I think that's the rule for every state with sales tax, so 45 of the 50 states. If you didn't pay sales tax to the state and you use it in the state, there's a "use tax" that applies instead of a sales tax. Effectively it is the same thing, just different groups sending in the money.
I think the lower courts already got this right, there is no need for the SCOTUS to review the decision.
The first time it came up there was no law on the books, so the courts ruled that they need a presence in the state. Otherwise there is an enormous burden to figure out taxes, collect them, report them, and send them in to all the different states. If they already have a presence in the state then they're already doing the paperwork so collecting and submitting the taxes is not a large burden. The lower courts already agreed with the precedent and said that was the case, they need a presence in the state to collect sales tax for the state. If they don't have a presence in the state then it is up to the individuals to file with their own state taxes.
Over the decades there was no change in federal law or federal policy on the matter. Congress could pass a law if they want something different. It would still be a a burden to make small businesses file taxes in every state, that burden hasn't gone away.
The earlier ruling was made because there was no law on the books either way.
Normally if people or states think it was wrong, they should petition their congress-critters to pass a new law. New laws generally give new structure for the courts to follow. In this situation a new law would have allowed it.
The lower courts have already said that there is no law in effect, and without a law the prior judgement of requiring an in-state presence applies. I don't think that should change. If people or states want it added, craft and pass a law to that effect.
Warrants allow for searches and seizures. And that is what police did. But a warrant for the machines doesn't mean the company needs to help officers access accounts, read the data, nor help by decoding or decrypting them.
There are many legal tools if the authorities want to obtain specific documents and records. An unannounced visit to seize computer equipment is typically the worst of those tools. The searches are often sloppy and (for those who are prepared) the searches are easily overcome by measures like those in the story. Authorities love "snatch and grab" because the surprise often grants access to a wide range of other secondary data, also including ad-hoc statements and access to items that are nearby on whiteboards and both on and inside desks and at the time of the police break-in.
The company still has a fight ahead, but the policy generally is a strong case that they were protecting user's data rather than obstructing justice. Agents had an order to seize computers, the computers were seized. If agents produce an order to produce specific documents, I'm sure they could be produced. They complied with the requests while also protecting private information of millions of customers. That isn't obstruction.
If they actually destroyed their data, or if they altered or falsified data, those actions would be obstruction. But locking down records for proper data preservation and basic data security are not obstruction.
only buy cars where you can still hack the connectivity hardware out.
"Hack" is a very broad term.
I'm sure car community sites would figure out where the cell chip or cell radio is located. It may take a bit of digging in the vehicle to find the board, but likely only take a twist of a screwdriver or a slice with a utility knife to render the thing inoperable. There will be youtube videos and howto articles within days of the vehicle hitting the streets.
Probably only a small percentage of owners would use it, but enough people would be sick of the ads and figure out how disable them. I can hook up GPS maps and music on my phone if I want them.
Shared transit benefits society in hundreds of ways..but if you prefer to sit in a Taxi stuck in rush hour traffic, be my guest.
That is absolutely true. Transit systems are amazing when they provide efficient means to get lots of people from their origin to their destination.
The problem with this monorail (and far too many public systems as well) is that it does not get people from their origin to their destination. The system does connect with one well-populated endpoint (in this case the downtown casinos on the Las Vegas Strip) but does not connect them to other useful locations. There are many good systems that connect popular destinations, usually a combination of city centers, a major airport, multiple major residential areas, and often some lesser destinations like executive/private airports, smaller civic centers and community centers, shopping venues, and other places people want to go.
I've been in cities where the mass transit connects things well. New York does the connectivity part very well, assuming you can stand the smell of the system. San Francisco's BART is hit-or-miss, either you get a great employer with shuttles to a station or offices near a station on one end plus happen to live relatively close to a station, or the system is near-worthless except to reduce traffic. Salt Lake City does it surprisingly well, mostly because the 2 million people live between a strip of mountains and lakes about 5 miles wide and 100 miles long, with long-distance rail systems running the entire length and short-distance rail systems running in the middle 40 miles, all fully integrated with a bus system. Others in the topic have already mentioned Austin's system, which runs from downtown up to a university, and then meanders through a single residential area with very few stops; it completely avoids the airports, the major shopping districts, and has virtually no stops in residential areas and also has no spurs or coordinated buses in residential areas, so it gets very little use.
All mass transit systems have difficulty with the 'last mile problem' in residential areas, but for good transit systems that is the only difficult issue to overcome.
The Las Vegas monorail is NOT one of those systems. It fails in the first step of actually connecting both the origin and the destination. The cities that connect people with the places they want to go generate massive ridership numbers.
Seems like extortion to me. Telling people "pay us $400 or we'll turn you over to police" can be a strong threat, especially if the person is on legal probation, already has an outstanding warrant, or has other legal issues.
I tell them that my type of programming is almost all mathematics. Few programmers use this much math. I look at all kinds of problems and find solutions for them.
I use linear algebra all the time. You might have been exposed to matrix math, using 3x3 and 4x4 matrices, multiplying them together, finding inverses and transposes, working with vectors and dot products and cross products. That's the basic math of the 3D world, much like addition and subtraction are the basics of the math for processing a budget. I do linear algebra on paper and on calculators at my desk, plus I tell the computer to do that stuff. I read technical math research papers about many systems, often two or three per month, and I implement the algorithms they describe.
I look for errors in code and fix them. When people say "this isn't working right", I find the errors and fix them no matter who wrote the buggy code. Sometimes it is very difficult to understand other people's code, sometimes it is like a giant knot that needs to be untangled so it can be understood. When people say "this is running slow", I study the math that they use, I figure out what math can be faster, and I tell the computer to use that math instead.
I work with designers who say "I need a game system that does such-and-such", I figure out a way to make that happen. For example, on {project they would understand} I programmed the computer how to {action they would understand}.
Many times I am given very difficult problems that are studied by mathematicians and scientists, problems that are known to be impossible to solve at speeds games need. That's why the impossible problems, intractable problems, and fast-growing problems are important to study in college. In those cases my job is to figure out other ways to solve the problem that are fast enough to run in microseconds. Usually that means cheating and taking shortcuts. As one example, finding the perfect organization for objects inside a container is very difficult and slow, since the perfect organization requires testing every option. Instead we can cheat by taking the biggest items and stuffing them in the container first, getting smaller and smaller pieces until they are all present. Another is choosing the perfect path which takes a lot of processing, versus cheating and taking the first really good path. It often isn't the perfect solution, but it is good enough for what we need.
That and they've held him for a year without trial
In all these cases it is the defendant (and their lawyers) who must agree the right to a speedy trial be waived. It is usually in the defendant's own best interest.
In most cases prosecutors have all the cards and are prepared with ally they need when they finally press charges. They are more than willing to move to a trial immediately before the defense has time to gather all they need. The government usually spends months preparing these cases so they're certain that (right or wrong) they can get a conviction or a plea deal.
