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Comment Re:Great quote... (Score 1) 925

Yes, but the reason that health care costs are so high in America is that we have the best quality of health care in the world.

America may have some of the best care in the world for those that can afford it. But the median level of care is most certainly not the best in the world, and the overall level of care we receive per dollar spent is event worse.

Rather than continuing this thread's trend of anecdotes and ideology, here's a study which describes how and why the US's health care system is different than other countries.

Comment Re:Libertarians have too much baggage. (Score 1) 785

I think that at least part of the reason many Libertarians are "pro property rights" is really that they're for reduced government control. In the case of real-world [physical] property, governments can usurp individual property rights by eminent domain, which Libertarians are often opposed to. Thus in those examples, "pro property rights" is really synonymous with "reduced government power".

Point being, I'd think that among Libertarians there would actually be strong opposition to strict pro-IP laws, as they increase the power of the government at the cost of a reduction of individual freedom. That reduction is [in theory] a trade-off for increased production of creative works. But with other issues Libertarians tend to require a much larger benefit to society in order to outweigh the cost of individual freedoms (think about the extremes to which this is sometimes taken, like those that are against the National Park Service). So I'd expect the same would apply here.

Comment Re:There's another hassle too (Score 1) 733

I don't think you get the error - Firefox isn't warning you because the signing cert (/CA) is unrecognized, it's warning you because it sees two certificates supposedly signed with the same cert (/CA) but which share the same serial number.

Since any two Linksys devices are unrelated, there's no way for one to know which serial numbers are valid for it to use that the other hasn't already taken. Multiply this by the number of Linksys devices out there.

I write firmware for an embedded device, and we have this same problem. Our solution was simply to generate a random signing certificate for each device the very first time it boots, and use that to sign a new certificate any time the IP changes. It's a bit more of a hassle for the user (who now has to add the root cert for each device to his browser's trusted list), but it avoids the nasty error messages. It's also more resistant to a wide-area attack - in theory someone could crack just one Linksys router to get the private part of its root cert, then use that to forge any other router's certificate. It might even be extractable directly from the firmware image.

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