I read their FAQ. It's pretty obvious to me that CARB is going to break or at least substantially degrade E911 service:
Will my GPS still work?
for aftermarket GPS devices, deletion windows, or areas without reflective coatings, will be created in the windshield and the location of these windows noted in the owner's manual. ARB tests showed that placing the GPS device or the external antenna within the deletion window allows the device to operate as effectively as in a car with no reflective glass.
Will E911 service on my cell phone be compromised by reflective glass?
E911 uses a combination of cell phone and GPS technology to direct emergency personnel to your location. Although ARB staff did not test E911 technology directly, cell phone and GPS navigation technology were tested separately and found to work in vehicles with reflective glass. As a result, staff does not expect E911 to be adversely affected by the Cool Cars regulation.
So, E911 will work if I hold my phone up to the deletion window? That sounds great for emergency situations, say after a car crash. After an accident people are in shock so they are not going to think about holding their phone up to a deletion window so 911 knows where they are, that is if they are even able.
Is it too much to ask that CARB actually test E911? They tested cell phone use on one vehicle with wrap around reflective glass so it is absurd to say the know the impact of reflective glass on vehicles since there are many types of vehicles they did not test.
CARB should be be sued in federal court for interfering with FCC mandates for E911.
Anyone remember AOL Time Warner? which is now in the process of being undone....
Content and pipes are fundamentally different businesses. In a content business, there's no monopoly position to use to increase profits year after year. Content providers have to continually produce content people want to see as opposed to providing mediocre service and raising prices every year. If Comcast does this, it will be a disaster.
When you take a picture of a non-public figure on private property without consent where the subject matter is primarily that person, you do not have full exclusive rights to that photograph -- it is not "yours" in the legal or moral sense.
You've undermined your own argument. Since you are correct that such photographs can not be used for commercial purposes regardless of whether the they are taken on private or public property, draconian usurpation of copyrights is not necessary.
This is a perfect example of how security nuts make life difficult even for people in positions of tremendous power. He's the head of the government. Logically, Obama should just be able to say, "I'm keeping my Blackberry" and have his staff figure out how comply to with records retention, etc. It's not that hard.
That Obama doesn't automatically win this one as the most powerful man is world makes me feel better about the continually hassles I'm forced to put up with by the IT department in name of "security.
While not everyone's idea of fun, math skills can be put to good use in quantitative finance and it can be extremely lucrative. The sector has melted down for the moment but it will recover.
To expand on the treble damages issue: The reason to have your legal counsel search is what the legal counsel finds out is protected by attorney / client confidentiality. Development teams should not search for or discuss patents outside of privileged discussions with counsel.
Get the corporate legal counsel involved. If your firm is large enough to have an in-house attorney, this is really easy to do. Just tell your boss that there are certain legal risks to the company from scraping and you are going to talk to the corporate counsel to make sure your doing it the right way.
If you work for a large company, it's highly unlikely anyone objects to asking legal. Large companies are very CYA and no manager wants a paper / email trail where an employee said maybe we should ask legal for guidance and the manager said not to do it. Smaller companies there can be more resistance because they have less of legal/regulatory compliance mindset. If you frame the issue as you need to protect the company from liability, it's harder for your boss to object.
If the attorneys say 'ok' and you still have ethical issue with it, then you have to decide whether you want to work there.
The law prohibiting non-compete agreements is one of California's primary economic advantages. It's absolute lunacy for states to allow these contracts.
If an employee quits his or her job and can provide the better product or service, it's in the state's interest to allow it. Otherwise, someone somewhere else will do it, probably in another state or an other country which is bad for the state's economy and tax base.
Protecting corporate interests usually just makes the corporation fat, lazy, and uncompetitive. Eventually it gets demolished by the competition anyway. Better to let the process the happen quickly, especially when the new competitor opens up shop right down the street.
Banks and retailers should treat anything with the remotest possibility of leakage of customer data a must fix problem, and this means IT security should get done, regardless of cost.
That statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of probability. There is no piece of information where probability of it leaking is zero, even the US military's most closely guarded secrets. Security measures can push the probability close to zero but it's not possible to get here. There's always some compromise one can't imagine or even the simpler problem that someone trusted will betray you.
