How about the billions in chasing phantom terrorists, waging two wars, creating the DHS, funding a massive wiretapping dragnet, new TSA security crackdowns, general security crackdowns, and plenty of pricey court cases arguing against the 4th Amendment.
Your pathetic attempt at distraction ignores the devastating cost of our overreaction.
In terms of excessive punishments, California sentenced a man to life in prison for stealing a handful of DVDs from a store. See Lockyer v. Andrade, life in prison for stealing $150 worth of DVDs was held by the Supreme Court to not be excessive.
she effectively acknowledged that the statutory damages were not in violation of her rights because she agreed to the instructions.
And what I said was that the Eighth Amendment may constitute a right you cannot waive. While that right cannot be stripped, it may also be a right you cannot waive, as in you cannot agree to a public dissection (drawing) if the DA wants to pursue that option. You cannot waive your right to be shielded from cruel and unusual punishment.
However, the same court said in Lockyer v. Andrade that life in prison for shoplifting $150 worth of video tapes was not excessive, so I doubt they'll have a problem with the constitutionality of the judgment.
Courts have found in the past you cannot waive certain due process rights, and I'm pretty sure they may say you can't waive your rights prohibiting a cruel and unusual punishment.
Google fails me at the moment, but I remember a case a few years back about a death row inmate arguing he should be allowed to hang, but the courts said he couldn't agree to it because it's cruel and unusual.
The FCC is trying to protect telecom's entrance into the content delivery business. Also, content creators like Viacom are pushing for breaking up cable, as this will provide them with more leverage on channel contracts.
Over the past couple of years, the FCC has pushed Time Warner to divest itself of it's channels, and threatened to cap Comcast from new markets. If the cable companies are capped in size, but still geographically monopolistic, the cable have less leverage to push against the broadcast flag, for the legality of DVR, remote DVR, and start over services. That's what the "concern" is over cable companies controlling what channels people watch. The big content companies are afraid of the concentrated buying power and the ability to say "No" to their shenanigans. If the big cable companies drop a major network, it will hurt the network. But if a smaller company drops it, the small cable company takes the hit.
I work at a local cable co. Right now, we record every channel, and can pipe any show straight to your box on demand from the past week. It's a remote DVR we keep at the head end, and our employees can test it out. But we can't roll it out to our subscribers, because no network will give us the rights to do so. Comcast tried to do this without negotiating rights, but they got slapped with a lawsuit. We've been totally unable to negotiate the rights to it. We're even losing the fight over the broadcast flag. We used to universally ignore the flag, but some networks are pushing us to use it. FiOS has no problem flagging content, and AT&T has said they will push for it. We get that thrown in our face, constantly, during negotiations. We don't have the buying power to face off against a monopoly. ESPN, MTV, these are monopolies.
Telecoms want smaller competitors (they are far larger than Time Warner or Comcast). Content companies want easier negotiations. What we need is local competition and more consumer friendly broadcast laws. The FCC just wants to push smaller cable companies.
First, there's no law about constructive dismissal in the US. And proving it in a US court, which are notoriously unfriendly to labor in many states, would be impossible if you could show necessary business reasons for the change.
Second, they're getting flak over the "security measures," not "scaling back NASA." I'd say if the directive had my intent in mind, it worked. It's harder to argue against "security" than it is "budget cuts."
As an expert at abusive management during the failing days at Krispy Kreme, this sounds like they want the employees to quit. I've seen this happen too many times.
Say, if I was really callous and sociopathic, and I wanted to scale back operations and cut costs, I wouldn't fire or lay off anyone. I would require the employees to do things they wouldn't tolerate, but seem "necessary and proper" for their jobs. I'd switch reporting to 4:00am so that reports would be ready for management, give 3 hour lunches to people who live too far away to commute home for lunch, or other highly inconvenient tasks or requirements.
When they quit, you didn't have to report to investors you were scaling back operations, just that you couldn't fill the positions. Then you could cut the positions and claim better productivity.
If I wanted to scale NASA's budget back, and not catch tons of flak, I would do this. When the researchers refused to comply, I could just say "They're a security risk, we're all about security after 9/11, so you can't work on 90% of projects." When they quit, or I fired them for not complying, I could just say "We have a shortage of qualified engineers, we can't fill these positions."
And when nobody cared anymore, I'd scale back operations and cut the positions, shrinking the budget. It's a great way to handle a budget crisis and cut without making it look like one.
