If you knew how they were built today, you'd not be talking about the RF-based digital streams and level-X routers. An ATV signal doesn't have "packets", and current cable television systems are based on ATV. That's why you can plug a clearQAM ATV receiver into one and get some kind of signal. Now that Comcast is encrypting "everything" it isn't much, but the TV recognizes the ATV signals even if it can only display a few of the streams. My Pinnacle receiver shows a rather complete list of things it knows about, almost all of them with the encrypted flag set. If it was all "packets" and "routers", it wouldn't know anything about it.
Wired connections, you can pass a lot more through,
Wired connections already pass a lot more through. Two hundred or more signals. As much as you'd like to pretend that you can keep packing more and more into the same wire, you just can't. If you could pack twice as much into the same channel (6MHz frequency chunk) they'd already be doing it. They already pack up to 20 signals into one channel, albeit at a miserable bitrate. The problem is you can't have one provider packing 20 signals into the same space that some other provider is packing their 20 signals. I don't know how many times I have to say it before the idea gets through -- two signals at the same frequency won't work.
So, out of the 118 or so channels on a typical cable system, how many do each "cable company" get? What happens when it is full? Who doesn't get to play? You want competition, I understand. It isn't as simple as saying "use TDMA" to get there.
If you want to see how unsimple it is to do that, look at P25 phase 2 with TDMA for radio. I see ads for the equipment, but I don't see the equipment being fielded. In fact, I see P25 digital-capable equipment being used in analog mode because the digital mode didn't quite meet expectations. I can say with no hesitancy I do NOT want cable TV to go down that rabbit hole, no matter how much I don't want Comcast to merge with TWC.
And, again, this is only a concern on an ANALOG CABLE SETUP. On a digital setup. You simply don't deal directly with channelization.
I didn't say the customer dealt with channelization. The hardware does. How do you think the data streams are encoded on a cable network? Magic? Floobydust? It's not some big 100baseT network with data packets flying all over the place. There are some limited number of digital streams encoded onto an RF carrier, and each RF signal is carried on the cable just like the old analog one-station-per-channel signals were. At 6MHz each, an 800MHz system can get 118 or so "channels", and that's pushing it unless you are VERY fastidious in your connections.
So ok, you hand a channel over to a content provider. How does that provider authorize you to get it? Shares the OOB channel, I guess. And he gets only 2 to ten reasonable quality digital streams per channel. You think you can pack two full-service cable systems into one existing cable? Patent it. If your answer is to turn every channel into "on demand", then don't bother.
In fact, it's just like the current OTA digital, with the addition of OOB control for authorization, and the digital signals are often encrypted so a standard clearQAM ATV cannot display them.
Maybe, at some level there's still channelization, but it's abstracted away from the content and entirely manageable in software.
Yes, at some level there is channelization, and that level is the hardware level. It's how the signal moves over the cable. You can't just wave your hands and say "it's software" because no, it isn't. The software comes after the digital signal is decoded.
The fact that the little box on top of your TV can show you any number the cable company wants it to changes nothing about the underlying transport which is still analog RF and channelized. And changing that would mean rebuilding the entire network and replacing all the existing hardware, including consumer-owned equipment.
Yet cities decide to take matters into the own hands
Because they are creating a fake market with captive subscribers. Taxpayers don't get to say "I don't want to be a subscriber" to the taxpayer-funded cable services. They pay taxes or else. And if they want to be a customer to the original commercial company, they get to pay twice. Can you imagine why a government-run cable service might be a success despite a lack of a true market for their services? The government run service can easily undercut the competition and sell at below-cost because the taxpayers will make up any losses.
Another person who didn't read to the end of what I wrote to see how I resolved the ambiguity in the term "channel". No, you cannot have two signals on the same frequency on the same cable. You can't just wave your hands and talk about "IP capabilities".
The multicast stream for each channel won't cross over any layer-2 switches/bridges,
That's not how the existing cable TV networks are designed. The digital "multicast" is carried via analog RF and uses quite a bit of bandwidth to do that. That box out on the pole is not a router, it is an amplifier. Everyone watching the "big game" is tuned to the same frequency and decoding the same digital stream on that frequency, and that changes nothing about all the other frequencies in use. They're still being used. Your converter box doesn't have to talk back to Momma to tell them to start sending some other program, it just tunes to that channel when you tell it to.
