Not sure what you mean by this. You still obviously use the built-in Windows wireless on the clients, no different from a coffee shop or a hotel and even easier since I didn't have the stupid little initial splash page that most of those have. Then you just run a VPN on top of that. Since the people with laptops had to know how to use the VPN when they were offsite (e.g. hotels, coffee shops, whatever) it was very easy to train them just to think of our wireless network as being offsite.
There was one other thing though. You could connect to the e-mail server without a VPN at all. So most users didn't even bother to fire up the VPN since they were really only interested in being able to get their e-mail and work with local files on their laptops.
Where I last worked I set up one wireless network. It was completely open (no encryption at all) and firewalled to limit what you could do with it. You could then fire up the VPN client (the same one you'd use if you were totally offsite like in a hotel) and you'd have access to the internal network.
It really wasn't that hard to set up at all. We needed the VPN for offsite users anyway and so it seemed logical that wireless could simply be treated as if it were any other offsite network. When I set it up, WEP had already been proven mostly broken and WPA didn't exist yet. And what's the difference? Since it's a separate network you can treat it like any other open network. You get no illusion of security. Plus any random joe visiting us could hop right on the network with no trouble at all.
I do a similar thing at home actually. My router has an Atheros-based PCI card in it. I run it in master mode (which is unfortunately still only available when using MadWifi) and give it its own IP space. The firewall rules simply don't allow traffic to/from the wired network and the wireless network. If I need to get to my fileserver I fire up the VPN.
Oh noes, some idiot sysadmin accidently sent my e-mail to the FBI. Someone call a congressional hearing.
If it's that confidential that someone else seeing it would be a serious problem, use encryption. There's no way they accidently get copies of your crypto keys. Better yet, don't send it in an e-mail, don't write it in a letter, and don't say it over the phone. If it really needs to be kept a secret, have a face to face meeting. If it doesn't need to be kept that much of a secret (and 99% of things don't) then some lackey at the FBI knowing about it is not going to be a problem.
Yes he did. And that was exactly the point of his e-mail. He got paid very well while we were paying him. I don't believe he landed us a single contract! He had the dubious honor of being one of maybe 2 or 3 people to be fired in the past decade.
As for references.. well, what can you do? Quoting that e-mail would potentially open up the company to a defamation suit so that's not an option. Not to mention that you don't really want to make it well-known that you hired a con man. As far as the company is concerned, they got rid of the guy and that alone is good enough. If someone else hires him, that's their problem.
You did read the article right? It wasn't the FBI that screwed up. The FBI caught the mistake that the company's sysadmin made when setting up the eavesdropping.
Yes, it can happen again without too much effort. What are you going to do to fix it? Send the FBI in to set up the eavesdropping themselves so the sysadmin doesn't screw it up? Keep in mind we're talking about a run of the mill court-ordered warrant here. It's a very standard and very legal way to gather evidence. This story has very little if anything at all to do with post-9/11 surveillance or FISA or anything else that might be questionable or debatable. No where in the article does it say that the surveillance was set up as part of a FISA warrant which leads me to believe that the Times reporter is trying to feign a connection for scare value.
I hate to say it but I think the debate is pretty much closed on court-ordered warrants. If the court orders them and you don't have any legal argument to squash the order then you have to comply with it or be found in contempt of court. There's nothing really secretive about the process either, except ideally to the person who's being surveilled.
Funny. Obviously it's not routine at all so the chances of making a mistake are even greater. You don't need to file it in some secret folder though. It's no secret at all that when the government produces a valid warrant you need to comply with it or be held in contempt of court. And if I were the sysadmin, I'd be looking through the e-mail myself, not just sending it to the government. If the government is that interested in it then something very wrong is most likely to be going on and I'd like to know about it if it's happening on my network.
Where I used to work we occasionally set up our own eavesdropping of mails. For example, when a top-level employee who no one trusted was about to be fired we archived all of his mail and put in some hooks so the big boss's could read all of it. Upon reading the guy's comments like "Man, I soaked these suckers for so much cash making them think I could sell their services" it only reaffirmed the big boss's decision to fire the guy for nonperformance.
Also very good just in case he tried to come back with some bogus suit about being unjustly fired. E-mail is not a private means of communication, particularly corporate e-mail.
Seriously. What's the story here? Some sysadmin who apparently didn't know what he was doing put the wrong thing in his e-mail server configuration and inadvertently sent all e-mail for the entire domain instead of e-mail for one address.
Mistakes happen all the time. The appropriate thing to look for is whether the mistake was caught and corrected in a timely fashion. It seems that the mistake was caught and corrected in a timely fashion which basically makes this a story about an everyday occurrence.
This story might make a good one for some sysadmin journal reminding sysadmins to document policies that help ensure mistakes do not happen and if they do are caught by the company itself instead of by the FBI. For example, a simple procedure would be to check the appropriate logs after changing the configuration to make sure the configuration is doing what it was intended to do.
Young campus radicals like your former self formed the Weather Underground, SLA, RAF, and other terrorist groups. These actually did shoot people, rob banks, and blow up buildings. And these were in the tame days of the 70s, when you had to give people bomb instructions by hand, or photocopy.
People seem to have mostly forgotten that this was actually happening. The terrorists of those years get glorified as dissenters because they mingled with people who were pure dissenters. It's a very good strategy for a criminal of that sort to mix up the issue to make law enforcement's job harder.
Reading jihadist materials from the internet is one of the ways that ordinary people become radicals. I'm sure your "information wants to be free" types will be out here defending it, but let's be honest, your average Muhammad isn't going to build his own bomb so he can ride the subway without reading instructions on how to do so. Racist skinheads also use online materials to self-radicalize, and I bet that nobody here would be against coming down hard on them.
The best defense against this is to point out that it is propaganda. The police would have done much better to.. well, you know actually investigate the case. If they couldn't find that the students had any plans to do anything then they should have sat them down and talked with them about why these materials are dangerous. It's always the same modus operandi. Impressionable people are dissatisfied with their life in some way and are told that if they simply follow these teachings they'll be better off.
In fact, you show the clear reason why it's important to investigate these cases but to act on each one individually. You cannot just assume that any young muslim man who has read this stuff a few times has actually started believing it. You have to evaluate each person differently, perhaps even using psychologists to try to gauge whether the person is a terrorist trying to act like a student or really is just a student. You have to spend some time educating people. They could have maybe sent him to a tolerance class. You know, like make him sit down with a priest, a rabbi, and an imam and talk about what his religion (islam) means to him and why terrorism is not the answer.
They chose instead to proceed with a very weak case because they figured they could win it. And they did. Fortunately there is an appeals process and the appellate judge realized the whole thing stank. I suppose that is the nature of prosecutions though. If it looks like the law might apply and you figure you can get a jury to vote your way, you proceed with it.
I figure that most people on Slashdot have written at least a shell script or two in their life. Besides that, you don't have to qualify or anything to get an ADC account. I'm just pointing out that non-developers can use the service but that if they do they should follow the implicit rules and act like developers.
...and I'm not sure why you feel Slashdot is the place to be schooling folks on etiquette.