Defense lawyers recommend the time so they can demand as much evidence as they can. It also allows time to build a solid defense, and to question and verify all the evidence prosecutors have gathered. (Prosecutors still withhold far too often, a currently estimated 20% of all criminal cases, and even the most blatant violators where prosecutors openly admit to the crime will go unpunished. Google finds only a single DA who has been imprisoned for it -- Ken Anderson who was imprisoned for 10 days following discovery in a case where the prosecutor's crimes caused an innocent man to be in prison nearly 25 years. A few have resigned over the crimes, a few had legal licenses revoked, but no others have been to prison despite the estimated 20% of all cases where prosecutors violate people's rights. )
Of course, time between arrest and trial still doesn't make the asset forfeiture right. That system is all kinds of messed up.
Well really they're just telling the truth. They decided to kill NN and fuck what the public thought. It won't matter if 100% of the anti-NN comments are fraudulent, because their minds are made up already. It's like Pai's "it's funny because it's true" I'm-a-shill joke.
Yup. The fake comments won't affect the proposal. The real comments won't affect the proposal. The comments were a formality, not something they cared about.
They can choose to modify the rule if there are persuasive new arguments in the comments, they can also choose to retract or modify the rule due to public outcry, but they are not obligated to do either.
Only a new law or presidential directive can force the agency to modify the rules if they won't change it themselves. That's why the big push to contact legislators.
They started a branding with "FanXperience" and "FanX", Wikipedia says it started in 2014 three months before SDCC started legal proceedings.
I think that's a better name, since so little of the conventions are focused around comic books any more. They pull from TV shows, from movies, from video games, from anime, from graphic novels, from authors, from non-comic artists, and from many other sources as well. All those fandoms are in addition to comic books.
Headliners aren't typically from comic books any more. Looking over the Salt Lake show's history they feature more than just Stan Lee and other comic greats, their show alumni page is a "Who's Who" among many popular lines. Star Trek headliners of Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, Jonathan Frakes, George Takei; Star Wars stars Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels; Dr Who stars Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill; stars across many shows like Elija Wood, Christopher Lloyd, Felicia Day, John Cusack.
I mean, their list even has the Seinfeld Soup Nazi guy Larry Thomas as a featured guest and autograph signer at Salt Lake Comic Con. I can imagine how that one went: "No autograph for you!" "But I've been in line for ages!" "Come back one year. Next!"
Since comic books are a relatively small part of the event, dumping the name doesn't seem like much of a stretch. Their FanX or FanXperience branding seems more appropriate anyway.
Blah, there's nothing being "emulated" (and nothing legitimate about it). It's just another predeployed trusted CA cert on the employee's computer, if the employee cares to check, they can easily tell they're being MITM'd
It is fully legitimate: The computers belong to the company, the network access is the company's, the employee's work belongs to the company, the time is being paid for by the company. What may have been implied in old employment agreements about employers providing tools is now often explicitly stated, that workers have no right to privacy on their network communications.
Organizational MitM has been part of the protocol since the very beginning. It was there in the first implementation in Netscape, and was almost immediately implemented in organizational proxy tools. When discussions were made to eliminate it just a few months later, there were many businesses, schools, and government agencies who saw the security implications for virus scanners and the very high cost of losing their proxy functionality, and they told the implementers they needed the MitM feature in place if they didn't want the newly-blossoming products blocked banned. Organizational MitM has been an intentional feature in SSL, and TLS ever since.
These proxy tools do "emulate" as described. They create a new certificate signed by the organization, but showing the "issued to" and other fields matching the original. Hence they emulate the original certificate, even though the fingerprints and keys are different.
The typical way to do all of that is through QoS settings.
A "fast lane" and "slow lane" does not mean data flows at different rates through the routers or the network. It means that when many streams of data are coming through and the router must decide which one is processed first, it will give priority to one over the other. QoS settings also go under the name "traffic shaping",
The difference is subtle, but enough that marketers, PR folk, and political statements leverage it.
Thus they can say that they aren't slowing down anything, they aren't actually throttling or limiting anything. Those are accurate. However, that doesn't mean they are treated the same.
When a line forms the non-favored traffic must wait in the line and the other can jump to the front. Another (which is already legal and widely used) allows for preference for different routes for different types of packets and patterns, large bulk data goes through one route while small units go through another route. In general that's fine when it is unbiased, much like postal sorting has different equipment for letters than it does for packages without regard for who sent it. The issue is that without Title 2 rules, the network managers can use QoS settings to prioritize based on sender or destination, and that's a problem.
You know, it's not really fair to expect the average citizen to be able to phrase his viewpoint in legal terms.
True enough. But if they keep ignoring them, the average citizen will phrase the viewpoints in pitchforks and torches. Those aren't legal terms but they are readily understood.
The classic "four boxes of liberty" hasn't gone away. "There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use them in that order." If the FCC members refuse to listen to the soap box, and the ballot box is ineffectual and deadlocked between two extreme positions that refuse the will of the people, they better hope the judges who review the change will listen to the will of the people. That last one is unpleasant, and sadly political assassinations in the US has entered a sharp uptick. We're now averaging one every two years, and it's been two years.
It may not be possible to decrypt the files, even for Apple
True enough. The/. headline is light on the details, but the story says the demanded three things: Contents of the iPhone, contents of an iCloud account if it exists, and extracted contents from a third LG phone.
They can hand over the contents of the iCloud account if they can match it up. It might be interesting to see what they do with the phone, and it depends quite a lot on the wording of the warrant. They may reply with "the phone is encrypted, but here is the encrypted storage contents". For the LG phone, they would likely reply that it is not their device and they have no corporate knowledge or corporate tools to handle it.
By the way, doesn't a search warrant only allow them to perform a search?
There are several legal tools, but typically there are subpoenas, warrants, and court orders. Police and other government agents prefer warrants as they are more difficult to legally fight, are often given in surprise or delivered aggressively, and give government lawyers and police the biggest net. Court orders take more time, and often require back-and-forth discussions with lawyers from both sides and with the judge.
Subpoenas are easier to obtain but also easier to fight. A subpoena allows for the business to sort through the records and decide what is inside or outside the scope. A warrant tends to use terms that are more vague, tend to not specify the exact issue under investigation, and allow for the government agency to dig through it (rather than the business) to determine if the information is relevant.
Warrants are also typically delivered in surprising ways ostensibly to prevent destruction of evidence and reduce risks to the police involved. For businesses this usually means isolating people and making legal demands while they are alone and in shock, hoping they forget that they need to call a lawyer and have the right to not say anything, warrants are for searching and not for interrogation. For individuals or residences, that typically means smashing down people's doors when they know residents aren't home, or showing up at 3:00 AM with guns, tear gas, and assault gear. There are naturally good and bad ones. One has a few professionally dressed officers that politely knock at the door and say "Good evening Mr Smith, I have a warrant to search the premises, please step outside", and which one throws in a flash-bang device and shouts "This is the police! Get on the ground now! Put your hands on your head! We have a warrant!! Shut that baby up NOW or I'll arrest both you and the child for interfering with an investigation!"
60k out of college while working for IBM is a gift...
They don't get anything. There is no money from IBM. IBM registered to show they are actually teaching people rather than using unpaid labor, that way apprentices can be completely unpaid. When they're done with the program, they can be hired where their "average starting wage is above $60,000." Most companies I know start their college graduates at about 30%-50% more than that.
The wording is a little vague between IBM and SalesForce's Marc Benioff, but mentioned in the story it looks like they're looking for five million unpaid American apprentices.... Because five million people without income creates jobs and stuff.
