Ebola's almost complete lack of aerosol transmission is and will remain a substantial barrier to the population risk the disease poses

The thing is, what you're saying there is just plain implausible unless the air itself kills the viruses with remarkable efficiency, in which case it would survive for only minutes on a hard surface (like HIV), rather than hours (like influenza). From what I've read, it survives for hours on hard surfaces, which lends serious doubt to any claim that Ebola exhibits an "almost complete lack of aerosol transmission".

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that Ebola is airborne. It currently is not (or at least it is not currently believed to be). However, it is unsafe to assume that the way a virus behaves in Africa (hot weather, high humidity, little use of HVAC, mostly rural, families that stay home to care for the sick) will match the way it would behave in the United States (highly variable air temperatures, potentially low humidity because of the use of HVAC, heavily urban, people who go to work even when sick). Such a conclusion would be fundamentally invalid because it doesn't control for an absolutely insane number of variables.

In particular, with airborne diseases, propagation by aerosol transmission increases rather dramatically when the air is cold and the humidity is low (particularly when it is insanely low because of HVAC). That's one reason why the cold and flu season in the U.S. spikes markedly during the winter. In the parts of Africa where Ebola is currently found, the hot air temperature and relatively high humidity don't lend themselves to aerosol transmission. So there's a distinct possibility that the exact same strain of disease that is not airborne in Africa would be airborne in the United States.

Such temperature-dependent and humidity-dependent behavior would also be consistent with researchers' conclusions after an October 1989 lab incident in which the closely related Ebola Reston virus spread rapidly among physically isolated populations of lower primates. "Due to the spread of infection to animals in all parts of the quarantine facility, it is likely that Ebola Reston may have been spread by airborne transmission." (Beltz, Lisa. Emerging Infectious Diseases. 253)

https is and always was broken by design. It is, and never was, safe against a government adversary and it never will be.

Other than certificate pinning (which you can do with CA certs and SSL/TLS just as easily), describe a scheme that doesn't have this problem. No?

At some point, you have to have a trusted party to provide trust in a cert. Otherwise, you have nothing. And that trusted party can be compromised, at which point you have nothing.

Web of trust:

The closest thing I'm aware of to avoiding that involves a web of trust, where trust is distributed more, but without a central authority, there's no consistency in how well different parts of that web perform validation of the identity of the requestor, which results in even weaker trust than with a central authority.

Of course, you could set a trust policy that requires multiple signatures to trust a certificate, but at some point, you're still trusting random websites that you don't know, and whatever limit you set, a government could always exceed it. If you say that three sites must sign something for you to trust it, the government can find three sites that can be bribed, or even use their own sites to sign it.

Mind you, you could carefully craft trust policies, and then manually evaluate every certificate that fails to decide whether you trust it, and that would be more secure for people who are highly skilled at crypto, but for the average person, such a scheme would be much, much weaker.

DNS-based security:

Another proposal for reducing the importance of the CAs is putting the certs in DNS records. This ensures that only those who can mess with DNS can change the certs.

Unfortunately, most users rely on external DNS servers for recursion. If the government substitutes their own, they can refuse all DNSSec queries, and most users will be none the wiser. This effectively makes DNSSec useless until OS vendors make it mandatory by showing errors when it gets an unsigned response.

I'm glad I didn't post that example from anywhere near Wasco, CA, Jacksonville, FL, or Staten Island, NY.

Hey, I wonder who's in that black van outsi...

*^%^#%$^*@& NO CARRIER

Since you don't seem to be able to recognize that drawings of children are not children, it seems to me that you're part of the problem.

Video games encourage you to (in character) kill other people. Do we see hundreds of gamers going out every day and killing people? Of course not. Why? Because normal, healthy people are capable of separating fantasy from reality. Anyone who can't is clinically insane—more specifically, psychotic.

In the same way, arousing sexual lust towards a drawing in a fantasy universe, regardless of the supposed age of the character in that drawing, does not result in any increased risk of people attacking actual children. People are either inclined to sexually abuse children or they aren't. The ones who are will do so even without being exposed to drawings of kids. The ones who are not so inclined won't sexually abuse children even if they are exposed to it.

IMO, simulated child porn is no different from simulated rape porn, simulated torture porn, or any number of other similarly disgusting things. It's fake, and the people who like it know that it is fake, but they derive sexual pleasure from the taboo act of pretending to do something that would be horrible if it were real. As far as I know, there's no evidence that such groups have a higher percentage of people who actually commit those acts than the general population. Thus, criminalizing those fantasies, no matter how disgusting you might personally consider them to be, does not serve a legitimate public interest.