Because from the looks of things around here, the majority of slashdotters are in need of a serious etiquette lesson?
Don't be too quick to judge though. With one foreign endpoint and one domestic endpoint you necessarily effectively spy on the domestic for those conversations. But the communication did cross our border and obviously the intention of the wiretap was not to spy on the domestic. Nor can any information gleaned from that spying ever be used in court. So the domestic is already protected. The suits against the phone companies are not to protect the domestics even though they claim they are.
It's sort of important to understand that these provisions against unwarranted search are in some ways intended to allow you to privately discuss the possibility of overthrowing the government, although certainly not by attacking it. But once you start talking about attacking it and particularly when you start involving foreigners in your plans it's clearly treason which is not at all protected. There's a fine line between the two. And often the decision as to which was which comes after the fact. Consider the failed second revolutionary war that people refer to as the civil war. Although it should be noted that none of the prominent people involved in that were convicted of treason, probably because it was not the Confederacy who attacked the U.S. but actually the other way around.
I stand corrected then. I probably should have phrased it as "If this is true, then that means..."
Despite being fairly conservative I am against this retroactive immunity. Or perhaps it's because I'm fairly conservative that I'm against this retroactive immunity. GWB is not exactly a model conservative by any means.
If the wiretaps weren't illegal (and I am inclined to think they were legal) then there is no case. If the wiretaps were illegal then as you point out the phone companies still had to know it was illegal. Whether or not they are is still sort of up in the air. The President's lawyers are saying they are and were legal. So there are a lot of hurdles that these plaintiffs have to overcome already in order to successfully win their case.
If there's a guy in Yemen talking to a guy in Topeka, you can't say that you're only spying on the guy from Yemen because you're necessarily listening to the guy from Topeka too.
Indeed you cannot. You are necessarily spying on both parties for that one conversation. The argument is that one endpoint being foreign makes it a foreign conversation. This is basically in line with past foreign surveillance (e.g. during WWII before FISA existed at all) so the argument cannot be discounted outright.
Besides that, imagine the case of some mob front group getting their phones tapped. For the sake of argument, say they run a dry cleaning business or something. If I call to see if my clothes are ready I am necessarily being spied on without a warrant even though a warrant exists for the tap on the dry cleaning business's phone. Taking your argument to its logical conclusion means that no eavesdropping could ever occur because they would not only have to have a warrant to spy on the mob-run business but also for every person who ever called in to it.
There are other protections for the party who was spied on indirectly. Namely, that law enforcement cannot use those recordings in court unless they can show that you were part of the conspiracy to begin with in which case the warrant applied to you as well, they just didn't specifically know it at the time. But if you were talking about some unrelated activity, even a criminal one, they'd have a hard time doing this. They'd even have a hard time getting a warrant to tap your phone based on this conversation. What are they going to do? Go to a judge and say "Your honor, we inadvertently stumbled upon John Doe having a conversation about unrelated criminal activity because we were tapping John Q. Public's phone?" Even if the judge grants their tap on your phone, a halfway decent lawyer can get that tossed.
It's no different for warrantless wiretaps. They have a wiretap on the foreigner. They cannot use this wiretap against you. And actually it's even more stringent because even if you did involve yourself in it there is no way that they can come back and retroactively apply the warrant to you due to conspiracy because no warrant existed. So in that respect, it's really in their best interest to get that warrant especially if they think non-foreigners are involved in the conspiracy.
Reality is that the situation is not as dire as some would have you believe. One of these cases in particular was brought by a lawyer who was conversing with his client overseas. Someone in the government inadvertently leaked the document that detailed a wiretap was in place for his client. He's brought the case to the court making the legal argument that he was tapped but the reality is that he's being paid by his client and he's not trying to do some noble thing he's just trying to keep his client off the hook. It's standard operating procedure for a lawyer to use every means potentially possible to help his client.
Right. Meaning that the this little retroactive immunity provision is a stupid political statement. The people with open suits now can simply appeal the dismissals (if they even occur at all) on these grounds and the cases will again proceed. Whether or not the cases are eventually ruled for or against the telecoms is another matter. My understanding of things is that the telecoms are claiming that they only actually spied on communications with at least one foreign endpoint even though the equipment necessarily has the ability to spy on any communications.
Remember that this is the Foreign Intelligence/Surveillance Act. If they did use it to spy on purely domestic communications without a warrant then they are probably guilty because they stepped outside the bounds of the law. Most of the cases though seem to be brought by people who were indeed having an international conversation so I think it may be difficult to win these cases against the telecoms.
This is not bug reporting for random people. This is bug reporting for people who develop software on OS X systems. To use it you need an Apple ID and I believe you need to specifically sign up for at least the free ADC account (which is like two or three clicks if you already have an Apple ID) in order to use the bug reporter.
They mention purchasing tech support incidents because if you are a software developer and have a more immediate need to talk with someone at Apple then you need to buy a support incident. Bug reporter is a 1-way street. You tell them. It's free. That's it. If you want to get advice on how to work around it then you need to buy the support incident.
Of course you get 2 incidents included with even the base ($500 annual) Select package which also includes a 20% discount on system hardware (limited to 1 complete system) and a 10% discount on accessory purchases made at the same time. So if you are a developer this is great because you almost always want the super-fast hardware that costs enough (e.g. > $2500) that your Select membership pays for itself and you get 2 support incidents and a bunch of other stuff (seeds, etc.) for free.
As I said, be respectful since this is like a semi-direct line to Apple's developers. It's for one developer to another.
I do apologize. I was treating OP as if he was an American and thus should have learned of this in primary school. Obviously he was a Swede since he identified himself as such. And for what it's worth, most Americans wouldn't remember that they'd learned it in primary school, much to our detriment.
The prior system would of course be the very old (pre-Norman) Engish system and the systems generally used throughout Europe, even today. So give the Brits credit since it is English Common Law that brought about the jury trial. It was the U.S. though that codified it in its constitution and almost immediately refined it in the 7th amendment to the constitution.
Doing some limited googling it seems that the big change with the U.S. system was that trial by jury is the default in the U.S. system whereas trial by jury had to be requested under Common Law. Under the U.S. system you can request a "bench trial" meaning that the judge alone will rule on the case. Therefore, if you feel the evidence does not show your guilt but a jury may find you guilty because they don't like you you can waive your right to a jury trial and have a judge decide the case purely on its merits. Therefore, if you like the Swedish (and much of the rest of Europe) system you can simply request it.
I wish I could think of it now but at least I recall being told probably way back in middle school or something that the right to a trial by jury was considered of utmost importance to prevent political imprisonment. That is, people were being imprisoned by the English for treason with only English-appointed judges making this verdict.
Remember that the U.S. system is explicitly designed to allow another revolution. In a sort of queer way though the very things that allow for a revolution allow us to avoid a revolution. Reagan commented on this in his January 1981 inaugural speech which is probably one of the greatest speeches of all time.
It should be noted though that revolution did happen once in our history and failed. Historians later referred to it as the civil war which is somewhat inaccurate.
