If you take all that stuff out of my algebra class, that would have left.... Um... the concept of what is a variable and variable substitution, and not much else? I'm struggling to think what would remain in Alg I if that all got pulled out into Alg II.
There was a "pre-algebra" class expected to be taken in middle school that covered stuff like matrix math and imaginary numbers, complex numbers, etc. Perhaps the order has been inverted and they do that stuff after algebra now instead of before?
It is normally the 2nd year of Algebra in American High Schools.
No kidding... You sure its not the third year? How bout "What topics do they cover?"
I'm guessing what we called Algebra in the 80s got dumbed down and perhaps they no longer cover the quadratic equation, etc, in "algebra" anymore. So, Algebra II would pretty much be the second semester of what we used to call Algebra.
If its not that, then I'm not sure what Algebra II could be. We were offered four classes, to be taken in strict order, Geometry, Algebra, Pre-calculus (I guess the word "trigonometry" doesn't fit in a CHAR(16) column or something stupid like that), Calculus. We also had remedial general math class for the folks whom never learned fractions, or in some cases couldn't add. Kids had to pass 2 years of math to graduate H.S. The "standard track" kids therefore took geometry and algebra, I continued on into trig and calc with the college track kids.
I wish they offered some more useful classes. Statistics or discrete math would have been a heck of a lot more useful to the average citizen.
But I don't understand the use cases for finger-only tablets.... . Does anyone have experiences with these fingery tablets?
90% of my ipad time is clicking delete on almost all emails, scrolling and reading some emails. Its a really easy choice, wait five minutes for the PC to boot up and anti-virus to finish and log in, click thru todays firefox upgrade and windows "upgrade", etc etc, or five seconds on the ipad till I do what I want. Regardless of CPU speed, latency makes PCs incredibly slow compared to an ipad.
It makes a pretty good web-shopping platform on the couch. Peapod, Amazon, etc. Again, instant latency compared to a PC, and no virus/security issues.
Very star trek tablet web page viewing experience. Pick up, look at local weather radar, local weather forecast, stocks, bank account, whatever, then put down. No upgrading / virus scanning / latency drama, its just there and ready for me instantly.
Makes a great ebook reader. Some awesome fast and smooth pdf readers and CBZ/CBR comic book reading apps.
Generally speaking the experience on a tablet places the user in the drivers seat, whereas the experience on a non-linux desktop/laptop/netbook places the device in the drivers seat with the user as a passenger.
Simple. If making a good tablet isn't enough to sell a good tablet, that means that the demand for tablets is being driven by Apple rather than a need for tablets.
That assumes anyone wants to buy a tablet. Almost no one does. They want to "do stuff" and use apps from the itunes app store on something about the size of a book. It conveniently happens that the action of "buying a tablet" is a step on the path to that destination. Buying a tablet about as relevant as buying gas for the car to drive out there and buy it, its just something annoying, tedious, and expensive that you have to do before you have fun.
Anyone who sells something that connects to itunes and is about the size of a book will win. Anyone whom sells a similar sized piece of glass and plastic with some computer chips will not win.
Please do not save me a seat on the space shuttle you build.
If the telecom world built a space shuttle, you'd be billed in one inch increments in detail for the entire launch, it would be almost impossible to find out how much it'll cost other than the short term advertised rate, most of the operating budget would go toward TV commercials and the previously mentioned billing system, and they'd market their launch service as being "unlimited" but if you tried to remain in orbit too long they'd either shoot you down or bill by the inch traveled at exorbitant rates. If you want water, air, and fuel, you'll have to sign up for each separately at a high monthly fee. Randomly stuff would stop working and someone with one day of training in a call center on the other side of the planet, would read a script asking you to reboot your spacecraft, while simultaneously trying to upsell you more services you don't need "Well sir I'm very sorry to hear your space station crashed. While we wait for it to reboot, would you like to hear about our special offer on moon bases?".
But, the good news is, the shuttle would be "free" if you signed a two year contract.
Like the original poster, I also worked in telecom, I know how it is...
I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day.
