I'm not sure if this "recent" awareness of the program brings about anything new or any new applications but I believe that it was already settled in the courts where a judge said that because a computer and not a human was monitoring, it wasn't in conflict with the constitution.
Sending email has long be held to be the equivalent of sending a post card through the mail. You have no expectation of privacy and the law recognizes this fact. Similarly, if you do NOT encrypt your email, you have no expectation of privacy. FULL STOP.
Now where things get interesting is when you do encrypt your email, will the courts hold this to be analogous to a letter in an envelope? Somehow, under the current regime, I suspect the rule will be if the NSA can crack it.. the NSA can look at it.
they say don't monitor the content you send/recieve, only the amount (we have a 4 gigabyte/week bandwidth limit in the dorm rooms, but it only counts off-campus traffic). They will call you into "Judicial Affairs" if they get a letter from the (RI/MP)AA, and if they detect a virus on your computer (I dunno how they do that, and it seems to go against their claim they don't scan content you send on the network), they require you to bring it in to be reformated, or forfeit dorm room Internet access, which I believe is a privacy violation
Viruses, like everything else, leave "foot" prints on the network.. this may be trying to hit a specific port on every machine on the network segment, trying to connect to an IRC server in on the former Soviet block.. lots of things a network admin can see just watching the traffic passing through the routers, and I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't software to do analytics in near real time on the traffic for just that purpose.
"I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."
"You will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime." -- Barack Obama
It is amazing how many people still believe what a politician says. We should retitle all politicians as professional liers .
The difference is 7,000 different taxing entities each with a different tax rate based on the classification of the item.
You live in NYC the item sells for $5.99 to pay all the taxes.. you live in Podunk, Louisiana you pay $3.05.. and oh yeah what you pay if you are living in England and want to order a few pairs of Levis from the the States ?
For the most part, it is impossible to know what your actual usage is. Supposedly TW and Comcast have put up pages that detail specific usage, but from what I've heard, they aren't live data.. they are any where from hours to days behind.. kind of like the cell phone companies -- "you have used X minutes.. but this page may not be accurate and can not be used as proof of service."
People complain about providers advertising "unlimited" that they can't provide for the price. People complain when providers have unpublished caps. People complain when providers publish caps. People complain when providers offer an "unlimited" service for a price that supports it.
That just it.. for what you were paying $50 per month.. you will now be paying $150 a month and there has NOT been any change in equipment or total capacity of the network.
TW is just putting an extra $100 into the profit pile
It is not so much the caps.. it is the fact the the rates are 3-5x what people are paying now which is, antidotally, 2-3x times what most people around the world pay. Caps wouldn't be so bad if everyone got some benefit.. as it is it is just an excuse for the ISPs to grab a 3-5x price increase.
Yes everyone has flash, but what they don't tell you is that you'll also need the Swarmcast NexDef browser plug-in. Check out the not so great review of the flash/nexdef experience: MLB Support Forums [mlbsupport.com]
As well as the fact that you must subscribe to the service.. no free games ever...
Finally, do the obvious stuff... Replace Norton Antivirus with AVG Free, Secure Shell Client with Putty, etc. MS Office with OpenOffice if you dare.
Be careful here, a lot of the "free" software on the internet is only free for individual use. That precludes the use on any corporate machine for any reason. Commercial use doesn't mean makes a profit.. it means, it is used as part of the process.
here is a small list from my brother the high school english teacher and tennis coach:
Girl shows up to class in complete violation of dress code.. short shorts, and see through halter top.. gets referred to principles office.. 3 hours later brother gets served papers that he is being sued for violating the girls 1st amendment rights
Male student texting in class in violation of school policy, when asks surrenders the phone. Upon exiting at the end of the class student (foolishly) attacks teacher. Next day, teacher served papers for assaulting said student.
Start tennis player in senior year.. decides to break curfew on overnight tournament trip. Coach suspends student for 3 matches but requires student to be present at practice. Student shows up to practice drunk. Police show up, student takes off running across cactus filled open country to avoid arrest for minor in possession and public intoxication. Police head to students home to wait on him to arrive, where he is arrested and checks in a bac of 1.6 two time the limit. Daddy lawyer sues the school district to get his son reinstated for the senior season and demands $10 M in damages or the firing for the coach (brother is now teaching 8th grade english and coaching 8th grade tennis -- at a pay cut of about $20k a year).