Must-Carry (usually local) channels haven't proved a burden to cable companies (much as they like to bitch about them), so there is already precedent for this.
Must-carry is pretty much dead. Once a "content provider" asks for money for their content they are no longer "must carry". That's why things like this happen. Every one of those CBS network affiliates could have demanded "must carry" but chose to demand money for the right to carry them (bundled with pay services). And then pointed the finger at TWC for not carrying them. Their own fault.
Facilities that are de-facto government sanctioned monopolies
If they are government created then they are dejure, not defacto. Defacto monopolies exist because of market, not legal, reasons.
In vastly more places there is exactly ONE cable plant in the ground. There is no competition.
Because the market isn't there.
Further, most municipalities will not allow building out competitive networks, simply because the disruption is so great.
If the second company meets the requirements for a franchise, the municipality cannot stop them. Take the existing franchise, substitute the second companies name for the first, and company two will have a really good legal case if the city refuses to grant them a franchise under the same conditions.
This "disruption" is a regular occurrence in many cities, pulling another cable through the underground conduits is trivial, and putting up a wire on a pole is not much worse.
At this point, transport on the cable networks is mostly digital. So you're no longer worried about analog channel competition.
As I already said, in a vain attempt at preventing this, I was talking about the frequency space that used to be called "channel 5", etc, NOT THE ARBITRARY CHANNEL DESIGNATION EMBEDDED IN THE DIGITAL STREAM. NO, you cannot have multiple channel 5s on the same network. I don't care what you call the data stream -- channel 5, channel 10, etc -- only the bandwidth that is used to transport it.
VLAN-A: First provider: Channels+Data
VLAN-B: Second provider: Channels+Data
There are a limited number of channels. There is a limited amount of space for data. How many content providers do you want to allow? 50? That's about two, maybe three, channels per provider, and depending on bit rate of their digital signals, anywhere from two to twenty digital channels.
Now, how do they share the control channel (single data stream)? Or do the converters have to monitor every possible data stream looking for authorization codes? And kiss goodbye ANY hope of unencrypted signals.
De-regulation along the lines of the power companies? In other words, break apart "generation" and "distribution"......make TV/broadband one entity and then make the lines themselves a different entity. Have the distribution entity charge customers the same rate scale so that other companies can compete on equal footing.
The problem with this solution is that the cable system isn't designed that way. The electric grid is, in essence, wires. Generators put electrons onto the wire, customers pull them back off. You can't tell where an electron came from, but the utility company bills you for them at the rate of the company you choose (assuming that company has actually put enough electrons onto the wire to cover their customer's use.)
Cable TV isn't that way. You can't put two channel 5s on the same system. There is a limit to how much can be put on. A provider that gets to use channels 1-20, for example, prevents anyone else from using 1-20. How do you divvy up the limited space? Once you get 83 content providers, you've pretty much used up the full system. And multiple Internet providers would be even worse -- the space is smaller. (And before someone points out that under the wonderful new digital world anything can appear on your TV as "Channel 5", I'm talking about the frequencies and not the arbitrary digital channel id.)
While this kind of arrangement has finally worked itself out in the telecom divestiture, for a long time it was a big big mess. Especially messy for the consumer who was stuck trying to get problems fixed. "It's the local loop." "It's your long distance provider". "If we come out to fix the wire and it turns out to be your CPE, we'll charge you a large fee for a visit."
And for a very long time it was a real battleground for the long distance carriers (i.e. "content"). Consumers would get called regularly trying to get them to change carriers, and then get "slammed" -- involuntary changes. You'd get a number that started out 10-xxx-... and find out after you called it that you had manually picked a shyster LD company that charged astronomical rates.
Of course they don't compete. Cable companies have government-sanctioned monopolies.
I'd say give them a choice. You can merge if you relinquish your monopoly.
Ok, done.
Every franchise I've seen is non-exclusive. I.e., it isn't a government-sanctioned monopoly. It is a defacto one based on market forces, not a dejure one based on government action.
Only if you're polluting more than your fair share, comrade.
For some people, exhaling carbon dioxide is polluting more than their fair share.
