If you look at the listed conditions, you can predict that a free market will lead to vile conditions in health care. There is a high barrier to entry, and it's difficult for the customers to reliably judge the quality of the care.
If you take the government regulation that is screwing up a market like health care as a given, then sure - you'll conclude that it can't possibly be a properly functioning market. But treating government regulations as a given is begging the question.
The barrier to entry in health care need not be as high as it is today, and there need be no lack if information about the skill of doctors or their previous outcomes.
So we institute health plans, and government regulations and other measures that allow a facade of the free market to continue without producing a result so vile that the populace revolts.
The government regulations combined with a "facade of the free market" is precisely why health care in the USA is so messed up. Socialized medicine works much better. Free market medicine can probably do better than that. But the corrupt system of government regulation preventing competition and ensuring cartel profits while claiming to be a free market is far, far worse than either a socialized or free market system.
Where these conditions are not met, then the free market does not work.
Absolutely. But the primary cause of those conditions not being met is unnecessary government interference, usually for the profit of major campaign donors. Portraying this as a "free market" situation is just as dishonest as portraying it as democratic socialism would be.
Properly functioning markets will generally provide better outcomes (in terms of efficiency, economic output, and personal freedom) than centralized decision making. If you have a meaningful counterargument to that I'd love to hear it, because the economics (and related freedom arguments) are extremely solid.
The trick is that an economy that is intentionally warped to be dysfunctional in one specific way (to give massive profits to companies that contribute to senator's campaigns) doesn't count as a "properly functioning market" no matter how loudly you insist on calling it "capitalism".
First, you are absolutely correct that a local-government granted monopoly is probably one of the major sources of any individual's current ISP selection woes.
But there's also a second issue, as described here. It's hard to describe the issue in a way that doesn't sound radically biased, but the simple fact of the matter is that the telecom companies committed to deploying massive fiber networks and managed to squirm out of it (mostly thorough regulator-capture).
So this isn't just a local government failure. It's also a massive federal government failure, from which there is perfectly good reason for US residents to feel cheated out of decent speed data infrastructure.
It's absolutely true that the GPL has a higher cost of compliance than a "BSD style" license.
The cost of compliance is still trivial compared to the benefit of using pre-existing code in a scenario where releasing source for a module is compatible with your business goals. This 15 page document basically says "you really have to release the source for your modified GPL modules", and explains that it's easier to do that if your build process isn't messed up.
Conclusion: No software has a $0 acquisition cost in an environment where technicians and programmers get paid. Legally using GPL software by following the license is frequently a good cost / benefit trade off; the practical costs are frequently much lower than using a proprietary alternative. And again, I absolutely agree that the practical cost of "BSD style" stuff is even lower than that.
There's nothing dangerous about the GPL if you comply with the license terms. If you don't want to comply with the license terms, the libraries simply aren't available to you. I don't see what the problem is.
Which also implies two things: Either every self-signed SSL site I visit will be dropping a cert permanently into my cache (and what happens when that expires?), or it's possible for certs to expire (either their date expires, or my cache purges them for inactivity).
Handling the cache is an interesting question that would require some design effort. My guess would be that under normal circumstances it would be easy to cache every certificate until it expired.
In the second case, every time a cert expires, it's possible for me to be pwned. I'll agree that's not often, but it does bother me.
The browser should keep track and warn/error if a site goes from PKI signed to self-signed. Given that, this problem only applies to self-signed sites - and having it be possible for you to pwned once a year is better than every time for an insecure connection.
If they're too cheap to pay $20 (or nothing), how likely is it that they'll be able to properly manage their own little CA?
If someone has self-signed a certificate, that required more technical know how than simply getting a certificate. There are all kinds of places to screw up SSL security and there's no rule that PKI-signed sites got everything right.
Which can leave you in the uncomfortable situation where some forum site you like has had to generate a new cert.
That seems like an improvement on the insecure-connection case to me.
For a project that's going to go on for more than a couple months, selecting a task-appropriate programming language will be more useful than selecting one that some single programmer happens to know. As for whether a given language is taught in University or not - I don't see how that could possibly matter. A good University CS program will teach the student to pick up new languages whenever they feel like it.
How the hell will you know if it was changed when you never visited it before??
You sure don't have a bookmark there if you haven't visited it before.
Basically, the use case that you're describing is someone A.) manually types an SSL URL and B.) can't identify the "this cert is not verified" indicators in the UI.
