Figured this was going to be the outcome after Zediva Lost a few years back.
So apparently, if I VPN into my network using my cellphone, and watch my HDHomerun Prime I'm breaking the law.
No, you wouldn't be breaking the the law. If you charged thousands of people a monthly fee to log into your network and watch TV shows, then you would be in violation of copyright law.
The law that was used to justify banning Aereo's model, unfortunately, is pretty broad. The 1976 amendment to the Copyright Act basically says "if you act like a cable company, you are a cable company". It doesn't matter what technical trickery you use, if the end result is a product that appears (to a judge) to be like a cable company, you are out of luck.
So a lot of the blame has to do with Congress. SCOTUS had to go back to 1976 to find law that might apply here. And the law they found was very broad. If Congress were functioning, and keeping law in pace with technology (and not bought by lobbyists), the ruling may have been a better one.
It seems to me that judges should be ruling based on the law
They do. But law has wording like "if a reasonable person", or "if the entity acts like a CATV company".
So a judge has to make a judgement call about the definition of 'reasonable' in a given situation. Or make a judgement call about if a service is "acting like a cable company" (1976 amendment to Copyright act).
If law could be followed like an equation, we wouldn't need judges or juries.
I haven't read through the ruling, but I suspect they just applied the "quacks like a duck" rule.
Yeah, the 1976 amendment to the Copyright act was specifically mentioned. No matter what technique you use, if the end result is basically acting like a cable company, you have to abide by copyright rules / pay rebroadcast fees.
I suspect the ruling may have been different if Aereo had required customers to buy their own antennas
I doubt it. Just skimming comments about the 1976 amendment to Copyright, it seems that scotus may be 50% to blame here, but congress is easily 50% to blame itself. 'quack like a duck' applies if the duck is a robot, a human dressed like a duck, an image of a duck... etc...
Your post is full of idealism. Very little of which is going to work in the real world in practice.
There is no way that enough workers could become employers to cause a shortage in workers, thereby raising demand for workers. It is an interesting text book thought experiment, but that has never happened in the history of the world, nor will it in the future.
There's a plausible argument that people shouldn't lose their free speech rights just because they get together in order to exercise them, or formalize their arrangement by forming a corporation.
If the employees of Walmart want to donate to a political issue, or group together to buy an advertisement, go for it. If the owners of Walmart want to donate to a political issue, go for it.
But just like we limit direct campaign contributions, there is no reason we couldn't limit individual political spending. Let everyone spend a total of 100 dollars, directly, on political issues. Travel, hotels, doesn't count. But buying tv time, buying posters, donating to a campaign, very direct and obvious political spending, issue advertising, does count.
I got lots of kids who "played with computers" but had no clue on AD, Domains, and so on.
I've been a system analyst and then web analyst for the past 17 years working primarily on linux/solaris/unix type systems. When I started, I was a "kid who played with computers", fresh out of college with a non-computer degree, applied for data center operations jobs, and ended up being hired as a system analyst. Why? I really don't know to this day. The CIO saw something in me I guess.
I was successful and people were happy with my work. I wouldn't discount smart minds, just because they haven't been exposed to 'enterprise' stuff yet.
I've worked in healthcare (7 years) and then a college (10 years) in IT.
The major difference I noticed between doctors and professors, was that the doctors were often under heavy regulation and coordination by the hospital. A doctor couldn't just go out and buy IT solutions on his/her own.
At the college, the exact opposite is true, as you indicated. It has hard to quantify how much money is wasted by not coordinating IT, but I would guess the dollar amount is not insignificant. The software and servers are probably the smaller amount of the waste. The amount of work hours devoted to the thousands of redundant solutions is likely the biggest source of waste.
Sometimes I do have to blame ourselves though. One of the bigger complaints is "well I tried to work with IT, but they had no time to help me". And that can sometimes be true due to limited IT staffing and project resources. I sometimes think that schools would save a lot of money, by spending a lot more on IT. If IT had a reputation of "they are so easy to work with, they can always help, their solutions are top notch, projects get done quickly", etc.. a lot less people would go off and try to reinvent the wheel.
