As somebody else pointed out, look up RICO. What I'd like to do take issue with your implicit assumption that *being* a mobster does not do the kind of harm that is obviously criminal.
Suppose you join the mob as their computer geek. You help them encrypt their records and all kinds of other things people in general have a right to do, but you do it with the full and explicit understanding that you're helping the mob kill and rob people. None of the things you do all day long like check the mail server logs for hackers or generating crypto keys for the hitmen is illegal in itself. And because you're a consummate professional, you fix things that the really sensitive information is safe even from you. If one of those hitmen murders somebody, you had no specific knowledge that specific murder was going to take place, so you can't be prosecuted for the murder. You *did* intentionally participate in the murder by helping the hitman do his job. It's possible the murder might not have taken place without your help (e.g., that the cops would have found the unencrypted contract on a laptop). But your criminal intent is effectively "laundered" so it can't be attached to any single crime.
I think that kind intentional contribution to many crimes without specific knowledge of any would be the point of applying something like RICO to black hat hackers. Let's say you're part of a hacker gang that steals identities. You don't necessarily participate directly, but play a supporting role knowing that this is what's going on. Although you knowingly play a critical role in stealing thousands of identities, you don't can't be implicated in any single instance of theft because you didn't know that individual theft was going to happen. So you acted with criminal intent, participating in thousands of thefts, but because that theft can't be tied to any one of those thefts you can't be charged with identity theft. That's because you're not an identity thief, you're an identity theft *racketeer*.
That's what's going on here. They're going to go after criminal hackers using racketeering laws that were designed for just that purpose. How many years have we been saying that putting "cyber-" in front of something doesn't make it a new kind of crime? Same goes here. Bringing up Capone here is quite apropos. Saying anyone charged with tax evasion is being charged as a "Mobster" would be logically equivalent to saying that anyone charged for racketeering is being charged as a "Mobster".
I actually rather like using "mute" instead of "moot"; it's one of those instances where somebody hears a word that expresses a long-forgotten metaphor and mentally substitutes a word that actually makes sense.
"Moot" comes from a "moot court" in which law students debate a hypothetical case. The only point of arguing such a case is to practice arguing; so a "moot point" is either a point that is not worth debating on its own merits (more common), or a point that is debatable (less common).
What the sergeant was attempting to express here is that the facts of this case vouchsafe him no guidance pertaining to further action; the issue does not speak to him; viz., it is "mute". It's a poignant metaphor, and I suspect Sergeant Lauersdorf has a certain poetical bent, sadly frustrated by his choice of career.
Companies go bankrupt all the time. Even a *profitable* company can go bankrupt if it can't raise cash to meet current obligations. So it's not the case that companies go bankrupt because they don't create value. Companies go bankrupt when they don't generate cash flow. And it's hard to generate cash flow if you don't have a product to sell yet, or you can't scale production enough to cover your fixed costs.
Reading TFA, this looks like a classic case of a company stuck between a cash rock and a cash hard place. It took them longer than they'd hoped to ramp up their production facilities to achieve lower production costs, and that happened at time when the economic downturn is driving prices for their product down. Meanwhile competitors who already have the scale and low foreign wages to weather this downturn are doing OK, which is reasonable proof that if they'd caught a break on getting their factories on line they'd have been fine. But they didn't catch a break.
These things happen. If you want to be entrepreneurial, you can't be a pussy and only back safe bets. Of course whether this was a good bet or not depends on the technology and other details, but the government is more likely to recoup some of its losses than a private investor would be. That's because if the technology proves practical and is licensed to an American company, that will generate jobs and revenue.
Rule of thumb (pun intended) of angular measurement for most people with their hands extended at full arm's length:
* pinkie finger subtends about 1 degree * first three fingers (index to ring) held tightly together subtend about five degrees. * fist subtends about ten degrees. * fingers spread into span subtend about 25 degrees.
My guess is that somebody realized the spacecraft would be positioned to capture a picture of the earth and moon with nice angular separation. Had their luck been ideal, they'd have caught the Earth and Moon at close to maximum angular separation, but while the spacecraft was somewhat closer so the limbs of the planets were sharper. Then the photo would serve as an illustration of all the relative scales concerned. Of course the camera might not have a wide enough angle or enough resolution for that.
Do you really think Jobs has some sort of moral code? He's a narcissist; everything he does is for his own self-aggrandizement.
Asking whether Jobs is a rock star CEO or just another self-aggrandizing sociopath is like asking whether Coke is a beverage or just another soft drink.
At most the security company that peeked was guilty of invasion of privacy.
Er... You make it sound like that's a small thing. If the police violated her 4th amendment rights, that in itself would not be such a big thing for her because it would immunize her from any charges brought on evidence obtained from that violation, directly or indirectly. It would be the accompanying invasion of privacy by the police that did her harm in that case.
Now a private entity collecting this information and handing it to the police would be *worse*, because (a) they'd be spreading the invasion and possibly (b) she is obliged to defend herself now because the third party have effectively helped the police do an end-run around the rules.
Personally, I'd argue that if a private company has a relationship to the police in which they routinely provided the police with evidence as part of services they're selling, they're acting as an agent of the state. It's not the same as if they were just being public spirited here, there's a private quid pro quo going on as well: the police are taking actions which add value to the company's product. Even though they don't get paid in *cash*, they get paid in other considerations which have considerable monetary value to them, and which are *excludable* competitive benefits. I think in that case 4th amendment evidence rules *should* apply. Whether they do in practice would be a matter of case law rather than reason.
What should matter in this case is the *substance* of what has been done for her, not some kind of abstract, Mad Tea Party ontological argument. If there is a system by which the police routinely collect evidence, the admissibility of that evidence should be governed by the Constitution under the 4th and 14th amendments no matter how cleverly disguised the business arrangements between the police and investigators are. Likewise the privacy invasion is a serious harm no matter the good intentions of the company and state, and all the cases where the system has been spying on actual criminals.
