They're just trying to raise money for network upgrades. They need to install all new state of the art spying gear to make sure they have the information about their customers marketers will pay top dollar for.
In U.S. law, "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and...
In U.S. law, early amendments to the constitution can be overridden by later amendments. The 16th Amendment authorizes the federal government to collect income tax, and there is no way to do that without sticking its nose into every nook and cranny of everyone's financial affairs.
You may still have your 4th amendment rights in other areas, but not for anything to do with money. 99% of the people are okay with that. If you are not, then you can join the 1% that vote Libertarian. Good luck.
The 16th amendment simply provides for basic authorization of tax collection. The implementation is a long list of laws passed by congress collectively referred to as the tax code (including the law that creates the IRS itself). These laws, just like any other, must comply with all the other amendments - 4th included.
Don't sell it. Give it to them. Make maintenance a tax assessment, just like sewage, roads, etc.
The summary mentions multiple times, including in the very first sentance, that this applies to a municipality providing internet service to people outside its city boundaries. We don't let politicians levy taxes on people outside their jurisdictions, you may have previously heard this referred to as "no taxation without representation". People tend to feel rather strongly about it.
It seems that these researchers have a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying causes of this debate. ISP's want to sit in the middle between businesses and users and charge both sides as much as possible to talk to each other. They don't care what we want prioritized, they only care who will pay them to be prioritized.
They might as well have made an app that tells Donald Trump when people want him to shutup. He doesn't care, neither do the ISP's
The caps are not put in place by ISPs to make people pay for TV as the summary claims. (Why would an ISP that has no video services at all have caps if that were truly the reason? What is T-Mobile's TV service?) They're put in place to keep people who think they ought to have 100% fulltime use of a shared resource from keeping other users from getting what they are paying for.
I'm still not convinced this isn't some sort of odd false flag operation.
Imagine you're the NSA and you've been unable to get inside of some other countries likely air gapped cyber security operation... putting some juicy tools out there they're likely to snatch up and play with at least get you to see who the players are and maybe these tools work maybe they blow up... As for the vulnerabilities, with so many people playing this game, any vulnerability not found by the NSA is likely to be found by some other organization.
Even the vulnerabilities could be snares... I'm suspect of all of this and think it's just part of a big ruse.
MEMO
To: Equation Group From: General Keith B. Alexander CC: Not China; Definitely not Russia Subject: OPERATION INCOMPETANCE -- TOP SECRET
Since your nerdy version of what I'm pretty sure is some kind of witchcraft has failed to breach the enemy's 'cyber security operation', I've come up with a plan of my own. We simply need to make our entire agency look wildly inept with regard to what is supposed to be our core specialty by publicly posting years worth of your teams research to a public github account, claiming we hacked us. Next, we go through the motions of a public auction to ensure how bad we suck at our jobs stays on the front page of every newspaper for as long as possible. Once we have the enemy fooled, we'll send them the decryption key to the rest of your research (I mentioned that, right?) which contains a booby trap! No way they'll see that coming!
I'm pretty sure they will hook their 'air gapped cyber security operation' up to the internet for a minute to download what is advertised as NSA malware. It's not like they air gapped the place to keep out NSA malware, right?
> I'm guessing the receivers were incredibly permissive in how they treat incoming signals.
I would not be at all surprised, as this technology is, or was until recently, in development.
First making it work and then hardening it is not a bad strategy, as long as you actually do the latter - and it is a good idea to think about how you would do it before you need to.
Does this really require hardening? For far less than $60 I could make a laser that permanently blinds human drivers. Should we require laser resistant windshields in all cars or maybe just arrest anyone stupid enough to aim a laser at traffic?
"one does assume that organized crime is also going to look at the chaos triggered by the hurricane in order to do more of whatever it is that they usually do. Therefore the FBI needs to be prepared."
I would argue that the MO of organized crime is not to try to identify where every federal and state emergency and law enforcement agency is flooding all of their resources and personnel and then join that party. Their intention is to make money, not be supervillans. They need things like funtional infrastructure (airports / shipping ports to import contraband, functional roads to move the contraband, working banks so locals have access to money, etc) which does not exist in these disaster zones. Please stop excusing the FBI's illegal behavior based on wild assumptions.
