I still have a choice, to buy or not buy Auto Insurance. If I don't drive a car, I don't need auto insurance. With Health Care, they want to force you to buy it,regardless if you want it! Our freedom of choice is being diminished!
No they don't. Roberts called this out in his opinion explicitly... you can fully lawfully refuse to buy insurance. You simply pay slight more in taxes (or even pay nothing extra if you are too poor). You cannot go to jail, you cannot be put on trial, your property cannot be liened, your wages cannot be garnished. The only remedy for collecting the tax is taking it out of next year's refund.
Or you can have health insurance and pay less taxes.
What's the difference between calling it a tax credit or a mandate? The reality is exactly the same so functionally there is no difference.
Your argument is like saying Congress has mandated you to buy energy efficient windows or to buy a house because people who do those things pay less taxes (even though those things cost more than what you save in taxes, resulting in a net out of pocket). It is literally the *exact same* situation as the ACA "mandate".
I think all this nonsense is just a symptom of the modern disease you see with "social justice" activists on tumblr, excessive political correctness, or the blow hards on AM talk radio... Anything I don't like must be morally wrong / illegal and I will cry, complain, and moan about how my rights are being trampled, my freedom is being curtailed, ad nauseum simply because someone dared to disagree with me or I'm not getting my own way... I am totally a beautiful and unique little snowflake and how dare you! Why I never!
It's the worst kind of fake outrage / being offended. People savor it like a fine wine, storing it up and trotting it out when they want to feel smugly superior to all those "other people" who are clearly beneath them.
Rush Limbaugh and the "how dare you trigger me with your hetero-normative patriarchal comments!" people are the same disease... faux outrage over manufactured slights to serve their own selfish ends and pump up their own egos.
If you don't do what the government wants, you will find a new "tax" will appear to make you do it.
The court explicitly called this out - there is a line after which a "tax" becomes oppressive/coercive and would exceed Congress' authority. That said, they evaluated the "mandate" and found that it did not exceed this line because it is limited to a maximum (whatever insurance would cost you) and cannot be enforced with jail time or liens, and in fact is simply deducted from next year's refund.
The Federal Government stated, and the court accepted, that someone who absolutely refuses to buy insurance can pay the tax and wholly satisfy the law... as Roberts said,
"Those subject to the individual mandate may lawfully forgo health insurance and pay higher taxes, or buy health insurance and pay lower taxes. The only thing they may not lawfully do is notbuy health insurance and not pay the resulting tax."
Basically this is no different than installing energy efficient windows. Only people who own homes and buy energy efficient windows get the tax break, everyone has has to pay higher taxes. Congress is offering the carrot/stick approach to get people to install more efficient windows and that is perfectly within their power.
I've never seen anyone substantiate this claim except in the case of a multi-story building designed without elevators where a remodel requires one to be installed. Those are a vanishingly small number of cases these days since all multi-story facilities come with elevators now (and the price of simple hydraulic elevators has dropped).
No one is making you retrofit anything if you are just using an existing building as-is. You only have to comply with the ADA if you are remodeling and then you can bypass restrictions if the facility is physically unable to accommodate or if it would be a financial hardship. How much does it really cost to combine two toilet stalls into one wheelchair accessible stall? A bag of quick-crete, a compass & string, and a couple hours of your time and you can pour your own wheelchair ramp for less than a hundred bucks and be 100% compliant with the latest code.
The vast majority of complaining about ADA compliance is just penny-pinchers or people who don't like doing extra design work, even if it doesn't add much to the cost or timeline... Same reason railroads didn't adopt the safer air brakes or coupling knuckles even though both saved them money (and many brake and car men their fingers/lives!) in the long run and resulted in far fewer derailments. Congress literally had to force them to adopt technologies that saved lives, paid for themselves, and ultimately saved a lot of money.
ADA won't save money so please, do tell, how exactly a combat vet with his legs blown off has any chance of enjoying a semi-normal life without things like the ADA? Don't those businesses owe him something, for protecting the society that allows them to even have a business in the first place? Or did the safety and security of the United States spring wholly from their own bootstraps in some sort of Randian fantasy land?
1. Most theaters have or are going all digital. With a digital projector, there is no reason it shouldn't support 48fps with a simple firmware update... In fact many already support alternate framerates so the theater can rent the rooms for presentations, live TV events, etc, none of which are 24fps. This nonsense about cost is just to allow the theaters to charge more for tickets.
2. Much like Retina/HiDPI needs to be experienced for a period of time before you can appreciate the difference, I suspect that once you get used to the improved quality of 48fps it will be annoying to drop back to 24fps. I used to think the iPad 3 screen wasn't a big deal for the first day or two I used it. Then I tried to go back to the iPad 2... I couldn't do it. The "screen door" effect was too glaring.
3. There is absolutely no technical question as 48fps is smoother and better. Film has long, slow pans *because* directors are used to working within the limitations of film... Not because it is necessarily better. Like any new technology, there will be people who abuse it. There will also be people who stick with the older styles or blend new and old.
Remember: 24fps was chosen as a reasonable minimum that would fool the eye (not look like constant flickering) but be as slow as possible to make the equipment cheaper to produce and especially to compensate for the insensitivity of early film stock which needed as long of an exposure as possible to register the action without excessively bright lights... In the earliest days sets were unbearably hot due to the massive amounts of light needed. Color film set this effort back for a while until the film got better, just as sound set portability back as cameras were loud so you needed barriers and had to find ways to hide microphones on set.
Microsoft is survived it's current Mutton Head simply because it has giant trucks full of money.
That may be partially true but I think it has more to do with Bill's philosophy of hiring A-level people (who hire other A people, whereas B people hire C, D, etc). He also pushed hard for an own-it management style - if you were in charge of some area then he let you get on with it. Management interference was kept to a minimum.
It takes a long time to strangle the culture out of an organization and that seems to be slowly taking place at Microsoft.
It remains to be seen if Apple can continue in the long term but it has one thing most others in that situation don't - the original visionary came back and rescued the company, followed by success after success. That visionary also faced his own failures and matured as a person and manager (compare Steve Jobs terror stories pre-departure and his management style after returning).
One key per signature -- as in, I can't sign a bootloader with both MS's key and Red Hat's key. I can have both keys and sign one bootloader with one and the other bootloader with the other. They can -- and some vendors are willing to -- allow both MS and Red Hat's keys. The real problem that the one-key-per-signature (or one-signature-per-binary if you prefer) situation is that you can't use secure boot without trusting the MS key, since all of the included components are signed with it.