Those are 3 of the more interesting ones that have happened to my brother. On average he refers 6 or 7 kids to the principle's office every day of the school year and of those 35-40 kids per week... 3 or 4 try suing him. So far, with the exception of the School district caving on him.. he hasn't lost a case yet (but he does a pretty big legal insurance policy -- almost as bad as doctors malpractice insurance)
A 14 year old wouldn't stop texting in class? Leading to a frisking by a law enforcement officer and a court appearance? What the hell happened to "in loco parente" ("in place of parent", means while the student is at school, the school is the parent)? This parent gives you permission to destroy the fucking phone. If you're in shop class, you have quite a few more tools at your disposal to drive the point home, a physics lab, slightly less so. Unless the class was government, there's no reason to involve the men in blue. This was math class. Confiscate, eliminate the problem.
In this day and age.. "in loco parente" has been crushed by all the parents suing schools and teachers..
Because too many parents refuse to believe that their child would engage in any such behaviors and sue the schools to either defend their child's good name or just to get rich. More and more school districts are going the route of either obey the teacher or obey the cops.. your choice.
Isn't the purpose of the gasoline tax in the United States to account for the wear an tear that your vehicle causes to the roads? If we start implementing tolling on nearly every major highway, we should start to see a reduction or removal of the gasoline tax. No way in hell should we be paying for something twice.
Here in TX we are paying for some roadways 3 times..first with the gas taxes,, then with revenue from sales taxes and now the state is turning them into toll roads..
The result: a new source of money for highways and bridges badly in need of repair.' You can bet that legislators, mayors, and city councilpersons everywhere will see this as an even-better source of income than red-light cameras. You've been warned."
Why is this a bad thing? If the users of the road have to pay a little extra to maintain the road they're using, I don't have problem with it. If the money is being poured into some politician's slush fund, sure that's a problem, but reasonable use fees are exactly what's called for her. It sure beats the "selective billing" process of red-light cameras.
Why is it a bad thing.. let me count the ways...
1) typically, (at least in TX), the photo billed to the home address of the registered owner of the car.. carries a $1 service fee, + a 20% penalty (for not having the prepaid transponder) + the toll.. so a 50 cent toll is now $1.60 + check and postage
2) Most of the money doesn't go back to up keep of the road.. it goes to profit for the corporation running the toll system
3) If you piss off some one.. they will simply take a digital picture of your license plate and run through all the toll plazas they can find. And you will have to fight each one individually..If the person has any brains.. he will do it in the same make/model/year as your vehicle and you will never convince the the administrative judge it is not you, unless you in your car happen to trip through a toll plaza within seconds of the miscreant
Don't laugh it is become a big problem in Europe where kids to get back a teachers.. take pic of the teachers license plate and then go speeding through as many speed traps as they can find. Each ticket running a few hundred Euros, unless you live in Finland where the ticket is a percentage of your income.
4) Quite a few of the companies running such systems are run by European companies that take all the profits back home rather than reinvesting in this country.
I had twins in the class and yes most calls where answered by 60 boxes of puffs..and on those rare times when not every child brought boxes, they brought the following week.
Basically, she made sure that all 6 fifth grade classes always had tissue. She knew she had 29 sets of parents that could afford it and she decided it was more important for the health of the fifth grade to make sure that all 6 teachers never ran out and never had to ask again beyond the 4 boxes listed on the school supply list.
As to Puffs, around here it is easier to find 200 count tissues in Puffs than the other brands and I would guess she preferred them.
Its the tax benefit.. buying an ad has a much bigger tax benefit than donating supplies.
And parents hate being asking to send more supplies to school every week. I mean 30 kids in a 5th grade class and every other week the teacher was asking for every student to bring in 2 200 count boxes of Puffs. For the record, the teacher asked for 1080 boxes of tissue in a single school year, Do you really think her class went through 6 boxes of tissue a day ?
Ads on tests are no more unethical than a school district not providing sufficient materials for the students to be tested on.
A teacher should not have to pay out of his/her own pocket to be able to hand out quizzes and tests.
And if it has come down to the teacher having to pay for generation of quizzes and tests. The the entire Administration (head of the school district, his assistants, and all the principals) need a big pay cut.
Personally, I don't really care how the ISP is set up. I don't care what hardware they run, how often they replace it, or how they pay for it. That's not my problem. All I care about is the service that I pay them to provide.
