Freely publish a public key. Step 2; there is no step 2 as anyone can now send me encrypted mail that I can decrypt using my private key.
I know (and love) several people who do tinfoil hat shit like carrying their cell phones turned off in foil bags or refusing to even own a cell phone.
I've tried everything possible to get them to use PGP, including installing the once-free-to-use version that integrated well with Outlook Express on their computers. One's a PhD in history, the other has a BS in mechanical engineering, so neither is stupid and one is very technically adept but neither one can put the effort into actually using PGP.
And they both end up sending me horrible emails that really ought to be encrypted lest whoever's reading them think I'm tied up in their crazy ideas or take them too seriously.
The rest of the world with less technical sophistication and way less sense of paranoia? Forget about it. It's too much effort to find the right software and make it work.
Is it a question of "solving" poverty or is it a question of making it harder to suffer the ill effects of being poor?
My sense is that we will always have poor people, until we reach some stage of technological development where being poor means having to wait in line for the replicator.
I think part of the problem with poverty is that we're politically unable to address some of the socio-cultural aspects of poverty without devolving into racial stereotyping (when unfair) or claims of racial stereotyping (when fair, but with a high overlap between behaviors and race).
I'm inclined to believe that, but I also think it's inherently risky on its own because the HENRYs (high earners, not rich yet) as a class are well educated, highly skilled and can bring a lot of influence to bear.
My guess is that they would be co-opted with their own tax breaks on things they like, such as small business exemptions with narrow focus (eg, medical professionals running small practices), tax deductions for interest payments on big-ticket luxury items that only high earners can afford.
Enough to reduce the cohesion of HENRYs but not enough to make tax increases on high earners seem like real money.
If you don't have key management complications you have certificate trust complications.
You could do public key directories (is there still a PGP directory?), but then you have trust questions about keys retrieved from a directory, which leads you back to key management issues.
I think they're suffering from a crisis of innovation largely brought on by their own iron grip on the hardware and software features.
As an example, is refusing to support a Bluetooth mouse really meaningful anymore? Maybe it was with iPad 1.0 because they wanted to promote a touch interface and allowing a mouse in on the "ground floor" of a touch-centric device might have corrupted a touch-centric UI, but IMHO there's a lot you can do with a mouse in terms of functionality and productivity that touch or even a pen can't provide. Yet to do this day you can't pair a Bluetooth mouse with an iPad, even if the mouse is only enabled for apps that might specifically support it (ie, won't work in the home screen, settings, etc, but could with with an app specifically written to support mouse events).
The lightning port is far more locked down than 30 pin was, there's no support for external storage devices, and so on.
I think if they want "excitement" at this stage they have to open the door to innovation by opening up the device in some ways that lets someone else develop new and interesting uses for it. Apple have fenced themselves in with these devices by restricting so much that the list of interesting uses has become kind of a finite set.
Relatively small penalties paid by the city/state, etc. because these people should get something but at the end of the day it's not the people making the false arrest and imprisonment who pay - it's you and I the taxpayers, when we also haven't done anything wrong.
Sure we've done something wrong. We've voted time and again for politicians who support repressive policing, long jail sentences and bought into the idea that too many criminals were "getting away with it" in trials. Politicians (and prosecutors, who are often elected officials themselves) have seen this as a green light for aggressive prosecution and the use of tactics like leveling multiple charges against people with poor legal defense in the hopes that they will take a plea bargain on one charge and skip a trial.
It'd be nice to blame this solely on rogue individuals, but in reality these people are just responding to the incentives they've been given -- lock up lots of people and you get elected again or can move on to higher office.
I wish the punishment for wrongful conviction was personal financial liability, disbarment, removal from the judiciary and possibly criminal sanction, but mostly it isn't and of course the system is stacked against this, as nobody in the criminal justice system is willing to inflict these kinds of punishments lest they be subject to them as well.
So in the end, the only people "we" can hold responsible for wrongful conviction are ourselves. If the taxpayer hates paying people off for having their lives wrongly thrown away for two decades, maybe they should consider it the price of supporting an aggressive criminal justice system.
Shrinking it really isn't an improvement for *Ethernet*, it's a change made for the sake of "improving" some other element of equipment design, and more than likely, for someone else's benefit and likely financial at that.
