Bad form to reply to myself, I know, but I did find one noteworthy detail in that memo upon further inspection:
Passwords will also be tested to ensure a minimum level of complexity; existing weak passwords will be required to be changed.
...so MIT stores its passwords in a form that allows complexity testing... Interesting.
They could just be brute-forcing 7 characters and calling it a day, or adding something to a commonly-used login system... but if it's feasible to test how complex an existing password is, I have to wonder about how the passwords are being stored.
Those engaged in research, teaching and learning activities will be given the option to opt out of the default network security policy through a self service mechanism.
Basically, it looks like someone in administration finally asked "What if we're actually a target?" and the response was "we're royally screwed". Yes, it's nice to give open access to everything, but I doubt most college students, even at MIT, follow reasonable security procedures. So now, they're going to block everything by default, and if someone wants to open access, they can do it themselves. Best case, there's no problems and nobody notices. Worst case, MIT's network isn't such a help during an attack.
So a university changed its default security policy. Big deal. I don't see how this is newsworthy.
For what it's worth, I do like the Program Manager interface. I like that it's absolutely simple, and does only a single thing at a time. 99% of the time, that's a bad thing, but once in a while it's perfect, such as for an interface for one-off appliances. When the machine boots, Program Manager only offers icons for the applications necessary for the appliance. While other applications may still exist on the system, they can be kept hidden from the more dangerous users.
No, you can't use the bookkeeping system to watch Youtube.
No, you can't check your email from the audio console.
No, the industrial control system won't let you launch that hilarious prank program you brought in on your USB flash drive.
These days I use Xfce for such consoles, but it takes a significant amount of tweaking to get it locked-down enough. If anyone has better suggestions for a secure-against-user-stupidity system, I'm open to them.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Let Them Eat Teslas
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· Score: 1
So if you qualify for the credits (by "buying a car for business" and "primarily driving an electric car daily"), and if the credits total more than $10k, and if you're approved for the $10k down payment, and if you pay more than $10k in taxes, then you get a refund for the down payment (and the income tax you paid on the money used for the down payment). That's a lot of conditions.
Or in other words, meet a bunch of criteria showing you're doing "good" things, and the government will cut down your tax bill. This is no different from any other tax credit, and certainly not worth the sensationalism pushed by the summary.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Let Them Eat Teslas
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· Score: 1
Either Elon Musk is planning on some serious profit-taking in 3 years or he knows something about the quality of his cars we don't. Either way, it is a huge red flag in my mind.
I think you answered your own concerns. In 3 years, when the resale guarantee matures, the S Class value offer will be much cheaper than it seems now, so Elon Musk isn't risking as much as it may seem (and it looks like Musk will only guarantee it after Tesla does, so Tesla's taking the bigger financial risk). The whole guarantee is just a hedge bet against the Tesla having even higher depreciation than the Mercedes-Benz. If you're in the market for a luxury car, the guarantee gives an upper bound on depreciation, making its long-term cost easier to predict.
As one of the articles mentions, the guarantee is intended to ease the minds of buyers skeptical of electric cars' feasibility. If the Model S fails miserably in terms of depreciation, the buyer still has a car worth $57,000.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Let Them Eat Teslas
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Wait, you mean the summary is misleading me? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! Maybe the details of the Tesla deal will bring some truth:
US Bank and Wells Fargo will provide 10% down financing on approved credit, and the down payment is covered or more than covered by US Federal and state tax credits ranging from $7,500 to $15,000. New Jersey, Washington and DC also have no sales tax for electric vehicles. These advantages are not available when leasing.
So buyers don't "get the government to pick up the first $15,000 (no down payment needed!)", but rather they get a government credit that may cover the 10% down payment, assuming their purchase qualifies for the various government programs. There's no further details on what exactly the tax credits are, but my suspicion is that they're generic credits for buying an electric car or other blessed "green" technology, and probably cover 7.5% to 15% of the item's value..
After 36 months, you have the right, but not the obligation to sell your Model S to Tesla for the same residual value percentage as the iconic Mercedes S Class, one of the finest premium sedans in the world, made by Daimler (also a Tesla partner and investor).
Not only is Tesla guaranteeing that resale value, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk is personally standing behind that guarantee to give customers absolute peace of mind about the value of the asset they are purchasing.
And here's the part that's being touted as "revolutionary". The company founder is apparently personally guaranteeing the car's resale value. That's it. We're back to the idealized old days where company owners stood by their products and actually put money behind having satisfied customers. Not really "revolutionary" in my book, but I don't write headlines.
As is usual for Slashdot these days, the summary is sensationalist bullshit and most of the comments are knee-jerk anti-government reactions.
If you are a small Mom and Pop operations (Under 5 employees) you could easily be running the "business" as a front for a smuggling operation.
If you are a Small Business (Under 100 Employees) you could be intentionally supporting drug smuggling, but it'd be more difficult to hide with so many people involved.
If you are a Medium Business (Under 1000 Employees) it's pretty unlikely you're breaking laws intentionally, but you could just be incompetent.
If you are a Large Business (1000+ Employees) you have a sufficient team of lawyers to make sure everything's as legal as it can be, so misuse of your product almost definitely goes against your intentions.
I haven't really cared much about Linus' philosophy, so I may be way off on this, but I'm under the impression that Linus cares most about the users having machines that work well to do whatever they want. That's different from Apple's view (machines that work cleanly to do what we want) and the Microsoft view (machines that do what vendors want, regardless of how messy the implementation), and the GNU view (machines that the user can use to build what they want).
