First, individual certs are a great idea, as long as they're free.
They are, for military members. Everyone in the military has a public and private key, though most don't know it.
[People recognize my style]
Fine. But do they recognize the style of everyone in their chain of command? Do they recognize the style of Joe Bloe working at the NCC? Does the new guy who got there last week know your style already?
Second, an "order" given by e-mail doesn't carry anything like the weight that a verbal or written order does.
An e-mail order carries more weight than a verbal order simply because there is a record of it and thus is more resistant to dispute.
e-mail from my Colonel asking for my credit card numbers
How about the e-mail from the network control center telling you to install the attached "patch"? If you think that credit card numbers are the most serious issue here, you are the idiot.
Under the current rules, an e-mail from a superior carries the force of an order. In most situations, this is a good thing. However, there is a problem in that plain e-mail is inherently insecure. Most military e-mail servers don't perform any sort of authentication, so I could easily send mail that looks like it came from General Foobar.
Of course, the solution is some sort of PKI solution -- and it's mostly here. US military ID cards are smartcards with PKI certficates on them. There was a mandate that all official DOD e-mail be signed. The deadline passed years ago, with most people unaware that it was ever a requirement. The problem is that the military's infrastructure just isn't ready.
In the Air Force, for example, your e-mail address is first.last@basename.af.mil. What happens when you change bases? You have to get a new cert, of course, and now you can't decrypt e-mail sent to your old address (ie, archived mail). Further, say you have an Army person stationed at an Air Force installation. The Army has unified e-mail addresses (name@us.army.mil), but the Soldier will also have a unit e-mail address, which will probably be his primary SMTP address (if it weren't, he wouldn't show up correctly in the GAL). The solution is to give him two e-mail addresses on his cert.
But wait! The software the DOD uses to write the certs can't do two RFC822 addresses. Lame, but true. So now you're stuck forcing the Soldier to have his army.mil address set as his primary SMTP, have it forward e-mail to his unit account, and just suck it up when people complain about not being able to find him in the GAL.
Now for the real reason PKI isn't fully implemented. Exchange 2000 OWA can't handle S/MIME out of the box. Exchange 2003 can, and some major commands run it, but at least one (I'm looking at you, USAFE) have it disabled (WHY????!!!). The long and the short is that commanders wouldn't be able to read their secure e-mail from anywhere but their desks.
The end result is that the taxpayers payed millions of dollars to pave the way for a decent secure e-mail solution for the US military, but we don't use it. The result is that those cadets (and anyone else) really don't know who their e-mail comes from, but they still must act as if it's an order from the person it says sent it.
Your reading comprehension problem is creaping up again, but this time, it's with figuring out what you wrote yourself! Here, let me remind you (emphasis mine):
Until [1909] the feds had to be satisfied with
taxing imports and exports. That was it. Period. Not taxing the pamphlets produced by whoever stating or showing whatever. There were no such taxes.
You made a statement that is obviously shown to be false based on an introductory US history class. I learned this crap in seventh grade. If you had stuck to
Nor did the constitution contemplate any such taxes or in any way, directly or indirectly, provide for them.
you might have a case, as its up to how one interprets the Constitution.
But it doesn't matter because you didn't stick to that. So take your pick: are you really that ignorant, or are you just a liar?
Without HTTP 1.1 and the Host header, you could just bind multiple IPs to a single machine. Similarly, a lot of very expensive hosting services use one public IP and load balance across several servers.
In short, I can't figure out what the point of your post is. The only time you're guaranteed one IP per domain name is if they uses HTTPS, and even then you're still not guaranteed one IP per machine.
Read your own sources. I re-quote: "... the manufacture, in intermediate sale, or in the ultimate sale commonly amounting to consumption."
In 1791, for example, an excise tax (and it was called so at the time) was levied on the sale of distilled spirits. There was a small uprising (the Whiskey Rebellion) over it.
the feds had to be satisfied with taxing imports and exports. That was it. Period
You're either incredibly ignorant or you're a liar. Read about the Whiskey Rebellion. Come back with a clue.