Just in terms of the math problems in common core, initially I looked at them and was really confused. After reading some articles about the education theory behind the math problems, it makes complete sense to me.
Look at the math again. Just the simple stuff, like the changes to addition/subtraction. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/07/about-that-common-core-math-problem-making-the-rounds-on-facebook/
I read somewhere else that the official IRS email server backup plan is to maintain 6 months.
If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly.
That policy surprises me that it is up to the individual employee to print paper copies of email if it could be related to federal work. So archaic.
I wonder if the investigators targeted 10 IRS employees at random, and attempted to get their email from the same period, if they would find a similar "failure to backup" problem. As in, none of the missing emails from the 6 people are due to malicious behavior, but just generally neglecting their duty to back up to paper.
That doesn't mean much to me. I'd like the investigators to target 10 IRS employees at random and see if they have email from the same time period. Maybe 90% of all IRS employees don't keep email after X years or months. Has anyone determined that?
In other articles the IRS states that it has been their policy for a long time to only maintain 6 months of email backups. After that, it is up to the client to retain more. What percent of IRS employees keep 2 years of email without fail? (How long ago were the investigators seeking emails from? unclear).
Ditto with the hard drive. What percent of IRS employees have hard drives older than X time (whatever time period the investigators are searching for).
The article doesn't make clear any sequence of events. Are we even sure that the manager and IT knew anything about the drive when it was recycled? Had the investigation been started, and had Lois Lerner been named as a person of interest, before the hard drive was recycled?
Battery swap station, faster than filling a tank of gas: http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap
80% of your needs? I bet it is higher than that.. if you are the typical worker: 1 vacation a year, 2 trips out of State each year once for Thanksgiving and once for Xmas. So you rent a gas car 3 times per year, not a big deal, and that is only assuming you aren't traveling to areas that having the charging stations with the battery swap... and/or you are unwilling to charge during a 1 hour lunch while on the road.
Study some anthropology or linguistics some time. The meaning (and/or implied meaning) of words can change in different contexts (time, speaker, place, etc..). Not just offensive terms, all sorts of regular words also.
Combine that with the fact that language is a living thing (constantly evolving), and there is no definite objective answer to the question "is this offensive", but rather, "is this offensive" can only be answered subjectively by the people who a particular word or phrase applies.
If 99% of all Native Americans think 'red skin' is offensive, then it is offensive.
Imagine the fuss if we had to replace all such names that have insulting origins.
Language is living. It constantly evolves. The single only thing that determines if a phrase or word is insulting, is if the majority of the people referred to by the word or phrase consider it insulting.
Just look at the history of words used to refer to Black people. Most of those words were used by Black people themselves at certain times and in certain contexts. As language and culture evolved though, certain words became offensive, period, or became offensive in certain contexts.
NEVERTHELESS, the US has ample tools in its toolbox to deal with "bad actors" in many indirect ways, and reassure our actual allies of our firm commitment to their security. Yet the US response has been confused, dilatory, impotent...
What more do you think we should have done? I've seen clips of conservatives describing how they would handle an issue like this with Russia (from years ago), and they basically outlined the exact steps that the President took. Likely because those steps were cooked up a long time ago by the State Department and Pentagon, and have nothing to do with any particular administration's feelings about a situation.
They do, and their official policy is 6 months of tape backup. After that, it is gone/overwritten. Whether the IT department followed the rules or not having only a 6 month retention period, I don't know.
9/10 tasks of my first tasks for the first 5 years of my career were cleaning data. You quickly learned that often a combination of tools worked best. Import into spreadsheet and cut off a column, export back out to text. Edit with VI and:s/^V//g to remove some stuff.. finally finish by writing a small script to loop through the file and do something.
Since most systems all had perl, then later python, installed, that is what we used.
Heck, even some years later when the web started becoming a bigger thing, I ended up using web languages to parse text files, just because that was what I had become most familiar with.