If I pay them $50/month for "unlimited" bandwidth, I want my unlimited bandwidth. If they tell me that "unlimited" actually means 100 Gb/month, I want my 100 Gb/month. I don't care if it puts an additional burden on them or not - that isn't my problem. If they can't provide 100 Gb/month for $50, they shouldn't sell it to me.
And the question comes down to what is your price point? Are you willing to pay $2, $3, $4 per GB per month for that 95% availability? Or $10-$15 per GB if you want 99.9% ?
The average smuck, doesn't give a rat's ass, whether it is 50% or 99% available, he only cares that he can read his email, do his banking faster than dialup an that it costs less than $20 per month. However, for the techie that understands and/or works from home, he/she expects 99.9% availability and bandwidth, this is where Net Neutrality argument fails.
If I'm am willing to pay the premium to get the 99.9% levels of service, why should my traffice be given favorable handling. Priority handling shouldn't be based on where I'm going, it should be based on who is willing to pay for it !
Perhaps if the big telco's spent a bit more on upgrading, widening and developing their networks rather than just pounding penny profits to shareholders this wouldn't be an issue. When are they going to realize that the people paying $35 ~ $200 a month for services which today cost about 10% of the charge are the real shareholders, and are the only real reason they are in business.
Never! As stated by the CEO of AT&T, his goal is that every household in America be paying AT&T $120 before taxes for landline, television and cellular service (this being base line services not the level of service most people actually use)
Except for folks like me that work for a cheap ass fortune 500 company from home. The company caps re-embursement at $50 per month.
Typical month for me is around 150 GB down and a 100 GB up. Under most of the metered services being either offered or in trial, my cost would easily double just on usage, and up another 20% on taxes.. leaving me to pay $70-80 per month out of my pocket to work for a fortune 500 company (20 years of seniority and 5 weeks of vacation).
Not many opportunities to move without taking a substantial cut in pay and vaction time.
Problem is most ISPs aren't setup to pay for new equipment at the needed rates. They are setup to only replace equipment as it fails or as it reaches the end of tax deductibility( 3- 5 years in the US ). Around here, we replace everything every third year and figure that 20% of the gear will fail in any given year.
Thus to change to an every year update plan would probably require a doubling (which the ISPs would see as their chance to triple) the existing rates, with no other benefits than the ability to use your paid for bandwidth. No speed or reliability improvements without adding yet another multiple to the cost.
Sorry to say, but I truly doubt that there will ever be any threat to the Reps or Dems from third parties, as they control the entire game. From the rules on establishing a 3rd party to drawing the district lines every thing is gear to keeping the big 2 in power and every decade it gets slanted to keeping in power the side that was in power during the census.
For example, Texas officially had 15 candidates for president on the ballot, the catch is 13 of those you had to write in (oh by the way, you can't write in anyone not on the official list).
So at best in Texas, we see Republicans, Democrats and occasionally, Liberterians and Independents.
Slashdot Mirror
Sending email has long be held to be the equivalent of sending a post card through the mail. You have no expectation of privacy and the law recognizes this fact. Similarly, if you do NOT encrypt your email, you have no expectation of privacy. FULL STOP.
Now where things get interesting is when you do encrypt your email, will the courts hold this to be analogous to a letter in an envelope? Somehow, under the current regime, I suspect the rule will be if the NSA can crack it.. the NSA can look at it.
Sorry, I can whine all I want.. I didn't vote for anyone in charge for just those reasons.
Viruses, like everything else, leave "foot" prints on the network.. this may be trying to hit a specific port on every machine on the network segment, trying to connect to an IRC server in on the former Soviet block.. lots of things a network admin can see just watching the traffic passing through the routers, and I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't software to do analytics in near real time on the traffic for just that purpose.
Because the Automakers claim that it takes that long to develop the "new" technology needed to meet the target criteria.
It is amazing how many people still believe what a politician says. We should retitle all politicians as professional liers .
The difference is 7,000 different taxing entities each with a different tax rate based on the classification of the item.
You live in NYC the item sells for $5.99 to pay all the taxes.. you live in Podunk, Louisiana you pay $3.05 .. and oh yeah what you pay if you are living in England and want to order a few pairs of Levis from the the States ?
For the most part, it is impossible to know what your actual usage is. Supposedly TW and Comcast have put up pages that detail specific usage, but from what I've heard, they aren't live data .. they are any where from hours to days behind.. kind of like the cell phone companies -- "you have used X minutes.. but this page may not be accurate and can not be used as proof of service."
