Mr. Kennedy is not a credible source. You know that, right?
I'm not concerned with whether he's credible. I just responded to the question about where the 3 months bit was coming from. It's poor form to imply people are pulling it out of a dark orifice when it's right there in TFA.
Another thing though that no one else is bringing up; how much tax revenue have they given up for 10 years?
The "lost tax revenue" I could care even less about. Governments habitually operate at a higher tax rate than the peak of the Laffer Curve. (Raising taxes further brings in more in the short term, though it ends up costing more than it brought in later. That's why they go far past the peak rather than zeroing in on it and maximizing the amount they suck out of the people's pockets.) So, on the average, every million dollars they DON'T tax now is MORE than a million dollars they'll eventually get in taxes later, once the transient has worked itself out. It's also SEVERAL million dollars more that people will earn in "generating" that added tax.
What concerns me more is including the wages and jobs LOST thanks to taxing the people to get those millions to spend "promoting" the plan, when comparing it to the pay for the jobs "generated" by the plan.
It can do bursts of computation, memory access, or anything else that varies the amount you wiggle voltages or currents on wires in a way that emits radio waves. You can do it without even trying (which is one way some smartcards exposed private keys...).
In the days of CRTs that applied especially well: Graphics output could modulate the beam and generate a LOT of radio. (Doing gray scales by making shifting fine patters would be an especially "in your face but you can't see it" approach.) A fast photocell could read it from the light, as well.
Preventing / shielding against things like this is what "Tempest" is about.
I recall, back in the late '60s / early '70s, when I was doing software on a machine at a classified site. It had a music program that worked by wiggling the lines on three console display lamps that were also connected, by three resistors (forming a cheap D2A converter) to a volume control T-pad and a loudspeaker. Turns out it also modulated the memory access and/or other signals - a lot. I had left it playing "moon river" overnight, drove up to the building, and heard it on my A.M. radio.
I realized it would have been trivial to exfiltrate a small amount of data, even on my starving student budget, by emulating an FSK modem and hooking a transistor radio to a battery-powered tape recorder (about the size of a briefcase in those days) left in the trunk of my car. (Not that I'd have needed to, since I could carry mag tapes in and out, but as a "white hat", how could it be done, exercise.)
The security guys figured that out, too. A bit later I got a ping from management: Some guys from Washington had also driven up, noticed the arcade-quality "music", and given them grief about it.
The low numbers didn't stop some state officials from defending the initiative. "Given the program was only up and running for basically one quarter of a year," Andrew Kennedy, a senior economic development aide to Governor Cuomo, told Capital New York,
Did you try actually reading it all before posting?
Wait a second -- this program has only been running for one quarter of a year? 76 jobs doesn't sound that bad, on such a short time frame.
Damn right!
It takes a substantial time to set up a company. (The startup I just helped start up took over five months before I was actually "employed" (and over 6 before the payroll was in place to pay me as an employee with a W2 rather than a consultant with a 1099).)
Three months and they ALREADY have 76 new jobs? It sounds like there are some bats exiting hell!
Come back in a year and see how many there are, and how fast more are being added.
And when counting the cost of the program versus the benefits of it, don't forget to take into account that investments provide their payback over time - so count those costs against the paybacks from several years.
Modern Li-ion batteries have a round-trip efficiency of about 85%.
And some of the high-power, super-fast-charge Li-* batteries coming into production have efficiencies in the high 90s.
They have to. One of the limits on the charging and discharging rate of the batteries is the inefficiency. That lost energy doesn't just disappear. It turns into HEAT, INSIDE the battery. If you can dump 3/4 of a high-capacity battery's capacity into it in a couple minutes, without melting it down or setting it on fire, it's because the battery didn't turn much of the energy into heat. (Ditto on pulling it back out quickly.) That means it went into chemical storage, rather than loss.
The next topic is "general warrant". One of the reason US revolution took place is because of unhappiness due to King George's general warrants, allowing to search everyone without reason. The outcome was 4th amendment which clearly defined that persons and their private life are untouchable, unless there is suspicion, affirmed by the government servant and approved by the judge.
Spying on the population was also a big driver behind the THIRD amendment:
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
While forcing the colonists to provide housing and upkeep for the soldiers sent to oppress them was an economic issue, there was more to it than that.
A soldier "quartered" in a colonist's house also served as a spy for the crown and its army. He eavesdropped on the conversations of the family and visiting friends. He had the opportunity to view their records when they weren't home (or even if they were). He reported anything suspicious to his unit. His presence inhibited getting together with others to hold private discussions, especially about opposing (by protest or otherwise) anything the government was doing. He was a continuous walking search, fed and housed by the people he was investigating.
