How many people outside the university actually know about this? I doubt many. $4.3 million spent on marketing seems to say they tried but I get the feeling they failed.
Google and census.gov think there are 20 million full time college / university students. There's probably about as many non-traditional students as traditional students. Doing some estimation and division, they should have been able to at least junk mail a significant fraction of the possible students.
LOL the really poor aren't going to have the credit limit to put more than a class or two on it anyway.
Its really aimed for tuition reimbursement people like I was for my BS degree (BS in several ways I guess). You pay the registrar or whoever in full on your CC, submit a reimbursement form to work, get a direct deposit right into checking in a week or so, write check or online bill pay to pay off the CC all done. Toward the end of my degree $employer required I submit a C or better report card or transcript to obtain reimbursement, so I had to float one semester's tuition at all times before getting reimbursed, which actually wasn't all that bad.
So my "tuition reimbursement" wasn't really free, depending on the exact CC billing cycle, etc, but still close enough to free not to matter very much.
TLDR is yeah I put an entire bachelors degree on a CC, got promptly reimbursed, it all turned out OK.
Earlier in my career I got an associates and I got a fixed monthly amount of money from the GI Bill and I had tuition bills which were lump sum, so I used the CC to smooth things out... takes about 3 months GI BIll income to pay off, then its time for another semester...
I was fine with online classes. Most/.ers out of school don't understand how popular hybrid is, especially for lower level classes. All the schools around me are doing great offering degree program enrolled for credit online / hybrid classes.
The mystery is why anyone would sign up, out of the blue, to blow $1400 on a precalc class (or whatever it is). Why?
If you want a degree you apply for admission and take online precalc for $1400 and are removed from this metric goal because you're a student now.
I do know some professions require a minimal level of continuing education, so out of the blue someone could sign up for "a class". But precalc isnt going to pass muster, its going to have to be vaguely upper level engineering, or maybe education. Not precalc.
So who is supposed to pay that kind of dough, for basically nothing?
Just to present the other side of the argument, they did create about 60,000 jobs in an area that prior to their arrival was primarily known for its orange groves.
Ah who needs civil rights when you can have jobs... After all, we need to frame the argument as a binary either or, even though it isn't.
My decades long experience with CCTV is its mostly anti-employee rather than anti-public. When the rentacops aren't creeping at the hotties, they'll gather evidence against people on someone's list. "Oh look, kid-who-boss-wants-to-fire went to the can for more than the defined 3 minutes".
Adding RFID means those poor bastards in costumes will now have numeric metrics of how many kids they hugged and will be paid WRT competing with each other and so forth. As a social trend/goal I don't think its anything to be proud of or look forward to.
"human flesh worker drone 2426625-131253, the computer reports that your walking speed is 2.8 MPH and we have a meaningless metric that says we must terminate all human flesh worker drones who walk slower than 2.9 MPH so good bye security will escort you off the property" Yeah I bet that's a fabulous place to visit. Then again Alcatraz and the German concentration camps have a lot of visitors and they were not exactly the peak of human happiness, so maybe not so bad.
He said it himself, its not their park its ours, because we paid for it. We should have more say in how something we paid for is run, vs private property. If you don't like the rules for welfare, get off welfare.
Walt Disney World was granted a 20 year tax break from the government
Only if this software were in the "git er done" market, which it most certainly is not. In the trendy "how you do it is all that matters" "theres no other way to measure professionalism than tool one ups man ship" "I am cool solely because I use something cool" this is useless for all but amateurs or maybe beginning students, who they never made any money off anyway.
Aside from freshness issues, giving away last years design wedding cake to the company cafeteria does kinda cannibalize cake sales for the day as you claim, but giving away the same visually obviously slightly out of date wedding cake to a fashion cover photographer at modern bride magazine is likely to result in WTF am I supposed to do with old junk, compost it? its not like I could use it "professionally".
