I know what the groupthink around here is, but "...now, because of videos, we are seeing just how systemic and widespread it is" is an expression of a preconceived notion, not a valid inference from data.
It's hardly a statistical analysis(no surprise for a sentence-long chunk of text that doesn't even have any numbers in it); but there's a fairly strong cause for suspicion: We know (actually, we surprisingly frequently don't, because apparently nobody bothers to track this very hard) approximately how many police/public interactions occur where the public side ends up dead; and we know that those have historically been deemed either justified or minimally culpable virtually all the time. Now, we have access to independent video in a relatively small and unsystematic sample of those cases; and it turns out to differ from the official story fairly frequently.
Given the poor quality of the overall records, and the difficulty of characterizing the distribution of independently videoed encounters compared to encounters as a whole, it would be quite a trick to come up with any reasonably precise "Number of past justified uses of force that were actually murder" number; but a great deal easier to support the hypothesis that it isn't a small problem if it shows up in such a limited sample.
Isn't the 'app' development process to the point where you don't even consider shipping until you've built at least one egregious privacy issue into your product?
The trouble, of course, is that once you connect something to the internet(especially if every single unit phones home to one half-assed 'cloud management' server that can get cracked and compromise everyone without all the tedious IP-guessing), you make attacks in bulk, without regard for geography, trivial.
Weak security on things that you need to be quite nearby to exploit certainly isn't good(and can make things like car theft or burglary easier); but they inherently limit the number of people you need to worry about. Once the internet enters the picture, anyone on earth with vague technical knowledge and income high enough to not be living in a box can potentially be messing with you, for fun or profit, or both.
They do. Playing state governments against one another in a race to the bottom is SOP(doesn't work for matters where the feds have taken jurisdiction; but for things like gutting state workers comp regulations, they've been enormously successful).
That's a slightly different tactic(here, they were exploiting the wedge between 'values' and 'business', when eroding worker rights, environmental restrictions, or scoring 'development incentives', the play is usually a 'be pro-business, get to claim job creation!' pitch); but it's another case were state governments have proven to be fairly weak negotiators vs. corporations of nontrivial size. That experience probably didn't dampen the confidence of the various companies that decided to publicly condemn Indiana, it's virtually certain that all have tried, and most or all have succeeded, at pushing around a state government before.
Companies can and do try to pull the same things on countries; but success is more mixed: smaller, weaker, or less diversified countries can usually be pushed(extraction industries, like mining and oil drilling have particular experience here, since they have to go where the minerals are; but also need very little in the way of a supporting local economy to function); others are harder to directly manipulate; but companies can move between them as their labor costs and environmental standards dictate.
As it happens, I think that Fiorina is a terrible person and even worse presidential candidate; but my agreement or disagreement(with her or with the law being fought over, or both) is pretty much irrelevant to the assessment of why Apple(and others) acted as they did vs. Indiana but not vs. Saudi Arabia: they aren't being hypocritical, they are simply pragmatically attempting to advance an agenda they care about(but only to a finite extent) in the areas where circumstances suggest that they will be able to do so and not attempting unwinnable pushes.
That's more or less what every public statement a company issues is intended to do(not always successfully calculated; but they try): get what they want where the cost of getting it is less than the value of getting it, avoid fights that they can't win, or can't win cost effectively.
Indiana is the low hanging fruit in this case: For US political purposes, politicians that cultivate 'pro-business' images either also cultivate 'values', or tend to work with those who do. Here, the legislature was hoping to throw the 'values' voters a bone by solving a mostly imaginary problem, ideally without any political cost to themselves(except a little extra antipathy from the liberals who weren't going to vote for them anyway).
That puts Apple(and the assorted other companies that have denounced the move, it's a bit of a list) in a fairly strong position: they can't necessarily stop Indiana from doing something; but they can make it clear that you can't burnish your social-conservative credentials without risking your pro-business credentials. It's a natural 'wedge' issue. If Apple and others say nothing, people who are basically interested in business get to pander to social conservatives for free. If they say something, that won't change the game for politicians whose primary support is social conservative; but it will make the ones who listen to the local chamber of commerce much jumpier about doing this sort of thing.
Without access to that particular political dynamic, their ability to influence a foreign market is a great deal weaker, if present at all.
Given what the job market for people with only high school diplomas looks like, we may have indirectly 'solved' that problem, in the sense that interest in the details of your diploma is even lower than interest in your SAT score.
