Is it? Are you a constitutional expert? Is it unconstitutional to collect income taxes? (I see this as the same thing)
Well, it was unconstitutional until they passed the 16th amendment. Unless, of course, one believes that they decided to pass that amendment "for the lulz".
There is a reason that we have an amendment procedure in the Constitution. If we really feel that it should be legal to have the Federal government force people to obtain health insurance, then an amendment is required. I know the 10th amendment isn't popular anymore, but that doesn't mean it is void.
Of course, the Feds could always use coercion (that is popular) to force the states to fall in line. This is what they have done with RealID (threaten states who don't comply with denial of their citizens access to domestic air travel without a passport), or forcing states to increase the minimum drinking age to 21 by threatening to cut off their highway funds:
Less than a week after [the Louisiana Supreme Court] decision, the Clinton Administration warned Louisiana to find a way to reverse the ruling. The state will lose $17 million in Federal highway money if it does not comply with the 1986 National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which requires states to set their legal drinking age at 21.
The Constitution doesn't illegalize coercion. Threatening highway funding is very popular. It's dirty to sidestep the Constitution with coercion, but that's life in the post-Progressive era--government money always comes with coercion. The best way to avoid being coerced is to never accept the money in the first place.
Alliant Credit Union allows scanned image upload deposit ("eDeposit Plus"). I am hopeful they will jump on the smartphone app bandwagon, though one imagines that a user could take the requisite photographs and then upload them via the Alliant eDeposit interface even today.
Tangential rant: I am in the same situation as you. USAA burned me on the Deposit@Home service with their misleading website. I opened a USAA credit card *solely* to satisfy the "line of credit" requirement for D@H (yes, the site said a credit card was sufficient). After the cc account was opened, I still could not use D@H. I called and confirmed that their site was incorrect and that I had to qualify for insurance coverage as well. I immediately closed the now extraneous cc account. Wasted time and an entry on my credit report.
I have made Alliant my primary account now. They offer better interest rates than USAA (1.78% currently on checking accounts) and a free quarterly FICO-type score from Experian. To contrast, USAA has a better Bill Pay interface and EBPP; concordantly, I still use both institutions.
Think of this example: someone sets up vending machines powered by solar panels in every community, and these machines print wood shaped to order for very low prices, and the machines take next-to-no labor to keep going. Basically, what you outlined, only even better (maybe the devices just suck carbon and water from the air to make the wood). Your company can't compete with the prices and quality and speedy delivery, so everyone you employ is laid off. The owner of this enterprise, who owns all the patents and who gets all the money, decides to pile it under his or her mattress[...]
Dude: I am no forensics master, but aren't you violating a basic premise of debate by countering the GP's actual example with a speculative future scenario in which you cherry-picked the parameters to bolster your agenda?
If that is a legitimate debate tactic, then one presumes he could counter with a similarly cherry-picked scenario where he and his firm counter the structural shift in their industry by developing "programs" for these devices to create "fad wood cut designs of the week" (ala iPhone). He would then consolidate his firm's massive profits and, of course, go on to personally develop economical nanotechnology and nuclear fusion--thereby ending scarcity for the entire world!
...not as nice of a tactic when used both sides, it seems.
Aside from that, it seems that most of your concerns miss the point that most of your future scenarios result in one of two general outcomes. One possibility is that the trend away from agriculture to manufacturing, and then away from manufacturing to services, and then away from services to "aaaa! no more work for Americans!" is economically sustainable at a national level, then there is no problem. In such a case, the general wealth level of the nation (and the society at large) is high enough that we are borderline post-scarcity (otherwise, markets for 'new things/services' would emerge). That is, one way or another, we continue to be to afford to pay other countries to "make stuff" for us. Don't know how we would manage to do that, but good for us if so.
However, what if such a trend is unsustainable? I believe this to be the more likely case. In that case, China (et al) stops feeling the urge to continue to inflate our standard of living by floating our colossal trade deficits. I mean, what are we giving today them besides US Treasury IOU's? (the fact that they can trade US dollars for oil is notwithstanding, because eventually the world will decide that the farce has gone on long enough if they value nothing we produce) Okay, so, now the value of our dollar plummets, we aren't getting our market flooded by goods that are manufactured at prices with which we can't compete domestically, and then suddenly we start finding it is cost-effective to manufacture in the US again.
