For most people the price of wine is not about taste. It is about exclusivity and following the rules of the pack. You pay this price for this bottle of wine because that is what your peer group is doing. Otherwise why would it be so easy to forge wine labels and sell then as the real thing? If you have connections and providence people don't seem to know the difference.
That is not to say that expensive wine does not provide value. You are paying for vintage grapes and expert winemakers, which all cost money.OTOH there is no reason to go into debt for a bottle of expensive wine anymore that one should go into debt for a Prada bag.
So what services like this provide is protection for those who want to be a part of a peer group but can't afford it. They can say how silly those rich people are for paying for expensive wine that is the same as the cheap wine. It really isn't the same, but it really doesn't matter. If there is someone who has the ability to authoritively say they are the same, then those who need to feel included can.
30 years ago Apple sold the equivalent of this, one of the first machines that could easily be transported and used at the home or office, and it cost $5,000 in todays dollars. It was 16 pounds, could be packed up in less than five minutes, and it was the status symbol to be carrying it through the worlds airports.
Computers and the movement away from terminals meant that there was a market for a single machine that could be used at home and the office. The Osbourne tried to meet this need before the Mac, while Compaq made the defining all in one transportable PC.
Now, however, everything can go on drop box and corporate MS licensing means that one can have MS Office everywhere. Machines are no longer $5K so most of us can have one at the office and one at home. There is no need to make the sacrifices of having one machine, unless there are other factors involved. If there are, a laptop equivalent to a desktop is in the $1K-$2K range, which is really why desktops are fading fast, and MS is panicking. Get a laptop, hook it up to a screen at home, and if you want to take it with you, you can.
But of course MS panicking means they are going to totally misread the situation and promote silly product like this. The current issue is not about home or office. It is about between the home and office, and how do we compute. It is not 30 years ago when it was cool to pull out you Compaq and plug it in a work. This so called all in one does not have the advantages of a laptop. It does not have the advantages of something like an all in one iMac, where the screen is not sitting directly on the table. It has a touchscreen with is clearly useful for on the go computer use, but who uses 18" for on the go anymore. The most popular screen size now for laptops is around 14". Bigger screen were needed when pixel density was lower, and are needed for desktop use where screens are further away. But in the same way that most do not wear their Bluetooth headsets because they look a bit of git, pulling out an 18" tablet is going to do the same.
If obama was dictator this might make sense. But he isn't. There are many legislators, governors, and local officials who together take bribes to implement policies that may not be in the best interest of the country as a whole.
The IRS situation is particularly appropriate here as what the IRS was doing was trying to prevent the money laundering going on in this article. Such money laundering does not only provide US political power to legitimate US corportations and firms, but also to terrorists and foreign nations. The IRS was only targeting a specific group of 501(c)(4) applicants with political sounding names. A 501(c)(4) group is not supposed to be political, it is supposed to serve a community purpose. The only thing a 501(c)(4) status does is protect donors, whose name do not have to be divulged. It does not provide any tax benefits. If the IRS let a 501(c)(4) group engage in political activity, then Al Qaeda could secretly form such a group, fund it, and destabilize the US government. The same is true for the drug cartels, and of course Koch.
The number of 501(c)(4) doubled after the tea party victories of 2010, and most approved were conservative, and yes liberal groups were denied for being too political. What is clear from the current discussions is the conservatives have no problems with the US government being corrupted by terrorists. Otherwise they would demand that the IRS was given such extra scrutineer to all 501(c)(4) groups, or get rid of the law altogether.
Yes, I misspoke. The difference is if one is trying to build a criminal case or if one is try to prevent a crime. In the former there is no point trying to extort a confession as the evidence that means anything is on the stand, and the fifth protects us. IN the later where lives might be saved and the charge may well be conspiracy, the baseline changes.
Now, obviously, I am not saying that the police ought to be able to beat information out of you. (The right not to be tortured by the police exists separately from the right to remain silent -- more on that later.)