If Linus were to head Windows 9, I might just forgive Microsoft for the past few decades. Linus comes with his notorious vitriol for sloppy implementation, so I could expect a cleaner API that might survive more than three years before Microsoft deems it "too limiting" and replaces it. His complete detachment from current Windows architecture would also promise a Unix-based Windows, much like Classic Mac OS was replaced by a Unix core for OS X. I might just actually enjoy that... Bash, rather than PowerShell. Executable commands, rather than COM, ActiveX, or OLE. Strict configuration files, rather than the corruption-prone registry...
President Lincoln filled his cabinet with people who opposed each other and the President himself. His meetings were filled with opposing viewpoints, from which the best were selected. Microsoft is in a position to make a similar pride-swallowing decision, but I doubt it will ever happen.
Oh, yes... pennies for that simple stuff that any nerd can set up in minutes or less. Now get a cultural expert to determine whether the villain's taunt is close enough to cause outcry among war-torn villagers in rural Africa, and someone to check all countries to see if Initech is a real company that might sue for defamation, and get a linguistics expert to check every character's name for any unfortunate coincidences, and a small army of lawyers to make sure that joke about Chinese-made products will still be well-received in China... and see how many more truckloads of pennies that costs. Also don't forget the accountants to count those penny-carrying trucks.
Modern "distribution" means more than just putting a product in a customer's hands. It means putting a product in customers' hands knowing that it will be as likely to be suitable for that customer as much as it would for any other. Distributing to a global market means the product must be suitable for entire world, with all its quirks and cultures, not just the United States' free-expression orgy. Bandwidth isn't the problem.
They're also missing out on the cost to distribute it worldwide while making sure not to run afoul of censorship laws, cultural taboos, local trademarks, or embarrassing history. After all that, there might still be some profit, but perhaps not enough to justify the increased administrative difficulty and legal risk for the parent company. Believe it or not, some companies really don't want to go chasing endlessly after every cent of profit they can possibly get.
Finally a Slashdotter that understands piracy both helps and also hurts, especially when the legal means of consuming the content covers most of the intended market.
"Full disclosure" is incredibly dangerous, especially in a case as emotionally-charged as this one. The major names in the case are already known and pretty well-publicized. There's plenty of blame for injustices here, but there's already plenty of targets to receive that blame legitimately. We do not need a list of every person trivially involved with the case, readily organized into a hit list for Anonymous' wrath.
Perhaps if the government was seen as being transparent...
Perhaps, indeed... but note it's the perception that matters, not the facts. As I mentioned above, I blame the media. We never see front-page headlines of "overwhelming evidence convicts murderer who confesses in closing arguments", because that's just boring. Instead we see "underdog hero accused of hot-topic crime by big bad government".
This isn't the government fearing the people. This is people fearing the people, and the government trying to step between them. Stopping vigilantism is why we have a rigid justice system in the first place.
Or more accurately, what does the GP have against JSTOR's low-ranking IT admin who found the access log when requested? Or the teenage daughter of the manager at JSTOR who passed on the request for that log? Or the MIT janitor who was supposed to lock that storage closet?
Those are the people whose names are going to be named, and whose lives will be ruined when Anonymous lets loose their unbridled vigilante mayhem. Of course, the dear Common Man will loudly praise Anonymous' "justice", and when that IT admin can't get a job, or that teenager's fake nude picture is plastered across her college's website, or that janitor's door is knocked down by a SWAT team responding to a tip about a bombmaker... those are just minor incidents, nowhere near as tragic as putting valid accusations before our dear Saint Swartz.
Unfortunately, far too many people think they have an absolute right to whatever they feel "justice" might be. If that means torching someone's house because they handed over an access log, then someone will likely do it. Maybe some investigator's family will have their whole social calendar thrown up on 4chan for public discussion, or a JSTOR programmer suddenly finds he owes $5,000,000 on a resort home in Dubai. This is the sad world we live in today, where people believe that it's not only feasible, but indeed desirable to seek vigilante justice.
It's ironic that today, just and fair trials are so common that they don't make the news, but the injustices and scandals reported in the media are what shape people's opinions of the government.
1. Your basic arguments are hostile to the poor, or your ignorant. One of the two.
False dichotomy. You could simply be factually wrong. Let's look at the facts...
People aren't going into debt because of lavish lifestyles. They're going into debt because adjusted for inflation they've lost ground every year for 30 years. You make less than your father did.
[citation needed]. Not about the inflation bit, but rather about that being why people are going into debt. Fact is, adjusted for inflation, people are still 5 times deeper in debt than they were in 1975.
2. Lenders accept no risk.
Maybe you conveniently missed how many banks went bankrupt recently. That's an awful lot of damage for "no risk".
They bundle bad loans together until they're so big that letting them go would wreck the economy, then demand 'Austerity' from the poor to pay for it. This is what really happened.
And nobody's saying they didn't. Of course, the question of whether it was legal or not is still up for debate, and as of a few days ago was still under investigation by the US DOJ. Of course, you're free to jump to your conclusions... just recognize they aren't facts.
Remember the S&L scandal? As for the loan and inflation, easy to deal with. Just lobby congress to raise minimum payments.