Intel only provided RNG on the 810 series of chipsets, and that was the Pentium 3 generation. The VIA C3 is of the same generation of chipsets, nothing faster than a 1.4 ghz processor. AMD does provide a path, but it's an optional part of the chipset, and not universally supported.
The Commodore had one too, on the sound chip.
The old P3 i810 and VIA C3 chipsets had RNGs built in. They relied on thermal noise. Some AMD chipsets still have it. But for the most part, no modern motherboard comes integrated with a hardware RNG.
I'll agree that "Solid state is the only reasonable media for a handheld device."
I've washed some DS games a few times in the laundry. When in the hospital, I vomited on a cartridge once too. No damage, the labels looked fine, and they play no problem.
I know washing a minidisc will kill it, but I don't know about a UMD. I can't imagine a UMD being nearly as rugged.
In a former life, I worked as an NDT technician. One of our biggest jobs was industrial radiography. Which, long story short, involves radioisotope cameras and lots of safety training. With an radiation safety expert, radiation alarms, survey meters, and proper equipment they'll be plenty safe.
The biggest problem for them would be to properly dose the cockroaches. What kinds and levels of radiation will they be receiving? Any clown can x-ray a roach until it dies, but what would the fallout profile of a world-ending nuclear war look like? What's the long-term effect of radioisotopes in their bodies? How much ionizing radiation will they receive?
There's alpha, beta, gamma, neutron... What kind of radiation are they going to use? Safety, while incredibly important for an experiment like this, is relatively easy to accomplish if they get an expert. Attacking the correct problem may prove far more troublesome.
There may be restrictions on what kind of device you call sell, regarding patents and licensing, but we don't check your equipment beyond "it works to your satisfaction." I don't write the software or build the hardware. But I do know we don't check to see if your device is approved. There are far too many CC-ready TV models for us to verify.
When we purchase equipment or bill our contractors for losing a piece, that's the price. That's what we pay, in bulk. They do come with very decent warranties.
Because, most of our boxes are cheaper, and we average around $600 per CPE placed. Few people have HD boxes. The boxes also last a few years, and come with good service agreements with SA and Motorola.
Now we get at the meat of the problem. The point of the legislation was to open the system in question up to OTHERS. As it stands, it appears I can buy a tv with a cablecard, but that's it. Motorola and ScientificAtlanta certainly don't have a card and driver for my PC at Worst Buy or even Fry's.
I'd agree this is a problem. But we don't manufacture the STBs. Cisco and Motorola both make boxes that work just fine on CableCards. We don't jigger our network strange to break any kind of standards compliance. We'd have no problem with a PCI card that let your turn your computer into a DVR, we just aren't going to manufacture the card. We use a standard and it works. If nobody else wants to make consumer equipment, there's little we can do.
that is entirely the problem, and frankly if you wouldnt sell me any box you provide your business is retarted.
the point is that we as consumers shuold have a choice and viable alternatives to paying the outlandish fees that "you" charge while still getting the service we provide. We don't charge equipment fees. In fact, local law prohibits us from doing this, but none of our divisions do. We charge for DVR service, but so does Tivo. Some of that is licensing, some of it is infrastructure, some of it is profit.
There are no good devices because everytime one was created YOU found a way to make it not work. No. We have done no such thing. I'm afraid I'm going to need some kind of citation for that accusation. Have we broken any Tivos? No.
then there was the whole lets only scramble some channels thing which was slightly better.. That's because HBO doesn't let you get their channel without paying.
then digital came out, and the whole one-way two-way problem was created. Are you trying to imply that we could have put 600 channels and on-demand channels down the line without using a compressed, digital signal? Your Cable Card handles the digital signal just fine. There are no technical limitations there, and if you put one in a cablecard slot on your TV, it will work. It's because we need an addressable box on your end to authorize the service you purchased. It's like how you need a power meter for your house. That's necessary equipment too.
It's supposed to work with all of our old equipment, so I'm guessing it's either just a Tivo thing, or it won't be a problem. I don't know anything specific about Tivos though. I've never used one.
No, I did. I saw it on Ars earlier. I'm responding to the the summary that blamed us for not playing ball. It blames the cable companies for not playing ball. That's BS. We'll sell you any box we provide. Do you really want to spend $1200 on an SA HD-DVR? Nobody else does, that's why we aren't selling them.
