While data centers get toasty, they don't get hot enough to generate steam. Your computer will melt before that happens.
Read up on "Carnot Efficiency" to discover why obtaining useful work (other than heat) from air only say, 20F or so above-ambient is not very practical.
I hope that it was an under-educated writer talking about harvesting waste human-body heat, and not the NSF or the inventor.
Harvesting waste heat from a 98-degree human operating in even a 30 degree environment is only 13% efficient, at maximum. I just don't see it being real useful to try and harvest waste heat from an ICE or turbine. If a power-plant turbine had useful exhaust steam, they would already be using it to turn another turbine I expect.
The fact it has no moving parts is nice, but how high could the efficiency possibly go?
Most energy loss in an ICE is from Air Compression and valvetrain loss?
I would think that most of it would be because combustion is a woefully inefficient way of raising air pressure. Air compression should not be causing too much loss because that energy can be largely recovered on the power stroke. (except for ring blow-by (minimal) and compression-related-heat soaking into the cyl. wall) Valvetrain loss should only be due to cam friction (which is reduced by oil), as the energy required to compress the valve springs should be mostly returned when the valves are released.
This idea has so many different problems, it is not even vaguely amusing.
1) They are going to "use heat from equipment to manage temperature on board the ships"? Huh? Unless these things are parked in the Arctic, "temperature management" in a data center always involves getting rid of the heat, not using it. The heat is a problem, not a solution. 2) It's a ship. In a storm, it moves. That's bad. 3) Ooh... ventilating a ship with air saturated with salt spray! Why didn't I think of that? Even if they mostly recirculated air, their chillers are going to get corroded to junk pretty quickly. 4) What exactly is a "major internet market" if you are referring to a geographical location? As long as you can get a fiber drop, you can get all the bandwidth you need. Google is building all sorts of data centers in the middle of nowhere, where Real Estate is practically free.
SirWired
If I did something like that, I would be fired
on
Negroponte vs Intel
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
At the company I work for, the Code of Conduct we are required to review every year has an explicit prohibition against this sort of thing. The section is actually entitled "Selling Against a Signed Order". The code isn't that long, so the fact that there is a special section for this one situation shows how important it is.
If I were to try and sell against a signed order, I would be fired. Immediately. With no chance of appeal.
Encouraging a customer to break a signed contract could get both the customer and my company sued by the competitor for contract interference, and rightly so.
I'm a little confused why you think that an international border is not different from an internal one... They are fundamentally different entities. There are of course the obvious legal distinctions: namely the Feds have exclusive jurisdiction over the national border. Not so state and local ones.
The first thing that comes to mind is that the U.S. government has no direct control over what happens outside of the border. Without inspections, there is simply no reasonable way to ensure that illegal persons and/or goods do not enter the country. There is no visibility as to where those people or goods came from. Within the country, there is the law enforcement apparatus of the U.S. tasked to capture criminals, prevent the manufacture of contraband, etc. Since the U.S. cannot stop the manufacture of contraband abroad, how exactly do you propose that it be prevented from entering the country? One shipping container looks just like another. Without ID checks, how do you ensure that those crossing the border are not known enemies? Inside the U.S., the IRS can obtain probable cause for tax problems if your return doesn't match the W-2 your employer sent in. How is Customs supposed to verify you are paying proper duty on your goods without examining them? If probable cause were required, where would it come from? Again, one shipping container looks just like another.
The control of the national border is a legitimate government interest, and searches and ID checks are a reasonable way of exercising it.
I also don't get where you get the idea that the 4th amendment is ignored at the border. You do have those protections, they just are not nearly as strong. Your possessions cannot be permanently seized "just because", you are not subject to a body-cavity search as part of a random check. You are protected against "unreasonable" search and seizure, but reasonableness is held to a different standard to fit the circumstances.
At the border of the country, searches that would be unreasonable in downtown Chicago become reasonable. The random (and not so random) inspections that are carried out are pretty much the only way (short of extensive operations on foreign soil) that Customs and Immigration laws could possibly be enforced.
Part of the reasonableness standard is determining if the same legitimate ends (securing the border of the country) can be achieved through less intrusive means. What is your less-intrusive alternative to the inspection of people, possessions, and goods at the border?
Based on that logic, the 4th amendment would prevent the US government from doing anything about an invading army once the invading army was completely across the border into the US.
Once an invading army is through Customs, how would you stop them? Up until the point the guns come out, what is your less-invasive alternative to stopping them at the border through simple ID and cargo checks? The 4th amendment affords them full protection once they are through the border. They can drive throughout the country at will, as long as those weapons stay out of plain sight.
The question posed is: Does the security of air travel, as currently implemented, constitute "reasonable" search under the 4th amendment? The question is NOT: "Is air security effective in reducing terrorism?"
