Actually, I believe the $14,600 number is incorrect and that he's actually suing for something like $62,400 per employee.
Notice that $14,600/employee * 61000 employees ~= $890m, which is a far cry short of $3.8b.
Reading the article, the claim is for $200 per pay period per employee per claim. There are 12 claims and if we assume biweekly paychecks, 26 pay periods. $200 * 12 * 26 = $62,400 per employee. $62,400/employee * 61000 employees ~= $3.8b, which suggests this math is correct. It's certainly possible that the number of pay periods is wrong, but using 24 pay periods for twice/month paychecks produces ~$3.5b which is shy of the mark.
I've heard 3 strikes before and seems like a reasonable policy for an ISP to apply for disconnecting people, so I propose that ISPs disconnect people who have been found liable in 3 distinct cases for infringement (utilizing their internet connect). This allows us to use a well-known and authoritative method for determining what constitutes a strike. Furthermore, we should restrict it to copyright violations that have occurred in the past 3 years to allow people to reform their illicit behavior.
Carnegie Mellon has attracted a lot of major tech companies to Pittsburgh where they hope to pick up CMU graduates who are a looking to stay. It additionally is a significant source of start ups. Companies with offices in Pittsburgh include:
Google Apple IBM Uber Duolingo Shoefitr Dynamics Safaba etc.
Expected value is only a good metric for evaluating lottery tickets if you expect to win often enough that it'll average out over time. For this particular lottery where $2 buys you a 1/175m chance of winning $337.8m, it doesn't make sense to reason that you're paying an average of $0.07 cents to play unless you're planning to buy several billion tickets over the time period you care about. For this lottery, the entire point is the variance. If you buy a ticket you are paying a trivial amount of money for a small possibility of a life-changing event.
There are occasionally lotteries and people for which expected value does make sense: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/how-mit-students-scammed-the-massachusetts-lottery-for-8-million/ http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million-to-hedge-bets-in-lottery.html
The police in the DC area appear to have very strong beliefs that children should be accompanied very closely by parents at all times. About a year ago, my wife and I were walking to the air and space museum with our 8 year old daughter and her 8 year old cousin in DC. We walked by a park and the children thought it would be fun to walk through the park and meet us on the other side. They were stopped in the middle of the park by a police officer who demanded to know where their parents were. They pointed at us, about 50 feet away. The police officer first demanded that we come meet him in the middle of the park to pick up the children and, after we refused, settled for escorting them the 50 feet to meet us.
We felt like the officer was acting ludicrously and a royal jerk. It's discomforting to see that this problem is more wide spread, so I hope these parents are able to get the police and CPS to back down. I completely agree that children do not magically become grownups on their 18th birthday, they need to slowly expand their boundaries and comfort zone over time as they grow into adults.
I would like to introduce Mr. Cicconi to a device called a 'Telephone', particularly a variant colloquially termed a 'landline'. Historically 'telephone' companies, such as AT&T, would sell users a 'landline' to which they could connect a 'telephone'. These services included a basic connection charge as well as usage charges. In the event that a connection was made form one 'landline' to another, the party that initiated the session was charged for the usage of the session. This is exactly the treatment that Mr. Hastings is proposing.
In particular, I would like to note that while some providers charged users based upon usage, other providers allowed for a fixed cost plan where the subscriber paid a flat payment independent of their usage. These sorts of unlimited plans are exactly what AT&T, Comcast, etc. are selling as an ISP to their customers now, so they have no business trying to extract usage fees from Netflix and they have no business telling us that we're asking non-Netflix customers to subsidize the connections of Netflix customers. We've paid the fees that AT&T, Comcast, etc. demand for unlimited usage, so they need to provide it without whining about how they're not getting paid twice for the same service.
I recently discovered the answer to this question. It's because everyone else has one. When you get rear ended on a bicycle by a car going 30mph, you are quickly accelerated from 15mph to 45mph and then wipe out. This has a tendency to break limbs, cause concussions, and do other damage. The only known defences are to ride somewhere else (which frequently means you can't actually get to the grocery store) or add mass. If you up your mass to 3000 lbs, then the acceleration and damage are minimal. I prefer to put that mass into the vehicle, but you can try adding 3000lbs in body fat if you want.
Go post your question on a forum for stay-at-home parents. They should have some pretty good ideas as they have a lot of mind-numbing boredom to deal with.
