You forgot that the "porno princess" now claims her child is not autistic.

Just to toss another bit on the "greed argument" pile, the drugs to treat a disease cost 10 to 10,000,000 times more than the vaccines to prevent the disease. So if it was about greed, they wouldn't be giving vaccines. It's MUCH more profitable to treat a polio victim for the rest of their life than to vaccinate against it.

"But Chicken Pox doesn't have a treatment drug!!". It has lots and lots of drugs in the rare cases when it causes serious complications and sends the victim to the ICU.

It's due to how screwed-up NY state politics are.

NY used to have a House representing "the people" and a Senate representing "geography". Similar to the US House and Senate. The result of this was upstate NY was able to get some attention and benefits from the state government, because the NY City-dominated House had to negotiate with the upstate-dominated Senate.

Then a resident of NY City sued, citing the NY State Constitution's requirement that each person be represented equally. And won. The result was the state Senate was changed to also be based on population. Since NY city is roughly half of NY state's population, upstate NY was more-or-less politically abandoned for decades. At the same time, the deindustrialization of upstate NY (and the rest of the Rust Belt) utterly devastated the upstate NY economy.

This program is an attempt to start reversing some of that pain. Resulting in a somewhat odd program - there are virtually no major industries left in upstate NY to receive the tax breaks you propose. They need to import something.

But it's going to be a very hard sale. The area has been suffering from major economic depression for a very long time. Even the "successful" cities look old and dreary, and there is the palpable sense that everything has either gone to hell, or will be going to hell soon. It's going to be very hard to get someone to decide to move their business into that environment. Heck, even the locals desperately hope their children grow up to move somewhere better. Like Detroit.

In some locations around the world, you do have to worry about simultaneous disasters. Residents of California are due for a major earthquake, and the resulting building collapses and fires could destroy both the bank and the home. Similarly, someone in a hurricane-prone area could have both their home and bank flooded.

So if you want to really be absolutely, positively sure, you are going to need some significant geographic distribution as well.

Or just encrypt it and upload it to a cloud service that replicates to multiple datacenters.

Oh, you also neglected to pay attention to how your proposal enables man-in-the-middle attacks. Again, you lack any verification by the user. All the bracelet knows is that they were presented with a valid signature. I'm making a purchase in Wal-Mart, but your plan doesn't actually verify it's Wal-Mart's certificate.

It's absolutely wrong that I am proposing a 'stealable' ID.

And I didn't say you were proposing a 'stealable' ID. I said I can read the code remotely. Which lets me charge you $20, just as if you were making a purchase.

See, your proposal failed to include any sort of verification by the bracelet-wearer that they wanted to make the purchase, or even verify the purchase amount.

Even if you do require something like a button press, standard location and equipment means I can push the button on your bracelet by "accidentally" bumping into you.

In other words, your proposal makes a modern version of "pickpocketing" not only possible, but extremely easy to do.

That said, I do think that groups like the NSA and FBI have been quite successful in keeping people (like Jeff4747) remarkably uneducated.

That's extremely amusing since you managed to completely fail to understand the problems I pointed out. You leapt to ID theft when I was talking about stealing plain-old money.

But good job pontificating with maximum hypocrisy.

Yeah, that's a terrible idea.

First, it's wireless, so I can "grab" your identity when you walk by. That'll be handy. It's even going to be strapped to a similar body part, so I can know exactly where to "accidentally" bump into you if it requires pushing a button to activate.

Second, you are transmitting the code through the purchase system. That's very handy, because I can just capture the code via your compromised PC.

"Two-factor" authentication systems work because the data does not flow through a single system. If my credit company texts me a one-time PIN to approve a purchase, you have to intercept both the purchase and the text message. The text message also lets me verify the purchase (Hey, the cash register says $23, but the text message says $475).

Third, it's a surveillance state dream come true.

You then bring up thought leaders, demonstrating that this is either sarcasm or massive stupidity.

There are plenty of billionaires who will pay to distribute Reason's pseudo-intellectual bullshit to the masses.

Yes, facts like Manning was not sentenced to LIFE in prison, but for 35 years. And facts like Manning leaked far more documents than Petraeus did. And facts like her name is Chelsea Manning.

Yes, Petraeus's sentence was a joke. But when you're going to be harping on "facts", you kinda need to get yours correct.

As for this fine gentleman who just got sentenced, he's going to serve about 15 hours per victim (unless he gets paroled or other early release). Less than a day per crime doesn't seem unreasonable. If anything, it's rather light for extortion.

Just find the black guy. If he's for it, then they are opposed and will fight to the death to stop it.

I really hope in the next two years Obama comes out in favor of breathing. Watching Boehner and McConnell repeatedly pass out would be entertaining.

Not quite.

The vote has to be scheduled by the "rules" committee. Which more-or-less means the speaker can prevent any bill from reaching the floor of the House.

Theoretically, the way around this is a discharge petition - if a majority of House members sign the petition, it leaves committee and goes to the floor.

That almost never succeeds, because it requires members of the majority to say "fuck you" to their party leadership, resulting in losing committee assignments and other perks.

Yes, the malware would report back the values for the same image as the non-infected drives, giving you the same results as the majority.

That's how it should be done, but that isn't necessarily how it always will be done. An executive hears that a simple device would let just anyone read their valuable firmware, and suddenly he wants to disable the interface unless you execute a super-secret command. And now your JTAG interface isn't raw hardware access.

Because humans do not write perfect software. In addition, people are willing to aid spy agencies for money.

You boot up with a known good BIOS, after the system has loaded up, while it's still live, you pull the good BIOS chip, insert the bricked one, run your firmware update

And since the malware is already running, it writes itself into the new chip.