The idea is ridiculous - many old games that is still spoken about as innovative, fun by nostalgic geeks were in almost all cases designed by and distributed by specialized game development companies. Including EA.
I'm reminded of older games, and even new games, when I read these.
The complaint is that it takes about 40 hours of gameplay to unlock. Similar multiplayer match games report that mainstream players often spend 15-20 hours per week for about a month, then settle to about 10 hours per week until the games fall out of favor. Their hardcore players can log 80+ hours per week. This means many players would be able to unlock one hero before the end of November, and hardcore gamer teens will likely unlock one or two before Thanksgiving. Most players will unlock two or three before Christmas, hardcore gamers could unlock all the heroes before Christmas under the old structure.
In the older games the high-end unlockables were not available until near the end of the game, often requiring 100+ hours to achieve. And those were single player games played once, not the online match games where statistically people replay them for over a thousand hours on average before moving on.
With the update math suggests they're unlocked with about six hours of gameplay. All of them can be unlocked with 80 hours of gameplay, meaning hardcore players will likely have them all unlocked before the Thanksgiving holiday is over, more casual players can have every character unlocked before Christmas. Far too easy for such a long-running game, in my view.
I think EA was trying to bypass the claims that only the unemployed teens devoting extended hours to the game could unlock those characters, so they added an alternate way to achieve them. Players have been calling for this type of unlock for years, and few games offer it. At 40 hours to unlock and $80 for Darth Vader, that's about $2/hour. Lesser characters were closer to $1/hour or $0.50/hour. While I rarely buy in-game content, those prices don't feel outlandish. Unfortunately and ironically, by providing exactly the thing the players demand, the players revolted.
It's more than that. The judge's demand is worthless and is unlawful.
Honestly the judge should know better. He can write all he wants about "Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries" in his court order. But if they were not part of the suit, they cannot be part of the order.
Of course, the judge can bring them in as new named parties, but by doing so he'll have to face the lawyers from all those companies. His order will need to stand scrutiny and appeals from the legal teams of many of the biggest companies in the world.
That part of the order should just be ignored for now. It is illegal, and if the court attempts to enforce it, they can find themselves at the wrong end of a bar review for it.
There are plenty of ways for non-mobile people to lose weight - dieting, upper body exercise etc etc.
Methods exist, yes.
However, as we all know, if it were easy to lose body weight there wouldn't be any fat people.
Even though methods exist, it is still critical to recognize that substantial weight loss is difficult, it requires major life changes for most people, often changes including changes to friendships or careers and/or psychological care, and only the smallest percent of people who attempt to lose significant weight will actually succeed.
The doctor's trying to save your life, not deny you healthcare. Where's the controversy here? I don't see it.
The controversy is that everyone interprets the statements in their own world view, and generally comes to conclusions they don't like.
Taking the time to deeply understand the issues, even the hard parts, before forming the conclusions and jumping on the bandwagon with pitchforks and torches.
Certain things increase the risk factors. As you point out, when that happens and the risks of doing the surgery could be reduced by making some changes and doing the surgery later, then it makes sense to postpone it.
The article mentions it, but most of the opinions don't notice, that these are delays and are supposed to be time limited. The doctors are supposed to work with the patients for up to nine months, and at the end of the nine months the surgery proceeds anyway. I'm sure some physicians will work with the patient, help them with ways to change their lifestyle to reduce weight, or change lifestyle to remove help break the smoking addictions, but some of them won't work with the patient for those nine months.
The physicians who have brains in their head, or at least proper modern training, will know that both of these require major lifestyle changes and they are not easy. If it was easy to stop smoking there wouldn't be enormous industries built around it. If it was easy to change your overall body weight there wouldn't be industries around dieting and weight-loss. The extreme cases usually have many components. There are social components, psychological components, and other areas of life that need to be addressed in addition to the behavior. It can mean overcoming issues around immediate family, around friends, neighbors, co-workers, and even careers. A person with family who smoke, neighbors and co-workers who smoke, or are in an industry where all workplaces routinely have smoke breaks, simply hooking them up with a patch is not going to help them quit. Similarly with weight, when the entire family is overweight, when the community and friends have frequent dinner parties, when the business has trays of sweets that everyone eats and the business is constantly taking people to working lunches and business dinners, telling someone to count calories won't work.
Then the medical professionals are supposed to evaluate the risks of waiting versus the risk of proceeding, and to help make wise decisions on the patient's behalf. But the thing is people are human. Doctors make mistakes, nor do they have perfect information. Even when a doctor does everything by the book, there is still opportunity for things to go wrong. I've known people who were adamantly against mainstream medicine because a doctor made a judgement call that impacted a person's life; because one doctor once did something that harmed them or their loved one, they distrust that doctors have the patient's best interest in mind. I have a friend whose face is partially paralyzed because a numbing shot for a tooth cavity happened to have a rare complication, but that friend looked up stats and details afterword, and realized it was a rare side effect that could not have been predicted or avoided with today's technology. Even when everything looks like it should go right sometimes things go wrong during or after operations. Some people allow for it, some people take the exceptions and let them become conspiracies or treat them as incompetence of the profession.
But all of this is too much mental effort for most people. For many, they see the headline, make a bunch of assumptions, reach wrong conclusions, complain about how it is either completely fair or completely unfair, when in practice it is all somewhere in between, with rational humans making the best decisions they can along the way.
A corporation wants to pretend it's above the law by engaging in a shell game with their documents.
Are you following the same story? This is not the shell game you propose.
The US government refuses to include details like if the person is an American, but instead they have bound the details of the case in secrecy. Microsoft is a global company with smaller corporations in each nation to follow the local laws. The US government in a local criminal investigation (for something not criminal in much of the world) has issued a search warrant for one company to seize information held by a sister-company in another nation, for hardware held in another nation, against someone who is probably a citizen of another nation, for crimes that are probably not illegal in that other nation.
For those who have followed the case for the past several years, it is clear the US government is looking for a way to sidestep existing international law and international treaties. Instead of following standard protocol for international warrants, and using the international crime-fighting treaties to get an Irish warrant against Microsoft of Ireland to seize data stored on servers in Ireland about a person who is probably an Irish citizen or perhaps a citizen of the EU, the government has doubled-down on the bad bet. For the past four years they could have cancelled the warrant and gone through the regular international channels to get a warrant for international communications.
It is nonsensical. As some parallels, consider how Microsoft has offices in Dubai. Imagine the response if the Dubai government demanded of Microsoft's Dubai office that Microsoft USA turned over all emails from Microsoft's American servers about Americans because they might be related to an investigation of Dubai's laws forbidding sexual relations, even flirting, outside of marriage. So to investigate a Dubai woman who might have had indirect contact with someone in America, in order to find evidence to punish her, instead of going through regular international courts they produce a search warrant in Dubai that requires Dubai police to seize servers in the US. Then they fight for four years in an attempt to get that search warrant executed.
Or another parallel, consider how Microsoft has offices in China. Imagine if the Chinese government demanded Microsoft's Chinese office that Microsoft USA turned over all emails from Microsoft's American servers about Americans because they might be related to an investigation about Chinese laws prohibiting ill-speaking of government workers. To investigate someone in China who might have had indirect contact with someone in America, so they can find evidence that perhaps the Chinese person really did write something subversive to the government, instead of using the international legal tools, they produce a warrant that requires Chinese investigators to seize servers in the US. Then they fight for four years in an attempt to get that search warrant executed.