One interesting thing is that we can pretend we're still in control of the govt thus discussing the specific example of minting a trillion dollar coin IN THE FUTURE is theoretically useful, at least at reducing levels of civil rebellion if nothing else. WRT using a brush to give Mars a swirly, thats already in the past, so theres not much room for debate... until the real results come in, what am I supposed to write, a "comb over would look better than a swirly" or "+1" or "like" or what?
I'd like to read the paper when it hits arxiv. Assuming it does. For one thing the fixation is on "dust" but it looks in the closeup that the brush scraped away rock and little nuggets remain... of what? Sedimentary rock with small chunks of something harder embedded in them? Or is there an alternative photointerpretation? If sedimentary, why so similar in size of its embedded "stuff", so maybe not? Or are those just boring brush marks from the sweeper itself that mean nothing? Anyway you're not going to see analysis beyond "oh shiny" in the mainstream media, so until some detailed papers are released there's not much to talk about, with the exception of the 0.001% of the/.ers who are real geologists.
I do dream of a/. that has more links to arxiv and professors blogs than to discover and gawker. Probably get a lot more discussion then.
I disagree with your simplistic analysis of Roman Imperialistic effectiveness: "warm coasties".
Please expand on why, rather then basically agreeing with me in the rest of your post.
For example lets talk about Dacia solely for the bad reason that I remember more about it than the others off the top of my head. Really the only difference between Germania and Dacia was after Germania was conquered (each time) the Romans immediately said F this and abandoned it, whereas Trajan conquered Dacia and they didn't say F it and go home until Diocletion or was it right after Constantine. Whatever, the point is no difference between the two scenarios except for delay and stubborness. The reacted a little differently to the same problem along a slightly different timeframe with identical results. Yeah I'm well aware this is a gross simplification of centuries of history, that's the point, its a/. post and I'm not Gibbon reincarnated. The peculiarities of random desires and politics make for slightly different timelines but in the long run identical results when faced with the same problem.
You may or may not have a point WRT Dalmatia I would have to look that up before voicing much opinion, I'll just give you that debate point. Gaul was a good example of how the empire threw itself into intense "romanization" or whatever for centuries and in the extremely long run it failed anyway like the others. I would theorize that between the two of us we've listed examples of the spectrum of legendary Roman stubbornness pretty well from one extreme to another, rather than disproving the original thesis that what they were being stubborn about (to various levels) was simply beyond their ability to ever beat due to cultural issues.
More or less accurate with the exception that its obviously (?) possible to civilize Scotland, more or less (Well, I have ancestors from there, so I'm not sure what that proves) Its the roman cultural blindspot. They obviously could have civilized the scots, but they didn't. Ditto nomadic horsemen, forest dwellers... They just couldn't hack anything but coastie farmers and merchants. They were really legendarily good at that niche, but everything else? nope.
How is it with sugar consumption. Is there a correlation? S
The problem with correlating "a" individual industrial era commodity is you're really correlating ALL industrial era commodities because they all grew about the same rate in the same economy. So the answer is obviously "YES". Along with antibiotic manufacture and use, synthetic detergents vs traditional soaps, blah blah blah.
Pretty much you can pick any industrial era chemical and its graph will look more or less like every other industrial era chemical...
since their mental competence ensures that they can hold a job
That would imply an exploding crime rate during the first depression in the 30s and the second depression beginning around 2007, but I'm not seeing it. There's a whole heck of a lot more people sitting around doing nothing now than in 2005.
Weren't the Romans unable to conquer germanic tribal 'barbarians'? If I recall correctly that wasn't for lack of trying.
Read ur Gibbon etc...
The romans were geniuses at "doin stuff" with coasties. They knew exactly what to do with coastie farmers and merchants in warmish climates. Oh boy did they ever, they built a whole empire out of them. They had no idea what to do with forest dwellers and prairie horse riders. at all. Like a cultural blindspot. The german campaigns were rome's Vietnam. Well either that or the isle of brittania. They never lost a battle (well, with one isolated very famous incident in the Tuetenberg forest), at least until centuries later in the demographic collapse when they were hopelessly outnumbered. They always lost the war, (almost) never lost a battle. And every time they won, they looked at their hard fought land, said WTF and went back home, until they had to do it all over.