Claiming there must be "no possibility" is what leads to bad decision making. Rather than analyzing risks people are forced to falsely declare them non-existent.
One the problems with question is that there is no mention of what is at stake if this breach occurs.
Is it national security?
Is somebody going to die or come to serious harm?
Or is it more mundane? Maybe some future business ideas will leak out and diminish their value. There's a whole spectrum of possibilities and the mundane once ought to be decided on cost.
After all the most secure computer is one that's kept in a locked, guarded room with no network connections what so ever. It's just not a very productive setup.
Ask yourself whether your "internal findings" are really representative or just attempt to CYA in case there is a problem. Coming at this problem from the side of someone whose job it is to get things done rather create objections, I frequently see security people asking for extremely expensive security "enhancements" that provide marginal if any value.
All business decisions should be made on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. Most staff positions including security usually do a poor job of assessing either side and instead focus on potential risks without quantifying them. Just because security would be better by doing X, does not mean X is good idea. If X is really expensive and your competitors do not it, your firm is now at a cost disadvantage which depending on the industry can be catastrophic.
I really have no way of knowing whether actions you are talking about really negative expected value actions or not in the sense that over a long period the risks involved will be realized and the damage will be far greater than the cost of taking preventative action. However, changing ratings is troublesome. A much better process is a well defined override or exception procedure. The business should understand what they are doing. A rigid system that says we can not do anything rated 'Y' even if there is 100M at stake will only result in the rating be changed.
There's a market for light and cheap. To high income people, $400-$500 is practically disposable. You can spend that much on an iPod touch. It's not a big deal to break it or lose it because it's not expensive.
If all you want is email or web access, a cheap ultra portable like an ASUS eee is a perfect match.
Comparing these devices to full sized laptops misses the point.
The record labels are just a bunch of whiners. They grew accustom to fat margins stemming from power over the distribution channel. Their pricing doesn't work for Walmart's value proposition but like always they blame their customers, in the case the next one in the value chain, the retailer. Blaming the customer is their favorite tactic. They blame the end customer for piracy.
The record labels will die before they realize their business model longer works. Nobody wants pay $15.99 and no amount of wishing by record company execs will make that different.
I don't care whether DST uses or saves energy. I don't like to get up early in the morning so sunlight early is useless to me. I'd much rather have it be light when I go home.
If you are getting up before the sun comes up, it's a sign you are getting up too early. The only time a geek should see the sun rise is after pulling an all-nighter.
From the AP article: Doing something as simple as keeping a spare battery in its original retail packaging or a plastic zip-lock bag will prevent unintentional short-circuiting and fires," Krista Edwards, deputy administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said in a release.
Not surprisingly this TSA rule makes no sense. Any battery can short not just lithium ones. I'm not battery expert but I would think and shorted battery could start a hold fire especially when it's packed with a bunch of clothes in the a suitcase. Regardless, this risk doesn't seem to be serious as millions of people fly everyday and I don't think there was ever been a plane brought down by a battery fire.
Hold fires are dangerous and worth preventing but this is just stupid. Automated fire suppression in the hold would be much more effective but I'm sure the airline lobbyists will continue to kill that idea.
The carry-on limits don't make much sense either. I don't see how a single passenger having one or ten batteries is going to make an difference especially since most of the fires that I read about are from batteries in devices. I guess regulating electronics producers so that their products don't randomly catch fire is too much trouble so it's easier and I guess more fun for the TSA to make up some useless regulation to torment the flying public with.
Most employees are remarkable at aligning their effort with the incentives in their environment. The problem for management is that the employees align themselves with the actual incentives not empty platitudes about how quality is important.
In the software development environments I've worked in management values schedule predictability and turning around projects fast. Management does not care about or even evaluate code quality or long run productivity. They would rather have a short development phase and blow huge amounts of time and effort in maintenance. Lower levels of management might know that sloppy coding has long run consequence but they are incentivized to get releases out quickl. Upper management rarely if ever has any understanding of software development even in companies that exclusively develop software so they don't know any better.
Over time, a project that started with 5 people now has 3-4x times as many people who can't seem get anything done. Changing anything seems to result a cascade of bugs.