There are simple existing tools for this. They can submit a request for Irish law enforcement to execute the search warrant against Microsoft of Ireland so they can search the servers held in Ireland. That type of international search warrant happens all the time. They are choosing to ignore it not because Microsoft in America is playing a shell game, but because the police are looking for ways around the safeguards that have been established to protect people from abuses of other nations.
That is exactly the situation that makes it so interesting from a legal view.
The US courts can order the US company to take the action. But the instant they start messing with the data in Ireland, the emails of a the citizen who lives in Ireland, then the international treaties between the US and Ireland come into play.
If that happens -- meaning the US Supreme Court orders or allows the government to violate the international treaty even though proper channels exist through the treaty -- the consequences get complicated very quickly. Nations routinely violate treaties and the US does it all the time, particularly around military actions. Exactly how the nations respond varies by nation.
Ireland may quietly do nothing and allow the treaty violation. Diplomatic channels have been active since this started, and whatever action is taken will have closed-door diplomatic consequences. More publicly, Ireland's politicians may raise the issue with the international courts or with the UN. They may instead chose a more passive-aggressive stance either with or without public declarations, requiring more strict scrutiny to law enforcement requests and requiring extra time as they triple-check every detail of the request against all applicable law. Since international law enforcement requests must be vetted by all nations involved, Ireland could respond extremely slowly or find reasons to disallow the bulk of future requests, perhaps only allowing the most extreme cases (like child sexual abuse) to pass through in a timely manner.
Other nations may also respond in varying degrees. Like above this may range from no visible response, closed-door diplomatic responses, to increasing difficulty working with the nation, to public statements of disapproval, to full-blown official actions in international policy organizations.
Nations that are firmly against the US could rightly publicise it as yet another instance of the US willfully ignoring their treaty obligations. With Trump routinely going to the media to declare he will disregard treaties this is not a surprising thing. Even before Trump, as a nation the country lost its moral high ground on treaties decades ago; the US is a nation that generally follows the rule of law, but has demonstrated no qualms about violating the rule of law when those in power think they can get away with it. Although this one is relatively small, yet another treaty violation can be added to the stack and the rallying cries about the duplicitous actions of the country, and how the US does whatever it wants without regard to treaties and promises it has made.
If it goes forward, probably the US government will get the data they have been fishing for, they'll win that specific battle, but it will come at a cost for future international cooperation. There will be an enormous cost to all the other international police investigations that use the treaty. While they get the data in one specific case, untold thousands of other cases that are legitimate and using the proper channels will face the negative repercussions, in addition to whatever political fallout comes with it.
Many people think in an a mutually exclusive way. EITHER a secure tool, OR a system using obscurity. Good security systems employ both. Lock it with the best tools that can be found, AND obscure all the details.
What is described sounds just fine. A security company revealed their source code to be used by a government to show it is backdoor-free. That's typical in the security industry, and is generally not inherently a problem. The organizations should, as you described, not tell the world exactly which implementation they're using, which could include the stock version of the one being sold or a specially modified version, or even a completely different program.
The problem is the masses don't understand that. This is SOP in security systems, not a headline news story.
Be grateful there is a substitute today. I'm one of the old fogies who helped get Blender freed up. At least today there is one substantial 3D tool open.
I'd put several tools and technologies far before Maya. Consumer routers are probably top on my list, particularly from the companies where the only option is the locked-up corporate version.
I love my FTTP gigabit connection's speed, but the only option is AT&T in my region, and since 2015 that has been a mandatory eternal rental. No purchase option, no other devices can be attached, no choice of box. All customers have a mandatory rental fee which cannot be escaped, and no other equipment can be used. The closest I can come is attach my own device to the gateway, but it lives behind their locked-away gateway no matter what.
I suppose it was just wishful thinking that anyone reading the site would have the requisite math skills...
Google is shouting from the rooftops that they are seeking gender diversity with 31% women, plus trying to hire even more women.
No, I think they have just recognized what lot of other companies have also recognized, which is that the gender disproportions have more to do with company and workplace culture, educational opportunities and encouragement, role models, social acceptance, and work-life balance than with any inherent biological predispositions.
Now yes, I read the paper. And I agree with some of what was written, I disagree with some of what was written. I've also read analysis by social scientists who studied the paper and they said the science aspects were fundamentally correct. But that's beyond the point.
But that skips over a few points. We aren't talking about people going to school. We aren't talking about people in school. We aren't talking about who will be entering the workforce. Instead we are talking about the numbers and percentages of people who are in the workforce right now today.
In the post I wasn't talking about biology. I was talking about math of right now today.
Let's do the math, because apparently you missed it. And lets use really easier numbers.
Right now today about 20% to 25% of the software engineer workforce is female. The other 75%-80% is male.
Let's say there are 1000 workers in the marketplace. 20% of the workers are female. That means 800 men and 200 women. Some really big companies try to look like they hire an equal number of men and women even though that doesn't reflect the actual number of people out there. They hire a bunch of women, giving them a 31% female workforce. They've 155 women and 345 men, with 500 employees total. That means 455 men remain in the workforce, and only 45 women remain in the workforce. Because that one company scooped up so many women, disproportionate from the marketplace, now everybody else in the marketplace is going to look like they're discriminating. The company who scooped up a higher percentage of women left the entire marketplace skewed, the remaining workforce is only 9% women. Companies can now either hire fairly -- getting only 9% women in their workforce, or they can try to over-hire women and leave other companies with an even worse disproportionate number of men and women in the workforce.
In this case Google and Apple and a few other large employers have scooped up a disproportionate number of the workforce in an attempt to look fair, even though from a statistical analysis it is completely unfair. Not only does their communication hurt the market as a whole (because they are wrongly stating that the starting balance is inherently unfair), but their actions hurt everyone else; nobody else can begin to approach the same percentages because the big companies have skewed the numbers even more.
If Google wants to help in the short term, they can completely ignore gender in hiring. They can hire based on merit. If more women get hired, or more men get hired, then let it be by merit alone. Statistically it will quickly balance out, merit tends to be roughly equal across large groups, so Google and every other company would quickly reach a balance of about 20%-25% women because the entire workforce is 20%-25% women.
In the long term they can start looking at the entrance to the pipe. They can look for ways to address elementary school teachers who tell little kids "That's okay, I didn't understand it either. Math is hard, draw me a picture with these crayons." They can look for teachers of twelve-year-olds who tell their students, "It's okay Jenny, most girls don't like math, go talk with the other girls about clothes." They can look for teachers of sixteen-year-olds who tell their students, "Michelle, you shouldn't be taking AP Calculus, have you considered pep squad instead?" They
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I think that's the rule for every state with sales tax, so 45 of the 50 states. If you didn't pay sales tax to the state and you use it in the state, there's a "use tax" that applies instead of a sales tax. Effectively it is the same thing, just different groups sending in the money.
I think the lower courts already got this right, there is no need for the SCOTUS to review the decision.