I, for one, am glad to see so many people now ready to accept the fact that Iraq did, indeed, have weapons of mass destruction. Every person who claims that we went into that war on a lie and were there for the oil should now accept that the very oil they say we were seeking is a major cause of anthropogenic global climate change -- a major weapon of mass destruction endangering not just hundred of thousands or millions, but billions of people.
Where did you read anything about the competitors not congratulating the winners? You do realize that it is possible to congratulate the winner while also trying to find the cause for a loss, don't you?
They yanked down a ton of sheet rock looking for fire. The firemen are looking at the wall and floor.
That's because when a structure becomes involved in a fire, even if it didn't start there, they need to make sure the fire isn't still active in the walls of the structure. It's really embarrassing for firemen to pack up after thinking they've put a fire out, only to get called back a couple of hours later because some two-by-four in the wall wasn't fully extinguished. Also dangerous for the structure owner.
Um, now. Engineering labs, science labs, computer requirements etc are much higher.
Not for math majors. That's why I used the example I did. Yes, those degrees that require lab work have higher costs, and in many cases lab fees are passed on to the student. Math majors do need computers, too.
I used the examples I did because it points out that the marketplace decides the comparative value; similar costs to obtain the degree but different value put upon them by employers.
But it's also about the only way to get files reliabily sent and received by people in companies.
People should use the tools that work. Emailing a 100Mb file to someone is horrible and breaks many mail clients. Emailing a 100Mb file to 100 someones is, well, ridiculous. Sourcing a 100Mb file to anyone who wants it is, well, a very good job for FTP.
Why not HTTP? I trust my FTP server security more than I do my web server. Not that I don't trust my web server, but one is a relatively simple tool doing something relatively simple, the other is modules this and access that and URLs that do special things... And I don't trust PUT at all for incoming material.
And if I bother to inquire about it, I want your answer of "male" to mean the genotype XY,
So if someone asks you where the bathroom is and you can't immediately tell from how they are dressed whether they want the Gents or the Gals version, you think the proper way to determine the answer is to know their genotype? You'd really tell a post-op trans XY now-woman to use the men's room?
Who decides which degree has more value to society?
Since the plan is to base payback on a percentage of income, we've pretty much defined the arbiter of degree value to be the employers.
There is just as much overhead cost for a black history major as there is for a math major. The cost for electricity to light the classrooms doesn't depend on who uses them. The administration that keeps track of the progress of the student costs the same. Instructors, ditto. Are black history majors finding jobs that would have them paying back any significant portion of the costs of educating them, or will they join all the other history majors at minimum wage jobs in the burger-flipping industry?
In practice, the extra money doesn't even mostly go to education -- it goes to a massive increase in sinecure positions -- positions unrelated to teaching, which, at some universities, are now over 50% of the positions.
As someone who works at one, I can tell you that most of the money that pays for not teaching positions comes from research grants. For example, ALL of my money comes from that. The faculty I work with, if they teach, get paid for the terms they teach and use grant money for the rest, or take unpaid summer vacation.
The administration that deals with research gets paid out of something called "overhead". That's money skimmed off the research grants at an exorbitant rate. For example, purchases other than "permanent equipment" (which is defined to be "more than $5000") get at least 40% tacked on for "overhead". In other words, if you buy a $4000 computer the Uni tacks $1600 on to the price and deducts $5600 from your research account. If you can talk the vendor into charging you $5001 for that same computer, he gets $1001 more and you spend $599 less. And some vendors just don't get the clue when you discuss this with them.
This solution will just add to that. Like a new tax added without ending the old one, now two rates get ratcheted up.
The problem is that there certainly WILL be two taxes. The state income/property/etc taxes that are currently used to fund education will still be required. Something has to pay for the education that isn't being paid for by the students under the new payment plan. The service employee unions aren't going to defer their paychecks until enough graduates start paying enough taxes to pay them. And those taxes will have to go UP initially because state taxpayers will be paying the full bill instead of just most of the bill like today. Once they're up, they don't tend to come back down.
It's a wonderful sounding plan, but there are a lot of gotcha's that lurk in the details.
And to add to mark-t's comment, the ruling also deals explicitly with the question of "would have" accessed it, saying that it is irrelevant whether people actually did directly access it or not, the fact was it was a publicly available link. "They wouldn't have accessed it" is moot. The audience was not being changed.
