Children of rich, connected parents will start higher on the pyramid and have an easier time climbing higher still.
Who ever said that equality of opportunity had to be a purely individual metric? Parents taking advantage of their own opportunities to improve their children's circumstances is a legitimate application of equal opportunity on the part of the parents. Equal opportunity does not preclude the existence of families and other close-knit groups looking out for each other and advancing their collective interests in cooperation or competition with other such groups. Considered from a different point of view, it is perfectly normal for people to benefit not only from their own opportunities but also from opportunities which others freely choose to share.
"Equal opportunity" is somewhat misleading in that it does not actually mean that everyone has exactly the same opportunities. The opportunities one has access to are partly a matter of luck, partly a matter of other people's choices (most notably one's parents' choices), and partly a matter of "making one's one luck"—in any case they are expected to vary from person to person. The ideal underlying "equality of opportunity" is more like "equal opportunity under the law"—in other words, the principle that the law should treat everyone equally and not place roadblocks in the way of certain people on the basis of irrelevant factors such as social status, class, creed, race, wealth, ethnicity, or origin to prevent them from taking advantage of such opportunities as may present themselves.
My value and your value for a thing might be different and that value might change over time but if money is handed over in exchange for a thing then a value has been agreed.
No, a price has been agreed. All you can say about value based on that transaction is that, at the time, the seller valued the thing less than the money while the buyer valued the thing more than the money.
Security "defects" as you call them are discovered in libraries, communication protocols, CPU's, and other things which the app simply uses. Some stem from bugs, others simply from the fact that more computing power is becoming available...
The app developer chooses the libraries which ship as part of the application. That makes them responsible if there is a defect in the library, regardless of who originally developed it. Security holes in system libraries, CPUs, etc. are still defects, but they aren't defects in the app and so I wouldn't expect the app developer to be held responsible for fixing them. The focus here is on bugs in the app's code and reasonable security expectations as of the time the product was sold. Updating the app to address new threats is more akin to implementing new features than fixing defects.
it gives the maker incentive to patch and keep things compatible with the world
You don't need a lease model for that. If ongoing compatibility is an issue then users will pay for upgrades. The incentive for patching is to maintain one's reputation, avoid liability for security holes in the app, and discharge the reasonable minimum obligations enforced by the app stores. What the lease model gets you is the ability to extract an ongoing, unearned rent from users who are perfectly happy with the existing version of the software and see no reason to upgrade.
Personally—assuming I can't find an open-source application to do what I need—I would much rather pay a reasonable amount up front for indefinite access to a particular version of the software, upgrading to newer versions at my own discretion and expense, than enter into any kind of lease arrangement where my access to the software can be revoked without warning at the developer's whim. I'm in the market for a tool, not a long-term, and typically one-sided, relationship.
Are you willing to pay $20 for every security fix, or just prefer to save money and have the app being a gaping security hole on your phone?
Security holes are defects. Defective software should be either refunded in full or patched by the developer at no additional charge, on penalty of being banned from publishing in the app store altogether. This applies not only for security issues but also for any advertised features which do not function properly.
It is reasonable to expect users to pay for new major versions with new features. The old versions should remain usable for existing users who are not interested in upgrading, with no built-in expiration dates or malicious "security updates" which disable existing features. If the platform changes such that the app no longer works (and not because the developer put in checks for specific platform versions—a form of built-in expiration date) then that is a between the platform developers and the user.
The subscription model does make sense for apps which primarily serve as front-ends for centralized network services. In that case you're not so much subscribing to the app so much as subscribing to the service the app depends on, which represents an ongoing expense for the service provider.
I mean, you don't label a banana, since it naturally comes that way picked off the tree.
A GMO banana would also naturally come that way picked off the (GMO) tree. I doubt you've ever seen a real natural banana—they're mostly seeds. The seedless kind sold in stores is a hybrid which would not exist without plenty of human intervention in the growing process.
GMO vs. non-GMO is a distraction. The only labeling that makes sense along these lines is an estimate of how long humans have been regularly eating food with the exact same DNA and chemical makeup. It makes no difference whether the changes to the DNA came from a lab, irradiation, or selective breeding; they all have the same effect.
It doesn't seem all that hard. Consider this scheme: Each choice on each ballot is secretly associated with a unique code. You record the code for your choice on a separate piece of paper and place that paper in the ballot box, optionally keeping a copy for later verification. The page with all the codes on it is then destroyed. If you want to "prove" that you voted a different way, you record the code for that choice and then request a new ballot (without putting anything in the box). The first ballot is set aside. When the voting period is over all of the codes in the ballot boxes *and* all of the codes on the discarded ballots are shuffled together and publicized, along with the choices they represent—since the discarded ballots include one code for each choice these extra codes do not favor any particular position and can simply be subtracted from the final tally. Anyone who wishes to verify their vote can check that their code is present and associated with the correct choice. However, only the voter knows whether the code they recorded was the one they actually submitted or the one on the discarded ballot. To an aspiring vote-buyer these appear identical, but only the real code increases the tally for that choice relative to the other options.
In a perfect system, everyone can see what the votes are (so they can verify the count)...
Check. The votes themselves (the unique codes and the choices they represent) are public, and the total can be checked against the number of votes cast (excluding any invalid/spoiled votes) and the number of discarded ballots.
...everyone who voted can see that their votes are included in the tally correctly...
