Background levels are around 1 mS/year. So why advocate thresholds more than two orders of magnitude lower than what people normally get in a year? I just don't think science has much to do with your choice of thresholds.
Advocating a threshold based on background radiation is just as arbitrary. Nuclear disasters and atmospheric tests just raise the background in some places, at some times, beyond "safe" levels.
Look no further than what Obama did a few weeks ago. He picked winners and losers. The winners are nuke plants. Look to what stocks his cabinet owns.
Clearly this is all Obama's fault. Not just global warming regulation, but the actual global warming. And its Obama's fault that the Aussie's made the law in the first place and then repealed it now. 10 years ago they knew the US would have a weak leader....
The AM437x is nearly 18months late, and likely was far along in the pipeline when those layoffs happened. TI's OMAP roadmap has been slipping for the past two years, with many processors there will never get released.
Dev houses using the BBB and RPi as base systems are going to eat everyones lunch. It is the comoditization of embedded hardware design. It was bound to happen sooner or later. the RPi started it, but the BBB brought enough IO channels to really get the ball rolling..
The comoditization of embedded hardware designed happened over a decade ago. Have you heard of Kontron? PC104? Com Express? You seem to have missed the 2000's.... this is nothing new. These days it is amazing what is put on a DIMM module - far more than the Beagle Bone and Pi toys provide and at far lower unit prices.
I heard the phrase "People using tool / platform / programming language / development process / telescopic fork are going to eat everyone's lunch." at least three times a year for the past 15 years. It is good evangelist speak, but rarely does it translate to reality... When it does, usually some other high barrier of entry is involved - a large amount of capital, good connections, or some wicked smart technical genius. Nobody eats anybody's lunch when it is so easy that any inexperienced person can do it.
And those who put hobbiest toys booting off MMC devices into products for sale, because they can't figure out how to port to a DIMM module or spin a board with a reference design, will be lucky to score on a dumpster dive.
Since politics has historically existed in all recorded human cultures, is humanity corrupt and criminal by nature? What is the alternative?
If one were to bring a political "system based on corrupt practice" down, how would it be replaced? And what about those who the inevitably see a new political system as criminal?
It is absolutely not fine. Some MMC devices that are better than others. The system plays a huge factor, the software configuration matched with the MMC can make a difference. Component skew and differences in implementation between chips and chip revs are huge factors. If you really think that MMC is reliable, then I have some swampland.... MMC for embedded is a bit of a mess.
Embedded devices are install and forget machines. It doesn't matter much who supports them or doesn't once they are in the field.
My customers would differ that support doesn't matter. For what I build, I have to design with a 5 years horizon. That includes new marketing requirements and field support among other things...
But that is rather tangential to my point... Because the HW development has stopped, is very possible that TI won't be writing drivers for OMAP devices much longer. Which means, as the Linux kernel progress, drive development may not. Looking 5 years down the line, this could get tricky, particularly considering TI's management of its own code base.
Not to say that BB is not a fine development platform. It is just not something I would pick up for a new design. This is coming from someone who has 3 Beagle Bones sitting his desk.
As far as unit availability, Special Computing is ramping up production and already surpassed all the other BBB manufacturers combined. Last I heard, they were over 120k per month production, the vast majority of which is going into mass-production doo-hickeys from various manufacturers.
Interesting. I can't say that I know of any products that are shipping Beagle Bones. Most that use the 335x will use embedded modules (usuall DIMMs) with NAND, from manufactures that assure reliability, usually at a much lower price point. The Beagle Bone itself is a reference design, and I've seen a few cases where the circuit is just put down on a larger board with other stuff.
I'm sure that TI will be making 335x until people stop buying them. TI generally doesn't EOL parts like that. But putting whole BBBs in products seems a bit risky for a lot of other reasons.
The Russians have been protecting a suspected criminal fraudster who happens to be the son of a government official. These suspicions aren't thin. Seleznev has even admitted to his crimes. If its state sponsored thuggery, then the state is Russia, not US. Roman Seleznev is just another cyber criminal who was dumb enough to step outside of Mother Russia long enough to get caught.
If this had been Snowden, then I think the argument for political motivation is real. But Snowden, his existence in Russian exile, gives Russia some leverage to make claim of political arrest and state overreach. The US government has put itself in a position where it looks bad even when it is doing something good.