The first time it came up there was no law on the books, so the courts ruled that they need a presence in the state. Otherwise there is an enormous burden to figure out taxes, collect them, report them, and send them in to all the different states. If they already have a presence in the state then they're already doing the paperwork so collecting and submitting the taxes is not a large burden. The lower courts already agreed with the precedent and said that was the case, they need a presence in the state to collect sales tax for the state. If they don't have a presence in the state then it is up to the individuals to file with their own state taxes.
Over the decades there was no change in federal law or federal policy on the matter. Congress could pass a law if they want something different. It would still be a a burden to make small businesses file taxes in every state, that burden hasn't gone away.
The earlier ruling was made because there was no law on the books either way.
Normally if people or states think it was wrong, they should petition their congress-critters to pass a new law. New laws generally give new structure for the courts to follow. In this situation a new law would have allowed it.
The lower courts have already said that there is no law in effect, and without a law the prior judgement of requiring an in-state presence applies. I don't think that should change. If people or states want it added, craft and pass a law to that effect.
Except the cops had a warrant.
Warrants allow for searches and seizures. And that is what police did. But a warrant for the machines doesn't mean the company needs to help officers access accounts, read the data, nor help by decoding or decrypting them.
There are many legal tools if the authorities want to obtain specific documents and records. An unannounced visit to seize computer equipment is typically the worst of those tools. The searches are often sloppy and (for those who are prepared) the searches are easily overcome by measures like those in the story. Authorities love "snatch and grab" because the surprise often grants access to a wide range of other secondary data, also including ad-hoc statements and access to items that are nearby on whiteboards and both on and inside desks and at the time of the police break-in.
The company still has a fight ahead, but the policy generally is a strong case that they were protecting user's data rather than obstructing justice. Agents had an order to seize computers, the computers were seized. If agents produce an order to produce specific documents, I'm sure they could be produced. They complied with the requests while also protecting private information of millions of customers. That isn't obstruction.
If they actually destroyed their data, or if they altered or falsified data, those actions would be obstruction. But locking down records for proper data preservation and basic data security are not obstruction.
"Hack" is a very broad term.
I'm sure car community sites would figure out where the cell chip or cell radio is located. It may take a bit of digging in the vehicle to find the board, but likely only take a twist of a screwdriver or a slice with a utility knife to render the thing inoperable. There will be youtube videos and howto articles within days of the vehicle hitting the streets.
Probably only a small percentage of owners would use it, but enough people would be sick of the ads and figure out how disable them. I can hook up GPS maps and music on my phone if I want them.
Shared transit benefits society in hundreds of ways..but if you prefer to sit in a Taxi stuck in rush hour traffic, be my guest.
That is absolutely true. Transit systems are amazing when they provide efficient means to get lots of people from their origin to their destination.
The problem with this monorail (and far too many public systems as well) is that it does not get people from their origin to their destination. The system does connect with one well-populated endpoint (in this case the downtown casinos on the Las Vegas Strip) but does not connect them to other useful locations. There are many good systems that connect popular destinations, usually a combination of city centers, a major airport, multiple major residential areas, and often some lesser destinations like executive/private airports, smaller civic centers and community centers, shopping venues, and other places people want to go.
I've been in cities where the mass transit connects things well. New York does the connectivity part very well, assuming you can stand the smell of the system. San Francisco's BART is hit-or-miss, either you get a great employer with shuttles to a station or offices near a station on one end plus happen to live relatively close to a station, or the system is near-worthless except to reduce traffic. Salt Lake City does it surprisingly well, mostly because the 2 million people live between a strip of mountains and lakes about 5 miles wide and 100 miles long, with long-distance rail systems running the entire length and short-distance rail systems running in the middle 40 miles, all fully integrated with a bus system. Others in the topic have already mentioned Austin's system, which runs from downtown up to a university, and then meanders through a single residential area with very few stops; it completely avoids the airports, the major shopping districts, and has virtually no stops in residential areas and also has no spurs or coordinated buses in residential areas, so it gets very little use.
All mass transit systems have difficulty with the 'last mile problem' in residential areas, but for good transit systems that is the only difficult issue to overcome.
The Las Vegas monorail is NOT one of those systems. It fails in the first step of actually connecting both the origin and the destination. The cities that connect people with the places they want to go generate massive ridership numbers.
Not the person you're replying to, but Google still works at finding citations. One of many:
Headline: Walmart halts program that told shoplifters: Pay up or face police ... Shoplifting suspects at stores that use Corrective Education are shown a video describing the program and are given 72 hours to decide whether they will pay or not, according to the Journal. The program costs either $400 up front or $500 later. If they decline, the retailer may pursue "other legal rights to seek restitution and resolve this crime," the video reportedly says. ... The move comes after a California court ruled in August that Corrective Education's program violates the state's extortion laws.
Seems like extortion to me. Telling people "pay us $400 or we'll turn you over to police" can be a strong threat, especially if the person is on legal probation, already has an outstanding warrant, or has other legal issues.
I tell them that my type of programming is almost all mathematics. Few programmers use this much math. I look at all kinds of problems and find solutions for them.
I use linear algebra all the time. You might have been exposed to matrix math, using 3x3 and 4x4 matrices, multiplying them together, finding inverses and transposes, working with vectors and dot products and cross products. That's the basic math of the 3D world, much like addition and subtraction are the basics of the math for processing a budget. I do linear algebra on paper and on calculators at my desk, plus I tell the computer to do that stuff. I read technical math research papers about many systems, often two or three per month, and I implement the algorithms they describe.
I look for errors in code and fix them. When people say "this isn't working right", I find the errors and fix them no matter who wrote the buggy code. Sometimes it is very difficult to understand other people's code, sometimes it is like a giant knot that needs to be untangled so it can be understood. When people say "this is running slow", I study the math that they use, I figure out what math can be faster, and I tell the computer to use that math instead.
I work with designers who say "I need a game system that does such-and-such", I figure out a way to make that happen. For example, on {project they would understand} I programmed the computer how to {action they would understand}.
Many times I am given very difficult problems that are studied by mathematicians and scientists, problems that are known to be impossible to solve at speeds games need. That's why the impossible problems, intractable problems, and fast-growing problems are important to study in college. In those cases my job is to figure out other ways to solve the problem that are fast enough to run in microseconds. Usually that means cheating and taking shortcuts. As one example, finding the perfect organization for objects inside a container is very difficult and slow, since the perfect organization requires testing every option. Instead we can cheat by taking the biggest items and stuffing them in the container first, getting smaller and smaller pieces until they are all present. Another is choosing the perfect path which takes a lot of processing, versus cheating and taking the first really good path. It often isn't the perfect solution, but it is good enough for what we need.
That and they've held him for a year without trial
In all these cases it is the defendant (and their lawyers) who must agree the right to a speedy trial be waived. It is usually in the defendant's own best interest.
In most cases prosecutors have all the cards and are prepared with ally they need when they finally press charges. They are more than willing to move to a trial immediately before the defense has time to gather all they need. The government usually spends months preparing these cases so they're certain that (right or wrong) they can get a conviction or a plea deal.