If I were designing a security system for TSA, I would definitely consider printing a (possibly fake) screening status in the barcode in plain text. If you keep a database of what status you assigned to which boarding ticket, then you can more thoroughly screen (or arrest and jail indefinitely) anyone who changes the easily hackable obvious screening status on their boarding pass. This is much like a honeypot that folks sometimes use in network security. (For those who don't know, a honeypot is an easily hackable machine that serves no purpose except to be hacked so that an observer can find folks who are trying to break in.)
IANAL. One might argue that he qualifies under section (iv) on the basis that a pen and paper constitutes a 'recording device'. One might further argue that he qualifies under section (v) on the basis that converting his paper notes into electronic text constituted a transcription of the aforementioned recording. I think this is clearly nonsense and not the intent of the law, as these appear to be intended to cover those people employed by the court to perform these roles and not some individual who happened to engage in these practices while playing a role not on the list. I'd also note that (vi) explicitly limits itself to attorneys for the government and fails to gag attorneys for the witnesses. If note taking and posting is found to be illegal, perhaps we'll see a rise in demand for attorneys with eidetic memories.
I would think the IP addresses would be useless forever. It would likely take way more effort than it is worth to get them unblocked. Even if the court lifted the block, it would be hard to guarantee that they had been unblocked by every ISP out there. If this goes into overdrive, we might have a new compelling reason to switch to IPv6 as larger and larger swaths of IPv4 addresses become dead.
Agreed! The display is very important. I do not understand why the other commenters seems to be asking for a 1920x1080 display. This wide screen is good for watching movies, but crap for development work. I need more verticle screen real estate so that I can see a larger block of code at once. Verticle space is far more valuable than horizontal. I would gladly take a 1600x1200 display over a 1920x1080. If they really want to be innovative, they'll put a 1920x1200 display on the laptop along with a feature where it can be rotated vertical to give me 1200x1920. That's what I do on my desktop and it works great. Duplicate it on my laptop and I'll finally be able to use it for work purposes.
Typically compulsory licensing requirements include that the price must be fair. No reasonably human being (and likely no court) would feel that $1 billion dollars per thermostat is a fair licensing price when Honeywell is selling their thermostats for $50-$100 each. Presumably they'd have to sell their thermostats at $1b+ to claim that the patents were worth $1b per unit and seems likely that Honeywell would find themselves out of business pretty quickly if they demanded $1b+ per thermostat.
I had no idea these Nest Thermostats existed, but they look awesome. Now that I know about them I can go out and buy one and enjoy an increased quality of life. Thanks, Honeywell, for bringing them to my attention!
DNS is a lot like a phone book, which is something many people understand. If we blacklist someone from DNS it's like removing them from the phone book. Their phone number still works and anyone can call them. Removing an illicit phone number from the phone book will not prevent people from dialing the number. A phone number would still be passed around in forums, between friends, etc.
Regularly removing phone numbers from the phone book may create many alternative phone books which is likely to create a big headache for all users in figuring out which phone book they need to use to find a particular website and in figuring out which phone books contain legitimate information and which ones will give you the real phone number for your bank and which ones will give you fake books. This is particularly concerning because the legislation proposed doesn't apply due process to removing a phone number from the phone book, but instead allows for arbitrary removals.
I think what he's trying to say is that they're now accepting payment in Lattes. I intend to take advantage of this new feature and send them a Latte or two every month rather than paying with my credit card.
Seems like you should weigh the pros and cons of selling it on the open market. Depending on the portion of the company owned, you may well be better off threatening to donate it to some entity that they would not want owning a portion of the company, such as a competitor.
The right answer is to use encryption on all websites. Unfortunately we're not yet at a point where all websites can be bothered to support encryption which means that we should use encryption for every website that supports it and carefully consider whether websites that don't support it are worth the risk. It would be nice if your web-browser would automatically use encryption on sites where it is available and, thanks to the EFF, there is a Firefox plug-in that does just that. Consider giving HTTPS Everywhere a try.
I agree, these are interesting questions. You propose some interesting analogies and the conclusions of them are hard to argue with. There is, however, a subtle point that gets lost in these analogies; Apple is the only publisher or merchant. Would your conclusions hold weight if a publisher refused to publish books with advertisements in them and they were the only entity that could publish books? Or what if they refused to sell clothing with advertising on it while being the only seller of clothing? I believe that in either of these cases the answer is no, if one publisher had a monopoly on the ability to publish books or one clothing store had a monopoly on selling clothes, that it would be unreasonable for them to regulate what books can be published or what clothing can be sold based on their own arbitrary opinions.
