Not that this would help you - unless the court gets the credit agencies to expunge your record.
Credit reporting laws are WAY too lax. If somebody merely claims you owe them money it makes you a credit risk, regardless of the merits of the situation. When a bank has thousands of people asking to borrow money, why would they even bother to investigate whether you're really a risk when they can just charge you a higher rate?
That collection is going to cost him money every time he borrows money for any purpose. His innocence is of little concern to a lender - why would they lend money to somebody who would challenge them if they reneg on their contract when they could lend money to somebody who will just roll over and pay up?
Is that available on all plans? Ie, for any subsidized plan, is there an unsubsidized equivalent for $20 less? Does the math work out OK for family plans?
From what I've seen most of the unsubsidized plans are a lot more limited - maybe fine for somebody 22 years old and single, but often not a right fit for a lot of people.
I dunno - it isn't typical practice for consumers to get charged TWO sets of termination fees - so unless they're both relatively small and add up to a typical fee this could easily be seen as misleading if it wasn't CLEARLY stated.
Also - it is almost impossible to get an unsubsidized service in the US - at best you can pay the subsidized rates and just not get the subsidy. This is showing the slightest signs of changing, but we're a long way from where we need to be.
Honestly, carriers should be banned from combining phone subsidies with plan rates. They should just have two contracts - one for the service, and another for the phone. The two should be unbundled and people should be able to pick either one or terminate either one in isolation - without triggering any penalty clauses in the other.
Carriers could still charge termination fees, and subsidize phones, but if you bring your own phone you could avoid the big ones. Since the two deals couldn't be linked it would prevent games like manipulating prices on one and making it up on the other - if they charge deflated prices for the phone and inflated plans then people can just buy the phone without a plan and use it with a different carrier. If both prices reflect real costs then this won't be worth anybody's while. The purpose of subsidies should be to assist people with getting a plan who might not otherwise fork out the up-front cash - not to trap people with stuff they don't want. If they don't like the service they can take their AT&T phone and use it with T-mobile as long as they keep paying AT&T for the cost of the phone itself sans plan.
It's a Democrat thing, and if you aren't in the party you wouldn't understand. We just can't resist a guy who will cynically screw with us then break our hearts.
That certainly explains the last election!
As somebody who is fairly moderate politically this is why I always chuckled when conservative friends would cry about the sky falling if Obama were elected. I was pretty sure he'd turn out more-or-less the way he did. And, as an added bonus he has a pulse so that already gives us a net gain over the last two elections...
Same system - slightly different set of beneficiaries.
Canonical could just take a page from the Gentoo playbook and not redistribute modified firefox binaries at all.
Go ahead and install a pristine copy of firefox. Then, have the package manager modify the configuration. They haven't redistributed any modified files (just the originals plus patches they own), so they don't need a redistribution license. Granted, if they do patch the binaries they need to stay on Mozilla's good side since redistributing modified binaries does require a license, and Mozilla could probably get upset about the one and revoke their right to do the other.
Gentoo bypasses all of this by not redistributing any modified sources. They either mirror the upstream sources as-is, or they don't mirror them and have the user download them directly (automatically). Then they patch the source on the user's machine and build it. The resulting binaries cannot be legally redistributed by the end-user, unless they select the option to remove the Mozilla branding.
I would certainly agree that ethical concerns do slow research in medicine.
However, I'm not sure that stem cells are all that great an example of this. It probably has some impact, but it is small.
If you really wanted to advance medical technology with no regard for ethics then you'd start experimenting on people the way you experiment with rats. Start by breeding them so that you can get strains that are fairly uniform, and then genetically manipulate a population to get cancer at the age of 3 so that you can begin aggressive anticancer trials. When you're ready to work on a more diverse community of subjects you can move to prisoners.
There is no question that these kinds of approaches would remarkably speed up the discovery of medical treatments (you'd eliminate a lot of variation and clinical trials would have 100% compliance rates and close monitoring). I'd bet that within 20 years you'd even save far more lives than you took. However, just the thought of actually doing any of this is absolutely abhorrent.
Well, being stopped isn't the same as reporting that you were stopped. 3% isn't really a big figure.
