What happens when the militia itself needs disposing of?
Nuff said.

Glad to see there's someone out there that cares about privacy and is looking to do something about it!

Unless this was irony, no: Bill Gates doesn't care about privacy. He cares about profits.

All I see here is one company - Google - bringing misery to people with their surveillance equipment in disguise, and an individual trying to profit from the coming backlash. All in all, both are out to profit from you, but none have your interests at heart.

Just throwing out this contrary case:

How well do the maps work when you don't have cell coverage in most cars? Just fine.

How well do the maps work when you don't have cell coverage with Apple? Not really at all.

Okay here we go

I have the following:
$600,000 loft (and appropriate decor/rooftop pool)
BMW 328i
84 IMDb credits, and my crew has won three Oscars
2 dogs
2 iPhones
1 Macbook Air
2 MacPros
(I also have a MacBook running ubuntu)

I am uncertain of the future of tech without Apple products.
I just don't 'get' the obnoxious contrarianism of Android products. Or their enormous screens, or their uniformly poor OS upgrade and hardware support, or Google's completely obscure roadmap for Android.

The thing Apple is selling you, beside the hardware, is the complete integrated product. They take your money, they give you something that works, that's their sole "monetization" strategy. Unlike everyone else in the business, trying to suck you into their various creepy ad/clickstream/search front-running scams.

I won't even go into the Google tracking everything you do to, you know, "help" you.

This isn't the 1990s, competitive Apple products are always competitively priced. It's the feature packages on Apple kit that people get upset about.

there are probably many unnoticed security holes in just about every OS and commonly used library

Yeah that's the distinction. The point is that we noticed, and this *single* security hole has an enormous reach.

That it reacts fast is good. That the bug could be audited in the source, in public, is good.

We should remember that FLOSS reacted very quickly to the "revelation," but the bug itself has been sitting there for years, which isn't really supposed to happen.

It's nice we know how long it's been there, and can have all kinds of philosophical discussions about why the OpenSSL folks decided to write their own malloc.

Also OpenSSL was effectively a monoculture and just about every SSL-encrypted internet communication over the last two years has been compromised. OpenSSL has no competition at its core competency, so the team really has no motivation to deliver an iteratively better product, apart from their need to scratch an itch. FLOSS software projects tend not to operate in a competitive environment, where multiple OSS products are useful for the same thing and vie for placement. This is probably bad.

his point was that people need to see what they're giving to the government

People "see" it already, on their paystubs and on their 1040s.

What he wants is for tax collection -- not taxes themselves, just the way they're collected -- to be intentionally disruptive, so that people will attempt to lower rates and revenues not because they are high, per se, but just because the way they're collected causes economic harm.

No, you'd just have a bunch of big banks getting into tax financing, offering modest loans at reasonable interest rates(see fine print) to help people who didn't save for their bill.

The withholding system works because it causes the least economic distortion -- the more a tax "hurts," the more adverse an effect it has on day-to-day economic decisions, the more it's liable to cause people to make bad economic decisions, like saving huge lump sums in the bank instead of investing or consumption. A tax "hurting" might be good politics (for some people), but if it causes people to have irregular cash flow or makes it significantly harder for them to make planning decisions it will hurt economic growth.

If you want to talk overall economic health, taxation does not really impact it since all those tax dollars just go strait back into the economy anyway.

Ehhhhhhhh.. it's not that simple. The government can allocate wealth well or badly, it can waste a significant amount of money by overpaying, by giving a supplier more than the least they would be willing to accept -- classic economic rent. Suppliers win premium prices through lobbying.

It cuts both easy though, lobbying can cause the government to waste money, or cause the government to force everyone else to waste money, just as Intuit has basically carved out an entire industry for itself as the IRS's middleman, while if the IRS were to simply pre-fill people's returns itself most people would save a little bundle every year on tax prep.

Can't tell you how many times I've received the "well if they got this far, it's game over anyway" response, and it's been bullshit every single time. SSL isn't a magic cure-all; it's one of many, many different layers, each of which raise the bar of complexity and difficulty of successful, undetected penetration. Is SSL a super powerful security layer? No, but why take away something that's trivial for you to set up and maintain and which creates additional work for an attacker?

This idea that we should simply give up at some point is absurd. It's the reason you find incidents like the Target breach happen so much (though typically not with that level of impact). It's because beyond a certain point, everyone just throws their hands up and assumes that if somebody got that far, they won. Meanwhile, 20 other countermeasures which would cost nearly nothing to implement are left by the wayside and any one of them just might have been the straw that broke the attackers' back. This mentality needs to stop if we're ever to make progress preventing attacks and limiting the damage done.

Of course SSL isn't anywhere close to bulletproof. Just like a firewall isn't bulletproof. Anti-malware/anti-rootkit applications aren't bulletproof. NIDS/IPS and HIDS aren't bulletproof. All those things together, however, raises the bar for an attacker to successfully locate and exploit a vulnerability and remain undetected. The less of those kinds of things you have in place (and appropriately configured/monitored/alarming/etc), the lower that bar.

My response said nothing of SSL being a magic cure-all. It was a response to the idea that security behind the firewall is unnecessary because firewall.

The 1980s called and would like their "my firewall stops ALLLL the hackerz!" approach to security back.

On the server providing updates to all your Windows systems? Thank goodness you have no authority over my network. All the guys on my team get regular reminders about the importance of defense in depth.

Flying cars are technically possible.

Flying cars however are not desirable for everyday drivers: they have a hard enough time managing 2 dimensions, we don't need them to occupy a third. So unless they're fully automatic in flight mode (with manual control disabled), flying cars can only be flown by trained pilot.

The market for pilots who want a plane that turns into a car is very small. That's why flying cars won't happen - not enough money in it.