Unfortunately the waters are murkier than this. Apple has a monopoly on publishing apps for the iP* platform (iPhone, iPod, iPad), but other companies make similar platforms. Is it ok for one company to have a monopoly on (and use it to restrict) publishing for a particular platform when other competing platforms are available? After all, one could buy an Android phone instead of an iPhone and thus avoid Apple's restrictions. Is that good enough or does the market for each individual platform need to be free? I'm not sure how this might map into your above examples. The closest I can come is one merchant having a monopoly on cotton shirts while wool and polyester shirts are available from others, but that fails to capture the way you choose one platform and are locked into it for two years.
This ruling is entirely unreasonable for two reasons:
(1) This effectively extends the jurisdiction of an community law to the entire country
(2) This requires that someone know and understand all the laws of every community
I don't know whether the ruling is wrong with regard to the law or whether the law is horribly broken, but rulings like this are entirely unreasonable. It goes against the principles of the US to allow a small group of people to inflict their personal views and opinions on the entire country. I really hope that this precedent is changed, either by a successful appeal to the supreme court or better laws.
When I was in elementary school, we went to the computer lab a couple days a week and were forced to use the PAWS typing tutor software on the Apple IIe. Is it really that case that there are still schools that don't teach this? Also, based on my experience, I don't think we should wait until high school to teach people to type. Elementary school seems like the right place, as children are learning to read and write, why not learn to type too?
I absolutely agree with a crystal radio. It's a simple, cheap, fun project which could easily be completed within a class period or two. To make the project more fun (and make them do more Physics), let them decide what radio station they want it to tune. They'll have to calculate the appropriate values for the inductor(s) and capacitor(s) for the LC filter and they'll get to tune into their favorite station.
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Actually, I believe the $14,600 number is incorrect and that he's actually suing for something like $62,400 per employee.
Notice that $14,600/employee * 61000 employees ~= $890m, which is a far cry short of $3.8b.
Reading the article, the claim is for $200 per pay period per employee per claim. There are 12 claims and if we assume biweekly paychecks, 26 pay periods. $200 * 12 * 26 = $62,400 per employee. $62,400/employee * 61000 employees ~= $3.8b, which suggests this math is correct. It's certainly possible that the number of pay periods is wrong, but using 24 pay periods for twice/month paychecks produces ~$3.5b which is shy of the mark.
I've heard 3 strikes before and seems like a reasonable policy for an ISP to apply for disconnecting people, so I propose that ISPs disconnect people who have been found liable in 3 distinct cases for infringement (utilizing their internet connect). This allows us to use a well-known and authoritative method for determining what constitutes a strike. Furthermore, we should restrict it to copyright violations that have occurred in the past 3 years to allow people to reform their illicit behavior.
Carnegie Mellon has attracted a lot of major tech companies to Pittsburgh where they hope to pick up CMU graduates who are a looking to stay. It additionally is a significant source of start ups. Companies with offices in Pittsburgh include:
Google
Apple
IBM
Uber
Duolingo
Shoefitr
Dynamics
Safaba
etc.
Expected value is only a good metric for evaluating lottery tickets if you expect to win often enough that it'll average out over time. For this particular lottery where $2 buys you a 1/175m chance of winning $337.8m, it doesn't make sense to reason that you're paying an average of $0.07 cents to play unless you're planning to buy several billion tickets over the time period you care about. For this lottery, the entire point is the variance. If you buy a ticket you are paying a trivial amount of money for a small possibility of a life-changing event.
There are occasionally lotteries and people for which expected value does make sense:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/how-mit-students-scammed-the-massachusetts-lottery-for-8-million/
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million-to-hedge-bets-in-lottery.html
The police in the DC area appear to have very strong beliefs that children should be accompanied very closely by parents at all times. About a year ago, my wife and I were walking to the air and space museum with our 8 year old daughter and her 8 year old cousin in DC. We walked by a park and the children thought it would be fun to walk through the park and meet us on the other side. They were stopped in the middle of the park by a police officer who demanded to know where their parents were. They pointed at us, about 50 feet away. The police officer first demanded that we come meet him in the middle of the park to pick up the children and, after we refused, settled for escorting them the 50 feet to meet us.