That just it.. for what you were paying $50 per month .. you will now be paying $150 a month and there has NOT been any change in equipment or total capacity of the network.
TW is just putting an extra $100 into the profit pile
It is not so much the caps.. it is the fact the the rates are 3-5x what people are paying now which is, antidotally, 2-3x times what most people around the world pay. Caps wouldn't be so bad if everyone got some benefit.. as it is it is just an excuse for the ISPs to grab a 3-5x price increase.
As well as the fact that you must subscribe to the service.. no free games ever...
Be careful here, a lot of the "free" software on the internet is only free for individual use. That precludes the use on any corporate machine for any reason. Commercial use doesn't mean makes a profit .. it means, it is used as part of the process.
here is a small list from my brother the high school english teacher and tennis coach:
Girl shows up to class in complete violation of dress code.. short shorts, and see through halter top.. gets referred to principles office.. 3 hours later brother gets served papers that he is being sued for violating the girls 1st amendment rights
Male student texting in class in violation of school policy, when asks surrenders the phone. Upon exiting at the end of the class student (foolishly) attacks teacher. Next day, teacher served papers for assaulting said student.
Start tennis player in senior year.. decides to break curfew on overnight tournament trip. Coach suspends student for 3 matches but requires student to be present at practice. Student shows up to practice drunk. Police show up, student takes off running across cactus filled open country to avoid arrest for minor in possession and public intoxication. Police head to students home to wait on him to arrive, where he is arrested and checks in a bac of 1.6 two time the limit. Daddy lawyer sues the school district to get his son reinstated for the senior season and demands $10 M in damages or the firing for the coach (brother is now teaching 8th grade english and coaching 8th grade tennis -- at a pay cut of about $20k a year).
Those are 3 of the more interesting ones that have happened to my brother. On average he refers
6 or 7 kids to the principle's office every day of the school year and of those 35-40 kids per week... 3 or 4 try suing him. So far, with the exception of the School district caving on him.. he hasn't lost a case yet (but he does a pretty big legal insurance policy -- almost as bad as doctors malpractice insurance)
In this day and age.. "in loco parente" has been crushed by all the parents suing schools and teachers..
Because too many parents refuse to believe that their child would engage in any such behaviors and sue the schools to either defend their child's good name or just to get rich. More and more school districts are going the route of either obey the teacher or obey the cops.. your choice.
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/24/teens-copying-enemies-license-plates-to-get-revenge-via-speed-c/
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/04/458.asp
http://wcbstv.com/politics/congestion.pricing.london.2.597052.html
Isn't the purpose of the gasoline tax in the United States to account for the wear an tear that your vehicle causes to the roads? If we start implementing tolling on nearly every major highway, we should start to see a reduction or removal of the gasoline tax. No way in hell should we be paying for something twice.
Here in TX we are paying for some roadways 3 times..first with the gas taxes,, then with revenue from sales taxes and now the state is turning them into toll roads..
The result: a new source of money for highways and bridges badly in need of repair.' You can bet that legislators, mayors, and city councilpersons everywhere will see this as an even-better source of income than red-light cameras. You've been warned."
Why is this a bad thing? If the users of the road have to pay a little extra to maintain the road they're using, I don't have problem with it. If the money is being poured into some politician's slush fund, sure that's a problem, but reasonable use fees are exactly what's called for her. It sure beats the "selective billing" process of red-light cameras.
Why is it a bad thing.. let me count the ways...
1) typically, (at least in TX), the photo billed to the home address of the registered owner of the car.. carries a $1 service fee, + a 20% penalty (for not having the prepaid transponder) + the toll.. so a 50 cent toll is now $1.60 + check and postage
2) Most of the money doesn't go back to up keep of the road .. it goes to profit for the corporation running the toll system
3) If you piss off some one.. they will simply take a digital picture of your license plate and run through all the toll plazas they can find. And you will have to fight each one individually..If the person has any brains.. he will do it in the same make/model/year as your vehicle and you will never convince the the administrative judge it is not you, unless you in your car happen to trip through a toll plaza within seconds of the miscreant
Don't laugh it is become a big problem in Europe where kids to get back a teachers.. take pic of the teachers license plate and then go speeding through as many speed traps as they can find. Each ticket running a few hundred Euros, unless you live in Finland where the ticket is a percentage of your income.
