast domain any larger than a/22 block (1024 addresses). IPv6 breaks that mold.
Technically, there are no broadcast domains in IPv6, as broadcast was removed in favor of multicast. However, you're right about larger networks being possible. Whether this is a good thing depends greatly on the circumstances. It might be a good idea to set up a giant mesh network across a campus sharing the same giant subnet and allowing many thousands of devices within that subnet, but smaller subnets may still have their uses in tighter confinements (though this may increase the odds
I think the accumulation of power and loyalty required to make for a quick coup that doesn't spill over is the kind of thing that leads to executions (like what apparently just happened to Ri Yong Gil). If it's made clear that the elite are going to fall, they might take as much with them as they can. The orders may be internal, but it will almost certainly spill over, especially if someone decides that it's a South Korean/US plot to overthrow the government.
North Korea is more rational than most people tend to believe, but not rational to the level that, say, Iran is (and they're far more rational than people tend to believe). They do believe the world is out to get them, but they also know enough not to pull the trigger themselves unless there's no other choice--though that may include taking the nation down with them if someone tries a coup.
Absent an enlightened successor to Kim Jong-Un in about 30 years, any shift in that impoverished country is likely to be bloody, violent, and involve a lot of carnage outside its borders.
The US doesn't have nuclear weapons there now, but did deploy them in South Korea in the 1950s. It even made a point of announcing it, which the North Koreans took rather badly. South Korea is reportedly nuclear-free and has been for decades, but at one point, yeah, there were nuclear weapons present.
The only vaguely viable weapons were sealed by inspectors and awaiting destruction, and were verified as still sealed and awaiting destruction after the war. What few free weapons showed up had been buried and largely forgotten and were decades past their shelf lives.
It's more that the US isn't willing to do anything about it because it guarantees thousands to hundreds of thousands of dead allies and unpredictable results for geopolitical balance in the region. By chiding them publicly, it sets up a history of warnings in case something does happen, but lets all those people keep living for now.
Also, South Korea doesn't want to fight over it, preferring to wait until the regime collapses on itself and then figuring out how to clean up that mess, which would be easier than cleaning up that mess plus the leftovers from a war.
It's not a direct read, but the idea is the same. You're thinking of a letter, and your attention goes to the letter on the screen even if your eyes don't move at all (they mention this for use in locked-in syndrome, where there's no voluntary movement at all). The iris responds to a lesser degree than it would if it were to center on the letter, but it still responds to the brightness, an involuntary movement based on a thought.
It's not a direct brain interface, but it makes for an indirect one through. A reading of what the subject is thinking, even at so rudimentary a level as a binary choice like this, without relying on a conscious physical action can be seen as a form of brain interface.
Hawking still uses a system activated by a muscle in his cheek, one of the few over which he still has some level of control, which is then detected by an IR sensor in his glasses. Earlier versions used a small joystick while he still had some control over a few fingers (or maybe it was just one), but the system has been adapted as he's lost more and more control.
This system might allow him to continue working even if he loses the last vestiges of control over his facial muscles.
If the response after the sexual activity is to get up, put clothes back on, head out, and pretend that nothing happened, that doesn't mean that rape didn't happen. The only point at issue is if consent was given (and it can be implied by activity). If consent was not given, it's rape.
My experience is that this isn't limited to radical conservatives. There are plenty of people on the left that have the same reaction. I think it's innate to humans in general to rebel to being told they're wrong.
Activities after rape should not be used to determine if rape occurred. Some people sit in the corner and cry, some get on with their lives.
Nonconsensual sex is rape. Whether Assange is guilty of it isn't for me (or you) to determine. That's a matter for the courts. There's a lot of blame to go around for how this has been handled.