If it's on the internet, on a publicly available web server and not locked down - say, behind some sort of security barrier that requires a username/password or similar - then no one should consider linking to it a problem.
I think it could reasonably be argued that a link to material that is then displayed in a frame that inappropriately attributes the material would be infringing. E.g., a page with links to images, which when clicked display in an enclosing frame that says "Hey look at the great image I made." And, unfortunately, I've had exactly that problem on a website I run where a TV station was using my images and missattributing them. The only solution I could come up with was adding a watermark.
The ruling is specific to say "in the context of this case", which was a simple link to someone else's content that was already publicly available on the applicant's website. It doesn't cover hidden (unpublished) links or inappropriate attribution.
And if the criminal outright stole the real card and had the pin, then changing the pin is pointless too since they have the card in their possession so why bother?
Because they don't know the pin, and without the PIN they can't use the card. As I asked once already, that's the point of having a chip/pin card, isn't it? If the pin doesn't prevent unauthorized use of the card, why have a pin to start with?
I suppose there are situations where it might benefit a thief if the pin was shared between cards,
That wasn't what I was talking about. I was talking about the ability to change the PIN at an ATM being a security problem unless was done correctly, and pointing out that people who program ATMs often don't do things that most of us would believe to be obvious. The next time you have to enter the two zeros for cents in a withdrawal, keep that in mind.
but the flip side is someone who cannot change the pin of their cards would be more likely to write down each number and put them in their wallet.
I would believe exactly the opposite. I still know the PIN for a card I got twenty years ago because I never changed it. It is PIN/login information for accounts that change that I need to write down.
Your argument is stupid mainly because a password is not a personally associated word, it is a word that lets you pass.
First, in modern authentication systems, the password is the secret that authenticates the user to the system. Standard advice is that you never use the same password on multiple accounts, as the recent breaches as several online services have shown. Second, it wasn't an argument. And third, whoosh....
Consider: under what scenario are you harmed by an attacker knowing the PIN of all your credit cards is the same?
I have lost/he has stolen my wallet and has all of my cards in his possession and knows the PIN for one of my cards. That would seem to be an obvious problem.
Note that they are busted once you notice the problem and report it (and you are not generally liable for such theft).
They aren't busted until the cops show up and put them in handcuffs. I don't report it until I know it happened, and by then I can be out a lot of money, even if for just a few days. I think the point I've been making all along is that debit cards are different in that specific aspect from credit cards, and that not having money available to use for intended purposes is, indeed, a problem.
It's kind of a bizarre scenario.
And yet, people have their wallets stolen. Bad guys install card swipe monitors in ATMs. Shoulder surfing is not unheard of. It's a bizarre world out there.
Beyond all that though, the guy above prefers having *no PIN at all*.
I don't care what the original guy wanted, the one I replied to was pointing out that a solution was to have one PIN for all cards. And I pointed out the parallel to having one password for all accounts. Parallels are parallels and not identities because they aren't identical. There can be differences.
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but I do have 4 bank accounts (well, credit union) behind one password.
How nice for you. Won't it be fun for you if someone gets your password and can get into all four accounts to play with you? You're trusting all four of your credit unions to protect your login data and not taking even the most rudimentary protection step of putting a different password on each. "Here, hacker, you've gotten my account data at bank A, welcome to bank B, C, and D...." Although, I suspect you have conflated "online account" with "credit union account" and what you meant to say was that you have one online account at one credit union which gives you access to four different banking functions. You don't have the option of having four different passwords because it isn't four different online accounts. That's pretty common, you know. I have about 13 different "accounts" under one online account. Do I win?
Yes, I've been there, but I've never lived there long enough to get an account from a bank or go through all the residency requirements for such, and thus never had a local Chip/PIN card. None of the ATM machines I've used there has offered to let me change my PIN on my current debit card.
I don't see how this increases risk since if a thief can access an account with an old PIN then it would be pretty stupid for them to alert the real owner to their presence by changing it to something else.
The thief would have the card and the PIN, and the owner would be notified by the bank when the account went negative. I.e., if you don't have your card, you aren't putting it into an ATM machine to be asked for your PIN which you would then find out has been changed, right? The thief would have to change it because he doesn't know the current one and thus cannot use the card. That's the whole point of the PIN isn't it?
