Re:free speech doesn't apply!
on
MAPS Sued Again
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· Score: 2
The Constitution can be applied to private parties when they seek to use the courts to enforce contracts. Deed restrictions that prohibit the sale of the property to Blacks and Jews are common in certain areas. The courts will not enforce these restrictions.
It might be a good idea to adopt the new UMTS standard from the GSM group, and while they're at it, the DAB digital radio standard, also the DVB digital tv standard, but these are royalty free technologies from Europe, which means no royalties for US companies and a shed load of jingoism/politics. Oh well.
These are not royalty free technologies. They all require the licensing of patents.
GSM is obsolete and inferior to CDMA. DAB is a failure. DVB-T is the only technology listed that would be good for the USA. Unfortunately, the FCC still believes that ATSC (8-VSB) can be made to work, even though everyone else has jumped ship.
Re:MAPS use is voluntary, what's the beef?
on
MAPS Sued Again
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· Score: 1
Sometimes I wish that judges had the power to "bitchslap" companies and individuals who file bogus lawsuits intended to harass or punish people they don't like. The lawyers should also be disciplined or disbarred.
One of the points in application for H1 visas is that the employer has to pay a rate comparable to the top rates in the industry.
Replace "has to pay" with "supposed to pay".
It has been well documented that some companies have paid well under prevailing wages to their H1B employees. I know from past experience that it can take years for the government to handle these cases, assuming they decide to prosecute at all. Too many sleazebag managers have the attitude that laws are for the losers who get caught.
What are the odds of finding life here on Earth so completely unrelated to anything we know? (Apart from/. trolls, that is)
It does happen. I would nominate the proteins responsible for BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy). It isn't life by the traditional definition, but it multiplies and causes disease.
I believe that the Honeywell computer operation, which had previously absorbed GE's computer operation, was sold to Bull. Honeywell is also composed of parts of the Bendix company, which used to make computers. The Bendix computer division was sold to CDC back in the 1960s. Reading the history of some of these companies is like looking at the geneaology of Europe's royal families, everyone is somebody else's cousin.
It can be an issue, even within the United States. Some states, like Maryland, have passed laws that make it a crime for their citizens to buy tobacco and alcohol products from vendors in other states. This is to protect politically influential distributors and state tax revenues. This makes things difficult if you try to sell these products over the Internet.
Every time I see an article about the next "super battery", I wonder if people have considered the safety issues of batteries with high energy densities and high discharge currents. Under the right conditions, some batteries can explode, catch on fire, go into thermal runaway while being charged, or cause burns when shorted. Lithium ion batteries are already banned in some applications.
I used to work in a electronics maintenance shop that did a lot of work with Ni-Cad batteries. Part of the standard periodic maintenance was the complete discharge of the battery. This was done by discharging the battery to a low level, then the battery was disassembled and the individual cells were discharged down to zero volts. The battery was then reassembled and given a full charge. This isn't practical with most consumer grade batteries. They should never be completely discharged, as this could ruin some of the cells from reverse voltage.
What you, and some other posters, don't seem to understand is that while you may work for a company that treats all of its employees with respect, and follows the spirit of the law, there are other companies that abuse the law and their employees. As an example, AIG dumped its IT staff and outsourced the work to an H1B body shop. See the testimony of Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor, at this page.
If you want something that is easy to implement, try a continuously variable slope delta modulation (CVSDM) encoder/decoder. You can get communications quality voice at 32 kilobit/second. Not as good as the more sophisticated systems used in PCS and secure telephones, but very easy to implement and it doesn't need a fast CPU. It is used on the Space Shuttle's air-to-ground communication links.
(1) his machines were BINARY. ENIAC was stupid enough to be decimal--this is *extremely* inefficient and accounts for why eniac was so damned large.
Decimal is not "stupid". It used to be standard for business computers to use decimal arithmetic and scientific computers to use binary arithmetic. Later computers, notably the IBM 360 series, unified the two, supporting decimal and binary arithmetic on a single system.
If I have a choice between "liberal" justices that view the Constitution as a "living document", feeling free to add new parts and ignore the parts that they don't like, and "conservative" justices that strictly interpret the Constitution, I'll support the candidate that will appoint "conservative" justices.
If you care about freedom, you want a justice that believes that "no law" means "no law".
The UK government seems to be even slower than the US government at declassifying documents. There are laws in the US that specify declassification schedules, but there are plenty of exemptions for things like cryptographic related information. There is still stuff from World War II that hasn't been declassified.