If you are looking for a Linux based Dev System with support for many ARM processors, I would look at Yocto: https://www.yoctoproject.org/
This runs on 32 and 64 bit systems, has emulators for several processors, and generally appears to have support from many embedded ARM platform vendors.
Yocto leverages Open Embedded and so essentially builds a distribution, much like Gentoo. You will be rolling your own system from scratch. One of the beauties of Yocto is that you can maintain a similar source control configuration for multiple platforms, making it very easy to port across platforms.
One of my favorites out there today is the A10-OLinuXino-LIME....
The Beagle Bone was good in its day, but it is kind of over the hill. The processor is underpowered compared to other ARMs
Just to be clear, the A10-OLinuXino-LIME, BeagleBone white and BeagleBone Black all contain a single Cortex-A8 core, and the TI AM3359 runs at the same 1GHz speed in the BBB as the Allwinner A10 does in the LIME.
The original BeagleBone (white) ran its AM3359 at 720MHz so its CPU performance is a bit less, but the BeagleBone Black (BBB) superceded it a year ago and at a much lower price. As a result, the reasonable current-day comparison is between A10-OLinuXino-LIME and BBB, and on CPU power their similar speed Cortex-A8 cores make them pretty much identical.
These chips are hardly identical when you look at the peripherals. The Beagle Bone really is lacking in the SoC side of things and has been surpassed by a lot of other ARM chips.
For instance - the A10 LIME has a SATA port. What are the external options on a BBB? SD or the single USB port? And the 4G eMMC can have problems - there tends to be subtle difference in the parts between vendor and chip rev which make the system open to some of the reliability issues seen with SD.
I have all of these boards and many other similar ones, and my assessment is that BBB is much more capable for embedded projects because of its additional dual realtime 200MHz PRU cores (which are quite unrivalled),
Unrivalled? It can be rivaled with two PICs.
Not to say the PRU isn't nice, because it can be incredibly useful custom IO interface, but why would I need to do this? If I have some external device that requires that level of customization, then I'd be much better served to adapt it on the side of the device with a more ubiquitous interface (SPI, UART, PCIe), not create some custom interface on a processor.
while the A10-OLinuXino-LIME is more suitable as an extremely low end desktop-style "computer" because of its dual USB2 host sockets and rather more capable MALI-400 GPU.
Desktop-style?
I use the the A10-OLinuXino-LIME in low end Linux server apps - remote sensing and transmitting of data over ethernet. It seems to work quite well in this application. Don't use a monitor. I've leveraged the MALI-400 for codec conversion in a streaming app, which works fairly well. Cannot even begin to do that on a Beagle Bone.
Agree the A20 looks promising, but I haven't actually used it yet, so I can't comment.
The ARM architecture has some fairly good Linux support and wide adoption.
One of my favorites out there today is the A10-OLinuXino-LIME This is a low cost 1GHz ARM board with a Mali-400 GPU, a SATA port, 100BT port, two USB ports for under $50. I'm a big fan of the SATA port... using a SSD for the system solves many reliability problems. It also has support for LIPO battery but I haven't tried it.
Perhaps the best value/performance is the Wandboard QUAD. Quad iM.6 with 2GB Ram, WiFi, SATA, and an OpenCL supported Vivante GC 2000 all for $129. For the price it can't be beat... though the power consumption may be a bit higher than other small embedded systems..
The most popular two boards out there seem to be Beagle Bone and Rasperry PI. I'm not big on either...
The Beagle Bone was good in its day, but it is kind of over the hill. The processor is underpowered compared to other ARMs out there today for the same price/power consumption. Its peripherals are limited to essentially one USB 2.0 port and a bunch of multifunction IO on a header - which may be useful if you are hobbying. The one USB2.0 limits storage options. Because of the poor reliability of MMC, I prefer to use SSD these days, which means I need a USB drive enclosure of some type and need to get a hub if I want other USB. With all this, I'm still stuck at 2.0 speeds on the SSD.
The other issue with the Beagle Bone is that the processor is kind of on a dead end in terms of development cycle. That is, TI is not actively developing new OMAPs, but they have been authoring most of the Linux drivers for these chips. TI will continue to produce the OMAPs that are on the Beagle Bone, but I wonder how much they will continue to support driver development for future Linux.
