Clinton campaign aide Charles Delavan replied that it was "a legitimate email"............he had intended to type "illegitimate,"
If that's true, shouldn't they have used "an" instead of "a". These are college graduates after all, right?
Depends on the layer of his mind where the mistake was made. If it is above the abstraction layer of the grammar processing for emitting the typo, he would emit a grammatical but erroneous-in-multiple-words statement.
Yes, you read it the same way I did. The appeals court judge in this case said he failed to see the distinction and disagreed with the earlier supreme court ruling.
And the Supremes were right and this judge wrong.
The portion of the Fifth that protects against self-incrimination is the US Constitution's answer to "Who will guard the guardians?" It's a practical measure to oppose torturing confessions out of people.
It's difficult to get a cop to bust another cop for torturing a suspect to force inforation out of him. But if forcing information out of a suspect means everything "tainted" by what he said is thrown out as evidence, torturing a suspect becomes, not just useless, but counter-productive. This is far more effective at reducing the use of rubber hoses, bright lights, kidney punches, and sleep deprivation on accused criminals that just a prohibition on doing so. (For starters, it's not good for career advancement if you blow a big case by getting all the evidence thrown out, including that which WASN'T, but MIGHT HAVE BEEN, developed from what the accused had said.)
"The judge says tell us the password." "I won't." What "or else" is next? It's pretty clear that forcing the password out of someone who doesn't want to turn it over is extracting info that might produce evidence to use against him. Fifth Amendment clear and simple.
Bluetooth (at least "Bluetooth smart" / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)) recognized that problem and lets a device use either the IEEE MAC unique-per-device address or one of three others. In bluetooth-ese:
- "public": MAC address
- "private static": 46 bit random number (stable between chip reboots but may change on reboot) Much like a MAC but you don't have to buy it from IEEE and can expect a collision in a random group of more than forty million devices or so.
- "private non-resolvable": 46-bit random number that changes every few minutes or so (when the device isn't participating in a connection). You have to connect to it and handshake with it to figure out if it's the one you want.
- "private resolvable": 22-bit random number that changes every few minutes or so, plus a 24-bit cryptographic hash of it using a key that is the device's identity. If the partner knows the key it can check if the device it hears is the one it's looking for by hashing the random number with the key and checking it against the hash. False negatives not possible but false-positives are, so repeat after a change or two to be sure.
The non-static private addressing modes make it hard to keep track of a particular tag for more than a couple minutes, unless you're connected (thus exposing yourself) or otherwise in-the-know about its keying secrets.
= = = =
But I'll bet $5, sight-unseen, that the government's spec (like the one for tire-pressure monitors) involves a unique identifier that can be tracked by roadside radio devices.
"Just under 100,000 tonnes" and a tonne is about 1.1 tons, so 100,000 tons is about right or maybe just a tad low.
I tried to find the mass of methane in the atmosphere but most of the online stuff keeps scoring it in PPMV of the atmosphere, rather than mass of the methane (though they're happy to measure all the additions and subtractions as mass). So I'm ballparking it:
A few decades back (when the ppbv of methane was estimated at 1.7 rather than 1.83) the annual production of methane was estimated at 2.7e14 gm (3e8 tons) and lifetime in atmosphere of 30 years. That would put the mass of the methane in the atmosphere around 9e9 tons. 1e5 additional tons represents 0.00111... % added methane - to the total atmosphere.
20/1,830 ppb is about 1%. So that leak alone accounts for about 1/1000th (0.1%) of the rise - assuming it mixed quickly. If it stayed mostly in the northern hemisphere and mostly in the troposphere multiply by about 8/3. It would still account for about 0.27%.
(Pity. A couple more orders of magnitude and it would be close to completely explaining the observation. This says it's about a quarter shot glass in a bucket. B-) )
The main way to get a better estimate is to replace my horrible approximation of the mass of CH4 in the atmosphere with something closer to the truth.
It is easy to advocate destruction of, say, the EPA, but once you are the chief of the EPA, then is is your organization, and there is a natural desire to defend your turf.
But if you're the head of the organization and the rest of the organization don't obey your orders, it's not "your" organization, is it?
And if you think the organization should be disbanded, or gutted and rebuilt in your image, this gives you just a DANDY excuse. It's "insubordination" (the bureaucratic equivalent of "mutiny") and cause for dismissal.
UFOs are often convenient cover for secret Re:Carl Saganflight tests.
That gives the government an incentive to encourage UFO nuts.