Defense lawyers recommend the time so they can demand as much evidence as they can. It also allows time to build a solid defense, and to question and verify all the evidence prosecutors have gathered. (Prosecutors still withhold far too often, a currently estimated 20% of all criminal cases, and even the most blatant violators where prosecutors openly admit to the crime will go unpunished. Google finds only a single DA who has been imprisoned for it -- Ken Anderson who was imprisoned for 10 days following discovery in a case where the prosecutor's crimes caused an innocent man to be in prison nearly 25 years. A few have resigned over the crimes, a few had legal licenses revoked, but no others have been to prison despite the estimated 20% of all cases where prosecutors violate people's rights. )
Of course, time between arrest and trial still doesn't make the asset forfeiture right. That system is all kinds of messed up.
Well really they're just telling the truth. They decided to kill NN and fuck what the public thought. It won't matter if 100% of the anti-NN comments are fraudulent, because their minds are made up already. It's like Pai's "it's funny because it's true" I'm-a-shill joke.
Yup. The fake comments won't affect the proposal. The real comments won't affect the proposal. The comments were a formality, not something they cared about.
Agencies are required to publish rule changes, and they're required to accept public comments for a time. But ultimately: "This process is not like a ballot initiative or an up-or-down vote in a legislature. An agency is not permitted to base its final rule on the number of comments in support of the rule over those in opposition to it. At the end of the process, the agency must base its reasoning and conclusions on the rulemaking record, consisting of the comments, scientific data, expert opinions, and facts accumulated during the pre-rule and proposed rule stages."
They can choose to modify the rule if there are persuasive new arguments in the comments, they can also choose to retract or modify the rule due to public outcry, but they are not obligated to do either.
Only a new law or presidential directive can force the agency to modify the rules if they won't change it themselves. That's why the big push to contact legislators.
They started a branding with "FanXperience" and "FanX", Wikipedia says it started in 2014 three months before SDCC started legal proceedings.
I think that's a better name, since so little of the conventions are focused around comic books any more. They pull from TV shows, from movies, from video games, from anime, from graphic novels, from authors, from non-comic artists, and from many other sources as well. All those fandoms are in addition to comic books.
Headliners aren't typically from comic books any more. Looking over the Salt Lake show's history they feature more than just Stan Lee and other comic greats, their show alumni page is a "Who's Who" among many popular lines. Star Trek headliners of Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, Jonathan Frakes, George Takei; Star Wars stars Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels; Dr Who stars Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill; stars across many shows like Elija Wood, Christopher Lloyd, Felicia Day, John Cusack.
I mean, their list even has the Seinfeld Soup Nazi guy Larry Thomas as a featured guest and autograph signer at Salt Lake Comic Con. I can imagine how that one went: "No autograph for you!" "But I've been in line for ages!" "Come back one year. Next!"
Since comic books are a relatively small part of the event, dumping the name doesn't seem like much of a stretch. Their FanX or FanXperience branding seems more appropriate anyway.
Blah, there's nothing being "emulated" (and nothing legitimate about it). It's just another predeployed trusted CA cert on the employee's computer, if the employee cares to check, they can easily tell they're being MITM'd
It is fully legitimate: The computers belong to the company, the network access is the company's, the employee's work belongs to the company, the time is being paid for by the company. What may have been implied in old employment agreements about employers providing tools is now often explicitly stated, that workers have no right to privacy on their network communications.
Organizational MitM has been part of the protocol since the very beginning. It was there in the first implementation in Netscape, and was almost immediately implemented in organizational proxy tools. When discussions were made to eliminate it just a few months later, there were many businesses, schools, and government agencies who saw the security implications for virus scanners and the very high cost of losing their proxy functionality, and they told the implementers they needed the MitM feature in place if they didn't want the newly-blossoming products blocked banned. Organizational MitM has been an intentional feature in SSL, and TLS ever since.
These proxy tools do "emulate" as described. They create a new certificate signed by the organization, but showing the "issued to" and other fields matching the original. Hence they emulate the original certificate, even though the fingerprints and keys are different.
The typical way to do all of that is through QoS settings.
A "fast lane" and "slow lane" does not mean data flows at different rates through the routers or the network. It means that when many streams of data are coming through and the router must decide which one is processed first, it will give priority to one over the other. QoS settings also go under the name "traffic shaping",
The difference is subtle, but enough that marketers, PR folk, and political statements leverage it.
Thus they can say that they aren't slowing down anything, they aren't actually throttling or limiting anything. Those are accurate. However, that doesn't mean they are treated the same.
When a line forms the non-favored traffic must wait in the line and the other can jump to the front. Another (which is already legal and widely used) allows for preference for different routes for different types of packets and patterns, large bulk data goes through one route while small units go through another route. In general that's fine when it is unbiased, much like postal sorting has different equipment for letters than it does for packages without regard for who sent it. The issue is that without Title 2 rules, the network managers can use QoS settings to prioritize based on sender or destination, and that's a problem.
You know, it's not really fair to expect the average citizen to be able to phrase his viewpoint in legal terms.
True enough. But if they keep ignoring them, the average citizen will phrase the viewpoints in pitchforks and torches. Those aren't legal terms but they are readily understood.
The classic "four boxes of liberty" hasn't gone away. "There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use them in that order." If the FCC members refuse to listen to the soap box, and the ballot box is ineffectual and deadlocked between two extreme positions that refuse the will of the people, they better hope the judges who review the change will listen to the will of the people. That last one is unpleasant, and sadly political assassinations in the US has entered a sharp uptick. We're now averaging one every two years, and it's been two years.
It may not be possible to decrypt the files, even for Apple
True enough. The /. headline is light on the details, but the story says the demanded three things: Contents of the iPhone, contents of an iCloud account if it exists, and extracted contents from a third LG phone.
They can hand over the contents of the iCloud account if they can match it up. It might be interesting to see what they do with the phone, and it depends quite a lot on the wording of the warrant. They may reply with "the phone is encrypted, but here is the encrypted storage contents". For the LG phone, they would likely reply that it is not their device and they have no corporate knowledge or corporate tools to handle it.
By the way, doesn't a search warrant only allow them to perform a search?
There are several legal tools, but typically there are subpoenas, warrants, and court orders. Police and other government agents prefer warrants as they are more difficult to legally fight, are often given in surprise or delivered aggressively, and give government lawyers and police the biggest net. Court orders take more time, and often require back-and-forth discussions with lawyers from both sides and with the judge.
Subpoenas are easier to obtain but also easier to fight. A subpoena allows for the business to sort through the records and decide what is inside or outside the scope. A warrant tends to use terms that are more vague, tend to not specify the exact issue under investigation, and allow for the government agency to dig through it (rather than the business) to determine if the information is relevant.
Warrants are also typically delivered in surprising ways ostensibly to prevent destruction of evidence and reduce risks to the police involved. For businesses this usually means isolating people and making legal demands while they are alone and in shock, hoping they forget that they need to call a lawyer and have the right to not say anything, warrants are for searching and not for interrogation. For individuals or residences, that typically means smashing down people's doors when they know residents aren't home, or showing up at 3:00 AM with guns, tear gas, and assault gear. There are naturally good and bad ones. One has a few professionally dressed officers that politely knock at the door and say "Good evening Mr Smith, I have a warrant to search the premises, please step outside", and which one throws in a flash-bang device and shouts "This is the police! Get on the ground now! Put your hands on your head! We have a warrant!! Shut that baby up NOW or I'll arrest both you and the child for interfering with an investigation!"
60k out of college while working for IBM is a gift...
