I'm sure no version of Android from Google will include USB mass storage. Doing that requires unmounting /data to remount it as USB mass storage, which creates all sorts of issues. That's why Android switched to using MTP -- back in J, IIRC. It was something of an issue back then because MTP support wasn't very good on the major desktop OSes, but it is now so I'm not sure why anyone would care for the inferior solution. I'm also somewhat surprised that CM still manages to offer it and suspect that continuing to offer it will become increasingly difficult, requiring increasingly deep modifications of the OS and breaking more and more apps, because the assumption that /data is never unmounted is getting deeply ingrained in the system.

Now that Lollipop has SELinux enabled in enforcing mode I think CM will have to start hacking out SELinux rules to support UMS, or disable SELinux altogether.

I don't believe L includes ad-hoc Wifi. I'm curious to hear what you use it for. I've never felt any need for it, and it's not obvious to me how it would be useful if you aren't running servers on your mobile device, which would require a rooted OS anyway. If you're going to break the security model by rooting you might as well go all the way and install CM or similar. I expect the CM guys will have an L-based version not too long after release, so if CM is what you need, you should use it.

If you didn't have CM on it, you'd get 5.0 on November 3rd. Android has announced that N7 (2012 and 2013) will be in the first group of Nexus devices to get it.

Penalizing investment tends to push capital out of the US economy and into overseas economies, for one thing. Forcing US capital abroad is good for the rest of the world, but not for the US economy.

The problem with trying to attack capital is that it is mobile. This is like the whole Apple-and-Google-pay-no-taxes issue; there is a jurisdiction which allows them to avoid taxes so they sensibly move their capital there. You can try to tax it when it moves, but the movement just gets disguised as a business transaction. If you tax international trade (aka tariffs) you end up damaging the economy by impeding trade.

Barring international treaties which establish common taxation regimes worldwide, this will always be a problem for governments of wealthy countries trying to tax capital, because it is in the interest of less wealthy countries to offer very low tax rates in order to attract capital. Ireland has announced they're ending their practice of doing this, but someone else will offer it.

The brilliant thing about taxing consumption is twofold. First, consumption is tied to people while capital can live in all sorts of places and forms, and people have a physical location and a legal tie to a government. People are mobile, too, but less mobile than capital. People like to live primarily in their own culture, near their own family, business partners, etc., and even if they're willing to move to another country changing their nationality is a big deal, with all sorts of repercussions. And even if they're willing to do that, they're rarely willing to move to and become a citizen of a third-world dump of a country in order to get low taxes. Moving to France isn't going to reduce your tax bill.

Second, consumption is easy to identify. You can try to hide your consumption by having corporations purchase all of your homes, cars, toys, etc., and then let you "use" them, but the IRS already handles that sort of thing very effectively, even under an income tax regime. Use of such things is income. With a consumption tax approach it becomes even easier; you don't bother figuring out what percentage of that jet is used by which person and at what value to count it as income, you just tax the purchase of the jet. Doesn't matter if they try to work around that with lease agreements, or whatever, someone has to acquire ownership of the jet, and regardless of who that someone is, you tax them, which means the taxes are built into the lease, or whatever.

The remaining dodge here is for wealthy people to do all of their consumption overseas. I have my overseas shell corporation buy the jet in Barbados, where there are no consumption taxes, then allow me to use it. This puts us back in the position of having to figure out what portion of the jet's time is allocated to me and then having the US assess the relevant consumption tax to me, via random audits plus the threat of prison time if I fail to report and pay what I should. Same with foreign homes, etc.

But to the extent the wealthy can dodge consumption taxes with foreign consumption, it only works for foreign assets. Real estate, cars, caviar, etc., that are purchased in the US are easily taxed. Same with anything that is imported into the US. So unless the wealthy decide to spend most of their time overseas they'll do most of their consuming here.

I should mention that for many of the same reasons I think corporate income taxes are a bad idea. Corporations have lots of flexibility to relocate money to avoid taxes, and given the complexities of business it's non-trivial even to determine what the income is, and it's in that complexity where most of the loopholes live, and in any case, what's the point? All money ultimately belongs to people, even corporate money, and it has to leave the corporation before any person can use it. People are easier to tax, whether via income or consumption taxes. There's also the fact that corporate income taxes are effectively a hidden tax on customers (who pay more), employees (who make less) and shareholders (who make less), and I'm opposed to hidden taxes.

Umm, no. The iteration count change has nothing to do with encryption or key scheduling.

This is about how the encryption is is produced. What's needed is a mechanism for turning the password you type in into a key that can be used with a block cipher (in some appropriate mode). Any cryptographic hash will do that, so let's suppose that you use SHA256. You hash the password, then use the resulting bits as a key to encrypt data with AES128. Even though the hash is strong and the encryption is strong, the system is almost certainly weak because the password is probably not very strong. Suppose it has 30 bits of entropy. This means there are 2^30 possible hashes and 2^30 possible encryption keys.

