Except that we know for sure that the NSA has made breakthroughs in the past, putting them years ahead of academia in cryptanalysis. They knew about differential cryptanalysis before it was officially discovered. Bruce Schneier points out that according to documents leaked by Snowden, the NSA's "research and development" budget for cryptanalysis is more than is being spent on cryptanalysis research by all of academia combined.
So what can they offer? A larger budget for your research than you would ever get in a university setting, plus no "publish or perish" pressures, no having to spend time teaching classes, and working with other people who are also on the cutting edge of cryptologic research. The NSA is also known to have their own chip fabrication facilities, so they can create custom hardware - which isn't something you're generally going to get to work with on a university budget.
"in really big cities nobody drives because there's so much traffic".
Have you actually thought about that statement? If no one drives, what exactly is all that traffic? Or do you believe that there are millions of driverless cars wandering around on the streets out there?
Top recorded speed of a Nissan GTR: 195 mph (Nissan estimates 193 mph top speed). Top speed of a Lotus Elise: 148 mph. Also, note the phrase "The firm intends to enter the vehicle into next year's Le Mans 24 race" in the summary. It looks like a Le Mans car because that's what it's meant to be.
This is not a right of the states, though. The Constitution states that "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State." Thus, if you have been married in one state, every other state must recognize your marriage - that's the "full credit".
Further, it states that "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States." That is, no state can choose to take away the rights that the states in general have agreed that citizens have.
The states in ratifying the Constitution agreed to these terms. They gave up certain rights in order to join the Union. It's no different from a person entering a binding contract - the states have to play by the rules they agreed to.
DOMA attempts to say that the states don't have to obey these provisions of the Constitution when it comes to marriage. The people putting DOMA forward seem to have forgotten that the Constitution overrides any contradictory law, and the only way around that is to amend it.
I can't speak to the logic behind it, but yes, that's equally illegal. The FCC regulations say that anything designed to "obscure the meaning" of communication is prohibited on amateur radio.
It's been generally held, though, that secure authentication is okay - the meaning there is "prove you are who you say you are", "this is my proof", "okay, accepted" (or "sorry, rejected"). As long as it's possible to tell that that's the gist of the communication, obscuring what one would need to know to prove it is okay.
That's about exporting encryption. It has nothing to do with amateur radio. For that, you need to check out FCC title 47 CFR, part 97. That says that anything that "obscures the meaning" of communication is not allowed unless specifically stated in part 97.
That doesn't mean everything has to be plaintext, though. It's been generally held that secure authentication methods are okay, for example. Thus, you can use challenge-response authentication, public key authentication, or other such things, even though those involve encryption. In such a case, the actual meaning of the communication is: "prove you are who you say you are", followed by "here's my proof".
It'll be interesting to see if the FCC will allow it. I do agree with you, though, that it's foolish to fight against allowing encryption; if the government doesn't want to allow it, they simply won't. It's well established in US law that being able to communicate via amateur radio is not a right - if it were, amateur radio operators wouldn't have to be licensed.
And? I didn't say that they were. Regardless of how the US treats the people there, though, it's still a US territory. The people he sold to were undercover Federal agents. I'll admit that I'm only presuming that they're US citizens, but that seems a reasonably safe presumption.
You might want to re-read the article. He was arrested in Saipan, with is an island in the Pacific... and a US Territory. Thus, he was arrested by the US, for selling to US citizens while on US soil.
Basically, he got greedy and decided the potential gain was worth the risk that it was a set-up, and bet wrongly.
The monster that was created against the foes of both World Wars has turned against the society that created it. It's become the reason for its own existence.
Mine was down this morning, but I can ping my home box and SSH to it now from work. Looks like it's fixed in my area (Tallahassee, Florida). My past experience is that CenturyLink is reliable - at least, more so than Comcast, which is my only other broadband option that doesn't involve satellite or the like.
So... you agree that no one can use an iPad for document creation, because it doesn't work for you?
Way to over-generalize. For me, I bought an Apple Wireless Keyboard (http://www.apple.com/keyboard/) to use with mine. Since my home computer is an Imac, it's quite literally the exact same keyboard I use on my desktop. It's a bit longer than the iPad, but it's light and tough - I've dropped it in parking lots several times, and never had a problem from it.
