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  1. They could have used an aluminum case and attached the board to that as a heatsink.

  2. Re:A note to you nerds and geeks on Nintendo To ROM Sites: Forget Cease-and-Desist, Now We're Suing (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 0

    They consumed it for themselves and because it is a limited resource I can no longer use it.

    If they always returned it in as good or better condition, then? Do they have the right to use your property as they see fit, or do you have the right to provide it to them with terms? Is it theft because it was taken, or theft because you need to use it and it is not on hand?

    Something like that does not happen with intellectual property.

    Of course in the case of (re)sale value you can argue that by creating unlicensed copies you're driving the price people are willing do pay down by increasing the supply without necessarily increasing the demand by the same degree. I would agree with that.

    These seem to be "something like that".

    There is also the question above, about what is theft. You cite many things about what you have lost; what about the basic control over your property? Is it free for others to take at no cost to you?

    It's sort of a silly argument, kind of like how people complain about their neighbor sleeping with their wife while they're at work.

  3. Re:A note to you nerds and geeks on Nintendo To ROM Sites: Forget Cease-and-Desist, Now We're Suing (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 0

    You have control over the property which was produced, not the property which may be produced. A person has control over the derivatives of their own intellectual property--control which can be taken, as control includes prevention as much as exercise. Imagine if others drove your car, but only when you weren't using it; what have they taken from you?

  4. As far as Federal vs State, I could agree that (particularly on the restructuring of welfare that may increase taxes) that those necessitate a federal initiative to accommodate the potential tax increase.

    It's actually possible to build the American Citizen's Dividend without a tax increase. The restructuring changes how taxes are taken and allocated in interesting ways.

    The tax rates increase, and this acts as a transfer between a stable program and the general fund. Basically, the Dividend pays twice each month, so offsets any Federal taxes taken. If tax rates increase and the Dividend is a flat benefit paid to all adults, then we add the two to find the benefit. Paid $250 more in taxes and the benefit is $500? Your taxes went down by $250, basically.

    That's essentially moving $250 of the benefit into the general fund--a scheme so designed so as to build the Dividend as a stable program not requiring human intervention at any point in the future (future generations must protect it from unnecessary meddling). Social Security's OASDI programs, on the other hand, are structured in a way requiring constant tax program adjustment, and so face a constant assault by those with differing political ideals attempting to under-adjust, over-adjust, or otherwise distort the program.

    Here's the rub: if you structure the Dividend to break apart the Federal income taxes on corporate and personal incomes into general taxes and a 12.5% Dividend FICA and then discount any of that FICA paid back to the same person from the program cost, you end up with a tax cut.

    My model restructures $1.1 trillion of programs into a new $1.5 trillion program. While housing assistance, food stamps, and the like remain as-is and face the simple impact of people being less-poor to begin with (lower cost for greater effectiveness), Social Security's OASDI programs are built directly on top of the Dividend and require a further $0.5 trillion. Thus $1.1 trillion of programs becomes $2 trillion.

    Much of the population pays quite a lot into a 12.5% income tax. In 2016, the benefit was $6,000, and so you could discount $6,000 per-adult from population above a certain income level, and a portion of that on the way down. You end up putting over $1.2 trillion directly back into the hands of the taxpayers who paid those taxes--meaning you've converted $1.1 trillion of programs into $0.8 trillion.

    No single-adult household with an income under $23,000 nor two-adult earner under $55,000 is paying any Federal tax of any sort at that level. The overall tax rate is negative. The tax rates among higher incomes are, when including the Dividend as a sort of tax refund, lower than current, right up to the top earners. Households with no income are getting a sub-minimum-wage income--one that, unlike their food and housing assistance (which they still receive, albeit factoring in this new income in the means test), doesn't go away when they get a job, reducing the sting of the employment-discouraging welfare trap.

    In areas where industry has collapsed, this forces the economy into stability. Heavy poverty draws a heavy stimulus, and much of that keeps coming as employment grows and welfare leaves. As it stands, when people become employed, welfare cuts off and removes the support for those menial jobs created first, dumping the economy back into poverty as unemployment once again rises. It gets stuck.