In the town where I live in Massachussetts, the paper ballots really are hand counted by volunteers under the close observation of representatives of the parties and/or candidates involved. Hand counting is completely feasible (we do it), so there is no excuse for any counting technique with worse security properties to be used.
On the same token, they probably wouldn't find it profitable to run cabling out to sparsely-populated rural areas. The same is true for all utilities, though.
This is a real effect, but the solution is absolutely not to find the closest major corporation with a locally-negotiated monopoly and give them a bunch of money and more monopoly to serve rural areas.
The way this problem is traditionally solved is for the residents of the rural area to create a co-op and build their own infrastructure. This works great.
If they live too far out in the sticks, maybe they have to live without the service (or move back to civilization). Just because someone decides to live in northern Alaska with no other human for a hundred miles does not entitle them to taxpayer-funded infrastructure.
Government doesn't create utility monopolies, The Last Mile does.
I'm pretty sure that when local governments sign contracts agreeing to not allow any competition over that last mile, that's a "government act" rather than "the market at work".
You may have only one cable line and one phone line to your house, but the competition between the two [...]
Competition between two suppliers isn't a competitive market. It's a duopoly - not very much better than a monopoly.
The one decision that really saddled us with crappy access was the FCC ruling that internet access was an information service rather than a telecommunication service - so telecos no longer had to lease their lines at wholesale prices to competitors.
Unbundling the local loop (basically, socializing the last mile) is probably the most effective way to create a competitive market among internet providers, but simply letting multiple companies (and others like co-ops) run wires would produce a better solution than we have now. Just guessing that there's probably a natural monopoly is in no way a valid excuse for the government to grant a monopoly.
High speed broadband counts as "basic" anymore? What a society we live in.
The key difference between network connectivity and electricity or telephones is that you're not used to having decent internet connectivity yet. I see your comment as being basically the same as having said that electricity was an unnecessary luxury back in the 1930's.
We don't really need high quality VoIP telephony, and we didn't really need electric lights because kerosene lamps worked fine. We don't really need video conferencing and real-time video presentations, and we didn't really need refrigerators because iceboxes worked fine.
Infrastructure advances like electricity or high speed internet don't result in revolutionary changes overnight. First they make existing tasks much more efficient - which makes the economy much more productive overall. Only much later do they allow for revolutionary breakthroughs (e.g. electricity allowed for modern computers).
The key thing here isn't that VoIP telephones are going to make everyone a millionaire tomorrow. It's that in 30 years when Asia and Europe have modern infrastructure and all the benefits thereof and the USA doesn't the USA will be a backwards country of poor people who can't compete in the modern economy. If we want to avoid that, Manhattan better keep up with Tokyo and Boston better keep up with Helsinki. Right now we're about a decade behind.
There is definitely no such thing as "Islamic fascism". Nazi Germany existed. The Soviet Union existed. Saying that "islamic fascism" is a threat to the United States is a lot like saying how wonderful it is that we survived the massive threat that Nicaragua posed in the 80's.
You do realize that not everyone is in Africa is actually starving, right?
If country A, starving, borders country B which is poor but not starving, providing more economic opportunities to country B will tend to help them exploit country A out of starvation.
The fact is that humanity isn't dying off fast enough. In fact, our planetary population continues to increase. Someday the phony sustainability we've been living under is going to crash, and billions are going to die (as they should).
There's nothing phony about large scale industrialized farming. That's the natural way for an intelligent species to sustain a high population density. This does require a certain amount of societal stability, and when that stability falters millions will die. Billions of deaths at once in food production and distribution glitches is a bit high for the current population - food is grown too locally for that to happen.
No? I'm amazed at the number of people who can afford $20/month for internet access but can't afford a *one time charge* of $20 so I can have more money for no good reason.
Well unless you want to start going to https://72.14.207.99/ I suggest you propose a better solution.
Any time you go to a SSL authenticated website, the browser should store the certificate. If the certificate changes, it should notify the user (i.e. info bar). If it changes from a PKI authenticated certificate to a self signed certificate, it should flip out like it does now.
This still leaves open the possibility of first-visit hijackings, but first visits are usually to http URLs that a DNS hijack could redirect anyway.
Port 443 would be blocked for all except online banks and those who comply with the government in other ways (think lots of logs and/or live monitoring of post-ssl traffic).