Of course, everyone in the US is poorer on average in the latter scenario, because free trade tends to be ruthlessly efficient--and inefficiency is expensive. For example, it isn't efficient to pay a union worker $40/hour + benefits to screw on jar lids, when a robot could do it much faster, more accurately, and more cheaply. Are you aware that you share the same concerns as the original Luddites? The structural economic shifts in efficiency brought by technological progress have been beneficial to the economy & society as a whole, and there are two centuries of evidence to support this.
Of course, individual actors must "evolve or die", just as the buggywhip manufacturers needed to migrate into manufacturing automobile tires (or bondage gear, depending on their marketing department's forecasts). Anyone can predict dire economic scenarios due to technological advances, but you will forgive me if I believe that they are unlikely given the overwhelming preponderance of the historical evidence.
Bullshit. "Big Pharma" doesn't make up disorders. They make drugs and then test which disorders they might be able to target.
...and then popularize the disorders that are matches.
"Do you have P.A.D.? Nearly eleventy billion Americans have this potentially deadly disorder. Why have you never heard of this before? We at the *cough*bristolmeyerssquibb*cough* P.A.D. Coalition are trying to get the word out about P.A.D. now that we found that Plavix can be used to treat it! Call your doctor *now*... you may already be dying of something no one has ever heard of before last year!"
That pretty much summarizes the TV commercial I saw last week. Wag the dog, indeed.
As someone who holds two B.S. degrees {computer engineering, computer science}, I take issue with the GP's statement. The typical CS student does not learn about transistor fanout, CMOS logic, VLSI, etc.
CS is derived from St. Turing and his universal machine. CE covers how to make (and use) one of those.
Thus if all your guns and ammunition are manufactured within the state you live, they can't bring a federal case.
Well, despite your assertion, that's exactly what they did in the Stewart case. Anyway, your arguments seem to be summarized by your final statement:
Which is that the federal government is in its rights to prevent the creation of an interstate market for an illegal good.
You beg the question... under which Constitutionally-enumerated power does the Federal government have the ability to designate machine guns or even drugs as illegal? Oh, right, the original theory they used was the interstate commerce clause--thus making your argument circularly referential.
Case in point: back in the beginning of the 20th century, the Powers That Be decided that drugs are bad (mm'kay?). They hadn't invented twisting the commerce clause beyond belief, so they attempted to tax it out of existence. That wasn't very effective as a total ban, so they decided to escalate.
Think of Prohibition. When it was imposed, Constitutional interpretation indicated that an entire amendment was necessary to ban alcohol. In today's world, this could be accomplished by a simple law under the twisted commerce clause theory.
Actually, I misspoke: in today's world, all it would take is a bureaucrat making a decision, much less a law or (god forbid) an amendment. Look what happened with MDMA -- the DEA criminalized its possession (ie. Schedule I) by regulatory fiat in 1985. No law, not even a Congressional debate.
We have certainly come a long way in Constitutional interpretation, and not necessarily in an intellectually honest fashion.
Everything is defined as interstate commerce now, at least when the Feds want it to be. Allow me to cite two Supreme Court cases:
Gonzales v. Raich - A woman in California grew medical marijuana (legal in CA) and gave it away for free, solely within California. This was defined as interstate commerce in the decision.
US v. Stewart - Stewart personally designed and built his own homebrew machine guns, not for sale. After he was busted by the feds, he lost the case but won on appeal. The government appealed the case to the Supreme Court. It was remanded by the Supreme Court back to the appellate court for reconsideration "in light of" Raich. This means that the Supreme Court considers Stewart's actions to be interstate commerce too.
In conclusion, "interstate commerce" is now de facto defined as "anything the Federal government wants to regulate, even if there is no commercial or interstate aspect". Naturally, I imagine that this flexible definition is reserved for the Feds use only--no doubt states will have to continue to use the actual definition (ie. what the Constitution actually means).
I do have extensive experience with "both sides" of HIPAA (provider and consumer), and I have several specific rejoinders to your reply. I had a long reply written out; however, because I neglected to choose a completely random username way back in the day I deleted the response to avoid being haunted by the long-tail of the Internet.
I do not expect anyone to lend credence to my allegations without further specifics, but I accept that.
However, may I ask if you are in academia or in the corporate realm?
Yes, I am (and was) aware of the penalties and fines involved. That is why I didn't press the issue: though I was embarrassed and very distressed at the several, unrelated disclosures (yes, they were clear-cut HIPAA violations), I didn't rate the tort as worth a quarter million dollars plus the inconvenience of a court case (which, of course, would cause further embarrassment).
The particular circumstances of both violations were related to background circumstances that I doubt will ever change, despite the law now having additional teeth. I was unwilling to make pariahs of otherwise upstanding physicians over this particular circumstance, despite what happened in my case.