In my experience biotech companies don't like messing with academia. There isn't any money to be made there anyway, and if some lab manages to increase the market for some patented technology it only means more money for the patent holder.
Now, if the "academic" lab wanted to start mass-producing vials of vaccines or something that would be a different matter.
Back when I was in the lab the biggest issues tended to be around expression systems and of course PCR (the patent on that is almost certainly gone by now). However, for the most part people just ignored these patents. Sure, the first time you bought a kit for some expression system you might have to pay more, but a lot of the components are easily reproduced once you have a kit, and the pricing wasn't all that bad compared to the convenience factor (you're studying a gene, not trying to perfect making bacteria competent for transformation). PCR had a big markup, but you could get stuff suitable for "primer extensions" cheap and the instructions would cover everything except telling your thermocycler to repeat the cycle 30 times.
Patents are really only an issue for commercialization of a technology. In fact, I'd be all for a general extension to patent law to explicitly allow violation of any patent for the purpose of non-commercial research where any devices made in violation of a patent are not sold or distributed.
I think it depends on what you're using the metrics for. I'd argue that they should collect everything, and then categorize it appropriately.
For example, suppose Hulu announces that they'll take one high-cost ad per show. Suddenly advertisers will want to know what their market share is and all that.
On the other hand, when networks decide what shows to cancel - they don't care about how many people watch the show on mediums other than their own, regardless of whether they have ads or not.
I suspect that the reason that Neilsen is doing what it is doing is that it is because it is what their customers are looking for. When Hulu pitches their online service to an ad agency they don't need Neilsen to tell them how many people are watching their shows - they already collect that stuff on their own.
Ironically this is one of my biggest pet-peeves with android, despite the fact that it runs on linux.
Everybody and their uncle wants their app to run a service. Often this functionality can't be disabled.
Sure, it is nice that your mail app supports IMAP push and all that, but what if I only want to use it once a week? Why do I need it running 24x7 and waking the phone every time I get a network packet?
Ditto for apps that go nuts about telling you about updates - go ahead and let me know once if you must, but isn't the whole reason for having a market so that every program doesn't need to manage its own updates?
And, of course, there is no GUI for disabling services. As the phone owner I'd like to have a say in whether a given service runs or not. Sure, it is nice to have some disclosure when I install the app, but that only lets me choose whether to install it or not - not whether I want it to be running only when I want it to.
Ditto for apps that enable location when I don't need it to - I can't override that and my only choice is to not run the app. Why can't I just tell the OS to save power and privacy and just feed the app a bogus location so that it is happy? Sure, I can turn the feature on and off at the phone level, but that is pretty inconvenient. And some apps might just refuse to run with it turned off - if I want to lie to the app, I should be able to do so.
Yup - I have a remote starter on my car - aftermarket.
These sorts of devices aren't all that expensive. I'd have no issues with hacking an alternative receiver (phone or whatever) into the INPUT on the unit, but not directly into the starter.
A typical remote starter does stuff like:
1. Have a sensor on the spark plug wires so that it can detect the engine RPM and figure out when the engine has turned over. It runs the starter "just enough." 2. Refuses to start the engine if it is already running. 3. Has a timer so that it won't run the starter all day if something goes wrong. 4. Has a safety interlock on the hood, so that your mechanic doesn't lose his hands when the engine cranks without warning (granted, whoever installs it might not bother to wire this up). 5. Have some kind of mechanism built in so that somebody can't just drive off with your car. 6. Has some kind of way to transition to normal operation when you insert the keys. 7. Often they have extra features like a mode that will periodically run the car for 15 minutes to keep the engine warm - for cold climates I guess (though I suspect an electrical heater would be safer).
I would never wire something like this to my car without some basic safety/control functionality. By the time you do all that you could have just bought one - they aren't actually that expensive if you install them yourself.
The main issue here would be keeping up with all the changes in the laws.
Honestly, I'd be happy with software that would just let me fill in the form completely manually (just like a hand-filled form) and e-file it. The problem is that the government has created artificial barriers to e-filing so that only big companies can do it.
All I do is print it all out and mail it in. I make sure I always owe money at the end of the year, so financially it works better if it takes longer for them to process the check anyway.
