Data retention laws only apply to things you are required to keep. You can keep any information that your customers allow you to collect. And you can be subpoenaed for any information that you do collect. But only information that you are required to keep has a legally mandated retention period.
I'm surprised more businesses don't realize the legal obligations that they take on when they collect unnecessary information on their customers. Note ISPs that refuse to keep anything beyond essential logging because keeping it entails a liability to the company. And it's not just law enforcement, the act of collecting can put you under civil requirements and liabilities, for example, PCI.
I can think of very little, if any, customer data that a dating web site would be required to keep. But once you start collecting associations and communications, ala Facebook, then you can expect law enforcement to take interest. Even collecting innocuous things like who visited a profile (something OkCupid and even LinkedIn track) could be used for tracking 'terrorism'.
A big factor on social web sites is ownership. If you pay GoDaddy hosting they are not responsible for data retention on your site. In fact, they may not do any kind of backups at all on your site. Web hosting companies consider it to be your data, thus your responsibility. Social web sites, OTOH, consider your profile to be their data. They only thing that will force them to delete something they consider a business advantage are privacy laws that are virtually non-existent because governments see the value of having access to information they don't have to collect or store.
Something that works even better in 'going local' is doing thing that can't be done remotely. My HVAC guy has NO concerns about being outsourced. India, Brazil, Philippines, they aren't going to send someone to install my new AC. From the work at home mom perspective, there are many Internet related activities;
eBay, Craigslist postings. An eBay seller's account is tedious for someone just looking to get rid of an occasional item that is too good to throw away. And look at some of the Craiglist postings; no pictures, poor descriptions, etc. My niece helped a local business liquidate excess inventory through Craigslist.
While it's a shrinking market, there are still many older adults that aren't computer savvy. Yet their kids and grand-kids are staying in touch through Facebook. You could teach them how to set up an account, configure privacy settings, post messages and pictures. I also regularly see people post on online forums that they don't know how to upload pictures with their posts.
And many high schools and community centers have community education courses. You could teach one on protecting your privacy while still utilizing internet services. An understanding that regardless of what terms you choose when you upload, things on Facebook and Youtube never go away. I'll bet there might be some interest in 'Getting the most out of your iPhone/Android'.
Of course, if you're an introvert and just don't want to deal with people directly, you're probably screwed (and not in the homemade porn kind of way). The point of going local is to help people interact with technology.
As a New Zealander, maybe you could explain the helicopters. Is it common for police in New Zealand to conduct raids from helicopters? I have visions of SWAT teams in kevlar with assault rifles storming this guy's 'mansion'. We are talking about a non-violent crime here. Would calmly walking up to the front door and knocking be out of the question?
They're talking about a/cable/ company, not a/fiber/ company.
SureWest is a cable provider, but they do so via fiber. In this area, SureWest is what was formerly Everest. And Everest's big selling point was that they were fiber and could provide combined TV/Internet/phone service. (as in POTS phone service) They don't have the legacy cable runs that Time Warner and Comcast have, in this area, dating back to the early 80s.
I'm pretty sure the 'more cumbersome' that he is talking about is the training and safety requirements of having their linemen working in the power transmission lines.
There are already problems with small-engine devices like boats and snowmobiles etc.
The problems can generally be fixed by rebuilding the carbs. The cheap diaphragms and gaskets don't hold up well to alcohol. I've been through this on several lawn mowers, weedeaters, chainsaws, etc. Check to see if premium grades have 10% as well. In my area they do not. I haven't had any problems since I switched to premium for small engines and use a fuel stabilizer. You can also buy a fuel additive that is supposed to help. I bought a bottle, but since premium appears to have solved the problem I haven't tried it.
You want to pay extra every month to have a disposable TV that is locked to their service so you can have new and shiny every two years? A wet dream for both the cable companies and the equipment manufacturers.
Bet you anything the FBI is hiring programmers right now after having seen the advantages of developing and maintaining their own supply of stable, competent craftsman -programmers.
You're much more confident than I am. The Federal government is the leader in NIH. (Not Invented Here) 'Smaller Government' is all about out sourcing everything possible to private businesses.