The problem is that there are no GOOD consumer devices. There just aren't. We can't help that. We aren't in the STB business.
He had no clue. First, many techs, especially contractors, are clueless. Second, everything Comcast does is braindead.
You can have CCs in any device, no approval necessary. However, there is no guarantee your STB will work with one unless it's been certified. Tivos do work, but only uses them one way. There are only Cisco and Motorola devices that are two-way, and allow on demand or channel guides. One of those bad boys will set you back about a grand, or more for the HDs.
The article mentions that the biggest reason people aren't using CCs is because there are no good STBs. That's totally not true. There are plenty made by Cisco (Scientific Atlanta) and Motorola. They just cost between $800 and $1300 and come with your cable service. There's just no point in buying one, although we will sell them if you want them. As for consumer-grade options, I can't answer that, it just seems that no PC component company wants to make a CC interface, and the only consumer STB is Tivo.
I just wanted to point out there are tons of cable cards out there, and they are part of the digital boxes provided by the cable company.
I'm the inventory coordinator for a cable company. All of our new DVRs and Digital boxes run off of cable cards. If I pop open the card cover, inside is the exact same cable card we give customers. It's even handy when we want to test a new box, we just use an already addressed card instead of addressing a whole new box.
It isn't cableCard technology that's the problem. It works with our system just fine. The problem happens to be crappy STBs that don't conform to CC specifications. Motorola, Cisco, and MS all make boxes that work just fine on our system with our on-demand and and program guide. Now, whether they have better access to documentation from Cable Labs, I'll never know. But it's BS that it's somehow the technology's fault.
Legos in sets have always gone for between 8 to 12 cents a piece. 5,000 pieces at 10c a piece is $500, which is about right.
Remember, a 200 piece set goes for between 18-22. The generic boxes of blocks are usually cheaper, running as low as 5c an element.
If you wanted to build a Falcon, this is probably the cheapest way to go. And you get 5000 elements that would work great on other spaceship projects, like the infamous Serenity.
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How about the billions in chasing phantom terrorists, waging two wars, creating the DHS, funding a massive wiretapping dragnet, new TSA security crackdowns, general security crackdowns, and plenty of pricey court cases arguing against the 4th Amendment.
Your pathetic attempt at distraction ignores the devastating cost of our overreaction.
Yes, as long as it comes with a Kaylee to do any necessary "repairs."
In terms of excessive punishments, California sentenced a man to life in prison for stealing a handful of DVDs from a store. See Lockyer v. Andrade, life in prison for stealing $150 worth of DVDs was held by the Supreme Court to not be excessive.
And what I said was that the Eighth Amendment may constitute a right you cannot waive. While that right cannot be stripped, it may also be a right you cannot waive, as in you cannot agree to a public dissection (drawing) if the DA wants to pursue that option. You cannot waive your right to be shielded from cruel and unusual punishment.
However, the same court said in Lockyer v. Andrade that life in prison for shoplifting $150 worth of video tapes was not excessive, so I doubt they'll have a problem with the constitutionality of the judgment.
Courts have found in the past you cannot waive certain due process rights, and I'm pretty sure they may say you can't waive your rights prohibiting a cruel and unusual punishment.
Google fails me at the moment, but I remember a case a few years back about a death row inmate arguing he should be allowed to hang, but the courts said he couldn't agree to it because it's cruel and unusual.
This may be in the same category.
Blame content creators and telecom.
The FCC is trying to protect telecom's entrance into the content delivery business. Also, content creators like Viacom are pushing for breaking up cable, as this will provide them with more leverage on channel contracts.
Over the past couple of years, the FCC has pushed Time Warner to divest itself of it's channels, and threatened to cap Comcast from new markets. If the cable companies are capped in size, but still geographically monopolistic, the cable have less leverage to push against the broadcast flag, for the legality of DVR, remote DVR, and start over services. That's what the "concern" is over cable companies controlling what channels people watch. The big content companies are afraid of the concentrated buying power and the ability to say "No" to their shenanigans. If the big cable companies drop a major network, it will hurt the network. But if a smaller company drops it, the small cable company takes the hit.
I work at a local cable co. Right now, we record every channel, and can pipe any show straight to your box on demand from the past week. It's a remote DVR we keep at the head end, and our employees can test it out. But we can't roll it out to our subscribers, because no network will give us the rights to do so. Comcast tried to do this without negotiating rights, but they got slapped with a lawsuit. We've been totally unable to negotiate the rights to it. We're even losing the fight over the broadcast flag. We used to universally ignore the flag, but some networks are pushing us to use it. FiOS has no problem flagging content, and AT&T has said they will push for it. We get that thrown in our face, constantly, during negotiations. We don't have the buying power to face off against a monopoly. ESPN, MTV, these are monopolies.
