RTFA. He didn't get paid for his work and risk, just for the time he missed from his regular job.
"We'd still like to talk with you in person," one of his handlers replied. "I can think of a couple of easy ways for you to help."
"Can you guys help me with cash?" Thordarson shot back.
For the next few months, Thordarson begged the FBI for money, while the FBI alternately ignored him and courted him for more assistance. In the end, Thordarson says, the FBI agreed to compensate him for the work he missed while meeting with agents (he says he worked at a bodyguard-training school), totaling about $5,000.
As to why
He offered a second reason that he admits is more truthful: "The second reason was the adventure."
STIPULATED FINAL ORDER FOR PERMANENT INJUNCTION AND CIVIL PENALTY JUDGMENT [...] Findings [...]
3. Defendant neither admits nor denies any of the allegations in the Complaint, except as specifically stated in this Order. Only for purposes of this action, Defendant admits the facts necessary to establish jurisdiction.
they were also telling lies about the details of what they were selling (assuming TFS is accurate). That's the sort of thing that sounds like it ought to be investigated on a criminal basis.
Headline: FTC wins monster $7.5 million penalty against "Do Not Call" list violator Federal Trade Commission today said it has won a $7.5 million civil penalty against Mortgage Investors Corporation for dialing up 5.4 million numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry
Article: The settlement, announced on the 10-year anniversary of the DNC Registry, [...]
The article only uses the word "settlement" once. The FTC didn't "win" anything.
So, as you said, the traditional protectionist malaise as everywhere (reminds me of the stupid solar industry in Europe which actually managed to convince the EU Commission to introduce tariffs on Chinese solar panels... up to 67%... now the Chinese are striking back with tariffs on European products *sigh* - will this never end?)
The U.S. Commerce Department ruled that Chinese manufacturers sold cells in the U.S. at prices below the cost of production and announced preliminary antidumping duties ranging from 31 percent to 250 percent, depending on the manufacturer.
The Commerce Department issued its final ruling Wednesday in a long-simmering trade dispute with China, imposing tariffs ranging from about 24 to nearly 36 percent on most solar panels imported from the country.
ImdatS, did it occur to you that maybe this is happening because China was subsidizing solar cell mfgs so that they could sell their products below cost?
In 2008, Jay Flatley, chief executive of Illumina, offered Rienhoff the chance to sequence Bea's transcriptome -- all of the RNA expressed by a sample of her cells -- along with those of her parents and her two brothers.
Unsatisfied, Rienhoff went back to Illumina in 2009 to ask for more help. He proposed exome sequencing, which captures the whole protein-encoding portion of the genome, and is in some ways more comprehensive than transcriptome sequencing. At the time, Illumina was developing its exome-sequencing technology, and the company again took on the Rienhoff family as a test group.
The answer to his daughter's health problems was not found in his garage, with second hand equipment.
I don't understand why simply putting the closed source firmware on the card suddenly makes it ok for free software.
Licensing and distribution.
Anything that's in hardware has already dealt with the issues of licensing and distribution. Closed source software represents and entirely different beast for free software distribution.
Unfortunately, memory leaks are usually blamed on the browser, not on a plug-in, regardless of the cause.
Give me an easy way to trace which plug-in it is. Surely Mozilla could do that? They already tell me which plug-ins take a long time to load, why not some basic memory management?
What concerns me about this method of controlling this is the compliance costs. Whenever there is a tax there are forms to be filled out, reports to be filed and audits to be done.
The tax collection and remittance would all be handled by the exchanges. Audits are trivial, since every single trade is already logged.
Well if these brokerages spend all of this money complying with a tiny tax to stop an undesirable behavior they are going to pass that on to customers.
0.03% is a rounding error to most traders. The only people who will be thwarted by the tax are HFTs who make their money on fractions of a cent.
0.03% is an extremely small cost to pay for stamping out zero-sum HFT activity. If we're lucky, they'll roll that money back into the SEC for better enforcement of the stock and commodities markets.
And remember, even if you have a title to a plot of land, whatever is below the surface certainly does not belong to you.
