If you could go back in time and expose J. Edgar Hoover as a cross-dressing sadomasochist BEFORE he managed to seize control of the FBI, would it still be the same kind of power-mad agency?
I often wonder if it would be a milder government law enforcement agency with narrower authority if Hoover had been sidelined for some other bureaucrat, or if what the FBI has become is essentially an inevitability -- a byproduct of the bank robberies of the 1930s, the security panics of the 1940s, the Red Scare and anticommunism, the cold war and the 1960s civil unrest.
Perhaps it would still be what it is, but somehow with a different tone had it not been one man's personal kingdom for 40 years, a man who scared most Presidents into leaving him alone.
In my mind, the guy got caught because he was a dick about it, not because of the stealthy efforts of directional locating agents.
My theory on pulsing the jammer wasn't that you'd constantly be pulsing it, but that you'd be able turn it on and pulse it a few times over a 10 or 15 minute period and give the appearance that cell service was unreliable enough that trying to keep re-establishing calls was a waste of effort.
I'm sure you could still be tracked if there was an active directional location system up, but I think it would be more challenging with short pulses and with most of the time spent in the off position, especially since you're on a moving train. I would guess that really homing in on you would require them to be pretty close to you during a pattern of on pulses, too.
The other thing that would be beneficial would be some way to tune the power output as low as possible to achieve the effect you want but without so much output power that you can be triangulated from any distance.
I would think that stealthy use like this would make it more difficult to tracking even with directional equipment and would certainly make it very hard for someone to establish a coherent pattern of jamming.
I don't know how long these devices need to be on to be effective as disrupting cell phones, but the descriptions of their use implies that you flip the switch and it pretty much instantly disrupts calls.
I would think the "safer" method of using a jammer would not be to turn the thing on and leave it on (thus leaving you exposed to detection), but to have some kind of pulse mode where it comes on for the minimum amount of time necessary to disrupt calls. Of course, people will think it's just a normal dropped call, so have a time that causes it to pulse on again for 5 seconds 30-60 seconds later to kill off calls that people re-establish.
Ideally you would determine the ideal pulse frequency and repetition to just convince people that the phone network isn't working and have them give up. My thought is that after about 5 iterations of this, a lot of people would simply give up and assume there was some network disruption. There's probably some optimal repeat pattern necessary to keep the most persistent from retrying, like a one-off pulse every 10-15 minutes or some kind of 30 minute period where there's an exponential backoff on repeated pulses.
The "positive" benefit would be that it would be a lot kinder to people just using data, since the interruptions would be pretty brief for them. I would also think it would be a lot harder to track, especially if it allowed the device to remain completely off for long periods of time. And I think it would be a lot harder to reach the conclusion that a jammer was even being used because there would a lot less obvious evidence of a long pattern of loss of signal. And the battery would last longer.
Facebook is just proof that people simply want to reinforce their own beliefs and parrot the beliefs of their peer groups. They're not interested in facts or finding any real truths because so many of them contradict what they want to believe or the conventional wisdom of their peer groups.
I'm curious if a drone could be built that uses a lawn mower or weed trimmer gas engine directly as the power source (skipping the electric generation part). A helicopter design seems reasonable but I can see where a quadcopter might be impractical from a transmission perspective.
I know they make RC turbines for use RC planes and helicopters, perhaps a quad-turbine quadcopter to avoid the transmission gearing? The turbines are really expensive, but I would imagine for deep pocketed organizations, a quad-turbine quadcopter sounds kind of interesting and probably has enough power to also carry enough fuel to have long flight times and decent payloads.
I think they pay 4x because the value is worth more than 4x.
You get a dramatic performance improvement which in itself provides efficiencies in service delivery, reduced power consumption. And the performance benefit itself is an exponential improvement, not just an incremental one.
I kind of doubt anyone's going to know. I've waited in line to use the coin machine at the bank and seen the two people in front of me dump almost as many coins as I did into the machine. Nobody emptied the machine after each customer to check the coins.
By the time the bank actually empties the machine the individual denomination hoppers are filled with so many coins that the ones *I* deposited are already mixed in.
I think a lot of this "getting away with it" business depends on getting away with the original crime -- stealing the contents of the coin bags to begin with. If you can get away with *that* part of it cleanly (either they NEVER find out or only years later and can't reduce the suspect population meaningfully), then laundering a zillion coins by itself just won't be that complicated.
If you're on a very short list of suspects, then unloading a lot of quarters becomes really complicated.