Hmm.. that does sound like a bug. Without spaces when you launch an application then switch to something else the windows for the new application will typically come up underneath whatever you switched to. It's a nice little feature so you can start a hefty app starting while you go do something else.
Have you filed a "radar"? Simply log in to https://bugreport.apple.com with your Apple ID and fill out the information as accurately and concisely as possible. Don't be a dick about it. Just calmly explain that it is interrupting your workflow and that you would suggest it have the same behavior it does when not using spaces. That is to say that the app opens silently if you've proceeded to do something else on the system since deciding to launch the app.
You may not get a resolution anytime soon and you may not get any feedback for a long time. Generally a bug that stays open for a long time means that the Apple developers are working on it. Unfortunately you cannot see any comments they make to each other but such is the nature of things. Most likely, your bug will be filed as a duplicate. That's ok, it just means that Apple is already aware of it and already has an active bug report for it. By reporting it though, you let Apple know that you care about it.
Unless you report it, Apple cannot know. They don't go trolling slashdot for comments like this.
You are apparently just displaying your ignorance. Remember that the U.S. justice system with juries was an improvement over the prior justice system that had no juries. The idea is that if 12 average people acquit you, you are acquitted. There can be no retrial. If 12 average people convict you the judge still has the power to overturn it and acquit you. It's a rarity but it does happen when the judge looks at the facts of the case and decides that the prosecution did not make a sound legal argument. Note though that to a judge circumstantial evidence is still evidence so I think Hans is probably going to be found guilty. The majority of cases are based on circumstantial evidence. It's not like criminals are going to help the prosecution make the case by leaving all sorts of clear evidence of the crime.
Occasionally this means that people get acquitted for something they are very likely to have done. And of course sometimes people get convicted for something they did not do. But you cannot blame the jury system for that. That is no more likely to happen in the jury system vs. the non-jury system. The bias is heavily in favor of the defendant. Both a jury and a judge have to convict a man. If either one acquits him, he's free.
And that, frankly, is about the best we can do. Some people argue that judges should be appointed and not elected so they don't have to bow to political demands and indeed our Supreme Court is stocked with lifetime appointees. At the local level though it's far more common for judges to be elected. Even if the jury convicts a man and the judge does not acquit him because it would be dangerous to his political career there is still a chance that an appellate court will overturn it. And if that fails there's a chance that the state's supreme court will overturn it. And if that fails there's a chance that the federal Supreme Court will overturn it.
You have to be very guilty to be convicted of anything in this country. Even if you are found guilty there are a lot of chances to get it overturned. And if you cannot afford an attorney there are thousands of them that you can contact who will take on your appeal pro bono. Reiser may even get one of these attorneys after he is convicted. And he may not be convicted if the jury doesn't believe the lab worker who changed her story.
Um, no. OS X will not normally boot on a regular EFI machine. The Apple-supplied bootloader is an EFI program but it is located in the HFS+ volume, not the little EFI FAT partition. Even if you were to copy the boot.efi program to an EFI system's EFI partition you still wouldn't be able to boot OS X because boot.efi requires that it be able to read HFS+ volumes using Apple's HFS+ EFI service. You might have luck extracting the HFS+ driver from an Apple's ROM and putting it into that same little EFI FAT partition.
Netkas's "PC EFI" booter is nothing more than the Darwin/x86 bootloader with a few enhancements. Basically he took a source release I had made months earlier, fixed a few bugs, and released it (binary only) a few days before I finally got the gumption to do a new source release with the bugs fixed. Since then he's added a few things like GPT support and the ability to hard-code a device-properties blob to help with graphics card issues. Neither my booter nor his has anything at all to do with EFI. The OS X kernel does not really care much about EFI aside from needing a couple of simple data structures and a handful of stub functions.
Of course, even with my booter or his booter or using Apple's own boot.efi and HFS+ EFI driver on an EFI system you still run into the issue that Apple's binaries are encrypted. Granted it's trivial to write an alternative decryption routine that provides its own keys instead of grabbing them from the machine. Code to do this is widely available so OS X is for the most part fully hacked.
Still, once you hack it it theoretically works indefinitely. It doesn't go checking with Apple. It doesn't disable itself after a few days. It cannot do this because a real Mac does not do this.
In my experience, large companies are often almost as inefficient as governments. At least in situations where they have not much competition (where real competition exists, the incumbent will adapt or die).
Yes, of course this is the case. But I prefer to turn it on its head. The government acts like a large corporation with no competition. At least there's a chance that a large corporation may have competition, possibly in the future even if it does not now. When the government gets involved competition dies.
This said, most newcomer telecoms in Germany are not eager to lay their own cable. How much of that is due to lack of money, and how much of it is due to legal problems (right of way and such?) I don't know. Might have to research that a bit more...
They are adverse to laying their own cable here too. Why wouldn't they be? With politicians so willing to take bribes, err sorry campaign contributions, to force incumbents to rent out their last mile infrastructure any startup in its right mind will go the route with far less capital outlay. Politicians are a hell of a lot cheaper than building infrastructure. Guess which one most startups choose?
Don't get suckered into the PR campaign by these companies that its too expensive to build their own infrastructure. The telephone companies themselves did it. That's why they have their infrastructure. The cable companies came along later and did it. That's why they have their infrastructure. It's clearly not impossible to build it nor impossible to find investors who will invest in it. That said, I'm sure the investors have a hand in encouraging these companies to attempt to pay off politicians before doing a huge capital outlay for infrastructure.
Socialism is a mental disease. It plays on the fear, uncertainty, and doubt of people and tries to convince them that certain things aren't reasonably possible so we must have the government involved. It has had the same M.O. for years now. The only defense against it is to point out that socialism is not really for the benefit of the people but is instead a quid pro quo that politicians engage in with companies.
I would estimate there has been about 10x inflation from the mid-60s to today. Your 30 cent gas now costs $3.00. Your $1800 car is now $18,000. Your $5 doctor's visit is now $50. Oh shit.. wait a second.
Which of these industries is backed by a government program paying suppliers/providers of the good/service a set amount? Oh yes. That's right. Health care. The medicare/medicaid have maximum amounts they will pay for a given procedure. That is, they set a price ceiling. But what happens is that no provider (i.e. doctor) in his right mind will set his price any lower than what the government will pay. If the customer (i.e. patient) complains, he can simply say that the government is willing to pay that much, why isn't his insurance company?
The government health-care programs we have have thus created an effective price floor by setting a price ceiling.
Now.. to explain the inflation you really need look no further than the Johnson administration. I just did a quick Google on this so I could have something to back this up. I found this gem from Time magazine in 1966. Everyone with any brains knew what he was doing was going to lead to massive inflation. It did. Yet for some reason the reporters and journalists of today are very hush hush about this clear correlation between massive government spending and inflation. The economic theories predict it as a cause-effect relationship and we have historical evidence clearly showing the correlation. Yet no one wants to talk about that.
You also clearly fail to note that the minimum wage is and always has been a bullshit number. It is federally mandated and totally fails to reflect the price differences between regions. States or even smaller localities like cities are of course free to set their own minimum wages and if it's such a great idea then you'd think more of them would be doing it. Granted some have.