Those are called "mining rights" and they're for sale too. It's just that most of us don't bother buying them, because there's nothing worth owning under our land.
This article doesn't talk about it, but the volcanic ash (AOL Keyword: pozzolan ash) can be found in deposits all over the world.
It's already mined commercially and it will be trivial to increase that mining capacity in locations that are far away from anywhere environmentally sensitive.
The USAF has been working on "stealth helicopters" for years. They haven't been able to make them silent, but they can make them sound like wind noise, eliminating the distinctive "whap-whap-whap" blade sounds.
The first trick is spreading the noise out over a larger range of frequencies. You can accomplish this by changing the rotor blade spacing to reduce harmonics. So instead of equally spaced rotors, the distance between them is unequal, which mitigates that whap-whap-whap sound.
The second big method involves actively "flapping" the rotors. This lets you change the plane of the rotor just enough to miss the vortex from the previous rotation. By always traveling through smooth air, you can minimize uneven pressure waves which create noise.
The rest of the tweaks are aerodynamic adjustments to the blade tips/materials/shape. And last but not least, throttle back and reduce the rotor speed.
I don't think that the Chinese will succeed for the same reasons why the French and other European nations didn't succeed initially in Panama. The Panama canal took a national interest to construct, not a corporate interest, and was driven in large part by our nation having two coasts with a whole lot of distance in between, and by our "Manifest Destiny" doctrine. Simple economic interests operated by a corporation may not be able to pull it off, especially if that corporation is there only for that purpose, as problems along the way will make it very hard to raise capital when investors don't think that their investment will pay off.
TFA doesn't really give you the full picture, so I can understand why you'd think this is a "corporate interest" The Chinese government created a company that they own and fund, for the purposes of building, owning, and operating this canal for 100 years.
China isn't not building the canal to operate it for-profit. The bulk of the benefit to China will be reflected in lower shipping costs.
/Most of the largest companies in China are partially or wholly government owned.
...unless you're one of the people relying on a piece of software that only runs on OS X, i.e. the main target demographic for this machine, in which case a PC isn't a valid substitute at any price.
No. But it does come with images of the big wave surfing location, Mavericks, for which it is actually named. A location that has 25 foot surf on an average day.
The new Mac Pro packs an unprecedented amount of power in an unthinkable amount of space. A big reason we were able to do that is the ingenious unified thermal core. Rather than using multiple heat sinks and fans to cool the processor and graphics cards, we built everything around a single piece of extruded aluminum designed to maximize airflow as well as thermal capacity. It works by conducting heat away from the CPU and GPUs and distributing that heat uniformly across the core. That way, if one processor isnâ(TM)t working as hard as the others, the extra thermal capacity can be shared efficiently among them. No computer has been built this way before. And yet it makes so much sense, itâ(TM)s now hard to imagine building one any other way.
Isn't that what laptops do? Are they not computers for the purposes of this conversation? The only reason no one else does a "unified thermal core" for desktops is because industry standard motherboard layouts are not compatible with such a design.
From tabbing back and forth through the interactive swf, it looks like the layout is a triangle, with the 'mainboard' and two graphics cards making up the legs. The "unified thermal core" is a hollow triangular heat sink running down the center, with a copper mating point on each face. It also looks like the flash drive is mounted directly behind the core of one graphics card, which should do wonders for its lifespan. There's also a 'daughter' board in the base of the case, with some undocumented chips on it.
The CPU can be replaced without complete disassembly. You will have to remove the 'mainboard' though.
Technically impressive. Completely non-standard. It's interesting that Apple believes 1 CPU and 2 GPUs is the future of professional computing.
It always amuses the hell out of me when people think there were these amazing ancient technologies so much better than anything modern.
There are. Concrete is one example. The ancients also did incredibly complex things with ceramics and glazes that we haven't been able to recreate yet.
The reason for their "amazing ancient technologies" is that was all they had. Improvements in materials science were mostly the result of accidents or brute force experimentation. Now imagine if the combined intellectual power of the modern world was focused on perfecting only one or two technologies over the course of centuries.
As I have been exposed to this industry and have been learning what's what and what goes on, I have learned a great respect for at least THIS government agency.