Look at the spectacular cost of billing systems in the old-world voice telecom... You need 24x7 monitoring NOC and NOC tools and troubleshooting tools for the multiple geographically separate multiple synchronized billing database servers. And, being telecom, you need at least eight layers of management, minimum, each of which needs different reporting systems and dashboards. Finally there's the intermittent / process oriented / batch oriented monitoring tools required. And probably some queuing software, and I'm sure they won't use something cheap or opensource. On the input side you need multiple separate diverse communications links, all monitored by the 24x7 NOC of course using the most expensive tools possible. On the output side you need multiple backup systems and offsite backup, and of course infrastructure to restore old data, for legal and billing disputes. And you need it all security audited to be secure because its chock full of personally identifiable information and needs to be ADA and SOX compliant. Much as public libraries are used as a harassment tool in lawsuits by being forced to provide detailed patron records, you can assume that online newspaper readers will be harassed the same way, so you need to store every click for a long time or accept the costs of being in contempt of court.
You know that at the telco, you're gonna have to sell an unholy heck of a lot of minutes at one penny per minute just to pay for the billing infrastructure that collects those pennies, or you'll have to pay for all that infrastructure upfront as much capex as possible. Or you can save everybody a lot of money and just bill flat rate...
Both in telecom billing, and apparently the "great firewall of NYT" the situation is very much like selling 25 cent cans of soda pop for 50 cents out of a trillion dollar vending machine, it would be less of a loss to just give it away.
This thing doesn't stop you madly swinging your arms about until your eyesight comes back, which I think will be a pretty common response.
Infantryman, OK. tank driver or attack heli pilot, not so good. Civilian driver, not good.
I wonder if its been patented? Rednecks have been shooting deer at night from the back of pickup trucks by pointing a floodlight at the deer, which makes it freeze, since... I donno probably about one night after the floodlight and/or pickup truck was invented. Probably the part he is patenting is doing this process while NOT drinking beer and NOT listening to country music.
...and I'm sure the long term effects of overloading your sensitive, incredibly difficult and costly to regrow optic nerves to this degree are well known, and this represents no long term danger. right?
I'd worry more about the short term danger, as it sounds conceptually an unholy heck of a lot simpler and cheaper than an IR guided surface to air missile, yet probably equally effective... So cheap you could use it against tank drivers... or police car drivers... or just random civillian / citizen / consumer (whatever we are?) car drivers...
makes no sense without the myth structure of God, Jesus etc
That's the whole point of the quote, self-market with the false appearance of being the only game in town. The opposite of Christianity must be... following christian-mythos bad guys. Not following something else, or nothing at all. Make it look like the only game in town....
Well, according to his own website (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html) his plan is to finish volume 5 by 2020 and will then revisit volumes 1-3 to update them. And only then, and if he's still alive, will ge start on volumes 6 and 7, which he doesn't count as "central core of computer programming for sequential machines", though.
In his latest book collected papers on fun and games he referred to it as his last book. Hopefully his last book as in last book of the "collected papers" series.
Most have HFC networks, meaning they have fat fibers to the phone poles in the neighborhoods. They just run RG6 into the house instead of fiber. Now, anyway. They do happily run fiber into businesses.
I wonder if GOOG will actually be getting municipal permission to hang/bury their own fiber or will just make the cableco / telco rich by renting their local loops.
Yes. A lot of cities have fiber not available to the vast majority of the citizens of the state. I live in the capital of an middle-sized state and don't have any fiber option at my home at all.- and I live 2.5 miles for a fairly sizable downtown of in a city of 2.5 million or so.
For residential. I'd be willing to bet that you've got a hybrid fiber coax install for your cabletv, and business accounts can connect to spare fibers in the HFC network. They ran 12 pair to your neighborhood node for a reason, not just because they like 11-times redundancy (or 96 pair or whatever).
Expensive fiber is only used for ground (loop) isolation, lightning protection, or sheer inertia for gig and slower. 10 gig has been the standard for a long time. Off the shelf you're looking at about $300 for a PCI card for a typical server. GBIC transceivers are about $150. Because thats probably well under an order of magnitude cheaper than the labor for the fiber install, it seems pointless to try to "save money" by running 10 meg ethernet over a fiber.
You can't buy 10gig fiber gear at walmart. Today. Outside of Kansas. So far. That is likely to be the big problem, as there is probably a city full of bloatware installed bargain basement $250 PCs, so sticking a $300 card in a $250 PC with no firewall is going to be a bit... weird.
Anyway let me know when consumer grade 10gigabit wireless is off the shelf. Probably about the time we can buy fiber OC-192 off the shelf at walmart for $5.
"Communications depends on an omnidirectional low-gain antenna communicating at a low data rate and a steerable high-gain antenna, both in direct contact with Earth. A low gain antenna is also used to relay data to spacecraft orbiting Mars."
You know what would improve wikipedia, a third article on the same vehicle. How bout a MER-A article with a third separate writeup.