It seems to me that law-enforcement and intelligence agency spyware, such as keyloggers and various data exfiltration tools, is EXACTLY the digital equivalent: It is a digital agent that "lives" in the home or office of the target. It consums the target's resources (disk space, CPU cycles network bandwidth) to support itself. It spies spying on the activities and "papers" of the target, reporting anything suspicious (or anything, actually) back to its commander, to be used as evidence and/or to trigger an arrest or other attack. It is ready, at a moment's notice, to forcefully interfere with, destroy, or corrupt the target's facilities or send forged messages from him.
Spyware is EXACTLY one of the most egregious acts (one of the "Intolerable Acts") that sparked the American Revolution. I'd love to see the Third brought back out of the doldrums and used against these "digital soldiers" the government is "quartering" inside our personal and private computing devices.
A multispectral data processing program I wrote back in my college days: Part of launching it was giving it the date the data was collected. This was sanity checked against the system clock. Dates like before the construction of the scanners we usually used had a reasonable error message, asking if you were sure and giving a chance to reenter.
The message for a data collection date later than the data processing date was: "WONKITY! [name of institute] processes TOMORROW'S data TODAY!"
This was a reference to an incident in a humorous science fiction novel: _Bill the Galactic Hero_. The protagonists are sneaking around and are discovered by a cleaning robot and challenged as security breaching interlopers. One of them "bashes the robot on the braincase with a spanner", causing it to say "WONKITY!" and stagger away, rather than reporting them to security.
= = = =
When I was working on a typesetting system for newspaper publication, I heroically refrained from having it very occasionally insert "fnord" into the text. (See _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ for the joke, which is FAR to complex to explain here.)
Or you could look at it as your employees doing [long list]
Tell management it's a "watermark" to detect copied code. (It's obviously not an open-source project. B-) )
Seriously: Suppressing easter-egg hiding means the best programmers are likely to look for a happier shop and move on, leaving the anal manager with the cream skimmed off his pool of talent.
On the other hand, a professional programmer will not spend substantial time on such things.
(An easy way to do it without substantial cost is to build it initially as part of a scaffold or a test suite component - with the easter-eggyness being a way to make it obviously a side issue and not corrupt the mission-critical output. Then the incremental labor cost of building it in as an easter egg is small - or may even be negative, by not taking it OUT of the version to be shipped as the product. B-) )
Solar generation can be had, for reasonably sunny sites, for abut $/kW, which puts it ahead of grid. Wind, since the advent of neodymium permanent-magnet alternators in kWish sizes, is also becoming competitive (and a solar/wind combo tends to balance nicely against available load. Alternators are electronics and the Moore's Law improvements are also bringing them down (though the economy of scale isn't there, yet.)
The big missing piece has been a high-capacity, long-lived, low-toxicity energy storage system, to cover calm nights and other weather variations. (Thee days of storage, in halfway-decent renewable energy sites, means you only have to run the backup generator a couple times a year - which you have to do, anyhow, to keep it from rotting internally.)
So these battery improvements should be enabling for off-grid housing, as well.
Won't kill the grid, though. Because all these electric cars will need charging - at several times the consumption of a house. Even in the good sites, adding an electric car to the load bumps the generation's capital cost up again, big time. Win some, lose some.
Companies - at least in the US - try to keep their engineers from looking at other patents, because knowing you're infringing triples the damage awards.
I hate the keyboard and trackpad on this Toshiba Satellite S75. (It's just as bad as the ones on the Lenovo Z710, too.) Overly-wide, ultra-thin, chicklets, with no clearance for fingernails. Brush the trackpad while typing and half a sentence is highlighted and instantly overwritten by the next keystroke, making it disappear. Typos up the wazoo. In nearly a year I haven't been able to get used to these designs.
The vast majority of patent trolls are typically very small entities that like to sue BIG companies for one obvious reason: Big companies have deep pockets.
It's not just patent trolls.
When a big technology company is in trouble, one thing they may do to try to stay alive is go through their portfolio of patents and sue everybody doing anything related to them. This is in the hope that they can pull in enough cash to stay alive a few more months, by finding actual infringement on discovery, or just provoking a patent cross-licensing-and-balancing-cash deal to make the suit go away.
About a decade ago I was on the receiving end of such a suit: My project had done some chips that included some new SONET functionality. Nortel was getting desparate and went after everybody doing SONET, so my project (and a few others) were related. I got called in to advise the lawyers on how what we did was different from the claims. (It was - drastically.) I hear that one ended up in a "swap and we pay some cash" settlement.
This was the only time I recall actually being asked to look at another company's patent on what we were doing. Companies - at least in the US - try to keep their engineers from looking at other patents, because knowing you're infringing triple. So we get to reinvent various wheels rather than raise the risk. That means one of the claimed advantages of patents - releasing recipies for the neat technology to general use after the patents expire - is about as bogus as the ever-extended copyrights.
Maybe, some day, Congress will actually fix some of the real fucking problems we have, with having a pseudo, tech. intergrated Government. And maybe, Hell will actually freeze over!
I hear Hell already froze over - several decades ago.