I've read that some (most?) of the pirate CD plants are owned and run by the PLA (People's Liberation Army). This makes it a bit difficult for the government to crack down on piracy. Just think if Napster was owned by the 82nd Airborne.
Believe me, the last thing that you want is an efficient Congress. It would be the death of us all if every "good idea" on Capitol Hill was made into law.
Teenagers, as a group, do stupid things at a higher rate than the general population. As they get older, experience, maturity, and in extreme cases, Darwin, reduce their accident rate. Men, who are biologically expendable, are much more likely to be involved in accidents than women. Teenage males are much more expensive to insure than other drivers. See this page for some statistics on death rates broken down by age and gender.
It isn't all bad news, young people pay less for health and life insurance. I would gladly pay teenage male rates for auto insurance if it included an 18-year old body:-).
The insurance industry indirectly discriminates on the basis of other factors, due to the practice of setting rates on the basis of ZIP code. My insurance rates increased noticably when I moved to my current residence, which is in an area with lower incomes and higher crime rates than my previous residence.
The problem with cutting the fuel tax is how the government would replace the lost revenues or what spending programs would be cut. This is a common problem in the USA, too many people think that government benefits fall out of the sky, as shown by much of the recent discussion on adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.
The USA and the UK provided rotor machines to many countries after World War II. They neglected to inform the recipients that the machines had been cracked.
In later years, the NSA and other NATO intelligence agencies arranged for subtle defects to be added to the systems sold by Crypto AG.
I wouldn't doubt that the NSA is still trying to get backdoors installed in commercial software. How successful they've been is an open question.
Xerox provided the Soviet embassy in Washington with a photocopy machine that had a "special feature", a well hidden camera that photographed every document that was copied.
I've often wondered why so many operating systems have a superuser account that overrides all security controls. If an ordinary user has a file that has its permissions set to read/write by user only (Unix mode 0600), why should the operating system allow any other user access to that file? Windows NT started out with some good ideas but someone screwed it up by adding the take ownership feature. Someone might ask, how do you backup the files on the system? One solution would be to give special access rights to a trusted and audited backup/restore program. I would also suggest that the backup program encrypt all data stored on tape with its own private key.
If you have the choice, and sometimes you don't, sign up with a local company that has real people to answer the phones and email. It is too easy to get lost in the bureaucracy of a large corporation. I belong to a local credit union that has gained quite a few new customers at the expense of the megabanks who bought up most of the local banks. Customer service at the megabanks seems to consist of an 800 number that is routed to a customer service center in some other state.
IBM has worked on similar projects in the past. There was the cryptolope
project, which was supposed to be a secure way of delivering content over the Internet
Besides the other problems that have been mentioned, GPS receivers do not work very well inside buildings. You usually have to install an external antenna on the roof of the building.
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The Constitution can be applied to private parties when they seek to use the courts to enforce contracts. Deed restrictions that prohibit the sale of the property to Blacks and Jews are common in certain areas. The courts will not enforce these restrictions.
These are not royalty free technologies. They all require the licensing of patents.
GSM is obsolete and inferior to CDMA. DAB is a failure. DVB-T is the only technology listed that would be good for the USA. Unfortunately, the FCC still believes that ATSC (8-VSB) can be made to work, even though everyone else has jumped ship.
Sometimes I wish that judges had the power to "bitchslap" companies and individuals who file bogus lawsuits intended to harass or punish people they don't like. The lawyers should also be disciplined or disbarred.
Replace "has to pay" with "supposed to pay".
It has been well documented that some companies have paid well under prevailing wages to their H1B employees. I know from past experience that it can take years for the government to handle these cases, assuming they decide to prosecute at all. Too many sleazebag managers have the attitude that laws are for the losers who get caught.
It does happen. I would nominate the proteins responsible for BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy). It isn't life by the traditional definition, but it multiplies and causes disease.
I believe that the Honeywell computer operation, which had previously absorbed GE's computer operation, was sold to Bull. Honeywell is also composed of parts of the Bendix company, which used to make computers. The Bendix computer division was sold to CDC back in the 1960s. Reading the history of some of these companies is like looking at the geneaology of Europe's royal families, everyone is somebody else's cousin.
It can be an issue, even within the United States. Some states, like Maryland, have passed laws that make it a crime for their citizens to buy tobacco and alcohol products from vendors in other states. This is to protect politically influential distributors and state tax revenues. This makes things difficult if you try to sell these products over the Internet.
