That's a noble goal, but housing, food, and utilities are all land intensive. With concentration of wealth comes ownership and control of land. Most of what is needed to sustain a person isn't items, but a place to live (limited resource, owned by the wealthy), water (somewhat limited resource, water rights owned by the wealthy), and food (land and water dependent). Even electricity depends on expensive-to-extract fuel (thus available at the whim of the wealthy) or land (for wind, solar, geothermal, etc).

What makes you think that the owners of the land will let you use it? The items that you make aren't worth anything to them since they can make their own items without you.

If that's true, then every legitimate aspect of a business is a profit center (including the custodial services, etc) and the term loses any useful meaning. Really, the term was coined by Peter Drucker, the father of a failed management style, (who later referred to it as, "One of the biggest mistakes I have made."). It is currently only used by cartoon-grade MBA types to differentiate sales departments from support departments for the purposes of inflated bonuses and compensation.

And those zeros are differences in the cost of (a lack of) security to Sony. Unless you're selling security, it does not generate revenue (and thus profit). Hence cost center vs profit center .

Are you serious? Most of the felony cases prosecuted are done so by states. Most of the felonies that you can name are state laws.

Absolutely. Verification out-of-band on first connect was implied, but I should have stated that more clearly. Ultimately I just use my own CA and DANE, which is simpler and easier to roll out.

If we're going to stick with the root CA system, we really should start fixing it. Allowing multiple CA signatures, pinning certificates, limiting the scope of CA signatures, etc... Any of those options improve the situation. Even culling the root CA list and setting up region specific CA packs would help tremendously. There's no reason my systems should implicitly trust all of the corporations and governments in that list. If I want to shop on Chinese sites, I can download the Chinese CA list, but there's no reason for everybody in the world to have every root CA. This is a weakest-link system by design. Continually adding more links isn't helping!

Reflexive paranoia is a trained response to constantly dealing with selfish shitheads. It's the only way to hold onto the nice things we still have.

If you verify the self-signed certificate the first time you use it, it can't be substituted for another self-signed certificate at any later point in time without triggering an alert. However, even if you personally verify a CA signed certificate, it can be continually be replaced with other CA signed certificates without ever alerting you (DANE and such not withstanding).

Because of the currently implemented browser behavior, which is to implicitly trust any certificate signed by any root CA, personally verified self-signed certificates are more resistant to MITM attacks.

This case is about personal privacy and national sovereignty somewhat, but it's primarily about the setting precedent for the privilege of multinational corporations.

I know this is going to be an unpopular viewpoint, but the industry is behind Microsoft here because it lessens their accountability to any governments anywhere. The Snow Crash future, where big corporations make their own rules and don't answer to anyone, depends on them not having any accountability to anyone else. Just like shuffling their money around the globe gets them out of having to pay taxes anywhere, shuffling their data around will prevent them from even being investigated for any crimes they may commit. Expect future incriminating emails and documents to be stored safely in subpoena-proof countries.

You don't AI to implement an automated system. As you said, it all works fine with the debit card system. The problems are not so much with ACH itself as they are with the implementation (manual processing and infrequent polling).

The advantage of sticking with ACH is that it's already widely implemented. Rolling out truly automated backend handling and increased polling rate can be done gradually, bank by bank, while not interrupting the operation of banks that haven't upgraded yet.

This whole thing reads like, "We need a new system of transportation! The automobile sucks because we've all agreed to only use it once a day."

Perhaps I'm missing something, but why isn't ACH ("Automated", by the way, even though I like "Atomated" better!) up for this task? Even if the upgraded ACH isn't instantaneous, it could at least be faster. Increase the polling rate and the transaction handling and the whole system is faster.

We already have a system in place to handle money transfers. It could use some tweaking, sure, but kludging a replacement based on debit cards isn't the right way to get to a better system.

The fact that we're not perfect is not a reason to avoid striving for perfection. Understanding the mechanism of human nature, with all of its irrational twists, is part of the path to bettering ourselves.

The fact that most people don't even accept that an emotional attachment to a position that lacks evidence is an issue indicates that we don't even understand our own motivations and thought processes very well. It's alright that we're not perfectly logical and our irrational behavior probably benefits us in significant ways, but it's important that we be able to recognize where the motivation for our (lack of) reasoning originates.

Traffic deaths aren't random, even if they aren't intentional. Nearly every traffic death can be traced to a specific and often avoidable cause. Addressing a minute fraction of those causes will have a dramatic effect on the number of people who die in the US every year.

On the other hand, if your opponent's most successful attack ever can't be distinguished from year to year variations in the death rate of Americans, spending any significant energy fighting him is a waste. We could have a 9/11 attack every single day for hundreds of years and still not deplete the American population. This is an ant-bite of a threat and deserves an ant-bite appropriate response.

Fatigue has set in. You've been here long enough to know that we have made a fuss throughout the years. Nothing at all has ever come of it, so we gave up complaining. Relatively simple it is, too. Many of the gripes about SlashCode of old have been fixed over at SoylentNews.

Anyway, asking for improvements now is dangerous... we might end up with Beta!

That's true, but that's a special case of the more general:

The only difference between almost any person involved in governing and a totalitarian is that the former says, "You are free to do whatever you want, as long as what you want is what I think you should want."

Despite the lofty goals claimed by almost any person of any party, whether running for office or just voting, the main reason that people get involved in government is to assert control over others. There are positive and negative outcomes of their actions, but every single one of these people think that things would be better if only they were king. The only tool that government has is coercion; political differences come down to how that tool is to be applied.

Most of the rest of those who actually want to reduce the power of government either still want the government involved where "what I think you should want" is concerned, or have other non-governmental means to effect coercion.

If you see any political party in the US as not fitting into that statement, it's just because "what [you] think [they] should want" and "what [they] think you should want" are aligned. Your liberal adversaries see themselves as just as rational and correct as you see yourself.

You can! Every passenger's running phone, and some computers that are awake, are sent through the baggage scanners at every airport. Even more impressive, the computers that run them are next to the poorly built and maintained scanners all day every day.