Not quite... part of the UEFI spec says that hardware should carry the UEFI driver on-board and be able to spit it out for the firmware to use prior to OS boot. (The UEFI environment is basically just a stripped-down OS of its own). This gets around having the BIOS require foreknowledge of your peripheral/standard... it knows what a disk controller is, so your add-in card can just provide a disk controller UEFI driver that understands the card's command set, etc.
Unfortunately that spec says the drivers only have a slot for one signature so by default almost every hardware manufacturer is going to use the MS provided signing key to sign their driver, meaning removing the MS root key from your system will likely lead to all your UEFI-capable hardware to suddenly stop working because the system can't verify that it hasn't been tampered with. This is a useful capability since hardware is often full of holes and I can totally see malware flashing itself onto add-in cards to make it unremovable/undetectable.
This part is only really relevant for the paranoid who want to ditch Microsoft's key - unless you have some mechanism to verify and whitelist the drivers you will be stuck with an extremely limited set of compatible hardware.
None of this fixes the chain of trust issues that affect certificates in general (eg SSL CAs being compromised).
Any proper system would have the end user hold the root key for the system and they could choose (or not) to bless certs from various vendors (or just directly sign the bootloader). Of course, MS doesn't want a proper system, they want lock-in.
Actually this kind of scheme is already an automatic fail. Remember that users routinely answered *yes* to install malicious ActiveX controls from insecure websites. Do you really think they will have any clue in your scenario? (Hint: I just want to see my video/punch the monkey/see that bikini photo, YES you dumb computer! Stop asking so many questions!)
Heck, on Android people routinely answer YES to the security dialogs when some random game or utility asks for every possible permission... that's how all those SMS malware apps and the like end up being installed by thousands of people.
Anything that relies on the user to make a security decision has failed before it leaves the drawing board. That's what makes this so damn complicated and annoying. We already have problems with chain of trust now that there are hundreds of CSAs, some of whom routinely get compromised (sometimes for years) and are used to issue bogus certificates.
RedHat/Fedora is completely correct - if you want to be secure you need to deal with the certificate chain of trust (which they are punting on by using Microsoft to handle it) and you must sign the boot loader, kernel, and all modules/drivers. That's the only way to be at least somewhat certain that no one has injected malware along the way.
I tried to start an indie label, partnering with a band that was well-liked locally and had some regional fame. We recorded at home with a TT-24 for digital I/O and monitoring and Logic 7 & Profire Lightbridge for getting it onto disk. Were able to do 24-bit 96khz and plenty of plugins. I had more multi-track channels and more processing power/virtual gear than any studio in the early 1990s. Grabbed a set of self-powered studio monitors for under $1000 (which blow away anything that was available for purchase in 1990).
We did the Tunecore digital distribution method, got into the local record shops, and generally tried to take advantage of any avenue we could.
Ultimately we lost money, here are the mistakes we made:
1. We pressed Vinyl. Granted, we got a good deal and it was a quality product (including MP3 download card using software I wrote myself) but the economics make it such that you need to sell at least a couple hundred to break even and there wasn't enough of a market for it. We sold over 100 in the first year, just from a few local shows and two local record stores. Come to find out this was more than almost everyone else - the local record store sold out (and paid us out) several times - the store manager was shocked to actually be paying money out as most of the indie albums don't sell enough to reach the threshold. Lesson: Don't press vinyl. Unless you can sell out a 5,000 seat venue in at least 10 cities you will lose money.
2. We thought CDs were on their way out so we didn't make that many of them. It turns out we should have - we sold through the CD run quickly and it was our biggest money maker, even at $5 each. This was in 2009 but still - people are more likely to buy CDs when out and about because they are small and easy to carry. Vinyl means a trip back to the car or having to lug it around town for the rest of the night.
3. Digital only works if you have access to some channel to get noticed - a friend with a very popular blog, a host of a very popular podcast who likes you, etc. There is too much music in the online catalogs - often good music. It is extremely difficult to stand out in the crowd, no matter how good you are. You should plan on about 1% conversion rate of people at the show to merch sales, so if 1000 people show up 10-20 will buy something.
4. Publicists and marketing don't work unless you can put a huge budget behind them. Thankfully we didn't spend a ton on this but others we know spent their life savings or thousands. Yes, they got local college radio interviews and blog mentions but none of it translated into increased sales of albums. It did bring a few people to shows but not enough to make up for the outlay in merch sales. This seemed to apply regardless of the genera.
5. We spent money on the launch show - it was a huge loser. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have bothered. It just takes too much money to put on a good light show so unless you have access to moving lights or projectors that you can borrow for free, or can play to a venue that already has the gear, don't bother. This leads into the next item...
6. Unless you are a well-known act, you will get screwed by the venues (who are often trying to squeak by themselves). Always charge a cover and make sure your deal is for the cover if you can (and have *your* helper work the door!). Local promotion is difficult - people are bombarded with Facebook notices, emails, etc about a ton of shows all the time so most people tune out. If possible, find out where the crowds already show up locally and make a deal to play there. It is much easier to make a new fan by going to where the people already are than trying to convince a bunch of strangers to come see an unknown band.
7. You must take credit cards. Period. Get an iPhone and Square and make sure you have signal. Make each band member get on a different network (VZW, ATT, Sprint) so you can be certain you will have coverage at the venue. Taking cards will often more than double your take vs not taking c
I'm curious if price discovery is accurate right now since NASDAQ isn't delivering execution notices for FB orders. I know eTrade was down earlier (even the public website) and Fidelity has a notice that FB trades are stuck and have been since it started trading.
All that makes me curious how many orders are stuck out there in limbo land? Will people find out tomorrow that the order they thought was cancelled got filled?
Seems like a big screw up that NASDAQ doesn't want anyone to know about. I don't think you could have mishandled an IPO any further.
I believe in science when it gives me cell phones and computer processors. When it discovers superconductivity. When it saves my life from cancer. When Hubble delivers pictures of the universe.
But climate change? No sir bob. That's just a bridge too far. You may be able to walk on the moon, splice genes to create whole new organisms, perform surgery with micro-robots over the world-wide communication network that uses LASERs to transmit over tiny glass fibers miles long - all while being told exactly where on the surface of the earth you are by a vast array of satellites in orbit, keeping time by measuring the vibrations of atoms - but frankly I just need to see more evidence for climate change.
(and for the record I'm in favor of an environmental and working conditions tax on imports from countries that do not have similar systems to the first world. If china wants to let people dump toxins and work people to death, they should have to pay an import tax to account for that).
All the major BitTorrent clients already do this, at least with the data chunks. If a certain peer fails more than a few hash checks it is permanently banned.