You remember the tea party, a tiny little tax revolt against the King? These people knew about taxation as bludgeon and control mechanism. They weren't having any.
Learn your history. They first drafted the Articles of Confederation, which didn't let the national government (it could hardly be called "federal") do anything more than ask the state governments to donate money. The US operated under this hairbrained scheme for years; they drafted up the Constitution because they realized that the AoC were a complete wash.
Contrary to your understanding, the last thing on their minds was not the oppressive tax regime of the British but the complete impotence of the AoC. The Constitution formed a strong central government in order to fix the problems. It was so strong that the only way the Federalists could get it adopted was by adding the Bill of Rights.
I'm sick of giving you lessons in history and reading comprehension. Respond if you like, but I doubt I'll reply.
You make good points. I think the issue is more of a rhetorical one than anything. I would not call East Germany "socialist", I'd call it "communist". And I'd call West Germany "socialist", certainly compared to the US.
I think the "bombed-out building" metric isn't a good indicator of the success of East vs West Germany so much as US vs Russia. I was at Paulskirche in Frankfurt (the building that I udnerstand held the first united German government in 1848) a couple of days ago, reading the panels about its history. It was pretty much destroyed in the air raids, and then it was completely rebuilt by 1947. Now surely, that money didn't come from the German economy. No, it came from the Marshall plan.
A lot of people claim that the our winning the Cold War proved capitalism is better than communism, but I'm not so sure. We started off with an awefully large advantage -- 20 million dead Russians worth of an advantage.
And when a particular porn site gets taxed five times as high as other porn sites because the gov't doesn't like its pictures, you'll be onto something.
Mags and videos with naked and/or busy folk are behind the counter or in adult-only access areas like adult bookstores.
Why? Because it's the law. Why is it the law? Because the state believes porn is harmful. You're making my case for me!
The phrase forms the opening of the Declaration of Independence, in fact it may be the best-known phrase in any of America's political documents
Yes, indeed. And the Declaration has absolutely no legal weight whatsoever. It's not law, it's not legal precedent, and its words have no bearing in a court room any more than do the Articles of Confederation.
The feds (congress et al) were given very limited power to tax in the constitution
Dude... did you even bother to read what I wrote previously? Excise tariffs (which this would be) are explicitly authorized in (as I said earlier) Art I Sec 8: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises"
You quoted the section where direct taxes and duties on state exports are banned. An excise tax is not a direct tax -- income tax is a direct tax. Amendment 16 modified the Const to allow it -- nor is it a duty.
There are only 18 categories of actions Congress is explicitly authorized to take, and this tax falls under one of those categories.
You can download how to make a home-made bomb [and other bad things]
Yes, and none of those bad things are legally considered to be harmful just by reading them except in certain circumstances (incitement).
your property can be taken
Under the un-amended constitution, the state could have taken your property at will. The 4th Am. requires that the compensate you justly: "... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
The power to tax "anything" is a power that was taken in direct opposition to what the constitution said
Sure, they can't tax anything. But excise taxes are fair game.
Maybe even go read the constitution.
I daresay it seems I know it a lot better than you.
Porn is available in our society in only a few venues. Parents can easily control access to those venues
Not likely. If so, it's probably thanks only to strict zoning laws. The problem is those zoning laws are based on the very arguments you're railing against. In fact, I don't see how you could/possibly/ prevent your children from seeing porno for 18 years without the help of the state unless you engage in some serious psychological abuse ("OK, Jimmy, time to go outside... put your blindfold on!")
I know for a fact that it is (or used to be) possible for children to surf porn from public library computers and school computers. You may argue that letting a child go to school is tantamount to abdicating parental responsibility; I'd respond by considering you a loonie and moving on.
Your comparison to guns is rhetorically admirable, but it's also ridiculously inappropriate. You cannot download a gun from the Internet. If it's taken as axiom that pornography harms children (which it must for this part of the conversation to make any sense whatsoever), it is significanlty different from the harm inflicted by a gun because the pornography potentially harms by merely being/observed/. (Actually, the legal precedent is stronger -- that pornography harms by its very presense, whether it's directly observed or not -- which is the legal basis for those strict zoning laws I mentioned above.)