I respect Assange's determination; I really didn't think he'd last very long before giving up, but he's sticking this out far longer than most believed he would. I also am not opposed to his mission, though it's still pretty one-sided against the US government and some of the things he's claimed have been in cables aren't really what's being said. I'd like to see more from other countries, particularly those in Africa and Asia. Still, I think he's far too stuck on the idea that the Swedes would turn him over to the US government when the UK's extradition treaty is far easier to use, though I don't think he's done anything wrong under US law as he wasn't in the US when he received the information, he's not a US citizen or resident, and he holds no loyalties to the country. Maybe there's an argument for incitement, but that requires some pretty significant proof, and courts (with tons of amici filings by media organizations) may not be keen to agree on that abridgment of free speech. Arguments for damage to national security are similarly thin, especially given the claims of damage in the Pentagon Papers and other
I don't know enough about Swedish law to determine whether the prosecutor could travel to another country for the required interview; I've seen claims that they can or can't, that it's OK under some circumstances but not others. Perhaps it's a point of principle to not do it under circumstances where the accused has such a high degree of control; if he were questioned in the embassy and charges were filed, would he then give up, or would he continue his fugitive status?
Even if Sweden drops the charges (or he waits them out completely), he's not leaving the embassy without getting arrested for bail jumping. He's almost certain to get the maximum sentence (one year) for doing so, and to spend it incarcerated. Once that's finished, I expect he'll be deported to Australia (which I believe also has an easily-implemented extradition treaty with the US), and that relatively few countries will accept him in the future, assuming Australia doesn't revoke his passport. Ecuador might take him in (though the Australian government and those of the nations surrounding Ecuador could make this difficult even if Ecuador did issue travel papers), but that may change with the 2017 elections, since Rafael Correa is term-limited to two terms under the 2008 constitution (he was first elected under that constitution in 2009 and re-elected in 2013).
Whatever happens, it is unlikely that any court, in whatever country, is going to ever grant him bail in the future.
That was essentially how the Constitution originally worked, albeit through electoral votes. However, it creates a great deal of uncertainty. An elected president gives people an idea of what to expect for the next four years, at least in terms of what will be attempted. The potentially complete change of policy should the vice president become president could undermine plans made based on those expectations.
A pure democracy wouldn't work well in any case other than very small systems of government. Especially in a modern society, there are simply too many issues before the Congress overall, let alone all the states, for the people as a whole to understand what they'd be voting on. (I'm aware that members of Congress often have not actually read the bills involved, but theoretically, they're a group that has the time to understand what's before them. What we're talking about here is largely theoretical anyway.)
We see this in the regulatory environment. The reasons that the FCC, FAA, EPA, and others get authority to create regulatory law is because even Congress knows that it can't understand the nuances of these fields and so provides for agencies to handle the law themselves within certain boundaries. If they go beyond the boundaries, Congress can rein them in.
Other than representative democracy, I don't see means by which this situation could get better. Representative democracies are subject to manipulation, but every so often, enough people get upset at the status quo that changes happen. We saw this to a small extent in the US with the Tea Party, and the fragmtentation of the Republican Party for the 2016 presidential election suggests that it's ongoing or even expanding. Were a fragmentation like that to happen simultaneously in the Democratic Party, it might actually kick some major changes into happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Handling cash as a merchant does not entail fees, per se, but it does entail costs. At a low end, bank deposits must be done, and that requires sending someone to the bank, diverting them from potentially better uses of their time and opens the possibility of robbery. At a high end, one might perform deposits using armored trucks, the services of which cost money. There's also the cost of securely storing the money in either a reinforced register or a safe, both of which cost money and are still subject to theft, and in some cases guards must be employed.
Remember that Spirit and Opportunity were expected to operate for at least 90 days. There's the conservative estimate for how long something should last, and there's how long it actually lasts after the mission starts.
There is work being done on the maintainable infrastructure, but it's mostly being done by private companies like Bigelow.
Ever walk up to a store where there's an armored truck idling outside? The crew is armed, and that's because the trucks are targets, with an attempt against them every so often. You don't see remotely that level of physical security involved with credit card transactions. Look at the marijuana stores in Colorado and Washington that have trouble getting bank accounts and consider the risks involved with all-cash transactions.
