Someone swore to me that their brother saw this happen in Sydney in the customs/immigration line.
The story was: "I was with a group of people from my flight from Hong Kong to Sydney at the immigration/customs station. The guy in front of me was a British businessman. He was annoyed because of the late flight and the long customs line and was obviously in a hurry.
He showed his passport to the customs officer, who looked it over, paging through all the visa stamps. He sensed the businessman was in a hurry and asked the businessman a lot of questions, superficial and obvious -- do you travel a lot, where have you been, why are you in Sydney, and finally, if he had a criminal record.
The businessman was totally fed up. The late flight, the busy schedule, the long line at customs, and now finally this petty bureaucrat -- he'd had it.
So he answered, "I didn't think that was a prerequisite anymore."
The customs person looked straight at him, and stamped REFUSED ENTRY on his passport and told him he'd have to go back to Hong Kong."
----
There's lots of reasons to not believe it's true -- I'd imagine that the customs process for Commonwealth citizens isn't that onerous, especially for British citizens visiting Australia, especially if they were traveling from another Commonwealth country, and I can't imagine that you could just arbitrarily deny someone entry (well, at least in civilized countries like Australia).
Could this end up being the basis of "safe" cloud filesharing?
Open account with Company A. Company A doesn't own servers, they outsource their servers to Company B. Company B has some storage, but outsources some of this to Companies C, D, and E (...and F, and G...)
Due to fluctuating demand, costs, and performance modeling, Company B migrates data periodically between storage vendors, who in turn, migrate data between data centers.
At any one point, the person with an account at Company A can access their data but they have no idea where its stored, and neither does anyone at company A. Thanks to virtualization, company B actually has to work at figuring out where an individual TB chunk of data is at any one time.
Company A has a storage plan from company B that says they pay per week for storage used (due to high fluctuation) and that company B may delete data within 3 days of nonpayment.
Now, Company A may not be a safe place to store your precious data, but given the outsourced storage and virtualizaton and delete-on-nonpayment contract, the FBI may not be able to find the data they want or get enough search warrants within the time frame necessary,.
I think in some science and math classes you really do have to "watch" what the professor is doing to understand the subject -- it would be hard to try to take notes on calculus, you need to watch how the algebra is done, and I suspect the same may be true of chemistry.
Most of my classes were liberal arts and the majority had the professor speaking from notes. There were no handouts, although one or two teachers would put up an outline for each lecture on an overhead. Each class also had anywhere from 4-8 readings assigned, about 3/4 books and the others an awful photocopied mess from books.
I didn't take many science classes, but I found that taking notes in class was the single best thing I could do.
Forget the class title, the lecture is what's being taught, the readings only supplementary. Some profs tried to be rough and tough and test on book-only subject matter, but seldom did they just pick obscure bullshit from chapter 35, there was always a wink and a nudge, usually "Pay attention to Rawls chapters 5-6-7, it doesn't fit the lectures but I think it's important."
There's no doubt that a rapid inflation of the US dollar would have many debilitating side effects, not the least of which is worker pay packets.
But I don't think anyone would advocate that kind of naked runaway inflation.
Most likely the way this would be done (as an economic weapon) would be revaluation of the currency. Announce "new dollars" which are exchanged at a rate of 5 new dollars for every 1 old dollar. All future pay, prices, etc will be in the newly valued "new dollars". All outstanding private debt is paid at the new dollar exchange rate (ie, if I owed you 10 old dollars, I now owe you 50 new dollars) but Treasuries are payable only at the old dollar denomination -- if a Treasury is worth $100 old dollars, the government says it will pay $100 new dollars.
This is the magic of a sovereign currency, and one reason guys like Ron Paul want to return to the gold standard. When dollars don't really mean anything, they're like numbers in excel, you can just move the decimal point. When they are represented by a physical object you can't just squish a Gold Eagle coin to twice the circumference and call it 2 oz. gold.
Yeah, because it's not like we let people sell climbing rope, brake parts, or anything else that could cause people to get seriously hurt on the internet without any oversight or checks whatsoever.