Anyway, I am very cynical of HIPAA. It has never protected me from health care providers making disclosures to third parties when I wanted (and was entitled to) privacy, and it just adds inconvenience when I want to do simple things like having a family member pick up one of my prescriptions ("Oh my god! We could never allow that, even if we had written authorization on file! Think of your privacy!").
So... what did HIPAA accomplish? Well, now when I go to a pharmacy, they force me to sign a HIPAA disclosure/waiver before they will fulfill my prescriptions. What does this disclosure say? Stuff along the lines of "here is our policy on how we will violate your privacy when we feel like it. Don't you feel better knowing?". Of course, I could choose not to sign, but then they won't fill my prescriptions. Ah, being presented with a Hobson's choice over medical necessities always warms my heart about the human spirit.
"Blessed are the coercers, for surely they will fuck you over while smiling at you."
Anyway, to my point: yes, you are protected by HIPAA. However, my expectation is that they will just circumvent it by a click-through EULA waiver. No waiver, no play. There you go. Hobson would be proud.
On top of that the creator of this site was born and raised in Holland
Holland, Michigan, United States. Home of a wooden shoe outlet, a Delft pottery outlet, and the Tulip Time festival... don't ask me why I know firsthand.
No, since Dropbox only transmit the parts of a file that changed.
The way most encryption works, if you change a piece of the plaintext file, you get a wildly different ciphertext file.[...]I don't know if this is the case with Truecrypt's volumes, but I bet that it is.
I have done what was described: rsyncing a TrueCrypt volume file that changes over time. Yes, there is an "expansion factor", but I would peg it at 2 - 5x the size of the diff within the encrypted volume. To restate: this scheme is entirely tenable with TrueCrypt volumes and rsync. A good binary diff capability is required, but that is the raison d'etre of rsync. I have never used Dropbox, so I have no idea how their deltas work for binary files.
I was originally of the same opinion as you. I anticipated some sort of avalanche effect from small changes in the ciphertext. However, this isn't the case for several reasons -- first, you can read about TrueCrypt's crypto modes of operation and how the blocks work. Second, you can reason that TrueCrypt would be completely unusable if writing a single byte near the beginning of an encrypted hard drive/volume caused a chain reaction that would require the entire partition to be re-encrypted due to cipher block chaining cascading to the whole drive.
I don't claim to be a cryptography expert (perhaps someone can further enlighten me), but it seems that CBC would break down in a disk encryption scheme if there weren't a new IV rather frequently (for the same reason as I mentioned above). Of course, TrueCrypt uses XTS mode, so it seems that I am just idly musing at this point and should click Submit.
Perhaps. However, you will excuse me if I don't give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that this product is not the equivalent of a modchip or root exploit... it just happened that Datel managed to reverse engineer the memory card protocol.
Don't you think Microsoft would have smacked Datel with a DMCA C&D/lawsuit if they could have? This alone should be proof enough that the device is based on simple reverse engineering.
And people throw the word anti-competitive about way too much.
That may be, but this certainly seems like a straightforward case of anticompetitive practices.
Caveat emptor. Your real problem is stores not honouring consumer rights by allowing you to return a item.
Having strong libertarian sentiments, I would really like to go with you on the caveat emptor/personal responsibility angle. However, I just don't perceive it this way... from my perspective, it seems that I purchased a product (the XBox) and now as a condition of my continued use of its primary, reasonably expected function, I am required to accept Microsoft's unilateral ability to change the terms of use at their whim. There is a reason that contracts of adhesion are so limited in jurisprudence. Please note that I am not referring to XBox Live *service*; I am referring to the continued use of the console *product* with current and future games. Again, if this would not eventually become a mandatory "upgrade" for offline play, there would be no problem.
Actually, if Microsoft offered me a remedy of allowing me to return the XBox due to their unilateral change of the terms of use of the product I purchased--even disregarding all the games and accessories I have--I would consider this roughly fair.
It wouldn't change my opinion that they are sleazy for deliberately breaking compatibility, which would also be a decision factor when considering any future dealings with Microsoft as a vendor.
(I award myself 7 bonus points for making it through this reply and resisting the urges to use car analogies)
The problem only comes when you try to connect to connect to Microsoft's hardware (Xbox Live) or when you're offered free software (Dashboard upgrade)
Everyone seems to be missing a fundamental issue: okay, let's say I am fine with not being able to connect to XBox Live (lame), but where exactly do I end up when I purchase a new game that demands I upgrade in order to play at all, even offline (like CoD:World at War did)? Now I get to choose whether to lose money on the non-returnable, opened game or lose access to all my saved data and render my memory hardware useless? Swell.