Let's assume the nations of the world, out of the goodness of their hearts, decide to ignore your offshore entity. It's still not going to work because such an entity is going to be intrinsically politically unstable.
The first thing is that the artificial nation is going to have a very small population. Probably the closest analog we could name would be intentional communities, or communes. They generally don't last very long -- certainly not as long as a nation. Most fail in a year or two, a few go on for a few decades, especially if they're anchored by a charismatic religious or quasi-religious leader.
But this enterprise has the earmarks of the less successful ventures. You get a lot of people who feel malcontent in regular society, enough to give up on it entirely. Highly *motivated* and *opinionated* people. And you're going to put them all together in a tiny structure in the middle of the ocean where they can't get away from each other. Well, they could stay in their little apartments all day and avoid each other, but you can't build a working society with misanthropes who never want to see other human beings. And even if you structure your society so people more or less never deal with each other, you still are going to have disputes. And I assume these will have at least some kind of elected government, and people will disagree with each other.
And it won't matter how uniform these people seem to be when you put them into this bottle; human perception of difference expands or contracts to fit whatever differences there are. In the pressure-cooker atmosphere on these things, what to outsiders seem like hair-splitting differences between these irascible, opinionated, not very sociable people will take on the appearance of cosmic gulfs. In a libertarian state, one of the few functions of the police is to keep people from murdering each other. They'll have their hands full in this one.
But let's throw all that out, and assume all the psychological and sociological factors just work out. It's *still* a politically unstable entity because it has two factors which combine to make it a congenial target for authoritarian takeover, either from within or without: tiny population and substantial cash flow. Nobody is going to move to the middle of the ocean in order to be poor, so it follows that substantial resources are going to be flowing into and out of these places, or stored in the place. Anybody who can subdue the population can declare a new government, seize those assets. Then being in control of their own *state*, they have lots of options at that point. They could execute the people outside the clique as criminals. If the assets controlled by the state are productive, they might opt to skim the proceeds to keep the inhabitants under the iron heel -- provided they had any value. Or they just transfer all the assets to a stable country and leave.
I don't expect experts but have some common sense. Reality is that something the size of an altoids tin won't take down a plane.
Really? That's common sense? How could it be common sense unless the minimum size device needed to take down a plane was something everyone would know from day to day experience?
Do you know what that minimum size is? Is it even possible to set a minimum boundary? As a data point, consider that Pan Am 103 was brought down by a mere 250 g of plastic explosive -- a small enough amount that it was disguised in the chassis of a portable tape player and stowed in a checked bag. There may possibly be more powerful explosives, and it is certainly possible to place an explosive more favorably than in a randomly oriented bag stored in an aluminum box in the cargo hold. That was a common explosive; it's believed there are explosives that are half again as powerful, although they aren't readily synthesized.
As somebody who's messed with electronics I'd recognize an Altoid tin project for what it is. In fact I'd be *less* suspicious of an Altoid tin project than something like a laptop. Even so it's ridiculous to talk about "common sense" when it comes to bombs. Most people have never seen a homemade bomb in their life, and even those who mess around with them recreationally have no idea what somebody with relevant engineering expertise could manage.
The TSA should be experts on bombs, and it should be their job to be professionals at identifying bombs.
Sure, I agree, but as long as we're talking about "reality", it won't happen until we decide we want to pay what it would cost to staff the TSA checkpoints that way.
You don't get to decide whether something is or isn't dangerous when you haven't got a 12-year old's knowledge of electronics.
Which is exactly what happened here. The TSA staff didn't decide anything. They *presumed* it was dangerous, and called in somebody who had the training that in an ideal, non-financially-constrained world they'd have right there at the gate.
That's what everybody ends up doing with expensive technical expertise. The person you call up on the support line for software ought to be an expert in that software, and ideally very knowledgeable about the systems that software interacts with. But it won't happen until we choose to favor companies that give us good service over those who give us lousy service at the lowest possible price.
Geeks with Altoid can electronics projects aren't a use-case that was considered in the system design. So what? Is that really such a surprise? What should be surprising is that people bright enough to design and build circuits can't figure out that it'd be simpler and less hassle to put their tiny mint-tin projects in a FedEx envelope and ship them rather than running it through the carry-on security checkpoint. I'm not saying there's anything wrong about sort of forgetting how clueless mundane folk are; it's an easy mistake to make. But it's just silly to bellyache like it's something that *somebody else should fix for us*. Nobody is going to fix anything for us, until we persuade them to.
Of course if you think you can convince our fellow citizens to pay what it would take to people who can be trained as experts in bomb identification and then follow through on that training, I'll cheer you on. But until you manage that I'm shipping my homebrew junk rather than carrying it on. And I'm not planning on holding my breath until you succeed.
What I don't understand is, why spend $1300 on an untested design?
What I'd do is put an RFID tag on the user's key, then take a high quality conventional lock and add an RFID reader to it and a pawl which prevents the lock cylinder from turning unless an RFID on the allow list is present.
The point would be the lock would fail to a safe, or relatively safe condition. If the electronic system were defeated you'd still have a functioning lock.
There's probably no provision in the law explicitly forbidding you to release sharks with fricken' lasers at the municipal swimming pool, but that doesn't mean it's legal. In most jurisdiction there's a basic provision in the law saying the operator of a vehicle must do so in a safe manner.
I suspect it's not any different in principle from engaging cruise control. In some situation that would be unsafe, therefore illegal. In practice, nobody knows how safe a new software system like this is, so there could be trouble.
Also, even if the person "operating" the car were "manually driving", that does not preclude the modifications made to the car being implicated.
You're not incorrect, but you are missing the point.