    You can't do this at the State level. Rather than a tax cut, it's a massive tax on the wealthy, the middle-class, and businesses to provide a small concession on the order of a few hundred dollars each year to the poor. At the Federal level, there's no tax increase when you're giving each adult six thousand.

    There are two arguments that could be made. 1) any welfare program (restructuring included) must be at the federal level.

    Welfare programs are mainly operated at the State level, although soc

  5. Re:A note to you nerds and geeks on Nintendo To ROM Sites: Forget Cease-and-Desist, Now We're Suing (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    My point is that the government exists to protect your rights by taking hold of other rights under a social contract. Theft is an infringement of the right to property. The law only codifies this as a responsibility of government: it steps in and prohibits, via the use of force, others from taking your property.

    Governments must expend to operate, and so with our overall consent has the power to tax and to spend. That's not an infringement of the right to property.

    Governments allow one to actually enforce control over intellectual property as property. It's something you own, and so over which you have control. You deprive someone of that control--of essential possession of intellectual property--when you infringe their copyright.

  6. Why not try to win in local elections before moving to the federal level? Have you tried to win office in your state legislature or was challenging an incumbent congressmen your first try for public office?

    I started on economics policies, and the policies I designed are not possible at a State level. I went straight for Congress because I couldn't do anything else. It's long and complicated to explain; to be short: restructuring Federal social insurances and welfare programs on top of a Universal Dividend--a type of fully-egalitarian social insurance evolved from Universal Basic Income--lands you with a modest tax cut and a self-correcting economy (no recessions, collapsed local economies build to middle-class in short order, reliable full employment, and generally an end to homelessness and hunger), along with making Social Security permanently-solvent.

    Trying to do this at the State level lands you with a 10% income tax increase at all levels and on businesses, with a smaller impact. It's like trying to do emissions control and fuel efficiency on a car by bolting something to the tailpipe: sure you have a catalytic converter in the back; but there's an EGR valve feeding back to the intake manifold, variable valve timing, fuel injection, drive-by-wire, cylinder redesign, and an entire engine management system up front. Do you know how much energy you'd have to expend to scrub and react away all the toxic emissions of a dirty engine at the tailpipe? You'd fail anyway.

    I have since broadened my policy goals to include a great many issues about which I learned on the campaign trail. Healthcare is still a Federal issue (many states can't pay for their own; it has to be Federal). Criminal justice reform and election law are both, and State-level reforms build pressure to force a Federal-level change.

    The states control the elections so if you wanted election reform the state would be a logical start.

    Not entirely true. The Federal government currently prohibits multi-member Congressional district and proportional representation; and the Constitution controls the election of the President. To change these, we require a Constitutional amendment.

    As I stated above: we can approach this from a State level. States have a House of Delegates and a Senate, as well as a Governor (President). By implementing a model of representation, we can demonstrate that model's merits. As this becomes commonplace, people will then demand a Constitutional Amendment requiring the same model for US Congress and the President.

    I may not like the Republicans but what the Democrats are doing now is even more unsavory. So when I see you posting ideas that, in your words, " the Democrats would likely gain total, unending control". I get anxious about your proposals even if you acknowledge there are problems and one consequence could be one party rule.

    No arguments there. That seems an inevitability, however, given the push for California to divide, for Puerto Rico to become a State, and for DC to gain representation. These are Democratic strongholds.

    This only highlights the importance of election methods which reflect the will of the people: we must make candidates more-important than parties, and pressure the party ideals. Fusion voting and ranked ballots, for example, allows weak third parties significant influence over elections; while proportional representation gives us Delegates with diverse ideals and views representing the variations across the electorate. This gives us the distinction between Bernies and Hillaries, and between McCains and Ryans, while essentially averaging everything out for Senators and Executives.

    Parties can guide voters, but they also provide a toxic fraternity between elected officials rather than between voters and their representatives. While this fraternity does tend to hold the

  7. Re:A note to you nerds and geeks on Nintendo To ROM Sites: Forget Cease-and-Desist, Now We're Suing (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    You can't deprive anyone of something that they don't already own. That is what it basically comes down to.