I actually have one of these Datel devices and an XBox Arcade. My opinion was that this was a better value than purchasing an overpriced/undercapacity HDD. Micro SDHC is cheap, and I could swap them out if I needed more capacity.
This kind of thing is completely unreasonable: they are intentionally locking out this device for no other reason than to be anti-competitive. At some point, these kind of antics from a manufacturer eclipse any amount of fun that was being had with the item or service. I have reached this point.
This marks the beginning of the end of my use of the XBox platform for gaming. My current games will work, offline. I can still stream video to it (in a limited fashion) with Vuze, so I will keep using the XBox for that until I get a "real" device for that purpose. It goes without saying that I won't be spending any more money on games, hardware, accessories, or XBox Live--the XBox is going to be gathering dust sooner rather than later.
The adage is to vote with your money, right? Fine: never again, Microsoft.
You mean like this example from NASA's own site? I found that in 15 seconds on google.
Where do you think they would send the ISS? A Lagrange point? Please.
It is going to be thrown away just after it is complete. I think it is sick, but they have been talking about this ever since the 1990's. I remember reading about this planned destruction at age 12 in Popular Science--even before they had launched the first component. I was very disgusted with our "progress" in space exploration, then as now.
I've never heard of any classic user who left OS X because of the GUI
I left the Mac platform because of the OS X GUI (among other reasons). From my perspective, Apple seemed to have abandoned everything I liked about the Mac and replaced it with a GUI that was a poor copy of Windows. Consonantly, I decided to transition—if it feels like a crappy copy of Windows, then why not just use Windows?
To establish my Mac snob bona fides:
I was raised on Mac OS, starting in 1989 with System 6 on a Mac IIcx and used Macintosh exclusively all the way through 2001 on my Wallstreet Powerbook G3.
Before college, I worked for 18 months at an Apple Authorized Service Provider as the sole Apple Certified Technician in a 90 mile radius.
I developed applications for the Mac following Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (I asked for a copy of the official "Inside Macintosh" HIG for my 15th birthday).
Back to my assertion that OS X a crappy copy of Windows rather than a viable successor to Mac OS 9...
The Dock:
It's like the Windows Taskbar, only bad. Everything is an icon or a tiny copy of the app's current screen. I know the name of the window/app I want to access, but I don't necessarily recall what its window/icon *looks* like at the moment.
"Oh, but they have Expose now!" What a hack... Windows has taskbar grouping by application. Choose the application, pick the window from the list by title, and go. Mac OS has "show all the open windows in the system... and try to find which of the 30 shuffled-up-postage-stamp-sized-images-ofthe-window-contents is the one you are looking for"
Taskbar grouping again... have you ever tried to minimize 30 documents to the Dock simultaneously? Oh, and what if you want to minimize all the windows for one application (and, no, I *don't* mean Hide Application)? These are simple tasks on Windows.
I don't want the Dock in my way. Ever had a large window open and then had the Dock auto show over the edge so that you cannot resize it without moving your mouse away and waiting for the Dock to retreat so you can dart in to try it again? At least Windows lets you resize windows from any edge, unlike the "helpful" Finder. This wasn't an issue in OS 9: no Dock, no problem.
The Filesystem:
Remember when Apple's marketing material used to mock Windows for having to use three-letter filename extensions? "Oh, yeah... that."
One of my favorite aspects of the Mac OS was the multifork filesystem and the file metadata (type/creator codes). You could create files of a common format, say, TEXT,
that other apps would register that they grokked. However, the files also had a creator code. That meant that if you double clicked on a TEXT-type file that was created by one app,
it would open the app that created it (note how that differs from concept of default applications). However, if you had another app open that grokked the TEXT type, then its open file dialog box would show the same file.
OS X "upgraded" that feature away.
OS X also "upgraded" applications into special kinds of directories/bundles instead of a standalone file decorated with a resource fork. Not a problem, eh? Well, what if I really dont want my application to end in.app? No such restriction in OS 9.
In General:
Have you ever tried to have a bunch of browser windows open and then another app interleaved in those windows?
The Mac OS metaphor of the "application as the root" driving everything is a severe hindrance to this intuitive task compared to the Windows metaphor of having the window itself be at the top of the hierarchy.