That would have its virtues; but doesn't cover a few cases, some of which are on display here: The tests that were being doctored are administered at multiple grade levels(as they are in most states with similar testing systems); because they want feedback that is more granular and more frequent than "GED success rate of alumni", which is not terribly useful for middle and elementary schools in particular. From the student's perspective, you also want to discover that things are going off the rails well before they finish high school, not when they finish and turn out to be a write off.
Then there's just the logistics of administration: this test, put together by some statewide curriculum body, administered to all students, not customized in any way by instructors, was supposed to be the 'outside' grade not controlled by the people teaching. Unfortunately, some mixture of naive trust and limited resources produced a chain of custody that was pitifully worthless and left the test materials with more or less no defense against manipulation prior to scoring. Not a wildly difficult problem to fix; but doing it securely is definitely going to cost more than just re-using the labor you already have.
I hardly expect high standards, adherence to even basic good practice, or other non-awfulness from most of the wretched 'app' morass; but I'm a bit surprised that whoever made this one found it easier to build a hilariously worthless system from scratch, rather than misuse, and probably violate the license of, some existing encryption library or command line application(or, y'know, go crazy and use the Android Cryptography API)...
There's still plenty of room for error when using someone else's tools, so I wouldn't necessarily expect the results to be bulletproof; but "actually uses an encryption algorithm; pity it fucks up key management." would at least be doable.
Making sure that your racketeer influenced and corrupt organization is also a nice respectable LLC can be very helpful in keeping RICO away, as best I can tell from recent history...
I suspect that this is irrelevant to your little rant; but it's commonly the case for teachers(and some; but not all, flavors of support staff) to be unionized; but administrators, principals, and the superintendent almost certainly weren't.
Moral of the trial appears to be "Don't mess with the feds unless you've been granted too big to fail status".
Moral of the story seems to be that, surprise surprise, if you attempt to rule by the metric, you'd better be damned good at using it or all you'll get is peons who are good at gaming the metric. You'll get there even faster if you make demands that can only be satisfied by gaming the metric; with extra credit for exquisitely defeating the purpose of data-driven-improvement by creating a class of people whose organizational survival depends on gaming the metric, and who can then be reliably expected to intimidate and retaliate against anyone who makes gaming the metric harder (like any honorable and/or competent enough to succeed without cheating employees you might have...)
Obviously, you can't get much of anything done if you just pretend that the world, is, like, fundamentally inaccessible to your reductionist empirical 'measurements', man... and sometimes there's simply no pretending that it isn't time to cut some dead weight; but the sheer naivete of these test score based funding allocation proposals(and implementations) seriously makes me wonder if the people proposing them are just dumb, actually believed that most schools that suck suck because of slacking and can be fixed just by whipping the slackers a bit, or whether the intent was always just to find a nice, 'objective' way to declare the schools a write-off and purge them.
Based on the results, it's impossible to argue that these schools are just A-OK and peachy keen; but it's not exactly news that "just intimidate and fire workers until Wall Street smiles" has not worked all that well as a corporate management strategy, and many of these testing initiatives seem to be largely the same plan, adapted for the public sector.
As it happens, Scalia concurred with the majority on the applicability of the interstate commerce clause in Gonzales v. Raich. He didn't endorse the majority opinion, and wrote his concurrence on slightly different grounds; but concur he did. Whether this is because he communed with the spirits of the founding fathers and they told him that this was in line with their original intentions, or whether he doesn't like potheads is unclear.
Why would you embrace the future if a substantial portion of your wealth is also stuck in the past?
(Even more so when you can act to hobble the future just a bit, locally; but also have the resources to enjoy its fruits by importing them from other areas if you desire. It's like asking "Why do the dictators of ghastly hellholes not try to improve their countries? Don't they want to be the ruler of a better and more prosperous, healthy, etc. country?" They don't really need to care; because they have enough plunder in the bank to import the amenities of basically any society in the world for their own enjoyment, it's not like they have to be able to produce it domestically or do without.)
If Congress were to pass some 'Free Sale of Vehicles and American Free Enterprise Act', which explicitly overrode laws like this, it would take about 10 seconds for the supreme court to decide that a law governing business within West Virginia is subordinate to federal authority because intrastate commerce has an affect on interstate commerce (that's basically Gonzales v. Raich, so they could cut and paste); but congress hasn't done so.
The Interstate Commerce Clause doesn't require the feds to regulate any and all matters of interstate commerce, it just gives them the authority to, if they so choose. Without any contradictory federal legislation there is no conflict, and no case; but if there were I'd be shocked to see a commerce clause argument fail.