This is where I realized that the entire exercise was crap. In terms of rule of law in the US, the right not be tortured and the right to not self incriminate are equal. This is because any such evidence will be inadmissible in the court room. The right not to self incriminate removes the incentive of the police to go to extreme measures, such as keeping someone in a room for a day without food and water. If we did not have the right to not testify against ourselves, or against our spouse, then the police would have an obligation to push the boundaries. of interrogation
Now, in non criminal activity, such as someone blowing up a school, then there may be a discussion of whether torture is valid. But in that case we are trying to save immediate innocent lives, not build a criminal case against the attacker.
As I am sure has been mentioned, there are two steps here. First, many malls have kiosks that are set up specifically to receive stolen phones(called recyclers). You go to the mall, leave you phone unattended for a second, it gets taken and 2 minutes late it is converted to cash. There a countermeasure to minimize stolen phones, but these are easily countermanded. So unless one immediately reports a phone stolen, and the system updates in minutes, the incentive to steal is not reduced.
Second the phones that are stolen and then reported can simply be shipped to a location that is not going to check the phone, or sold to someone who is not going to check if it works prior to purchasing it. After all if you sell an iPhone for $100, someone will buy it, and then go ATT and be told that it was stolen. What can they do? Nothing, they have received stolen merchandise. Of course this would be a direct sales, not ecoATM.
Like drugs, the only way to solve the problem is the end user. Or bring some defensiveness to the owners. Like when I was a kid. You didn't wear your expensive nikes to school. You would get stabbed. Or, as time when by, your walkman. You didn't make yourself out to be a victim.
This is all over the 70's, empowered spoiled children, going to work, expecting to get paid for doing nothing, expecting their lame ideas to be gushed over as they were the 'self-esteem' generation. Unfortunately so many of the ideas were simply a way to make one persons life easier, or increase personal power, and did not really take into account the firms overall best interest.
There is this myth that management hate ideas from workers. This is not my experience. I have had many ideas used. I have had some ideas tried and then thrown away. The reality is to have your ideas used you first have them, then you have to be able to show they will be effective, and then you have to be willing to have ideas shot down and try again. For most people they either are not thinking about the problems in terms of the firm, or they get one idea, have it shot down, and give up.
Furthermore I have seen people who have good ideas be promoted and allowed to take on more responsibility. It is how corporate, as lame as it, works. Now obviously you have to work within the corporate culture, and if you can't you won't work at that corporation unless you are very smart and they tolerate you. But you likely won't be moved into management.
Here is why this might be important. The mid late 80's were a pretty bad time, unemployment above 7%, but most of us were able to get job by hustling the newly lucrative computer skills(only high school diploma at that time) into job. Now the employment rate is a little higher, but we are also in a time when firms do not really understand how to apply today's technology, just like back them, and a lot of it has become simple enough that a 20 year old can do some pretty effective stuff. I wonder if people can't get job because they believe articles like this that they do not have to go and sell their ideas, but rather wait for corporate to come to them, prostrated, and beg for the youth wisdom.
Janeane Garofalo had a line on Dr. Katz where she talking about the insanity of a world where you marry whomever has the locker next to you in high school. Funny episode.
If I were the marrying kind, a person within 10 miles of where I grew up would not be so bad. The worst relationships were with people who were not.
In terms of online versus 'traditional', I would say my friends who go online fall into three camps. The first is those who are looking to get married, and just need to find someone else who is looking to get married. Online is a good way to meet a reasonable person who is going willing to work to fit lives together. Since it is about marriage, there is no wasted time wining and dining people who just want to play.
The second is the person who is looking for a very particular mate to marry. The objective is to marry, but now there is rubric. Online lets you match a rubric to a various possibilities. I have one friend to do this, every date looked fundamentally the same, eventually found one that was acceptable to marry. In all fairness this friend did in desperation try to expand the mold, but just wasn't able to make it work, so online it was.
Then there is just sex. Looking for an unoffensive lover is part of the service of these sites. Which is also part of traditional dating. Or personals in the newspaper. Or going on vacation.
You know, it is generally accepted by civilized nations that man made climate change is a big problem, and it's solutions are necessarily complex. Part of the problem, perhaps 20%, comes from the excessive production of meat and the deforestation, fertilization, and other land use issues related to mean production. Civilized places like Argentina eat about 90 kilograms of meat per year per person, while uncivilized places like the US eat in excess of 120 kg of meat per year per person. This also effect the availability of fresh water, something that effect large portions of the US.