First of all, keep in mind he's your god, not my god.
It's a turn of phrase. Take the stick out of your ass.
just because something is written into the founding documents doesn't make it correct
Don't put words in my mouth; I never said it was "correct". But it's there, whether we like it or not, and it's just as much a part of the law of the land as the First Amendement.
dual-level logical fallacy
Oh, great. I called you on a fallacy, so now you have to try to call me on one. How childish. What's a "dual-level logical fallacy" anyway?
"all men are created equal"
That's not in the Constitution nor in any document with any legal validity. Nice try, though.
It is not reasonable to tax purveyors of legitimate adult products for the costs associated with dealing with the purveyors of illegitimate child pornography.
My point here is that the whole argument over whether pornography harms children is completely immaterial. Congress can impose the tax for any reason because the power to do so is given to them by the Constitution. They could say they're doing it because porn turns the sky green and it wouldn't matter. The justification is just political posturing.
Children are exposed to pornography because the parents are either irresponsible... or they're accepting of it
You're arguing from a formal logical fallacy there, bub. Children do not walk around all day in a protective bubble.
As for legislative justification, that is not meaningful in and of itself. The legislature makes bad law and bad precedent on a regular basis.
My god, man, get a sense of perspective! We're not talking about some obscure (or even not so obscure) precedent. We're talking about one of the few (18, to be specific) powers that is explicitly given to Congress by the original Constitution.
That's a bad analogy. Children being exposed to pornography is an unavoidable consequence of it being available; viruses are not an unavoidable consequence of computer games.
A better analogy is taxing gas to pay for highway maintenance. An even better analogy might be taxing gas to pay for environmental repair projects (especially since not everyone believes in Global Warming, just as not everyone believes porn harms children).
The fact is, excise tariffs are authorized explicitly by the Constitution (Art I, Sec 8). You may not like it, but it's a perfectly legitimate proposal. I hope it gets voted down.
Probably not just the curtain. That probably was a contract job, so it includes researching an attractive curtain (has to look good on camera, etc), delivery, and installation. It may also include a limited service contract (cleaning semi-annually, for example).
Right then. So you agree that the state shouldn't tax something and then spend the monies on mitigating the moral degredation caused by said thing. Because that would be legislating morality, which you disagree with.
The degaussing thing is common. Usually only degauss drives once they go bad (so we can just throw them away instead of treating them as sensitive). DRMO (the military program to sell/give away to other units old equipment) isn't even supposed to accept anything with hard drives in it. Or at least, the one here doesn't -- maybe they're just extra-paranoid.
As for the wiping thing, the gov't has strict requirements that, if followed precisely using approved software, are considered good enough to declassify a US SECRET drive. I believe it's six passes, each pass writing a certain bit-pattern across the whole drive. After this is done, the bits have been flipped enough so as to render any data retrieval nearly impossible. IIRC, NATO SECRET drives can be declassified by a similar process with seven passes.
Um... no. Well, maybe. The whole point of separating the client and server via a transparent, transaction-based protocol (ie, HTTP) is that it doesn't matter what the server uses -- hell, the client can't even tell. The best it can do is guess based on spurious clues like file extension or HTTP headers.
Gmail's server code could be implemented in bash script for all we know, and it would function the same (well, slower maybe).
It is possible, though statistically *very* unlikely, that given two people, the first is better at everything we care to measure than the second. In such a case, I would describe person A as a better person than person B.
The way I see it, "better" isn't so much hard to define as it's hard to *prove*. Specifically, the logical retort on your part to my above point is that person B might be better than person A at things that we cannot measure. And that's true for any given two people -- we can never be *really* sure that person A really is better (by my definition) than person B.
However, I maintain that it is theoretically possible (even if we cannot determine such a case with surety) that there could exist two people such that the first is better than the second in every way.
Slashdot Mirror
First, individual certs are a great idea, as long as they're free.
They are, for military members. Everyone in the military has a public and private key, though most don't know it.
[People recognize my style]
Fine. But do they recognize the style of everyone in their chain of command? Do they recognize the style of Joe Bloe working at the NCC? Does the new guy who got there last week know your style already?
