The flaw isn't in the protocols, it's in your misuse of them.
The fundamental problem is that you need to be able to prove to someone who's never met you that you are who you say you are. There's just no way to do that, in software or in real life, without reference to some mutually trusted third party.
Say you're picking up theater tickets at will-call: they ask you to show an ID card which 1) you couldn't reasonably have made yourself (hence the third party), 2) has the same name on it that was used to buy the tickets, and 3) is verifiably tied to your physical identity via a photo. You have to provide all three of these elements in order to prove you own the tickets.
The solution you suggested originally -- having the user install your CA cert over a non-authenticated connection -- is like calling the box office before you leave the house to read them your driver's license over the phone. Two out of three elements are completely missing! What if someone else gets there before you do and says "Yeah, I'm spottedkangaroo, I called earlier"?
But please don't continue to suggest your #1 option above. It accomplishes nothing helpful and is in fact worse than an unencrypted connection, because it gives your users a false sense of security. I'll give you an example.
Citibank used to have a login page that was not served over SSL, although the form submitted to an https: URL. This was dangerous because there was no way to be sure the login form hadn't been changed en route. You could be giving your password to anyone.
To reassure their less-informed users, Citibank actually displayed an icon of a lock near the login box, and if you clicked on it, a message popped up explaining that the lock icon meant the page was secure and that you should never submit confidential data without seeing this icon. This message was not just wrong; it was blatant, exploitative disinformation that put less knowledgeable users at greater risk for no good reason. Now anyone with a picture of a lock can pretend to be secure! So thanks for that, Citibank.
Your "solution" #1 is akin to this, but in some ways more dangerous. If you do this, your users are no better off, but you've kept them from seeing a useful security warning. And if your certificate does get spoofed, now they've compromised their browser, and criminals can use the fake cert to forge any site they want to those users. So thanks for that.
create your own CA and tell your customers to import the CA by clicking here (before putting them in ssl mode)
How are your customers going to know the cert comes from you? As long as you're serving it from a known address instead of personally installing it your clients' browsers, couldn't the man-in-the-middle that you're so worried about just replace your cert with his own?
Or am I missing something?
The idea, as far as I can tell, is to improve browser caching, not just distribution.
If a lot of sites that use prototype.js all refer to it by the same URL, chances are greater that a given client will already have cached the file before it hits your site. Therefore, you don't have to serve as much data and your users don't have to keep dozens of copies of the same file in their caches, and sites load marginally faster for everyone on the first hit only.
Plus Google gets even more tracking data with which to Not Be Evil. See, everybody wins.
Much less difficult?
on
Flying Humans
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· Score: 2, Funny
If you plan it for months or years, develop suitable technology, model and simulate it, do various tests before the real attempt, etc., it should be much less difficult to survive it than if you're forced to do it by circumstances. Isn't that like saying it's much less difficult to become President after you've won the election?
I don't want to get into a big debate about health care -- neither of us can solve the problem, and it's off-topic -- but I do want to respond to a few points you made.
So would a free market health system work better? I suggest no: most people are not equipped to have a good idea whether a doctor is good, or a total quack. This is the problem with any expert. If you don't know as much as you need to, it's unlikely you're going to have a good handle on how good they are. And thus, we need a third-party non-invested source to give us the skinny.
I agree. But why should that source be the government? Why couldn't there be multiple private certifying agencies in competition with each other? You seem to value consensus, so why do you insist that all doctors be certified by one central agency? (If that's not what you're insisting, I apologize.)
Should it cost a lot for doctors to get licensed? Yes, because they're important, and it's important that we make sure they're good.
Broken record here, but it should cost a lot only if the market places a high value on that service.
You are, of course, free to get your health care from an unlicensed quack. But the government can't allow such people to mix in with doctors they are signing off on; the harm there is obvious and great.
But that's just my point: I'm not free to get my health care from an unlicensed person, quack or not. You can go to prison for practicing medicine without a license, unless you stick to a small list of allowed procedures. I'm not saying the government shouldn't endorse doctors and medical schools -- just that it shouldn't be the only authority, and that I should be able to value that endorsement as I see fit (or even ignore it entirely).
Arguing the public airwaves aren't a commons issue is different, though. I expect that 20 years this will be a moot point, but as it stands now, yes, you can totally turn off the TV. But allowing a free-for-all in terms of content would mean that a child looking for a particular program would be faced with a challenge (nearly) equivalent to finding a book appropriate to them in a library overrun with pornography. I may not have a problem with this. You may not have a problem with this. But surely we can see how the general consensus is that it's not exactly alright?