I would think a front would only be necessary for a long-term ongoing scam where you had a limitless supply of coins. $196,000 sounds like a lot of money, but the big jar on my dresser when filled usually yields close to $500 when I cash them in.
The safe thing to do would not be looking for a way to cash them all in quickly, but to cash in $2000 a month at varied locations in approximately $500 lots. $2000 a month in tax-free cash would make a nice boost in income and could be used for dining out and other common cash purchases, and the amount is probably low enough to not attract any scrutiny.
You could probably even use the same location with the right attitude and a believable narrative, like you own a couple of vending machines in your business lunchroom or laundry machines in your apartments, or you have a freelance business that brings in quarters and don't want to deal with banks.
My only real concern wouldn't be getting caught because cashing in a lot of quarters is suspicion of a theft but that the coin-op business is notorious for involvement by organized crime and tax evasion. The IRS may review coin-cashing business records looking for tax evasion patterns.
I also wonder if it would be possible to just open a business banking account for a phony front business like a laundry or car wash and just take the coins to the bank. You'd have to pay taxes and make it look legitimate on paper, but it would be a perfect front for just using the bank for cashing in the coins.
Casinos all seem to use electronic tokens now with barcoded chits that print out when you cash out.
There's a History or Discovery channel documentary about a guy who made slugs for casinos during the brief era between coins and electronic tokens. The guy was a retired toolmaker with a little extra money and he bought some equipment capable of making a detailed copy of casino tokens, created a die for stamping them and churned out several.
The first batch didn't work because the machines rejected its magnetic signature. He demilled the design off an actual token and had a metallurgical analysis done and found a commercial alloy used for flatware that was a close match. Those tokens worked.
He would go into a casino, buy a small amount of tokens and then play with a mix of his counterfeits and real tokens. I don't recall if he mostly made money from winnings payouts or by cashing in his fake tokens. He ultimately got caught, I think by visiting the same casino too often, but his copies were nearly indistinguishable from the originals -- I think they actually had to do a metallurgical analysis to determine which were fakes.
The design they would license would be the visual design, not the engineering. I would wager that any licensing agreement would be language making the licensee responsible for the engineering safety and possibly even requiring end buyers to also sign a waiver agreeing to hold DC comics harmless for any flaws in the vehicle's mechanical safety and reliability.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there was already a ton of precedent for this in civil case law if not actual statutes governing this. Car customizing is almost as old as cars are and given that many restorations and modifications are oriented towards performance, I doubt GM have been held accountable for accidents caused when someone sold a restored Corvette that turned out to have mechanical flaws in its restoration.
Just reading the Wikipedia page on the Frankfurt School (which has a section on Cultural Marxism as mostly a derogatory right wing conspiracy theory) makes me wonder what even the Frankfurt School has to do with Marxism as a straight-up economic theory.
It also makes whatever Cultural Marxism actually is sound not exactly far-fetched, given the wide-ranging aspects of the Frankfurt School.
I would expect gadgets on Amazon any day that you can attach the tracker to that simulate various types of movement to fool the tracker -- long walks, intensive exercise sessions, etc.
I just ended up signing it with the notion that it was unenforceable.
My sense is that cost and complexity of bringing a breach of contract suit makes it unlikely they would bother unless I "stole" one of the major accounts (which I never worked on).
For run of the mill "violations" like going to work for another consultancy without treading on any of their existing accounts, I don't think they would bother. If I even thought there would be a hassle, I wouldn't tell them where I'm working (or tell them that I didn't even have a job lined up) and just the effort and cost of figuring that out would make them lose interest -- actually hiring an attorney to put together a lawsuit would make it unlikely to happen.
Employers are constantly one the lookout for tools that they can use to coerce employees into doing what they want.
"Being healthy" has in many ways become a secular religion and fitness trackers tie into both the instant gratification impulse of validating "healthy" behavior as well as the on-trend desire to display the latest gadgets. Displaying your good taste in cutting edge technology *and* your adherence to the fitness/health dogma seems almost identical to a religious person prominently wearing a crucifix -- your good taste in jewelry AND your piety gets displayed at the same time.
It's almost evil genius for corporations to co-opt this. They gain the potential (however dubious it may prove to be) of reduced healthcare costs while all the while leveraging all the social power associated with fitness trackers. It wouldn't surprise me if we find out at some point that they're able to exploit location tracking from them as well, allowing employers to use location criteria to exploit personal details they might not otherwise be able to (eg, employee shows up at gay bars frequently).