I'm not against good monitors; but (alas) we are still at the point where most monitors are not 'good' in all respects, but forcused on being good for one thing or another, until you get to some rather heroically expensive ones.
In a case like this, the U2413 is nice, and hardly excessive; but if you skipped the classy color fidelity features you could likely pick up two mediocre monitors of the same resolution, or get more work room with a 2560x1440 or similar; and screen space matters more than color when manipulating text.
Dual monitors can be a bit of a 'conversion experience' thing. I, also, have never seen anyone regret getting a second screen; but I've seen quite a few people who didn't think that they'd have any use for such a thing until they got it and had a day or two to get used to it.
I doubt that that is why entire organizations are stingy with screens; but it can be something where someone will be a skeptic until they've tried it for themselves.
In that vein, I'd tend to suspect that the website operators themselves are (in part) likely to want to do this purely for their own interests:
Young kids have limited buying power, and aren't really in the market for things that get advertised on porn sites or likely to subscribe to paywalled ones, are unlikely to be terribly into porn, and will be terrible PR if their discovery of the wacky world of gangbangs or whatever through your services comes to the attention of their parents, the authorities, or the media. Just not good business.
Teens are really where the interests of the operators and the desires of parents and politicians start to part ways: they are much more likely to be interested, and potentially even customers; but it's terribly impolite to admit that. However, it's not news that a horny teenager can cut through client-side censorware with the power of sheer lust and/or trivial googling.
This makes the "We are a responsible industry, and we clearly label our products as for responsible legal adults only! Concerned parents, try this handy family-safety software!" line both minimally costly in terms of loss of customer reach and plays much better than 'information wants to be free, man! you can't block the internet!' when it comes to keeping regulators off your back.
I'm a little surprised that there haven't been any cases(at least not ones that have come to light) of somebody solving this 'problem' by the means that would actually work.
'Precocious puberty' is occasionally a problem, for various reasons, and treatments are available. Nothing except medical ethics and the strong odds that it's a terrible plan with the potential for unpleasant and life-long consequences would prevent the same treatment from being used to delay the onset of puberty in 'normal' children.
Just keep shooting kiddo full of Leuprorelin and he or she can remain free of dirty hormones for years longer than usual! And so much less barbaric looking than just castrating them...
(And, incidentally, there was a brief craze in alt-med circles for treating autism with Leuprorelin, based on some nonsense about how testosterone was keeping the mercury from getting chelated out or something, and a nontrivial number of people were able to get prescriptions for the stuff, despite it not being remotely tested or approved for autism, so it wouldn't necessarily be impossible to get it for equally spurious reasons.)
I suspect that the answer is depressing close to "no"; but it's important to remember the context: election season is ramping up in the UK and all the parties are currently making assorted promises of dubious truth and plausibility in an attempt to curry favor with their constituencies. In this case, won't-someone-please-think-of-the-children!!! nonsense plays pretty well across the board, is a logical extension of the existing Tory Great-Firewall-of-Cameron efforts, and may be an attempt to burnish their reactionary credentials to try to counter UKIP without having to say anything excessively embarrassing.
They may or may not think that it's possible; and may not even much care; but as a piece of political theater it is logical enough. Remember, you only need to be an expert on getting elected in order to make it into office. Never underestimate a politician's skill in this area; but never let one pretend that it implies skill in other areas.
It wouldn't stop people from asking; but this one seems like one of those "either inevitable, or nothing to worry about" requests.
If MS is in a situation where they think that they can(as with Adobe and their 'Creative Cloud' licensing move for CS versions 6+), the money will just be too good to pass up and they'll force the issue. Maybe keep around a few overpriced non-subscription SKUs that mysteriously turn out to cost about as much as the subscription price over their supported lifetime just to silence the whiners; but structure the incentives such that almost nobody will buy that. In a lot of enterprise contexts, this is already substantially the case, and some flavor of 'Software Assurance' is already being paid.
If MS is in a situation where they think they'll sacrifice platform dominance if they push it, they'll fold. Observe the existence of "Windows 8.1 with Bing", which is basically "Free anywhere you would have installed ChromeOS or Android if we charged you $50", and the general low to zero price of OEM Windows on the various tablety things that are knife fighting with Android or ChromeOS on the low end.
