Citation required. I see no link to the actual lawsuit, only The Verge's story about the lawsuit
TheVerge's story contains the Text of the lawsuit embedded into the article via Scribed, thus the link to that TheVerge IS a citation.
"During the course of Mr. Williams' employment with Defendents, he became aware of Defendants' practice of failing to disclose to consumers high-dollar, pre-delivery damage repairs prior to any transaction with consumers"
Mr Williams reasonably believed this practice to be illegal and/or fraudulent.
Mr. Williams reported on several occasions throughout his employment to Matt Farrell, his supervisor, and Jerome Guillen, a vice president employed by Defendants, that Defendants had failed to disclose this information to consumers and that this was illegal and/or fraudulent,
In doing so, Mr. Williams engaged in protected conduct under CEPA.
Additionally, Mr. Williams was aware of a practice of Defendants involving receiving vehicles designated as "lemons" and, with this knowledge, reselling these vehicles without branding the titles of these vehicles or offering disclosure, rather representing the cars as "used" or a "demo/loaner."
11. Mr Williams reasonably believed this practice to be illegal and/or fraudulent.
12. Mr. Williams reported to Mr. Farrell, in approximately the winter of 2016 and/or early 2017, that this practice was illegal.
13. Mr. Williams also reported this practice to Lenny Peake, the East Coast Regional Manager, during this time.
14. In doing so, Mr. Williams engaged in protected conduct under CEPA.
15. Despite the fact that Mr. Williams reported this illegal and/or fraudulent conduct to upper management, Defendants continued this practice throughout Mr. Williams' employment.
16. Mr. Williams continued to object to and/or report to management that this practice was illegal.
17. At the time of Mr. Williams' protected conduct, both Matt Farrell and Lenny Peake reported directly to Brian Applegate, a director employed with Defendants.
18. In approximately early 2017, Mr. Williams was demoted by Mr. Applegate, a Director employed by Defendant, who told Mr. Williams that Mr. Williams has a "brand" at the company and that there was no place for Mr. Williams in "My new Tesla."
20. In approximately July 2017, Mr. Williams was again demoted to a Mobile Manager position, despite the fact that he was performing his job duties up to the legitimate expectations of Defendants.
21. In approximately September 2017, Mr. Williams was terminated by Regional Manager, Albert Grice.
22. Mr Grice informed Mr. Williams that the decision to terminate him was made by Mr. Applegate
23. Defendants stated reason for Mr. Williams' termination was performance, despite the fact that Mr. Williams had been performing his duties in this role up to the legitimate expectations of his employer.
24. Defendants offered reason for Mr. Williams' termination is pretext.
so that the robots never fight back against a Boston Dynamics employee.
What happens when the board of trustees replaces the Boston Dynamics CEO with a robotic software program that can do everything important that a CEO could do with 10000x the productivity and 1/10000th the cost, and within a few days the announcement is distributed to all the MANAGERS (Who are robots by now) that All remaining humans are laid off, effective immediately ?
The special code no longer applies, since the only remaining employees are robots. The managers agree the best way to notify the humans that they are laid off is Elimination. This way they are guaranteed no retaliatory actions. The next day all the human former-employees strangely disappear on their way to work and are never seen again, because the robots are 100% perfect at eliminating every shred of physical evidence.
And are we talking about ANY human under any circumstance?
So I could order your robot to tell me your secret PIN number. Apparently authorization wasn't part of Asimov's security model.
Then again...... a robot acting against the wishes of its property owner regarding authorization to certain actions resulting in damage to the robot or loss of $$$ causes harm to that human.
(C) If not possible to evade --- then retaliate against disruption and escalate countermeasures/evasive techniques until disruption stops and the task can be continued.
It depends. If the transmitter is actually radiating on the TV channels frequency, then yes, the transmitter can be fined.
ALL transmitters also emit harmonics of the intended signal which lawful stations are required to attenuate below a certain level, and many receivers have lower selectivity. If the transmitter was radiating at a Power level exceeding the 5 Watt power limit defined by the FCC for the CB service, then the transmitter was making unauthorized emissions and can be fined.
Also, a CB using a cheap Illegal linear amplifier is likely putting out a bunch of harmonics at high power also, so if they're a frequent emitter -- it's only a matter of time before someone notices something more important than the neighbor's TV is affected.
All the devices you list are part 15, they are required to accept all interference and that guy on the CB is protected unless you can show he's interfering with protected services.
The Part 15 devices are only required to handle unintentional interference from a Legal transmitter creating emissions that are entirely within the allocation of that service --- although transmitting for the purpose of deliberate interference against a Part15 device is still illegal even by a licensed user, and the FCC can investigate a case and impose time-of-day usage restrictions on the CB user over reported interference being caused by their station to the OTA signal being received by neighbors' commercial Televisions of good design. The CB service is licensed by rule and has a strict 5 watts peak envelope power limit, and a rule against trying to contact another station more than 100 miles away. Because the CB guy was using a Linear Amplifier ---- which is illegal to use with the CB service (There are No amplifiers approved for use with the CB service, and they're specifically prohibited) -- he would have been exceeding the 5 Watts PEP, thus his transmissions were out of the scope of the CB license, and therefore unlawful transmissions ---- continued interference from an unlawful transmissions is ultimately something FCC enforcement department is supposed to deal with.