    Well, people begin with infinite freedom. You have the power to speak, to imprison, to rape, and to kill. You can take from others their infinite freedoms.

    People then give up some of this infinite freedom to the government; in exchange, the government provides them protections.

    Accordingly, a person gains protection of the control over their own intellectual property. They have the right to create--to have an idea, to put their time and labor into it instead of into something that would produce a tangible and saleable good they can physically control--and to control that creation. They have a right to ensure that they can sell a pulse stepper motor that took years of constant research and a third of their personal wealth to get working rather than having every manufacturer tear down every motor they find and make a copy for a cheap tweak to their own production.

    This gives people the right to spend millions making a movie, to spend months or years of their lives writing a book, and to have that time returned to them through the trade of labor--represented by money earned through...labor. Such things are trivial to copy.

    Theft is an infringement of your right to property.

  8. Re:A note to you nerds and geeks on Nintendo To ROM Sites: Forget Cease-and-Desist, Now We're Suing (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    The analogy is broken and misdirected because it's nonsense. You need real analogies to understand.

    The problem is largely a matter of depth of pockets. People talk about stealing a car and downloading a movie, but it's not like that: a car and a physical movie print are the same thing, while a download is a copy.

    Making a copy costs nothing. The download bandwidth, the cost to serve millions of downloads in time-efficient manner (i.e. high site traffic), divide it out and it's a penny for thousands of copies.

    Copying a car is harder. Building a one-off is nigh-impossible without tens or hundreds of times the cost of a car. For a car manufacturer, it's on the lower end of the scale. A car manufacturer can also retool a factory and build a car for reasonable cost, compared to the cost of a car as usual.

    Both the car manufacturer and the movie studio make an expensive product. Creating a movie and creating a car design both involve lots of labor investment, wages paid, materials consumed, the lot. It can cost millions or hundreds of millions. The same goes for a video game or a book--and even the cheaper things, like JK Rowling's books, are cheaper because they consume large swaths of one person's life instead of dozens or hundreds.

    Patents protect creators from theft by other wealthy manufacturers. Copyrights protect creators from theft by the poorest of us. It's called "intellectual property" because you're not stealing a car; you're stealing information. A car is made using the design method of a car, which can be particular. A video game's data is its design method, as is the text of a book. Those things take time and effort, and require compensation.

    Now, these days, we've got a copyright system which extends copyright infinitely. This is also theft, and of the same nature. You see, these copyrighted works become part of our heritage, part of our culture. We grew up with Mario; we grew up with Sonic; we grew up with Harry Potter. I don't mind letting Jo keep her copyrights for 14 years--and I don't mind absolutely destroying those unscrupulous publishing houses and developers who deny her any royalties by delaying production of derivatives until after those copyrights expire--but simply holding the same property for eternity? Bollocks.

    If you ask me, they should be allowed to keep control over commercial derivatives for perhaps a longer time, and copyright on single works for shorter duration. It's now ours. It's part of our culture. Nevertheless, the creators must have some protection, within reasonable limits.

  9. Re:We should be playing God! on Scientists Take Step Toward Creating Artificial Embryos (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    one of them thinks "I wonder how much money I can make off that?"

    You have to fund the research (and later production) somehow. Scientists and equipment makers do, after all, need to eat. Most corporate profits aren't egregious, but there are a few who maintain long-term high profit margins and need ... addressing.

    "I wonder what sort of awesome weapon of war I can use that for?"

    Unfortunately, while competition tends to squeeze out those high profit margins as research matures into cheap, consumer-grade technology, weapons of war just keep getting worse.

    You have two excellent tools against war: democracy and a strong interdependence on trade. Trade increases production possibilities, to the point that two nations going to war would immediately collapse their capacity to engage in war if they ceased trading with one another.

    Unfortunately, technology makes things cheaper, and cheap gene-editing technology allows people to spend $2,000 and produce a pretty serious batch of virulent smallpox in their basements. When the threat is not one of nation-states, we have a serious problem.

  10. The Democrats are playing games. They've screamed and yelled about saving the birds but said nothing when Obama signed an executive order allowing for the killing of protected eagles, or for holding up nuclear power expansion.