I think the only tenable position is that it's up to the individual parents. If TV becomes a porn-fest and you think that's bad for your kids, get rid of it or invest in technology that allows you to control what they watch. Don't invest in government regulation that allows you to control what I watch.
This is one of those problems that is more appropriately solved by technology and good parenting than by regulation, and it's better for democracy that way too.
And realize that this is entirely separate from whether a thing can be said at all. Only a few, truly maladjusted people think that pornography, say, should be banished. But there is a difference between allowing speech and allowing it anywhere, anytime. The difficult question is how to draw the bright line between what is a reasonable restriction and what is tyrannical restriction.
Certainly -- but in almost all cases, there's a better way to achieve the desired result than by content restriction. Shouting in the middle of the street at 4 a.m. isn't a free speech issue, since the noise itself causes harm -- but posting leaflets in the same street at the same time of night is OK. The issue isn't content, or when-and-where, but the ancillary effects of the chosen delivery method. If I can deliver my speech in such a way that anyone who feels harmed by it can choose not to receive it -- for example, by turning off the TV -- then punishing me for the content of my speech IS tyranny, plain and simple.
So you say. But the thing about democracy is that it does not have to do with what one person holds to be true, or even what the objective truth is, but rather what the society as a whole holds to be true. If the society holds that hate speech is a form of speech that should not be tolerated, because its harm outweighs the harm done by a degree of censorship - then that is the case. That is, in fact, the meaning of democracy, that these values are decided not by a single authoritative voice, but by a consensus.
That's one reason the Bill of Rights exists, and why it's so difficult to change the Constitution. The framers recognized that free speech is so fundamental to the democratic process that even that process should not be able to abridge it -- at least, not without a great deal of debate. But unfortunately, we've had a series of bad Supreme Court decisions that have limited freedom of speech in the name of safety, decency, and other false idols.
Before you argue, though, that we don't have a true consensus; that is a problem with the process and not the result. If your actual issue is that we do a poor job of achieving a true consensus, then wage that battle instead.
My argument is with the notion that we can ever be better off by restricting speech than by allowing it. You can always point to a type or example of speech and say "The world would be a better place if that guy hadn't said that." But you can never claim that it would be better had he not been allowed to say it. The marketplace of ideas is not only a good idea -- it's perhaps the most important concept human civilization has ever developed.
You're implying here that physical force is some sort of trump card. You go on to suggest that corporations cannot inflict bodily harm.
Not directly, intentionally, and legally, they can't. And it's not just a trump card -- it's the defining characteristic of government. It explains why our Constitution was written so as not to give rights to the people, but so as to define those rights which the government does not have. Any expansion of those powers is a step toward tyranny.
The truth of the matter is that people's freedom is constrained a great many ways, and that corporations have access to a large number of those ways, just as the government does. Nevermind pollutants, corporations decide who has the right to health care in this country and who does not.
I'd argue that the free market decides, which means we collectively decide -- very democratic, you'll notice -- but the system does have its flaws. Most of those flaws come from excessive government interference in the market. I could get cheaper health care, for example, if my doctor didn't need the government's authorization to practice medicine, because there would be more doctors to choose among, and thus more competition. As long as I trust his credentials, and I (or my insurance provider) am willing to pay what he asks, why should either of us need to ask permission?
Why is iTunes doing so well except that it offers the option of watching what it is you want to watch? You cannot claim cable companies are providing that same degree of freedom; and there is mounting evidence they collude to keep you from actual freedom on these counts.
Again, they are able to collude only because of an artificial scarcity imposed by the government and by the physicalities of delivering cable service. The internet goes a long way toward eliminating that scarcity (as you point out with your iTunes example). In a free market, collusion is punished by competition from new entrants.
The world I want to live in allows consenting adults whatever freedoms do not infringe on others'. But it also looks out for people whom are not consenting. Children
I would note that any protest you staged that is considered to do harm to the public interest can be stopped. This is why we forbid hate speech; it generates a toxic environment. Similarly, with airwaves, the reasoning is that because there is a limited number, and everyone has access to them and regularly utilizes it, we should be aware of how what we put there affects them. In the interest of children, for instance, we forbid certain categories of behavior being portrayed during certain periods of the day.