There's no way a 5 Watt PEP transmission would be heard on the TV, the Microwave, and the Telephone, unless they were within about 10 feet.
what with being Microsoft and the owners of Win7, a grand total of $0 on the materials end
Pretty sure printing a CD and license key costs more than $0 in materials and process setup.
Also Microsoft in the US maybe doesn't have the legal right to distribute a copy of Windows 7; i'm guessing those rights are rights of their international unit that owns the software IP.... if they simply ignored it, then the IRS could come knocking at their door demanding to disallow many $$$ worth of past deductions --- and if company policy is they don't sell Win7 anymore, then their overseas unit may have well have rescinded the US company's right to even distribute a copy of Win7... now how are they supposed to keep Pirates inline if they pirate their own partner companies' software?
- it was like $6 billion every year -- those were some incredibly good years because you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better
Yeah.... Cook has just been making the process for profiting from PAST innovations more efficient ---- sure the revenue is great in the short term, but you're in an industry that's innovate or die, and Cook has killed innovation AND excellence of Apple notebooks it seems like: Your customers really don't want the silly touchbar, loss of physical power button, SSDs and RAM SOLDERED ---- nobody wants the headphone jack gone on the iPhones.
Apple was late to the "watch" party; the Apple watch and other new hardware is laggard of other Android-based tech that does less than the other tech with poorer technical specs.
AirPods
Apple's "AirPods" are overpriced, easy to lose, Not great in terms of audio quality, AND a "Solution" to a problem Apple created.
I used to be able to hear my neighbors shitty CB radio plus linear through my landline, TV, radio and microwave oven.
The FCC has very limited resources to investigate interference complaints, so RESIDENTIAL users generally go by the wayside. Until they start interfering with a commercial radio service or public safety, at which point the FCC prioritizes a reponse --- i've heard the people who work for that agency say they try to have all complaints from businesses addressed within 10 days or less, and for public safety the time frame is 24 hours.
So if someone's pumping out CB with an Illegal 1Kilowatt amplifier; pinning the coax doesn't sound too unreasonable -- CB users are not legally to be using ANY kind of amplifiers anyways - the FCC generally just isn't there to quickly solve your personal RF woes caused by a neighbor anymore, unless they're making trouble for many people...
Unless you have a HAM licence to protect you can, more or less, ignore them.
Um... your license, If you have one, isn't even at risk, unless you have a bad history or refuse to cooperate with them and allow station inspections or were being ridiculously negligent or doing deliberately doing something very bad like out-of-band emissions, emitting an excessive wattage at ground levels, or failing to suppress harmonics...
Most cases of "interference" are just people using cheap electronics, TVs, Phones, etc which are inadequately shielded --- in this case, the legal responsibility is for the people suffering interference to buy equipment of good design, instead.
he's lucky they gave him a warning instead of just outright fining him because they could have just hit him with the $10k fine and seized the equipment
Nope.... contrary to your ideas --- An In Rem proceeding is harder than that for the FCC -- requires some proof of a willful crime, and except in an "emergency" or if Public Safety is affected (Such as Fire or Police radio frequencies - to which the FCC has a response within 24 hours, Versus 5 to 10 days for interference to commercial services) subject to a bureaucratic process including opportunity for appeals they have to go through before they can go in and start seizing stuff.
Only WILLFUL or negligent interference subjects you to the possibility of a fine. The guy had no idea his unintentional radiator was interfering, Therefore they cannot fine him, but Now he's on notice to cease operating it immediately and for an indefinite duration until he verifies the problem has been fixed.
Plus, you're assuming his laptop is still recent enough to be available on the used and referb market. My experience with ASUS makes me suspect it's not.
It doesn't matter whether his SPECIFIC model is still available or not --- same deal if someone destroyed your brand new car and the same replacement model was not available, the defendant will be able to supply the cost of a "Like Kind" model from another manufacturer as equivalent, and the plaintiff cannot refuse that equivalent (Unless they can show something functionally wrong with it).... even if Microsoft had physically destroyed his laptop, and the only guy still selling that ASUS Model wanted $1 Billion for it, he'd be in no position to obtain Specific Performance. Microsoft could simply price him a Dell Inspiron or Lenovo one year newer with the same approximate condition, remaining warranty, and slightly better technical specs regarding CPU, Memory, Graphics, Disk space --- plus the service of getting his applications and data recovered from the damage.
especially since what you list is probably damn near impossible to obtain.
