How much do you value an extra week of vacation to say, more retirement contribution or more salary?
Vacation accrual rate and initial vacation balances are generally non-negotiable. Most of silicon valley outsources their human resources to a couple of companies, and, posing as a company interested in obtaining the services of those of both Apple and Google, and in the middle of considering options, neither company could handle an initial balance.
The Apple one (ADC) could handle a different accrual rate, but given business rules and set-limits, they would have had to have pretended I was at Apple 5 years to give the extra week of accrual, and it would top out exactly the same point as anyone else who had been there for sufficient years to top out, as soon as I hit "sufficient - 5". In addition, there would have been sabbatical triggers, stock vesting triggers (I'd vest month-to-month, instead of a one year cliff).
In the Google case, I delayed my start date as an "unpaid absence" to get the vacation. In the Apple case, the boss stepped in and said "just take the week; let me know when it will be ahead of time, and don't schedule it through the system, and I'll ignore it if you will" (worked until the second manager change happened).
Payroll systems are generally set up on a "minimal business rules" basis, and are stupid hard to change.
So no, some things are not in the bucket with everything else as "everything's negotiable".
Why should a mom-and-pop internet business be exempt from taxes that the mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar store has to pay?
Because in the second case, mom-and-pop live in Singapore?
Is this a trick question?
So what? If they're selling to the US, let them pay US sales taxes - after all, if they're selling to any particular area, they're operating in that area (despite Amazon's attempts to avoid paying taxes where it doesn't have a warehouse).
So you are saying that the should pay both U.S. sales tax (actually state, county, and city sales taxes, where applicable, since not all states, counties, and cities have sales taxes) PLUS pay the Singaporean sales taxes as well (which Singapore will want, since that is where the sale is booked)?
So what you are saying is you hate Internet commerce and want to end it, in favor of Walmart. It's not like a mom and pop store in the U.S. can compete with Walmart, so the only brick and mortar beneficiary of such a policy will be Walmart. Oh, and the state, county, or city tax man.
Any “standard-essential patents” should be public domain (or as close as possible, as Elon Musk did with the Tesla battery circuitry), or they should not be included in the standards. Period. FRAND/RAND is code for forming a club where the existing players get to play, but for which there is still a large - potentially huge) cost to join said club - and therefore an artificial barrier to entry into any existing market.
Either make it free to license, or leave it out of the standard, please.
Ms. Carnegie said it was up to the government to create a different system, which the company would then abide by."
In other words: "if you lower your taxes to a number that we like, we might consider paying them".
That's a rather gross misrepresentation, even reading between the lines. I think that a real read between the lines would be:
(1) Our primary booking agency where we contract with people in Australia to provide ad service to them is in Singapore (2) All of our booking expertise is also (currently) in Singapore (3) If the situation were more favorable in Australia, we would consider establishing a booking agency here as well (4) Maybe
Must be nice being a multinational corporation, getting to chose how much taxes you pay and where you pay them...
Technically, private individuals can, and some do, the same thing. Then they employ themselves by one of those offshore companies for $1 a year, and perform consulting services for that corporation, and then book all the revenue generated through the same loopholes as the big boys used.
For this to be worthwhile, however, you have to be a private individual who pulls down 7+ figures of direct income per year, as the corporate management costs (which are relatively fixed) have to come out of that. Otherwise the corporate loading and financial management costs will exceed the percentage of your income which you save in taxes (hence the need for a high income).
Some people's labor is actually worth 7+ figures; most people's labor is not; therefore this loophole is not frequently used by private individuals.
Meanwhile in the real world, people go broke (no more jobs... sorry), small and medium-sized businesses go broke (can't compete with Amazon? Too bad), local governments and states go broke (not enough revenue? Your taxes are too high, just lower them so you can compete with the 0% rate in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates).
You are conflating issues. These companies going broke, too, will not make your "in the real world" any less broke; it's not like a government has ever lowered taxes because they had "too much revenue". Though you may feel vindictively better that everyone is in the same boat.
The economic pressures that have led to the current situation are rather complex, and most are political.
There's a reason I feel zero guilt in using ad-block. It's perfectly legal for Google to dodge taxes this way, and it's perfectly legal for me to dodge Google's ads using browser extensions.
You shouldn't feel guilt about thwarting Google displaying the ads.
