Wikipedia is highly opinionated in the earlier paragraphs, and it sounds like the commentator is actually talking about the UK. As noted later, the person suing had to prove you said something defamatory (positive onus) and your defences are justification (the truth, same as the US), fair comment, responsible communication, privilege and innocent dissemination.
Besides financial issues, there are ownership problams and legal penalties to worry about.
it's perfectly plausible that at least the Irish courts will find that Microsoft doesn't own the customer's data, but merely controls it. Under that interpretation, they have a legal responsibility to protect it. In US judgements thus far, they're the owners and can use it for anything they feel like, but can also be ordered by a court to produce it.
They really want the US courts to say they don't have to produce it because it belongs to Ireland in some way. They definitely don't want the US courts to say they are holding customer's data and have limitations on what they can use it for.
Conflict of laws is a fun problem for a lawyer, and can produce lots of billable hours. It's much less fun for a client, and double-plus ungood for an importer, exporter or multinational. It's perfectly possible for a client to be required by law to do two contradictory things in two different countries while they wait for the courts to sort it out, and be fined by either or both courts for every day they obey the other.
My place has enough money, but we don't see as many good people as we did a few months back. At the same time, I have colleagues with other skill-sets that can't even get an interview... There's a definite disconnect in here somewhere
Convert your metrics into time units so you can say something like "I need 6 CPU/S per 100 users at nor more that 80% utilization" . The math is less weird than trying to work in percentages of something you're going to replace with a CPU that's 12% faster (;-))
They'll do the spreadsheet calculation for you, if you're proposing something mildly profitable. Don't expect to get a copy of the spreadsheet, the salespeople think it high-tech (;-))
I used to work for the (late, lamented) Sun Microsystems, and when we needed to give a credible answer to a price-sensitive customer, we used Teamquest Model. It pulls time-based info out of production-systems stats, so it doesn't add to the load, and then off-line does a classic queuing-system model of the system, working all in time units. That then allows the customer (really meaning me!) to ask what to expect from some specific configuration, and compare different systems for their price-performance tradeoffs.
For common setups, we have spreadsheets based on what Model said, so the salespeople typically don't know there's a cool mathematical model behind the scenes (;-)) That's probably true of other vendors who use TQ models: it runs on anything modern, so lots of vendors use it.
I have nothing to do with the company: they just allowed me to save $1.2 million once for a new datacenter, so I'm really really impressed by them.
Hi, I'm an enraged customer, I'd like to speak to your escalations manager.
It helps to say that in the kindest possible tone, too.
"Escalation manager" is the normal term for someone who talks to "enraged customers". It may or may not be what your ISP uses, but the two phrases in the same sentence tend to get you to the right manager.
--dave
Did escalations for a while at Sun, some of the problems were real fun. Others weren't.
Imagine if a company in Virginia had, in their terms and conditions, a line prohibiting a citizen of Massachusetts from purchasing their product or service? One requiring they buy it from a specified licencee in Mass?
Can you say "criminal conspiracy in restraint of trade" ?
This scheme will work for one branch in Lesser Nowhere, Sechwan Province, with a finite and small set of pictures, and a small number of crooks. Once the number of faces increases, the probability of a false positive explodes, roughly as (N 2) (select every two out of N), where N is the size of the pools of pictures + the person being scanned.
The well-known example is the "birthday paradox", in which twenty-three people at a party increases the probability of two of them having the same birthday to fifty-fifty. That particular case was because the actual probability was multiplied by (25 2) = 25! / ((25-2)! * 2!) = 6900 comparisons being made, times 1/365 chances of a hit.
The German federal security service considered using one of my then employer's recognizers for airports to catch terrorists, but ended up facing the problem of accusing grandma of being part of the Bader-Meinhoff gang (;-)) No matter how accurate we were, a few more people in the pool would give us false positives. We'd need roughly an accuracy of 99.9 followed by roughly as many decimal places of 9s as there were powers of ten of people.
A sister company did recruiting, and a then colleague said "I asked for a MVS and Unix person in a particular state with experience in a package", and got hundreds of names, none of whom knew all those things". The didn't know the difference between "and" (3 candidates) and "or" (3000 unqualified candidates). I still get requests for things I only ever did once, with co-requisites of things I've never done...
