I said that Google does NOT provide precise numbers for NSLs, but DOES provide precise numbers for everything else. Apple provided precise numbers for nothing, which is why I found it odd.
These companies keep saying they can only legally report the numbers in these very coarse terms. I smell weasel words and voluntary censorship. Can someone identify the US law that prohibits reporting of precise numbers, not the details of targets etc., of requests that are not subject to national security suppression orders?
I do. Big corporations don't lie when they make simple statements like that. It's not the way they operate.
Even more, the executives of shareholder-owned companies have rather strong legal requirements to be honest in statements to shareholders, which public statements are. Public falsehoods can send execs to prison. Barring some element of the law that can allow the US government to authorize (or require) them to lie, they legally can't. And, AFAIK, there is no such law. The government can gag them, but not force them to lie.
I don't think they'd need to account for it separately for GAAP compliance, or to call it out as operational costs. It could just as easily be bucketed as miscellaneous legal and/or compliance overhead, and there's no reason to specifically "write it off" as an operational cost... the salaries of the employees doing it are going to be part of the operational cost structure regardless of whether or not the details are tracked.
You can bet that if these companies are well run, accounting knows how much they are spending on legal compliance to this sort of request, even broken down to which agency is their biggest cost center.
Probably, but just as part of their own internal management, not for any externally-visible reasons. And they could just as easily not separate it out from the large volume of other government relations and legal overhead if they didn't feel it adds value to do so.
They know down to the decimal, guaranteed (they bill for the requests at the very least).
What makes you think companies get to bill the government for compliance with legal orders? It's possible they can recover reasonable costs for collecting the data, but I strongly doubt they can get anything. Just like all of the other paperwork that governments require of them, I'm sure it's just a cost of doing business.
With 416 horsepower on tap and full torque available from a standstill thanks to the electric motor, the Model S went from 60 mph to 100 mph in less than five seconds.
Ok... what does the whole "100% torque from standstill" thing have to do with 60-100 time?
Right. He should have said "full torque available at any speed".
It's surprising to me that Apple didn't provide more detail. Others do. Yes, companies are currently not allowed to provide precise data on National Security Letter requests, but for all other sorts of government requests, including warrants and subpoenas, there are no legal restrictions. Google publishes the precise number of requests and the precise number of affected user accounts for those requests, falling back on giving ranges only for the NSLs (it's worth pointing out that it's thank to Google's efforts that anyone can publish any information on NSLs; they're the ones who negotiated the permission to publish ranges). Other companies also publish precise statistics for everything except NSLs.
When it comes to the knowledge, I have stuff on my blog (http://tidbitsfortechs.com) that is free. I've always believed that knowledge is free, service costs, and so Google's Helpouts rub me the wrong way a bit.
What about the service of providing exactly the information I'm looking for, even when I don't really know what I need to know?
Publishing information on blogs, in books, etc., is great, but it may take me a lot of time to find what I'm looking for, or even to figure out how to look for it. On the other hand, if I can find a person that is knowledgeable in the area and get 30 minutes of their time, they can often save me many hours -- or days -- of research.
This is something that I do every day at work... I have access to all of the source code, so there are no questions about how the systems I work on function that I cannot answer with enough delving, and I'll know that I have the most accurate possible answer. There's also lots of design documentation if I want something that is less accurate but more concise. Yet, still, when I need to know how the FrobnizServer generates Whazzits, it's a much better use of my time to ask Bob, who is not only more accurate than the design docs (though less accurate than the code) and more concise than either, but also capable of understanding my goals and intelligently redirecting my enquiry as appropriate.
I see Helpouts as more analogous to "Give me an easy way to find and communicate with an expert to direct me to the knowledge I need" than to a collection of searchable blog posts.
Grr. I made one mistake... and made it twice! The 1934 law was the Gun Control Act, not the National Firearms Act. GCA, not NFA. The GCA was a fairly good law. The NFA, not so much.
Oh, I should clarify that although "machine gun" is a classification that is technically distinct from "battle rifle", "assault rifle", "submachine gun" and "machine pistol", it's also a catchall for "fully-automatic firearm", particularly since under the law they're all in the same category. And it was that catchall that I was referring to the post to which you replied.