I use it for emails, and for writing stories, using an editor that saves RTF and can use Google Drive or Dropbox (and some others as well, but those are the two I use with it). There are also ones that will save Word format.
Basically, Bill's complaint boils down to "Nobody should be using an iPad for document creation, because we haven't created a version of Word for it yet!"
Quibble: the state doesn't 'allow' gambling on Indian reservations. It has no power to stop it. The Supreme Court has held that states do not have power to regulate activities performed by Indians on Indian reservations.
Sure, I can look up directions before I start driving. However, then, if the directions are more than moderately complex, I need to write them down or print them out... which means having one or more pieces of paper that I will need to consult while driving. That leaves me a choice of either finding somewhere to pull over every time I need to glance at the directions to see what I need to look for next, or pick up and look at a piece of paper while operating a moving vehicle.
With a GPS, on the other hand, I can let it essentially act as navigator for me, telling me when I'm getting close to somewhere that I need to turn, which way to turn, what street name I'm looking for, etc. With a GPS that does that decently, I never actually have to look at the GPS at all while driving, nor take a hand off the wheel.
Further, using a GPS is superior to pre-looked-up directions in several ways: 1. Detours happen. There might be road work being done, an accident, or heavy traffic that I have to find a route around.
(Indeed, one of my brothers uses a GPS to get around Atlanta, in spite of having lived there for more than twenty years now. When I was up visiting him, I kidded him about it, saying, 'Don't you know your way around here yet?' His reply was: 'Sure, I know all the roads. But the GPS knows where all the traffic backups are right now.' I have another brother who also lives in Atlanta, who uses his own knowledge of the roads to get around. After riding around with him a while, I quickly saw the wisdom of the first brother's statement.)
2. Related to detours, if I miss a turn or need to go off-route to get food, gas, or something else, the GPS can smoothly handle the change, giving me a different route. A good one won't just say 'make a u-turn now' - it'll find a new route that won't require me to do something quite so drastic. And speaking of food and gas...
3. A good GPS will also have a database of points of interest, including gas stations, restaurants, etc. This is very useful information on a long trip through unfamiliar territory. And yes, some maps have that information as well... but you're the one who insisted that directions need to be looked up beforehand. If I look at a map while on the trip, that's not looking up directions beforehand. And speaking of that....
4. Plans change. I get a call while on the way up to Atlanta telling me that the brother I was going to stay with has had an emergency, and need to go to my other brother's house instead. Only he's in a new house, in a new neighborhood, so I don't already know how to get there. Or my wife gets sick on our five-day trip, and I need to find a clinic she can go to. Or I find out that an old friend I haven't seen in a decade or so is in the city, and need to get somewhere to meet him. Not everyone has the luxury of always planning out their itinerary ahead of time... and sometimes it even changes while you're in the car driving.
So the upshot is... yeah, I can do that. I did do it for many years, since I was driving long before consumer-level GPSes. But why would I go back to doing that, when using a GPS is so much better?
... which is not what you said before. But, now that you've decided to change your tune, we can now extend this back:
A democracy in which the majority do not obey the laws, but require a minority to obey them, is a tyranny. A democracy in which the majority make harsh laws that they are not subjected to is a tyranny.
See? The same rules that apply to a king apply to the majority in a democracy. Thus, a democracy can be a tyranny, just as an absolute monarch can be a tyrant, even though there is no legal restraint on his power.
Look carefully at your argument. You start with "by the (sic) definition the rightful rulers of a democracy are the people, the majority. A tyranny is a regimen where the power has been taken from its rightfully (sic) rulers and its ruler is not subjected to any law or constitution."
Let's examine where this logically leads us: By definition, the rightful rulers of a hereditary monarchy are those of a certain bloodline. By your argument, a hereditary monarch can't be a tyrant - after all, he or she is the rightful ruler, and your argument states that tyranny only exists when power has been taken away from the rightful rulers. By definition, the rightful rulers of a theocracy are the priestly class. So, by your argument, a theocracy can't be a tyranny.
Quite simply, your definition of what it takes to be a tyranny makes no sense.
And it wasn't WikiLeaks who published the unedited cables. Wikileaks was careful to redact the ones they published.
You might want to check facts before speaking, although around here that's obviously not a requirement for an "Informative" rated post. I read a LOT of those cables, and frankly speaking most of them were boring drivel that didn't have anything to do with any wars at all, and didn't reveal any kind of criminal activity.
