Slightly off-topic, but a big problem with the cost of prescription eyewear appears to a complete lockup of the market by one vendor, Luxotica. This vendor apparently controls the production, sales, and even the insurance for prescription eyewear. That makes it easy for them to provide the appearance of competition, without any actual competition. And if they control the insurance vendors, then they can reimburse you more for picking one of their brands than a competitive brand. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem... or search for "Luxotica scam" or similar terms to see other articles.
Of course it is, by corollary to the Second Amendment - everyone needs something in which to bear their arms when exercising that right, and outlawing plastic bags would surely infringe on that right.
Ok - after reading the article, I think they might not have had any security architecture whatsoever. No compartmentalization of data flows. No firewall. Probably no monitoring. And judging from the comments, no traffic accounting/auditing capability.
It seems like they had no understanding of the IT risks at all.
If I were analyzing their security, I would be much more concerned with the "no firewall" comment than how much they spent on a switch... No firewall, really? Bet they saved a lot of money not having to put that in place and monitor it....
The Newton didn't solve any problems, nor did the DynaBook, yet here we are with iPod Touches, iPhones, and iPads. I don't see myself buying the current gen iWatch, but I also didn't buy the first few generations of iPod, either, or the first few generations of the Macintosh. Sometimes the only way to evolve a product is to get it out in the wild and see how it adapts/is adapted/is adapted to. I don't know if this is a deliberate strategy on Apple's part, but it matches the pattern reasonably well.
The word "fanny" in the US means the same thing as "bum" in your country; it has nowhere the meaning of the word "fanny" in your country. (I learned this whilst puzzling out the commentary in British men's magazines a number of years back. It's interesting how such a big difference in meanings for the same word in two closely related languages can arise.)
Isn't the NRA being a voice for members of the NRA specifically, and not necessarily a voice for all hi owners? Senator Feinstein is reputed to be a gun owner, for example, yet the NRA is unlikely to be thinking that they are HER voice. If the NRA publicly takes positions that too many members disagree with, wouldn't those people either quit their memberships or act within the bylaws of the organization and elect officers who would change the NRAs public positions? From what I have seen, the NRA takes positions that are sometimes very nuanced and which require a deep understanding of the issues and fundamental rights of Americans to debate the stands that they take. You appear to be assigning a purely commercial motive to the NRA's public positions, yet offer no rationale as to why the NRA members continue to pay their dues (now being raised even) if the organization is not representing their interests. Your thoughts?
The US Constitution does not give the federal government the power to restrict or even to control technology used to secure communications or "private papers" (my 17th century label for data), does it? The 4th amendment clearly states that the federal government can't even try to collect information without having a warrant that clearly identifies the information to be collected. Since this clearly defined restriction on what the federal government may do comes only in a statement otherwise confirming a complete right to privacy from the snooping eyes and ears of everyone including the federal government (how else can the right to be secure... be interpreted?), it surely can't be construed as giving the government the sweeping power to control the very means of protecting that right of the people, can it?
I don't recall the Constitution handing the power to control the manner in which communications or papers (data) are secured so as to preserve the givernment's limited jurisdiction to "sneak a peak" when warranted (pun intended). Ciphers and other means to protect information from unauthorized disclosure were well-known to the framers of the Constitution, so this cannot be claimed to be an omission from ignorance.
To me the point is the fact that she availed herself of the opportunity (to arm herself for self defense) at some point in the past when she felt she needed to, but she would now deny to others the ability to make that same choice to protect themselves. She *may* believe that it is overall for the better, but her current context under which she is reaching that conclusion is nothing like her context previously, and that (to me) makes her conclusion suspect. Strip her of her wealth and power, and all protections not available to the average citizen, place her in a more dangerous home environment, then see how whether she quickly changes her mind again.
She probably "brings home the bacon" to her constituents in California, and they like having a powerful Senator like her from their state/district, so they will of course keep electing her, as opposed to whoever runs against her. An alternative might not be so good at bringing home the bacon, and are obviously not as powerful (which would explain why the voters aren't sure they could bring home the bacon).