They don't get anything. There is no money from IBM. IBM registered to show they are actually teaching people rather than using unpaid labor, that way apprentices can be completely unpaid. When they're done with the program, they can be hired where their "average starting wage is above $60,000." Most companies I know start their college graduates at about 30%-50% more than that.
The wording is a little vague between IBM and SalesForce's Marc Benioff, but mentioned in the story it looks like they're looking for five million unpaid American apprentices. ... Because five million people without income creates jobs and stuff.
The idea is ridiculous - many old games that is still spoken about as innovative, fun by nostalgic geeks were in almost all cases designed by and distributed by specialized game development companies. Including EA.
I'm reminded of older games, and even new games, when I read these.
The complaint is that it takes about 40 hours of gameplay to unlock. Similar multiplayer match games report that mainstream players often spend 15-20 hours per week for about a month, then settle to about 10 hours per week until the games fall out of favor. Their hardcore players can log 80+ hours per week. This means many players would be able to unlock one hero before the end of November, and hardcore gamer teens will likely unlock one or two before Thanksgiving. Most players will unlock two or three before Christmas, hardcore gamers could unlock all the heroes before Christmas under the old structure.
In the older games the high-end unlockables were not available until near the end of the game, often requiring 100+ hours to achieve. And those were single player games played once, not the online match games where statistically people replay them for over a thousand hours on average before moving on.
With the update math suggests they're unlocked with about six hours of gameplay. All of them can be unlocked with 80 hours of gameplay, meaning hardcore players will likely have them all unlocked before the Thanksgiving holiday is over, more casual players can have every character unlocked before Christmas. Far too easy for such a long-running game, in my view.
I think EA was trying to bypass the claims that only the unemployed teens devoting extended hours to the game could unlock those characters, so they added an alternate way to achieve them. Players have been calling for this type of unlock for years, and few games offer it. At 40 hours to unlock and $80 for Darth Vader, that's about $2/hour. Lesser characters were closer to $1/hour or $0.50/hour. While I rarely buy in-game content, those prices don't feel outlandish. Unfortunately and ironically, by providing exactly the thing the players demand, the players revolted.
He said there were companies who were cooperative.
I'd love to see that list published, so more companies can add them to blacklists.
It's more than that. The judge's demand is worthless and is unlawful.
Honestly the judge should know better. He can write all he wants about "Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries" in his court order. But if they were not part of the suit, they cannot be part of the order.
Of course, the judge can bring them in as new named parties, but by doing so he'll have to face the lawyers from all those companies. His order will need to stand scrutiny and appeals from the legal teams of many of the biggest companies in the world.
That part of the order should just be ignored for now. It is illegal, and if the court attempts to enforce it, they can find themselves at the wrong end of a bar review for it.
There are plenty of ways for non-mobile people to lose weight - dieting, upper body exercise etc etc.
Methods exist, yes.
However, as we all know, if it were easy to lose body weight there wouldn't be any fat people.
Even though methods exist, it is still critical to recognize that substantial weight loss is difficult, it requires major life changes for most people, often changes including changes to friendships or careers and/or psychological care, and only the smallest percent of people who attempt to lose significant weight will actually succeed.
The doctor's trying to save your life, not deny you healthcare. Where's the controversy here? I don't see it.
The controversy is that everyone interprets the statements in their own world view, and generally comes to conclusions they don't like.
Taking the time to deeply understand the issues, even the hard parts, before forming the conclusions and jumping on the bandwagon with pitchforks and torches.
Certain things increase the risk factors. As you point out, when that happens and the risks of doing the surgery could be reduced by making some changes and doing the surgery later, then it makes sense to postpone it.
The article mentions it, but most of the opinions don't notice, that these are delays and are supposed to be time limited. The doctors are supposed to work with the patients for up to nine months, and at the end of the nine months the surgery proceeds anyway. I'm sure some physicians will work with the patient, help them with ways to change their lifestyle to reduce weight, or change lifestyle to remove help break the smoking addictions, but some of them won't work with the patient for those nine months.
The physicians who have brains in their head, or at least proper modern training, will know that both of these require major lifestyle changes and they are not easy. If it was easy to stop smoking there wouldn't be enormous industries built around it. If it was easy to change your overall body weight there wouldn't be industries around dieting and weight-loss. The extreme cases usually have many components. There are social components, psychological components, and other areas of life that need to be addressed in addition to the behavior. It can mean overcoming issues around immediate family, around friends, neighbors, co-workers, and even careers. A person with family who smoke, neighbors and co-workers who smoke, or are in an industry where all workplaces routinely have smoke breaks, simply hooking them up with a patch is not going to help them quit. Similarly with weight, when the entire family is overweight, when the community and friends have frequent dinner parties, when the business has trays of sweets that everyone eats and the business is constantly taking people to working lunches and business dinners, telling someone to count calories won't work.
Then the medical professionals are supposed to evaluate the risks of waiting versus the risk of proceeding, and to help make wise decisions on the patient's behalf. But the thing is people are human. Doctors make mistakes, nor do they have perfect information. Even when a doctor does everything by the book, there is still opportunity for things to go wrong. I've known people who were adamantly against mainstream medicine because a doctor made a judgement call that impacted a person's life; because one doctor once did something that harmed them or their loved one, they distrust that doctors have the patient's best interest in mind. I have a friend whose face is partially paralyzed because a numbing shot for a tooth cavity happened to have a rare complication, but that friend looked up stats and details afterword, and realized it was a rare side effect that could not have been predicted or avoided with today's technology. Even when everything looks like it should go right sometimes things go wrong during or after operations. Some people allow for it, some people take the exceptions and let them become conspiracies or treat them as incompetence of the profession.
But all of this is too much mental effort for most people. For many, they see the headline, make a bunch of assumptions, reach wrong conclusions, complain about how it is either completely fair or completely unfair, when in practice it is all somewhere in between, with rational humans making the best decisions they can along the way.
A corporation wants to pretend it's above the law by engaging in a shell game with their documents.
Are you following the same story? This is not the shell game you propose.
The US government refuses to include details like if the person is an American, but instead they have bound the details of the case in secrecy. Microsoft is a global company with smaller corporations in each nation to follow the local laws. The US government in a local criminal investigation (for something not criminal in much of the world) has issued a search warrant for one company to seize information held by a sister-company in another nation, for hardware held in another nation, against someone who is probably a citizen of another nation, for crimes that are probably not illegal in that other nation.
For those who have followed the case for the past several years, it is clear the US government is looking for a way to sidestep existing international law and international treaties. Instead of following standard protocol for international warrants, and using the international crime-fighting treaties to get an Irish warrant against Microsoft of Ireland to seize data stored on servers in Ireland about a person who is probably an Irish citizen or perhaps a citizen of the EU, the government has doubled-down on the bad bet. For the past four years they could have cancelled the warrant and gone through the regular international channels to get a warrant for international communications.
It is nonsensical. As some parallels, consider how Microsoft has offices in Dubai. Imagine the response if the Dubai government demanded of Microsoft's Dubai office that Microsoft USA turned over all emails from Microsoft's American servers about Americans because they might be related to an investigation of Dubai's laws forbidding sexual relations, even flirting, outside of marriage. So to investigate a Dubai woman who might have had indirect contact with someone in America, in order to find evidence to punish her, instead of going through regular international courts they produce a search warrant in Dubai that requires Dubai police to seize servers in the US. Then they fight for four years in an attempt to get that search warrant executed.