The project that TFA is about was "made agile" in September 2010, 17 months ago.
That part of the article really bothered me. They talk about Agile and two week sprints, then go on to tell about the system test in October that failed. From the article it sounds like no one is using the system because it isn't deployed. What are they doing at the end of their 'two week sprints', because they obviously aren't rolling any code to production.
Admittedly they are taking over an existing project, so release schedules could be short. But two weeks seems awful short. I would think 2 months would be more productive. But in the process of changing from Waterfall to Agile I would think you'd have to say some parts of the system are done, or will be at the end of the first work period, and then all the incomplete functionality would be assigned to future releases. If all you're doing is 'deploying' to test and saving everything for a massive rollout, then I hate to break it to you but you are still doing waterfall.
And I just felt all warm and fuzzy when I saw near the end of the article that they went back to Lockheed Martin to upgrade the hardware for the system they failed to build. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice....... idiots. Maybe you shouldn't hire your executives from businesses that failed spectacularly.
(a buyer with ~25 feedback gets hurt a lot more than a seller with 10,000 feedback when each leaves the other a negative, and they knew it)
eBay's whole feedback system is a circle jerk anyway. You give me good feedback and I'll give you good feedback. It's designed to bury negative feedback in positive feedback. Basically, most buyers don't care what good feedback a seller gets. Maybe neutral, but you want to see what kind of negatives a seller has. A much better system would be showing neutrals and negatives but only counting positives. Then a prospective buyer could see what neutral/negative feedback was received over how many successful/positive auctions. Currently you have to wade through thousands of A+++++++++++++++++++++ useless feedback to see how a seller handles an auction where both parties weren't happy. And if you were going to display ANY positive feedback, it would be from buyers who initially posted neutral/negative and choose to change it to positive after resolution.
It will only stop working if *your* stuff stops working. And they'll email you telling you your free account is going to expire before it goes.
Not necessarily. I never received an e-mail telling me that my host name was expiring. I just know that one day it stopped working and when I checked their system it told me that it no longer existed, but was available if I wanted to subscribe. I didn't use it very often, it was just a means to access my home network from a remote location occasionally. I had my router set up to automatically keep the listing updated.
I no longer have my host set up with DynDNS, and no longer recommend them. Not because I'm pissed that they wouldn't give it to me free. But because after years of using dnsalias.net they made the arbitrary decision that this particular domain was now a premium domain and I couldn't get my hostname back without subscribing. They didn't have a problem providing a free host name, just not the one I had been using for years. So if I'm going to make a change, it doesn't matter to me whether it's with them or someone else.
They can sit back and say, "we he wasn't paying anyway." But like many who have been around here for some time, I'm one of those people who dabble with many technologies. Making me the one who is consulted when the paying customers are looking for solutions. I tend to recommend things that I am familiar with and have had a good experience using.
This has been repeated many times, and I don't think it's true. For example, one of the listed uses of CarrierIQ is to analyze dropped calls. If the call is dropped, what device knows? The tower? Does the tower know the call wasn't handed off to another tower? Obviously the carrier would be able to find out if a call dropped or switched towers, but with millions of phones and thousands of towers, there are a lot of data points to sort through when their network doesn't even know for sure it there was a problem. And even then, could they tell why the call dropped? The handset will know for sure that the call dropped. It will know if the drop was the the result of signal loss or battery failure. It will be able to log the state of the handset's radio at the time of the drop and the handset's location.
If it's a software failure on the handset side it could dump registers and build a debug packet. None of that is possible from the network side. Is there the possibility of grabbing some user data? Absolutely. Any time you dump a block of memory locations there is a possibility of getting user data. Do you send application crash reports on your PC? Dr Watson, the crash manager in Firefox.
I think this whole tempest in a teapot is about how it was presented. Too many people believe the first sensationalist article they read. The end result isn't going to be better privacy, it's going to be degraded network performance.
You buy Oracle for databases because corporate decision makers believe it's the only DB that can truly scale. Then you buy Toad so you can actually use it.