You mean you would call someone who referred to evolution as the origin of life as a theory, and who could correctly identify and respond to other theories of the origin "poorly prepared"? I'd call those who are ignorant of anything but the rote "facts" they are taught would be poorly prepared, but that's just me.
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If you knew how they were built today, you'd not be talking about the RF-based digital streams and level-X routers. An ATV signal doesn't have "packets", and current cable television systems are based on ATV. That's why you can plug a clearQAM ATV receiver into one and get some kind of signal. Now that Comcast is encrypting "everything" it isn't much, but the TV recognizes the ATV signals even if it can only display a few of the streams. My Pinnacle receiver shows a rather complete list of things it knows about, almost all of them with the encrypted flag set. If it was all "packets" and "routers", it wouldn't know anything about it.
Wired connections, you can pass a lot more through,
Wired connections already pass a lot more through. Two hundred or more signals. As much as you'd like to pretend that you can keep packing more and more into the same wire, you just can't. If you could pack twice as much into the same channel (6MHz frequency chunk) they'd already be doing it. They already pack up to 20 signals into one channel, albeit at a miserable bitrate. The problem is you can't have one provider packing 20 signals into the same space that some other provider is packing their 20 signals. I don't know how many times I have to say it before the idea gets through -- two signals at the same frequency won't work.
So, out of the 118 or so channels on a typical cable system, how many do each "cable company" get? What happens when it is full? Who doesn't get to play? You want competition, I understand. It isn't as simple as saying "use TDMA" to get there.
If you want to see how unsimple it is to do that, look at P25 phase 2 with TDMA for radio. I see ads for the equipment, but I don't see the equipment being fielded. In fact, I see P25 digital-capable equipment being used in analog mode because the digital mode didn't quite meet expectations. I can say with no hesitancy I do NOT want cable TV to go down that rabbit hole, no matter how much I don't want Comcast to merge with TWC.
And, again, this is only a concern on an ANALOG CABLE SETUP. On a digital setup. You simply don't deal directly with channelization.
I didn't say the customer dealt with channelization. The hardware does. How do you think the data streams are encoded on a cable network? Magic? Floobydust? It's not some big 100baseT network with data packets flying all over the place. There are some limited number of digital streams encoded onto an RF carrier, and each RF signal is carried on the cable just like the old analog one-station-per-channel signals were. At 6MHz each, an 800MHz system can get 118 or so "channels", and that's pushing it unless you are VERY fastidious in your connections.
So ok, you hand a channel over to a content provider. How does that provider authorize you to get it? Shares the OOB channel, I guess. And he gets only 2 to ten reasonable quality digital streams per channel. You think you can pack two full-service cable systems into one existing cable? Patent it. If your answer is to turn every channel into "on demand", then don't bother.
In fact, it's just like the current OTA digital, with the addition of OOB control for authorization, and the digital signals are often encrypted so a standard clearQAM ATV cannot display them.
Maybe, at some level there's still channelization, but it's abstracted away from the content and entirely manageable in software.
Yes, at some level there is channelization, and that level is the hardware level. It's how the signal moves over the cable. You can't just wave your hands and say "it's software" because no, it isn't. The software comes after the digital signal is decoded.
The fact that the little box on top of your TV can show you any number the cable company wants it to changes nothing about the underlying transport which is still analog RF and channelized. And changing that would mean rebuilding the entire network and replacing all the existing hardware, including consumer-owned equipment.
Yet cities decide to take matters into the own hands
Because they are creating a fake market with captive subscribers. Taxpayers don't get to say "I don't want to be a subscriber" to the taxpayer-funded cable services. They pay taxes or else. And if they want to be a customer to the original commercial company, they get to pay twice. Can you imagine why a government-run cable service might be a success despite a lack of a true market for their services? The government run service can easily undercut the competition and sell at below-cost because the taxpayers will make up any losses.
The multicast stream for each channel won't cross over any layer-2 switches/bridges,
That's not how the existing cable TV networks are designed. The digital "multicast" is carried via analog RF and uses quite a bit of bandwidth to do that. That box out on the pole is not a router, it is an amplifier. Everyone watching the "big game" is tuned to the same frequency and decoding the same digital stream on that frequency, and that changes nothing about all the other frequencies in use. They're still being used. Your converter box doesn't have to talk back to Momma to tell them to start sending some other program, it just tunes to that channel when you tell it to.