Raspberry PI is useful for what it was designed as, an educational tool. But as an embedded processor it is not that great, kinda overhyped. The boot option is very limited - boot loader must reside on an SD. Also, Raspberry PI hardware is not open source. The Broadcom processor most nifty feature is a closed sources GPU, and the hardware requires a mysterious bin blob to boot properly. It is a toy.
This isn't true at all The President has ultimate authority over the actions of the intelligence agencies..
To the degree that the President knows what is going on. The problem, in a practical sense, the NSA doesn't have to listen to or inform the President of it's actions. Career civil servants acting outside of the wishes of an elected administration is nothing new... look at the FBI under Hoover or the CIA under Bush. There is an inherent advantage the civil servants have here, not in just being able to classify everything in sight, but also longevity and experience.
Not to say that the President isn't complicit here, he absolutely is. The President could get into the shorts of the NSA, which would essentially shut the agency down. But that would have political backlash that no President has been willing to accept. The NSA has too much legal leverage here.
The Congress has ultimate control of funding for the intelligence agencies. Further, both houses of Congress have intelligence oversight committees that were formed in the wake of multiple scandals from the 1960s and 1970s..
Yes, this is my point. Congress is the body that has the most ability to provide oversight. They have the actual carrot and stick - funding. But the degree to which it does provide oversight minimal. Instead, they have passed laws that have made the NSA harder to oversee, and have squelched all public debate as "classified". Congress is either dropping the ball here or screwing us royally, depending on how one looks at it.
None of this is new. FISA was written as a direct result of the US Army spying on domestic protests by American citizens. The domestic and overbroad spying by the NSA is exactly the type of thing that FISA was originally intended to halt.
Every time we pass a law to stop some shitty corporate or military behavior, it gets slowly watered down over the years until it's incapable of meeting its original goals.
.
Right. I don't think the public even understands this shit. FISA wasn't exactly on the level when it was written back in 1979. There is no appeal to the Supreme Court, which, for what is essentially a criminal court, appears outside the constitution. The FISA court may have have a practical purpose from 1979 to 1999 where it averaged about 600 requests for electronic surveillance per year. Then in 2000, there were 13,000+ request, like the unconstitutional big brother in the weeds.
The FISA legislation is the typical nonsense we can expect from congress. A half assed solution to a problem that, 20 years later, enough people had forgotten its purpose to be exploited.
Every step of the way, the NSA has been forced to go back and qualify its previous statements. And not just statements to the American people, but to Congress as well.
This is kind of like the scorpion and the frog.
Perhaps the concern here shouldn't be the NSA as much as the people who make the laws that enable the NSA to be the way they are. The NSA is a large secret agency that has been created by decades of congressional legislation. Due to "security concerns" the NSA operates relatively autonomously, and, by design, even the president and courts have limited oversight. The limitation of this oversight of the Judicial and Executive branches should be challenged but really hasn't. Why?
And people rail against the NSA, but they really need to look at congress who has allowed the agency, through legislation, to completely avoid the Judicial branch of our government, and not be accountable to the executive branch which it is supposedly running under.
One of the things I've notices is a general public complacency on this NSA issue. I'm curious as to why more people don't think the NSA spying is a problem. I was having a conversation with a friend the other day, and he seem real concerned about CIA drone strikes in Yemen. When I said I was more concerned about the NSA in Mountain View, he looked at me like I needed a tinfoil hat.
What's worse, intercepting peoples messages or making them public for anyone to read?
If by "making them public" you are referring to the messages the article wrote of, then you are a moron. Its clear the reporter got permission from the author of the message to reprint, and the article did very well to show how intrusive the collection process is.
If by "making them public" you are referring to the NSA storing the intercepted message, and then allowing random defense contractor jerkoffs / lawyers / cops / self appointed authorities to access them in the future, then you might have a point.
What rules? I see nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters. A Federal Court has already ruled that all these FAA press releases have no binding power over anybody, dismissing the only case the FAA has brought which has gone to judgement so far.
Apples and oranges.
That court ruling is in regard to the process of issuing fines for the use of a UAV for commercial purposes. Most articles I've read about this ruling have take an academic legal argument being made to avoid paying a fine, and have extrapolated it into some huge governmental over reach. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Congress has given the FAA this power to regulate (set rules, levy fine) anything that flies for commercial purpose. This power seems rather clear cut and the court agrees. The court's only issue is that the FAA was ambiguous in defining a UAV for the purpose of issuing fines - that the FAA rules could essentially fine a commercial operator for a paper airplane, which even the FAA agrees would be ridiculous.