Our Constitution (US) is set up around the right to say what you like and the GOVERNMENT can not limit it, with a few exceptions. (Shouting fire in a crowded theater, etc) Our legal system is set up so that you can say whatever you like, but you are responsible for what you say. Free speech doesn't mean there are no consequences.
The whole argument here about free speech does not even apply to this case. This is about contempt of court. Note that the summary starts off with "violated a restraining order". The court told him to "leave this woman alone." He thought he found a way to harass her that wasn't specifically spelled out in the order of protection. The judge told him he was wrong. If he wants to argue with that, he's free to appeal. But refusing to follow the instructions of the court is contempt, and there are penalties for that. You could stand in court and state your intention to read the Constitution, and when the judge says shut up and sit down, he's not infringing on your right to free speech.
So if LightSquared goes live, 75% of consumer (and possibly commercial) GPS units will have serious problems.
If you had been following along, you would know that consumer GPS units are not affected. That has already been resolved when LightSquared agreed to hold off using the upper band for a period of time, allowing most consumer GPS units to be replaced by normal obsolescence. Their use of the lower band will only affect precision GPS units.
If I was in to conspiracy theories, I'd say that little fact is left out of news articles intentionally to rile up the general population against LightSquared.
Looking at it as someone who has been following this for months, and has no stake in the game either way, it looks more like this; precision GPS manufacturers didn't feel the need to filter a band in between two that they were using since it wasn't really being by anything with any power, and it could have cost them a few more pennies per unit. And then LightSquared managed to somehow get the FCC to consider opening the band to terrestrial transmitters. Now it's a multi-billion dollar pissing match. Nobody is completely right, and nobody is completely wrong.
I hope you aren't really using "buying a house" as an example of reasonable and prudent money management right now!
Why not? The house I bought 3 years ago is worth over 50% more than what I paid for it, even in the current market. The problem right now isn't that buying houses is bad financially (if you can get the financing), right now is just a bad time to sell a house. It won't stay that way for ever.
The SSA effectively draws all it's money from the general fund at this point, as it has no sellable assets: just taxes, and bonds that can only be redeemed if there are taxes/other borrowing to cover them.
SSA draws ALL of it's money right now from payroll taxes that are legislated to pay for it and returns on invested historical surpluses. It's assets are bonds issued by the Federal government. Whether those bonds have any value depends on Congress getting control of it's spending/revenue issues. Of course there's always the risk that politicians will convince the weaker minded public to dismantle SSA and go to private pensions, ALA the proposals of Bush Jr a few years back. That wasn't about making SS solvent or controlling it's costs, it was about the politicians looking at all the money they need to pay back to SSA and trying to find a way to nullify those debts. It would effectively be stealing all the money we've paid in that they borrowed for pet projects over the last 3 decades.
In order to maintain financial health, private citizens and organizations are required to spend less money than they take in.
Long term yes, short term no. If that wasn't the case, very few would ever buy a house, or a new car. Also, saying spending is the problem isn't the whole story. As an individual, decreasing spending is the most common way to control deficits. But even there you have the option of asking your boss for a raise, moving to a higher paying job, or taking a second job to increase revenue.
And it doesn't apply to governments. Governments have the ability raise taxes for any expenditure that falls within their charter. Political gamesmanship is what causes long term debt. Congress wants credit for creating programs that people want, but doesn't want the responsibility of making sure revenue is increased to match.
50 employees don't generate a whole lot of sewage or garbage, so not a lot of income from a data center there. 50 employees don't generate a lot of traffic, so maintenance would be low and it's not likely the datacenter will be paying for it anyway. In the end, you still come down to 50 salaries; the support mechanism, schools, roads, etc, are paid for by those salaries.
A datacenter would generate income from power usage. Even though the power supplier might not even be in that region, franchise fees and sales tax would go to local governments. Property taxes would help with police and fire, but to see how much that will help a community you have to look at any tax breaks that were given to get the datacenter in the first place. It may be a net loss for the community.