Now, I now that many in the US see climate change as just a conspiracy to destroy our way of life, our democracy, and the one a true country founded on the principles of god. But most civilized countries do take this a serious problem and are in fact trying to do something about. It does, after all, effect the possible extinction or severe reduction in the viability of our species.
But despite this, the US is like a child that is willing to accept punishment to get a cookie.
This is the kind of expectation of privacy that naive kids have. They think if they post a terrorist plot on facebook, and their facebook is private, that they have an expectation of privacy. They don't. Your friends can see you facebook, it isn't private.
Here is something to ponder. If you have sex, in front of an open window, in your home, is there an expectation of privacy? Are we going to arrest someone for filming the act? If you are talking so loud in a closed door meeting that everyone can here you, is there an expectation of privacy? I don't know. I have closed door meetings all the time, and we speak in tones that don't let others know what we are talking about. But I think legally it would be the equivalent to recording a private conversation in private club.
Additionally, I do not see fraud. He did not edit the tape to make it sound like something criminal activity was going on in the office. He merely recorded and released what actually happened. The consensus is it did not harm to the senator.
My main concern is that we have a senator that is not competent enough to keep conversations private and requires the taxpayer to clean up his garbage.
This is from Bruce Schneier on fooling scanners into thinking you are someone else.
And this one on not having to hack the database at all.
This kind of technology is battle of wits. The defensive technology gets more sophisticated, the offensive technology get more effective. The problem always is that the defensive technology has to be global, while the offensive technology can be very local, and very often there is no consequence for probing attacks. For instance, terrorist can effectively test carrying contraband on planes, as there is no consequence for being caught, until they come up with a combination that will make it through.
Even if one can't fool the scanner with a fake iris, and can't hack the database to steal the biometric(and one would not anyway because there are easier means), that does not mean one can't hack the database, implant a new iris scan of your suicide bomber on top of an existing legitimate record, and then send that terrorist on the bus to create mayhem.
For something like a school bus, or an airport, trained personel is superior to technological gimmickry. A school bus driver that knows the students may be more expensive, but is also more secure. Agents in the airport trained to identify suspicious behavior is more expensive, but also more secure.
Unlike RFID, which is a perfectly reasonable way to implement the safety and record keeping issues that parents want, iris scans cannot be replaced when the information becomes compromised. For instance, when the school database is hacked and the biometric information is leaked, we cannot the change the eyes. Once compromised it is always compromised. This is the general issue with biometric scans. it does not fail gracefully. And of course iris scans are RFID squared. You can't leave your eyes behind.
And the solution is to go back to the good old days when corporate controlled data and user only had terminal access. This with todays technology this is not so hard to do. User devices are display only. All storage and processing is done on IT controlled servers. The average worker bee does not need a high end PC, and has not needed one for years. At least not for work. It has been a perk that companies supplied a PC that could also be used for entertainment purposes.
The real downside, to me, is support. If a user device is not working, then no work will get done. This means that the firm has to fix the device or lose productively. This is not such a big deal because modern devices, especially non-MS Window devices, are very reliable.
Look at the colonization of the Americans. Peaceful explorers, just looking for a new spice route, found land. But it had people on it. So those people were purposefully and accidentally killed.
It is likely that if explorers found earth, and took time to land on it, they would be like the europeans landed on the American Natives. It is not so much that such alliens would purposely kill everyone, but disease and our own stubbornness would over time mean the end of humans. Yes, we might infect the alliens but presuamble they would have more advanced medical equipment and smaller population to protect.
It is also a reflection of the population distribution of the US. Draw a line north and south through Dallas. East of the line has the states with high population density. West of the line, even west Texas, has much lower population density. On the pacific there is a higher population center, but together they only have a population density of about 170 people per square mile, about that Georgia and half of Florida.
