If you are relying on Part 15 FCC regulations, be sure to read them first. Using a device in a way not contemplated by the manufacturer can turn your "approved" device into a "home-built transmitter [that is] not for sale" which puts the onus entirely on you to comply with the rules.
Having said that, if nobody complains, then you almost certainly won't be hearing from the FCC, and even if you were to use a device "as intended" and it caused harmful interference, you are still required to cease using it.
With the exception of intermittent and periodic transmissions, and biomedical telemetry devices, Part 15 transmitters are not permitted to operate in the TV broadcast bands.
I guess that means if you are only going to transmit "intermittently" or "periodically" then this is fine, but it's probably not okay to use this for your home-security system that runs 24/7.
Channel 3 is in the 54-70MHz band, which is okay but only at very low power, 100 microvolts/m measured at 3 m away ("quasi-peak").
It is almost certainly legally safe to use this over low-VHF channels over coax rather than "over the airwaves," and you'll probably get a stronger signal to boot. But it won't be as much fun.
There may be some opportunity to use this under other parts of the FCC rules, such as part 18 (industrial, scientific, and medical) and, on applicable frequencies, part 97 (amateur radio license-holders only, and only in ham bands, and even then NTSC is not an acceptable "mode" in many bands).
Or, rather, they should publicly "float the idea" of spinning it off and see if anyone - including hobbyists - bite.
Obviously, there are exceptions. For example, if the tech is still legally encumbered or would require publishing still-valuable trade secrets you may not want to spin it off. Ditto if you are killing it because of liability concerns (e.g. your company had a side-business in tobacco in the 1980s or early 1990s) and you know that even if you spin it off, your country's legal system will still stick you with more liability for future users if you spin it off than if you kill it outright.
But for things like old Polaroid film tech, there's no reason not to see if anyone wants to buy your tech and maybe even buy the manufacturing facility (or if you need the facility for other products, they might want to lease time on it so they can do occasional production runs).
For computers that can be re-purposed or re-sold, the actual residual value after 3 years (or whatever your "time to fully depreciated" is) significantly greater than zero.
For "locked down" computers, the actual residual value becomes a cost - the cost of having it hauled off as e-waste.
In cases where computers must be locked-down (e.g. due to a grant requirement), the "true cost" should be the buy-in cost + the ongoing maintenance cost - the residual cost (or... + the disposal cost).
By explicitly calling this out in your requisition process, it will make people think twice before applying for grants that require locked-down computers.
"Be it resolved that computers... purchased by the department which boot using the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) have the ability to disable the Secure Boot features for both local hard drive and network booting."
I would also explicitly exclude "special purpose" computers that your department may purchase for other purposes (e.g. computers that run security cameras, which you may WANT to be locked-down), provided the individual purchase is approved by a review board. I would also allow the same "escape clause" for equipment purchased by your department using outside, restricted funds where the funding restriction contradicts the policy. Such specific exemptions may already be implicit in your organization's structure. If they are, then you do not need to spell them out explicitly.
2025, boardroom of a start-up company looking on where to invest, where to find customers, and where to set up offices:
Chris: Hey Jo, I've been looking at our European customer base. We haven't really been targeting them but there seems to be a lot of interest. You think we should look into setting up offices there?
Jo: It's worth a look, but we need to play this conservative. Remember how France and the UK squeezed huge tax settlements out of Google and other tech companies back when we were in high school?
Chris: Yeah, we'll have to go really slow on this and hire a tax advisor before we ever set foot in Europe. In the meantime, let's not target European customers and make sure that if we allow any third-party advertisements on our products that they are clearly NOT aimed at European customers.
Jo: *sigh* Well, hopefully we can work out something with the governments over there so we know ahead of time what the tax bill will be. We should pay our fair share of taxes, but there's no way we should set ourselves up for being blind-sided.
Chris: Well, you know, the nominal tax rate over there is pretty high. If we can't get some kind of up-front discount, we may just have to forgo that market entirely.
For Japan it's just one more way to bypass the banking system.