I think there is a big split between coders that work in businesses whose primary goal is creating software, and coders who work in businesses whose primary task is something other than producing software (healthcare, education, etc..).
Everyone assumes it was political bias though. I haven't seen any proof that it was bias. Was there a legitimate reason for the extra scrutiny? Were there shady groups of people using the Tea Party phenomenon to set up shady tax shelters or shady "give us money to take down the government!!" scams? I sure noticed a huge increase in "buy gold now the world is ending" commercials when the Tea Party rose up.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that most of those 292 new "patriotic" groups did need some extra scrutiny.
It is the HMO'ing of the health care system. Doctors get sucked up in big health care chains and basically have to just follow scripts on the computer screen. They make a diagnosis, the computer spits out what the HMO says to try first, try second, and try third. So early symptoms of diabetes, med 1, med 2, med 3. See ya next time.
There is zero room given for a holistic view of a person's lifestyle. That has been my experience with HMO type health care anyway. You walk out with the distinct impression that the doctors cares very little about your actual health.. or if they did at one time, the system has drained that caring away.
IMO, you can't count on a general doc to lead you in the right direction anymore. You need to do the research yourself and ask to get referrals to specialists.
Almost all discrimination is legal. There are very few things you cannot legally discriminate against.
In an idealized world, people get jobs because they can do the job. They can keep the job as long as they do it well. The only factor used to discriminate (=differentiate) is the ability to do the job.
I think you may have that backwards. In terms of law, there are only a small handful of areas that are specifically protected. Race, Religion, Sexuality (in some States), Age, Gender, Disability, National Origin.. I think that might be it. 8 attributes.
There are hundreds of reasons you could discriminate when hiring that don't fall into those 8'ish legally protected categories. "Weird looking", "Not a good culture fit", "don't like nose rings", "says they play mmorpgs", "too conservative", "too liberal", "vegetarian", "meat eater", etc... you could have thousands of pet peeves that are no more than personal discrimination when it comes to hiring. And none of which are legally protected.
The Democrat agenda will do nothing to reduce illegal immigration, but rather increase it.
That is an unfounded assumption. http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2013/jul/01/debbie-wasserman-schultz/more-border-security-and-patrols-under-obama-previ/ Not to mention he's pissed off a lot of immigrant communities by stepping up deportation to all time highs. So if Obama is leading this "Democrat agenda", he's doing a terrible reverse job of it.
Bringing in lots of new workers is a direct cause of lower wages and more job competition and unemployment in the USA.
Citation needed. Because I've seen shows where farms, as an experiment, have advertised in white neighborhoods. No one takes those jobs. We have 10 million illegal immigrants in the US doing jobs that most Americans will not do. In addition, their presence here isn't lowering wages. All businesses are going to pay the absolute lowest they can, which means minimum wage for almost all service and farm jobs. That will never change. Especially given global competition. It is a race to the bottom, and the only bottom is one that we legally define as the minimum wage.
Really rich, corporate Republicans want more labor because it benefits them fiscally.
True. And Democrats.
Lots of Democrats in general want more immigrants because it strengthens the power of the government and the welfare state, and shifts voting demographics favorably for them
Demographics are already shifting towards blue. The existing minority voters, even just the legal ones, are already growing at rates that will outpace the current majorities. The only reason this country appears to be conservative is because of gerrymandering. The democrats I know want immigration reform because of ideals: the US melting pot, the 'give us your huddled masses', tired of seeing kids who grew up here kicked out, etc.. I suppose the politicians in Washington may have other motives, but the average democratic citizen thinks of it has a moral issue.
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Figured this was going to be the outcome after Zediva Lost a few years back.
So apparently, if I VPN into my network using my cellphone, and watch my HDHomerun Prime I'm breaking the law.
No, you wouldn't be breaking the the law. If you charged thousands of people a monthly fee to log into your network and watch TV shows, then you would be in violation of copyright law.