Every time I see an article about the next "super battery", I wonder if people have considered the safety issues of batteries with high energy densities and high discharge currents. Under the right conditions, some batteries can explode, catch on fire, go into thermal runaway while being charged, or cause burns when shorted. Lithium ion batteries are already banned in some applications.
I used to work in a electronics maintenance shop that did a lot of work with Ni-Cad batteries. Part of the standard periodic maintenance was the complete discharge of the battery. This was done by discharging the battery to a low level, then the battery was disassembled and the individual cells were discharged down to zero volts. The battery was then reassembled and given a full charge. This isn't practical with most consumer grade batteries. They should never be completely discharged, as this could ruin some of the cells from reverse voltage.
What about it, you stupid <ethnic group> <gender> <religion> <sexual orientation>?
Is that "hate speech"? Is it a thought crime to use a forbidden word?
What you, and some other posters, don't seem to understand is that while you may work for a company that treats all of its employees with respect, and follows the spirit of the law, there are other companies that abuse the law and their employees. As an example, AIG dumped its IT staff and outsourced the work to an H1B body shop. See the testimony of Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor, at this page.
If you want something that is easy to implement, try a continuously variable slope delta modulation (CVSDM) encoder/decoder. You can get communications quality voice at 32 kilobit/second. Not as good as the more sophisticated systems used in PCS and secure telephones, but very easy to implement and it doesn't need a fast CPU. It is used on the Space Shuttle's air-to-ground communication links.
The commercial version of PGP will allow you to create encrypted disks in container files. That would be much simpler than attempting to hack NTFS.
Decimal is not "stupid". It used to be standard for business computers to use decimal arithmetic and scientific computers to use binary arithmetic. Later computers, notably the IBM 360 series, unified the two, supporting decimal and binary arithmetic on a single system.
If you care about freedom, you want a justice that believes that "no law" means "no law".
The UK government seems to be even slower than the US government at declassifying documents. There are laws in the US that specify declassification schedules, but there are plenty of exemptions for things like cryptographic related information. There is still stuff from World War II that hasn't been declassified.
I've read that some (most?) of the pirate CD plants are owned and run by the PLA (People's Liberation Army). This makes it a bit difficult for the government to crack down on piracy. Just think if Napster was owned by the 82nd Airborne.
Believe me, the last thing that you want is an efficient Congress. It would be the death of us all if every "good idea" on Capitol Hill was made into law.
It isn't all bad news, young people pay less for health and life insurance. I would gladly pay teenage male rates for auto insurance if it included an 18-year old body :-).
The insurance industry indirectly discriminates on the basis of other factors, due to the practice of setting rates on the basis of ZIP code. My insurance rates increased noticably when I moved to my current residence, which is in an area with lower incomes and higher crime rates than my previous residence.
The problem with cutting the fuel tax is how the government would replace the lost revenues or what spending programs would be cut. This is a common problem in the USA, too many people think that government benefits fall out of the sky, as shown by much of the recent discussion on adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.
In later years, the NSA and other NATO intelligence agencies arranged for subtle defects to be added to the systems sold by Crypto AG.
I wouldn't doubt that the NSA is still trying to get backdoors installed in commercial software. How successful they've been is an open question.
Xerox provided the Soviet embassy in Washington with a photocopy machine that had a "special feature", a well hidden camera that photographed every document that was copied.
I've often wondered why so many operating systems have a superuser account that overrides all security controls. If an ordinary user has a file that has its permissions set to read/write by user only (Unix mode 0600), why should the operating system allow any other user access to that file? Windows NT started out with some good ideas but someone screwed it up by adding the take ownership feature. Someone might ask, how do you backup the files on the system? One solution would be to give special access rights to a trusted and audited backup/restore program. I would also suggest that the backup program encrypt all data stored on tape with its own private key.
If you have the choice, and sometimes you don't, sign up with a local company that has real people to answer the phones and email. It is too easy to get lost in the bureaucracy of a large corporation. I belong to a local credit union that has gained quite a few new customers at the expense of the megabanks who bought up most of the local banks. Customer service at the megabanks seems to consist of an 800 number that is routed to a customer service center in some other state.
IBM has worked on similar projects in the past. There was the cryptolope project, which was supposed to be a secure way of delivering content over the Internet
Besides the other problems that have been mentioned, GPS receivers do not work very well inside buildings. You usually have to install an external antenna on the roof of the building.