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  1. Re:Remember Trump and Sanders on Full Text of Trans-Pacific Partnership Released (Officially, This Time) (mfat.govt.nz) · · Score: 1

    I am small government conservative and I don't hate those ideas. You are correct about the tax the states plan being the original assumption about how the Federal Government was to be funded. The trouble is the Civil War happened! For good or ill (mostly ill IMHO) one of the things that came out of that is people started seeing the USA as a single entity rather than a group of member states.

    Americans are already upset about the economic disparities that exist today. What say West Virgina look like without the massive disparity in the Federal tax revenues it generates vs what is distributed there? Not good. I don't think 'Americans' would accept the likely outcomes. I doubt other state representatives would be 'cool' about some states perpetually defaulting on their taxes while their state paid either. Its unfortunate but its the reality. Some how equal opportunity has morphed into equalizing results and rolling that back is darn tough.

  2. Re:Remember Trump and Sanders on Full Text of Trans-Pacific Partnership Released (Officially, This Time) (mfat.govt.nz) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    On the domestic scale sure on the international scale not always the case. What you have said has been in the economics text books so long most people accept it uncritically but it fails to consider the long term effects of trade imbalances.

    Generally with a nation as large and divers as ours with an array of resources as vast as ours one would be tempted to think trade imbalances could not occur but they do. The problem the free traders consistently fail to deal with is that the economies of our trading partners are not in many cases as market oriented as our own and our own economy is not really a true open market anymore either. The rules over and above the enforcement of private property rights create opportunities to game the system and so the system gets gamed.

    If we were to:
    Drop the new Obamacare employer mandates
    Drop the individual mandate
    Drop all payroll and corporate taxes
    Replace income taxes with a flat tax
    Either rollback health/safety and environmental protections -or- restrict trade to nations with comparable regulation and enforcement

    Then we could have free trade with the remaining partners. Otherwise the ability to game the system is always going to temp people to shop the market the imposes the least penalty for the negative externalizes of whatever it is they do and lowest cost labor while still selling the output of that production into the more lucrative American market and enjoying the gifts of our society themselves. Their will be a net outflow of wealth until the US reaches nearer equilibrium in terms of median personal wealth with the rest of the world. I know there are many on the left of the political graph who think there is Justice in that, and may influencers on the Right side who don't care because they are 1%ers doing the gaming and don't care what happens to the rest of us.

    Personally I'd rather the USA stay the worlds richest nation! That is almost certain to be whats best for me, my family, and my friends. I have no desire to try and hold any other nation down or prevent the expansion of the middle class around the world. Good luck to them, but I see no reason we need to give away what's ours to enable that. Now some lefties are going to return to say we unfairly came by what we have. Yes okay maybe if you want to say we took the land from the Natives, but other than that no not really if you look at the whole of those situations and the alternatives.

  3. Re:It also does away with national sovereigty! on Full Text of Trans-Pacific Partnership Released (Officially, This Time) (mfat.govt.nz) · · Score: 0

    Which is why I really really think we need to elect an isolationist president. The only way to save America from these type of shenanigans is to spark an all out trade war. No it won't be good for the economy but freedom is more important than that.

    Some how we need to get someone in office who will say "fuck the treaty" and then when 'they' go after us with the WTO or international courts that same person will say, 'oh yea this is a sovereign nation of which I am the elected leader and I don't recognize your authority to do anything; fuck off'

  4. Re:Detecting weapons is NOT the purpose of TSA... on TSA Screeners Can't Detect Weapons (and They Never Could) (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    The trouble is as someone who flies often its already pretty onerous, invasive, and expensive. I'd really like to see it all go back to the way it was pre-911. I don't know how to effect that other than by talking about it.

    The alternative is what: we continue to run a massive public works program, that accomplishes nothing other than violating the person and privacy of our fellow citizens when traveling, to the end of time?

    That does not sound like a good plan to me.

  5. Re:Detecting weapons is NOT the purpose of TSA... on TSA Screeners Can't Detect Weapons (and They Never Could) (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    That would be an interesting experiment. Go to the airport, take a short flight say from a regional to hub and back the same day. On the return trip do some airport shopping, in the sanitized zone. See if its possible to acquire items needed to construct an explosive device capable of harming an aircraft, and test your device at home in large open area where the only person who could possibly be injured is you.

  6. Re:China is whaaat? on Why Avast Won't Show Source Code To the Government, But Others Do (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    I say again it takes two to tango. If there was nothing to hide when it became very clear we were moving forward with an invasion force Saddam still could have said "wait time out, look at whatever you want wherever any time" The US military rather than the UN inspectors could have gone in a done the verifying. He did not do that even though he had to have know there was no possibly way his forces could repel a US invasion.