A lot of peers also support dynamic block lists that use known lists of media companies and groups like the one mentioned in the story. The client will periodically download the list and block any traffic from those IPs.
I couldn't find any technical detail but I assume they are injecting fake data in the initial hash exchange. With the magnet link system all you have is an initial hash and you use peer discovery to find someone in the network who knows what files (and associated hashes) that magnet link hash is associated with (the bit torrent info header from a.torrent file). As far as I know it is using SHA1, although older systems used MD5 in which case you could fake an info reply with crap data that passes the hash, tricking the client into claiming it is an invalid download. But with SHA1 it doesn't appear to be feasible to do on demand, but I wonder if they are using some sort of massive lookup table to do the same sort of poisoning attack? Seems unlikely. It also seems you could use the same logic from file chunks - send the magnet link hash to several peers and if some peers consistently give a failure block them.
Another potential weak point is peer exchange... If you pretend to be a valid peer but inject just enough of your own corrupted peers in the list (and/or just flood the list with slow responders, etc) you may be able to significantly delay the download or even stop it. For example, have your poison peers hand out correct file chunks at high speed (to get preferred) but make sure that none of them hand out certain crucial chunks or all respond extremely slowly for them. Your client could end up with a peer list mostly of the poison peers and find that it just never seems to finish the download, though it gets to 97% OK.
As much as it sucks to have a vendor pushing patches without explicit dialogs/permission, I would argue that the global damage from lack of patches far outweighs the downsides at this point.
This is one area Chrome gets right. Java (along with Firefox, Windows, et al) should automatically download and apply all security patches without prompting or notifying the user in any way unless you go in and manually disable it.
I've seen people see the Windows Update dialog and immediately click cancel. They just see it as another annoying useless dialog box and dismiss it.
Except Verizon has run fiber to a millions of existing homes. I can get 150Mbit service here and the equipment is capable of more. Each fiber serves up to 32 homes via a passive optical splitter with time-division multiplexing. There are four separate wavelengths, one for outbound data at 622Mbit total for the older B-pon and 2.4Gbit for the new G-pon stuff, one wavelength for upload (155Mbit on B, 1.2Gbit on G), another for POTS, and the last for passive cable TV. It wasn't even that expensive - IIRC about 4 billion a year.
There is absolutely no reason that any of the ILECs or cable companies couldn't do the same thing and roll out fiber to every home in the USA. We have simply chosen to let the companies milk their existing infrastructure (and thus we the people).
Any of the states could pass legislation requiring it, or just run it themselves. Or the federal government could force them to do it. For example: 100% tax on profits if at least 10% of the customers are not using 100Mbit fiber Internet connections at the end of this year, the percentage increasing by 10% every year until it reaches some reasonable number like 90%. All sales/transfers will still apply the cap (so no selling off COs to meet the target).
This is not technology or capital problem, its just a lack of will. As long as Cox/AT&T can boost the share price by diverging capex to profits they will do so.
I can already tell you how that will turn out: Microsoft won't be suing anyone.
C# and the core runtime are ECMA standards with strong patent promises, meaning Microsoft explicitly gives everyone in the world the right to implement their own C# compiler and version of the System.* libraries.
Their open-ness with regard to the CLR and C# is far and away better than Sun did with Java. They even contributed DLR code to mono itself.
Not to mention how much better the language is... With real co/contra variant generics (type erasure? GTFU), first-class functions with delegates, closures, lambda expressions, and LINQ. Plus the new async/await stuff. On and type inference just makes things easier on a day to day coding basis.
Meanwhile Java has spent the last 10 years standing still. They couldn't even get closures into the latest release and from my understanding of the docs they aren't going to do true first-class closures anyway. It's a freakin joke of a language at this point.
First, women are socialized from an early age that engineering, tinkering, technical things are not girly and to avoid them.
Second, I saw more than one woman get tired of the creepy stalkers, the sperglords, and awkward anti-social guys in the CS classes and decide to switch majors. Who knows if they would have been good developers but it can be hard to concentrate on coding when you get hit on constantly by creepazoids.
Lastly I agree with some people's comments... The discrimination isn't happening at the hiring level and in many cases isn't even overt. Women are just encouraged to go away and leave the programming to the boys and then we act surprised when they do just that.
Bill always said he'd open source windows or split that division off before he gave up the MS Office revenue.
If Microsoft were smart, they'd put Office on every platform. Most people aren't going to switch phones from Android or iOS just to get Office. But every single corporate user in the world will be issued a copy if Microsoft ports it.
Wifi only works because it is extremely short range, and even then it sucks in sufficiently crowded areas. Trying to do cell service that way would be a disaster.
If the 700mhz, 800mhz, AWS, and PCS band frequencies were held by a regulated public utility company (e.g. Oncor for electricity in Texas) and that utility simply charged cost to deliver plus a small guaranteed profit we wouldn't have a spectrum issue at all. The carriers would compete based on backhaul, services, customer service, price, etc. The infrastructure provider would simply roll out LTE nationwide (just like they are rolling out smart meters) using a small monthly charge to pay off the upgrades.
The way we handle cellular service in the US right now is terribly inefficient from a market perspective. If Sprint has a tower next to my house but I have an ATT phone, all that Sprint spectrum is wasted. Or if ATT has towers with plenty of capacity but Sprint's tower is overloaded it doesn't matter - the Sprint customers can't use that idle spectrum. This forces all the carriers to allocate much more frequency than they might otherwise need. Every major city has duplicated towers and equipment, wasting electricity and increasing the overall infrastructure cost.
Further there is no incentive to change because this creates such a high barrier to entry that new competitors can't enter the market. When you don't fear new competitors, you just pass the increased cost on to your customers.
This is clearly a situation that benefits almost no one except the carriers and only benefits them insofar as it keeps new competitors out of the market. Otherwise it is wholly inefficient and a great example of the free market creating perverse incentives.
* Of course without any regulation of spectrum it would be effectively useless because transmissions would constantly step on each other. The idea that competitors wouldn't intentionally sabotage each other through covert means is insane... and I don't mean same-industry competitors, I mean stuff like cable companies setting up towers to explicitly jam wireless internet companies to protect their existing business. Without government regulation that is exactly what would happen.
The article did not clarify if they removed the "Low Memory" and "Active Assertions Beyond Permitted Time" entries from the crash log.
When iOS has memory demands it will kill suspended background processes and this shows up in the crash logs with a low memory reason. When a background process is running (not suspended) to complete some task (like downloading/uploading data, etc) and it exceeds the allowed execution time, iOS will kill it with an assertions beyond permitted time reason.
