Wow. If my '99 WIndstar did that, I'd have had to take it to the dealer at least two or three times in any given year. Which is to say that I would have ripped out the alarm system and the radio about a week after the warranty ended....
So does that mean that if you leave a light on and run your battery down, you have to take it to the dealer to get it repaired? What freaking lunatic came up with that one? Not that I'll ever buy a Ford again, given my experiences with them, but that just clinches it.
Good organic milks are actually pasteurized at a lower temperature...
Maybe so, but all the organic milk you can buy around here is ultra-pasteurized (higher temperature). As for me, I buy the organic milk because I can buy it and not have to worry about it going bad before I use it. (Shelf life is typically five or six weeks.)
I'd love to see every little law enforced. Maybe if Congresspeople were regularly fined hundreds of dollars for doing laundry on Thursday, we'd see a return to a more sensible corpus of legal code that is small enough for an ordinary person to understand it, and in which old, stale, useless laws are regularly pruned to make room for newer, more relevant laws.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
—Douglas Adams
I've been saying for years that we should have something like this, but not for cameras. For ringers.
I want the ability to put "Quiet Zone" beacons in every theater, conference room, and house of worship. When in the presence of an active Quiet Zone beacon (which could be configured to turn on or off depending on time of day, based on whether the house lights in the theater are on or off, etc.), the phone would automatically switch to vibrate, regardless of the user's settings.
Of course, my version of the idea can't be done with infrared because that won't go through someone's pocket or a case, and you can safely assume that if someone's cell phone rings during church or right in the middle of the most suspenseful part of a movie, it is because they forgot to pull it out to switch it to vibrate, so it hasn't been outside of the person's pocket at all. It needs to be a low power RF signal with directional antennas and limited range.
I would also like to have the ability to set "Do Not Disturb" flags on meetings in iCal and have the cell phone's ringer automatically disabled during those meetings, but although that's another way to solve the same problem, it tends not to work nearly as well for unscheduled things like going to see a movie or whatever.
First, this is happening to Android developers as well. Second, although you're on the right track, IMO, defending third-party suits is really not that different from an out-of-court settlement to a lawsuit; it encourages other sleazy IP factories to sue app developers to get a quick payoff at Apple's/Google's expense.
If Apple and Google believe that their contracts with Lodsys grant rights to third-party app developers, then they should sue Lodsys for breach of contract, damage to their reputations (slander), and tortious interference. Between Apple and Google, it shouldn't be hard to thoroughly bury this patent troll company. Anything short of utterly burying them won't be enough of a deterrent to patent troll suits in the future.
Even better, because such suits would not be counter-suits (Lodsys isn't suing Apple or Google, AFAIK), they could be filed in a more friendly district, e.g. Northern California.
I don't know how big those teams are, but I get the impression we're talking about thirty or forty people in California between them. So all Amazon has to do is make them remote employees, close the office, and raise their salaries to compensate them for the trouble of renting their own space at an office sharing place. Problem solved, all for a lot less than they would stand to lose to other untaxed businesses by charging sales tax to such a large percentage of their customers.
Heck, even if the California legislature turned the screw even tighter and it meant relocating or laying off those employees, they'd still be much better off doing that than charging tax in California. Heck, they would probably be better off scrapping A9 and the Kindle entirely than charging sales tax in California. This really isn't a battle that California's legislature can win.
They could wield the threatening power just fine without the government's help. You don't have to have a legitimate case to sue.
That said, the real problem is that lobbyists are basically writing the laws these days. Our congresscritters can say all they want to about the law not being used in that way. Odds are good that MPAA lobbyists wrote this bill, and that they knew exactly how it could be used and wrote it this way very deliberately.
Nothing short of an outright ban on paid lobbying can restore democracy to America.
The problem is, sales tax predominantly impacts the poor. The poor spend a much larger percentage of their income than the rich. Therefore, sales tax is inherently a regressive tax. If you really want a tax that taxes the poor least, you have to ditch sales tax entirely and move to an income tax.