Under 'Space-wise', I'd add "don't be penny-wise-pound-foolish when equipping people". Yes, not all requests are reasonable(you need a color-calibrated monitor that covers at least 99% of aRGB to write code, why?); but most reasonable requests are pretty damn cheap compared to somebody you'd trust to write your code or operate your IT systems. You will not improve happiness or productivity; and (when productivity is taken into account) probably won't even save money by denying people extra monitors, that comfy ergonomic keyboard, etc. Even non-technical generic office function types are often less well equipped than would make sense(yes, 1280x1024 is what Dell was selling in 2007, and that monitor does still work. Do you want to think about the percentage of your accountant's salary that is, in fact, buying 'scrolling horizontally' rather than 'accounting'?); but people writing code or looking a a big pile of configuration and status interfaces generally need the space.
There's no such thing as a free lunch; but there are areas where comparative advantage, economies of scale, and convenience all play a role.
Do I actually think that the office coffee supply isn't coming, in some small way, out of my paycheck? No, certainly not. Do I think that the cup of coffee I am able to have because of it is fresher than something that came from home in a thermos, cheaper than something from the local coffee place, and more convenient than having to pick it up from the local coffee place? Yes, that I do.
It is true that the 'free' stuff continuum increasingly becomes mediocre non-monetary compensation picked out for you by the company in order to keep you in the office as you get more extreme; but for certain logistical support functions the fact that it is on site and cheaper in bulk can compensate for this. It also depends on location: some office parks and corporate campuses would have basically zero supply of food, coffee, or anything that isn't banal landscaping and generic buildings for a 15+ minute drive in any direction unless they had some sort of cafeteria facility built in(not necessarily free; but even the ones you pay in tend to be there because the companies that rent the space want that amenity available, not because a plucky restaurant just decided to start up). If the workplace is in a denser urban area, the local coffee place may still be more expensive than the office drip pot; but you'll at least have options if you want to get lunch or something.
It's also a nicely crafted piece of doublespeak: 'carte blanche to just spy on people' suggests a right to just chose somebody for whatever reason you feel like and just start spying on them, for whatever reason. As far as we know, unsystematic picking of random targets isn't something that the NSA does a lot of, and it may well be something they don't have legal authority to do.
However, pretty much the whole point of public displeasure over what the NSA has been doing is that its programs are sufficiently broad, and the inclusion criteria sufficiently trivial, that essentially everyone, everywhere, all the time, is probably covered. They don't need the right to pick you out of a hat for personal attention, because they act like they have a mandate to get what they can on everyone, just daily course of business.
It's well done. Deny that you do something largely irrelevant to what you are actually accused of; but in a way that sounds similar to denying the occurrence of the consequences of what you actually do.
Even if their daily grind gives them no personal access to the objectionable work being done; only stupidity or willful ignorance would prevent them from learning about and thinking about what the NSA does in the same way the rest of us did.
Somebody who just pushes buttons or spies on North Korea or whatever wouldn't have any reason to develop an on-the-job sense that they were doing the wrong thing; but when you can't open a newspaper without seeing reports on 'NSA basically spies on all the stuff, all the time, at home and abroad; FISA is a sad joke, massive domestic dragnet, etc, etc.'; the fact that you don't feel like you do bad things at work is irrelevant to your consideration of whether your employer does some deeply troubling work.
In fact, if they do feel 'betrayed'; it's hard to argue that they aren't explicitly identifying with the actions of the agency; even if their job is unrelated to the ones that caught the public eye. Given that those programs were effectively certain to operate with impunity for as long as they wanted if they went undiscovered(even with public knowledge, they've been substantially resistant to any real change); there is very little room for a "Well, those programs are wrong but Snowden should have opposed them more responsibly!" position that isn't bullshit. Filling out a form and dropping it in the suggestion box or sending his boss a worried email or something would have been indistinguishable from doing nothing, in terms of effect.
I don't know what the state of insulin pumps is; but the product here is for in-hospital infusion pumps. I assume that the demand is basically "We have dozens to hundreds of these pumps all over the building(s), each one dispensing some drug on some schedule, with both of those changing from time to time on all units, and we want to be able to keep track of that. Also, some configuration errors could be fatal, so it would be nice to be able to check them against a data source larger and more frequently updated than anything internal to the pump."
They clearly fucked up the implementation; but that's the sort of problem where I'd be sorely tempted to punch the vendor if I couldn't get a MIB out of them. I suspect that it doesn't help, at all, that hospital infusion pumps are very likely to be used with drugs that you can't necessarily trust all of your staff with(anesthetics have a habit of being zesty opiates, to which one or more of your staff may already have developed an addiction, let's see how long they can cover it up!) , so you have more limited options in terms of who you can send out with a programming cable and a strong incentive to get the data to a location where discrepancies are harder to hide.
