This is especially scary as you cannot avoid student loan debt through bankruptcy.
You can't discharge student loans through bankruptcy court, you have to actually sue and prove hardship, making it a much more difficult debt to clear. The thought was that students shouldn't graduate and then immediately declare bankruptcy to get rid of their student loans.
The basic three pronged standard for discharging student loan debt was set up in the Brunner decision by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (NY,CT,VT). The 10th Circuit has their own modified version of that standard, but the rest of the country more or less uses the Brunner test.
The short version is that, to prove hardship, you must show by a preponderance of the evidence: (1) You cannot afford to pay the loan and have minimized your expenses (2) Your prospects of paying the loan are not likely to improve (3) You've made a good faith effort to pay the loan.
YYMV, since each jurisdiction has been writing its own rules on how to interpret Brunner.
High schools used to widely teach two important classes: 1. Civics 2. Home Economics (now known as Family and Consumer Sciences)
Civics taught you how the government was run, Home Ec taught you how to run your life. The schools that still have Home Ec, teach it as an elective instead of a full year course. Civics is required in less than a dozen States. YMMV.
Can someone explain to me why the images have such bad quality and resolution? Satellite images of the earth are good enough to spot someone sunbathing on a roof.
The narrow band cameras have a resolution of 0.5 meters/pixel That also happens to be the legal limit for commercially available satellite imagery.
They could have sent up something to take higher resolution pictures, but they wouldn't have the memory, weight, or power budget to handle the files.
There's also the fact that (A) the system they're using is proven technology that was modified from the Mars orbiter camera and (B) 0.5 meters/pixel is a fairly high resolution for mapping a landscape.
Before the 2006 Michigan gubernatorial primary, three political scientists isolated a group of voters and mailed them copies of their voting histories, listing the elections in which they participated and those they missed. Included were their neighborsâ(TM) voting histories, too, along with a warning: after the polls closed, everyone would get an updated set.
After the primary, the academics examined the voter rolls and were startled by the potency of peer pressure as a motivational tool. The mailer was 10 times better at turning nonvoters into voters than the typical piece of pre-election mail whose effectiveness has ever been measured.
Malchow, a 58-year-old former Mississippi securities lawyer who managed Al Goreâ(TM)s first Senate campaign and went on to start a direct-mail firm, read the academicsâ(TM) study and wanted to put the device to work. But he had trouble persuading his firmâ(TM)s clients â" which over the years have included the Democratic National Committee and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. â" to incorporate such a tactic into their get-out-the-vote programs. All feared a backlash from citizens who might regard the mailer as a threat from someone seeking their vote.
Then, as New Jersey prepared to elect its governor last fall [in 2010], Malchow experimented with less ominous language, an idea he adopted from the Fordham political scientist Costas Panagopoulos.
The article then goes on to mostly talk about liberal attempts to study voter behavior so that they can shape opinions and get people to the polls.
It's a natural result of group dynamics and peer pressure. It doesn't even have to be overt peer pressure, as we are social animals and we pick up on social cues.
Unless you're going to do cavity searches of everyone that goes into a secured area, you're much better off improving the shielding for air-gapped computers.
In this whitepaper, they infect the air gapped computer with malware and then use the monitor cable as a transmitting antenna. Interestingly, they propose infecting workers' phones with malware, making this a potential external threat, as opposed to an insider one.
Because a single Republican governor implemented a similar system in a Democrat-controlled state, then automatically, this is a Republican plan that all (or even a majority of) Republicans across the nation supported? What a stupid statement! It completely flies in the face of actual facts.
It's not racist to observe that African Americans are much more likely to be impoverished than whites.
As a percentage of the African American population, this is true. In absolute numbers, white individuals are poor more often than African Americans.
The poverty figures roughly break down to ~40% white, ~25% black, ~25% hispanic, ~4% asian. If you want the numbers to add up to 100, you'll have to look up the actual figures.
Poverty is not exclusively a minority problem, yet that perception heavily colors any discussion of the issue.
The fact is that NO ONE who runs for President or Congress anymore opposes H1B's. They're all now completely owned by corporations. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM.
Yes, YOUR GUY TOO!
Even RON PAUL voted to increase H1-B visas while he was in Congress.
If not, then why are you sneering at the companies that are actually doing something, rather than nothing?
I'm not sneering at anyone.