That makes perfect sense. And by the same logic, if someone uploads or shares a movie that a distributor would have paid between $10-20 million for the rights to distribute, the fine should be about $50-150k.
It's important to remember that people aren't being sued for downloading, they're being sued for uploading. And distribution rights are expensive. Apple doesn't pay Warner Brothers $1, once, in exchange for being able to distribute some new song. AMC Theaters doesn't give New Line Cinemas a simple $14 for the rights to show Straight Outta Compton on a thousand screens for the next three months.
Remember back when Michael Jackson bought the distribution rights to the Beatles' catalog for several million? It worked out to around $20-30k per song... which happens to be right about the same amount Jammie Thomas and Joel Tenenbaum had to pay for their infringement.
I'm not sure if you don't understand the underlying economics of the movie industry, or if you don't understand how popcorn time works - or both. Companies don't pay a lump sum for "distribution rights". Using AMC Theatres as you did, the studio would be paid per ticket sold to see the show (basically the entire ticket price, with the venue making income on concession sales). So if a ticket is $8, and 10 people attend the movie, AMC pays New Line $80. If 1,000,000 people attend, AMC pays $8,000,000. Your theoretical example of a Hollywood studio only making $14 in theaters can and does happen. Here is a list of 11 movies that made less than $400 gross while they were in theaters - some staring actors you probably recognize: http://mentalfloss.com/article...
Popcorn time seeds the torrent while you are watching the movie. So if I watch a movie and "upload" 4% of it to 12 different people before it ends, I only "distributed" 48% of a single movie in total. Using our $8 ticket price, wouldn't I owe $3.80? I can't imagine it getting to $50,000 - $150,000 as you suggest. The only exception to this would be the one person who originally uploaded the movie to the internet... but that would be both off topic and contrary to your 'uploads' statement so I won't address it.
Unemployment is down ~2% across the board since 2008.
Average hourly wage is up ~4% (Although the MEDIAN seasonally adjusted wage is down slightly, perhaps indicating a widening gap in wages?)
Perhaps the reason tech related jobs are doing relatively poorly is because they are too easily outsourced. If it doesn't matter where you are physically when you do your job, then you are literally competing with the entire planet for that job.
=Smidge=
I would start by not using the low point of the greatest recession in living memory as my reference point.
I'm not sure why you are fretting about data use when there are plenty of unlimited plans available (You didn't say where you live, so I'm guessing US based on slashdot user base). Telecommunications companies have been making an effort to push us all into tiered / limited data plans mostly to boost their bottom lines. T-Mobile offers 2 lines with unlimited data for $100 a month - so why accept limited data from a-holes like ATT or Verizon? Show them what you think of their policies by giving your money to their competitors instead.
Want Verizon to sit up straight and come around? NYC is the *perfect* place for community access broadband. Enormous population density with probably high 90% subscribership.
Even easier, invite Google Fiber into town with promises from the Mayor that the city will make it a priority to clear the way for their fiber installation. It wouldn't cost the city anything other than refocusing the attention of some employees and would certainly get Verizon's attention. Plus, unlike their other installations, Google already has a large number of employees living locally.
What surprises me most is that we haven't seen a comprehensive software solution for this yet. Sure, i've seen an implementation or two that only work on specific chipsets with Android, but where is the app that detects these stingrays, notifies all users in the area then triangulates the devices position and tracks it's movements using crowdsourced data? Maybe even an option to shutoff your phones radio or broadcast nonsense identification until it's gone.
It seems to me that if turning one of these on aways resulted in nearly instant identification of the vehicle carrying it, this nonsense would end pretty quick.
I had the opportunity to attend an award lecture early this year for one of the researchers working on the core mathematics / feedback control systems for bipedal walking robots. It's the basis for all of the DARPA robots and he covered many of the relevant topics. available here if anyone wants to know more:
We should certainly be providing a well rounded education, but let's not ignore where this whole push to code comes from. It's from the people who pay the coders, and they hate paying high wages. The same people who cry about a lack of engineers in general, who push for more H1B's, who want to drive down wages in the industry.