Slashdot Mirror
I know what the groupthink around here is, but "...now, because of videos, we are seeing just how systemic and widespread it is" is an expression of a preconceived notion, not a valid inference from data.
It's hardly a statistical analysis(no surprise for a sentence-long chunk of text that doesn't even have any numbers in it); but there's a fairly strong cause for suspicion: We know (actually, we surprisingly frequently don't, because apparently nobody bothers to track this very hard) approximately how many police/public interactions occur where the public side ends up dead; and we know that those have historically been deemed either justified or minimally culpable virtually all the time. Now, we have access to independent video in a relatively small and unsystematic sample of those cases; and it turns out to differ from the official story fairly frequently.
Given the poor quality of the overall records, and the difficulty of characterizing the distribution of independently videoed encounters compared to encounters as a whole, it would be quite a trick to come up with any reasonably precise "Number of past justified uses of force that were actually murder" number; but a great deal easier to support the hypothesis that it isn't a small problem if it shows up in such a limited sample.
Isn't the 'app' development process to the point where you don't even consider shipping until you've built at least one egregious privacy issue into your product?
The trouble, of course, is that once you connect something to the internet(especially if every single unit phones home to one half-assed 'cloud management' server that can get cracked and compromise everyone without all the tedious IP-guessing), you make attacks in bulk, without regard for geography, trivial.
Weak security on things that you need to be quite nearby to exploit certainly isn't good(and can make things like car theft or burglary easier); but they inherently limit the number of people you need to worry about. Once the internet enters the picture, anyone on earth with vague technical knowledge and income high enough to not be living in a box can potentially be messing with you, for fun or profit, or both.
They do. Playing state governments against one another in a race to the bottom is SOP(doesn't work for matters where the feds have taken jurisdiction; but for things like gutting state workers comp regulations, they've been enormously successful).
That's a slightly different tactic(here, they were exploiting the wedge between 'values' and 'business', when eroding worker rights, environmental restrictions, or scoring 'development incentives', the play is usually a 'be pro-business, get to claim job creation!' pitch); but it's another case were state governments have proven to be fairly weak negotiators vs. corporations of nontrivial size. That experience probably didn't dampen the confidence of the various companies that decided to publicly condemn Indiana, it's virtually certain that all have tried, and most or all have succeeded, at pushing around a state government before.
Companies can and do try to pull the same things on countries; but success is more mixed: smaller, weaker, or less diversified countries can usually be pushed(extraction industries, like mining and oil drilling have particular experience here, since they have to go where the minerals are; but also need very little in the way of a supporting local economy to function); others are harder to directly manipulate; but companies can move between them as their labor costs and environmental standards dictate.
As it happens, I think that Fiorina is a terrible person and even worse presidential candidate; but my agreement or disagreement(with her or with the law being fought over, or both) is pretty much irrelevant to the assessment of why Apple(and others) acted as they did vs. Indiana but not vs. Saudi Arabia: they aren't being hypocritical, they are simply pragmatically attempting to advance an agenda they care about(but only to a finite extent) in the areas where circumstances suggest that they will be able to do so and not attempting unwinnable pushes.
That's more or less what every public statement a company issues is intended to do(not always successfully calculated; but they try): get what they want where the cost of getting it is less than the value of getting it, avoid fights that they can't win, or can't win cost effectively.
Why would those situations be equivalent?
Indiana is the low hanging fruit in this case: For US political purposes, politicians that cultivate 'pro-business' images either also cultivate 'values', or tend to work with those who do. Here, the legislature was hoping to throw the 'values' voters a bone by solving a mostly imaginary problem, ideally without any political cost to themselves(except a little extra antipathy from the liberals who weren't going to vote for them anyway).
That puts Apple(and the assorted other companies that have denounced the move, it's a bit of a list) in a fairly strong position: they can't necessarily stop Indiana from doing something; but they can make it clear that you can't burnish your social-conservative credentials without risking your pro-business credentials. It's a natural 'wedge' issue. If Apple and others say nothing, people who are basically interested in business get to pander to social conservatives for free. If they say something, that won't change the game for politicians whose primary support is social conservative; but it will make the ones who listen to the local chamber of commerce much jumpier about doing this sort of thing.
Without access to that particular political dynamic, their ability to influence a foreign market is a great deal weaker, if present at all.
Given what the job market for people with only high school diplomas looks like, we may have indirectly 'solved' that problem, in the sense that interest in the details of your diploma is even lower than interest in your SAT score.