The FAA is appealing and they may very well win this as they seem to be working within the laws as written. If this upsets you, blame your congress person, not the FAA. But you probably won't get far unless you have the resources to change public opinion - most people feel the FAA does a good job here. The general thinking is that aerial anarchy is a bad thing.
The "ridiculous rules" linked above completely different here. Those rule may be a case of the FAA exceeding its power - congress specified nothing about regulating the user interface to model airplanes. Those rules are bogus.
It seems to me that the benefits to working at the same company for long periods have gone away.
I started as an engineer in the 90's for a very large company that spent a lot of money training its people and on the tools for internal R&D. The company had been around for about 70 years and was full of gray beards doing cool and interesting projects. I think this is where longevity comes from - companies that heavily invest in R&D tend to make Engineers want to stay.
But, by investing in itself, the company built up a huge asset base, and so its fate was to be sliced up and sold off to maximize immediate shareholder gain. In the 90's many larger tech companies with heavy R&D cultures met similar fates. There may be a few left - perhaps Corning, Intel, and IBM... But for the most parts, large companies don't invest in themselves anymore.
Most successful large tech corporation now seem to buy expertise, rather than build from within. They poach people with the right experience or puchase smaller companies and startups that have already figured out the R&D. From the management side, it is the philosophy of the quick fix. But this mindset won't ever keep engineers long term. Either the engineer gets bored or gets poached.
And you think this will cripple anything _but_ the Windows Store? The Windows Store is a joke.
I think its safe to say that the "Windows Store" Desktop app strategy has failed. Nobody cares. Windows Store solves no problems for desktop users. The store may work for handheld devices and Xbox. Problem for Microsoft is that few want windows on their phone or tablet when Android and Apple are out there.
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Background levels are around 1 mS/year. So why advocate thresholds more than two orders of magnitude lower than what people normally get in a year? I just don't think science has much to do with your choice of thresholds.
Advocating a threshold based on background radiation is just as arbitrary. Nuclear disasters and atmospheric tests just raise the background in some places, at some times, beyond "safe" levels.
China is aiming to build enough nuclear capacity to beat the USA + France (#1 and #2 users of nuclear power) combined.
Mr. President, we cannot allow a nuclear capacity gap!
Look no further than what Obama did a few weeks ago. He picked winners and losers. The winners are nuke plants. Look to what stocks his cabinet owns.
Clearly this is all Obama's fault. Not just global warming regulation, but the actual global warming. And its Obama's fault that the Aussie's made the law in the first place and then repealed it now. 10 years ago they knew the US would have a weak leader....
1) No tax on breathing
2) One less revenue stream for government
3) More freedom for emitters of CO2
4) Happier plants since they need CO2
Yup. And who needed those polar ice caps anyway?
Dude, don't bogart the bread.
Don't buy stuff from China. It built with the bones of children AND it contains malware.
TI+ARM is alive and well.
More like on life support since 2012: http://www.eetimes.com/documen...
The AM437x is nearly 18months late, and likely was far along in the pipeline when those layoffs happened. TI's OMAP roadmap has been slipping for the past two years, with many processors there will never get released.
Dev houses using the BBB and RPi as base systems are going to eat everyones lunch. It is the comoditization of embedded hardware design. It was bound to happen sooner or later. the RPi started it, but the BBB brought enough IO channels to really get the ball rolling..
The comoditization of embedded hardware designed happened over a decade ago. Have you heard of Kontron? PC104? Com Express? You seem to have missed the 2000's.... this is nothing new. These days it is amazing what is put on a DIMM module - far more than the Beagle Bone and Pi toys provide and at far lower unit prices.
I heard the phrase "People using tool / platform / programming language / development process / telescopic fork are going to eat everyone's lunch." at least three times a year for the past 15 years. It is good evangelist speak, but rarely does it translate to reality... When it does, usually some other high barrier of entry is involved - a large amount of capital, good connections, or some wicked smart technical genius. Nobody eats anybody's lunch when it is so easy that any inexperienced person can do it.
And those who put hobbiest toys booting off MMC devices into products for sale, because they can't figure out how to port to a DIMM module or spin a board with a reference design, will be lucky to score on a dumpster dive.
Blurring lines between criminality and politics.?
The two are synonymous. What's this line?
Since politics has historically existed in all recorded human cultures, is humanity corrupt and criminal by nature? What is the alternative?