OK so they're optimizing for peak solar electrical power and peak outside air temp, which unfortunately coincides with (nearly) peak RF path loss. Makes sense if the problem is assumed to be temp related.
Why this waiting for a month or year on earth calendars?
I know spirit has a direct link to earth. Not relaying thru an orbiter on Mars or whatever. So received SNR on BOTH sides is gonna vary by a wee bit as our planets orbit, from pretty darn close to very far away.
So, if the closest approach to mars is around jan 2010, march 2012, etc, why not try to communicate then, at highest signal levels, rather than fooling around now or next month? In fact it would seem that "right now" is pretty close to orbital opposition, so why they're even trying to communicate by transmitting thru the Sun is a mystery to me.
I'm guessing a likely failure mode is something bent or tilted the antenna.. It was stuck in the sand, after all.
I'm sure that: 1) They have their unknown reasons, which would be interesting to read. 2) Its just journalistic filler material anyway, so deciding to report it now, doesn't really mean anything, maybe this is a report from Jan of 2010?
get people when they are young and steering them away from unhealthy lifestyles (alcohol, tobacco, drugs, etc.)?
Can't fix stupid. However, if they've already pushed the self destruct button, its possible that they could be steered toward a cheaper, faster demise rather than a slow expensive trainwreck. I can see the ads now "For patients whom drink more than 12 beers every day, and only patient whom drink more than 12 beers every day, the Surgeon General recommends that methanol and OJ is a better drink than ethanol and OJ; bottoms up!"
Remember they're not in the business of improving health, they're in the business of improving profit.
Why would they want to lose it after paying large sums of cash?
Well, the IRS is gonna be really pissed, but the general public getting money tax free is going to be happy. Assuming "the general public" got the cash and not some politician. Hmm.
The point here is that you go off all crazy on security policies that are impossible to follow, someone will find a work-around that defeats the purpose.
The worst part of your story is the actual failure mode is failure to understand the difference between encryption and authentication.
You're "supposed" to share encryption keys to transfer data, and you've got a huge known plaintext problem with encryption. So you have to change keys / passwords every week or whatever.
In comparison, the only person that knows your authentication password is one human. The computer, if done correctly, only knows a salted hash. Changing passwords is cargo cult science, it pointless. Its applying a solution from one problem to a completely unrelated problem. And it makes it worse by making password changing and resetting common and trivialized (in addition to making human management of passwords so difficult that they subvert the system as per your report). Finally it feeds illogic and stupidity, in that good security can be a PITA, therefore anything that is a PITA must be good security, right, and the more of a PITA it is the better the security must be?
For a lost income claim, the money is taxable (just as the income it is supposed to be replacing would be).
The problem is tax evasion. There's a million "bubba gump shrimp boats" down there, that "on paper" never make more than a couple K of taxable income per year. But under the table they were absolutely raking it in. Cash sales to restaurants. Cash sales at the pier to brokers. Cash sales to general public and/or local fisherman whom happen to be at the pier. The only guy in LA with more cash than a dealer is a fishing boat owner. Now with the spill, there is a huge dilemma of how much money they should get from B.P., what they actually made, or what they reported to the IRS.
I'm told by relatives in LA that the IRS takes people down because they are so dumb that they buy diesel for their boat on a credit card, so its easily tracked, and they spend more money JUST ON DIESEL than they report as gross income to the IRS. Theres a whole folklore as to which marina cooperates with the feds and which marinas take cash for fuel, and how its better to buy diesel at a "gas" station for cash, pay the diesel road tax, and pour it into your boat, than to get busted, apparently offroad has a dye added so you can't burn it onroad, and boat owners buy the dye to make it look like they're burning marina diesel instead of truck diesel.
That gives some idea of how bad the tax evasion is down there. I would not be surprised if this is all a show, and the laptop mysteriously is found in the local IRS office.
Slashdot Mirror
Solving equations, graphing, factoring polynomials, reducing polynomials, square roots, cube roots, n-th roots.
Imaginary numbers, complex numbers, quadratic equation.
Matrix math.
If you take all that stuff out of my algebra class, that would have left.... Um... the concept of what is a variable and variable substitution, and not much else? I'm struggling to think what would remain in Alg I if that all got pulled out into Alg II.
There was a "pre-algebra" class expected to be taken in middle school that covered stuff like matrix math and imaginary numbers, complex numbers, etc. Perhaps the order has been inverted and they do that stuff after algebra now instead of before?