Anyway, to get to the point. Currency does not necessarily have to be backed by a generally useless resource to be valuable. Those pushing for a silver or a gold standard fail to note that when new deposits are found the prices of those resources drops dramatically. Consider the ads on TV that tell you how much silver has risen in value over the last 20 years. What they fail to tell you is that it had a significantly higher value just before their chart begins.
I appreciate Ron Paul for his steadfast refusal to compromise his ideals but I don't appreciate him for the same reason. He looks at the Iraq war and claims it is an unjustifiable military expense. He doesn't even consider the potential benefits of it. Some would say that Bush & Co. didn't appreciate the economic impact that waging a war would have. That may be true and if it is, Ron Paul's position is actually no better or worse than Bush's. I personally feel though that Bush is keenly aware of the cost of his war yet passionately feels that waging it is in our country's best interests. Plenty of people don't see it that way. I'm not even necessarily sure I see it that way. But I am not so foolish as to discount every reason Bush had as obviously unimportant. He has said it time and again that he felt allowing Saddam to break his peace treaty would send the wrong message to the world, and particularly to that region, that you can break an agreement with us and get away with it. That, to me, is just good sense unless of course the cost of standing up is too high. And that's where you can maybe fault Bush for probably low-balling the cost estimate. It wouldn't be the first time a leader (governmental, business, or otherwise) made a bad decision, and it won't be the last. The world will keep turning, trust me.
As for Ron Paul's other positions. Well, again, what can I say. In principle I like the idea of getting rid of a whole slew of bullshit social programs. But in practice to do so overnight as Ron Paul has proposed would like
Not ever having used SOM I can't compare it directly but it seems to me that the basic idea is to have an object model with a hard to break ABI (i.e. you can add methods without breaking it) and interoperability with other languages.
Apple has distilled various Objective-C bridging efforts into a common bridge library that is now used by PyObjC (which predates the Apple/NeXT merger) and RubyCocoa and is slated for use with.NET. By virtue of being able to mix Objective-C into a C or C++ file (more or less simply by changing the extension from c to m or from cc/cpp to mm) you instantly get interoperability with C and C++. If you absolutely need to call Objective-C from plain C or C++ you can use the underlying objc_msgSend call.
Both the PyObjC and RubyCocoa bridges allow you to implement Objective-C classes in Python or Ruby so as long as you can stomach writing your interface declarations in Objective-C you can get most of the way there to the holy grail of cross-language object interoperability.
If you think about it, it's not much different from any other object model it's just that Objective-C happens to have a direct implementation in Objective-C whereas COM and SOM don't. The biggest downside of course is that you do need an Objective-C compiler and the only one is GNU. Then again, GNU is a decent enough compiler and runs on almost all platforms so it's not a huge deal. If you have really performance-critical code paths you can always write them in plain C with your vendor compiler and link to them.
I think a better idea would have been to keep the cable as public infrastructure and rent it to any interested telecom at the same price
But then you make the government maintain the last-mile infrastructure which they will do with as much diligence and efficiency as they have shown in their maintenance of the roadways. That is to say, not much of either.
In most cases the incumbent electric utility owns the so-called "telephone poles." You can tell this because they usually have a little numbered metal plaque on them with the name of the company who owns them. If you want to run your non-electric (e.g. cable/telephone) lines on them you simply pay them rent. They already have the poles and you're not competing with them for business so it's a nice additional revenue stream for them and they'll be more than happy to accommodate you. That's exactly how the cable companies got started 20-30 years ago.
Granted there is still an awful lot of capital cost to running all of your last-mile lines but that's only a monetary barrier to entry which is a normal part of starting many businesses. It's easily recoupable over a number of years by simply retaining customers whose houses you ran lines to. Eventually you can pay back your investors plus interest and everyone is happy.
There are contracts in the UK, but the cancellation fee is usually quite modest (around £30-50, which is equivalent at the present exchange rate to ~$60-100).
That's about what the carriers in the U.S. charge for early termination.
And to be honest, you don't have to pay it. Remember the contract is between two parties. If they weren't providing service to your satisfaction then you are totally free to switch to another carrier. The company themselves will hound you for a bit and you will tell them you're not going to pay them since you weren't satisfied with their service and that you feel they didn't uphold their end of the contract. They'll then probably send it to a debt collector. You'll tell him you weren't satisfied with the company's service and thus are not going to pay him. He'll tell you he'll put a mark on your credit. You tell him to go right ahead and do that and be prepared for a defamation lawsuit for damaging your otherwise spotless credit record. Just hiring an attorney for one hour to dismiss the case will cost him more than he can possibly collect from you. The U.S. is not a loser-pays legal system like the U.K. so he knows he'll have to pay his lawyer even if he wins the dismissal motion.
Worst case: you get a bad mark on your credit. If your credit is otherwise good, it doesn't even matter.
Seriously though.. use the legal system to your advantage. Notice that you don't even need to file the damn suit and clog up the court system. You only need threaten to. You are one debtor in thousands and you have a possibly reasonable case for not paying. You're not worth it to the debt collector. He paid pennies on the dollar to take on your debt. With all likelihood, he'll let it go.
I think that's an exaggeration. Even with 15 to 1 overselling it's still very likely to be far faster than dial-up. The real question is whether Comcast's service remains superior enough to the alternatives that they can justify their extra-high prices.
My guess is that unless they turn their act around quickly they will lose customers. Even the people who are not very tech savvy often have tech savvy friends. If their neighbor says to them, you know, I switched to [insert competitor] and I'm paying half as much and my connection doesn't stall out anymore then they are very likely to switch themselves. It will almost by necessity wind up being a tidal wave.
If Comcast's competitors are smart they'll start advertising against Comcast and spread the word that their service is a better value. Let's not forget that the free market brought us cable-modems in the first place. Entering the ISP market is difficult because you need to run lines. The cable companies already had the necessary rights to run lines which removed that barrier to entry. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to get local government approval to run new lines unless you are an incumbent. So it seems that the market competition is going to be effectively limited to the incumbent cable company vs. the incumbent phone company. It's not ideal but it's better than nothing and it's far better than the fake competition enshrined by government regulation forcing incumbent phone companies to open up their lines to competitors who are basically just paper-pushing companies.
That's why Verizon is pushing FIOS so hard. They have finally found the loophole in the law that let's them actually compete against cable companies to build a better infrastructure without being burdened by the bottom-feeder "alternative" phone companies.
A similar thing has happened in the electric power market. The "deregulation" (actually just a set of regulatory changes) of that industry forced power companies to open their transmission lines to competitors and to sell their power at wholesale rates to the paper-pushers. So now you can buy your power from Joe Blow's Fly By Night Power Inc. and save yourself half a cent per kWh. Great. One little problem though: Joe Blow has no incentive to invest in infrastructure and the incumbent has less incentive than it did before since the transmission infrastructure can no longer be really considered an asset to them. So then we get stupid shit like blackouts and brownouts. Hell, we even get incumbents with generation infrastructure realizing that they can make more money by artificially reducing supply to raise the wholesale market price and thus eat into the paper-pusher's profits.