You should maybe feel a teensy bit of guilt over the fact that you are using an ad-supported site which derives its revenue from displaying Google ads to its visitors, in lieu of a subscription fee.
Google could probably care less; in fact, in cafeteria discussions at Google, this came up once, and the general consensus was that, if the ads were not going to result in sales, Google preferred that people run the ad blockers.
Of course, this reduces the revenue for the ad-supported site which you liked well enough to visit, but not well enough to pay for. So I suspect, at some point, that the ad-block-detection code (which is there) will give you a temporary redirect to another page that says:
"If you don't like seeing advertisements, fine, we'll save that in your preferences and quit trying to show them to you; but in lieu of having ads, would you please support the continued operation of our site with a small donation, so that we can continue to provide you with the content you came here to see?"
So, actually, if anything, it's a "Poor Site I Like Who Is Now Getting Any Income..." situation.
Your definition of not hurting anyone is fairly important though. I think in this case, the company *and* the government could be morally but not legally in the wrong.
Then you are sending the wrong authorities after them. Instead of sending tax men, you should be sending Bishops, to correct their moral violations. Tax men are only applicable when there are legal violations.
(1) First, if you have that many people following you, and you can't lose the majority of them, then if you can't lose such a big tail, how am I to take you seriously about knowing about security?
(2) Sure, and that's his only twitter account. But if you add up all the followers Infosec Taylor Swift has, on all her accounts, the numbers are boggling!
The bottom turtle is missing (u-boot itself is not signed and checked by the BIOS/SOC POST code... I'm sure they are working on fixing it; if not, I charge unreasonable consulting fees, and I'm available;)... also worked with the same problem on Chrome...).
Regardless of whether you view Snowden as a despicable traitor or an honorable whistleblower, it's worth a watch.
I didn't think so.
Oliver criticized Snowden for his complex descriptions of complex issues, and asserted that it's Snowden's job to make the facts easily digestible and relatable for the general public. It's not. In the first place, it's the media's job to do that.
Uh... that was "the media" doing exactly what you just said it was "the media's" job to do, and then putting a face on the issue.
Isn't it possible to comply with GPL and still have the restriction on what can run on the hardware?
With GPLv2 code, yes; with GPLv3 code, which was supposed to close the patent and DRM "loopholes" to prevent "TIVO-ization", it's unclear; those clauses of the GPLv3 haven't been tested, mostly because as soon as something goes from GPLv2 to GPLv3, companies tend to use the older code and maintain it themselves, find an alternative, or run screaming, like Apple did with LLVM.
They probably are just trying to hide a hard coded signing key, but that's the whole point of the GPL isn't it? That you can't get away with that kind of crap.
No, actually, that's the point of the GPLv3. GPLv2 is perfectly happy with it, and it's why vendors are happy using Linux in embedded devices.
The u-boot code is GPLv2, and it's perfectly OK to "TIVO-ize" it. It's what we did in Chrome OS, in fact. It's just that, in Chrome OS, the BIOS that loads the u-boot checks the signature block on the u-boot, too, and sends it the signature verification key to use on the kernel, and on the rest of the OS.
You're not allowed to change the boot code, and you're not allowed to change the kernel image, and so on, unless you enable "programmer mode" for the BIOS, and then it gets bitchy on boot to warn a user that they're on a potentially compromised machine.
I suspect that instead of "Turtles, all the way down", they missed a turtle at the bottom. I suspect that they are furiously working to correct this by adding another turtle, and, technically, under U.S. law, after receiving notification and acknowledging receipt (this is usually done using a constable, process server, or registered mail), they have 90 days in which to respond.
So at the very least, the blogger jumped the gun.
The GPL exists to keep the ecosystem open for the people that want to use it, and prevent big portions of it from being co-opted by commercial organizations and hidden behind DRM like signing keys burried in bootloaders.
You are once again speaking incorrectly. I suspect that you have not read Richard Stallman's "GNU Manifesto". I'll summarize it for you without the rationalizations and justifications: "I hate copyright. So I have written the GPL to fuck over copyright *using* copyright."; there is some other crap in there as well, about preventing the existance of professional programmers as a class, rather than as work for hire contractors, yada yada, but that's the gist of it.
And again: the code in question is GPLv2; the GPLv3 is what addresses patents and DRM. And it's irrelevant here.
If someone wants to hide their firmware behind a hard coded signing key they have to write they're own boot loader, they're not allowed to use a GPL'd bootloader and then just ignore the rules because it's cheaper to steal someone elses.