Check. Just need to look at the public results and confirm that the code they wrote down is included in the correct group.
...and yet they can also provide fake proof of a different vote to anyone trying to influence them, such that this influencer has no way to know whether the provided proof is fake or not.
Check. Just write down the code for the influencer's choice and then request a new ballot.
Also, you need to separate votes in different races for the public record - otherwise Influencer can supply a 'how to vote' card with a distinctive pattern of votes in races the influence doesn't care about, but can be used to prove the voter voted as demanded.
Check. Each choice is reported separately, so there's no way to correlate votes across different races.
Or to put it another way, we want to receive a particular piece of information X, we can't keep it a secret from the party that provides X that we requested X.
Agreed, fixed to address your concern.
That is still incorrect. We can keep it a secret that we requested X from the party that provides X, by routing the request through third parties so that the party that provides X does not know who initiated the request, and none of the third parties who do know who initiated the request know that X was requested.
I meant the endpoint that is actually doing the resolving is the one to substitute it.
OK, that I can agree with. I'm not sure I'd call that "substituting" since the resolver is initiating the response, but it is true that you're still stuck trusting the resolver, unless you have a parallel authentication protocol like DNSSec (which just shifts the trust root to ICANN and the registrars) or a distributed trustless system like Namecoin, which has a different set of trade-offs.
Which is.. . the role of a CA system like we have in TLS to authoritatively map keys with common names.
DNSSec does this better, for one very simple reason: the organizations you need to trust in DNSSec are the very same ones that you already need to trust to allocate the common names and accurately resolve them to IP addresses. Whereas in the TLS CA system, at least in the common case of domain-validation certificates, you're forced to trust both the registrars (since anyone who controls the resolution of a domain name can get a DV certificate for that domain) and every single CA on the planet, since any CA can issue a certificate for any domain.
But that is indeed my point -- either you are talking about keeping the contents of the requests confidential from eavesdroppers (in which case, all you need is DNS-over-TLS) or you are talking about keeping it confidential from the resolver itself, which is flat out impossible.
We can't keep the entire request confidential from the resolver, true. Perhaps with homomorphic encryption we could, but so far that remains too inefficient to be a practical solution. However, we only need the source of the request to be confidential, and onion routing handles that nicely, in addition to protecting against MitM attacks and eavesdropping. The resolver only needs to know what information is being requested, not who made the request.
Or to put it another way, we want to receive a particular piece of information X, we can't keep it a secret that we requested X.
Actually we can. That's how Tor works. We can't keep it a secret that we made a request of some kind, and we can't keep what was requested a secret from the service provider, but we can keep it a secret that we requested X via onion routing—the internal routing node(s) don't see the request (since it's encrypted to the service provider), and the service provider doesn't see where the request originated (just the last internal node it was routed through and the first node in the return path).
nodes in a 'mesh' DNS resolver could maliciously substitute their own resolutions
Internal Tor nodes do not have the option of substituting their own responses. First, they don't even see the request or the response since both are encrypted, so they wouldn't have any idea what to substitute. Second, the response is authenticated with the service provider's private key, so no one else could generate a response the client would accept even if they somehow guessed what the request was.
DNSSec makes sense for other reasons (when you can't trust the resolver itself, or its communications with other nameservers), but that's separate from the problem of communicating anonymously with the resolver. Fully distributed and trustless (but not anonymous) name resolution systems do exist as an alternative to hierarchical DNS with root keys and trusted registrars. Namecoin is one example.
I agree with you about the case, but I can understand why the judge granted the temporary restraining order.
Well I can't. First, there isn't any need for deliberations; all of this is well-settled law in all respects except for the use of new-fangled "3D printing" in place of the traditional mill, drill press, etc. Not only the distribution of plans but the actual process of manufacturing your own "untraceable" guns (of considerably higher quality) has been perfectly legal for ages. Rather than issuing a restraining order the judge should have summarily dismissed the case with prejudice. Second, the restraining order is pointless. The plans are already out there. Restricting the defendant from publishing them online isn't going to prevent anyone from obtaining them. What does the judge think this will accomplish, besides infringing on the defendant's 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech?
And as for what the Constitution would have to say about manufacturing, that's a misunderstanding of the Constitution. The Constitution is not an enumeration of rights granted to the people or states, but an enumeration of restrictions placed upon the federal gov't.
This is a far worse misunderstanding of the Constitution. The Constitution is neither an enumeration of rights granted to the people or states nor of restrictions placed on the federal government, but rather an enumeration of powers delegated to the federal government. The Bill of Rights was controversial precisely because its detractors felt that it was unnecessary, since the power to infringe these rights was never granted in the first place, and also because they feared it might mislead people to conclude, as you did, that anything not explicitly forbidden in the Bill of Rights must be permissible. On the contrary—even there is no language in the Constitution restricting the government from taking a certain action—each action taken by the federal government must still be justified as an exercise of one of its enumerated powers.
The default is that the federal government is not allowed to do anything unless that power was specifically granted to it in the Constitution. In addition, certain key areas, such as infringing the freedom of speech or the right of the people to keep and bear arms, are explicitly off-limits even if the other portions of the Constitution could be misconstrued as granting such powers.
If they wouldn't let me pay then I'd leave it behind right there. They can put it away.