Second, an "order" given by e-mail doesn't carry anything like the weight that a verbal or written order does.
An e-mail order carries more weight than a verbal order simply because there is a record of it and thus is more resistant to dispute.
e-mail from my Colonel asking for my credit card numbers
How about the e-mail from the network control center telling you to install the attached "patch"? If you think that credit card numbers are the most serious issue here, you are the idiot.
Under the current rules, an e-mail from a superior carries the force of an order. In most situations, this is a good thing. However, there is a problem in that plain e-mail is inherently insecure. Most military e-mail servers don't perform any sort of authentication, so I could easily send mail that looks like it came from General Foobar.
Of course, the solution is some sort of PKI solution -- and it's mostly here. US military ID cards are smartcards with PKI certficates on them. There was a mandate that all official DOD e-mail be signed. The deadline passed years ago, with most people unaware that it was ever a requirement. The problem is that the military's infrastructure just isn't ready.
In the Air Force, for example, your e-mail address is first.last@basename.af.mil. What happens when you change bases? You have to get a new cert, of course, and now you can't decrypt e-mail sent to your old address (ie, archived mail). Further, say you have an Army person stationed at an Air Force installation. The Army has unified e-mail addresses (name@us.army.mil), but the Soldier will also have a unit e-mail address, which will probably be his primary SMTP address (if it weren't, he wouldn't show up correctly in the GAL). The solution is to give him two e-mail addresses on his cert.
But wait! The software the DOD uses to write the certs can't do two RFC822 addresses. Lame, but true. So now you're stuck forcing the Soldier to have his army.mil address set as his primary SMTP, have it forward e-mail to his unit account, and just suck it up when people complain about not being able to find him in the GAL.
Now for the real reason PKI isn't fully implemented. Exchange 2000 OWA can't handle S/MIME out of the box. Exchange 2003 can, and some major commands run it, but at least one (I'm looking at you, USAFE) have it disabled (WHY????!!!). The long and the short is that commanders wouldn't be able to read their secure e-mail from anywhere but their desks.
The end result is that the taxpayers payed millions of dollars to pave the way for a decent secure e-mail solution for the US military, but we don't use it. The result is that those cadets (and anyone else) really don't know who their e-mail comes from, but they still must act as if it's an order from the person it says sent it.
But it doesn't matter because you didn't stick to that. So take your pick: are you really that ignorant, or are you just a liar?
OK, cool. I was just objecting to your characterization of such ISPs as necessarily "cheap".
You believe wrong, unless you're talking about an arbitrary limitation of Apache or a particular OS (of which I'm ignorant).
Theoretically, the number of IPs is limited by the size of your subnet(s), but that's it. You could have two IPs available or two hundred thousand.
Without HTTP 1.1 and the Host header, you could just bind multiple IPs to a single machine. Similarly, a lot of very expensive hosting services use one public IP and load balance across several servers.
In short, I can't figure out what the point of your post is. The only time you're guaranteed one IP per domain name is if they uses HTTPS, and even then you're still not guaranteed one IP per machine.
Read your own sources. I re-quote: "... the manufacture, in intermediate sale, or in the ultimate sale commonly amounting to consumption."
In 1791, for example, an excise tax (and it was called so at the time) was levied on the sale of distilled spirits. There was a small uprising (the Whiskey Rebellion) over it.
the feds had to be satisfied with taxing imports and exports. That was it. Period
You're either incredibly ignorant or you're a liar. Read about the Whiskey Rebellion. Come back with a clue.
You remember the tea party, a tiny little tax revolt against the King? These people knew about taxation as bludgeon and control mechanism. They weren't having any.
Learn your history. They first drafted the Articles of Confederation, which didn't let the national government (it could hardly be called "federal") do anything more than ask the state governments to donate money. The US operated under this hairbrained scheme for years; they drafted up the Constitution because they realized that the AoC were a complete wash.
Contrary to your understanding, the last thing on their minds was not the oppressive tax regime of the British but the complete impotence of the AoC. The Constitution formed a strong central government in order to fix the problems. It was so strong that the only way the Federalists could get it adopted was by adding the Bill of Rights.