Neither of these are actual "crashes" as you might think of them and in fact users are often completely unaware the app was killed because when you switch back to the app it just reloads its state where it left off (and well-written apps actually restore your position in the UI).
If these two items weren't excluded then the results for iOS are worthless.
The article also pointed out that iOS 5 is new and there are likely to be crashes generated due to apps not being updated yet and that Android is likely to have a similar problem as ICS actually starts rolling out (or people buy new devices when they are stuck with a non-upgradable device).
As a software developer this is a serious question for me and one that I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to.
How can I feed my family or control my own destiny if the software is all I have? Am I not dependent on the benevolence of a corporation or university to fund my project or work as a clerk or something during the day and code at night? I know Open Source companies can make money on services or hardware but I'm not an Open Source company, I'm just one guy trying to make a living. I don't have the capital to produce hardware and my software is designed for end-users who don't require much in the way of services.
If I were working on some glue code that might be useful to other developers and where I would benefit from their contributions I certainly would open source it (and I do contribute patches to some of the open source projects I use). I also get the idea of an open source OS or other large projects because so many companies depend on it there are enough "payers" in the pool to fund a lot of full-time devs - more than enough to cover the people who make millions off it (eg: Linux) yet contribute nothing back... plus with millions of users you have enough part-time tinkerers that you also get significant contributions from them.
But I just don't see why I would open source my apps. No company in the world can pay my salary based on them, yet there are thousands of users willing to pay $0.99 for them, enough that I can keep my hardware up to date and have a little bit left over to go out to eat every month (certainly not enough to quit my job). But there aren't enough users that there would be a lot of programmers willing to contribute.
If I open-sourced them, I'd be in the same position as Google with Android - funding the majority of it but having Chinese search companies replacing all my services with their own and selling it while simultaneously cutting off part of the revenue stream I use to fund further development.
I like open source, I use it, I contribute to it, but I have absolutely no desire to follow the Stallman "everything must be open source!" philosophy. I'm interested to hear other dev's thoughts on this stuff...
This doesn't give root, it just allows you to run a command within the context of the installed app.
How many times do we need to revisit the MS Word VBScript virus problem before we learn from it?
Here are some obligatory automatic security fails (on any platform) that guarantee your wonderfully architected system will be oft and immediately bypassed:
1. Asking the user to decide. Users don't read dialog boxes and just click/tap to make them go away. They will often happily answer YES to the "Install unsigned ActiveX control" dialog so they can see the dancing monkey or play some game. How often do you think they will pay attention to what rights an app wants and make a reasoned decision about whether that is a good idea or not? (Hint: almost never)
2. Asking the developers to oh-so-politely make sure they use best-practices and don't have any exploits or holes. They can and will not only willfully ignore your security best-practices but in fact will go out of their way to hijack the system because *their* app is special and like totally has a really good reason for it man! (See apps that hijack the right-click menu/sys tray/startup group/install 15 services/drivers that all auto-start/etc on Windows and the awful state of many drivers).
3. Assuming that an app should be able to do what the user can do - Granted this is not a problem with a sandbox system but still... Apps can't be trusted. Even when there is no ill intent there can still be unintended exploits (or just bad designs like running in the background constantly draining the battery when not necessary - part of the reason iOS still doesn't let apps run continuously unless they have an explicit reason like audio playback).
4. Assuming the user has the time or a f**k to give. In most cases the computer, phone, etc is just an appliance and they don't know or care about automatic updates, patches, security, etc. They just want the damn thing to work and stop annoying them. After all... most dangerous things have warnings and/or safety features and don't require you to check the manufacturer's website on a daily/weekly basis to see what new way to kill yourself has popped up. It can be impossible to keep up with even for technically-minded people who happen to have busy lives.
I'm surprised that it didn't have some sort of dead-reckoning or inertial system as a backup in such cases. If the dead-reckoning says "whoa, it is physically impossible for you to be anywhere NEAR where you think you are so ignore the GPS, go on inertial"...
You forget that these things are designed by bloated defense contractors. These are the same people that were caught transmitting unencrypted video signals from spy drones that enemies were recording OTA.
It wouldn't shock me in the slightest if it really was that easy to hijack the drone. It also wouldn't shock me that they didn't build-in any destruct safe-guard that erases all software, blow all fuses, and use the battery to burn the internals. In fact wrapping an Li-ion polymer pack around the control board then purposely putting the battery into overload to make it catch fire seems a reasonable way to handle it. Have it listen for a short encrypted destruct packet over shortwave that is encrypted with a one-time pad so they can blast the destruct signal at high power and have it bounce all over the world. I'm quite sure you could make it incredibly difficult to block that simple short destruct signal.
Of course you must remember that it would be highly beneficial for Iran to claim they brought it down on purpose. Why you would tell your enemy how you did it publicly is beyond me.
When will the IE6-only sites get updated to fix their broken implementations?
If Microsoft doesn't force people to update then the answer is never because there is no reason to update it. These are the same type of excuses people made for not getting rid of ISA, the floppy disk, and Flash.
If someone doesn't take the lead and force people to move forward then inertia will guarantee you are stuck with old crappy technology forever.
Saying the original company or design is lost/gone is a horrible answer... what happens when the office holding that old PC w/an ISA control board gets robbed/catches fire/gets struck by lightning?
Please drag the world into the HTML-5 future (kicking and screaming if you must). Don't let the web turn into dead legacy technology that can't be updated.
So, use MVC and DRY. But one day you will find a situation where they get in the way of the most elegant solution. Or, more likely, they will get in the way of hacking a new feature into some legacy POS in time to meet the deadline that Marketing already promised to the client!:D
Wait, you mean marketing didn't tell the customer the feature was already supported in the shipping version?!?
So Motorola, which came up with part of the GRPS standard, gets to use its patents to shut down a competitor? How is that not a massive anti-trust violation?
I was under the impression that they were required to license all the standards-related patents under RAND terms.
Maybe I'm not up to date but last I checked Sprint does in fact blacklist the ESNs of stolen phones.
I know that the only safe way to buy a used Sprint phone is to have the seller meet you at the Sprint store and lookup the ESN to make sure it isn't blacklisted.
Verizon uses CDMA so they have the same situation (no sim card, just built-in ESN) so I don't know why they wouldn't offer the same service.
IIRC, the CDMA carriers get batches of valid ESNs from their vendors... they won't allow any unknown ESN onto their network so hacking the phone to show a different ESN is less than straightforward... you can't just make up any random number.