However, several others corrected me... there actually has been a crime committed by a lawfully-owned fully-automatic weapon, a machine pistol, actually. It was committed by a police officer using his personally-owned full auto MAC-11. Still, one in 80 years is a pretty good track record. To me that says the current restrictions are perfectly adequate, and perhaps excessive. In fact, I think the 1986 ban is clearly excessive. I hope a future second amendment lawsuit strikes down that ban. A perfect 52-year record is more than enough to demonstrate that whatever basis the government thinks it has for restricting full auto firearms, and whatever standard of scrutiny the Supreme Court chooses to apply to second amendment issues, there's no justification for restrictions beyond those imposed by the NFA.
Will never happen. The "gun toters" are fully cognizant of their responsibility for where their bullets go, particularly in crowed areas.
BTW, your argument was the primary one against the shall-issue concealed carry laws that were passed by nearly all states in the country, starting almost 40 years ago. If you were right, we'd have seen it. Instead we see examples like the one I mentioned in Portland (you should look that up).
In nearly all states. There are a few states that have banned them, but most just allow federal law to rule. As for the conditions, you have to pay a $200 tax and send some forms to the BATFE. Assuming you clear a background check, you can have your automatic weapon. Most people who buy them set up a trust and have the trust buy them, though, because if an individual owns the gun you have to tell the BATFE every time you transport it, and transferring ownership is a pain. Automatic weapons owned by trusts are less hassle.
Since the 1986 ban on entry of new full auto weapons into civilian hands, the guns have gotten extremely expensive. Fixed supply and increasing demand will do that. So in practice, cost is the primary obstacle to owning one. Expect to drop upwards of $8K, and it's not at all hard to get over $20K for a single gun.
You do realize that machine guns are large guns that either stationary or mounted on vehicles, right?
That's not true. Machine guns are distinct from assault rifles and machine pistols, and they are generally crew-served weapons but they don't have to be too big or heavy to be man-portable. I was an M-60 gunner for several years, and while the '60 is considered "crew-served" that's because the assistant gunner carries the spare barrels and additional ammunition, not because the gun itself isn't fully transportable by a single person. I humped the 60 plus 400 rounds of belted ammunition all by myself, for many miles.
Later we swapped out the 60s for the M-239 "SAW", which is considerably lighter than the 60s. That saved some wear and tear on my back.
There's an additional distinction, which is between light, medium and heavy machine guns. The SAW is a light machine gun. The M-60 is sometimes considered a light machine gun and sometimes medium. I also fired the M2, and that is a heavy machine gun, and clearly not man-portable... though it is perfectly legal for a civilian to own one, after jumping through the same hoops.
Even if a criminal could get his hands on one, he would probably ignore it, that isn't much use for a machine gun unless you are drug lord with his own army.
Yup. The 1934 NFA was passed because criminals were using a lot of machine guns, but that was mostly because they were easily available, not because they're particularly useful for criminals. So the mild obstacles established by the NFA were enough to stop almost all criminal machine gun use.
Note that machine guns are not hard for criminals to get. They're much cheaper and much easier to obtain on the black market. But they're not that useful for non-military applications.
Other fully automatic weapons are under similar restrictions depend on state and they are limited on magazine size making the automatic part much less useful.
No, they're not limited by magazine size. Yes, a tiny number of states have magazine size restrictions, but most of those states have state bans of full auto firearms anyway. But in most of the country, if you have jumped through the federal hoops and paid the money to buy a full auto firearm, there are no capacity restrictions. The federal law makes no distinctions on capacity... if it fires more than one bullet per pull of the trigger it's full auto and must go through the NFA licensing process.
You really should consider learning something about things before you pop off, you know.
soooo... shooting happened, people grieved for a few days & nearly 1/4 century later few people even remember it (I probably wouldn't if I didn't work with people who were there) and there have been exactly ZERO recurrences despite the conspicuous absence of a bear patrol - go figure...
On the other hand, immediately after the shooting there was a huge surge in the number of people seeking and getting Weapons Carry Licenses. So... I suspect that on an average day in a suburban Atlanta mall today there are a handful of armed people. I'm not saying that's what's preventing shootings, but I do suspect that it will terminate any that do occur in the future fairly quickly, as happened last year in Portland.