4) Quite a few of the companies running such systems are run by European companies that take all the profits back home rather than reinvesting in this country.
I had twins in the class and yes most calls where answered by 60 boxes of puffs..and on those rare times when not every child brought boxes, they brought the following week.
Basically, she made sure that all 6 fifth grade classes always had tissue. She knew she had 29 sets of parents that could afford it and she decided it was more important for the health of the fifth grade to make sure that all 6 teachers never ran out and never had to ask again beyond the 4 boxes listed on the school supply list.
As to Puffs, around here it is easier to find 200 count tissues in Puffs than the other brands and I would guess she preferred them.
Its the tax benefit.. buying an ad has a much bigger tax benefit than donating supplies.
And parents hate being asking to send more supplies to school every week. I mean 30 kids in a 5th grade class and every other week the teacher was asking for every student to bring in 2 200 count boxes of Puffs. For the record, the teacher asked for 1080 boxes of tissue in a single school year, Do you really think her class went through 6 boxes of tissue a day ?
Ads on tests are no more unethical than a school district not providing sufficient materials for the students to be tested on.
A teacher should not have to pay out of his/her own pocket to be able to hand out quizzes and tests.
And if it has come down to the teacher having to pay for generation of quizzes and tests. The the entire Administration (head of the school district, his assistants, and all the principals) need a big pay cut.
Personally, I don't really care how the ISP is set up. I don't care what hardware they run, how often they replace it, or how they pay for it. That's not my problem. All I care about is the service that I pay them to provide.
If I pay them $50/month for "unlimited" bandwidth, I want my unlimited bandwidth. If they tell me that "unlimited" actually means 100 Gb/month, I want my 100 Gb/month. I don't care if it puts an additional burden on them or not - that isn't my problem. If they can't provide 100 Gb/month for $50, they shouldn't sell it to me.
And the question comes down to what is your price point? Are you willing to pay $2, $3, $4 per GB per month for that 95% availability? Or $10-$15 per GB if you want 99.9% ?
The average smuck, doesn't give a rat's ass, whether it is 50% or 99% available, he only cares that he can read his email, do his banking faster than dialup an that it costs less than $20 per month. However, for the techie that understands and/or works from home, he/she expects 99.9% availability and bandwidth, this is where Net Neutrality argument fails.
If I'm am willing to pay the premium to get the 99.9% levels of service, why should my traffice be given favorable handling. Priority handling shouldn't be based on where I'm going, it should be based on who is willing to pay for it !
Perhaps if the big telco's spent a bit more on upgrading, widening and developing their networks rather than just pounding penny profits to shareholders this wouldn't be an issue. When are they going to realize that the people paying $35 ~ $200 a month for services which today cost about 10% of the charge are the real shareholders, and are the only real reason they are in business.
Never! As stated by the CEO of AT&T, his goal is that every household in America be paying AT&T $120 before taxes for landline, television and cellular service (this being base line services not the level of service most people actually use)
Except for folks like me that work for a cheap ass fortune 500 company from home. The company caps re-embursement at $50 per month.
Typical month for me is around 150 GB down and a 100 GB up. Under most of the metered services being either offered or in trial, my cost would easily double just on usage, and up another 20% on taxes .. leaving me to pay $70-80 per month out of my pocket to work for a fortune 500 company (20 years of seniority and 5 weeks of vacation).
Not many opportunities to move without taking a substantial cut in pay and vaction time.
Problem is most ISPs aren't setup to pay for new equipment at the needed rates. They are setup to only replace equipment as it fails or as it reaches the end of tax deductibility( 3- 5 years in the US ). Around here, we replace everything every third year and figure that 20% of the gear will fail in any given year.
Thus to change to an every year update plan would probably require a doubling (which the ISPs would see as their chance to triple) the existing rates, with no other benefits than the ability to use your paid for bandwidth. No speed or reliability improvements without adding yet another multiple to the cost.
Sorry to say, but I truly doubt that there will ever be any threat to the Reps or Dems from third parties, as they control the entire game. From the rules on establishing a 3rd party to drawing the district lines every thing is gear to keeping the big 2 in power and every decade it gets slanted to keeping in power the side that was in power during the census.
For example, Texas officially had 15 candidates for president on the ballot, the catch is 13 of those you had to write in (oh by the way, you can't write in anyone not on the official list).
So at best in Texas, we see Republicans, Democrats and occasionally, Liberterians and Independents.