I love this comment from the OpenCongress link:

“The government failed at running a railroad.

The Government failed at running a Post Office

The Government failed at running two mortgage companies

The Government failed at running a rescue and recovery effort.

The Government failed at running an acquisition organization.

The Government faield at running an educational system (even though it is not their responsibility)

The Government is failing at running an automobile company.

The Government is failing at promoting an economy.”

1. The Government succeeded at building a railroad, the rapid settlement of the West in the late 1800s was proof of that. Cars, airplanes, etc., made the railroad obsolete and it now finds itself struggling. Welcome to progress and capitalism.
2. The Post Office was a VERY successful endeavor for decades. The rise of technology (email in particular), UPS, FedEx, and DHL, has all but abolished the need for a government-sponsored delivery industry.
3. The Government didn’t fail at running mortgage companies, they were victims of a broader economic crisis brought about by the loose and fast lending of other, private banks. They contributed to the problem sure, but they weren’t the sole cause.
4. Rescue and Recovery effort? Acquisition Organization? When you don’t specify WTF you’re talking about.
5. It Should be their responsibility, many founders thought so (including Thomas Paine), and the only thing they’ve failed at is underfunding it. Why are teachers among the lowest paid people in the country? Why are schools built 50 years ago now so hard to replace or refurnish? People are seriously trying to blame governments (local, state, and federal, all of whom, were elected by those same people) for failing to properly fund education? Then in the same breath some of those morons will bitch about higher taxes?
6. Can we give them time to find the bathroom of the ALREADY FAILING INDUSTRY before we claim they are failing to run it?
7. The stock portfolio that i follow bottomed out around February or March, and in the last 5 months my retirement account set up in January has doubled in value. I think the economy is beginning its recovery.

So I had an interesting challenge come my way today. I received an attachment I was supposed to look at, with the extension .pgp. Since I don’t use PGP regularly (with the exception of this time, I have never had to use it for any ‘production’ purpose) I went through the motions of re-learning how to decrypt PGP attachments, what I needed to download, etc. Fetching what I needed and digging around some, I recalled having to have a key of some kind. Right. Look me up on most keyservers and you’ll now find two entries ($20 says I’m the only Peelman in there, offer expires at the end of the week). One from 2005, one from 2008. What makes this funny/sad/aggrivating is the story behind the 2005 key, and the basis for why I hate PGP/GPG with most of my being.

So I’m roughly a junior in college, and finally in Purdue’s Computer Technology program, after a protracted experience trying to switch majors while the department continually moved the goal posts. I had recently gotten a Powerbook in the summer and my new geeky CPT friends and I were sitting around drinking beers, geeking out and talking about encryption (I supposed, how else we would have gotten here I’m not sure). The result of this is: at that point or sometime shortly thereafter I created a PGP key with some ridiculous passphrase. A passphrase that was forgotten soon thereafter. I’m pretty sure it was stored in the Keychain on my Powerbook for safe keeping (keep reading…) Later, while trying to retype it I confused myself so much that the mixture of letters, numbers, and symbols got lost in my mind, never to be found again. Regardless, its gone. No revocation key was created ahead of time (now I know that as a failsafe, you’re supposed to generate one and store it on a CD or something so that the key can be revoked in cases just like this. Pretty sure that wasn’t in any disclaimer i read at the time).

So the key was long forgotten, unused anyway, and 7 months after creation the hard drive on my Powerbook died (teaching me another painful lesson–now I back things up like some kind of freak). I can’t quite say that it was long forgotten, because last week, a peer sent the email in question and dug my public key out of some key repository. I always knew it would come back to bite me in the ass.

Let me pause a moment, for the uninitiated, and explain what PGP is. PGP is a form of Public Key Encryption. Through some mathematical wizardry that I can only hope I never have to deal with, you can generate a “pair” of keys, a public and a private. You post your public key out on various key servers, which then talk to each other and exchange the public keys they know about. You store your private key somewhere safe, this part is important since without the private key staying private and secure, your public key is useless (hence my dilemma). Through the magic of encryption algorithms, it is possible to take your public key, and encrypt the data in such a way that it can only be decrypted by your private key. Its a lot more complicated than that, but the basic idea is to be able to encrypt the data in such a way that only the intended recipient can decode it with his/her private key.