Oh... one more point. Even if you can find one or two examples of bad decisions, that really doesn't invalidate my point. I mentioned that picking winners and losers is really hard. Anyone is bound to get it wrong from time to time, and I never claimed Larry was doing a perfect job, just a good job.
> And don't think that picking winners and losers is easy. Well, it's easy to *do*, but very hard to do *right*. And, FWIW, I think Larry is doing a great job.
"great job"? Do you remember Google Wave?
A *very poor* job here..
What was a poor job? Wave? Or the decision to kill it? In any case, that was before Larry became CEO, so it's not really relevant to my point.
Who made the stupid decision to use letter-by-letter in the synchronous mode instead of line-by-line?
I never used Wave, and it was shut down long before I joined Google, so I have no idea what you're talking about, much less who made that decision. It doesn't sound like the sort of decision made by a CEO, however.
So taxes on income and labor and the worst, taxes on revenue are better
Eh? Taxes on revenue are terrible. Yeah, they're simple, but they penalize low-margin businesses, driving capital away from highly-efficient industries.
Everyone would be fine with finding other ways to make money -- and in fact Google's non-ad revenues are consistently growing much faster than it's ad revenues.
Of course that's going to be true; you've got such a large proportion of online advertising that growing the size of the pie is going to be really hard.
Except that ad revenues are growing 25-30% year on year as well.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't read my post :-)
I said that Google does NOT provide precise numbers for NSLs, but DOES provide precise numbers for everything else. Apple provided precise numbers for nothing, which is why I found it odd.
These companies keep saying they can only legally report the numbers in these very coarse terms. I smell weasel words and voluntary censorship. Can someone identify the US law that prohibits reporting of precise numbers, not the details of targets etc., of requests that are not subject to national security suppression orders?
See my post on this topic: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4414461&cid=45340907
I do. Big corporations don't lie when they make simple statements like that. It's not the way they operate.
Even more, the executives of shareholder-owned companies have rather strong legal requirements to be honest in statements to shareholders, which public statements are. Public falsehoods can send execs to prison. Barring some element of the law that can allow the US government to authorize (or require) them to lie, they legally can't. And, AFAIK, there is no such law. The government can gag them, but not force them to lie.
I don't think they'd need to account for it separately for GAAP compliance, or to call it out as operational costs. It could just as easily be bucketed as miscellaneous legal and/or compliance overhead, and there's no reason to specifically "write it off" as an operational cost... the salaries of the employees doing it are going to be part of the operational cost structure regardless of whether or not the details are tracked.
You can bet that if these companies are well run, accounting knows how much they are spending on legal compliance to this sort of request, even broken down to which agency is their biggest cost center.
Probably, but just as part of their own internal management, not for any externally-visible reasons. And they could just as easily not separate it out from the large volume of other government relations and legal overhead if they didn't feel it adds value to do so.
They know down to the decimal, guaranteed (they bill for the requests at the very least).
What makes you think companies get to bill the government for compliance with legal orders? It's possible they can recover reasonable costs for collecting the data, but I strongly doubt they can get anything. Just like all of the other paperwork that governments require of them, I'm sure it's just a cost of doing business.
I am guessing its to make the United States Government to look bad.
I'm all for that!
With 416 horsepower on tap and full torque available from a standstill thanks to the electric motor, the Model S went from 60 mph to 100 mph in less than five seconds.
Ok... what does the whole "100% torque from standstill" thing have to do with 60-100 time?
Right. He should have said "full torque available at any speed".
It's surprising to me that Apple didn't provide more detail. Others do. Yes, companies are currently not allowed to provide precise data on National Security Letter requests, but for all other sorts of government requests, including warrants and subpoenas, there are no legal restrictions. Google publishes the precise number of requests and the precise number of affected user accounts for those requests, falling back on giving ranges only for the NSLs (it's worth pointing out that it's thank to Google's efforts that anyone can publish any information on NSLs; they're the ones who negotiated the permission to publish ranges). Other companies also publish precise statistics for everything except NSLs.