Given that planes fly people from one population center to another, Atlanta is more a weighted center than Kansas. it is just that no one lives in Kansas, it is that it would take a lot of fuel to get those people to where they want to go. I have real problems with the hub and spoke airline system, but it does have one good thing going for it. It tends to fly full planes. Pick and drop off people while going through the unpopulated regions of the west. Bring them all to a central place in the East. Then fly full planes to places people go. Yes people go to California and Seatlle, but it is probably better to fly full planes from Atlanta and Chicago and Denver rather than empty planes Omaha. This is even reflected when flying to Seatle. Often when coming from the southwest, cheap flights go through California.
According to a radio show I listen to Hebrew, with was only a liturgical language for much of the Common Era, was revived, in part, by Eliezer Ben Yehuda after he was inspired by reading a hebrew translation of Robinson Crusoe. Use in popular media will standardize and spread a language. For instance English was much less of fixed language prior to the time of Shakespeare. By the Mid 17th century,many words were added and the structure more fixed into what we speak now, in part due to Shakespeare standardizing the grammer. Some of this was done by the first truly influential dictionary in 1755.
Which is to say that simply by the processing of translating a play this could form a basis for Navajo as a modern language.
You know that this is an opinion piece in Bloomberg, a business rag. The USITC is there to promote trade and adjudicate certain trade disagreements, mostly imports. I don't see that it has any jurisdiction to really go to foreign countries to see how products exported from the US are used.
One can immediately be suspicous of an article that differentiates 'dumping' from being put in a landfill. Also, while there may be no incentive for another country to import junk, there is a lot of incentive for the US to export junk. Containers are sitting there unused at the ports, and it is probably only a few thousand dollars to send a container to the coast of Africa from the Gulf Coast. Once the container is there, any regulatory headaches concerning disposing of the computer equipment will be gone. The cargo ship can auction off the container for additional profit, and the purchase can sell what he can, and incinerate the rest, polluting the air with toxic heavy metals.
I am not saying this is what happens, but since we are treating opinion as news, who cares?
Pets.com blew though $400 million in two years in todays dollars. And presumable they had no significant R&D costs, and no physical product, other than the sock puppet. It was all spent on snacks and advertising.
In free market countries, like the US, ownership is everything. For instance, I can own as many houses as I want, and even if I don't use them, they are mine. All I have to do is pay taxes and sometimes upkeep. The taxes are there to so that I have an incentive to sell land that I am not utilizing to someone else who might be able to make more efficient use of it. In less free market countries, like the UK, it used to be the case where land that wasn't used could be used by other people. In any case, there is no real precedent in a corporation taking property that from a private citizen that is not being used. There is, unfortunately, precedent in government taking private property from less powerful entities and giving it to more powerful entities. We see this in the US with the Keystone XL pipeline. This, however, has not always happened with domain names. The key, as far as I can tell, is not whether the domain is being used, but if an unsolicited offer had been made.
In this case, as the domain was registered long ago, MS should simply fork out a million dollars for it. Speculation is perfectly legal and tolerated. Quarterly income for microsoft is in the billions. A million is a rounding error on their quarterly admin expenses.
Most people in the US could have the IRS prepare their taxes based on income, interest, and other factors that are already reported to the IRS. I know the IRS could prepare most of my taxes with me just adding a few details. The reason this does not happen is that tax preparers pay huge bribes to legislators. An online service would not be that hard. It would also protect low income people from fraudulent loans for money they would have in couple days anyway.
The government grows because the nation grows. A larger more complex nation requires larger services. For instance, there were no need for ultra engineered paved roads in 1776. Post war federal spending as a percent of GDP has been around 20%. Most of the complexity in the tax code is to provide special privileges to special entities. It is, however, correct, for those certain entities will have income that is hard to define. This is why a flat tax would not work. Most of us we would pay about the same, but the special entities would manage to define income so they would pay less. Look at it this way. If I make money by working with my own two hands, my body, that is taxed at a higher rate than if I sit back and earn interest. Income of the wealthy is different differently than income of the working class.
The current deficit situation is probably caused by special entities not paying as much tax as they once did. For instance, federal debt fell rapidly post war, but increased 30 percentage points with respect to GDP during the reagan bush era. There were two reasons for this. First, as mentioned, borrowing is good and the country was not paying the debt down too fast. Second, Reagan cut taxes to below sustainable levels, something with bush realzied and fixe resulting, along with good, policy, the debt falling about 10 percentage points during the Clinton years.