And here, my fellow geeks (and everybody else who has managed to make it through the tech jargon thus far), is where my reasoning for hating PGP lies. Unless you explicitly set them to, PGP keys never expire. They are eternal and forever and will live out on the netropolis of key servers until PGP ceases to exist and the last key server is shut down (not a likely event given its following). There is no way to revoke them without knowing the original pass phrase and having the original key. So 10 years from I might get another “secure” email that’s useless gibberish and undecipherable.

There are those who claim that this is the beauty of the system. That it prevents just some random Joe from revoking your key accidently or on purpose. Sorry, but I’m not buying. So for now I have a new key, that I have backed up in like 9 different places, with a memorable (but secure) pass phrase.

Short version

X509 PKI and S/MIME Digital Certificates FTW. Not only do you get a managed system, you get mandatory expiration dates, a web of trust that actually makes sense, encryption, and the best part: Integration with almost every major browser / mail client there is, with _no_ plugins, hacks, or third party plugins. Simply import the certificate file into the OS’s certificate manager (or if its Thunderbird, into your profile). www.thawte.com for more information. If you need/want a notary to get your name in your certificate, I’m good for 30 of the 50 points you have to get from the web of trust.

And I’ll say it again:

The US has run the table on the world’s economy for 60 years and that train has run off the rails. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we had the lowest working industrial population in the world, and we made up for it with huge advances and sheer wastefulness in power generation (both steam, electricity, and oil) and mechanization.

We were able to become the worlds leading industrial and economic power because we were the only ones really left capable after WWII. Most of Europe would feel the fallout from WWII until the mid-eighties when they started to recover. Africa remains dark for the most part. Japan took the worst beating but has come back as an economic super power and now owns a significant portion of our national debt. The rest of Asia was busy dragging itself out of the rice patties and into its own Industrial Age, allowing THEM to take on all the benefits we Americans had, without any of the overhead of actually having to create any of the Industry. It was already done, the trial-and-error was mostly over. They just had to build factories and staff them and we had a cheap source for manufactured goods. Now THOSE countries are starting to evolve beyond their industrial ages whereas we hit the technology age and turned into Jeff Spicoli. We have progressively gotten more ignorant and apathetic about our place in the world’s economy. Our manufacturing base has moved overseas to escape the overhead of labor unions. Why pay healthcare benefits and have employees who pay income tax? Get mexicans or asians to do the work, and charge the same money, that way you can pocket the difference and buy a 3rd private jet or a 4th yacht. *See below

After the depression and WWII, we decided we had to bury the communists, so we spent BILLIONS on national defense, creating the largest debt of any country in the world. All the while we spent paltry amounts of money on stupid things like infrastructure, education, social security, healthcare, non-defense-related-science research, genomics, etc.

Until we re-sort ourselves life is going to suck here for a while. We’re going to be pinched economically, everybody’s at fault and no one is to blame. Well, not quite. One percent of the country owns 38% of the wealth. Ten percent owns 71% (inclusive). Those are Wikipedia’s numbers from 2001, so the numbers are most likely different, but i can’t see them being any better (from my point of view as a resident of the middle class). I blame them.

Addendum:

And oh yes, I’m envious of the rich. I covet things that I cannot afford, fancy cars, computers, houses, etc. But when I look at some of these guys, who own multiple houses, private aircraft (and can afford to pay a pilot a decent wage to fly them around at a whim, and pay rent on a hanger or tarmac space at an airport), multiple exotic cars and boats, $400 pants, $500 shirts, the ears of congressmen, senators, presidents, etc., it really pisses me off.