I'm not familiar with large-scale phone routing, but I suspect that the only reason that this can work is that:
1. The US phone address space is small compared to even IPv4. 2. I'm guessing the routing only happens once to create a circuit, and after that the same route is followed for the rest of the call (maybe with occasional adjustments, but not per-packet).
With IPv4 imagine what would happen if people could port their IP addresses. A packet might find its way all the way to New York, and then it might get then sent on a trip to Paris, where they look it up and see that it moved and send it to China. Then every single packet after that is independently routed and follows a similar route.
Since the IP network treats every packet as standalone it needs to be able to quickly find a route and send it on, without lots of traffic changing directions.
Only issue with that is how the routing system works. Routers are incapable of keeping track of where every single individual IP is located on the internet. Instead they just get announcements for very large networks, and then as the packet gets closer to its destination it can be tracked with greater and greater granularity.
Dynamic DNS is a much better approach - it separates the implementation of the naming and the routing functions.
I have no idea how the phone system manages to handle number portability. I suspect that either they just rely on the fact that relatively few numbers are ported, or they do a one-time lookup on the phone number to get a different "real" network address for the phone and use that for the routing. That basically just treats the phone number as a DNS address and your local switch as the real IP address.
Just because there's an LGPL project supporting something doesn't mean that patents and licenses don't apply.
Yes, but they wouldn't be violating anybody's patents if all they did was enabled firefox to utilize ffmpeg if a user has it on their system. Users shouldn't have that installed if they aren't legally allowed to use it anyway. If you must, have firefox prompt the user and ask them "I see that you have software installed that allows h264 videos to be played, hit OK to confirm that you are allowed to play these videos, or hit the disable button to disable this feature." Since anybody can legally purchase a license to play h264 videos in just about any jurisdiction, how is Mozilla to know if that isn't the case?
Hmm - looks like they exclude anybody filing schedules C, F, E, and K-1.
And why should I have to give a tax preparation company my personal information? Granted, for most people their free service should work fine. Of course, I'm sure the EULA leaves them off the hook if their software makes a mistake.
Yup - unless you mail it in. I've used software to prepare my taxes for years, and I print it out and mail it in. Some vendors will let you e-file for "free" after a rebate.
The issue is the IRS doesn't take direct submissions from taxpayers - they will only talk to megacorps. If they dealt with individuals then maybe people wouldn't need the megacorps as much, and we can't have that!
Really? I can prepare my own taxes and file them electronically without paying anybody a cent, regardless of my income level or what forms I am filing?
Can you give a reference for this? The last time I checked the best you could do is have the government pick up the filing tab if your income fell into 1040EZ range. No doubt there would be other limitations like standard deduction only/etc.
My state, on the other hand, lets me file electronically over the web. I don't need to pay for software, or services, or whatever. Now, the web interface is fairly minimalistic, but it certainly involves no more work than filling out the paper forms.
I haven't filed electronically in years, despite using software to prepare my returns. I refuse to pay money to make the IRS's job easier - I manage my withholding anyway so that they never owe me a dime anyway - so if it takes them to June to cash my check so much the better.
The IRS could create a web filing system that was free to use, and even after paying for the software development they'd make the cost back the same year with the reduced volume of paper.
Hmm - when I say "not to be pedantic" it doesn't mean that I'm not being pedantic, but rather that the purpose of my post is not to be pedantic. That is, I'm not being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic.
That applied to my last post. This one is posted purely for the sake of being pedantic.:) Well, and maybe a bit of humor as well...
Well, on the slavery bit at least I think it is probably questionable how much the central regime sanctions that. Maybe some local officials take bribes to look the other way, and maybe the government doesn't do enough about it, but it doesn't sound like this is sanctioned policy.
I'm more concerned about stuff like general censorship, Tienanmen Square, and disappearing activists. Those activities are fully state sanctioned.
Prophetic? I disagree. I think he's only stating what's already happened to us.
Hmm, not to be pedantic, but the sense of foretelling the future is not the only definition of prophesy. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, most of what was considered prophesy in the Biblical sense actually concerned stuff that was happening in the present. The extent to which the future was predicted tended to just be in terms of extrapolation from the past, with an obvious emphasis on fitting this into some divine teaching or instruction. Since the extrapolation was generally based on religious principles, the extrapolation often would include stuff like "if you don't shape up, some army will come along and exact divine punishment on us."