Attempting to protect citizens during a particularly vulnerable time (there is no escape from a violent incident several miles above the ground) is considered by the courts to be a legitimate government interest. Moreover, the searches, as currently implemented, are considered to be a "reasonable" expression of that interest. That's it when it comes to legality.
Are searches done in a useful manner? Are they a waste of resources that would be better spent elsewhere? Is there any point? All those are policy questions, which is beyond the scope of the legality of the measures. An "unreasonable" waste of resources does not make the searches "unreasonable" exercises of government power.
SirWired
While irrelevant to the question of the legality of airline security, it is really impossible to determine the effectiveness of the measures because deterrent effect cannot be measured without controlled experiments which are unlikely to be carried out.
I will be the first to admit that aviation security in the U.S. is a poorly done pile of crap. It is makes swiss cheese look as solid as a brick of lead.
However, the legality of a bag search is not affected by how neat or nice they are about it, or if it is done in your presence. (The lack of witnesses might affect the admissibility of any criminal evidence found, but that is another matter.) The legality of a bag search is not affected by the fact that there are oodles of other ways to do very bad things to an aircraft.
Also, the only clothing one is required to remove in public in a TSA line is your coat and shoes. (This was not always the case, but a few nasty incidents changed that quickly.) You are allowed to request that a search of your bags or your person be done in private.
My point is that a search of your bags prior to them being loaded onto an aircraft is a reasonable exercise of government power, and therefore legal.
It appears the search at Customs in the original article was a random search, and it appears to have worked. (Certainly they do not inspect the contents of every laptop entering the country.)
SirWired
By the way, the Lockerbie bombing was caused by checked luggage. All international luggage from the U.S. was either scanned/searched or subject to passenger-matching shortly afterwards. (meaning, if you didn't get on the plane, your luggage had to be pulled) This practice was merely extended to Domestic luggage after 9/11. As another related side note, there is actually no requirement to search or X-Ray all luggage. However, since the only legal alternative for the airlines is to passenger-match every single bag, which would delay the aircraft terribly in the event of a passenger missing their flight. This was done after 9/11 prior to the whole TSA apparatus being in place, but no airline would choose it.
Here's the problem. Any argument for controlling international borders also applies to state and local borders. If you can keep someone or something out of a country then you can also keep it out of a state, city or neighborhood.
Why does any argument that applies to national borders also apply to state and local borders? I see no reason for this to be the case.
Along with the clowns who opposed slavery and thought women should have equal rights.
Heh. You got me there. However, I should point out that there is no nation currently on earth that does not exercise some measure of control over its borders. (I must admit, I don't know about the Vatican... they may leave that up to Italy.) Even at the time of the Constitution, there were nations that realized slavery was a bad idea, and that women should have equal rights.
***
I expect that a government that did not reserve the right to control its borders would not be around very long. If a government does not reserve the right to stop or search those entering its borders, then they would have no authority to stop an incoming army.
Yes, many borders are porous (The U.S. Canada border being a famous example), but that does not diminish the right to enforce it at will.
Your luggage is subject to search on domestic flights for good and sufficient reasons. The ability to smuggle a bomb onboard an aircraft in checked luggage was an obvious and stupid hole in airline security. (There are still plenty of obvious and stupid holes left, but this is certainly a start.)
This is all legal because it is considered to be a reasonable exercise of power for the government to protect its citizens in this manner. Your carry-on luggage and your clothing have been subject to search for decades, why should checked luggage be any different?
However, it would likely be considered unreasonable for a TSA agent to demand a search through your laptop hard drive, since the contents of your hard drive have no bearing on the safety of an aircraft.
At the border, OTOH, the customs agents are charged with (among other things) the preventing the importation of contraband into the U.S. Illegal materials are illegal whether they be in a magazine or contained on a laptop hard drive.
What separates a "reasonable" search from an "unreasonable" one? I believe in the legal world, a "reasonable" search would be one that narrowly serves a legitimate government interest. Random searches of people on the street "just because" are unreasonable because they are too broad. Searching those that would board an aircraft specifically for items that could cause harm to those on board the plane is sufficiently narrow to be "reasonable".
What it really comes down to is that few American travel internationally so, from a purely selfish perspective, Americans are OK with border searches but because they don't expect to be affected personally while they oppose other searches (e.g. house searches) that would affect them personally.
It has nothing to do with the complacency or acceptance of Americans for laws that do not affect them. It has to do with the fact that border searches, are, in fact, a reasonable exercise of power by the government of a sovereign nation. All nations have the power to control the people and objects that cross its borders. Period.
Is the request that all those entering the country show valid identification also unreasonable? Under your logic, it would seem to be.
