Yes, I would imagine the idea is to make the administrative/orchestration interface look just like AWS while actually being on the classified network. That way they can hire engineers who have AWS experience and just have them spin up servers the same way. They can also take their orchestration tools and ansible script.
This could potentially increase security by limiting the obnoxious roadblocks that provide the frustration incentive to break the rules on these systems in the first place. If everything on the classified system works almost the same way it does in the rest of the IT world, you make hiring easier, you make government more efficient, you reduce job frustration.
The Obama administration did push through an update to the Federal overtime regulations to make the majority of blue collar workers, especially retail/restaurant managers eligible for OT again, because they mostly get salaries around $24k/yr whereas a $12/hr worker would get OT without question, but its been blocked in court and the Trump administration is trying to kill it.
Yes. This is the fundamental problem. The only way crypto-currency gains traction is if the transaction fees and other "friction" drops below other convenient methods. This is probably why a lot of companies are developing private block chain systems and consortiums for special purposes so they can make the transaction fees essentially at cost (of operating their computing hardware)
Its still just a ton of speculation until some killer apps arrive. IMHO the real blockchain value is in the distributed cryptographically secure ledger, not the "scrip" they want to call money.
Government doesn't actually have to set the price. They just cap the availability and an auction process sets the price. Cap and trade ends up being more flexible and responsive to market conditions than a flat rate pollution tax.
The government can manipulate the auction results via supply or reserve tranches of credits, (effectively at cheaper prices) for some nationally important industries or exempt small emitters (like you and your car) while requiring large emitters like an airline or rail conglomerate or a electrical utility to purchase the credits each year.
You are confusing voter fraud (voting multiple times or for other people) with election fraud (miscounting the votes or manipulating how inconvenient it is to vote) .
Realistically voter fraud is meaningless outside of the occasional small local off-year race where a few extra votes will matter.
What the EC does is make the votes of the vast majority of the country meaningless and hands it to a few voters in a few states. The EC is a relic that should have gone away decades ago.
This is now the second time in 5 cycles where this has happened. National Popular Vote will actually make the two (or more) candidates campaign for every vote instead of trying to strategize about what counties in swing states will matter.
There are several other structural changes we ought to consider but eliminating the EC is an easy one and would be broadly popular.
There is simply a completely different type of employment culture in India than in the US. In the US we are used to interacting with a self-selecting group of immigrants who work really hard and often put up with a lot of stuff under H1 or other visa programs that American citizens wouldn't tolerate from employers.
Back in India though, there is a culture of treating employees like shit, and consequently a culture among employees of working as little as possible. Employers also don't screen candidates well for off-shore call centers and the like because if they are working on a large contract, all the accountability is based on metrics that can be manipulated and the US based business that contracted them probably only cares about reducing their costs.
My Indian and other immigrant coworkers work their asses off. The support teams I deal with in India can't even be bothered to show up to a phone call and are usually incapable of anything more than opening up a ticket with the software/hardware vendor directly.
Not really. In the US, if you had a private letter ruling like this where the IRS blessed your tax avoidance scheme and a court later disagreed, you still owe the taxes and internet. You would probably be spared the penalties since you followed IRS guidance in good faith. The law firm you hired to work with the IRS, might owe you some kind of refund or indemnity from their insurer.
I believe the way this happens is similar to what in the US is called a "Private Letter Ruling"
Basically a business or individual wants to know if a particular tax or other business strategy, basically a loophole, is legal. So they hire a specialty law firm and pay them to document the plan and then send it to the IRS or another regulator. What they get back is an opinion by that regulator that what they are doing is legal or not. Its not binding in court though but it might protect you from penalties or criminal charges for tax evasion if a court later disagrees with the private letter ruling since you followed the best legal advice and regulator interpretations in good faith.
So what seems to have happened here is Apple had this complex tax avoidance scheme and was able to convince Irish tax officials to sign off that their interpretation is that this is legal. However what was really happening is that Apple was telling all the other EU tax authorities that revenue was being earned in Ireland and would be taxed there. Then they were being allowed to tell Irish tax authorities that most of it was being earned and taxed elsewhere simultaneously.
Fundamentally this is a dishonest deal and the EU is right to require that a corporation when filing its taxes is not allowed to create two alternate stories to document its revenue and profits whereby a large portion of it, $100B+ of profits in this case is not being taxed anywhere.
I doubt they reverse anytime soon. IIRC, Roberts wrote a policy paper on FAA expansion back in the Reagan years. It's among his personal projects and a long sought goal of his pro-corporate backers throughout his career.
