Privacy protection is off-topic. This has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with emiitting RF (bursts or CW) in commercial facilities for purposes of damaging RFID tags.
A business has every right to put RFID tags on their products. We have every right to disable them AFTER we purchase the product.
I find a brief cycle in the Microwave does a good job - also a hammer, knife or rock work well...
13.56MHz is the top edge of a radioastronomy allocation (13.41-13.56); it is "Long Wave" and well below: the 27MHz CB band, the 54-72 MHz broadcast TV channels 2-4, the 76-88 MHz broadcast TV channels 5-6, the 88-108 MHz FM broadcast band, the 174-216 MHz broadcast TV channels 7-13 . ..
If you plan to generate enough RF at that frequency to "burn that baby", the power supply you tow behind you will give you away - moreover, any significant RF power in that range calls for -gasp- TUBES - say a pair of 6LQ6 in push-pull - but that is still way below their normal operating range ~18-30 MHz.
Also, the core flaw in this scheme (at any frequency) is that pesky (and easily detected) RFI you generate while walking around the store.
Operation of an unregulated transmitter, for a frequency you don't have a license to operate at is a federal crime (think FCC and pirate radio stations); also consider how your plan might effect legit radio/ranging (crashing aircraft on approach is discouraged) or, assuming that you actually find a way to beam microwaves (requires a waveguide) you might just cook bio-matter (the baby's corneas in the next isle or your fingers).
Once any sophisticated reprogrammer is available, you can be certain you will be treated EXACTLY the same way as people who print their own money: counterfeiters go to jail for a long time.
What comes out in oral argument is not what comes out in the decision. The effect of the SCT upholding the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act in Eldred v. Ashcroft is that copyrights are restored in works that were previously in the public domain. And, yes it has screwed publishers reprinting works that were in the public domain. Just a month ago a this case upheld exactly what you assumed couldn't happen:
In Luck's Music Library, Inc. v. Ashcroft, the District Court for the District of Columbia on June 19, 2004, rejected the arguments of a music publishing company and a film preservation company that the restoration of copyrights was unconstitutional. The court concluded that there is nothing to stop Congress from removing works from the public domain, distinguishing the Supreme Court's dictum to the contrary in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) on the ground that Graham dealt with patents and not copyrights. The court relied heavily on the Supreme Court's Eldred decision, upholding the constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Act.
BTW, ex post facto laws and bills of attainder are distinguished as applying to criminal acts (the SCT upheld Bush's Tax Rebate for taxes already paid against a challenge that the act was an ex post facto law). The net result is that the former copyright holders have a right to recover their work from the public domain and they have to file their renewal with the Copyright office to "give notice" to all current or potentially infringing users.
Thereafter the criminal sanctions and civil sanctions take effect. So, a publisher could face $250,000.00 and 20 years in criminal sanctions and treble-damages + attorney's fees in civil damages for continuing to publish a work that was in the public domain for up to 19 years (the lookback is 20 years) if they don't keep up with what is being "renewed".
I wouldn't use the term "stupid" to describe the author. I'd suggest that the situation is one of grossly differing bargaining positions as between the artist/author and the publisher / production company.
Consider that the example: the majority of the McCartney/Lennon copyrights are held by Michael Jackson. Without going into the details, you woud have to admit that the Beatles were a very popular band with a significant revenue and consistent artistic output. If a band with the Beatles level of success can have their copyright alienated from them, what hope does a starving independent have?
Consider that Joe Schuster and Jerome Seigel originally sold "Superman" rights for $500.00 each - and that was the "industry standard practice" at the time (May 1938). The copyright netted DC comics hundreds of millions. Schuster & Seigel sued to regain (or, retain) the rights to Superboy in 1946 and it cost them a fortune. They finally worked out a deal where DC paid them $35k/year each for life but that was in 1975.
Now, here are two examples of very popular work where the copyright was alienated from the creators and went on to enrich people other than the artist/author.