Must-Carry (usually local) channels haven't proved a burden to cable companies (much as they like to bitch about them), so there is already precedent for this.
Must-carry is pretty much dead. Once a "content provider" asks for money for their content they are no longer "must carry". That's why things like this happen. Every one of those CBS network affiliates could have demanded "must carry" but chose to demand money for the right to carry them (bundled with pay services). And then pointed the finger at TWC for not carrying them. Their own fault.
Facilities that are de-facto government sanctioned monopolies
If they are government created then they are dejure, not defacto. Defacto monopolies exist because of market, not legal, reasons.
In vastly more places there is exactly ONE cable plant in the ground. There is no competition.
Because the market isn't there.
Further, most municipalities will not allow building out competitive networks, simply because the disruption is so great.
If the second company meets the requirements for a franchise, the municipality cannot stop them. Take the existing franchise, substitute the second companies name for the first, and company two will have a really good legal case if the city refuses to grant them a franchise under the same conditions.
This "disruption" is a regular occurrence in many cities, pulling another cable through the underground conduits is trivial, and putting up a wire on a pole is not much worse.
At this point, transport on the cable networks is mostly digital. So you're no longer worried about analog channel competition.
As I already said, in a vain attempt at preventing this, I was talking about the frequency space that used to be called "channel 5", etc, NOT THE ARBITRARY CHANNEL DESIGNATION EMBEDDED IN THE DIGITAL STREAM. NO, you cannot have multiple channel 5s on the same network. I don't care what you call the data stream -- channel 5, channel 10, etc -- only the bandwidth that is used to transport it.
VLAN-A: First provider: Channels+Data VLAN-B: Second provider: Channels+Data
There are a limited number of channels. There is a limited amount of space for data. How many content providers do you want to allow? 50? That's about two, maybe three, channels per provider, and depending on bit rate of their digital signals, anywhere from two to twenty digital channels.
Now, how do they share the control channel (single data stream)? Or do the converters have to monitor every possible data stream looking for authorization codes? And kiss goodbye ANY hope of unencrypted signals.
De-regulation along the lines of the power companies? In other words, break apart "generation" and "distribution"......make TV/broadband one entity and then make the lines themselves a different entity. Have the distribution entity charge customers the same rate scale so that other companies can compete on equal footing.
The problem with this solution is that the cable system isn't designed that way. The electric grid is, in essence, wires. Generators put electrons onto the wire, customers pull them back off. You can't tell where an electron came from, but the utility company bills you for them at the rate of the company you choose (assuming that company has actually put enough electrons onto the wire to cover their customer's use.)
Cable TV isn't that way. You can't put two channel 5s on the same system. There is a limit to how much can be put on. A provider that gets to use channels 1-20, for example, prevents anyone else from using 1-20. How do you divvy up the limited space? Once you get 83 content providers, you've pretty much used up the full system. And multiple Internet providers would be even worse -- the space is smaller. (And before someone points out that under the wonderful new digital world anything can appear on your TV as "Channel 5", I'm talking about the frequencies and not the arbitrary digital channel id.)
And for a very long time it was a real battleground for the long distance carriers (i.e. "content"). Consumers would get called regularly trying to get them to change carriers, and then get "slammed" -- involuntary changes. You'd get a number that started out 10-xxx-... and find out after you called it that you had manually picked a shyster LD company that charged astronomical rates.
Sure, yeah, let's do it all again with cable TV.
Of course they don't compete. Cable companies have government-sanctioned monopolies. I'd say give them a choice. You can merge if you relinquish your monopoly.
Ok, done.
Every franchise I've seen is non-exclusive. I.e., it isn't a government-sanctioned monopoly. It is a defacto one based on market forces, not a dejure one based on government action.
Only if you're polluting more than your fair share, comrade.
For some people, exhaling carbon dioxide is polluting more than their fair share.
I, for one, am glad to see so many people now ready to accept the fact that Iraq did, indeed, have weapons of mass destruction. Every person who claims that we went into that war on a lie and were there for the oil should now accept that the very oil they say we were seeking is a major cause of anthropogenic global climate change -- a major weapon of mass destruction endangering not just hundred of thousands or millions, but billions of people.