A lot of the cold-war-era "conspiracy theories" sound like "second cover" stories. That's a psychological technique for diverting investigation into some large-enough-to-be-worth-the-effort secret project. Works like this:
Plant TWO cover stories. The first is plausible but misdirection. The second is fruitcake-nuts (but ideally has aspects that look attractively like actual artifacts of the project being hidden). Somebody investigating what is going on first hits the first cover. If he accepts it, fine. If he notices it doesn't quite fit and digs deeper, he finds the obviously screwy second cover. Oops? Now what?
The tendency of the more rational is to reject it - but bounce back to the first cover and give up there. The less well-hinged may report the second cover (much to the glee of the security people). Few are going to keep digging past both to discover some approximation of what's really going on - and if they DO get there and talk about it in public, if they happen to have said anything related to the second cover story (or even if the HAVEN'T), they can be debunked by painting them as having accepted the self-evidently tinfoil-hat-grade second cover story and propagating a variant of it.
The "conspiracy theories are always wrong and insane" meme is very convenient for this as well (as it is for any actual conspirators B-) )
UFOs are often convenient cover for secret flight tests.
Wasn't there a not too long ago release of government info-or-whatever about the Roswell incident?
Story was that one of the things they were testing there was the reentry mechanism for the upcoming (and still very cold-war-secret-military-tech) mercury launches, by lifting various model reentry vehicles to the edge of the atmosphere using weather balloons and dropping them . Not all that good a model of the heating, but a great way to check whether it would end up flying heat-shield-first until it was at low-atmosphere terminal velocity and time for the 'chutes.
Video showed a mercury capsule heat-shield, with retro-pack still attached, upside-down on sawhorses-or-the-like in a hanger. Looked very much like the canonical flying-saucer artwork of the era, and the picture was given as an explanation for the story of a passerby seeing what looked like a flying saucer in a hanger.
... the felonious taking of the property of another from his or her person or in his or her immediate presence, against his or her will, by violence or intimidation.
What Alphabet did is by definition Robbery.
If they'd given, or promised, a Christmas Bonus, then yes it would be robbery.
If the (or their predecessors) had led the workers to expect bonuses only by voluntarily giving them in the past, but had never written contract terms or otherwise promised the bonuses for this year, then the hypothetical missing bonus was never the property of the workers in the first place.
I mean getting caught doesn't exactly inspire confidence...
That they caught it and went public with it helps inspire confidence in Georgia's election process and results. "The DHS tried to crack us (the dirty sons of Bs), failed, and got caught!"
Hell they probably would have accepted the offer for a free pen test. Instead many orgs react rather violently if they dont know about it and you did it.
An unexpected, unauthorized, "free pen test" is indistinguishable from a bad-guy cracking attempt, and must be treated as if it's a real threat. This causes ENORMOUS extra costs as the victim has to batten the hatches, examine everything for corruption and/or possible persistent threat instalation, compare working databases to backups and examine the differences vs. update audit trails, and so on.
Not to mention the concern that it might be a real attempt by the DHS, or a rogue group within it, to hack the election.
Drivers at the taxi-hailing app company reported feeling forced to work extremely long hours, sometimes more than 70 a week, just to make a basic living...
Sounds like a typical Silicon Valley startup to me.
If your company removes money from you and gives it to someone else, that is called Robbery.
But if the company just doesn't give you a Christmas/End-of-Year gift that they had been voluntarily giving previously, it may be a disappointment but it isn't Robbery.
= = = =
It may also be really stupid move on the company's part, though. It's going to cost them a bunch in employee satisfaction, and thus performance, over the next year or more.
Of course, if they were thinking of replacing a bunch of the employees with H1Bs or the like, tweaking them off so they perform poorly could then be used in claims that they were not good performers and thus needed replacing.
If I can't write a donation off on my taxes, then I didn't donate it.
If you weren't given the money you weren't taxed on it. So it was just as much "written off on your taxes" as if you'd gotten it, donated it, and deducted it.
Can you name one thing that your customers actually want that is actually being prevented by network neutrality regulations?
Glitchless streaming.
Streaming (things like audio, video, phone calls) requires relatively small and constant bandwidth (though compression adds variability) but isn't good at tolerating dropouts or variations in transit time. When it does get dropouts it's better to NOT send a retry correction (and have the retry packet risk delaying and/or forcing the drop of another packet).
TCP connections (things like big file transfers) error check and retry, fixing dropouts and errors so the data arrives intact, though with no guarantee exactly when. But they achieve high bandwidth and evenly divide the bandwidth at a bottleneck by deliberately speeding up until they super-saturate the bottleneck and force dropouts. The dropouts tell them they've hit the limit, so they slow down and track the bleeding edge.
Put them both on a link and treat the packets equally and TCP causes streaming to break up, stutter, etc. Overbuilding the net helps, but if the data to be tranferred is big enough TCP will ALWAYS saturate a link somewhere along the way.