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I still have a choice, to buy or not buy Auto Insurance. If I don't drive a car, I don't need auto insurance. With Health Care, they want to force you to buy it ,regardless if you want it! Our freedom of choice is being diminished!
No they don't. Roberts called this out in his opinion explicitly... you can fully lawfully refuse to buy insurance. You simply pay slight more in taxes (or even pay nothing extra if you are too poor). You cannot go to jail, you cannot be put on trial, your property cannot be liened, your wages cannot be garnished. The only remedy for collecting the tax is taking it out of next year's refund.
Or you can have health insurance and pay less taxes.
What's the difference between calling it a tax credit or a mandate? The reality is exactly the same so functionally there is no difference.
Your argument is like saying Congress has mandated you to buy energy efficient windows or to buy a house because people who do those things pay less taxes (even though those things cost more than what you save in taxes, resulting in a net out of pocket). It is literally the *exact same* situation as the ACA "mandate".
I think all this nonsense is just a symptom of the modern disease you see with "social justice" activists on tumblr, excessive political correctness, or the blow hards on AM talk radio... Anything I don't like must be morally wrong / illegal and I will cry, complain, and moan about how my rights are being trampled, my freedom is being curtailed, ad nauseum simply because someone dared to disagree with me or I'm not getting my own way... I am totally a beautiful and unique little snowflake and how dare you! Why I never!
It's the worst kind of fake outrage / being offended. People savor it like a fine wine, storing it up and trotting it out when they want to feel smugly superior to all those "other people" who are clearly beneath them.
Rush Limbaugh and the "how dare you trigger me with your hetero-normative patriarchal comments!" people are the same disease... faux outrage over manufactured slights to serve their own selfish ends and pump up their own egos.
If you don't do what the government wants, you will find a new "tax" will appear to make you do it.
The court explicitly called this out - there is a line after which a "tax" becomes oppressive/coercive and would exceed Congress' authority. That said, they evaluated the "mandate" and found that it did not exceed this line because it is limited to a maximum (whatever insurance would cost you) and cannot be enforced with jail time or liens, and in fact is simply deducted from next year's refund.
The Federal Government stated, and the court accepted, that someone who absolutely refuses to buy insurance can pay the tax and wholly satisfy the law... as Roberts said,
"Those subject to the individual mandate may lawfully forgo health insurance and pay higher taxes, or buy health insurance and pay lower taxes. The only thing they may not lawfully do is notbuy health insurance and not pay the resulting tax."
Basically this is no different than installing energy efficient windows. Only people who own homes and buy energy efficient windows get the tax break, everyone has has to pay higher taxes. Congress is offering the carrot/stick approach to get people to install more efficient windows and that is perfectly within their power.
I've never seen anyone substantiate this claim except in the case of a multi-story building designed without elevators where a remodel requires one to be installed. Those are a vanishingly small number of cases these days since all multi-story facilities come with elevators now (and the price of simple hydraulic elevators has dropped).
No one is making you retrofit anything if you are just using an existing building as-is. You only have to comply with the ADA if you are remodeling and then you can bypass restrictions if the facility is physically unable to accommodate or if it would be a financial hardship. How much does it really cost to combine two toilet stalls into one wheelchair accessible stall? A bag of quick-crete, a compass & string, and a couple hours of your time and you can pour your own wheelchair ramp for less than a hundred bucks and be 100% compliant with the latest code.
The vast majority of complaining about ADA compliance is just penny-pinchers or people who don't like doing extra design work, even if it doesn't add much to the cost or timeline... Same reason railroads didn't adopt the safer air brakes or coupling knuckles even though both saved them money (and many brake and car men their fingers/lives!) in the long run and resulted in far fewer derailments. Congress literally had to force them to adopt technologies that saved lives, paid for themselves, and ultimately saved a lot of money.
ADA won't save money so please, do tell, how exactly a combat vet with his legs blown off has any chance of enjoying a semi-normal life without things like the ADA? Don't those businesses owe him something, for protecting the society that allows them to even have a business in the first place? Or did the safety and security of the United States spring wholly from their own bootstraps in some sort of Randian fantasy land?
1. Most theaters have or are going all digital. With a digital projector, there is no reason it shouldn't support 48fps with a simple firmware update... In fact many already support alternate framerates so the theater can rent the rooms for presentations, live TV events, etc, none of which are 24fps. This nonsense about cost is just to allow the theaters to charge more for tickets.
2. Much like Retina/HiDPI needs to be experienced for a period of time before you can appreciate the difference, I suspect that once you get used to the improved quality of 48fps it will be annoying to drop back to 24fps. I used to think the iPad 3 screen wasn't a big deal for the first day or two I used it. Then I tried to go back to the iPad 2... I couldn't do it. The "screen door" effect was too glaring.
3. There is absolutely no technical question as 48fps is smoother and better. Film has long, slow pans *because* directors are used to working within the limitations of film... Not because it is necessarily better. Like any new technology, there will be people who abuse it. There will also be people who stick with the older styles or blend new and old.
Remember: 24fps was chosen as a reasonable minimum that would fool the eye (not look like constant flickering) but be as slow as possible to make the equipment cheaper to produce and especially to compensate for the insensitivity of early film stock which needed as long of an exposure as possible to register the action without excessively bright lights... In the earliest days sets were unbearably hot due to the massive amounts of light needed. Color film set this effort back for a while until the film got better, just as sound set portability back as cameras were loud so you needed barriers and had to find ways to hide microphones on set.
Microsoft is survived it's current Mutton Head simply because it has giant trucks full of money.
That may be partially true but I think it has more to do with Bill's philosophy of hiring A-level people (who hire other A people, whereas B people hire C, D, etc). He also pushed hard for an own-it management style - if you were in charge of some area then he let you get on with it. Management interference was kept to a minimum.
It takes a long time to strangle the culture out of an organization and that seems to be slowly taking place at Microsoft.
It remains to be seen if Apple can continue in the long term but it has one thing most others in that situation don't - the original visionary came back and rescued the company, followed by success after success. That visionary also faced his own failures and matured as a person and manager (compare Steve Jobs terror stories pre-departure and his management style after returning).
One key per signature -- as in, I can't sign a bootloader with both MS's key and Red Hat's key. I can have both keys and sign one bootloader with one and the other bootloader with the other. They can -- and some vendors are willing to -- allow both MS and Red Hat's keys. The real problem that the one-key-per-signature (or one-signature-per-binary if you prefer) situation is that you can't use secure boot without trusting the MS key, since all of the included components are signed with it.