The law that was used to justify banning Aereo's model, unfortunately, is pretty broad. The 1976 amendment to the Copyright Act basically says "if you act like a cable company, you are a cable company". It doesn't matter what technical trickery you use, if the end result is a product that appears (to a judge) to be like a cable company, you are out of luck.
So a lot of the blame has to do with Congress. SCOTUS had to go back to 1976 to find law that might apply here. And the law they found was very broad. If Congress were functioning, and keeping law in pace with technology (and not bought by lobbyists), the ruling may have been a better one.
It seems to me that judges should be ruling based on the law
They do. But law has wording like "if a reasonable person", or "if the entity acts like a CATV company".
So a judge has to make a judgement call about the definition of 'reasonable' in a given situation. Or make a judgement call about if a service is "acting like a cable company" (1976 amendment to Copyright act).
If law could be followed like an equation, we wouldn't need judges or juries.
I haven't read through the ruling, but I suspect they just applied the "quacks like a duck" rule.
Yeah, the 1976 amendment to the Copyright act was specifically mentioned. No matter what technique you use, if the end result is basically acting like a cable company, you have to abide by copyright rules / pay rebroadcast fees.
I suspect the ruling may have been different if Aereo had required customers to buy their own antennas
I doubt it. Just skimming comments about the 1976 amendment to Copyright, it seems that scotus may be 50% to blame here, but congress is easily 50% to blame itself. 'quack like a duck' applies if the duck is a robot, a human dressed like a duck, an image of a duck... etc...
http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/06/symposium-a-win-though-a-narrow-one-thanks-to-breyer-j-for-copyright-owners/
Your post is full of idealism. Very little of which is going to work in the real world in practice.
There is no way that enough workers could become employers to cause a shortage in workers, thereby raising demand for workers. It is an interesting text book thought experiment, but that has never happened in the history of the world, nor will it in the future.
What kind of accountability exists for any politician once the election is over?
There's a plausible argument that people shouldn't lose their free speech rights just because they get together in order to exercise them, or formalize their arrangement by forming a corporation.
If the employees of Walmart want to donate to a political issue, or group together to buy an advertisement, go for it. If the owners of Walmart want to donate to a political issue, go for it.
But just like we limit direct campaign contributions, there is no reason we couldn't limit individual political spending. Let everyone spend a total of 100 dollars, directly, on political issues. Travel, hotels, doesn't count. But buying tv time, buying posters, donating to a campaign, very direct and obvious political spending, issue advertising, does count.
I got lots of kids who "played with computers" but had no clue on AD, Domains, and so on.
I've been a system analyst and then web analyst for the past 17 years working primarily on linux/solaris/unix type systems. When I started, I was a "kid who played with computers", fresh out of college with a non-computer degree, applied for data center operations jobs, and ended up being hired as a system analyst. Why? I really don't know to this day. The CIO saw something in me I guess.
I was successful and people were happy with my work. I wouldn't discount smart minds, just because they haven't been exposed to 'enterprise' stuff yet.
I've worked in healthcare (7 years) and then a college (10 years) in IT.
The major difference I noticed between doctors and professors, was that the doctors were often under heavy regulation and coordination by the hospital. A doctor couldn't just go out and buy IT solutions on his/her own.
At the college, the exact opposite is true, as you indicated. It has hard to quantify how much money is wasted by not coordinating IT, but I would guess the dollar amount is not insignificant. The software and servers are probably the smaller amount of the waste. The amount of work hours devoted to the thousands of redundant solutions is likely the biggest source of waste.
Sometimes I do have to blame ourselves though. One of the bigger complaints is "well I tried to work with IT, but they had no time to help me". And that can sometimes be true due to limited IT staffing and project resources. I sometimes think that schools would save a lot of money, by spending a lot more on IT. If IT had a reputation of "they are so easy to work with, they can always help, their solutions are top notch, projects get done quickly", etc.. a lot less people would go off and try to reinvent the wheel.