Case in point: you have a bunch of browser windows open and you have a text document that is partially obscured by two browser windows. So, you click on one of the obscuring browser windows and minimize it expecting that the
Hm. I read the RFC, and it seems patently insufficient when discussing necessary granularity. Clearly, time should be represented in Planck units, as this is the (currently theorized) maximum necessary resolution to describe a timepoint.
Assuming the ultimate fate of the universe is heat death with proton decay, then 256-bit time should cover the span of the life of the universe to beyond the presence of matter (~10^100 years).
For the truly pedantic, Planck-resolution time structs could be coupled with meta-size header concept from the I-TAG described in RFC2795, which would yield arbitrary representation in the case of future needs, such as if the universe does not die on schedule.
It is left as an open question to decide where the zero-point of the calendar should be fixed, given the imprecise knowledge of the birth of the universe.
I was considering acquiring a SureFire U2 for myself, having purchased a L2 for my friend's wedding gift. I was very impressed by the SureFire's fit & finish.
Yeah, then I did some more research and bought a Fenix L2D instead.
SureFire U2:
Price: ~$275 street
Output: 100 (high), 2 (low) lumens
Runtime: 2 hours (high), 175 hours (low)
Battery type: CR123A (specialized, expensive, not found in typical stores)
Further bolstering the Fenix is the extreme runtime one can acheive using Energizer E2 (lithium) AA's (look at the L2D LOW Runtime chart): ~5000 minutes is over 80 hours of continuous runtime on one pair of batteries.
This isn't an shill--I was really quite interested in getting a well-engineered SureFire. Then I realized that for the same price I could buy 4 of these Fenix flashlights that are brighter, cheaper/easier to operate wrt batteries, and far less expensive. For my uses, the SureFire just couldn't stack up.
I might reconsider if I were buying a flashlight to mount on the fore-end of a SWAT team assault rifle, but that is not my intended use.
The GPS constellation of 24 satellites are arranged in six different orbital planes, each inclined 55 degrees to the equator. To obtain exactly two orbits per day, the satellites are placed at an altitude of 20,200km. "Look Ma, I didn't even cite Wikipedia!"
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it was unconstitutional until they passed the 16th amendment. Unless, of course, one believes that they decided to pass that amendment "for the lulz".
There is a reason that we have an amendment procedure in the Constitution. If we really feel that it should be legal to have the Federal government force people to obtain health insurance, then an amendment is required. I know the 10th amendment isn't popular anymore, but that doesn't mean it is void.
Of course, the Feds could always use coercion (that is popular) to force the states to fall in line. This is what they have done with RealID (threaten states who don't comply with denial of their citizens access to domestic air travel without a passport), or forcing states to increase the minimum drinking age to 21 by threatening to cut off their highway funds:
The Constitution doesn't illegalize coercion. Threatening highway funding is very popular. It's dirty to sidestep the Constitution with coercion, but that's life in the post-Progressive era--government money always comes with coercion. The best way to avoid being coerced is to never accept the money in the first place.
Alliant Credit Union allows scanned image upload deposit ("eDeposit Plus"). I am hopeful they will jump on the smartphone app bandwagon, though one imagines that a user could take the requisite photographs and then upload them via the Alliant eDeposit interface even today.
Tangential rant: I am in the same situation as you. USAA burned me on the Deposit@Home service with their misleading website. I opened a USAA credit card *solely* to satisfy the "line of credit" requirement for D@H (yes, the site said a credit card was sufficient). After the cc account was opened, I still could not use D@H. I called and confirmed that their site was incorrect and that I had to qualify for insurance coverage as well. I immediately closed the now extraneous cc account. Wasted time and an entry on my credit report.
I have made Alliant my primary account now. They offer better interest rates than USAA (1.78% currently on checking accounts) and a free quarterly FICO-type score from Experian. To contrast, USAA has a better Bill Pay interface and EBPP; concordantly, I still use both institutions.
Dude: I am no forensics master, but aren't you violating a basic premise of debate by countering the GP's actual example with a speculative future scenario in which you cherry-picked the parameters to bolster your agenda?
...not as nice of a tactic when used both sides, it seems.
If that is a legitimate debate tactic, then one presumes he could counter with a similarly cherry-picked scenario where he and his firm counter the structural shift in their industry by developing "programs" for these devices to create "fad wood cut designs of the week" (ala iPhone). He would then consolidate his firm's massive profits and, of course, go on to personally develop economical nanotechnology and nuclear fusion--thereby ending scarcity for the entire world!