Um, yeah. That's rather the whole concept of inflation. The same about of wealth requires more money, so paying back the same amount of your loan requires more actual money. Now, a fair outcome would be to also raise wages to meet the higher needs, but Congress failed there.
3. These laws don't matter if they're not enforced. There are places you can get 50% credit cards.
[citation needed]. The highest I've heard of in the states is 40% for an unsecured credit card immediately after bankruptcy... which puts the highest risk on the lender.
Also, see point # 1 of this post. After 30 years of declining wages it's difficult if not impossible for anyone to get out of debt long enough to build up any wealth.
Alright, let's look at point 1... Adjusted for inflation, people are still going deeper into debt. It's not a matter of building up wealth, it's a matter of spending beyond means routinely.
4. My argument is that debtors need leverage over lenders or the system quickly breaks down. In the absence of that leverage (bankruptcy) there's no incentive for the people who own you and me (re: George Carlin) not to return to debtors prisons and 16-tons.
Similarly, lenders need leverage over debtors, or the lenders can't expect any safety in lending. In the absence of that leverage (court-ordered payment plans), there's no incentive for the people who borrow money to pay back what they took.
It's the same crap argument I hear all the time that says we should get rid of regulations and safety nets. That you don't need it anymore. That things are better. Safer. There's other ways. You ignore the fact that there's a reason why people were given the power of bankruptcy in the first place.
And yours is the same crap argument I hear all the time that we need to help the little guy at the expense of Big Credit or whoever the bad guy is this week. That Big Credit is going to abuse us all into submission, because we're all forced to take their high-interest loans to buy the overpriced luxury goods that we need so badly. You ignore the fact that defaulting on loans is the reason high interest rates are charged in the first place.
It's a careful balance, and we just farked it right up.
Google will contribute its patented technology immediately to benefit the public good, and pledges to support open-source community projects into the future. Google will confine all its competitive legal actions to the commercial arena, encouraging the growth of non-Google technologies, pushing the state of the art ever forward.
...I feel dirty now... I think I got some marketing slime on me......Turing help me, I want multi-level enterprise synergy to embiggen the opportunity for realized potential!
you put a lot of effort into a post full of hate for the poor:P. Are you really that ignorant of why people file for bankruptcy or do you get paid to spew that nonsense?
Starting off the flames from the start, I see. No, I'm not getting paid to comment on Slashdot, and no, I don't hate the poor, having come pretty damned close to bankruptcy myself. Rather, I hate the people of all economic standings who think that if someone gives them credit they're free to forget about repayment and pass the burden on to the rest of society.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am currently involved in a bankruptcy lawsuit. A guy owes me a few thousand dollars, that went into buying his second sports car (or maybe his boat, or both... we're not certain) rather than paying off the back taxes he owed. Meanwhile he owns a business bringing in about a half-million dollars a year.
1. Bankruptcy is basically 8 years without credit. If you're a poor person that's a nightmare. No house and no car, both of which you need.
Not at all. Bankruptcy will stop you from getting new loans for a few years until you establish new credit, but the other poster already covered that. I'll just also point out that a single house and a car are usually protected in bankruptcy, so the debtor isn't left destitute without a means to make a living. This is actually a key detail in my own lawsuit, since the debt went to buy a car (and supposedly his other two cars and boat are actually company assets, he claims).
2. The lender should be expected to accept risk. It's funny how capitalists get shield from market risks by guys like you but workers are expected to suck it down. Workers pay for their masters bad decisions with lower standards of living.
The lenders do accept risk in many ways. First, there's the risk that the loan's interest won't actually outpace inflation, though that's rather unlikely right now. There's the risk that by loaning out money, they don't have the capital they need for a better opportunity later. There's the risk that a borrower might default without bankruptcy, in which case they have to go through foreclosure (which usually costs them more than they get). Then there's the big risk of bankruptcy, where they lose everything loaned out.
About the only time the lenders actually make money is when a loan is (almost) fully paid off or when it's sold to someone else who assumes the risk.
3. Usury loans quickly become slavery. You're not really free if someone controls your access to food/shelter/health care.
And that's why they're illegal in most jurisdictions. There are actually laws regulating what interest may be charged, generally hovering around "expected inflation plus a little bit". Anything higher is usually thrown out immediately in court.
4. People filing for bankruptcy have little money. They often can't afford the legal representation they need to avoid being taken advantage of. If they do hire a lawyer the settlement negotiated is often worse than the original loan terms. That's because there are hundreds of bankruptcy firms that just take your money and then take the first offer by the court. They pray on people trying to keep their heads above water by working 80 hours a week. I've known several people in that situation.
...and that's bad, I guess. I don't see the relevance to the original comment, but let's continue anyway. It's a slow day at the office.
So your argument is that we should be able to throw out more debt because evil companies take advantage of a difficult legal system? Personally I'd rather just reform the legal system. Maybe we could make some sort of public repository with resources for handling one's bankruptcy, where people could learn how to figure out what they can afford... We might even be able to incorporate it with other sources of knowledge, perhaps even with some trained
...bankruptcy law that make it impossible to discharge debt unless you're rich...
Well... good. Debt means you owe somebody, and you're not paying yet. Bankruptcy means you won't ever be able to pay them back. Discharging should be avoided in all cases where there's even a remote chance that someone can pay what they owe.