Again, incorrect; they just have to give out the sources to the GPL'ed boot loader. There's nothing stopping them having a BIOS or boot ROM mask programmed onto their SOC that refuses to run the u-boot if it's modified, and there's nothing preventing them from having the u-boot code (for which they must give away sources) have modifications (for which they give way sources) which *also* enforces DRM on the kernel.
And I think your legal analysis is incorrect, the gentlemen who wrote this blog entry doesn't have standing to sue and wouldn't be part of the case. My understanding is only the original copyright holder has standing to sue.
I thought he was a u-boot contributor, and so had a copyright interest? If I'm mistaken, I apologize, and amend the hypothetical charges to slander, libel, defamation of character, disclosure of trade secrets, and tortious interference of business. They could potentially sue his ass off on those grounds.
P.S. as a u-boot contributor, I *do* have standing.
Well, this just screwed the legal pooch... your posting pretty much kills any recovery change you hd in court.
They could easily claim:
(1) Witness tampering (2) Jury tampering (3) Impossibility of a fair hearing (and they get to pick the venue; how's East Texas sound?) (4) They were attempting to remedy the issue, and this posting did irreparable harm to their business
Most likely they are just trying to hide a hard-coded signing key.
Most likely, you are just bitching because you can't run your firmware on their hardware without the hard coded signing key.
"The article describes how scientists painstakingly gathered data on the quakes, and then tried to find ways to communicate the results — which are quite definitive — to politicians who often have financial reasons to disbelieve them."
Might I suggest... a man made earthquake where they live?
Come, Mr. Bigglesworth.... our work is done here...
I don't think so. Prison is Crime U. You are surrounded by slime-bags with slime-bag ideas all day who have all the time in the world to tell you tales.
Look, we only have the GP's presumption that the kid is crazy. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold types could just be freaking criminals, and not have to be clinically insane.
SWATing is attempted (or actual) homicide, as well as reckless endangerment of anyone else in the area where it takes place. Add "terrorism by means of a weapon of mass destruction" to the charges, if you dislike how militarized the police have become lately, then they probably qualify as a WMD.
If you are worried about them learning from the other inmates, reserve a separate cell block for those offenders under a certain age, without repeat offenses, and whatever other rules you want.
If you do an adult crime, you should do an adult time. If you don't like the adult time length, address the problem by adjusting the sentencing guidelines. One crime, one sentencing guideline for everyone.
If you offer differential penalties, then people who would suffer longer penalties will just recruit people who will serve shorter penalties to commit such crimes on their behalf. This permits them to show clean hands; the worst they are going to get, assuming they are ever caught, is an accessory charge. This is why we have older gang members recruiting younger kids into gangs. Differential penalties are at the root of a lot of social ills resulting in the perpetuation of gang cultures in various regions of the U.S.. It's a straight up risk analysis that you could do on a pocket calculator.
This is not rocket science, this is a simple emergent property of the rules which society has set up. Time to change the rules, and quit blaming externalities for peoples behaviours.
The terrorists used cell phone to coordinate their attacks and coordinate response to police and military actions.
Cell service goes out, you go to a "default plan of action". Pretty simple, if you've thought of a "cut-off while in an operational assignment scenario" in advance.
...before the actual emergency occurs. As we've seen many times, during major emergencies the cell phone networks are already crippled by volume and no one can make a call anyways.
911 generally still works during network overload; the wattage on your transmission goes up, and your phone does other ("different") things in "emergency mode". So yes, the normal traffic is all jammed up, but the 911 emergency mode service will happily kick even highest priority users off the cell tower, if there are no slots available. That's why you can be dropped off a call at peak calling times, if you are not a highest priority user.
If it gets overloaded with 911 calls, it handles those under a different mode, first come, first serve, to keep the backhaul network operating.
People in government branches have cell phones which operate in yet a third mode, and will even kick 911 calls off (secretary of state, secretary of defense, and so on).
You should really learn your phone network protocols...
Except that having your phone shut off is going to endanger your life.
Because you'll be furiously clicking everything you can to try and figure out why your texting is no longer working, instead of occasionally looking up from the phone, because you were texting while driving?
Lets say there is a bomb. And it has a phone attached. And you have inside information that it is really connected to a real cell phone. And you don't know where the person is with the other phone. And you know from your inside information that the timer will wait 6 hours before the fail-safe makes it blow up.