This doesn't have anything to do with benefiting the children, it's so Zuckerberg can be worth $28 Billion when he dies instead of $22 Billion - at the expense of those children.
Teslas costs are also very high compared to whats out there. They want $3,000 for a 10KW battery. Sure it's pretty and doesn't require much space, but you can buy 6V 230AH golf cart batteries for $105, something like this: http://sunelec.com/batteries/s... .
6V*230AH = 1380 watts per battery. 10KW / 1.38 = 7.25 batteries I need to match their energy storage capacity. At $105 per battery that only costs $760. So, do you want to pay $3,000, or $760?
I could build the entire system, with an inverter, battery charger, and a couple solar panels for what they charge for just the battery.
That's only a solution if the job has no requirement for her to be "on-call" outside office hours; being reachable when off the clock seems like the sort of thing that a sales exec is regularly expected to be. So not actually a solution.
I was one of these sales execs you mention in the past and I can tell you that it is not limited to just them. In my case my company specialized in industrial automation equipment. My phone regularly rang in the middle of the night with a line down at x plant or worse. Most of the time the fastest solution was to repair the damaged component. That means I needed an engineering manager to open up the repair facility at 2am. I need repair technicians to fix it, test technicians to verify the repair, a driver to pick it up and drop it back off, etc. All of these people also had to be reachable at all hours or the whole system falls apart.
It's not just the sales exec that is trackable, its his entire support structure.
Slashdot Mirror
$60 a month for 10Mb/s internet?
What the fuck is this shit comcast?
They're just trying to raise money for network upgrades. They need to install all new state of the art spying gear to make sure they have the information about their customers marketers will pay top dollar for.
In U.S. law, "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and ...
In U.S. law, early amendments to the constitution can be overridden by later amendments. The 16th Amendment authorizes the federal government to collect income tax, and there is no way to do that without sticking its nose into every nook and cranny of everyone's financial affairs.
You may still have your 4th amendment rights in other areas, but not for anything to do with money. 99% of the people are okay with that. If you are not, then you can join the 1% that vote Libertarian. Good luck.
The 16th amendment simply provides for basic authorization of tax collection. The implementation is a long list of laws passed by congress collectively referred to as the tax code (including the law that creates the IRS itself). These laws, just like any other, must comply with all the other amendments - 4th included.
next i want to hear the alert for missile lock and see it auto deploy counter measures..
You'll probably have to wait for their middle east rollout
Don't sell it. Give it to them. Make maintenance a tax assessment, just like sewage, roads, etc.
The summary mentions multiple times, including in the very first sentance, that this applies to a municipality providing internet service to people outside its city boundaries. We don't let politicians levy taxes on people outside their jurisdictions, you may have previously heard this referred to as "no taxation without representation". People tend to feel rather strongly about it.
It seems that these researchers have a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying causes of this debate. ISP's want to sit in the middle between businesses and users and charge both sides as much as possible to talk to each other. They don't care what we want prioritized, they only care who will pay them to be prioritized.
They might as well have made an app that tells Donald Trump when people want him to shutup. He doesn't care, neither do the ISP's
The caps are not put in place by ISPs to make people pay for TV as the summary claims. (Why would an ISP that has no video services at all have caps if that were truly the reason? What is T-Mobile's TV service?) They're put in place to keep people who think they ought to have 100% fulltime use of a shared resource from keeping other users from getting what they are paying for.
So this is just about network management?
Comcast VP: 300GB data cap is “business policy,” not technical necessity
http://arstechnica.com/busines...
Another Broadband CEO Admits: Data Caps Have Nothing To Do With Capacity
https://consumerist.com/2016/0...
Leaked Comcast memo reportedly admits data caps aren't about improving network performance
http://www.theverge.com/smart-...
Comcast Admits Broadband Usage Caps Are A Cash Grab, Not An Engineering Necessity
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
I'm still not convinced this isn't some sort of odd false flag operation.
Imagine you're the NSA and you've been unable to get inside of some other countries likely air gapped cyber security operation... putting some juicy tools out there they're likely to snatch up and play with at least get you to see who the players are and maybe these tools work maybe they blow up... As for the vulnerabilities, with so many people playing this game, any vulnerability not found by the NSA is likely to be found by some other organization.