Lots of existing ultrabooks already took out the extra thickness necessary to support an RJ45 jack as it is, I seriously doubt a new standard would cause them to add the extra hardware back in even if some future chipset included all the silicon for Ethernet and all they had to do was add a port. You buy a $20 USB3-gigabit Ethernet adapter and for all intents and purposes you have your Ethernet back.
Servers and workstations already have plenty of real estate for RJ45 ports, so shrinking there doesn't get you anything, especially if you go 10 gig. 10 gig buys you 10x the bandwidth, so you need fewer ports anyway for more bandwidth with less cabling as a side bonus.
The standard I would have liked to have seen would have been 4x discreet Ethernet links in a single plug and single cable for use with switches, servers and patch panels. The sole purpose would have been to cut back on the amount of discreet cabling necessary for multiple links between common devices (servers or patch panels) and switches. The cabling density in some racks is more than the cable trays and raceways can sanely hold, and more than I want to deal with and keep my sanity.
10G solves this problem in a lot of ways for servers already -- even if using iSCSI, actual bandwidth consumption is low enough that you can get by with 2x 10G links where you might have had 8x 1G links before.
On the panel side, I'm sure there are other solutions already out there.
What do you have to demonstrate that "more coders" is about a long-term conspiracy to reduce demand by increasing supply other than it's coincidental logic?
You could also say that "more coders" is about enabling more business growth because limits on the availability of coders limits growth of software businesses by making costs too high to support expansion.
It might even be possible that both are true at the same time, that capitalists may want to work to drive down costs in the near term, knowing that it will enable rapid expansion which will ultimately raise prices back to current levels when growth slows.
I'm actually inclined to believe that capitalists see coding as just a form of assembly work and want to push prices down closer to traditional factory wages because of how much traditional business economics is based on older industrial economic models and class structures.
I'm not sure it's necessarily the quantity of friends but how you interact with them. As I've gotten older, I've been able to maintain high quality interactions with them without a lot of frequency, which enables a higher number of friends without sacrificing quality.
Groups seem to take on their on dynamic. I've known people I liked individually but wouldn't have gotten much out of in a group. And groups (especially younger groups) often feel like they take on a competitiveness as their numbers go up. People seem to compete to be the group leader or act in ways that demonstrates loyalty or adhesion to the group, and in some ways, punish lack of group adhesion by individual members.
And numbers seem to matter -- groups of 3 never seem to work out, it's too easy to achieve 2 on 1 alliances (especially with a strong personality and weak personality). It's harder with larger odd numbers, but even 5 can result in two pairs with a single person left on their own.
I mostly like to stick to the Woody Allen line -- "I would never join a group that would have someone like me as a member."
Sue your local government for $5m... then YOU ARE THE ONE OUT OF THE $5m and it'll have to be made up via more taxes.
The public bears the financial obligation because the public ultimately bears the responsibility of a fair and honest criminal justice system. If you don't want to pay $5 million dollars to someone falsely convicted and jailed for two decades, don't falsely convict and jail people or elect/appoint those that do.
I don't necessarily think that it's smart that the government acts as the primary surety party for misconduct by its agents, as this creates a zero responsibility mindset. You would think that prosecutors especially would be required to carry a kind of liability insurance that would pay for their misconduct first, with only the government stepping in cases of gross misconduct (like falsely jailing someone for 20 years) to make up any difference. And it should be "use it and lose it" insurance that would cause them to no longer be eligible for office.
You would think that really important stuff like the signing keys would be stored in a special room more akin to a bank vault than anything else. Probably with 365/24 armed security and probably something that requires two people to go in at the same time so that no one person is alone with the equipment and a completely audit trail of the computer inside.
There are very few "sports reporters" that one could take seriously as actual journalists. I'd grant ex-pro players who actually have experience playing the sport they "report" on some kind of status as experts in their field, but what expertise does Andrews bring to the table?
Her only sports experience is as a cheerleader. As far as I can tell, her role is on-field "interviewer" where the talent in question is talking into a camera and holding a microphone. Maybe that makes her some kind of a journalist, but not exactly the kind of "journalism" that requires an awful lot of analytical skill or implies she has some kind of depth in her field. It's extremely hard to say she was hired for an encyclopedic knowledge of football or some other sport.