Sorry about the long rant but I'm getting really sick of people saying we need to increase regulation of these things. Look: Either fully regulate it (i.e. to the point of completely overseeing the company's financials and infrastructure plans) or don't. Do it half-assed and the fake "markets" you create will be played by smart business people with no ethics.
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Not sure what you mean by this. You still obviously use the built-in Windows wireless on the clients, no different from a coffee shop or a hotel and even easier since I didn't have the stupid little initial splash page that most of those have. Then you just run a VPN on top of that. Since the people with laptops had to know how to use the VPN when they were offsite (e.g. hotels, coffee shops, whatever) it was very easy to train them just to think of our wireless network as being offsite.
There was one other thing though. You could connect to the e-mail server without a VPN at all. So most users didn't even bother to fire up the VPN since they were really only interested in being able to get their e-mail and work with local files on their laptops.
Where I last worked I set up one wireless network. It was completely open (no encryption at all) and firewalled to limit what you could do with it. You could then fire up the VPN client (the same one you'd use if you were totally offsite like in a hotel) and you'd have access to the internal network.
It really wasn't that hard to set up at all. We needed the VPN for offsite users anyway and so it seemed logical that wireless could simply be treated as if it were any other offsite network. When I set it up, WEP had already been proven mostly broken and WPA didn't exist yet. And what's the difference? Since it's a separate network you can treat it like any other open network. You get no illusion of security. Plus any random joe visiting us could hop right on the network with no trouble at all.
I do a similar thing at home actually. My router has an Atheros-based PCI card in it. I run it in master mode (which is unfortunately still only available when using MadWifi) and give it its own IP space. The firewall rules simply don't allow traffic to/from the wired network and the wireless network. If I need to get to my fileserver I fire up the VPN.
Oh noes, some idiot sysadmin accidently sent my e-mail to the FBI. Someone call a congressional hearing.
If it's that confidential that someone else seeing it would be a serious problem, use encryption. There's no way they accidently get copies of your crypto keys. Better yet, don't send it in an e-mail, don't write it in a letter, and don't say it over the phone. If it really needs to be kept a secret, have a face to face meeting. If it doesn't need to be kept that much of a secret (and 99% of things don't) then some lackey at the FBI knowing about it is not going to be a problem.
Yes he did. And that was exactly the point of his e-mail. He got paid very well while we were paying him. I don't believe he landed us a single contract! He had the dubious honor of being one of maybe 2 or 3 people to be fired in the past decade.
As for references.. well, what can you do? Quoting that e-mail would potentially open up the company to a defamation suit so that's not an option. Not to mention that you don't really want to make it well-known that you hired a con man. As far as the company is concerned, they got rid of the guy and that alone is good enough. If someone else hires him, that's their problem.
You did read the article right? It wasn't the FBI that screwed up. The FBI caught the mistake that the company's sysadmin made when setting up the eavesdropping.
Yes, it can happen again without too much effort. What are you going to do to fix it? Send the FBI in to set up the eavesdropping themselves so the sysadmin doesn't screw it up? Keep in mind we're talking about a run of the mill court-ordered warrant here. It's a very standard and very legal way to gather evidence. This story has very little if anything at all to do with post-9/11 surveillance or FISA or anything else that might be questionable or debatable. No where in the article does it say that the surveillance was set up as part of a FISA warrant which leads me to believe that the Times reporter is trying to feign a connection for scare value.
I hate to say it but I think the debate is pretty much closed on court-ordered warrants. If the court orders them and you don't have any legal argument to squash the order then you have to comply with it or be found in contempt of court. There's nothing really secretive about the process either, except ideally to the person who's being surveilled.
Funny. Obviously it's not routine at all so the chances of making a mistake are even greater. You don't need to file it in some secret folder though. It's no secret at all that when the government produces a valid warrant you need to comply with it or be held in contempt of court. And if I were the sysadmin, I'd be looking through the e-mail myself, not just sending it to the government. If the government is that interested in it then something very wrong is most likely to be going on and I'd like to know about it if it's happening on my network.
Where I used to work we occasionally set up our own eavesdropping of mails. For example, when a top-level employee who no one trusted was about to be fired we archived all of his mail and put in some hooks so the big boss's could read all of it. Upon reading the guy's comments like "Man, I soaked these suckers for so much cash making them think I could sell their services" it only reaffirmed the big boss's decision to fire the guy for nonperformance.
Also very good just in case he tried to come back with some bogus suit about being unjustly fired. E-mail is not a private means of communication, particularly corporate e-mail.
Seriously. What's the story here? Some sysadmin who apparently didn't know what he was doing put the wrong thing in his e-mail server configuration and inadvertently sent all e-mail for the entire domain instead of e-mail for one address.
Mistakes happen all the time. The appropriate thing to look for is whether the mistake was caught and corrected in a timely fashion. It seems that the mistake was caught and corrected in a timely fashion which basically makes this a story about an everyday occurrence.
This story might make a good one for some sysadmin journal reminding sysadmins to document policies that help ensure mistakes do not happen and if they do are caught by the company itself instead of by the FBI. For example, a simple procedure would be to check the appropriate logs after changing the configuration to make sure the configuration is doing what it was intended to do.
Dude, that's just an EPIRB. It doesn't seem to say marine anywhere so I guess it's like half the price.
People seem to have mostly forgotten that this was actually happening. The terrorists of those years get glorified as dissenters because they mingled with people who were pure dissenters. It's a very good strategy for a criminal of that sort to mix up the issue to make law enforcement's job harder.
Reading jihadist materials from the internet is one of the ways that ordinary people become radicals. I'm sure your "information wants to be free" types will be out here defending it, but let's be honest, your average Muhammad isn't going to build his own bomb so he can ride the subway without reading instructions on how to do so. Racist skinheads also use online materials to self-radicalize, and I bet that nobody here would be against coming down hard on them.The best defense against this is to point out that it is propaganda. The police would have done much better to.. well, you know actually investigate the case. If they couldn't find that the students had any plans to do anything then they should have sat them down and talked with them about why these materials are dangerous. It's always the same modus operandi. Impressionable people are dissatisfied with their life in some way and are told that if they simply follow these teachings they'll be better off.
In fact, you show the clear reason why it's important to investigate these cases but to act on each one individually. You cannot just assume that any young muslim man who has read this stuff a few times has actually started believing it. You have to evaluate each person differently, perhaps even using psychologists to try to gauge whether the person is a terrorist trying to act like a student or really is just a student. You have to spend some time educating people. They could have maybe sent him to a tolerance class. You know, like make him sit down with a priest, a rabbi, and an imam and talk about what his religion (islam) means to him and why terrorism is not the answer.
They chose instead to proceed with a very weak case because they figured they could win it. And they did. Fortunately there is an appeals process and the appellate judge realized the whole thing stank. I suppose that is the nature of prosecutions though. If it looks like the law might apply and you figure you can get a jury to vote your way, you proceed with it.