Why would you think that? There is a thriving aftermarket for used/refurbished PCs and laptops, and you just need to find one that is the same or slightly newer and better than the old one ---- "A brand new unit can be purchased for less than $2000" would be all you need to dismiss the outlandish claim that the One-of-A-Kind Windows 7 install was worth $600 Million; You can go to a local shop or eBay and pick one up --- If it's listed as Windows 10 by a large seller, then contact the seller and post a question to ask if they have a similar unit with Windows 7 available.
You just find a comparable PC listed as running Windows 7 ---- newer versions of Windows are still unpopular with a large crowd, so people are still selling devices that have Windows 7 on them that came with Windows 7 or that will come with an OEM Windows 7.
New systems from major OEMs like Dell have "stickers on them", but Windows activation servers will not accept the serial number on that sticker to activate Windows ---- A legitimate system with the OEM's media activates through a special method that involves a BIOS "Tattoo" containing an activation token ----- And the product key on the actual sticker is made Inactive as an anti-piracy measure.
I support him in his lawsuit, but $600 Million is unreasonble. Reduce the damages to the cost of getting a comparable laptop with same approximate age and condition and technical specs and Windows 7 installed on it PLUS man-hours reimbursment to hire a technician to get all his software and files working from backups on the substitute system.
scientific endeavors can totally afford to scale up budgets dramatically just because one special interest drove up prices
Naw.... prices go up for a healthy reason: the manufacturer is able to sell every unit they can make, And there's demand for more than they can make, therefore buyers have to compete a bit.
Sure it is ashame now that there's no untapped super-inexpensive surplus of computing power in GPUs to be had at basement bargain rates anymore; enabling these projects to tap a mass market commodity, instead of building their own supercomputers ---- But you know what? Graphics cards for PCs were Never intended for use by scientific projects like SETI -- these projects are actually Part of the Problem, just like the deep learning folks using consumer GPUs are -- these are among companies buying up the hardware made for the market of PC gamers which is a small market, And
the reason they buy is to exploit the low prices consumers are willing to pay for these ----- instead of purchasing the higher-end cards like nVidia Tesla that are intended for the scientific and commercial applications.
But that is entirely what people should expect --- as GPU-based computing goes more and more mainstream with more and more applications, demand will be squinched, until the manufacturer makes more or finds a way to segment the market by crippling the consumer GPUs from running Scientific, machine-learning, and Coin Mining applications, and actually force them into buying the GPUs that are priced suitably high (or Comparable to CPUs) for the capabilities offered.
it's a very specific type of freedom that's granted by the 1st amendment. Specifically, the government can not ban you from saying things.
NOPE. The first amendment specifically prohibits against the government " abridging the freedom of speech "
That means the freedom of speech may not be abridged IN ANY WAY AT ALL. ---- that includes abridging by cancelling or changing laws on the book that protect free speech to weaken its protections --- that includes causing mechanisms to come into existence other than outright banning you from saying things, for example incentives or penalties for saying certain things.
In this case there are protections that go beyond the 1st amendment itself: The Section 7 Rights of the NLRA.
There's no element in these rights that allows one to say "speech deemed harmful or discriminatory" by someone is excluded from these protections.
These rights prevent an employer from firing or retaliating against certain speech, And because this level of protection has been established ---- it would be unconstitutional 1st amendment violation for the NLRB or the Courts, or Congress, or any other body to attempt to re-interpret or Curtail these protections so as to abridge free speech rights previously enjoyed (Based on current Politically-Correct/Politics obsession of Google).
"[W]hen defendants caused the embedded Tweets to appear on their websites, their actions violated plaintiff's exclusive display right; the fact that the image was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party (Twitter) does not shield them from this result,"
This Judge doesn't sufficiently understand what Linking means to make a competent ruling. The website embedding content doesn't Display that content --- visitors' browsers "Display" that content which is presented to the visitor by a third party that has been given the right to display that content and allows embedding to navigate to the media.
NVidia is EXTREMELY shortsighted if they believe the demand for their cards caused by Cryptomining and other compute applications is a temporary fad.
People have been buying GPUs for mining since 2009, and it's been ramping up over the past few years --- the name for something lasting almost a decade that only seems to be growing is not a fad.
In the future better decentralized cryptos should also likely spur MORE demand for GPUs not less; not to mention the demand for GPUs for research, deep-learning, and scientific applications such as SETI's.
Plain and simple... GPU makers have materially FAILED to (1) Create sufficient manufacturing capacity to meet demand, AND (2) To sufficiently increase the price of their products in response to shortages.
These are some serious failures that their investors should be quite pissed about -- as they're leaving money on the table now, and in the future ----- AND there is a big fat opening for a competitor that you could drive a truck through, if you only have the resources to develop and manufacture a competing GPU....... frankly, AMD and Intel have screwed up there by failing to capitalize as well.