Selling debt denominated in our own sovereign currency to the Chinese is like free money.
Everyone things "gee, if they decide to dump those treasuries we're all fucked" -- nah, all we have to do is say they're void and worth nothing, but thanks for a couple of trillion dollars over the years.
And they're denominated in our own currency, so if we wanted we could just inflate the debt to worthlessness. This has some of its own issues, but over time the debt becomes less valuable due to inflation and is not vulnerable to currency fluctuations (some Europeans have gotten fucked by borrowing in other currencies -- when their currency nosedives relative to their payment currency, it's like their payment goes up, even though in absolute terms its the same, it just takes more local currency to come up with the payment).
Plus China needs to buy US debt to keep their currency peg working.
IMHO the downside of all of this is that we're so intertwined with them.
I'll bet most of the "bad" stuff gets discussed way off site and no written record is kept.
Sort of bad gets discussed on golf courses, yachts, private homes, restaurants.
Really bad and they have one of those anonymous meetings where they just happen to be at the same anonymous, camera-less place at the same time so they can deny ever even meeting or colluding.
The other alternative is what happened in Minneapolis -- about 5 years ago they got all excited about "MUNICIPAL WIFI" and trotted out all the usual reasons we "needed" it.
* Shelbyville and North Haverbrook have it, and they just sit in the park and develop content now instead working at real jobs.
* It's inexpensive, and the poor need an inexpensive way to go online. Presumably because the poor are all sitting in front of $1500 computers and just can't get online.
* There's no other way to get broadband, despite the entire city being served by Comcast ($69, 10/3 Biz Class w/29 static) or Qwest DSL (multiple ISP choices at varying price/service levels).
* We don't have it yet, and without it, we still won't have it until we get it.
Faced with the economic reality that no private business wanted to provide wifi throughout the city we find out that the city is now swapping out the cellular data driven communications in cop cars and other city vehicles for....a wifi-based system.
And lo and behold, the same company that agreed to provide the cop/city wifi has been given a franchise to build and operate a public citywide wifi network, complete with all kinds of discounts and access to city infrastructure for equipment mounting. I'm sure the city also used whatever power they had to give them free access to the utility poles, too.
So what I think really happened was the city granted a sweetheart deal to the wifi provider for their municipal network in order to subsidize (without actually subsidizing...) the public wifi network.
I've only heard AT&T comment specifically about network limitations in SFO and NYC.
There's so much assumed/freelance/guessed information about the state of AT&T's nationwide network that I'm not sure how much if any of it is true.
I live in the Twin Cities and I almost never have issues with AT&T data bandwidth. Just the other day I actually watched Netflix on my iPhone (something I'd never done) and it worked fine as it normally does for most of my data transactions.
Is patching (or probably more accurately) custom hard disk firmware likely the answer here?
Firmware that expects some kind of handshake within N minutes of initial operation and if it fails to get that handshake it immediately begins an erase operation?
The handshake process could be controlled by password protected/encrypted software on the hard disk -- perhaps disguised as a pop-up for video settings.
Removal of the drive for cloning or examination will result in the drive doing an erase sequence before any data can be retrieved; leaving it in the host system without performing the handshake (ie, they just demand your username/password to log in) results in the drive self-erasing as well.
Someone who deals with high security for the military should have some ideas on this -- its exactly the kind of thing they would use to keep data from captured equipment from being stolen.
All the data centers I've ever been to have insane security. IIRC, the last one I worked in the tenant said that they had to apply to get badges and that anyone who needed a badge to get to their cage had to pass some kind of (trivial, I'm sure) "background check" and ID verification.
I'm guessing that between the security checks to keep out the nosy, the high electric usage that would be easy to explain, a grow operation would be easy to get away with.
You'd have to have the right kind of building, though. Some data centers appear to be converted warehouse spaces, and that wouldn't work, but the ones that are converted strip malls or small-scale office buildings would be great, since they tend to have these compartmentalized spaces.
Your translation is right. Dodd is lots of bad things but one thing he is not is an unskilled politician.