It was a particularly cold snap during winter in Michigan, with sub-zero (farenheit) temperatures. The expanding ice blew out a small (millpond-ish) dam. The water under the ice rushed down the river and overflowed it, pouring down the main street of the little village of Hell, Michigan. It was several inches deep when it slowed enough that the extreme cold froze it solid.
Since then a lot of the stuff that was waiting for Hell to freeze over has been happeng. That explains the last several decades nicely, eh? B-)
Most of the claims aren't listed so it's hard to draw a conclusion.
And don't hold your breath waiting for them to be listed publicly, either.
If this is over trade secrets, the alleged trade secrets, if legitimate, will still be secret. So unless/until Facebook gets a judgement that the claims are bogus, the proceedings will be under seal.
Even if they ARE bogus it may not be in Facebook's interest to publish them, either. They might be little-known enough that exposing them to their competition might make the competitive environent tougher for Facebook.
So don't be surprised if the "secrets" and the details of the verdict or settlement remain under wraps.
... in the last election the powers of greed tried to elect someone who was neither conservative nor liberal but really a direct representative of the 1%. They spent 3 to 4 times as much money, made people stand in 4 hour lines to vote, maximally gerrymandered every district they could...
While your underlying perception is largely correct, your supporting argiments are not. You need to understand the system more if you want to be convincing,
Of particular note is bringing up gerrymandering. In virtually all the states the electoral college votes are chosen in a statewide, popular-vote, winner-take-all contest. Gerrymandering doesn't affect this at all. (Which is good for the Republicans, as the Democrats have been far more effective at it.)
As for spending: With the support of labor unions and the media empires, the Democrats get massive, uncounted, campaign subsidies, while the Republicans mostly have to pay for their own propaganda directly..
The big exception to that is Fox News: But IMHO they, and the party establishment, are what lost for the Rs the last time around. Fox was blatantly pure Neocon (the faction of Romney, the R establishment, and the 1%ers,) The primaries are where the parties' candidates are chosen. Fox's hilariously biased reporting and the R establishments massive (and often violent) cheating, alienated the supporters of Ron Paul, to the point that they would not support him - virtually to a man - and also alienated many Rs who observed this circus. Romney lost five states by margins smaller than the number of people who voted for Paul in primaries and caucuses. Had they not done this, Romney might still have won the nomination honestly, and received eJ.nough votes to swing those states.
So, yes, their money didn't buy them the election. But IMHO what really lost it was intra-party behavior so corrupt that major factions of the party's voters decided they could not be allowed to have control of the government's levers of power - even if the alternative was an exceptionally effective, avowedly-Communist, Chicago-Machine politician
It should be noted that:
- The Japanese, like the Germans, had their own nuclear weapons program in progress. (That was how they were able to recognize the nuclear bombs for what they were: Bombs were SOME of the possibilities they were pursuing.)
- While they thought nuclear-reaction bombs were hard but doable, they were actively working on the immanent bombardment of the West Coast of the Untied States with radiological weapons - "dirty bombs" spreading fatal levels of radioactive material. (Remember that much of the US war infrastructure, including nuclear laboratories such as Livermore and the Navy's Pacific fleet construction and supply lines, were on or very near the west coast. The prevailing winds are from the west and able to carry fallout blankets to them.)
- The primary reason for using TWO bombs, only a few days apart, was to create the impression that the US could keep this up. The Japanese had an idea that making the bombs took so much resource that the US could only have a very few. And they were right.
As I understand it went something like this: There was enough material for no more than two or three more, then there'd have been about a year of infrastructure construction and ramp-up, after which the US could have started with monthly bombs and worked up to weekly or so. If the US could have gotten to that point unmolested, Japan was doomed. But a LOT can happen over that time in a total war - and big projects can get hamstrung when the bulk of the industrial output and manpower has to be used to fight off conventional attacks meanwhile. The idea was to give the Japanese the impression the US was ALREADY that far along.
12 grand with the air conditinoer and some unspecified options that don't prevent it from being stacked up like coffee cups?
For only a couple grand more I purchased, new, an 19 foot travel trailer, with kitchen, (propane stove, micrwave, propane/electric refrigerator) beds for five (if one is a kid) and two are friendlly - six if two are infants), which double as a daytime couch and bedding storage cabinet, TV antenna and prewire, air conditioner, bathroom with enclosed shower, closet, white grey and black water storage for two days if everybody showers daily, a week if they conserve, all hookablel to water and sewer if available, air conditinoier and furnace, lots of gear storage, two nights of battery power (though the microwave and air conditioner need shore power - the furnace runs on the batteries/power conditioner), hitch, dual-axle with tires, awning, etc.
This looks like a very pricey, very heavy, hardshell tent - with some lights, cots, and a big-brother computer monitoring system.
But I bet agencies would love the monitoring system.
My first unix box was an Altos. Don't recall exactly when I got it but it finally died in the late '80s.