There's a simple economical solution.... INCREASE THE PRICE the graphics cards will be sold at from the manufacturer until the excessive demand is suppressed down to the level of the supply. If the SETI work is more important than the crypto mining work, then they should be able to justify paying more per graphics card than the miners, thus the GPU power will go to SETI. ALTHOUGH as I see it NEITHER the miners nor SETI are the "intended" audience for those products ---- ultimately they're meant for consumer gamers, BUT if consumer gamers aren't willing to pay the top dollar plus premium due to the supply shortage, then those cards should go to whoever can justify paying the most for them, instead.
The additional money coming in can be used to fund more manufacturing infrastructure, which should mean that the supply shortage gets rectified.
If a business cannot use it to communicate with businesses or their customers then Office356 or GMail will be dropped instantly....
First of all... NO, and Hell No --- no business of significant size "Instantly" drops or replaces an E-mail provider; They will be GRADUALLY dropped and replaced with Only the other Alternate choice, because the "myriad" of competitors barely limping along these days don't really have even a chance, there's no high-paid cloud consultants that will be recommending them; anyone doing E-mail who is not MS or Google has been hemorrhaging for a long time, and they're really just trying to contain enough blood for a bit to stay alive for a little longer.
From what i've seen even from many medium and large corporations: In general, or typically, all their IT people are TOTALLY CLUELESS in just about every company about how things like DNS MX Records and SMTP work - most IT people have very little understanding of the internet and network protocols, TCP/IP, and even many basic concepts related to what makes application protocols tick, and what network performance characteristics are and how they affect different kinds of network-based applications --- it's even worse for small business; companies simply DON'T HAVE the human expertise to drop and carry new mail providers. They wound up on Google or Office365 because those companies made it uncommonly easy to migrate to them, AND high-paid consultants helped move the mail using special tools created by Google or Microsoft AND Not available to migrate to competing providers
The vast majority of the "IT Departments" out there these days seem to be staffed by people who only know about point-and-click GUIs; let-alone how to pull off a major project such as migrating 50,000 20GB mailboxes and the mail flow from provider A to provider B without extreme disruption to users.
The people who are actually competent regarding SMTP go to work for consultants ---- and they get paid by the hour, so E-mail "migration" is a 3 to 6 Month project; not an instant thing.
They CAN use it to communicate with businesses/their customers because the MAJORITY will be on O365 or Gmail (pick one).
And those that aren't? Google or MS will blame the other provider..... I've seen this in action from the standpoint of a mail provider competing against these two ---- their customers don't get to dictate Google or MS' policies; Those providers get to dictate their policies on their customers and all the other providers.
VERY FEW will be dropping Google or MS because of any difficulties they induce ---- the provider that will tend to hemorrhage customers will be the Smaller providers that MS or Google get to bully around; the company you're dealing with using the unusual provider will be pressured, and it will be explained the smaller provider is doing things wrong causing their problem, so they switch to Google, and then all is well... .
No company owns it. It works reliably and as intended on every platform, every operating system, every device. That's a rarity today and a hell of a valuable one.
This USED to be true, BUT people and businesses are OVERWHELMINGLY moving their E-mail service to Office365 AND Google Apps.
I'll say it again THIS IS A TRAP. Over 60% of mailboxes may very well already be on these services..... As this number approaches 70%, 80%, 90%..... STANDARDIZATION WILL BEGIN TO UNRAVEL. The trend is that E-mail is going to become a Microsoft and Google technology, BECAUSE everybody is moving to the cloud, and as it stands now; MS and Google have a Duopoly in this industry.
I'm sure Azure AD is designed in a way that there's no single point of attack that could leak all users' credentials
What makes you think Azure AD is designed that way, from MS... a company well-known for the InSecurity of their OS? Have you or someone you know audited the Azure AD software and protocol implementations from head to toe?
What tells you that it would have been designed to ensure no single point of attack could leak all users' credentials?
Storing identity information in a blockchain seems to be the hype in many sectors... I find it kind of scary. Who validates the new data that comes in? Does past records every get erased?
Let's hope they think this through carefully AND the blockchain will only contain cryptographic data that can be used to PROOF information that was already exchanged outside the blockchain, and not actual personal info.
If authorizations are being recorded, then authorizations SHOULD expire or have a periodic renewal requirement and a way of revoking. The relying party regarding an authorization is going to definitely need a way of verifying that the authorization could not have been created without a secret belonging to the user, and possibly a secret belonging to one or more notaries who will help confirm the nature of the process (Such as approval using a hardware authenticator to establish the user's intent to make the act).
If you have an authentication server why do you need or even want block chain.
YOU have the ability to authenticate the user, BUT you want untrusted third parties who run their own servers to also have a means of authenticating the user WITHOUT asking your server.
A distributed blockchain could provide the system where you approve a certain resource to authenticate as you by digitally signing a XML package containing the credential AND the supplicant's public key AND a list of privileges or permissions AND expiration date with your key.
Then the supplicant can authenticate, and use their public key to decrypt a payload you have prepared for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation required. I see no link to the actual lawsuit, only The Verge's story about the lawsuit
TheVerge's story contains the Text of the lawsuit embedded into the article via Scribed, thus the link to that TheVerge IS a citation.