Of course, the "rich" get special treatment, with a reason. "Rich" people often have others depending heavily on their solvency, moreso than the average person, whose bankruptcy would cost a few bigger companies their credits. The bigger someone's budget, the more likely they are the main source of income for others... and those others' livelihoods must be considered when resolving a bankruptcy. The wealthy individual may escape bankruptcy with a decent amount of net worth still intact, but likely held inaccessibly to avoid screwing over the people who depend on them.
...plus judges finding debtors in contempt of court for not paying and jailing them (aka debtors prisons 2.0)...
"Contempt of court" means there's a court order they're disobeying. That means the person has already gone through bankruptcy, and has worked out a plan to repay their debts, then just didn't do it. In addition to their original debt agreement, and any reorganization agreements during bankruptcy, they've now also failed the court's last attempt to let them work their way out. Terribly sad and all, but how many more agreements do we have to let people break before they get more than a slap on the wrist?
...have me scared.
What scares me is the notion that debt should be easily escapable. I understand that Lady Luck has a cruel sense of humor, and sometimes society really should release someone from their burdens, but the recent tendency has been to treat bankruptcy as a get-out-of-trouble-free card, and debt is a free pass to spend one's younger years partying on someone else's dime.
From working at big bad Microsoft to founding a patent-focused lab, you seem like an ideal person to answer a question I've had for a while: What's it like working in companies that are constantly under attack from those who try to claim a moral high ground?
To clarify, I don't mean to imply that you are evil, or that Microsoft or Intellectual Ventures are harming society, but rather I recognize that such accusations are common, regardless of truth. On the one hand, I don't assume that the FOSS fanatics (including myself at times) are always right about how bad Microsoft is, or the free-IP crowd is always right about how patents are crushing us, but at the same time I find it hard to believe they're always wrong, too. I'm curious what kind of moral dilemmas you encounter in this respect, if any, and what insight you might be able to provide as to life on the receiving end of the activists' assaults.
Cute rhetoric, but let's do the requested reading together.
In Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), the Supreme Court ruled that a search occurs when 1) a person expects privacy in the thing searched and 2) society believes that expectation is reasonable.
That's the first time privacy was ever a fourth-amendment issue. Prior to that, the only privacy that really mattered was personal possessions and actions - not information. Health matters were protected as early as the 1920s, but that protection did not extend to anything outside medicine.
Rather tangentially, you're missing the main point of my original post. It's not the intent of the fourth amendment that matters; it's the interpretation by the SCOTUS. The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution over two centuries ago, in a time when America's viability was questionable at best. The latest information technology was a piece of parchment and a sharp quill. The necessary applications of the Constitution today are far beyond anything they could have imagined, so why do we hold their original intents so damned sacred?
Personally, I'm of the opinion that the Constitution is a living document, and for the most part I agree with Jefferson's ideas on the matter:
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." But he also warned against treating the Constitution as "a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please."
I'd like to see an amendment to the constitution to the Constitution to make a framework for today's information-based society. It should clarify that a person's information is as vital and valuable as their tangible posessions, recognizing that as much work goes into intellectual creation as into physical manufacturing. I'd also like to see it declare (or support legislation to declare) that copyrights and other IP must benefit the public culture more than their owners, and that corporations, being artificial nonsentient entities, must have certain rights to function, but must be denied certain rights to reflect their nonsentient statue.
Also tangentially, who the fuck is Sean Hannity? I assume it's a pundit on some side or another, but I generally try to avoid all pundits. They like to forget history in favor of their particular talking points, like claiming the interstate commerce clause doesn't actually apply to interstate commerce.
Let's go ask a society that engages in human sacrifice... Or the death penalty... Or vigilante justice... Or a "justifiable homocide" defense...
Morality is subjective, but it's not consciously determined by individuals. It's determined by the society as a group, and most societies have determined that most forms of murder are wrong. Societal changes are slow, but they do happen in a few generations.
The whole point of morality is that our brains have evolved mechanisms to warn us (via a "that's wrong" disgust reaction) about things the rest of our tribe won't like. We do this by taking commonly-encountered concepts and internalizing them so deeply that we no longer include them in the rationalizing process. While that prevents us from trying to make excuses for our biggest offenses, it also makes us rather slow to adopt changes.
Its intent is to prevent government agents from using searches to interrupt people's daily business, like the British did. If a British soldier didn't get treated nicely by a shopkeeper, that shop could be effectively shut down while the soldier tore goods off the shelves and "searched". Then the shop would stay closed while the shopkeeper cleaned up, and bought replacements for anything broken. The next day, it'd be "searched" again.
I don't think you actually want the FBI to follow the fourth amendment's actual intent, which was really only concerned with the government harassing individuals, rather than dealing with any notion of privacy. This notion of someone's dealings being private, even when handled by someone else in another jurisdiction, is a modern invention.
Sarcasm aside, that's because this sentence isn't that bad. The guy took a dangerous device and used it as a toy, putting others' lives at risk. Yes, I understand that lasers are small and cheap, and easily confused with toys, but they can still put people at risk. That's why they carry warning labels. By pointing a laser at a plane's cockpit while being aware of the risk, Mr. Gardenhire has shown that he has no respect for the lives of others, so I find it perfectly reasonable to prevent him from interfering on others' lives for the next three years, and limit his benefits from the society after that.
With regards to the four-year-olds, that's a completely different matter, because the children aren't expected to understand or adhere to society's morality.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad form to reply to myself, I know, but I did find one noteworthy detail in that memo upon further inspection:
Passwords will also be tested to ensure a minimum level of complexity; existing weak passwords will be required to be changed.