Port 443 is *already* effectively blocked for anyone who isn't centrally approved. Have you seen the error message you get in IE or Firefox when you try to visit a site with a self-signed certificate?
There is exactly one attack that this stops: The attacker has hijacked DNS and the user is going directly to an https URL (probably through a bookmark). In order to protect against this attack, Firefox is effectively restricting use of the https protocal to sites that have been centrally approved.
That's a horrible trade off especially since there are other defenses against that one specific attack: for example, the browser could warn the user if the certificate is different from what it was last time - if they already have a bookmark, they've been to the site before.
Slashdot Mirror
If you take the government regulation that is screwing up a market like health care as a given, then sure - you'll conclude that it can't possibly be a properly functioning market. But treating government regulations as a given is begging the question.
The barrier to entry in health care need not be as high as it is today, and there need be no lack if information about the skill of doctors or their previous outcomes.
The government regulations combined with a "facade of the free market" is precisely why health care in the USA is so messed up. Socialized medicine works much better. Free market medicine can probably do better than that. But the corrupt system of government regulation preventing competition and ensuring cartel profits while claiming to be a free market is far, far worse than either a socialized or free market system.
Absolutely. But the primary cause of those conditions not being met is unnecessary government interference, usually for the profit of major campaign donors. Portraying this as a "free market" situation is just as dishonest as portraying it as democratic socialism would be.
Properly functioning markets will generally provide better outcomes (in terms of efficiency, economic output, and personal freedom) than centralized decision making. If you have a meaningful counterargument to that I'd love to hear it, because the economics (and related freedom arguments) are extremely solid.
The trick is that an economy that is intentionally warped to be dysfunctional in one specific way (to give massive profits to companies that contribute to senator's campaigns) doesn't count as a "properly functioning market" no matter how loudly you insist on calling it "capitalism".
There are two indecent issues here.
First, you are absolutely correct that a local-government granted monopoly is probably one of the major sources of any individual's current ISP selection woes.
But there's also a second issue, as described here. It's hard to describe the issue in a way that doesn't sound radically biased, but the simple fact of the matter is that the telecom companies committed to deploying massive fiber networks and managed to squirm out of it (mostly thorough regulator-capture).
So this isn't just a local government failure. It's also a massive federal government failure, from which there is perfectly good reason for US residents to feel cheated out of decent speed data infrastructure.
Wow. That's horrific.
For comparison:
- 2 gigs at a random datacenter in the US costs $1
- Fedex-ing a DVD-R (4.4 gigs) from Boston to Sydney in 2 business days costs $63
It's absolutely true that the GPL has a higher cost of compliance than a "BSD style" license.
The cost of compliance is still trivial compared to the benefit of using pre-existing code in a scenario where releasing source for a module is compatible with your business goals. This 15 page document basically says "you really have to release the source for your modified GPL modules", and explains that it's easier to do that if your build process isn't messed up.
Conclusion: No software has a $0 acquisition cost in an environment where technicians and programmers get paid. Legally using GPL software by following the license is frequently a good cost / benefit trade off; the practical costs are frequently much lower than using a proprietary alternative. And again, I absolutely agree that the practical cost of "BSD style" stuff is even lower than that.
There's nothing dangerous about the GPL if you comply with the license terms. If you don't want to comply with the license terms, the libraries simply aren't available to you. I don't see what the problem is.
Handling the cache is an interesting question that would require some design effort. My guess would be that under normal circumstances it would be easy to cache every certificate until it expired.
The browser should keep track and warn/error if a site goes from PKI signed to self-signed. Given that, this problem only applies to self-signed sites - and having it be possible for you to pwned once a year is better than every time for an insecure connection.
If someone has self-signed a certificate, that required more technical know how than simply getting a certificate. There are all kinds of places to screw up SSL security and there's no rule that PKI-signed sites got everything right.
That seems like an improvement on the insecure-connection case to me.
For a project that's going to go on for more than a couple months, selecting a task-appropriate programming language will be more useful than selecting one that some single programmer happens to know. As for whether a given language is taught in University or not - I don't see how that could possibly matter. A good University CS program will teach the student to pick up new languages whenever they feel like it.
You sure don't have a bookmark there if you haven't visited it before.
Basically, the use case that you're describing is someone A.) manually types an SSL URL and B.) can't identify the "this cert is not verified" indicators in the UI.