For example: Raytown MO had a Walmart store. Walmart came to the city and said "we want to build a new store to replace our current store, but we need some incentives to build it in Raytown and not in Kansas City". The incentive package turned out to be a bond package guaranteed by the city that would be paid for with proceeds from the city's portion of sales tax generated by the new store. To avoid losing the sales tax income, Raytown committed ALL of the sales tax from the store for 23 years. The store was late opening and Raytown had to make several bond payments. Currently Raytown has paid $1.8m in bond payments and has 21 years to go before it sees ANY sales tax income from Walmart's operation. Any guesses what the average life of a Walmart store is? BTW, there also appears to be no clause in the contract that requires Walmart to keep the store open until the bonds are paid.
It's quite common for businesses to start a bidding war with prospective communities. And the cities respond with TIFs, CIDs, tax abatements, or specials bonds. (Cities get better bond rates than companies) How much value would a $1b datacenter provide a community if they negotiated a property tax freeze for 10 years? It's not unusual for a city/county to agree to levy taxes on the unimproved value of the property for a period of time to encourage companies to relocate to their communities.
OTOH, if a small business opened a 10,000 sq/ft datacenter they would likely get no incentives from local government. If you are going to operate 24x7x365 and always have staff on the premises, you will need to hire 6-10 employees. You will invests $1m+ and likely provide more income to the local community than Apple.
If your grandma was truly paranoid about her privacy, she'd know any number of people who could load a replacement OS on her phone for a few dollars.
When my niece had her iPhone she paid to have someone jailbreak it. It wasn't hard to find some one, and it wasn't expensive. And with it, every time Apple pushed a new release she had to pay to do it again. With cyanogen you wouldn't have to update the phone OS as long as you didn't need a feature fixed. Many 'feature' phones go from birth to death with the factory installed image.
Lowest bidder is the problem. In the Cisco counterfeit scandal, Cisco business partners were finding that the only way they could win a bid was by using, let's say, parts of dubious origin.
That's not a problem with lowest bidder. That is a problem with the purchaser not really caring whether they get what they order. If the specification calls for Cisco gear and bidder B gets the contract over bidder A because they are supplying counterfeit gear, it's contract fraud. They don't get away with it because there is some inherent problem with lowest bidder contracting. They get away with it because the purchaser isn't holding the vendor to the contract requirements. Would it be a price problem if you went to a restaurant, ordered prime rib, and got hamburger instead? Would you accept it, or tell them this is not what you ordered? Would you continue to go there because their prices were lower on 'prime rib'?
We need to be able to edit posted comments and an email notice when someone replies to our comment.
Every board I frequent that has comment editing has broken and incomprehensible topics due to people coming back and editing their comments. When they get called out on something stupid, go back and edit. On one board a major contributor got pissed at the board admins and went back and purged the content of every comment he wrote over a very long period of time. Now none of those threads make sense. Preview is a much better solution.
And I get e-mails every time someone (not anonymous) replies to my comments on Slashdot. The feature is there. Look under Account -> Messages -> Comment Reply
I'd really rather not have the Mark I "Lowest Bidder" air-to-air missile fizzle out and slam into a populated area by mistake.
Lowest bidder isn't the problem. And removing that encourages cronyism. It's a quality control issue. It's the fact that the government purchasers are 'not spending their own money'. It's easier to accept poor quality despite paying a premium than it is to fight the corrupt system. Put a carrot and stick policy in place at gov't receiving facilities. Just like businesses, you do lot checks on received components. Inspectors receive a bonus that is paid by the supplier for every sub-standard part received. Vendors get a scorecard (quality, on-time delivery, price) that determines future business (or continuation of current contract). And failure on the inspectors part to make reasonable attempts find and report sub-standards parts results in sanctions. And anyone, at any level of federal government that intentionally interferes with the QC system risks prosecution.
Slashdot Mirror
Data retention laws only apply to things you are required to keep. You can keep any information that your customers allow you to collect. And you can be subpoenaed for any information that you do collect. But only information that you are required to keep has a legally mandated retention period.