Telecoms want smaller competitors (they are far larger than Time Warner or Comcast). Content companies want easier negotiations. What we need is local competition and more consumer friendly broadcast laws. The FCC just wants to push smaller cable companies.
I'm aware that it's an executive branch mandate. But NASA is taking it far beyond what the other agencies are doing.
First, there's no law about constructive dismissal in the US. And proving it in a US court, which are notoriously unfriendly to labor in many states, would be impossible if you could show necessary business reasons for the change.
Second, they're getting flak over the "security measures," not "scaling back NASA." I'd say if the directive had my intent in mind, it worked. It's harder to argue against "security" than it is "budget cuts."
As an expert at abusive management during the failing days at Krispy Kreme, this sounds like they want the employees to quit. I've seen this happen too many times.
Say, if I was really callous and sociopathic, and I wanted to scale back operations and cut costs, I wouldn't fire or lay off anyone. I would require the employees to do things they wouldn't tolerate, but seem "necessary and proper" for their jobs. I'd switch reporting to 4:00am so that reports would be ready for management, give 3 hour lunches to people who live too far away to commute home for lunch, or other highly inconvenient tasks or requirements.
When they quit, you didn't have to report to investors you were scaling back operations, just that you couldn't fill the positions. Then you could cut the positions and claim better productivity.
If I wanted to scale NASA's budget back, and not catch tons of flak, I would do this. When the researchers refused to comply, I could just say "They're a security risk, we're all about security after 9/11, so you can't work on 90% of projects." When they quit, or I fired them for not complying, I could just say "We have a shortage of qualified engineers, we can't fill these positions."
And when nobody cared anymore, I'd scale back operations and cut the positions, shrinking the budget. It's a great way to handle a budget crisis and cut without making it look like one.
You're slightly mistaken.
Intel only provided RNG on the 810 series of chipsets, and that was the Pentium 3 generation. The VIA C3 is of the same generation of chipsets, nothing faster than a 1.4 ghz processor. AMD does provide a path, but it's an optional part of the chipset, and not universally supported.
There used to be more ubiquitous hardware RNG.
The Commodore had one too, on the sound chip. The old P3 i810 and VIA C3 chipsets had RNGs built in. They relied on thermal noise. Some AMD chipsets still have it. But for the most part, no modern motherboard comes integrated with a hardware RNG.
No, Intel no longer provides a hardware RNG on most chipsets. The last is the i810.
Some AMD64 chipsets still do though. You generally don't find hardware RNG on any chipset below the "Major Enterprise Purchase" mark.
Which could be bettered, easily.
I'll agree that "Solid state is the only reasonable media for a handheld device."
I've washed some DS games a few times in the laundry. When in the hospital, I vomited on a cartridge once too. No damage, the labels looked fine, and they play no problem.
I know washing a minidisc will kill it, but I don't know about a UMD. I can't imagine a UMD being nearly as rugged.
This all comes down to bad marketing on behalf of the DHS. With the proper ad campaigns, people would be less apprehensive.
Fade in of serious-looking woman.
"To stop people from making fake IDs, we called them "Real IDs."
"With Real ID, we can easily track minorities and other poor people. Anyone we can't track can be easily deported.
"With Real ID, you know when someone shows you a Real ID, it's a real ID. It's in the name."
Cut to Real ID logo.
In a former life, I worked as an NDT technician. One of our biggest jobs was industrial radiography. Which, long story short, involves radioisotope cameras and lots of safety training. With an radiation safety expert, radiation alarms, survey meters, and proper equipment they'll be plenty safe.
The biggest problem for them would be to properly dose the cockroaches. What kinds and levels of radiation will they be receiving? Any clown can x-ray a roach until it dies, but what would the fallout profile of a world-ending nuclear war look like? What's the long-term effect of radioisotopes in their bodies? How much ionizing radiation will they receive?
There's alpha, beta, gamma, neutron... What kind of radiation are they going to use? Safety, while incredibly important for an experiment like this, is relatively easy to accomplish if they get an expert. Attacking the correct problem may prove far more troublesome.