The thing burned something like a kilowatt. It also had a four-inch muffin fan - blowing outward. While this sucked dust in all the openings, it was convenient for heat scavenging, AND exhaust. The latter was important in my non-air-conditioned college-town house.
I got a couple 4" drier vents, some drier vent hose, and a heat-scavenging diverter valve (which were big that year - for electric driers only!). Took the flapper valve and rain shield off one of the drier vents, yeilding a fitting that I mounted on the pancae fan's four mounting screws. It coupled the airflow nicely into the drier vent hose, which was essentially exactly the diameter of the fan blade shroud. A few 2x4s mad a wooden insert that went into the window in place of the screen unit, with the other vent in the middle of it. Hooked the two together with the hose, with the diverter in the middle of it, and the third hose segment feeding the hot air register.
In the summer the space-heater's-worth of hot air went out the window instead of into the house. In the winter the hot air fed the furnace distributon, providing a base heat supply to the house with the furnace coming on to "top it off" to the desired temperature.
What makes anyone think mandatory voting would somehow fix thatWhat makes anyone think mandatory voting would somehow fix that?
In fact it would cause more problems that it purports to solve. In particular, it would greatly increase the incidence of violence in politics and, in particular, the likelyhood of civil war.
Elections aren't about being nice by doing what the majority prefer. Elections are about seeing how the civil war would come out, so you don't have to fight it. To do this they have to be a good enough MODEL of the war, and be run, if not squeay clean, at least honestly and transparently enough to convince the losers that, if they tried to reverse the result by violence, they'd lose THAT contest, too.
That means, among other things, that only people who care enough to fight should vote. Dragging in a bunch of people who could care less and are only voting because they're required to, dilutes the votes of those who care. If they also vote opposite to a group who care a lot and are percieved as a bunch of brainwashed non-threats, those people can easily convince themselves that they could win a war, make it stick, and are justified in fighting to reverse their oppression.
Voter fraud is when an actual voter votes multiple times or tries to vote as someone they are not.
Like the illegal alien who lived down the street from us, who showed my wife (whom he somehow thought would be sympathetic) the more-than-20 voter registration cards and bragged about how he went to a bunch of different polling places every election.
As opposed to election fraud, like the nonexistant guy who votes absentee and claims our house as his residence (whom we've been trying to get de-listed for at least four election cycles), the next-door neighbor who died of liver failure and is still voting absentee - despite her daughter taking the death certificate down to the registrar of voters, again on more than one election cycle, the several thousand "voters" who absentee voted from the same address in Berkeley,...
Both, of course, are greatly aided by the "motor-voter law", which makes it trivial for anyone with a social security number (real real or fake) to pick up a mail-in form - or a box of them ("I'm working at a voter registration drive") - at any of several sorts of government offices (such as the Secretary of State's). Register yourself (voter fraud) or register a bunch of fake people (election fraud). It's doubly easy if your state has just-check-the-box absentee voting: Mail in a BUNCH of them and vote a BUNCH of times. Industrial-strength election corruption.
That's why there was such a flap about Obama's move to have the DHS issue Social Security numbers to illegals. Sure it's illegal for them to actually vote. But that's enforced even less than the laws against them being here in the first place.
If you have to go to court against your employer to prove that all of the above are true (on your own dime), then you effectively don't really have any of those protections.
Why should you have to prove anything? Especially before you start?
You just file for your own patents, start your own company, and move on. If your idea turns out to be the foundation of a new industry or a disruptive game-changer on an existing one, and your (ex) employer is clueless, he might spend a bunch of HIS money to claim some of the proceeds once you're successful. Then you and your corporate lawyer get to watch the judge laugh him out of court - and maybe order him to pay YOU $ome buck$ on the way out.
Sure you might end up in court eventually. But that's the name of the game with patents on valuable ideas. All a patent IS is a license to sue.
Sigh. I should have read your post a little more before replying.
In general, in the absence of a prior agreement to the contrary, what you wrote is true in most states.
But we're talking in the PRESENCE of a prior agreement to the contrary:
- You hired on to do X, for Consolidated Widgets, a company that does X, Y, and Z and isn't interested in doing Q (any time soon).
- When you hired on, Con Widgets had you sign a patent assignment giving ALL your inventions to them.
- While still employed, you had a bright idea that's a major breakthrough for Q.
- You develop your idea on your own time with your own resources.
In California, YOU own the Q invention, regardless of what your contract with Con Widgets says. (Con Widgets still gets your inventions on X, Y, Z, and anything you worked on in their labs.) California EXPLICITLY VOIDS the patent assignment terms in the former case.
AFAIK, in every other state Con Widgets would own your Q breakthrough, too.
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Mr. Kennedy is not a credible source. You know that, right?
I'm not concerned with whether he's credible. I just responded to the question about where the 3 months bit was coming from. It's poor form to imply people are pulling it out of a dark orifice when it's right there in TFA.