That's a "fail dangerous", not a fail safe", as is already discussed, and the answer is: once the timer is going, turning the cell service back on won't stop the bomb.
What if it is not a bomb. What if a war breaks out, and you know for a fact that there is an intelligence agent reporting over a regular cell phone, using coded words, about the movements of ships out of a harbor. Cutting off that flow of information while you set sail might be very valuable.
Fail dangerous again: the agent goes quiet, you start a timer. You dispatch another agent to verify. and if that agent goes quiet, too, you hit the launch button.
I'm not arguing for (or against) the wisdom of these policies. But there are obvious and legit reasons for the government to make plans for how to deal with unlikely emergencies.
One would hope that they are not plans capable of being disrupted by intellectual midgets with Venn diagrams.
As to this case, the Executive gets to tell the Court that their reason is that their conclusion is that National Security requires it. That it is their opinion makes it a good enough reason, because national security is not the business of the Court.
It's an immediate in-camera hearing at a secure facility with only the judge and the government present. If the judge is not high enough clearance level, then they are either granted it for the hearing, or a substitute judge is used. The substitute judge is then empaneled as part of the remaining trial proceedings, and may give advice without revealing other information. If not one has high enough clearance (and I know for a fact that there are judges with Q clearance, so that's unlikely), the government must then show *why* no one has high enough clearance. This is recursive.
It doesn't just go down a rabbit hole, unless the opposition party to the government stops pushing. Which is rather unlikely for something as simple as a cell network shutdown.
Slashdot Mirror
Says the guy who got hit in the head with a 1/2 pound wrench, rather than a 110 pound cast iron square manhole cover...
A modest proposal for equal pay for title...
How about you allow them to negotiate from a base from which the position is set.
If they negotiate less high than everyone else who has negotiated, you give them the highest rate previously negotiated.
If the negotiate higher than the previous high, everyone gets a raise.
Solves the same problem, doesn't it?
"Reddit must suck already for women"
It does.
Oh! You meant the company, not the site! My bad!
It does.
How much do you value an extra week of vacation to say, more retirement contribution or more salary?
Vacation accrual rate and initial vacation balances are generally non-negotiable. Most of silicon valley outsources their human resources to a couple of companies, and, posing as a company interested in obtaining the services of those of both Apple and Google, and in the middle of considering options, neither company could handle an initial balance.
The Apple one (ADC) could handle a different accrual rate, but given business rules and set-limits, they would have had to have pretended I was at Apple 5 years to give the extra week of accrual, and it would top out exactly the same point as anyone else who had been there for sufficient years to top out, as soon as I hit "sufficient - 5". In addition, there would have been sabbatical triggers, stock vesting triggers (I'd vest month-to-month, instead of a one year cliff).
In the Google case, I delayed my start date as an "unpaid absence" to get the vacation. In the Apple case, the boss stepped in and said "just take the week; let me know when it will be ahead of time, and don't schedule it through the system, and I'll ignore it if you will" (worked until the second manager change happened).
Payroll systems are generally set up on a "minimal business rules" basis, and are stupid hard to change.
So no, some things are not in the bucket with everything else as "everything's negotiable".
Why should a mom-and-pop internet business be exempt from taxes that the mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar store has to pay?
Because in the second case, mom-and-pop live in Singapore?
Is this a trick question?
So what? If they're selling to the US, let them pay US sales taxes - after all, if they're selling to any particular area, they're operating in that area (despite Amazon's attempts to avoid paying taxes where it doesn't have a warehouse).
So you are saying that the should pay both U.S. sales tax (actually state, county, and city sales taxes, where applicable, since not all states, counties, and cities have sales taxes) PLUS pay the Singaporean sales taxes as well (which Singapore will want, since that is where the sale is booked)?
So what you are saying is you hate Internet commerce and want to end it, in favor of Walmart. It's not like a mom and pop store in the U.S. can compete with Walmart, so the only brick and mortar beneficiary of such a policy will be Walmart. Oh, and the state, county, or city tax man.
Any “standard-essential patents” should be public domain (or as close as possible, as Elon Musk did with the Tesla battery circuitry), or they should not be included in the standards. Period. FRAND/RAND is code for forming a club where the existing players get to play, but for which there is still a large - potentially huge) cost to join said club - and therefore an artificial barrier to entry into any existing market.