The solution would be measure productivity over the life of system but in most environments are way too short term focused for that.
"They can't stick with this model with the weighted costs that they have," said Mike McGuire, vice president of research at Gartner, an industry research group.
Like most businesses, the music labels costs grew in proportion to their revenues. Revenues are declining and now labels have the difficult challenge of adapting. Though I think they have a bigger problem than the Gartner analyst does. I don't understand what purpose they serve. They used to be a critical part of the distribution chain since was extremely difficult for independent artists to get CD shelf space and radio air play in the pre-Internet world. If iTunes and internet radio, arists don't need the labels anymore. Labels keep a huge share of money from music sales with artists getting very little. Since the labels don't control distribution any more, the artists are better off without them.
Airlines tend to have to poor profitability because they offer an undifferentiated product with many substitutes (driving, WebEx, etc) and compete on price. Previously "innovations" like yield management and overbooking were supposed increase profitability as well. What happens though is that all the competitors adopt the "innovation", the base fare falls and the profitability is unchanged.
Charging for priority luggage delivery does not overcome the basic problem that for most consumers one flight is as good as other and legacy carriers like United are locked into higher cost structures than upstarts like Southwest, Jet Blue or Virgin America.
The hypocrisy of our government and corporate America is astounding. We hear constant cries about how all forms of non-economic damages from pain and suffering to punitive damages are ruining America and making it hard to do business. One of the jurors is "sending a message" to music pirates. I wonder if this same juror is for "tort reform" which would prevent jurors from sending manufactures of knowingly sell effective products that kill people a message. But when it comes to music piracy, 9000 times economic damages is some how appropriate. I wish I could get 9000x economic damages every time someone harmed me. Maybe if I hire some lobbyists, I can get Congress to help me out on this one.
they'd stick to guns on the CableCARD mandate and shut down cable systems that were not compatible with 3rd party devices. With a credible shutdown threat looming, this problem would get fixed in less than a month. I know it will never happen due to the huge campaign contributions politicians get from cable companies.
I'm not convinced the cable companies are doing themselves an favors. I'm unlikely to upgrade from my old analog cable if can't have an HD Tivo. Cable companies seem to think HD is a form of crack people cann't live without but I'm doing just fine on analog.
Every male Swiss citizen has mandatory military service and the assault rifle is there because after active duty, all male Swiss citizens below a certain age are part of the military reserves. It's disingenuous or ignorant to compare Switzerland with US gun ownership since any untrained idiot can buy a firearm in the US.
It's not surprising Swiss crime rates are low. They are a regimented society that value order among all else. Swiss citizens do not have civil liberties. Crime is usually low in police states.
External occupiers generally lose when fighting nationalist forces. The main reason for this is that the occupier powers always have the option of leaving and the nationalists don't. The occupier generally wants something (resources, a buffer zone, etc) and the local nationalists forces can frustrate them from getting it. The occupier gives us and goes home.
I can't think of any home-grown fascist movements that have been stopped by unorganized citizens with fire arms. By the time you'd get around to fighting the fascists with weapons, they'd already have control of the government and have disappeared any citizens likely to cause them trouble. Not to mention that'd have whipped the nation into a faux patriotic frenzy claiming those who resist their security measures are pro-terrorist or some such non-sense. Your neighbors would be informing on you. The exact opposite happens in the conflicts against external powers where the average citizen helps the resistance not the occupiers.
That's the dumbest thing I've heard all week and I've been reading lame excuses from hedge funds about why they lost so much of their investors money in the subprime meltdown. You can not oppose a government that has tanks, F16s, and nuclear weapon by force. I know there is pro-gun culture in America that believes doing so is possible but this belief is patently silly when one considers the kind of weaponry the government has access to and the kind of weaponry you have access to.
If you really believe there is no difference between the parties and don't want to live under a police state, I think your only option is to leave the country. The Bush administration clear wants a police state and if Democrats want one too, there's going to be no stopping it.
Today's NYT certainly makes it look it Congressional Democrats were pwned by the Bush administration over the FISA changes. Pretty stupid to use a bill drafted by the Bush administration but there's a long way from getting pwned to endorsing a police state.
The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver's licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system by May 2008.