If one were to bring a political "system based on corrupt practice" down, how would it be replaced? And what about those who the inevitably see a new political system as criminal?
Khmer Rouge, Blanc, and Bleu anyone?
MMC reliability is fine.
It is absolutely not fine. Some MMC devices that are better than others. The system plays a huge factor, the software configuration matched with the MMC can make a difference. Component skew and differences in implementation between chips and chip revs are huge factors. If you really think that MMC is reliable, then I have some swampland.... MMC for embedded is a bit of a mess.
Embedded devices are install and forget machines. It doesn't matter much who supports them or doesn't once they are in the field.
My customers would differ that support doesn't matter. For what I build, I have to design with a 5 years horizon. That includes new marketing requirements and field support among other things...
But that is rather tangential to my point... Because the HW development has stopped, is very possible that TI won't be writing drivers for OMAP devices much longer. Which means, as the Linux kernel progress, drive development may not. Looking 5 years down the line, this could get tricky, particularly considering TI's management of its own code base.
Not to say that BB is not a fine development platform. It is just not something I would pick up for a new design. This is coming from someone who has 3 Beagle Bones sitting his desk.
As far as unit availability, Special Computing is ramping up production and already surpassed all the other BBB manufacturers combined. Last I heard, they were over 120k per month production, the vast majority of which is going into mass-production doo-hickeys from various manufacturers.
Interesting. I can't say that I know of any products that are shipping Beagle Bones. Most that use the 335x will use embedded modules (usuall DIMMs) with NAND, from manufactures that assure reliability, usually at a much lower price point. The Beagle Bone itself is a reference design, and I've seen a few cases where the circuit is just put down on a larger board with other stuff.
I'm sure that TI will be making 335x until people stop buying them. TI generally doesn't EOL parts like that. But putting whole BBBs in products seems a bit risky for a lot of other reasons.
The Russians have been protecting a suspected criminal fraudster who happens to be the son of a government official. These suspicions aren't thin. Seleznev has even admitted to his crimes. If its state sponsored thuggery, then the state is Russia, not US. Roman Seleznev is just another cyber criminal who was dumb enough to step outside of Mother Russia long enough to get caught.
If this had been Snowden, then I think the argument for political motivation is real. But Snowden, his existence in Russian exile, gives Russia some leverage to make claim of political arrest and state overreach. The US government has put itself in a position where it looks bad even when it is doing something good.
Using the quad as a single board computer in an embedded app. It is amazing.
The only downside is the price. The power is nearly 10W, and has no flash on board, so an SSD will put it over 10W.
If you are looking for a Linux based Dev System with support for many ARM processors, I would look at Yocto: https://www.yoctoproject.org/
This runs on 32 and 64 bit systems, has emulators for several processors, and generally appears to have support from many embedded ARM platform vendors.
Yocto leverages Open Embedded and so essentially builds a distribution, much like Gentoo. You will be rolling your own system from scratch. One of the beauties of Yocto is that you can maintain a similar source control configuration for multiple platforms, making it very easy to port across platforms.
Just to be clear, the A10-OLinuXino-LIME, BeagleBone white and BeagleBone Black all contain a single Cortex-A8 core, and the TI AM3359 runs at the same 1GHz speed in the BBB as the Allwinner A10 does in the LIME.
The original BeagleBone (white) ran its AM3359 at 720MHz so its CPU performance is a bit less, but the BeagleBone Black (BBB) superceded it a year ago and at a much lower price. As a result, the reasonable current-day comparison is between A10-OLinuXino-LIME and BBB, and on CPU power their similar speed Cortex-A8 cores make them pretty much identical.
These chips are hardly identical when you look at the peripherals. The Beagle Bone really is lacking in the SoC side of things and has been surpassed by a lot of other ARM chips.
For instance - the A10 LIME has a SATA port. What are the external options on a BBB? SD or the single USB port? And the 4G eMMC can have problems - there tends to be subtle difference in the parts between vendor and chip rev which make the system open to some of the reliability issues seen with SD.
I have all of these boards and many other similar ones, and my assessment is that BBB is much more capable for embedded projects because of its additional dual realtime 200MHz PRU cores (which are quite unrivalled),
Unrivalled? It can be rivaled with two PICs.