Another thing though that no one else is bringing up; how much tax revenue have they given up for 10 years?
The "lost tax revenue" I could care even less about. Governments habitually operate at a higher tax rate than the peak of the Laffer Curve. (Raising taxes further brings in more in the short term, though it ends up costing more than it brought in later. That's why they go far past the peak rather than zeroing in on it and maximizing the amount they suck out of the people's pockets.) So, on the average, every million dollars they DON'T tax now is MORE than a million dollars they'll eventually get in taxes later, once the transient has worked itself out. It's also SEVERAL million dollars more that people will earn in "generating" that added tax.
What concerns me more is including the wages and jobs LOST thanks to taxing the people to get those millions to spend "promoting" the plan, when comparing it to the pay for the jobs "generated" by the plan.
So workstations on an airgapped network can never get software upgrades?
Or data to be processed?
It can do bursts of computation, memory access, or anything else that varies the amount you wiggle voltages or currents on wires in a way that emits radio waves. You can do it without even trying (which is one way some smartcards exposed private keys ...).
In the days of CRTs that applied especially well: Graphics output could modulate the beam and generate a LOT of radio. (Doing gray scales by making shifting fine patters would be an especially "in your face but you can't see it" approach.) A fast photocell could read it from the light, as well.
Preventing / shielding against things like this is what "Tempest" is about.
I recall, back in the late '60s / early '70s, when I was doing software on a machine at a classified site. It had a music program that worked by wiggling the lines on three console display lamps that were also connected, by three resistors (forming a cheap D2A converter) to a volume control T-pad and a loudspeaker. Turns out it also modulated the memory access and/or other signals - a lot. I had left it playing "moon river" overnight, drove up to the building, and heard it on my A.M. radio.
I realized it would have been trivial to exfiltrate a small amount of data, even on my starving student budget, by emulating an FSK modem and hooking a transistor radio to a battery-powered tape recorder (about the size of a briefcase in those days) left in the trunk of my car. (Not that I'd have needed to, since I could carry mag tapes in and out, but as a "white hat", how could it be done, exercise.)
The security guys figured that out, too. A bit later I got a ping from management: Some guys from Washington had also driven up, noticed the arcade-quality "music", and given them grief about it.
From TFA, as quoted in the story post:
Did you try actually reading it all before posting?
Wait a second -- this program has only been running for one quarter of a year? 76 jobs doesn't sound that bad, on such a short time frame.
Damn right!
It takes a substantial time to set up a company. (The startup I just helped start up took over five months before I was actually "employed" (and over 6 before the payroll was in place to pay me as an employee with a W2 rather than a consultant with a 1099).)
Three months and they ALREADY have 76 new jobs? It sounds like there are some bats exiting hell!
Come back in a year and see how many there are, and how fast more are being added.
And when counting the cost of the program versus the benefits of it, don't forget to take into account that investments provide their payback over time - so count those costs against the paybacks from several years.
Modern Li-ion batteries have a round-trip efficiency of about 85%.
And some of the high-power, super-fast-charge Li-* batteries coming into production have efficiencies in the high 90s.
They have to. One of the limits on the charging and discharging rate of the batteries is the inefficiency. That lost energy doesn't just disappear. It turns into HEAT, INSIDE the battery. If you can dump 3/4 of a high-capacity battery's capacity into it in a couple minutes, without melting it down or setting it on fire, it's because the battery didn't turn much of the energy into heat. (Ditto on pulling it back out quickly.) That means it went into chemical storage, rather than loss.
The next topic is "general warrant". One of the reason US revolution took place is because of unhappiness due to King George's general warrants, allowing to search everyone without reason. The outcome was 4th amendment which clearly defined that persons and their private life are untouchable, unless there is suspicion, affirmed by the government servant and approved by the judge.
Spying on the population was also a big driver behind the THIRD amendment:
While forcing the colonists to provide housing and upkeep for the soldiers sent to oppress them was an economic issue, there was more to it than that.
A soldier "quartered" in a colonist's house also served as a spy for the crown and its army. He eavesdropped on the conversations of the family and visiting friends. He had the opportunity to view their records when they weren't home (or even if they were). He reported anything suspicious to his unit. His presence inhibited getting together with others to hold private discussions, especially about opposing (by protest or otherwise) anything the government was doing. He was a continuous walking search, fed and housed by the people he was investigating.
It seems to me that law-enforcement and intelligence agency spyware, such as keyloggers and various data exfiltration tools, is EXACTLY the digital equivalent: It is a digital agent that "lives" in the home or office of the target. It consums the target's resources (disk space, CPU cycles network bandwidth) to support itself. It spies spying on the activities and "papers" of the target, reporting anything suspicious (or anything, actually) back to its commander, to be used as evidence and/or to trigger an arrest or other attack. It is ready, at a moment's notice, to forcefully interfere with, destroy, or corrupt the target's facilities or send forged messages from him.