When it comes to the knowledge, I have stuff on my blog (http://tidbitsfortechs.com) that is free. I've always believed that knowledge is free, service costs, and so Google's Helpouts rub me the wrong way a bit.
What about the service of providing exactly the information I'm looking for, even when I don't really know what I need to know?
Publishing information on blogs, in books, etc., is great, but it may take me a lot of time to find what I'm looking for, or even to figure out how to look for it. On the other hand, if I can find a person that is knowledgeable in the area and get 30 minutes of their time, they can often save me many hours -- or days -- of research.
This is something that I do every day at work... I have access to all of the source code, so there are no questions about how the systems I work on function that I cannot answer with enough delving, and I'll know that I have the most accurate possible answer. There's also lots of design documentation if I want something that is less accurate but more concise. Yet, still, when I need to know how the FrobnizServer generates Whazzits, it's a much better use of my time to ask Bob, who is not only more accurate than the design docs (though less accurate than the code) and more concise than either, but also capable of understanding my goals and intelligently redirecting my enquiry as appropriate.
I see Helpouts as more analogous to "Give me an easy way to find and communicate with an expert to direct me to the knowledge I need" than to a collection of searchable blog posts.
Grr. I made one mistake... and made it twice! The 1934 law was the Gun Control Act, not the National Firearms Act. GCA, not NFA. The GCA was a fairly good law. The NFA, not so much.
Oh, I should clarify that although "machine gun" is a classification that is technically distinct from "battle rifle", "assault rifle", "submachine gun" and "machine pistol", it's also a catchall for "fully-automatic firearm", particularly since under the law they're all in the same category. And it was that catchall that I was referring to the post to which you replied.
However, several others corrected me... there actually has been a crime committed by a lawfully-owned fully-automatic weapon, a machine pistol, actually. It was committed by a police officer using his personally-owned full auto MAC-11. Still, one in 80 years is a pretty good track record. To me that says the current restrictions are perfectly adequate, and perhaps excessive. In fact, I think the 1986 ban is clearly excessive. I hope a future second amendment lawsuit strikes down that ban. A perfect 52-year record is more than enough to demonstrate that whatever basis the government thinks it has for restricting full auto firearms, and whatever standard of scrutiny the Supreme Court chooses to apply to second amendment issues, there's no justification for restrictions beyond those imposed by the NFA.
Will never happen. The "gun toters" are fully cognizant of their responsibility for where their bullets go, particularly in crowed areas.
BTW, your argument was the primary one against the shall-issue concealed carry laws that were passed by nearly all states in the country, starting almost 40 years ago. If you were right, we'd have seen it. Instead we see examples like the one I mentioned in Portland (you should look that up).
There has not been a single crime committed with a lawfully-owned civilian nuclear device either.
That's because there aren't any. Unlike lawfully-owned civilian machine guns. There are tens of thousands of those.
In what states and under what conditions?
In nearly all states. There are a few states that have banned them, but most just allow federal law to rule. As for the conditions, you have to pay a $200 tax and send some forms to the BATFE. Assuming you clear a background check, you can have your automatic weapon. Most people who buy them set up a trust and have the trust buy them, though, because if an individual owns the gun you have to tell the BATFE every time you transport it, and transferring ownership is a pain. Automatic weapons owned by trusts are less hassle.
Since the 1986 ban on entry of new full auto weapons into civilian hands, the guns have gotten extremely expensive. Fixed supply and increasing demand will do that. So in practice, cost is the primary obstacle to owning one. Expect to drop upwards of $8K, and it's not at all hard to get over $20K for a single gun.
You do realize that machine guns are large guns that either stationary or mounted on vehicles, right?
That's not true. Machine guns are distinct from assault rifles and machine pistols, and they are generally crew-served weapons but they don't have to be too big or heavy to be man-portable. I was an M-60 gunner for several years, and while the '60 is considered "crew-served" that's because the assistant gunner carries the spare barrels and additional ammunition, not because the gun itself isn't fully transportable by a single person. I humped the 60 plus 400 rounds of belted ammunition all by myself, for many miles.