So, trolls and teenagers posting on Slashdot about how bad tech policy will destroy the US is actually well in keeping with the traditional definition of prophesy.:)
Others have pointed out that terminal velocity depends on air density. I'd like to point out a very good illustration of this.
Some of the hottest stuff in the universe is the hydrogen gas (well, ions) that fills intergalactic space in the middle of large galaxy clusters. It isn't just white-hot, it is x-ray hot.
How does it get that way? Simple: terminal velocity.
The terminal velocity of a hydrogen atom in intergalactic space (density measured in atoms per cubic mile) is, well, astronomical. So, an atom that starts off floating in some void and falls towards a galaxy cluster. It probably takes 10s to 100s to maybe even 1000 million years to get there. Along the way it might bump into a few atoms on the whole trip. The first one it hits releases the kinds of energy associated with particle accelerators and the free protons and electrons just keep on falling. I'd be surprised if it even reaches terminal velocity as that would imply some kind of equilibrium where the kinetics have rate constants in the millions of years most likely.
Eventually it hits the middle and starts decelerating until it is well into the next void (which takes as long as the original fall), then begins falling back repeating the process.
Fascinating stuff...
Disclaimer - I'm not an astrophysicist - and if any real ones have more to add I'm certainly all ears...:)
That would be the actual damages resulting from her not buying the music herself. However, her uploading did allow many others to cause the plaintiffs the same damages. We just don't know how many.
Personally I'd probably have aimed more at $10k than $50k, but I don't think that it is unreasonable for the court to take a position that punishes people for violating the intent of a law. Otherwise, what point is there in having the law?
Actually, that would be an unwise design - as it causes a node to take action when it gets an unauthenticated command. That basically gives anybody some level of control on your botnet.
For example, I can spoof a fake command from some IP - now the botnet takes down a server of MY choosing. While it is busy doing that, it probably isn't taking down the server the botnet owner wants it to take down, or sending spam, or whatever.
Nope - you design a node to treat an unauthenticated command as if it was never received.
Should they put a tariff on at-will employment states?
Nope - I am not suggesting that every minor difference in public policy is worthy of balancing tariffs. Comparing Belgium and France is comparing shades of gray. On the other hand, comparing England and China is not.
And just who and how are these tariff's defined?
Like anything else - by national legislatures. It would be in the interest of progressive nations to work with each other to cooperate on this.
How do you put a price on the smell of a paper factory?
You look at how much money it is costing companies to comply with the laws in your own jurisdiction that don't exist elsewhere, and add 10-20% for good measure, and apply that to everything. Sure, it isn't exact, and it doesn't have to be.
And if you want politicians to determine this, then it's going to get political, that's their job.
Yup - pretty much. Hey, you won't see the politicians doing this anyway - they're too busy taking bribes from Walmart or whatever...
Have you considered that it is possible that we pay more than we ever did in the past, and yet schools wouldn't have money to buy paper? It is called too much money on overhead.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for using technology in education. However, far too much money goes on toys that don't really get well-utilized. The cost of one computer would supply paper for an entire school. The problem with technology is that it is very expensive to maintain. It can be worth it if it is well-utilized, but if you just use it as a typewriter and to pull up the odd webpage it isn't worth having (at least not at school - in the home is a different matter).
To be worthwhile technology has to be well-integrated into the curriculum and deliver something that simply wasn't being delivered before.
I'm actually not going to join the chorus whining about teacher salaries. On average they are probably fine. The problem is that they're almost entirely based on seniority and there is a huge range - I'd make new teachers make only moderately less than retiring ones, and use a pay model more reminiscent of private enterprise. That will probably help to attract more qualified teachers.
The whole summer off bit seems really odd as well. Why exactly do we need to take two months or more off every year? Why not just have a continuous cycle? By all means fit in more outdoor activities and all that in the summer, but there is no reason that we have to take the time off.
There are a lot of reforms that could help fix schools, but the focus is too much on placating special interests and not providing eduction. I don't see that changing anytime soon...