Either make it free to license, or leave it out of the standard, please.
Ms. Carnegie said it was up to the government to create a different system, which the company would then abide by."
In other words: "if you lower your taxes to a number that we like, we might consider paying them".
That's a rather gross misrepresentation, even reading between the lines. I think that a real read between the lines would be:
(1) Our primary booking agency where we contract with people in Australia to provide ad service to them is in Singapore
(2) All of our booking expertise is also (currently) in Singapore
(3) If the situation were more favorable in Australia, we would consider establishing a booking agency here as well
(4) Maybe
Must be nice being a multinational corporation, getting to chose how much taxes you pay and where you pay them...
Technically, private individuals can, and some do, the same thing. Then they employ themselves by one of those offshore companies for $1 a year, and perform consulting services for that corporation, and then book all the revenue generated through the same loopholes as the big boys used.
For this to be worthwhile, however, you have to be a private individual who pulls down 7+ figures of direct income per year, as the corporate management costs (which are relatively fixed) have to come out of that. Otherwise the corporate loading and financial management costs will exceed the percentage of your income which you save in taxes (hence the need for a high income).
Some people's labor is actually worth 7+ figures; most people's labor is not; therefore this loophole is not frequently used by private individuals.
Meanwhile in the real world, people go broke (no more jobs... sorry), small and medium-sized businesses go broke (can't compete with Amazon? Too bad), local governments and states go broke (not enough revenue? Your taxes are too high, just lower them so you can compete with the 0% rate in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates).
You are conflating issues. These companies going broke, too, will not make your "in the real world" any less broke; it's not like a government has ever lowered taxes because they had "too much revenue". Though you may feel vindictively better that everyone is in the same boat.
The economic pressures that have led to the current situation are rather complex, and most are political.
There's a reason I feel zero guilt in using ad-block. It's perfectly legal for Google to dodge taxes this way, and it's perfectly legal for me to dodge Google's ads using browser extensions.
You shouldn't feel guilt about thwarting Google displaying the ads.
You should maybe feel a teensy bit of guilt over the fact that you are using an ad-supported site which derives its revenue from displaying Google ads to its visitors, in lieu of a subscription fee.
Google could probably care less; in fact, in cafeteria discussions at Google, this came up once, and the general consensus was that, if the ads were not going to result in sales, Google preferred that people run the ad blockers.
Of course, this reduces the revenue for the ad-supported site which you liked well enough to visit, but not well enough to pay for. So I suspect, at some point, that the ad-block-detection code (which is there) will give you a temporary redirect to another page that says:
"If you don't like seeing advertisements, fine, we'll save that in your preferences and quit trying to show them to you; but in lieu of having ads, would you please support the continued operation of our site with a small donation, so that we can continue to provide you with the content you came here to see?"
So, actually, if anything, it's a "Poor Site I Like Who Is Now Getting Any Income..." situation.
Just saying.
Your definition of not hurting anyone is fairly important though. I think in this case, the company *and* the government could be morally but not legally in the wrong.
Then you are sending the wrong authorities after them. Instead of sending tax men, you should be sending Bishops, to correct their moral violations. Tax men are only applicable when there are legal violations.
Why should a mom-and-pop internet business be exempt from taxes that the mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar store has to pay?
Because in the second case, mom-and-pop live in Singapore?
Is this a trick question?
Is Elon Musk at Solar City going to hire them all?
I mean, it's great they get training; I'm not so sure training *for this specific vocation* is actually going to be that useful to them.
On the value of twitter followers...
(1) First, if you have that many people following you, and you can't lose the majority of them, then if you can't lose such a big tail, how am I to take you seriously about knowing about security?
(2) Sure, and that's his only twitter account. But if you add up all the followers Infosec Taylor Swift has, on all her accounts, the numbers are boggling!
That is all.
The bottom turtle is missing (u-boot itself is not signed and checked by the BIOS/SOC POST code... I'm sure they are working on fixing it; if not, I charge unreasonable consulting fees, and I'm available;) ... also worked with the same problem on Chrome ...).
If you don't call you congressman about this issue, the NSA is going to put your DICK in PRISM!
Do YOU know what HAPPENS to dicks in PRISM?!?!?
Regardless of whether you view Snowden as a despicable traitor or an honorable whistleblower, it's worth a watch.
I didn't think so.