If you knew up front that they didn't accept cash then this is pure vandalism. On the other hand, if a reasonable person in your position would not have known about the policy (your first time & not clearly posted) then that would be a reasonable course of action. The store would probably prefer to have their own employees restocking the shelves, actually, just to ensure everything goes back where it belongs.
If it is food.... then it's a debt and it's their fault for letting me eat it before paying for it.
If you're referring to a restaurant where the expectation is that you eat first and pay later, then I agree that this represents a debt and legal tender laws would apply. If you offer to settle your bill in full with cash (with no expectation of receiving change) and they refuse, they can't later legally claim you still owe them for the meal. The simple solution if they don't want to deal with cash is to collect the payment up front when the order is placed.
The Washington AG appears to be confused about a lot of things. Starting with:
... also infringed upon states' Tenth Amendment right to regulate firearms within their own states.
There is no such right. It is perfectly obvious that any such state regulation would be in direct violation of the Second Amendment. As applied to the distribution of design information, as in this case, the proposed regulations would also be in direct violation of the First Amendment. Fortunately for everyone the First Amendment tends to be enforced fairly strictly, though the courts have a distressing tendency to look the other way when various states infringe the right of The People to keep and bear arms.
What stores even have the old manual card impression machines?
Would they even work if they had them? While my current card has raised digits, IIRC the last one did not. Prepaid cards are frequently unembossed as well. At the very least it wouldn't work for everyone.
On the other hand, if you have enough local power to keep a smartphone recharged, and intermittent Internet connectivity, you can process credit cards offline using the magnetic stripes. There is a higher risk of fraud, of course, but no more than there would be with the impression machine. I know at least Square allows cards to be scanned offline with their app and uploaded for processing at a later time at no extra charge, though the merchant must accept the risk that delayed transactions may fail. Even without their custom magstripe dongle you can still enter the card numbers manually. It might be worth keeping an account like that active just in case of emergencies.
So right now we have a system which is paying an average of 30k/year to 110M welfare recipients. People who, on average and for various reasons, can be expected to have above-average cost of living. Some of them are likely to require significantly more than 30k to cover special needs and/or ongoing medical costs. And you're proposing to replace all of this with a flat payment of $10k/year/person? Surely even you wouldn't expect someone currently receiving $30k/year to cover necessary living expenses to make do with a measly $10k, but where is the rest supposed to come from when all the welfare infrastructure has been replaced with a "simple" UBI?
If you plan to replace the existing welfare system with something "simpler" you can't just take the current totals and redistribute them evenly among three times as many recipients. You need to ensure that even those with the highest cost of living among existing welfare recipients—especially them, since they likely have the greatest need—do not see a significant cut in their benefits. Doing so while dismantling the apparatus responsible for determining how much each individual actually needs, and instead attempting to pay everyone the same amount, will require far more resources than the existing system. Not only would you have three times as many people receiving benefits, but the average payout would also need to increase since you're no longer matching benefits to individual needs.
The cost of a welfare system expanded to cover everyone without reducing average benefits would be about $10T. Adjusted to pay everyone an equal amount which would ensure that, say, the 80% percentile of current recipients see no reduction in benefits (assuming the 80/20 rule—that 80% of the cost goes toward 20% of recipients) could easily quadruple that figure while still reducing benefits for over 20 million people.
Nonetheless, it is the integrator's responsibility—not the suppliers'—to ensure that the final product will meet the mission requirements. One cannot simply take a COTS operating system which was never designed or advertised for use in mission-critical systems, integrate it into such a system without fully specifying and verifying all the requirements being placed on it, and then defer liability to the supplier when it inevitably fails in the field.
I promise you that someone will die because Windows 10 will update on a mission critical piece of equipment at some point - whether in industrial or medical - and I hope Microsoft is held liable.
That's not how it works. Whoever chose to use Windows 10 in mission-critical equipment despite its obvious unsuitability for the purpose would be liable, not Microsoft.
... you can argue until the cows come home about intercepting raw HTTP and altering it all you want, because corporations MITM HTTPS anyway, so it would just as easy to do the same thing.
Corporations can do that on devices they control because they have the necessary administrative access to install their own root certificates. Your local coffee shop or residential ISP can't MitM their customers' HTTPS traffic so easily, whereas the practice of tampering with pages served over HTTP is depressingly commonplace. This is far from theoretical; major ISPs have been caught red-handed injecting scripts and other content into web pages as well as splicing unique user IDs into HTTP headers for tracking purposes.
Short of banning HTTP from the web entirely, I would at least propose to restrict pages served over HTTP from any form of interactivity. No scripts, no plugins, no forms, no "responsive" CSS, limited media formats—no audio or video, just still images in a few well-vetted formats with ironclad decoders. Anything else is too risky to entrust to unauthenticated content. I'd also add a big warning banner above the page saying that the (human-readable) content of the page may have been tampered with and cannot be trusted.
Any why are we so quick to condemn actions like this, but cheer on the likes of people who go after GPL violators?
The point of the GPL is to leverage copyright in order to guarantee certain freedoms to the software's users; freedoms which, at least according to some, users ought to have by right in the first place, and which copyright has helped take away. If you happen to be in the group which thinks this way, there is nothing inconsistent about opposing copyright but still being upset with GPL violators, not because they are violating copyright (which is just a means to an end—using the opponent's preferred system against them) but rather because they are denying the users of their software those freedoms.