And more to the point, I agree that the people who are most able to afford things should pay the most in taxes, which is why I view any expansion of the sales tax system as a terrible idea, and a step in exactly the wrong direction. The fact that I said I'd be willing to pay some sales tax on online purchases is purely an indication that I feel that I have the money to be able to afford to pay more in taxes, not an indication that a sales tax is the right way to do so. Quite the opposite, in fact. I think sales taxes should be abolished, as they are the most reprehensible means of taxation currently in place, AFAIK.
If California eliminated its sales tax and raised its income tax by... say 50% (putting the highest bracket at around 15%), California would have no budget problem, and the majority of Californians would still pay less in taxes than they do today. More to the point, California would never have a budget crisis again because income from taxes would be much less volatile if based on income rather than expenditures.
Note that I'm pulling the actual numbers out of my you-know-what. They're gross approximations, and someone with access to a table of income distribution in California would have to calculate the actual numbers before deciding on the new income tax brackets.
But for an online service, you could have multiple people concurrently using the single-user service. (I don't know if this is possible with Netflix, or if their system prevents a single account from logging in from multiple locations.)
The thing is, it is the service's responsibility to use technical measures to prevent this, and it is trivial to do so. So basically, this bill's sole purpose is to protect the laziest of the lazy from having to do their jobs.
And do you honestly expect anyone to keep every credit card statement and every receipt for an entire year, then call every single company to find out if they paid tax on dozens of purchases (there is no legal requirement that says that taxes must be itemized on a receipt, so a receipt with no tax shown is not proof that tax was not paid) all for the privilege of paying more tax?
Yeah, didn't think so. Heck, most people don't even bother keeping receipts for things they can itemize so that they can pay less tax. On the whole, the government probably comes out ahead.
Basically, if the government doesn't collect it from retailers, the odds of anyone paying it are pretty much zero.
I don't have a problem with California collecting sales tax on online purchases, so long as that tax is significantly less than the full sales tax, in light of the fact that they shouldn't pay for services they aren't getting. Of course, it won't be. They'll charge the full tax rate simply because they can. As for shipping, costs offsetting it, Amazon offers free shipping on most orders. In spite of rolling the shipping cost into the purchase price, they still come out cheaper than local merchants most of the time, and that's before you factor in sales tax. So it is leveling the playing field a bit, but it still doesn't compensate for California's exorbitant cost of living, land costs, construction costs, etc.
The bigger problem here is that Amazon only has a legal obligation to pay that tax as long as they have a nexus in California. Amazon has no physical presence in California. California is attempting to extend the definition of nexus to include affiliates.
So here's what will happen: California will pass the law. The day it goes into effect, Amazon will terminate its affiliate relationships with everyone in California, and will continue doing business normally without paying a dime of sales taxes. This is what has happened in every state that has passed similar laws, and there's no reason any sane, intelligent person would believe that Amazon would value California affiliates so highly that they would not cut them off in a heartbeat if it meant not losing a sizable percentage of California sales to other companies that don't have to charge CA sales tax. So basically, when this law is passed (and it almost certainly will be, given that our lawmakers are, by and large, idiots), the result will be a substantial loss to California's economy, which will result in a substantial loss in state tax revenue (all of those affiliates were paying California income tax on their earnings) without bringing in a single penny in sales tax revenue.
That said, it will set a great precedent if California does this. I'd be willing to place a bet that once Amazon shows that it has the stones to scrape off its California affiliates with about as much concern as you or I would scrape gum off of our shoes, no other state will be so stupid as to try this. Then again, there's that Einstein quote....
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. —Albert Einstein
look, your standard GSM cellphone broadcasts at roughly 1mW in a nearly isotropic fashion. Your head take up roughly 35 percent (estimate) of the isotropic broadcast sphere. So, when you are on the phone, you are absorbing 350 microwatts of RF. Does it bother you at all that most TV and radio stations broadcast at 5 million to 50 million times the effective irradiated power of your cellphone, at 5kW-50kW?
The distance square law says that the TV stations, whose towers are all on average 30 miles away on the side of a mountain, are attenuated anywhere from four hundred billion to 1.1 trillion times more than the cell phone at three inches from my head or body, so no, it doesn't bother me at all.