Slashdot Mirror
Not that this would help you - unless the court gets the credit agencies to expunge your record.
Credit reporting laws are WAY too lax. If somebody merely claims you owe them money it makes you a credit risk, regardless of the merits of the situation. When a bank has thousands of people asking to borrow money, why would they even bother to investigate whether you're really a risk when they can just charge you a higher rate?
That collection is going to cost him money every time he borrows money for any purpose. His innocence is of little concern to a lender - why would they lend money to somebody who would challenge them if they reneg on their contract when they could lend money to somebody who will just roll over and pay up?
Is that available on all plans? Ie, for any subsidized plan, is there an unsubsidized equivalent for $20 less? Does the math work out OK for family plans?
From what I've seen most of the unsubsidized plans are a lot more limited - maybe fine for somebody 22 years old and single, but often not a right fit for a lot of people.
I dunno - it isn't typical practice for consumers to get charged TWO sets of termination fees - so unless they're both relatively small and add up to a typical fee this could easily be seen as misleading if it wasn't CLEARLY stated.
Also - it is almost impossible to get an unsubsidized service in the US - at best you can pay the subsidized rates and just not get the subsidy. This is showing the slightest signs of changing, but we're a long way from where we need to be.
Honestly, carriers should be banned from combining phone subsidies with plan rates. They should just have two contracts - one for the service, and another for the phone. The two should be unbundled and people should be able to pick either one or terminate either one in isolation - without triggering any penalty clauses in the other.
Carriers could still charge termination fees, and subsidize phones, but if you bring your own phone you could avoid the big ones. Since the two deals couldn't be linked it would prevent games like manipulating prices on one and making it up on the other - if they charge deflated prices for the phone and inflated plans then people can just buy the phone without a plan and use it with a different carrier. If both prices reflect real costs then this won't be worth anybody's while. The purpose of subsidies should be to assist people with getting a plan who might not otherwise fork out the up-front cash - not to trap people with stuff they don't want. If they don't like the service they can take their AT&T phone and use it with T-mobile as long as they keep paying AT&T for the cost of the phone itself sans plan.
It's a Democrat thing, and if you aren't in the party you wouldn't understand. We just can't resist a guy who will cynically screw with us then break our hearts.
That certainly explains the last election!
As somebody who is fairly moderate politically this is why I always chuckled when conservative friends would cry about the sky falling if Obama were elected. I was pretty sure he'd turn out more-or-less the way he did. And, as an added bonus he has a pulse so that already gives us a net gain over the last two elections...
Same system - slightly different set of beneficiaries.
Canonical could just take a page from the Gentoo playbook and not redistribute modified firefox binaries at all.
Go ahead and install a pristine copy of firefox. Then, have the package manager modify the configuration. They haven't redistributed any modified files (just the originals plus patches they own), so they don't need a redistribution license. Granted, if they do patch the binaries they need to stay on Mozilla's good side since redistributing modified binaries does require a license, and Mozilla could probably get upset about the one and revoke their right to do the other.
Gentoo bypasses all of this by not redistributing any modified sources. They either mirror the upstream sources as-is, or they don't mirror them and have the user download them directly (automatically). Then they patch the source on the user's machine and build it. The resulting binaries cannot be legally redistributed by the end-user, unless they select the option to remove the Mozilla branding.
I would certainly agree that ethical concerns do slow research in medicine.
However, I'm not sure that stem cells are all that great an example of this. It probably has some impact, but it is small.
If you really wanted to advance medical technology with no regard for ethics then you'd start experimenting on people the way you experiment with rats. Start by breeding them so that you can get strains that are fairly uniform, and then genetically manipulate a population to get cancer at the age of 3 so that you can begin aggressive anticancer trials. When you're ready to work on a more diverse community of subjects you can move to prisoners.
There is no question that these kinds of approaches would remarkably speed up the discovery of medical treatments (you'd eliminate a lot of variation and clinical trials would have 100% compliance rates and close monitoring). I'd bet that within 20 years you'd even save far more lives than you took. However, just the thought of actually doing any of this is absolutely abhorrent.
Well, being stopped isn't the same as reporting that you were stopped. 3% isn't really a big figure.