It seems much more likely she was hired for reasons that had nothing to do with her knowledge or journalism. More like "we want more women to watch sports, so we'll add women reporters" or worse, "men like to look at pretty women, so we'll add some pretty women".
Now she has a claim for her experience being surreptitiously recorded in the nude, but is it actually in the millions of dollars? What kind of *damages* did she actually suffer? She didn't suffer damage to her career (she actually got a newer, better contract after the incident), she doesn't seem to bear any kind of emotional scars or shame so intense that she has had to retire from public exposure. And she is good looking, too, so it's not like she was humiliated over it because she was fat or unappealing.
If anything the "damage" is mostly the validation that she's on TV principally because she's attractive and has sex appeal. I also wonder if the "damage" is somehow tied to the fact that being a sex symbol requires a certain amount of forbidden fruit / unobtainium. Once the genie is out of the bottle and she's been seen naked, does it remove some of that allure? It wouldn't surprise me in the world of image and fame if that kind of cynical attitude wasn't actually driving this.
Whatever it is, it's not $55 million in damages unless she says "well, I was going to collect $25 million to be nude" in a movie or magazine, but they cancelled after the pictures were on the internet because it was no longer new or novel. I'd buy that -- that's an actual loss of income potential.
I wet slip my fiberglass boat in Minnesota April through September. I get a very slight film but no beard. My marina acid washes it in the fall and it looks new afterwards.
Everything I've read about oceangoing hulls suggests much more labor is necessary. Biocide bottom paint and periodic scraping, acid washing and repainting with bottom paint every couple of years.
I wish I had a lift, but it's entirely cosmetic for me in relatively cold lake water.
I think these amounts awarded to Hogan and Erin Andrews (TV reporter secretly video recorded nude in her hotel room) are excessive when people who are wrongfully convicted of crimes they didn't commit get fractions of that amount after serving many years in prison.
This guy (http://www.nbcnews.com/id/18715007/) wrongfully convicted of a rape he didn't commit was imprisoned for 18 years and only got $5 million.
And Hogan gets $115 million and Andrews got $55 million? If you use the $5 million figure for false imprisonment, Hogan would have to have been imprisoned for 415 years to justify that amount, Andrews 198 years.
Don't get me wrong, both Hogan and Andrews were wronged, but to what extent were their lives ruined the same way being convicted of rape and losing decades of your life to a prison sentence? Hogan's career as anything but somebody famous for being famous is basically over anyway, and I seriously doubt any of his celebrity has been damaged by viewing him having sex.
Andrews cried crocodile tears on the stand, but how believable is that considering she apparently has no problem continuing to be on TV (new contract, even!)? She's only on TV because of her sex appeal to male sports fans and her entire career since high school has been based around being basically an eye candy accessory (being a cheerleader in high school and college). If anything, her complaint boils down to overexposure, and whatever loss of her allure occurs because now we've seen her naked. She wasn't even caught do anything of the embarrassing "fappening" poses, either, just walking around her hotel room.
I think $5 million probably isn't enough for someone who was jailed for 18 years, although you can probably make some kind of lost earnings argument that is at least grounded in reality. Hogan and Andrews? I can't even begin to see the justification.
...for the Secretary of State? As I've read this on Slashdot (which means I read some of the summary and comments, so I'm probably way off), I seem to remember that they only offered this phone and it was expensive.
First of all, does she have to buy it personally? That seems dumb, the Secretary of State is #4 in the line of succession and usually one of the highest profile members of the Federal Government and a phone using whatever's necessary to secure her communications isn't just standard?
I would think on orientation day it would be like first thing they give you after the coffee cup with 'WORLDS GREATEST SECRETARY OF STATE" and your door badge.
And if just her "office" has to buy it, is $5k some kind of major strain on the Secretary of States office budget? Was it like "oh shit, we stocked up on inkjet cartridges and K-cups and blew the budget?" or "Well shit, everyone got Aeron chairs and now we can't give the Secretary a secure phone."
It's almost like you have to hate Apple because they have shown Microsoft a path that enables them to make their products more controlled and more locked in -- walled garden web stores, forced software updates, touch-centric user interfaces.