To put that in perspective, even if there are 200 stations each putting out 50 million times as much total power, proportionally, the amount of radiation I receive from all of them combined in a year is still about what I receive from my cell phone in three days.
Also, a cell phone hanging on your belt or sitting in your pocket tends to not move around much. Thus, the exposure is entirely on one part of your body all the time, and always from the same direction. This is significantly different from signals transmitted by distant TV and radio transmitters that hit you roughly equally from every possible angle (assuming that you do not just sit in the same spot 24x7).
In short, the two are not at all similar levels of exposure, and really aren't even directly comparable.
As far as I know, assuming a website creates their pages correctly, identifying the fields correctly as being password fields, Safari stores those passwords in the keychain, which means that without access to the user's keychain or login password, you can't get to website passwords unless you compromise the running browser itself.
As for modifying the underlying filesystem, you'd need to be root to do that. There are only three ways for a process to realistically become root without explicit authorization by an admin user: exploit a setuid binary (of which Mac OS X has relatively few—I count only 39 in Snow Leopard, the vast majority of which are BSD tools that have been scrutinized by the Open Source community for decades), exploit a daemon that is running as root, or exploit a kernel bug. Given the size and nature of the code in question, those last two are much more likely than the first.
No, no, no, you misunderstood me. If the NATO member nations were doing nothing wrong, then they would have no need for privacy, and thus by their own logic, the actions of anonymous are ethical and reasonable.
There's a lot of denial here in the thread, though. If cellphones were conclusively proven to cause cancer, one gets the feeling people would cling to them the way people keep smoking cigarettes.
The evidence that at least GSM-style cell phones cause harm (low frequency pulsing) is actually pretty significant. It seems likely that the only reason we're not seeing consistent statistically elevated death rates in human studies is that we're bigger, and thus more meat and bone to absorb the radiation before it would affect our internal organs.
At the very least, having seen some of these recent studies, I'm very much looking forward to LTE and the move away from GSM.
And then they get out into the job market, get "laid off" several times in a row, and find themselves unemployable. Eventually you get caught. Perhaps not in the strictest "I know you cheated at [x]" sense, but caught nonetheless.
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My Facebook account got brute forced just a few months ago. It still happens.
Wow. If my '99 WIndstar did that, I'd have had to take it to the dealer at least two or three times in any given year. Which is to say that I would have ripped out the alarm system and the radio about a week after the warranty ended....
So does that mean that if you leave a light on and run your battery down, you have to take it to the dealer to get it repaired? What freaking lunatic came up with that one? Not that I'll ever buy a Ford again, given my experiences with them, but that just clinches it.
Maybe so, but all the organic milk you can buy around here is ultra-pasteurized (higher temperature). As for me, I buy the organic milk because I can buy it and not have to worry about it going bad before I use it. (Shelf life is typically five or six weeks.)
If that were true, then scrapie, BSE (mad cow disease), and other transmissible encephalopathies would not exist.
The yellow cake is a lie.
I'd love to see every little law enforced. Maybe if Congresspeople were regularly fined hundreds of dollars for doing laundry on Thursday, we'd see a return to a more sensible corpus of legal code that is small enough for an ordinary person to understand it, and in which old, stale, useless laws are regularly pruned to make room for newer, more relevant laws.
That cake was da bomb. It's to die for.
It reminds me of this:
I've been saying for years that we should have something like this, but not for cameras. For ringers.
I want the ability to put "Quiet Zone" beacons in every theater, conference room, and house of worship. When in the presence of an active Quiet Zone beacon (which could be configured to turn on or off depending on time of day, based on whether the house lights in the theater are on or off, etc.), the phone would automatically switch to vibrate, regardless of the user's settings.
Of course, my version of the idea can't be done with infrared because that won't go through someone's pocket or a case, and you can safely assume that if someone's cell phone rings during church or right in the middle of the most suspenseful part of a movie, it is because they forgot to pull it out to switch it to vibrate, so it hasn't been outside of the person's pocket at all. It needs to be a low power RF signal with directional antennas and limited range.
I would also like to have the ability to set "Do Not Disturb" flags on meetings in iCal and have the cell phone's ringer automatically disabled during those meetings, but although that's another way to solve the same problem, it tends not to work nearly as well for unscheduled things like going to see a movie or whatever.