    Of course. It's one of the things I intend to fix with the party, although that's going to be a rough ride.

    I intend to move our voting system to a Smith method (Schulze or Ranked Pairs) with STV using Meek transfers for multiple-winner elections, selecting two nominees per party by Primary. This allows the American People to elect someone representative of the population as a whole, or proportionally representative in the case of multiple representatives. As well, I intend to bring back fusion voting, which the Republicans pushed to eliminate back in the 1800s as they realized coalitions would grind them into dust.

    This raises a problem: the Democrats would likely gain total, unending control. In fact, should California divide or Puerto Rico enter as a State, the Democrats will likely gain total, unending control anyway.

    These Smith-restricted methods are tended to elect candidates more fitting the American people as a whole. That does temper what the Democrats might become as a party, increasing the significance of candidates; yet identity draws voters to a party, and draws elected officials to something called "party unity". I worry the sheer label will encourage them to operate as a whole body more than individual representatives, and to compromise their representation.

    It is still better than the alternative, and brings one important factor to our government: stability.

    As it stands, we elect by plurality vote from a two-plus system--essentially a majority vote between two parties--and the party nominates the candidate. That means the Democratic candidate excludes the input of Conservative voters and will skew toward the median of Liberal Democrats; while the Republican candidate excludes the input of Liberal voters and will skew toward the median of Conservative Republicans.

    Under this situation, candidates gain an advantage by becoming more-extreme. They excite their voter base and do not have to deal with the opposite party's voters. They get the nomination, and then only have to coax out a slim margin of swing voters to take the election. Party loyalists fill the bulk.

    This system self-perpetuates: the political dialogue draws more voters from the center and to the extremes; and the extreme politicians win. Power shifts back and forth until one party manages to maintain a winning margin, leaving us with an extremist government. Instability first, then something even worse.

    Smith-restricted voting methods and proportional representation both ensure stability.

    Proportional representation spreads the candidate views across the electorate, and makes sense for delegates and Representatives in Congress: they can argue differing views to compromise.

    In the second house--the Senate--and the Executive races, Smith-restricted voting always elects the Condorcet candidate, or a candidate who falls into a set which independently defeats all not in the set (the Condorcet candidate appears when this set is one candidate). While one house must come to an agreement between parties, the other must come to an agreement befitting broad representation of the electorate.

    This eliminates the extremes from those single-seat races and brings us a more-stable government, whereby parties must shift the electorate as a whole to shift the nature of the country. The differences in opinions are more tempered, and utter alienation of large portions of the voting base simply do not work for the concentrated power of Senators and Executives.

    We still need to clean up the mess that makes these major parties. The Republicans are completely-broken from an idealistic standpoint; the Democrats have the right ideals, yet their execution is corroded by politics. Democrats further also alienate the American people by behaving as elitists, rather than elites: they expect voters to get in line and let them handle all the complicated things without question. Our democracy cannot survive like this; we must do better.

  11. Re:You're assuming some very important questions on New Zealand Firm's Four-Day Week an 'Unmitigated Success' (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    It's required for a government decision.

  12. Re:You're assuming some very important questions on New Zealand Firm's Four-Day Week an 'Unmitigated Success' (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Oh, it's not about investors. You have to implement this by requiring comp time for salaried workers (pay them for excess hours worked in a week--not time-and-a-half, just regular hours, and maybe only quarterly cash-out if they don't use it as vacation time) and setting the full-time work week to a shorter number of hours.

    We need metrics and information on all of this to identify the economic consequences. Policy is not to be taken up lightly. It cuts both ways, too: one of my policies is modeled to cause something like -12% unemployment if unemployment (U3) is currently 5%. That creates an economic crisis; cutting working hours lowers total annual productivity, which reduces purchasing power, cutting into employment and creating unemployment. Shortening the work week is a strategy to dodge out the labor shortage and hyperinflation crisis; yet if workers only lose a fraction of the productivity represented by the hours decreased, this strategy won't work and we will need to do other things to put on the brakes.