He knows that if you want to pass legislation that might gain opposition, you want to do it quickly and without giving your opposition an opportunity to rally against it.
You want to introduce a bill, let people know it's simple, keeps jobs in America, protects children from harm and should be passed right away.
My sense is that what they're fighting for isn't an "end to piracy" but a way to legislate their profit margins.
It seems obvious to me that for $20 a month for unlimited viewing subscriptions of all titles or $5 per title to own (via download) they could really put a crimp in piracy, but they would have to accept a permanently reduced profit margin.
That doesn't build beach houses in Malibu, mansions in Bel-Air, private jet airfare or put Bentley Continentals in a lot of driveways.
By re-defining piracy as "any act of copyrighted content consumption without a license for the specific act of consumption" they will be able to finally achieve per per consumption, legislated in law, which will in turn allow them to guarantee margins by controlling the price.
An interesting idea, and maybe there's some merit there, if anything from the rent-seeking behavior you might expect when the player, the media and the content are controlled by one company, but you could tell a different story.
Sony as a hardware manufacturer has probably always been concerned about "default" media formats.
Wikipedia says they "pressured" Philips to license Compact Cassette royalty-free, but who knows what they had to give up or horse-trade to get this. Sony and Philips jointly developed CDs which became a standard, but it took a long time for the music labels to get on board and broadly support the format enough for consumers to buy into it enough to purchase hardware.
While they did well with audio, they lost badly with Betamax, a format never adopted widely by studios, costing them potentially millions of Betamax hardware sales and forcing them to license VHS from JVC.
Owning content allows you to push your own hardware format, even if you license it to others -- it makes it faster to adoption and increases the turnaround time on hardware development investments since consumers are likely to adopt it faster if the equipment is available and the media is, too.
Another complimentary spin on this is that I think Sony got involved in Hollywood during the 1980s -- remember when Japan was soaring and was buying everything they could? It's not hard to see their content ownership as driven at least as much by a desire to get into a profitable business at a time in history when buying stuff in dollars was very cheap for them to do.
Point 2: how often is this technology going to be aimed at white people, given the huge racial disparity of the current stop-and-frisk program?>
The politically correct expectation is that they will use it against each race equal to their proportion in society (ie, if there are 8 martians for every 100 people, then 8% of scans will be of martians).
What they should do is use the FBI Uniform crime reports and and use them on all race(s) at the rate they commit violent crimes relative to their ratio of the population.
So if 8% of the population is martians but they commit 30% of the violent crimes, they should get 30% of the scans. Right? Or is there something wrong with this?
Don't most systems like this used a closed loop of pipe and just circulate the fluid?
Not only does it not fuck with the groundwater, you can tweak the fluid (antifreeze, more or less) so that it can carry more heat and make the overall system more efficient.
We used to setup jumps for our bikes in the street because the asphalt had worn smooth and when we fell the abrasions weren't as bad as the sidewalk, which had a lot of rough patches and you'd get hurt.
I'm thinking the lesson is that kids figure out what hurts and what doesn't and learn some kind of sanity about risk taking.
Now, everything is made "safe" for them and they have no concept of risk.
Strangely this is like those that run the banking system...
There was some kind of show on TV that talked about the overlap between gangs and the military.
Apparently its way more extensive than you might expect -- they had dozens of photos of Disciples graffiti in BAGHDAD after the invasion and fairly alarming statistics about gang activity in the military (gangs continuing WITHIN the military).
Apparently the military's need for soldiers during Iraq led them to be less than selective when dealing with people who had criminal records or arrest histories.
There was also talk about discharged gang members using their military training against the police, but this seemed a lot more alarmist and harder to believe (I think they had one example they beat to death).
Not everyone who makes it into the military has a combat role assignment and I suspect that the low-end guys from gang backgrounds ended up in more service roles and not in front-line combat roles and thus while they may have had basic training in combat, probably didn't have a ton of first-hand experience or expertise in it,.
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Someone swore to me that their brother saw this happen in Sydney in the customs/immigration line.
The story was: "I was with a group of people from my flight from Hong Kong to Sydney at the immigration/customs station. The guy in front of me was a British businessman. He was annoyed because of the late flight and the long customs line and was obviously in a hurry.