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I read their FAQ. It's pretty obvious to me that CARB is going to break or at least substantially degrade E911 service:
Will my GPS still work?
for aftermarket GPS devices, deletion windows, or areas without reflective coatings, will be created in the windshield and the location of these windows noted in the owner's manual. ARB tests showed that placing the GPS device or the external antenna within the deletion window allows the device to operate as effectively as in a car with no reflective glass.
Will E911 service on my cell phone be compromised by reflective glass?
E911 uses a combination of cell phone and GPS technology to direct emergency personnel to your location. Although ARB staff did not test E911 technology directly, cell phone and GPS navigation technology were tested separately and found to work in vehicles with reflective glass. As a result, staff does not expect E911 to be adversely affected by the Cool Cars regulation.
So, E911 will work if I hold my phone up to the deletion window? That sounds great for emergency situations, say after a car crash. After an accident people are in shock so they are not going to think about holding their phone up to a deletion window so 911 knows where they are, that is if they are even able.
Is it too much to ask that CARB actually test E911? They tested cell phone use on one vehicle with wrap around reflective glass so it is absurd to say the know the impact of reflective glass on vehicles since there are many types of vehicles they did not test.
CARB should be be sued in federal court for interfering with FCC mandates for E911.
Anyone remember AOL Time Warner? which is now in the process of being undone....
Content and pipes are fundamentally different businesses. In a content business, there's no monopoly position to use to increase profits year after year. Content providers have to continually produce content people want to see as opposed to providing mediocre service and raising prices every year. If Comcast does this, it will be a disaster.
When you take a picture of a non-public figure on private property without consent where the subject matter is primarily that person, you do not have full exclusive rights to that photograph -- it is not "yours" in the legal or moral sense.
You've undermined your own argument. Since you are correct that such photographs can not be used for commercial purposes regardless of whether the they are taken on private or public property, draconian usurpation of copyrights is not necessary.
This is a perfect example of how security nuts make life difficult even for people in positions of tremendous power. He's the head of the government. Logically, Obama should just be able to say, "I'm keeping my Blackberry" and have his staff figure out how comply to with records retention, etc. It's not that hard.
That Obama doesn't automatically win this one as the most powerful man is world makes me feel better about the continually hassles I'm forced to put up with by the IT department in name of "security.
While not everyone's idea of fun, math skills can be put to good use in quantitative finance and it can be extremely lucrative. The sector has melted down for the moment but it will recover.
To expand on the treble damages issue: The reason to have your legal counsel search is what the legal counsel finds out is protected by attorney / client confidentiality. Development teams should not search for or discuss patents outside of privileged discussions with counsel.
Get the corporate legal counsel involved. If your firm is large enough to have an in-house attorney, this is really easy to do. Just tell your boss that there are certain legal risks to the company from scraping and you are going to talk to the corporate counsel to make sure your doing it the right way.
If you work for a large company, it's highly unlikely anyone objects to asking legal. Large companies are very CYA and no manager wants a paper / email trail where an employee said maybe we should ask legal for guidance and the manager said not to do it. Smaller companies there can be more resistance because they have less of legal/regulatory compliance mindset. If you frame the issue as you need to protect the company from liability, it's harder for your boss to object.
If the attorneys say 'ok' and you still have ethical issue with it, then you have to decide whether you want to work there.
The law prohibiting non-compete agreements is one of California's primary economic advantages. It's absolute lunacy for states to allow these contracts.
If an employee quits his or her job and can provide the better product or service, it's in the state's interest to allow it. Otherwise, someone somewhere else will do it, probably in another state or an other country which is bad for the state's economy and tax base.
Protecting corporate interests usually just makes the corporation fat, lazy, and uncompetitive. Eventually it gets demolished by the competition anyway. Better to let the process the happen quickly, especially when the new competitor opens up shop right down the street.
Banks and retailers should treat anything with the remotest possibility of leakage of customer data a must fix problem, and this means IT security should get done, regardless of cost.
That statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of probability. There is no piece of information where probability of it leaking is zero, even the US military's most closely guarded secrets. Security measures can push the probability close to zero but it's not possible to get here. There's always some compromise one can't imagine or even the simpler problem that someone trusted will betray you.