So... I take it you don't know what "redact" means? Because nothing you said there contradicts what the poster you're replying to said.
The point is that if the NYT had received a mass of cables, they would have picked through them to identify the ones which actually had newsworthy material.
And that's just the thing. They would have picked through to identify what they thought was newsworthy. And since human labor is expensive, they probably would have done it by a bunch of keyword searches, then reading the ones that the searches caught on - or, more likely, getting some interns to read those.
By publishing all the cables, Wikileaks allowed the public to determine for themselves what is and isn't important, and allowed a "many eyeballs see all things" approach.
And if they would have posted the infamous "helicopter video" they'd have published the whole thing instead of editing it down to make it look worse like Assange did.
Don't know anything about that, so can't comment on it.
The world needs a NEUTRAL place for leaks and whistleblowing, not a site used to pump a particular political agenda, which is what Wikileaks has become.
Until someone starts one, though, Wikileaks is what we have. Anyone who wants to make a leak site with another slant is free to - having multiple ones would be a good thing!
The article explains that the application works like this: you have to start off by IDing your friend to it. It then analyzes the clothing they're wearing and their dimensions. When you want to look for them, it scans for a match, and picks out the person (or what could potentially be the person) for you.
The article goes on to mention a couple of reasons that they chose to do it this way: one is to protect privacy! By not using facial recognition, they make sure that the app can't easily be pre-loaded with a database of people and look for them all the time. For another, humans are already good at facial recognition. If you can see your friend's face, there's a good chance that you'll recognize them. This, however, helps when you're scanning the crowd and their back might be to you.
Honestly, it sounds like a good idea to me. Sure, it's going to have problems if you're surrounded by identically-dressed people, but you're not left any worse off by that than you were without it. Since it uses their bodily dimensions as well, it may still be of some use. And I know from times that I've been shopping with my wife and was looking for her that I, personally, have a horrible memory for what people are wearing. If I see her face, sure, I'll recognize her - but I often find myself remembering not the outfit she was wearing today, but the one she was wearing yesterday, or the one she was wearing when I met her for lunch.....
Okay, so... thanks for demonstrating that you're a moron.
First off, your association of "mailing lists" with illegal activities. The mailing lists that the poster is referring to aren't the ones spammers use - they're the ones that people use to communicate with others with similar interests. Generally, the mailing list software runs on a server, and people can sign up for the list. When someone sends an email to the list, everyone who has signed up for the list gets it. The members can choose to leave the list at any time.
Historically, most mailing list software worked via email commands - you would send a message to the list to ask to subscribe to it, and the list software would automatically add you. When you wished to leave, you sent a message asking to unsubscribe. These days, a lot of software also offers a web interface.
Conceptually, this is similar to web forums; the difference is that the message comes to your email, instead of you having to go to a web site to read it, and you can reply by email, instead of replying through a web site. There are many non-profit organizations that also still use these to communicate with people, because right now it's very inexpensive, and it doesn't require that their supporters regularly visit a web site. If you have announcements to send out, but only have a dozen or so a year, it makes a lot more sense than putting them out through a web forum.
The existence of mailing lists raises a question, though - who's responsible for paying the tax? The person who sent the original email sends one email; the mailing list server sends hundreds or thousands.
But wait, there's more! What about mailboxes that go to multiple people? For example, if you send mail to "tech@(the company I work for)", your email actually goes to about half a dozen people. Should you be charged for each of those? If you answer 'yes', then every time anyone sends an email, they're taking an unknown risk - they don't know how many copies of that email will actually be generated, so they don't know what it will cost.
How about internal email? The vast majority of email doesn't go across the Internet at all - most companies send much, much more internal email than they do external email. Will that be taxed? If so, how, and how will it be enforced?
Which brings up the whole problem of enforcement. You say to have a code number in each email, and have email software reject email without the code. First off, where are the code numbers going to be issued from? If there's a single web site to get the code numbers from, then congratulations - you've just created a single point of failure for all email on the Internet. Second, how are these numbers going to be verified? If it's a simple checksum sort of check, ways will be found to generate fake 'valid' codes. If the mail software has to contact someplace to find out whether the code is valid, you're opening up the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks (someone faking either a 'valid' or 'invalid' response), and, again, adding a point of failure to the email system.