What's at issue isn't whether primary monopoly (desktop OS or search) is legally obtained. What's at issue is whether once obtained that monopoly is used to gain monopolies in other markets.
The issue with the browser isn't primarily the price; it isn't even really whether or not IE was an intrinsic and inseparable part of Windows. The issue in the Microsoft/Netscape case is whether MS used its desktop monopoly power to take control of the market Netscape was in. There's documentary evidence that this was Microsoft's intent.
So the analogy's validity hinges on this question: did Google use its search engine monopoly to enter the mobile OS market or eject other players from that market?
I think the answer is no. Google doesn't prevent other mobile OS's such as iOS from using Google services, and the APIs for Google services are open and documented. Google search is the primary search engine on my iPod touch, and GMail, Google Maps and Google Earth all work fine on it. Nor are users of Android devices tied to Google services. One of the hallmarks of Android's architecture is how easy it is to replace built-in services like contact management. It is possible that some handset makers may be tied to Google's services contractually as part of an Android co-marketing or technical support agreement, but if they don't want Android they aren't barred from Google's search. And if they wanted to go their own way entirely, say make a Microsoft service-centric Android phone without Google help, they could, although they'd have to stay clear of using any Google trademarks.
Having a monopoly in one area does restrict you in others, but not to the point where you have to price and package your products to suit your competitors. It just means you can't use that monopoly to bar access to the market to your competitors.
Sorry, but how is the Tea Party involved in this story, or are you just spewing rhetoric everywhere?
OK, so you didn't read the article. At issue is an anti-patent troll provision in the bill which only applies to banks, and makes it easy for them to challenge stupid patents. A company that holds a patent on transmitting check numbers over the Internet (I am not kidding) lobbied Tea Party leaders and launched an astroturf campaign targeted at Tea Party members and depicting the provisions as "another bank bailout" (I am not kidding).
As a result, the normally pro-bank Republican party was split, with Tea Party affiliated congressman voting against the anti-patent troll language.
The Democrats are also split on this provision, and the situation there is equally squalid but more complicated. On one side are the Democrats with ties tot he financial industry, of course. On the other are the proverbial strange bedfellows: those with ties to the patent trolls and their lobbyists, and those with ties to high tech industries opposed to patent trolls but afraid that a special provision for the financial industry would weaken a future bid to get the same deal for themselves.
This all takes place in the context of a longer term fight between High Tech and Big Pharma, which is a bit like the TMBG song "Particle Man". High Tech doesn't like the status quo because it makes it difficult if not impossible to create a product like a smartphone without tripping over some crazy patent. Big Pharma, which doesn't have this problem (it sells and patents molecules), likes the status quo. They had a fight and Pharma won, so finance stepped in to get the things High Tech wanted, but only for themselves so they wouldn't have to fight Pharma too.
That in turn takes place in the context of international trade treaties the US has signed that aren't very consistently observed, but give a convenient monkey wrench to throw into the reform works for anyone who prefers the status quo. Despite this, the banking industry was able to get its reforms (which are reasonable except that they only apply to the banks) passed in the Senate, only for the Tea Party to split the Republican support in the House.
So to conclude: across the board reform targeting stupid patents is blocked by Big Pharma. Industry targeted reform is difficult to pass because of treaty obligations, and High Tech doesn't have the clout to make it happen. The banks had enough clout to get industry specific reform into a bill, but where shot down by Tea Partiers who were sold a framing of the issue by the patent trolls that was even dumber than the patents the trolls wanted protected.
The upshot is that the only patent "reform" we're going to get is to make the system more favorable to large companies and less favorable to small ones. Apparently that's the one thing all our legislators can agree upon.
I think you miss the Mephistophelean appeal of Oracle's RDBMS.
Let's start with the obvious: simplicity is a matter of complexity and scale. If you are managing a small company's inventory of computers, then a spreadsheet is simple. If you are managing the fixed assets of a fortune 500 company it's no longer simple t use a bunch of spreadsheets. You could create a complex system that ran on a computing cluster and managed thousands of spreadsheets linked by macros, but you wouldn't. That would be complicated than using an industrial strength database platform.
Likewise, you aren't going to install Oracle Real Application Clusters to handle the list of people who have clean-up duty in the office coffee-room.
Oracle's flagship RDBMS, despite it's many real flaws, scales both in complexity and volume very well, probably better than anything other RDBMS. It doesn't have much of a reputation among hackers because most hackers prefer to handle complexity in some kind of application server architectural layer. But Oracle offers some unique (and proprietary) features that are very helpful, even if you aren't a database-centric developer. That is particularly true in advanced handling of transaction isolation, which Oracle handles better than anyone else. Period. There's nothing out there that does less locking as a result of user or DBA actions. It is even possible to "fork" working databases; isolating subsets of users from each others transactions and even schema changes until you're ready to merge. I knew one outfit that handled huge volumes of geospatial data that used this to simplify it's workflow and data release processes. There's other ways of doing that, of course, but it was neat, simple, and above all *proprietary*. That company will never move to anything else, because Oracle solved that problem in the simplest possible way.
As a developer I found Oracle's transaction logging a huge help in diagnosing customer data integrity problems. I wish other products provided such an easy way to track down spurious or erroneous transactions and selectively undo them. It was a huge time saver.
Make no mistake: there are some *really* smart and competent computer scientists and software engineers working for Oracle, and they know data management and transaction control as well as anyone on the planet. Now the *corporate values* of Oracle are a different matter altogether; as is their expertise in user-centric design. There's a lot to criticize about Oracle, but also a lot that deserves sincere praise.
Sounds more to me like he was lamenting his investment in the company that made the innovative CPU after it was crushed in the market by Intel's marketing clout backing the x86 architecture ("and that has made all the difference.").
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 5, Informative
So if you're trying to balance a budget, how in the hell do you justify spending way more money than you take in?