Every generation or so for centuries it was something like: "Look guys, we've won ourselves some trees" "Oh? Olive trees? No?" "Well WTF are we suppose to do with them? F it lets go back across the Rhine to civilization."
As for the horsemen thing they never really figured out what to do with the Parthian empire either, as I recall Hadrian simply gave up conquered horsemen land. Yeah the rich romans had horses, they had no idea what to do with cultures where everyone was a horseman.
They've got a well deserved rep as master administrators... of warm coasties. They were a belly laugh as administrators of forest dwellers and horsemen cultures.
That is very impressive considering that the parts of Europe not colonized by the Greeks or Romans were still in the tribal stage of civilization at the time.
An alternative viewpoint is everyone other than crude barbarians either got merged into the empire or got the "Carthage treatment" so yeah, pretty much if everyone on multiple continents is either wiped out or forced to merge, the remainder is pretty much going to be the dregs of society. The last kid picked at gym class isn't likely to be an athletic prodigy.
Requires an assumption that crime rates are constant across IQ, instead of tending to always be the lower end of the bell curve.
It would be very interesting to figure out, somehow, if criminals on average are also getting smarter and how that's affecting the crimes they accomplish. Perhaps at one point in the past they were too stupid to commit crimes, therefore the crime rate increases as IQ increases. I suppose if my theory were true, 100 years ago most criminals were idle theives, unorganized pickpockets and drunkards and such, whereas now most criminals would be involved in something extremely complicated, like maybe financial schemes and multinational illegal pharmaceutical manufacture and distribution. Hmm maybe there's something to that theory.
VERY optimistically it might be a temporary cultural effect, once enough of the morons pass thru the narrow "both smart and dumb enough to be criminals" then rates would tend to drop as they are now.
Alternative theory: Hydrocarbon contamination causes brain damage. Duh. Different hydrocarbons cause different levels of damage. Duh. WHY WAS LEAD ADDED TO GASOLINE? Talk to a competent chemist. Basically straight chain hydrocarbons are great liquid fuels other than the low octane pre-detonation thing, which can be fixed with a dose of TEL (which also is a great exhaust valve lube, as a side effect). So leaded gasolines were ridiculously straight chain... non-leaded has to be much higher quality fuel to get a decent octane number without the lead. Obviously different hydrocarbons are going to cause different brain damage levels. So I'd not be surprised to learn that inhaling tons of non-catalytic converter straight chain hydrocarbons Fs up the brain a lot worse than basically clean air coming our of catalytic converter cars powered by non-straight chain hydrocarbons. After all, whats likely to F someone up, 99.9% whats dumped into the environment that being the hydrocarbon, or the 0.1% additive of lead?
I would theorize that stuffing gasoline full of ethanol across various regions of the country would poison brains in a different way. Most seem to agree that modern psychiatric medicine causes most school shootings, but I'd theorize that maybe sniffing strange exhaust because of strange gasoline might have some effect. Possibly the rise in shootings is a direct result of ethanol in gasoline. Certainly long term ethanol consumption has never done a human brain any good, so breathing ethanol exhaust and leaks etc 24x7 probably does no good.
You know, except for the whole fact that we know lead sequestering directly affects mental function in ways that cause the individual to become more violent.
You're matching symptoms, like the autism anti-vaxers. Hitting your head with a hammer causes headache. Consuming mass quantities of beer causes headache. Conclusion, beer is obviously made out of hammers, after all they both cause the same symptoms therefore must be the same scientific effect.
If bridge A sees an incoming 130 byte packet from the LAN side thats obviously skype, pass it. If bridge A sees an incoming 70 byte packet from the LAN side thats obviously skype, add a 60 byte encrypted / hashed / whateverd back channel of data.
If bridge B sees an incoming 130 byte packet from the LAN side thats obviously skype, ram it thru the decrypt / dehash / whateverd thing and see if the last 60 bytes decodes to a valid back channel data packet. To a crude first approximation your bit error rate will approximate your magic number or header or whatever length, so requiring the decrypted packet data to begin with 0x1234 means you'll only false positive about once in 2**32 decodes, probably good enough for text, maybe not so good for DVD iso transfer.