Further, where is this software going to come from? Someone has to write it, and has to write versions that will work with every suite of mail server software that exists - unless you're also going to mandate restrictions on what mail server software people can run, in which case be prepared for a huge second tax there, as software companies lobby to have their software be the only approved mail server software.
Going to this specific case, though - this isn't the US government proposing this. It's a city council. They have no legal power to enforce their laws on anyone outside the city, and their police have no authority outside the city limits. There's no reasonable way for them to actually enforce this.
Lastly, your message seems to be written under the assumption that this is about spam. It's not. It's about getting funding to prop up the local post office. We have ways to eliminate spam and
Actually, the packet mail delivery industry isn't suffering. FedEx, UPS, and DHL are all doing fine - it's only the US Postal Service that's having problems. A big part of their problems are caused by government regulation, which many see as being designed to try to get rid of the USPS. See http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/03/04/how-the-postal-service-is-being-gutted.aspx for fuller explanations.
So... you really want a situation where, if you go on vacation in another state, and happen to refer to your spouse as your spouse, you could be arrested for that, because that state doesn't recognize your marriage as being legal? Because that's what you're arguing for, when you say that each state should be allowed to say who can and can't be married.
I can, however, point out that W. Bush and his father went a long way toward creating the security situation they were running the country under. Sure, the Republicans can argue that paying for the military is like making your house payment... but personally, I would argue that our current military setup is more akin to investing in a security system, panic room, and armed guards when you're living in a low-crime neighborhood. Not to mention providing those for some of your neighbors, and going around threatening people you don't like on weekends.
There, the breakdown is by quarter, and going by that, they have Bush taking the spending rate from $1.9 trillion to $3.2 trillion, while Obama takes it from $3.2 trillion to $3.8 trillion, and then it starts to go back down. That's a $1.3 trillion increase for Bush, but a $0.6 trillion increase for Obama.
Note too that while Obama inherited deficit spending, Bush started off with a surplus.
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You say that as if the US didn't feel free to violate treaties and international law whenever it wants.
Except that we know for sure that the NSA has made breakthroughs in the past, putting them years ahead of academia in cryptanalysis. They knew about differential cryptanalysis before it was officially discovered. Bruce Schneier points out that according to documents leaked by Snowden, the NSA's "research and development" budget for cryptanalysis is more than is being spent on cryptanalysis research by all of academia combined.
So what can they offer? A larger budget for your research than you would ever get in a university setting, plus no "publish or perish" pressures, no having to spend time teaching classes, and working with other people who are also on the cutting edge of cryptologic research. The NSA is also known to have their own chip fabrication facilities, so they can create custom hardware - which isn't something you're generally going to get to work with on a university budget.
No matter what your acceleration is, it will take you infinite time to get to the speed of light. Relativity, man.
"in really big cities nobody drives because there's so much traffic".
Have you actually thought about that statement? If no one drives, what exactly is all that traffic? Or do you believe that there are millions of driverless cars wandering around on the streets out there?
Top recorded speed of a Nissan GTR: 195 mph (Nissan estimates 193 mph top speed). Top speed of a Lotus Elise: 148 mph. Also, note the phrase "The firm intends to enter the vehicle into next year's Le Mans 24 race" in the summary. It looks like a Le Mans car because that's what it's meant to be.
This is not a right of the states, though. The Constitution states that "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State." Thus, if you have been married in one state, every other state must recognize your marriage - that's the "full credit".
Further, it states that "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States." That is, no state can choose to take away the rights that the states in general have agreed that citizens have.
The states in ratifying the Constitution agreed to these terms. They gave up certain rights in order to join the Union. It's no different from a person entering a binding contract - the states have to play by the rules they agreed to.
DOMA attempts to say that the states don't have to obey these provisions of the Constitution when it comes to marriage. The people putting DOMA forward seem to have forgotten that the Constitution overrides any contradictory law, and the only way around that is to amend it.
I can't speak to the logic behind it, but yes, that's equally illegal. The FCC regulations say that anything designed to "obscure the meaning" of communication is prohibited on amateur radio.
It's been generally held, though, that secure authentication is okay - the meaning there is "prove you are who you say you are", "this is my proof", "okay, accepted" (or "sorry, rejected"). As long as it's possible to tell that that's the gist of the communication, obscuring what one would need to know to prove it is okay.