The idea that a US Senator is supposed to represent the US as a whole, and not his/her own district doesn't seem to work out in practice. No surprise since any politician who enjoys wielding power wants to keep on wielding it, and the only way they can do that is to keep getting elected, which means keeping the voters who elect you happy. A good reason for term limits, I think.
The magic words to the vendors when they are trying to sell you home automation, security, entertainment electronics and such that communicate on your LAN is "Is it self-contained?" and then explain that the security policy on your network doesn't allow any devices within your physical home envelope to communicate outside of your home network for security reasons except when specifically authorized. If their device won't operate without a "phone home" capability, then it is no sale. (I back this up on my home network by having a special LAN for such devices from which no outside connectivity is allowed). If enough of us do this (which is standard operating procedure for any company that cares about security), perhaps vendors will get the message and stop selling consumer stuff that requires "cloud" services to keep running.
I didn't buy into DIVX when they came up with that boondoggle, and I'm not going to do it now with home automation, security, entertainment electronics, etc. Take a stand! Start a movement!
Sadly enough, this appears to be true. I told some of my 16-year old daughter's friends that Google goes through their e-mail (when they use a Google address), and they had a hard time believing it, and wanted to know why Google would do that. I pointed out that the service had to be paid for SOMEHOW, and that monetizing their e-mail traffic was how. They seemed genuinely puzzled that there was any bill to be paid...
I guess my generation assumed "free TV" was really free, and current generations assume "free information services" are really free. I think I better check and make sure that my kids really get how the bills are paid.
To be fair, it wasn't just a single exemplar listed. It was a series of different Apple products purchased, all of which seemed to last reasonably long in that person's experience.
My experience with Apple products purchased for my personal use is similar, starting with the Mac Plus I purchased in 1987, followed by a Mac SE30 [1990], a PowerMac 7200 [1995], a PowerMac G4 QuickSilver [2001], a 24" iMac Core2 Duo 2009 (still in use), a Macbook Pro Late 2011 (still in use), and the machine I'm typing this on, a 27" iMac Late 2013. All of them were supplanted only when I got envious of new machines specs - all of them were perfectly functional when I stopped using them [all of which I (sadly) still have in my possession]. Along with a disk-based iPod from 2008, a disk-based iPod from 2009, two Gen 4 iPod Touches [passed down to kids], 2 iPod Nanos of differing vintages (bought for kids), and an iPod Shuffle (door prize); all of which are still functional (one of the disk-based iPods lived in my wife's minivan most of its life, and has been transferred to her new car as her music library on wheels).
To be fair, my experience with quality business-class Windows/Intel computers that I have had in my hands primarily for work purposes has been similar, although the Windows/Intel computers seem to run out of steam as O/S upgrades are applied faster than the Apple products.
I've heard about and seen some Apple products with shorter lifespans, but my overall experience is that they tend to hang in there (except for beige cases on older models yellowing in the sun, unfortunately).
I myself am unamused at the proliferation of "apps" that don't do much more than a web site would do. I tend not to install them, and even uninstalled a few that I had installed because I found that I really didn't like the automatic switch from the web site to the app when I just wanted to use the web site (Amazon, for instance). Although I am not an expert in iOS app development, I suspect that an app gives the vendor the potential for much greater access to personal data on the device than just going through Safari. In some cases the app may provide for a better user experience, but keeping vendors at arm's length through the browser seems more secure to me.
If someone has $100s of millions of dollars in an IRA, they are going to be paying a lot of income tax down the road a bit. IRA distributions are taxed as ordinary income, no matter where the income in the IRA comes from. And you HAVE to take the IRA distributions sometime, starting at age 70 1/2 if you haven't started earlier, with the yearly "Required Minimum Distribution" (RMD) being based on the balance in your IRA divided by your life expectancy in years. Having over $10 million in an IRA starts looking pretty bad from an income tax standpoint. I suspect that people like Mitt Romney can afford tax advisors that get them a better deal than that.
The devil is in the details. Saying the capital gains tax in the United States is 0% to 15% is disingenuous. The details are more nuanced. Some useful definitions are at https://www.irs.gov/uac/Ten-Fa....