Spyware is EXACTLY one of the most egregious acts (one of the "Intolerable Acts") that sparked the American Revolution. I'd love to see the Third brought back out of the doldrums and used against these "digital soldiers" the government is "quartering" inside our personal and private computing devices.
A multispectral data processing program I wrote back in my college days: Part of launching it was giving it the date the data was collected. This was sanity checked against the system clock. Dates like before the construction of the scanners we usually used had a reasonable error message, asking if you were sure and giving a chance to reenter.
The message for a data collection date later than the data processing date was: "WONKITY! [name of institute] processes TOMORROW'S data TODAY!"
This was a reference to an incident in a humorous science fiction novel: _Bill the Galactic Hero_. The protagonists are sneaking around and are discovered by a cleaning robot and challenged as security breaching interlopers. One of them "bashes the robot on the braincase with a spanner", causing it to say "WONKITY!" and stagger away, rather than reporting them to security.
= = = =
When I was working on a typesetting system for newspaper publication, I heroically refrained from having it very occasionally insert "fnord" into the text. (See _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ for the joke, which is FAR to complex to explain here.)
Yes, PLEASE.
Or you could look at it as your employees doing [long list]
Tell management it's a "watermark" to detect copied code. (It's obviously not an open-source project. B-) )
Seriously: Suppressing easter-egg hiding means the best programmers are likely to look for a happier shop and move on, leaving the anal manager with the cream skimmed off his pool of talent.
On the other hand, a professional programmer will not spend substantial time on such things.
(An easy way to do it without substantial cost is to build it initially as part of a scaffold or a test suite component - with the easter-eggyness being a way to make it obviously a side issue and not corrupt the mission-critical output. Then the incremental labor cost of building it in as an easter egg is small - or may even be negative, by not taking it OUT of the version to be shipped as the product. B-) )
If you want to beat a Democrat in California, you need a fiscal conservative who is socially somewhat liberal.
Sounds like the Liberty Wing, Libertarians, and the Tea Party.
Solar generation can be had, for reasonably sunny sites, for abut $/kW, which puts it ahead of grid. Wind, since the advent of neodymium permanent-magnet alternators in kWish sizes, is also becoming competitive (and a solar/wind combo tends to balance nicely against available load. Alternators are electronics and the Moore's Law improvements are also bringing them down (though the economy of scale isn't there, yet.)
The big missing piece has been a high-capacity, long-lived, low-toxicity energy storage system, to cover calm nights and other weather variations. (Thee days of storage, in halfway-decent renewable energy sites, means you only have to run the backup generator a couple times a year - which you have to do, anyhow, to keep it from rotting internally.)
So these battery improvements should be enabling for off-grid housing, as well.
Won't kill the grid, though. Because all these electric cars will need charging - at several times the consumption of a house. Even in the good sites, adding an electric car to the load bumps the generation's capital cost up again, big time. Win some, lose some.
Tell the people who lead the California Republican Party to pick candidates who are closer to the center.
They did. They still do. That's most of why they keep losing.
If they pick a "centerist" (alias "democrat lite") why would anybody on the right bother to vote?
Companies - at least in the US - try to keep their engineers from looking at other patents, because knowing you're infringing triples the damage awards.
I hate the keyboard and trackpad on this Toshiba Satellite S75. (It's just as bad as the ones on the Lenovo Z710, too.) Overly-wide, ultra-thin, chicklets, with no clearance for fingernails. Brush the trackpad while typing and half a sentence is highlighted and instantly overwritten by the next keystroke, making it disappear. Typos up the wazoo. In nearly a year I haven't been able to get used to these designs.
The vast majority of patent trolls are typically very small entities that like to sue BIG companies for one obvious reason: Big companies have deep pockets.
It's not just patent trolls.
When a big technology company is in trouble, one thing they may do to try to stay alive is go through their portfolio of patents and sue everybody doing anything related to them. This is in the hope that they can pull in enough cash to stay alive a few more months, by finding actual infringement on discovery, or just provoking a patent cross-licensing-and-balancing-cash deal to make the suit go away.
About a decade ago I was on the receiving end of such a suit: My project had done some chips that included some new SONET functionality. Nortel was getting desparate and went after everybody doing SONET, so my project (and a few others) were related. I got called in to advise the lawyers on how what we did was different from the claims. (It was - drastically.) I hear that one ended up in a "swap and we pay some cash" settlement.
This was the only time I recall actually being asked to look at another company's patent on what we were doing. Companies - at least in the US - try to keep their engineers from looking at other patents, because knowing you're infringing triple. So we get to reinvent various wheels rather than raise the risk. That means one of the claimed advantages of patents - releasing recipies for the neat technology to general use after the patents expire - is about as bogus as the ever-extended copyrights.
