What makes you think that when we as a people vote for the government to do something, it's "without the understanding that what we are giving has a price attached to it". Laws that are passed have costs calculated by the CBO, and funding mechanisms attached, as a part of the law. It's only a few right-wing loons that think that some things (e.g. wars, tax breaks to corporations) don't have to be paid for.

You appear to have a lot of misconceptions about TANF (Welfare). Go read http://thinkprogress.org/econo... .

If the people pass laws to promote businesses investing in developing new capabilities (e.g. space flight) then we WANT companies to do that work and thus get those grants, tax breaks, etc. That's how the airline industry got launched in the US, for example - huge government subsidies (airports, air traffic control system) and contracts (for mail delivery) that jump started the US airline industry, which was IMO a brilliant investment, because transportation doesn't just benefit the company providing transportation, it benefits everyone who uses transportation. Highways were another brilliant investment, funding construction companies and thus jobs, and creating a national road system that everyone benefits from.

The subsidies/grants/tax breaks that I object to are the ones that go to mature, profitable industries that don't need any support because they should be able to survive on their own. Oil companies and sports teams are just the most blatant examples. Agri-business corporations don't need subsidies, either - the farming grants should be reserved for the few percent of farmers who are independent, small family farms, and right now the money all goes to huge, profitable corporations that have huge resources and don't need the money, and relatively little to the small farms that need the support to survive the ups-and-downs of farming.

To support your point, note that the unemployment rate goes up and down quite dramatically over time based on the economy, i.e. job availability. That pretty much proves that when people are unemployed it's because they can't find work, not that they're not willing to work.

Exactly right! Votes need to be physically recorded, so they can be physically secured, counted, audited, can only be modified physically in one location, etc. Digitally recorded votes are far too easy to manipulate, and almost all digital voting systems are impossible to audit making them completely untreatable.

This is exactly right - we don't need online voting - it's a horrible idea. The key problem is that it opens up vote fraud to the entire internet, with no oversight or physical control, instead of just people physically in a polling station under the observation of election monitors.

If the goal is to increase voting, the solution is to make election day a national holiday so it's equally accessible to everyone. And everyone involved in voting knows this.

The problem is that while everyone says that they want everyone to vote, one of the two parties knows they are only supported by a minority of the population and they only retain power by keeping the majority from voting, by making voting as difficult as possible.

Interesting review, but the comment you were replying to "As you’d expect, it’s an awkward mess" was not about the Apple Watch, it was about doing a naive port of a *web browser to the Apple Watch where the *browser* was, as you would expect, useless, though an interesting tech demo.

Exactly - "smart watches" aren't particularly for telling time, they are a small display that's visible at a glance for notifications and other information you want easily. For example, my Pebble tells me about my next meeting, including drive time, which is great to be able to easily watch so that I stay on schedule. And it's an activity tracker (running Up software) so I don't need to wear a separate activity tracker band. And it tells me who's calling so that I can decide whether to accept or reject a call w/out pulling my phone out. And check Uber cabs in the area. Think of it as the most valuable 10% of what you can do on a phone, made more convenient so that you don't have to pull your phone out as often.

Nobody dies if they don't have a smart watch, of course, but it does make life easier.

It's a good point that as IoT devices proliferate there are security implications because your house will have dozens or even hundreds of devices all talking TCP/IP using whatever random protocols and implementations each device's manufacturer came up with.

That being said, I think it's unrealistic to imagine that each little company should hire their own security experts to make their own rock-solid stack, because many of these devices are home-made, or made by little startups, etc. And even if every manufacture aggressively tracked technology, users won't upgrade their firmware constantly.

Instead, I'd suggest that a better option would be to standardize the basic communications and develop a FOSS hardened communications stack for IoT devices, and push IoT producers to adopt it, so that everyone at least builds on a secure platform. There are many communications stacks for IoT, but the problem (IMO) is that they're generally proprietary by companies trying to "win" in a battle between IoT stacks, and because there are so many code bases, and they are proprietary, they can't be trusted, and even if they are trusted, they can't be used by all developers because they're tied to proprietary platforms.