The NRC hasn't denied an operating permit in 30 years.
The last permit denied was only under heavy pressure. When the facts came out, everything ended up in court with General Electric & Contractors being charged under RICO statues.
It wasn't a traditional court case, in that it was a summary jury trial. GE & others ended up settling because the Judge agreed that their actions were fraudulent and that they engaged in racketeering.
You cannot assume that DNA is unique. You cannot assume that fingerprints are unique. You cannot assume that a person has fingerprints. You cannot assume that a person has fingers. You cannot assume that DNA will not be trivially replicated/faked You cannot assume that fingerprints will not be trivially replicated/faked You cannot assume that fingerprints will not change You cannot assume that DNA will not change
You cannot even assume that a person has only 1 type of DNA in their body.
It's easy to make generalizations it's hard to account for all the edge cases.
Slashdot Mirror
RTFA. He didn't get paid for his work and risk, just for the time he missed from his regular job.
"We'd still like to talk with you in person," one of his handlers replied. "I can think of a couple of easy ways for you to help."
"Can you guys help me with cash?" Thordarson shot back.
For the next few months, Thordarson begged the FBI for money, while the FBI alternately ignored him and courted him for more assistance. In the end, Thordarson says, the FBI agreed to compensate him for the work he missed while meeting with agents (he says he worked at a bodyguard-training school), totaling about $5,000.
As to why
He offered a second reason that he admits is more truthful: "The second reason was the adventure."
Pro-tip: You can stop saying "for allegedly violating" and start saying "for violating" when the guilty verdict is handed down.
What guilty verdict?
http://www2.ftc.gov/os/caselist/10223084/130627mortgageinvestorsstip.pdf
STIPULATED FINAL ORDER FOR PERMANENT INJUNCTION AND CIVIL PENALTY JUDGMENT
[...]
Findings
[...]
3. Defendant neither admits nor denies any of the allegations in the Complaint, except as specifically stated in this Order. Only for purposes of this action, Defendant admits the facts necessary to establish jurisdiction.
Another settlement with no admission of guilt.
they were also telling lies about the details of what they were selling (assuming TFS is accurate). That's the sort of thing that sounds like it ought to be investigated on a criminal basis.
Headline: FTC wins monster $7.5 million penalty against "Do Not Call" list violator
Federal Trade Commission today said it has won a $7.5 million civil penalty against Mortgage Investors Corporation for dialing up 5.4 million numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry
Article: The settlement, announced on the 10-year anniversary of the DNC Registry, [...]
The article only uses the word "settlement" once.
The FTC didn't "win" anything.
So, as you said, the traditional protectionist malaise as everywhere (reminds me of the stupid solar industry in Europe which actually managed to convince the EU Commission to introduce tariffs on Chinese solar panels... up to 67% ... now the Chinese are striking back with tariffs on European products *sigh* - will this never end?)
May 18, 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-17/u-s-solar-tariffs-on-chinese-cells-may-boost-prices.html
The U.S. Commerce Department ruled that Chinese manufacturers sold cells in the U.S. at prices below the cost of production and announced preliminary antidumping duties ranging from 31 percent to 250 percent, depending on the manufacturer.
October 10, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/business/global/us-sets-tariffs-on-chinese-solar-panels.html
The Commerce Department issued its final ruling Wednesday in a long-simmering trade dispute with China, imposing tariffs ranging from about 24 to nearly 36 percent on most solar panels imported from the country.
ImdatS, did it occur to you that maybe this is happening because China was subsidizing solar cell mfgs so that they could sell their products below cost?
How many of these measures to "Protect something from piracy" ever work? Name the most DRM'd copy-protected movie ever distributed.
DIVX worked, didn't it?
I doubt it'd stand up to an attack today, but it was secure enough for its time.
In 2008, Jay Flatley, chief executive of Illumina, offered Rienhoff the chance to sequence Bea's transcriptome -- all of the RNA expressed by a sample of her cells -- along with those of her parents and her two brothers.