When you suggest that the music label "fronts lots of money" and the artist can choose to sell or not to sell then I must point out that the music industry has been a cesspool of dirty tricks from the inception of Edison's invention forward. "Payola", a scheme to move recordings up the charts by bribing DJ's, was in place through the 1960's and funny accounting practices have made millions for "real" copyright attorneys who have to carve up the "label" to pry the artist's contract royalties loose. Add to that the fact that substantially all of the commercial radio in the US is held by Clear Channel and you now know how a Brittany Spears can be packaged, marketed and disposed of by a company that programs the entire playlist for the country from one or two offices. Computers and high-speed telecommunications have been instrumental in the demise of independent radio. Of course, They Might Be Giants used the Internet to market their original work.
You assume that the system is honest and that the artists are rubes...yet two of the most popular and sophisticated artists/authors in the 20th century were eaten alive and they are but a small, small example of the ends to which powerful entities will go to make a buck off of somebody on the sly.
If everybody had David Boies on retainer and Microsoft's billions to fund their licensing negotiations and the ensuing litigation then I'd have to agree with you.
From the Telsat site: "Anik E2 Ku-Band there are two wideband DVC signals in each transponder sharing the available EIRP. The EIRP of each DVC signal is about 5 dB below the saturated EIRP."
The footprint cuts an arc through the middle of the US reaching about midway through the state of Missouri at the highest bandwidth / angle of view available. The signal is way below what radar detectors should be able to receive. If a transciever (a small dish with an active emitter) were to leak enough RFI to set off a radar detector it would be dangerous to the users.
The key defect of the Sony Bono copyright extension act is that it does not reward the creator of the work...it extends monopoly rights to the assignees of the work.
The history of copyright is one long battle between the rights of the author and the rights of third-parties. The Sony Bono copyright extension act does nothing to reward or encourage the author...it removed many works from the public domain and established criminal sanctions for any fool who might use those works newly re-copywritten. Who pushed this law in the US? Disney. THE MOUSE almost went into the public domain and a company contemplated the demise of their core IP rights and promptly made certain THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN.
The Sony Bono copyright extension act is only the most current power grab. It is the camel's nose under the tent of author's rights. Creator's be damned-let's reward the assignees. Mr. Michael Jackson funds his interests with the copyright royalties from the works of McCartney & Lennon. Not one dime of those royalties reward, support or encourage either of the two living Beatles. They fund Mr. Jackson's "Neverland" ranch and his defense attorneys. All you need is love? Or, is all you need are buckets of money to fund Mr. Jackson's peculiar concept of love? Any way you look at this it stinks on ice!
You can be certain that well before the MOUSE or Jackson find their IP holdings in danger of falling into the public domain again that another extension will be enacted.
Now is the time for a major nation to upset this unearned windfall for the lucky, but uncreative, assignees of author's works. Limit the rights of publishers, purchasers and offspring to profit from the (usually) under compensated creator's works!
Let's start with something right about the US Patent Law: we allow only the "first to invent" to obtain a patent. First to the patent office does not win the race, innovation does.
The whole thing went into the toilet with one book: "Rembrandt's in the Attic: Unlocking the Hidden Value of Patents." The IP world caught fire with this one.
Nobody can claim that the USPTO is poorly managed. The office has been hobbled by outrageous rules and regulations governing their budget, e.g. the Commerce Department (USPTO operates under this executive agency) requires the USPTO to pay for itself through patent fees. Costs of operation are estimated every few years (per regulation) and the USPTO then changes fees to bring revenue into compliance with the projected operating costs.
The fees then change during the pendancy of every patent. No patent-holder can pay all of his/her fees up front because they don't know what the fees will be until they find out what the current fees are when the payment dates arrive. You can't pay a fee more than one(1) year early and you can never pay a fee late (patent is forfeit). This is nuts.
If Congress actually legislated a rational budget for the USPTO then the system would work - at least as well as it did until the early 1980s. Ever heard of a "patent agent" as opposed to a "patent attorney"? How about the costs of small vs. large entity patents? Why do we still have 1 year of "hidden prior art" - (OK, the USPTO is supposed to identify common art and create an interference internally)?