If the 1st Congress passed a law authorizing border searches, I would venture that there was some clown in the late 1780's that tried to argue the same thing, and lost then too.
The 4th amendment does not apply to searches at the border, and it never has. Throughout modern history, every country in the world (the U.S. included) has reserved the right to search anything and everything entering the country, save diplomatic pouches.
The 4th amendment only covers "unreasonable" search and seizure. Border searches are considered reasonable, and therefore require no warrant. This was formally codified by the 1st Congress (thank you Findlaw), who could be assumed to know the intentions of the founding fathers. More intrusive operations over and above a cursory search (such as X-Rays, or I supposed computer checks) only require "reasonable suspicion", as opposed to the more strict "probable cause".
The current version of the law states: 19 USC 1581: (a) Customs officers Any officer of the customs may at any time go on board of any vessel or vehicle at any place in the United States or within the customs waters or, as he may be authorized, within a customs-enforcement area established under the Anti-Smuggling Act [19 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.], or at any other authorized place, without as well as within his district, and examine the manifest and other documents and papers and examine, inspect, and search the vessel or vehicle and every part thereof and any person, trunk, package, or cargo on board, and to this end may hail and stop such vessel or vehicle, and use all necessary force to compel compliance.
I would think a search of the hard drive falls well within a "package".
Certainly, nothing can actually stop jury nullification. Deliberations are secret, so unless some of the jurors speak out after the fact, nobody will ever know why a jury decided to rule the way it did.
That said, jury nullification should only apply where the law itself is illegal (which means unconstitutional, in the case of the U.S.). If juries were simply to ignore any law or refuse to render any verdict they felt "wrong", then that leaves us with no law at all. Law does not exist simply as "suggestions" to juries.
Where do we draw the line between the rule of law, and the right of the jury to disregard it? In the case of criminal trials, we should certainly lean towards giving Juries leeway in deciding a law unjust, but what about civil trials? Don't I have a right as a plaintiff to expect the jury to judge my case based on the law, especially if I entered in an agreement with the understanding (by both parties) that the law would be followed?
The concept of widespread Jury Nullification assumes that the Jurors are well informed, rational, and resistant to ruling based on emotion, as opposed to law and fact. In the real, world, things get to be far more complex.
In contract law, there is a principle called the "Parol Evidence Rule". Basically, if the clear written language of a contract contradicts oral discussions, or "intent", the written contract wins. Especially in situations involving intense two-way bargaining between the parties. (i.e. If a grocery store made you sign away the deed to your house in a 15-page 4-point-type contract when you bought a pack of gum, the judge would have some leeway. That is not the case here.)
In this case, both parties were represented by counsel and there were extensive discussions between the negotiating parties.
The CEO at the time, who was not directly involved in the contract negotiations, did testify he had a different opinion about what he thought his company was selling than what the negotiators testified. However, since the written contract is clear, there is no need for a jury to evaluate the credibility of the different witnesses, as the contract itself overrides any testimony a witness could give. If this were not the case, written contracts would be worthless.
The parol evidence rule is a matter of law, as are the consequences of the contract language. If the contract was vague, THEN we could have a jury listen to testimony from the parties, but the contract language was clear: the copyrights were not transferred.
Judges decide law, Juries decide fact. Deciding if legal language is vague or clear, and if it is clear, interpreting it, is a matter of law.
The thing I can't figure out is why this "legal blogger" didn't know this. They go over this stuff in Intro to Law that us poor, dumb, engineers take as a schedule-filling elective...
The point of this is not to keep hackers from finding malware, it is to keep Google search users from getting infected through poisoned search results.
It should not come as a surprise to anybody (except perhaps the logic-impaired Cringely) that perhaps Apple might feel the need to release a product update in a rapidly evolving market sometime before the sucker is completely obsolete. The fact that 3G capability is a glaring hole in the current model is not exactly front-page news. Also, "sometime next year" could mean a span as long as 17 months, an eternity in the cell phone market. I would expect that it will receive a flash capacity bump at the same time (at least a doubling).
Also, where does the $1 Billion number come from? The same dark, damp, place that produced the "fact" that IBM was going to lay off half of its worldwide workforce?
Cringely: Wild Speculation for folks too dumb for Dvorak.
Okay, I can accept that some people live and die by FaceBook, MySpace, what have you. Personally, I think that they have about as much "real world" relevance as Second Life (the media darling of just a few months ago.) If it is easily possible for a person to accumulate thousands of "Friends", then the concept of "Friend" on these services has absolutely no meaning.
If folks want to dedicate a lot of time/effort to these social networking site, I have no problem with that. But the likelihood of an "average" boss giving a flying fig as to who is or is not in an employee's online profile is approximately near zero.