So here is my problem. When kids join the military, they think that it is all free. That they get the free money, free training, free room and board, a pension, healthcare, all at taxpayer expense, for free. You don't. When in the military you boss is the POTUS, and you don't get to argue. You agreed with that when you accepted the above minimum wage paycheck for training. Also, according to what I read, you accept to be inactive duty for a number of years. I would also add that if you go around saying you are a decorated veteran, there is some responsibility to not act like a fool and disgrace that work.
This is true to some extent for any taxpayer funded job. If you are a teacher you can be let go for your facebook page. If you are a politician you can be forced to resign for your tweets. Taxpayer funded jobs are not like private jobs. They come with strings.
In this light let look at this case. This guy is a retired Marine, which means that he volunteered to serve his country, follow the chain of command, and accepted a pay check to do so. He is 26-27 so he is probably still on active duty. He is quoted as saying "I'm starting the Revolution. I'm done waiting." I don't know about you, but when a person trained in war says that they are going to start a revolution, that would make a little worried.
Note that such a thing is the basis for treason..."Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
My understanding he is being treated with kid gloves. He was held in a mental facility, instead of being charged with treason. If he is suffering from PSTD this is a good thing. Many vets do not get the help they need, and listening for these cries for help is something that the government should be doing.
In the end Facebook, despite what we want to believe, is a public venue and we should not be plotting revolutions using it. Everyone knows Twitter is where all the cool revolutionaries go. The government has some responsibility to monitor public communications to keep the country safe. This is one of the few enumerated roles of government, and is why this kid did not have to go out and find a real job. In this case, he many only be crazy as opposed to someone who would go into Time Square a shoot a dozen people. In either case, be it prevention or help, I don't see how this is a bad thing. If nothing else it is an example to kids that the military is not just playing soldier, it has some lifelong responsibilities.
I don't normally assume that major companies do not have competent lawyers, but as far as I know price fixing is illegal in the US. There are ways to keep prices set for new products, but for the most part we have "suggested retail price". This also would seem to violate the first sale doctrine, which has been upheld in many court cases.
Exactly. As long as you stay in the walled garden you are safe. But if the advantage of Android is to venture out, then what is the purpose of staying in?
The answer is of course that it is easier to build certain apps on Android, so even if you stay in the walled garden, you end up with more stuff because it is not as well guarded. Which leads to the occasional pest. It is a trade off.
What I don't understand is how this poses a security risk. Sure your personal discussion and naked photos will be intercepted, but really that has always been an issue. Cell phones and texts should not be considered secure. As far as bank codes, those are pretty useless without more information, and if anything other than the one time code is transmitted in a text message that is security issue with the bank, not an issue with the malware.
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That is not to say that expensive wine does not provide value. You are paying for vintage grapes and expert winemakers, which all cost money.OTOH there is no reason to go into debt for a bottle of expensive wine anymore that one should go into debt for a Prada bag.
So what services like this provide is protection for those who want to be a part of a peer group but can't afford it. They can say how silly those rich people are for paying for expensive wine that is the same as the cheap wine. It really isn't the same, but it really doesn't matter. If there is someone who has the ability to authoritively say they are the same, then those who need to feel included can.
Computers and the movement away from terminals meant that there was a market for a single machine that could be used at home and the office. The Osbourne tried to meet this need before the Mac, while Compaq made the defining all in one transportable PC.
Now, however, everything can go on drop box and corporate MS licensing means that one can have MS Office everywhere. Machines are no longer $5K so most of us can have one at the office and one at home. There is no need to make the sacrifices of having one machine, unless there are other factors involved. If there are, a laptop equivalent to a desktop is in the $1K-$2K range, which is really why desktops are fading fast, and MS is panicking. Get a laptop, hook it up to a screen at home, and if you want to take it with you, you can.
But of course MS panicking means they are going to totally misread the situation and promote silly product like this. The current issue is not about home or office. It is about between the home and office, and how do we compute. It is not 30 years ago when it was cool to pull out you Compaq and plug it in a work. This so called all in one does not have the advantages of a laptop. It does not have the advantages of something like an all in one iMac, where the screen is not sitting directly on the table. It has a touchscreen with is clearly useful for on the go computer use, but who uses 18" for on the go anymore. The most popular screen size now for laptops is around 14". Bigger screen were needed when pixel density was lower, and are needed for desktop use where screens are further away. But in the same way that most do not wear their Bluetooth headsets because they look a bit of git, pulling out an 18" tablet is going to do the same.