And employers then gain a socially desirable coercive tool, able to ratchet up "goals" with reverse incentives tied to them that increase company profit -- ie, if you're not able to "meet the new fitness quota" you pay more for health insurance (or the company pays less).
A small consulting company I worked for asked me after about two years to sign a non-compete agreement. I talked to an employment attorney who reviewed the agreement. He said it was a generic boilerplate with no obvious negatives, but then he asked me what I was given in consideration for signing the agreement -- raise, new title, any material benefits?
I said no, should I ask for any? He said no, that might cause problems -- your best bet is to just sign it, but knowing that its not enforceable, as signing a non-compete when you already are employed without being given consideration has generally rendered non-compete agreements unenforceable in our state under the assumption that the relationship is coercive.
I'm wondering if the coercive nature of employment could be used to block fitness tracker use in the US under a similar kind of logic.
I think the entire concept is bogus. What I do away from work is my own business, and if that includes sitting like statue for the 16 hours I'm off work, so be it. I also think there's good reason to question what and how much exercise is ultimately beneficial. I'd also think companies would want to be cautious about implying penalties or career limitations from not meeting arbitrary fitness goals -- those in the worst physical shape may be coerced into levels of activity that are unhealthy for them, believing if they don't post numbers that meet some arbitrary employer standards they could lose their jobs, benefits or compensation.
Ultimately I view these fitness trackers as a kind of confessional for the fitness religion, either affirming one's adherence to fitness dogma or one's place as a fitness heretic.
This was my first thought -- just sell the guy a license to make the replicas, the same way they would charge a toymaker to make toy replicas of the Batmobile. Given the price he charges, I'm sure his buyers have an expectation of detail and quality that goes way beyond what DC Comics would expect of any toymaker and probably matching what would be expected out of a big budget Hollywood production.
And maybe they did, but the terms were so onerous that the finished product wouldn't be economically viable. If there are N people willing to buy a $90k Batmobile replica, there are certainly fewer people willing to buy a $200,000 replica.
The only thing I can think of is that they're protecting some kind of special replica licensing revenue that they may make out of theme parks or restaurants that want one. Or maybe they believe that the "movie magic" could potentially be spoiled, thus undermining potential film profits, if Batmobiles somehow become commonplace.
I have a problem with them prosecuting a person in another country. Does that mean I am subject to foreign laws? This is all bullshit.
Say what you will about the United States, but I don't think there's too many crimes you can commit here that will result in you being extradicted overseas. But there sure seems to be a lot of things you can do overseas that will result in your ass getting shipped to the US to be tried and convicted.
even contacted an attorney over it, but he wouldn't take the case due to an inability to assign a dollar value to the "damage"
This is really the problem in a nutshell. It's an abhorrent invasion of privacy but nobody can really calculate a dollar value on the damages incurred. Maybe a megabyte of data, total, on a monthly basis, and even then only if the data wasn't somehow excepted from data usage.
$135 million is chump change. What kind of profit do you think they made selling this tracking information on millions of wireless users over months/years of doing it?
It should be $100 million dollars PLUS $50 per subscriber cookie. The tracking cookie database and any other databases built from this data should be scrubbed, as verified by a third party auditor chosen by the FCC, billed to Verizon. They should be barred from re-implementing this system under any other name or any other opt-in format with a follow-up audit by FCC chosen auditors.
Any future violation of this nature should be fined at $100 per violation.
Didn't know about the design goal wanting 400V DC input. That clearly cements it in some kind of fixed installation mode, but it would be interesting to know if the input voltage can be scaled down.
There are some interesting variable speed DC generators which seem to provide better overall efficiency than fixed-speed AC generators because they can run at lower RPMs when power demand is lower, but they mostly seem to make sense when integrated into a larger battery bank. And usually they have some kind of programmable range of run speeds tied to various use cases -- like deep charging battery, topping off the battery or maximum load output.
"Most marine generators in recreational applications are about 5kw" That's on the high end, for fixed diesel installations; most of the boaters that I know use much smaller portable generators. (I don't; too noisy.)
I guess it depends on what you're looking at. Most recreational boats I've looked at that come with generators seem to start at 5 kw, which seems to fit the typical maximum power usage (stereo/TV, microwave, air conditioning, lighting). Kohler's smallest is 4kw @ 50 hz and 5 kw @ 60 hz. Boats over 40 ft tend towards even larger, like 9+ kw.