Your compromises almost exactly match mine (I wasn't lucky enough to be part of the Target breach, but it did happen with a small restaurant), and my wife was affected by the OPM breach. You can get your money back from credit card fraud, and for most people, the OPM hack was an inconvenience and some free credit monitoring. Security in general does have to get better, but it's still a far cry from the risks associated with carrying cash. Once cash is gone, it's gone. Maybe you get something back if you have insurance, but you're paying for that along the way.
That makes it even more secure.
There are targeted attacks where people are told to withdraw some amount of money from the bank or their loved ones suffer the consequences.
Two cases here from 2015:
http://legacy.wbir.com/story/n...
http://www.mansfieldnewsjourna...
And here's one from 1992:
http://www.deseretnews.com/art...
Using an ATM card isn't any safer, with robberies involving forced ATM withdrawals happening frequently. Fraudulent activity is covered by banking regulations and FDIC insurance.
It's a different risk profile, but that does not necessarily mean more risk. In this case, the screen scraper app is going to hit far fewer users of the ATM than the card skimmer would, and it would probably be discovered quickly as the codes generated by an authorized user were used elsewhere and the user noticed money missing. Preventing this becomes fairly simple: make the code only work within some specific time and distance of where it was generated. If it has to be used within ten minutes and five miles of being generated, it's much harder to use even if the phone is compromised. If it's not used, it become invalid and has to be regenerated.
The phones are cheap, plans are prepaid (and cheap), it's safer than carrying cash, and the mobile networks are ubiquitous. While the US has only recently been getting on board with transferring money by phones, much of Africa has been doing it for years.
Example: A Samsung Note 2 (not the latest and greatest, but still a decent phone) from Jumia Kenya is 550 Kenyan shillings. According to xe.com, that's about US$5.39, based on an exchange rate of about 102 Ksh to the US dollar.
Being poor doesn't mean being disconnected. Poverty hasn't been a barrier to mobile phone use in other parts of the world for many years. Even in Afghanistan, cell phone towers are common even in the remote regions, because they get used.
The banking apps I have on my phone don't allow persistent login, and automatically log out after a certain period of time without activity (and it's not very long). Someone would have to swipe the phone while it's logged in and continue performing activity within the app along the way to the ATM for that to work. It's not impossible, but it makes for a targeted attack, which lowers the odds of it happening.
Pro athletes being barred from the Olympics hasn't been a thing for many years, and the early requirement for amateur status is alleged to have kept the competition among the wealthy (or at least those sponsored by the wealthy), as the poor couldn't afford the time off of work to train, especially when the modern Olympics began and work days and weeks were very long.
It was common early on until people (rightfully) started getting concerned about the possibility of device tracking, and it's probably still used in some devices. By the time it started getting implemented at any real scale, privacy extensions became the norm.
The concept has been extended to other areas, too. Apple added it to iOS MAC addressing for hotspot detection (though the real MAC address is used for the actual connection), and the concept has been proposed for IEEE adoption in the 802.11 spec except that each connection would get a random MAC address, too. The concern is exactly the same: the ease of tracking people through unique identifiers they carry with them wherever they go.
RFC 1918 addresses were a kludgy solution to problematic address assignment early on, and a recognition that the IPv4 address space was too finite for even the conservative growth forecasts of the time. Its use as a security feature has created a long-running debate about whether it really is a security feature (it's not, though it has some beneficial side effects). Even with that ugly history, IPv6 does include private addressing options in the form of Unique Local IPv6 Unicast Addresses (RFC 4193), and are within the address space fc00::/7, though only fd00::/8 is really designed for internal networking use at this point. Use of Unique Local Addressing is discouraged for networks connected to the Internet in favor of real firewalls.
This is a running problem, but things have stabilized over the last few years as larger implementations have been rolled out, which have resulted in significant synchronizations between different groups. Documentation still requires a lot of work, and there's some horrifically bad stuff out there from more than a decade ago, but it's getting better.