This simple idea is pretty simple to traffic analyze. Are the conversation patterns more like speech or embedded text? A slightly intelligent algo on the TX side could fix that (perhaps only the first silence packet after normal speech gets special data, or it only sends special data in a vaguely normal conversational (very) random pattern). You can come up with traffic analysis systems all day.. my rev-2 design could be caught by displaying a histogram of how long each stretch of silence is, how odd that this convo 1 packet long silences match the typical graph for 2 packet long silences instead of typical 1 packet long...
My guess is they even added in the 38 byte ethernet overhead. Yielding 66 bytes. Add 4 bytes for the codec and its fairly reasonable.
Of course they probably didn't use the 8021q ethernet overhead which is 42 bytes, or they wouldn't have any payload at all! (I suppose its possible... an empty payload is intuitively about as "silent" as you can get)
Aside from enormous difficulty of managing the import taxation-register and verifying compliance, what do you think?
Only enforce on companies larger than X personnel or Y sales volume or something like that?
I think people overestimate how common inspection is in our homeland. Unless the boss committed a political offense, its rare to be inspected for anything more than once every couple years for anything, unless someone gets hurt on the job or an anonymous report is made. I'm guessing that the inspection cost will not be very high.
Another interesting way to save money is to provide an industry standard assumption. If the company thinks they can beat it, fine, get physically inspected, but otherwise the assumption is the cost of EPA compliance would be $X per unit or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
How many people outside the university actually know about this? I doubt many. $4.3 million spent on marketing seems to say they tried but I get the feeling they failed.
Google and census.gov think there are 20 million full time college / university students. There's probably about as many non-traditional students as traditional students. Doing some estimation and division, they should have been able to at least junk mail a significant fraction of the possible students.
LOL the really poor aren't going to have the credit limit to put more than a class or two on it anyway.
Its really aimed for tuition reimbursement people like I was for my BS degree (BS in several ways I guess). You pay the registrar or whoever in full on your CC, submit a reimbursement form to work, get a direct deposit right into checking in a week or so, write check or online bill pay to pay off the CC all done. Toward the end of my degree $employer required I submit a C or better report card or transcript to obtain reimbursement, so I had to float one semester's tuition at all times before getting reimbursed, which actually wasn't all that bad.
So my "tuition reimbursement" wasn't really free, depending on the exact CC billing cycle, etc, but still close enough to free not to matter very much.
TLDR is yeah I put an entire bachelors degree on a CC, got promptly reimbursed, it all turned out OK.
Earlier in my career I got an associates and I got a fixed monthly amount of money from the GI Bill and I had tuition bills which were lump sum, so I used the CC to smooth things out... takes about 3 months GI BIll income to pay off, then its time for another semester...
I was fine with online classes. Most /.ers out of school don't understand how popular hybrid is, especially for lower level classes. All the schools around me are doing great offering degree program enrolled for credit online / hybrid classes.
The mystery is why anyone would sign up, out of the blue, to blow $1400 on a precalc class (or whatever it is). Why?
If you want a degree you apply for admission and take online precalc for $1400 and are removed from this metric goal because you're a student now.
I do know some professions require a minimal level of continuing education, so out of the blue someone could sign up for "a class". But precalc isnt going to pass muster, its going to have to be vaguely upper level engineering, or maybe education. Not precalc.
So who is supposed to pay that kind of dough, for basically nothing?
Disney World is the largest single-site employer in America IIRC.
Then that welfare queen should pay their taxes like everyone else, instead of making us pay more to make up for it.
Just to present the other side of the argument, they did create about 60,000 jobs in an area that prior to their arrival was primarily known for its orange groves.