Banning the export of any weapon doesn't affect anyone's 2nd Amendment rights
Human beings, not just American citizens, possess the natural rights of property and self-defense, which includes the right to keep and bear arms. While the 2nd Amendment per se may only apply within the US—because the Constitution itself only has jurisdiction over the US federal and state governments—the "2nd Amendment right" to keep and bear arms has a much wider scope.
All of which is immaterial, since it isn't the right of non-citizens to keep and bear arms which is infringed by banning weapon exports, but rather the right of American citizens to peaceably use and dispose of their own private property, including weapons, as they please, which—while not expressly codified in any Amendment—is far more fundamental to a free society. The 2nd Amendment only (directly) says that the government cannot prohibit the possession of weapons; it doesn't say anything about the right to manufacture or trade them, whether between citizens or across borders. This most fundamental of rights was simply taken for granted. Of course, the government was never empowered to interfere with the manufacture or trade of any kind of good to begin with, but it wouldn't have hurt to make this explicit in the Bill of Rights. The founders, unfortunately, were a bit too optimistic about the good nature (and sense) of those who would come after them.
Why do you need a license to run software? Because the computer is copying it from disk to main memory to execute it...
Sorry, you've apparently fallen for propaganda. A license may be required to install the software (creating a durable copy on the disk), but not simply to run it. At least in the US, creating an ephemeral copy of a program in main memory for the purpose of executing it does not result in a durable copy in the same regulated by copyright law. (Other jurisdictions may have even less coherent rules, of course.)
... same for the contents of a DVD.
Except, last I checked, DVDs don't come with licenses. Neither do books, and the contents of DRAM are no different from the ephemeral copy of the text created by bouncing light off the pages in order to read them.
In practice the only act of copying which matters is the one which results in a new person gaining access to the work. In the modern world any attempt to control the number of copies in a single individual's possession (ephemeral copies, backups, multiple devices, etc.) is absurd. No one who is not distributing copies to others should have any reason to know or care about copyright law. Unfortunately the law has yet to catch up to reality, and is still based on principles which were frankly dubious even when making (persistent) copies was the work of specialists and not the fundamental basis for all modern technology.
Actually... they're the ones with the actuarial tables... screw the doctors, maybe we SHOULD be asking the INSURANCE guys how to be healthy!
If your goal is to minimize the amount you're spending on health care, then yes, insurance companies are exactly the right people to ask. You're likely to get better real-world advice from them than from the actual health care providers. Insurers have the best incentives to discover exactly what factors increase or decrease the cost of health care. The ones that get it wrong will either overestimate the expected cost and set their prices too high, in which case people flock to other insurance providers, or else set their prices too low and get driven out of business when the bills come in.
Or maybe not... since they have a vested interest in you dying young, while you're still healthy, before the unavoidable health care costs of advancing age make you a less and less profitable person to insure.
This makes zero sense unless insurance premiums remain fixed as you age and cannot be updated to reflect the increasing expected cost of care. As long as the deal remains fair to both sides, as it would without outside intervention, insurers have no vested interest in clients dying young. Perverse incentives such as this one are a consequence of politicians trying to turn insurance into something else entirely.
Still not convinced? Okay, so what happens if you think you're living a healthy lifestyle, but you're doing so somewhere your insurer knows is near a cluster of cases of a rare and aggressive form of cancer, and so cancels your insurance, because the premiums you pay aren't worth the risk given the cost of treatment and how much more likely it is for someone who lives where you do?
In that case I would really want to know about this environmental factor which is probably going to give me a heightened risk of cancer, and what I may be able to do to avoid it or at least mitigate the damage. They've actually just done me a huge favor by uncovering this issue. Of course, they aren't going to cancel the policy, just raise the premiums—which is perfectly fair, since we both know those premiums are now covering a higher expected cost. It's no longer the same product which was being offered before, so why should the amount I pay remain the same?
Insurance, by it's very own nature, is going to have people people who take more and those who give more. There is no way around that.
True, but you're changing the subject. The point is not that what each individual pays in premiums should match what they receive in claims—which would obviously make insurance pointless. The point is that the premiums should match each individual's expected cost (i.e. cost times probability). That is the only way the exchange can be fair to both sides. Insurance is not a charity or welfare program. You can try to force insurers into that role with mandatory participation, price ceilings, and rules about pre-existing conditions, essentially forbidding the provision of insurance at a price which would be fair to those with average or below-average risk, but the outcome of such a policy will be strictly worse than if you had left the insurance market alone to do what it does best and instead openly operated a welfare program to pay for health care (not insurance) for those in need.
AIUI, you cannot legally refuse to produce physical objects like keys, but you can legally refuse to give them the contents of your mind - in this case, a password.
This is a distinction without a difference. Producing a physical key implies admitting that you know which key opens the lock and where that key can be found. In what sense is either of these aspects not "the contents of your mind"? If they already knew where the key was they would just take it; what they want from you is information about the key, not the key itself.
In any case, rulings regarding physical keys have no bearing on electronic storage or communications, apart from the rare cases where there is some sort of physical HSM involved. Despite the whimsical name, cryptographic "keys" are really just long passcodes, which are part of the process for translating a ciphered message. Long-established precedent says that while they can seize an encoded journal, with a warrant, they can't force the author to decode it. Electronically-aided encryption is no different.
Slashdot Mirror
Children of rich, connected parents will start higher on the pyramid and have an easier time climbing higher still.