In the town where I live in Massachussetts, the paper ballots really are hand counted by volunteers under the close observation of representatives of the parties and/or candidates involved. Hand counting is completely feasible (we do it), so there is no excuse for any counting technique with worse security properties to be used.
This is a real effect, but the solution is absolutely not to find the closest major corporation with a locally-negotiated monopoly and give them a bunch of money and more monopoly to serve rural areas.
The way this problem is traditionally solved is for the residents of the rural area to create a co-op and build their own infrastructure. This works great.
If they live too far out in the sticks, maybe they have to live without the service (or move back to civilization). Just because someone decides to live in northern Alaska with no other human for a hundred miles does not entitle them to taxpayer-funded infrastructure.
I'm pretty sure that when local governments sign contracts agreeing to not allow any competition over that last mile, that's a "government act" rather than "the market at work".
Competition between two suppliers isn't a competitive market. It's a duopoly - not very much better than a monopoly.
Unbundling the local loop (basically, socializing the last mile) is probably the most effective way to create a competitive market among internet providers, but simply letting multiple companies (and others like co-ops) run wires would produce a better solution than we have now. Just guessing that there's probably a natural monopoly is in no way a valid excuse for the government to grant a monopoly.
The key difference between network connectivity and electricity or telephones is that you're not used to having decent internet connectivity yet. I see your comment as being basically the same as having said that electricity was an unnecessary luxury back in the 1930's.
We don't really need high quality VoIP telephony, and we didn't really need electric lights because kerosene lamps worked fine. We don't really need video conferencing and real-time video presentations, and we didn't really need refrigerators because iceboxes worked fine.
Infrastructure advances like electricity or high speed internet don't result in revolutionary changes overnight. First they make existing tasks much more efficient - which makes the economy much more productive overall. Only much later do they allow for revolutionary breakthroughs (e.g. electricity allowed for modern computers).
The key thing here isn't that VoIP telephones are going to make everyone a millionaire tomorrow. It's that in 30 years when Asia and Europe have modern infrastructure and all the benefits thereof and the USA doesn't the USA will be a backwards country of poor people who can't compete in the modern economy. If we want to avoid that, Manhattan better keep up with Tokyo and Boston better keep up with Helsinki. Right now we're about a decade behind.
You're blaming government-granted monopolies on the free market?
Yea, basic communication infrastructure is unimportant and anyone who wants it must be a huge nerd.
Oh wait. Only a loser would say that.
There is definitely no such thing as "Islamic fascism". Nazi Germany existed. The Soviet Union existed. Saying that "islamic fascism" is a threat to the United States is a lot like saying how wonderful it is that we survived the massive threat that Nicaragua posed in the 80's.
You do realize that not everyone is in Africa is actually starving, right?
If country A, starving, borders country B which is poor but not starving, providing more economic opportunities to country B will tend to help them exploit country A out of starvation.
There's nothing phony about large scale industrialized farming. That's the natural way for an intelligent species to sustain a high population density. This does require a certain amount of societal stability, and when that stability falters millions will die. Billions of deaths at once in food production and distribution glitches is a bit high for the current population - food is grown too locally for that to happen.
Have you considered programming in Malbolge?
Send me $20 right now.
No? I'm amazed at the number of people who can afford $20/month for internet access but can't afford a *one time charge* of $20 so I can have more money for no good reason.
Any time you go to a SSL authenticated website, the browser should store the certificate. If the certificate changes, it should notify the user (i.e. info bar). If it changes from a PKI authenticated certificate to a self signed certificate, it should flip out like it does now.
This still leaves open the possibility of first-visit hijackings, but first visits are usually to http URLs that a DNS hijack could redirect anyway.
Port 443 is *already* effectively blocked for anyone who isn't centrally approved. Have you seen the error message you get in IE or Firefox when you try to visit a site with a self-signed certificate?
There really aren't. Not for people who want to run public websites.
IBM's still selling Power servers to enterprise clients - which must mean J2EE. What are they using for Java runtimes?
There is exactly one attack that this stops: The attacker has hijacked DNS and the user is going directly to an https URL (probably through a bookmark). In order to protect against this attack, Firefox is effectively restricting use of the https protocal to sites that have been centrally approved.
That's a horrible trade off especially since there are other defenses against that one specific attack: for example, the browser could warn the user if the certificate is different from what it was last time - if they already have a bookmark, they've been to the site before.