No, it doesn't. S/MIME, PGP-mail, etc. Of course that only works if the party you're e-mailing can also use client-side e-mail encryption.

Google is working on enabling OpenPGP-encrypted e-mail for Gmail with a Chrome extension: https://github.com/google/end-...

Meh. Everything is bigger than Hollywood.

Okay, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but honestly, on the scale of major first-world institutions that people know and recognize, Hollywood is pretty small potatoes. Apple alone rakes in more than double the entire worldwide film industry's take. 2013 worldwide film industry revenues: $88B, and Hollywood is only about 2/3 of that. 2014 Apple revenues: $183B. IBM also is also bigger than Hollywood. Google is about as big as Hollywood. Ford is bigger than Hollywood. GM is bigger than Hollywood. Exxon Mobil is more than six times as large as Hollywoood.

The film industry is almost noise in the US national economy. It's chump change.

Where Hollywood is a heavyweight, though, is in politics. It has massively disproportionate power in comparison to its segment of the economy. Why? Simple: political power is about influence, not money, and Hollywood has direct access to the voters' brains. Large quantities of money can also buy access to said brains, but there is no amount of money that could buy as much political advertising as Hollywood can pack into its entertainment output. And any individual actor of note can stand up and say something and get press coverage that would cost tens of millions if purchased, free.

Luckily, Hollywood isn't politically homogeneous, so to a large degree the politics of our entertainment media reflect the same varied sets of opinions found in the nation as a whole. Not perfectly, but largely. There are some areas in which the interests of Hollywood are highly homogeneous, however, such as around copyright law, and there they wield incredible clout.

Anyway, my core point here isn't about that, it's just that Hollywood's visibility and influence makes it seem much bigger than its actual economic status.

Oh, they're rather good at marketing and processing credit card payments too.

Naive is a version of untrustworthy. Ask your Nigerian Banker.

So what you're saying is that there is old hardware that will only work if you make your system insecure. OK.

FWIW, I don't consider any system that allows remote sessions to be secure. Period. So you need to isolate such systems. (This isn't an argument that you shouldn't run such systems. Just that you should take precautions.)

As an aside, I think that allowing compressed files to be expanded with the execute bit set is also a security hazard...just one that's probably worth the cost. In most circumstances. (And hazard isn't the same as hole. Not quite.)

You are making the assumption that they didn't intend this result. Or at least that they weren't aware that this would be the result. I find that quite dubious. As you say, it was obvious by inspection

OTOH, what would have been the result of disbanding the Iraqi army? You've created a bunch of people trained in violence suddenly out of work. I'm not convinced that it would have resulted in a better situation, though clearly it would be a different situation. And long term occupation would also have tremendous probabilities for disaster.

The real mistake was deciding to invade. After that I don't think there was a decent exit strategy...not if you are counting human cost. But this *must* have been obvious ahead of time, so clearly that wasn't their consideration. Who benefited? Who expected to benefit? How? It strikes me as a clearly political decision with only political gains.

True, there also needs to be a maximum length of any given law which includes in the length all other laws cited by reference.

I also think there needs to be a reasonable test for intelligibility. It's not right that everyone should understand every law, that's an impossibily high bar, but an average high school senior should. And at minimum should be able to. I can't think of a simple way of phrasing that test though that isn't of the form "Take a bunch of average high school seniors and have them write an essay about what the law means, and what it means is the intersection of what they claim it means", and that's also a poor idea, because it would eliminate everything...but I can't think of an objective "average understanding" evaluator.

The whole point of a free market sale is that you're both doing each other a favor. You'd rather have a trip home than the money in your pocket, and I'd rather have the money in your pocket than the time/expense it takes me to give you a lift. It is a service industry even if it isn't charity.

How can a buyer choose to pay more if the government regulates the maximum cost of a ride?

Tips are just part of the price if they're negotiated in advance. If they aren't negotiated in advance then they have no impact on the availability of the service. Nobody is going to go out in a storm hoping that somebody is going to be nice and give them a big tip.

Tipping after a service is rendered really doesn't make that much sense economically unless you're a regular customer (in which case you're really just tipping way before the next service is rendered, which is why it works). Having payment based on performance certainly makes sense economically, but only if both parties are bound by the agreement.

And the Nexus 4 would still be under contract if you bought it on a 2 year contract on the last day that it was sold. Let's see if it gets the next update.

That said, Google has been getting better. The Nexus 4 is the longest-supported Nexus phone to date. The previous ones didn't get any updates after about 1.5 years from their first sale.

Not being able to afford something doesn't mean that there is a shortage.

And I'm not suggesting people that can't afford a cab should die in a blizzard. Free markets and socialism are orthogonal. You can have either with or without the other.

If you're going to die in a blizzard, then call the police. They won't charge you to respond, and if we're talking a really big issue then the national guard should be bussing people out of dodge.

There is also no need to have poor people in a free market. You can give people a basic income so that they can afford food, and then let the prices reflect scarcity, so if there is a big chicken shortage the poor people can just switch to eating hamburger. You don't have to keep the price of chicken cheap and then watch as every store runs out of it anyway.

One browser that supports multiple profiles should accomplish that just fine.

You're not a web developer are you?

How persistent is the storage over time? I've had CDs become unreadable due to media degradation...though I don't know whether it was fading of the dyes or yellowing of the covering...or some other reason...but it wasn't scratches.

I'm not suggesting that they're motivated by anything other than making a buck (though the reality is somewhere in-between - workers are motivated by more than money).

The thing is, I bet that even with the price caps Uber drove a whole lot more people home than the local police department did. I bet that if prices were higher they'd have driven more people home (after all, the goal of the algorithm is to charge the highest price possible while utilizing drivers 100%).

So, if you want to feel good then donate money to the police. If you want to get home, then offer to pay a driver whatever they feel the ride is worth.

I won't argue that governments created the cable monopolies, but network effects tend to create many others. What government action prevented anybody from buying an alternative OS pre-installed on their home PC without paying a fee to Microsoft in the process?

If you want to believe that monopolies are harmless you can do so. It really doesn't matter - corruption like the one in this article will ensure we never get rid of the government-sponsored monopolies let alone get rid of the ones I'd want to see go away.