Even the vulnerabilities could be snares... I'm suspect of all of this and think it's just part of a big ruse.
MEMO
To: Equation Group
From: General Keith B. Alexander
CC: Not China; Definitely not Russia
Subject: OPERATION INCOMPETANCE -- TOP SECRET
Since your nerdy version of what I'm pretty sure is some kind of witchcraft has failed to breach the enemy's 'cyber security operation', I've come up with a plan of my own. We simply need to make our entire agency look wildly inept with regard to what is supposed to be our core specialty by publicly posting years worth of your teams research to a public github account, claiming we hacked us. Next, we go through the motions of a public auction to ensure how bad we suck at our jobs stays on the front page of every newspaper for as long as possible. Once we have the enemy fooled, we'll send them the decryption key to the rest of your research (I mentioned that, right?) which contains a booby trap! No way they'll see that coming!
I'm pretty sure they will hook their 'air gapped cyber security operation' up to the internet for a minute to download what is advertised as NSA malware. It's not like they air gapped the place to keep out NSA malware, right?
END MEMO
> I'm guessing the receivers were incredibly permissive in how they treat incoming signals.
I would not be at all surprised, as this technology is, or was until recently, in development.
First making it work and then hardening it is not a bad strategy, as long as you actually do the latter - and it is a good idea to think about how you would do it before you need to.
Does this really require hardening? For far less than $60 I could make a laser that permanently blinds human drivers. Should we require laser resistant windshields in all cars or maybe just arrest anyone stupid enough to aim a laser at traffic?
"one does assume that organized crime is also going to look at the chaos triggered by the hurricane in order to do more of whatever it is that they usually do. Therefore the FBI needs to be prepared."
I would argue that the MO of organized crime is not to try to identify where every federal and state emergency and law enforcement agency is flooding all of their resources and personnel and then join that party. Their intention is to make money, not be supervillans. They need things like funtional infrastructure (airports / shipping ports to import contraband, functional roads to move the contraband, working banks so locals have access to money, etc) which does not exist in these disaster zones. Please stop excusing the FBI's illegal behavior based on wild assumptions.
That makes perfect sense. And by the same logic, if someone uploads or shares a movie that a distributor would have paid between $10-20 million for the rights to distribute, the fine should be about $50-150k.
It's important to remember that people aren't being sued for downloading, they're being sued for uploading. And distribution rights are expensive. Apple doesn't pay Warner Brothers $1, once, in exchange for being able to distribute some new song. AMC Theaters doesn't give New Line Cinemas a simple $14 for the rights to show Straight Outta Compton on a thousand screens for the next three months.
Remember back when Michael Jackson bought the distribution rights to the Beatles' catalog for several million? It worked out to around $20-30k per song... which happens to be right about the same amount Jammie Thomas and Joel Tenenbaum had to pay for their infringement.
I'm not sure if you don't understand the underlying economics of the movie industry, or if you don't understand how popcorn time works - or both. Companies don't pay a lump sum for "distribution rights". Using AMC Theatres as you did, the studio would be paid per ticket sold to see the show (basically the entire ticket price, with the venue making income on concession sales). So if a ticket is $8, and 10 people attend the movie, AMC pays New Line $80. If 1,000,000 people attend, AMC pays $8,000,000. Your theoretical example of a Hollywood studio only making $14 in theaters can and does happen. Here is a list of 11 movies that made less than $400 gross while they were in theaters - some staring actors you probably recognize: http://mentalfloss.com/article...
Popcorn time seeds the torrent while you are watching the movie. So if I watch a movie and "upload" 4% of it to 12 different people before it ends, I only "distributed" 48% of a single movie in total. Using our $8 ticket price, wouldn't I owe $3.80? I can't imagine it getting to $50,000 - $150,000 as you suggest. The only exception to this would be the one person who originally uploaded the movie to the internet... but that would be both off topic and contrary to your 'uploads' statement so I won't address it.
Well, how do you want to measure economic health?
GDP is up ~8.5% since 2008.
DJIA is up ~18.5% since 2008.