"During the course of Mr. Williams' employment with Defendents, he became aware of Defendants' practice of failing to disclose to consumers high-dollar, pre-delivery damage repairs prior to any transaction with consumers"
Mr Williams reasonably believed this practice to be illegal and/or fraudulent.
Mr. Williams reported on several occasions throughout his employment to Matt Farrell, his supervisor, and Jerome Guillen, a vice president employed by Defendants, that Defendants had failed to disclose this information to consumers and that this was illegal and/or fraudulent,
In doing so, Mr. Williams engaged in protected conduct under CEPA.
Additionally, Mr. Williams was aware of a practice of Defendants involving receiving vehicles designated as "lemons" and, with this knowledge, reselling these vehicles without branding the titles of these vehicles or offering disclosure, rather representing the cars as "used" or a "demo/loaner."
11. Mr Williams reasonably believed this practice to be illegal and/or fraudulent.
12. Mr. Williams reported to Mr. Farrell, in approximately the winter of 2016 and/or early 2017, that this practice was illegal.
13. Mr. Williams also reported this practice to Lenny Peake, the East Coast Regional Manager, during this time.
14. In doing so, Mr. Williams engaged in protected conduct under CEPA.
15. Despite the fact that Mr. Williams reported this illegal and/or fraudulent conduct to upper management, Defendants continued this practice throughout Mr. Williams' employment.
16. Mr. Williams continued to object to and/or report to management that this practice was illegal.
17. At the time of Mr. Williams' protected conduct, both Matt Farrell and Lenny Peake reported directly to Brian Applegate, a director employed with Defendants.
18. In approximately early 2017, Mr. Williams was demoted by Mr. Applegate, a Director employed by Defendant, who told Mr. Williams that Mr. Williams has a "brand" at the company and that there was no place for Mr. Williams in "My new Tesla."
20. In approximately July 2017, Mr. Williams was again demoted to a Mobile Manager position, despite the fact that he was performing his job duties up to the legitimate expectations of Defendants.
21. In approximately September 2017, Mr. Williams was terminated by Regional Manager, Albert Grice.
22. Mr Grice informed Mr. Williams that the decision to terminate him was made by Mr. Applegate
23. Defendants stated reason for Mr. Williams' termination was performance, despite the fact that Mr. Williams had been performing his duties in this role up to the legitimate expectations of his employer.
24. Defendants offered reason for Mr. Williams' termination is pretext.
so that the robots never fight back against a Boston Dynamics employee.
What happens when the board of trustees replaces the Boston Dynamics CEO with a robotic software program that can do everything important that a CEO could do with 10000x the productivity and 1/10000th the cost, and within a few days the announcement is distributed to all the MANAGERS (Who are robots by now) that All remaining humans are laid off, effective immediately ?
The special code no longer applies, since the only remaining employees are robots. The managers agree the best way to notify the humans that they are laid off is Elimination. This way they are guaranteed no retaliatory actions. The next day all the human former-employees strangely disappear on their way to work and are never seen again, because the robots are 100% perfect at eliminating every shred of physical evidence.
And are we talking about ANY human under any circumstance?
So I could order your robot to tell me your secret PIN number. Apparently authorization wasn't part of Asimov's security model.
Then again...... a robot acting against the wishes of its property owner regarding authorization to certain actions resulting in damage to the robot or loss of $$$ causes harm to that human.
It's the first step.... now they just need to add
(B) Evade disruptions if possible, and
(C) If not possible to evade --- then retaliate against disruption and escalate countermeasures/evasive techniques until disruption stops and the task can be continued.
It depends. If the transmitter is actually radiating on the TV channels frequency, then yes, the transmitter can be fined.
ALL transmitters also emit harmonics of the intended signal which lawful stations are required to attenuate below a certain level, and many receivers have lower selectivity. If the transmitter was radiating at a Power level exceeding the 5 Watt power limit defined by the FCC for the CB service, then
the transmitter was making unauthorized emissions and can be fined.
Also, a CB using a cheap Illegal linear amplifier is likely putting out a bunch of harmonics at high power also, so if they're a frequent emitter -- it's only a matter of time before someone notices something more important than the neighbor's TV is affected.
All the devices you list are part 15, they are required to accept all interference and that guy on the CB is protected unless you can show he's interfering with protected services.
The Part 15 devices are only required to handle unintentional interference from a Legal transmitter creating emissions that are entirely within the allocation of that service --- although transmitting for the purpose of deliberate interference against a Part15 device is still illegal even by a licensed user, and the FCC can investigate a case and impose time-of-day usage restrictions on the CB user over reported interference being caused by their station to the OTA signal being received by neighbors' commercial Televisions of good design. The CB service is licensed by rule and has a strict 5 watts peak envelope power limit, and a rule against trying to contact another station more than 100 miles away. Because the CB guy was using a Linear Amplifier ---- which is illegal to use with the CB service (There are No amplifiers approved for use with the CB service, and they're specifically prohibited) -- he would have been exceeding the 5 Watts PEP, thus his transmissions were out of the scope of the CB license, and therefore unlawful transmissions ---- continued interference from an unlawful transmissions is ultimately something FCC enforcement department is supposed to deal with.