EUI-64 hasn't been the default method of assigning the addresses for several years now, with privacy extensions (RFC 4941) taking precedence. At least since Windows 7 (and maybe Vista), Windows has used randomly generated temporary addresses that are regenerated regularly. Once an address is no longer needed (no existing connections, no listeners, etc.), it's dropped completely. A computer may have several IPv6 addresses at one time for this reason: my primary Windows system currently has eight addresses, six of them deprecated, and none an EUI-64 address. EUI-64 addressing can be enabled, but it's not the default.
Apple also generates temporary addresses, though it also uses an EUI-64 address. However, the temporary address is the preferred one, and the one that's used for initiating outbound connections. Same thing happens with Linux, at least with Debian 8, and I believe iOS and Android do the same thing. (My iPhone running v9.2 does, anyway.)
Slowly changing. Comcast has one of the biggest IPv6 rollouts in place, and AT&T also has it widespread. Google claims that 10% of its global traffic and 23% of US traffic comes from native IPv6 sources. There's still plenty of room to grow, but it won't be too much longer until we're at a tipping point.
The Good:
Technically, there are no broadcast domains in IPv6, as broadcast was removed in favor of multicast. However, you're right about larger networks being possible. Whether this is a good thing depends greatly on the circumstances. It might be a good idea to set up a giant mesh network across a campus sharing the same giant subnet and allowing many thousands of devices within that subnet, but smaller subnets may still have their uses in tighter confinements (though this may increase the odds
I think the accumulation of power and loyalty required to make for a quick coup that doesn't spill over is the kind of thing that leads to executions (like what apparently just happened to Ri Yong Gil). If it's made clear that the elite are going to fall, they might take as much with them as they can. The orders may be internal, but it will almost certainly spill over, especially if someone decides that it's a South Korean/US plot to overthrow the government.
It could remain contained, but I'm not hopeful.
North Korea is more rational than most people tend to believe, but not rational to the level that, say, Iran is (and they're far more rational than people tend to believe). They do believe the world is out to get them, but they also know enough not to pull the trigger themselves unless there's no other choice--though that may include taking the nation down with them if someone tries a coup.
Absent an enlightened successor to Kim Jong-Un in about 30 years, any shift in that impoverished country is likely to be bloody, violent, and involve a lot of carnage outside its borders.
The US doesn't have nuclear weapons there now, but did deploy them in South Korea in the 1950s. It even made a point of announcing it, which the North Koreans took rather badly. South Korea is reportedly nuclear-free and has been for decades, but at one point, yeah, there were nuclear weapons present.
The only vaguely viable weapons were sealed by inspectors and awaiting destruction, and were verified as still sealed and awaiting destruction after the war. What few free weapons showed up had been buried and largely forgotten and were decades past their shelf lives.
The two Koreas have an armistice and are legally still at war. The United States was never in a declared war with North Korea.
It's more that the US isn't willing to do anything about it because it guarantees thousands to hundreds of thousands of dead allies and unpredictable results for geopolitical balance in the region. By chiding them publicly, it sets up a history of warnings in case something does happen, but lets all those people keep living for now.
Also, South Korea doesn't want to fight over it, preferring to wait until the regime collapses on itself and then figuring out how to clean up that mess, which would be easier than cleaning up that mess plus the leftovers from a war.
It's not a direct read, but the idea is the same. You're thinking of a letter, and your attention goes to the letter on the screen even if your eyes don't move at all (they mention this for use in locked-in syndrome, where there's no voluntary movement at all). The iris responds to a lesser degree than it would if it were to center on the letter, but it still responds to the brightness, an involuntary movement based on a thought.
It's not a direct brain interface, but it makes for an indirect one through. A reading of what the subject is thinking, even at so rudimentary a level as a binary choice like this, without relying on a conscious physical action can be seen as a form of brain interface.
Hawking still uses a system activated by a muscle in his cheek, one of the few over which he still has some level of control, which is then detected by an IR sensor in his glasses. Earlier versions used a small joystick while he still had some control over a few fingers (or maybe it was just one), but the system has been adapted as he's lost more and more control.
This system might allow him to continue working even if he loses the last vestiges of control over his facial muscles.