Short-term capital gains (investments held less than 1 year) are taxed at ordinary income tax rates, which are typically higher than the special treatment given to long-term capital gains but could be lower if the individual earning the gains is in a lower tax bracket because of their overall income being low.
For the folks with high incomes, long-term capital gains are 20%. For folks with somewhat smaller incomes, the long-term capital gains rate might be 15%, and for those with incomes that cause them to have a tax rate already below 15%, the capital gains rate could be as low as 0%. The fat cats with big incomes are not paying anything like the 0% tax on THEIR capital gains, but COULD be paying less than ordinary income tax rates if most of their income is from capital gains rather than ordinary income.
In the end, the Alternative Minimum Tax can and does swoop in and raise the overall tax rate paid to 26% to 28%, again depending on overall income and how well someone has done reducing their overall tax rate with deductions and other treatments. Anyone triggering AMT also has a number of deductions taken away from them, making the 26% to 28% tax due on a greater portion of their gross income as well. More on the AMT https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/.... Oh, and, in addition to AMT, the Affordable Care Act also added an additional 3.8% net investment income tax onto both short-term and long-term capital gains for individuals making over $200,000/year, so they are likely to be paying a total of 23.8% on their long-term capital gains, not someplace between 0% and 15%.
The reason given for the lower tax rate on long-term capital gains is typically to encourage people and corporations to invest their money (put it to work) instead of just sitting on it, and to keep it invested (for at least a year) instead of being speculative and trading it in and out, disruptively.
Of course it would cost more than $1,600. The attack also has cost the hospital a lot more than $1,600. Part of the problem with convincing management to spend more $$ on IT security risk mitigation is that the cost of IT risk mitigation has a lot of variables in it (including the insightfulness and capabilities of the IT staff) AND the expected cost of IT security problems is hard to get a handle on, again due to many variables. Hence you see many organizations doing the basics that have become commonly accepted costs of doing business (firewall, individual ident and authentication/authorization, backups, and anti-virus being chief among them), but a lot less doing more than that. Doing the basics doesn't require detailed analysis and justifications, so it's a much lower bar to get over. Doing more often requires a relatively weak function in the business to put up a prolonged campaign against more powerful interests; the reward for success in spending more for mitigations may well be "nothing happens", but whether it's because the mitigations were successful or the risks were overblown may never be clear to top managers. And having the organizations that by chance DON'T have a problem year over year when they forego spending on "esoteric" IT security measures avoid calamity reinforces the belief that such spending is unjustified. One fix might be the rise of an "IT security" insurance industry that would refuse coverage until organizations had a more comprehensive risk mitigation strategy in place, another would be public regulations with large(r) fines and or criminal liability for executives. I think there are parallels to be found in the world of physical loss risks such as on the job injury prevention and public safety in the event of fires and earthquakes where businesses needed outside forces to come to bear on them before they would put in place a lot of the now-standard protections (things like occupancy limits, sprinklers, fire exits, stairway capacity planning, emergency lighting, as well as other physical plant protections like machine lockouts, safety guards, etc.).
I think he is referring to the fact that only males in the United States are required to register for the Selective Service, which is the registration that will be used to draft people into the military in the event that Congress decides it is necessary to build up the military forces. I have read articles and comments noting that it seems discriminatory against males that only males are required to register with the Selective Service.
If this turns out to be a typical outcome of medical facility IT administration, then electronic medical records might not be such a good idea, at least not without adjustments to how the records are hosted.
Just like "critical infrastructure" should not be connected to the Internet, it seems medical facility records infrastructure needs to be separate as well. Perhaps this is a general architectural strategy that should be implemented wherever organizations process sensitive information - one level of infrastructure for general purpose communications and Internet access, another (separate) level of infrastructure for the sensitive information, with an acceptance of the higher cost of maintaining the proper separation. One big mashup appears to have some significant risks.
If the NSA did this, the listening would be done by a small cadre of unknown people with no data being shared publicly, especially if something interesting is found. Think about how Unternet access to freely available satellite imagery has changed how we look at and understand the world, both natural and man made. The tools are already in use by the few, secretly. This puts more of us on a slightly more equal footing.