Just in terms of the math problems in common core, initially I looked at them and was really confused. After reading some articles about the education theory behind the math problems, it makes complete sense to me.
Look at the math again. Just the simple stuff, like the changes to addition/subtraction. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/07/about-that-common-core-math-problem-making-the-rounds-on-facebook/
I read somewhere else that the official IRS email server backup plan is to maintain 6 months.
If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly.
That policy surprises me that it is up to the individual employee to print paper copies of email if it could be related to federal work. So archaic.
I wonder if the investigators targeted 10 IRS employees at random, and attempted to get their email from the same period, if they would find a similar "failure to backup" problem. As in, none of the missing emails from the 6 people are due to malicious behavior, but just generally neglecting their duty to back up to paper.
That doesn't mean much to me. I'd like the investigators to target 10 IRS employees at random and see if they have email from the same time period. Maybe 90% of all IRS employees don't keep email after X years or months. Has anyone determined that?
In other articles the IRS states that it has been their policy for a long time to only maintain 6 months of email backups. After that, it is up to the client to retain more. What percent of IRS employees keep 2 years of email without fail? (How long ago were the investigators seeking emails from? unclear).
Ditto with the hard drive. What percent of IRS employees have hard drives older than X time (whatever time period the investigators are searching for).
The manager knew this one was more "interesting"
The article doesn't make clear any sequence of events. Are we even sure that the manager and IT knew anything about the drive when it was recycled? Had the investigation been started, and had Lois Lerner been named as a person of interest, before the hard drive was recycled?
Battery swap station, faster than filling a tank of gas: http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap
80% of your needs? I bet it is higher than that.. if you are the typical worker: 1 vacation a year, 2 trips out of State each year once for Thanksgiving and once for Xmas. So you rent a gas car 3 times per year, not a big deal, and that is only assuming you aren't traveling to areas that having the charging stations with the battery swap... and/or you are unwilling to charge during a 1 hour lunch while on the road.
Study some anthropology or linguistics some time. The meaning (and/or implied meaning) of words can change in different contexts (time, speaker, place, etc..). Not just offensive terms, all sorts of regular words also.
Combine that with the fact that language is a living thing (constantly evolving), and there is no definite objective answer to the question "is this offensive", but rather, "is this offensive" can only be answered subjectively by the people who a particular word or phrase applies.
If 99% of all Native Americans think 'red skin' is offensive, then it is offensive.
Imagine the fuss if we had to replace all such names that have insulting origins.
Language is living. It constantly evolves. The single only thing that determines if a phrase or word is insulting, is if the majority of the people referred to by the word or phrase consider it insulting.
Just look at the history of words used to refer to Black people. Most of those words were used by Black people themselves at certain times and in certain contexts. As language and culture evolved though, certain words became offensive, period, or became offensive in certain contexts.
NEVERTHELESS, the US has ample tools in its toolbox to deal with "bad actors" in many indirect ways, and reassure our actual allies of our firm commitment to their security. Yet the US response has been confused, dilatory, impotent...
What more do you think we should have done? I've seen clips of conservatives describing how they would handle an issue like this with Russia (from years ago), and they basically outlined the exact steps that the President took. Likely because those steps were cooked up a long time ago by the State Department and Pentagon, and have nothing to do with any particular administration's feelings about a situation.
They do, and their official policy is 6 months of tape backup. After that, it is gone/overwritten. Whether the IT department followed the rules or not having only a 6 month retention period, I don't know.
The veterans administration officials stated in a congressional hearing that their main information systems are 30 years old...
It would not surprise me in the slightest to learn that the IRS email systems are 20 years old.
Or make it a utility and let the city provide the service. Still a monopoly, but a non-profit one, voted and controlled by the people of that town.
Like this when a bunch of cities in Utah got together and built a fiber network: http://www.utopianet.org/
Actually parental involvement is the very last thing kids need in the educational process.
Every teacher and study on the subject disagrees with you.
Ditto.