  13. Re:In related news: water is wet. on New Zealand Firm's Four-Day Week an 'Unmitigated Success' (theguardian.com) · · Score: 2

    That's actually a target for my Universal Dividend. It has an economic stimulus effect that pushes us into something like -12% unemployment, which means hyperinflation. Remember when Zimbabwe had 100-trillion-dollar bills? Yeah.

    That disruptive mess will settle eventually, after much pain.

    Alternately, you could make people more-poor. You do this by reducing working hours. If it takes 40 hours to produce something but work weeks are now 30 hours, then now you must work 1.3 weeks to purchase that same thing. That's less purchasing capacity, and less support for jobs.

    My structural wealth policies take a tax to feed the Dividend, plus set minimum wage to 1/4 the annual per-adult wage. That means shortening the working week to 28 hours from 40 would raise the minimum hourly wage from $10.20/hr (2,000 hours) to $14.57/hr (1,400 hours) in 2018 (estimate). That concentrates income into fewer hands, compacting the wage structure and also reducing jobs.

    Basically, my models show that the Dividend would have such an economic impact as to move us from 5% unemployment (U3) to -12%. We must, therefor, increase unemployment by roughly 15%-20% to avoid an economic disaster (target is about 3%-4% U3).

    Eventually you can't simply shorten working hours. At that point, you have to start taking temporary high taxes on the working class and dumping the money into low-productivity work (like environmental clean-up or big CAES installation) or, in the extreme case, other nations. If your economic cycle excludes recessions and instead dips into normalcy and peaks into labor shortage and hyperinflation, your strategy gets weird.

    Of course, nobody would much mind having that problem.

  14. Re:Sense of Self. on New Zealand Firm's Four-Day Week an 'Unmitigated Success' (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    You're confusing America with Japan.

  15. Re:You're assuming some very important questions on New Zealand Firm's Four-Day Week an 'Unmitigated Success' (theguardian.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It claims to have "employees performing better in their jobs and enjoying them more than before the experiment." That at least suggests a per-hour productivity increase.

    I'd like to know some real metrics, too. I want four 7-hour days, and have observed that office work is not time-productive: a lot happens in downtime, where employees wait for other work to be done, or think on things and rest their minds to improve problem-solving. This is the phenomena that you cannot do 10 hours of work by compacting it into 5 hours even though you only spent 4 of those 10 hours actually working.

    Multi-tasking represents one approach: do something else while you can't simply move to the next step. Multi-tasking sacrifices some productivity when the delay is internal: if you're dealing with programmers, engineers, marketing, and other creative problem solvers, loading them with a different task disrupts their capacity to solve all tasks.

    Leisure is an alternate approach: get up and leave. Come back to this later.

  16. Well, yes. Software engineering approaches are the equivalent of not letting people wander into that back room where the ballots sit, able to pick through and change things without supervision. Without a basic capacity for security, there is no security.

    A better approach would be to have the system print out human readable, machine readable paper ballots, which the voter carries from the voting booth to a secure ballot box.

    The machine that reads the ballots then has software which does the same task as the original machine: interpreting and storing votes.

    You have suggested that the voting machine might lie about how it's storing ballots, and so the network cable should be replaced by a form of visible packets which human voters can inspect. The problem is the machine that reads the ballots in also runs supplied software, which also may have malicious code.

    Ballots aren't public. Eventually, those secret ballots get tallied. Every individual verifies their vote as it goes into the machine; then the machine counts them; then the machine tilts 5% of the votes to change the election. It's close enough that nobody can really say what the outcome should have been, and feels confident enough that it was a close race and could have gone either way.

    Assuming the machines are technically impervious to outside attack and the individual voting machines themselves are non-malicious, we can count an election by having each machine display the final tallies to public observers. The public can then independently tally everything up.

    If the machines have no network connection, then the election judge can walk from machine to machine, displaying, announcing, and recording the tallies. The judge can use a hardware PGP device to digitally sign the election results from each machine, copying them to a USB drive. Then the judge inserts the USB drive into a network-connected terminal, which totals the tallies, displays them all, and sends copies up to a State system and to any pre-registered third parties. Anyone can pull these recorded ballots from the State system--the block of identifying information, if any, is encrypted.