That would have its virtues; but doesn't cover a few cases, some of which are on display here: The tests that were being doctored are administered at multiple grade levels(as they are in most states with similar testing systems); because they want feedback that is more granular and more frequent than "GED success rate of alumni", which is not terribly useful for middle and elementary schools in particular. From the student's perspective, you also want to discover that things are going off the rails well before they finish high school, not when they finish and turn out to be a write off.
Then there's just the logistics of administration: this test, put together by some statewide curriculum body, administered to all students, not customized in any way by instructors, was supposed to be the 'outside' grade not controlled by the people teaching. Unfortunately, some mixture of naive trust and limited resources produced a chain of custody that was pitifully worthless and left the test materials with more or less no defense against manipulation prior to scoring. Not a wildly difficult problem to fix; but doing it securely is definitely going to cost more than just re-using the labor you already have.
I hardly expect high standards, adherence to even basic good practice, or other non-awfulness from most of the wretched 'app' morass; but I'm a bit surprised that whoever made this one found it easier to build a hilariously worthless system from scratch, rather than misuse, and probably violate the license of, some existing encryption library or command line application(or, y'know, go crazy and use the Android Cryptography API)...
There's still plenty of room for error when using someone else's tools, so I wouldn't necessarily expect the results to be bulletproof; but "actually uses an encryption algorithm; pity it fucks up key management." would at least be doable.
Making sure that your racketeer influenced and corrupt organization is also a nice respectable LLC can be very helpful in keeping RICO away, as best I can tell from recent history...
I suspect that this is irrelevant to your little rant; but it's commonly the case for teachers(and some; but not all, flavors of support staff) to be unionized; but administrators, principals, and the superintendent almost certainly weren't.
Moral of the trial appears to be "Don't mess with the feds unless you've been granted too big to fail status".
Moral of the story seems to be that, surprise surprise, if you attempt to rule by the metric, you'd better be damned good at using it or all you'll get is peons who are good at gaming the metric. You'll get there even faster if you make demands that can only be satisfied by gaming the metric; with extra credit for exquisitely defeating the purpose of data-driven-improvement by creating a class of people whose organizational survival depends on gaming the metric, and who can then be reliably expected to intimidate and retaliate against anyone who makes gaming the metric harder (like any honorable and/or competent enough to succeed without cheating employees you might have...)
Obviously, you can't get much of anything done if you just pretend that the world, is, like, fundamentally inaccessible to your reductionist empirical 'measurements', man... and sometimes there's simply no pretending that it isn't time to cut some dead weight; but the sheer naivete of these test score based funding allocation proposals(and implementations) seriously makes me wonder if the people proposing them are just dumb, actually believed that most schools that suck suck because of slacking and can be fixed just by whipping the slackers a bit, or whether the intent was always just to find a nice, 'objective' way to declare the schools a write-off and purge them.
Based on the results, it's impossible to argue that these schools are just A-OK and peachy keen; but it's not exactly news that "just intimidate and fire workers until Wall Street smiles" has not worked all that well as a corporate management strategy, and many of these testing initiatives seem to be largely the same plan, adapted for the public sector.
As it happens, Scalia concurred with the majority on the applicability of the interstate commerce clause in Gonzales v. Raich. He didn't endorse the majority opinion, and wrote his concurrence on slightly different grounds; but concur he did. Whether this is because he communed with the spirits of the founding fathers and they told him that this was in line with their original intentions, or whether he doesn't like potheads is unclear.
Why would you embrace the future if a substantial portion of your wealth is also stuck in the past?
(Even more so when you can act to hobble the future just a bit, locally; but also have the resources to enjoy its fruits by importing them from other areas if you desire. It's like asking "Why do the dictators of ghastly hellholes not try to improve their countries? Don't they want to be the ruler of a better and more prosperous, healthy, etc. country?" They don't really need to care; because they have enough plunder in the bank to import the amenities of basically any society in the world for their own enjoyment, it's not like they have to be able to produce it domestically or do without.)
If Congress were to pass some 'Free Sale of Vehicles and American Free Enterprise Act', which explicitly overrode laws like this, it would take about 10 seconds for the supreme court to decide that a law governing business within West Virginia is subordinate to federal authority because intrastate commerce has an affect on interstate commerce (that's basically Gonzales v. Raich, so they could cut and paste); but congress hasn't done so.
The Interstate Commerce Clause doesn't require the feds to regulate any and all matters of interstate commerce, it just gives them the authority to, if they so choose. Without any contradictory federal legislation there is no conflict, and no case; but if there were I'd be shocked to see a commerce clause argument fail.