I used to ride an express bus route to work. Daily round trip times were a minimum 90 minutes. The same daily round trips in a car were 40 minutes.
Local routes were worse, especially if you had to connect to another route -- you were guaranteed 10+ minutes of wait time for the connection. I've had one way trips on local routes that exceeded 45 minutes that were 20 minute car trips.
I always thought that one of the best fixes would be stop the common practice of stopping buses at every corner, and make them semi-express, stopping only every 5 blocks. This would only add an additional 2 blocks of walking, but greatly speed up driving because it would require much fewer stops. It was always maddening to have the bus stop at every. single. corner. to let people on or off, and quite often this resulted in missing a stoplight, meaning additional waiting.
Historically, how well has that worked for the working poor?
It sure seems like the only time the typical worker gets ahead is when major historical changes occur that alter the playing field in ways that economic power and the force of establishment violence can't change -- the mass deaths during the plague, the combination of economic depression and World War II, or outright political revolution, which seems to have enough negative outcomes that it can't really be endorsed.
Other than that, political and economic systems seem to be capable of withstanding and even thriving with a narrow economic and political elite and the masses held in working poverty or outright slavery. Rome built one of the greatest empires known on a slave economy. European feudalism lasted for centuries, a grip only loosened by the labor imbalance of the plague and took centuries and the influence of Marxism to truly wane.
While the economies of scale and mass production seem capable of altering the equation through broader material prosperity, the trends don't exactly appear encouraging. Wage stagnation, wealth concentration, race-to-the-bottom labor practices, and financial corruption of the political process don't seem to be stacking the odds in favor of the typical worker.
The current political process seems to indicate a disaffection for the status quo, but would even an election of Sanders be enough to actually rebalance the equation? We're due again for our usual post-administration review of the accomplishments or lack thereof of Presidential power as a reminder of how voting for "change" seldom results in lasting positive change for the masses.
We don't really know what the NSA can or can't do, just that the FBI can't do it on their own.
I would also guess maybe the FBI didn't ask for help (or say "pretty please with sugar on top") on purpose because they wanted to leverage it into their PR campaign for unlimited surveillance.
Given that part of the FBI's mandate is domestic counterintelligence, if there was some kind of real threat to national security, they wouldn't be running a PR campaign and the NSA would be asking if they wanted the data on USB3 sticks.
Hell, the NSA may just decide it would be worth the lulz to provide them with a Nexus running iOS with the data on it, just because they can.
How did that work out for Swiss banks and their tradition of banking secrecy? They eventually caved in to IRS demands to track down tax evaders.
There are maybe 4-5 countries on Earth with the combined economic, military and diplomatic power to be home to a product completely beyond the influence of any government.
And even then it doesn't guarantee that the product will be available anywhere outside of its home country (where presumably you're also able to manufacture it, so you don't have any dependency on potentially hostile manufacturing host countries).
I keep waiting for someone to find a vulnerability in VMware that lets a VM keep running without appearing in inventory. Bonus points if it can vMotion itself and have access to the management side to manipulate networks.
Well, that's how it is in Minnesota, and the logic of statewide uniformity was part of the State Supreme Court's decision outlawing red light cameras in this state.
There are often good reasons for state preemption of laws. Would you want traffic laws that vary from city to city, so that you would be vulnerable to prosecution because it would be impossible to know every municipal variation in traffic laws?
It can also wreak havoc for people or businesses that operate in multiple places in a single state, and can open the door to jurisdiction shopping to sue where the laws are most favorable even though the specific offense may not be based there.
I think most economists realize that information asymmetry leads to market distortions, which is partly why stuff like insider trading is actually illegal and the presence of a number of labeling or disclosure laws that require sellers to provide some kinds of information to buyers. At least here, if you've had to call an exterminator in the past year you have to disclose that to a buyer, for example.
I'm always dismayed, though, at how often lack of transparency is actually allowed through complex billing systems, "introductory" rates and general shady behavior. It's impossible, I know, but I wish there was a way to make sleazy sales tactics illegal where if you can demonstrate a way in which you were intentionally misled in a transaction you could keep the purchase and get refunded.