What I am, is aware that even free hardware comes with its own costs. You have to prevent theft, manage software on it, track it, lock down the browser, deal with breakage, and a dozen other details.
Underprivileged schools are the least able to to do all these things, either because of staffing or funding. And the only way they can manage such requirements is by taking time/money away from other educational goals.
It's very easy for a well intentioned gift to turn into a white elephant.
You don't need a pencil to operate an iPad, and these poor kids will likely benefit more than most from exposure to technology.
If the iPad is a replacement for text books, then I am happy to concede this point. If it isn't a replacement, yes the students will benefit from exposure to technology, but that exposure won't make up for what's missing.
It shouldn't, that's my point, there shouldn't be any government involvement in our private lives at all, there shouldn't be any government involvement in anything beyond the very basic protection against invasion and that's it.
You are welcome to your ideology, but it's almost completely unsupported by the ideals behind the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Honestly, it sounds like you're living in the wrong country, but I can't say I know of one that meets your desires. The countries with no *de facto "involvement in anything beyond the very basic protection against invasion," are all so incredibly weak... that they cannot provide even a minimal protection against invasion.
*AFAIK, there's no country with a de jure state of affairs that you'd enjoy.
"Underprivileged" schools really need basics like text books, notebooks, and pencils for the kids. Technology is not a replacement for the bare necessities that are missing in the most underfunded schools.
- precisely. If you live on a farm somewhere you are not entitled to have your services subsidised by people who live in the cities. You shouldn't be subsidised regardless where you live, regardless for what the reasons are, regardless of who you are.
Did you know that the Federal Government's authority to build highways comes exclusively from their enumerated power To establish Post offices and post Roads;
/While we're at it, let's undo rural electrification and telephone programs too
evaporation leaves behind the heavier components of oil,
This is the portion of the barrel that ends up 1. getting burned in the engines of massive cargo ships 2. turned into asphalt 3. being used as feedstock for industrial chemistry
/Before asphalt, the tar leftover from the pyrolysis of coal was used for the same purposes.
Now seeing the company first fined, then have its stock slide, and then be sued by its shareholders....THAT seems like it would send the right message, don't you think?
The alternative is to pierce the corporate veil and directly go after the executives (and lawyers) who signed off on this.
While it's a fun idea, it would create all kinds of chaos until the loopholes are figured out and everyone goes back to business as normal. So instead we'll be stuck with punishing those poor innocent shareholders whose demands for better profits and larger dividends are a major driver of shitty corporate behavior.
More realistically, at the corporate level, salary/bonus/benefit clawback provisions in executive contracts would go a ways towards disincentivizing criminal behavior. But the odds of that happening are slim to none, and Slim is actually a billionaire businessman, so he's already against it.
It is very illegal for a merchant to store your credit card number for more than the 5 seconds it takes to authorize the transaction, unless they implement fairly strong protection to make sure nobody can steal those numbers later. But even if they do this, it is still very illegal for them to try to share those card numbers and what they purchased, which would be necessary for different merchants to "track" your purchases.
"fairly strong protection" = industry standards. Those standards are written by the industry, not by anyone that cares about the card holder's interests.
The least you can do is give us a ballpark location so we can look at a coverage map.
A fixed wireless ISP might also do the trick. Their coverage tends not to be very comprehensive, so it's hit or miss if the residential facility will be in the coverage zone.
So if you have 35 megabits down, now you have 35 megabits up. 75 down, 75 up, etc...
Granted, not everyone has FIOS, or can get it, but it may well provide pressure to others (Comcast we're looking at you) to match it.
Cable's limitations on upstream bandwidth are architectural and not caused by their normal asshole business practices.
Even the latest and greatest DOCSIS 3.0 hardware being rolled out to consumers is limited to bonding 4 upstream channels. Cisco's literature says it's capable of 120 Mbits upload, but that seems a little optimistic, and I don't know where they pulled 30 Mbit/channel from.
In some markets, Comcast has pulled fiber to the home and offers 505/100 Mbit service, but the rest of their markets only have a maximum 150/20 Mbits option.
The reality is that the vast majority of home users don't require significant upload bandwidth and, other than playing numbers games in markets where they have direct competition, Comcast has no compelling reason to do anything about it.