I'll take a crack at this.
If you evaluated private enterprise budgets the same way you did the federal budget, you'd see that it's quite common for even profitable [note 1] companies to lay out more cash than they take in, by issuing corporate bonds. If you step back and look at the actual financial effect of issuing a bond on a corporation, you'd see that what it does is allow the corporation to spend more cash than its operations can raise. Why would they want to do that? Because restricting their spending to what they take in also restricts their ability to grow.
If you are an engineer, you'll recognize this as an optimization problem. The corporation can always grow more by outlaying more cash, but its supply of cash is limited. So it obtains more cash by issuing securities to be paid out from future, expanded revenues. But there is a point where the interest burden on the debt assumed exceeds the amount of growth generated. That determines the point at which you stop borrowing. If businesses were deterministic (which they aren't), there'd be an equation of corporate value as a function of cash outlay that takes into account the present value of growth against interest costs.
Of course this is a gross simplification, of course, but the financial principle is the same. You manage your cash outlays and borrowing in such a way that (a) you maximize net growth while (b) being able to meet your current obligations.
I don't spend more money than I take in.
Didn't take a student loan, did you? Nor a loan for a house?
The problem with people and credit cards (or bad mortgages) isn't taking on debt per se, but taking on debt to obtain things of no long term value or dubious long term value. Let's take an eighteen year-old who wants to be an engineer. Would it make sense for him to work for ten or fifteen years at a low wage job so he could pay his way through college without borrowing? You'd be a fool to advise that, because the education would add so much to his value as an income generating concern that a loan at reasonable interest rates is a financial no-brainer.
So here's the takeaway lesson: don't worry about borrowing; worry about stupid and pointless spending. It's very easy to prove that the smart money doesn't think that the US has a borrowing problem, by looking at the credit rating of US Treasury securities. Up until now, that has been viewed as the safest possible investment, and ironically if our credit rating drops it will be *because* we aren't willing to borrow money to meet our current expenses, the way any well-run business would.
Of course, there is a psychological link between easy borrowing and stupid spending, but the problem is still stupid spending. Credit is buying money, and credit card interest is stupid spending because the interest rates are high.
note 1 : "profit" and "positive cash flow" are different things altogether, but as individuals our wealth is usually so insignificant that we can conflate them as a first approximation because we aren't that far, in financial terms, from living hand-to-mouth. The situation for a largish business is different. Companies might well borrow money and pay dividends in the same quarter, and it would raise no eyebrows.
It's like yelling at kids with their elbows on the table, or complaining about writers who split infinitives. Experts and etiquette and grammar have been debunking these "rules" for ages, but in vain. These bogus "rules" have legs because it's easy for an ignoramus to catch somebody else violating them.
In effect, the interest adds to the cost of what you are buying. Nobody would take a loan and put the money under his mattress, but if you *did*, then yes, you'd be going into debt for the privilege of paying interest.
Note that businesses often take loans because the inflated cost is offset by the advantages of keeping their cash working in other places. I once had a rich kid working for me who bought a yacht with a bank loan. For most of us that would be stupid, but *he* did it because the loan interest was less than his investments were making.
Sure, but what does geographic *location* have to do with anything at dispute here?
If you were to group nations by culture, economy, and political system, Canada would belong with a group mostly made up of Western European countries. Sensible (that is to say intelligent *and* non-pedantic) people realize that GP poster was referring to this group (the linguistic term for this is "synecdoche"), not making an assertion about Canada's location on the globe.
Now if we were referring to the idea of forming a consortium of nations interested in connecting to each other by high speed rail links, your point would be an intelligent one to raise.
We are not facing a "debt" crisis here. Judging from current market prices for US securities, people with lots of money to put in safe places still think our public debt is manageable. What we are facing is a liquidity crisis.
I think the term "debt ceiling" is misleading. Many people seem to think this is about limiting Obama's ability to add to the debt. Issuing treasury securities adds very little to the debt; it's *spending* that creates debt. If I loan you a thousand dollars, you are not "in debt" until you spend that money on something I can't or won't accept as repayment, like your vacation. Under our Constitution the President cannot spend money on his own authority. Spending is authorized, and in some cases mandated by Congress. And of course "spending" usually isn't a cash up front affair. When we order a million dollars worth of missiles from Raytheon, they don't demand cash up front; they deliver the missiles and present us with a bill. The "money is spent", and now the President has to find a way to raise the cash to satisfy Raytheon.
What Congress is doing is tying the President's hands when it comes to raising the cash to pay the bills.
If he can't raise the cash by issuing securities, and Congress won't raise the cash by hiking taxes, this leaves him with two options: not pay the bills, or print (in this case *strike*) new money. The problem with creating new money is it ties the money supply to the federal budget, rather than the needs of the economy for stable prices. That's how the Weimar Republic paid its bills. It'd be OK to do once, but if Congress doesn't raise taxes of the debt ceiling, we could be in the same hyperinflation boat.
Issuing securities is, within limits, a fiscally responsible way to pay the bills, if we can trust the market's judgment of our credit risk. Remember those bills are a *result* of assuming financial obligations; they aren't the *cause* of those obligations. The cause of federal debt isn't federal savings bonds or T-bills, it's federal appropriations. And you can't pay the resulting bills with spending cuts, even if those cuts are a good idea for entirely different reasons. Creditors won't accept fiscal austerity as payment; they want *cash*.
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As somebody else pointed out, look up RICO. What I'd like to do take issue with your implicit assumption that *being* a mobster does not do the kind of harm that is obviously criminal.