Who ever said that equality of opportunity had to be a purely individual metric? Parents taking advantage of their own opportunities to improve their children's circumstances is a legitimate application of equal opportunity on the part of the parents. Equal opportunity does not preclude the existence of families and other close-knit groups looking out for each other and advancing their collective interests in cooperation or competition with other such groups. Considered from a different point of view, it is perfectly normal for people to benefit not only from their own opportunities but also from opportunities which others freely choose to share.
"Equal opportunity" is somewhat misleading in that it does not actually mean that everyone has exactly the same opportunities. The opportunities one has access to are partly a matter of luck, partly a matter of other people's choices (most notably one's parents' choices), and partly a matter of "making one's one luck"—in any case they are expected to vary from person to person. The ideal underlying "equality of opportunity" is more like "equal opportunity under the law"—in other words, the principle that the law should treat everyone equally and not place roadblocks in the way of certain people on the basis of irrelevant factors such as social status, class, creed, race, wealth, ethnicity, or origin to prevent them from taking advantage of such opportunities as may present themselves.
My value and your value for a thing might be different and that value might change over time but if money is handed over in exchange for a thing then a value has been agreed.
No, a price has been agreed. All you can say about value based on that transaction is that, at the time, the seller valued the thing less than the money while the buyer valued the thing more than the money.
Security "defects" as you call them are discovered in libraries, communication protocols, CPU's, and other things which the app simply uses. Some stem from bugs, others simply from the fact that more computing power is becoming available...
The app developer chooses the libraries which ship as part of the application. That makes them responsible if there is a defect in the library, regardless of who originally developed it. Security holes in system libraries, CPUs, etc. are still defects, but they aren't defects in the app and so I wouldn't expect the app developer to be held responsible for fixing them. The focus here is on bugs in the app's code and reasonable security expectations as of the time the product was sold. Updating the app to address new threats is more akin to implementing new features than fixing defects.
it gives the maker incentive to patch and keep things compatible with the world
You don't need a lease model for that. If ongoing compatibility is an issue then users will pay for upgrades. The incentive for patching is to maintain one's reputation, avoid liability for security holes in the app, and discharge the reasonable minimum obligations enforced by the app stores. What the lease model gets you is the ability to extract an ongoing, unearned rent from users who are perfectly happy with the existing version of the software and see no reason to upgrade.
Personally—assuming I can't find an open-source application to do what I need—I would much rather pay a reasonable amount up front for indefinite access to a particular version of the software, upgrading to newer versions at my own discretion and expense, than enter into any kind of lease arrangement where my access to the software can be revoked without warning at the developer's whim. I'm in the market for a tool, not a long-term, and typically one-sided, relationship.
Are you willing to pay $20 for every security fix, or just prefer to save money and have the app being a gaping security hole on your phone?
Security holes are defects. Defective software should be either refunded in full or patched by the developer at no additional charge, on penalty of being banned from publishing in the app store altogether. This applies not only for security issues but also for any advertised features which do not function properly.
It is reasonable to expect users to pay for new major versions with new features. The old versions should remain usable for existing users who are not interested in upgrading, with no built-in expiration dates or malicious "security updates" which disable existing features. If the platform changes such that the app no longer works (and not because the developer put in checks for specific platform versions—a form of built-in expiration date) then that is a between the platform developers and the user.
The subscription model does make sense for apps which primarily serve as front-ends for centralized network services. In that case you're not so much subscribing to the app so much as subscribing to the service the app depends on, which represents an ongoing expense for the service provider.
I mean, you don't label a banana, since it naturally comes that way picked off the tree.
A GMO banana would also naturally come that way picked off the (GMO) tree. I doubt you've ever seen a real natural banana—they're mostly seeds. The seedless kind sold in stores is a hybrid which would not exist without plenty of human intervention in the growing process.
GMO vs. non-GMO is a distraction. The only labeling that makes sense along these lines is an estimate of how long humans have been regularly eating food with the exact same DNA and chemical makeup. It makes no difference whether the changes to the DNA came from a lab, irradiation, or selective breeding; they all have the same effect.
It doesn't seem all that hard. Consider this scheme: Each choice on each ballot is secretly associated with a unique code. You record the code for your choice on a separate piece of paper and place that paper in the ballot box, optionally keeping a copy for later verification. The page with all the codes on it is then destroyed. If you want to "prove" that you voted a different way, you record the code for that choice and then request a new ballot (without putting anything in the box). The first ballot is set aside. When the voting period is over all of the codes in the ballot boxes *and* all of the codes on the discarded ballots are shuffled together and publicized, along with the choices they represent—since the discarded ballots include one code for each choice these extra codes do not favor any particular position and can simply be subtracted from the final tally. Anyone who wishes to verify their vote can check that their code is present and associated with the correct choice. However, only the voter knows whether the code they recorded was the one they actually submitted or the one on the discarded ballot. To an aspiring vote-buyer these appear identical, but only the real code increases the tally for that choice relative to the other options.
In a perfect system, everyone can see what the votes are (so they can verify the count)...
Check. The votes themselves (the unique codes and the choices they represent) are public, and the total can be checked against the number of votes cast (excluding any invalid/spoiled votes) and the number of discarded ballots.
...everyone who voted can see that their votes are included in the tally correctly...
Check. Just need to look at the public results and confirm that the code they wrote down is included in the correct group.