In my experience biotech companies don't like messing with academia. There isn't any money to be made there anyway, and if some lab manages to increase the market for some patented technology it only means more money for the patent holder.
Now, if the "academic" lab wanted to start mass-producing vials of vaccines or something that would be a different matter.
Back when I was in the lab the biggest issues tended to be around expression systems and of course PCR (the patent on that is almost certainly gone by now). However, for the most part people just ignored these patents. Sure, the first time you bought a kit for some expression system you might have to pay more, but a lot of the components are easily reproduced once you have a kit, and the pricing wasn't all that bad compared to the convenience factor (you're studying a gene, not trying to perfect making bacteria competent for transformation). PCR had a big markup, but you could get stuff suitable for "primer extensions" cheap and the instructions would cover everything except telling your thermocycler to repeat the cycle 30 times.
Patents are really only an issue for commercialization of a technology. In fact, I'd be all for a general extension to patent law to explicitly allow violation of any patent for the purpose of non-commercial research where any devices made in violation of a patent are not sold or distributed.
I think it depends on what you're using the metrics for. I'd argue that they should collect everything, and then categorize it appropriately.
For example, suppose Hulu announces that they'll take one high-cost ad per show. Suddenly advertisers will want to know what their market share is and all that.
On the other hand, when networks decide what shows to cancel - they don't care about how many people watch the show on mediums other than their own, regardless of whether they have ads or not.
I suspect that the reason that Neilsen is doing what it is doing is that it is because it is what their customers are looking for. When Hulu pitches their online service to an ad agency they don't need Neilsen to tell them how many people are watching their shows - they already collect that stuff on their own.
Ironically this is one of my biggest pet-peeves with android, despite the fact that it runs on linux.
Everybody and their uncle wants their app to run a service. Often this functionality can't be disabled.
Sure, it is nice that your mail app supports IMAP push and all that, but what if I only want to use it once a week? Why do I need it running 24x7 and waking the phone every time I get a network packet?
Ditto for apps that go nuts about telling you about updates - go ahead and let me know once if you must, but isn't the whole reason for having a market so that every program doesn't need to manage its own updates?
And, of course, there is no GUI for disabling services. As the phone owner I'd like to have a say in whether a given service runs or not. Sure, it is nice to have some disclosure when I install the app, but that only lets me choose whether to install it or not - not whether I want it to be running only when I want it to.
Ditto for apps that enable location when I don't need it to - I can't override that and my only choice is to not run the app. Why can't I just tell the OS to save power and privacy and just feed the app a bogus location so that it is happy? Sure, I can turn the feature on and off at the phone level, but that is pretty inconvenient. And some apps might just refuse to run with it turned off - if I want to lie to the app, I should be able to do so.
Yup - I have a remote starter on my car - aftermarket.
These sorts of devices aren't all that expensive. I'd have no issues with hacking an alternative receiver (phone or whatever) into the INPUT on the unit, but not directly into the starter.
A typical remote starter does stuff like:
1. Have a sensor on the spark plug wires so that it can detect the engine RPM and figure out when the engine has turned over. It runs the starter "just enough."
2. Refuses to start the engine if it is already running.
3. Has a timer so that it won't run the starter all day if something goes wrong.
4. Has a safety interlock on the hood, so that your mechanic doesn't lose his hands when the engine cranks without warning (granted, whoever installs it might not bother to wire this up).
5. Have some kind of mechanism built in so that somebody can't just drive off with your car.
6. Has some kind of way to transition to normal operation when you insert the keys.
7. Often they have extra features like a mode that will periodically run the car for 15 minutes to keep the engine warm - for cold climates I guess (though I suspect an electrical heater would be safer).
I would never wire something like this to my car without some basic safety/control functionality. By the time you do all that you could have just bought one - they aren't actually that expensive if you install them yourself.
The main issue here would be keeping up with all the changes in the laws.
Honestly, I'd be happy with software that would just let me fill in the form completely manually (just like a hand-filled form) and e-file it. The problem is that the government has created artificial barriers to e-filing so that only big companies can do it.
All I do is print it all out and mail it in. I make sure I always owe money at the end of the year, so financially it works better if it takes longer for them to process the check anyway.