...so MIT stores its passwords in a form that allows complexity testing... Interesting.
They could just be brute-forcing 7 characters and calling it a day, or adding something to a commonly-used login system... but if it's feasible to test how complex an existing password is, I have to wonder about how the passwords are being stored.
Apparently, the new policy is just by default:
Those engaged in research, teaching and learning activities will be given the option to opt out of the default network security policy through a self service mechanism.
Basically, it looks like someone in administration finally asked "What if we're actually a target?" and the response was "we're royally screwed". Yes, it's nice to give open access to everything, but I doubt most college students, even at MIT, follow reasonable security procedures. So now, they're going to block everything by default, and if someone wants to open access, they can do it themselves. Best case, there's no problems and nobody notices. Worst case, MIT's network isn't such a help during an attack.
So a university changed its default security policy. Big deal. I don't see how this is newsworthy.
I've tried that, but then I'm missing window decorations and the other niceties X expects a bona-fide window manager to provide.
For what it's worth, I do like the Program Manager interface. I like that it's absolutely simple, and does only a single thing at a time. 99% of the time, that's a bad thing, but once in a while it's perfect, such as for an interface for one-off appliances. When the machine boots, Program Manager only offers icons for the applications necessary for the appliance. While other applications may still exist on the system, they can be kept hidden from the more dangerous users.
No, you can't use the bookkeeping system to watch Youtube.
No, you can't check your email from the audio console.
No, the industrial control system won't let you launch that hilarious prank program you brought in on your USB flash drive.
These days I use Xfce for such consoles, but it takes a significant amount of tweaking to get it locked-down enough. If anyone has better suggestions for a secure-against-user-stupidity system, I'm open to them.
So if you qualify for the credits (by "buying a car for business" and "primarily driving an electric car daily"), and if the credits total more than $10k, and if you're approved for the $10k down payment, and if you pay more than $10k in taxes, then you get a refund for the down payment (and the income tax you paid on the money used for the down payment). That's a lot of conditions.
Or in other words, meet a bunch of criteria showing you're doing "good" things, and the government will cut down your tax bill. This is no different from any other tax credit, and certainly not worth the sensationalism pushed by the summary.
Either Elon Musk is planning on some serious profit-taking in 3 years or he knows something about the quality of his cars we don't. Either way, it is a huge red flag in my mind.
I think you answered your own concerns. In 3 years, when the resale guarantee matures, the S Class value offer will be much cheaper than it seems now, so Elon Musk isn't risking as much as it may seem (and it looks like Musk will only guarantee it after Tesla does, so Tesla's taking the bigger financial risk). The whole guarantee is just a hedge bet against the Tesla having even higher depreciation than the Mercedes-Benz. If you're in the market for a luxury car, the guarantee gives an upper bound on depreciation, making its long-term cost easier to predict.
As one of the articles mentions, the guarantee is intended to ease the minds of buyers skeptical of electric cars' feasibility. If the Model S fails miserably in terms of depreciation, the buyer still has a car worth $57,000.
Wait, you mean the summary is misleading me? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! Maybe the details of the Tesla deal will bring some truth:
US Bank and Wells Fargo will provide 10% down financing on approved credit, and the down payment is covered or more than covered by US Federal and state tax credits ranging from $7,500 to $15,000. New Jersey, Washington and DC also have no sales tax for electric vehicles. These advantages are not available when leasing.
So buyers don't "get the government to pick up the first $15,000 (no down payment needed!)", but rather they get a government credit that may cover the 10% down payment, assuming their purchase qualifies for the various government programs. There's no further details on what exactly the tax credits are, but my suspicion is that they're generic credits for buying an electric car or other blessed "green" technology, and probably cover 7.5% to 15% of the item's value..
After 36 months, you have the right, but not the obligation to sell your Model S to Tesla for the same residual value percentage as the iconic Mercedes S Class, one of the finest premium sedans in the world, made by Daimler (also a Tesla partner and investor).
Not only is Tesla guaranteeing that resale value, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk is personally standing behind that guarantee to give customers absolute peace of mind about the value of the asset they are purchasing.
And here's the part that's being touted as "revolutionary". The company founder is apparently personally guaranteeing the car's resale value. That's it. We're back to the idealized old days where company owners stood by their products and actually put money behind having satisfied customers. Not really "revolutionary" in my book, but I don't write headlines.
As is usual for Slashdot these days, the summary is sensationalist bullshit and most of the comments are knee-jerk anti-government reactions.
If you are a small Mom and Pop operations (Under 5 employees) you could easily be running the "business" as a front for a smuggling operation.
If you are a Small Business (Under 100 Employees) you could be intentionally supporting drug smuggling, but it'd be more difficult to hide with so many people involved.
If you are a Medium Business (Under 1000 Employees) it's pretty unlikely you're breaking laws intentionally, but you could just be incompetent.
If you are a Large Business (1000+ Employees) you have a sufficient team of lawyers to make sure everything's as legal as it can be, so misuse of your product almost definitely goes against your intentions.
I haven't really cared much about Linus' philosophy, so I may be way off on this, but I'm under the impression that Linus cares most about the users having machines that work well to do whatever they want. That's different from Apple's view (machines that work cleanly to do what we want) and the Microsoft view (machines that do what vendors want, regardless of how messy the implementation), and the GNU view (machines that the user can use to build what they want).