Later we swapped out the 60s for the M-239 "SAW", which is considerably lighter than the 60s. That saved some wear and tear on my back.
There's an additional distinction, which is between light, medium and heavy machine guns. The SAW is a light machine gun. The M-60 is sometimes considered a light machine gun and sometimes medium. I also fired the M2, and that is a heavy machine gun, and clearly not man-portable... though it is perfectly legal for a civilian to own one, after jumping through the same hoops.
Even if a criminal could get his hands on one, he would probably ignore it, that isn't much use for a machine gun unless you are drug lord with his own army.
Yup. The 1934 NFA was passed because criminals were using a lot of machine guns, but that was mostly because they were easily available, not because they're particularly useful for criminals. So the mild obstacles established by the NFA were enough to stop almost all criminal machine gun use.
Note that machine guns are not hard for criminals to get. They're much cheaper and much easier to obtain on the black market. But they're not that useful for non-military applications.
Other fully automatic weapons are under similar restrictions depend on state and they are limited on magazine size making the automatic part much less useful.
No, they're not limited by magazine size. Yes, a tiny number of states have magazine size restrictions, but most of those states have state bans of full auto firearms anyway. But in most of the country, if you have jumped through the federal hoops and paid the money to buy a full auto firearm, there are no capacity restrictions. The federal law makes no distinctions on capacity... if it fires more than one bullet per pull of the trigger it's full auto and must go through the NFA licensing process.
You really should consider learning something about things before you pop off, you know.
No, I just said taxing revenue is a bad idea.
What you mean only criminals commit crimes? Amazing insight that as soon as someone starts shooting your point is valid.
I said "lawfully-owned"... someone's decision to start shooting doesn't change the legal ownership status of the firearm.
soooo... shooting happened, people grieved for a few days & nearly 1/4 century later few people even remember it (I probably wouldn't if I didn't work with people who were there) and there have been exactly ZERO recurrences despite the conspicuous absence of a bear patrol - go figure...
On the other hand, immediately after the shooting there was a huge surge in the number of people seeking and getting Weapons Carry Licenses. So... I suspect that on an average day in a suburban Atlanta mall today there are a handful of armed people. I'm not saying that's what's preventing shootings, but I do suspect that it will terminate any that do occur in the future fairly quickly, as happened last year in Portland.
Most sane people do not feel safe with roaming machine-gun-toting civilians in any venue neither.
OTOH, there hasn't been a single crime committed with a lawfully-owned civilian machine gun (or other automatic firearm) since 1934.
Oh... one more point. Even if you can find one or two examples of bad decisions, that really doesn't invalidate my point. I mentioned that picking winners and losers is really hard. Anyone is bound to get it wrong from time to time, and I never claimed Larry was doing a perfect job, just a good job.
> And don't think that picking winners and losers is easy. Well, it's easy to *do*, but very hard to do *right*. And, FWIW, I think Larry is doing a great job.
"great job"? Do you remember Google Wave? A *very poor* job here..
What was a poor job? Wave? Or the decision to kill it? In any case, that was before Larry became CEO, so it's not really relevant to my point.
Who made the stupid decision to use letter-by-letter in the synchronous mode instead of line-by-line?
I never used Wave, and it was shut down long before I joined Google, so I have no idea what you're talking about, much less who made that decision. It doesn't sound like the sort of decision made by a CEO, however.
Will Hodejo1 or Timothy now hold their hands up, admit their mistake and promise to do better in future?
Maybe Hodejo1, but the suggestion that Timothy might deserves a +6 Funny.
So taxes on income and labor and the worst, taxes on revenue are better
Eh? Taxes on revenue are terrible. Yeah, they're simple, but they penalize low-margin businesses, driving capital away from highly-efficient industries.
Everyone would be fine with finding other ways to make money -- and in fact Google's non-ad revenues are consistently growing much faster than it's ad revenues.
Of course that's going to be true; you've got such a large proportion of online advertising that growing the size of the pie is going to be really hard.
Except that ad revenues are growing 25-30% year on year as well.
And yet... the links you found actually contradicted your point. And I never called you a liar, just asked you for a citation.
(And note that it Chrome Remote satisfies the Open Source requirement, too.)