The Supremacy Clause does not trump Article 1, Section 8 where the powers of the federal government are specifically enumerated, or the Bill of Rights, which was passed to capture the votes of anti-federalists who feared that the new government would get too powerful if there were not explicit checks placed on its power. Seriously, just read even the Wikipedia article on the Tenth Amendment. This is not some novel, controversial issue to people who have a clue what they're talking about.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Yes, the Constitution was supposed to be stronger than the Articles of Confederation. That is not synonymous with unlimited and all-powerful.

I have a JD and a Texas bar card that say otherwise.

Common sense will never come into style, and "they" will never hire people to think and actually produce useful/actionable insights. You see, it's a bit of a catch-22. No one will make good decisions until someone sensible is in charge, but we'll never put sensible people in charge until we've started making good decisions. It's ignorant sociopaths all the way down.

Did you not read the summary, even?

Yes, ultimately physical security is always an issue. They can try to make the devices difficult to access, but as you've pointed out, that's always going to be a problem.

But this is a different level of "insecure". These things are controlled through open, unencrypted wireless networking. There are no passwords. It's like the difference between saying, "Your home is never completely secure, since someone can always break a window or crowbar the door open," vs. "Let's just leave our valuables sitting out on the lawn, completely unattended."

I don't know. I my experience, a lot of poor security isn't caused by incompetence. It's caused by someone saying, "But that will cost more money..." or "That will take too much time..." or "But I want to buy from this supplier because the owner is my brother-in-law..."

I mean, they don't necessarily say those things out loud, but those are often the reasons. It's not necessarily that they're too dumb to understand that it's bad security. They just don't care. They're not thinking about the potential for problems down the road. They're not thinking about long-term maintenance. They're not really thinking about public safety. They're just thinking about, "I have to get this job done in a way that makes my life better/easier. I want to work less and make a big bonus."

Not that I work in a traffic-related industry. That's just been my general professional experience as to why security is usually terrible.

No, it's scary how much we still don't care about security. These things could definitely be fixed, we just don't care to fix them. We don't demand security in the first place, we aren't willing to pay for security, and we aren't really willing to fix security when it's broken. People will run around looking for blood for 5 minutes when it's discovered that there are huge security flaws, but nobody will fix them.

Remember all the news when it was discovered that a person could easily and untraceably hack voting machines? Do you think that was ever fixed? The way we use credit cards is insecure. Most email is unencrypted. We use Social Security Numbers as both an identifier and a form of authentication.

Most of what we do is completely insecure, and it's actually kind of amazing how rarely people take advantage of it. But it's really disturbing that we aren't remotely willing to secure things that would be relatively easy to secure, and would solve lots of problems.

No, you're thinking of some government that you just made up. Go read the Constitution, especially the 10th Amendment. The states wanted to make it very clear that they were giving the federal government only specific, enumerated powers. Then FDR told the court where it could stick its Constitution (as the GP said) and told them that if they didn't back down, he would stack the court with yes-men who would give him his way. The court backed down, and the result was 75 years of the federal government encroaching into everyday life until you couldn't buy a shower head without Uncle Sam's permission, and people like you who don't even realize anymore that it was supposed to be a government of specific, enumerated powers.

This will obviously ultimately lead to Mothra, which will be aswesome, especially if these guys also figure out how to build Godzilla so they can have an epic battle to the death that wrecks a scale model of Tokyo.

It seems like it might work better to say, "San Francisco still sucks-- which might not be so bad, depending on which side of the glory hole you sit."

I didn't even call Libertarians out by now, and already the morons with mod points who compromise the Ron Paul Commemorative Movement are out to stomp on me.

Well fuck you, maters. I've got karma to burn.

A lot of people who complain about government are people who would like to terminate most, if not all, labor protections. They bury that desire in ideological ruminations, and have convinced vast legions of rubes that the only good government is a non existent government, and somehow the magic of market forces will protect workers.

> it's not that hard to find a loyal customer

Then please, do name one. Please don't say "it's easy to do". If it's that easy, feel free.

> But there's a fair number of people who said they really liked their Zunes just for playing MP3s (back when they used them), they just didn't like the crappy sharing feature or the MS music store or the way MS screwed up "PlaysForSure".

I'm afraid that you've just reinforced my point.

I am a big Scalzi fan and have loved every bit of his fiction that I have read - except for Redshirts. So I don't get it either, but a lot of people love it. A TV show will come of it and that escapes me as well. Apparently we are just not in touch with something a lot of other people see in it.

I don't actually browse the entire internet and have no interest in guaranteeing equivalent revenue to everyone selling penis enlargements. My share of the burden is only a dozen or so websites visited regular. But since many of those are content aggregators let's go ahead and say I visit 100 x that many websites, and consider these casual visits as equal to supporting the website for an entire year.

This makes $230 / 1,036,878,123 websites (internetlivestats.com) * 1200 = 2.7*e-4 dollars to cover my website burden. And I feel I probably deserve some credit for subscribing to Netflix and Amazon prime. Obviously bandwidth is a better measure of the 'cost' I need to cover for these websites to remain hosted, but averaging over all websites does (in a difficult to quantify way) account for the fact that many of the websites out there even now are not profit-motivated.

I hope the authors of this study were also sure to deduct the cost users already pay due to web advertisements in the form of malware infections, including the compromise of bank accounts, identity, etc.