Slashdot Mirror
Freely publish a public key. Step 2; there is no step 2 as anyone can now send me encrypted mail that I can decrypt using my private key.
I know (and love) several people who do tinfoil hat shit like carrying their cell phones turned off in foil bags or refusing to even own a cell phone.
I've tried everything possible to get them to use PGP, including installing the once-free-to-use version that integrated well with Outlook Express on their computers. One's a PhD in history, the other has a BS in mechanical engineering, so neither is stupid and one is very technically adept but neither one can put the effort into actually using PGP.
And they both end up sending me horrible emails that really ought to be encrypted lest whoever's reading them think I'm tied up in their crazy ideas or take them too seriously.
The rest of the world with less technical sophistication and way less sense of paranoia? Forget about it. It's too much effort to find the right software and make it work.
Is it a question of "solving" poverty or is it a question of making it harder to suffer the ill effects of being poor?
My sense is that we will always have poor people, until we reach some stage of technological development where being poor means having to wait in line for the replicator.
I think part of the problem with poverty is that we're politically unable to address some of the socio-cultural aspects of poverty without devolving into racial stereotyping (when unfair) or claims of racial stereotyping (when fair, but with a high overlap between behaviors and race).
I'm inclined to believe that, but I also think it's inherently risky on its own because the HENRYs (high earners, not rich yet) as a class are well educated, highly skilled and can bring a lot of influence to bear.
My guess is that they would be co-opted with their own tax breaks on things they like, such as small business exemptions with narrow focus (eg, medical professionals running small practices), tax deductions for interest payments on big-ticket luxury items that only high earners can afford.
Enough to reduce the cohesion of HENRYs but not enough to make tax increases on high earners seem like real money.
If you don't have key management complications you have certificate trust complications.
You could do public key directories (is there still a PGP directory?), but then you have trust questions about keys retrieved from a directory, which leads you back to key management issues.
I think they're suffering from a crisis of innovation largely brought on by their own iron grip on the hardware and software features.
As an example, is refusing to support a Bluetooth mouse really meaningful anymore? Maybe it was with iPad 1.0 because they wanted to promote a touch interface and allowing a mouse in on the "ground floor" of a touch-centric device might have corrupted a touch-centric UI, but IMHO there's a lot you can do with a mouse in terms of functionality and productivity that touch or even a pen can't provide. Yet to do this day you can't pair a Bluetooth mouse with an iPad, even if the mouse is only enabled for apps that might specifically support it (ie, won't work in the home screen, settings, etc, but could with with an app specifically written to support mouse events).
The lightning port is far more locked down than 30 pin was, there's no support for external storage devices, and so on.
I think if they want "excitement" at this stage they have to open the door to innovation by opening up the device in some ways that lets someone else develop new and interesting uses for it. Apple have fenced themselves in with these devices by restricting so much that the list of interesting uses has become kind of a finite set.
Relatively small penalties paid by the city/state, etc. because these people should get something but at the end of the day it's not the people making the false arrest and imprisonment who pay - it's you and I the taxpayers, when we also haven't done anything wrong.
Sure we've done something wrong. We've voted time and again for politicians who support repressive policing, long jail sentences and bought into the idea that too many criminals were "getting away with it" in trials. Politicians (and prosecutors, who are often elected officials themselves) have seen this as a green light for aggressive prosecution and the use of tactics like leveling multiple charges against people with poor legal defense in the hopes that they will take a plea bargain on one charge and skip a trial.
It'd be nice to blame this solely on rogue individuals, but in reality these people are just responding to the incentives they've been given -- lock up lots of people and you get elected again or can move on to higher office.
I wish the punishment for wrongful conviction was personal financial liability, disbarment, removal from the judiciary and possibly criminal sanction, but mostly it isn't and of course the system is stacked against this, as nobody in the criminal justice system is willing to inflict these kinds of punishments lest they be subject to them as well.
So in the end, the only people "we" can hold responsible for wrongful conviction are ourselves. If the taxpayer hates paying people off for having their lives wrongly thrown away for two decades, maybe they should consider it the price of supporting an aggressive criminal justice system.
Shrinking it really isn't an improvement for *Ethernet*, it's a change made for the sake of "improving" some other element of equipment design, and more than likely, for someone else's benefit and likely financial at that.