    This leads me to conclude there are a few possibilities:
    1) Saddam thought he had weapons he did not have
    2) There were in fact weapons and interested parties succeeded in removing/hiding them before our occupying force made that impossible
    3) There were weapons we found them, and are being lied to about that for 'reasons'

    My guess is 2, because three requires a cover up that would be hard in the modern world. To many people would have seen to much and there are two many people with strong political interests, not all of them domestic that would want to see some of that information out there. If nothing else Suni groups like ISIS would want to use it as anti-secular and anit-Shia propaganda.

    1 bothers me for similar reasons, folks like Chemical-Ali existed and it would have been hard for them to cover up the fact the cupboard was bare to Saddam and his Sons in the context of weapons inspections and so fourth. Impossible no but unlikely I think.

    Which leaves 2 again. There were allegations weapons were being smuggled into Syria during the Iraq war. Suddenly when the Syrian conflict breaks out chemical weapons are used. We know the regime had such weapons. There is cause to suspect some of the attacks might have been staged by the rebels, who could easily have obtained them from the chaos that was Iraq. It all fits, or Assad might have been sitting on even larger stock piles of the stuff after the collapse of Iraq and simply said might as well use some.

    Finally WMDs or no WMDs the Bush lied narrative isn't really accurate unless you an apologist for the DNC. Plenty of folks of the foreign Intel committees had access to pretty much all the information the Administration did. Intel isn't an exact science. A case was made based on the evidence, maybe the evidence was weak, circumstantial, and tainted but lots of Senate and Congress critters went along and voted en mass to authorize the war, but "Bush espoused his inaccurate view" does not sound as good in a stump speech. Personal while I am happy to admit in hind sight Iraq was stupid and we should have known better. What I find more astonishing is the current Presidents total failure to learn anything from that experience. This is the type of mistake our nation probably has to make once a generation. We should only be making it once a generation though. Meanwhile the military misadventures in the middle easy continue.

  7. Re:We need community alternatives on Why Avast Won't Show Source Code To the Government, But Others Do (zdnet.com) · · Score: 2

    The model works for Linux and True Crypt because the barrier to entry is low. Anyone can work on those projects with just about any PC from the last decade in their basement.

    No you can't probably hack on a specific hardware driver much without buying some kit but most people doing that have said kit and are incentivized to make it work for them, then they just share. I know some of the kernel driver devs 'work for kit' too send me a shiny new iWhatever and I'll try and update the iWhatever N-1 driver to work with the new device, etc.

    A/V on the other hand still relies first and foremost on signatures be they for files on disk or IPS like signatures for the integrated firewalls. Yes anyone can work on the heuristic and IOC monitoring side of things but you can't probably build an effective package that way. To create signatures you need a vast network of monitoring and information gathering points. You need to have honey pots stood up, etc. Its big coordinated effort to aggregate all the data too which won't be 'fun' for really anyone to work on.

    Its really the same issue we see with open source games, GIS applications, and anything that is as content heavy as it is tech heavy. The open source model is very good and building the tooling basic infrastructure. Its pretty good at solving 'interesting' problems and other blue sky efforts. It falls down when it come to doing things that require running the infrastructure or grinding work creating content, like scanning 1000s of USGS maps or something.

    So OSS could create the AV software, it could create the analysis tools to monitor malware execution on a vast array of virtual machines and compile the results into defs, but it will not host the vast array of virtual machines, because that costs real money, real big money, that has to come from some place.

  8. Re:You would think these companies would learn on Microsoft Cuts OneDrive Storage Limits, Citing Abuse (onedrive.com) · · Score: 1

    Exactly words need to have meaning. Unlimited means exactly that and should. Therefor no business should really be offering anything unlimited ever. Generally 'unlimited' and basic economics are at odds.

    There no good reason why Microsoft could not have just said 'up to 100TB of storage - more than most will ever need!' I suspect that would have been just fine for them too. I would be Microsoft is correct in that most of the 75+ TB users are probably morons who just wanted to see if there was an upper limit. If Microsoft had just said so at the outset even if that limit was higher like 100TB most would not bother testing it, the fun already being ruined for them.

    The handful of people who have a use case for 75TB+ Microsoft could probably deal with and not have it ruin the profitability of the service.