Not quite... part of the UEFI spec says that hardware should carry the UEFI driver on-board and be able to spit it out for the firmware to use prior to OS boot. (The UEFI environment is basically just a stripped-down OS of its own). This gets around having the BIOS require foreknowledge of your peripheral/standard... it knows what a disk controller is, so your add-in card can just provide a disk controller UEFI driver that understands the card's command set, etc.
Unfortunately that spec says the drivers only have a slot for one signature so by default almost every hardware manufacturer is going to use the MS provided signing key to sign their driver, meaning removing the MS root key from your system will likely lead to all your UEFI-capable hardware to suddenly stop working because the system can't verify that it hasn't been tampered with. This is a useful capability since hardware is often full of holes and I can totally see malware flashing itself onto add-in cards to make it unremovable/undetectable.
This part is only really relevant for the paranoid who want to ditch Microsoft's key - unless you have some mechanism to verify and whitelist the drivers you will be stuck with an extremely limited set of compatible hardware.
None of this fixes the chain of trust issues that affect certificates in general (eg SSL CAs being compromised).
Any proper system would have the end user hold the root key for the system and they could choose (or not) to bless certs from various vendors (or just directly sign the bootloader). Of course, MS doesn't want a proper system, they want lock-in.
Actually this kind of scheme is already an automatic fail. Remember that users routinely answered *yes* to install malicious ActiveX controls from insecure websites. Do you really think they will have any clue in your scenario? (Hint: I just want to see my video/punch the monkey/see that bikini photo, YES you dumb computer! Stop asking so many questions!)
Heck, on Android people routinely answer YES to the security dialogs when some random game or utility asks for every possible permission... that's how all those SMS malware apps and the like end up being installed by thousands of people.
Anything that relies on the user to make a security decision has failed before it leaves the drawing board. That's what makes this so damn complicated and annoying. We already have problems with chain of trust now that there are hundreds of CSAs, some of whom routinely get compromised (sometimes for years) and are used to issue bogus certificates.
RedHat/Fedora is completely correct - if you want to be secure you need to deal with the certificate chain of trust (which they are punting on by using Microsoft to handle it) and you must sign the boot loader, kernel, and all modules/drivers. That's the only way to be at least somewhat certain that no one has injected malware along the way.
I tried to start an indie label, partnering with a band that was well-liked locally and had some regional fame. We recorded at home with a TT-24 for digital I/O and monitoring and Logic 7 & Profire Lightbridge for getting it onto disk. Were able to do 24-bit 96khz and plenty of plugins. I had more multi-track channels and more processing power/virtual gear than any studio in the early 1990s. Grabbed a set of self-powered studio monitors for under $1000 (which blow away anything that was available for purchase in 1990).
We did the Tunecore digital distribution method, got into the local record shops, and generally tried to take advantage of any avenue we could.
Ultimately we lost money, here are the mistakes we made:
1. We pressed Vinyl. Granted, we got a good deal and it was a quality product (including MP3 download card using software I wrote myself) but the economics make it such that you need to sell at least a couple hundred to break even and there wasn't enough of a market for it. We sold over 100 in the first year, just from a few local shows and two local record stores. Come to find out this was more than almost everyone else - the local record store sold out (and paid us out) several times - the store manager was shocked to actually be paying money out as most of the indie albums don't sell enough to reach the threshold. Lesson: Don't press vinyl. Unless you can sell out a 5,000 seat venue in at least 10 cities you will lose money.
2. We thought CDs were on their way out so we didn't make that many of them. It turns out we should have - we sold through the CD run quickly and it was our biggest money maker, even at $5 each. This was in 2009 but still - people are more likely to buy CDs when out and about because they are small and easy to carry. Vinyl means a trip back to the car or having to lug it around town for the rest of the night.
3. Digital only works if you have access to some channel to get noticed - a friend with a very popular blog, a host of a very popular podcast who likes you, etc. There is too much music in the online catalogs - often good music. It is extremely difficult to stand out in the crowd, no matter how good you are. You should plan on about 1% conversion rate of people at the show to merch sales, so if 1000 people show up 10-20 will buy something.
4. Publicists and marketing don't work unless you can put a huge budget behind them. Thankfully we didn't spend a ton on this but others we know spent their life savings or thousands. Yes, they got local college radio interviews and blog mentions but none of it translated into increased sales of albums. It did bring a few people to shows but not enough to make up for the outlay in merch sales. This seemed to apply regardless of the genera.
5. We spent money on the launch show - it was a huge loser. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have bothered. It just takes too much money to put on a good light show so unless you have access to moving lights or projectors that you can borrow for free, or can play to a venue that already has the gear, don't bother. This leads into the next item...
6. Unless you are a well-known act, you will get screwed by the venues (who are often trying to squeak by themselves). Always charge a cover and make sure your deal is for the cover if you can (and have *your* helper work the door!). Local promotion is difficult - people are bombarded with Facebook notices, emails, etc about a ton of shows all the time so most people tune out. If possible, find out where the crowds already show up locally and make a deal to play there. It is much easier to make a new fan by going to where the people already are than trying to convince a bunch of strangers to come see an unknown band.
7. You must take credit cards. Period. Get an iPhone and Square and make sure you have signal. Make each band member get on a different network (VZW, ATT, Sprint) so you can be certain you will have coverage at the venue. Taking cards will often more than double your take vs not taking c
I'm curious if price discovery is accurate right now since NASDAQ isn't delivering execution notices for FB orders. I know eTrade was down earlier (even the public website) and Fidelity has a notice that FB trades are stuck and have been since it started trading.
All that makes me curious how many orders are stuck out there in limbo land? Will people find out tomorrow that the order they thought was cancelled got filled?
Seems like a big screw up that NASDAQ doesn't want anyone to know about. I don't think you could have mishandled an IPO any further.
I believe in science when it gives me cell phones and computer processors. When it discovers superconductivity. When it saves my life from cancer. When Hubble delivers pictures of the universe.
But climate change? No sir bob. That's just a bridge too far. You may be able to walk on the moon, splice genes to create whole new organisms, perform surgery with micro-robots over the world-wide communication network that uses LASERs to transmit over tiny glass fibers miles long - all while being told exactly where on the surface of the earth you are by a vast array of satellites in orbit, keeping time by measuring the vibrations of atoms - but frankly I just need to see more evidence for climate change.
(and for the record I'm in favor of an environmental and working conditions tax on imports from countries that do not have similar systems to the first world. If china wants to let people dump toxins and work people to death, they should have to pay an import tax to account for that).
All the major BitTorrent clients already do this, at least with the data chunks. If a certain peer fails more than a few hash checks it is permanently banned.