He showed his passport to the customs officer, who looked it over, paging through all the visa stamps. He sensed the businessman was in a hurry and asked the businessman a lot of questions, superficial and obvious -- do you travel a lot, where have you been, why are you in Sydney, and finally, if he had a criminal record.
The businessman was totally fed up. The late flight, the busy schedule, the long line at customs, and now finally this petty bureaucrat -- he'd had it.
So he answered, "I didn't think that was a prerequisite anymore."
The customs person looked straight at him, and stamped REFUSED ENTRY on his passport and told him he'd have to go back to Hong Kong."
----
There's lots of reasons to not believe it's true -- I'd imagine that the customs process for Commonwealth citizens isn't that onerous, especially for British citizens visiting Australia, especially if they were traveling from another Commonwealth country, and I can't imagine that you could just arbitrarily deny someone entry (well, at least in civilized countries like Australia).
But it's a fun story.
Could this end up being the basis of "safe" cloud filesharing?
Open account with Company A. Company A doesn't own servers, they outsource their servers to Company B. Company B has some storage, but outsources some of this to Companies C, D, and E (...and F, and G...)
Due to fluctuating demand, costs, and performance modeling, Company B migrates data periodically between storage vendors, who in turn, migrate data between data centers.
At any one point, the person with an account at Company A can access their data but they have no idea where its stored, and neither does anyone at company A. Thanks to virtualization, company B actually has to work at figuring out where an individual TB chunk of data is at any one time.
Company A has a storage plan from company B that says they pay per week for storage used (due to high fluctuation) and that company B may delete data within 3 days of nonpayment.
Now, Company A may not be a safe place to store your precious data, but given the outsourced storage and virtualizaton and delete-on-nonpayment contract, the FBI may not be able to find the data they want or get enough search warrants within the time frame necessary,.
Haha, good use -- you mean keeping the wealthy class wealthy, and the senior bank execs in charge?
I think in some science and math classes you really do have to "watch" what the professor is doing to understand the subject -- it would be hard to try to take notes on calculus, you need to watch how the algebra is done, and I suspect the same may be true of chemistry.
Most of my classes were liberal arts and the majority had the professor speaking from notes. There were no handouts, although one or two teachers would put up an outline for each lecture on an overhead. Each class also had anywhere from 4-8 readings assigned, about 3/4 books and the others an awful photocopied mess from books.
I didn't take many science classes, but I found that taking notes in class was the single best thing I could do.
Forget the class title, the lecture is what's being taught, the readings only supplementary. Some profs tried to be rough and tough and test on book-only subject matter, but seldom did they just pick obscure bullshit from chapter 35, there was always a wink and a nudge, usually "Pay attention to Rawls chapters 5-6-7, it doesn't fit the lectures but I think it's important."
The four customers they still have don't care since they're all using Palm Pres.
Lets all the delicious moisture through, blocks the stuff you want blocked???
Really? You're a materials science expert within a week?
There's no doubt that a rapid inflation of the US dollar would have many debilitating side effects, not the least of which is worker pay packets.
But I don't think anyone would advocate that kind of naked runaway inflation.
Most likely the way this would be done (as an economic weapon) would be revaluation of the currency. Announce "new dollars" which are exchanged at a rate of 5 new dollars for every 1 old dollar. All future pay, prices, etc will be in the newly valued "new dollars". All outstanding private debt is paid at the new dollar exchange rate (ie, if I owed you 10 old dollars, I now owe you 50 new dollars) but Treasuries are payable only at the old dollar denomination -- if a Treasury is worth $100 old dollars, the government says it will pay $100 new dollars.
This is the magic of a sovereign currency, and one reason guys like Ron Paul want to return to the gold standard. When dollars don't really mean anything, they're like numbers in excel, you can just move the decimal point. When they are represented by a physical object you can't just squish a Gold Eagle coin to twice the circumference and call it 2 oz. gold.
Yeah, because it's not like we let people sell climbing rope, brake parts, or anything else that could cause people to get seriously hurt on the internet without any oversight or checks whatsoever.