The problem with this approach is that someone has to decide what constitutes hate speech. Right now, certain classes (race, religion) are protected while others (sexual orientation) are not. Since the ability to criticize the government is vital to democracy, we can't trust the government with the power to make any such distinctions. The harm to democracy that arises from outlawing ANY speech far outweighs whatever harm that speech could cause by being heard.
You can argue all you want about the categories, but it's pretty accepted that environments that affect everyone should have some publicly motivated controls on them. The regulator of those controls, ultimately, is the government. And thank goodness! Because we have no inherent protection from corporations or even just other individuals otherwise.
The only difference between the government and corporations is that government gets to use force. So what you're saying is that the only part of society that's allowed to take away your freedom or inflict bodily harm on you should also be allowed to decide what you can say and hear? Wouldn't you rather have the freedom to change channels and watch what you want?
We've seen the government's approach to regulating "indecent" speech: it's secretive, capricious, and retaliatory. Indecency is used as a pretext to target those whose speech the government doesn't agree with -- such as Howard Stern, whose employer the FCC fined half a million dollars for content that was less explicit than Oprah's. There are no written rules for what you can and can't say. The closest thing to a standard that exists is a George Carlin routine.
You really think this is better than allowing consenting adults to make decisions for themselves? This is the world you want to live in?
Congress can't make it illegal for you to say "shit" or "fuck" or show a tit on TV, but they don't have to allow you to use the public airwaves to do it.
Thank you, Thomas Paine. I suppose it follows that they can't make it illegal for you to stage a protest, but they don't have to allow you to use public property to do it. Right? Wrong.
I can't believe this authoritarian bullshit I'm replying to is standing at +5 Informative. Exercising your freedom of speech means something only if it's in public. What the hell is the point of protecting private speech?
I would have thought that, for obvious reasons, aerodynamics are not a big issue when designing a spacecraft... On the contrary. Any random interstellar particle you do hit is going to have a momentum proportional to the product of your relative velocity (probably huge) and the cosine of the angle of incidence. Hit a dust speck straight on at, say, 1/3 C and you'll probably tear your hull apart. So by having an aerodynamic profile you minimize that cosine.
100 kiloton warhead (number pulled from air for rhetorical purposes) Close... these were 150 kiloton payloads, which is a yield roughly 10 times the size of Hiroshima. Each.
Here's what you do next time a salesdroid won't stop pushing the extended warranty on an expensive item. Say this: "Oh, so you're telling me this product will probably break before I'm done with it? NEVER MIND THEN."
Then watch carefully for the look of total, helpless panic. It's totally worth it.
Federal mandatory sentences were found unconstitutional in 2005 and are now interpreted merely as guidelines. The district and appeals courts now have full discretion over sentencing. So even if your claim was once correct, it's not so correct anymore.
It's quite obviously an artist's rendition. If you look closely at the TIFF, you can see repeating patterns in the "cosmos" and smudge-tool brushstrokes. No question.
It's also better to play silence than to stop playing entirely, if you're using digital outputs. Stopping the output means that the receiver/amplifier loses its signal lock and has to regain it when you un-pause. This often causes a delay or an audible click.
Maybe they are not "allowed" to call again, but the fact is that they did, over and over again, for about a month.
That would have been the point at which you sued for statutory damages under the FDCPA. It's a bitch, but you have to stand up and fight for your rights sometimes. No one else will.
I don't know how long ago this occurred, but if it was within the past 30 years, you could have sent them a polite letter and the calls would have stopped immediately. If you tell a collection agency to stop calling you, they are not allowed to call again -- regardless of whether the debt is valid or not. The next thing they would have to do is sue you, and it sounds like you had enough documentation that you'd easily have prevailed and might even have gotten back more than your costs due to the harassment.
Not quite. It isn't the number of peaks that counts, it's the ratio of peak to "trough" -- how much louder the loud passages are than the quiet passages. If that ratio is high, then since the peaks are relatively rare, listeners will have to turn up the recording to hear the rest of it at a satisfying level.
The problem is that in digital recording you never want to "max out" as you put it -- you'll lose part of the sound due to an unpleasant kind of distortion called clipping. So the mastering technique called dynamic range compression flattens out the overall contour of the audio by smoothing out the peaks, and then you can master the whole thing at a louder volume.