Methinks DAB is going to need to market itself to phone vendors, to go along with it's sucking in governments, or it might not succeed in forcing everyone to buy a new radio (;-))
I think you'll find that electricity won't flow out of the solar supplier if the voltage in the line is at 120v, as there's nowhere with a lower voltage for it to flow to. Anyone who draws current from the system creates a region of lower voltage, and current flows toward them until the voltage is the same everywhere. Think of it electricity as being rather like water in a sealed watertower: no more flows in if it's full, plenty flows out if someone lowers the pressure by opening a tap.
Therefor the spike from all the solar installations just offers more power. If no one takes it, current doesn't flow, the solar folks' ammeters don't budge and they don't get paid by the power distribution company. If somebody turns on a light, current flows, and some supplier's ammeter moves, usually a supplier close to the lightbulb. Ditto the consumer's ammeter, what we call the "electric meter"
To connect a power source to the grid, there has to be a cutoff that disconnects it when the grid voltage drops to zero due to, for example, a tree falling and shorting it to ground. If there isn't a cutoff
- the grid sucks all your power and probably blows your fuses and/or rectifier diodes, and
- the hydro guy who expects to be handing a dead line suddenly has it jump to 110 or 220V, the instant he lifts it off ground.
Linemen don't like becoming part of the circuits, so they successfully called for the disconnect-if-zero laws.
Power companies (at least in Canada and large parts of the world) already have equipment to deal with the fact that the power can flow both ways.
In fact, claiming they don't have equipment is only true IFF the power companies are the ones who like electrocuting their employees (;-))
Obstruction of justice is typically things like bribing witnesses, which is specifically mentioned in the law. Not refusing to unlock oa locked cell-phone, which the courts have held requires a warrant in other circumstances.
From the information in the article, this sounds like an attempt to scare a citizen into doing something.
Attempts to widen this particular law to cover less serious crimes get rejected by the courts: the very first case on the subject inCanII says (emphasis added)
[19] Moreover, an assertion that the mere attempt by an accused to identify an informant is a crime, fails to take into account that the types of conduct which constitute obstruction of justice, even though not fully articulated in the Criminal Code, are relatively well and narrowly defined in the law, and must remain so narrowly defined in order to have certainty in the law. Offences against the administration of justice have always included such conduct as attempting to influence a jury or to threaten a witness, or publishing sensitive information when a matter is working its way through the justice system, a general category of conduct which lawyers sometimes call an infraction of the sub judice rule. I have been unable to find a single suggestion anywhere in the law that an accused cannot take steps to identify a police informant; the court should act with restraint in opening new classes of obstruction of justice. Although obstruction of justice is an evolving concept, its main tendency is to narrow the categories of conduct which may constitute a crime rather than to enlarge them: Sunday Times. Recent examples of the narrowing of the categories include the removal of scandalizing the court as a matter of contempt, Kopyto, and the striking down of the publication ban on bail hearings, White.
Only on-disk, non-addressable controller proms are "read" by the software in the proms.
The boot prom has to boot stuff or the product can't be sold, and in this case is used to boot a program that runs on the hardware that continuously reads the prom. That HW can verify it, and all the other proms which are reachable from the CPU, including all sorts of stuff plugged into the various busses. That includes some disks, the ones we were worried about viruses wiping.
For some specific disks, you may have to pull the drive and clamp directly to the prom's pins.Those are the ones a spy would want to subvert.
Boot from a randomly chosen Linux rescue disk, and check the various proms. You've used the boot rom to boot a CD/DVD, but what you've booted is wildly different from the Windows systems that are the common target, so the attackers will have great difficulty in hiding what they've done from an unfamiliar system.
It's actually easier to hide evil stuff in disk proms, as your only access to them is via routines *in* the disk prom, as one of the other commentators pointed out,
We always had that on old Suns, as you could easily brick entire systems by running a bad update. When disks started showing up with downloaded firmware, we were surprised that viruses *didn't* start bricking them with cat/dev/nul | xg_config --some-options
Slashdot Mirror
s/endocrine/enforceable/
Wikipedia is highly opinionated in the earlier paragraphs, and it sounds like the commentator is actually talking about the UK. As noted later, the person suing had to prove you said something defamatory (positive onus) and your defences are justification (the truth, same as the US), fair comment, responsible communication, privilege and innocent dissemination.