Selling debt denominated in our own sovereign currency to the Chinese is like free money.
Everyone things "gee, if they decide to dump those treasuries we're all fucked" -- nah, all we have to do is say they're void and worth nothing, but thanks for a couple of trillion dollars over the years.
And they're denominated in our own currency, so if we wanted we could just inflate the debt to worthlessness. This has some of its own issues, but over time the debt becomes less valuable due to inflation and is not vulnerable to currency fluctuations (some Europeans have gotten fucked by borrowing in other currencies -- when their currency nosedives relative to their payment currency, it's like their payment goes up, even though in absolute terms its the same, it just takes more local currency to come up with the payment).
Plus China needs to buy US debt to keep their currency peg working.
IMHO the downside of all of this is that we're so intertwined with them.
I'll bet most of the "bad" stuff gets discussed way off site and no written record is kept.
Sort of bad gets discussed on golf courses, yachts, private homes, restaurants.
Really bad and they have one of those anonymous meetings where they just happen to be at the same anonymous, camera-less place at the same time so they can deny ever even meeting or colluding.
The other alternative is what happened in Minneapolis -- about 5 years ago they got all excited about "MUNICIPAL WIFI" and trotted out all the usual reasons we "needed" it.
* Shelbyville and North Haverbrook have it, and they just sit in the park and develop content now instead working at real jobs.
* It's inexpensive, and the poor need an inexpensive way to go online. Presumably because the poor are all sitting in front of $1500 computers and just can't get online.
* There's no other way to get broadband, despite the entire city being served by Comcast ($69, 10/3 Biz Class w/29 static) or Qwest DSL (multiple ISP choices at varying price/service levels).
* We don't have it yet, and without it, we still won't have it until we get it.
Faced with the economic reality that no private business wanted to provide wifi throughout the city we find out that the city is now swapping out the cellular data driven communications in cop cars and other city vehicles for....a wifi-based system.
And lo and behold, the same company that agreed to provide the cop/city wifi has been given a franchise to build and operate a public citywide wifi network, complete with all kinds of discounts and access to city infrastructure for equipment mounting. I'm sure the city also used whatever power they had to give them free access to the utility poles, too.
So what I think really happened was the city granted a sweetheart deal to the wifi provider for their municipal network in order to subsidize (without actually subsidizing...) the public wifi network.
Are they really, nationwide?
I've only heard AT&T comment specifically about network limitations in SFO and NYC.
There's so much assumed/freelance/guessed information about the state of AT&T's nationwide network that I'm not sure how much if any of it is true.
I live in the Twin Cities and I almost never have issues with AT&T data bandwidth. Just the other day I actually watched Netflix on my iPhone (something I'd never done) and it worked fine as it normally does for most of my data transactions.
Is patching (or probably more accurately) custom hard disk firmware likely the answer here?
Firmware that expects some kind of handshake within N minutes of initial operation and if it fails to get that handshake it immediately begins an erase operation?
The handshake process could be controlled by password protected/encrypted software on the hard disk -- perhaps disguised as a pop-up for video settings.
Removal of the drive for cloning or examination will result in the drive doing an erase sequence before any data can be retrieved; leaving it in the host system without performing the handshake (ie, they just demand your username/password to log in) results in the drive self-erasing as well.
Someone who deals with high security for the military should have some ideas on this -- its exactly the kind of thing they would use to keep data from captured equipment from being stolen.
All the data centers I've ever been to have insane security. IIRC, the last one I worked in the tenant said that they had to apply to get badges and that anyone who needed a badge to get to their cage had to pass some kind of (trivial, I'm sure) "background check" and ID verification.
I'm guessing that between the security checks to keep out the nosy, the high electric usage that would be easy to explain, a grow operation would be easy to get away with.
You'd have to have the right kind of building, though. Some data centers appear to be converted warehouse spaces, and that wouldn't work, but the ones that are converted strip malls or small-scale office buildings would be great, since they tend to have these compartmentalized spaces.
It was damaging our ability to innovate.