I'm not familiar with large-scale phone routing, but I suspect that the only reason that this can work is that:
1. The US phone address space is small compared to even IPv4.
2. I'm guessing the routing only happens once to create a circuit, and after that the same route is followed for the rest of the call (maybe with occasional adjustments, but not per-packet).
With IPv4 imagine what would happen if people could port their IP addresses. A packet might find its way all the way to New York, and then it might get then sent on a trip to Paris, where they look it up and see that it moved and send it to China. Then every single packet after that is independently routed and follows a similar route.
Since the IP network treats every packet as standalone it needs to be able to quickly find a route and send it on, without lots of traffic changing directions.
Only issue with that is how the routing system works. Routers are incapable of keeping track of where every single individual IP is located on the internet. Instead they just get announcements for very large networks, and then as the packet gets closer to its destination it can be tracked with greater and greater granularity.
Dynamic DNS is a much better approach - it separates the implementation of the naming and the routing functions.
I have no idea how the phone system manages to handle number portability. I suspect that either they just rely on the fact that relatively few numbers are ported, or they do a one-time lookup on the phone number to get a different "real" network address for the phone and use that for the routing. That basically just treats the phone number as a DNS address and your local switch as the real IP address.
Just because there's an LGPL project supporting something doesn't mean that patents and licenses don't apply.
Yes, but they wouldn't be violating anybody's patents if all they did was enabled firefox to utilize ffmpeg if a user has it on their system. Users shouldn't have that installed if they aren't legally allowed to use it anyway. If you must, have firefox prompt the user and ask them "I see that you have software installed that allows h264 videos to be played, hit OK to confirm that you are allowed to play these videos, or hit the disable button to disable this feature." Since anybody can legally purchase a license to play h264 videos in just about any jurisdiction, how is Mozilla to know if that isn't the case?
Hmm - looks like they exclude anybody filing schedules C, F, E, and K-1.
And why should I have to give a tax preparation company my personal information? Granted, for most people their free service should work fine. Of course, I'm sure the EULA leaves them off the hook if their software makes a mistake.
Yup - unless you mail it in. I've used software to prepare my taxes for years, and I print it out and mail it in. Some vendors will let you e-file for "free" after a rebate.
The issue is the IRS doesn't take direct submissions from taxpayers - they will only talk to megacorps. If they dealt with individuals then maybe people wouldn't need the megacorps as much, and we can't have that!
Really? I can prepare my own taxes and file them electronically without paying anybody a cent, regardless of my income level or what forms I am filing?
Can you give a reference for this? The last time I checked the best you could do is have the government pick up the filing tab if your income fell into 1040EZ range. No doubt there would be other limitations like standard deduction only/etc.
My state, on the other hand, lets me file electronically over the web. I don't need to pay for software, or services, or whatever. Now, the web interface is fairly minimalistic, but it certainly involves no more work than filling out the paper forms.
I haven't filed electronically in years, despite using software to prepare my returns. I refuse to pay money to make the IRS's job easier - I manage my withholding anyway so that they never owe me a dime anyway - so if it takes them to June to cash my check so much the better.
The IRS could create a web filing system that was free to use, and even after paying for the software development they'd make the cost back the same year with the reduced volume of paper.
Hmm - when I say "not to be pedantic" it doesn't mean that I'm not being pedantic, but rather that the purpose of my post is not to be pedantic. That is, I'm not being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic.
That applied to my last post. This one is posted purely for the sake of being pedantic. :) Well, and maybe a bit of humor as well...
Well, on the slavery bit at least I think it is probably questionable how much the central regime sanctions that. Maybe some local officials take bribes to look the other way, and maybe the government doesn't do enough about it, but it doesn't sound like this is sanctioned policy.
I'm more concerned about stuff like general censorship, Tienanmen Square, and disappearing activists. Those activities are fully state sanctioned.
Prophetic? I disagree. I think he's only stating what's already happened to us.
Hmm, not to be pedantic, but the sense of foretelling the future is not the only definition of prophesy. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, most of what was considered prophesy in the Biblical sense actually concerned stuff that was happening in the present. The extent to which the future was predicted tended to just be in terms of extrapolation from the past, with an obvious emphasis on fitting this into some divine teaching or instruction. Since the extrapolation was generally based on religious principles, the extrapolation often would include stuff like "if you don't shape up, some army will come along and exact divine punishment on us."