So... to make an analogy, the US Constitution is like a whitelist of federal government powers implemented as the Constitutional firewall. And the "Interstate Commerce Clause" is where TCP port 80 was plumbed into the Constitutional firewall as a network-level pass-through instead of having a good application-level filter on it. So now anything the federal government wants to blast through the Constitutional firewall they just wrap up in TCP 80. Got it.
The "going dark" theory doesn't seem to hold water. There is vastly more information available now, in a very "hoover-able" (able to be sucked up) fashion, than ever before.
The law enforcement community in the US complained that with the digitization of telephone service, they would not be able to tap phones when needed - so they got a law that requires all phone switches be remotely "tappable" and voila, better access than ever before by law enforcement. We have all taken to using mobile phones, smart phones, and e-mail; all of which places all kinds of information in an electronic form that can be easily captured when before it was in ephemeral conversations and/or a million pieces of paper that couldn't be easily trolled through in a million years.
Sure, there has been a change in how law enforcement gathers information, with some ways going away, but new ways being made available. Overall it seems to me (without being in any way an expert) that there is probably a substantially larger amount of information available more easily today than 30 years ago before the explosion in personal digital communications. Encryption may impede some access, but overall it seems like a net gain.
Having said that, it doesn't necessarily make it a simple job to get the goods on someone to have all of the information available. It still has to be analyzed, assessed, and linked together with all of the other bits in order to be useful in an investigation. Its easy to see why law enforcement wants to make this process as easy as possible. But that's why we have constitutional protections - to help lay out the ground rules for finding a balance. I'm not surprised that there are some in the law enforcement community leaning on the scales as hard as they can, probably with the hopes of making sure the balance tips just a little bit more towards making their jobs easier.
One problem with advocating for various "rights" is that recognizing "rights" doesn't guarantee a fair or equitable outcome. As long as the conversation remains rooted in trying to declare various "rights" for everyone, you will probably end up with a system in which no completely fair or equitable outcome can be achieved.
By way of example: 20 years ago I moved out of the southern California area to another part of the country so that I could afford to buy a house in a neighborhood in which I could raise a family. I ended up buying a lot in a very quiet, fairly secluded area, then had a house built. I started a family, and life in our quiet secluded neighborhood was good until about 5 years ago when my backyard neighbor sold his house to an individual who turned it into a drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic. We asked how a business could be introduced to a residential neighborhood, and we were told he had the right to do so because it was a "group home," and the people he was treating had a right to live someplace. Ok, we shrugged and got on with our lives, although the noise from this property was much greater than when a family lived there. Then he bought another house that adjoined both our property and his original property, and added on to his business. Again, he "had the right" because he was helping people who needed help. When he bought the third house (that bordered our property) we decided to move. Not because of the "drug and alcohol" aspect, but because our neighborhood was no longer a neighborhood - we had upwards of 45 people a day driving in and out of our small street, 3 shifts of workers a day, all strangers. We were becoming surrounded by a very profitable business that acts nothing like a "home", which filled our small neighborhood with strangers.
We had "rights", but the people who were being treated also had "rights" and the guy running the business had "rights". All well intended, I'm sure, but the outcome was not fair or equitable, at least as far as we are concerned. Our relocation was traumatic because it wasn't anything we had been prepared for and came at a very inconvenient time for our children's schooling. Balancing various needs resulted in a year-long split between two halves of my family living quite some distance apart, and has seriously hosed-up my completing an advanced degree, but we are now in what we believe to be a much better living situation.
San Francisco and other communities that become overwhelmed by unbalanced economic forces will probably not solve their problems by focusing on "rights." The problems also won't be solved by pointing the finger at people of different political persuasions, either. The solutions will not come quickly, and individuals will need to make decisions for themselves with respect to how long they want to fight versus get on with their lives. And the outcomes won't be "fair and equitable" to everyone. That's life.