Suppose you join the mob as their computer geek. You help them encrypt their records and all kinds of other things people in general have a right to do, but you do it with the full and explicit understanding that you're helping the mob kill and rob people. None of the things you do all day long like check the mail server logs for hackers or generating crypto keys for the hitmen is illegal in itself. And because you're a consummate professional, you fix things that the really sensitive information is safe even from you. If one of those hitmen murders somebody, you had no specific knowledge that specific murder was going to take place, so you can't be prosecuted for the murder. You *did* intentionally participate in the murder by helping the hitman do his job. It's possible the murder might not have taken place without your help (e.g., that the cops would have found the unencrypted contract on a laptop). But your criminal intent is effectively "laundered" so it can't be attached to any single crime.
I think that kind intentional contribution to many crimes without specific knowledge of any would be the point of applying something like RICO to black hat hackers. Let's say you're part of a hacker gang that steals identities. You don't necessarily participate directly, but play a supporting role knowing that this is what's going on. Although you knowingly play a critical role in stealing thousands of identities, you don't can't be implicated in any single instance of theft because you didn't know that individual theft was going to happen. So you acted with criminal intent, participating in thousands of thefts, but because that theft can't be tied to any one of those thefts you can't be charged with identity theft. That's because you're not an identity thief, you're an identity theft *racketeer*.
That's what's going on here. They're going to go after criminal hackers using racketeering laws that were designed for just that purpose. How many years have we been saying that putting "cyber-" in front of something doesn't make it a new kind of crime? Same goes here. Bringing up Capone here is quite apropos. Saying anyone charged with tax evasion is being charged as a "Mobster" would be logically equivalent to saying that anyone charged for racketeering is being charged as a "Mobster".
No problem. Just wait ten years and it'll come out as a bloated, incomprehensible desktop application.
I actually rather like using "mute" instead of "moot"; it's one of those instances where somebody hears a word that expresses a long-forgotten metaphor and mentally substitutes a word that actually makes sense.
"Moot" comes from a "moot court" in which law students debate a hypothetical case. The only point of arguing such a case is to practice arguing; so a "moot point" is either a point that is not worth debating on its own merits (more common), or a point that is debatable (less common).
What the sergeant was attempting to express here is that the facts of this case vouchsafe him no guidance pertaining to further action; the issue does not speak to him; viz., it is "mute". It's a poignant metaphor, and I suspect Sergeant Lauersdorf has a certain poetical bent, sadly frustrated by his choice of career.
Companies go bankrupt all the time. Even a *profitable* company can go bankrupt if it can't raise cash to meet current obligations. So it's not the case that companies go bankrupt because they don't create value. Companies go bankrupt when they don't generate cash flow. And it's hard to generate cash flow if you don't have a product to sell yet, or you can't scale production enough to cover your fixed costs.
Reading TFA, this looks like a classic case of a company stuck between a cash rock and a cash hard place. It took them longer than they'd hoped to ramp up their production facilities to achieve lower production costs, and that happened at time when the economic downturn is driving prices for their product down. Meanwhile competitors who already have the scale and low foreign wages to weather this downturn are doing OK, which is reasonable proof that if they'd caught a break on getting their factories on line they'd have been fine. But they didn't catch a break.
These things happen. If you want to be entrepreneurial, you can't be a pussy and only back safe bets. Of course whether this was a good bet or not depends on the technology and other details, but the government is more likely to recoup some of its losses than a private investor would be. That's because if the technology proves practical and is licensed to an American company, that will generate jobs and revenue.
They're measuring the angle the point of your head makes.
Rule of thumb (pun intended) of angular measurement for most people with their hands extended at full arm's length:
* pinkie finger subtends about 1 degree
* first three fingers (index to ring) held tightly together subtend about five degrees.
* fist subtends about ten degrees.
* fingers spread into span subtend about 25 degrees.
My guess is that somebody realized the spacecraft would be positioned to capture a picture of the earth and moon with nice angular separation. Had their luck been ideal, they'd have caught the Earth and Moon at close to maximum angular separation, but while the spacecraft was somewhat closer so the limbs of the planets were sharper. Then the photo would serve as an illustration of all the relative scales concerned. Of course the camera might not have a wide enough angle or enough resolution for that.
Do you really think Jobs has some sort of moral code? He's a narcissist; everything he does is for his own self-aggrandizement.
Asking whether Jobs is a rock star CEO or just another self-aggrandizing sociopath is like asking whether Coke is a beverage or just another soft drink.
At most the security company that peeked was guilty of invasion of privacy.
Er... You make it sound like that's a small thing. If the police violated her 4th amendment rights, that in itself would not be such a big thing for her because it would immunize her from any charges brought on evidence obtained from that violation, directly or indirectly. It would be the accompanying invasion of privacy by the police that did her harm in that case.
Now a private entity collecting this information and handing it to the police would be *worse*, because (a) they'd be spreading the invasion and possibly (b) she is obliged to defend herself now because the third party have effectively helped the police do an end-run around the rules.
Personally, I'd argue that if a private company has a relationship to the police in which they routinely provided the police with evidence as part of services they're selling, they're acting as an agent of the state. It's not the same as if they were just being public spirited here, there's a private quid pro quo going on as well: the police are taking actions which add value to the company's product. Even though they don't get paid in *cash*, they get paid in other considerations which have considerable monetary value to them, and which are *excludable* competitive benefits. I think in that case 4th amendment evidence rules *should* apply. Whether they do in practice would be a matter of case law rather than reason.
What should matter in this case is the *substance* of what has been done for her, not some kind of abstract, Mad Tea Party ontological argument. If there is a system by which the police routinely collect evidence, the admissibility of that evidence should be governed by the Constitution under the 4th and 14th amendments no matter how cleverly disguised the business arrangements between the police and investigators are. Likewise the privacy invasion is a serious harm no matter the good intentions of the company and state, and all the cases where the system has been spying on actual criminals.
Evolution isn't all about growing a third arm or changing the color of your fur.
Sure, but that's the fun part.
Let's assume the nations of the world, out of the goodness of their hearts, decide to ignore your offshore entity. It's still not going to work because such an entity is going to be intrinsically politically unstable.