Maybe, some day, Congress will actually fix some of the real fucking problems we have, with having a pseudo, tech. intergrated Government. And maybe, Hell will actually freeze over!
I hear Hell already froze over - several decades ago.
It was a particularly cold snap during winter in Michigan, with sub-zero (farenheit) temperatures. The expanding ice blew out a small (millpond-ish) dam. The water under the ice rushed down the river and overflowed it, pouring down the main street of the little village of Hell, Michigan. It was several inches deep when it slowed enough that the extreme cold froze it solid.
Since then a lot of the stuff that was waiting for Hell to freeze over has been happeng. That explains the last several decades nicely, eh? B-)
Most of the claims aren't listed so it's hard to draw a conclusion.
And don't hold your breath waiting for them to be listed publicly, either.
If this is over trade secrets, the alleged trade secrets, if legitimate, will still be secret. So unless/until Facebook gets a judgement that the claims are bogus, the proceedings will be under seal.
Even if they ARE bogus it may not be in Facebook's interest to publish them, either. They might be little-known enough that exposing them to their competition might make the competitive environent tougher for Facebook.
So don't be surprised if the "secrets" and the details of the verdict or settlement remain under wraps.
... in the last election the powers of greed tried to elect someone who was neither conservative nor liberal but really a direct representative of the 1%. They spent 3 to 4 times as much money, made people stand in 4 hour lines to vote, maximally gerrymandered every district they could...
While your underlying perception is largely correct, your supporting argiments are not. You need to understand the system more if you want to be convincing,
Of particular note is bringing up gerrymandering. In virtually all the states the electoral college votes are chosen in a statewide, popular-vote, winner-take-all contest. Gerrymandering doesn't affect this at all. (Which is good for the Republicans, as the Democrats have been far more effective at it.)
As for spending: With the support of labor unions and the media empires, the Democrats get massive, uncounted, campaign subsidies, while the Republicans mostly have to pay for their own propaganda directly..
The big exception to that is Fox News: But IMHO they, and the party establishment, are what lost for the Rs the last time around. Fox was blatantly pure Neocon (the faction of Romney, the R establishment, and the 1%ers,) The primaries are where the parties' candidates are chosen. Fox's hilariously biased reporting and the R establishments massive (and often violent) cheating, alienated the supporters of Ron Paul, to the point that they would not support him - virtually to a man - and also alienated many Rs who observed this circus. Romney lost five states by margins smaller than the number of people who voted for Paul in primaries and caucuses. Had they not done this, Romney might still have won the nomination honestly, and received eJ.nough votes to swing those states.
So, yes, their money didn't buy them the election. But IMHO what really lost it was intra-party behavior so corrupt that major factions of the party's voters decided they could not be allowed to have control of the government's levers of power - even if the alternative was an exceptionally effective, avowedly-Communist, Chicago-Machine politician
No, the alternative was to wait.
It should be noted that:
- The Japanese, like the Germans, had their own nuclear weapons program in progress. (That was how they were able to recognize the nuclear bombs for what they were: Bombs were SOME of the possibilities they were pursuing.)
- While they thought nuclear-reaction bombs were hard but doable, they were actively working on the immanent bombardment of the West Coast of the Untied States with radiological weapons - "dirty bombs" spreading fatal levels of radioactive material. (Remember that much of the US war infrastructure, including nuclear laboratories such as Livermore and the Navy's Pacific fleet construction and supply lines, were on or very near the west coast. The prevailing winds are from the west and able to carry fallout blankets to them.)
- The primary reason for using TWO bombs, only a few days apart, was to create the impression that the US could keep this up. The Japanese had an idea that making the bombs took so much resource that the US could only have a very few. And they were right.
As I understand it went something like this: There was enough material for no more than two or three more, then there'd have been about a year of infrastructure construction and ramp-up, after which the US could have started with monthly bombs and worked up to weekly or so. If the US could have gotten to that point unmolested, Japan was doomed. But a LOT can happen over that time in a total war - and big projects can get hamstrung when the bulk of the industrial output and manpower has to be used to fight off conventional attacks meanwhile. The idea was to give the Japanese the impression the US was ALREADY that far along.
12 grand with the air conditinoer and some unspecified options that don't prevent it from being stacked up like coffee cups?
For only a couple grand more I purchased, new, an 19 foot travel trailer, with kitchen, (propane stove, micrwave, propane/electric refrigerator) beds for five (if one is a kid) and two are friendlly - six if two are infants), which double as a daytime couch and bedding storage cabinet, TV antenna and prewire, air conditioner, bathroom with enclosed shower, closet, white grey and black water storage for two days if everybody showers daily, a week if they conserve, all hookablel to water and sewer if available, air conditinoier and furnace, lots of gear storage, two nights of battery power (though the microwave and air conditioner need shore power - the furnace runs on the batteries/power conditioner), hitch, dual-axle with tires, awning, etc.