Identify the traffic type and treat their packets differently - giving higher priority to stream packets (up to a limit, so applications can't gain by cheating, claiming to be a stream when they're not) - and then they play together just fine. Stream packets zip through, up to an allocation limit at some fraction of the available bandwidth, and TCP transfers evenly divide what's left - including the unused part of the streams' allocation.
But the tools for doing this also enable the ISPs to do other, not so good for customers, things. Provided they chose to do so, of course.
IMHO the bad behavior can be dealt with best, not by attempting to enforce "Network Neutrality" as a technical hack at an FCC regulation level, but as a consumer protection issue, by an agency like the FTC. Some high points:
- Break up the vertical integration of ISPs into "content provider" conglomerates, so there's no incentive to penalize the packets of competitors to the mother-ship's services.
- Treat things like throttling high-volume users and high-bandwidth services as consumer fraud: "You sold 'internet service'". Internet service doesn't work that way. Ditto "pay for better treatment of your packets" (but not "pay to sublet a fixed fraction of the pipe").
- Extra scrutiny for possible monopolistic behavior anywhere there are less than four viable broadband competitors, making it impractical for customers to "vote with their feet".
"How hard is to remember to unload your weapon before packing it?" I guess there's no I.Q. check for firearms purchases, maybe there should be.
IQ and attention to detail are different things.
Also: Even the best-trained, most reliable, gun user can have a lapse when in a hurry, as in when packing for a flight.
That's why firearms training stresses redundancy, with rules like "A gun is loaded as soon as you put it down and look away". Or "Don't point (even an "unloaded") gun at anything you don't want to destroy."
The phenomenon is referred to as "a visit from the Ammo Fairy". That entity is similar to the Tooth Fairy, but instead of leaving a coin under you pillow it leaves a round in your chamber. B-)
My wife and I each had a copy of the first three volumes when we married. Yes, there are female computer nerds. B-)
I first encountered it when assigned one of the volumes as a text back in 1971. Of course the class didn't consist of learning EVERYTHING in the volume. B-)
I use it from time to time - mainly as a reference book. Most recently this spring, when I needed a reference on a data structure (circular linked lists) for a paper. I've found it useful often when doing professional computer programming and hardware design (for instance, where the hardware has to support some software algorithm efficiently, or efficient algorithms in driver software allow hardware simplification).
I don't try to read it straight through. But when I need a algorithm for some job and it's not immediately obvious which is best, the first place I check is Knuth. He usually has a clear description of some darned good wheel that was already invented decades ago, analyzed to a fare-thee-well.
I only see him about once a year. He's still a sharp cookie.
Three and a half years ago the US government, under the Obama administration, let the ban on propagandizing US citizens expire - and immediately began writing and spreading "fake news".
U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans
For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. governmentâ(TM)s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts.
So the only thing new here is US citizens noticed one of the government's renewed, official, domestic propaganda operations.
Most of the harm from ISP misbehavior is the manifestation of one of two perverse-incentive situations:
- integration of an ISP into a content-provider megacorp, leading to penalization of competitors or other perceived threats to the larger content-providing component.
- an under-competitive market situation (monopoly, duopoly, other under-four-competitors) situation, allowing ISPs to provide less than they promised or less than what is expected of "internet service" without a "vote with their feet" option for customers.
Both of these are not internet-technology issues and both are things the FCC handles poorly, and which are outside its mandate. They're better handled by such agencies as the FTC and DOJ, under antitrust and consumer fraud models, than by the FCC.
With respect to the content-provider/ISP vertical integration issue: Trump has already come out opposing the ATT/ Time-Warner merger. Additionally, the mainstream media's pile-on against his campaign has left him with no love for the "content providers". I'd be willing to bet that he'd be all for antitrust action to split up the other ISP ("content transport") / news reporting ("content generation") partnerships under the rubric of "breaking up anticompetitive vertical integration". B-)
Why didn't they start this years ago when Obama extended and expanded the Patriot Act?
Probably because:
- Servers in the US have First Amendment protection
- Servers in other countries have whatever protection - or restrictions - the other countries have.
In particular:
- Moving certain data (such as encryption software) from the US to other countries may violate US export laws. (Backing up a server in the US to a server outside the US is more clearly an export than serving in the US something that was downloaded in the US.)
- Storing certain data - such as personal information, NAZI propaganda, or criticism of various governments - may be illegal in various countries.
So setting up a backup in some other country was probably perceived as more risk than leaving the data solely in the US under Obama, while the perceived risk to the data under Trump may be enough to move the volunteers to take on the extra trouble .
(If Brewster hasn't commented on this by then, I'll try to remember to ask him the next time I see him. But that's probably most of a year away...)