Lots of existing ultrabooks already took out the extra thickness necessary to support an RJ45 jack as it is, I seriously doubt a new standard would cause them to add the extra hardware back in even if some future chipset included all the silicon for Ethernet and all they had to do was add a port. You buy a $20 USB3-gigabit Ethernet adapter and for all intents and purposes you have your Ethernet back.
Servers and workstations already have plenty of real estate for RJ45 ports, so shrinking there doesn't get you anything, especially if you go 10 gig. 10 gig buys you 10x the bandwidth, so you need fewer ports anyway for more bandwidth with less cabling as a side bonus.
The standard I would have liked to have seen would have been 4x discreet Ethernet links in a single plug and single cable for use with switches, servers and patch panels. The sole purpose would have been to cut back on the amount of discreet cabling necessary for multiple links between common devices (servers or patch panels) and switches. The cabling density in some racks is more than the cable trays and raceways can sanely hold, and more than I want to deal with and keep my sanity.
10G solves this problem in a lot of ways for servers already -- even if using iSCSI, actual bandwidth consumption is low enough that you can get by with 2x 10G links where you might have had 8x 1G links before.
On the panel side, I'm sure there are other solutions already out there.
What do you have to demonstrate that "more coders" is about a long-term conspiracy to reduce demand by increasing supply other than it's coincidental logic?
You could also say that "more coders" is about enabling more business growth because limits on the availability of coders limits growth of software businesses by making costs too high to support expansion.
It might even be possible that both are true at the same time, that capitalists may want to work to drive down costs in the near term, knowing that it will enable rapid expansion which will ultimately raise prices back to current levels when growth slows.
I'm actually inclined to believe that capitalists see coding as just a form of assembly work and want to push prices down closer to traditional factory wages because of how much traditional business economics is based on older industrial economic models and class structures.
I'm not sure it's necessarily the quantity of friends but how you interact with them. As I've gotten older, I've been able to maintain high quality interactions with them without a lot of frequency, which enables a higher number of friends without sacrificing quality.
Groups seem to take on their on dynamic. I've known people I liked individually but wouldn't have gotten much out of in a group. And groups (especially younger groups) often feel like they take on a competitiveness as their numbers go up. People seem to compete to be the group leader or act in ways that demonstrates loyalty or adhesion to the group, and in some ways, punish lack of group adhesion by individual members.
And numbers seem to matter -- groups of 3 never seem to work out, it's too easy to achieve 2 on 1 alliances (especially with a strong personality and weak personality). It's harder with larger odd numbers, but even 5 can result in two pairs with a single person left on their own.
I mostly like to stick to the Woody Allen line -- "I would never join a group that would have someone like me as a member."
Sue your local government for $5m ... then YOU ARE THE ONE OUT OF THE $5m and it'll have to be made up via more taxes.
The public bears the financial obligation because the public ultimately bears the responsibility of a fair and honest criminal justice system. If you don't want to pay $5 million dollars to someone falsely convicted and jailed for two decades, don't falsely convict and jail people or elect/appoint those that do.
I don't necessarily think that it's smart that the government acts as the primary surety party for misconduct by its agents, as this creates a zero responsibility mindset. You would think that prosecutors especially would be required to carry a kind of liability insurance that would pay for their misconduct first, with only the government stepping in cases of gross misconduct (like falsely jailing someone for 20 years) to make up any difference. And it should be "use it and lose it" insurance that would cause them to no longer be eligible for office.
You would think that really important stuff like the signing keys would be stored in a special room more akin to a bank vault than anything else. Probably with 365/24 armed security and probably something that requires two people to go in at the same time so that no one person is alone with the equipment and a completely audit trail of the computer inside.
There are very few "sports reporters" that one could take seriously as actual journalists. I'd grant ex-pro players who actually have experience playing the sport they "report" on some kind of status as experts in their field, but what expertise does Andrews bring to the table?
Her only sports experience is as a cheerleader. As far as I can tell, her role is on-field "interviewer" where the talent in question is talking into a camera and holding a microphone. Maybe that makes her some kind of a journalist, but not exactly the kind of "journalism" that requires an awful lot of analytical skill or implies she has some kind of depth in her field. It's extremely hard to say she was hired for an encyclopedic knowledge of football or some other sport.