Trust CanLII over Wikipedia (;-))
--dave
Besides financial issues, there are ownership problams and legal penalties to worry about.
it's perfectly plausible that at least the Irish courts will find that Microsoft doesn't own the customer's data, but merely controls it. Under that interpretation, they have a legal responsibility to protect it. In US judgements thus far, they're the owners and can use it for anything they feel like, but can also be ordered by a court to produce it.
They really want the US courts to say they don't have to produce it because it belongs to Ireland in some way. They definitely don't want the US courts to say they are holding customer's data and have limitations on what they can use it for.
Conflict of laws is a fun problem for a lawyer, and can produce lots of billable hours. It's much less fun for a client, and double-plus ungood for an importer, exporter or multinational. It's perfectly possible for a client to be required by law to do two contradictory things in two different countries while they wait for the courts to sort it out, and be fined by either or both courts for every day they obey the other.
--dave
My place has enough money, but we don't see as many good people as we did a few months back. At the same time, I have colleagues with other skill-sets that can't even get an interview... There's a definite disconnect in here somewhere
Convert your metrics into time units so you can say something like "I need 6 CPU/S per 100 users at nor more that 80% utilization" . The math is less weird than trying to work in percentages of something you're going to replace with a CPU that's 12% faster (;-))
They'll do the spreadsheet calculation for you, if you're proposing something mildly profitable. Don't expect to get a copy of the spreadsheet, the salespeople think it high-tech (;-))
It was a customer's center so I'm being vague, but it was more than 10%
I used to work for the (late, lamented) Sun Microsystems, and when we needed to give a credible answer to a price-sensitive customer, we used Teamquest Model. It pulls time-based info out of production-systems stats, so it doesn't add to the load, and then off-line does a classic queuing-system model of the system, working all in time units. That then allows the customer (really meaning me!) to ask what to expect from some specific configuration, and compare different systems for their price-performance tradeoffs.
For common setups, we have spreadsheets based on what Model said, so the salespeople typically don't know there's a cool mathematical model behind the scenes (;-)) That's probably true of other vendors who use TQ models: it runs on anything modern, so lots of vendors use it.
I have nothing to do with the company: they just allowed me to save $1.2 million once for a new datacenter, so I'm really really impressed by them.
--dave
Hi, I'm an enraged customer, I'd like to speak to your escalations manager.
It helps to say that in the kindest possible tone, too.
"Escalation manager" is the normal term for someone who talks to "enraged customers". It may or may not be what your ISP uses, but the two phrases in the same sentence tend to get you to the right manager.
--dave
Did escalations for a while at Sun, some of the problems were real fun. Others weren't.
Region lockouts are a restraint on trade. If they were enforced within the US, they'd be an illegal one.
Imagine if a company in Virginia had, in their terms and conditions, a line prohibiting a citizen of Massachusetts from purchasing their product or service? One requiring they buy it from a specified licencee in Mass?
Can you say "criminal conspiracy in restraint of trade" ?
Yes, my thanks to you and the AC who caught that!
This scheme will work for one branch in Lesser Nowhere, Sechwan Province, with a finite and small set of pictures, and a small number of crooks. Once the number of faces increases, the probability of a false positive explodes, roughly as (N 2) (select every two out of N), where N is the size of the pools of pictures + the person being scanned.
The well-known example is the "birthday paradox", in which twenty-three people at a party increases the probability of two of them having the same birthday to fifty-fifty. That particular case was because the actual probability was multiplied by (25 2) = 25! / ((25-2)! * 2!) = 6900 comparisons being made, times 1/365 chances of a hit.
The German federal security service considered using one of my then employer's recognizers for airports to catch terrorists, but ended up facing the problem of accusing grandma of being part of the Bader-Meinhoff gang (;-)) No matter how accurate we were, a few more people in the pool would give us false positives. We'd need roughly an accuracy of 99.9 followed by roughly as many decimal places of 9s as there were powers of ten of people.