There are a lot of people who seem to want to use a Honda suitcase generator on 30 ft. boats. I think this is a nutty fire risk, and the 2kw models probably can't start the air conditioning, either.
Of course I've only ever looked at power boats, too. I don't know how it works on sailboats -- most larger ones with inboard engines may use the propulsion power plant with the prop disengaged and tied to a heavy duty alternator for battery bank charging. Although I would kind of expect more dedicated power generation on larger boats that may have bigger power consumption (fridges, lighting, marine electronics).
My own interest was mainly to see how practical a solar/battery bank would be on a recreational boat, or how much generator run time it might reduce when not running air conditioning.
I usually only notice the degradation in performance on iOS devices once they are at least two major hardware revs behind. I would also say that it's been less bad as overall hardware performance has gotten better.
I will grant you that it is kind of mystifying why once the invisible device line gets crossed performance plummets. It'd be nice to believe it's a pure conspiracy to sell more gadgets, but there's probably at least as much of a technical argument that more software requires more memory and more cycles and it's debatable how much Apple should spend in development resources optimizing products 3+ generations old, but despite the poor performance they DO support installing the current OS on older devices, so it's not like it's a zero resource effort, either.
As for the iPod, I seem to recall at least the first model was Mac-only and didn't support windows at all. I know when I bought my first, I bought the "windows" model which I believe supported USB charging, although I seem to remember something funky about the 30 pin cable supporting either firewire or usb charging, but not both. My 2007 car has a 30 pin iPod interface, but won't charge a modern USB-only device with a 30 pin cable.
2-5kw is a sweet spot for these applications. Most marine generators in recreational applications are about 5kw -- and most of that is usually to drive air conditioning or similar high voltage applications.
2kw or so, though, is pretty decent for off-battery use of lower powered items and might even provide enough power (if you can use all 2k) for a small microwave.
Apple's "genius" was to bring disposability to expensive products. Imagine someone telling you in 1999 that people would be buying a new ã700 phone every two years or less. It would have sounded ridiculous.
Imagine telling someone in 1999 they would have a phone which could take better pictures than almost every digital camera on the market and high definition videos, provide them and their laptop with high speed Internet access comparable to a pair of bonded T1s, give them access to the web, their email, documents, and even some content creation tools, capable of carrying their entire music library, play videos, and be so secure the FBI would beg the creator in public to help them crack it.
The only rub would be they might want to upgrade it every couple of years because the next one would have even better performance and likely desirable new features.
I would imagine a significant number of people would jump all over it.
In only a kind of semi-snarky way, how many people who bitch about other people spending their money on new phones don't do it because they can't or it's somehow their secret, get rich scheme? I get that it's kind of dubious financial decision for people further down the income scale and some tech savvy people get some personal satisfaction out of hacking/rooting a lesser device or have some personal religious denial about "not needing" a modern smartphone.
But for a not-insignificant part of the market, it's a miracle device whose benefits so greatly outweigh the nominal dollar cost that the value seems worth it, and it isn't a significant expense.
At a certain point it just sounds like sour grapes. You can't have it, so you tell yourself you don't want it and convince yourself that everyone else is a fool for having it.
NATO is not willing to stand up for Turkey any more, because Erdogan behaves like a total lunatic and better replace him with a logically calculating general in a soon to happen coup d'etat. (Military dictatorship has always been the normal way of life in post-ottoman Turkey.)
There was just an article in yesterday's NY Times about the government seizure of a major newspaper which said:
As Turkey faces its domestic demons, critics say the government has been emboldened to target its enemies within the country because the European Union and NATO allies, in particular, have looked the other way as they seek Turkey's support to contain the refugee crisis and pacify the raging civil war in Syria.
I would argue that NATO is willing to cut him a lot of slack for various reasons. Euro-centric factions over the flow of refugees from the Middle East, and US-centric factions over Turkish support of NATO air missions and support for whatever handful of rebels are left in Syria which aren't aligned with any specific jihadi elements.
It remains to be seen whether Erdogan's dismantling of the officer corps over the past few years has meaningfully reduced his chances of another military junta in Turkey, or whether it will have the unintended consequences of worsening its performance in the field, increasing chaos and emboldening the remaining officers to pull of another coup.
I suspect the existential fear of something like a civil war in Turkey will give Erdogan carte blanche in the near term, especially with NATO, as they don't have many other resources to counter every other thing working against them in the region. The Israelis and the Jordanians are sitting this one out, the Saudis have demonstrated a lack of effectiveness in Yemen and are facing their own economic challenges through a self-imposed oil glut.