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Slightly off-topic, but a big problem with the cost of prescription eyewear appears to a complete lockup of the market by one vendor, Luxotica. This vendor apparently controls the production, sales, and even the insurance for prescription eyewear. That makes it easy for them to provide the appearance of competition, without any actual competition. And if they control the insurance vendors, then they can reimburse you more for picking one of their brands than a competitive brand. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem... or search for "Luxotica scam" or similar terms to see other articles.
Of course it is, by corollary to the Second Amendment - everyone needs something in which to bear their arms when exercising that right, and outlawing plastic bags would surely infringe on that right.
Ok - after reading the article, I think they might not have had any security architecture whatsoever. No compartmentalization of data flows. No firewall. Probably no monitoring. And judging from the comments, no traffic accounting/auditing capability.
It seems like they had no understanding of the IT risks at all.
If I were analyzing their security, I would be much more concerned with the "no firewall" comment than how much they spent on a switch... No firewall, really? Bet they saved a lot of money not having to put that in place and monitor it....
The Newton didn't solve any problems, nor did the DynaBook, yet here we are with iPod Touches, iPhones, and iPads. I don't see myself buying the current gen iWatch, but I also didn't buy the first few generations of iPod, either, or the first few generations of the Macintosh. Sometimes the only way to evolve a product is to get it out in the wild and see how it adapts/is adapted/is adapted to. I don't know if this is a deliberate strategy on Apple's part, but it matches the pattern reasonably well.
The word "fanny" in the US means the same thing as "bum" in your country; it has nowhere the meaning of the word "fanny" in your country. (I learned this whilst puzzling out the commentary in British men's magazines a number of years back. It's interesting how such a big difference in meanings for the same word in two closely related languages can arise.)
Isn't the NRA being a voice for members of the NRA specifically, and not necessarily a voice for all hi owners? Senator Feinstein is reputed to be a gun owner, for example, yet the NRA is unlikely to be thinking that they are HER voice. If the NRA publicly takes positions that too many members disagree with, wouldn't those people either quit their memberships or act within the bylaws of the organization and elect officers who would change the NRAs public positions? From what I have seen, the NRA takes positions that are sometimes very nuanced and which require a deep understanding of the issues and fundamental rights of Americans to debate the stands that they take. You appear to be assigning a purely commercial motive to the NRA's public positions, yet offer no rationale as to why the NRA members continue to pay their dues (now being raised even) if the organization is not representing their interests. Your thoughts?
The US Constitution does not give the federal government the power to restrict or even to control technology used to secure communications or "private papers" (my 17th century label for data), does it? The 4th amendment clearly states that the federal government can't even try to collect information without having a warrant that clearly identifies the information to be collected. Since this clearly defined restriction on what the federal government may do comes only in a statement otherwise confirming a complete right to privacy from the snooping eyes and ears of everyone including the federal government (how else can the right to be secure... be interpreted?), it surely can't be construed as giving the government the sweeping power to control the very means of protecting that right of the people, can it?
I don't recall the Constitution handing the power to control the manner in which communications or papers (data) are secured so as to preserve the givernment's limited jurisdiction to "sneak a peak" when warranted (pun intended). Ciphers and other means to protect information from unauthorized disclosure were well-known to the framers of the Constitution, so this cannot be claimed to be an omission from ignorance.
To me the point is the fact that she availed herself of the opportunity (to arm herself for self defense) at some point in the past when she felt she needed to, but she would now deny to others the ability to make that same choice to protect themselves. She *may* believe that it is overall for the better, but her current context under which she is reaching that conclusion is nothing like her context previously, and that (to me) makes her conclusion suspect. Strip her of her wealth and power, and all protections not available to the average citizen, place her in a more dangerous home environment, then see how whether she quickly changes her mind again.
She probably "brings home the bacon" to her constituents in California, and they like having a powerful Senator like her from their state/district, so they will of course keep electing her, as opposed to whoever runs against her. An alternative might not be so good at bringing home the bacon, and are obviously not as powerful (which would explain why the voters aren't sure they could bring home the bacon).