Unsatisfied, Rienhoff went back to Illumina in 2009 to ask for more help. He proposed exome sequencing, which captures the whole protein-encoding portion of the genome, and is in some ways more comprehensive than transcriptome sequencing. At the time, Illumina was developing its exome-sequencing technology, and the company again took on the Rienhoff family as a test group.
The answer to his daughter's health problems was not found in his garage, with second hand equipment.
I don't understand why simply putting the closed source firmware on the card suddenly makes it ok for free software.
Licensing and distribution.
Anything that's in hardware has already dealt with the issues of licensing and distribution.
Closed source software represents and entirely different beast for free software distribution.
This is what insurance for, though. Both ways of a thief getting in are what insurance is for.
Your insurance policy probably doesn't cover shit if there's no evidence of forced entry, but YMMV.
The police might not even take a report.
the government will spend billions of dollars subsidizing Solyndra wannabes,
You realize that Solyndra turned into a four letter word because the USA was not subsidizing its solar industry as much as the Chinese were?
Solyndra is not the example you want to use, unless your example is that trade wars suck for the people getting undercut.
Unfortunately, memory leaks are usually blamed on the browser, not on a plug-in, regardless of the cause.
Give me an easy way to trace which plug-in it is.
Surely Mozilla could do that?
They already tell me which plug-ins take a long time to load, why not some basic memory management?
Are we at war with China?
Are we even in a cold war with China?
But if you lower the brightness a lot like a laptop screen used indoors, the PWM becomes pretty obvious.
I wish you had never pointed this out.
Now I can see the flickering on the lowest brightness level.
What concerns me about this method of controlling this is the compliance costs. Whenever there is a tax there are forms to be filled out, reports to be filed and audits to be done.
The tax collection and remittance would all be handled by the exchanges.
Audits are trivial, since every single trade is already logged.
Well if these brokerages spend all of this money complying with a tiny tax to stop an undesirable behavior they are going to pass that on to customers.
0.03% is a rounding error to most traders.
The only people who will be thwarted by the tax are HFTs who make their money on fractions of a cent.
0.03% is an extremely small cost to pay for stamping out zero-sum HFT activity.
If we're lucky, they'll roll that money back into the SEC for better enforcement of the stock and commodities markets.
And remember, even if you have a title to a plot of land, whatever is below the surface certainly does not belong to you.
Those are called "mining rights" and they're for sale too.
It's just that most of us don't bother buying them, because there's nothing worth owning under our land.
This article doesn't talk about it, but the volcanic ash (AOL Keyword: pozzolan ash) can be found in deposits all over the world.
It's already mined commercially and it will be trivial to increase that mining capacity in locations that are far away from anywhere environmentally sensitive.
The USAF has been working on "stealth helicopters" for years. They haven't been able to make them silent, but they can make them sound like wind noise, eliminating the distinctive "whap-whap-whap" blade sounds.
The first trick is spreading the noise out over a larger range of frequencies.
You can accomplish this by changing the rotor blade spacing to reduce harmonics.
So instead of equally spaced rotors, the distance between them is unequal, which mitigates that whap-whap-whap sound.
The second big method involves actively "flapping" the rotors.
This lets you change the plane of the rotor just enough to miss the vortex from the previous rotation.
By always traveling through smooth air, you can minimize uneven pressure waves which create noise.
The rest of the tweaks are aerodynamic adjustments to the blade tips/materials/shape.
And last but not least, throttle back and reduce the rotor speed.
Even if he is lying, the fact that there's any ambiguity at all is proof that there's not enough oversight.
"and Congress is made aware of these activities." does not actually mean all of Congress was made aware of the activities.
"Congress is made aware" usually means "we told leadership and some key people on an intelligence (sub)committee."
The first 4 GHz are easy.
Here's Ivy Bridge chips pushing ~220 Watts to reach 4.7 GHz
http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/1924/power-consumption.jpg
/AMD's FX-9xxx series uses a 32nm process.
/Intel's Ivy Bridge and Haswell use a 22nm process.