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If you could go back in time and expose J. Edgar Hoover as a cross-dressing sadomasochist BEFORE he managed to seize control of the FBI, would it still be the same kind of power-mad agency?
I often wonder if it would be a milder government law enforcement agency with narrower authority if Hoover had been sidelined for some other bureaucrat, or if what the FBI has become is essentially an inevitability -- a byproduct of the bank robberies of the 1930s, the security panics of the 1940s, the Red Scare and anticommunism, the cold war and the 1960s civil unrest.
Perhaps it would still be what it is, but somehow with a different tone had it not been one man's personal kingdom for 40 years, a man who scared most Presidents into leaving him alone.
In my mind, the guy got caught because he was a dick about it, not because of the stealthy efforts of directional locating agents.
My theory on pulsing the jammer wasn't that you'd constantly be pulsing it, but that you'd be able turn it on and pulse it a few times over a 10 or 15 minute period and give the appearance that cell service was unreliable enough that trying to keep re-establishing calls was a waste of effort.
I'm sure you could still be tracked if there was an active directional location system up, but I think it would be more challenging with short pulses and with most of the time spent in the off position, especially since you're on a moving train. I would guess that really homing in on you would require them to be pretty close to you during a pattern of on pulses, too.
The other thing that would be beneficial would be some way to tune the power output as low as possible to achieve the effect you want but without so much output power that you can be triangulated from any distance.
I would think that stealthy use like this would make it more difficult to tracking even with directional equipment and would certainly make it very hard for someone to establish a coherent pattern of jamming.
I don't know how long these devices need to be on to be effective as disrupting cell phones, but the descriptions of their use implies that you flip the switch and it pretty much instantly disrupts calls.
I would think the "safer" method of using a jammer would not be to turn the thing on and leave it on (thus leaving you exposed to detection), but to have some kind of pulse mode where it comes on for the minimum amount of time necessary to disrupt calls. Of course, people will think it's just a normal dropped call, so have a time that causes it to pulse on again for 5 seconds 30-60 seconds later to kill off calls that people re-establish.
Ideally you would determine the ideal pulse frequency and repetition to just convince people that the phone network isn't working and have them give up. My thought is that after about 5 iterations of this, a lot of people would simply give up and assume there was some network disruption. There's probably some optimal repeat pattern necessary to keep the most persistent from retrying, like a one-off pulse every 10-15 minutes or some kind of 30 minute period where there's an exponential backoff on repeated pulses.
The "positive" benefit would be that it would be a lot kinder to people just using data, since the interruptions would be pretty brief for them. I would also think it would be a lot harder to track, especially if it allowed the device to remain completely off for long periods of time. And I think it would be a lot harder to reach the conclusion that a jammer was even being used because there would a lot less obvious evidence of a long pattern of loss of signal. And the battery would last longer.
Facebook is just proof that people simply want to reinforce their own beliefs and parrot the beliefs of their peer groups. They're not interested in facts or finding any real truths because so many of them contradict what they want to believe or the conventional wisdom of their peer groups.
I'm curious if a drone could be built that uses a lawn mower or weed trimmer gas engine directly as the power source (skipping the electric generation part). A helicopter design seems reasonable but I can see where a quadcopter might be impractical from a transmission perspective.
I know they make RC turbines for use RC planes and helicopters, perhaps a quad-turbine quadcopter to avoid the transmission gearing? The turbines are really expensive, but I would imagine for deep pocketed organizations, a quad-turbine quadcopter sounds kind of interesting and probably has enough power to also carry enough fuel to have long flight times and decent payloads.
I think they pay 4x because the value is worth more than 4x.
You get a dramatic performance improvement which in itself provides efficiencies in service delivery, reduced power consumption. And the performance benefit itself is an exponential improvement, not just an incremental one.
I kind of doubt anyone's going to know. I've waited in line to use the coin machine at the bank and seen the two people in front of me dump almost as many coins as I did into the machine. Nobody emptied the machine after each customer to check the coins.
By the time the bank actually empties the machine the individual denomination hoppers are filled with so many coins that the ones *I* deposited are already mixed in.
I think a lot of this "getting away with it" business depends on getting away with the original crime -- stealing the contents of the coin bags to begin with. If you can get away with *that* part of it cleanly (either they NEVER find out or only years later and can't reduce the suspect population meaningfully), then laundering a zillion coins by itself just won't be that complicated.
If you're on a very short list of suspects, then unloading a lot of quarters becomes really complicated.