I figure that most people on Slashdot have written at least a shell script or two in their life. Besides that, you don't have to qualify or anything to get an ADC account. I'm just pointing out that non-developers can use the service but that if they do they should follow the implicit rules and act like developers.
...and I'm not sure why you feel Slashdot is the place to be schooling folks on etiquette.Because from the looks of things around here, the majority of slashdotters are in need of a serious etiquette lesson?
Don't be too quick to judge though. With one foreign endpoint and one domestic endpoint you necessarily effectively spy on the domestic for those conversations. But the communication did cross our border and obviously the intention of the wiretap was not to spy on the domestic. Nor can any information gleaned from that spying ever be used in court. So the domestic is already protected. The suits against the phone companies are not to protect the domestics even though they claim they are.
It's sort of important to understand that these provisions against unwarranted search are in some ways intended to allow you to privately discuss the possibility of overthrowing the government, although certainly not by attacking it. But once you start talking about attacking it and particularly when you start involving foreigners in your plans it's clearly treason which is not at all protected. There's a fine line between the two. And often the decision as to which was which comes after the fact. Consider the failed second revolutionary war that people refer to as the civil war. Although it should be noted that none of the prominent people involved in that were convicted of treason, probably because it was not the Confederacy who attacked the U.S. but actually the other way around.
I stand corrected then. I probably should have phrased it as "If this is true, then that means ..."
Despite being fairly conservative I am against this retroactive immunity. Or perhaps it's because I'm fairly conservative that I'm against this retroactive immunity. GWB is not exactly a model conservative by any means.
If the wiretaps weren't illegal (and I am inclined to think they were legal) then there is no case. If the wiretaps were illegal then as you point out the phone companies still had to know it was illegal. Whether or not they are is still sort of up in the air. The President's lawyers are saying they are and were legal. So there are a lot of hurdles that these plaintiffs have to overcome already in order to successfully win their case.
Indeed you cannot. You are necessarily spying on both parties for that one conversation. The argument is that one endpoint being foreign makes it a foreign conversation. This is basically in line with past foreign surveillance (e.g. during WWII before FISA existed at all) so the argument cannot be discounted outright.
Besides that, imagine the case of some mob front group getting their phones tapped. For the sake of argument, say they run a dry cleaning business or something. If I call to see if my clothes are ready I am necessarily being spied on without a warrant even though a warrant exists for the tap on the dry cleaning business's phone. Taking your argument to its logical conclusion means that no eavesdropping could ever occur because they would not only have to have a warrant to spy on the mob-run business but also for every person who ever called in to it.
There are other protections for the party who was spied on indirectly. Namely, that law enforcement cannot use those recordings in court unless they can show that you were part of the conspiracy to begin with in which case the warrant applied to you as well, they just didn't specifically know it at the time. But if you were talking about some unrelated activity, even a criminal one, they'd have a hard time doing this. They'd even have a hard time getting a warrant to tap your phone based on this conversation. What are they going to do? Go to a judge and say "Your honor, we inadvertently stumbled upon John Doe having a conversation about unrelated criminal activity because we were tapping John Q. Public's phone?" Even if the judge grants their tap on your phone, a halfway decent lawyer can get that tossed.
It's no different for warrantless wiretaps. They have a wiretap on the foreigner. They cannot use this wiretap against you. And actually it's even more stringent because even if you did involve yourself in it there is no way that they can come back and retroactively apply the warrant to you due to conspiracy because no warrant existed. So in that respect, it's really in their best interest to get that warrant especially if they think non-foreigners are involved in the conspiracy.
Reality is that the situation is not as dire as some would have you believe. One of these cases in particular was brought by a lawyer who was conversing with his client overseas. Someone in the government inadvertently leaked the document that detailed a wiretap was in place for his client. He's brought the case to the court making the legal argument that he was tapped but the reality is that he's being paid by his client and he's not trying to do some noble thing he's just trying to keep his client off the hook. It's standard operating procedure for a lawyer to use every means potentially possible to help his client.
Right. Meaning that the this little retroactive immunity provision is a stupid political statement. The people with open suits now can simply appeal the dismissals (if they even occur at all) on these grounds and the cases will again proceed. Whether or not the cases are eventually ruled for or against the telecoms is another matter. My understanding of things is that the telecoms are claiming that they only actually spied on communications with at least one foreign endpoint even though the equipment necessarily has the ability to spy on any communications.
Remember that this is the Foreign Intelligence/Surveillance Act. If they did use it to spy on purely domestic communications without a warrant then they are probably guilty because they stepped outside the bounds of the law. Most of the cases though seem to be brought by people who were indeed having an international conversation so I think it may be difficult to win these cases against the telecoms.
This is not bug reporting for random people. This is bug reporting for people who develop software on OS X systems. To use it you need an Apple ID and I believe you need to specifically sign up for at least the free ADC account (which is like two or three clicks if you already have an Apple ID) in order to use the bug reporter.
They mention purchasing tech support incidents because if you are a software developer and have a more immediate need to talk with someone at Apple then you need to buy a support incident. Bug reporter is a 1-way street. You tell them. It's free. That's it. If you want to get advice on how to work around it then you need to buy the support incident.
Of course you get 2 incidents included with even the base ($500 annual) Select package which also includes a 20% discount on system hardware (limited to 1 complete system) and a 10% discount on accessory purchases made at the same time. So if you are a developer this is great because you almost always want the super-fast hardware that costs enough (e.g. > $2500) that your Select membership pays for itself and you get 2 support incidents and a bunch of other stuff (seeds, etc.) for free.
As I said, be respectful since this is like a semi-direct line to Apple's developers. It's for one developer to another.
I do apologize. I was treating OP as if he was an American and thus should have learned of this in primary school. Obviously he was a Swede since he identified himself as such. And for what it's worth, most Americans wouldn't remember that they'd learned it in primary school, much to our detriment.
The prior system would of course be the very old (pre-Norman) Engish system and the systems generally used throughout Europe, even today. So give the Brits credit since it is English Common Law that brought about the jury trial. It was the U.S. though that codified it in its constitution and almost immediately refined it in the 7th amendment to the constitution.
Doing some limited googling it seems that the big change with the U.S. system was that trial by jury is the default in the U.S. system whereas trial by jury had to be requested under Common Law. Under the U.S. system you can request a "bench trial" meaning that the judge alone will rule on the case. Therefore, if you feel the evidence does not show your guilt but a jury may find you guilty because they don't like you you can waive your right to a jury trial and have a judge decide the case purely on its merits. Therefore, if you like the Swedish (and much of the rest of Europe) system you can simply request it.
I wish I could think of it now but at least I recall being told probably way back in middle school or something that the right to a trial by jury was considered of utmost importance to prevent political imprisonment. That is, people were being imprisoned by the English for treason with only English-appointed judges making this verdict.
Remember that the U.S. system is explicitly designed to allow another revolution. In a sort of queer way though the very things that allow for a revolution allow us to avoid a revolution. Reagan commented on this in his January 1981 inaugural speech which is probably one of the greatest speeches of all time.
It should be noted though that revolution did happen once in our history and failed. Historians later referred to it as the civil war which is somewhat inaccurate.