Maybe, at the ripe old age of 30, I just don't "get it", but the real-world utility of this crap completely escapes me... Can somebody here enlighten me as to why an average employee should care?
Given that most users do not even posses a program capable of decoding a.tar.gz (despite its near-ubiquity among IT folks, WinZip (or other programs that can read.tgz's) is by no means a universally installed program)
I have gotten craploads of spam/attempted malware that contains zip files, but nobody has ever attempted to send me a.tar.gz file in a spam. Is dropping zip files only foolproof? no, but that doesn't mean that it is a bad idea.
I don't really care if it is a pen name, or even if she has some past event that would lead her to grind an axe against SCO. Nothing she has posted is made up or a forgery, and her predictions as to how things would go have been spot-on. Yeah, sometimes her editorial comments are a bit much, but she does know how to explain the law to mere mortals.
OTOH, Rob Enderele has an obvious axe to grind against IBM, (he worked for Rolm during a botched acquisition by IBM), and he has been shown to be full of a steaming pile of dung and consistently wrong about SCO's case, except at the end after the disasterous court rulings, where he said essentially "SCO never had that strong of a case". Yeah, too bad that is the opposite of what he said earlier, when he talked about "Open Source and the Fools Who Use It" at SCOForum.
Or maybe we could look to the collected works of Maureen O'Gara for opinions on the SCO case. Whoops! She has been flat-out wrong with her facts, stating things that were demonstrably not true. In addition, she decided to go stalking after PJ. Legal? Yes. Relevant to the correctness of her information, no.
Laura DiDio? She was easily taken in when SCO showed her that some code happened to be the same in UNIX and Linux. Too bad it was likely public-domain code, and part of the POSIX standard. Google could have answered that question.
That clown at Forbes? You could fairly accurately predict how the SCO case was going to go by assuming that the judge would rule the opposite of whatever he said.
Who am I going to believe? The person who gets the facts right and interprets them correctly, or those other Tools?
Lastly, PJ, if she exists (and I think she does) is almost certainly Agoraphobic. This is not a secret. She vividly described an oncoming panic attack at LinuxWorld near the start of this whole mess, when Groklaw was just getting started.
In any case, I really don't care if "PJ" is actually some secret cabal of IBM lawyers in a basement somewhere in New York. PJ has been right, the Main Stream Media largely hasn't. Period. (I don't think IBM is colossally stupid enough to pull off such a stunt. The truth is bound to come out eventually, and it would be a PR disaster for PJ to be an IBM plant.)
I'm largely working from memory here, (I took a class on wireless comms in college taught by some PHd from Lucent)... GSM uses a TDMA (time division multiple access) -based setup (except for 3G setups, which actually use a new form of CDMA.) GSM/TDMA is spectrum inefficient due to the fact that silence takes up just as much bandwidth as voice. In addition, GSM/TDMA has a fixed maximum number of users for the cell. CDMA can theoretically handle a nearly infinite number of simultaneous connections on a cell, although as the number of calls goes up, the call quality goes down. For obscure reasons relating to carrier waves, CDMA has better penetration into buildings.
Given that all the "3G" standards are pretty much all CDMA-based, I'd say that the only part of the old GSM infrastructure that will be left after the transition is over is the SIM-card stuff. It'll still be called "GSM", but over the air, it won't even vaguely resemble the original TDMA-based version.
The GP said that "Verizon uses a propriatary form of CDMA". This is not true. The different North American CDMA providers, can, and do, share networks. IIRC, Alltel makes more money selling their network wholesale than they make selling phone plans directly to consumers.
I think the announcements aren't exactly correct. What I think they mean to say is that they will now authorize any device that passes qualification to use Verizon's service, as in, you can walk into a Verizon store and activate to work with their plans and bill you for the privledge.
Any CDMA device will already work on Verizon's network (which is what I said), provided that your provider has a roaming agreement with Verizon.
Errr... Verizon, Sprint and Alltel all use CDMA phones that are compatible with each other's network without a problem. No, you can't use a GSM phone with a CDMA network, but so what? I can't fit square pegs in a round hole, but that does not cause me to rail against companies that make those square pegs.
CDMA has some distinct advantages over GSM, which is why some networks use it. It is not merely to be difficult. Yes, the fact that most of the rest of the world doesn't use it is a problem, but that doesn't bother those of us that don't leave the U.S. often enough for it to matter.
I don't tell them how much the retail price was or how much I paid, mainly because its none of their business and I'm not an arrogant prick that says "I SPEND MONEY LOLZ!" to try and impress people.
Then why did you feel compelled to tell us, if it not something you even tell your friends?
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops. Of course they don't need to use air chillers... some well-designed seawater pumps would indeed do nicely.
SirWired
While data centers get toasty, they don't get hot enough to generate steam. Your computer will melt before that happens.