I would think a front would only be necessary for a long-term ongoing scam where you had a limitless supply of coins. $196,000 sounds like a lot of money, but the big jar on my dresser when filled usually yields close to $500 when I cash them in.
The safe thing to do would not be looking for a way to cash them all in quickly, but to cash in $2000 a month at varied locations in approximately $500 lots. $2000 a month in tax-free cash would make a nice boost in income and could be used for dining out and other common cash purchases, and the amount is probably low enough to not attract any scrutiny.
You could probably even use the same location with the right attitude and a believable narrative, like you own a couple of vending machines in your business lunchroom or laundry machines in your apartments, or you have a freelance business that brings in quarters and don't want to deal with banks.
My only real concern wouldn't be getting caught because cashing in a lot of quarters is suspicion of a theft but that the coin-op business is notorious for involvement by organized crime and tax evasion. The IRS may review coin-cashing business records looking for tax evasion patterns.
I also wonder if it would be possible to just open a business banking account for a phony front business like a laundry or car wash and just take the coins to the bank. You'd have to pay taxes and make it look legitimate on paper, but it would be a perfect front for just using the bank for cashing in the coins.
Casinos all seem to use electronic tokens now with barcoded chits that print out when you cash out.
There's a History or Discovery channel documentary about a guy who made slugs for casinos during the brief era between coins and electronic tokens. The guy was a retired toolmaker with a little extra money and he bought some equipment capable of making a detailed copy of casino tokens, created a die for stamping them and churned out several.
The first batch didn't work because the machines rejected its magnetic signature. He demilled the design off an actual token and had a metallurgical analysis done and found a commercial alloy used for flatware that was a close match. Those tokens worked.
He would go into a casino, buy a small amount of tokens and then play with a mix of his counterfeits and real tokens. I don't recall if he mostly made money from winnings payouts or by cashing in his fake tokens. He ultimately got caught, I think by visiting the same casino too often, but his copies were nearly indistinguishable from the originals -- I think they actually had to do a metallurgical analysis to determine which were fakes.
The design they would license would be the visual design, not the engineering. I would wager that any licensing agreement would be language making the licensee responsible for the engineering safety and possibly even requiring end buyers to also sign a waiver agreeing to hold DC comics harmless for any flaws in the vehicle's mechanical safety and reliability.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there was already a ton of precedent for this in civil case law if not actual statutes governing this. Car customizing is almost as old as cars are and given that many restorations and modifications are oriented towards performance, I doubt GM have been held accountable for accidents caused when someone sold a restored Corvette that turned out to have mechanical flaws in its restoration.
Just reading the Wikipedia page on the Frankfurt School (which has a section on Cultural Marxism as mostly a derogatory right wing conspiracy theory) makes me wonder what even the Frankfurt School has to do with Marxism as a straight-up economic theory.
It also makes whatever Cultural Marxism actually is sound not exactly far-fetched, given the wide-ranging aspects of the Frankfurt School.
I would expect gadgets on Amazon any day that you can attach the tracker to that simulate various types of movement to fool the tracker -- long walks, intensive exercise sessions, etc.
I just ended up signing it with the notion that it was unenforceable.
My sense is that cost and complexity of bringing a breach of contract suit makes it unlikely they would bother unless I "stole" one of the major accounts (which I never worked on).
For run of the mill "violations" like going to work for another consultancy without treading on any of their existing accounts, I don't think they would bother. If I even thought there would be a hassle, I wouldn't tell them where I'm working (or tell them that I didn't even have a job lined up) and just the effort and cost of figuring that out would make them lose interest -- actually hiring an attorney to put together a lawsuit would make it unlikely to happen.
Employers are constantly one the lookout for tools that they can use to coerce employees into doing what they want.
"Being healthy" has in many ways become a secular religion and fitness trackers tie into both the instant gratification impulse of validating "healthy" behavior as well as the on-trend desire to display the latest gadgets. Displaying your good taste in cutting edge technology *and* your adherence to the fitness/health dogma seems almost identical to a religious person prominently wearing a crucifix -- your good taste in jewelry AND your piety gets displayed at the same time.
It's almost evil genius for corporations to co-opt this. They gain the potential (however dubious it may prove to be) of reduced healthcare costs while all the while leveraging all the social power associated with fitness trackers. It wouldn't surprise me if we find out at some point that they're able to exploit location tracking from them as well, allowing employers to use location criteria to exploit personal details they might not otherwise be able to (eg, employee shows up at gay bars frequently).