...and yet they can also provide fake proof of a different vote to anyone trying to influence them, such that this influencer has no way to know whether the provided proof is fake or not.
Check. Just write down the code for the influencer's choice and then request a new ballot.
Also, you need to separate votes in different races for the public record - otherwise Influencer can supply a 'how to vote' card with a distinctive pattern of votes in races the influence doesn't care about, but can be used to prove the voter voted as demanded.
Check. Each choice is reported separately, so there's no way to correlate votes across different races.
Or to put it another way, we want to receive a particular piece of information X, we can't keep it a secret from the party that provides X that we requested X.
Agreed, fixed to address your concern.
That is still incorrect. We can keep it a secret that we requested X from the party that provides X, by routing the request through third parties so that the party that provides X does not know who initiated the request, and none of the third parties who do know who initiated the request know that X was requested.
I meant the endpoint that is actually doing the resolving is the one to substitute it.
OK, that I can agree with. I'm not sure I'd call that "substituting" since the resolver is initiating the response, but it is true that you're still stuck trusting the resolver, unless you have a parallel authentication protocol like DNSSec (which just shifts the trust root to ICANN and the registrars) or a distributed trustless system like Namecoin, which has a different set of trade-offs.
Which is .. . the role of a CA system like we have in TLS to authoritatively map keys with common names.
DNSSec does this better, for one very simple reason: the organizations you need to trust in DNSSec are the very same ones that you already need to trust to allocate the common names and accurately resolve them to IP addresses. Whereas in the TLS CA system, at least in the common case of domain-validation certificates, you're forced to trust both the registrars (since anyone who controls the resolution of a domain name can get a DV certificate for that domain) and every single CA on the planet, since any CA can issue a certificate for any domain.
But that is indeed my point -- either you are talking about keeping the contents of the requests confidential from eavesdroppers (in which case, all you need is DNS-over-TLS) or you are talking about keeping it confidential from the resolver itself, which is flat out impossible.
We can't keep the entire request confidential from the resolver, true. Perhaps with homomorphic encryption we could, but so far that remains too inefficient to be a practical solution. However, we only need the source of the request to be confidential, and onion routing handles that nicely, in addition to protecting against MitM attacks and eavesdropping. The resolver only needs to know what information is being requested, not who made the request.
Or to put it another way, we want to receive a particular piece of information X, we can't keep it a secret that we requested X.
Actually we can. That's how Tor works. We can't keep it a secret that we made a request of some kind, and we can't keep what was requested a secret from the service provider, but we can keep it a secret that we requested X via onion routing—the internal routing node(s) don't see the request (since it's encrypted to the service provider), and the service provider doesn't see where the request originated (just the last internal node it was routed through and the first node in the return path).
nodes in a 'mesh' DNS resolver could maliciously substitute their own resolutions
Internal Tor nodes do not have the option of substituting their own responses. First, they don't even see the request or the response since both are encrypted, so they wouldn't have any idea what to substitute. Second, the response is authenticated with the service provider's private key, so no one else could generate a response the client would accept even if they somehow guessed what the request was.
DNSSec makes sense for other reasons (when you can't trust the resolver itself, or its communications with other nameservers), but that's separate from the problem of communicating anonymously with the resolver. Fully distributed and trustless (but not anonymous) name resolution systems do exist as an alternative to hierarchical DNS with root keys and trusted registrars. Namecoin is one example.
I agree with you about the case, but I can understand why the judge granted the temporary restraining order.
Well I can't. First, there isn't any need for deliberations; all of this is well-settled law in all respects except for the use of new-fangled "3D printing" in place of the traditional mill, drill press, etc. Not only the distribution of plans but the actual process of manufacturing your own "untraceable" guns (of considerably higher quality) has been perfectly legal for ages. Rather than issuing a restraining order the judge should have summarily dismissed the case with prejudice. Second, the restraining order is pointless. The plans are already out there. Restricting the defendant from publishing them online isn't going to prevent anyone from obtaining them. What does the judge think this will accomplish, besides infringing on the defendant's 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech?
And as for what the Constitution would have to say about manufacturing, that's a misunderstanding of the Constitution. The Constitution is not an enumeration of rights granted to the people or states, but an enumeration of restrictions placed upon the federal gov't.
This is a far worse misunderstanding of the Constitution. The Constitution is neither an enumeration of rights granted to the people or states nor of restrictions placed on the federal government, but rather an enumeration of powers delegated to the federal government. The Bill of Rights was controversial precisely because its detractors felt that it was unnecessary, since the power to infringe these rights was never granted in the first place, and also because they feared it might mislead people to conclude, as you did, that anything not explicitly forbidden in the Bill of Rights must be permissible. On the contrary—even there is no language in the Constitution restricting the government from taking a certain action—each action taken by the federal government must still be justified as an exercise of one of its enumerated powers.
The default is that the federal government is not allowed to do anything unless that power was specifically granted to it in the Constitution. In addition, certain key areas, such as infringing the freedom of speech or the right of the people to keep and bear arms, are explicitly off-limits even if the other portions of the Constitution could be misconstrued as granting such powers.
If they wouldn't let me pay then I'd leave it behind right there. They can put it away.
If you knew up front that they didn't accept cash then this is pure vandalism. On the other hand, if a reasonable person in your position would not have known about the policy (your first time & not clearly posted) then that would be a reasonable course of action. The store would probably prefer to have their own employees restocking the shelves, actually, just to ensure everything goes back where it belongs.