We felt like the officer was acting ludicrously and a royal jerk. It's discomforting to see that this problem is more wide spread, so I hope these parents are able to get the police and CPS to back down. I completely agree that children do not magically become grownups on their 18th birthday, they need to slowly expand their boundaries and comfort zone over time as they grow into adults.
I would like to introduce Mr. Cicconi to a device called a 'Telephone', particularly a variant colloquially termed a 'landline'. Historically 'telephone' companies, such as AT&T, would sell users a 'landline' to which they could connect a 'telephone'. These services included a basic connection charge as well as usage charges. In the event that a connection was made form one 'landline' to another, the party that initiated the session was charged for the usage of the session. This is exactly the treatment that Mr. Hastings is proposing.
In particular, I would like to note that while some providers charged users based upon usage, other providers allowed for a fixed cost plan where the subscriber paid a flat payment independent of their usage. These sorts of unlimited plans are exactly what AT&T, Comcast, etc. are selling as an ISP to their customers now, so they have no business trying to extract usage fees from Netflix and they have no business telling us that we're asking non-Netflix customers to subsidize the connections of Netflix customers. We've paid the fees that AT&T, Comcast, etc. demand for unlimited usage, so they need to provide it without whining about how they're not getting paid twice for the same service.
I recently discovered the answer to this question. It's because everyone else has one. When you get rear ended on a bicycle by a car going 30mph, you are quickly accelerated from 15mph to 45mph and then wipe out. This has a tendency to break limbs, cause concussions, and do other damage. The only known defences are to ride somewhere else (which frequently means you can't actually get to the grocery store) or add mass. If you up your mass to 3000 lbs, then the acceleration and damage are minimal. I prefer to put that mass into the vehicle, but you can try adding 3000lbs in body fat if you want.
Go post your question on a forum for stay-at-home parents. They should have some pretty good ideas as they have a lot of mind-numbing boredom to deal with.
If I were designing a security system for TSA, I would definitely consider printing a (possibly fake) screening status in the barcode in plain text. If you keep a database of what status you assigned to which boarding ticket, then you can more thoroughly screen (or arrest and jail indefinitely) anyone who changes the easily hackable obvious screening status on their boarding pass. This is much like a honeypot that folks sometimes use in network security. (For those who don't know, a honeypot is an easily hackable machine that serves no purpose except to be hacked so that an observer can find folks who are trying to break in.)
IANAL. One might argue that he qualifies under section (iv) on the basis that a pen and paper constitutes a 'recording device'. One might further argue that he qualifies under section (v) on the basis that converting his paper notes into electronic text constituted a transcription of the aforementioned recording. I think this is clearly nonsense and not the intent of the law, as these appear to be intended to cover those people employed by the court to perform these roles and not some individual who happened to engage in these practices while playing a role not on the list. I'd also note that (vi) explicitly limits itself to attorneys for the government and fails to gag attorneys for the witnesses. If note taking and posting is found to be illegal, perhaps we'll see a rise in demand for attorneys with eidetic memories.
I would think the IP addresses would be useless forever. It would likely take way more effort than it is worth to get them unblocked. Even if the court lifted the block, it would be hard to guarantee that they had been unblocked by every ISP out there. If this goes into overdrive, we might have a new compelling reason to switch to IPv6 as larger and larger swaths of IPv4 addresses become dead.
Agreed! The display is very important. I do not understand why the other commenters seems to be asking for a 1920x1080 display. This wide screen is good for watching movies, but crap for development work. I need more verticle screen real estate so that I can see a larger block of code at once. Verticle space is far more valuable than horizontal. I would gladly take a 1600x1200 display over a 1920x1080. If they really want to be innovative, they'll put a 1920x1200 display on the laptop along with a feature where it can be rotated vertical to give me 1200x1920. That's what I do on my desktop and it works great. Duplicate it on my laptop and I'll finally be able to use it for work purposes.
Typically compulsory licensing requirements include that the price must be fair. No reasonably human being (and likely no court) would feel that $1 billion dollars per thermostat is a fair licensing price when Honeywell is selling their thermostats for $50-$100 each. Presumably they'd have to sell their thermostats at $1b+ to claim that the patents were worth $1b per unit and seems likely that Honeywell would find themselves out of business pretty quickly if they demanded $1b+ per thermostat.