And employers then gain a socially desirable coercive tool, able to ratchet up "goals" with reverse incentives tied to them that increase company profit -- ie, if you're not able to "meet the new fitness quota" you pay more for health insurance (or the company pays less).
A small consulting company I worked for asked me after about two years to sign a non-compete agreement. I talked to an employment attorney who reviewed the agreement. He said it was a generic boilerplate with no obvious negatives, but then he asked me what I was given in consideration for signing the agreement -- raise, new title, any material benefits?
I said no, should I ask for any? He said no, that might cause problems -- your best bet is to just sign it, but knowing that its not enforceable, as signing a non-compete when you already are employed without being given consideration has generally rendered non-compete agreements unenforceable in our state under the assumption that the relationship is coercive.
I'm wondering if the coercive nature of employment could be used to block fitness tracker use in the US under a similar kind of logic.
I think the entire concept is bogus. What I do away from work is my own business, and if that includes sitting like statue for the 16 hours I'm off work, so be it. I also think there's good reason to question what and how much exercise is ultimately beneficial. I'd also think companies would want to be cautious about implying penalties or career limitations from not meeting arbitrary fitness goals -- those in the worst physical shape may be coerced into levels of activity that are unhealthy for them, believing if they don't post numbers that meet some arbitrary employer standards they could lose their jobs, benefits or compensation.
Ultimately I view these fitness trackers as a kind of confessional for the fitness religion, either affirming one's adherence to fitness dogma or one's place as a fitness heretic.
This was my first thought -- just sell the guy a license to make the replicas, the same way they would charge a toymaker to make toy replicas of the Batmobile. Given the price he charges, I'm sure his buyers have an expectation of detail and quality that goes way beyond what DC Comics would expect of any toymaker and probably matching what would be expected out of a big budget Hollywood production.
And maybe they did, but the terms were so onerous that the finished product wouldn't be economically viable. If there are N people willing to buy a $90k Batmobile replica, there are certainly fewer people willing to buy a $200,000 replica.
The only thing I can think of is that they're protecting some kind of special replica licensing revenue that they may make out of theme parks or restaurants that want one. Or maybe they believe that the "movie magic" could potentially be spoiled, thus undermining potential film profits, if Batmobiles somehow become commonplace.
I have a problem with them prosecuting a person in another country. Does that mean I am subject to foreign laws? This is all bullshit.
Say what you will about the United States, but I don't think there's too many crimes you can commit here that will result in you being extradicted overseas. But there sure seems to be a lot of things you can do overseas that will result in your ass getting shipped to the US to be tried and convicted.
even contacted an attorney over it, but he wouldn't take the case due to an inability to assign a dollar value to the "damage"
This is really the problem in a nutshell. It's an abhorrent invasion of privacy but nobody can really calculate a dollar value on the damages incurred. Maybe a megabyte of data, total, on a monthly basis, and even then only if the data wasn't somehow excepted from data usage.
In theory, the punishment should be severe enough that it drains any profit received from the prohibited behavior.
If Verizon made $300 million in profit from the cookies, Verizon should lose $300 million.
$135 million is chump change. What kind of profit do you think they made selling this tracking information on millions of wireless users over months/years of doing it?
It should be $100 million dollars PLUS $50 per subscriber cookie. The tracking cookie database and any other databases built from this data should be scrubbed, as verified by a third party auditor chosen by the FCC, billed to Verizon. They should be barred from re-implementing this system under any other name or any other opt-in format with a follow-up audit by FCC chosen auditors.
Any future violation of this nature should be fined at $100 per violation.
Didn't know about the design goal wanting 400V DC input. That clearly cements it in some kind of fixed installation mode, but it would be interesting to know if the input voltage can be scaled down.
There are some interesting variable speed DC generators which seem to provide better overall efficiency than fixed-speed AC generators because they can run at lower RPMs when power demand is lower, but they mostly seem to make sense when integrated into a larger battery bank. And usually they have some kind of programmable range of run speeds tied to various use cases -- like deep charging battery, topping off the battery or maximum load output.
"Most marine generators in recreational applications are about 5kw"
That's on the high end, for fixed diesel installations; most of the boaters that I know use much smaller portable generators. (I don't; too noisy.)
I guess it depends on what you're looking at. Most recreational boats I've looked at that come with generators seem to start at 5 kw, which seems to fit the typical maximum power usage (stereo/TV, microwave, air conditioning, lighting). Kohler's smallest is 4kw @ 50 hz and 5 kw @ 60 hz. Boats over 40 ft tend towards even larger, like 9+ kw.