  9. Re:this is why we have crap for politicians on Larry Lessig Ends Presidential Campaign, Citing Unfair Debate Rules (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    The relatively powerful federal government with its feature of a powerful executive was largely a reaction to the failing of the weak one we had in place under the Articles of Confederation.

    People wanted to be able to 'get things done' at that point. They came up with a pretty good system which still had solid controls in place but over the past 200 years one excuse and abdication of congressional authority after the next has gradually turned the presidency into a king.

  10. Re:OS/2 is still alive? on The Return of OS/2 Warp Set For 2016 (techrepublic.com) · · Score: 2

    Guys, the actual quote was 'DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run' and that was in reference to Lotus 123.

  11. Re:Simple counter-measure on The Rise of Political Doxing (schneier.com) · · Score: 2

    Right but this is the very argument against collecting and aggregating the information at all. It is harmful when its released and sooner or later it does get out or does get aggregated.

    The very politicians crying about this today will be the ones arguing to create another national registry or list of some kind tomorrow unless they fell the pain from this.

    The public needs to see how harmful this stuff is and unfortunately the only way we are ever going to get Jane and Joe average to care is if they see some good people ( or people they think are good people) get really really hurt by this stuff. Otherwise the "won't somebody thing of the children" argument is always going to win.

    Most of this doxing stuff ultimately comes from public records, yes there are some private records that doxers go after as well but the really hurtful stuff tends to be public records. Government knows to much about us. We need that to change. So the next time some dumbshit thinks something like a national health care program is a good idea let alone national id, it will go down in flames like it should.

  12. There are object lessons from the incident... on Revisiting the Infamous Sony BMG Rootkit Scandal 10 Years Later (networkworld.com) · · Score: 1

    There is basically one object lesson:

    Laws are for little people, and companies like Sony are to big to [effectively] prosecute because...reasons...

    Lets face it if you're a teenage kid and you commit some minor mostly harmless act of vandalism with a computer in some way you go to jail. If you make some copies of journals you get relentlessly prosecuted. You make a copy of Sony's IP you get slapped with $100K plus fines on you as an individual. You write jail break for a Sony product they do everything they can to destroy your life.

    If you are big company like Sony with media connections, you get a comparatively minor fine and are made to compensate victims to such a minor degree that it won't even cover their costs if they need profession assistance to clean up your hack.

    If you or I did what Sony did we'd see the FBI seize or domain, and redirect visitors. Why did Sony get to keep Sony.com? Its fucking bullshit.

  13. Re:Both sides were harassed on SXSW Cancels Panels On Harassment Due To Harassment (sxsw.com) · · Score: 1

    You'd be surprised. I have participated in running a largish convention, about 3000 ppl. The margins are actually pretty thin. Security is probably the biggest expense. Even if the goons are all volunteer you still need some qualified paid people to manage them, (they go on power trips). You also need equipment for them radios etc. Most places will require some number of official police and fire people be hired from the local municipality (not cheap). If those folks have to do anything that might cast the venue in a negative light the contract usually has expensive penalties.

    So the direct cost might not be huge but the risk of it getting expensive is, and if that happens it can kill your profitability.

  14. Re:+1 for privacy supporters -1 for gun control on Judge: Defendant 'Had a Right' To Shoot Down Drone (wdrb.com) · · Score: 1

    Private property is the very cornerstone of individual liberty. Frankly most of our castle doctrine laws are far to week. I think in some states it still extends to defense of property but most places you have to be in fear of your life. You absolutely should be able to use force to stop someone who is engaged in an act of theft or destruction on your property even if you don't feel your person or family is threatened. Drones are trespassing, and people should have some freedom to deal with trespassers, in an area that is either fenced or has posted signs.

    Firing bird shot into the air is not a serious hazard. I don't know how you think hunters get birds, hint they don't wait for them to land. The mass individual bits of bird shot is sufficiently low that under the power of gravity its pretty harmless. It won't break the skin. So firing a shotgun into the air while a nuisance in a populated area is still very unlikely to injure anyone. Maybe if someone was unlucky enough to be staring into the sky with their eyes open at that moment, but otherwise its hard to imagine anyone getting hurt.

  15. Re:Windows 10? Really? on InFocus's New Kangaroo: a Screenless $99 Windows 10 Portable PC (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 1

    I can't understand who this is for either. I mean Infocus so I guess its for presentations. If you can cable up a display or projector how likely is it you need a battery? What the hell is the point in that? Are supposed to pair with a portable battery powered projector? Is there really a market for people who need to give a enough presentations in places without basic instructor to buy this thing?