Oliver criticized Snowden for his complex descriptions of complex issues, and asserted that it's Snowden's job to make the facts easily digestible and relatable for the general public. It's not. In the first place, it's the media's job to do that.
Uh... that was "the media" doing exactly what you just said it was "the media's" job to do, and then putting a face on the issue.
Isn't it possible to comply with GPL and still have the restriction on what can run on the hardware?
With GPLv2 code, yes; with GPLv3 code, which was supposed to close the patent and DRM "loopholes" to prevent "TIVO-ization", it's unclear; those clauses of the GPLv3 haven't been tested, mostly because as soon as something goes from GPLv2 to GPLv3, companies tend to use the older code and maintain it themselves, find an alternative, or run screaming, like Apple did with LLVM.
The code in question is GPLv2.
They probably are just trying to hide a hard coded signing key, but that's the whole point of the GPL isn't it? That you can't get away with that kind of crap.
No, actually, that's the point of the GPLv3. GPLv2 is perfectly happy with it, and it's why vendors are happy using Linux in embedded devices.
The u-boot code is GPLv2, and it's perfectly OK to "TIVO-ize" it. It's what we did in Chrome OS, in fact. It's just that, in Chrome OS, the BIOS that loads the u-boot checks the signature block on the u-boot, too, and sends it the signature verification key to use on the kernel, and on the rest of the OS.
You're not allowed to change the boot code, and you're not allowed to change the kernel image, and so on, unless you enable "programmer mode" for the BIOS, and then it gets bitchy on boot to warn a user that they're on a potentially compromised machine.
I suspect that instead of "Turtles, all the way down", they missed a turtle at the bottom. I suspect that they are furiously working to correct this by adding another turtle, and, technically, under U.S. law, after receiving notification and acknowledging receipt (this is usually done using a constable, process server, or registered mail), they have 90 days in which to respond.
So at the very least, the blogger jumped the gun.
The GPL exists to keep the ecosystem open for the people that want to use it, and prevent big portions of it from being co-opted by commercial organizations and hidden behind DRM like signing keys burried in bootloaders.
You are once again speaking incorrectly. I suspect that you have not read Richard Stallman's "GNU Manifesto". I'll summarize it for you without the rationalizations and justifications: "I hate copyright. So I have written the GPL to fuck over copyright *using* copyright."; there is some other crap in there as well, about preventing the existance of professional programmers as a class, rather than as work for hire contractors, yada yada, but that's the gist of it.
And again: the code in question is GPLv2; the GPLv3 is what addresses patents and DRM. And it's irrelevant here.
If someone wants to hide their firmware behind a hard coded signing key they have to write they're own boot loader, they're not allowed to use a GPL'd bootloader and then just ignore the rules because it's cheaper to steal someone elses.
Again, incorrect; they just have to give out the sources to the GPL'ed boot loader. There's nothing stopping them having a BIOS or boot ROM mask programmed onto their SOC that refuses to run the u-boot if it's modified, and there's nothing preventing them from having the u-boot code (for which they must give away sources) have modifications (for which they give way sources) which *also* enforces DRM on the kernel.
And I think your legal analysis is incorrect, the gentlemen who wrote this blog entry doesn't have standing to sue and wouldn't be part of the case. My understanding is only the original copyright holder has standing to sue.
I thought he was a u-boot contributor, and so had a copyright interest? If I'm mistaken, I apologize, and amend the hypothetical charges to slander, libel, defamation of character, disclosure of trade secrets, and tortious interference of business. They could potentially sue his ass off on those grounds.
P.S. as a u-boot contributor, I *do* have standing.
Well, this just screwed the legal pooch... your posting pretty much kills any recovery change you hd in court.
They could easily claim:
(1) Witness tampering
(2) Jury tampering
(3) Impossibility of a fair hearing (and they get to pick the venue; how's East Texas sound?)
(4) They were attempting to remedy the issue, and this posting did irreparable harm to their business
Most likely they are just trying to hide a hard-coded signing key.
Most likely, you are just bitching because you can't run your firmware on their hardware without the hard coded signing key.
"The article describes how scientists painstakingly gathered data on the quakes, and then tried to find ways to communicate the results — which are quite definitive — to politicians who often have financial reasons to disbelieve them."
Might I suggest ... a man made earthquake where they live?
Come, Mr. Bigglesworth .... our work is done here...