The spinal nerves could smell those other spinal nerves an inch away.

You have the queen as *your* head of state however ;) Same person, different crown.

Commonwealth != British. You gave those rights up when you split from the British Empire :)

In the UK we get a minimum of 4 weeks paid vacation, a set time for working hours, and even salaried workers are due compensation for working over their contractual hours.

Been in IT in the UK for 20 years now, never experienced what you are talking about.

Yup, we actually have decent employment law here in the UK. Sucks to be you, wherever you come from...

Because he's looking to open it as a conversion server for pretty much anyone that wants to use it on an ongoing basis - which means that CapEx is a much better solution.

Why not? Binaries are still part of the application in many cases - images, videos, dependencies etc

It's still perfectly legal to want the President dead. You just can't say you want it to happen. Speaking isn't a thought, it's an action.

Actually, you can legally say that you want it to happen, at least based on my understanding of the law in question. Where it becomes a crime is when there is both an expressed desire to actually cause that harm (or a call for others to do so) and a reasonable expectation that it might be feasible for you (or those others) to do so in the manner suggested.

Here are a couple of examples that illustrate the difference:

• Lack of intent: In theory, you could legally say that you wish the President would get beaten to death by a gang dressed in clown suits while smoking bananas and drinking cheap beer. If you did so, such a statement would not be committing a crime, because wanting someone to die is not the same thing as threatening to kill someone.

  With that said, if someone actually expressed such an interest, the Secret Service would take a very close interest in that person's background, looking to see if (for example) he or she had ever bought a clown costume, bananas, or cheap beer.

  Additionally, it should be noted that if you then went on to say, "And if I ever get the chance, I'll be part of that gang," then you would almost certainly go to prison, because that statement of personal intent would cross the legal threshold for being a threat. Similarly, if you asked others to harm the President, or said things that appeared to advocate the assassination of the President, that would also be considered a true threat.

• Implausible means: Most people could legally say that they want to hit the President with a giant meteor from space without committing a crime, because to the best of my knowledge, even our best scientists have no real means of making a meteor fall on the White House, much less some random person who has never had any affiliation with any space program whatsoever. With that said, if you are affiliated with NASA, such a statement might be seen as a threat. Maybe.

Additionally, the following conditions must all be met before something is considered a threat:

• The threat must be made intentionally, not accidentally.
• The context and manner of the threat must be such that a reasonable person overhearing it would assume that it was an actual expression of intent to harm the President. (For example, snarky comments at a political rally or in a stand-up comedy routine are not likely to be seen as legitimate threats.)
• The threat must not be made under duress, and must not be forced.

Of course, you can easily get into grey areas, and if you do, even if you don't get jail time for it, you'll probably get a lot more scrutiny than you'd like.

Finally, I'd like to add that IANAL, and this post should not be taken as legal advice.

What society finds acceptable is irrelevant; even if they find it unacceptable, that does not mean it should be illegal.

This. The gold standard for legality is that something should be legal unless it harms someone else—as Justice Holmes put it, "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." Society's values are, or at least should be, utterly irrelevant in determining whether something should or should not be legal, except perhaps in defining what constitutes another person, and in defining what constitutes harm.

Then again, I'm half expecting somebody to deliberately twist that and say, "But manga characters are people, too...." And this, I fear, will be the first sign that all hope for humanity is lost....

Ok, so you know jack shit then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

I also suggest, as a starting point, reading the Church of England article as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

And being a protestant myself, we definitely believe in the Holy Trinity.

You need to retake religious studies :) Seriously, your entire understanding of Christianity is wrong.

Catholicism is Christianity in entirety - it has essentially two main branches, Roman Catholic, and Protestant (or Church of England based Christianity, and also includes most other non-Roman Catholic Christian branches such as Baptists, Methodist etc, which are all offshoots of the CoE branch). But both sit under the label of Catholicism.

Protestants most certainly believe in the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and while they believe Jesus was mortal, that forms the basis of being able to rise from the dead - his divinity after crucifixion comes from him conquering death and rising again. Oh, and they most definitely believe he is the Son of God.

Your idea of how salvation occurs is also completely broken for both branches of Catholicism - simply leading a good life won't get you any brownie points, you have to believe in Jesus Christ and the fundamental tenet that he died for humanities sins on the cross.