The best solution is to pick a stronger password, but we can do better even without requiring the user to get a better memory and type more.

The reason the system is weak is that SHA256 is fast. An attacker can try all 2^30 possible passwords fairly quickly, because a common desktop machine can perform millions of operations per second. Let's assume it's only a million per second. 2^30/1000000/60/2 = ~9 minutes, on average (the division by 2 is because on average the attacker only has to search half of the space).

Suppose instead that you iterate SHA256 a million times and use the result of that as the AES key. That means on your machine it takes you one second to compute the key before you can start decrypting. Assuming there's no defect in SHA256 that allows the attacker to shortcut those iterations, he has to do the same thing when trying to search the password space. Now instead of being able to test a million passwords per second, he can only test one per second, so brute forcing your password takes about 9 million minutes, which is about 17 years.

Well, assuming the attacker uses only one computer, and assuming that it's no more powerful than yours. In reality, the attacker is going to use a big stack of GPUs, each of which can perform SHA256 thousands of times faster than a desktop machine because they're vector machines. And, given the scheme described, he's going to store the results of those password hashing attempts, constructing a table so he can skip the hashing step when he attacks someone else's data.

To address the first problem, the solution is to use an iterated function that also uses a lot of RAM (to increase hardware costs for the attacker), and perhaps to increase the iteration count some more. To address the second problem, add salt.

It's worth pointing out that the PBKDF2 password hash used by both TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt does not use a lot of RAM. You need to upgrade to scrypt or newer hashing functions for that. I'm not sure why VeraCrypt didn't do that, since they were breaking compatibility anyway.

You probably do need to make it somewhat progressive, taxing luxury goods at a higher rate.

Haven't parents always been liable for the actions of their children? I've always figured I was. If my kids made some mess they couldn't clean up, I knew I was on the hook for it. I suppose I shouldn't speak in the past tense, because I still have two who aren't yet legal adults.

That's a problem with the particular way they've chosen to balance it, not an inherent flaw in the concept.

I don't see where that says anything about it being Google's official tablet development platform.

This is mostly an issue with games, since they're the apps that push the performance boundaries enough that it makes sense to write native code.

So a less-technical but almost as correct answer is: If you buy an Intel tablet some games won't run on it until the game developers get around to building for Intel. How long that takes depends in large part on how many Intel tablets are sold.

Interesting. Do you have a citation for that?

There are different ways to make it work.

The one promoted by proponents of the Fair Tax (aka Flat Tax) is to put a flat percentage tax on everything, but then to pay a consumption allowance back based on family size. For the extremely poor this allowance could potentially exceed their total income.

Another approach is to tax different goods differently. Staple foods, basic clothing, housing and transportation wouldn't be taxed at all. Gulfstream jets, luxury yachts and homes like Gates' might be taxed 200% (which wouldn't have deterred him at all), with different tax levels in between for goods depending on where it's perceived they fall on the scale from "necessity" to "extravagance".

There are other approaches, but my core point is that the idea isn't inherently unworkable or stupid.

One challenge is how you get the super wealthy to buy local. If a superyacht costs 3X as much if I buy it here as if I buy it in, say, Italy, I'll buy it in Italy. Perhaps it would be necessary to require foreign transactions over a certain amount to be reported and assess taxes on them. People could evade these taxes fairly easily... but if you slap some severe penalties (e.g. jail time) on them for those who get caught, that can be deterred. This could even be applied to foreign income, so offshoring your money then spending it doesn't help; then the only way to escape is by changing your citizenship.

Or by buying legislative loopholes.

But loophole-resistance is a strength of consumption-based taxes, I think. The more complex you make the laws the easier it is to write loopholes into them, and taxing income is about the worst possible approach from that perspective, because income is inherently complex. Not for me -- nearly all of my income is on a single W-2 -- but for businesses and people who own businesses, determining what part of revenue is income can be devilishly complex, especially if there's a motivation to avoid classifying it as such.

In contrast, consumption taxes are extremely simple. It doesn't matter who buys X, the tax is paid on the purchase, by the purchaser. So the government always gets its cut, and layering ownership doesn't really help the person or people who ultimately own the money spent.

Depends on how progressive the consumption tax is.

Progressive consumption taxes don't typically try to tax additional dollars at higher rates. Instead, they tax different goods differently, generally with no taxes at all on staple foods, basic clothing, low-end housing and transportation, etc., then higher rates on more luxurious items. Deciding where on the necessity to luxury to extravagance continuum a given item falls gets pretty political, but it could be done.

Funding government services and managing inequality are separate problems. That doesn't mean that you can't address both with a single solution, but it's a good idea to keep in mind that they are separate so you don't insist on sub-optimal solutions merely because they target both problems if better solutions address the problems separately.

To be fair, the GP didn't make this claim. He claimed that the effect of the diplomatic process was to give Hussein time to hid the WMD project(s), not that that was the purpose of the process.

I agree with the rest of your post.