Ah who needs civil rights when you can have jobs... After all, we need to frame the argument as a binary either or, even though it isn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proslavery_in_the_antebellum_United_States
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory
My decades long experience with CCTV is its mostly anti-employee rather than anti-public. When the rentacops aren't creeping at the hotties, they'll gather evidence against people on someone's list. "Oh look, kid-who-boss-wants-to-fire went to the can for more than the defined 3 minutes".
Adding RFID means those poor bastards in costumes will now have numeric metrics of how many kids they hugged and will be paid WRT competing with each other and so forth. As a social trend/goal I don't think its anything to be proud of or look forward to.
"human flesh worker drone 2426625-131253, the computer reports that your walking speed is 2.8 MPH and we have a meaningless metric that says we must terminate all human flesh worker drones who walk slower than 2.9 MPH so good bye security will escort you off the property" Yeah I bet that's a fabulous place to visit. Then again Alcatraz and the German concentration camps have a lot of visitors and they were not exactly the peak of human happiness, so maybe not so bad.
You said it yourself. It's their park, not yours.
He said it himself, its not their park its ours, because we paid for it. We should have more say in how something we paid for is run, vs private property. If you don't like the rules for welfare, get off welfare.
Walt Disney World was granted a 20 year tax break from the government
Only if this software were in the "git er done" market, which it most certainly is not. In the trendy "how you do it is all that matters" "theres no other way to measure professionalism than tool one ups man ship" "I am cool solely because I use something cool" this is useless for all but amateurs or maybe beginning students, who they never made any money off anyway.
Aside from freshness issues, giving away last years design wedding cake to the company cafeteria does kinda cannibalize cake sales for the day as you claim, but giving away the same visually obviously slightly out of date wedding cake to a fashion cover photographer at modern bride magazine is likely to result in WTF am I supposed to do with old junk, compost it? its not like I could use it "professionally".
Now American politics?
One interesting thing is that we can pretend we're still in control of the govt thus discussing the specific example of minting a trillion dollar coin IN THE FUTURE is theoretically useful, at least at reducing levels of civil rebellion if nothing else. WRT using a brush to give Mars a swirly, thats already in the past, so theres not much room for debate... until the real results come in, what am I supposed to write, a "comb over would look better than a swirly" or "+1" or "like" or what?
get less comments
I'd like to read the paper when it hits arxiv. Assuming it does. For one thing the fixation is on "dust" but it looks in the closeup that the brush scraped away rock and little nuggets remain... of what? Sedimentary rock with small chunks of something harder embedded in them? Or is there an alternative photointerpretation? If sedimentary, why so similar in size of its embedded "stuff", so maybe not? Or are those just boring brush marks from the sweeper itself that mean nothing? Anyway you're not going to see analysis beyond "oh shiny" in the mainstream media, so until some detailed papers are released there's not much to talk about, with the exception of the 0.001% of the /.ers who are real geologists.
I do dream of a /. that has more links to arxiv and professors blogs than to discover and gawker. Probably get a lot more discussion then.
So what would you rather it be called
Geological Oriented Articulated Terrain Surface Exfoliator . Curiosity Xperiment
I got the perfect icon and team mascot for this project too, although it probably looks better on a spelunking instrument.
I disagree with your simplistic analysis of Roman Imperialistic effectiveness: "warm coasties".
Please expand on why, rather then basically agreeing with me in the rest of your post.
For example lets talk about Dacia solely for the bad reason that I remember more about it than the others off the top of my head. Really the only difference between Germania and Dacia was after Germania was conquered (each time) the Romans immediately said F this and abandoned it, whereas Trajan conquered Dacia and they didn't say F it and go home until Diocletion or was it right after Constantine. Whatever, the point is no difference between the two scenarios except for delay and stubborness. The reacted a little differently to the same problem along a slightly different timeframe with identical results. Yeah I'm well aware this is a gross simplification of centuries of history, that's the point, its a /. post and I'm not Gibbon reincarnated. The peculiarities of random desires and politics make for slightly different timelines but in the long run identical results when faced with the same problem.