Of course, the system does not operate in a vacuum: If you have a patent on something really swift, then you can buy off congress and have a patent extension created by special legislation. So the rules apply equally to everybody, except for those who have enough money to buy their own rule.
Then there are the arcaine and backward aspects of the USPTO:
What the heck are Markush Groups doing in chemical patents? Pick your poison and stick with it. You shouldn't be able to claim 30% of isomer 1 and 20% of isomer 2.
The USPTO has only recently gone to computerized applications and searches of issued patents (I have over 80 years of USPQ volumes for the rest of the "prior art"). They used a rod-and-index-keyhole-card system for their searches of various classes of prior art. This system changed to computers under Leaman - in the second Clinton term!
The vast majority of patents that are challenged in court are found invalid. And, the "supreme court" of Patents is the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That court has patent attorneys as judges. Finally, It has only taken 214 years for 6 million patents to issue in the US. The first patent act went into effect in 1790.
The black & gold monsters "precious resin" breaks all the time and I became tired of having a $300.00 pen that I was constantly sending off to the company with $25.00 for a "NEW" one "under warranty" or else they leak ink in the stainless steel ball-point version when you fly unpressurized at 5000ft above MSL.
If a ban on static memory / portable drives is in place at your company then you have no business with one.
Of course, hiding the devices in hilighter pens and the handle to your coffee mug isn't too hard.
What the ban does is make all possession of these devices improper in the workplace.
What is the maskwork for your new chip worth? What is it worth to a competitor? How do you move the data?
If the two idiots at AOL and Vegas had scammed the userbase this way they might not have been caught.
Nope, the advent of portable RAM drives means that these devices will be used improperly.
OH, on a personal note: only a genuine geek has a USB watch. It will (eventually) wind up in that dresser drawer reserved for the calculator watch, the last 7 cell phones, 5 PDAs, pen cams, dead MtBlanc pens, old swag and $200.00 in odd pocket change.
The size of the company workforce determines how often they remit 940 & 941 taxes. They can be required to file weekly if they have a large enough workforce.
Well, if the company is a mom_and_pop shop you might have a good point. They can't afford to offend their limited market of consumers.
If the company is Microsoft-sized (with the ethics of msft or ENRON) however, then they will have an incentive to screw the customer. They will go from x% profit on the ordinary transaction to 100% profit from the "escheat" of the gift certificate.
And, don't forget that in both cases the company has made money "unearned income" from interest earned on the unspent funds on "deposit" with the company. Drawing interest is a way to lower "operating costs" for the company. I can also imagine how the structuring of the "escheat" could benefit the tax and bottom line positions of the company and those considerations could easily become the prime motivators.
It comes down to writing more definitive contracts - and making clear to the "buyer" of the gift certificate what the terms of the deal are.
Finally, just exactly what is the problem with RETURNING the unspent finds to the buyer?
If a company has a "gift certificate" they have a contract with the buyer to provide the benefit to the buyer's designee. If nobody claims the money under the controlling state law (we might want to designate a state for the purposes of the contract) then the money is abandoned property and escheats to the state. Anything else is a windfall for the company - and remember, absent the structure of laws the company could not exist. Pay the piper and lower the tax burden.
Besides, the company will have a major incentive to find the designee so that they can make their ordinary profit - rather than lose everything. Consumers benefit all around!
ENRON, Adelphia, Worldcom - pick the scandal and they have screwed lower-level employees with worthless options and tossed loads of cash at the top boys with the same tool: stock options.
If there were rules requiring the company to "expense" an option we would have some, small, check on the value of these things. As it is today, the value (or the right to exercise the option) varies greatly.
If the company had to expense options (and, thereby disclose the classes of options they provided) and they reported the options as a part of the annual report and 10-Q filings - both employees and shareholders would have some idea of the real status of these instruments.