The IRS situation is particularly appropriate here as what the IRS was doing was trying to prevent the money laundering going on in this article. Such money laundering does not only provide US political power to legitimate US corportations and firms, but also to terrorists and foreign nations. The IRS was only targeting a specific group of 501(c)(4) applicants with political sounding names. A 501(c)(4) group is not supposed to be political, it is supposed to serve a community purpose. The only thing a 501(c)(4) status does is protect donors, whose name do not have to be divulged. It does not provide any tax benefits. If the IRS let a 501(c)(4) group engage in political activity, then Al Qaeda could secretly form such a group, fund it, and destabilize the US government. The same is true for the drug cartels, and of course Koch.
The number of 501(c)(4) doubled after the tea party victories of 2010, and most approved were conservative, and yes liberal groups were denied for being too political. What is clear from the current discussions is the conservatives have no problems with the US government being corrupted by terrorists. Otherwise they would demand that the IRS was given such extra scrutineer to all 501(c)(4) groups, or get rid of the law altogether.
Yes, I misspoke. The difference is if one is trying to build a criminal case or if one is try to prevent a crime. In the former there is no point trying to extort a confession as the evidence that means anything is on the stand, and the fifth protects us. IN the later where lives might be saved and the charge may well be conspiracy, the baseline changes.
This is where I realized that the entire exercise was crap. In terms of rule of law in the US, the right not be tortured and the right to not self incriminate are equal. This is because any such evidence will be inadmissible in the court room. The right not to self incriminate removes the incentive of the police to go to extreme measures, such as keeping someone in a room for a day without food and water. If we did not have the right to not testify against ourselves, or against our spouse, then the police would have an obligation to push the boundaries. of interrogation
Now, in non criminal activity, such as someone blowing up a school, then there may be a discussion of whether torture is valid. But in that case we are trying to save immediate innocent lives, not build a criminal case against the attacker.
Second the phones that are stolen and then reported can simply be shipped to a location that is not going to check the phone, or sold to someone who is not going to check if it works prior to purchasing it. After all if you sell an iPhone for $100, someone will buy it, and then go ATT and be told that it was stolen. What can they do? Nothing, they have received stolen merchandise. Of course this would be a direct sales, not ecoATM.
Like drugs, the only way to solve the problem is the end user. Or bring some defensiveness to the owners. Like when I was a kid. You didn't wear your expensive nikes to school. You would get stabbed. Or, as time when by, your walkman. You didn't make yourself out to be a victim.
There is this myth that management hate ideas from workers. This is not my experience. I have had many ideas used. I have had some ideas tried and then thrown away. The reality is to have your ideas used you first have them, then you have to be able to show they will be effective, and then you have to be willing to have ideas shot down and try again. For most people they either are not thinking about the problems in terms of the firm, or they get one idea, have it shot down, and give up.
Furthermore I have seen people who have good ideas be promoted and allowed to take on more responsibility. It is how corporate, as lame as it, works. Now obviously you have to work within the corporate culture, and if you can't you won't work at that corporation unless you are very smart and they tolerate you. But you likely won't be moved into management.
Here is why this might be important. The mid late 80's were a pretty bad time, unemployment above 7%, but most of us were able to get job by hustling the newly lucrative computer skills(only high school diploma at that time) into job. Now the employment rate is a little higher, but we are also in a time when firms do not really understand how to apply today's technology, just like back them, and a lot of it has become simple enough that a 20 year old can do some pretty effective stuff. I wonder if people can't get job because they believe articles like this that they do not have to go and sell their ideas, but rather wait for corporate to come to them, prostrated, and beg for the youth wisdom.
If I were the marrying kind, a person within 10 miles of where I grew up would not be so bad. The worst relationships were with people who were not.