Or another parallel, consider how Microsoft has offices in China. Imagine if the Chinese government demanded Microsoft's Chinese office that Microsoft USA turned over all emails from Microsoft's American servers about Americans because they might be related to an investigation about Chinese laws prohibiting ill-speaking of government workers. To investigate someone in China who might have had indirect contact with someone in America, so they can find evidence that perhaps the Chinese person really did write something subversive to the government, instead of using the international legal tools, they produce a warrant that requires Chinese investigators to seize servers in the US. Then they fight for four years in an attempt to get that search warrant executed.
There are simple existing tools for this. They can submit a request for Irish law enforcement to execute the search warrant against Microsoft of Ireland so they can search the servers held in Ireland. That type of international search warrant happens all the time. They are choosing to ignore it not because Microsoft in America is playing a shell game, but because the police are looking for ways around the safeguards that have been established to protect people from abuses of other nations.
That is exactly the situation that makes it so interesting from a legal view.
The US courts can order the US company to take the action. But the instant they start messing with the data in Ireland, the emails of a the citizen who lives in Ireland, then the international treaties between the US and Ireland come into play.
If that happens -- meaning the US Supreme Court orders or allows the government to violate the international treaty even though proper channels exist through the treaty -- the consequences get complicated very quickly. Nations routinely violate treaties and the US does it all the time, particularly around military actions. Exactly how the nations respond varies by nation.
Ireland may quietly do nothing and allow the treaty violation. Diplomatic channels have been active since this started, and whatever action is taken will have closed-door diplomatic consequences. More publicly, Ireland's politicians may raise the issue with the international courts or with the UN. They may instead chose a more passive-aggressive stance either with or without public declarations, requiring more strict scrutiny to law enforcement requests and requiring extra time as they triple-check every detail of the request against all applicable law. Since international law enforcement requests must be vetted by all nations involved, Ireland could respond extremely slowly or find reasons to disallow the bulk of future requests, perhaps only allowing the most extreme cases (like child sexual abuse) to pass through in a timely manner.
Other nations may also respond in varying degrees. Like above this may range from no visible response, closed-door diplomatic responses, to increasing difficulty working with the nation, to public statements of disapproval, to full-blown official actions in international policy organizations.
Nations that are firmly against the US could rightly publicise it as yet another instance of the US willfully ignoring their treaty obligations. With Trump routinely going to the media to declare he will disregard treaties this is not a surprising thing. Even before Trump, as a nation the country lost its moral high ground on treaties decades ago; the US is a nation that generally follows the rule of law, but has demonstrated no qualms about violating the rule of law when those in power think they can get away with it. Although this one is relatively small, yet another treaty violation can be added to the stack and the rallying cries about the duplicitous actions of the country, and how the US does whatever it wants without regard to treaties and promises it has made.
If it goes forward, probably the US government will get the data they have been fishing for, they'll win that specific battle, but it will come at a cost for future international cooperation. There will be an enormous cost to all the other international police investigations that use the treaty. While they get the data in one specific case, untold thousands of other cases that are legitimate and using the proper channels will face the negative repercussions, in addition to whatever political fallout comes with it.
Many people think in an a mutually exclusive way. EITHER a secure tool, OR a system using obscurity. Good security systems employ both. Lock it with the best tools that can be found, AND obscure all the details.
What is described sounds just fine. A security company revealed their source code to be used by a government to show it is backdoor-free. That's typical in the security industry, and is generally not inherently a problem. The organizations should, as you described, not tell the world exactly which implementation they're using, which could include the stock version of the one being sold or a specially modified version, or even a completely different program.
The problem is the masses don't understand that. This is SOP in security systems, not a headline news story.
Maya
Be grateful there is a substitute today. I'm one of the old fogies who helped get Blender freed up. At least today there is one substantial 3D tool open.
I'd put several tools and technologies far before Maya. Consumer routers are probably top on my list, particularly from the companies where the only option is the locked-up corporate version.
I love my FTTP gigabit connection's speed, but the only option is AT&T in my region, and since 2015 that has been a mandatory eternal rental. No purchase option, no other devices can be attached, no choice of box. All customers have a mandatory rental fee which cannot be escaped, and no other equipment can be used. The closest I can come is attach my own device to the gateway, but it lives behind their locked-away gateway no matter what.
I suppose it was just wishful thinking that anyone reading the site would have the requisite math skills...
Google is shouting from the rooftops that they are seeking gender diversity with 31% women, plus trying to hire even more women.
No, I think they have just recognized what lot of other companies have also recognized, which is that the gender disproportions have more to do with company and workplace culture, educational opportunities and encouragement, role models, social acceptance, and work-life balance than with any inherent biological predispositions.
Now yes, I read the paper. And I agree with some of what was written, I disagree with some of what was written. I've also read analysis by social scientists who studied the paper and they said the science aspects were fundamentally correct. But that's beyond the point.
But that skips over a few points. We aren't talking about people going to school. We aren't talking about people in school. We aren't talking about who will be entering the workforce. Instead we are talking about the numbers and percentages of people who are in the workforce right now today.
In the post I wasn't talking about biology. I was talking about math of right now today.
Let's do the math, because apparently you missed it. And lets use really easier numbers.
Right now today about 20% to 25% of the software engineer workforce is female. The other 75%-80% is male.
Let's say there are 1000 workers in the marketplace. 20% of the workers are female. That means 800 men and 200 women. Some really big companies try to look like they hire an equal number of men and women even though that doesn't reflect the actual number of people out there. They hire a bunch of women, giving them a 31% female workforce. They've 155 women and 345 men, with 500 employees total. That means 455 men remain in the workforce, and only 45 women remain in the workforce. Because that one company scooped up so many women, disproportionate from the marketplace, now everybody else in the marketplace is going to look like they're discriminating. The company who scooped up a higher percentage of women left the entire marketplace skewed, the remaining workforce is only 9% women. Companies can now either hire fairly -- getting only 9% women in their workforce, or they can try to over-hire women and leave other companies with an even worse disproportionate number of men and women in the workforce.
In this case Google and Apple and a few other large employers have scooped up a disproportionate number of the workforce in an attempt to look fair, even though from a statistical analysis it is completely unfair. Not only does their communication hurt the market as a whole (because they are wrongly stating that the starting balance is inherently unfair), but their actions hurt everyone else; nobody else can begin to approach the same percentages because the big companies have skewed the numbers even more.
If Google wants to help in the short term, they can completely ignore gender in hiring. They can hire based on merit. If more women get hired, or more men get hired, then let it be by merit alone. Statistically it will quickly balance out, merit tends to be roughly equal across large groups, so Google and every other company would quickly reach a balance of about 20%-25% women because the entire workforce is 20%-25% women.
In the long term they can start looking at the entrance to the pipe. They can look for ways to address elementary school teachers who tell little kids "That's okay, I didn't understand it either. Math is hard, draw me a picture with these crayons." They can look for teachers of twelve-year-olds who tell their students, "It's okay Jenny, most girls don't like math, go talk with the other girls about clothes." They can look for teachers of sixteen-year-olds who tell their students, "Michelle, you shouldn't be taking AP Calculus, have you considered pep squad instead?" They