I'm surprised more businesses don't realize the legal obligations that they take on when they collect unnecessary information on their customers. Note ISPs that refuse to keep anything beyond essential logging because keeping it entails a liability to the company. And it's not just law enforcement, the act of collecting can put you under civil requirements and liabilities, for example, PCI.
I can think of very little, if any, customer data that a dating web site would be required to keep. But once you start collecting associations and communications, ala Facebook, then you can expect law enforcement to take interest. Even collecting innocuous things like who visited a profile (something OkCupid and even LinkedIn track) could be used for tracking 'terrorism'.
A big factor on social web sites is ownership. If you pay GoDaddy hosting they are not responsible for data retention on your site. In fact, they may not do any kind of backups at all on your site. Web hosting companies consider it to be your data, thus your responsibility. Social web sites, OTOH, consider your profile to be their data. They only thing that will force them to delete something they consider a business advantage are privacy laws that are virtually non-existent because governments see the value of having access to information they don't have to collect or store.
Something that works even better in 'going local' is doing thing that can't be done remotely. My HVAC guy has NO concerns about being outsourced. India, Brazil, Philippines, they aren't going to send someone to install my new AC. From the work at home mom perspective, there are many Internet related activities;
eBay, Craigslist postings. An eBay seller's account is tedious for someone just looking to get rid of an occasional item that is too good to throw away. And look at some of the Craiglist postings; no pictures, poor descriptions, etc. My niece helped a local business liquidate excess inventory through Craigslist.
While it's a shrinking market, there are still many older adults that aren't computer savvy. Yet their kids and grand-kids are staying in touch through Facebook. You could teach them how to set up an account, configure privacy settings, post messages and pictures. I also regularly see people post on online forums that they don't know how to upload pictures with their posts.
And many high schools and community centers have community education courses. You could teach one on protecting your privacy while still utilizing internet services. An understanding that regardless of what terms you choose when you upload, things on Facebook and Youtube never go away. I'll bet there might be some interest in 'Getting the most out of your iPhone/Android'.
Of course, if you're an introvert and just don't want to deal with people directly, you're probably screwed (and not in the homemade porn kind of way). The point of going local is to help people interact with technology.
As a New Zealander, maybe you could explain the helicopters. Is it common for police in New Zealand to conduct raids from helicopters? I have visions of SWAT teams in kevlar with assault rifles storming this guy's 'mansion'. We are talking about a non-violent crime here. Would calmly walking up to the front door and knocking be out of the question?
Are ghosts allowed to cross state lines?
They're talking about a /cable/ company, not a /fiber/ company.
SureWest is a cable provider, but they do so via fiber. In this area, SureWest is what was formerly Everest. And Everest's big selling point was that they were fiber and could provide combined TV/Internet/phone service. (as in POTS phone service) They don't have the legacy cable runs that Time Warner and Comcast have, in this area, dating back to the early 80s.
I'm pretty sure the 'more cumbersome' that he is talking about is the training and safety requirements of having their linemen working in the power transmission lines.
There are already problems with small-engine devices like boats and snowmobiles etc.
The problems can generally be fixed by rebuilding the carbs. The cheap diaphragms and gaskets don't hold up well to alcohol. I've been through this on several lawn mowers, weedeaters, chainsaws, etc. Check to see if premium grades have 10% as well. In my area they do not. I haven't had any problems since I switched to premium for small engines and use a fuel stabilizer. You can also buy a fuel additive that is supposed to help. I bought a bottle, but since premium appears to have solved the problem I haven't tried it.
Didn't work out so well for Toby Keith.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOd2NuHgwew&ob=av2e
You want to pay extra every month to have a disposable TV that is locked to their service so you can have new and shiny every two years? A wet dream for both the cable companies and the equipment manufacturers.
Bet you anything the FBI is hiring programmers right now after having seen the advantages of developing and maintaining their own supply of stable, competent craftsman -programmers.
You're much more confident than I am. The Federal government is the leader in NIH. (Not Invented Here) 'Smaller Government' is all about out sourcing everything possible to private businesses.
The project that TFA is about was "made agile" in September 2010, 17 months ago.