I'm sick of giving you lessons in history and reading comprehension. Respond if you like, but I doubt I'll reply.
You make good points. I think the issue is more of a rhetorical one than anything. I would not call East Germany "socialist", I'd call it "communist". And I'd call West Germany "socialist", certainly compared to the US.
I think the "bombed-out building" metric isn't a good indicator of the success of East vs West Germany so much as US vs Russia. I was at Paulskirche in Frankfurt (the building that I udnerstand held the first united German government in 1848) a couple of days ago, reading the panels about its history. It was pretty much destroyed in the air raids, and then it was completely rebuilt by 1947. Now surely, that money didn't come from the German economy. No, it came from the Marshall plan.
A lot of people claim that the our winning the Cold War proved capitalism is better than communism, but I'm not so sure. We started off with an awefully large advantage -- 20 million dead Russians worth of an advantage.
And when a particular porn site gets taxed five times as high as other porn sites because the gov't doesn't like its pictures, you'll be onto something.
Mags and videos with naked and/or busy folk are behind the counter or in adult-only access areas like adult bookstores.
Why? Because it's the law. Why is it the law? Because the state believes porn is harmful. You're making my case for me!
The phrase forms the opening of the Declaration of Independence, in fact it may be the best-known phrase in any of America's political documents
Yes, indeed. And the Declaration has absolutely no legal weight whatsoever. It's not law, it's not legal precedent, and its words have no bearing in a court room any more than do the Articles of Confederation.
The feds (congress et al) were given very limited power to tax in the constitution
Dude... did you even bother to read what I wrote previously? Excise tariffs (which this would be) are explicitly authorized in (as I said earlier) Art I Sec 8: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises"
You quoted the section where direct taxes and duties on state exports are banned. An excise tax is not a direct tax -- income tax is a direct tax. Amendment 16 modified the Const to allow it -- nor is it a duty.
There are only 18 categories of actions Congress is explicitly authorized to take, and this tax falls under one of those categories.
You can download how to make a home-made bomb [and other bad things]
Yes, and none of those bad things are legally considered to be harmful just by reading them except in certain circumstances (incitement).
your property can be taken
Under the un-amended constitution, the state could have taken your property at will. The 4th Am. requires that the compensate you justly: "... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
The power to tax "anything" is a power that was taken in direct opposition to what the constitution said
Sure, they can't tax anything. But excise taxes are fair game.
Maybe even go read the constitution.
I daresay it seems I know it a lot better than you.
The Berlin Wall fell precisely because socialism is an abject, empirical failure in practice.
Um... you do know that the old West Germany was the socialist one, right? And the present-day Germany is still socialist.
Porn is available in our society in only a few venues. Parents can easily control access to those venues
/possibly/ prevent your children from seeing porno for 18 years without the help of the state unless you engage in some serious psychological abuse ("OK, Jimmy, time to go outside... put your blindfold on!")
/observed/. (Actually, the legal precedent is stronger -- that pornography harms by its very presense, whether it's directly observed or not -- which is the legal basis for those strict zoning laws I mentioned above.)
Not likely. If so, it's probably thanks only to strict zoning laws. The problem is those zoning laws are based on the very arguments you're railing against. In fact, I don't see how you could
I know for a fact that it is (or used to be) possible for children to surf porn from public library computers and school computers. You may argue that letting a child go to school is tantamount to abdicating parental responsibility; I'd respond by considering you a loonie and moving on.
Your comparison to guns is rhetorically admirable, but it's also ridiculously inappropriate. You cannot download a gun from the Internet. If it's taken as axiom that pornography harms children (which it must for this part of the conversation to make any sense whatsoever), it is significanlty different from the harm inflicted by a gun because the pornography potentially harms by merely being
First of all, keep in mind he's your god, not my god.
It's a turn of phrase. Take the stick out of your ass.
just because something is written into the founding documents doesn't make it correct
Don't put words in my mouth; I never said it was "correct". But it's there, whether we like it or not, and it's just as much a part of the law of the land as the First Amendement.
dual-level logical fallacy
Oh, great. I called you on a fallacy, so now you have to try to call me on one. How childish. What's a "dual-level logical fallacy" anyway?