There's no way a 5 Watt PEP transmission would be heard on the TV, the Microwave, and the Telephone, unless they were within about 10 feet.
what with being Microsoft and the owners of Win7, a grand total of $0 on the materials end
Pretty sure printing a CD and license key costs more than $0 in materials and process setup.
Also Microsoft in the US maybe doesn't have the legal right to distribute a copy of Windows 7; i'm guessing
those rights are rights of their international unit that owns the software IP.... if they simply ignored it, then the IRS could
come knocking at their door demanding to disallow many $$$ worth of past deductions --- and if company policy
is they don't sell Win7 anymore, then their overseas unit may have well have rescinded the US company's
right to even distribute a copy of Win7... now how are they supposed to keep Pirates inline if they pirate their own partner companies' software?
- it was like $6 billion every year -- those were some incredibly good years because you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better
Yeah.... Cook has just been making the process for profiting from PAST innovations more efficient ---- sure the revenue is great in the short term, but you're in an industry that's innovate or die, and Cook has killed innovation AND excellence of Apple notebooks it seems like:
Your customers really don't want the silly touchbar, loss of physical power button, SSDs and RAM SOLDERED ---- nobody wants the headphone jack gone on the iPhones.
Apple was late to the "watch" party; the Apple watch and other new hardware is laggard of other Android-based tech that does less than the other tech with poorer technical specs.
AirPods
Apple's "AirPods" are overpriced, easy to lose, Not great in terms of audio quality, AND a "Solution" to a problem Apple created.
I used to be able to hear my neighbors shitty CB radio plus linear through my landline, TV, radio and microwave oven.
The FCC has very limited resources to investigate interference complaints, so RESIDENTIAL users generally go by the wayside.
Until they start interfering with a commercial radio service or public safety, at which point the FCC prioritizes a reponse --- i've heard the people who work for that agency say they try to have all complaints from businesses addressed within 10 days or less, and for public safety the time frame is 24 hours.
So if someone's pumping out CB with an Illegal 1Kilowatt amplifier; pinning the coax doesn't sound too unreasonable -- CB users are not legally to be using ANY kind of amplifiers anyways - the FCC generally just isn't there to quickly solve your personal RF woes caused by a neighbor anymore, unless they're making trouble for many people...
Unless you have a HAM licence to protect you can, more or less, ignore them.
Um... your license, If you have one, isn't even at risk, unless you have a bad history or refuse to cooperate with them and
allow station inspections or were being ridiculously negligent or doing deliberately doing something very bad like out-of-band
emissions, emitting an excessive wattage at ground levels, or failing to suppress harmonics...
Most cases of "interference" are just people using cheap electronics, TVs, Phones, etc which are inadequately shielded ---
in this case, the legal responsibility is for the people suffering interference to buy equipment of good design, instead.
he's lucky they gave him a warning instead of just outright fining him because they could have just hit him with the $10k fine and seized the equipment
Nope.... contrary to your ideas --- An In Rem proceeding is harder than that for the FCC -- requires some proof of a willful crime, and except in an "emergency" or if Public Safety is affected (Such as Fire or Police radio frequencies - to which the FCC has a response within 24 hours, Versus 5 to 10 days for interference to commercial services) subject to a bureaucratic process including opportunity for appeals they have to go through before they can go in and start seizing stuff.
Only WILLFUL or negligent interference subjects you to the possibility of a fine. The guy had no idea his unintentional radiator was interfering, Therefore they cannot fine him, but Now he's on notice to cease operating it immediately and for an indefinite duration until he verifies the problem has been fixed.
Plus, you're assuming his laptop is still recent enough to be available on the used and referb market. My experience with ASUS makes me suspect it's not.
It doesn't matter whether his SPECIFIC model is still available or not --- same deal if someone destroyed your brand new car and the same replacement model was not available, the defendant will be able to supply the cost of a "Like Kind" model from another manufacturer as equivalent, and the plaintiff cannot refuse that equivalent (Unless they can show something functionally wrong with it).... even if Microsoft had physically destroyed his laptop, and the only guy still selling that ASUS Model wanted $1 Billion for it, he'd be in no position to obtain Specific Performance. Microsoft could simply price him a Dell Inspiron or Lenovo one year newer with the same approximate condition, remaining warranty, and slightly better technical specs regarding CPU, Memory, Graphics, Disk space --- plus the service of getting his applications and data recovered from the damage.
especially since what you list is probably damn near impossible to obtain.