If the Republicans want to rubber stamp a clown cabinet, so be it. Should be a fun four years.
Cabinet is just some of the President's direct reports. No big deal. He can just wait until the next Senate recess and make recess appointments. Meanwhile, he can talk to anybody he wants WITHOUT a confirmation, and if congress leaves open a cabinet post with special powers, he can just wield them directly, himself, until it's filled. That means he can either rubber-stamp the UNofficial advisor's advice, or substitute his own decisions. That's more power for him than even having the Senate confirm a puppet (who might turn out to be Pinnochio and go his own way on something).
What IS a big deal is appointment of federal judges, federal appellate judges, and Supreme Court justices. The Ds applied the "nuclear option" to the first two, so expect the Rs to follow suit - and extend it to the third if the Ds get in the way.
Thanks TIME... for lowering the bar even further, human garbage all over the world can now realistically aspire to be your man of the year.
Time's "Person of the Year" isn't "BEST Person of the Year". It's "MOST INFLUENTIAL ON THE WORLD Person of the Year". That's why people like Castro get it.
Time has pointed this out LOTS of times.
IMHO Assange is a good candidate for THIS year. Trump did a lot of shaking things up, too - but mainly by being elected. As with Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, it's a bit early. I'm sure he'll have more effect on the world once he's ACTUALLY BEEN INAUGURATED and has been yanking the levers of power for most of a year.
Take a look at the continental-states-by-county maps from the recent election. Notice that the blue counties are, almost without exception, the sites of large cities or suburbs, while the red counties are primarily rural.
Obviously, it is you who misunderstand it: Alexander Hamilton described the framers' view of how electors would be chosen, "A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated [tasks]."
From my favorite historian: "Whatever Alexander Hamilton's reasons for doing anything probably had little to do with anyone else's view.... He was pretty much a sworn enemy of Jefferson, Madison, and anyone else who was in favor of the rights of the common person." He was also the primary, and outspoken, opponent of the Bill of Rights.
[The electoral college would be operating exactly] as it was intended: giving the electors the ability to prevent a moronic populist from ascending to the presidency is arguably precisely the entire point of the electoral college.
You misunderstand the purposes of the electoral college. They are:
1. To limit the opportunity for corruption to swing the presidential election
2. To steer a middle ground between "One Man One Vote" (which would let some single-digit number of high-population states control the presidency, leaving the rest of the states unrepresented in the executive branch) and "One State One Vote" (which would do much the same but with the high-population states and their masses of citizens as the unrepresented ones).
It still does both.
2. is the part you always hear about, and which leads to the occasional "minority president" in a close race and/or one with an urban/rural split. It's working exactly as intended, keeping New York, California, and .
1. may not be working in the WAY it was intended, but the system still accomplishes it. The electoral college serves as a firewall, limiting election fraud by a corrupt political machine (such as Tammany Hall or Daily's Chicago) to no more than their state's electors. If the presidency were determined by a popular vote, ONE corrupt machine could fake up a massive margin and swing any close election.
Remember the Florida recount in the Bush-Gore 2000 election? If the presidency were decided by the POPULAR vote you'd have to recount the WHOLE COUNTRY in such a situation.
If the use of electors, rather than straight tabulation of votes, ever reflected an elitist intent to provide an opportunity to override the will of the population, that has long since been obsoleted by the mechanism of their selection. They are chosen by the candidates' parties or the candidate himself, and the positions are usually a reward for especially faithful service. So don't hold your breath waiting for a wash of "unfaithful electors" to swing this election to Hillary.
Try that with real science journals and see how far you get.
You missed the point.
If you read even the SUMMARY of TFA, above, you'll see that the POINT was that the fake-journal operations are buying up REAL journals, with real reputations, and converting them into more pay-for-play fakes. (Their customers will no doubt be willing to pay even more for placement in a respected journal, before its reputation collapses.)
It's the various academicians that still can't believe Trump won because, "nobody I know voted for Trump".
This is a case of:
- A security researcher using the close election and hand-wringing over possible cheating to try to institutionalize actually CHECKING the paper audit trails against the tabulated results, before discarding the paper.
- And calling for candidates who lost close elections (on either side) to ask for a recount - because that's the only way to get it to happen in THIS election before the paper ballots ARE discarded, after the deadline which is JUST DAYS AWAY.
- Then the mainstream media (in "nobody I know voted for Trump" mode because they don't TALK to anybody outside their echo chamber) trying to spin that into "academics say Hillary lost due to vote-rigging".)
Read TFA: He explicitly says he thinks it's unlikely Hillary lost due to rigging, that the unexpected trump win was due to massively defective polls.
Disclaimer: I've met Halderman. He's a top-notch computer security researcher (and teacher of such in academia) and a cool head.