I recall reading this article in 2012. It talks about ways that cable could upgrade its DOCSIS 3.0 setup to boost upload bandwidth, but concludes nothing will happen until DOCSIS 3.1 show up. That article was written 2 years ago and 3.1 infrastructure isn't expected to be widely rolled out until 2016/2017.
TLDR: Comcast doesn't care about your upload speeds.
At last year's BAI Retail Delivery conference, I hosted a meeting of CMOs from large FIs, which featured Lee Scott, the former CEO of Walmart (who is a member of MCX). I asked Mr. Scott why, in the face of so many failed consortia before it, would MCX succeed?
He said: "I don't know that it will, and I don't care. As long as Visa suffers."
Even if it's not a true story, it's highly indicative of the relationship that many businesses have with the credit card network operators.
It's why many large retail chains have their own store credit card. Those cards allow them to directly process in-store purchases and skip the middle man's fees.
In Europe we moved to EMV some 6-9 years ago. It is not without its problems, but cloning cards & other fraud is much harder.
MasterCard, Visa, Discover and American Express set a USA deadline of October 2015. After that deadline passes, any merchant who hasn't switched over to a chip & pin/signature setup will be liable for credit card fraud that happens in their stores.
Naturally, no one actually expects 100% compliance by the deadline, so who knows how it will actually shake out. Keywords: Liability Shift
Slashdot Mirror
This is especially scary as you cannot avoid student loan debt through bankruptcy.
You can't discharge student loans through bankruptcy court, you have to actually sue and prove hardship, making it a much more difficult debt to clear.
The thought was that students shouldn't graduate and then immediately declare bankruptcy to get rid of their student loans.
The basic three pronged standard for discharging student loan debt was set up in the Brunner decision by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (NY,CT,VT).
The 10th Circuit has their own modified version of that standard, but the rest of the country more or less uses the Brunner test.
The short version is that, to prove hardship, you must show by a preponderance of the evidence:
(1) You cannot afford to pay the loan and have minimized your expenses
(2) Your prospects of paying the loan are not likely to improve
(3) You've made a good faith effort to pay the loan.
YYMV, since each jurisdiction has been writing its own rules on how to interpret Brunner.
I agree that the main failing is in high school.
High schools used to widely teach two important classes:
1. Civics
2. Home Economics (now known as Family and Consumer Sciences)
Civics taught you how the government was run, Home Ec taught you how to run your life.
The schools that still have Home Ec, teach it as an elective instead of a full year course.
Civics is required in less than a dozen States.
YMMV.
Can someone explain to me why the images have such bad quality and resolution? Satellite images of the earth are good enough to spot someone sunbathing on a roof.
The narrow band cameras have a resolution of 0.5 meters/pixel
That also happens to be the legal limit for commercially available satellite imagery.
They could have sent up something to take higher resolution pictures, but they wouldn't have the memory, weight, or power budget to handle the files.
There's also the fact that (A) the system they're using is proven technology that was modified from the Mars orbiter camera and (B) 0.5 meters/pixel is a fairly high resolution for mapping a landscape.
Actually, a Democratic campaign consultant first pushed the idea, after reading an academic study
Published: October 29, 2010
Before the 2006 Michigan gubernatorial primary, three political scientists isolated a group of voters and mailed them copies of their voting histories, listing the elections in which they participated and those they missed. Included were their neighborsâ(TM) voting histories, too, along with a warning: after the polls closed, everyone would get an updated set.
After the primary, the academics examined the voter rolls and were startled by the potency of peer pressure as a motivational tool. The mailer was 10 times better at turning nonvoters into voters than the typical piece of pre-election mail whose effectiveness has ever been measured.
Malchow, a 58-year-old former Mississippi securities lawyer who managed Al Goreâ(TM)s first Senate campaign and went on to start a direct-mail firm, read the academicsâ(TM) study and wanted to put the device to work. But he had trouble persuading his firmâ(TM)s clients â" which over the years have included the Democratic National Committee and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. â" to incorporate such a tactic into their get-out-the-vote programs. All feared a backlash from citizens who might regard the mailer as a threat from someone seeking their vote.
Then, as New Jersey prepared to elect its governor last fall [in 2010], Malchow experimented with less ominous language, an idea he adopted from the Fordham political scientist Costas Panagopoulos.
The article then goes on to mostly talk about liberal attempts to study voter behavior so that they can shape opinions and get people to the polls.