Aside from that, it seems that most of your concerns miss the point that most of your future scenarios result in one of two general outcomes. One possibility is that the trend away from agriculture to manufacturing, and then away from manufacturing to services, and then away from services to "aaaa! no more work for Americans!" is economically sustainable at a national level, then there is no problem. In such a case, the general wealth level of the nation (and the society at large) is high enough that we are borderline post-scarcity (otherwise, markets for 'new things/services' would emerge). That is, one way or another, we continue to be to afford to pay other countries to "make stuff" for us. Don't know how we would manage to do that, but good for us if so.
However, what if such a trend is unsustainable? I believe this to be the more likely case. In that case, China (et al) stops feeling the urge to continue to inflate our standard of living by floating our colossal trade deficits. I mean, what are we giving today them besides US Treasury IOU's? (the fact that they can trade US dollars for oil is notwithstanding, because eventually the world will decide that the farce has gone on long enough if they value nothing we produce) Okay, so, now the value of our dollar plummets, we aren't getting our market flooded by goods that are manufactured at prices with which we can't compete domestically, and then suddenly we start finding it is cost-effective to manufacture in the US again.
Of course, everyone in the US is poorer on average in the latter scenario, because free trade tends to be ruthlessly efficient--and inefficiency is expensive. For example, it isn't efficient to pay a union worker $40/hour + benefits to screw on jar lids, when a robot could do it much faster, more accurately, and more cheaply. Are you aware that you share the same concerns as the original Luddites? The structural economic shifts in efficiency brought by technological progress have been beneficial to the economy & society as a whole, and there are two centuries of evidence to support this.
Of course, individual actors must "evolve or die", just as the buggywhip manufacturers needed to migrate into manufacturing automobile tires (or bondage gear, depending on their marketing department's forecasts). Anyone can predict dire economic scenarios due to technological advances, but you will forgive me if I believe that they are unlikely given the overwhelming preponderance of the historical evidence.
"Do you have P.A.D.? Nearly eleventy billion Americans have this potentially deadly disorder. Why have you never heard of this before? We at the *cough*bristolmeyerssquibb*cough* P.A.D. Coalition are trying to get the word out about P.A.D. now that we found that Plavix can be used to treat it! Call your doctor *now*... you may already be dying of something no one has ever heard of before last year!"
That pretty much summarizes the TV commercial I saw last week. Wag the dog, indeed.
As someone who holds two B.S. degrees {computer engineering, computer science}, I take issue with the GP's statement. The typical CS student does not learn about transistor fanout, CMOS logic, VLSI, etc.
CS is derived from St. Turing and his universal machine. CE covers how to make (and use) one of those.
Well, despite your assertion, that's exactly what they did in the Stewart case. Anyway, your arguments seem to be summarized by your final statement:
You beg the question... under which Constitutionally-enumerated power does the Federal government have the ability to designate machine guns or even drugs as illegal? Oh, right, the original theory they used was the interstate commerce clause--thus making your argument circularly referential.
Case in point: back in the beginning of the 20th century, the Powers That Be decided that drugs are bad (mm'kay?). They hadn't invented twisting the commerce clause beyond belief, so they attempted to tax it out of existence. That wasn't very effective as a total ban, so they decided to escalate.
Think of Prohibition. When it was imposed, Constitutional interpretation indicated that an entire amendment was necessary to ban alcohol. In today's world, this could be accomplished by a simple law under the twisted commerce clause theory.
Actually, I misspoke: in today's world, all it would take is a bureaucrat making a decision, much less a law or (god forbid) an amendment. Look what happened with MDMA -- the DEA criminalized its possession (ie. Schedule I) by regulatory fiat in 1985. No law, not even a Congressional debate.
We have certainly come a long way in Constitutional interpretation, and not necessarily in an intellectually honest fashion.
Given this forum's audience, homebrew seemed a reasonable term/analogy. It seems it may have been too esoteric, though.
Everything is defined as interstate commerce now, at least when the Feds want it to be. Allow me to cite two Supreme Court cases:
Gonzales v. Raich - A woman in California grew medical marijuana (legal in CA) and gave it away for free, solely within California. This was defined as interstate commerce in the decision.
US v. Stewart - Stewart personally designed and built his own homebrew machine guns, not for sale. After he was busted by the feds, he lost the case but won on appeal. The government appealed the case to the Supreme Court. It was remanded by the Supreme Court back to the appellate court for reconsideration "in light of" Raich. This means that the Supreme Court considers Stewart's actions to be interstate commerce too.