In terms of online versus 'traditional', I would say my friends who go online fall into three camps. The first is those who are looking to get married, and just need to find someone else who is looking to get married. Online is a good way to meet a reasonable person who is going willing to work to fit lives together. Since it is about marriage, there is no wasted time wining and dining people who just want to play.
The second is the person who is looking for a very particular mate to marry. The objective is to marry, but now there is rubric. Online lets you match a rubric to a various possibilities. I have one friend to do this, every date looked fundamentally the same, eventually found one that was acceptable to marry. In all fairness this friend did in desperation try to expand the mold, but just wasn't able to make it work, so online it was.
Then there is just sex. Looking for an unoffensive lover is part of the service of these sites. Which is also part of traditional dating. Or personals in the newspaper. Or going on vacation.
Now, I now that many in the US see climate change as just a conspiracy to destroy our way of life, our democracy, and the one a true country founded on the principles of god. But most civilized countries do take this a serious problem and are in fact trying to do something about. It does, after all, effect the possible extinction or severe reduction in the viability of our species.
But despite this, the US is like a child that is willing to accept punishment to get a cookie.
Here is something to ponder. If you have sex, in front of an open window, in your home, is there an expectation of privacy? Are we going to arrest someone for filming the act? If you are talking so loud in a closed door meeting that everyone can here you, is there an expectation of privacy? I don't know. I have closed door meetings all the time, and we speak in tones that don't let others know what we are talking about. But I think legally it would be the equivalent to recording a private conversation in private club.
Additionally, I do not see fraud. He did not edit the tape to make it sound like something criminal activity was going on in the office. He merely recorded and released what actually happened. The consensus is it did not harm to the senator.
My main concern is that we have a senator that is not competent enough to keep conversations private and requires the taxpayer to clean up his garbage.
And this one on not having to hack the database at all.
This kind of technology is battle of wits. The defensive technology gets more sophisticated, the offensive technology get more effective. The problem always is that the defensive technology has to be global, while the offensive technology can be very local, and very often there is no consequence for probing attacks. For instance, terrorist can effectively test carrying contraband on planes, as there is no consequence for being caught, until they come up with a combination that will make it through.
Even if one can't fool the scanner with a fake iris, and can't hack the database to steal the biometric(and one would not anyway because there are easier means), that does not mean one can't hack the database, implant a new iris scan of your suicide bomber on top of an existing legitimate record, and then send that terrorist on the bus to create mayhem.
For something like a school bus, or an airport, trained personel is superior to technological gimmickry. A school bus driver that knows the students may be more expensive, but is also more secure. Agents in the airport trained to identify suspicious behavior is more expensive, but also more secure.
Unlike RFID, which is a perfectly reasonable way to implement the safety and record keeping issues that parents want, iris scans cannot be replaced when the information becomes compromised. For instance, when the school database is hacked and the biometric information is leaked, we cannot the change the eyes. Once compromised it is always compromised. This is the general issue with biometric scans. it does not fail gracefully. And of course iris scans are RFID squared. You can't leave your eyes behind.
The real downside, to me, is support. If a user device is not working, then no work will get done. This means that the firm has to fix the device or lose productively. This is not such a big deal because modern devices, especially non-MS Window devices, are very reliable.
It is likely that if explorers found earth, and took time to land on it, they would be like the europeans landed on the American Natives. It is not so much that such alliens would purposely kill everyone, but disease and our own stubbornness would over time mean the end of humans. Yes, we might infect the alliens but presuamble they would have more advanced medical equipment and smaller population to protect.
Given that planes fly people from one population center to another, Atlanta is more a weighted center than Kansas. it is just that no one lives in Kansas, it is that it would take a lot of fuel to get those people to where they want to go. I have real problems with the hub and spoke airline system, but it does have one good thing going for it. It tends to fly full planes. Pick and drop off people while going through the unpopulated regions of the west. Bring them all to a central place in the East. Then fly full planes to places people go. Yes people go to California and Seatlle, but it is probably better to fly full planes from Atlanta and Chicago and Denver rather than empty planes Omaha. This is even reflected when flying to Seatle. Often when coming from the southwest, cheap flights go through California.
Which is to say that simply by the processing of translating a play this could form a basis for Navajo as a modern language.