Where did you read anything about the competitors not congratulating the winners? You do realize that it is possible to congratulate the winner while also trying to find the cause for a loss, don't you?
They yanked down a ton of sheet rock looking for fire. The firemen are looking at the wall and floor.
That's because when a structure becomes involved in a fire, even if it didn't start there, they need to make sure the fire isn't still active in the walls of the structure. It's really embarrassing for firemen to pack up after thinking they've put a fire out, only to get called back a couple of hours later because some two-by-four in the wall wasn't fully extinguished. Also dangerous for the structure owner.
Um, now. Engineering labs, science labs, computer requirements etc are much higher.
Not for math majors. That's why I used the example I did. Yes, those degrees that require lab work have higher costs, and in many cases lab fees are passed on to the student. Math majors do need computers, too.
I used the examples I did because it points out that the marketplace decides the comparative value; similar costs to obtain the degree but different value put upon them by employers.
But it's also about the only way to get files reliabily sent and received by people in companies.
People should use the tools that work. Emailing a 100Mb file to someone is horrible and breaks many mail clients. Emailing a 100Mb file to 100 someones is, well, ridiculous. Sourcing a 100Mb file to anyone who wants it is, well, a very good job for FTP.
Why not HTTP? I trust my FTP server security more than I do my web server. Not that I don't trust my web server, but one is a relatively simple tool doing something relatively simple, the other is modules this and access that and URLs that do special things ... And I don't trust PUT at all for incoming material.
Of course, I still use UUCP. It. Just. Works.
And if I bother to inquire about it, I want your answer of "male" to mean the genotype XY,
So if someone asks you where the bathroom is and you can't immediately tell from how they are dressed whether they want the Gents or the Gals version, you think the proper way to determine the answer is to know their genotype? You'd really tell a post-op trans XY now-woman to use the men's room?
Who decides which degree has more value to society?
Since the plan is to base payback on a percentage of income, we've pretty much defined the arbiter of degree value to be the employers.
There is just as much overhead cost for a black history major as there is for a math major. The cost for electricity to light the classrooms doesn't depend on who uses them. The administration that keeps track of the progress of the student costs the same. Instructors, ditto. Are black history majors finding jobs that would have them paying back any significant portion of the costs of educating them, or will they join all the other history majors at minimum wage jobs in the burger-flipping industry?
In practice, the extra money doesn't even mostly go to education -- it goes to a massive increase in sinecure positions -- positions unrelated to teaching, which, at some universities, are now over 50% of the positions.
As someone who works at one, I can tell you that most of the money that pays for not teaching positions comes from research grants. For example, ALL of my money comes from that. The faculty I work with, if they teach, get paid for the terms they teach and use grant money for the rest, or take unpaid summer vacation.
The administration that deals with research gets paid out of something called "overhead". That's money skimmed off the research grants at an exorbitant rate. For example, purchases other than "permanent equipment" (which is defined to be "more than $5000") get at least 40% tacked on for "overhead". In other words, if you buy a $4000 computer the Uni tacks $1600 on to the price and deducts $5600 from your research account. If you can talk the vendor into charging you $5001 for that same computer, he gets $1001 more and you spend $599 less. And some vendors just don't get the clue when you discuss this with them.
This solution will just add to that. Like a new tax added without ending the old one, now two rates get ratcheted up.
The problem is that there certainly WILL be two taxes. The state income/property/etc taxes that are currently used to fund education will still be required. Something has to pay for the education that isn't being paid for by the students under the new payment plan. The service employee unions aren't going to defer their paychecks until enough graduates start paying enough taxes to pay them. And those taxes will have to go UP initially because state taxpayers will be paying the full bill instead of just most of the bill like today. Once they're up, they don't tend to come back down.
It's a wonderful sounding plan, but there are a lot of gotcha's that lurk in the details.
And to add to mark-t's comment, the ruling also deals explicitly with the question of "would have" accessed it, saying that it is irrelevant whether people actually did directly access it or not, the fact was it was a publicly available link. "They wouldn't have accessed it" is moot. The audience was not being changed.
If it's on the internet, on a publicly available web server and not locked down - say, behind some sort of security barrier that requires a username/password or similar - then no one should consider linking to it a problem.