A default plan is less able to react to police/military action.
I would answer this, but it's starting to feel like you are asking me to write a decision tree playbook for you.
I don't think so. Prison is Crime U. You are surrounded by slime-bags with slime-bag ideas all day who have all the time in the world to tell you tales.
Look, we only have the GP's presumption that the kid is crazy. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold types could just be freaking criminals, and not have to be clinically insane.
SWATing is attempted (or actual) homicide, as well as reckless endangerment of anyone else in the area where it takes place. Add "terrorism by means of a weapon of mass destruction" to the charges, if you dislike how militarized the police have become lately, then they probably qualify as a WMD.
If you are worried about them learning from the other inmates, reserve a separate cell block for those offenders under a certain age, without repeat offenses, and whatever other rules you want.
If you do an adult crime, you should do an adult time. If you don't like the adult time length, address the problem by adjusting the sentencing guidelines. One crime, one sentencing guideline for everyone.
If you offer differential penalties, then people who would suffer longer penalties will just recruit people who will serve shorter penalties to commit such crimes on their behalf. This permits them to show clean hands; the worst they are going to get, assuming they are ever caught, is an accessory charge. This is why we have older gang members recruiting younger kids into gangs. Differential penalties are at the root of a lot of social ills resulting in the perpetuation of gang cultures in various regions of the U.S.. It's a straight up risk analysis that you could do on a pocket calculator.
This is not rocket science, this is a simple emergent property of the rules which society has set up. Time to change the rules, and quit blaming externalities for peoples behaviours.
The terrorists used cell phone to coordinate their attacks and coordinate response to police and military actions.
Cell service goes out, you go to a "default plan of action". Pretty simple, if you've thought of a "cut-off while in an operational assignment scenario" in advance.
...before the actual emergency occurs. As we've seen many times, during major emergencies the cell phone networks are already crippled by volume and no one can make a call anyways.
911 generally still works during network overload; the wattage on your transmission goes up, and your phone does other ("different") things in "emergency mode". So yes, the normal traffic is all jammed up, but the 911 emergency mode service will happily kick even highest priority users off the cell tower, if there are no slots available. That's why you can be dropped off a call at peak calling times, if you are not a highest priority user.
If it gets overloaded with 911 calls, it handles those under a different mode, first come, first serve, to keep the backhaul network operating.
People in government branches have cell phones which operate in yet a third mode, and will even kick 911 calls off (secretary of state, secretary of defense, and so on).
You should really learn your phone network protocols...
Except that having your phone shut off is going to endanger your life.
Because you'll be furiously clicking everything you can to try and figure out why your texting is no longer working, instead of occasionally looking up from the phone, because you were texting while driving?
Lets say there is a bomb. And it has a phone attached. And you have inside information that it is really connected to a real cell phone. And you don't know where the person is with the other phone. And you know from your inside information that the timer will wait 6 hours before the fail-safe makes it blow up.
That's a "fail dangerous", not a fail safe", as is already discussed, and the answer is: once the timer is going, turning the cell service back on won't stop the bomb.
What if it is not a bomb. What if a war breaks out, and you know for a fact that there is an intelligence agent reporting over a regular cell phone, using coded words, about the movements of ships out of a harbor. Cutting off that flow of information while you set sail might be very valuable.
Fail dangerous again: the agent goes quiet, you start a timer. You dispatch another agent to verify. and if that agent goes quiet, too, you hit the launch button.
I'm not arguing for (or against) the wisdom of these policies. But there are obvious and legit reasons for the government to make plans for how to deal with unlikely emergencies.
One would hope that they are not plans capable of being disrupted by intellectual midgets with Venn diagrams.
As to this case, the Executive gets to tell the Court that their reason is that their conclusion is that National Security requires it. That it is their opinion makes it a good enough reason, because national security is not the business of the Court.
It's an immediate in-camera hearing at a secure facility with only the judge and the government present. If the judge is not high enough clearance level, then they are either granted it for the hearing, or a substitute judge is used. The substitute judge is then empaneled as part of the remaining trial proceedings, and may give advice without revealing other information. If not one has high enough clearance (and I know for a fact that there are judges with Q clearance, so that's unlikely), the government must then show *why* no one has high enough clearance. This is recursive.
It doesn't just go down a rabbit hole, unless the opposition party to the government stops pushing. Which is rather unlikely for something as simple as a cell network shutdown.