To be a good substitute for a bank deposit, something must be liquid and it must have either no loss of value or an acceptable upper limit on the loss of value compared to putting money in the bank.
Bitcoin is just too volatile. If I put 10,000 Yen in the bank now then withdraw it in 6 months, how much is it going to be worth? Almost certainly at least 9,900 Yen. If I buy 10,000 Yen worth of Bitcoin, how much will it be worth 6 months from now? Maybe 20,000 Yen, maybe 5,000 Yen, who knows?
the only thing owners can do is disable the remote-control feature completely.
In other news, thieves discovered a way to break into garages using drive-by attacks (this happened in the 1980s or 1990s). The only thing owners could do was to disable the remote-control feature completely (or replace it with a different one).
Yes, there are a few environments where you need to be able to turn the heat or AC on before you get into the car. Alaska and Phoenix, Arizona, I'm looking at you. But for everyone else, the risk (upper bound on the probability of a high-cost hack is still too high) outweighs the convenience.
It's not cheap. A very small negative interest rate is still less costly than renting a safe place to store cash and insuring it against loss, particularly for large amounts.
If I were in Japan and I had lots of cash, I would be looking at "investing" money I didn't need in the next 2-3 months in a "market basket" of Japan's equivalent of money-market accounts, commercial paper, short-term high-quality bonds, and in market-baskets of currencies of other countries, in the hopes that the ups and downs of these investments would even out to something slightly higher than inflation.
By the way, for many years or decades, US banks and money-market accounts have paid effective negative interest rates after you factor in inflation, and that's before factoring in taxation on the nominal interest. There's not much before-taxes practical difference between a 5% inflation rate and a slightly-less-than-5% interest rate and a 0.01% inflation rate and a slightly-less-than-0% interest rate. Psychological difference, yes. Taxation difference, yes (sub-0% interest is actually better in most cases), but practical difference, no.
Bitcoin should not be anonymous. All bitcoin exchanges should be like banks, or part of existing banks, and tracked like every other financial transaction
When I walk into my neighborhood bank and ask for change for a $100, they don't ask for ID.
If I go to the effort to put on a good disguise first, as long as I look like I'm not wearing a disguise they don't blink an eye.
Now if only I could figure out a way to fool the heatmap-reading cameras into thinking I'm someone else....
By the way, until the terrorism-inspired (well, that's what THEY say) "know your customer" laws, American banks were a lot more lax about requiring ID on passbook savings accounts. Now if you want to do anything other than make change or buy a one-time-use/disposable low-denomination "Christmas gift" debit cards like the ones you can buy in grocery stores, you have to provide your thumbprint and at least one (or two?) government IDs.
Thank you Mr. Terrorist. I feel a lot safer now that I have to put my $100 bills under the mattress and face the increased risk being burgled or robbed. *sarcasm*
the whole point of bitcoin was to be able to process transactions without the need for trusted intermediaries. Government's role (or lack therof) didn't enter into it.
We aren't talking about Japan backing BC, we are talking about how the government of Japan will treat BC transactions for taxation and other regulatory purposes.
If they treat it as a commodity, it may be subject to tariffs, sales and other goods-and-services-transaction taxes, and the like. If they treat it like a currency, then it may be subject to currency-transaction-reporting laws and the like.
If I buy $10,000 worth of candy and sell it the next day for $10,100, that's typically going to result in sales tax, or it would in most states in the United States at least.
If I buy $10,000 worth of candy and export it to another country, I have to deal with both the export laws of my country and the import laws of the other country as they relate to candy, foods, and the like.
If I buy $10,000 of Euro and sell it the next day for $10,100, there is no sales tax (well, I don't think there is anyway). If I export that Euro to another country by wire or by suitcase, it's treated much differently than if I was exporting candy or some other physical commodity (Euro banknotes are not a "commodity" for this purpose).
Does Japan want to treat BC like it was candy or like it was the Euro for regulatory purposes? That is the question.
It has high transaction costs due to the need to check against fraud.
Google tells me that, right now, "1 Bitcoin equals 424.75 US Dollar".
So, arguably, Bitcoin is an equally terrible currency as gold.