Hmm.. that does sound like a bug. Without spaces when you launch an application then switch to something else the windows for the new application will typically come up underneath whatever you switched to. It's a nice little feature so you can start a hefty app starting while you go do something else.
Have you filed a "radar"? Simply log in to https://bugreport.apple.com with your Apple ID and fill out the information as accurately and concisely as possible. Don't be a dick about it. Just calmly explain that it is interrupting your workflow and that you would suggest it have the same behavior it does when not using spaces. That is to say that the app opens silently if you've proceeded to do something else on the system since deciding to launch the app.
You may not get a resolution anytime soon and you may not get any feedback for a long time. Generally a bug that stays open for a long time means that the Apple developers are working on it. Unfortunately you cannot see any comments they make to each other but such is the nature of things. Most likely, your bug will be filed as a duplicate. That's ok, it just means that Apple is already aware of it and already has an active bug report for it. By reporting it though, you let Apple know that you care about it.
Unless you report it, Apple cannot know. They don't go trolling slashdot for comments like this.
You are apparently just displaying your ignorance. Remember that the U.S. justice system with juries was an improvement over the prior justice system that had no juries. The idea is that if 12 average people acquit you, you are acquitted. There can be no retrial. If 12 average people convict you the judge still has the power to overturn it and acquit you. It's a rarity but it does happen when the judge looks at the facts of the case and decides that the prosecution did not make a sound legal argument. Note though that to a judge circumstantial evidence is still evidence so I think Hans is probably going to be found guilty. The majority of cases are based on circumstantial evidence. It's not like criminals are going to help the prosecution make the case by leaving all sorts of clear evidence of the crime.
Occasionally this means that people get acquitted for something they are very likely to have done. And of course sometimes people get convicted for something they did not do. But you cannot blame the jury system for that. That is no more likely to happen in the jury system vs. the non-jury system. The bias is heavily in favor of the defendant. Both a jury and a judge have to convict a man. If either one acquits him, he's free.
And that, frankly, is about the best we can do. Some people argue that judges should be appointed and not elected so they don't have to bow to political demands and indeed our Supreme Court is stocked with lifetime appointees. At the local level though it's far more common for judges to be elected. Even if the jury convicts a man and the judge does not acquit him because it would be dangerous to his political career there is still a chance that an appellate court will overturn it. And if that fails there's a chance that the state's supreme court will overturn it. And if that fails there's a chance that the federal Supreme Court will overturn it.
You have to be very guilty to be convicted of anything in this country. Even if you are found guilty there are a lot of chances to get it overturned. And if you cannot afford an attorney there are thousands of them that you can contact who will take on your appeal pro bono. Reiser may even get one of these attorneys after he is convicted. And he may not be convicted if the jury doesn't believe the lab worker who changed her story.
Um, no. OS X will not normally boot on a regular EFI machine. The Apple-supplied bootloader is an EFI program but it is located in the HFS+ volume, not the little EFI FAT partition. Even if you were to copy the boot.efi program to an EFI system's EFI partition you still wouldn't be able to boot OS X because boot.efi requires that it be able to read HFS+ volumes using Apple's HFS+ EFI service. You might have luck extracting the HFS+ driver from an Apple's ROM and putting it into that same little EFI FAT partition.
Netkas's "PC EFI" booter is nothing more than the Darwin/x86 bootloader with a few enhancements. Basically he took a source release I had made months earlier, fixed a few bugs, and released it (binary only) a few days before I finally got the gumption to do a new source release with the bugs fixed. Since then he's added a few things like GPT support and the ability to hard-code a device-properties blob to help with graphics card issues. Neither my booter nor his has anything at all to do with EFI. The OS X kernel does not really care much about EFI aside from needing a couple of simple data structures and a handful of stub functions.
Of course, even with my booter or his booter or using Apple's own boot.efi and HFS+ EFI driver on an EFI system you still run into the issue that Apple's binaries are encrypted. Granted it's trivial to write an alternative decryption routine that provides its own keys instead of grabbing them from the machine. Code to do this is widely available so OS X is for the most part fully hacked.
Still, once you hack it it theoretically works indefinitely. It doesn't go checking with Apple. It doesn't disable itself after a few days. It cannot do this because a real Mac does not do this.
Yes, of course this is the case. But I prefer to turn it on its head. The government acts like a large corporation with no competition. At least there's a chance that a large corporation may have competition, possibly in the future even if it does not now. When the government gets involved competition dies.
This said, most newcomer telecoms in Germany are not eager to lay their own cable. How much of that is due to lack of money, and how much of it is due to legal problems (right of way and such?) I don't know. Might have to research that a bit more...They are adverse to laying their own cable here too. Why wouldn't they be? With politicians so willing to take bribes, err sorry campaign contributions, to force incumbents to rent out their last mile infrastructure any startup in its right mind will go the route with far less capital outlay. Politicians are a hell of a lot cheaper than building infrastructure. Guess which one most startups choose?
Don't get suckered into the PR campaign by these companies that its too expensive to build their own infrastructure. The telephone companies themselves did it. That's why they have their infrastructure. The cable companies came along later and did it. That's why they have their infrastructure. It's clearly not impossible to build it nor impossible to find investors who will invest in it. That said, I'm sure the investors have a hand in encouraging these companies to attempt to pay off politicians before doing a huge capital outlay for infrastructure.
Socialism is a mental disease. It plays on the fear, uncertainty, and doubt of people and tries to convince them that certain things aren't reasonably possible so we must have the government involved. It has had the same M.O. for years now. The only defense against it is to point out that socialism is not really for the benefit of the people but is instead a quid pro quo that politicians engage in with companies.
I would estimate there has been about 10x inflation from the mid-60s to today. Your 30 cent gas now costs $3.00. Your $1800 car is now $18,000. Your $5 doctor's visit is now $50. Oh shit.. wait a second.
Which of these industries is backed by a government program paying suppliers/providers of the good/service a set amount? Oh yes. That's right. Health care. The medicare/medicaid have maximum amounts they will pay for a given procedure. That is, they set a price ceiling. But what happens is that no provider (i.e. doctor) in his right mind will set his price any lower than what the government will pay. If the customer (i.e. patient) complains, he can simply say that the government is willing to pay that much, why isn't his insurance company?
The government health-care programs we have have thus created an effective price floor by setting a price ceiling.
Now.. to explain the inflation you really need look no further than the Johnson administration. I just did a quick Google on this so I could have something to back this up. I found this gem from Time magazine in 1966. Everyone with any brains knew what he was doing was going to lead to massive inflation. It did. Yet for some reason the reporters and journalists of today are very hush hush about this clear correlation between massive government spending and inflation. The economic theories predict it as a cause-effect relationship and we have historical evidence clearly showing the correlation. Yet no one wants to talk about that.
You also clearly fail to note that the minimum wage is and always has been a bullshit number. It is federally mandated and totally fails to reflect the price differences between regions. States or even smaller localities like cities are of course free to set their own minimum wages and if it's such a great idea then you'd think more of them would be doing it. Granted some have.