A lot of peers also support dynamic block lists that use known lists of media companies and groups like the one mentioned in the story. The client will periodically download the list and block any traffic from those IPs.
I couldn't find any technical detail but I assume they are injecting fake data in the initial hash exchange. With the magnet link system all you have is an initial hash and you use peer discovery to find someone in the network who knows what files (and associated hashes) that magnet link hash is associated with (the bit torrent info header from a .torrent file). As far as I know it is using SHA1, although older systems used MD5 in which case you could fake an info reply with crap data that passes the hash, tricking the client into claiming it is an invalid download. But with SHA1 it doesn't appear to be feasible to do on demand, but I wonder if they are using some sort of massive lookup table to do the same sort of poisoning attack? Seems unlikely. It also seems you could use the same logic from file chunks - send the magnet link hash to several peers and if some peers consistently give a failure block them.
Another potential weak point is peer exchange... If you pretend to be a valid peer but inject just enough of your own corrupted peers in the list (and/or just flood the list with slow responders, etc) you may be able to significantly delay the download or even stop it. For example, have your poison peers hand out correct file chunks at high speed (to get preferred) but make sure that none of them hand out certain crucial chunks or all respond extremely slowly for them. Your client could end up with a peer list mostly of the poison peers and find that it just never seems to finish the download, though it gets to 97% OK.
As much as it sucks to have a vendor pushing patches without explicit dialogs/permission, I would argue that the global damage from lack of patches far outweighs the downsides at this point.
This is one area Chrome gets right. Java (along with Firefox, Windows, et al) should automatically download and apply all security patches without prompting or notifying the user in any way unless you go in and manually disable it.
I've seen people see the Windows Update dialog and immediately click cancel. They just see it as another annoying useless dialog box and dismiss it.
Except Verizon has run fiber to a millions of existing homes. I can get 150Mbit service here and the equipment is capable of more. Each fiber serves up to 32 homes via a passive optical splitter with time-division multiplexing. There are four separate wavelengths, one for outbound data at 622Mbit total for the older B-pon and 2.4Gbit for the new G-pon stuff, one wavelength for upload (155Mbit on B, 1.2Gbit on G), another for POTS, and the last for passive cable TV. It wasn't even that expensive - IIRC about 4 billion a year.
There is absolutely no reason that any of the ILECs or cable companies couldn't do the same thing and roll out fiber to every home in the USA. We have simply chosen to let the companies milk their existing infrastructure (and thus we the people).
Any of the states could pass legislation requiring it, or just run it themselves. Or the federal government could force them to do it. For example: 100% tax on profits if at least 10% of the customers are not using 100Mbit fiber Internet connections at the end of this year, the percentage increasing by 10% every year until it reaches some reasonable number like 90%. All sales/transfers will still apply the cap (so no selling off COs to meet the target).
This is not technology or capital problem, its just a lack of will. As long as Cox/AT&T can boost the share price by diverging capex to profits they will do so.
I can already tell you how that will turn out: Microsoft won't be suing anyone.
C# and the core runtime are ECMA standards with strong patent promises, meaning Microsoft explicitly gives everyone in the world the right to implement their own C# compiler and version of the System.* libraries.
Their open-ness with regard to the CLR and C# is far and away better than Sun did with Java. They even contributed DLR code to mono itself.
Not to mention how much better the language is... With real co/contra variant generics (type erasure? GTFU), first-class functions with delegates, closures, lambda expressions, and LINQ. Plus the new async/await stuff. On and type inference just makes things easier on a day to day coding basis.
Meanwhile Java has spent the last 10 years standing still. They couldn't even get closures into the latest release and from my understanding of the docs they aren't going to do true first-class closures anyway. It's a freakin joke of a language at this point.
First, women are socialized from an early age that engineering, tinkering, technical things are not girly and to avoid them.
Second, I saw more than one woman get tired of the creepy stalkers, the sperglords, and awkward anti-social guys in the CS classes and decide to switch majors. Who knows if they would have been good developers but it can be hard to concentrate on coding when you get hit on constantly by creepazoids.
Lastly I agree with some people's comments... The discrimination isn't happening at the hiring level and in many cases isn't even overt. Women are just encouraged to go away and leave the programming to the boys and then we act surprised when they do just that.
Bill always said he'd open source windows or split that division off before he gave up the MS Office revenue.
If Microsoft were smart, they'd put Office on every platform. Most people aren't going to switch phones from Android or iOS just to get Office. But every single corporate user in the world will be issued a copy if Microsoft ports it.
Wifi only works because it is extremely short range, and even then it sucks in sufficiently crowded areas. Trying to do cell service that way would be a disaster.
If the 700mhz, 800mhz, AWS, and PCS band frequencies were held by a regulated public utility company (e.g. Oncor for electricity in Texas) and that utility simply charged cost to deliver plus a small guaranteed profit we wouldn't have a spectrum issue at all. The carriers would compete based on backhaul, services, customer service, price, etc. The infrastructure provider would simply roll out LTE nationwide (just like they are rolling out smart meters) using a small monthly charge to pay off the upgrades.
The way we handle cellular service in the US right now is terribly inefficient from a market perspective. If Sprint has a tower next to my house but I have an ATT phone, all that Sprint spectrum is wasted. Or if ATT has towers with plenty of capacity but Sprint's tower is overloaded it doesn't matter - the Sprint customers can't use that idle spectrum. This forces all the carriers to allocate much more frequency than they might otherwise need. Every major city has duplicated towers and equipment, wasting electricity and increasing the overall infrastructure cost.
Further there is no incentive to change because this creates such a high barrier to entry that new competitors can't enter the market. When you don't fear new competitors, you just pass the increased cost on to your customers.
This is clearly a situation that benefits almost no one except the carriers and only benefits them insofar as it keeps new competitors out of the market. Otherwise it is wholly inefficient and a great example of the free market creating perverse incentives.
* Of course without any regulation of spectrum it would be effectively useless because transmissions would constantly step on each other. The idea that competitors wouldn't intentionally sabotage each other through covert means is insane... and I don't mean same-industry competitors, I mean stuff like cable companies setting up towers to explicitly jam wireless internet companies to protect their existing business. Without government regulation that is exactly what would happen.
The article did not clarify if they removed the "Low Memory" and "Active Assertions Beyond Permitted Time" entries from the crash log.
When iOS has memory demands it will kill suspended background processes and this shows up in the crash logs with a low memory reason. When a background process is running (not suspended) to complete some task (like downloading/uploading data, etc) and it exceeds the allowed execution time, iOS will kill it with an assertions beyond permitted time reason.