Moore interviewed American contractor Nicholas Berg, who was later kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Iraq, but removed the interview from the final cut. He said that the interview would not be released to the media and dealt privately with Berg's family.
http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0361596/trivia
That Rove & Bush are involved (terms of the investigation...not mine) in the Valerie Plame matter (and, Bush has hired outside criminal defense counsel! See, http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20040604.html ) says that Moore will not harm the innocent - he attacks the public figures who put themselves into the mix unlike Bush who attacks anything in "his" way.
Speaking of public figures:
I really like Moore's clip of Paul Wolfowitz's grooming and eating the nits. I always assumed that grooming pattern was limited to the Great Apes. ..evidently Wolfowitz is a real conservative's conservative-carrying his emergency extra protein as parasites.
By definition, if one (1) "unethical" employee can sink the entire ship - there is no effective security system. Redundancy is required in robust systems. Singularity is death.
Much more telling is the fact that months passed after the breach and the case came before the DOJ on a "tip".
If AOL didn't have an effective audit log of the access to the user base and they didn't have an effective statistical analysis program in place to correlate the sudden increase in spam then they were idiots.
It doesn't take rocket science to recognize a security breach where the massive spam blitz included a significant portion of user accounts were only days - or hours - old when they were taken. The sudden inclusion of a block of accounts that all have a common incept period within a massive spam blitz is statistically significant as hell. Somebody in security should have been checking the user base audit log for access at or near those last incept date accounts.
I have no illusions: AOL has to guard their user base just as well as every concert ticket-taker.
The access to a user base like AOL's ought to require more than one superuser account.
I've represented bank systems programmers and in order to merge a set of databases (checking deposits against new standards under the Patriot Act) the protocol calls for at least three users working in concert to run the job. No one person has the ability to access the entire database(s) - at least not without a serious breach in security. These banks use distributed UNIX clusters....
Oops, that's right - they have no security system. That's why some idiot can swipe 92meg of users and sell them to some other idiot who wants to spam us with his own (did I say these guys were idiots?) gambling scheme and then resell the 92meg of users to the other vile spammers.
AOL can't be let off the hook. They had a duty to protect the user base as certainly as every one of us has a duty not to leave loaded guns where 5 year-olds can play with them. This is a clear example of AOL permitting a dangerous instrumentality to fall into the hands of the incompetent.
BUT, we should also tell Ashcroft that the two idiots are "the terrorists' friends" and let Ashcroft make them disappear (along with their families, friends and dogs).
First thing: toiletmaster or monster (what a shitty handle) made the changes in topic-not me. TP boy changed the subject and brought in a radical shift to Ayn Rand.
Turning to you: "A human being in this world", eh? Quite interesting. Do you think that you are a freebooter? That the state has to give you the right to a line-item veto of your tax support of the state? Not in this world. Try it- the IRS has a special, Earth-bound Hell, for tax protesters.
As for way you "believe" or don't about the reports of the state's funding records seems pretty naive. If the conspiracy is so great that the records of a third of a century are "questionable" then, what criteria do you use to validate data?
Bush is transparent: He says, "no child left behind" and works to dismantle the public school system to appease his constituents who want a voucher system. He says that he is not interested in building states - and then invades Afghanistan and Iraq. We are now "building states" in those countries.
It goes on, and on.
FWIW, I am a trial attorney and I practice plaintiff's civil rights law. I have had friends in the space program, but they are all out of the program now - some are in the private sector and some are in academia. I have heard, firsthand, how NASA was gutted and how the bad managers were brought in to "streamline" the "process".
Finally, my family is (was) related, by marriage, to Ms. Rand. When the Toilet-boy decided to get medieval on my ass, I called BS on his.
Slashdot Mirror
Privacy protection is off-topic. This has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with emiitting RF (bursts or CW) in commercial facilities for purposes of damaging RFID tags.
A business has every right to put RFID tags on their products. We have every right to disable them AFTER we purchase the product.
I find a brief cycle in the Microwave does a good job - also a hammer, knife or rock work well...