If Linus were to head Windows 9, I might just forgive Microsoft for the past few decades. Linus comes with his notorious vitriol for sloppy implementation, so I could expect a cleaner API that might survive more than three years before Microsoft deems it "too limiting" and replaces it. His complete detachment from current Windows architecture would also promise a Unix-based Windows, much like Classic Mac OS was replaced by a Unix core for OS X. I might just actually enjoy that... Bash, rather than PowerShell. Executable commands, rather than COM, ActiveX, or OLE. Strict configuration files, rather than the corruption-prone registry...
President Lincoln filled his cabinet with people who opposed each other and the President himself. His meetings were filled with opposing viewpoints, from which the best were selected. Microsoft is in a position to make a similar pride-swallowing decision, but I doubt it will ever happen.
Oh, yes... pennies for that simple stuff that any nerd can set up in minutes or less. Now get a cultural expert to determine whether the villain's taunt is close enough to cause outcry among war-torn villagers in rural Africa, and someone to check all countries to see if Initech is a real company that might sue for defamation, and get a linguistics expert to check every character's name for any unfortunate coincidences, and a small army of lawyers to make sure that joke about Chinese-made products will still be well-received in China... and see how many more truckloads of pennies that costs. Also don't forget the accountants to count those penny-carrying trucks.
Modern "distribution" means more than just putting a product in a customer's hands. It means putting a product in customers' hands knowing that it will be as likely to be suitable for that customer as much as it would for any other. Distributing to a global market means the product must be suitable for entire world, with all its quirks and cultures, not just the United States' free-expression orgy. Bandwidth isn't the problem.
They're also missing out on the cost to distribute it worldwide while making sure not to run afoul of censorship laws, cultural taboos, local trademarks, or embarrassing history. After all that, there might still be some profit, but perhaps not enough to justify the increased administrative difficulty and legal risk for the parent company. Believe it or not, some companies really don't want to go chasing endlessly after every cent of profit they can possibly get.
Finally a Slashdotter that understands piracy both helps and also hurts, especially when the legal means of consuming the content covers most of the intended market.
"Full disclosure" is incredibly dangerous, especially in a case as emotionally-charged as this one. The major names in the case are already known and pretty well-publicized. There's plenty of blame for injustices here, but there's already plenty of targets to receive that blame legitimately. We do not need a list of every person trivially involved with the case, readily organized into a hit list for Anonymous' wrath.
Perhaps if the government was seen as being transparent...
Perhaps, indeed... but note it's the perception that matters, not the facts. As I mentioned above, I blame the media. We never see front-page headlines of "overwhelming evidence convicts murderer who confesses in closing arguments", because that's just boring. Instead we see "underdog hero accused of hot-topic crime by big bad government".
This isn't the government fearing the people. This is people fearing the people, and the government trying to step between them. Stopping vigilantism is why we have a rigid justice system in the first place.
Or more accurately, what does the GP have against JSTOR's low-ranking IT admin who found the access log when requested? Or the teenage daughter of the manager at JSTOR who passed on the request for that log? Or the MIT janitor who was supposed to lock that storage closet?
Those are the people whose names are going to be named, and whose lives will be ruined when Anonymous lets loose their unbridled vigilante mayhem. Of course, the dear Common Man will loudly praise Anonymous' "justice", and when that IT admin can't get a job, or that teenager's fake nude picture is plastered across her college's website, or that janitor's door is knocked down by a SWAT team responding to a tip about a bombmaker... those are just minor incidents, nowhere near as tragic as putting valid accusations before our dear Saint Swartz.
Yeah, that'd be nice.
Unfortunately, far too many people think they have an absolute right to whatever they feel "justice" might be. If that means torching someone's house because they handed over an access log, then someone will likely do it. Maybe some investigator's family will have their whole social calendar thrown up on 4chan for public discussion, or a JSTOR programmer suddenly finds he owes $5,000,000 on a resort home in Dubai. This is the sad world we live in today, where people believe that it's not only feasible, but indeed desirable to seek vigilante justice.
It's ironic that today, just and fair trials are so common that they don't make the news, but the injustices and scandals reported in the media are what shape people's opinions of the government.
1. Your basic arguments are hostile to the poor, or your ignorant. One of the two.
False dichotomy. You could simply be factually wrong. Let's look at the facts...
People aren't going into debt because of lavish lifestyles. They're going into debt because adjusted for inflation they've lost ground every year for 30 years. You make less than your father did.
[citation needed]. Not about the inflation bit, but rather about that being why people are going into debt. Fact is, adjusted for inflation, people are still 5 times deeper in debt than they were in 1975.
2. Lenders accept no risk.
Maybe you conveniently missed how many banks went bankrupt recently. That's an awful lot of damage for "no risk".
They bundle bad loans together until they're so big that letting them go would wreck the economy, then demand 'Austerity' from the poor to pay for it. This is what really happened.
And nobody's saying they didn't. Of course, the question of whether it was legal or not is still up for debate, and as of a few days ago was still under investigation by the US DOJ. Of course, you're free to jump to your conclusions... just recognize they aren't facts.
Remember the S&L scandal? As for the loan and inflation, easy to deal with. Just lobby congress to raise minimum payments.