Not to say the PRU isn't nice, because it can be incredibly useful custom IO interface, but why would I need to do this? If I have some external device that requires that level of customization, then I'd be much better served to adapt it on the side of the device with a more ubiquitous interface (SPI, UART, PCIe), not create some custom interface on a processor.
while the A10-OLinuXino-LIME is more suitable as an extremely low end desktop-style "computer" because of its dual USB2 host sockets and rather more capable MALI-400 GPU.
Desktop-style?
I use the the A10-OLinuXino-LIME in low end Linux server apps - remote sensing and transmitting of data over ethernet. It seems to work quite well in this application. Don't use a monitor. I've leveraged the MALI-400 for codec conversion in a streaming app, which works fairly well. Cannot even begin to do that on a Beagle Bone.
Agree the A20 looks promising, but I haven't actually used it yet, so I can't comment.
The ARM architecture has some fairly good Linux support and wide adoption.
One of my favorites out there today is the A10-OLinuXino-LIME This is a low cost 1GHz ARM board with a Mali-400 GPU, a SATA port, 100BT port, two USB ports for under $50. I'm a big fan of the SATA port... using a SSD for the system solves many reliability problems. It also has support for LIPO battery but I haven't tried it.
Perhaps the best value/performance is the Wandboard QUAD. Quad iM.6 with 2GB Ram, WiFi, SATA, and an OpenCL supported Vivante GC 2000 all for $129. For the price it can't be beat... though the power consumption may be a bit higher than other small embedded systems..
The most popular two boards out there seem to be Beagle Bone and Rasperry PI. I'm not big on either...
The Beagle Bone was good in its day, but it is kind of over the hill. The processor is underpowered compared to other ARMs out there today for the same price/power consumption. Its peripherals are limited to essentially one USB 2.0 port and a bunch of multifunction IO on a header - which may be useful if you are hobbying. The one USB2.0 limits storage options. Because of the poor reliability of MMC, I prefer to use SSD these days, which means I need a USB drive enclosure of some type and need to get a hub if I want other USB. With all this, I'm still stuck at 2.0 speeds on the SSD.
The other issue with the Beagle Bone is that the processor is kind of on a dead end in terms of development cycle. That is, TI is not actively developing new OMAPs, but they have been authoring most of the Linux drivers for these chips. TI will continue to produce the OMAPs that are on the Beagle Bone, but I wonder how much they will continue to support driver development for future Linux.
Raspberry PI is useful for what it was designed as, an educational tool. But as an embedded processor it is not that great, kinda overhyped. The boot option is very limited - boot loader must reside on an SD. Also, Raspberry PI hardware is not open source. The Broadcom processor most nifty feature is a closed sources GPU, and the hardware requires a mysterious bin blob to boot properly. It is a toy.
I, for one, will welcome our new robot overlords.
This isn't true at all .
The President has ultimate authority over the actions of the intelligence agencies.
To the degree that the President knows what is going on. The problem, in a practical sense, the NSA doesn't have to listen to or inform the President of it's actions. Career civil servants acting outside of the wishes of an elected administration is nothing new... look at the FBI under Hoover or the CIA under Bush. There is an inherent advantage the civil servants have here, not in just being able to classify everything in sight, but also longevity and experience.
Not to say that the President isn't complicit here, he absolutely is. The President could get into the shorts of the NSA, which would essentially shut the agency down. But that would have political backlash that no President has been willing to accept. The NSA has too much legal leverage here.
The Congress has ultimate control of funding for the intelligence agencies. .
Further, both houses of Congress have intelligence oversight committees that were formed in the wake of multiple scandals from the 1960s and 1970s.
Yes, this is my point. Congress is the body that has the most ability to provide oversight. They have the actual carrot and stick - funding. But the degree to which it does provide oversight minimal. Instead, they have passed laws that have made the NSA harder to oversee, and have squelched all public debate as "classified". Congress is either dropping the ball here or screwing us royally, depending on how one looks at it.
None of this is new. FISA was written as a direct result of the US Army spying on domestic protests by American citizens.
The domestic and overbroad spying by the NSA is exactly the type of thing that FISA was originally intended to halt.
Every time we pass a law to stop some shitty corporate or military behavior, it gets slowly watered down over the years until it's incapable of meeting its original goals.
.
Right. I don't think the public even understands this shit. FISA wasn't exactly on the level when it was written back in 1979. There is no appeal to the Supreme Court, which, for what is essentially a criminal court, appears outside the constitution. The FISA court may have have a practical purpose from 1979 to 1999 where it averaged about 600 requests for electronic surveillance per year. Then in 2000, there were 13,000+ request, like the unconstitutional big brother in the weeds.