13.56MHz is the top edge of a radioastronomy allocation (13.41-13.56); it is "Long Wave" and well below: the 27MHz CB band, the 54-72 MHz broadcast TV channels 2-4, the 76-88 MHz broadcast TV channels 5-6, the 88-108 MHz FM broadcast band, the 174-216 MHz broadcast TV channels 7-13 . . .
If you plan to generate enough RF at that frequency to "burn that baby", the power supply you tow behind you will give you away - moreover, any significant RF power in that range calls for -gasp- TUBES - say a pair of 6LQ6 in push-pull - but that is still way below their normal operating range ~18-30 MHz.
Also, the core flaw in this scheme (at any frequency) is that pesky (and easily detected) RFI you generate while walking around the store.
Operation of an unregulated transmitter, for a frequency you don't have a license to operate at is a federal crime (think FCC and pirate radio stations); also consider how your plan might effect legit radio/ranging (crashing aircraft on approach is discouraged) or, assuming that you actually find a way to beam microwaves (requires a waveguide) you might just cook bio-matter (the baby's corneas in the next isle or your fingers).
Once any sophisticated reprogrammer is available, you can be certain you will be treated EXACTLY the same way as people who print their own money: counterfeiters go to jail for a long time.
1 boring /. thread =/> eternity^2
It's not a matter of the merits of the case. It is the mandatory arbitration that precludes the determination of the case on the merits.
This is an ICANN reg.
What comes out in oral argument is not what comes out in the decision. The effect of the SCT upholding the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act in Eldred v. Ashcroft is that copyrights are restored in works that were previously in the public domain. And, yes it has screwed publishers reprinting works that were in the public domain. Just a month ago a this case upheld exactly what you assumed couldn't happen:
In Luck's Music Library, Inc. v. Ashcroft, the District Court for the District of Columbia on June 19, 2004, rejected the arguments of a music publishing company and a film preservation company that the restoration of copyrights was unconstitutional. The court concluded that there is nothing to stop Congress from removing works from the public domain, distinguishing the Supreme Court's dictum to the contrary in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) on the ground that Graham dealt with patents and not copyrights. The court relied heavily on the Supreme Court's Eldred decision, upholding the constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Act.
BTW, ex post facto laws and bills of attainder are distinguished as applying to criminal acts (the SCT upheld Bush's Tax Rebate for taxes already paid against a challenge that the act was an ex post facto law). The net result is that the former copyright holders have a right to recover their work from the public domain and they have to file their renewal with the Copyright office to "give notice" to all current or potentially infringing users.
Thereafter the criminal sanctions and civil sanctions take effect. So, a publisher could face $250,000.00 and 20 years in criminal sanctions and treble-damages + attorney's fees in civil damages for continuing to publish a work that was in the public domain for up to 19 years (the lookback is 20 years) if they don't keep up with what is being "renewed".
I wouldn't use the term "stupid" to describe the author. I'd suggest that the situation is one of grossly differing bargaining positions as between the artist/author and the publisher / production company.
/author.
Consider that the example: the majority of the McCartney/Lennon copyrights are held by Michael Jackson. Without going into the details, you woud have to admit that the Beatles were a very popular band with a significant revenue and consistent artistic output. If a band with the Beatles level of success can have their copyright alienated from them, what hope does a starving independent have?
Consider that Joe Schuster and Jerome Seigel originally sold "Superman" rights for $500.00 each - and that was the "industry standard practice" at the time (May 1938). The copyright netted DC comics hundreds of millions. Schuster & Seigel sued to regain (or, retain) the rights to Superboy in 1946 and it cost them a fortune. They finally worked out a deal where DC paid them $35k/year each for life but that was in 1975.
Now, here are two examples of very popular work where the copyright was alienated from the creators and went on to enrich people other than the artist
When you suggest that the music label "fronts lots of money" and the artist can choose to sell or not to sell then I must point out that the music industry has been a cesspool of dirty tricks from the inception of Edison's invention forward. "Payola", a scheme to move recordings up the charts by bribing DJ's, was in place through the 1960's and funny accounting practices have made millions for "real" copyright attorneys who have to carve up the "label" to pry the artist's contract royalties loose. Add to that the fact that substantially all of the commercial radio in the US is held by Clear Channel and you now know how a Brittany Spears can be packaged, marketed and disposed of by a company that programs the entire playlist for the country from one or two offices. Computers and high-speed telecommunications have been instrumental in the demise of independent radio. Of course, They Might Be Giants used the Internet to market their original work.