Slashdot Mirror
Clinton campaign aide Charles Delavan replied that it was "a legitimate email"............he had intended to type "illegitimate,"
If that's true, shouldn't they have used "an" instead of "a". These are college graduates after all, right?
Depends on the layer of his mind where the mistake was made. If it is above the abstraction layer of the grammar processing for emitting the typo, he would emit a grammatical but erroneous-in-multiple-words statement.
Yes, you read it the same way I did. The appeals court judge in this case said he failed to see the distinction and disagreed with the earlier supreme court ruling.
And the Supremes were right and this judge wrong.
The portion of the Fifth that protects against self-incrimination is the US Constitution's answer to "Who will guard the guardians?" It's a practical measure to oppose torturing confessions out of people.
It's difficult to get a cop to bust another cop for torturing a suspect to force inforation out of him. But if forcing information out of a suspect means everything "tainted" by what he said is thrown out as evidence, torturing a suspect becomes, not just useless, but counter-productive. This is far more effective at reducing the use of rubber hoses, bright lights, kidney punches, and sleep deprivation on accused criminals that just a prohibition on doing so. (For starters, it's not good for career advancement if you blow a big case by getting all the evidence thrown out, including that which WASN'T, but MIGHT HAVE BEEN, developed from what the accused had said.)
"The judge says tell us the password." "I won't." What "or else" is next? It's pretty clear that forcing the password out of someone who doesn't want to turn it over is extracting info that might produce evidence to use against him. Fifth Amendment clear and simple.
Bluetooth does that already
WiFi does.
Bluetooth (at least "Bluetooth smart" / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)) recognized that problem and lets a device use either the IEEE MAC unique-per-device address or one of three others. In bluetooth-ese:
- "public": MAC address
- "private static": 46 bit random number (stable between chip reboots but may change on reboot) Much like a MAC but you don't have to buy it from IEEE and can expect a collision in a random group of more than forty million devices or so.
- "private non-resolvable": 46-bit random number that changes every few minutes or so (when the device isn't participating in a connection). You have to connect to it and handshake with it to figure out if it's the one you want.
- "private resolvable": 22-bit random number that changes every few minutes or so, plus a 24-bit cryptographic hash of it using a key that is the device's identity. If the partner knows the key it can check if the device it hears is the one it's looking for by hashing the random number with the key and checking it against the hash. False negatives not possible but false-positives are, so repeat after a change or two to be sure.
The non-static private addressing modes make it hard to keep track of a particular tag for more than a couple minutes, unless you're connected (thus exposing yourself) or otherwise in-the-know about its keying secrets.
= = = =
But I'll bet $5, sight-unseen, that the government's spec (like the one for tire-pressure monitors) involves a unique identifier that can be tracked by roadside radio devices.
Said to be 100,000 tons of methane gas
"Just under 100,000 tonnes" and a tonne is about 1.1 tons, so 100,000 tons is about right or maybe just a tad low.
I tried to find the mass of methane in the atmosphere but most of the online stuff keeps scoring it in PPMV of the atmosphere, rather than mass of the methane (though they're happy to measure all the additions and subtractions as mass). So I'm ballparking it:
A few decades back (when the ppbv of methane was estimated at 1.7 rather than 1.83) the annual production of methane was estimated at 2.7e14 gm (3e8 tons) and lifetime in atmosphere of 30 years. That would put the mass of the methane in the atmosphere around 9e9 tons. 1e5 additional tons represents 0.00111... % added methane - to the total atmosphere.
20/1,830 ppb is about 1%. So that leak alone accounts for about 1/1000th (0.1%) of the rise - assuming it mixed quickly. If it stayed mostly in the northern hemisphere and mostly in the troposphere multiply by about 8/3. It would still account for about 0.27%.
(Pity. A couple more orders of magnitude and it would be close to completely explaining the observation. This says it's about a quarter shot glass in a bucket. B-) )
The main way to get a better estimate is to replace my horrible approximation of the mass of CH4 in the atmosphere with something closer to the truth.
It is easy to advocate destruction of, say, the EPA, but once you are the chief of the EPA, then is is your organization, and there is a natural desire to defend your turf.
But if you're the head of the organization and the rest of the organization don't obey your orders, it's not "your" organization, is it?
And if you think the organization should be disbanded, or gutted and rebuilt in your image, this gives you just a DANDY excuse. It's "insubordination" (the bureaucratic equivalent of "mutiny") and cause for dismissal.
How convenient.
UFOs are often convenient cover for secret Re:Carl Saganflight tests.
That gives the government an incentive to encourage UFO nuts.