If the response after the sexual activity is to get up, put clothes back on, head out, and pretend that nothing happened, that doesn't mean that rape didn't happen. The only point at issue is if consent was given (and it can be implied by activity). If consent was not given, it's rape.
My experience is that this isn't limited to radical conservatives. There are plenty of people on the left that have the same reaction. I think it's innate to humans in general to rebel to being told they're wrong.
Activities after rape should not be used to determine if rape occurred. Some people sit in the corner and cry, some get on with their lives.
Nonconsensual sex is rape. Whether Assange is guilty of it isn't for me (or you) to determine. That's a matter for the courts. There's a lot of blame to go around for how this has been handled.
I respect Assange's determination; I really didn't think he'd last very long before giving up, but he's sticking this out far longer than most believed he would. I also am not opposed to his mission, though it's still pretty one-sided against the US government and some of the things he's claimed have been in cables aren't really what's being said. I'd like to see more from other countries, particularly those in Africa and Asia. Still, I think he's far too stuck on the idea that the Swedes would turn him over to the US government when the UK's extradition treaty is far easier to use, though I don't think he's done anything wrong under US law as he wasn't in the US when he received the information, he's not a US citizen or resident, and he holds no loyalties to the country. Maybe there's an argument for incitement, but that requires some pretty significant proof, and courts (with tons of amici filings by media organizations) may not be keen to agree on that abridgment of free speech. Arguments for damage to national security are similarly thin, especially given the claims of damage in the Pentagon Papers and other
I don't know enough about Swedish law to determine whether the prosecutor could travel to another country for the required interview; I've seen claims that they can or can't, that it's OK under some circumstances but not others. Perhaps it's a point of principle to not do it under circumstances where the accused has such a high degree of control; if he were questioned in the embassy and charges were filed, would he then give up, or would he continue his fugitive status?
Even if Sweden drops the charges (or he waits them out completely), he's not leaving the embassy without getting arrested for bail jumping. He's almost certain to get the maximum sentence (one year) for doing so, and to spend it incarcerated. Once that's finished, I expect he'll be deported to Australia (which I believe also has an easily-implemented extradition treaty with the US), and that relatively few countries will accept him in the future, assuming Australia doesn't revoke his passport. Ecuador might take him in (though the Australian government and those of the nations surrounding Ecuador could make this difficult even if Ecuador did issue travel papers), but that may change with the 2017 elections, since Rafael Correa is term-limited to two terms under the 2008 constitution (he was first elected under that constitution in 2009 and re-elected in 2013).
Whatever happens, it is unlikely that any court, in whatever country, is going to ever grant him bail in the future.
OK, you've sliced about 2% of the voting age population out of the voting pool. How much does this actually change things?
That was essentially how the Constitution originally worked, albeit through electoral votes. However, it creates a great deal of uncertainty. An elected president gives people an idea of what to expect for the next four years, at least in terms of what will be attempted. The potentially complete change of policy should the vice president become president could undermine plans made based on those expectations.
A pure democracy wouldn't work well in any case other than very small systems of government. Especially in a modern society, there are simply too many issues before the Congress overall, let alone all the states, for the people as a whole to understand what they'd be voting on. (I'm aware that members of Congress often have not actually read the bills involved, but theoretically, they're a group that has the time to understand what's before them. What we're talking about here is largely theoretical anyway.)
We see this in the regulatory environment. The reasons that the FCC, FAA, EPA, and others get authority to create regulatory law is because even Congress knows that it can't understand the nuances of these fields and so provides for agencies to handle the law themselves within certain boundaries. If they go beyond the boundaries, Congress can rein them in.
Other than representative democracy, I don't see means by which this situation could get better. Representative democracies are subject to manipulation, but every so often, enough people get upset at the status quo that changes happen. We saw this to a small extent in the US with the Tea Party, and the fragmtentation of the Republican Party for the 2016 presidential election suggests that it's ongoing or even expanding. Were a fragmentation like that to happen simultaneously in the Democratic Party, it might actually kick some major changes into happening.