I think it could reasonably be argued that a link to material that is then displayed in a frame that inappropriately attributes the material would be infringing. E.g., a page with links to images, which when clicked display in an enclosing frame that says "Hey look at the great image I made." And, unfortunately, I've had exactly that problem on a website I run where a TV station was using my images and missattributing them. The only solution I could come up with was adding a watermark.
The ruling is specific to say "in the context of this case", which was a simple link to someone else's content that was already publicly available on the applicant's website. It doesn't cover hidden (unpublished) links or inappropriate attribution.
And if the criminal outright stole the real card and had the pin, then changing the pin is pointless too since they have the card in their possession so why bother?
Because they don't know the pin, and without the PIN they can't use the card. As I asked once already, that's the point of having a chip/pin card, isn't it? If the pin doesn't prevent unauthorized use of the card, why have a pin to start with?
I suppose there are situations where it might benefit a thief if the pin was shared between cards,
That wasn't what I was talking about. I was talking about the ability to change the PIN at an ATM being a security problem unless was done correctly, and pointing out that people who program ATMs often don't do things that most of us would believe to be obvious. The next time you have to enter the two zeros for cents in a withdrawal, keep that in mind.
but the flip side is someone who cannot change the pin of their cards would be more likely to write down each number and put them in their wallet.
I would believe exactly the opposite. I still know the PIN for a card I got twenty years ago because I never changed it. It is PIN/login information for accounts that change that I need to write down.
Your argument is stupid mainly because a password is not a personally associated word, it is a word that lets you pass.
First, in modern authentication systems, the password is the secret that authenticates the user to the system. Standard advice is that you never use the same password on multiple accounts, as the recent breaches as several online services have shown. Second, it wasn't an argument. And third, whoosh....
Consider: under what scenario are you harmed by an attacker knowing the PIN of all your credit cards is the same?
I have lost/he has stolen my wallet and has all of my cards in his possession and knows the PIN for one of my cards. That would seem to be an obvious problem.
Note that they are busted once you notice the problem and report it (and you are not generally liable for such theft).
They aren't busted until the cops show up and put them in handcuffs. I don't report it until I know it happened, and by then I can be out a lot of money, even if for just a few days. I think the point I've been making all along is that debit cards are different in that specific aspect from credit cards, and that not having money available to use for intended purposes is, indeed, a problem.
It's kind of a bizarre scenario.
And yet, people have their wallets stolen. Bad guys install card swipe monitors in ATMs. Shoulder surfing is not unheard of. It's a bizarre world out there.
Beyond all that though, the guy above prefers having *no PIN at all*.
I don't care what the original guy wanted, the one I replied to was pointing out that a solution was to have one PIN for all cards. And I pointed out the parallel to having one password for all accounts. Parallels are parallels and not identities because they aren't identical. There can be differences.
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but I do have 4 bank accounts (well, credit union) behind one password.
How nice for you. Won't it be fun for you if someone gets your password and can get into all four accounts to play with you? You're trusting all four of your credit unions to protect your login data and not taking even the most rudimentary protection step of putting a different password on each. "Here, hacker, you've gotten my account data at bank A, welcome to bank B, C, and D...." Although, I suspect you have conflated "online account" with "credit union account" and what you meant to say was that you have one online account at one credit union which gives you access to four different banking functions. You don't have the option of having four different passwords because it isn't four different online accounts. That's pretty common, you know. I have about 13 different "accounts" under one online account. Do I win?
Then you haven't been to Europe
Yes, I've been there, but I've never lived there long enough to get an account from a bank or go through all the residency requirements for such, and thus never had a local Chip/PIN card. None of the ATM machines I've used there has offered to let me change my PIN on my current debit card.
I don't see how this increases risk since if a thief can access an account with an old PIN then it would be pretty stupid for them to alert the real owner to their presence by changing it to something else.
The thief would have the card and the PIN, and the owner would be notified by the bank when the account went negative. I.e., if you don't have your card, you aren't putting it into an ATM machine to be asked for your PIN which you would then find out has been changed, right? The thief would have to change it because he doesn't know the current one and thus cannot use the card. That's the whole point of the PIN isn't it?
You mean you would call someone who referred to evolution as the origin of life as a theory, and who could correctly identify and respond to other theories of the origin "poorly prepared"? I'd call those who are ignorant of anything but the rote "facts" they are taught would be poorly prepared, but that's just me.