The FISA legislation is the typical nonsense we can expect from congress. A half assed solution to a problem that, 20 years later, enough people had forgotten its purpose to be exploited.
Every step of the way, the NSA has been forced to go back and qualify its previous statements.
And not just statements to the American people, but to Congress as well.
This is kind of like the scorpion and the frog.
Perhaps the concern here shouldn't be the NSA as much as the people who make the laws that enable the NSA to be the way they are. The NSA is a large secret agency that has been created by decades of congressional legislation. Due to "security concerns" the NSA operates relatively autonomously, and, by design, even the president and courts have limited oversight. The limitation of this oversight of the Judicial and Executive branches should be challenged but really hasn't. Why?
And people rail against the NSA, but they really need to look at congress who has allowed the agency, through legislation, to completely avoid the Judicial branch of our government, and not be accountable to the executive branch which it is supposedly running under.
One of the things I've notices is a general public complacency on this NSA issue. I'm curious as to why more people don't think the NSA spying is a problem. I was having a conversation with a friend the other day, and he seem real concerned about CIA drone strikes in Yemen. When I said I was more concerned about the NSA in Mountain View, he looked at me like I needed a tinfoil hat.
What's worse, intercepting peoples messages or making them public for anyone to read?
If by "making them public" you are referring to the messages the article wrote of, then you are a moron. Its clear the reporter got permission from the author of the message to reprint, and the article did very well to show how intrusive the collection process is.
If by "making them public" you are referring to the NSA storing the intercepted message, and then allowing random defense contractor jerkoffs / lawyers / cops / self appointed authorities to access them in the future, then you might have a point.
What rules? I see nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters. A Federal Court has already ruled that all these FAA press releases have no binding power over anybody, dismissing the only case the FAA has brought which has gone to judgement so far.
Apples and oranges.
That court ruling is in regard to the process of issuing fines for the use of a UAV for commercial purposes. Most articles I've read about this ruling have take an academic legal argument being made to avoid paying a fine, and have extrapolated it into some huge governmental over reach. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Congress has given the FAA this power to regulate (set rules, levy fine) anything that flies for commercial purpose. This power seems rather clear cut and the court agrees. The court's only issue is that the FAA was ambiguous in defining a UAV for the purpose of issuing fines - that the FAA rules could essentially fine a commercial operator for a paper airplane, which even the FAA agrees would be ridiculous.
The FAA is appealing and they may very well win this as they seem to be working within the laws as written. If this upsets you, blame your congress person, not the FAA. But you probably won't get far unless you have the resources to change public opinion - most people feel the FAA does a good job here. The general thinking is that aerial anarchy is a bad thing.
The "ridiculous rules" linked above completely different here. Those rule may be a case of the FAA exceeding its power - congress specified nothing about regulating the user interface to model airplanes. Those rules are bogus.
Or the DOD just finished its Death Star?
Sorry. How about "Dalvik"?
It seems to me that the benefits to working at the same company for long periods have gone away.
I started as an engineer in the 90's for a very large company that spent a lot of money training its people and on the tools for internal R&D. The company had been around for about 70 years and was full of gray beards doing cool and interesting projects. I think this is where longevity comes from - companies that heavily invest in R&D tend to make Engineers want to stay.
But, by investing in itself, the company built up a huge asset base, and so its fate was to be sliced up and sold off to maximize immediate shareholder gain. In the 90's many larger tech companies with heavy R&D cultures met similar fates. There may be a few left - perhaps Corning, Intel, and IBM... But for the most parts, large companies don't invest in themselves anymore.
Most successful large tech corporation now seem to buy expertise, rather than build from within. They poach people with the right experience or puchase smaller companies and startups that have already figured out the R&D. From the management side, it is the philosophy of the quick fix. But this mindset won't ever keep engineers long term. Either the engineer gets bored or gets poached.
Seriously?
And you think this will cripple anything _but_ the Windows Store? The Windows Store is a joke.
I think its safe to say that the "Windows Store" Desktop app strategy has failed. Nobody cares. Windows Store solves no problems for desktop users. The store may work for handheld devices and Xbox. Problem for Microsoft is that few want windows on their phone or tablet when Android and Apple are out there.