If it is food.... then it's a debt and it's their fault for letting me eat it before paying for it.
If you're referring to a restaurant where the expectation is that you eat first and pay later, then I agree that this represents a debt and legal tender laws would apply. If you offer to settle your bill in full with cash (with no expectation of receiving change) and they refuse, they can't later legally claim you still owe them for the meal. The simple solution if they don't want to deal with cash is to collect the payment up front when the order is placed.
The Washington AG appears to be confused about a lot of things. Starting with:
... also infringed upon states' Tenth Amendment right to regulate firearms within their own states.
There is no such right. It is perfectly obvious that any such state regulation would be in direct violation of the Second Amendment. As applied to the distribution of design information, as in this case, the proposed regulations would also be in direct violation of the First Amendment. Fortunately for everyone the First Amendment tends to be enforced fairly strictly, though the courts have a distressing tendency to look the other way when various states infringe the right of The People to keep and bear arms.
In the USA it is required by law that all debts be payable by US Dollars.
Emphasis on debts. Businesses which do not extend credit are under no obligation to accept cash in exchange for goods or services.
What stores even have the old manual card impression machines?
Would they even work if they had them? While my current card has raised digits, IIRC the last one did not. Prepaid cards are frequently unembossed as well. At the very least it wouldn't work for everyone.
On the other hand, if you have enough local power to keep a smartphone recharged, and intermittent Internet connectivity, you can process credit cards offline using the magnetic stripes. There is a higher risk of fraud, of course, but no more than there would be with the impression machine. I know at least Square allows cards to be scanned offline with their app and uploaded for processing at a later time at no extra charge, though the merchant must accept the risk that delayed transactions may fail. Even without their custom magstripe dongle you can still enter the card numbers manually. It might be worth keeping an account like that active just in case of emergencies.
So right now we have a system which is paying an average of 30k/year to 110M welfare recipients. People who, on average and for various reasons, can be expected to have above-average cost of living. Some of them are likely to require significantly more than 30k to cover special needs and/or ongoing medical costs. And you're proposing to replace all of this with a flat payment of $10k/year/person? Surely even you wouldn't expect someone currently receiving $30k/year to cover necessary living expenses to make do with a measly $10k, but where is the rest supposed to come from when all the welfare infrastructure has been replaced with a "simple" UBI?
If you plan to replace the existing welfare system with something "simpler" you can't just take the current totals and redistribute them evenly among three times as many recipients. You need to ensure that even those with the highest cost of living among existing welfare recipients—especially them, since they likely have the greatest need—do not see a significant cut in their benefits. Doing so while dismantling the apparatus responsible for determining how much each individual actually needs, and instead attempting to pay everyone the same amount, will require far more resources than the existing system. Not only would you have three times as many people receiving benefits, but the average payout would also need to increase since you're no longer matching benefits to individual needs.
The cost of a welfare system expanded to cover everyone without reducing average benefits would be about $10T. Adjusted to pay everyone an equal amount which would ensure that, say, the 80% percentile of current recipients see no reduction in benefits (assuming the 80/20 rule—that 80% of the cost goes toward 20% of recipients) could easily quadruple that figure while still reducing benefits for over 20 million people.
Nonetheless, it is the integrator's responsibility—not the suppliers'—to ensure that the final product will meet the mission requirements. One cannot simply take a COTS operating system which was never designed or advertised for use in mission-critical systems, integrate it into such a system without fully specifying and verifying all the requirements being placed on it, and then defer liability to the supplier when it inevitably fails in the field.
I promise you that someone will die because Windows 10 will update on a mission critical piece of equipment at some point - whether in industrial or medical - and I hope Microsoft is held liable.
That's not how it works. Whoever chose to use Windows 10 in mission-critical equipment despite its obvious unsuitability for the purpose would be liable, not Microsoft.
... you can argue until the cows come home about intercepting raw HTTP and altering it all you want, because corporations MITM HTTPS anyway, so it would just as easy to do the same thing.
Corporations can do that on devices they control because they have the necessary administrative access to install their own root certificates. Your local coffee shop or residential ISP can't MitM their customers' HTTPS traffic so easily, whereas the practice of tampering with pages served over HTTP is depressingly commonplace. This is far from theoretical; major ISPs have been caught red-handed injecting scripts and other content into web pages as well as splicing unique user IDs into HTTP headers for tracking purposes.
Short of banning HTTP from the web entirely, I would at least propose to restrict pages served over HTTP from any form of interactivity. No scripts, no plugins, no forms, no "responsive" CSS, limited media formats—no audio or video, just still images in a few well-vetted formats with ironclad decoders. Anything else is too risky to entrust to unauthenticated content. I'd also add a big warning banner above the page saying that the (human-readable) content of the page may have been tampered with and cannot be trusted.
Any why are we so quick to condemn actions like this, but cheer on the likes of people who go after GPL violators?
The point of the GPL is to leverage copyright in order to guarantee certain freedoms to the software's users; freedoms which, at least according to some, users ought to have by right in the first place, and which copyright has helped take away. If you happen to be in the group which thinks this way, there is nothing inconsistent about opposing copyright but still being upset with GPL violators, not because they are violating copyright (which is just a means to an end—using the opponent's preferred system against them) but rather because they are denying the users of their software those freedoms.