A lot of the cold-war-era "conspiracy theories" sound like "second cover" stories. That's a psychological technique for diverting investigation into some large-enough-to-be-worth-the-effort secret project. Works like this:
Plant TWO cover stories. The first is plausible but misdirection. The second is fruitcake-nuts (but ideally has aspects that look attractively like actual artifacts of the project being hidden). Somebody investigating what is going on first hits the first cover. If he accepts it, fine. If he notices it doesn't quite fit and digs deeper, he finds the obviously screwy second cover. Oops? Now what?
The tendency of the more rational is to reject it - but bounce back to the first cover and give up there. The less well-hinged may report the second cover (much to the glee of the security people). Few are going to keep digging past both to discover some approximation of what's really going on - and if they DO get there and talk about it in public, if they happen to have said anything related to the second cover story (or even if the HAVEN'T), they can be debunked by painting them as having accepted the self-evidently tinfoil-hat-grade second cover story and propagating a variant of it.
The "conspiracy theories are always wrong and insane" meme is very convenient for this as well (as it is for any actual conspirators B-) )
UFOs are often convenient cover for secret flight tests.
Wasn't there a not too long ago release of government info-or-whatever about the Roswell incident?
Story was that one of the things they were testing there was the reentry mechanism for the upcoming (and still very cold-war-secret-military-tech) mercury launches, by lifting various model reentry vehicles to the edge of the atmosphere using weather balloons and dropping them . Not all that good a model of the heating, but a great way to check whether it would end up flying heat-shield-first until it was at low-atmosphere terminal velocity and time for the 'chutes.
Video showed a mercury capsule heat-shield, with retro-pack still attached, upside-down on sawhorses-or-the-like in a hanger. Looked very much like the canonical flying-saucer artwork of the era, and the picture was given as an explanation for the story of a passerby seeing what looked like a flying saucer in a hanger.
What Alphabet did is by definition Robbery.
If they'd given, or promised, a Christmas Bonus, then yes it would be robbery.
If the (or their predecessors) had led the workers to expect bonuses only by voluntarily giving them in the past, but had never written contract terms or otherwise promised the bonuses for this year, then the hypothetical missing bonus was never the property of the workers in the first place.
I mean getting caught doesn't exactly inspire confidence...
That they caught it and went public with it helps inspire confidence in Georgia's election process and results. "The DHS tried to crack us (the dirty sons of Bs), failed, and got caught!"
In the DHS, not so much.
Hell they probably would have accepted the offer for a free pen test. Instead many orgs react rather violently if they dont know about it and you did it.
An unexpected, unauthorized, "free pen test" is indistinguishable from a bad-guy cracking attempt, and must be treated as if it's a real threat. This causes ENORMOUS extra costs as the victim has to batten the hatches, examine everything for corruption and/or possible persistent threat instalation, compare working databases to backups and examine the differences vs. update audit trails, and so on.
Not to mention the concern that it might be a real attempt by the DHS, or a rogue group within it, to hack the election.
Drivers at the taxi-hailing app company reported feeling forced to work extremely long hours, sometimes more than 70 a week, just to make a basic living ...
Sounds like a typical Silicon Valley startup to me.
If your company removes money from you and gives it to someone else, that is called Robbery.
But if the company just doesn't give you a Christmas/End-of-Year gift that they had been voluntarily giving previously, it may be a disappointment but it isn't Robbery.
= = = =
It may also be really stupid move on the company's part, though. It's going to cost them a bunch in employee satisfaction, and thus performance, over the next year or more.
Of course, if they were thinking of replacing a bunch of the employees with H1Bs or the like, tweaking them off so they perform poorly could then be used in claims that they were not good performers and thus needed replacing.
If I can't write a donation off on my taxes, then I didn't donate it.
If you weren't given the money you weren't taxed on it. So it was just as much "written off on your taxes" as if you'd gotten it, donated it, and deducted it.
Can you name one thing that your customers actually want that is actually being prevented by network neutrality regulations?
Glitchless streaming.
Streaming (things like audio, video, phone calls) requires relatively small and constant bandwidth (though compression adds variability) but isn't good at tolerating dropouts or variations in transit time. When it does get dropouts it's better to NOT send a retry correction (and have the retry packet risk delaying and/or forcing the drop of another packet).
TCP connections (things like big file transfers) error check and retry, fixing dropouts and errors so the data arrives intact, though with no guarantee exactly when. But they achieve high bandwidth and evenly divide the bandwidth at a bottleneck by deliberately speeding up until they super-saturate the bottleneck and force dropouts. The dropouts tell them they've hit the limit, so they slow down and track the bleeding edge.
Put them both on a link and treat the packets equally and TCP causes streaming to break up, stutter, etc. Overbuilding the net helps, but if the data to be tranferred is big enough TCP will ALWAYS saturate a link somewhere along the way.