First, this is happening to Android developers as well. Second, although you're on the right track, IMO, defending third-party suits is really not that different from an out-of-court settlement to a lawsuit; it encourages other sleazy IP factories to sue app developers to get a quick payoff at Apple's/Google's expense.
If Apple and Google believe that their contracts with Lodsys grant rights to third-party app developers, then they should sue Lodsys for breach of contract, damage to their reputations (slander), and tortious interference. Between Apple and Google, it shouldn't be hard to thoroughly bury this patent troll company. Anything short of utterly burying them won't be enough of a deterrent to patent troll suits in the future.
Even better, because such suits would not be counter-suits (Lodsys isn't suing Apple or Google, AFAIK), they could be filed in a more friendly district, e.g. Northern California.
Just saying.
*shrugs*
I don't know how big those teams are, but I get the impression we're talking about thirty or forty people in California between them. So all Amazon has to do is make them remote employees, close the office, and raise their salaries to compensate them for the trouble of renting their own space at an office sharing place. Problem solved, all for a lot less than they would stand to lose to other untaxed businesses by charging sales tax to such a large percentage of their customers.
Heck, even if the California legislature turned the screw even tighter and it meant relocating or laying off those employees, they'd still be much better off doing that than charging tax in California. Heck, they would probably be better off scrapping A9 and the Kindle entirely than charging sales tax in California. This really isn't a battle that California's legislature can win.
s/years/femtoseconds/ and I'm okay with it.
They could wield the threatening power just fine without the government's help. You don't have to have a legitimate case to sue.
That said, the real problem is that lobbyists are basically writing the laws these days. Our congresscritters can say all they want to about the law not being used in that way. Odds are good that MPAA lobbyists wrote this bill, and that they knew exactly how it could be used and wrote it this way very deliberately.
Nothing short of an outright ban on paid lobbying can restore democracy to America.
The problem is, sales tax predominantly impacts the poor. The poor spend a much larger percentage of their income than the rich. Therefore, sales tax is inherently a regressive tax. If you really want a tax that taxes the poor least, you have to ditch sales tax entirely and move to an income tax.
And more to the point, I agree that the people who are most able to afford things should pay the most in taxes, which is why I view any expansion of the sales tax system as a terrible idea, and a step in exactly the wrong direction. The fact that I said I'd be willing to pay some sales tax on online purchases is purely an indication that I feel that I have the money to be able to afford to pay more in taxes, not an indication that a sales tax is the right way to do so. Quite the opposite, in fact. I think sales taxes should be abolished, as they are the most reprehensible means of taxation currently in place, AFAIK.
If California eliminated its sales tax and raised its income tax by... say 50% (putting the highest bracket at around 15%), California would have no budget problem, and the majority of Californians would still pay less in taxes than they do today. More to the point, California would never have a budget crisis again because income from taxes would be much less volatile if based on income rather than expenditures.
Note that I'm pulling the actual numbers out of my you-know-what. They're gross approximations, and someone with access to a table of income distribution in California would have to calculate the actual numbers before deciding on the new income tax brackets.
The thing is, it is the service's responsibility to use technical measures to prevent this, and it is trivial to do so. So basically, this bill's sole purpose is to protect the laziest of the lazy from having to do their jobs.
And do you honestly expect anyone to keep every credit card statement and every receipt for an entire year, then call every single company to find out if they paid tax on dozens of purchases (there is no legal requirement that says that taxes must be itemized on a receipt, so a receipt with no tax shown is not proof that tax was not paid) all for the privilege of paying more tax?
Yeah, didn't think so. Heck, most people don't even bother keeping receipts for things they can itemize so that they can pay less tax. On the whole, the government probably comes out ahead.
Basically, if the government doesn't collect it from retailers, the odds of anyone paying it are pretty much zero.