"all men are created equal"
That's not in the Constitution nor in any document with any legal validity. Nice try, though.
It is not reasonable to tax purveyors of legitimate adult products for the costs associated with dealing with the purveyors of illegitimate child pornography.
My point here is that the whole argument over whether pornography harms children is completely immaterial. Congress can impose the tax for any reason because the power to do so is given to them by the Constitution. They could say they're doing it because porn turns the sky green and it wouldn't matter. The justification is just political posturing.
That's simplistic nonsense.
No, yuo!
Children are exposed to pornography because the parents are either irresponsible... or they're accepting of it
You're arguing from a formal logical fallacy there, bub. Children do not walk around all day in a protective bubble.
As for legislative justification, that is not meaningful in and of itself. The legislature makes bad law and bad precedent on a regular basis.
My god, man, get a sense of perspective! We're not talking about some obscure (or even not so obscure) precedent. We're talking about one of the few (18, to be specific) powers that is explicitly given to Congress by the original Constitution.
That's a bad analogy. Children being exposed to pornography is an unavoidable consequence of it being available; viruses are not an unavoidable consequence of computer games.
A better analogy is taxing gas to pay for highway maintenance. An even better analogy might be taxing gas to pay for environmental repair projects (especially since not everyone believes in Global Warming, just as not everyone believes porn harms children).
The fact is, excise tariffs are authorized explicitly by the Constitution (Art I, Sec 8). You may not like it, but it's a perfectly legitimate proposal. I hope it gets voted down.
Right, because charging sales tax for newspapers violates freedom of the press. Jackass.
Because that worked so well for Al Gore, didn't it?
Probably not just the curtain. That probably was a contract job, so it includes researching an attractive curtain (has to look good on camera, etc), delivery, and installation. It may also include a limited service contract (cleaning semi-annually, for example).
Right then. So you agree that the state shouldn't tax something and then spend the monies on mitigating the moral degredation caused by said thing. Because that would be legislating morality, which you disagree with.
I also do this as part of my job.
The degaussing thing is common. Usually only degauss drives once they go bad (so we can just throw them away instead of treating them as sensitive). DRMO (the military program to sell/give away to other units old equipment) isn't even supposed to accept anything with hard drives in it. Or at least, the one here doesn't -- maybe they're just extra-paranoid.
As for the wiping thing, the gov't has strict requirements that, if followed precisely using approved software, are considered good enough to declassify a US SECRET drive. I believe it's six passes, each pass writing a certain bit-pattern across the whole drive. After this is done, the bits have been flipped enough so as to render any data retrieval nearly impossible. IIRC, NATO SECRET drives can be declassified by a similar process with seven passes.
Huh? ASP talks to MSSQL using ODBC (or OLEDB). You can do the same from anywhere else.
Um... no. Well, maybe. The whole point of separating the client and server via a transparent, transaction-based protocol (ie, HTTP) is that it doesn't matter what the server uses -- hell, the client can't even tell. The best it can do is guess based on spurious clues like file extension or HTTP headers.
Gmail's server code could be implemented in bash script for all we know, and it would function the same (well, slower maybe).
Yup, Microsoft looks like it made a poor imitation of Firefox.
Yup, and Firefox is just a poor imitation of Opera.
Fast user switching doesn't work when your system is connected to a Windows domain.
I'll take my buggy Ubuntu version, thanks. XFree in Debian broke for me for *all versions* after 4.1. X.org works fine.
It is possible, though statistically *very* unlikely, that given two people, the first is better at everything we care to measure than the second. In such a case, I would describe person A as a better person than person B.
The way I see it, "better" isn't so much hard to define as it's hard to *prove*. Specifically, the logical retort on your part to my above point is that person B might be better than person A at things that we cannot measure. And that's true for any given two people -- we can never be *really* sure that person A really is better (by my definition) than person B.
However, I maintain that it is theoretically possible (even if we cannot determine such a case with surety) that there could exist two people such that the first is better than the second in every way.