If I remember correctly it was algebra for things more complicated than linear equations, powers, roots, etc.
You mean things like trigonometric identities? Basically a renamed trigonometry class, then.
It is normally the 2nd year of Algebra in American High Schools.
No kidding... You sure its not the third year? How bout "What topics do they cover?"
I'm guessing what we called Algebra in the 80s got dumbed down and perhaps they no longer cover the quadratic equation, etc, in "algebra" anymore. So, Algebra II would pretty much be the second semester of what we used to call Algebra.
If its not that, then I'm not sure what Algebra II could be. We were offered four classes, to be taken in strict order, Geometry, Algebra, Pre-calculus (I guess the word "trigonometry" doesn't fit in a CHAR(16) column or something stupid like that), Calculus. We also had remedial general math class for the folks whom never learned fractions, or in some cases couldn't add. Kids had to pass 2 years of math to graduate H.S. The "standard track" kids therefore took geometry and algebra, I continued on into trig and calc with the college track kids.
I wish they offered some more useful classes. Statistics or discrete math would have been a heck of a lot more useful to the average citizen.
But I don't understand the use cases for finger-only tablets. ... . Does anyone have experiences with these fingery tablets?
90% of my ipad time is clicking delete on almost all emails, scrolling and reading some emails. Its a really easy choice, wait five minutes for the PC to boot up and anti-virus to finish and log in, click thru todays firefox upgrade and windows "upgrade", etc etc, or five seconds on the ipad till I do what I want. Regardless of CPU speed, latency makes PCs incredibly slow compared to an ipad.
It makes a pretty good web-shopping platform on the couch. Peapod, Amazon, etc. Again, instant latency compared to a PC, and no virus/security issues.
Very star trek tablet web page viewing experience. Pick up, look at local weather radar, local weather forecast, stocks, bank account, whatever, then put down. No upgrading / virus scanning / latency drama, its just there and ready for me instantly.
Makes a great ebook reader. Some awesome fast and smooth pdf readers and CBZ/CBR comic book reading apps.
Generally speaking the experience on a tablet places the user in the drivers seat, whereas the experience on a non-linux desktop/laptop/netbook places the device in the drivers seat with the user as a passenger.
Simple. If making a good tablet isn't enough to sell a good tablet, that means that the demand for tablets is being driven by Apple rather than a need for tablets.
That assumes anyone wants to buy a tablet. Almost no one does. They want to "do stuff" and use apps from the itunes app store on something about the size of a book. It conveniently happens that the action of "buying a tablet" is a step on the path to that destination. Buying a tablet about as relevant as buying gas for the car to drive out there and buy it, its just something annoying, tedious, and expensive that you have to do before you have fun.
Anyone who sells something that connects to itunes and is about the size of a book will win. Anyone whom sells a similar sized piece of glass and plastic with some computer chips will not win.
Please do not save me a seat on the space shuttle you build.
If the telecom world built a space shuttle, you'd be billed in one inch increments in detail for the entire launch, it would be almost impossible to find out how much it'll cost other than the short term advertised rate, most of the operating budget would go toward TV commercials and the previously mentioned billing system, and they'd market their launch service as being "unlimited" but if you tried to remain in orbit too long they'd either shoot you down or bill by the inch traveled at exorbitant rates. If you want water, air, and fuel, you'll have to sign up for each separately at a high monthly fee. Randomly stuff would stop working and someone with one day of training in a call center on the other side of the planet, would read a script asking you to reboot your spacecraft, while simultaneously trying to upsell you more services you don't need "Well sir I'm very sorry to hear your space station crashed. While we wait for it to reboot, would you like to hear about our special offer on moon bases?".
But, the good news is, the shuttle would be "free" if you signed a two year contract.
Like the original poster, I also worked in telecom, I know how it is...
I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day.
Look at the spectacular cost of billing systems in the old-world voice telecom... You need 24x7 monitoring NOC and NOC tools and troubleshooting tools for the multiple geographically separate multiple synchronized billing database servers. And, being telecom, you need at least eight layers of management, minimum, each of which needs different reporting systems and dashboards. Finally there's the intermittent / process oriented / batch oriented monitoring tools required. And probably some queuing software, and I'm sure they won't use something cheap or opensource. On the input side you need multiple separate diverse communications links, all monitored by the 24x7 NOC of course using the most expensive tools possible. On the output side you need multiple backup systems and offsite backup, and of course infrastructure to restore old data, for legal and billing disputes. And you need it all security audited to be secure because its chock full of personally identifiable information and needs to be ADA and SOX compliant. Much as public libraries are used as a harassment tool in lawsuits by being forced to provide detailed patron records, you can assume that online newspaper readers will be harassed the same way, so you need to store every click for a long time or accept the costs of being in contempt of court.