Um, yeah. That's rather the whole concept of inflation. The same about of wealth requires more money, so paying back the same amount of your loan requires more actual money. Now, a fair outcome would be to also raise wages to meet the higher needs, but Congress failed there.
3. These laws don't matter if they're not enforced. There are places you can get 50% credit cards.
[citation needed]. The highest I've heard of in the states is 40% for an unsecured credit card immediately after bankruptcy... which puts the highest risk on the lender.
Also, see point # 1 of this post. After 30 years of declining wages it's difficult if not impossible for anyone to get out of debt long enough to build up any wealth.
Alright, let's look at point 1... Adjusted for inflation, people are still going deeper into debt. It's not a matter of building up wealth, it's a matter of spending beyond means routinely.
4. My argument is that debtors need leverage over lenders or the system quickly breaks down. In the absence of that leverage (bankruptcy) there's no incentive for the people who own you and me (re: George Carlin) not to return to debtors prisons and 16-tons.
Similarly, lenders need leverage over debtors, or the lenders can't expect any safety in lending. In the absence of that leverage (court-ordered payment plans), there's no incentive for the people who borrow money to pay back what they took.
It's the same crap argument I hear all the time that says we should get rid of regulations and safety nets. That you don't need it anymore. That things are better. Safer. There's other ways. You ignore the fact that there's a reason why people were given the power of bankruptcy in the first place.
And yours is the same crap argument I hear all the time that we need to help the little guy at the expense of Big Credit or whoever the bad guy is this week. That Big Credit is going to abuse us all into submission, because we're all forced to take their high-interest loans to buy the overpriced luxury goods that we need so badly. You ignore the fact that defaulting on loans is the reason high interest rates are charged in the first place.
It's a careful balance, and we just farked it right up.
Well, you got
Or to translate from English to Marketing:
Google will contribute its patented technology immediately to benefit the public good, and pledges to support open-source community projects into the future. Google will confine all its competitive legal actions to the commercial arena, encouraging the growth of non-Google technologies, pushing the state of the art ever forward.
...I feel dirty now... I think I got some marketing slime on me... ...Turing help me, I want multi-level enterprise synergy to embiggen the opportunity for realized potential!
you put a lot of effort into a post full of hate for the poor :P. Are you really that ignorant of why people file for bankruptcy or do you get paid to spew that nonsense?
Starting off the flames from the start, I see. No, I'm not getting paid to comment on Slashdot, and no, I don't hate the poor, having come pretty damned close to bankruptcy myself. Rather, I hate the people of all economic standings who think that if someone gives them credit they're free to forget about repayment and pass the burden on to the rest of society.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am currently involved in a bankruptcy lawsuit. A guy owes me a few thousand dollars, that went into buying his second sports car (or maybe his boat, or both... we're not certain) rather than paying off the back taxes he owed. Meanwhile he owns a business bringing in about a half-million dollars a year.
1. Bankruptcy is basically 8 years without credit. If you're a poor person that's a nightmare. No house and no car, both of which you need.
Not at all. Bankruptcy will stop you from getting new loans for a few years until you establish new credit, but the other poster already covered that. I'll just also point out that a single house and a car are usually protected in bankruptcy, so the debtor isn't left destitute without a means to make a living. This is actually a key detail in my own lawsuit, since the debt went to buy a car (and supposedly his other two cars and boat are actually company assets, he claims).
2. The lender should be expected to accept risk. It's funny how capitalists get shield from market risks by guys like you but workers are expected to suck it down. Workers pay for their masters bad decisions with lower standards of living.
The lenders do accept risk in many ways. First, there's the risk that the loan's interest won't actually outpace inflation, though that's rather unlikely right now. There's the risk that by loaning out money, they don't have the capital they need for a better opportunity later. There's the risk that a borrower might default without bankruptcy, in which case they have to go through foreclosure (which usually costs them more than they get). Then there's the big risk of bankruptcy, where they lose everything loaned out.
About the only time the lenders actually make money is when a loan is (almost) fully paid off or when it's sold to someone else who assumes the risk.
3. Usury loans quickly become slavery. You're not really free if someone controls your access to food/shelter/health care.
And that's why they're illegal in most jurisdictions. There are actually laws regulating what interest may be charged, generally hovering around "expected inflation plus a little bit". Anything higher is usually thrown out immediately in court.
4. People filing for bankruptcy have little money. They often can't afford the legal representation they need to avoid being taken advantage of. If they do hire a lawyer the settlement negotiated is often worse than the original loan terms. That's because there are hundreds of bankruptcy firms that just take your money and then take the first offer by the court. They pray on people trying to keep their heads above water by working 80 hours a week. I've known several people in that situation.
...and that's bad, I guess. I don't see the relevance to the original comment, but let's continue anyway. It's a slow day at the office.
So your argument is that we should be able to throw out more debt because evil companies take advantage of a difficult legal system? Personally I'd rather just reform the legal system. Maybe we could make some sort of public repository with resources for handling one's bankruptcy, where people could learn how to figure out what they can afford... We might even be able to incorporate it with other sources of knowledge, perhaps even with some trained
...bankruptcy law that make it impossible to discharge debt unless you're rich...
Well... good. Debt means you owe somebody, and you're not paying yet. Bankruptcy means you won't ever be able to pay them back. Discharging should be avoided in all cases where there's even a remote chance that someone can pay what they owe.