In conclusion, "interstate commerce" is now de facto defined as "anything the Federal government wants to regulate, even if there is no commercial or interstate aspect". Naturally, I imagine that this flexible definition is reserved for the Feds use only--no doubt states will have to continue to use the actual definition (ie. what the Constitution actually means).
I do have extensive experience with "both sides" of HIPAA (provider and consumer), and I have several specific rejoinders to your reply. I had a long reply written out; however, because I neglected to choose a completely random username way back in the day I deleted the response to avoid being haunted by the long-tail of the Internet.
I do not expect anyone to lend credence to my allegations without further specifics, but I accept that.
However, may I ask if you are in academia or in the corporate realm?
Unless something has changed, HIPAA policies are defined by the organizations that are subject to HIPAA regulation. Isn't self-policing great?
"Hooray! We are HIPAA-compliant based on the HIPAA policy that we wrote for ourselves and now interpret 'flexibly'!"
Yes, I am (and was) aware of the penalties and fines involved. That is why I didn't press the issue: though I was embarrassed and very distressed at the several, unrelated disclosures (yes, they were clear-cut HIPAA violations), I didn't rate the tort as worth a quarter million dollars plus the inconvenience of a court case (which, of course, would cause further embarrassment).
The particular circumstances of both violations were related to background circumstances that I doubt will ever change, despite the law now having additional teeth. I was unwilling to make pariahs of otherwise upstanding physicians over this particular circumstance, despite what happened in my case.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. At least you didnt spell it with two "p"'s. That's the worst.
Anyway, I am very cynical of HIPAA. It has never protected me from health care providers making disclosures to third parties when I wanted (and was entitled to) privacy, and it just adds inconvenience when I want to do simple things like having a family member pick up one of my prescriptions ("Oh my god! We could never allow that, even if we had written authorization on file! Think of your privacy!").
So... what did HIPAA accomplish? Well, now when I go to a pharmacy, they force me to sign a HIPAA disclosure/waiver before they will fulfill my prescriptions. What does this disclosure say? Stuff along the lines of "here is our policy on how we will violate your privacy when we feel like it. Don't you feel better knowing?". Of course, I could choose not to sign, but then they won't fill my prescriptions. Ah, being presented with a Hobson's choice over medical necessities always warms my heart about the human spirit.
"Blessed are the coercers, for surely they will fuck you over while smiling at you."
Anyway, to my point: yes, you are protected by HIPAA. However, my expectation is that they will just circumvent it by a click-through EULA waiver. No waiver, no play. There you go. Hobson would be proud.
Holland, Michigan, United States. Home of a wooden shoe outlet, a Delft pottery outlet, and the Tulip Time festival... don't ask me why I know firsthand.
May I suggest that "regulatory capture" is the term you are seeking?
For additional fun/depression, check out "iron triangle".
I have done what was described: rsyncing a TrueCrypt volume file that changes over time. Yes, there is an "expansion factor", but I would peg it at 2 - 5x the size of the diff within the encrypted volume. To restate: this scheme is entirely tenable with TrueCrypt volumes and rsync. A good binary diff capability is required, but that is the raison d'etre of rsync. I have never used Dropbox, so I have no idea how their deltas work for binary files.
I was originally of the same opinion as you. I anticipated some sort of avalanche effect from small changes in the ciphertext. However, this isn't the case for several reasons -- first, you can read about TrueCrypt's crypto modes of operation and how the blocks work. Second, you can reason that TrueCrypt would be completely unusable if writing a single byte near the beginning of an encrypted hard drive/volume caused a chain reaction that would require the entire partition to be re-encrypted due to cipher block chaining cascading to the whole drive.
I don't claim to be a cryptography expert (perhaps someone can further enlighten me), but it seems that CBC would break down in a disk encryption scheme if there weren't a new IV rather frequently (for the same reason as I mentioned above). Of course, TrueCrypt uses XTS mode, so it seems that I am just idly musing at this point and should click Submit.
Perhaps. However, you will excuse me if I don't give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that this product is not the equivalent of a modchip or root exploit... it just happened that Datel managed to reverse engineer the memory card protocol.
Don't you think Microsoft would have smacked Datel with a DMCA C&D/lawsuit if they could have? This alone should be proof enough that the device is based on simple reverse engineering.
That may be, but this certainly seems like a straightforward case of anticompetitive practices.