That's about exporting encryption. It has nothing to do with amateur radio. For that, you need to check out FCC title 47 CFR, part 97. That says that anything that "obscures the meaning" of communication is not allowed unless specifically stated in part 97.
That doesn't mean everything has to be plaintext, though. It's been generally held that secure authentication methods are okay, for example. Thus, you can use challenge-response authentication, public key authentication, or other such things, even though those involve encryption. In such a case, the actual meaning of the communication is: "prove you are who you say you are", followed by "here's my proof".
It'll be interesting to see if the FCC will allow it. I do agree with you, though, that it's foolish to fight against allowing encryption; if the government doesn't want to allow it, they simply won't. It's well established in US law that being able to communicate via amateur radio is not a right - if it were, amateur radio operators wouldn't have to be licensed.
And? I didn't say that they were. Regardless of how the US treats the people there, though, it's still a US territory. The people he sold to were undercover Federal agents. I'll admit that I'm only presuming that they're US citizens, but that seems a reasonably safe presumption.
You might want to re-read the article. He was arrested in Saipan, with is an island in the Pacific... and a US Territory. Thus, he was arrested by the US, for selling to US citizens while on US soil.
Basically, he got greedy and decided the potential gain was worth the risk that it was a set-up, and bet wrongly.
The monster that was created against the foes of both World Wars has turned against the society that created it. It's become the reason for its own existence.
As Orwell put it, "The object of power is power."
Bad Slashdot. No more character-biscuits.
Half the linear size would be a quarter the area. To get half the area, you'd need to have ( 1 / square root of 2 ) the linear size... so about 7/10.
Mine was down this morning, but I can ping my home box and SSH to it now from work. Looks like it's fixed in my area (Tallahassee, Florida). My past experience is that CenturyLink is reliable - at least, more so than Comcast, which is my only other broadband option that doesn't involve satellite or the like.
So... you agree that no one can use an iPad for document creation, because it doesn't work for you?
Way to over-generalize. For me, I bought an Apple Wireless Keyboard (http://www.apple.com/keyboard/) to use with mine. Since my home computer is an Imac, it's quite literally the exact same keyboard I use on my desktop. It's a bit longer than the iPad, but it's light and tough - I've dropped it in parking lots several times, and never had a problem from it.
I use it for emails, and for writing stories, using an editor that saves RTF and can use Google Drive or Dropbox (and some others as well, but those are the two I use with it). There are also ones that will save Word format.
Basically, Bill's complaint boils down to "Nobody should be using an iPad for document creation, because we haven't created a version of Word for it yet!"
Quibble: the state doesn't 'allow' gambling on Indian reservations. It has no power to stop it. The Supreme Court has held that states do not have power to regulate activities performed by Indians on Indian reservations.
Sure, I can look up directions before I start driving. However, then, if the directions are more than moderately complex, I need to write them down or print them out... which means having one or more pieces of paper that I will need to consult while driving. That leaves me a choice of either finding somewhere to pull over every time I need to glance at the directions to see what I need to look for next, or pick up and look at a piece of paper while operating a moving vehicle.
With a GPS, on the other hand, I can let it essentially act as navigator for me, telling me when I'm getting close to somewhere that I need to turn, which way to turn, what street name I'm looking for, etc. With a GPS that does that decently, I never actually have to look at the GPS at all while driving, nor take a hand off the wheel.
Further, using a GPS is superior to pre-looked-up directions in several ways: 1. Detours happen. There might be road work being done, an accident, or heavy traffic that I have to find a route around.
(Indeed, one of my brothers uses a GPS to get around Atlanta, in spite of having lived there for more than twenty years now. When I was up visiting him, I kidded him about it, saying, 'Don't you know your way around here yet?' His reply was: 'Sure, I know all the roads. But the GPS knows where all the traffic backups are right now.' I have another brother who also lives in Atlanta, who uses his own knowledge of the roads to get around. After riding around with him a while, I quickly saw the wisdom of the first brother's statement.)
2. Related to detours, if I miss a turn or need to go off-route to get food, gas, or something else, the GPS can smoothly handle the change, giving me a different route. A good one won't just say 'make a u-turn now' - it'll find a new route that won't require me to do something quite so drastic. And speaking of food and gas...