So what we need is an IoT stack, secure and efficient enough to run on tiny processors (Arduino...) ideally grounded in an open standards group such as the IETF. And with a marketing program to drive all IoT platforms to adopt it. Of course, there can be multiple competing implementations as there are with all network stacks. That's valuable from a security perspective, because it prevents everyone from running one code base and thus having the same security vulnerabilities. And, of course, competition makes everything better, as they compete to be more efficient, secure, etc. As long as they are interoperable, and based on a fundamentally secure design.

Of course, this won't fix all problems - you can certainly build an insecure app on top of an secure protocol - but at least it'll eliminate a bunch of "basic" problems, like identity and securing streams, etc.

I used to think this way, because if you want to know the time look at a clock or cell phone. Then I got a Pebble, and found that it's fantastically useful to have little bits of info pushed to your wrist to see at a glance, and to have your watch know your schedule and location rather than just the time, so it can tell you things like "you should leave for your next appointment now, given where you are and where you need to be and the traffic". Then you only need to pull out your phone occasionally, she you want to actually talk with someone or use a large screen. It's very convenient.

The article isn't actually about end-to-end email security, but about using web-based email, because you can't trust the contents of the browser window. The answer, of course, is to use a Mail app, and not web-based email. If you use a mail app, end-to-end security works great!

The real problem that needs solving isn't hacking PGP into web-mail, it's making certificate management user-friendly. And that's not even that hard to do!

Sure. But the goal was educational, not production, what they did is pretty reasonable. That is, they built a large cluster of computers for kids to learn parallel programming on, using dirt-cheap commodity components accessible to kids. Sure, it's not a supercomputer in that it won't be on the Top 100 list, but it's a good educational "trainer" supercomputer, in that learning parallel programming teaches the the programming models (though not the specific languages) used by the real supercomputers.

Now, if they could get FORTRAN running parallel on the cluster, that's be really useful for teaching kids to be ready for supercomputing! Not as 'hip' as Node.js, but really useful for doing supercomputing.

One correction - from what I've read Netflix demanded that Comcast give them direct transit for free, Comcast insisted that it be paid transit, through a provider, which is how pretty much all web sites operate - they pay their ISP, the web site's ISP buys transit to the consumer ISPs, and the traffic gets delivered. Netflix refused to buy more bandwidth from a provider, insisting that Netflix be able to bypass their ISP and deliver transit straight to Comcast, and they should get the transit for free from Comcast. Then Netflix tried to push more traffic to Comcast then their ISP was paid to deliver, the connections from Netflix to Comcast saturated and started dropping packets (or were throttled by Comcast, hard to tell from the outside). Netflix' bet was that if their service degraded on Comcast, they could tell their customers it was Comcast's fault, and force Comcast to provide transit for free to avoid the bad PR.

The rule only says that ISPs have to transit traffic without differentiating between it.

Paid caches aren't network transit. They're not affected by this rule.

Peering arrangements are network transit, but the rule just says the ISP has to deliver the traffic they're paid by customers to deliver, whether or not the ISP likes the specific web site the data is coming from. It's not relevant whether the transit is free (peering) or paid transit.

Albert Manero at his team at UCF are doing a great job. One bit I want to add: the community that he's working in is e-NABLE ( http://www.enablingthefuture.o... ). The "one note" stuff is just a Microsoft sponsorship deal, done after-the-fact, and while their financial and marketing sponsorship of Albert's work is awesome (his work takes time and money, even if he gives the results away for free), it would be better to credit the actual community that contributed to the design, not the made up community that MS created for marketing spin. In particular, the hand used in the Limitless design is Flexy Hand (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:242639) by Gyrobot, who's a very cool guy who deserves some credit for his work.

No, the first amendment says that The People have the Right to form Well Regulated Militia. The Founders strongly opposed the idea of private armies, and in fact when people tried to set up their own military force outside of the Militia they were found guilty of treason and shut down by the army.

It's weird how modern gun salesmen have managed to twist "the people have a right to form well regulated militia" into "gun companies have the right to sell unlimited quantities of any kinds of guns to anonymous buyers over the internet".