Your translation is right. Dodd is lots of bad things but one thing he is not is an unskilled politician.
He knows that if you want to pass legislation that might gain opposition, you want to do it quickly and without giving your opposition an opportunity to rally against it.
You want to introduce a bill, let people know it's simple, keeps jobs in America, protects children from harm and should be passed right away.
My sense is that what they're fighting for isn't an "end to piracy" but a way to legislate their profit margins.
It seems obvious to me that for $20 a month for unlimited viewing subscriptions of all titles or $5 per title to own (via download) they could really put a crimp in piracy, but they would have to accept a permanently reduced profit margin.
That doesn't build beach houses in Malibu, mansions in Bel-Air, private jet airfare or put Bentley Continentals in a lot of driveways.
By re-defining piracy as "any act of copyrighted content consumption without a license for the specific act of consumption" they will be able to finally achieve per per consumption, legislated in law, which will in turn allow them to guarantee margins by controlling the price.
An interesting idea, and maybe there's some merit there, if anything from the rent-seeking behavior you might expect when the player, the media and the content are controlled by one company, but you could tell a different story.
Sony as a hardware manufacturer has probably always been concerned about "default" media formats.
Wikipedia says they "pressured" Philips to license Compact Cassette royalty-free, but who knows what they had to give up or horse-trade to get this. Sony and Philips jointly developed CDs which became a standard, but it took a long time for the music labels to get on board and broadly support the format enough for consumers to buy into it enough to purchase hardware.
While they did well with audio, they lost badly with Betamax, a format never adopted widely by studios, costing them potentially millions of Betamax hardware sales and forcing them to license VHS from JVC.
Owning content allows you to push your own hardware format, even if you license it to others -- it makes it faster to adoption and increases the turnaround time on hardware development investments since consumers are likely to adopt it faster if the equipment is available and the media is, too.
Another complimentary spin on this is that I think Sony got involved in Hollywood during the 1980s -- remember when Japan was soaring and was buying everything they could? It's not hard to see their content ownership as driven at least as much by a desire to get into a profitable business at a time in history when buying stuff in dollars was very cheap for them to do.
Rent-seeking, it's not just about buying rack space.
Point 2: how often is this technology going to be aimed at white people, given the huge racial disparity of the current stop-and-frisk program?>
The politically correct expectation is that they will use it against each race equal to their proportion in society (ie, if there are 8 martians for every 100 people, then 8% of scans will be of martians).
What they should do is use the FBI Uniform crime reports and and use them on all race(s) at the rate they commit violent crimes relative to their ratio of the population.
So if 8% of the population is martians but they commit 30% of the violent crimes, they should get 30% of the scans. Right? Or is there something wrong with this?
Don't most systems like this used a closed loop of pipe and just circulate the fluid?
Not only does it not fuck with the groundwater, you can tweak the fluid (antifreeze, more or less) so that it can carry more heat and make the overall system more efficient.
We used to setup jumps for our bikes in the street because the asphalt had worn smooth and when we fell the abrasions weren't as bad as the sidewalk, which had a lot of rough patches and you'd get hurt.
I'm thinking the lesson is that kids figure out what hurts and what doesn't and learn some kind of sanity about risk taking.
Now, everything is made "safe" for them and they have no concept of risk.
Strangely this is like those that run the banking system...
There was some kind of show on TV that talked about the overlap between gangs and the military.
Apparently its way more extensive than you might expect -- they had dozens of photos of Disciples graffiti in BAGHDAD after the invasion and fairly alarming statistics about gang activity in the military (gangs continuing WITHIN the military).
Apparently the military's need for soldiers during Iraq led them to be less than selective when dealing with people who had criminal records or arrest histories.
There was also talk about discharged gang members using their military training against the police, but this seemed a lot more alarmist and harder to believe (I think they had one example they beat to death).
Not everyone who makes it into the military has a combat role assignment and I suspect that the low-end guys from gang backgrounds ended up in more service roles and not in front-line combat roles and thus while they may have had basic training in combat, probably didn't have a ton of first-hand experience or expertise in it,.