There are a lot of people who seem to want to use a Honda suitcase generator on 30 ft. boats. I think this is a nutty fire risk, and the 2kw models probably can't start the air conditioning, either.
Of course I've only ever looked at power boats, too. I don't know how it works on sailboats -- most larger ones with inboard engines may use the propulsion power plant with the prop disengaged and tied to a heavy duty alternator for battery bank charging. Although I would kind of expect more dedicated power generation on larger boats that may have bigger power consumption (fridges, lighting, marine electronics).
My own interest was mainly to see how practical a solar/battery bank would be on a recreational boat, or how much generator run time it might reduce when not running air conditioning.
I usually only notice the degradation in performance on iOS devices once they are at least two major hardware revs behind. I would also say that it's been less bad as overall hardware performance has gotten better.
I will grant you that it is kind of mystifying why once the invisible device line gets crossed performance plummets. It'd be nice to believe it's a pure conspiracy to sell more gadgets, but there's probably at least as much of a technical argument that more software requires more memory and more cycles and it's debatable how much Apple should spend in development resources optimizing products 3+ generations old, but despite the poor performance they DO support installing the current OS on older devices, so it's not like it's a zero resource effort, either.
As for the iPod, I seem to recall at least the first model was Mac-only and didn't support windows at all. I know when I bought my first, I bought the "windows" model which I believe supported USB charging, although I seem to remember something funky about the 30 pin cable supporting either firewire or usb charging, but not both. My 2007 car has a 30 pin iPod interface, but won't charge a modern USB-only device with a 30 pin cable.
Marine or other mobile applications?
2-5kw is a sweet spot for these applications. Most marine generators in recreational applications are about 5kw -- and most of that is usually to drive air conditioning or similar high voltage applications.
2kw or so, though, is pretty decent for off-battery use of lower powered items and might even provide enough power (if you can use all 2k) for a small microwave.
Apple's "genius" was to bring disposability to expensive products. Imagine someone telling you in 1999 that people would be buying a new ã700 phone every two years or less. It would have sounded ridiculous.
Imagine telling someone in 1999 they would have a phone which could take better pictures than almost every digital camera on the market and high definition videos, provide them and their laptop with high speed Internet access comparable to a pair of bonded T1s, give them access to the web, their email, documents, and even some content creation tools, capable of carrying their entire music library, play videos, and be so secure the FBI would beg the creator in public to help them crack it.
The only rub would be they might want to upgrade it every couple of years because the next one would have even better performance and likely desirable new features.
I would imagine a significant number of people would jump all over it.
In only a kind of semi-snarky way, how many people who bitch about other people spending their money on new phones don't do it because they can't or it's somehow their secret, get rich scheme? I get that it's kind of dubious financial decision for people further down the income scale and some tech savvy people get some personal satisfaction out of hacking/rooting a lesser device or have some personal religious denial about "not needing" a modern smartphone.
But for a not-insignificant part of the market, it's a miracle device whose benefits so greatly outweigh the nominal dollar cost that the value seems worth it, and it isn't a significant expense.
At a certain point it just sounds like sour grapes. You can't have it, so you tell yourself you don't want it and convince yourself that everyone else is a fool for having it.
NATO is not willing to stand up for Turkey any more, because Erdogan behaves like a total lunatic and better replace him with a logically calculating general in a soon to happen coup d'etat. (Military dictatorship has always been the normal way of life in post-ottoman Turkey.)
There was just an article in yesterday's NY Times about the government seizure of a major newspaper which said:
I would argue that NATO is willing to cut him a lot of slack for various reasons. Euro-centric factions over the flow of refugees from the Middle East, and US-centric factions over Turkish support of NATO air missions and support for whatever handful of rebels are left in Syria which aren't aligned with any specific jihadi elements.
It remains to be seen whether Erdogan's dismantling of the officer corps over the past few years has meaningfully reduced his chances of another military junta in Turkey, or whether it will have the unintended consequences of worsening its performance in the field, increasing chaos and emboldening the remaining officers to pull of another coup.
I suspect the existential fear of something like a civil war in Turkey will give Erdogan carte blanche in the near term, especially with NATO, as they don't have many other resources to counter every other thing working against them in the region. The Israelis and the Jordanians are sitting this one out, the Saudis have demonstrated a lack of effectiveness in Yemen and are facing their own economic challenges through a self-imposed oil glut.