The idea that a US Senator is supposed to represent the US as a whole, and not his/her own district doesn't seem to work out in practice. No surprise since any politician who enjoys wielding power wants to keep on wielding it, and the only way they can do that is to keep getting elected, which means keeping the voters who elect you happy. A good reason for term limits, I think.
The magic words to the vendors when they are trying to sell you home automation, security, entertainment electronics and such that communicate on your LAN is "Is it self-contained?" and then explain that the security policy on your network doesn't allow any devices within your physical home envelope to communicate outside of your home network for security reasons except when specifically authorized. If their device won't operate without a "phone home" capability, then it is no sale. (I back this up on my home network by having a special LAN for such devices from which no outside connectivity is allowed). If enough of us do this (which is standard operating procedure for any company that cares about security), perhaps vendors will get the message and stop selling consumer stuff that requires "cloud" services to keep running.
I didn't buy into DIVX when they came up with that boondoggle, and I'm not going to do it now with home automation, security, entertainment electronics, etc. Take a stand! Start a movement!
Sadly enough, this appears to be true. I told some of my 16-year old daughter's friends that Google goes through their e-mail (when they use a Google address), and they had a hard time believing it, and wanted to know why Google would do that. I pointed out that the service had to be paid for SOMEHOW, and that monetizing their e-mail traffic was how. They seemed genuinely puzzled that there was any bill to be paid...
I guess my generation assumed "free TV" was really free, and current generations assume "free information services" are really free. I think I better check and make sure that my kids really get how the bills are paid.
Please let this be an early April Fools Day joke.
To be fair, it wasn't just a single exemplar listed. It was a series of different Apple products purchased, all of which seemed to last reasonably long in that person's experience.
My experience with Apple products purchased for my personal use is similar, starting with the Mac Plus I purchased in 1987, followed by a Mac SE30 [1990], a PowerMac 7200 [1995], a PowerMac G4 QuickSilver [2001], a 24" iMac Core2 Duo 2009 (still in use), a Macbook Pro Late 2011 (still in use), and the machine I'm typing this on, a 27" iMac Late 2013. All of them were supplanted only when I got envious of new machines specs - all of them were perfectly functional when I stopped using them [all of which I (sadly) still have in my possession]. Along with a disk-based iPod from 2008, a disk-based iPod from 2009, two Gen 4 iPod Touches [passed down to kids], 2 iPod Nanos of differing vintages (bought for kids), and an iPod Shuffle (door prize); all of which are still functional (one of the disk-based iPods lived in my wife's minivan most of its life, and has been transferred to her new car as her music library on wheels).
To be fair, my experience with quality business-class Windows/Intel computers that I have had in my hands primarily for work purposes has been similar, although the Windows/Intel computers seem to run out of steam as O/S upgrades are applied faster than the Apple products.
I've heard about and seen some Apple products with shorter lifespans, but my overall experience is that they tend to hang in there (except for beige cases on older models yellowing in the sun, unfortunately).
I myself am unamused at the proliferation of "apps" that don't do much more than a web site would do. I tend not to install them, and even uninstalled a few that I had installed because I found that I really didn't like the automatic switch from the web site to the app when I just wanted to use the web site (Amazon, for instance). Although I am not an expert in iOS app development, I suspect that an app gives the vendor the potential for much greater access to personal data on the device than just going through Safari. In some cases the app may provide for a better user experience, but keeping vendors at arm's length through the browser seems more secure to me.
If someone has $100s of millions of dollars in an IRA, they are going to be paying a lot of income tax down the road a bit. IRA distributions are taxed as ordinary income, no matter where the income in the IRA comes from. And you HAVE to take the IRA distributions sometime, starting at age 70 1/2 if you haven't started earlier, with the yearly "Required Minimum Distribution" (RMD) being based on the balance in your IRA divided by your life expectancy in years. Having over $10 million in an IRA starts looking pretty bad from an income tax standpoint. I suspect that people like Mitt Romney can afford tax advisors that get them a better deal than that.
The devil is in the details. Saying the capital gains tax in the United States is 0% to 15% is disingenuous. The details are more nuanced. Some useful definitions are at https://www.irs.gov/uac/Ten-Fa....