You know that at the telco, you're gonna have to sell an unholy heck of a lot of minutes at one penny per minute just to pay for the billing infrastructure that collects those pennies, or you'll have to pay for all that infrastructure upfront as much capex as possible. Or you can save everybody a lot of money and just bill flat rate...
Both in telecom billing, and apparently the "great firewall of NYT" the situation is very much like selling 25 cent cans of soda pop for 50 cents out of a trillion dollar vending machine, it would be less of a loss to just give it away.
That's why everyone was always putting on goggles in the old newsreels about nukes.
I thought it was to prevent permanent damage due to the ultraviolet light, much like staring at an electric arc welder?
This thing doesn't stop you madly swinging your arms about until your eyesight comes back, which I think will be a pretty common response.
Infantryman, OK. tank driver or attack heli pilot, not so good. Civilian driver, not good.
I wonder if its been patented? Rednecks have been shooting deer at night from the back of pickup trucks by pointing a floodlight at the deer, which makes it freeze, since... I donno probably about one night after the floodlight and/or pickup truck was invented. Probably the part he is patenting is doing this process while NOT drinking beer and NOT listening to country music.
...and I'm sure the long term effects of overloading your sensitive, incredibly difficult and costly to regrow optic nerves to this degree are well known, and this represents no long term danger. right?
I'd worry more about the short term danger, as it sounds conceptually an unholy heck of a lot simpler and cheaper than an IR guided surface to air missile, yet probably equally effective... So cheap you could use it against tank drivers... or police car drivers... or just random civillian / citizen / consumer (whatever we are?) car drivers...
makes no sense without the myth structure of God, Jesus etc
That's the whole point of the quote, self-market with the false appearance of being the only game in town. The opposite of Christianity must be ... following christian-mythos bad guys. Not following something else, or nothing at all. Make it look like the only game in town....
Well, according to his own website (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html) his plan is to finish volume 5 by 2020 and will then revisit volumes 1-3 to update them. And only then, and if he's still alive, will ge start on volumes 6 and 7, which he doesn't count as "central core of computer programming for sequential machines", though.
In his latest book collected papers on fun and games he referred to it as his last book. Hopefully his last book as in last book of the "collected papers" series.
If anyone knows of definitive and comprehensive readings for other engineering fields like EE, CivilE, or ChemE, I'd like to know of them.
Closest I've got for EE is either the classic "Art of Electronics" or an ARRL handbook...
Are probably pooping their pants right now.
Most have HFC networks, meaning they have fat fibers to the phone poles in the neighborhoods. They just run RG6 into the house instead of fiber. Now, anyway. They do happily run fiber into businesses.
I wonder if GOOG will actually be getting municipal permission to hang/bury their own fiber or will just make the cableco / telco rich by renting their local loops.
Yes. A lot of cities have fiber not available to the vast majority of the citizens of the state. I live in the capital of an middle-sized state and don't have any fiber option at my home at all.- and I live 2.5 miles for a fairly sizable downtown of in a city of 2.5 million or so.
For residential. I'd be willing to bet that you've got a hybrid fiber coax install for your cabletv, and business accounts can connect to spare fibers in the HFC network. They ran 12 pair to your neighborhood node for a reason, not just because they like 11-times redundancy (or 96 pair or whatever).
Call me when you get that Gbit wireless working.
Expensive fiber is only used for ground (loop) isolation, lightning protection, or sheer inertia for gig and slower. 10 gig has been the standard for a long time. Off the shelf you're looking at about $300 for a PCI card for a typical server. GBIC transceivers are about $150. Because thats probably well under an order of magnitude cheaper than the labor for the fiber install, it seems pointless to try to "save money" by running 10 meg ethernet over a fiber.
You can't buy 10gig fiber gear at walmart. Today. Outside of Kansas. So far. That is likely to be the big problem, as there is probably a city full of bloatware installed bargain basement $250 PCs, so sticking a $300 card in a $250 PC with no firewall is going to be a bit ... weird.
Anyway let me know when consumer grade 10gigabit wireless is off the shelf. Probably about the time we can buy fiber OC-192 off the shelf at walmart for $5.