Banning the export of any weapon doesn't affect anyone's 2nd Amendment rights
Human beings, not just American citizens, possess the natural rights of property and self-defense, which includes the right to keep and bear arms. While the 2nd Amendment per se may only apply within the US—because the Constitution itself only has jurisdiction over the US federal and state governments—the "2nd Amendment right" to keep and bear arms has a much wider scope.
All of which is immaterial, since it isn't the right of non-citizens to keep and bear arms which is infringed by banning weapon exports, but rather the right of American citizens to peaceably use and dispose of their own private property, including weapons, as they please, which—while not expressly codified in any Amendment—is far more fundamental to a free society. The 2nd Amendment only (directly) says that the government cannot prohibit the possession of weapons; it doesn't say anything about the right to manufacture or trade them, whether between citizens or across borders. This most fundamental of rights was simply taken for granted. Of course, the government was never empowered to interfere with the manufacture or trade of any kind of good to begin with, but it wouldn't have hurt to make this explicit in the Bill of Rights. The founders, unfortunately, were a bit too optimistic about the good nature (and sense) of those who would come after them.
Why do you need a license to run software? Because the computer is copying it from disk to main memory to execute it ...
Sorry, you've apparently fallen for propaganda. A license may be required to install the software (creating a durable copy on the disk), but not simply to run it. At least in the US, creating an ephemeral copy of a program in main memory for the purpose of executing it does not result in a durable copy in the same regulated by copyright law. (Other jurisdictions may have even less coherent rules, of course.)
... same for the contents of a DVD.
Except, last I checked, DVDs don't come with licenses. Neither do books, and the contents of DRAM are no different from the ephemeral copy of the text created by bouncing light off the pages in order to read them.
In practice the only act of copying which matters is the one which results in a new person gaining access to the work. In the modern world any attempt to control the number of copies in a single individual's possession (ephemeral copies, backups, multiple devices, etc.) is absurd. No one who is not distributing copies to others should have any reason to know or care about copyright law. Unfortunately the law has yet to catch up to reality, and is still based on principles which were frankly dubious even when making (persistent) copies was the work of specialists and not the fundamental basis for all modern technology.
Co-operation isn't slavery.
This isn't cooperation. This is force. Any limitations "negotiated" under duress are null and void.
Actually... they're the ones with the actuarial tables... screw the doctors, maybe we SHOULD be asking the INSURANCE guys how to be healthy!
If your goal is to minimize the amount you're spending on health care, then yes, insurance companies are exactly the right people to ask. You're likely to get better real-world advice from them than from the actual health care providers. Insurers have the best incentives to discover exactly what factors increase or decrease the cost of health care. The ones that get it wrong will either overestimate the expected cost and set their prices too high, in which case people flock to other insurance providers, or else set their prices too low and get driven out of business when the bills come in.
Or maybe not... since they have a vested interest in you dying young, while you're still healthy, before the unavoidable health care costs of advancing age make you a less and less profitable person to insure.
This makes zero sense unless insurance premiums remain fixed as you age and cannot be updated to reflect the increasing expected cost of care. As long as the deal remains fair to both sides, as it would without outside intervention, insurers have no vested interest in clients dying young. Perverse incentives such as this one are a consequence of politicians trying to turn insurance into something else entirely.
Still not convinced? Okay, so what happens if you think you're living a healthy lifestyle, but you're doing so somewhere your insurer knows is near a cluster of cases of a rare and aggressive form of cancer, and so cancels your insurance, because the premiums you pay aren't worth the risk given the cost of treatment and how much more likely it is for someone who lives where you do?
In that case I would really want to know about this environmental factor which is probably going to give me a heightened risk of cancer, and what I may be able to do to avoid it or at least mitigate the damage. They've actually just done me a huge favor by uncovering this issue. Of course, they aren't going to cancel the policy, just raise the premiums—which is perfectly fair, since we both know those premiums are now covering a higher expected cost. It's no longer the same product which was being offered before, so why should the amount I pay remain the same?
Insurance, by it's very own nature, is going to have people people who take more and those who give more. There is no way around that.
True, but you're changing the subject. The point is not that what each individual pays in premiums should match what they receive in claims—which would obviously make insurance pointless. The point is that the premiums should match each individual's expected cost (i.e. cost times probability). That is the only way the exchange can be fair to both sides. Insurance is not a charity or welfare program. You can try to force insurers into that role with mandatory participation, price ceilings, and rules about pre-existing conditions, essentially forbidding the provision of insurance at a price which would be fair to those with average or below-average risk, but the outcome of such a policy will be strictly worse than if you had left the insurance market alone to do what it does best and instead openly operated a welfare program to pay for health care (not insurance) for those in need.
AIUI, you cannot legally refuse to produce physical objects like keys, but you can legally refuse to give them the contents of your mind - in this case, a password.
This is a distinction without a difference. Producing a physical key implies admitting that you know which key opens the lock and where that key can be found. In what sense is either of these aspects not "the contents of your mind"? If they already knew where the key was they would just take it; what they want from you is information about the key, not the key itself.
In any case, rulings regarding physical keys have no bearing on electronic storage or communications, apart from the rare cases where there is some sort of physical HSM involved. Despite the whimsical name, cryptographic "keys" are really just long passcodes, which are part of the process for translating a ciphered message. Long-established precedent says that while they can seize an encoded journal, with a warrant, they can't force the author to decode it. Electronically-aided encryption is no different.