That part of the article really bothered me. They talk about Agile and two week sprints, then go on to tell about the system test in October that failed. From the article it sounds like no one is using the system because it isn't deployed. What are they doing at the end of their 'two week sprints', because they obviously aren't rolling any code to production.
Admittedly they are taking over an existing project, so release schedules could be short. But two weeks seems awful short. I would think 2 months would be more productive. But in the process of changing from Waterfall to Agile I would think you'd have to say some parts of the system are done, or will be at the end of the first work period, and then all the incomplete functionality would be assigned to future releases. If all you're doing is 'deploying' to test and saving everything for a massive rollout, then I hate to break it to you but you are still doing waterfall.
And I just felt all warm and fuzzy when I saw near the end of the article that they went back to Lockheed Martin to upgrade the hardware for the system they failed to build. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice....... idiots. Maybe you shouldn't hire your executives from businesses that failed spectacularly.
(a buyer with ~25 feedback gets hurt a lot more than a seller with 10,000 feedback when each leaves the other a negative, and they knew it)
eBay's whole feedback system is a circle jerk anyway. You give me good feedback and I'll give you good feedback. It's designed to bury negative feedback in positive feedback. Basically, most buyers don't care what good feedback a seller gets. Maybe neutral, but you want to see what kind of negatives a seller has. A much better system would be showing neutrals and negatives but only counting positives. Then a prospective buyer could see what neutral/negative feedback was received over how many successful/positive auctions. Currently you have to wade through thousands of A+++++++++++++++++++++ useless feedback to see how a seller handles an auction where both parties weren't happy. And if you were going to display ANY positive feedback, it would be from buyers who initially posted neutral/negative and choose to change it to positive after resolution.
Any job that requires a CYA email archive is not worth having.
It will only stop working if *your* stuff stops working. And they'll email you telling you your free account is going to expire before it goes.
Not necessarily. I never received an e-mail telling me that my host name was expiring. I just know that one day it stopped working and when I checked their system it told me that it no longer existed, but was available if I wanted to subscribe. I didn't use it very often, it was just a means to access my home network from a remote location occasionally. I had my router set up to automatically keep the listing updated.
I no longer have my host set up with DynDNS, and no longer recommend them. Not because I'm pissed that they wouldn't give it to me free. But because after years of using dnsalias.net they made the arbitrary decision that this particular domain was now a premium domain and I couldn't get my hostname back without subscribing. They didn't have a problem providing a free host name, just not the one I had been using for years. So if I'm going to make a change, it doesn't matter to me whether it's with them or someone else.
They can sit back and say, "we he wasn't paying anyway." But like many who have been around here for some time, I'm one of those people who dabble with many technologies. Making me the one who is consulted when the paying customers are looking for solutions. I tend to recommend things that I am familiar with and have had a good experience using.
selling diagnostics the carriers already had
This has been repeated many times, and I don't think it's true. For example, one of the listed uses of CarrierIQ is to analyze dropped calls. If the call is dropped, what device knows? The tower? Does the tower know the call wasn't handed off to another tower? Obviously the carrier would be able to find out if a call dropped or switched towers, but with millions of phones and thousands of towers, there are a lot of data points to sort through when their network doesn't even know for sure it there was a problem. And even then, could they tell why the call dropped? The handset will know for sure that the call dropped. It will know if the drop was the the result of signal loss or battery failure. It will be able to log the state of the handset's radio at the time of the drop and the handset's location.
If it's a software failure on the handset side it could dump registers and build a debug packet. None of that is possible from the network side. Is there the possibility of grabbing some user data? Absolutely. Any time you dump a block of memory locations there is a possibility of getting user data. Do you send application crash reports on your PC? Dr Watson, the crash manager in Firefox.
I think this whole tempest in a teapot is about how it was presented. Too many people believe the first sensationalist article they read. The end result isn't going to be better privacy, it's going to be degraded network performance.
Not to mention, according to a study I read about a few years ago, the average systems administrator make more than the average lawyer
My auto mechanic charges $60 per hour; he has the highest quality/lowest price in the area. And he doesn't have to do shift work or be on call.