So, trolls and teenagers posting on Slashdot about how bad tech policy will destroy the US is actually well in keeping with the traditional definition of prophesy. :)
Others have pointed out that terminal velocity depends on air density. I'd like to point out a very good illustration of this.
Some of the hottest stuff in the universe is the hydrogen gas (well, ions) that fills intergalactic space in the middle of large galaxy clusters. It isn't just white-hot, it is x-ray hot.
How does it get that way? Simple: terminal velocity.
The terminal velocity of a hydrogen atom in intergalactic space (density measured in atoms per cubic mile) is, well, astronomical. So, an atom that starts off floating in some void and falls towards a galaxy cluster. It probably takes 10s to 100s to maybe even 1000 million years to get there. Along the way it might bump into a few atoms on the whole trip. The first one it hits releases the kinds of energy associated with particle accelerators and the free protons and electrons just keep on falling. I'd be surprised if it even reaches terminal velocity as that would imply some kind of equilibrium where the kinetics have rate constants in the millions of years most likely.
Eventually it hits the middle and starts decelerating until it is well into the next void (which takes as long as the original fall), then begins falling back repeating the process.
Fascinating stuff...
Disclaimer - I'm not an astrophysicist - and if any real ones have more to add I'm certainly all ears... :)
That would be the actual damages resulting from her not buying the music herself. However, her uploading did allow many others to cause the plaintiffs the same damages. We just don't know how many.
Personally I'd probably have aimed more at $10k than $50k, but I don't think that it is unreasonable for the court to take a position that punishes people for violating the intent of a law. Otherwise, what point is there in having the law?
Actually, that would be an unwise design - as it causes a node to take action when it gets an unauthenticated command. That basically gives anybody some level of control on your botnet.
For example, I can spoof a fake command from some IP - now the botnet takes down a server of MY choosing. While it is busy doing that, it probably isn't taking down the server the botnet owner wants it to take down, or sending spam, or whatever.
Nope - you design a node to treat an unauthenticated command as if it was never received.
So would you apply that to the states as well?
Nope - the constitution actually forbids that.
Should they put a tariff on at-will employment states?
Nope - I am not suggesting that every minor difference in public policy is worthy of balancing tariffs. Comparing Belgium and France is comparing shades of gray. On the other hand, comparing England and China is not.
And just who and how are these tariff's defined?
Like anything else - by national legislatures. It would be in the interest of progressive nations to work with each other to cooperate on this.
How do you put a price on the smell of a paper factory?
You look at how much money it is costing companies to comply with the laws in your own jurisdiction that don't exist elsewhere, and add 10-20% for good measure, and apply that to everything. Sure, it isn't exact, and it doesn't have to be.
And if you want politicians to determine this, then it's going to get political, that's their job.
Yup - pretty much. Hey, you won't see the politicians doing this anyway - they're too busy taking bribes from Walmart or whatever...
Have you considered that it is possible that we pay more than we ever did in the past, and yet schools wouldn't have money to buy paper? It is called too much money on overhead.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for using technology in education. However, far too much money goes on toys that don't really get well-utilized. The cost of one computer would supply paper for an entire school. The problem with technology is that it is very expensive to maintain. It can be worth it if it is well-utilized, but if you just use it as a typewriter and to pull up the odd webpage it isn't worth having (at least not at school - in the home is a different matter).
To be worthwhile technology has to be well-integrated into the curriculum and deliver something that simply wasn't being delivered before.
I'm actually not going to join the chorus whining about teacher salaries. On average they are probably fine. The problem is that they're almost entirely based on seniority and there is a huge range - I'd make new teachers make only moderately less than retiring ones, and use a pay model more reminiscent of private enterprise. That will probably help to attract more qualified teachers.
The whole summer off bit seems really odd as well. Why exactly do we need to take two months or more off every year? Why not just have a continuous cycle? By all means fit in more outdoor activities and all that in the summer, but there is no reason that we have to take the time off.
There are a lot of reforms that could help fix schools, but the focus is too much on placating special interests and not providing eduction. I don't see that changing anytime soon...