I agree the "gold bugs" are a little misguided. Gold if you use it as a wealth store at all is purely about playing a 'long game' that is it almost always recovers its original value at some point if you hold it long enough. You would have to exchange pretty close to the same number of oz in gold for the cash required to get a similar quality house built in 1813 as you would in 2013.

If you have amassed a great fortune you want to preserve across generations gold might be a workable way to do it. It might even work fairly well if you plan to buy before a panic and don't expect to sell until 10 or 15 years later when the recovery is complete.

The notion that having gold is going to anything for you during mass panic is silly. Because you right nobody is going to trade something useful like food or transportation for a mostly inert metal.

Well I want Charles Storss to die in fire!

Laws and tax levels should be things that are mostly agreeable to everyone. People mostly are decent unless they become to powerful. Most people want to pay their 'fair' share and follow the rules. Its when the rules become to onerous you get more misbehavior, which in turn begets more misbehavior as people get more used to flaunting the law.

On the other hand when you make governments ability to enforce so effective breaking the rules becomes impossible, you take away the incentive to keep the rules reasonable for all. It how you get abusive shit like the war one drugs.

IPSec *can* tunnel but does not require a tunnel, I don't disagree isolation would be better but most of the time that isolation ends at the next hop router anyway. It isn't as if a retail box store is going to have a layer2 network back to HQ.

If you have some port security in place like 802.1x so you can have some at least low level of assurance that the only things on the network are supposed to be there, there isn't nearly as much value in isolation in this type of situation.

Frankly tunneled IPSec is weaker than what I am proposing, it only would authenticate the tunnel endpoints to each other, transport mode would allow the server and the swipe machines to mutually authenticate every session. If you just put them on a vlan and route the address range into an IPSec tunnel or other VPN than anyone who can get access to the network on either side can talk to the swipe machines or the server end and start banging away at the application layer for vulns. If the ip stack on the other hand is configured to just drop any packet without a valid ah header that is going to be much much harder.

IPSec would not require a tunnel and should be perfectly safe as well. That has the advantage of not requiring any separate routing, vlans, etc.

  Honestly if you are building an IP based CC scanning device why you'd support anything other than IPSec I don't know.

Techdirt covers a lot of the shit that is going on from a strongly unbiased (and fact driven) perspective. I strongly suggest reading their articles in coverage of the NSA, Apple, and really anything technology. That is the true informed US view which some people share, not this kind of blatant propaganda. Some, not all. Lawrence Lessig's rootstrikers is a movement focused on fixing the whole american politics problem at it's source - lobbying money.

I do unfortunately agree that misinformed inflammatory coverage does always pull in far more views, but then again it's the same as the politicians below and for the same reason: The politicians do compromise, but only to their constituents - which have shifted from those who vote to those who write their effectively larger paycheck via lobbying. So unless there is significant outrage the politicians don't tend to do anything.

Follow the money. All of broadcast news comes from 1 or 2 sources, so the rest is just posturing for funding.

So let me get this straight, you're asking me to prove a negative but taking his own anecdotes at face value? Do you realize the idiocy in such a claim? Corn subsidies are why we have such ethanol production.

I do not need to waste my time digging up studies, a single google search will find evidence as it's been discussed throughout the fucking thread. Waste of my fucking time to even post this reply.

You also need to consider the question of scale. If you tried to have our current population live as the native Americans did we would have considerable environmental problems. Pollution from human waste, deforestation, constant high levels of fine particulate from open fires used for heat and cooking, we'd be hunting many species to extinction etc. What is Eco-friendly for a few hundred thousand and what works for a few million is quite different.

Iook and places like India and Hati if you don't think so. On the subject of China and also the modernizing parts of India it's also a question of scale. There may be a technical and moral equivelance and usually even a deficit compared to our consumption but there are so so many more people there that there isn't a practical equivalence.

To be truthful the anon comment was correct, and you are 100% wrong and your examples are anecdotal. The stuff is indeed harmful to cars. Any damage to the vehicle mitigates savings from E10 - and yet, we pay to produce E10 with gov't subsidies - so it's a double whammy to the taxpayer. No thanks!

E10 (and corn subsidies in general) are a load of shit that has resulted in diabetes, cancer, and all sorts of other wonderful things. Remind me how that high fructose corn syrup in every product that exists (as a result of subsidies) is working out for you?

I don't doubt you *can* harden and XP machine so it will be pretty resilient to most exploit attempts even without it being on a recent patch level. But in practice this isnt possible. As I pointed out things don't stay air-gaped. You can shutdown all those services and "unneeded" processes if all you want to do is read txt files with notepad but in the real world stuff depends on those services. You'd be amazed at how much software that does not *need* the network just won't run if the server or workstation services are stopped. Yes it half backed PLC vendor kludgeware but that stuff is why its being run on XP in the first place.

My comments on its light enough were directed at people developing control software. There is NO good reason to write it for windows. Its usually got its own interface anyway and it would be much easier to maintain on the other platforms.

There are lots options here any current *BSD or Linux Kernel with basic gnu tools and a purpose built interface would still be lighter than XP. No X and Gnome 3 or KDE 5 won't be but there are plenty of things that would. That's before you even look into the other choices like QNX and friends out there as well.

That's bullshit son and you know it. Nothing air-gapped ever stays air-gapped. Anyone who has worked in a manufacturing environment and delt with plant engineers knows "it won't be on the network, honest" really means "I'll have a vulnerable version of VNC on this thing next week for bonus points I'll set the net mask wrong so I'll have problems that seem strange to me; ask you to help out and forget all about the conversation we had about not putting it on the network."

Right because vendors never update their own software and have to issue fixes and stuff that should not be there never finds its way onto that USB stick they bring into the building. Sorry seen that too way to many times.

Right -- This unfortunitly is true and I really wish I could find a solution.

Excuses, excuse, number 4 is really the only quasi legitimate reason and when its $100,000+ machine it controls 4 is good enough. Don't waste our time with etc etc... What reasons you imagine its okay are crap.

Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;--And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

What Constitution are you reading? The congress pretty clearly has the power to declare or not a war.

In the US, corporatism does not follow specific political lines. It's not even specific to CBS. From a political groups perspective Tea Party, Libertarians, and Republicans are all in the exact same boat - with each denouncing eachother, yet having extremely similar right-leaning views.

So no, it's not about specifics - because it covers them all. Remember that our NSA is also a corporation itself, and thus plays both sides of the political field.