You buy Oracle for databases because corporate decision makers believe it's the only DB that can truly scale. Then you buy Toad so you can actually use it.
Our Constitution (US) is set up around the right to say what you like and the GOVERNMENT can not limit it, with a few exceptions. (Shouting fire in a crowded theater, etc) Our legal system is set up so that you can say whatever you like, but you are responsible for what you say. Free speech doesn't mean there are no consequences.
The whole argument here about free speech does not even apply to this case. This is about contempt of court. Note that the summary starts off with "violated a restraining order". The court told him to "leave this woman alone." He thought he found a way to harass her that wasn't specifically spelled out in the order of protection. The judge told him he was wrong. If he wants to argue with that, he's free to appeal. But refusing to follow the instructions of the court is contempt, and there are penalties for that. You could stand in court and state your intention to read the Constitution, and when the judge says shut up and sit down, he's not infringing on your right to free speech.
So if LightSquared goes live, 75% of consumer (and possibly commercial) GPS units will have serious problems.
If you had been following along, you would know that consumer GPS units are not affected. That has already been resolved when LightSquared agreed to hold off using the upper band for a period of time, allowing most consumer GPS units to be replaced by normal obsolescence. Their use of the lower band will only affect precision GPS units.
If I was in to conspiracy theories, I'd say that little fact is left out of news articles intentionally to rile up the general population against LightSquared.
Looking at it as someone who has been following this for months, and has no stake in the game either way, it looks more like this; precision GPS manufacturers didn't feel the need to filter a band in between two that they were using since it wasn't really being by anything with any power, and it could have cost them a few more pennies per unit. And then LightSquared managed to somehow get the FCC to consider opening the band to terrestrial transmitters. Now it's a multi-billion dollar pissing match. Nobody is completely right, and nobody is completely wrong.
I hope you aren't really using "buying a house" as an example of reasonable and prudent money management right now!
Why not? The house I bought 3 years ago is worth over 50% more than what I paid for it, even in the current market. The problem right now isn't that buying houses is bad financially (if you can get the financing), right now is just a bad time to sell a house. It won't stay that way for ever.
The SSA effectively draws all it's money from the general fund at this point, as it has no sellable assets: just taxes, and bonds that can only be redeemed if there are taxes/other borrowing to cover them.
SSA draws ALL of it's money right now from payroll taxes that are legislated to pay for it and returns on invested historical surpluses. It's assets are bonds issued by the Federal government. Whether those bonds have any value depends on Congress getting control of it's spending/revenue issues. Of course there's always the risk that politicians will convince the weaker minded public to dismantle SSA and go to private pensions, ALA the proposals of Bush Jr a few years back. That wasn't about making SS solvent or controlling it's costs, it was about the politicians looking at all the money they need to pay back to SSA and trying to find a way to nullify those debts. It would effectively be stealing all the money we've paid in that they borrowed for pet projects over the last 3 decades.
In order to maintain financial health, private citizens and organizations are required to spend less money than they take in.
Long term yes, short term no. If that wasn't the case, very few would ever buy a house, or a new car. Also, saying spending is the problem isn't the whole story. As an individual, decreasing spending is the most common way to control deficits. But even there you have the option of asking your boss for a raise, moving to a higher paying job, or taking a second job to increase revenue.
And it doesn't apply to governments. Governments have the ability raise taxes for any expenditure that falls within their charter. Political gamesmanship is what causes long term debt. Congress wants credit for creating programs that people want, but doesn't want the responsibility of making sure revenue is increased to match.
50 employees don't generate a whole lot of sewage or garbage, so not a lot of income from a data center there. 50 employees don't generate a lot of traffic, so maintenance would be low and it's not likely the datacenter will be paying for it anyway. In the end, you still come down to 50 salaries; the support mechanism, schools, roads, etc, are paid for by those salaries.
A datacenter would generate income from power usage. Even though the power supplier might not even be in that region, franchise fees and sales tax would go to local governments. Property taxes would help with police and fire, but to see how much that will help a community you have to look at any tax breaks that were given to get the datacenter in the first place. It may be a net loss for the community.