Claiming there must be "no possibility" is what leads to bad decision making. Rather than analyzing risks people are forced to falsely declare them non-existent.
One the problems with question is that there is no mention of what is at stake if this breach occurs.
Is it national security?
Is somebody going to die or come to serious harm?
Or is it more mundane? Maybe some future business ideas will leak out and diminish their value. There's a whole spectrum of possibilities and the mundane once ought to be decided on cost.
After all the most secure computer is one that's kept in a locked, guarded room with no network connections what so ever. It's just not a very productive setup.
Ask yourself whether your "internal findings" are really representative or just attempt to CYA in case there is a problem. Coming at this problem from the side of someone whose job it is to get things done rather create objections, I frequently see security people asking for extremely expensive security "enhancements" that provide marginal if any value.
All business decisions should be made on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. Most staff positions including security usually do a poor job of assessing either side and instead focus on potential risks without quantifying them. Just because security would be better by doing X, does not mean X is good idea. If X is really expensive and your competitors do not it, your firm is now at a cost disadvantage
which depending on the industry can be catastrophic.
I really have no way of knowing whether actions you are talking about really negative expected value actions or not in the sense that over a long period the risks involved will be realized and the damage will be far greater than the cost of taking preventative action. However, changing ratings is troublesome. A much better process is a well defined override or exception procedure. The business should understand what they are doing. A rigid system that says we can not do anything rated 'Y' even if there is 100M at stake will only result in the rating be changed.
There's a market for light and cheap. To high income people, $400-$500 is practically disposable. You can spend that much on an iPod touch. It's not a big deal to break it or lose it because it's not expensive.
If all you want is email or web access, a cheap ultra portable like an ASUS eee is a perfect match.
Comparing these devices to full sized laptops misses the point.
The record labels are just a bunch of whiners. They grew accustom to fat margins stemming from power over the distribution channel. Their pricing doesn't work for Walmart's value proposition but like always they blame their customers, in the case the next one in the value chain, the retailer. Blaming the customer is their favorite tactic. They blame the end customer for piracy.
The record labels will die before they realize their business model longer works. Nobody wants pay $15.99 and no amount of wishing by record company execs will make that different.
I don't care whether DST uses or saves energy. I don't like to get up early in the morning so sunlight early is useless to me. I'd much rather have it be light when I go home.
If you are getting up before the sun comes up, it's a sign you are getting up too early. The only time a geek should see the sun rise is after pulling an all-nighter.
From the AP article: Doing something as simple as keeping a spare battery in its original retail packaging or a plastic zip-lock bag will prevent unintentional short-circuiting and fires," Krista Edwards, deputy administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said in a release.
Not surprisingly this TSA rule makes no sense. Any battery can short not just lithium ones. I'm not battery expert but I would think and shorted battery could start a hold fire especially when it's packed with a bunch of clothes in the a suitcase. Regardless, this risk doesn't seem to be serious as millions of people fly everyday and I don't think there was ever been a plane brought down by a battery fire.
Hold fires are dangerous and worth preventing but this is just stupid. Automated fire suppression in the hold would be much more effective but I'm sure the airline lobbyists will continue to kill that idea.
The carry-on limits don't make much sense either. I don't see how a single passenger having one or ten batteries is going to make an difference especially since most of the fires that I read about are from batteries in devices. I guess regulating electronics producers so that their products don't randomly catch fire is too much trouble so it's easier and I guess more fun for the TSA to make up some useless regulation to torment the flying public with.
Most employees are remarkable at aligning their effort with the incentives in their environment. The problem for management is that the employees align themselves with the actual incentives not empty platitudes about how quality is important.
In the software development environments I've worked in management values schedule predictability and turning around projects fast. Management does not care about or even evaluate code quality or long run productivity. They would rather have a short development phase and blow huge amounts of time and effort in maintenance. Lower levels of management might know that sloppy coding has long run consequence but they are incentivized to get releases out quickl. Upper management rarely if ever has any understanding of software development even in companies that exclusively develop software so they don't know any better.
Over time, a project that started with 5 people now has 3-4x times as many people who can't seem get anything done. Changing anything seems to result a cascade of bugs.
The solution would be measure productivity over the life of system but in most environments are way too short term focused for that.