Checking BC for fraud has little or no additional transaction costs beyond the transaction itself.
Either the transaction will go through and the block-chain will not sense a conflict, which is the typical case, OR
The transaction will not go through, which is the typical case of fraud or double-spending, OR
very rarely,
The transaction will appear to go through but within minutes a problem will be detected and the transaction (and possibly other transactions that took place around the same time) is rolled back, in which case the two parties of the transaction will have to work out how to resolved the issue.
It's hypothetically possible for fraud to happen in a way that "forks" the block-chain in a way that has to be manually reconciled, but when that happens the entire BC ecosystem breaks down until the situation is restored. I've only heard of the block-chain being in this situation one time, and it was because of a software or code-implementation issue, not fraud.
What you can't easily tell is if a BC has been stolen. There may be theoretical ways to "flag" stolen BC if it's never been spent, but once it's been spent it's pretty much "sorry you got robbed" for the victim and "oh joy, I got away with theft, woot!" for the thief. But physical gold and paper money also share this property (let's assume there is no physical evidence that can be used to catch the thief, and that for currency, the serial numbers are not recorded anywhere so it is not traceable).
Actually, it's both currency (sort of) and money. Currency typically means paper money (or any "hard, tangible" money other than coinage - some currencies are made of cloth or plastic). As opposed to coinage, bank accounts, negotiable-as-cash instruments (think "checks," especially in the old days when 3rd-party and "4th/5th/etc-party" checks were common).
BC is both money and a currency. An individual "amount" of BitCoin is currency in that you can store it in a wallet or print it out on paper, it's "non-currency" money in that it can be deposited in a "bank account" and co-mingled with other "amounts" of bitcoin in the same wallet or bank account in such a way that when you "withdraw" it, it's no longer the same "individual amount."
One difference between BC and ordinary currency is that ordinary currency TYPICALLY is re-used over and over again (banks typically trade worn-out currency for fresh currency as needed, but that's after many, many transactions). As a currency, BC "units" typically have a short life, they are, in effect, being destroyed and re-created any time they are co-mingled or split into smaller units. However, you can "print out" BC and trade them like WWII soldiers used unopened packs of cigarettes as currency. It's not all that practical but it has been done as a proof-of-concept.
Sure, they are physical objects, but so are pieces of paper (er, cloth in some countries) and shiny base-metal coins.
If you are going to treat BC like currency, then treat "commodity" metal like currency and, for that matter, allow anyone who can guarantee the safety of their safe and insure it against theft or destruction the option of "printing" paper- or electronic-currency that is denominated in physical quantities of gold or silver (e.g. a "pre-mined" e-currency controlled by a bank or other institution, with the smallest fractional unit equal to 1 microgram of gold, or paper "gold certificates" backed by the bank or other institution that holds them that were valued in grams-of-gold).
Leaving routers wide-open to attack AND MARKETING THEM AS SUCH is not.
If Asus had marketed these as "here's a router, here's how you can hack it, here's how to plug the holes, and please don't do anything stupid like put it on a public network without fixing the holes and changing the passwords first"
and sold it to hobbyists rather than regular consumers, then there wouldn't (or rather, shouldn't) be any reason to drag the FTC into the matter.
It's not that it takes orders of magnitude less power, it's that they move the power-consuming-part to a device that isn't relying on a battery.
Here's a comparison:
Back in my grandfather's day, two kids who live on adjacent farms might use flashlights to "talk" to each other at night using Morse Code over distances of several hundred meters. But the flashlight batteries only had so much juice. But what if, instead of using flashlights, they used lenses and mirrors so they light source was a lamp that was plugged into the electrical outlet? They could talk all night and not use up any batteries at all.
Well, that's the gist of these devices. The "low power battery-operated devices" still need batteries to do the equivalent of "manipulating the lenses and mirrors" and operating an RF receiver, as well as whatever other task they are supposed to be doing (say, monitoring for pollution, or whatever).
They key is that they don't need to waste energy operating an RF transmitter - that work is done by a nearby device that has a reliable energy source.
That, and several "low power" devices can "share" the same transmitter.