You may or may not have a point WRT Dalmatia I would have to look that up before voicing much opinion, I'll just give you that debate point. Gaul was a good example of how the empire threw itself into intense "romanization" or whatever for centuries and in the extremely long run it failed anyway like the others. I would theorize that between the two of us we've listed examples of the spectrum of legendary Roman stubbornness pretty well from one extreme to another, rather than disproving the original thesis that what they were being stubborn about (to various levels) was simply beyond their ability to ever beat due to cultural issues.
It is telling you : "I am empty and deadly. Please enjoy your planet responsibly."
Didn't stop us from moving to Australia either.
More or less accurate with the exception that its obviously (?) possible to civilize Scotland, more or less (Well, I have ancestors from there, so I'm not sure what that proves)
Its the roman cultural blindspot. They obviously could have civilized the scots, but they didn't. Ditto nomadic horsemen, forest dwellers... They just couldn't hack anything but coastie farmers and merchants. They were really legendarily good at that niche, but everything else? nope.
How is it with sugar consumption. Is there a correlation? S
The problem with correlating "a" individual industrial era commodity is you're really correlating ALL industrial era commodities because they all grew about the same rate in the same economy. So the answer is obviously "YES". Along with antibiotic manufacture and use, synthetic detergents vs traditional soaps, blah blah blah.
Pretty much you can pick any industrial era chemical and its graph will look more or less like every other industrial era chemical...
since their mental competence ensures that they can hold a job
That would imply an exploding crime rate during the first depression in the 30s and the second depression beginning around 2007, but I'm not seeing it. There's a whole heck of a lot more people sitting around doing nothing now than in 2005.
Weren't the Romans unable to conquer germanic tribal 'barbarians'? If I recall correctly that wasn't for lack of trying.
Read ur Gibbon etc...
The romans were geniuses at "doin stuff" with coasties. They knew exactly what to do with coastie farmers and merchants in warmish climates. Oh boy did they ever, they built a whole empire out of them. They had no idea what to do with forest dwellers and prairie horse riders. at all. Like a cultural blindspot.
The german campaigns were rome's Vietnam. Well either that or the isle of brittania. They never lost a battle (well, with one isolated very famous incident in the Tuetenberg forest), at least until centuries later in the demographic collapse when they were hopelessly outnumbered. They always lost the war, (almost) never lost a battle. And every time they won, they looked at their hard fought land, said WTF and went back home, until they had to do it all over.
Every generation or so for centuries it was something like:
"Look guys, we've won ourselves some trees"
"Oh? Olive trees? No?"
"Well WTF are we suppose to do with them? F it lets go back across the Rhine to civilization."
As for the horsemen thing they never really figured out what to do with the Parthian empire either, as I recall Hadrian simply gave up conquered horsemen land. Yeah the rich romans had horses, they had no idea what to do with cultures where everyone was a horseman.
They've got a well deserved rep as master administrators... of warm coasties. They were a belly laugh as administrators of forest dwellers and horsemen cultures.
That is very impressive considering that the parts of Europe not colonized by the Greeks or Romans were still in the tribal stage of civilization at the time.
An alternative viewpoint is everyone other than crude barbarians either got merged into the empire or got the "Carthage treatment" so yeah, pretty much if everyone on multiple continents is either wiped out or forced to merge, the remainder is pretty much going to be the dregs of society. The last kid picked at gym class isn't likely to be an athletic prodigy.
Requires an assumption that crime rates are constant across IQ, instead of tending to always be the lower end of the bell curve.
It would be very interesting to figure out, somehow, if criminals on average are also getting smarter and how that's affecting the crimes they accomplish. Perhaps at one point in the past they were too stupid to commit crimes, therefore the crime rate increases as IQ increases. I suppose if my theory were true, 100 years ago most criminals were idle theives, unorganized pickpockets and drunkards and such, whereas now most criminals would be involved in something extremely complicated, like maybe financial schemes and multinational illegal pharmaceutical manufacture and distribution. Hmm maybe there's something to that theory.
VERY optimistically it might be a temporary cultural effect, once enough of the morons pass thru the narrow "both smart and dumb enough to be criminals" then rates would tend to drop as they are now.