    In every other use case I can think of and in fact even giving presentations its hard to imagine you'd not be better off with a gently used laptop for about the same money. A media PC, sure I guess for streaming but if you want to do that might as well use RPi or if you don't want to bother DIYing it at all a Chrome-cast or Amazon stick for less money.

    This is like a Pet rock with a shitty PC inside it.

  16. Re:"capability to cut cables" on Russian Presence Near Undersea Cables Concerns US (nytimes.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sure but the parents point is that just means you need to drop more bombs. Also a simple sonar from 60 years ago could give you a pretty good idea of where the charge you just dropped struck. Commercially available equipment is far more capable and perfectly affordable for even a small nation. Once you know the net effect of those currents after dropping a handful of charges is that they tend to land 2 miles north and east you position yourself two miles south and west of the cable and start dropping charges again until you strike home.

    I know some allied air raids in WWII had accuracy rates of only 30% or so and that was considered perfectly adequate. You just put more bombers in the air.

  17. Re:Military funding to thwart this threat? on Russian Presence Near Undersea Cables Concerns US (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This, mostly. ^

    I would not go as far as to call Ukraine a failed toppling exercise. It was a case of undue American political influence. The facts are no matter how you want to spin them there was a pro-russian President in power (who was crook but that isn't relevant to the larger Geo-political action). There were public uprisings and protests taking place. 'We' decided to fan the flames and cause the guy to be deposed because, 'democracy and rule of law', while we blissfully ignored the fact Ukraine had no legal process to remove an elected president involuntarily prior to the end of his term.

    If Ukraine had an impeachment process and we had simply been advocating thru public speech the people there use it without providing material support, I would say the situation would be quite clear that the Russians were the ones who over steeped but what we did was a lot more like backing a coup than anything else.

    Mexico arguably is closer to a failed state than Ukraine was prior to the resent upheaval. Do you think our government would be tolerant of Putin working to install a pro-Russian government there via extra legal means? I expect 'we' would see it as quite provocative and act accordingly.

    Again I am not apologizing for Putin at all, he is bad as any of the international criminals out there, but while the press wants to spin it as him being some sort of crazy aggressor I don't think that is reality. He might be aggressive but his actions don't seem all that crazy if you put yourself in his shoes, they look pretty rational and self interested to me. Which does not mean we have to like them or even mean we have to or should tolerate them but if we want to act 'rationally' and possibly self interested we should try to understand what the motives of the other players are rather than just writing them off as crazy.

  18. Except nobody would want to do it that way. Its like remodeling a residence ( or building one ) you get inspections as you go. You want the city's you want the assay guy to confirm the foundation you dug isn't to close to the property lines before you pour cement, you want the electrical, and plumbing inspectors to let you know something isn't acceptable before you close up the walls.

    Waiting to the end of the construction process to do safety audits sounds like an expensive mess likely to lead to a lot of poor fixes.

  19. I say Don't do traffic shaping. Why should SIP and RSTP get special treatment. Is my skype call less important? If you allow shaping of even the 'ultra well known protocols' than you effectively choke off innovation.

    So nobody can ever get a better voip protocol out the door because the network treats it like shit so for practical use it ends up being inferior. We have enough issues like proxies and NATs that can't deal with non http protocols in the case of proxies, and NATs that don't handle anything that isn't udp/tcp/icmp, to say nothing spotty IPv6 support. We are denied a lot of superior solutions because we let people make assumptions about how the network is used.

    You are only introducing more of that if you allow shaping, on 'retail' network connections. Its not going to do anything in the long run other than hold good technology back!

    Lets either have real simple net neutrality that is plain and easily understood by all. "You take IPv[X] protocol packets and you forward them to their destination to the best of your ability without regard for the destination, source, or higher level protocol."

    If you try to legislate anything more complex than that you will fail and you will cause unintended consequences.

  20. No that is the issue in Virgina they SHOULD build the data centers in the populated areas. The Entire I-95 corridor has all the infrastructure required to support them.

    Central and Western VA and West VA, have essentially the only large areas of unbroken forest left in the Mid Atlantic region.

    Everytime a power line or a pipe line has to go in to support one these projects its 100's of miles of a 75-foot wide cut across the landscape. Oh and the builders of these little projects always try to use eminent domain to do them against the wishes of the property owners!

    Its not right, its not needed. Its not about locating them a comfortable distance from where people live, its about trying to save a buck and take advantage of lower land values. Never might that it permanently changes the character of property the builders of these things don't own!. There are plenty of places to throw up a data-center in the already highly developed regions. Greater DC and Richmond have plenty of blighted areas with empty facilities. They would just cost a little more, so instead these people want to trample the rights of other to their property and ruin a very limited resource.