Read up on "Carnot Efficiency" to discover why obtaining useful work (other than heat) from air only say, 20F or so above-ambient is not very practical.
SirWired
I hope that it was an under-educated writer talking about harvesting waste human-body heat, and not the NSF or the inventor.
Harvesting waste heat from a 98-degree human operating in even a 30 degree environment is only 13% efficient, at maximum. I just don't see it being real useful to try and harvest waste heat from an ICE or turbine. If a power-plant turbine had useful exhaust steam, they would already be using it to turn another turbine I expect.
The fact it has no moving parts is nice, but how high could the efficiency possibly go?
SirWired
Most energy loss in an ICE is from Air Compression and valvetrain loss?
I would think that most of it would be because combustion is a woefully inefficient way of raising air pressure. Air compression should not be causing too much loss because that energy can be largely recovered on the power stroke. (except for ring blow-by (minimal) and compression-related-heat soaking into the cyl. wall) Valvetrain loss should only be due to cam friction (which is reduced by oil), as the energy required to compress the valve springs should be mostly returned when the valves are released.
SirWired
This idea has so many different problems, it is not even vaguely amusing.
1) They are going to "use heat from equipment to manage temperature on board the ships"? Huh? Unless these things are parked in the Arctic, "temperature management" in a data center always involves getting rid of the heat, not using it. The heat is a problem, not a solution.
2) It's a ship. In a storm, it moves. That's bad.
3) Ooh... ventilating a ship with air saturated with salt spray! Why didn't I think of that? Even if they mostly recirculated air, their chillers are going to get corroded to junk pretty quickly.
4) What exactly is a "major internet market" if you are referring to a geographical location? As long as you can get a fiber drop, you can get all the bandwidth you need. Google is building all sorts of data centers in the middle of nowhere, where Real Estate is practically free.
SirWired
At the company I work for, the Code of Conduct we are required to review every year has an explicit prohibition against this sort of thing. The section is actually entitled "Selling Against a Signed Order". The code isn't that long, so the fact that there is a special section for this one situation shows how important it is.
If I were to try and sell against a signed order, I would be fired. Immediately. With no chance of appeal.
Encouraging a customer to break a signed contract could get both the customer and my company sued by the competitor for contract interference, and rightly so.
SirWired
I'm a little confused why you think that an international border is not different from an internal one... They are fundamentally different entities. There are of course the obvious legal distinctions: namely the Feds have exclusive jurisdiction over the national border. Not so state and local ones.
The first thing that comes to mind is that the U.S. government has no direct control over what happens outside of the border. Without inspections, there is simply no reasonable way to ensure that illegal persons and/or goods do not enter the country. There is no visibility as to where those people or goods came from. Within the country, there is the law enforcement apparatus of the U.S. tasked to capture criminals, prevent the manufacture of contraband, etc. Since the U.S. cannot stop the manufacture of contraband abroad, how exactly do you propose that it be prevented from entering the country? One shipping container looks just like another. Without ID checks, how do you ensure that those crossing the border are not known enemies? Inside the U.S., the IRS can obtain probable cause for tax problems if your return doesn't match the W-2 your employer sent in. How is Customs supposed to verify you are paying proper duty on your goods without examining them? If probable cause were required, where would it come from? Again, one shipping container looks just like another.
The control of the national border is a legitimate government interest, and searches and ID checks are a reasonable way of exercising it.
I also don't get where you get the idea that the 4th amendment is ignored at the border. You do have those protections, they just are not nearly as strong. Your possessions cannot be permanently seized "just because", you are not subject to a body-cavity search as part of a random check. You are protected against "unreasonable" search and seizure, but reasonableness is held to a different standard to fit the circumstances.
At the border of the country, searches that would be unreasonable in downtown Chicago become reasonable. The random (and not so random) inspections that are carried out are pretty much the only way (short of extensive operations on foreign soil) that Customs and Immigration laws could possibly be enforced.
Part of the reasonableness standard is determining if the same legitimate ends (securing the border of the country) can be achieved through less intrusive means. What is your less-intrusive alternative to the inspection of people, possessions, and goods at the border?
Based on that logic, the 4th amendment would prevent the US government from doing anything about an invading army once the invading army was completely across the border into the US.
Once an invading army is through Customs, how would you stop them? Up until the point the guns come out, what is your less-invasive alternative to stopping them at the border through simple ID and cargo checks? The 4th amendment affords them full protection once they are through the border. They can drive throughout the country at will, as long as those weapons stay out of plain sight.
SirWired
The question posed is: Does the security of air travel, as currently implemented, constitute "reasonable" search under the 4th amendment? The question is NOT: "Is air security effective in reducing terrorism?"