Excessive compression leads to a harsh, unvaried, and tiring sound. AKA modern popular music.
If someone develops a truly novel business model, why shouldn't they be able to patent it and profit from it, just as if they had developed a new machine?
Because if the only environment where that business model can be successful is an artificial one in which the government has restrained all competition, then it's not really a business model.
Machines are different because you have to not only design and build them but also develop mass production processes, and that takes time and money. Business methods have to succeed or fail on their own merits, or we don't have capitalism anymore.
What you are referring to is the Supreme Court's power of judicial review -- which, interestingly, is not part of the Constitution. This power did not exist until 1803, when the Supreme Court itself arguably created it from whole cloth in Marbury v. Madison.
Slashdot Mirror
The flaw isn't in the protocols, it's in your misuse of them.
The fundamental problem is that you need to be able to prove to someone who's never met you that you are who you say you are. There's just no way to do that, in software or in real life, without reference to some mutually trusted third party.
Say you're picking up theater tickets at will-call: they ask you to show an ID card which 1) you couldn't reasonably have made yourself (hence the third party), 2) has the same name on it that was used to buy the tickets, and 3) is verifiably tied to your physical identity via a photo. You have to provide all three of these elements in order to prove you own the tickets.
The solution you suggested originally -- having the user install your CA cert over a non-authenticated connection -- is like calling the box office before you leave the house to read them your driver's license over the phone. Two out of three elements are completely missing! What if someone else gets there before you do and says "Yeah, I'm spottedkangaroo, I called earlier"?
Fine, good for you.
But please don't continue to suggest your #1 option above. It accomplishes nothing helpful and is in fact worse than an unencrypted connection, because it gives your users a false sense of security. I'll give you an example.
Citibank used to have a login page that was not served over SSL, although the form submitted to an https: URL. This was dangerous because there was no way to be sure the login form hadn't been changed en route. You could be giving your password to anyone.
To reassure their less-informed users, Citibank actually displayed an icon of a lock near the login box, and if you clicked on it, a message popped up explaining that the lock icon meant the page was secure and that you should never submit confidential data without seeing this icon. This message was not just wrong; it was blatant, exploitative disinformation that put less knowledgeable users at greater risk for no good reason. Now anyone with a picture of a lock can pretend to be secure! So thanks for that, Citibank.
Your "solution" #1 is akin to this, but in some ways more dangerous. If you do this, your users are no better off, but you've kept them from seeing a useful security warning. And if your certificate does get spoofed, now they've compromised their browser, and criminals can use the fake cert to forge any site they want to those users. So thanks for that.
create your own CA and tell your customers to import the CA by clicking here (before putting them in ssl mode)
How are your customers going to know the cert comes from you? As long as you're serving it from a known address instead of personally installing it your clients' browsers, couldn't the man-in-the-middle that you're so worried about just replace your cert with his own? Or am I missing something?
Don't forget to delete the original afterwards: sudo rm -rf ARDAgent.app
The idea, as far as I can tell, is to improve browser caching, not just distribution.
If a lot of sites that use prototype.js all refer to it by the same URL, chances are greater that a given client will already have cached the file before it hits your site. Therefore, you don't have to serve as much data and your users don't have to keep dozens of copies of the same file in their caches, and sites load marginally faster for everyone on the first hit only.
Plus Google gets even more tracking data with which to Not Be Evil. See, everybody wins.
So would a free market health system work better? I suggest no: most people are not equipped to have a good idea whether a doctor is good, or a total quack. This is the problem with any expert. If you don't know as much as you need to, it's unlikely you're going to have a good handle on how good they are. And thus, we need a third-party non-invested source to give us the skinny.
I agree. But why should that source be the government? Why couldn't there be multiple private certifying agencies in competition with each other? You seem to value consensus, so why do you insist that all doctors be certified by one central agency? (If that's not what you're insisting, I apologize.)
Should it cost a lot for doctors to get licensed? Yes, because they're important, and it's important that we make sure they're good.
Broken record here, but it should cost a lot only if the market places a high value on that service.
You are, of course, free to get your health care from an unlicensed quack. But the government can't allow such people to mix in with doctors they are signing off on; the harm there is obvious and great.
But that's just my point: I'm not free to get my health care from an unlicensed person, quack or not. You can go to prison for practicing medicine without a license, unless you stick to a small list of allowed procedures. I'm not saying the government shouldn't endorse doctors and medical schools -- just that it shouldn't be the only authority, and that I should be able to value that endorsement as I see fit (or even ignore it entirely).
