Politicians say things that they think will cause us to vote for them. When they say stupid shit, the fault isn't so much in the limited realm of "politics" but rather the much wider realm of all of us. Do most people argue in terms of evidence? You're not going to make politics become evidence-based, until you can answer that last question with a confident Yes.

It's about time someone stood up..

..so that we don't have to. The last thing I want in November when electing congresspeople, senators, and presidents, is to be stuck with that responsibility. It's about time someone relieved us all from having to think about the kind of relationship we want there to be, between our government and its people.

I pay extra income tax to send my country's military forces halfway around the world, to provide security for privately-owned oil tankers full of privately-owned oil to pass through the Persian Gulf. I pay extra income tax in order to provide non-humanitarian "foreign aid" to several other governments in the oil-rich area, just to keep them (somewhat) friendly.

Even if I opt out of using subsidized oil, I don't get to opt out of paying for the subsidy. Why would I pay even more to subsidize Yet Another competing energy source? (Well, ok, let's not get fanatical about that .. I understand that we've all come to an agreement to subsidize coal by allowing the plants that burn it to dump their CO2 into the public atmosphere as an externality (there's the subsidy) instead of making them plant forests to soak it up, but coal isn't really a direct competitor to oil; it's used differently so by subsidizing both, I'm not really paying to back two sides against each other, which would be silly.)

Can we just get the Central Committee's existing government-planned subsidy payments transferred? Why does the politburo always go with oil and coal in their five year plans? I'd be willing to do a subsidy re-assignment, at least short-term. (Long-term.. well, actually I'm unsure about the wisdom of even having a Central Committee and all this economic planning, but that's another topic.)

but perhaps 62 grand for a degree in music should give us pause to reconsider a) why does a degree in music cost 62 grand

This is the real issue. For all the discussion about how educuation is paid for, the loans and the subsidies or lack thereof, the elephant in the room is that it's expensive at all.

Something inefficient is going on, that the cost of education seems to be increasing faster than other inflation. I tend to take a techie/optimist approach and assume it ought to be going down if anything, but even if we assume that tech is just totally useless (i.e. the "information age" is irrelevant to education) then I still don't see why paying people to stand in front of classes and lecture would have its costs go up faster than other things.

This is ignoring the whole textbook publishing aspect and the role tech plays in those costs. I don't think we even want to open that can of worms in this discussion. I'm saying even without that blatant ripoff, my ripoff detector is still going off. Something stinks.

iTunes is not supported on Linux, and works horribly in Wine. Amazon MP3 have downloaders for some old 32-bit versions of Linux, which is quite useless, but their Windows downloader works fine under Wine

Amazon's store can also be configured to snail mail you shiny discs, which work with every OS.

And even if you know a person by that name, then there's the next problem: authenticating. Hey Facebook, why no PGP signing of profile ids yet?

That depends on the part of the story that's being left out: How did the quarterback figure out who the infiltrator was? Figuring out Suzy is fake: easy. Figuring out that Suzy is the principal: social engineered (CNN story) or other (maybe Slashdot story).

You do realize that it is conceivable that the last two combatants could kill each other or the survivor might not live long enough to issue a verdict? And odd or even, if you have to fight until there is only one left standing, you have the same potential problem.

Not if you implement your combat system to fit the requirements. Serialize all attacks (they never happen simultaneously), and make delivering a deathblow and delivering a verdict be a single atomic operation. That way, if someone dies while delivering the verdict, the deathblow is rolled back and their previous opponent becomes alive again.

Lack of saying how to pay for it, might be a criticial key to the motivation.

First of all, remember "they" never pay for anything; it would be "we," If, say, our taxes were to go up n% in order to fund such an effort, some people might complain or watch where that n% goes, making it harder for whoever the beneficiary of this law is, to remain undetected.

On the other hand, if a new law doesn't say how to pay, but rather, simply demands that services be "certified insecure" (yeah, it needs a better name) where the insecurity certification authority is presumably whoever is buying this new law, and they are paid not by one government program, but by skimming a little bit from every business in the country individually, there's less to talk about.

When the government spends $40 billion on something, someone might ask an embarrassing question about it. When you spend an extra $400 per year amortized across all goods and services in order to pay for those things' advertising on your phone, which in turn funds your phone's developers, who have to pay $40000 for an insecurity audit, to prove that your phone will always reject attempts to communicate high-entropy data (i.e. can't be used as a dumb pipe by some secure application), then there's no good question to ask.

Things just cost more than they used to, and don't work as reliably as they used to, and that's how things are. That's just something for weirdos to bitch about, not for the press to ask about.

People are willing to pay anything, as long as it's not called a tax. Why do you think Republicans still get votes?

One of the interesting and anachronistic things about the original CALEA is that it applied to telecom providers. With IP, though, we tend to think of "providers" as just ISPs, totally orthogonal to the software you use.

The FBI is not ever going to be able to force VoIP or websites to be insecure, unless they switch their legislative focus from providers to the client software implementations. At this point, it does no good to make the networks themselves more insecure, because anyone with even half a brain is going to design protocols based on the assumption that the entire network is already hopelessly compromised. You don't even need to be a paranoid loon ranting about what the CIA is doing to your tooth-fillings at this point; you can use Googbook or Iran or malware-spreading h4xx0rs as your bogeyman. There are so many different possible threats on networks now, that it's not considered paranoid to suspect that at least one of them might be credibly real. The news is full every day of instances where it was real, so the only question is whether or not something is snooping you, and at this moment.

Legislating what software you're allowed to run, is the only way to go from here, which makes any sense at all. If they don't do that, then a new CALEA isn't even a new and more-threatening "Big Brother" law, nor is there really any civil rights vs law enforcement debate; it's going to merely be another cash grab for some lobbyists somewhere -- run of the mill corruption.

Yet, I see the words VoIP "provider" here, not "software" or "client" or "implementation" or whatever. If you run a well-designed VoIP client, or if you're pasting PGP-encrypted text into web forms and copying PGP-encrypted text from web pages, then a new law can't hope to accomplish anything.

So is this an attempt to regulate endpoint software, disguised (i.e. is there an actual legitimate civil rights vs crime prevention/deterrence debate here)? Or have they given up the pretense already? And if so, then who benefits from the economic waste associated with building more systems to intercept ciphertext? Telecom companies? Government contractors? I know I'm missing something.