Seriously I do feel awful badly for those folks. I hate when bad things happen to anyone, even if they hate me with a passion.

I agree. However, I am reminded of the story of the farmer who's trying to show someone how to train a mule. He starts by walking up to the mule and whacking it on the head with a club, knocking the mule out. When the pupil asked him, "Why did you do that?" the farmer said, "Well, first you have to get his attention."

One has to wonder if a theoretical compassionate God is trying to get Texas and Oklahoma's attention. But then, considering the annual number of tornadoes and other natural disasters that hit Texas and Oklahoma, you'd have think He'd just give up by now and smite the whole region and leave it to the armadillos.

How did you get "the tax goes from 3% to 4%" from "the state raises taxes on car dealers by 30%?"

About your other point, sure some of the dealers may only raise prices by 29% and absorb that other 1%, but you're still missing the point

Are you really that stupid? Do you understand the difference between raising taxes on dealers "by 30%" and raising the taxes on dealers "to 30%"?

Raising taxes from 3% to 4% is a 33% increase in taxes. Raising taxes from 6% to 8% would be a 33% increase in taxes. Raising taxes from 15% to 20% would be a 33% increase in taxes. But even the biggest of those increases, assuming there's no competition and no dealer decides to take a little less profit in order to increase market share, the largest pass-through to consumers would only have to be 5%.

If you don't think only consumers pay taxes...

I never said that. Consumers often pay taxes. In the case of Amazon, the consumers would be paying the sales tax, because up to now Amazon has been able to avoid taxes on the notion that the internet is some magical places where taxes should not exist because...computers or something.

Maybe you can understand it if I explain it another way. If you have ten apples and I take ten percent of them today, and tomorrow I raise the percentage of apples I take from you by 100%, it does not mean I'm taking 100% of your apples.

Here's a nice tutorial on calculating percentage change with a calculator if you're still having trouble. If you need help turning on the calculator, you'll have to ask someone else.

http://www.wikihow.com/Calcula...

Seen any suspicious rainbows lately? This might fill you in on what the governmen is doing I hear it targets Christians:

Actually, there was a big stunning double rainbow over Dublin last week as the people of Ireland rejected the teachings of the Church and approved same sex marriage.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/u...

Texas, on the other hand, outlawed gay marriage and got deadly floods and tornadoes.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/26/...

Coincidence?

What is so hard to believe that we created the "god" myth? It's been done many times over the ages, so we have more proof of that than the other way around.

Yes, but all those other people who created gods were just making them up, whereas the god we made up is the Real Thing!

Maybe the anti-creationist, anti-Christian witch hunters set this bogus thing up, just to have an excuse to go after the Christians.

That's...plausible.

But maybe the Creationists set it up just to make it look like the anti-Christian witch hunters set it up so that then they could say, "Look how we're being made to look stupid and a little evil by the anti-Christian witch hunters who are all hiding in plain sight just steps away from the Christian churches that are on every other block throughout the United States.

this is an old tactic.

a long time ago, i picked up a random book in the library about the Aktion T4 program and read it while i should have been writing my thesis. it was interesting enough, until the last two chapters which ranted about how, obviously, pro-choicers were pushing America down the same path. it was annoying, but a nice reminder; i had to fact-check everything i read. i did, and the facts about T4 checked out, which suggests that they just took some legitimate research and bolted their drivel to it.

I've worked in a casino. I still picked my nose.

Obviously I wasn't handling chips or money

If I had the slightest confidence that this would actually involve a 'top to bottom' cleaning; I might be more optimistic(though with the caveat that 'top to bottom' purges have the unfortunate side effect of causing massive attrition among your skilled labor, even the stuff not in position to do anything more corrupt than take an extra long lunch break; which could be pretty brutal for an entity that is supposed to do rocket science). As it is, this sounds a lot more like some deck-chair shuffling.

If that is the case, our very own 'Department of Homeland Security' represents a reshuffling at least as large, absorbing as it did various departments under the vague theory that they hadn't been anti-terrorist enough. It...hasn't really been much to write home about.

Instead I consider this repayment for my good fortune and a way

Now that's a sentiment I can relate to.

Sorry for the novella but this doesn't fit into a single paragraph very well.

Not at all. It was a perfect post.

I think that you could bodge together a proof of concept with basically any router and either a smartcard reader that supports CAC-style behavior, or any of the fobs that can do keypair auth(I know yubikeys can, I haven't done much poking around); but the one snag is that, to my knowledge, there's nothing (at least nothing remotely standard) that does both robust crypto token and just enough writeable storage for the little bit of configuration data that would allow a user without much technical aptitude to autoconfigure a VPN, or trust of a given certificate, or any other use case that requires both the transmission of a small amount of data and robust authentication.

For myself, I'm interested just because hardware crypto tokens are so strong compared to passwords of any remotely tractable-to-humans complexity, and less vulnerable to untrustworthy clients than doing keypair auth with a private key that lives on a relatively vulnerable computer, rather than never leaving dedicated hardware; but for it to be something useful outside geeks and IT-managed environments, the extra bit of configuration data capability seems like it would be necessary.

Maybe if I were feeling entrepreneurial...

I'll have to check again. It wasn't when I pulled it; but that may have changed, and it is still in my reserve drawer.

So, let me get this straight: your public-sector space program is a fucked-up labyrinth of corruption, fraud, and mismanagement.

You propose to replace it with a sole-source, crony capitalist, 'state corporation', to take advantage of the important synergies between the public sector's capabilities in corruption and mediocrity and the private sector's sophistication in financial and organizational malfeasance?

Christ, guys, if you keep this up I'll start feeling good about US mil/aero procurement practices by comparison...

You can argue about the relative virtues of public sector and private sector agents for various purposes; but there is no lower form of life than the crony capitalist entity when it comes to corruption.

So you're saying that our educational system should focus on not leaving any children behind?

I'm not saying that any more than you're saying our educational system should focus on leaving a large percentage of children behind.

Because I think I can see a tiny flaw in that plan.

Two-factor auth is so far ahead of the current situation that the risk of 'what if they try to configure the router from a compromised PC?' probably isn't on the radar.

What I would love to see, though, would be a router that uses some USB or NFC security fob for idiot-proof and robust VPN setups: just imagine: plug the fob into the router, or set it on the NFC pad, press the 'bless' button; and the router would perform the appropriate cryptographic handshaking with the fob, and provide the configuration information for setting up the VPN(url, VPN type, etc.).

Then you bring the fob over to a computer or mobile device, hit 'make it so', and the VPN client reads out the config data, makes the appropriate configuration changes, and the fob authenticates the connection. Quick, trivially easy, much more secure than a password or even a certificate file on a USB drive; and you are neatly tunneled back to your home network regardless of the hostile and untrusted networks you may encounter during the day.

Should you lose the fob; hit the 'unbless all' button and all fobs need to be re-blessed before they can be used(obviously, web or other interfaces to the router could allow more granular and advanced control; but having to re-bless a few fobs is likely to be easier than having to understand a more complex interface for many unsophisticated users, who probably only have a small number of active fobs anyway).

The fact that there are telnet services listening on WAN ports 15 years after OpenSSH became available makes me suspect that nothing short of a vigorous scourging with nuclear fire could solve the utterly lax approach to even rudimentary security in consumer electronics.

Well, that and DRM. Tell 'em that the pirates will steal their precious 'premium content' and suddenly they get real interested in security, albeit more in the 'building prisons' than 'building fortresses' sense of the word.