Ugh, wikipedia has at least two articles...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_rover#Design_and_construction
"Communications depends on an omnidirectional low-gain antenna communicating at a low data rate and a steerable high-gain antenna, both in direct contact with Earth. A low gain antenna is also used to relay data to spacecraft orbiting Mars."
You know what would improve wikipedia, a third article on the same vehicle. How bout a MER-A article with a third separate writeup.
OK so they're optimizing for peak solar electrical power and peak outside air temp, which unfortunately coincides with (nearly) peak RF path loss. Makes sense if the problem is assumed to be temp related.
Why this waiting for a month or year on earth calendars?
I know spirit has a direct link to earth. Not relaying thru an orbiter on Mars or whatever. So received SNR on BOTH sides is gonna vary by a wee bit as our planets orbit, from pretty darn close to very far away.
So, if the closest approach to mars is around jan 2010, march 2012, etc, why not try to communicate then, at highest signal levels, rather than fooling around now or next month? In fact it would seem that "right now" is pretty close to orbital opposition, so why they're even trying to communicate by transmitting thru the Sun is a mystery to me.
I'm guessing a likely failure mode is something bent or tilted the antenna.. It was stuck in the sand, after all.
I'm sure that:
1) They have their unknown reasons, which would be interesting to read.
2) Its just journalistic filler material anyway, so deciding to report it now, doesn't really mean anything, maybe this is a report from Jan of 2010?
get people when they are young and steering them away from unhealthy lifestyles (alcohol, tobacco, drugs, etc.)?
Can't fix stupid. However, if they've already pushed the self destruct button, its possible that they could be steered toward a cheaper, faster demise rather than a slow expensive trainwreck. I can see the ads now "For patients whom drink more than 12 beers every day, and only patient whom drink more than 12 beers every day, the Surgeon General recommends that methanol and OJ is a better drink than ethanol and OJ; bottoms up!"
Remember they're not in the business of improving health, they're in the business of improving profit.
And someone on /. would suggest the best way to cap the data leak would be to nuke it ...
Why would they want to lose it after paying large sums of cash?
Well, the IRS is gonna be really pissed, but the general public getting money tax free is going to be happy. Assuming "the general public" got the cash and not some politician. Hmm.
"Password Protection" on a laptop is like putting up a forty-foot high steel ...
... blow-out preventer on a well, and then not keeping its batteries fully charged?
Just trying to put it in terms B.P. can easily understand given their recent history...
The point here is that you go off all crazy on security policies that are impossible to follow, someone will find a work-around that defeats the purpose.
The worst part of your story is the actual failure mode is failure to understand the difference between encryption and authentication.
You're "supposed" to share encryption keys to transfer data, and you've got a huge known plaintext problem with encryption. So you have to change keys / passwords every week or whatever.
In comparison, the only person that knows your authentication password is one human. The computer, if done correctly, only knows a salted hash. Changing passwords is cargo cult science, it pointless. Its applying a solution from one problem to a completely unrelated problem. And it makes it worse by making password changing and resetting common and trivialized (in addition to making human management of passwords so difficult that they subvert the system as per your report). Finally it feeds illogic and stupidity, in that good security can be a PITA, therefore anything that is a PITA must be good security, right, and the more of a PITA it is the better the security must be?
For a lost income claim, the money is taxable (just as the income it is supposed to be replacing would be).
The problem is tax evasion. There's a million "bubba gump shrimp boats" down there, that "on paper" never make more than a couple K of taxable income per year. But under the table they were absolutely raking it in. Cash sales to restaurants. Cash sales at the pier to brokers. Cash sales to general public and/or local fisherman whom happen to be at the pier. The only guy in LA with more cash than a dealer is a fishing boat owner. Now with the spill, there is a huge dilemma of how much money they should get from B.P., what they actually made, or what they reported to the IRS.
I'm told by relatives in LA that the IRS takes people down because they are so dumb that they buy diesel for their boat on a credit card, so its easily tracked, and they spend more money JUST ON DIESEL than they report as gross income to the IRS. Theres a whole folklore as to which marina cooperates with the feds and which marinas take cash for fuel, and how its better to buy diesel at a "gas" station for cash, pay the diesel road tax, and pour it into your boat, than to get busted, apparently offroad has a dye added so you can't burn it onroad, and boat owners buy the dye to make it look like they're burning marina diesel instead of truck diesel.
That gives some idea of how bad the tax evasion is down there. I would not be surprised if this is all a show, and the laptop mysteriously is found in the local IRS office.