    This means you can crowdsource the individual tallies as recorded by election observers, pull the individual machine statistics, and verify them yourself. You can have automated systems perform integrity validation and recounts. The initial tallies are known, and we can validate that the election judge's key--the public key is published--matches the judge who pulled them from the machine.

    So long as ballots are secret, you can't verify that any method has recorded and counted votes properly. Even a hand count fails. You can, at best, allow individuals to identify their ballots by some number, such as a digital signature, which means a third-party can allow individuals to check and acknowledge that their ballots are there and correct. Of course, that only works if individuals both remember their ballots and are honest rather than falsely complaining their vote has been changed.

    With non-secret ballots, you get vote buying, voter coercion, and all kinds of other things. Your employer can check your vote. Your girlfriend can check your vote. The redneck across the street can come beat you half to death for voting to legalize gay marriage. If the voting machine can produce a paper ballot with details about your vote, then you can be punished for not obtaining a paper ballot with details about your vote, so the very existence of the option is a danger.

    This occurs in many situations, and is a particular problem for Internet voting. With Internet voting, even an anonymous ballot draws coercion because someone can require you to vote in their presence. Polling places at least provide security for individual privacy. The solution to Internet voting disclosure is, of course, to allow a person

  17. No, I'm simply pointing out the theoretical capacity to produce something of some measure of security.

    I'd like a full brief on these practices and how they differ between the public and private markets, ready for public release, with case studies and recommendations. Salient details and the limited discussion necessary to explain them. This is one facet of government I'd like to see nailed down once and for all, and nobody has stepped up to make it a major issue because we're all more concerned about gun violence, education, and Social Security. Such government inefficiencies are a violation of human rights.

  18. Re:Admin credentials written on the side, too? on Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States (vice.com) · · Score: 2

    I'm pushing for voting systems that are stable and democratic--systems like Schulze and Ranked Pairs. Providing software and systems to handle the votes and give the public a means of validation has a political impact.

    My state got rid of its voting machines and went to paper ballots. Each ballot went into a machine for scanning. Even with a recount by hand, I question if the human election staff ever misread a vote due to fatigue and routine. Do they miscount? County Executive went to Johnny Olszewski by 9 votes; after a recount, it was 17. Voting machines, on the other hand, give me a touch screen upon which they display the entered, recorded vote, so I know the software has correct input--and computers don't miscount.

    Now imagine if the State gave each regional location machines with their own digital encryption keys. A hardware token, like a FIDO U2F device with PGP on-chip. There's only one per key, and it's not revealed, so the particular election judge's hardware token is known when reporting in--and we take physical steps to ensure the reports come at the end of the voting period, without time to tamper.

    Each regional machine can now report to the State office with a signed block of votes. The individual machines could even perform the signing (using the hardware device), placing the data on a removable drive for upload through an Internet-connected machine. Thus the ballots are recorded and given an integrity signature before they're on any machine with network access.

    That upload to the regional machine gets tallied, and that plus the individual vote packs get sent off to the State. Each step can also provide to a registered third-party, and the State and Regional central systems allow anyone to query and download the full set. Thus independent validation of untampered ballot packs (when signed, by whom, what content) becomes possible.

    We can observe this process as well. During "counting", each machine displays how many votes and vote-total statistics. The election judge announces them before pulling data. The public can come to watch; the public can write down statistics; the public can publish them; and any group or individual who wants to pull down the State's data can validate the totals.

    The software to compute each race uses a known, published algorithm--and code. You want to see how the Schulze winner came about? Same software, or a third-party software, reads in all the votes, shows you how any given ballot reads pairwise winners and losers, shows you the final tallies, generates the graph, highlights the strongest paths, shows the comparisons, and then shows the potential winner selection and the final winner. You can visually understand the process we're using (yep, it's complex!). The entire set of statistics and analysis can appear below, however you like.

    The State can publish those same statistics. Everyone can verify them. People can write their own software to run verification, instead of using the published code.

    That potential--the capacity to not only have third-parties report that, yes, their own tallies and their own monitoring and the crowd-published observation of the voting process matches the outcome, but also for the outcome to be explained in any level of detail from the simple winner to the complete performance of the counting process--allows us to implement systems which elect whomever the largest majority most approves, rather than a candidate who gets the most simple votes.