9/10 tasks of my first tasks for the first 5 years of my career were cleaning data. You quickly learned that often a combination of tools worked best. Import into spreadsheet and cut off a column, export back out to text. Edit with VI and :s/^V//g to remove some stuff.. finally finish by writing a small script to loop through the file and do something.
Since most systems all had perl, then later python, installed, that is what we used.
Heck, even some years later when the web started becoming a bigger thing, I ended up using web languages to parse text files, just because that was what I had become most familiar with.
I think there is a big split between coders that work in businesses whose primary goal is creating software, and coders who work in businesses whose primary task is something other than producing software (healthcare, education, etc..).
Everyone assumes it was political bias though. I haven't seen any proof that it was bias. Was there a legitimate reason for the extra scrutiny? Were there shady groups of people using the Tea Party phenomenon to set up shady tax shelters or shady "give us money to take down the government!!" scams? I sure noticed a huge increase in "buy gold now the world is ending" commercials when the Tea Party rose up.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that most of those 292 new "patriotic" groups did need some extra scrutiny.
It is the HMO'ing of the health care system. Doctors get sucked up in big health care chains and basically have to just follow scripts on the computer screen. They make a diagnosis, the computer spits out what the HMO says to try first, try second, and try third. So early symptoms of diabetes, med 1, med 2, med 3. See ya next time.
There is zero room given for a holistic view of a person's lifestyle. That has been my experience with HMO type health care anyway. You walk out with the distinct impression that the doctors cares very little about your actual health.. or if they did at one time, the system has drained that caring away.
IMO, you can't count on a general doc to lead you in the right direction anymore. You need to do the research yourself and ask to get referrals to specialists.
Almost all discrimination is legal. There are very few things you cannot legally discriminate against.
In an idealized world, people get jobs because they can do the job. They can keep the job as long as they do it well. The only factor used to discriminate (=differentiate) is the ability to do the job.
I think you may have that backwards. In terms of law, there are only a small handful of areas that are specifically protected. Race, Religion, Sexuality (in some States), Age, Gender, Disability, National Origin.. I think that might be it. 8 attributes.
There are hundreds of reasons you could discriminate when hiring that don't fall into those 8'ish legally protected categories. "Weird looking", "Not a good culture fit", "don't like nose rings", "says they play mmorpgs", "too conservative", "too liberal", "vegetarian", "meat eater", etc... you could have thousands of pet peeves that are no more than personal discrimination when it comes to hiring. And none of which are legally protected.
The Democrat agenda will do nothing to reduce illegal immigration, but rather increase it.
That is an unfounded assumption.
http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2013/jul/01/debbie-wasserman-schultz/more-border-security-and-patrols-under-obama-previ/
Not to mention he's pissed off a lot of immigrant communities by stepping up deportation to all time highs. So if Obama is leading this "Democrat agenda", he's doing a terrible reverse job of it.
Bringing in lots of new workers is a direct cause of lower wages and more job competition and unemployment in the USA.
Citation needed. Because I've seen shows where farms, as an experiment, have advertised in white neighborhoods. No one takes those jobs. We have 10 million illegal immigrants in the US doing jobs that most Americans will not do. In addition, their presence here isn't lowering wages. All businesses are going to pay the absolute lowest they can, which means minimum wage for almost all service and farm jobs. That will never change. Especially given global competition. It is a race to the bottom, and the only bottom is one that we legally define as the minimum wage.
Really rich, corporate Republicans want more labor because it benefits them fiscally.
True. And Democrats.
Lots of Democrats in general want more immigrants because it strengthens the power of the government and the welfare state, and shifts voting demographics favorably for them
Demographics are already shifting towards blue. The existing minority voters, even just the legal ones, are already growing at rates that will outpace the current majorities. The only reason this country appears to be conservative is because of gerrymandering. The democrats I know want immigration reform because of ideals: the US melting pot, the 'give us your huddled masses', tired of seeing kids who grew up here kicked out, etc.. I suppose the politicians in Washington may have other motives, but the average democratic citizen thinks of it has a moral issue.