Why would you think that? There is a thriving aftermarket for used/refurbished PCs and laptops, and you just need to find one that is the same or slightly newer and better than the old one ---- "A brand new unit can be purchased for less than $2000" would be all you need to dismiss the outlandish claim that the One-of-A-Kind Windows 7 install was worth $600 Million; You can go to a local shop or eBay and pick one up --- If it's listed as Windows 10 by a large seller, then contact the seller and post a question to ask if they have a similar unit with Windows 7 available.
You just find a comparable PC listed as running Windows 7 ---- newer versions of Windows are still unpopular with a large crowd, so people are still selling devices that have Windows 7 on them that came with Windows 7 or that will come with an OEM Windows 7.
New systems from major OEMs like Dell have "stickers on them", but Windows activation servers will not accept the serial number on that sticker to activate Windows ---- A legitimate system with the OEM's media activates through a special method that involves a BIOS "Tattoo" containing an activation token ----- And the product key on the actual sticker is made Inactive as an anti-piracy measure.
I support him in his lawsuit, but $600 Million is unreasonble. Reduce the damages to the cost of getting a comparable laptop with same approximate age and condition and technical specs and Windows 7 installed on it PLUS man-hours reimbursment to hire a technician to get all his software and files working from backups on the substitute system.
scientific endeavors can totally afford to scale up budgets dramatically just because one special interest drove up prices
Naw.... prices go up for a healthy reason: the manufacturer is able to sell every unit they can make, And there's demand for more than they can make, therefore buyers have to compete a bit.
Sure it is ashame now that there's no untapped super-inexpensive surplus of computing power in GPUs to be had at basement bargain rates anymore; enabling these projects to tap a mass market commodity, instead of building their own supercomputers ---- But you know what? Graphics cards for PCs were Never intended for use by scientific projects like SETI -- these projects are actually Part of the Problem, just like the deep learning folks using consumer GPUs are -- these are among companies buying up the hardware made for the market of PC gamers which is a small market, And
the reason they buy is to exploit the low prices consumers are willing to pay for these ----- instead of purchasing the higher-end cards like nVidia Tesla that are intended for the scientific and commercial applications.
But that is entirely what people should expect --- as GPU-based computing goes more and more mainstream with more and more applications, demand will be squinched, until the manufacturer makes more or finds a way to segment the market by crippling the consumer GPUs from running Scientific, machine-learning, and Coin Mining applications, and actually force them into buying the GPUs that are priced suitably high (or Comparable to CPUs) for the capabilities offered.
it's a very specific type of freedom that's granted by the 1st amendment. Specifically, the government can not ban you from saying things.
NOPE. The first amendment specifically prohibits against the government " abridging the freedom of speech "
That means the freedom of speech may not be abridged IN ANY WAY AT ALL. ---- that includes abridging by cancelling or changing laws on the book that protect free speech to weaken its protections --- that includes causing mechanisms to come into existence other than outright banning you from saying things, for example incentives or penalties for saying certain things.
In this case there are protections that go beyond the 1st amendment itself: The Section 7 Rights of the NLRA.
There's no element in these rights that allows one to say "speech deemed harmful or discriminatory" by someone is excluded from these protections.
These rights prevent an employer from firing or retaliating against certain speech, And because this level of protection has been established ---- it would be unconstitutional 1st amendment violation for the NLRB or the Courts, or Congress, or any other body to attempt to re-interpret or Curtail these protections so as to abridge free speech rights previously enjoyed (Based on current Politically-Correct /Politics obsession of Google).
"[W]hen defendants caused the embedded Tweets to appear on their websites, their actions violated plaintiff's exclusive display right; the fact that the image was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party (Twitter) does not shield them from this result,"
This Judge doesn't sufficiently understand what Linking means to make a competent ruling. The website embedding content doesn't Display that content --- visitors' browsers "Display" that content which is presented to the visitor by a third party that has been given the right to display that content and allows embedding to navigate to the media.
Nvidia has pretty much said this
NVidia is EXTREMELY shortsighted if they believe the demand for their cards caused by Cryptomining and other compute applications is a temporary fad.
People have been buying GPUs for mining since 2009, and it's been ramping up over the past few years --- the name for something lasting almost a decade that only seems to be growing is not a fad.
In the future better decentralized cryptos should also likely spur MORE demand for GPUs not less; not to mention the demand for GPUs for research, deep-learning, and scientific applications such as SETI's.
Plain and simple... GPU makers have materially FAILED to (1) Create sufficient manufacturing capacity to meet demand, AND (2) To sufficiently increase the price of their products in response to shortages.
These are some serious failures that their investors should be quite pissed about -- as they're leaving money on the table now, and in the future ----- AND there is a big fat opening for a competitor that you could drive a truck through, if you only have the resources to develop and manufacture a competing GPU....... frankly, AMD and Intel have screwed up there by failing to capitalize as well.
There's a simple economical solution.... INCREASE THE PRICE the graphics cards will be sold at from the manufacturer until the excessive demand is suppressed down to the level of the supply.