3. A good GPS will also have a database of points of interest, including gas stations, restaurants, etc. This is very useful information on a long trip through unfamiliar territory. And yes, some maps have that information as well... but you're the one who insisted that directions need to be looked up beforehand. If I look at a map while on the trip, that's not looking up directions beforehand. And speaking of that....
4. Plans change. I get a call while on the way up to Atlanta telling me that the brother I was going to stay with has had an emergency, and need to go to my other brother's house instead. Only he's in a new house, in a new neighborhood, so I don't already know how to get there. Or my wife gets sick on our five-day trip, and I need to find a clinic she can go to. Or I find out that an old friend I haven't seen in a decade or so is in the city, and need to get somewhere to meet him. Not everyone has the luxury of always planning out their itinerary ahead of time... and sometimes it even changes while you're in the car driving.
So the upshot is... yeah, I can do that. I did do it for many years, since I was driving long before consumer-level GPSes. But why would I go back to doing that, when using a GPS is so much better?
... which is not what you said before. But, now that you've decided to change your tune, we can now extend this back:
A democracy in which the majority do not obey the laws, but require a minority to obey them, is a tyranny. A democracy in which the majority make harsh laws that they are not subjected to is a tyranny.
See? The same rules that apply to a king apply to the majority in a democracy. Thus, a democracy can be a tyranny, just as an absolute monarch can be a tyrant, even though there is no legal restraint on his power.
Look carefully at your argument. You start with "by the (sic) definition the rightful rulers of a democracy are the people, the majority. A tyranny is a regimen where the power has been taken from its rightfully (sic) rulers and its ruler is not subjected to any law or constitution."
Let's examine where this logically leads us: By definition, the rightful rulers of a hereditary monarchy are those of a certain bloodline. By your argument, a hereditary monarch can't be a tyrant - after all, he or she is the rightful ruler, and your argument states that tyranny only exists when power has been taken away from the rightful rulers. By definition, the rightful rulers of a theocracy are the priestly class. So, by your argument, a theocracy can't be a tyranny.
Quite simply, your definition of what it takes to be a tyranny makes no sense.
And it wasn't WikiLeaks who published the unedited cables. Wikileaks was careful to redact the ones they published.
You might want to check facts before speaking, although around here that's obviously not a requirement for an "Informative" rated post. I read a LOT of those cables, and frankly speaking most of them were boring drivel that didn't have anything to do with any wars at all, and didn't reveal any kind of criminal activity.
So... I take it you don't know what "redact" means? Because nothing you said there contradicts what the poster you're replying to said.
The point is that if the NYT had received a mass of cables, they would have picked through them to identify the ones which actually had newsworthy material.
And that's just the thing. They would have picked through to identify what they thought was newsworthy. And since human labor is expensive, they probably would have done it by a bunch of keyword searches, then reading the ones that the searches caught on - or, more likely, getting some interns to read those.
By publishing all the cables, Wikileaks allowed the public to determine for themselves what is and isn't important, and allowed a "many eyeballs see all things" approach.
And if they would have posted the infamous "helicopter video" they'd have published the whole thing instead of editing it down to make it look worse like Assange did.
Don't know anything about that, so can't comment on it.
The world needs a NEUTRAL place for leaks and whistleblowing, not a site used to pump a particular political agenda, which is what Wikileaks has become.
Until someone starts one, though, Wikileaks is what we have. Anyone who wants to make a leak site with another slant is free to - having multiple ones would be a good thing!
The article explains that the application works like this: you have to start off by IDing your friend to it. It then analyzes the clothing they're wearing and their dimensions. When you want to look for them, it scans for a match, and picks out the person (or what could potentially be the person) for you.
The article goes on to mention a couple of reasons that they chose to do it this way: one is to protect privacy! By not using facial recognition, they make sure that the app can't easily be pre-loaded with a database of people and look for them all the time. For another, humans are already good at facial recognition. If you can see your friend's face, there's a good chance that you'll recognize them. This, however, helps when you're scanning the crowd and their back might be to you.
Honestly, it sounds like a good idea to me. Sure, it's going to have problems if you're surrounded by identically-dressed people, but you're not left any worse off by that than you were without it. Since it uses their bodily dimensions as well, it may still be of some use. And I know from times that I've been shopping with my wife and was looking for her that I, personally, have a horrible memory for what people are wearing. If I see her face, sure, I'll recognize her - but I often find myself remembering not the outfit she was wearing today, but the one she was wearing yesterday, or the one she was wearing when I met her for lunch.....