Arguing the public airwaves aren't a commons issue is different, though. I expect that 20 years this will be a moot point, but as it stands now, yes, you can totally turn off the TV. But allowing a free-for-all in terms of content would mean that a child looking for a particular program would be faced with a challenge (nearly) equivalent to finding a book appropriate to them in a library overrun with pornography. I may not have a problem with this. You may not have a problem with this. But surely we can see how the general consensus is that it's not exactly alright?
I think the only tenable position is that it's up to the individual parents. If TV becomes a porn-fest and you think that's bad for your kids, get rid of it or invest in technology that allows you to control what they watch. Don't invest in government regulation that allows you to control what I watch.
This is one of those problems that is more appropriately solved by technology and good parenting than by regulation, and it's better for democracy that way too.
And realize that this is entirely separate from whether a thing can be said at all. Only a few, truly maladjusted people think that pornography, say, should be banished. But there is a difference between allowing speech and allowing it anywhere, anytime. The difficult question is how to draw the bright line between what is a reasonable restriction and what is tyrannical restriction.
Certainly -- but in almost all cases, there's a better way to achieve the desired result than by content restriction. Shouting in the middle of the street at 4 a.m. isn't a free speech issue, since the noise itself causes harm -- but posting leaflets in the same street at the same time of night is OK. The issue isn't content, or when-and-where, but the ancillary effects of the chosen delivery method. If I can deliver my speech in such a way that anyone who feels harmed by it can choose not to receive it -- for example, by turning off the TV -- then punishing me for the content of my speech IS tyranny, plain and simple.So you say. But the thing about democracy is that it does not have to do with what one person holds to be true, or even what the objective truth is, but rather what the society as a whole holds to be true. If the society holds that hate speech is a form of speech that should not be tolerated, because its harm outweighs the harm done by a degree of censorship - then that is the case. That is, in fact, the meaning of democracy, that these values are decided not by a single authoritative voice, but by a consensus.
That's one reason the Bill of Rights exists, and why it's so difficult to change the Constitution. The framers recognized that free speech is so fundamental to the democratic process that even that process should not be able to abridge it -- at least, not without a great deal of debate. But unfortunately, we've had a series of bad Supreme Court decisions that have limited freedom of speech in the name of safety, decency, and other false idols.
Before you argue, though, that we don't have a true consensus; that is a problem with the process and not the result. If your actual issue is that we do a poor job of achieving a true consensus, then wage that battle instead.
My argument is with the notion that we can ever be better off by restricting speech than by allowing it. You can always point to a type or example of speech and say "The world would be a better place if that guy hadn't said that." But you can never claim that it would be better had he not been allowed to say it. The marketplace of ideas is not only a good idea -- it's perhaps the most important concept human civilization has ever developed.
You're implying here that physical force is some sort of trump card. You go on to suggest that corporations cannot inflict bodily harm.
Not directly, intentionally, and legally, they can't. And it's not just a trump card -- it's the defining characteristic of government. It explains why our Constitution was written so as not to give rights to the people, but so as to define those rights which the government does not have. Any expansion of those powers is a step toward tyranny.
The truth of the matter is that people's freedom is constrained a great many ways, and that corporations have access to a large number of those ways, just as the government does. Nevermind pollutants, corporations decide who has the right to health care in this country and who does not.
I'd argue that the free market decides, which means we collectively decide -- very democratic, you'll notice -- but the system does have its flaws. Most of those flaws come from excessive government interference in the market. I could get cheaper health care, for example, if my doctor didn't need the government's authorization to practice medicine, because there would be more doctors to choose among, and thus more competition. As long as I trust his credentials, and I (or my insurance provider) am willing to pay what he asks, why should either of us need to ask permission?
Why is iTunes doing so well except that it offers the option of watching what it is you want to watch? You cannot claim cable companies are providing that same degree of freedom; and there is mounting evidence they collude to keep you from actual freedom on these counts.
Again, they are able to collude only because of an artificial scarcity imposed by the government and by the physicalities of delivering cable service. The internet goes a long way toward eliminating that scarcity (as you point out with your iTunes example). In a free market, collusion is punished by competition from new entrants.
