Who ever said that the IRS definition for the purposes of taxation is the correct one to apply to a RFRA claim over contraception?

I highly doubt that the Waltons would qualify, given that billions of dollars of WalMart stock is held and traded publicly.

The opinion restricts itself to "closely-held corporations" (a phrase used dozens of times) rather than /all/ corporations. They don't define with precision what that exactly means -- that kind of drudgery is the domain of the lower courts -- they did point out that Hobby Lobby is privately held by a small number of folks from the same family. It would seem clear to infer that "closely-held" is sort of an antonym to "publicly-held" here, so I think there's virtually no chance any lower court would allow Wal Mart or Exxon to assert a RFRA claim.

Now, since companies under 100 employees are already exempt from most of PPACA, the net net of this only covers the rare company that simultaneously large enough to be hit by the mandate but still owned closely enough to merit RFRA protection. In other words, not too many in the scheme of things.

[ Full Disclosure: I don't support what Hobby Lobby believes, I think they deserve to lose on the merits. But at the end of the day, I'm not going to make a molehill into a mountain for rhetorical or fundraising purposes. ]

Yes, you are right, I mistyped.

Public: { H(CC+Salt), Salt, Amount of money spent on porn, Amount of student debt }

[ where + is just shorthanded for "mixed with" ]

It's not at all within the realm of possibility for an attacker to brute force the CC space for each salt separately. So yes, an attacker can run through (2**CC_entropy) hashes to brute force a single entry, but that exercise provides him no help when he goes to do the next entry. Moreover, he can't spin up a few TB of storage on S3 and pre-compute anything useful.

The point of the scheme is to turn a pwn-once-win-forever game into a pwn-one-win-one game. This guy paid once and won the entire database. I would like him to have to pay that cost once for each entry.

Yes, a secret salt is no salt at all.

But there are very important uses for salting that make it better than assigning a random number -- it allows someone that does know the input value look up the relevant entry without any involvement from the secure side.

Imagine you had the following two datasets that you've partitioned:

Private: { Credit Card Number, Random Salt }
Public: { H(CC+Salt), Amount of money spent on porn, Amount of student debt }

Now whenever you want to obscure an entry, you do need to go to private one. But if you want to answer the question "How much money did a person with CC X spend on porn", you can look it up without entering the secure domain. But no one without access to the private side can find credit cards in the DB or other stuff -- to within the computational costs of the operation multiplied by the entropy of the salt.

Yes, which is exactly what the person in this article actually did -- he created a lookup table to accelerate brute-forcing the entire released dataset.

And yes, there are a trillion credit cards. But if each one gets a random 32-byte salt added to it, then that's a 4-billion-trillion input space ...

Um, the standard is fine. The phrase "One-way hashes based on strong cryptography" means (to any professional in the business) that one must salt the hash with sufficient entropy to make brute-forcing the input space impossible. So 16 digit CC has little entry, but add a 16-byte hash and you've somewhere.

So yeah, "strong cryptography" can't fix stupid, but those that know how to use it are plenty fine.

And this is counting just those around me:

East Asia: Han, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese,
Indian Subcontinent: Telugu, Tamil, Sinhalese, Punjabi,
West Asia: Syriac, Turkmen, Arab, Persian,
North Asia: Slavs of all flavors,
Europe: Scandinavian, Germanic, Anglo-saxons, Castilians,
Africa: Hamitic, Bantu,

Looks pretty diverse to me, at least once you get past the crippling simplicity of the "White/Asian/Black/Latin" universe in which the race-baiters are forever trapped.

I also hate to be the one to point this out, but given a free choice much (not all) of the world population starts consuming meat once given the economic means to do so.

In a world that seems to be lurching towards greater individual autonomy and personal choice, your solution does not strike me as likely to get off the ground. At the end, you'll either have to adopt more and more coercive action to meet your goal or accept that there are billions of independent agents with different preferences.

This.

It's an interesting conundrum. We can at least try to pass laws to prevent our governments from spying us, but even if we succeed we can't very well pass a law forbidding others' governments from doing what they will.

Ultimately, I don't see a solution that's plausible here.

1) I would love nothing else for petro-power to become economically unsustainable with respect to renewables. Currently, that's not the case even with massive green-power subsidies. Here in CA, power prices are pushed ever higher as they push the mandates higher.

2) Functional regulation also requires a principled opposition that is willing to focus on actual deliverables rather than scoring points.

3) There is no way that global warming is going to be solved by regulations on the extractive industry, so this is a non-goal in this domain. If we want to try for a comprehensive solution to AGW, it needs to be done across industries and across countries. Global problems cannot be solved locally.

Now proper regulation would raise costs significantly and put pressure on finding REAL solutions sooner which is why environmentalists want to use them to prohibit dirty industry growth

This is exactly the problem, you are effectively deciding on the solution rather than the goal. If it's possible to pump crude out of Alaska without spilling it on the tundra, then you should be in favor of it. To the extent that safety requires raising the cost, that's an acceptable tradeoff, but it absolutely is not the goal unless you are just being obstructionist instead of productive.

Nuclear power is a great example. A still functioning regulatory system makes nuclear power more costly than solar PV. This is still the case with the large government subsidies involved in that industry already.

I worked in nuclear for a while. Most of the cost increase goes to lobbyists and lawyers to fight the other guys' lobbyists and lawyers. Which is all that the nimbyciles have every really accomplished -- making the industry grease the same palms that they are doing with at least as much dough.

[ Kind of ironic actually -- the fight against the parasitic plutocrats only spawns more plutocrats. Perhaps that's a sign about why it's unproductive not to engage with problems directly and find solutions. ]

I keep hearing other nations do a better job deciding such things; like Canada for example.

You mean that country that's pissed off we are stalling our decision on the giant pipeline to transport their oil from the tar sands?!

Truth be told, I've heard they don't care what the answer is since if we say no they'll build the pipeline to the Pacific themselves, but they wanted the stability of shipping it to us. Such a shame really to keep them in limbo, since they can't go elsewhere until we've officially said no too. But yeah, that oil isn't going to the stay in the ground in any event.

We are not anti-fracking or anti-drilling. My goodness, we live in Texas. Keep it in the pipes, and if you have a leak or spill, report it and be respectful to your neighbors. If you are going to put this stuff in close proximity to homes, be respectful and careful.

Yeah, pretty much this.

We all know that extraction companies do idiotic and careless things and don't give a fuck about safety -- either of their workers or of the environment around them.

We also know that a lot of environmentalists advocate the complete cessation of fracking and drilling even though that makes no practical sense (for now).

And so we've lost the middle ground of wanting a strong extractive industry with strong environmental safeguards and a culture of safety grown up around it. It would be a strategic error for companies to adopt such a policy in a situation where environmentalists are going to oppose them politically and legally anyway no matter what they do. And it would be a strategic error for environmentalists to advocate for responsible extraction given that the companies are going to weasel out of it anyway.

I know where we want to go, I think it's certainly technologically and economically feasible to extract oil and gas without damaging the environment. But the way we pursue it is fundamentally broken on all sides.

[ And none of this is intended to be negative. I consider myself an environmentalist and a technologist FWIW. ]

Dude with 30lbs of marijuana in an uncovered truck bed.

I hate the War on Drugs as much as the next /.er, but seriously, if you have that much weed you can probably afford a hard-top or a van or something.

Maybe not, depending on the license.

In fact, protecting the integrity of the software by using a digital signature is expressly the use case that GPLv3 is trying to forbid.