The first thing is that the artificial nation is going to have a very small population. Probably the closest analog we could name would be intentional communities, or communes. They generally don't last very long -- certainly not as long as a nation. Most fail in a year or two, a few go on for a few decades, especially if they're anchored by a charismatic religious or quasi-religious leader.
But this enterprise has the earmarks of the less successful ventures. You get a lot of people who feel malcontent in regular society, enough to give up on it entirely. Highly *motivated* and *opinionated* people. And you're going to put them all together in a tiny structure in the middle of the ocean where they can't get away from each other. Well, they could stay in their little apartments all day and avoid each other, but you can't build a working society with misanthropes who never want to see other human beings. And even if you structure your society so people more or less never deal with each other, you still are going to have disputes. And I assume these will have at least some kind of elected government, and people will disagree with each other.
And it won't matter how uniform these people seem to be when you put them into this bottle; human perception of difference expands or contracts to fit whatever differences there are. In the pressure-cooker atmosphere on these things, what to outsiders seem like hair-splitting differences between these irascible, opinionated, not very sociable people will take on the appearance of cosmic gulfs. In a libertarian state, one of the few functions of the police is to keep people from murdering each other. They'll have their hands full in this one.
But let's throw all that out, and assume all the psychological and sociological factors just work out. It's *still* a politically unstable entity because it has two factors which combine to make it a congenial target for authoritarian takeover, either from within or without: tiny population and substantial cash flow. Nobody is going to move to the middle of the ocean in order to be poor, so it follows that substantial resources are going to be flowing into and out of these places, or stored in the place. Anybody who can subdue the population can declare a new government, seize those assets. Then being in control of their own *state*, they have lots of options at that point. They could execute the people outside the clique as criminals. If the assets controlled by the state are productive, they might opt to skim the proceeds to keep the inhabitants under the iron heel -- provided they had any value. Or they just transfer all the assets to a stable country and leave.
I don't expect experts but have some common sense. Reality is that something the size of an altoids tin won't take down a plane.
Really? That's common sense? How could it be common sense unless the minimum size device needed to take down a plane was something everyone would know from day to day experience?
Do you know what that minimum size is? Is it even possible to set a minimum boundary? As a data point, consider that Pan Am 103 was brought down by a mere 250 g of plastic explosive -- a small enough amount that it was disguised in the chassis of a portable tape player and stowed in a checked bag. There may possibly be more powerful explosives, and it is certainly possible to place an explosive more favorably than in a randomly oriented bag stored in an aluminum box in the cargo hold. That was a common explosive; it's believed there are explosives that are half again as powerful, although they aren't readily synthesized.
As somebody who's messed with electronics I'd recognize an Altoid tin project for what it is. In fact I'd be *less* suspicious of an Altoid tin project than something like a laptop. Even so it's ridiculous to talk about "common sense" when it comes to bombs. Most people have never seen a homemade bomb in their life, and even those who mess around with them recreationally have no idea what somebody with relevant engineering expertise could manage.
The TSA should be experts on bombs, and it should be their job to be professionals at identifying bombs.
Sure, I agree, but as long as we're talking about "reality", it won't happen until we decide we want to pay what it would cost to staff the TSA checkpoints that way.
You don't get to decide whether something is or isn't dangerous when you haven't got a 12-year old's knowledge of electronics.
Which is exactly what happened here. The TSA staff didn't decide anything. They *presumed* it was dangerous, and called in somebody who had the training that in an ideal, non-financially-constrained world they'd have right there at the gate.
That's what everybody ends up doing with expensive technical expertise. The person you call up on the support line for software ought to be an expert in that software, and ideally very knowledgeable about the systems that software interacts with. But it won't happen until we choose to favor companies that give us good service over those who give us lousy service at the lowest possible price.
Geeks with Altoid can electronics projects aren't a use-case that was considered in the system design. So what? Is that really such a surprise? What should be surprising is that people bright enough to design and build circuits can't figure out that it'd be simpler and less hassle to put their tiny mint-tin projects in a FedEx envelope and ship them rather than running it through the carry-on security checkpoint. I'm not saying there's anything wrong about sort of forgetting how clueless mundane folk are; it's an easy mistake to make. But it's just silly to bellyache like it's something that *somebody else should fix for us*. Nobody is going to fix anything for us, until we persuade them to.
Of course if you think you can convince our fellow citizens to pay what it would take to people who can be trained as experts in bomb identification and then follow through on that training, I'll cheer you on. But until you manage that I'm shipping my homebrew junk rather than carrying it on. And I'm not planning on holding my breath until you succeed.
So they've been assigned a Thunderbird 2 pod number?
Mr. Spock: You must raise tax rates to balance your budget.
Republican: That would kill the economy! Higher taxes are inconsistent with economic growth.
Mr. Spock: What about returning to the same tax rates as under President Reagan?
Republican: That would be a great idea; Reagan's tax policies put the country back on the track for economic growth.
Mr. Spock: But restoring the Reagan tax rates would amount to a tax increase larger than anyone is currently proposing.
Republican:Reagan tax rates spurred growth. But taxes were higher under Reagan ... [head explodes]
Mr. Spock: Reaganomics is a wreath of pretty flowers that smell bad.
What I don't understand is, why spend $1300 on an untested design?
What I'd do is put an RFID tag on the user's key, then take a high quality conventional lock and add an RFID reader to it and a pawl which prevents the lock cylinder from turning unless an RFID on the allow list is present.
The point would be the lock would fail to a safe, or relatively safe condition. If the electronic system were defeated you'd still have a functioning lock.
There's probably no provision in the law explicitly forbidding you to release sharks with fricken' lasers at the municipal swimming pool, but that doesn't mean it's legal. In most jurisdiction there's a basic provision in the law saying the operator of a vehicle must do so in a safe manner.