A contract doesn't override the law. The government decides what contract terms are enforceable in court. Also most of the drivers started driving before the arbitration clause was added. You may have noticed about a year ago that virtually every company you do business with as a consumer sent out a notice with an arbitration clause because they found a wording that the Supreme Court agreed with even though the Federal Arbitration Act was never intended to cover consumer and employee disputes, but only business-to-business disputes. The expansion of FAA was basically a conservative project begun decades ago, long before some of the authors ended up on SCOTUS.
The bad part about lack of anonymity in our transactions is that Big Data actually gets us some reasonable legal use cases for privacy like why should my credit card company and everyone they share data with know what kind of porn I buy or what books I read or whether I go out to lunch often and who knows what kind of automated algorithms farther down the chain might do with that info like deny me employment surreptitiously.
I think unfortunately the cat is out of the bag in terms of protecting that kind of data from widespread sharing and mining. The only thing that we can really do now is legislate transparency in how its used (like credit reports) and prohibit discriminatory practices based on it.
Unfortunately financial privacy's primary use case is tax evasion, criminal purchases, and money laundering. I think it is better that we reform laws against consensual crimes like recreational drug use and respect freedom of speech/belief/press as a basic human right and not just count on bad laws being difficult to enforce.
I promise I'll give up my password when I get a warrant and verify it with my lawyer.
The only reasons for backdoors are to violate the 4th amendment with mass surveillance or for ephemeral keys that get destroyed like an encrypted chat or phone call but they should not have been recorded without a warrant in the first place.
The allegations about murder-for-hire were never proven in the court or even charged iirc. He was basically convicted for being in a criminal enterprise by running the marketplace. There are plenty of violent criminals who got far lighter sentences than Ulbricht for basically acting as an online middleman for illegal transactions. IMHO, you could probably imprison the CEO of Ebay for being the biggest fence of stolen goods under the same theory.
The other issue concerns employee use of employer owned systems. There have been cases where employees have been prosecuted for violating a purely civil agreement between them and their employer about the systems they have access to.
In general the law should not criminalize a civil contract violation or in the case of EULA's and Acceptable Use policies, it is questionable whether they are even valid contracts. This is especially true when the law in question is very one sided in favor of big companies using the threat of prosecution against researchers and employees and customers. I can't get the FBI to prosecute Comcast for turning on their public Wifi network on my router, even though it does potentially violate the CFAA.
If you make factual data public, you don't generally "own" it as in you don't have exclusive rights to it. You can't copyright a database of factual information. Basically the CFAA lets a firm make data public but then if someone uses a script to aggregate it, they can claim it was a felon. Just as an example, the CFAA could even apply to things like price comparison websites if a particular merchant doesn't want their public pricing information compared to their competitors.
After reading TFA, it seems like the company runs like a cult of personality of Ms. Holmes. Their answer for every objection is to impugn the integrity or intelligence of the person who raised the issue. Their remembrance of the facts diverges wildly from the first hand accounts of their critics. Whenever they mention Ms Holmes odd behavior, they basically make the No True Scotsman defense, that Ms Holmes would never do that. That is classic cult-like behavior.
I can't get my head around how they raised so much money with nothing but the most basic outline of an idea and not even an original one. Score one for political connections.
I smell something funny, but I don't think they have a test for that at Theranos.
I think the basic outline of the CCP plan is just to convert their military/political power into such overwhelming economic power through crony capitalism that even free and open democracy won't make any difference in who is running things.
The Big Sky area of Montana is already full of vacation homes and ranches of wealthy VC types so its not a big stretch that they might choose to plop a Data Center there. Still I think it is far more likely that you will see more data centers copping up in SLC because of the NSA. All the big government contractors will be putting boots on the ground in SLC and they can't co-locate at the NSA facility.
It would seem like the victim can consent to the location tracking of her stolen cell phone. No warrant necessary or certainly an easily obtained one.
Now if they tracked the perpetrators cell phone, that would require a warrant under SCOTUS rulings I've seen.
I don't think a civil NDA between the state and a government contractor has any power over a criminal case and it certainly does not override the 4th amendment.
Congress never intended pre-dispute binding arbitration clauses to apply to consumer contracts under the FAA but business-friendly courts have interpreted the law that way. Congress just needs to amend the FAA so that pre-dispute binding arbitration is not binding in consumer contracts, as well as prohibiting the requirement that consumers waive their right to class-action and jury trial pre-dispute.
It would also help if Congress gave the CFPA or some other pro-consumer leaning agency oversight of private arbitration companies because right now they have a massive conflict of interest since their customers are the big businesses that count on them ruling in their favor more often than courts would in consumer cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Just give the FTC drone strike authority and problem solved.
Yes, I would imagine the idea is to make the administrative/orchestration interface look just like AWS while actually being on the classified network. That way they can hire engineers who have AWS experience and just have them spin up servers the same way. They can also take their orchestration tools and ansible script.