    I've been trying to extend this to Internet voting, but there's some complication: Internet voting opens up vote-buying and voter pressuring. Controlled polling locations are inconvenient and disenfranchise many voters who do not have the time nor the transit capability to reach them; yet they provide privacy and anonymity so the voter can vote as they care. Internet voting allows a third party to bribe or threaten a voter, requiring them to vote privately with the third-party's observation. Any technical security against software attack only prevents direct, detectable tampering; private coercion escapes any firewall, any source code audit, and any form of unbreakable encryption. I've designed countermeasures, and still find them inadequate.

  19. Re:Admin credentials written on the side, too? on Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm working out a parliamentary voting system that I want to publish as open source. I'm even considering it on a government scale, with integrity and verifiability. The concerns are interesting and important; of course, that happens when your first concern is security.

  20. You could use Minix 3. The kernel itself is tiny; and each part is isolated, so auditable individually. High-level certification is fairly doable; more to the point, you can audit the outside-controllable path and strip out things you don't need.

    For a touch screen voting machine, you'll need graphical display, touch screen input, and disk access. That means file systems. It means the capacity to run and schedule processes. It means the capacity to manage memory.

    It doesn't mean BFQ and anticipatory scheduling; it means direct scheduling, simple prioritization. It doesn't mean fancy coalescing and defragmenting memory management; you pop that out and put in a naive memory allocator.

    You may have to make some concessions. Compressed RAM? No. High-end memory protections? Yes, you'll want to augment your VM page memory management module with a policy-driven memory management module that prevents the creation of writable, executable memory. You might want some sort of file system access control system, or a capabilities-based security system--complex code that adds mitigations.

    These bare-minimum systems are core. They either tend to not change or they tend to have a naive implementation that we can audit over the long term. The base kernel in something like Minix tends to not change much; the VM manager tends to stay as-is; the process schedulers also stay untouched. That code may be 5 or 10 years old, and becomes of particular importance when it becomes the subset for high-security embedded systems.

    Your risk falls greatly through those simple virtues.

  21. Re:I'll believe he's sincere when there's a vote on GOP Congressman Introduces Bill To Reinstate Net Neutrality Rules (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    You and I both know there's no point in a democrat proposing immigration legislation until the dems have majority and a democrat president

    You show the American people what is to be done and why it is not being done.

  22. The President executes the law. That's a lot more than simple enforcement.

    As for immigration law, the provisions give the power to take action against an offense. They don't give the mandate. That gives the executive flexibility: we can put you in prison, fine you, or whatnot, but we might put you on probation. In the case of immigration, the executive can choose to monitor: so long as you don't cause too much trouble, we take normal action to keep the situation stable, and make sure you pay taxes. The Congress has not forced this, nor has it passed law with the mandatory minimum sentencing of deportation or imprisonment.

  23. We give the executive powers because he's fast. The Congress has all the power and passes it through law to the executive; the Congress actually can't execute, and so leaves some details open to the executive so as to tweak the implementation.

    Down the line, the Congress can make more-specific instruction about how the executive may execute the powers of Congress.

  24. Re:The GOP always stands against the people. on GOP Congressman Introduces Bill To Reinstate Net Neutrality Rules (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Those markets are heavily-regulated to prevent companies from buying all other companies, although most of your options are owned by the same company. There are also provisions pushed by municipal authorities to force these providers to roll out to people in less-densely-populated areas where the cost is higher.

  25. Re:It looked like an awesome deal on Tesla Will Be First Automaker To Lose the Federal Tax Credit For Electric Cars (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Yep. It's not a drive most people make in their lifetime, much less every day. It's that one use case that bogs down electric vehicles.

    You're also time-shifting: most tires will wear out in 5,000 miles on that kind of duty cycle. That 40,000 or 80,000 mile rating doesn't work when you try to do it all at once. You're going to have your car in the shop for an hour at some point, plus the detour to get there. Still, if you wanted to make the trip by a certain temporal deadline, you can get to the tires later.