The key will be creating demand for security with consumers. Once they realize it is important they will look for it, and companies that fail to deliver will suffer as a result.

I like the idea, but I'm skeptical. I feel like security is too similar to, say, sturdiness of furniture -- like a hardwood wardrobe; it is not reasonable to expect the silent hand of the free market to understand why mortise and tenon joinery is worth the price compared to pocket screws, even on high end furniture. So my Dad's incredibly nice hardwood bedroom set that I just moved is already falling apart. Security, like quality construction of durable consumer goods, has an actual market price below the theoretical free market price if there were ideal consumers.

Even if it didn't, I think security has characteristics of an externality. Poor security leads to a fertile breeding ground for burglars, much as lack of immunization creates a breeding ground for disease. If that is true, good security should be socially rewarded and poor security should be socially punished -- even if each transaction were long-term rationally self-interested and well-informed.

Data provided by 'smart homes' will end up with the feds, in due time; but it'll be picked clean by every scumbag marketing weasel in the business first. Best of both worlds!

Don't forget the Internet savvy burglar class that is coming. These smart device companies aren't spending their angel funding on security. Casing houses is quickly going to become a service available on the darknet; for a fraction of a bitcoin, crackers with giant databases of IoT surveillance data will tell the burglar which houses in the target area are unoccupied during the hours they specify. Tapping the camera signals will let the burglars pre-plan which stuff to grab. For a premium price, they'll disable the alarms, unlock the doors, and open the garage.

And my freaking homeowners insurance will go up, while Harry Hairstyle the scumbag CEO's stock will continue to soar into the stratosphere, because he won't be found negligent, and the homeowner who trusted him won't be found stupid.

If the goal is to kill a drive, there's a much faster way. Pull it out of the case, but keep the wires connected. Shut down the machine. Turn the machine back on. When the drive is just starting to spin up, slam it flat on the desktop.

Before the platters are up to speed, there is very little Bernoulli force holding the heads up. The above operation will crash the head and leave a nice big scratch.

I like your IoT angle, so I'm going to hang my comment here (I'll tie it in to your comment at the end).

If the officer looked through the window and didn't see any other people, for example, we could intuitively factor that into the reasonable suspicion inquiry without having to think about burdens of proof.

I think it is easy to make the call with looking in the window because everyone knows how to pull their curtains. Pulling your curtains carries force of law telling government representatives, "I don't want you to look at me right now, unless you have a warrant." That is the essence of the right to be secure in ones home; that you have the authority to say that the government is not permitted to observe your home without a warrant, regardless of technological capability.

Does the same apply to Doppler radar, or IoT records? Do people have an easy and commonly known way to say, "I do not want the government to look at electromagnetic radiation or business records that indicate what is happening in my home"? If people do not have a commonly known way to indicate consent or lack thereof to be observed, which carries the same force of law as curtains, then a warrant is required to uphold the intent of the 4th.

And to address a following point that may get raised; electric meters are sometimes used as evidence of what is happening inside a house. I think that also violates the intent of the 4th.

But what we really need is not to understand the intent of the 4th. What we need is for the public to consider that the marginal cost of law enforcement may have exceeded the marginal cost of crime. That is to say; we may have too little crime relative to the cost (including the cost to liberty and dignity) of law enforcement.

she's taken an extremely antagonistic attitude which has ironically been fueling a lot of hate speech of late. Her cause definitely has merit, but her arguments are often weak and her methods questionable.

That's about where I come out too. My ideals have been well aligned with feminism for a couple decades and there are many feminist leaders I have a lot of respect for, but she comes off a bit too much like Al Sharpton. Fighting for an important and just cause, but the self promotion and manipulative rhetoric make it ring a little hollow. Fine for rallying the troops, perhaps, but not so good for communicating with the other side. The latter is the worthier part.

If this was true, why are the airlines constantly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy with razor-thin margins? They should be rolling in cash, and they're not.

It's a great question; from an economic standpoint, what does it mean when the price is distorted but the competitors are not highly profitable?

In a perfectly competitive and perfectly informed system, price approaches cost. If they can fly you through a hub for X dollars, they could fly you to that hub for something less than or equal to X. If that's not how the pricing comes out, the actual market is not closely approximating the theoretical free market. Therefore, the price is distorted, not natural.

So what is happening? Delve, don't say it is not happening because one of the red flags has not been raised.

Why? Because air travel is hugely competitive

The fact that there are multiple companies alone does not tell you whether there is sufficient competition. Only efficient pricing can indicate that, and we have already established that the pricing does not follow one of the most basic ideal free market laws.

and a great deal for the flying public.

On what are you basing this? The fact that lots of people consume a good alone does not indicate that it is efficiently priced. Lots of people consume lottery tickets, and they are wildly inefficiently priced as a direct result of a government monopoly (see Atlantic City for the effect of reduction of fiat monopolies in gambling). Back in the day in NYC and Boston, fire houses were for-profit operations. They would pull up in front of your house while it was burning down, and offer to put it out -- for a price. In context, it's a great deal that nearly every potential customer happily transacted, but it was not efficiently priced.

The price of airline travel not efficient. Given the laws of free market economics, that necessarily implies that we are not maximizing the productivity of this massive industry. It violates efficient pricing, but also does not seem to generate monopoly profits. What is the cause? Delve, or raise questions that further the exploration. Don't just try to shut down conversation because it doesn't match your preconceptions.