The world I want to live in allows consenting adults whatever freedoms do not infringe on others'. But it also looks out for people whom are not consenting. Children
I would note that any protest you staged that is considered to do harm to the public interest can be stopped. This is why we forbid hate speech; it generates a toxic environment. Similarly, with airwaves, the reasoning is that because there is a limited number, and everyone has access to them and regularly utilizes it, we should be aware of how what we put there affects them. In the interest of children, for instance, we forbid certain categories of behavior being portrayed during certain periods of the day.
The problem with this approach is that someone has to decide what constitutes hate speech. Right now, certain classes (race, religion) are protected while others (sexual orientation) are not. Since the ability to criticize the government is vital to democracy, we can't trust the government with the power to make any such distinctions. The harm to democracy that arises from outlawing ANY speech far outweighs whatever harm that speech could cause by being heard.
You can argue all you want about the categories, but it's pretty accepted that environments that affect everyone should have some publicly motivated controls on them. The regulator of those controls, ultimately, is the government. And thank goodness! Because we have no inherent protection from corporations or even just other individuals otherwise.
The only difference between the government and corporations is that government gets to use force. So what you're saying is that the only part of society that's allowed to take away your freedom or inflict bodily harm on you should also be allowed to decide what you can say and hear? Wouldn't you rather have the freedom to change channels and watch what you want?
We've seen the government's approach to regulating "indecent" speech: it's secretive, capricious, and retaliatory. Indecency is used as a pretext to target those whose speech the government doesn't agree with -- such as Howard Stern, whose employer the FCC fined half a million dollars for content that was less explicit than Oprah's. There are no written rules for what you can and can't say. The closest thing to a standard that exists is a George Carlin routine.
You really think this is better than allowing consenting adults to make decisions for themselves? This is the world you want to live in?
Congress can't make it illegal for you to say "shit" or "fuck" or show a tit on TV, but they don't have to allow you to use the public airwaves to do it.
Thank you, Thomas Paine. I suppose it follows that they can't make it illegal for you to stage a protest, but they don't have to allow you to use public property to do it. Right? Wrong.
I can't believe this authoritarian bullshit I'm replying to is standing at +5 Informative. Exercising your freedom of speech means something only if it's in public. What the hell is the point of protecting private speech?
Then it's a perfect bet. You only have to pay up if the money is worthless.
Here's what you do next time a salesdroid won't stop pushing the extended warranty on an expensive item. Say this: "Oh, so you're telling me this product will probably break before I'm done with it? NEVER MIND THEN."
Then watch carefully for the look of total, helpless panic. It's totally worth it.
Federal mandatory sentences were found unconstitutional in 2005 and are now interpreted merely as guidelines. The district and appeals courts now have full discretion over sentencing. So even if your claim was once correct, it's not so correct anymore.
It's quite obviously an artist's rendition. If you look closely at the TIFF, you can see repeating patterns in the "cosmos" and smudge-tool brushstrokes. No question.
It's also better to play silence than to stop playing entirely, if you're using digital outputs. Stopping the output means that the receiver/amplifier loses its signal lock and has to regain it when you un-pause. This often causes a delay or an audible click.
I don't know how long ago this occurred, but if it was within the past 30 years, you could have sent them a polite letter and the calls would have stopped immediately. If you tell a collection agency to stop calling you, they are not allowed to call again -- regardless of whether the debt is valid or not. The next thing they would have to do is sue you, and it sounds like you had enough documentation that you'd easily have prevailed and might even have gotten back more than your costs due to the harassment.
Learn your rights and you'll have a much easier time keeping them. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act is a good place to start.
Same is true of every fictional character other than Billy Pilgrim. Doesn't make it good storytelling, though.
The problem is that in digital recording you never want to "max out" as you put it -- you'll lose part of the sound due to an unpleasant kind of distortion called clipping. So the mastering technique called dynamic range compression flattens out the overall contour of the audio by smoothing out the peaks, and then you can master the whole thing at a louder volume.
Excessive compression leads to a harsh, unvaried, and tiring sound. AKA modern popular music.
Machines are different because you have to not only design and build them but also develop mass production processes, and that takes time and money. Business methods have to succeed or fail on their own merits, or we don't have capitalism anymore.
What you are referring to is the Supreme Court's power of judicial review -- which, interestingly, is not part of the Constitution. This power did not exist until 1803, when the Supreme Court itself arguably created it from whole cloth in Marbury v. Madison.