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Comment Re:Newsflash (Score 5, Insightful) 450

How would insurance of bitcoins even work? It seems particularly challenging for many reasons.

Generally, insurance policies are written for things with a strongly-known approximate value. Jewlery, physical property, buildings, a fixed amount of cash in a safe.... You can't generally get insurance on things with fluctuating value like real estate (you can insure the building on top of it, but you can't insure the lot against loss of value), various financial instruments, commodities futures, etc. Bit coins are highly variable - if I take out a policy against 10,000 bit coins, and they're lost, what value would the policy pay out based on? The value at the time I got my policy? The value at the time they were stolen? The value at the time the claim is settled? Does this take into account that if someone steals a large number of bitcoins, they're probably going to liquidate them quickly, which would depress the market? If the policy is based on the value at the time it's issued, the insured party has a motivation to purposefully lose or destroy the coins if the market dramatically drops - the insured value is higher than the market value. On the other hand, if the policy is based on the market value at the time of the incident, the insurance company's costs can skyrocket and no sane underwriter would write such a policy.

Speaking of the insurred's motivation to defraud based on fluctuating value, the risk of fraud here is sky-high. A cryptographically-secure, untraceable currency where mere knowledge of a few numbers is enough to steal the entire value without leaving any evidence behind? It'd be trivial for the owner to purposefully leave a backdoor, then anonymously exploit it, especially given the nasscent state of computer security in the legal system. It wouldn't even have to be that subtle a hole, either. As far as I know, there isn't any precedent to establish what liability companies have with regard to negligence in the field, with the notable exception of PCI:DSS for the credit card industry. (For example, all the cases against Sony were dismissed as far as I'm aware.) In our current environment, the insurance company would have a hard time proving neglicence to dispute the claim. With that kind of risk, there's no way any insurer would issue that kind of policy. I just don't see any reasonable way that an insurance company would write a policy like this, at any price. Moreover, many of these issues reach past the bitcoin realm and apply to all sorts of online providers. As more and more of companies move data to "the cloud" - what kind of recourse do they have when security and availibility events happen. Can I get an insurance policy to protect me if my cloud email provider exposes confidential business informaton to the world which significantly impacts my revenue stream? It's a very thorny landscape...

Comment Re:Despicable (Score 1) 554

Keep in mind this is North Carolina we're talking about...There aren't any Jews there, and you can't keep kosher because it's impossible to buy kosher meat.

I'm actually serious - that's not too far from where I grew up, and any kosher-keeping family with kids at that school would go to my old synagogue. There were only maybe 2 or 3 families there that would keep milk and meat seperate (I now keep fully Kosher but my parents don't), and none of them would be in More-at-Four.

But, if it happened, I'm sure the sure the parents would let the teacher know, and the teacher wouldn't push. From later, more reliable reports (not from a political newspaper), it sounds like this was nothing more than a teacher or other school official saying "Oh, you don't have any milk? Why don't you go through the line and get some?" which a 4 year old girl misunderstood and a mother and some reporters blew way out of proportion. It's not like they were forcing her in the way the original article alleged, and they certainly wouldn't push if the parent had previously informed them of a relgious diet, just as if they parent had informed them the child was lactose intolerent (which is far more likely than being a kosher-keeping Jew).

Comment Re:Despicable (Score 1) 554

My mother is a county preschool administrator in NC and part of her responsibilities include overseeing the Moore at Four program in her county.

She has an undergraduate degree, masters degree, and had about around 15 years of experience as a classroom teacher before she became an administrator. As far as I am aware, all of her staff are college-educated, and I know for a fact they've all had a myraid of mandatory trainings and certifications. These are not uneducated people.

Comment Re:Patents should promote innovation (Score 1) 249

Example: Suppose you want to patent RSA encryption

You mean like U.S. Patent 4,405,829 which was issued to Rivest, Shamir and Adleman and was enfoced requiring RSA implementations to be licensed until shortly before it expired in 2000? There's a reason PGP used El-Gamal and DSA for a long time without supporting RSA keys.

Comment Re:Take the fuel.. (Score 1) 416

Asbestos isn't really a problem when submerged. Its risks come due to tiny particles becoming airborne and getting stuck in the lung where they're an irritant. Underwater, it just clumps, and fish don't have lungs to irritate.

In fact, the standard protocol when dealing with asbestos (removal, etc). is to cover it with water. The EPA also had no problem with asbestos-filled subway cars into artificial reefs

Comment Re:And how can I use it on my BIND server? (Score 0) 165

There is no certificate authority involved, as the DNS hierarchy contains the signature chain, from the root servers, to each TLD, to each domain. One proposed use of DNSSEC is to publish an SSL certificate public key -- then no Certificate Authorities are required! A browser can use the DNSSEC validated response to match the public key (or more likely, fingerprint) to the web server it is connecting with. You can already use DNS to publish SSH key fingerprints, now you can sign that record for even more trust.

Ostensibly, CAs validate more than ownership of a domain - they're supposed to tie a legal entity to the website, in order to prevent bankofarmerica.com from MITMing your connection to your bank. You should theoretically check that the entity is the one you expect - headquarter in such and such state, etc. Realistically, no one did, and so now we have EV certs to try to make that more visible. Where we go from here is another question....

TL;DR: CAs are supposed to speak to more than just domain ownership.

Comment Re:Added burden for small businesses :( (Score 1) 413

Sorry - that should have been 50,000+ in terms of rate jurisdictions. 5000 is filing jurisdictions (counties)

Storing a number is fine. Keeping current about what products are taxed at what rates in all 50,000 is hard, especially given hundreds of thousands of items sold (Amazon). Filing quarterly tax returns in 5000 different jurisdictions, each of which has to be prepared and reviewed by accountants and lawyers is very, very expensive.

Comment Re:Added burden for small businesses :( (Score 1) 413

Any online company selling outside of its state would have to keep track of potentially 50 times as many different sales taxes (not all states have sales tax, I am aware)

50? Ha! Try 5000+! Not only can sales tax be imposed by the state, it can be imposed by:

  • Counties
  • Towns
  • Municipal Areas (think a city and it's suburbs)
  • Local/Regional Transit Districts
  • Fire Districts
  • Water Conservation Districts
  • Etc.

There are places where different tax rates depend not only on which side of the street you're on, but whether you're on the north side of the street to the east or west of the intersection with another major street, except for the 5000 block. I'm not kidding, although I wish I was.

Then, you have to figure out what rate to charge various items at, for every state. Food is taxed at different rates in many states, but what qualifies as food? In Washington, up until recently, a Kit-Kat bar was taxed at a different rate than a Snickers bar (apparently one was candy, and one was somehow a baked desert). Now you have to figure out and track different tax rates for every jurisdiction for every item you carry.

Not only that, but in some states, companies have to file separate tax paperwork with every county, detailing all their sales broken down by district. For a small internet retailer, this means that almost EVERY new customer means an extra tax filing and the fees to the accountants and lawyers that go with it.

A requirement to collect local sales tax for internet retailers is COMPLETELY unfair and a huge burden for companies, regardless of whether they are small mom-and-pops or the size of Amazon.com.

Comment Re:Will GoDaddy refund registrations paid in advan (Score 1) 279

That's how all transfers work - the transfer fee is the extension cost for the next year.

ICANN "Policy on Transfer of Registrations between Registrars"

8. Effect on Term of Registration
The completion by Registry Operator of a holder-authorized transfer under this Part A shall result in a one-year extension of the existing registration, provided that in no event shall the total unexpired term of a registration exceed ten (10) years.

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