Identify the traffic type and treat their packets differently - giving higher priority to stream packets (up to a limit, so applications can't gain by cheating, claiming to be a stream when they're not) - and then they play together just fine. Stream packets zip through, up to an allocation limit at some fraction of the available bandwidth, and TCP transfers evenly divide what's left - including the unused part of the streams' allocation.
But the tools for doing this also enable the ISPs to do other, not so good for customers, things. Provided they chose to do so, of course.
IMHO the bad behavior can be dealt with best, not by attempting to enforce "Network Neutrality" as a technical hack at an FCC regulation level, but as a consumer protection issue, by an agency like the FTC. Some high points:
- Break up the vertical integration of ISPs into "content provider" conglomerates, so there's no incentive to penalize the packets of competitors to the mother-ship's services.
- Treat things like throttling high-volume users and high-bandwidth services as consumer fraud: "You sold 'internet service'". Internet service doesn't work that way. Ditto "pay for better treatment of your packets" (but not "pay to sublet a fixed fraction of the pipe").
- Extra scrutiny for possible monopolistic behavior anywhere there are less than four viable broadband competitors, making it impractical for customers to "vote with their feet".
"How hard is to remember to unload your weapon before packing it?" I guess there's no I.Q. check for firearms purchases, maybe there should be.
IQ and attention to detail are different things.
Also: Even the best-trained, most reliable, gun user can have a lapse when in a hurry, as in when packing for a flight.
That's why firearms training stresses redundancy, with rules like "A gun is loaded as soon as you put it down and look away". Or "Don't point (even an "unloaded") gun at anything you don't want to destroy."
The phenomenon is referred to as "a visit from the Ammo Fairy". That entity is similar to the Tooth Fairy, but instead of leaving a coin under you pillow it leaves a round in your chamber. B-)
My wife and I each had a copy of the first three volumes when we married. Yes, there are female computer nerds. B-)
I first encountered it when assigned one of the volumes as a text back in 1971. Of course the class didn't consist of learning EVERYTHING in the volume. B-)
I use it from time to time - mainly as a reference book. Most recently this spring, when I needed a reference on a data structure (circular linked lists) for a paper. I've found it useful often when doing professional computer programming and hardware design (for instance, where the hardware has to support some software algorithm efficiently, or efficient algorithms in driver software allow hardware simplification).
I don't try to read it straight through. But when I need a algorithm for some job and it's not immediately obvious which is best, the first place I check is Knuth. He usually has a clear description of some darned good wheel that was already invented decades ago, analyzed to a fare-thee-well.
I only see him about once a year. He's still a sharp cookie.
Three and a half years ago the US government, under the Obama administration, let the ban on propagandizing US citizens expire - and immediately began writing and spreading "fake news".
From an FP article dated July 14, 2013:
So the only thing new here is US citizens noticed one of the government's renewed, official, domestic propaganda operations.
Most of the harm from ISP misbehavior is the manifestation of one of two perverse-incentive situations:
- integration of an ISP into a content-provider megacorp, leading to penalization of competitors or other perceived threats to the larger content-providing component.
- an under-competitive market situation (monopoly, duopoly, other under-four-competitors) situation, allowing ISPs to provide less than they promised or less than what is expected of "internet service" without a "vote with their feet" option for customers.
Both of these are not internet-technology issues and both are things the FCC handles poorly, and which are outside its mandate. They're better handled by such agencies as the FTC and DOJ, under antitrust and consumer fraud models, than by the FCC.
With respect to the content-provider/ISP vertical integration issue: Trump has already come out opposing the ATT/ Time-Warner merger. Additionally, the mainstream media's pile-on against his campaign has left him with no love for the "content providers". I'd be willing to bet that he'd be all for antitrust action to split up the other ISP ("content transport") / news reporting ("content generation") partnerships under the rubric of "breaking up anticompetitive vertical integration". B-)
Why didn't they start this years ago when Obama extended and expanded the Patriot Act?
Probably because:
- Servers in the US have First Amendment protection
- Servers in other countries have whatever protection - or restrictions - the other countries have.
In particular:
- Moving certain data (such as encryption software) from the US to other countries may violate US export laws. (Backing up a server in the US to a server outside the US is more clearly an export than serving in the US something that was downloaded in the US.)
- Storing certain data - such as personal information, NAZI propaganda, or criticism of various governments - may be illegal in various countries.
So setting up a backup in some other country was probably perceived as more risk than leaving the data solely in the US under Obama, while the perceived risk to the data under Trump may be enough to move the volunteers to take on the extra trouble .
(If Brewster hasn't commented on this by then, I'll try to remember to ask him the next time I see him. But that's probably most of a year away...)