You assume that the system is honest and that the artists are rubes...yet two of the most popular and sophisticated artists/authors in the 20th century were eaten alive and they are but a small, small example of the ends to which powerful entities will go to make a buck off of somebody on the sly.
If everybody had David Boies on retainer and Microsoft's billions to fund their licensing negotiations and the ensuing litigation then I'd have to agree with you.
From the Telsat site:
"Anik E2 Ku-Band there are two wideband DVC signals in each transponder sharing the available EIRP. The EIRP of each DVC signal is about 5 dB below the saturated EIRP."
The footprint cuts an arc through the middle of the US reaching about midway through the state of Missouri at the highest bandwidth / angle of view available. The signal is way below what radar detectors should be able to receive. If a transciever (a small dish with an active emitter) were to leak enough RFI to set off a radar detector it would be dangerous to the users.
The key defect of the Sony Bono copyright extension act is that it does not reward the creator of the work...it extends monopoly rights to the assignees of the work.
The history of copyright is one long battle between the rights of the author and the rights of third-parties. The Sony Bono copyright extension act does nothing to reward or encourage the author...it removed many works from the public domain and established criminal sanctions for any fool who might use those works newly re-copywritten. Who pushed this law in the US? Disney. THE MOUSE almost went into the public domain and a company contemplated the demise of their core IP rights and promptly made certain THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN.
The Sony Bono copyright extension act is only the most current power grab. It is the camel's nose under the tent of author's rights. Creator's be damned-let's reward the assignees. Mr. Michael Jackson funds his interests with the copyright royalties from the works of McCartney & Lennon. Not one dime of those royalties reward, support or encourage either of the two living Beatles. They fund Mr. Jackson's "Neverland" ranch and his defense attorneys. All you need is love? Or, is all you need are buckets of money to fund Mr. Jackson's peculiar concept of love? Any way you look at this it stinks on ice!
You can be certain that well before the MOUSE or Jackson find their IP holdings in danger of falling into the public domain again that another extension will be enacted.
Now is the time for a major nation to upset this unearned windfall for the lucky, but uncreative, assignees of author's works. Limit the rights of publishers, purchasers and offspring to profit from the (usually) under compensated creator's works!
Well done!
Let's start with something right about the US Patent Law: we allow only the "first to invent" to obtain a patent. First to the patent office does not win the race, innovation does.
The whole thing went into the toilet with one book: "Rembrandt's in the Attic: Unlocking the Hidden Value
of Patents." The IP world caught fire with this one.
Nobody can claim that the USPTO is poorly managed. The office has been hobbled by outrageous rules and regulations governing their budget, e.g. the Commerce Department (USPTO operates under this executive agency) requires the USPTO to pay for itself through patent fees. Costs of operation are estimated every few years (per regulation) and the USPTO then changes fees to bring revenue into compliance with the projected operating costs.
The fees then change during the pendancy of every patent. No patent-holder can pay all of his/her fees up front because they don't know what the fees will be until they find out what the current fees are when the payment dates arrive. You can't pay a fee more than one(1) year early and you can never pay a fee late (patent is forfeit). This is nuts.
If Congress actually legislated a rational budget for the USPTO then the system would work - at least as well as it did until the early 1980s. Ever heard of a "patent agent" as opposed to a "patent attorney"? How about the costs of small vs. large entity patents? Why do we still have 1 year of "hidden prior art" - (OK, the USPTO is supposed to identify common art and create an interference internally)?
Of course, the system does not operate in a vacuum: If you have a patent on something really swift, then you can buy off congress and have a patent extension created by special legislation. So the rules apply equally to everybody, except for those who have enough money to buy their own rule.