I had no idea these Nest Thermostats existed, but they look awesome. Now that I know about them I can go out and buy one and enjoy an increased quality of life. Thanks, Honeywell, for bringing them to my attention!
Be my guest. I'm fully in favor of the free flow of ideas, especially those that help to educate people.
DNS is a lot like a phone book, which is something many people understand. If we blacklist someone from DNS it's like removing them from the phone book. Their phone number still works and anyone can call them. Removing an illicit phone number from the phone book will not prevent people from dialing the number. A phone number would still be passed around in forums, between friends, etc.
Regularly removing phone numbers from the phone book may create many alternative phone books which is likely to create a big headache for all users in figuring out which phone book they need to use to find a particular website and in figuring out which phone books contain legitimate information and which ones will give you the real phone number for your bank and which ones will give you fake books. This is particularly concerning because the legislation proposed doesn't apply due process to removing a phone number from the phone book, but instead allows for arbitrary removals.
Is this DARPA's real motive or do they want the ability to cannibalize enemy satellites?
I think what he's trying to say is that they're now accepting payment in Lattes. I intend to take advantage of this new feature and send them a Latte or two every month rather than paying with my credit card.
Seems like you should weigh the pros and cons of selling it on the open market. Depending on the portion of the company owned, you may well be better off threatening to donate it to some entity that they would not want owning a portion of the company, such as a competitor.
The right answer is to use encryption on all websites. Unfortunately we're not yet at a point where all websites can be bothered to support encryption which means that we should use encryption for every website that supports it and carefully consider whether websites that don't support it are worth the risk. It would be nice if your web-browser would automatically use encryption on sites where it is available and, thanks to the EFF, there is a Firefox plug-in that does just that. Consider giving HTTPS Everywhere a try.
I agree, these are interesting questions. You propose some interesting analogies and the conclusions of them are hard to argue with. There is, however, a subtle point that gets lost in these analogies; Apple is the only publisher or merchant. Would your conclusions hold weight if a publisher refused to publish books with advertisements in them and they were the only entity that could publish books? Or what if they refused to sell clothing with advertising on it while being the only seller of clothing? I believe that in either of these cases the answer is no, if one publisher had a monopoly on the ability to publish books or one clothing store had a monopoly on selling clothes, that it would be unreasonable for them to regulate what books can be published or what clothing can be sold based on their own arbitrary opinions.
Unfortunately the waters are murkier than this. Apple has a monopoly on publishing apps for the iP* platform (iPhone, iPod, iPad), but other companies make similar platforms. Is it ok for one company to have a monopoly on (and use it to restrict) publishing for a particular platform when other competing platforms are available? After all, one could buy an Android phone instead of an iPhone and thus avoid Apple's restrictions. Is that good enough or does the market for each individual platform need to be free? I'm not sure how this might map into your above examples. The closest I can come is one merchant having a monopoly on cotton shirts while wool and polyester shirts are available from others, but that fails to capture the way you choose one platform and are locked into it for two years.
This ruling is entirely unreasonable for two reasons:
(1) This effectively extends the jurisdiction of an community law to the entire country
(2) This requires that someone know and understand all the laws of every community
I don't know whether the ruling is wrong with regard to the law or whether the law is horribly broken, but rulings like this are entirely unreasonable. It goes against the principles of the US to allow a small group of people to inflict their personal views and opinions on the entire country. I really hope that this precedent is changed, either by a successful appeal to the supreme court or better laws.
When I was in elementary school, we went to the computer lab a couple days a week and were forced to use the PAWS typing tutor software on the Apple IIe. Is it really that case that there are still schools that don't teach this? Also, based on my experience, I don't think we should wait until high school to teach people to type. Elementary school seems like the right place, as children are learning to read and write, why not learn to type too?
That's easy, just tell them that the screenings work about as well as speech recognition. It's 95% accurate and everyone knows how much it sucks.
I absolutely agree with a crystal radio. It's a simple, cheap, fun project which could easily be completed within a class period or two. To make the project more fun (and make them do more Physics), let them decide what radio station they want it to tune. They'll have to calculate the appropriate values for the inductor(s) and capacitor(s) for the LC filter and they'll get to tune into their favorite station.