Of course, the "rich" get special treatment, with a reason. "Rich" people often have others depending heavily on their solvency, moreso than the average person, whose bankruptcy would cost a few bigger companies their credits. The bigger someone's budget, the more likely they are the main source of income for others... and those others' livelihoods must be considered when resolving a bankruptcy. The wealthy individual may escape bankruptcy with a decent amount of net worth still intact, but likely held inaccessibly to avoid screwing over the people who depend on them.
...plus judges finding debtors in contempt of court for not paying and jailing them (aka debtors prisons 2.0)...
"Contempt of court" means there's a court order they're disobeying. That means the person has already gone through bankruptcy, and has worked out a plan to repay their debts, then just didn't do it. In addition to their original debt agreement, and any reorganization agreements during bankruptcy, they've now also failed the court's last attempt to let them work their way out. Terribly sad and all, but how many more agreements do we have to let people break before they get more than a slap on the wrist?
...have me scared.
What scares me is the notion that debt should be easily escapable. I understand that Lady Luck has a cruel sense of humor, and sometimes society really should release someone from their burdens, but the recent tendency has been to treat bankruptcy as a get-out-of-trouble-free card, and debt is a free pass to spend one's younger years partying on someone else's dime.
From working at big bad Microsoft to founding a patent-focused lab, you seem like an ideal person to answer a question I've had for a while: What's it like working in companies that are constantly under attack from those who try to claim a moral high ground?
To clarify, I don't mean to imply that you are evil, or that Microsoft or Intellectual Ventures are harming society, but rather I recognize that such accusations are common, regardless of truth. On the one hand, I don't assume that the FOSS fanatics (including myself at times) are always right about how bad Microsoft is, or the free-IP crowd is always right about how patents are crushing us, but at the same time I find it hard to believe they're always wrong, too. I'm curious what kind of moral dilemmas you encounter in this respect, if any, and what insight you might be able to provide as to life on the receiving end of the activists' assaults.
Cute rhetoric, but let's do the requested reading together.
In Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), the Supreme Court ruled that a search occurs when 1) a person expects privacy in the thing searched and 2) society believes that expectation is reasonable.
That's the first time privacy was ever a fourth-amendment issue. Prior to that, the only privacy that really mattered was personal possessions and actions - not information. Health matters were protected as early as the 1920s, but that protection did not extend to anything outside medicine.
Rather tangentially, you're missing the main point of my original post. It's not the intent of the fourth amendment that matters; it's the interpretation by the SCOTUS. The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution over two centuries ago, in a time when America's viability was questionable at best. The latest information technology was a piece of parchment and a sharp quill. The necessary applications of the Constitution today are far beyond anything they could have imagined, so why do we hold their original intents so damned sacred?
Personally, I'm of the opinion that the Constitution is a living document, and for the most part I agree with Jefferson's ideas on the matter:
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." But he also warned against treating the Constitution as "a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please."
I'd like to see an amendment to the constitution to the Constitution to make a framework for today's information-based society. It should clarify that a person's information is as vital and valuable as their tangible posessions, recognizing that as much work goes into intellectual creation as into physical manufacturing. I'd also like to see it declare (or support legislation to declare) that copyrights and other IP must benefit the public culture more than their owners, and that corporations, being artificial nonsentient entities, must have certain rights to function, but must be denied certain rights to reflect their nonsentient statue.
Also tangentially, who the fuck is Sean Hannity? I assume it's a pundit on some side or another, but I generally try to avoid all pundits. They like to forget history in favor of their particular talking points, like claiming the interstate commerce clause doesn't actually apply to interstate commerce.
Let's go ask a society that engages in human sacrifice... Or the death penalty... Or vigilante justice... Or a "justifiable homocide" defense...
Morality is subjective, but it's not consciously determined by individuals. It's determined by the society as a group, and most societies have determined that most forms of murder are wrong. Societal changes are slow, but they do happen in a few generations.
The whole point of morality is that our brains have evolved mechanisms to warn us (via a "that's wrong" disgust reaction) about things the rest of our tribe won't like. We do this by taking commonly-encountered concepts and internalizing them so deeply that we no longer include them in the rationalizing process. While that prevents us from trying to make excuses for our biggest offenses, it also makes us rather slow to adopt changes.
Honor the forth amendment, its words AND intent.
Its intent is to prevent government agents from using searches to interrupt people's daily business, like the British did. If a British soldier didn't get treated nicely by a shopkeeper, that shop could be effectively shut down while the soldier tore goods off the shelves and "searched". Then the shop would stay closed while the shopkeeper cleaned up, and bought replacements for anything broken. The next day, it'd be "searched" again.
I don't think you actually want the FBI to follow the fourth amendment's actual intent, which was really only concerned with the government harassing individuals, rather than dealing with any notion of privacy. This notion of someone's dealings being private, even when handled by someone else in another jurisdiction, is a modern invention.
Sarcasm aside, that's because this sentence isn't that bad. The guy took a dangerous device and used it as a toy, putting others' lives at risk. Yes, I understand that lasers are small and cheap, and easily confused with toys, but they can still put people at risk. That's why they carry warning labels. By pointing a laser at a plane's cockpit while being aware of the risk, Mr. Gardenhire has shown that he has no respect for the lives of others, so I find it perfectly reasonable to prevent him from interfering on others' lives for the next three years, and limit his benefits from the society after that.
With regards to the four-year-olds, that's a completely different matter, because the children aren't expected to understand or adhere to society's morality.