Then there are the arcaine and backward aspects of the USPTO:
What the heck are Markush Groups doing in chemical patents? Pick your poison and stick with it. You shouldn't be able to claim 30% of isomer 1 and 20% of isomer 2.
The USPTO has only recently gone to computerized applications and searches of issued patents (I have over 80 years of USPQ volumes for the rest of the "prior art"). They used a rod-and-index-keyhole-card system for their searches of various classes of prior art. This system changed to computers under Leaman - in the second Clinton term!
The vast majority of patents that are challenged in court are found invalid. And, the "supreme court" of Patents is the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That court has patent attorneys as judges. Finally, It has only taken 214 years for 6 million patents to issue in the US. The first patent act went into effect in 1790.
The black & gold monsters "precious resin" breaks all the time and I became tired of having a $300.00 pen that I was constantly sending off to the company with $25.00 for a "NEW" one "under warranty" or else they leak ink in the stainless steel ball-point version when you fly unpressurized at 5000ft above MSL.
If a ban on static memory / portable drives is in place at your company then you have no business with one.
Of course, hiding the devices in hilighter pens and the handle to your coffee mug isn't too hard.
What the ban does is make all possession of these devices improper in the workplace.
What is the maskwork for your new chip worth? What is it worth to a competitor? How do you move the data?
If the two idiots at AOL and Vegas had scammed the userbase this way they might not have been caught.
Nope, the advent of portable RAM drives means that these devices will be used improperly.
OH, on a personal note: only a genuine geek has a USB watch. It will (eventually) wind up in that dresser drawer reserved for the calculator watch, the last 7 cell phones, 5 PDAs, pen cams, dead MtBlanc pens, old swag and $200.00 in odd pocket change.
Oh, since 1964...
If you are only 40 years behind on Tax Law you are way ahead of the pack.
The size of the company workforce determines how often they remit 940 & 941 taxes. They can be required to file weekly if they have a large enough workforce.
Well, if the company is a mom_and_pop shop you might have a good point. They can't afford to offend their limited market of consumers.
If the company is Microsoft-sized (with the ethics of msft or ENRON) however, then they will have an incentive to screw the customer. They will go from x% profit on the ordinary transaction to 100% profit from the "escheat" of the gift certificate.
And, don't forget that in both cases the company has made money "unearned income" from interest earned on the unspent funds on "deposit" with the company. Drawing interest is a way to lower "operating costs" for the company. I can also imagine how the structuring of the "escheat" could benefit the tax and bottom line positions of the company and those considerations could easily become the prime motivators.
It comes down to writing more definitive contracts - and making clear to the "buyer" of the gift certificate what the terms of the deal are.
Finally, just exactly what is the problem with RETURNING the unspent finds to the buyer?
If a company has a "gift certificate" they have a contract with the buyer to provide the benefit to the buyer's designee. If nobody claims the money under the controlling state law (we might want to designate a state for the purposes of the contract) then the money is abandoned property and escheats to the state. Anything else is a windfall for the company - and remember, absent the structure of laws the company could not exist. Pay the piper and lower the tax burden.
Besides, the company will have a major incentive to find the designee so that they can make their ordinary profit - rather than lose everything. Consumers benefit all around!
Fuck yes!
ENRON, Adelphia, Worldcom - pick the scandal and they have screwed lower-level employees with worthless options and tossed loads of cash at the top boys with the same tool: stock options.
If there were rules requiring the company to "expense" an option we would have some, small, check on the value of these things. As it is today, the value (or the right to exercise the option) varies greatly.
If the company had to expense options (and, thereby disclose the classes of options they provided) and they reported the options as a part of the annual report and 10-Q filings - both employees and shareholders would have some idea of the real status of these instruments.
Mike Moore has a brain, and compassion. See,
.evidently Wolfowitz is a real conservative's conservative-carrying his emergency extra protein as parasites.