  21. Re:It's the Ownership Stupid on Is Amazon Harming the E-reader Category? (teleread.com) · · Score: 1

    Yea and for the really lazy like me, Amazon provides you your @kindle address. So you can a number of common format documents to your kindle just by e-mailing it. You are free to obtain these from anywhere you like.

    In my case its often plain text files form Archive.org. Lots of great public domain classics there, and the Kindle is a excellent device to read them on!

  22. Re:They are used to getting away with it. on Documents Expose the Inner Workings of Obama's Drone Wars · · Score: 0

    Not the bombing the Hospital was in any way shape or form justifiable but DOB really bugs me. I don't think they should be allowed to do what they do. The simple fact is they DO give aide and comfort to the enemy when they operate in places like Afghanistan and continue operating in places that are not under the control of friendlies. American members of the that group should be treated like the criminals they are.

  23. Re:Soft on crime, soft on terrorists, no backbone on Documents Expose the Inner Workings of Obama's Drone Wars · · Score: 1

    What do make of the President then. Who takes the political opportunity to vote against war and campaign against it but only expands it and even starts similar conflicts in places like Libya after taking office himself. Lets face it they are opportunists and liars. There are a few notable exceptions who have maintained convicted positions for long periods of time like Ron Paul, Zel Miller, Berny Sanders, and few others. The rest playing you.

  24. Re:Drones aren't the real story on Documents Expose the Inner Workings of Obama's Drone Wars · · Score: 1

    The real story here is the willingness of the military to take poor, inconclusive intelligence and use that to make decisions that kill people.

    No that isn't a story at all. Militaries kill people and break things. Its what they do its why you have them. Militaries try and win wars, you don't win by be afraid to shoot anyone because its possible they are not the enemy.

    The story here is the the President and the American public are willing to fight undeclared wars for extended periods of time without clear objectives, and with out a strategy in place that offers clear support for those objectives, and in places where its not even clear who our friends are what is really in our long term national interests. THAT IS THE STORY.

    President cowboy decided to go on an overly broad nation building exercise rather than just running a few criminals to ground and to pick a bar fight with one of his daddy's old enemies while he was at it. Then president peace prize after getting elected largely by promising end these senseless conflicts, decided instead to expand them. The one strategy that was actually working in terms of something close to what some of us might recognize as 'winning' the troop surge he cowardly and prematurely pulled away from because it might have cost him an election if his base did not turn out the second time. Instead he decided to bet on a policy that its ever more clear is little more the indiscriminate killing and he had the intelligence and analysis to know that but proceeds anyway to this day. But, then why stop there might as well make Libya a failed state to after all toppling the current government without a large occupying force repace order afterword worked so good for his predecessor!

    Bush made mistakes but at least he got authorizations and did things mostly within the law. Bushs mistakes were repeats of ones make 30+ years ago. Should he, Rummy and Dicky have known better. Probably in hindsight, yes, but at least the technology had changed a bit and there were other geopolitical changes offering reasons to think it could potentially be different this time. Obama on the other hand apparently know better the whole time he wasn't president railing against everything Bush did, but as soon as he took office developed total Amnesia apparently or more likely though he was smarter than all the people who just tried this stuff.

  25. Re:Maybe they're not on How Is the NSA Breaking So Much Crypto? (freedom-to-tinker.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Right but if you are really concerned about opsec you'd use two or more layers anyway.

    Something like HTTPs or Tor will make your traffic opaque to most parties. They are common protocols that don't attract attention of anyone who isn't already watching you specifically. So they are good choice for an outer layer. We also think if the right cipher suites are selected they are mathematically sound / secure. They should not depend on an obscurity component, aside form the negotiated key that is part of their normal operation.

    I might then make up an inner layer. Lots of attacks on the outer layer protocols tend to be downgrade attacks or attacks that cause selection of ciphers the attacker knows how to break. Just using another layer of TLS inside the tunnel might be a fine idea.

    Finally a third layer of something with a PSK for the symetric cipher that is a little more obscure but not known to have any problems. obscure means of course not as well testing, perhaps on of the rejected candidate algorithms for AES or a modified version of something existed. This does not have to be mathematically as good its mainly their to frustrate someone with an undisclosed ability to beach the other layers. It will make their tools not work out of the box. If they have the ability to break the other layers chances are they can break this one as well but you will make them work for it. The third level analyst with the metasploit module will some need help! This is will buy you time.