Being a fan of the free market means wanting to optimize our approximation of it, wanting to find every bug and tweak it, not dogmatic belief that we are already at the pinnacle.

I suspected as much from the synopsis. Came to the discussion hoping to get the straight dope before rising to the clickbait. You delivered. Thanks!

Simple question: Are you talking visas, or greeen cards?

If you're talking H1B visas, you're looking for indentured servants, and you are being disingenuous.

If you mean green cards, permanent residency, sponsored by the corporation that brings them in so we know they really are the elite, then I'm with you 100%.

It isn't so much that people are upset that police have the ability to listen in to phone calls or track us. Rather, they are upset that increasingly these powers are being used on everyone all the time, usually without needing a warrant or having any oversight. These powers have been, are and will continued to be abused by the authorities.

Came here to say this, and you said it better than I could. Thanks!

It is unfortunate that the millions of Fox News viewers on Dish were used as pawns by their provider. Hopefully they will vote with their hard earned money and seek another one of our other valued distributors immediately.

Stop being their pawns, do our bidding! Choke their cannon with your dead! And peel us some grapes!

If "production networks" cannot be rendered totally secure, they should not exist. Moreover, if they do exist they should be wholly insulated from the Internet

There's always a connection to the Internet. Sometimes it is sneakernet, sometimes it uses photonic information dellivery to bio-ocular scanning device, which uses cranial data storage and processing, and meatfingers to transmit the data through an array of buttons commonly called a "keyboard"; but there is always a connection. Hacking airgapped networks (which are still networks, just with some strange hops through biochemical computers) is just another stop on the path. If we can trick a computer into accepting a "dangerous" value, we can do the same for humans. If we can train humans to reject those values, we can train computers to do the same.

Humans are just another kind of programmable machine on the network we call Earth, with different kinds of exploitable flaws. Right now we trust the machines more than we should so their security is weaker than the humans in many cases, and so the machines are the targets. But that will change though hard experience.

Not trying to contradict you, just noodling on the nature of being a node on a network.

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial.

You know, my mechanical engineer friend had some really good suggestions about the appendix surgery I was planning to get. Perhaps I should let him make the call instead of the surgeon. Oh, wait, no, that would be stupid.

Notice how there aren't any artificial intelligence researchers on that list? They are no more qualified to discuss artificial intelligence than a mechanical engineer is to discuss surgery. Better than my dog, to be sure, but not good enough to take their word for it.

I am an artficial intelligence researcher. We are cyborgs, ever more tightly coupled to the increasingly intelligent machines -- like our smart phones -- that house ever more of our memory, our social circles, and our emotional artifacts. Whatever it is that makes us who we are, increasingly, is coupled to our machines. And we will continue to be cyborgs, with an increasing share of our consciousness handed off to the machines onto which we smear our selves.

It will not be us versus them. We are them.

*Abbott -- I swear I get that wrong every time I type it.

If the job still gets done it's a good thing that jobs gets replaced by AI.
The flaw isn't in who does the work, but how the economic system around it is set up.

This is dead on the money. The traditional example is moving shoe manufacturing to China. The model says that if we move shoe manufacturing to lower wage countries, then US GDP will increase. As a result, the average income in the US will increase, even if the shoe makers in the US cannot find new jobs.

"But what about those shoe makers?"

"Well," the mathematical model says, "even if we have to provide financial aid to put those former shoe makers into jobs for which they are currently underqualified, the net economic benefit of moving the manufacturing overseas is a win for the US (and for China)."

It's actually all quite true. The mathematical model is as well-tested as gravity. But there's the rub -- right now we're just straight up shifting the cashflow out of labor and into capital gains. From those who work for a living to those who have investment money to put at risk -- without a commensurate job retraining program or economic incentives for employers who migrate those labor resources into the new economy. Done that way, it's absolute shit for the laborers. But what's worse is that leaves them as a wasteful drag on the economy instead of developing them as a productive economic resource. In the long run, it is worse even for the wealthy who are doing a little better in the short run. It is, from a purely objective economic standpoint, fiscally stupid.

And not only are we allowing the shift to happen, we're encouraging it by having a lower capital gains tax rate than the labor tax rate (complicated math, it's higher than the 15% or 20% that the left claims, and lower than the 40% counting corp tax that the right claims, but the real tax incidence of capital gains on the investor is substantially lower than the real tax incidence of income tax on a laborer with the same income).

We are creating the exact sort of economic conditions that have sparked most of the major economic revolutions since the dawn of civilization. And we're seeing the same rise of nationalist rhetoric fueled oligarchy that was at the center of each of those previous examples -- with one major change: This time it's happening in multiple countries at once. Abbot, Harper, and Cameron are as deeply tied to Wall Street and the surveillance industrial complex as Obama and the rest of the party-line Republocrats are.

I hardly doubt that a future employer would hold him accountable for telling the truth under oath.

Was that intentional, Freudian slip, or mistake? I mean, I concur 100% -- there is no doubt in my mind that the most successful US companies strongly favor a willingness to lie under oauth -- but then I've worked on Madison Ave and my brother worked on Wall Street, so I've seen the sausage get made.