This could potentially increase security by limiting the obnoxious roadblocks that provide the frustration incentive to break the rules on these systems in the first place. If everything on the classified system works almost the same way it does in the rest of the IT world, you make hiring easier, you make government more efficient, you reduce job frustration.
The Obama administration did push through an update to the Federal overtime regulations to make the majority of blue collar workers, especially retail/restaurant managers eligible for OT again, because they mostly get salaries around $24k/yr whereas a $12/hr worker would get OT without question, but its been blocked in court and the Trump administration is trying to kill it.
Yes. This is the fundamental problem. The only way crypto-currency gains traction is if the transaction fees and other "friction" drops below other convenient methods. This is probably why a lot of companies are developing private block chain systems and consortiums for special purposes so they can make the transaction fees essentially at cost (of operating their computing hardware)
Its still just a ton of speculation until some killer apps arrive. IMHO the real blockchain value is in the distributed cryptographically secure ledger, not the "scrip" they want to call money.
Government doesn't actually have to set the price. They just cap the availability and an auction process sets the price. Cap and trade ends up being more flexible and responsive to market conditions than a flat rate pollution tax.
The government can manipulate the auction results via supply or reserve tranches of credits, (effectively at cheaper prices) for some nationally important industries or exempt small emitters (like you and your car) while requiring large emitters like an airline or rail conglomerate or a electrical utility to purchase the credits each year.
You are confusing voter fraud (voting multiple times or for other people) with election fraud (miscounting the votes or manipulating how inconvenient it is to vote) .
Realistically voter fraud is meaningless outside of the occasional small local off-year race where a few extra votes will matter.
What the EC does is make the votes of the vast majority of the country meaningless and hands it to a few voters in a few states. The EC is a relic that should have gone away decades ago.
This is now the second time in 5 cycles where this has happened. National Popular Vote will actually make the two (or more) candidates campaign for every vote instead of trying to strategize about what counties in swing states will matter.
There are several other structural changes we ought to consider but eliminating the EC is an easy one and would be broadly popular.
There is simply a completely different type of employment culture in India than in the US. In the US we are used to interacting with a self-selecting group of immigrants who work really hard and often put up with a lot of stuff under H1 or other visa programs that American citizens wouldn't tolerate from employers.
Back in India though, there is a culture of treating employees like shit, and consequently a culture among employees of working as little as possible. Employers also don't screen candidates well for off-shore call centers and the like because if they are working on a large contract, all the accountability is based on metrics that can be manipulated and the US based business that contracted them probably only cares about reducing their costs.
My Indian and other immigrant coworkers work their asses off. The support teams I deal with in India can't even be bothered to show up to a phone call and are usually incapable of anything more than opening up a ticket with the software/hardware vendor directly.
Not really. In the US, if you had a private letter ruling like this where the IRS blessed your tax avoidance scheme and a court later disagreed, you still owe the taxes and internet. You would probably be spared the penalties since you followed IRS guidance in good faith. The law firm you hired to work with the IRS, might owe you some kind of refund or indemnity from their insurer.
I believe the way this happens is similar to what in the US is called a "Private Letter Ruling"
Basically a business or individual wants to know if a particular tax or other business strategy, basically a loophole, is legal. So they hire a specialty law firm and pay them to document the plan and then send it to the IRS or another regulator. What they get back is an opinion by that regulator that what they are doing is legal or not. Its not binding in court though but it might protect you from penalties or criminal charges for tax evasion if a court later disagrees with the private letter ruling since you followed the best legal advice and regulator interpretations in good faith.
So what seems to have happened here is Apple had this complex tax avoidance scheme and was able to convince Irish tax officials to sign off that their interpretation is that this is legal. However what was really happening is that Apple was telling all the other EU tax authorities that revenue was being earned in Ireland and would be taxed there. Then they were being allowed to tell Irish tax authorities that most of it was being earned and taxed elsewhere simultaneously.
Fundamentally this is a dishonest deal and the EU is right to require that a corporation when filing its taxes is not allowed to create two alternate stories to document its revenue and profits whereby a large portion of it, $100B+ of profits in this case is not being taxed anywhere.
I doubt they reverse anytime soon. IIRC, Roberts wrote a policy paper on FAA expansion back in the Reagan years. It's among his personal projects and a long sought goal of his pro-corporate backers throughout his career.
A contract doesn't override the law. The government decides what contract terms are enforceable in court. Also most of the drivers started driving before the arbitration clause was added. You may have noticed about a year ago that virtually every company you do business with as a consumer sent out a notice with an arbitration clause because they found a wording that the Supreme Court agreed with even though the Federal Arbitration Act was never intended to cover consumer and employee disputes, but only business-to-business disputes. The expansion of FAA was basically a conservative project begun decades ago, long before some of the authors ended up on SCOTUS.