Okay, so... thanks for demonstrating that you're a moron.
First off, your association of "mailing lists" with illegal activities. The mailing lists that the poster is referring to aren't the ones spammers use - they're the ones that people use to communicate with others with similar interests. Generally, the mailing list software runs on a server, and people can sign up for the list. When someone sends an email to the list, everyone who has signed up for the list gets it. The members can choose to leave the list at any time.
Historically, most mailing list software worked via email commands - you would send a message to the list to ask to subscribe to it, and the list software would automatically add you. When you wished to leave, you sent a message asking to unsubscribe. These days, a lot of software also offers a web interface.
Conceptually, this is similar to web forums; the difference is that the message comes to your email, instead of you having to go to a web site to read it, and you can reply by email, instead of replying through a web site. There are many non-profit organizations that also still use these to communicate with people, because right now it's very inexpensive, and it doesn't require that their supporters regularly visit a web site. If you have announcements to send out, but only have a dozen or so a year, it makes a lot more sense than putting them out through a web forum.
The existence of mailing lists raises a question, though - who's responsible for paying the tax? The person who sent the original email sends one email; the mailing list server sends hundreds or thousands.
But wait, there's more! What about mailboxes that go to multiple people? For example, if you send mail to "tech@(the company I work for)", your email actually goes to about half a dozen people. Should you be charged for each of those? If you answer 'yes', then every time anyone sends an email, they're taking an unknown risk - they don't know how many copies of that email will actually be generated, so they don't know what it will cost.
How about internal email? The vast majority of email doesn't go across the Internet at all - most companies send much, much more internal email than they do external email. Will that be taxed? If so, how, and how will it be enforced?
Which brings up the whole problem of enforcement. You say to have a code number in each email, and have email software reject email without the code. First off, where are the code numbers going to be issued from? If there's a single web site to get the code numbers from, then congratulations - you've just created a single point of failure for all email on the Internet. Second, how are these numbers going to be verified? If it's a simple checksum sort of check, ways will be found to generate fake 'valid' codes. If the mail software has to contact someplace to find out whether the code is valid, you're opening up the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks (someone faking either a 'valid' or 'invalid' response), and, again, adding a point of failure to the email system.
Further, where is this software going to come from? Someone has to write it, and has to write versions that will work with every suite of mail server software that exists - unless you're also going to mandate restrictions on what mail server software people can run, in which case be prepared for a huge second tax there, as software companies lobby to have their software be the only approved mail server software.
Going to this specific case, though - this isn't the US government proposing this. It's a city council. They have no legal power to enforce their laws on anyone outside the city, and their police have no authority outside the city limits. There's no reasonable way for them to actually enforce this.
Lastly, your message seems to be written under the assumption that this is about spam. It's not. It's about getting funding to prop up the local post office. We have ways to eliminate spam and
Actually, the packet mail delivery industry isn't suffering. FedEx, UPS, and DHL are all doing fine - it's only the US Postal Service that's having problems. A big part of their problems are caused by government regulation, which many see as being designed to try to get rid of the USPS. See http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/03/04/how-the-postal-service-is-being-gutted.aspx for fuller explanations.
So... you really want a situation where, if you go on vacation in another state, and happen to refer to your spouse as your spouse, you could be arrested for that, because that state doesn't recognize your marriage as being legal? Because that's what you're arguing for, when you say that each state should be allowed to say who can and can't be married.
I can, however, point out that W. Bush and his father went a long way toward creating the security situation they were running the country under. Sure, the Republicans can argue that paying for the military is like making your house payment... but personally, I would argue that our current military setup is more akin to investing in a security system, panic room, and armed guards when you're living in a low-crime neighborhood. Not to mention providing those for some of your neighbors, and going around threatening people you don't like on weekends.
You might want to follow the cite I gave on to the article it cites. Here's the link for you: http://www.businessinsider.com/government-spending-2011-7
There, the breakdown is by quarter, and going by that, they have Bush taking the spending rate from $1.9 trillion to $3.2 trillion, while Obama takes it from $3.2 trillion to $3.8 trillion, and then it starts to go back down. That's a $1.3 trillion increase for Bush, but a $0.6 trillion increase for Obama.
Note too that while Obama inherited deficit spending, Bush started off with a surplus.