For example: Raytown MO had a Walmart store. Walmart came to the city and said "we want to build a new store to replace our current store, but we need some incentives to build it in Raytown and not in Kansas City". The incentive package turned out to be a bond package guaranteed by the city that would be paid for with proceeds from the city's portion of sales tax generated by the new store. To avoid losing the sales tax income, Raytown committed ALL of the sales tax from the store for 23 years. The store was late opening and Raytown had to make several bond payments. Currently Raytown has paid $1.8m in bond payments and has 21 years to go before it sees ANY sales tax income from Walmart's operation. Any guesses what the average life of a Walmart store is? BTW, there also appears to be no clause in the contract that requires Walmart to keep the store open until the bonds are paid.
It's quite common for businesses to start a bidding war with prospective communities. And the cities respond with TIFs, CIDs, tax abatements, or specials bonds. (Cities get better bond rates than companies) How much value would a $1b datacenter provide a community if they negotiated a property tax freeze for 10 years? It's not unusual for a city/county to agree to levy taxes on the unimproved value of the property for a period of time to encourage companies to relocate to their communities.
OTOH, if a small business opened a 10,000 sq/ft datacenter they would likely get no incentives from local government. If you are going to operate 24x7x365 and always have staff on the premises, you will need to hire 6-10 employees. You will invests $1m+ and likely provide more income to the local community than Apple.
Three letters? WTF?
Damn it, now they're going to have to change the password again.
Serious trouble, like turning a pump off for a 54" main...
Water Hammer
If your grandma was truly paranoid about her privacy, she'd know any number of people who could load a replacement OS on her phone for a few dollars.
When my niece had her iPhone she paid to have someone jailbreak it. It wasn't hard to find some one, and it wasn't expensive. And with it, every time Apple pushed a new release she had to pay to do it again. With cyanogen you wouldn't have to update the phone OS as long as you didn't need a feature fixed. Many 'feature' phones go from birth to death with the factory installed image.
Does your grandma change her own oil in her car?
Lowest bidder is the problem. In the Cisco counterfeit scandal, Cisco business partners were finding that the only way they could win a bid was by using, let's say, parts of dubious origin.
That's not a problem with lowest bidder. That is a problem with the purchaser not really caring whether they get what they order. If the specification calls for Cisco gear and bidder B gets the contract over bidder A because they are supplying counterfeit gear, it's contract fraud. They don't get away with it because there is some inherent problem with lowest bidder contracting. They get away with it because the purchaser isn't holding the vendor to the contract requirements. Would it be a price problem if you went to a restaurant, ordered prime rib, and got hamburger instead? Would you accept it, or tell them this is not what you ordered? Would you continue to go there because their prices were lower on 'prime rib'?
We need to be able to edit posted comments and an email notice when someone replies to our comment.
Every board I frequent that has comment editing has broken and incomprehensible topics due to people coming back and editing their comments. When they get called out on something stupid, go back and edit. On one board a major contributor got pissed at the board admins and went back and purged the content of every comment he wrote over a very long period of time. Now none of those threads make sense. Preview is a much better solution.
And I get e-mails every time someone (not anonymous) replies to my comments on Slashdot. The feature is there. Look under Account -> Messages -> Comment Reply
I'd really rather not have the Mark I "Lowest Bidder" air-to-air missile fizzle out and slam into a populated area by mistake.
Lowest bidder isn't the problem. And removing that encourages cronyism. It's a quality control issue. It's the fact that the government purchasers are 'not spending their own money'. It's easier to accept poor quality despite paying a premium than it is to fight the corrupt system. Put a carrot and stick policy in place at gov't receiving facilities. Just like businesses, you do lot checks on received components. Inspectors receive a bonus that is paid by the supplier for every sub-standard part received. Vendors get a scorecard (quality, on-time delivery, price) that determines future business (or continuation of current contract). And failure on the inspectors part to make reasonable attempts find and report sub-standards parts results in sanctions. And anyone, at any level of federal government that intentionally interferes with the QC system risks prosecution.