Attempting to protect citizens during a particularly vulnerable time (there is no escape from a violent incident several miles above the ground) is considered by the courts to be a legitimate government interest. Moreover, the searches, as currently implemented, are considered to be a "reasonable" expression of that interest. That's it when it comes to legality.
Are searches done in a useful manner? Are they a waste of resources that would be better spent elsewhere? Is there any point? All those are policy questions, which is beyond the scope of the legality of the measures. An "unreasonable" waste of resources does not make the searches "unreasonable" exercises of government power.
SirWired
While irrelevant to the question of the legality of airline security, it is really impossible to determine the effectiveness of the measures because deterrent effect cannot be measured without controlled experiments which are unlikely to be carried out.
I will be the first to admit that aviation security in the U.S. is a poorly done pile of crap. It is makes swiss cheese look as solid as a brick of lead.
However, the legality of a bag search is not affected by how neat or nice they are about it, or if it is done in your presence. (The lack of witnesses might affect the admissibility of any criminal evidence found, but that is another matter.) The legality of a bag search is not affected by the fact that there are oodles of other ways to do very bad things to an aircraft.
Also, the only clothing one is required to remove in public in a TSA line is your coat and shoes. (This was not always the case, but a few nasty incidents changed that quickly.) You are allowed to request that a search of your bags or your person be done in private.
My point is that a search of your bags prior to them being loaded onto an aircraft is a reasonable exercise of government power, and therefore legal.
It appears the search at Customs in the original article was a random search, and it appears to have worked. (Certainly they do not inspect the contents of every laptop entering the country.)
SirWired
By the way, the Lockerbie bombing was caused by checked luggage. All international luggage from the U.S. was either scanned/searched or subject to passenger-matching shortly afterwards. (meaning, if you didn't get on the plane, your luggage had to be pulled) This practice was merely extended to Domestic luggage after 9/11. As another related side note, there is actually no requirement to search or X-Ray all luggage. However, since the only legal alternative for the airlines is to passenger-match every single bag, which would delay the aircraft terribly in the event of a passenger missing their flight. This was done after 9/11 prior to the whole TSA apparatus being in place, but no airline would choose it.
SirWired
Here's the problem. Any argument for controlling international borders also applies to state and local borders. If you can keep someone or something out of a country then you can also keep it out of a state, city or neighborhood.
Why does any argument that applies to national borders also apply to state and local borders? I see no reason for this to be the case.
Along with the clowns who opposed slavery and thought women should have equal rights.
Heh. You got me there. However, I should point out that there is no nation currently on earth that does not exercise some measure of control over its borders. (I must admit, I don't know about the Vatican... they may leave that up to Italy.) Even at the time of the Constitution, there were nations that realized slavery was a bad idea, and that women should have equal rights.
***
I expect that a government that did not reserve the right to control its borders would not be around very long. If a government does not reserve the right to stop or search those entering its borders, then they would have no authority to stop an incoming army.
Yes, many borders are porous (The U.S. Canada border being a famous example), but that does not diminish the right to enforce it at will.
SirWired
Your luggage is subject to search on domestic flights for good and sufficient reasons. The ability to smuggle a bomb onboard an aircraft in checked luggage was an obvious and stupid hole in airline security. (There are still plenty of obvious and stupid holes left, but this is certainly a start.)
This is all legal because it is considered to be a reasonable exercise of power for the government to protect its citizens in this manner. Your carry-on luggage and your clothing have been subject to search for decades, why should checked luggage be any different?
However, it would likely be considered unreasonable for a TSA agent to demand a search through your laptop hard drive, since the contents of your hard drive have no bearing on the safety of an aircraft.
At the border, OTOH, the customs agents are charged with (among other things) the preventing the importation of contraband into the U.S. Illegal materials are illegal whether they be in a magazine or contained on a laptop hard drive.
What separates a "reasonable" search from an "unreasonable" one? I believe in the legal world, a "reasonable" search would be one that narrowly serves a legitimate government interest. Random searches of people on the street "just because" are unreasonable because they are too broad. Searching those that would board an aircraft specifically for items that could cause harm to those on board the plane is sufficiently narrow to be "reasonable".
SirWired
What it really comes down to is that few American travel internationally so, from a purely selfish perspective, Americans are OK with border searches but because they don't expect to be affected personally while they oppose other searches (e.g. house searches) that would affect them personally.
It has nothing to do with the complacency or acceptance of Americans for laws that do not affect them. It has to do with the fact that border searches, are, in fact, a reasonable exercise of power by the government of a sovereign nation. All nations have the power to control the people and objects that cross its borders. Period.
Is the request that all those entering the country show valid identification also unreasonable? Under your logic, it would seem to be.
If the 1st Congress passed a law authorizing border searches, I would venture that there was some clown in the late 1780's that tried to argue the same thing, and lost then too.