I'm not against good monitors; but (alas) we are still at the point where most monitors are not 'good' in all respects, but forcused on being good for one thing or another, until you get to some rather heroically expensive ones.
In a case like this, the U2413 is nice, and hardly excessive; but if you skipped the classy color fidelity features you could likely pick up two mediocre monitors of the same resolution, or get more work room with a 2560x1440 or similar; and screen space matters more than color when manipulating text.
Dual monitors can be a bit of a 'conversion experience' thing. I, also, have never seen anyone regret getting a second screen; but I've seen quite a few people who didn't think that they'd have any use for such a thing until they got it and had a day or two to get used to it.
I doubt that that is why entire organizations are stingy with screens; but it can be something where someone will be a skeptic until they've tried it for themselves.
In that vein, I'd tend to suspect that the website operators themselves are (in part) likely to want to do this purely for their own interests:
Young kids have limited buying power, and aren't really in the market for things that get advertised on porn sites or likely to subscribe to paywalled ones, are unlikely to be terribly into porn, and will be terrible PR if their discovery of the wacky world of gangbangs or whatever through your services comes to the attention of their parents, the authorities, or the media. Just not good business.
Teens are really where the interests of the operators and the desires of parents and politicians start to part ways: they are much more likely to be interested, and potentially even customers; but it's terribly impolite to admit that. However, it's not news that a horny teenager can cut through client-side censorware with the power of sheer lust and/or trivial googling.
This makes the "We are a responsible industry, and we clearly label our products as for responsible legal adults only! Concerned parents, try this handy family-safety software!" line both minimally costly in terms of loss of customer reach and plays much better than 'information wants to be free, man! you can't block the internet!' when it comes to keeping regulators off your back.
I'm a little surprised that there haven't been any cases(at least not ones that have come to light) of somebody solving this 'problem' by the means that would actually work.
'Precocious puberty' is occasionally a problem, for various reasons, and treatments are available. Nothing except medical ethics and the strong odds that it's a terrible plan with the potential for unpleasant and life-long consequences would prevent the same treatment from being used to delay the onset of puberty in 'normal' children.
Just keep shooting kiddo full of Leuprorelin and he or she can remain free of dirty hormones for years longer than usual! And so much less barbaric looking than just castrating them...
(And, incidentally, there was a brief craze in alt-med circles for treating autism with Leuprorelin, based on some nonsense about how testosterone was keeping the mercury from getting chelated out or something, and a nontrivial number of people were able to get prescriptions for the stuff, despite it not being remotely tested or approved for autism, so it wouldn't necessarily be impossible to get it for equally spurious reasons.)
I suspect that the answer is depressing close to "no"; but it's important to remember the context: election season is ramping up in the UK and all the parties are currently making assorted promises of dubious truth and plausibility in an attempt to curry favor with their constituencies. In this case, won't-someone-please-think-of-the-children!!! nonsense plays pretty well across the board, is a logical extension of the existing Tory Great-Firewall-of-Cameron efforts, and may be an attempt to burnish their reactionary credentials to try to counter UKIP without having to say anything excessively embarrassing.
They may or may not think that it's possible; and may not even much care; but as a piece of political theater it is logical enough. Remember, you only need to be an expert on getting elected in order to make it into office. Never underestimate a politician's skill in this area; but never let one pretend that it implies skill in other areas.
It wouldn't stop people from asking; but this one seems like one of those "either inevitable, or nothing to worry about" requests.
If MS is in a situation where they think that they can(as with Adobe and their 'Creative Cloud' licensing move for CS versions 6+), the money will just be too good to pass up and they'll force the issue. Maybe keep around a few overpriced non-subscription SKUs that mysteriously turn out to cost about as much as the subscription price over their supported lifetime just to silence the whiners; but structure the incentives such that almost nobody will buy that. In a lot of enterprise contexts, this is already substantially the case, and some flavor of 'Software Assurance' is already being paid.
If MS is in a situation where they think they'll sacrifice platform dominance if they push it, they'll fold. Observe the existence of "Windows 8.1 with Bing", which is basically "Free anywhere you would have installed ChromeOS or Android if we charged you $50", and the general low to zero price of OEM Windows on the various tablety things that are knife fighting with Android or ChromeOS on the low end.