I suspect it's not any different in principle from engaging cruise control. In some situation that would be unsafe, therefore illegal. In practice, nobody knows how safe a new software system like this is, so there could be trouble.
Also, even if the person "operating" the car were "manually driving", that does not preclude the modifications made to the car being implicated.
You're not incorrect, but you are missing the point.
What's at issue isn't whether primary monopoly (desktop OS or search) is legally obtained. What's at issue is whether once obtained that monopoly is used to gain monopolies in other markets.
The issue with the browser isn't primarily the price; it isn't even really whether or not IE was an intrinsic and inseparable part of Windows. The issue in the Microsoft/Netscape case is whether MS used its desktop monopoly power to take control of the market Netscape was in. There's documentary evidence that this was Microsoft's intent.
So the analogy's validity hinges on this question: did Google use its search engine monopoly to enter the mobile OS market or eject other players from that market?
I think the answer is no. Google doesn't prevent other mobile OS's such as iOS from using Google services, and the APIs for Google services are open and documented. Google search is the primary search engine on my iPod touch, and GMail, Google Maps and Google Earth all work fine on it. Nor are users of Android devices tied to Google services. One of the hallmarks of Android's architecture is how easy it is to replace built-in services like contact management. It is possible that some handset makers may be tied to Google's services contractually as part of an Android co-marketing or technical support agreement, but if they don't want Android they aren't barred from Google's search. And if they wanted to go their own way entirely, say make a Microsoft service-centric Android phone without Google help, they could, although they'd have to stay clear of using any Google trademarks.
Having a monopoly in one area does restrict you in others, but not to the point where you have to price and package your products to suit your competitors. It just means you can't use that monopoly to bar access to the market to your competitors.
Sorry, but how is the Tea Party involved in this story, or are you just spewing rhetoric everywhere?
OK, so you didn't read the article. At issue is an anti-patent troll provision in the bill which only applies to banks, and makes it easy for them to challenge stupid patents. A company that holds a patent on transmitting check numbers over the Internet (I am not kidding) lobbied Tea Party leaders and launched an astroturf campaign targeted at Tea Party members and depicting the provisions as "another bank bailout" (I am not kidding).
As a result, the normally pro-bank Republican party was split, with Tea Party affiliated congressman voting against the anti-patent troll language.
The Democrats are also split on this provision, and the situation there is equally squalid but more complicated. On one side are the Democrats with ties tot he financial industry, of course. On the other are the proverbial strange bedfellows: those with ties to the patent trolls and their lobbyists, and those with ties to high tech industries opposed to patent trolls but afraid that a special provision for the financial industry would weaken a future bid to get the same deal for themselves.
This all takes place in the context of a longer term fight between High Tech and Big Pharma, which is a bit like the TMBG song "Particle Man". High Tech doesn't like the status quo because it makes it difficult if not impossible to create a product like a smartphone without tripping over some crazy patent. Big Pharma, which doesn't have this problem (it sells and patents molecules), likes the status quo. They had a fight and Pharma won, so finance stepped in to get the things High Tech wanted, but only for themselves so they wouldn't have to fight Pharma too.
That in turn takes place in the context of international trade treaties the US has signed that aren't very consistently observed, but give a convenient monkey wrench to throw into the reform works for anyone who prefers the status quo. Despite this, the banking industry was able to get its reforms (which are reasonable except that they only apply to the banks) passed in the Senate, only for the Tea Party to split the Republican support in the House.
So to conclude: across the board reform targeting stupid patents is blocked by Big Pharma. Industry targeted reform is difficult to pass because of treaty obligations, and High Tech doesn't have the clout to make it happen. The banks had enough clout to get industry specific reform into a bill, but where shot down by Tea Partiers who were sold a framing of the issue by the patent trolls that was even dumber than the patents the trolls wanted protected.
The upshot is that the only patent "reform" we're going to get is to make the system more favorable to large companies and less favorable to small ones. Apparently that's the one thing all our legislators can agree upon.
Talk about "damning with faint praise"!
I think you miss the Mephistophelean appeal of Oracle's RDBMS.
Let's start with the obvious: simplicity is a matter of complexity and scale. If you are managing a small company's inventory of computers, then a spreadsheet is simple. If you are managing the fixed assets of a fortune 500 company it's no longer simple t use a bunch of spreadsheets. You could create a complex system that ran on a computing cluster and managed thousands of spreadsheets linked by macros, but you wouldn't. That would be complicated than using an industrial strength database platform.
Likewise, you aren't going to install Oracle Real Application Clusters to handle the list of people who have clean-up duty in the office coffee-room.
Oracle's flagship RDBMS, despite it's many real flaws, scales both in complexity and volume very well, probably better than anything other RDBMS. It doesn't have much of a reputation among hackers because most hackers prefer to handle complexity in some kind of application server architectural layer. But Oracle offers some unique (and proprietary) features that are very helpful, even if you aren't a database-centric developer. That is particularly true in advanced handling of transaction isolation, which Oracle handles better than anyone else. Period. There's nothing out there that does less locking as a result of user or DBA actions. It is even possible to "fork" working databases; isolating subsets of users from each others transactions and even schema changes until you're ready to merge. I knew one outfit that handled huge volumes of geospatial data that used this to simplify it's workflow and data release processes. There's other ways of doing that, of course, but it was neat, simple, and above all *proprietary*. That company will never move to anything else, because Oracle solved that problem in the simplest possible way.
As a developer I found Oracle's transaction logging a huge help in diagnosing customer data integrity problems. I wish other products provided such an easy way to track down spurious or erroneous transactions and selectively undo them. It was a huge time saver.