Having strong libertarian sentiments, I would really like to go with you on the caveat emptor/personal responsibility angle. However, I just don't perceive it this way... from my perspective, it seems that I purchased a product (the XBox) and now as a condition of my continued use of its primary, reasonably expected function, I am required to accept Microsoft's unilateral ability to change the terms of use at their whim. There is a reason that contracts of adhesion are so limited in jurisprudence. Please note that I am not referring to XBox Live *service*; I am referring to the continued use of the console *product* with current and future games. Again, if this would not eventually become a mandatory "upgrade" for offline play, there would be no problem.
Actually, if Microsoft offered me a remedy of allowing me to return the XBox due to their unilateral change of the terms of use of the product I purchased--even disregarding all the games and accessories I have--I would consider this roughly fair.
It wouldn't change my opinion that they are sleazy for deliberately breaking compatibility, which would also be a decision factor when considering any future dealings with Microsoft as a vendor.
(I award myself 7 bonus points for making it through this reply and resisting the urges to use car analogies)
Everyone seems to be missing a fundamental issue: okay, let's say I am fine with not being able to connect to XBox Live (lame), but where exactly do I end up when I purchase a new game that demands I upgrade in order to play at all, even offline (like CoD:World at War did)? Now I get to choose whether to lose money on the non-returnable, opened game or lose access to all my saved data and render my memory hardware useless? Swell.
I actually have one of these Datel devices and an XBox Arcade. My opinion was that this was a better value than purchasing an overpriced/undercapacity HDD. Micro SDHC is cheap, and I could swap them out if I needed more capacity.
This kind of thing is completely unreasonable: they are intentionally locking out this device for no other reason than to be anti-competitive. At some point, these kind of antics from a manufacturer eclipse any amount of fun that was being had with the item or service. I have reached this point.
This marks the beginning of the end of my use of the XBox platform for gaming. My current games will work, offline. I can still stream video to it (in a limited fashion) with Vuze, so I will keep using the XBox for that until I get a "real" device for that purpose. It goes without saying that I won't be spending any more money on games, hardware, accessories, or XBox Live--the XBox is going to be gathering dust sooner rather than later.
The adage is to vote with your money, right? Fine: never again, Microsoft.
Never again.
You mean like this example from NASA's own site? I found that in 15 seconds on google.
Where do you think they would send the ISS? A Lagrange point? Please.
It is going to be thrown away just after it is complete. I think it is sick, but they have been talking about this ever since the 1990's. I remember reading about this planned destruction at age 12 in Popular Science--even before they had launched the first component. I was very disgusted with our "progress" in space exploration, then as now.
I left the Mac platform because of the OS X GUI (among other reasons). From my perspective, Apple seemed to have abandoned everything I liked about the Mac and replaced it with a GUI that was a poor copy of Windows. Consonantly, I decided to transition—if it feels like a crappy copy of Windows, then why not just use Windows?
To establish my Mac snob bona fides:
Back to my assertion that OS X a crappy copy of Windows rather than a viable successor to Mac OS 9...
The Dock:
The Filesystem:
In General:
I wantonly disregarded the units in my assessment of requisite fixed time structures. 512-bit time would be necessary.
I should stop posting while sober.
Hm. I read the RFC, and it seems patently insufficient when discussing necessary granularity. Clearly, time should be represented in Planck units, as this is the (currently theorized) maximum necessary resolution to describe a timepoint.
Current estimates on the age of the universe indicate that approximately 10^61 planck times have elapsed. This puts us at a present need beyond 128-bit time.
Assuming the ultimate fate of the universe is heat death with proton decay, then 256-bit time should cover the span of the life of the universe to beyond the presence of matter (~10^100 years).
For the truly pedantic, Planck-resolution time structs could be coupled with meta-size header concept from the I-TAG described in RFC2795, which would yield arbitrary representation in the case of future needs, such as if the universe does not die on schedule.
It is left as an open question to decide where the zero-point of the calendar should be fixed, given the imprecise knowledge of the birth of the universe.
SureFire U2:
Fenix L2D:
Further bolstering the Fenix is the extreme runtime one can acheive using Energizer E2 (lithium) AA's (look at the L2D LOW Runtime chart): ~5000 minutes is over 80 hours of continuous runtime on one pair of batteries.
This isn't an shill--I was really quite interested in getting a well-engineered SureFire. Then I realized that for the same price I could buy 4 of these Fenix flashlights that are brighter, cheaper/easier to operate wrt batteries, and far less expensive. For my uses, the SureFire just couldn't stack up.
I might reconsider if I were buying a flashlight to mount on the fore-end of a SWAT team assault rifle, but that is not my intended use.
God, uncheck the fucking default "Post Anonymously". After all that, I am proven a dumbass.