SirWired
The 4th amendment does not apply to searches at the border, and it never has. Throughout modern history, every country in the world (the U.S. included) has reserved the right to search anything and everything entering the country, save diplomatic pouches.
The 4th amendment only covers "unreasonable" search and seizure. Border searches are considered reasonable, and therefore require no warrant. This was formally codified by the 1st Congress (thank you Findlaw), who could be assumed to know the intentions of the founding fathers. More intrusive operations over and above a cursory search (such as X-Rays, or I supposed computer checks) only require "reasonable suspicion", as opposed to the more strict "probable cause".
The current version of the law states:
19 USC 1581:
(a) Customs officers
Any officer of the customs may at any time go on board of any vessel
or vehicle at any place in the United States or within the customs
waters or, as he may be authorized, within a customs-enforcement area
established under the Anti-Smuggling Act [19 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.], or at
any other authorized place, without as well as within his district, and
examine the manifest and other documents and papers and examine,
inspect, and search the vessel or vehicle and every part thereof and any
person, trunk, package, or cargo on board, and to this end may hail and
stop such vessel or vehicle, and use all necessary force to compel
compliance.
I would think a search of the hard drive falls well within a "package".
SirWired
Certainly, nothing can actually stop jury nullification. Deliberations are secret, so unless some of the jurors speak out after the fact, nobody will ever know why a jury decided to rule the way it did.
That said, jury nullification should only apply where the law itself is illegal (which means unconstitutional, in the case of the U.S.). If juries were simply to ignore any law or refuse to render any verdict they felt "wrong", then that leaves us with no law at all. Law does not exist simply as "suggestions" to juries.
Where do we draw the line between the rule of law, and the right of the jury to disregard it? In the case of criminal trials, we should certainly lean towards giving Juries leeway in deciding a law unjust, but what about civil trials? Don't I have a right as a plaintiff to expect the jury to judge my case based on the law, especially if I entered in an agreement with the understanding (by both parties) that the law would be followed?
The concept of widespread Jury Nullification assumes that the Jurors are well informed, rational, and resistant to ruling based on emotion, as opposed to law and fact. In the real, world, things get to be far more complex.
SirWired
In contract law, there is a principle called the "Parol Evidence Rule". Basically, if the clear written language of a contract contradicts oral discussions, or "intent", the written contract wins. Especially in situations involving intense two-way bargaining between the parties. (i.e. If a grocery store made you sign away the deed to your house in a 15-page 4-point-type contract when you bought a pack of gum, the judge would have some leeway. That is not the case here.)
In this case, both parties were represented by counsel and there were extensive discussions between the negotiating parties.
The CEO at the time, who was not directly involved in the contract negotiations, did testify he had a different opinion about what he thought his company was selling than what the negotiators testified. However, since the written contract is clear, there is no need for a jury to evaluate the credibility of the different witnesses, as the contract itself overrides any testimony a witness could give. If this were not the case, written contracts would be worthless.
The parol evidence rule is a matter of law, as are the consequences of the contract language. If the contract was vague, THEN we could have a jury listen to testimony from the parties, but the contract language was clear: the copyrights were not transferred.
Judges decide law, Juries decide fact. Deciding if legal language is vague or clear, and if it is clear, interpreting it, is a matter of law.
The thing I can't figure out is why this "legal blogger" didn't know this. They go over this stuff in Intro to Law that us poor, dumb, engineers take as a schedule-filling elective...
SirWired
I meant 17 months from the release of the original iPhone.
SirWired
The point of this is not to keep hackers from finding malware, it is to keep Google search users from getting infected through poisoned search results.
Duh.
SirWired
It should not come as a surprise to anybody (except perhaps the logic-impaired Cringely) that perhaps Apple might feel the need to release a product update in a rapidly evolving market sometime before the sucker is completely obsolete. The fact that 3G capability is a glaring hole in the current model is not exactly front-page news. Also, "sometime next year" could mean a span as long as 17 months, an eternity in the cell phone market. I would expect that it will receive a flash capacity bump at the same time (at least a doubling).
Also, where does the $1 Billion number come from? The same dark, damp, place that produced the "fact" that IBM was going to lay off half of its worldwide workforce?
Cringely: Wild Speculation for folks too dumb for Dvorak.
SirWired
Okay, I can accept that some people live and die by FaceBook, MySpace, what have you. Personally, I think that they have about as much "real world" relevance as Second Life (the media darling of just a few months ago.) If it is easily possible for a person to accumulate thousands of "Friends", then the concept of "Friend" on these services has absolutely no meaning.
If folks want to dedicate a lot of time/effort to these social networking site, I have no problem with that. But the likelihood of an "average" boss giving a flying fig as to who is or is not in an employee's online profile is approximately near zero.