Make no mistake: there are some *really* smart and competent computer scientists and software engineers working for Oracle, and they know data management and transaction control as well as anyone on the planet. Now the *corporate values* of Oracle are a different matter altogether; as is their expertise in user-centric design. There's a lot to criticize about Oracle, but also a lot that deserves sincere praise.
Sounds more to me like he was lamenting his investment in the company that made the innovative CPU after it was crushed in the market by Intel's marketing clout backing the x86 architecture ("and that has made all the difference.").
So if you're trying to balance a budget, how in the hell do you justify spending way more money than you take in?
I'll take a crack at this.
If you evaluated private enterprise budgets the same way you did the federal budget, you'd see that it's quite common for even profitable [note 1] companies to lay out more cash than they take in, by issuing corporate bonds. If you step back and look at the actual financial effect of issuing a bond on a corporation, you'd see that what it does is allow the corporation to spend more cash than its operations can raise. Why would they want to do that? Because restricting their spending to what they take in also restricts their ability to grow.
If you are an engineer, you'll recognize this as an optimization problem. The corporation can always grow more by outlaying more cash, but its supply of cash is limited. So it obtains more cash by issuing securities to be paid out from future, expanded revenues. But there is a point where the interest burden on the debt assumed exceeds the amount of growth generated. That determines the point at which you stop borrowing. If businesses were deterministic (which they aren't), there'd be an equation of corporate value as a function of cash outlay that takes into account the present value of growth against interest costs.
Of course this is a gross simplification, of course, but the financial principle is the same. You manage your cash outlays and borrowing in such a way that (a) you maximize net growth while (b) being able to meet your current obligations.
I don't spend more money than I take in.
Didn't take a student loan, did you? Nor a loan for a house?
The problem with people and credit cards (or bad mortgages) isn't taking on debt per se, but taking on debt to obtain things of no long term value or dubious long term value. Let's take an eighteen year-old who wants to be an engineer. Would it make sense for him to work for ten or fifteen years at a low wage job so he could pay his way through college without borrowing? You'd be a fool to advise that, because the education would add so much to his value as an income generating concern that a loan at reasonable interest rates is a financial no-brainer.
So here's the takeaway lesson: don't worry about borrowing; worry about stupid and pointless spending. It's very easy to prove that the smart money doesn't think that the US has a borrowing problem, by looking at the credit rating of US Treasury securities. Up until now, that has been viewed as the safest possible investment, and ironically if our credit rating drops it will be *because* we aren't willing to borrow money to meet our current expenses, the way any well-run business would.
Of course, there is a psychological link between easy borrowing and stupid spending, but the problem is still stupid spending. Credit is buying money, and credit card interest is stupid spending because the interest rates are high.
note 1 : "profit" and "positive cash flow" are different things altogether, but as individuals our wealth is usually so insignificant that we can conflate them as a first approximation because we aren't that far, in financial terms, from living hand-to-mouth. The situation for a largish business is different. Companies might well borrow money and pay dividends in the same quarter, and it would raise no eyebrows.
It's like yelling at kids with their elbows on the table, or complaining about writers who split infinitives. Experts and etiquette and grammar have been debunking these "rules" for ages, but in vain. These bogus "rules" have legs because it's easy for an ignoramus to catch somebody else violating them.
In effect, the interest adds to the cost of what you are buying. Nobody would take a loan and put the money under his mattress, but if you *did*, then yes, you'd be going into debt for the privilege of paying interest.
Note that businesses often take loans because the inflated cost is offset by the advantages of keeping their cash working in other places. I once had a rich kid working for me who bought a yacht with a bank loan. For most of us that would be stupid, but *he* did it because the loan interest was less than his investments were making.
Sure, but what does geographic *location* have to do with anything at dispute here?
If you were to group nations by culture, economy, and political system, Canada would belong with a group mostly made up of Western European countries. Sensible (that is to say intelligent *and* non-pedantic) people realize that GP poster was referring to this group (the linguistic term for this is "synecdoche"), not making an assertion about Canada's location on the globe.
Now if we were referring to the idea of forming a consortium of nations interested in connecting to each other by high speed rail links, your point would be an intelligent one to raise.
We are not facing a "debt" crisis here. Judging from current market prices for US securities, people with lots of money to put in safe places still think our public debt is manageable. What we are facing is a liquidity crisis.
I think the term "debt ceiling" is misleading. Many people seem to think this is about limiting Obama's ability to add to the debt. Issuing treasury securities adds very little to the debt; it's *spending* that creates debt. If I loan you a thousand dollars, you are not "in debt" until you spend that money on something I can't or won't accept as repayment, like your vacation. Under our Constitution the President cannot spend money on his own authority. Spending is authorized, and in some cases mandated by Congress. And of course "spending" usually isn't a cash up front affair. When we order a million dollars worth of missiles from Raytheon, they don't demand cash up front; they deliver the missiles and present us with a bill. The "money is spent", and now the President has to find a way to raise the cash to satisfy Raytheon.
What Congress is doing is tying the President's hands when it comes to raising the cash to pay the bills.
If he can't raise the cash by issuing securities, and Congress won't raise the cash by hiking taxes, this leaves him with two options: not pay the bills, or print (in this case *strike*) new money. The problem with creating new money is it ties the money supply to the federal budget, rather than the needs of the economy for stable prices. That's how the Weimar Republic paid its bills. It'd be OK to do once, but if Congress doesn't raise taxes of the debt ceiling, we could be in the same hyperinflation boat.
Issuing securities is, within limits, a fiscally responsible way to pay the bills, if we can trust the market's judgment of our credit risk. Remember those bills are a *result* of assuming financial obligations; they aren't the *cause* of those obligations. The cause of federal debt isn't federal savings bonds or T-bills, it's federal appropriations. And you can't pay the resulting bills with spending cuts, even if those cuts are a good idea for entirely different reasons. Creditors won't accept fiscal austerity as payment; they want *cash*.