No, we don't verify your device or anything.
There may be restrictions on what kind of device you call sell, regarding patents and licensing, but we don't check your equipment beyond "it works to your satisfaction." I don't write the software or build the hardware. But I do know we don't check to see if your device is approved. There are far too many CC-ready TV models for us to verify.
When we purchase equipment or bill our contractors for losing a piece, that's the price. That's what we pay, in bulk. They do come with very decent warranties.
Because, most of our boxes are cheaper, and we average around $600 per CPE placed. Few people have HD boxes. The boxes also last a few years, and come with good service agreements with SA and Motorola.
I'd agree this is a problem. But we don't manufacture the STBs. Cisco and Motorola both make boxes that work just fine on CableCards. We don't jigger our network strange to break any kind of standards compliance. We'd have no problem with a PCI card that let your turn your computer into a DVR, we just aren't going to manufacture the card. We use a standard and it works. If nobody else wants to make consumer equipment, there's little we can do.
the point is that we as consumers shuold have a choice and viable alternatives to paying the outlandish fees that "you" charge while still getting the service we provide.
We don't charge equipment fees. In fact, local law prohibits us from doing this, but none of our divisions do. We charge for DVR service, but so does Tivo. Some of that is licensing, some of it is infrastructure, some of it is profit. There are no good devices because everytime one was created YOU found a way to make it not work.
No. We have done no such thing. I'm afraid I'm going to need some kind of citation for that accusation. Have we broken any Tivos? No. then there was the whole lets only scramble some channels thing which was slightly better..
That's because HBO doesn't let you get their channel without paying. then digital came out, and the whole one-way two-way problem was created.
Are you trying to imply that we could have put 600 channels and on-demand channels down the line without using a compressed, digital signal? Your Cable Card handles the digital signal just fine. There are no technical limitations there, and if you put one in a cablecard slot on your TV, it will work. It's because we need an addressable box on your end to authorize the service you purchased. It's like how you need a power meter for your house. That's necessary equipment too.
It's supposed to work with all of our old equipment, so I'm guessing it's either just a Tivo thing, or it won't be a problem. I don't know anything specific about Tivos though. I've never used one.
No, I did. I saw it on Ars earlier. I'm responding to the the summary that blamed us for not playing ball. It blames the cable companies for not playing ball. That's BS. We'll sell you any box we provide. Do you really want to spend $1200 on an SA HD-DVR? Nobody else does, that's why we aren't selling them.
The problem is that there are no GOOD consumer devices. There just aren't. We can't help that. We aren't in the STB business.
He had no clue. First, many techs, especially contractors, are clueless. Second, everything Comcast does is braindead.
You can have CCs in any device, no approval necessary. However, there is no guarantee your STB will work with one unless it's been certified. Tivos do work, but only uses them one way. There are only Cisco and Motorola devices that are two-way, and allow on demand or channel guides. One of those bad boys will set you back about a grand, or more for the HDs.
The article mentions that the biggest reason people aren't using CCs is because there are no good STBs. That's totally not true. There are plenty made by Cisco (Scientific Atlanta) and Motorola. They just cost between $800 and $1300 and come with your cable service. There's just no point in buying one, although we will sell them if you want them. As for consumer-grade options, I can't answer that, it just seems that no PC component company wants to make a CC interface, and the only consumer STB is Tivo.
I just wanted to point out there are tons of cable cards out there, and they are part of the digital boxes provided by the cable company.
I'm the inventory coordinator for a cable company. All of our new DVRs and Digital boxes run off of cable cards. If I pop open the card cover, inside is the exact same cable card we give customers. It's even handy when we want to test a new box, we just use an already addressed card instead of addressing a whole new box. It isn't cableCard technology that's the problem. It works with our system just fine. The problem happens to be crappy STBs that don't conform to CC specifications. Motorola, Cisco, and MS all make boxes that work just fine on our system with our on-demand and and program guide. Now, whether they have better access to documentation from Cable Labs, I'll never know. But it's BS that it's somehow the technology's fault.
Legos in sets have always gone for between 8 to 12 cents a piece. 5,000 pieces at 10c a piece is $500, which is about right.
Remember, a 200 piece set goes for between 18-22. The generic boxes of blocks are usually cheaper, running as low as 5c an element.
If you wanted to build a Falcon, this is probably the cheapest way to go. And you get 5000 elements that would work great on other spaceship projects, like the infamous Serenity.