I don't have a problem with California collecting sales tax on online purchases, so long as that tax is significantly less than the full sales tax, in light of the fact that they shouldn't pay for services they aren't getting. Of course, it won't be. They'll charge the full tax rate simply because they can. As for shipping, costs offsetting it, Amazon offers free shipping on most orders. In spite of rolling the shipping cost into the purchase price, they still come out cheaper than local merchants most of the time, and that's before you factor in sales tax. So it is leveling the playing field a bit, but it still doesn't compensate for California's exorbitant cost of living, land costs, construction costs, etc.
The bigger problem here is that Amazon only has a legal obligation to pay that tax as long as they have a nexus in California. Amazon has no physical presence in California. California is attempting to extend the definition of nexus to include affiliates.
So here's what will happen: California will pass the law. The day it goes into effect, Amazon will terminate its affiliate relationships with everyone in California, and will continue doing business normally without paying a dime of sales taxes. This is what has happened in every state that has passed similar laws, and there's no reason any sane, intelligent person would believe that Amazon would value California affiliates so highly that they would not cut them off in a heartbeat if it meant not losing a sizable percentage of California sales to other companies that don't have to charge CA sales tax. So basically, when this law is passed (and it almost certainly will be, given that our lawmakers are, by and large, idiots), the result will be a substantial loss to California's economy, which will result in a substantial loss in state tax revenue (all of those affiliates were paying California income tax on their earnings) without bringing in a single penny in sales tax revenue.
That said, it will set a great precedent if California does this. I'd be willing to place a bet that once Amazon shows that it has the stones to scrape off its California affiliates with about as much concern as you or I would scrape gum off of our shoes, no other state will be so stupid as to try this. Then again, there's that Einstein quote....
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
—Albert Einstein
The distance square law says that the TV stations, whose towers are all on average 30 miles away on the side of a mountain, are attenuated anywhere from four hundred billion to 1.1 trillion times more than the cell phone at three inches from my head or body, so no, it doesn't bother me at all.
To put that in perspective, even if there are 200 stations each putting out 50 million times as much total power, proportionally, the amount of radiation I receive from all of them combined in a year is still about what I receive from my cell phone in three days.
Also, a cell phone hanging on your belt or sitting in your pocket tends to not move around much. Thus, the exposure is entirely on one part of your body all the time, and always from the same direction. This is significantly different from signals transmitted by distant TV and radio transmitters that hit you roughly equally from every possible angle (assuming that you do not just sit in the same spot 24x7).
In short, the two are not at all similar levels of exposure, and really aren't even directly comparable.
As far as I know, assuming a website creates their pages correctly, identifying the fields correctly as being password fields, Safari stores those passwords in the keychain, which means that without access to the user's keychain or login password, you can't get to website passwords unless you compromise the running browser itself.
As for modifying the underlying filesystem, you'd need to be root to do that. There are only three ways for a process to realistically become root without explicit authorization by an admin user: exploit a setuid binary (of which Mac OS X has relatively few—I count only 39 in Snow Leopard, the vast majority of which are BSD tools that have been scrutinized by the Open Source community for decades), exploit a daemon that is running as root, or exploit a kernel bug. Given the size and nature of the code in question, those last two are much more likely than the first.
It's the target that gets them the most press, so more people do their homework by looking for holes ahead of time.
No, no, no, you misunderstood me. If the NATO member nations were doing nothing wrong, then they would have no need for privacy, and thus by their own logic, the actions of anonymous are ethical and reasonable.
Hey, NATO,
What's the matter? You've been telling us for years that if we didn't do anything wrong, there's no need for privacy. Welcome to our world.
Sincerely,
Everyone
They've already been shown to cause changes in gene expression, cognitive impairment, thyroid damage, and up to a 9% reduction in life expectancy in rat studies.
The evidence that at least GSM-style cell phones cause harm (low frequency pulsing) is actually pretty significant. It seems likely that the only reason we're not seeing consistent statistically elevated death rates in human studies is that we're bigger, and thus more meat and bone to absorb the radiation before it would affect our internal organs.
At the very least, having seen some of these recent studies, I'm very much looking forward to LTE and the move away from GSM.
And then they get out into the job market, get "laid off" several times in a row, and find themselves unemployable. Eventually you get caught. Perhaps not in the strictest "I know you cheated at [x]" sense, but caught nonetheless.