--dave
A sister company did recruiting, and a then colleague said "I asked for a MVS and Unix person in a particular state with experience in a package", and got hundreds of names, none of whom knew all those things". The didn't know the difference between "and" (3 candidates) and "or" (3000 unqualified candidates). I still get requests for things I only ever did once, with co-requisites of things I've never done...
Methinks DAB is going to need to market itself to phone vendors, to go along with it's sucking in governments, or it might not succeed in forcing everyone to buy a new radio (;-))
I think you'll find that electricity won't flow out of the solar supplier if the voltage in the line is at 120v, as there's nowhere with a lower voltage for it to flow to. Anyone who draws current from the system creates a region of lower voltage, and current flows toward them until the voltage is the same everywhere. Think of it electricity as being rather like water in a sealed watertower: no more flows in if it's full, plenty flows out if someone lowers the pressure by opening a tap.
Therefor the spike from all the solar installations just offers more power. If no one takes it, current doesn't flow, the solar folks' ammeters don't budge and they don't get paid by the power distribution company. If somebody turns on a light, current flows, and some supplier's ammeter moves, usually a supplier close to the lightbulb. Ditto the consumer's ammeter, what we call the "electric meter"
Linemen don't like becoming part of the circuits, so they successfully called for the disconnect-if-zero laws.
Power companies (at least in Canada and large parts of the world) already have equipment to deal with the fact that the power can flow both ways. In fact, claiming they don't have equipment is only true IFF the power companies are the ones who like electrocuting their employees (;-))
The stations are going to stay, just the protocol will change. Almost a perfect contradiction to the headlines (;-))
Many stations have emergency generators, as people use radio to get information during natural disasters (;-))
Which is sort of the *opposite* of open anything (;-))
Obstruction of justice is typically things like bribing witnesses, which is specifically mentioned in the law. Not refusing to unlock oa locked cell-phone, which the courts have held requires a warrant in other circumstances.
From the information in the article, this sounds like an attempt to scare a citizen into doing something.
Attempts to widen this particular law to cover less serious crimes get rejected by the courts: the very first case on the subject inCanII says (emphasis added)
[19] Moreover, an assertion that the mere attempt by an accused to identify an informant is a crime, fails to take into account that the types of conduct which constitute obstruction of justice, even though not fully articulated in the Criminal Code, are relatively well and narrowly defined in the law, and must remain so narrowly defined in order to have certainty in the law. Offences against the administration of justice have always included such conduct as attempting to influence a jury or to threaten a witness, or publishing sensitive information when a matter is working its way through the justice system, a general category of conduct which lawyers sometimes call an infraction of the sub judice rule. I have been unable to find a single suggestion anywhere in the law that an accused cannot take steps to identify a police informant; the court should act with restraint in opening new classes of obstruction of justice. Although obstruction of justice is an evolving concept, its main tendency is to narrow the categories of conduct which may constitute a crime rather than to enlarge them: Sunday Times. Recent examples of the narrowing of the categories include the removal of scandalizing the court as a matter of contempt, Kopyto, and the striking down of the publication ban on bail hearings, White.
Only on-disk, non-addressable controller proms are "read" by the software in the proms.
The boot prom has to boot stuff or the product can't be sold, and in this case is used to boot a program that runs on the hardware that continuously reads the prom. That HW can verify it, and all the other proms which are reachable from the CPU, including all sorts of stuff plugged into the various busses. That includes some disks, the ones we were worried about viruses wiping.
For some specific disks, you may have to pull the drive and clamp directly to the prom's pins.Those are the ones a spy would want to subvert.
Boot from a randomly chosen Linux rescue disk, and check the various proms. You've used the boot rom to boot a CD/DVD, but what you've booted is wildly different from the Windows systems that are the common target, so the attackers will have great difficulty in hiding what they've done from an unfamiliar system.
It's actually easier to hide evil stuff in disk proms, as your only access to them is via routines *in* the disk prom, as one of the other commentators pointed out,
We always had that on old Suns, as you could easily brick entire systems by running a bad update. When disks started showing up with downloaded firmware, we were surprised that viruses *didn't* start bricking them with cat /dev/nul | xg_config --some-options
[Belatedly: it was a paraphrase of what he said, as translated to English by his biographer --dave]