If the Republicans want to rubber stamp a clown cabinet, so be it. Should be a fun four years.
Cabinet is just some of the President's direct reports. No big deal. He can just wait until the next Senate recess and make recess appointments. Meanwhile, he can talk to anybody he wants WITHOUT a confirmation, and if congress leaves open a cabinet post with special powers, he can just wield them directly, himself, until it's filled. That means he can either rubber-stamp the UNofficial advisor's advice, or substitute his own decisions. That's more power for him than even having the Senate confirm a puppet (who might turn out to be Pinnochio and go his own way on something).
What IS a big deal is appointment of federal judges, federal appellate judges, and Supreme Court justices. The Ds applied the "nuclear option" to the first two, so expect the Rs to follow suit - and extend it to the third if the Ds get in the way.
Thanks TIME ... for lowering the bar even further, human garbage all over the world can now realistically aspire to be your man of the year.
Time's "Person of the Year" isn't "BEST Person of the Year". It's "MOST INFLUENTIAL ON THE WORLD Person of the Year". That's why people like Castro get it.
Time has pointed this out LOTS of times.
IMHO Assange is a good candidate for THIS year. Trump did a lot of shaking things up, too - but mainly by being elected. As with Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, it's a bit early. I'm sure he'll have more effect on the world once he's ACTUALLY BEEN INAUGURATED and has been yanking the levers of power for most of a year.
Which just goes to show how provincial you are.
Take a look at the continental-states-by-county maps from the recent election. Notice that the blue counties are, almost without exception, the sites of large cities or suburbs, while the red counties are primarily rural.
From my favorite historian: "Whatever Alexander Hamilton's reasons for doing anything probably had little to do with anyone else's view. ... He was pretty much a sworn enemy of Jefferson, Madison, and anyone else who was in favor of the rights of the common person." He was also the primary, and outspoken, opponent of the Bill of Rights.
[The electoral college would be operating exactly] as it was intended: giving the electors the ability to prevent a moronic populist from ascending to the presidency is arguably precisely the entire point of the electoral college.
You misunderstand the purposes of the electoral college. They are:
1. To limit the opportunity for corruption to swing the presidential election
2. To steer a middle ground between "One Man One Vote" (which would let some single-digit number of high-population states control the presidency, leaving the rest of the states unrepresented in the executive branch) and "One State One Vote" (which would do much the same but with the high-population states and their masses of citizens as the unrepresented ones).
It still does both.
2. is the part you always hear about, and which leads to the occasional "minority president" in a close race and/or one with an urban/rural split. It's working exactly as intended, keeping New York, California, and .
1. may not be working in the WAY it was intended, but the system still accomplishes it. The electoral college serves as a firewall, limiting election fraud by a corrupt political machine (such as Tammany Hall or Daily's Chicago) to no more than their state's electors. If the presidency were determined by a popular vote, ONE corrupt machine could fake up a massive margin and swing any close election.
Remember the Florida recount in the Bush-Gore 2000 election? If the presidency were decided by the POPULAR vote you'd have to recount the WHOLE COUNTRY in such a situation.
If the use of electors, rather than straight tabulation of votes, ever reflected an elitist intent to provide an opportunity to override the will of the population, that has long since been obsoleted by the mechanism of their selection. They are chosen by the candidates' parties or the candidate himself, and the positions are usually a reward for especially faithful service. So don't hold your breath waiting for a wash of "unfaithful electors" to swing this election to Hillary.
Try that with real science journals and see how far you get.
You missed the point.
If you read even the SUMMARY of TFA, above, you'll see that the POINT was that the fake-journal operations are buying up REAL journals, with real reputations, and converting them into more pay-for-play fakes. (Their customers will no doubt be willing to pay even more for placement in a respected journal, before its reputation collapses.)
It's the various academicians that still can't believe Trump won because, "nobody I know voted for Trump".
This is a case of:
- A security researcher using the close election and hand-wringing over possible cheating to try to institutionalize actually CHECKING the paper audit trails against the tabulated results, before discarding the paper.
- And calling for candidates who lost close elections (on either side) to ask for a recount - because that's the only way to get it to happen in THIS election before the paper ballots ARE discarded, after the deadline which is JUST DAYS AWAY.
- Then the mainstream media (in "nobody I know voted for Trump" mode because they don't TALK to anybody outside their echo chamber) trying to spin that into "academics say Hillary lost due to vote-rigging".)
Read TFA: He explicitly says he thinks it's unlikely Hillary lost due to rigging, that the unexpected trump win was due to massively defective polls.
Disclaimer: I've met Halderman. He's a top-notch computer security researcher (and teacher of such in academia) and a cool head.