As if millions of audiophiles cried out in terror and were not heard because their amplifiers didn't have 10db of gain at 1.03 terahertz.
There must be a name for this phenomenon.
It's a natural result of group dynamics and peer pressure.
It doesn't even have to be overt peer pressure, as we are social animals and we pick up on social cues.
Ash was a psychologist who pioneered research into conformity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
Bonus Fact: One of Ash's students was Milgram, later known for his electroshock obedience experiments.
Unless you're going to do cavity searches of everyone that goes into a secured area, you're much better off improving the shielding for air-gapped computers.
In this whitepaper, they infect the air gapped computer with malware and then use the monitor cable as a transmitting antenna.
Interestingly, they propose infecting workers' phones with malware, making this a potential external threat, as opposed to an insider one.
Because a single Republican governor implemented a similar system in a Democrat-controlled state, then automatically, this is a Republican plan that all (or even a majority of) Republicans across the nation supported? What a stupid statement! It completely flies in the face of actual facts.
Feel free to read the original source of the Romneycare idea:
http://healthcarereform.procon.org/sourcefiles/1989_assuring_affordable_health_care_for_all_americans.pdf
Internet2 Announces First Full-Production Virtual Internet Network Architecture
http://www.internet2.edu/news/detail/7257/
It gives me a better sense of what they're doing, but I'd still be happy to have someone dumb this down into an automotive analogy.
... If someone spray paints my neighbor's mailbox with graffiti and I clean it off, is that vigilantism?
It's not racist to observe that African Americans are much more likely to be impoverished than whites.
As a percentage of the African American population, this is true.
In absolute numbers, white individuals are poor more often than African Americans.
The poverty figures roughly break down to ~40% white, ~25% black, ~25% hispanic, ~4% asian.
If you want the numbers to add up to 100, you'll have to look up the actual figures.
Poverty is not exclusively a minority problem, yet that perception heavily colors any discussion of the issue.
The fact is that NO ONE who runs for President or Congress anymore opposes H1B's. They're all now completely owned by corporations. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM.
Yes, YOUR GUY TOO!
Even RON PAUL voted to increase H1-B visas while he was in Congress.
If not, then why are you sneering at the companies that are actually doing something, rather than nothing?
I'm not sneering at anyone.
What I am, is aware that even free hardware comes with its own costs.
You have to prevent theft, manage software on it, track it, lock down the browser, deal with breakage, and a dozen other details.
Underprivileged schools are the least able to to do all these things, either because of staffing or funding.
And the only way they can manage such requirements is by taking time/money away from other educational goals.
It's very easy for a well intentioned gift to turn into a white elephant.
You don't need a pencil to operate an iPad, and these poor kids will likely benefit more than most from exposure to technology.
If the iPad is a replacement for text books, then I am happy to concede this point.
If it isn't a replacement, yes the students will benefit from exposure to technology, but that exposure won't make up for what's missing.
It shouldn't, that's my point, there shouldn't be any government involvement in our private lives at all, there shouldn't be any government involvement in anything beyond the very basic protection against invasion and that's it.
You are welcome to your ideology, but it's almost completely unsupported by the ideals behind the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Honestly, it sounds like you're living in the wrong country, but I can't say I know of one that meets your desires.
The countries with no *de facto "involvement in anything beyond the very basic protection against invasion,"
are all so incredibly weak... that they cannot provide even a minimal protection against invasion.
*AFAIK, there's no country with a de jure state of affairs that you'd enjoy.
"Underprivileged" schools really need basics like text books, notebooks, and pencils for the kids.
Technology is not a replacement for the bare necessities that are missing in the most underfunded schools.
- precisely. If you live on a farm somewhere you are not entitled to have your services subsidised by people who live in the cities. You shouldn't be subsidised regardless where you live, regardless for what the reasons are, regardless of who you are.
Did you know that the Federal Government's authority to build highways comes exclusively from their enumerated power To establish Post offices and post Roads;
/While we're at it, let's undo rural electrification and telephone programs too
evaporation leaves behind the heavier components of oil,
This is the portion of the barrel that ends up
1. getting burned in the engines of massive cargo ships
2. turned into asphalt
3. being used as feedstock for industrial chemistry
/Before asphalt, the tar leftover from the pyrolysis of coal was used for the same purposes.