It seems much more likely she was hired for reasons that had nothing to do with her knowledge or journalism. More like "we want more women to watch sports, so we'll add women reporters" or worse, "men like to look at pretty women, so we'll add some pretty women".
Now she has a claim for her experience being surreptitiously recorded in the nude, but is it actually in the millions of dollars? What kind of *damages* did she actually suffer? She didn't suffer damage to her career (she actually got a newer, better contract after the incident), she doesn't seem to bear any kind of emotional scars or shame so intense that she has had to retire from public exposure. And she is good looking, too, so it's not like she was humiliated over it because she was fat or unappealing.
If anything the "damage" is mostly the validation that she's on TV principally because she's attractive and has sex appeal. I also wonder if the "damage" is somehow tied to the fact that being a sex symbol requires a certain amount of forbidden fruit / unobtainium. Once the genie is out of the bottle and she's been seen naked, does it remove some of that allure? It wouldn't surprise me in the world of image and fame if that kind of cynical attitude wasn't actually driving this.
Whatever it is, it's not $55 million in damages unless she says "well, I was going to collect $25 million to be nude" in a movie or magazine, but they cancelled after the pictures were on the internet because it was no longer new or novel. I'd buy that -- that's an actual loss of income potential.
I wet slip my fiberglass boat in Minnesota April through September. I get a very slight film but no beard. My marina acid washes it in the fall and it looks new afterwards.
Everything I've read about oceangoing hulls suggests much more labor is necessary. Biocide bottom paint and periodic scraping, acid washing and repainting with bottom paint every couple of years.
I wish I had a lift, but it's entirely cosmetic for me in relatively cold lake water.
I think these amounts awarded to Hogan and Erin Andrews (TV reporter secretly video recorded nude in her hotel room) are excessive when people who are wrongfully convicted of crimes they didn't commit get fractions of that amount after serving many years in prison.
This guy (http://www.nbcnews.com/id/18715007/) wrongfully convicted of a rape he didn't commit was imprisoned for 18 years and only got $5 million.
And Hogan gets $115 million and Andrews got $55 million? If you use the $5 million figure for false imprisonment, Hogan would have to have been imprisoned for 415 years to justify that amount, Andrews 198 years.
Don't get me wrong, both Hogan and Andrews were wronged, but to what extent were their lives ruined the same way being convicted of rape and losing decades of your life to a prison sentence? Hogan's career as anything but somebody famous for being famous is basically over anyway, and I seriously doubt any of his celebrity has been damaged by viewing him having sex.
Andrews cried crocodile tears on the stand, but how believable is that considering she apparently has no problem continuing to be on TV (new contract, even!)? She's only on TV because of her sex appeal to male sports fans and her entire career since high school has been based around being basically an eye candy accessory (being a cheerleader in high school and college). If anything, her complaint boils down to overexposure, and whatever loss of her allure occurs because now we've seen her naked. She wasn't even caught do anything of the embarrassing "fappening" poses, either, just walking around her hotel room.
I think $5 million probably isn't enough for someone who was jailed for 18 years, although you can probably make some kind of lost earnings argument that is at least grounded in reality. Hogan and Andrews? I can't even begin to see the justification.
...for the Secretary of State? As I've read this on Slashdot (which means I read some of the summary and comments, so I'm probably way off), I seem to remember that they only offered this phone and it was expensive.
First of all, does she have to buy it personally? That seems dumb, the Secretary of State is #4 in the line of succession and usually one of the highest profile members of the Federal Government and a phone using whatever's necessary to secure her communications isn't just standard?
I would think on orientation day it would be like first thing they give you after the coffee cup with 'WORLDS GREATEST SECRETARY OF STATE" and your door badge.
And if just her "office" has to buy it, is $5k some kind of major strain on the Secretary of States office budget? Was it like "oh shit, we stocked up on inkjet cartridges and K-cups and blew the budget?" or "Well shit, everyone got Aeron chairs and now we can't give the Secretary a secure phone."
It's almost like you have to hate Apple because they have shown Microsoft a path that enables them to make their products more controlled and more locked in -- walled garden web stores, forced software updates, touch-centric user interfaces.