Under 'Space-wise', I'd add "don't be penny-wise-pound-foolish when equipping people". Yes, not all requests are reasonable(you need a color-calibrated monitor that covers at least 99% of aRGB to write code, why?); but most reasonable requests are pretty damn cheap compared to somebody you'd trust to write your code or operate your IT systems. You will not improve happiness or productivity; and (when productivity is taken into account) probably won't even save money by denying people extra monitors, that comfy ergonomic keyboard, etc. Even non-technical generic office function types are often less well equipped than would make sense(yes, 1280x1024 is what Dell was selling in 2007, and that monitor does still work. Do you want to think about the percentage of your accountant's salary that is, in fact, buying 'scrolling horizontally' rather than 'accounting'?); but people writing code or looking a a big pile of configuration and status interfaces generally need the space.
There's no such thing as a free lunch; but there are areas where comparative advantage, economies of scale, and convenience all play a role.
Do I actually think that the office coffee supply isn't coming, in some small way, out of my paycheck? No, certainly not. Do I think that the cup of coffee I am able to have because of it is fresher than something that came from home in a thermos, cheaper than something from the local coffee place, and more convenient than having to pick it up from the local coffee place? Yes, that I do.
It is true that the 'free' stuff continuum increasingly becomes mediocre non-monetary compensation picked out for you by the company in order to keep you in the office as you get more extreme; but for certain logistical support functions the fact that it is on site and cheaper in bulk can compensate for this. It also depends on location: some office parks and corporate campuses would have basically zero supply of food, coffee, or anything that isn't banal landscaping and generic buildings for a 15+ minute drive in any direction unless they had some sort of cafeteria facility built in(not necessarily free; but even the ones you pay in tend to be there because the companies that rent the space want that amenity available, not because a plucky restaurant just decided to start up). If the workplace is in a denser urban area, the local coffee place may still be more expensive than the office drip pot; but you'll at least have options if you want to get lunch or something.
It's also a nicely crafted piece of doublespeak: 'carte blanche to just spy on people' suggests a right to just chose somebody for whatever reason you feel like and just start spying on them, for whatever reason. As far as we know, unsystematic picking of random targets isn't something that the NSA does a lot of, and it may well be something they don't have legal authority to do.
However, pretty much the whole point of public displeasure over what the NSA has been doing is that its programs are sufficiently broad, and the inclusion criteria sufficiently trivial, that essentially everyone, everywhere, all the time, is probably covered. They don't need the right to pick you out of a hat for personal attention, because they act like they have a mandate to get what they can on everyone, just daily course of business.
It's well done. Deny that you do something largely irrelevant to what you are actually accused of; but in a way that sounds similar to denying the occurrence of the consequences of what you actually do.
Even if their daily grind gives them no personal access to the objectionable work being done; only stupidity or willful ignorance would prevent them from learning about and thinking about what the NSA does in the same way the rest of us did.
Somebody who just pushes buttons or spies on North Korea or whatever wouldn't have any reason to develop an on-the-job sense that they were doing the wrong thing; but when you can't open a newspaper without seeing reports on 'NSA basically spies on all the stuff, all the time, at home and abroad; FISA is a sad joke, massive domestic dragnet, etc, etc.'; the fact that you don't feel like you do bad things at work is irrelevant to your consideration of whether your employer does some deeply troubling work.
In fact, if they do feel 'betrayed'; it's hard to argue that they aren't explicitly identifying with the actions of the agency; even if their job is unrelated to the ones that caught the public eye. Given that those programs were effectively certain to operate with impunity for as long as they wanted if they went undiscovered(even with public knowledge, they've been substantially resistant to any real change); there is very little room for a "Well, those programs are wrong but Snowden should have opposed them more responsibly!" position that isn't bullshit. Filling out a form and dropping it in the suggestion box or sending his boss a worried email or something would have been indistinguishable from doing nothing, in terms of effect.
I don't know what the state of insulin pumps is; but the product here is for in-hospital infusion pumps. I assume that the demand is basically "We have dozens to hundreds of these pumps all over the building(s), each one dispensing some drug on some schedule, with both of those changing from time to time on all units, and we want to be able to keep track of that. Also, some configuration errors could be fatal, so it would be nice to be able to check them against a data source larger and more frequently updated than anything internal to the pump."
They clearly fucked up the implementation; but that's the sort of problem where I'd be sorely tempted to punch the vendor if I couldn't get a MIB out of them. I suspect that it doesn't help, at all, that hospital infusion pumps are very likely to be used with drugs that you can't necessarily trust all of your staff with(anesthetics have a habit of being zesty opiates, to which one or more of your staff may already have developed an addiction, let's see how long they can cover it up!) , so you have more limited options in terms of who you can send out with a programming cable and a strong incentive to get the data to a location where discrepancies are harder to hide.