I don't think that the Chinese will succeed for the same reasons why the French and other European nations didn't succeed initially in Panama. The Panama canal took a national interest to construct, not a corporate interest, and was driven in large part by our nation having two coasts with a whole lot of distance in between, and by our "Manifest Destiny" doctrine. Simple economic interests operated by a corporation may not be able to pull it off, especially if that corporation is there only for that purpose, as problems along the way will make it very hard to raise capital when investors don't think that their investment will pay off.
TFA doesn't really give you the full picture, so I can understand why you'd think this is a "corporate interest"
The Chinese government created a company that they own and fund, for the purposes of building, owning, and operating this canal for 100 years.
China isn't not building the canal to operate it for-profit.
The bulk of the benefit to China will be reflected in lower shipping costs.
/Most of the largest companies in China are partially or wholly government owned.
...unless you're one of the people relying on a piece of software that only runs on OS X, i.e. the main target demographic for this machine, in which case a PC isn't a valid substitute at any price.
If only there was a site dedicated to showing you how to run OSX on wintel hardware: http://www.hackintosh.com/
Or maybe well known websites that had an up-to-date guide: http://lifehacker.com/the-always-up-to-date-guide-to-building-a-hackintosh-o-5841604
Did you really not know?
No. But it does come with images of the big wave surfing location, Mavericks, for which it is actually named. A location that has 25 foot surf on an average day.
I can see Russia from the top of this wave!
The new Mac Pro packs an unprecedented amount of power in an unthinkable amount of space. A big reason we were able to do that is the ingenious unified thermal core. Rather than using multiple heat sinks and fans to cool the processor and graphics cards, we built everything around a single piece of extruded aluminum designed to maximize airflow as well as thermal capacity. It works by conducting heat away from the CPU and GPUs and distributing that heat uniformly across the core. That way, if one processor isnâ(TM)t working as hard as the others, the extra thermal capacity can be shared efficiently among them. No computer has been built this way before. And yet it makes so much sense, itâ(TM)s now hard to imagine building one any other way.
Isn't that what laptops do? Are they not computers for the purposes of this conversation?
The only reason no one else does a "unified thermal core" for desktops is because industry standard motherboard layouts are not compatible with such a design.
From tabbing back and forth through the interactive swf, it looks like the layout is a triangle, with the 'mainboard' and two graphics cards making up the legs.
The "unified thermal core" is a hollow triangular heat sink running down the center, with a copper mating point on each face.
It also looks like the flash drive is mounted directly behind the core of one graphics card, which should do wonders for its lifespan.
There's also a 'daughter' board in the base of the case, with some undocumented chips on it.
The CPU can be replaced without complete disassembly.
You will have to remove the 'mainboard' though.
Technically impressive. Completely non-standard.
It's interesting that Apple believes 1 CPU and 2 GPUs is the future of professional computing.
It always amuses the hell out of me when people think there were these amazing ancient technologies so much better than anything modern.
There are. Concrete is one example.
The ancients also did incredibly complex things with ceramics and glazes that we haven't been able to recreate yet.
The reason for their "amazing ancient technologies" is that was all they had.
Improvements in materials science were mostly the result of accidents or brute force experimentation.
Now imagine if the combined intellectual power of the modern world was focused on perfecting only one or two technologies over the course of centuries.
As I have been exposed to this industry and have been learning what's what and what goes on, I have learned a great respect for at least THIS government agency.
The NRC hasn't denied an operating permit in 30 years.
The last permit denied was only under heavy pressure.
When the facts came out, everything ended up in court with General Electric & Contractors being charged under RICO statues.
It wasn't a traditional court case, in that it was a summary jury trial.
GE & others ended up settling because the Judge agreed that their actions were fraudulent and that they engaged in racketeering.
The NRC is a very captured regulatory body.
well between DNA and fingerprints then.
You cannot assume that DNA is unique.
You cannot assume that fingerprints are unique.
You cannot assume that a person has fingerprints.
You cannot assume that a person has fingers.
You cannot assume that DNA will not be trivially replicated/faked
You cannot assume that fingerprints will not be trivially replicated/faked
You cannot assume that fingerprints will not change
You cannot assume that DNA will not change
You cannot even assume that a person has only 1 type of DNA in their body.
It's easy to make generalizations
it's hard to account for all the edge cases.