Unemployment is down ~2% across the board since 2008.
Average hourly wage is up ~4% (Although the MEDIAN seasonally adjusted wage is down slightly, perhaps indicating a widening gap in wages?)
Perhaps the reason tech related jobs are doing relatively poorly is because they are too easily outsourced. If it doesn't matter where you are physically when you do your job, then you are literally competing with the entire planet for that job. =Smidge=
I would start by not using the low point of the greatest recession in living memory as my reference point.
... they need to recruit some of the absolutely terrible drivers we've all seen, and send them into the mix to do their usual random shit.
As someone who frequently drives in the Ann Arbor area, I suspect they have been recruiting for decades.
I'm not sure why you are fretting about data use when there are plenty of unlimited plans available (You didn't say where you live, so I'm guessing US based on slashdot user base). Telecommunications companies have been making an effort to push us all into tiered / limited data plans mostly to boost their bottom lines. T-Mobile offers 2 lines with unlimited data for $100 a month - so why accept limited data from a-holes like ATT or Verizon? Show them what you think of their policies by giving your money to their competitors instead.
Is this guy single? Maybe we should hook him up with Barbra Streisand.
Who do we root for? Prenda, FBI, or PirateBay.
I believe the appropriate order would be:
1) Pirate Bay
2) FBI
3) Satan
4) Prenda
As a resident of Chicago, I personally think these taxes are not really that big a deal. $10 a yeast for netflix...meh.
and that attitude is exactly why you are stuck paying them.
I used to work for a robot company
I knew corporations were people, but you're saying they can be robots too?!
Want Verizon to sit up straight and come around? NYC is the *perfect* place for community access broadband. Enormous population density with probably high 90% subscribership.
Even easier, invite Google Fiber into town with promises from the Mayor that the city will make it a priority to clear the way for their fiber installation. It wouldn't cost the city anything other than refocusing the attention of some employees and would certainly get Verizon's attention. Plus, unlike their other installations, Google already has a large number of employees living locally.
What surprises me most is that we haven't seen a comprehensive software solution for this yet. Sure, i've seen an implementation or two that only work on specific chipsets with Android, but where is the app that detects these stingrays, notifies all users in the area then triangulates the devices position and tracks it's movements using crowdsourced data? Maybe even an option to shutoff your phones radio or broadcast nonsense identification until it's gone.
It seems to me that if turning one of these on aways resulted in nearly instant identification of the vehicle carrying it, this nonsense would end pretty quick.
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs...
We should certainly be providing a well rounded education, but let's not ignore where this whole push to code comes from. It's from the people who pay the coders, and they hate paying high wages. The same people who cry about a lack of engineers in general, who push for more H1B's, who want to drive down wages in the industry.
This doesn't have anything to do with benefiting the children, it's so Zuckerberg can be worth $28 Billion when he dies instead of $22 Billion - at the expense of those children.
6V*230AH = 1380 watts per battery. 10KW / 1.38 = 7.25 batteries I need to match their energy storage capacity. At $105 per battery that only costs $760. So, do you want to pay $3,000, or $760?
I could build the entire system, with an inverter, battery charger, and a couple solar panels for what they charge for just the battery.
640Hz should be enough for everybody.
440hz sounds like a better idea to me, though.
No need to argue ladies, a DC signal is technically periodic over any interval, so you both win!
That's only a solution if the job has no requirement for her to be "on-call" outside office hours; being reachable when off the clock seems like the sort of thing that a sales exec is regularly expected to be. So not actually a solution.
I was one of these sales execs you mention in the past and I can tell you that it is not limited to just them. In my case my company specialized in industrial automation equipment. My phone regularly rang in the middle of the night with a line down at x plant or worse. Most of the time the fastest solution was to repair the damaged component. That means I needed an engineering manager to open up the repair facility at 2am. I need repair technicians to fix it, test technicians to verify the repair, a driver to pick it up and drop it back off, etc. All of these people also had to be reachable at all hours or the whole system falls apart.
It's not just the sales exec that is trackable, its his entire support structure.
Chess tourneys should be played by naked participants in a large faraday cage.
or we could have the TSA screen them http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...