Neither of these are actual "crashes" as you might think of them and in fact users are often completely unaware the app was killed because when you switch back to the app it just reloads its state where it left off (and well-written apps actually restore your position in the UI).
If these two items weren't excluded then the results for iOS are worthless.
The article also pointed out that iOS 5 is new and there are likely to be crashes generated due to apps not being updated yet and that Android is likely to have a similar problem as ICS actually starts rolling out (or people buy new devices when they are stuck with a non-upgradable device).
As a software developer this is a serious question for me and one that I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to.
How can I feed my family or control my own destiny if the software is all I have? Am I not dependent on the benevolence of a corporation or university to fund my project or work as a clerk or something during the day and code at night? I know Open Source companies can make money on services or hardware but I'm not an Open Source company, I'm just one guy trying to make a living. I don't have the capital to produce hardware and my software is designed for end-users who don't require much in the way of services.
If I were working on some glue code that might be useful to other developers and where I would benefit from their contributions I certainly would open source it (and I do contribute patches to some of the open source projects I use). I also get the idea of an open source OS or other large projects because so many companies depend on it there are enough "payers" in the pool to fund a lot of full-time devs - more than enough to cover the people who make millions off it (eg: Linux) yet contribute nothing back... plus with millions of users you have enough part-time tinkerers that you also get significant contributions from them.
But I just don't see why I would open source my apps. No company in the world can pay my salary based on them, yet there are thousands of users willing to pay $0.99 for them, enough that I can keep my hardware up to date and have a little bit left over to go out to eat every month (certainly not enough to quit my job). But there aren't enough users that there would be a lot of programmers willing to contribute.
If I open-sourced them, I'd be in the same position as Google with Android - funding the majority of it but having Chinese search companies replacing all my services with their own and selling it while simultaneously cutting off part of the revenue stream I use to fund further development.
I like open source, I use it, I contribute to it, but I have absolutely no desire to follow the Stallman "everything must be open source!" philosophy. I'm interested to hear other dev's thoughts on this stuff...
This doesn't give root, it just allows you to run a command within the context of the installed app.
How many times do we need to revisit the MS Word VBScript virus problem before we learn from it?
Here are some obligatory automatic security fails (on any platform) that guarantee your wonderfully architected system will be oft and immediately bypassed:
1. Asking the user to decide. Users don't read dialog boxes and just click/tap to make them go away. They will often happily answer YES to the "Install unsigned ActiveX control" dialog so they can see the dancing monkey or play some game. How often do you think they will pay attention to what rights an app wants and make a reasoned decision about whether that is a good idea or not? (Hint: almost never)
2. Asking the developers to oh-so-politely make sure they use best-practices and don't have any exploits or holes. They can and will not only willfully ignore your security best-practices but in fact will go out of their way to hijack the system because *their* app is special and like totally has a really good reason for it man! (See apps that hijack the right-click menu/sys tray/startup group/install 15 services/drivers that all auto-start/etc on Windows and the awful state of many drivers).
3. Assuming that an app should be able to do what the user can do - Granted this is not a problem with a sandbox system but still... Apps can't be trusted. Even when there is no ill intent there can still be unintended exploits (or just bad designs like running in the background constantly draining the battery when not necessary - part of the reason iOS still doesn't let apps run continuously unless they have an explicit reason like audio playback).
4. Assuming the user has the time or a f**k to give. In most cases the computer, phone, etc is just an appliance and they don't know or care about automatic updates, patches, security, etc. They just want the damn thing to work and stop annoying them. After all... most dangerous things have warnings and/or safety features and don't require you to check the manufacturer's website on a daily/weekly basis to see what new way to kill yourself has popped up. It can be impossible to keep up with even for technically-minded people who happen to have busy lives.
I'm surprised that it didn't have some sort of dead-reckoning or inertial system as a backup in such cases. If the dead-reckoning says "whoa, it is physically impossible for you to be anywhere NEAR where you think you are so ignore the GPS, go on inertial" ...
You forget that these things are designed by bloated defense contractors. These are the same people that were caught transmitting unencrypted video signals from spy drones that enemies were recording OTA.
It wouldn't shock me in the slightest if it really was that easy to hijack the drone. It also wouldn't shock me that they didn't build-in any destruct safe-guard that erases all software, blow all fuses, and use the battery to burn the internals. In fact wrapping an Li-ion polymer pack around the control board then purposely putting the battery into overload to make it catch fire seems a reasonable way to handle it. Have it listen for a short encrypted destruct packet over shortwave that is encrypted with a one-time pad so they can blast the destruct signal at high power and have it bounce all over the world. I'm quite sure you could make it incredibly difficult to block that simple short destruct signal.
Of course you must remember that it would be highly beneficial for Iran to claim they brought it down on purpose. Why you would tell your enemy how you did it publicly is beyond me.
When will the IE6-only sites get updated to fix their broken implementations?
If Microsoft doesn't force people to update then the answer is never because there is no reason to update it. These are the same type of excuses people made for not getting rid of ISA, the floppy disk, and Flash.
If someone doesn't take the lead and force people to move forward then inertia will guarantee you are stuck with old crappy technology forever.
Saying the original company or design is lost/gone is a horrible answer... what happens when the office holding that old PC w/an ISA control board gets robbed/catches fire/gets struck by lightning?
Please drag the world into the HTML-5 future (kicking and screaming if you must). Don't let the web turn into dead legacy technology that can't be updated.
So, use MVC and DRY. But one day you will find a situation where they get in the way of the most elegant solution. Or, more likely, they will get in the way of hacking a new feature into some legacy POS in time to meet the deadline that Marketing already promised to the client! :D
Wait, you mean marketing didn't tell the customer the feature was already supported in the shipping version?!?
So Motorola, which came up with part of the GRPS standard, gets to use its patents to shut down a competitor? How is that not a massive anti-trust violation?
I was under the impression that they were required to license all the standards-related patents under RAND terms.
Maybe I'm not up to date but last I checked Sprint does in fact blacklist the ESNs of stolen phones.
I know that the only safe way to buy a used Sprint phone is to have the seller meet you at the Sprint store and lookup the ESN to make sure it isn't blacklisted.
Verizon uses CDMA so they have the same situation (no sim card, just built-in ESN) so I don't know why they wouldn't offer the same service.
IIRC, the CDMA carriers get batches of valid ESNs from their vendors... they won't allow any unknown ESN onto their network so hacking the phone to show a different ESN is less than straightforward... you can't just make up any random number.