Moore interviewed American contractor Nicholas Berg, who was later kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Iraq, but removed the interview from the final cut. He said that the interview would not be released to the media and dealt privately with Berg's family.
http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0361596/trivia
That Rove & Bush are involved (terms of the investigation...not mine) in the Valerie Plame matter (and, Bush has hired outside criminal defense counsel! See, http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20040604.html ) says that Moore will not harm the innocent - he attacks the public figures who put themselves into the mix unlike Bush who attacks anything in "his" way.
Speaking of public figures:
I really like Moore's clip of Paul Wolfowitz's grooming and eating the nits. I always assumed that grooming pattern was limited to the Great Apes. .
I have serious doubts that the survey included machines with stable operating systems.
I would hazard a guess that the wintel world wants it that way...
Somebody gets paid to remove the malware.
By definition, if one (1) "unethical" employee can sink the entire ship - there is no effective security system. Redundancy is required in robust systems. Singularity is death.
Much more telling is the fact that months passed after the breach and the case came before the DOJ on a "tip".
If AOL didn't have an effective audit log of the access to the user base and they didn't have an effective statistical analysis program in place to correlate the sudden increase in spam then they were idiots.
It doesn't take rocket science to recognize a security breach where the massive spam blitz included a significant portion of user accounts were only days - or hours - old when they were taken. The sudden inclusion of a block of accounts that all have a common incept period within a massive spam blitz is statistically significant as hell. Somebody in security should have been checking the user base audit log for access at or near those last incept date accounts.
The failures on AOL's part just keep piling up.
Let's see: 92 million users get f**ked out of 10 minutes of their lives dumping the spam these fools send out...
.
I call for parity: 920 million minutes of community service for AOL's management and the two idiots. .
AS AN ARTIFICIAL REEF off the Florida (or New Jersey) coast.
I have no illusions: AOL has to guard their user base just as well as every concert ticket-taker.
The access to a user base like AOL's ought to require more than one superuser account.
I've represented bank systems programmers and in order to merge a set of databases (checking deposits against new standards under the Patriot Act) the protocol calls for at least three users working in concert to run the job. No one person has the ability to access the entire database(s) - at least not without a serious breach in security. These banks use distributed UNIX clusters....
AOL has no excuse.
Now, what part of AOL's security system failed?
Oops, that's right - they have no security system. That's why some idiot can swipe 92meg of users and sell them to some other idiot who wants to spam us with his own (did I say these guys were idiots?) gambling scheme and then resell the 92meg of users to the other vile spammers.
AOL can't be let off the hook. They had a duty to protect the user base as certainly as every one of us has a duty not to leave loaded guns where 5 year-olds can play with them. This is a clear example of AOL permitting a dangerous instrumentality to fall into the hands of the incompetent.
BUT, we should also tell Ashcroft that the two idiots are "the terrorists' friends" and let Ashcroft make them disappear (along with their families, friends and dogs).
see subject. You have to dance the money-man's dance in this world.
First thing: toiletmaster or monster (what a shitty handle) made the changes in topic-not me. TP boy changed the subject and brought in a radical shift to Ayn Rand.
Turning to you: "A human being in this world", eh? Quite interesting. Do you think that you are a freebooter? That the state has to give you the right to a line-item veto of your tax support of the state? Not in this world. Try it- the IRS has a special, Earth-bound Hell, for tax protesters.
As for way you "believe" or don't about the reports of the state's funding records seems pretty naive. If the conspiracy is so great that the records of a third of a century are "questionable" then, what criteria do you use to validate data?
Bush is transparent: He says, "no child left behind" and works to dismantle the public school system to appease his constituents who want a voucher system. He says that he is not interested in building states - and then invades Afghanistan and Iraq. We are now "building states" in those countries.
It goes on, and on.
FWIW, I am a trial attorney and I practice plaintiff's civil rights law. I have had friends in the space program, but they are all out of the program now - some are in the private sector and some are in academia. I have heard, firsthand, how NASA was gutted and how the bad managers were brought in to "streamline" the "process".
Finally, my family is (was) related, by marriage, to Ms. Rand. When the Toilet-boy decided to get medieval on my ass, I called BS on his.