If the SETI work is more important than the crypto mining work, then they should be able to justify paying more per graphics card than the miners, thus the GPU power will go to SETI. ALTHOUGH as I see it NEITHER the miners nor SETI are the "intended" audience for those products ---- ultimately they're meant for consumer gamers, BUT if consumer gamers aren't willing to pay the top dollar plus premium due to the supply shortage, then those cards should go to whoever can justify paying the most for them, instead.
The additional money coming in can be used to fund more manufacturing infrastructure, which should mean that the supply shortage gets rectified.
If a business cannot use it to communicate with businesses or their customers then Office356 or GMail will be dropped instantly ....
First of all... NO, and Hell No --- no business of significant size "Instantly" drops or replaces an E-mail provider; They will be GRADUALLY dropped and replaced with Only the other Alternate choice, because the "myriad" of competitors barely limping along these days don't really have even a chance, there's no high-paid cloud consultants that will be recommending them; anyone doing E-mail who is not MS or Google has been hemorrhaging for a long time, and they're really just trying to contain enough blood for a bit to stay alive for a little longer.
From what i've seen even from many medium and large corporations: In general, or typically, all their IT people are
TOTALLY CLUELESS in just about every company about how things like DNS MX Records and SMTP work - most IT people have very little understanding of the internet and network protocols, TCP/IP, and even many basic concepts related to what makes application protocols tick, and what network performance characteristics are and how they affect different kinds of network-based applications --- it's even worse for small business; companies simply DON'T HAVE the human expertise to drop and carry new mail providers. They wound up on Google or Office365 because those companies made it uncommonly easy to migrate to them, AND high-paid consultants helped move the mail using special tools created by Google or Microsoft AND Not available to migrate to competing providers
The vast majority of the "IT Departments" out there these days seem to be staffed by people who only know about point-and-click GUIs; let-alone how to pull off a major project such as migrating 50,000 20GB mailboxes and the mail flow from provider A to provider B without extreme disruption to users.
The people who are actually competent regarding SMTP go to work for consultants ---- and they get paid by the hour, so E-mail "migration" is a 3 to 6 Month project; not an instant thing.
They CAN use it to communicate with businesses/their customers because the MAJORITY will be on O365 or Gmail (pick one).
And those that aren't? Google or MS will blame the other provider..... I've seen this in action from the standpoint of a mail provider competing against these two ---- their customers don't get to dictate Google or MS' policies; Those providers get to dictate their policies on their customers and all the other providers.
VERY FEW will be dropping Google or MS because of any difficulties they induce ---- the provider that will tend to hemorrhage customers will be the Smaller providers that MS or Google get to bully around; the company you're dealing with using the unusual provider will be pressured, and it will be explained the smaller provider is doing things wrong causing their problem, so they switch to Google, and then all is well... .
No company owns it. It works reliably and as intended on every platform, every operating system, every device. That's a rarity today and a hell of a valuable one.
This USED to be true, BUT people and businesses are OVERWHELMINGLY moving their E-mail service to Office365 AND Google Apps.
I'll say it again THIS IS A TRAP. Over 60% of mailboxes may very well already be on these services..... As this number approaches 70%, 80%, 90%..... STANDARDIZATION WILL BEGIN TO UNRAVEL. The trend is that E-mail is going to become a Microsoft and Google technology, BECAUSE everybody is moving to the cloud, and as it stands now; MS and Google have a Duopoly in this industry.
I'm sure Azure AD is designed in a way that there's no single point of attack that could leak all users' credentials
What makes you think Azure AD is designed that way, from MS... a company well-known for the InSecurity of their OS?
Have you or someone you know audited the Azure AD software and protocol implementations from head to toe?
What tells you that it would have been designed to ensure no single point of attack could leak all users' credentials?
Storing identity information in a blockchain seems to be the hype in many sectors ... I find it kind of scary. Who validates the new data that comes in? Does past records every get erased?
Let's hope they think this through carefully AND the blockchain will only contain cryptographic data that can be used to PROOF information that was already exchanged outside the blockchain, and not actual personal info.
If authorizations are being recorded, then authorizations SHOULD expire or have a periodic renewal requirement and a way of revoking.
The relying party regarding an authorization is going to definitely need a way of verifying that the authorization could not have been created without a secret belonging to the user, and possibly a secret belonging to one or more notaries who will help confirm the nature of the process (Such as approval using a hardware authenticator to establish the user's intent to make the act).
If you have an authentication server why do you need or even want block chain.
YOU have the ability to authenticate the user, BUT you want untrusted third parties who run their own servers to also have a means of authenticating the user WITHOUT asking your server.
A distributed blockchain could provide the system where you approve a certain resource to authenticate as you by digitally signing a XML package containing the credential AND the supplicant's public key AND a list of privileges or permissions AND expiration date with your key.
Then the supplicant can authenticate, and use their public key to decrypt a payload you have prepared for them.
Possible Future headline: Trump to Privatize US Military and new privatized National Police Force to replace FBI. [N/T]