Short-term capital gains (investments held less than 1 year) are taxed at ordinary income tax rates, which are typically higher than the special treatment given to long-term capital gains but could be lower if the individual earning the gains is in a lower tax bracket because of their overall income being low.
For the folks with high incomes, long-term capital gains are 20%. For folks with somewhat smaller incomes, the long-term capital gains rate might be 15%, and for those with incomes that cause them to have a tax rate already below 15%, the capital gains rate could be as low as 0%. The fat cats with big incomes are not paying anything like the 0% tax on THEIR capital gains, but COULD be paying less than ordinary income tax rates if most of their income is from capital gains rather than ordinary income.
In the end, the Alternative Minimum Tax can and does swoop in and raise the overall tax rate paid to 26% to 28%, again depending on overall income and how well someone has done reducing their overall tax rate with deductions and other treatments. Anyone triggering AMT also has a number of deductions taken away from them, making the 26% to 28% tax due on a greater portion of their gross income as well. More on the AMT https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/.... Oh, and, in addition to AMT, the Affordable Care Act also added an additional 3.8% net investment income tax onto both short-term and long-term capital gains for individuals making over $200,000/year, so they are likely to be paying a total of 23.8% on their long-term capital gains, not someplace between 0% and 15%.
The reason given for the lower tax rate on long-term capital gains is typically to encourage people and corporations to invest their money (put it to work) instead of just sitting on it, and to keep it invested (for at least a year) instead of being speculative and trading it in and out, disruptively.
Of course it would cost more than $1,600. The attack also has cost the hospital a lot more than $1,600. Part of the problem with convincing management to spend more $$ on IT security risk mitigation is that the cost of IT risk mitigation has a lot of variables in it (including the insightfulness and capabilities of the IT staff) AND the expected cost of IT security problems is hard to get a handle on, again due to many variables. Hence you see many organizations doing the basics that have become commonly accepted costs of doing business (firewall, individual ident and authentication/authorization, backups, and anti-virus being chief among them), but a lot less doing more than that. Doing the basics doesn't require detailed analysis and justifications, so it's a much lower bar to get over. Doing more often requires a relatively weak function in the business to put up a prolonged campaign against more powerful interests; the reward for success in spending more for mitigations may well be "nothing happens", but whether it's because the mitigations were successful or the risks were overblown may never be clear to top managers. And having the organizations that by chance DON'T have a problem year over year when they forego spending on "esoteric" IT security measures avoid calamity reinforces the belief that such spending is unjustified. One fix might be the rise of an "IT security" insurance industry that would refuse coverage until organizations had a more comprehensive risk mitigation strategy in place, another would be public regulations with large(r) fines and or criminal liability for executives. I think there are parallels to be found in the world of physical loss risks such as on the job injury prevention and public safety in the event of fires and earthquakes where businesses needed outside forces to come to bear on them before they would put in place a lot of the now-standard protections (things like occupancy limits, sprinklers, fire exits, stairway capacity planning, emergency lighting, as well as other physical plant protections like machine lockouts, safety guards, etc.).
Hot/Crazy Matrix - humor, not to be confused with actual scientific understanding - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I think he is referring to the fact that only males in the United States are required to register for the Selective Service, which is the registration that will be used to draft people into the military in the event that Congress decides it is necessary to build up the military forces. I have read articles and comments noting that it seems discriminatory against males that only males are required to register with the Selective Service.
electronic medical records.
If this turns out to be a typical outcome of medical facility IT administration, then electronic medical records might not be such a good idea, at least not without adjustments to how the records are hosted.
Just like "critical infrastructure" should not be connected to the Internet, it seems medical facility records infrastructure needs to be separate as well. Perhaps this is a general architectural strategy that should be implemented wherever organizations process sensitive information - one level of infrastructure for general purpose communications and Internet access, another (separate) level of infrastructure for the sensitive information, with an acceptance of the higher cost of maintaining the proper separation. One big mashup appears to have some significant risks.