"They can't stick with this model with the weighted costs that they have," said Mike McGuire, vice president of research at Gartner, an industry research group.
Like most businesses, the music labels costs grew in proportion to their revenues. Revenues are declining and now labels have the difficult challenge of adapting. Though I think they have a bigger problem than the Gartner analyst does. I don't understand what purpose they serve. They used to be a critical part of the distribution chain since was extremely difficult for independent artists to get CD shelf space and radio air play in the pre-Internet world. If iTunes and internet radio, arists don't need the labels anymore. Labels keep a huge share of money from music sales with artists getting very little. Since the labels don't control distribution any more, the artists are better off without them.
Airlines tend to have to poor profitability because they offer an undifferentiated product with many substitutes (driving, WebEx, etc) and compete on price. Previously "innovations" like yield management and overbooking were supposed increase profitability as well. What happens though is that all the competitors adopt the "innovation", the base fare falls and the profitability is unchanged.
Charging for priority luggage delivery does not overcome the basic problem that for most consumers one flight is as good as other and legacy carriers like United are locked into higher cost structures than upstarts like Southwest, Jet Blue or Virgin America.
The hypocrisy of our government and corporate America is astounding. We hear constant cries about how all forms of non-economic damages from pain and suffering to punitive damages are ruining America and making it hard to do business. One of the jurors is "sending a message" to music pirates. I wonder if this same juror is for "tort reform" which would prevent jurors from sending manufactures of knowingly sell effective products that kill people a message. But when it comes to music piracy, 9000 times economic damages is some how appropriate. I wish I could get 9000x economic damages every time someone harmed me. Maybe if I hire some lobbyists, I can get Congress to help me out on this one.
they'd stick to guns on the CableCARD mandate and shut down cable systems that were not compatible with 3rd party devices. With a credible shutdown threat looming, this problem would get fixed in less than a month. I know it will never happen due to the huge campaign contributions politicians get from cable companies.
I'm not convinced the cable companies are doing themselves an favors. I'm unlikely to upgrade from my old analog cable if can't have an HD Tivo. Cable companies seem to think HD is a form of crack people cann't live without but I'm doing just fine on analog.
Every male Swiss citizen has mandatory military service and the assault rifle is there because after active duty, all male Swiss citizens below a certain age are part of the military reserves. It's disingenuous or ignorant to compare Switzerland with US gun ownership since any untrained idiot can buy a firearm in the US.
It's not surprising Swiss crime rates are low. They are a regimented society that value order among all else. Swiss citizens do not have civil liberties. Crime is usually low in police states.
External occupiers generally lose when fighting nationalist forces. The main reason for this is that the occupier powers always have the option of leaving and the nationalists don't. The occupier generally wants something (resources, a buffer zone, etc) and the local nationalists forces can frustrate them from getting it. The occupier gives us and goes home.
I can't think of any home-grown fascist movements that have been stopped by unorganized citizens with fire arms. By the time you'd get around to fighting the fascists with weapons, they'd already have control of the government and have disappeared any citizens likely to cause them trouble. Not to mention that'd have whipped the nation into a faux patriotic frenzy claiming those who resist their security measures are pro-terrorist or some such non-sense. Your neighbors would be informing on you. The exact opposite happens in the conflicts against external powers where the average citizen helps the resistance not the occupiers.
That's the dumbest thing I've heard all week and I've been reading lame excuses from hedge funds about why they lost so much of their investors money in the subprime meltdown. You can not oppose a government that has tanks, F16s, and nuclear weapon by force. I know there is pro-gun culture in America that believes doing so is possible but this belief is patently silly when one considers the kind of weaponry the government has access to and the kind of weaponry you have access to.
If you really believe there is no difference between the parties and don't want to live under a police state, I think your only option is to leave the country. The Bush administration clear wants a police state and if Democrats want one too, there's going to be no stopping it.
Today's NYT certainly makes it look it Congressional Democrats were pwned by the Bush administration over the FISA changes. Pretty stupid to use a bill drafted by the Bush administration but there's a long way from getting pwned to endorsing a police state.
Second paragraph of the linked article:
The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver's licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system by May 2008.
It passed in 2005.