I’m all for a capitalist society, where good ideas and hard work are rewarded. But when i hear talk about the “fairness” of Unions, or the “fairness” of an economic stimulus package, I can’t help but be appalled at the things that we choose to care about, while we sit by and let rampant greed and corruption corrode this country from the top down. The odds are no longer in the favor of hard work and good ideas being enough for somebody to make something out of themselves. The fact that you can still cheat, lie, and steal your way to the top should say something to everyone about the state of the country.

Finally! 2008 is about over…what a hellacious year it has been. There have definitely been several high points, including getting engaged, getting a kitten, getting a Mac Pro, and getting a job!

Yes, you read correctly, I am now employed! On Monday I received an offer at ITaP (Purdue’s IT Conglomerate) for a full-time position within Teaching and Learning Technologies, who I worked with as an undergrad. I will be helping maintain ~2500 Lab Machines, TIC sites, and some of the infrastructure behind them, among other things. I start January 5th and am about as excited as I can be. I’ll have an office, healthcare, sane hours, the whole nine yards; why didn’t I think of doing this 11 months ago?!

Lets go over 2008′s employment history for me:

• January – December: Independent Technical Consultant — Small Consulting Jobs
• January – April: Lab Coordinator — Cyber Forensics Lab (Purdue)
• January – May: Web Application Dev — AgCommunications (Purdue)
• May – June: Web Application Dev — (ETC)
• June – December: Technical Consultant — (FindRefs)
• June – July: Technical Consultant — (InfoComm)
• June – August: Network Software Tech — (Purdue)
• August – December: Teaching Assistant — (Purdue)

Now lets look at 2009′s tentative schedule:

• January – December: Lab/Sys Administrator — ITaP/TLT
• January – December: Ind. Technical Consultant — As Needed

I, personally, can definitely see the upside to this…

So to tie in the post’s title, 2009 should be the revolution I was looking for in that last post. With a stable, long-term, and somewhat generous income, and a plan-able schedule, I’ll hopefully have time to turn my attention to things I’ve been forced to neglect: my fiancé, my Home Theater (I need a new couch, receiver and Mac Mini, the former is dying and the latter has been dead over a month now), my servers (possibly either doing away with VMWare and going back to an all-in-wonder box or getting a decent Dell PowerEdge and running ESXi (or some combination of the two)), and with any luck several other yet-to-be-defined projects.

And Lastly, a quick announcement:

• I’m now a Twitterfiend. You can catch my feed at http://www.twitter.com/peelman

Article

Sadly, when the Supreme Court makes such a decision it becomes gospel for lower courts and few will stand to challenge it, even if the bench looks notably different from when the decision was made. That’s the bad thing about legal precedents, and they just set a big one.

My take is that if one was to rape a child, they know that they are raping a child, particularly a child under 12. If one is to undertake such an act, there is a small chance they don’t know the consequences, but regardless, it is effing WRONG on so many levels as to make distinctions not matter. The death penalty is a serious punishment, and should only be reserved for serious crimes, and I think that in this country we both overuse it and don’t use it enough. Rape can be proven via many means, and since this girl reportedly needed to have surgery afterwards to repair damage, not to mention the ridiculous amount of mental instability she might experience later in life, I can see it being justified here, given sufficient evidence, which the local and supreme courts of Louisiana apparently found.

This is the type of “legislating from the bench” that the courts should not be doing. What they just did may not have created a law for such cases, but it did create a precedent, which sadly in our time, is almost the same thing. They just overturned the laws governing this practice in 5 states. So because he just scarred her for life, and didn’t kill her, he gets to live. That’s fair?

Bravo to both presidential candidates for coming out against the ruling. It doesn’t make much difference at this point, but perhaps something can be done about it once Barack is in office

footnote: I’m not saying all legal precedents are bad, there area few that I am particularly fond of (Roe v Wade, Epperson v Arkansas, Miranda v Arizona, just to name a few), but as in all imperfect systems, mistakes are made (Dred Scott, and the case in question here, for instance).