Now seeing the company first fined, then have its stock slide, and then be sued by its shareholders....THAT seems like it would send the right message, don't you think?
The alternative is to pierce the corporate veil and directly go after the executives (and lawyers) who signed off on this.
While it's a fun idea, it would create all kinds of chaos until the loopholes are figured out and everyone goes back to business as normal. So instead we'll be stuck with punishing those poor innocent shareholders whose demands for better profits and larger dividends are a major driver of shitty corporate behavior.
More realistically, at the corporate level, salary/bonus/benefit clawback provisions in executive contracts would go a ways towards disincentivizing criminal behavior. But the odds of that happening are slim to none, and Slim is actually a billionaire businessman, so he's already against it.
It is very illegal for a merchant to store your credit card number for more than the 5 seconds it takes to authorize the transaction, unless they implement fairly strong protection to make sure nobody can steal those numbers later. But even if they do this, it is still very illegal for them to try to share those card numbers and what they purchased, which would be necessary for different merchants to "track" your purchases.
"fairly strong protection" = industry standards.
Those standards are written by the industry, not by anyone that cares about the card holder's interests.
The least you can do is give us a ballpark location so we can look at a coverage map.
A fixed wireless ISP might also do the trick.
Their coverage tends not to be very comprehensive, so it's hit or miss if the residential facility will be in the coverage zone.
So if you have 35 megabits down, now you have 35 megabits up. 75 down, 75 up, etc...
Granted, not everyone has FIOS, or can get it, but it may well provide pressure to others (Comcast we're looking at you) to match it.
Cable's limitations on upstream bandwidth are architectural and not caused by their normal asshole business practices.
Even the latest and greatest DOCSIS 3.0 hardware being rolled out to consumers is limited to bonding 4 upstream channels.
Cisco's literature says it's capable of 120 Mbits upload, but that seems a little optimistic, and I don't know where they pulled 30 Mbit/channel from.
In some markets, Comcast has pulled fiber to the home and offers 505/100 Mbit service, but the rest of their markets only have a maximum 150/20 Mbits option.
The reality is that the vast majority of home users don't require significant upload bandwidth and, other than playing numbers games in markets where they have direct competition, Comcast has no compelling reason to do anything about it.
I recall reading this article in 2012. It talks about ways that cable could upgrade its DOCSIS 3.0 setup to boost upload bandwidth, but concludes nothing will happen until DOCSIS 3.1 show up. That article was written 2 years ago and 3.1 infrastructure isn't expected to be widely rolled out until 2016/2017.
TLDR: Comcast doesn't care about your upload speeds.
Second, Target, KMart, and Walmart are involved with this... KMart and Target are idiots; Walmart has an empire, what are they colluding with them?
From the personal blog of Ron Shevlin, Senior Analyst at a financial industry think tank
http://snarketing2dot0.com/2014/09/03/failed-currentc/
At last year's BAI Retail Delivery conference, I hosted a meeting of CMOs from large FIs, which featured Lee Scott, the former CEO of Walmart (who is a member of MCX). I asked Mr. Scott why, in the face of so many failed consortia before it, would MCX succeed?
He said: "I don't know that it will, and I don't care. As long as Visa suffers."
Even if it's not a true story, it's highly indicative of the relationship that many businesses have with the credit card network operators.
It's why many large retail chains have their own store credit card.
Those cards allow them to directly process in-store purchases and skip the middle man's fees.
That mandatory quarantine and travel bans are a good idea yet?
No, nobody has figured that out yet.
The CDC says up to 1,050 people per week are coming into the USA from countries with active Ebola outbreaks.
Explain how you plan to run a rolling quarantine for 3,150 people?
In Europe we moved to EMV some 6-9 years ago. It is not without its problems, but cloning cards & other fraud is much harder.
MasterCard, Visa, Discover and American Express set a USA deadline of October 2015.
After that deadline passes, any merchant who hasn't switched over to a chip & pin/signature setup will be liable for credit card fraud that happens in their stores.
Naturally, no one actually expects 100% compliance by the deadline, so who knows how it will actually shake out.
Keywords: Liability Shift
Putting it in the contract gives them a right to do it,
Not necessarily.
Just because there's a clause in the contract doesn't mean it is legal and/or conscionable.
I'll say that it's nakedly anti-consumer and I hope a State's Attorney General or three will look into it and pressure AT&T to back off.