Anyway, to get to the point. Currency does not necessarily have to be backed by a generally useless resource to be valuable. Those pushing for a silver or a gold standard fail to note that when new deposits are found the prices of those resources drops dramatically. Consider the ads on TV that tell you how much silver has risen in value over the last 20 years. What they fail to tell you is that it had a significantly higher value just before their chart begins.
I appreciate Ron Paul for his steadfast refusal to compromise his ideals but I don't appreciate him for the same reason. He looks at the Iraq war and claims it is an unjustifiable military expense. He doesn't even consider the potential benefits of it. Some would say that Bush & Co. didn't appreciate the economic impact that waging a war would have. That may be true and if it is, Ron Paul's position is actually no better or worse than Bush's. I personally feel though that Bush is keenly aware of the cost of his war yet passionately feels that waging it is in our country's best interests. Plenty of people don't see it that way. I'm not even necessarily sure I see it that way. But I am not so foolish as to discount every reason Bush had as obviously unimportant. He has said it time and again that he felt allowing Saddam to break his peace treaty would send the wrong message to the world, and particularly to that region, that you can break an agreement with us and get away with it. That, to me, is just good sense unless of course the cost of standing up is too high. And that's where you can maybe fault Bush for probably low-balling the cost estimate. It wouldn't be the first time a leader (governmental, business, or otherwise) made a bad decision, and it won't be the last. The world will keep turning, trust me.
As for Ron Paul's other positions. Well, again, what can I say. In principle I like the idea of getting rid of a whole slew of bullshit social programs. But in practice to do so overnight as Ron Paul has proposed would like
Not ever having used SOM I can't compare it directly but it seems to me that the basic idea is to have an object model with a hard to break ABI (i.e. you can add methods without breaking it) and interoperability with other languages.
Apple has distilled various Objective-C bridging efforts into a common bridge library that is now used by PyObjC (which predates the Apple/NeXT merger) and RubyCocoa and is slated for use with .NET. By virtue of being able to mix Objective-C into a C or C++ file (more or less simply by changing the extension from c to m or from cc/cpp to mm) you instantly get interoperability with C and C++. If you absolutely need to call Objective-C from plain C or C++ you can use the underlying objc_msgSend call.
Both the PyObjC and RubyCocoa bridges allow you to implement Objective-C classes in Python or Ruby so as long as you can stomach writing your interface declarations in Objective-C you can get most of the way there to the holy grail of cross-language object interoperability.
If you think about it, it's not much different from any other object model it's just that Objective-C happens to have a direct implementation in Objective-C whereas COM and SOM don't. The biggest downside of course is that you do need an Objective-C compiler and the only one is GNU. Then again, GNU is a decent enough compiler and runs on almost all platforms so it's not a huge deal. If you have really performance-critical code paths you can always write them in plain C with your vendor compiler and link to them.
But then you make the government maintain the last-mile infrastructure which they will do with as much diligence and efficiency as they have shown in their maintenance of the roadways. That is to say, not much of either.
In most cases the incumbent electric utility owns the so-called "telephone poles." You can tell this because they usually have a little numbered metal plaque on them with the name of the company who owns them. If you want to run your non-electric (e.g. cable/telephone) lines on them you simply pay them rent. They already have the poles and you're not competing with them for business so it's a nice additional revenue stream for them and they'll be more than happy to accommodate you. That's exactly how the cable companies got started 20-30 years ago.
Granted there is still an awful lot of capital cost to running all of your last-mile lines but that's only a monetary barrier to entry which is a normal part of starting many businesses. It's easily recoupable over a number of years by simply retaining customers whose houses you ran lines to. Eventually you can pay back your investors plus interest and everyone is happy.
That's about what the carriers in the U.S. charge for early termination.
And to be honest, you don't have to pay it. Remember the contract is between two parties. If they weren't providing service to your satisfaction then you are totally free to switch to another carrier. The company themselves will hound you for a bit and you will tell them you're not going to pay them since you weren't satisfied with their service and that you feel they didn't uphold their end of the contract. They'll then probably send it to a debt collector. You'll tell him you weren't satisfied with the company's service and thus are not going to pay him. He'll tell you he'll put a mark on your credit. You tell him to go right ahead and do that and be prepared for a defamation lawsuit for damaging your otherwise spotless credit record. Just hiring an attorney for one hour to dismiss the case will cost him more than he can possibly collect from you. The U.S. is not a loser-pays legal system like the U.K. so he knows he'll have to pay his lawyer even if he wins the dismissal motion.
Worst case: you get a bad mark on your credit. If your credit is otherwise good, it doesn't even matter.
Seriously though.. use the legal system to your advantage. Notice that you don't even need to file the damn suit and clog up the court system. You only need threaten to. You are one debtor in thousands and you have a possibly reasonable case for not paying. You're not worth it to the debt collector. He paid pennies on the dollar to take on your debt. With all likelihood, he'll let it go.
I think that's an exaggeration. Even with 15 to 1 overselling it's still very likely to be far faster than dial-up. The real question is whether Comcast's service remains superior enough to the alternatives that they can justify their extra-high prices.
My guess is that unless they turn their act around quickly they will lose customers. Even the people who are not very tech savvy often have tech savvy friends. If their neighbor says to them, you know, I switched to [insert competitor] and I'm paying half as much and my connection doesn't stall out anymore then they are very likely to switch themselves. It will almost by necessity wind up being a tidal wave.
If Comcast's competitors are smart they'll start advertising against Comcast and spread the word that their service is a better value. Let's not forget that the free market brought us cable-modems in the first place. Entering the ISP market is difficult because you need to run lines. The cable companies already had the necessary rights to run lines which removed that barrier to entry. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to get local government approval to run new lines unless you are an incumbent. So it seems that the market competition is going to be effectively limited to the incumbent cable company vs. the incumbent phone company. It's not ideal but it's better than nothing and it's far better than the fake competition enshrined by government regulation forcing incumbent phone companies to open up their lines to competitors who are basically just paper-pushing companies.
That's why Verizon is pushing FIOS so hard. They have finally found the loophole in the law that let's them actually compete against cable companies to build a better infrastructure without being burdened by the bottom-feeder "alternative" phone companies.
A similar thing has happened in the electric power market. The "deregulation" (actually just a set of regulatory changes) of that industry forced power companies to open their transmission lines to competitors and to sell their power at wholesale rates to the paper-pushers. So now you can buy your power from Joe Blow's Fly By Night Power Inc. and save yourself half a cent per kWh. Great. One little problem though: Joe Blow has no incentive to invest in infrastructure and the incumbent has less incentive than it did before since the transmission infrastructure can no longer be really considered an asset to them. So then we get stupid shit like blackouts and brownouts. Hell, we even get incumbents with generation infrastructure realizing that they can make more money by artificially reducing supply to raise the wholesale market price and thus eat into the paper-pusher's profits.
Sorry about the long rant but I'm getting really sick of people saying we need to increase regulation of these things. Look: Either fully regulate it (i.e. to the point of completely overseeing the company's financials and infrastructure plans) or don't. Do it half-assed and the fake "markets" you create will be played by smart business people with no ethics.