The bad part about lack of anonymity in our transactions is that Big Data actually gets us some reasonable legal use cases for privacy like why should my credit card company and everyone they share data with know what kind of porn I buy or what books I read or whether I go out to lunch often and who knows what kind of automated algorithms farther down the chain might do with that info like deny me employment surreptitiously.
I think unfortunately the cat is out of the bag in terms of protecting that kind of data from widespread sharing and mining. The only thing that we can really do now is legislate transparency in how its used (like credit reports) and prohibit discriminatory practices based on it.
Unfortunately financial privacy's primary use case is tax evasion, criminal purchases, and money laundering. I think it is better that we reform laws against consensual crimes like recreational drug use and respect freedom of speech/belief/press as a basic human right and not just count on bad laws being difficult to enforce.
I promise I'll give up my password when I get a warrant and verify it with my lawyer.
The only reasons for backdoors are to violate the 4th amendment with mass surveillance or for ephemeral keys that get destroyed like an encrypted chat or phone call but they should not have been recorded without a warrant in the first place.
The allegations about murder-for-hire were never proven in the court or even charged iirc. He was basically convicted for being in a criminal enterprise by running the marketplace. There are plenty of violent criminals who got far lighter sentences than Ulbricht for basically acting as an online middleman for illegal transactions.
IMHO, you could probably imprison the CEO of Ebay for being the biggest fence of stolen goods under the same theory.
Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Cox, TW, all sued into bankruptcy, then the government steps in and nationalizes the last mile infrastructure. FTW!
The other issue concerns employee use of employer owned systems. There have been cases where employees have been prosecuted for violating a purely civil agreement between them and their employer about the systems they have access to.
In general the law should not criminalize a civil contract violation or in the case of EULA's and Acceptable Use policies, it is questionable whether they are even valid contracts. This is especially true when the law in question is very one sided in favor of big companies using the threat of prosecution against researchers and employees and customers. I can't get the FBI to prosecute Comcast for turning on their public Wifi network on my router, even though it does potentially violate the CFAA.
If you make factual data public, you don't generally "own" it as in you don't have exclusive rights to it. You can't copyright a database of factual information. Basically the CFAA lets a firm make data public but then if someone uses a script to aggregate it, they can claim it was a felon. Just as an example, the CFAA could even apply to things like price comparison websites if a particular merchant doesn't want their public pricing information compared to their competitors.
As a BMW 3 series driver from Maryland, my sincere hope is that BMW makes their cars drive just like us :)
After reading TFA, it seems like the company runs like a cult of personality of Ms. Holmes. Their answer for every objection is to impugn the integrity or intelligence of the person who raised the issue. Their remembrance of the facts diverges wildly from the first hand accounts of their critics. Whenever they mention Ms Holmes odd behavior, they basically make the No True Scotsman defense, that Ms Holmes would never do that. That is classic cult-like behavior.
I can't get my head around how they raised so much money with nothing but the most basic outline of an idea and not even an original one. Score one for political connections.
I smell something funny, but I don't think they have a test for that at Theranos.
Well I suppose on a long enough timeline, it is a joke but its not very funny within our lifetime.
I think the basic outline of the CCP plan is just to convert their military/political power into such overwhelming economic power through crony capitalism that even free and open democracy won't make any difference in who is running things.
The Big Sky area of Montana is already full of vacation homes and ranches of wealthy VC types so its not a big stretch that they might choose to plop a Data Center there. Still I think it is far more likely that you will see more data centers copping up in SLC because of the NSA. All the big government contractors will be putting boots on the ground in SLC and they can't co-locate at the NSA facility.
SF, NYC, and DC are just so expensive.
It would seem like the victim can consent to the location tracking of her stolen cell phone. No warrant necessary or certainly an easily obtained one.
Now if they tracked the perpetrators cell phone, that would require a warrant under SCOTUS rulings I've seen.
I don't think a civil NDA between the state and a government contractor has any power over a criminal case and it certainly does not override the 4th amendment.
Congress never intended pre-dispute binding arbitration clauses to apply to consumer contracts under the FAA but business-friendly courts have interpreted the law that way. Congress just needs to amend the FAA so that pre-dispute binding arbitration is not binding in consumer contracts, as well as prohibiting the requirement that consumers waive their right to class-action and jury trial pre-dispute.
It would also help if Congress gave the CFPA or some other pro-consumer leaning agency oversight of private arbitration companies because right now they have a massive conflict of interest since their customers are the big businesses that count on them ruling in their favor more often than courts would in consumer cases.