Maybe, at the ripe old age of 30, I just don't "get it", but the real-world utility of this crap completely escapes me... Can somebody here enlighten me as to why an average employee should care?
SirWired
Given that most users do not even posses a program capable of decoding a .tar.gz (despite its near-ubiquity among IT folks, WinZip (or other programs that can read .tgz's) is by no means a universally installed program)
.tar.gz file in a spam. Is dropping zip files only foolproof? no, but that doesn't mean that it is a bad idea.
I have gotten craploads of spam/attempted malware that contains zip files, but nobody has ever attempted to send me a
SirWired
I don't really care if it is a pen name, or even if she has some past event that would lead her to grind an axe against SCO. Nothing she has posted is made up or a forgery, and her predictions as to how things would go have been spot-on. Yeah, sometimes her editorial comments are a bit much, but she does know how to explain the law to mere mortals.
OTOH, Rob Enderele has an obvious axe to grind against IBM, (he worked for Rolm during a botched acquisition by IBM), and he has been shown to be full of a steaming pile of dung and consistently wrong about SCO's case, except at the end after the disasterous court rulings, where he said essentially "SCO never had that strong of a case". Yeah, too bad that is the opposite of what he said earlier, when he talked about "Open Source and the Fools Who Use It" at SCOForum.
Or maybe we could look to the collected works of Maureen O'Gara for opinions on the SCO case. Whoops! She has been flat-out wrong with her facts, stating things that were demonstrably not true. In addition, she decided to go stalking after PJ. Legal? Yes. Relevant to the correctness of her information, no.
Laura DiDio? She was easily taken in when SCO showed her that some code happened to be the same in UNIX and Linux. Too bad it was likely public-domain code, and part of the POSIX standard. Google could have answered that question.
That clown at Forbes? You could fairly accurately predict how the SCO case was going to go by assuming that the judge would rule the opposite of whatever he said.
Who am I going to believe? The person who gets the facts right and interprets them correctly, or those other Tools?
Lastly, PJ, if she exists (and I think she does) is almost certainly Agoraphobic. This is not a secret. She vividly described an oncoming panic attack at LinuxWorld near the start of this whole mess, when Groklaw was just getting started.
In any case, I really don't care if "PJ" is actually some secret cabal of IBM lawyers in a basement somewhere in New York. PJ has been right, the Main Stream Media largely hasn't. Period. (I don't think IBM is colossally stupid enough to pull off such a stunt. The truth is bound to come out eventually, and it would be a PR disaster for PJ to be an IBM plant.)
SirWired
I'm largely working from memory here, (I took a class on wireless comms in college taught by some PHd from Lucent)... GSM uses a TDMA (time division multiple access) -based setup (except for 3G setups, which actually use a new form of CDMA.) GSM/TDMA is spectrum inefficient due to the fact that silence takes up just as much bandwidth as voice. In addition, GSM/TDMA has a fixed maximum number of users for the cell. CDMA can theoretically handle a nearly infinite number of simultaneous connections on a cell, although as the number of calls goes up, the call quality goes down. For obscure reasons relating to carrier waves, CDMA has better penetration into buildings.
Given that all the "3G" standards are pretty much all CDMA-based, I'd say that the only part of the old GSM infrastructure that will be left after the transition is over is the SIM-card stuff. It'll still be called "GSM", but over the air, it won't even vaguely resemble the original TDMA-based version.
SirWired
The GP said that "Verizon uses a propriatary form of CDMA". This is not true. The different North American CDMA providers, can, and do, share networks. IIRC, Alltel makes more money selling their network wholesale than they make selling phone plans directly to consumers.
I think the announcements aren't exactly correct. What I think they mean to say is that they will now authorize any device that passes qualification to use Verizon's service, as in, you can walk into a Verizon store and activate to work with their plans and bill you for the privledge.
Any CDMA device will already work on Verizon's network (which is what I said), provided that your provider has a roaming agreement with Verizon.
SirWired
Errr... Verizon, Sprint and Alltel all use CDMA phones that are compatible with each other's network without a problem. No, you can't use a GSM phone with a CDMA network, but so what? I can't fit square pegs in a round hole, but that does not cause me to rail against companies that make those square pegs.
CDMA has some distinct advantages over GSM, which is why some networks use it. It is not merely to be difficult. Yes, the fact that most of the rest of the world doesn't use it is a problem, but that doesn't bother those of us that don't leave the U.S. often enough for it to matter.
SirWired
I don't tell them how much the retail price was or how much I paid, mainly because its none of their business and I'm not an arrogant prick that says "I SPEND MONEY LOLZ!" to try and impress people.
Then why did you feel compelled to tell us, if it not something you even tell your friends?
SirWired