Alternative theory: Hydrocarbon contamination causes brain damage. Duh. Different hydrocarbons cause different levels of damage. Duh.
WHY WAS LEAD ADDED TO GASOLINE? Talk to a competent chemist. Basically straight chain hydrocarbons are great liquid fuels other than the low octane pre-detonation thing, which can be fixed with a dose of TEL (which also is a great exhaust valve lube, as a side effect). So leaded gasolines were ridiculously straight chain... non-leaded has to be much higher quality fuel to get a decent octane number without the lead. Obviously different hydrocarbons are going to cause different brain damage levels. So I'd not be surprised to learn that inhaling tons of non-catalytic converter straight chain hydrocarbons Fs up the brain a lot worse than basically clean air coming our of catalytic converter cars powered by non-straight chain hydrocarbons. After all, whats likely to F someone up, 99.9% whats dumped into the environment that being the hydrocarbon, or the 0.1% additive of lead?
I would theorize that stuffing gasoline full of ethanol across various regions of the country would poison brains in a different way. Most seem to agree that modern psychiatric medicine causes most school shootings, but I'd theorize that maybe sniffing strange exhaust because of strange gasoline might have some effect. Possibly the rise in shootings is a direct result of ethanol in gasoline. Certainly long term ethanol consumption has never done a human brain any good, so breathing ethanol exhaust and leaks etc 24x7 probably does no good.
You know, except for the whole fact that we know lead sequestering directly affects mental function in ways that cause the individual to become more violent.
You're matching symptoms, like the autism anti-vaxers. Hitting your head with a hammer causes headache. Consuming mass quantities of beer causes headache. Conclusion, beer is obviously made out of hammers, after all they both cause the same symptoms therefore must be the same scientific effect.
Not to mention the spectacular semi-permanent decline in the economy since 2007 has not resulted in a permanent spectacular increase in crime.
Each side has a very smart bridge.
If bridge A sees an incoming 130 byte packet from the LAN side thats obviously skype, pass it.
If bridge A sees an incoming 70 byte packet from the LAN side thats obviously skype, add a 60 byte encrypted / hashed / whateverd back channel of data.
If bridge B sees an incoming 130 byte packet from the LAN side thats obviously skype, ram it thru the decrypt / dehash / whateverd thing and see if the last 60 bytes decodes to a valid back channel data packet. To a crude first approximation your bit error rate will approximate your magic number or header or whatever length, so requiring the decrypted packet data to begin with 0x1234 means you'll only false positive about once in 2**32 decodes, probably good enough for text, maybe not so good for DVD iso transfer.
This simple idea is pretty simple to traffic analyze. Are the conversation patterns more like speech or embedded text? A slightly intelligent algo on the TX side could fix that (perhaps only the first silence packet after normal speech gets special data, or it only sends special data in a vaguely normal conversational (very) random pattern). You can come up with traffic analysis systems all day.. my rev-2 design could be caught by displaying a histogram of how long each stretch of silence is, how odd that this convo 1 packet long silences match the typical graph for 2 packet long silences instead of typical 1 packet long...
My guess is they even added in the 38 byte ethernet overhead. Yielding 66 bytes. Add 4 bytes for the codec and its fairly reasonable.
Of course they probably didn't use the 8021q ethernet overhead which is 42 bytes, or they wouldn't have any payload at all! (I suppose its possible... an empty payload is intuitively about as "silent" as you can get)
Aside from enormous difficulty of managing the import taxation-register and verifying compliance, what do you think?
Only enforce on companies larger than X personnel or Y sales volume or something like that?
I think people overestimate how common inspection is in our homeland. Unless the boss committed a political offense, its rare to be inspected for anything more than once every couple years for anything, unless someone gets hurt on the job or an anonymous report is made. I'm guessing that the inspection cost will not be very high.
Another interesting way to save money is to provide an industry standard assumption. If the company thinks they can beat it, fine, get physically inspected, but otherwise the assumption is the cost of EPA compliance would be $X per unit or whatever.