This looks like a very pricey, very heavy, hardshell tent - with some lights, cots, and a big-brother computer monitoring system.
But I bet agencies would love the monitoring system.
My first unix box was an Altos. Don't recall exactly when I got it but it finally died in the late '80s.
The thing burned something like a kilowatt. It also had a four-inch muffin fan - blowing outward. While this sucked dust in all the openings, it was convenient for heat scavenging, AND exhaust. The latter was important in my non-air-conditioned college-town house.
I got a couple 4" drier vents, some drier vent hose, and a heat-scavenging diverter valve (which were big that year - for electric driers only!). Took the flapper valve and rain shield off one of the drier vents, yeilding a fitting that I mounted on the pancae fan's four mounting screws. It coupled the airflow nicely into the drier vent hose, which was essentially exactly the diameter of the fan blade shroud. A few 2x4s mad a wooden insert that went into the window in place of the screen unit, with the other vent in the middle of it. Hooked the two together with the hose, with the diverter in the middle of it, and the third hose segment feeding the hot air register.
In the summer the space-heater's-worth of hot air went out the window instead of into the house. In the winter the hot air fed the furnace distributon, providing a base heat supply to the house with the furnace coming on to "top it off" to the desired temperature.
What makes anyone think mandatory voting would somehow fix thatWhat makes anyone think mandatory voting would somehow fix that?
In fact it would cause more problems that it purports to solve. In particular, it would greatly increase the incidence of violence in politics and, in particular, the likelyhood of civil war.
Elections aren't about being nice by doing what the majority prefer. Elections are about seeing how the civil war would come out, so you don't have to fight it. To do this they have to be a good enough MODEL of the war, and be run, if not squeay clean, at least honestly and transparently enough to convince the losers that, if they tried to reverse the result by violence, they'd lose THAT contest, too.
That means, among other things, that only people who care enough to fight should vote. Dragging in a bunch of people who could care less and are only voting because they're required to, dilutes the votes of those who care. If they also vote opposite to a group who care a lot and are percieved as a bunch of brainwashed non-threats, those people can easily convince themselves that they could win a war, make it stick, and are justified in fighting to reverse their oppression.
Voter fraud is when an actual voter votes multiple times or tries to vote as someone they are not.
Like the illegal alien who lived down the street from us, who showed my wife (whom he somehow thought would be sympathetic) the more-than-20 voter registration cards and bragged about how he went to a bunch of different polling places every election.
As opposed to election fraud, like the nonexistant guy who votes absentee and claims our house as his residence (whom we've been trying to get de-listed for at least four election cycles), the next-door neighbor who died of liver failure and is still voting absentee - despite her daughter taking the death certificate down to the registrar of voters, again on more than one election cycle, the several thousand "voters" who absentee voted from the same address in Berkeley, ...
Both, of course, are greatly aided by the "motor-voter law", which makes it trivial for anyone with a social security number (real real or fake) to pick up a mail-in form - or a box of them ("I'm working at a voter registration drive") - at any of several sorts of government offices (such as the Secretary of State's). Register yourself (voter fraud) or register a bunch of fake people (election fraud). It's doubly easy if your state has just-check-the-box absentee voting: Mail in a BUNCH of them and vote a BUNCH of times. Industrial-strength election corruption.
That's why there was such a flap about Obama's move to have the DHS issue Social Security numbers to illegals. Sure it's illegal for them to actually vote. But that's enforced even less than the laws against them being here in the first place.
If you have to go to court against your employer to prove that all of the above are true (on your own dime), then you effectively don't really have any of those protections.
Why should you have to prove anything? Especially before you start?
You just file for your own patents, start your own company, and move on. If your idea turns out to be the foundation of a new industry or a disruptive game-changer on an existing one, and your (ex) employer is clueless, he might spend a bunch of HIS money to claim some of the proceeds once you're successful. Then you and your corporate lawyer get to watch the judge laugh him out of court - and maybe order him to pay YOU $ome buck$ on the way out.
Sure you might end up in court eventually. But that's the name of the game with patents on valuable ideas. All a patent IS is a license to sue.
Sigh. I should have read your post a little more before replying.
In general, in the absence of a prior agreement to the contrary, what you wrote is true in most states.
But we're talking in the PRESENCE of a prior agreement to the contrary:
- You hired on to do X, for Consolidated Widgets, a company that does X, Y, and Z and isn't interested in doing Q (any time soon).
- When you hired on, Con Widgets had you sign a patent assignment giving ALL your inventions to them.
- While still employed, you had a bright idea that's a major breakthrough for Q.
- You develop your idea on your own time with your own resources.
In California, YOU own the Q invention, regardless of what your contract with Con Widgets says. (Con Widgets still gets your inventions on X, Y, Z, and anything you worked on in their labs.) California EXPLICITLY VOIDS the patent assignment terms in the former case.
AFAIK, in every other state Con Widgets would own your Q breakthrough, too.