No what is needed is having bus routes not suck.
This exactly.
I used to ride an express bus route to work. Daily round trip times were a minimum 90 minutes. The same daily round trips in a car were 40 minutes.
Local routes were worse, especially if you had to connect to another route -- you were guaranteed 10+ minutes of wait time for the connection. I've had one way trips on local routes that exceeded 45 minutes that were 20 minute car trips.
I always thought that one of the best fixes would be stop the common practice of stopping buses at every corner, and make them semi-express, stopping only every 5 blocks. This would only add an additional 2 blocks of walking, but greatly speed up driving because it would require much fewer stops. It was always maddening to have the bus stop at every. single. corner. to let people on or off, and quite often this resulted in missing a stoplight, meaning additional waiting.
Historically, how well has that worked for the working poor?
It sure seems like the only time the typical worker gets ahead is when major historical changes occur that alter the playing field in ways that economic power and the force of establishment violence can't change -- the mass deaths during the plague, the combination of economic depression and World War II, or outright political revolution, which seems to have enough negative outcomes that it can't really be endorsed.
Other than that, political and economic systems seem to be capable of withstanding and even thriving with a narrow economic and political elite and the masses held in working poverty or outright slavery. Rome built one of the greatest empires known on a slave economy. European feudalism lasted for centuries, a grip only loosened by the labor imbalance of the plague and took centuries and the influence of Marxism to truly wane.
While the economies of scale and mass production seem capable of altering the equation through broader material prosperity, the trends don't exactly appear encouraging. Wage stagnation, wealth concentration, race-to-the-bottom labor practices, and financial corruption of the political process don't seem to be stacking the odds in favor of the typical worker.
The current political process seems to indicate a disaffection for the status quo, but would even an election of Sanders be enough to actually rebalance the equation? We're due again for our usual post-administration review of the accomplishments or lack thereof of Presidential power as a reminder of how voting for "change" seldom results in lasting positive change for the masses.
We don't really know what the NSA can or can't do, just that the FBI can't do it on their own.
I would also guess maybe the FBI didn't ask for help (or say "pretty please with sugar on top") on purpose because they wanted to leverage it into their PR campaign for unlimited surveillance.
Given that part of the FBI's mandate is domestic counterintelligence, if there was some kind of real threat to national security, they wouldn't be running a PR campaign and the NSA would be asking if they wanted the data on USB3 sticks.
Hell, the NSA may just decide it would be worth the lulz to provide them with a Nexus running iOS with the data on it, just because they can.
How did that work out for Swiss banks and their tradition of banking secrecy? They eventually caved in to IRS demands to track down tax evaders.
There are maybe 4-5 countries on Earth with the combined economic, military and diplomatic power to be home to a product completely beyond the influence of any government.
And even then it doesn't guarantee that the product will be available anywhere outside of its home country (where presumably you're also able to manufacture it, so you don't have any dependency on potentially hostile manufacturing host countries).
I keep waiting for someone to find a vulnerability in VMware that lets a VM keep running without appearing in inventory. Bonus points if it can vMotion itself and have access to the management side to manipulate networks.
Well, that's how it is in Minnesota, and the logic of statewide uniformity was part of the State Supreme Court's decision outlawing red light cameras in this state.
There are often good reasons for state preemption of laws. Would you want traffic laws that vary from city to city, so that you would be vulnerable to prosecution because it would be impossible to know every municipal variation in traffic laws?
It can also wreak havoc for people or businesses that operate in multiple places in a single state, and can open the door to jurisdiction shopping to sue where the laws are most favorable even though the specific offense may not be based there.
I love how people want to give benefits to poor people, but only if they're African American.
I think most economists realize that information asymmetry leads to market distortions, which is partly why stuff like insider trading is actually illegal and the presence of a number of labeling or disclosure laws that require sellers to provide some kinds of information to buyers. At least here, if you've had to call an exterminator in the past year you have to disclose that to a buyer, for example.
I'm always dismayed, though, at how often lack of transparency is actually allowed through complex billing systems, "introductory" rates and general shady behavior. It's impossible, I know, but I wish there was a way to make sleazy sales tactics illegal where if you can demonstrate a way in which you were intentionally misled in a transaction you could keep the purchase and get refunded.