


Forgot your password?

Comment: I would be suspicious of the hardware (Score 2) 245

by C R Johnson (#45299995) Attached to: Ars: Cross-Platform Malware Communicates With Sound

Just about every sound card ( and everything else ) in the last ten years had been made in a factory in China. What is to stop the PLA from slipping just this kind of malware into a sound card chip? Maybe they can even activate and update using sounds from a television.

Comment: Re: Sales tax (Score 1) 167

by C R Johnson (#45290191) Attached to: State Technology Taxes Face Stiff Resistance

There are some big advantages to replacing the income tax with a sales tax: Cost of compliance and Personal Privacy. Your personal cost to comply now would be zero. You are no longer have to send a report to the government every year. Because it is none of their business how much you make.
Yes if you are in a business which sells things, you have to pay the tax, but in most states you are doing that already. And your burden to report everyone's income is gone so you are saving time and money there.

Comment: They don't want us to know what they know about us (Score 2) 356

by C R Johnson (#42660575) Attached to: To Open Source Obama's Get-Out-the-Vote Code Or Not?

If the code is open, we might then have a notion of the scope, depth, and detail with which all of us are being tracked by the party. And that would probably be shocking to all of us who thought we had some level of privacy left. So I don't expect it to be open for just that reason.

Comment: Re:Cars save lives too (Score 0) 338

You are absolutely right.
Think about the time having a car saves you.
Instead of taking a bus and needing 2 hours to go to the store, it takes 30 minutes.
Instead of riding my bicycle 2.5 hours a day back and forth to my job it is 15 minutes each way.
And so on.
Add this up over a lifetime and it is years of life saved.
So I guess you are trading time now for time at the end of your life.