One can immediately be suspicous of an article that differentiates 'dumping' from being put in a landfill. Also, while there may be no incentive for another country to import junk, there is a lot of incentive for the US to export junk. Containers are sitting there unused at the ports, and it is probably only a few thousand dollars to send a container to the coast of Africa from the Gulf Coast. Once the container is there, any regulatory headaches concerning disposing of the computer equipment will be gone. The cargo ship can auction off the container for additional profit, and the purchase can sell what he can, and incinerate the rest, polluting the air with toxic heavy metals.
I am not saying this is what happens, but since we are treating opinion as news, who cares?
this is what I was thinking. Put Rand Paul in charge of it and blow the kids with spray paint away, don't care if a cop or drone does it.
Pets.com blew though $400 million in two years in todays dollars. And presumable they had no significant R&D costs, and no physical product, other than the sock puppet. It was all spent on snacks and advertising.
In this case, as the domain was registered long ago, MS should simply fork out a million dollars for it. Speculation is perfectly legal and tolerated. Quarterly income for microsoft is in the billions. A million is a rounding error on their quarterly admin expenses.
The government grows because the nation grows. A larger more complex nation requires larger services. For instance, there were no need for ultra engineered paved roads in 1776. Post war federal spending as a percent of GDP has been around 20%. Most of the complexity in the tax code is to provide special privileges to special entities. It is, however, correct, for those certain entities will have income that is hard to define. This is why a flat tax would not work. Most of us we would pay about the same, but the special entities would manage to define income so they would pay less. Look at it this way. If I make money by working with my own two hands, my body, that is taxed at a higher rate than if I sit back and earn interest. Income of the wealthy is different differently than income of the working class.
The current deficit situation is probably caused by special entities not paying as much tax as they once did. For instance, federal debt fell rapidly post war, but increased 30 percentage points with respect to GDP during the reagan bush era. There were two reasons for this. First, as mentioned, borrowing is good and the country was not paying the debt down too fast. Second, Reagan cut taxes to below sustainable levels, something with bush realzied and fixe resulting, along with good, policy, the debt falling about 10 percentage points during the Clinton years.
This is true to some extent for any taxpayer funded job. If you are a teacher you can be let go for your facebook page. If you are a politician you can be forced to resign for your tweets. Taxpayer funded jobs are not like private jobs. They come with strings.
In this light let look at this case. This guy is a retired Marine, which means that he volunteered to serve his country, follow the chain of command, and accepted a pay check to do so. He is 26-27 so he is probably still on active duty. He is quoted as saying "I'm starting the Revolution. I'm done waiting." I don't know about you, but when a person trained in war says that they are going to start a revolution, that would make a little worried.
Note that such a thing is the basis for treason..."Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
My understanding he is being treated with kid gloves. He was held in a mental facility, instead of being charged with treason. If he is suffering from PSTD this is a good thing. Many vets do not get the help they need, and listening for these cries for help is something that the government should be doing.
In the end Facebook, despite what we want to believe, is a public venue and we should not be plotting revolutions using it. Everyone knows Twitter is where all the cool revolutionaries go. The government has some responsibility to monitor public communications to keep the country safe. This is one of the few enumerated roles of government, and is why this kid did not have to go out and find a real job. In this case, he many only be crazy as opposed to someone who would go into Time Square a shoot a dozen people. In either case, be it prevention or help, I don't see how this is a bad thing. If nothing else it is an example to kids that the military is not just playing soldier, it has some lifelong responsibilities.
I don't normally assume that major companies do not have competent lawyers, but as far as I know price fixing is illegal in the US. There are ways to keep prices set for new products, but for the most part we have "suggested retail price". This also would seem to violate the first sale doctrine, which has been upheld in many court cases.
The answer is of course that it is easier to build certain apps on Android, so even if you stay in the walled garden, you end up with more stuff because it is not as well guarded. Which leads to the occasional pest. It is a trade off.
What I don't understand is how this poses a security risk. Sure your personal discussion and naked photos will be intercepted, but really that has always been an issue. Cell phones and texts should not be considered secure. As far as bank codes, those are pretty useless without more information, and if anything other than the one time code is transmitted in a text message that is security issue with the bank, not an issue with the malware.