If the NSA did this, the listening would be done by a small cadre of unknown people with no data being shared publicly, especially if something interesting is found. Think about how Unternet access to freely available satellite imagery has changed how we look at and understand the world, both natural and man made. The tools are already in use by the few, secretly. This puts more of us on a slightly more equal footing.
So... to make an analogy, the US Constitution is like a whitelist of federal government powers implemented as the Constitutional firewall. And the "Interstate Commerce Clause" is where TCP port 80 was plumbed into the Constitutional firewall as a network-level pass-through instead of having a good application-level filter on it. So now anything the federal government wants to blast through the Constitutional firewall they just wrap up in TCP 80. Got it.
The "going dark" theory doesn't seem to hold water. There is vastly more information available now, in a very "hoover-able" (able to be sucked up) fashion, than ever before.
The law enforcement community in the US complained that with the digitization of telephone service, they would not be able to tap phones when needed - so they got a law that requires all phone switches be remotely "tappable" and voila, better access than ever before by law enforcement. We have all taken to using mobile phones, smart phones, and e-mail; all of which places all kinds of information in an electronic form that can be easily captured when before it was in ephemeral conversations and/or a million pieces of paper that couldn't be easily trolled through in a million years.
Sure, there has been a change in how law enforcement gathers information, with some ways going away, but new ways being made available. Overall it seems to me (without being in any way an expert) that there is probably a substantially larger amount of information available more easily today than 30 years ago before the explosion in personal digital communications. Encryption may impede some access, but overall it seems like a net gain.
Having said that, it doesn't necessarily make it a simple job to get the goods on someone to have all of the information available. It still has to be analyzed, assessed, and linked together with all of the other bits in order to be useful in an investigation. Its easy to see why law enforcement wants to make this process as easy as possible. But that's why we have constitutional protections - to help lay out the ground rules for finding a balance. I'm not surprised that there are some in the law enforcement community leaning on the scales as hard as they can, probably with the hopes of making sure the balance tips just a little bit more towards making their jobs easier.
One problem with advocating for various "rights" is that recognizing "rights" doesn't guarantee a fair or equitable outcome. As long as the conversation remains rooted in trying to declare various "rights" for everyone, you will probably end up with a system in which no completely fair or equitable outcome can be achieved.
By way of example: 20 years ago I moved out of the southern California area to another part of the country so that I could afford to buy a house in a neighborhood in which I could raise a family. I ended up buying a lot in a very quiet, fairly secluded area, then had a house built. I started a family, and life in our quiet secluded neighborhood was good until about 5 years ago when my backyard neighbor sold his house to an individual who turned it into a drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic. We asked how a business could be introduced to a residential neighborhood, and we were told he had the right to do so because it was a "group home," and the people he was treating had a right to live someplace. Ok, we shrugged and got on with our lives, although the noise from this property was much greater than when a family lived there. Then he bought another house that adjoined both our property and his original property, and added on to his business. Again, he "had the right" because he was helping people who needed help. When he bought the third house (that bordered our property) we decided to move. Not because of the "drug and alcohol" aspect, but because our neighborhood was no longer a neighborhood - we had upwards of 45 people a day driving in and out of our small street, 3 shifts of workers a day, all strangers. We were becoming surrounded by a very profitable business that acts nothing like a "home", which filled our small neighborhood with strangers.
We had "rights", but the people who were being treated also had "rights" and the guy running the business had "rights". All well intended, I'm sure, but the outcome was not fair or equitable, at least as far as we are concerned. Our relocation was traumatic because it wasn't anything we had been prepared for and came at a very inconvenient time for our children's schooling. Balancing various needs resulted in a year-long split between two halves of my family living quite some distance apart, and has seriously hosed-up my completing an advanced degree, but we are now in what we believe to be a much better living situation.
San Francisco and other communities that become overwhelmed by unbalanced economic forces will probably not solve their problems by focusing on "rights." The problems also won't be solved by pointing the finger at people of different political persuasions, either. The solutions will not come quickly, and individuals will need to make decisions for themselves with respect to how long they want to fight versus get on with their lives. And the outcomes won't be "fair and equitable" to everyone. That's life.