Something not noted in the summary: Depending on the scenario, this may result in a net increase in power consumption if the "shared transmitter" is in a naive, "always on" mode compared to a conventional system where the transmitter(s) would only be on when needed. I'm not saying you can't design such a system that isn't "naive," just that if you do, your total power usage may be higher than a conventional system. But since you are "plugged in" and not on battery, it the "cost" may be negligible.
Bottom line: It's a neat and useful trick and if "mains power" is "many times cheaper than battery power" for your application, this is a big win. On the other hand, if "overall power used" is the controlling factor, it's not such a big win and if you aren't careful, it could be a big loss.
In the "new/reimagined/rebooted" Battlestar Galactica TV series, Commander Adama kept key computers on the ship isolated from each other to make it that much harder for the Cylons to take over the ship. As a result, they computers were a lot less useful than on most ships, where the computers worked together. But they were much safer from attack.
It's far past time for the world to adopt this "don't connect key networks to other networks" philosophy for industrial-control computers and other computers where "what could possibly go wrong" includes people dying or significant property damage as a direct result of a computer gone haywire.
This will mean some inconvenience and some major expenses.
For example:
For things like the electrical grid, traffic-control systems, and the like, it means replacing remote-controlled systems with systems that are controlled "on-site" when practical and using dedicated communications channels separate from the Internet and public-switched-telephone-network for remote-control systems when those aren't practical. You will still need to provide backup control facilities and all control channels will need to be encrypted and the physical wires or fiber-optic cables monitored to make attacks even more difficult to pull off and to make it possible to detect when a cable has been physically tampered with. This will be costly but less costly than having the grid go down or all traffic lights in a city go down because of a crook demanding ransom, a terrorist out to cause harm, or a "joker" (as in Batman) out for a laugh at everyone else's expense.
Another more "everyday" example:
The building supervisors in my office will have to turn off the "if you are working late, just dial this extension or go to this internal web site and tell the computer to keep the air conditioning on another 4 hours" feature.
It will have to either replace this with motion sensors or with some physical button I can press that is NOT connected to any network other than the isolated HVAC network.
Either that, or they will need put a very simple "one way firewall" between the phone or computer network and the HVAC network so if I go to a web site and say "I'm working late" the web site takes some physical action - like pushing a physical button or, more likely, turning on an LED or transmitting a specific RF signal - that the HVAC network detects and keeps the air conditioning on for me, just as if I had pushed a button on a wall.
Since the communication is one-way, and since there are no thermostats in the building attached to any network other than the isolated HVAC network, any "outside" attacker (one too far away to aim a heat sensor at the building) would have no way of knowing if his actions had any effect or not (he might ASSUME they worked as advertised, but he wouldn't know for sure). "Blinding the attacker" in this way makes it much more difficult for the attacker to discover bugs in the system, such as: * Due to a bug that management forgot about long ago, the humidifiers don't work at all during non-business hours, if a bad guy working for the competition can hack into the corporate LAN and use that as a springboard to tell the heating system to keep the heat on throughout the long, cold Thanksgiving weekend, the air will become very dry and the resulting dry air will cause some of the experiments in the science lab to go into safety mode and shut down, which will mean your client will be able to get the big government contract instead of the company that occupies this building.
It's also far past time to make sure key equipment has hardware-based fail-safes that cannot be overwritten or over-ridden by software. We already do this to some degree today (think electrical fuses and circuit breakers) but it should be a key guiding engineering principle for any equipment that could hurt or kill someone or cause significant direct property damage if the software was compromised or for that matter had a non-malicious-but-still-destructive bug in it.
Countries whose constitutions prohibit complying with these provisions will have no choice but to violate them or change their constitutions. In some countries, the latter is extremely difficult and not likely to happen.
Anyone know if this treaty has a clause that addresses such conflicts? If not, those countries might find themselves subject to the treaty's sanctions for non-compliance, being kicked out of the treaty altogether, or (and I state this as a purely theoretical matter since it's not gonna happen), another country becoming so offended that they declare war on the non-complying country and bomb them off the map.
It's the moral equivalent of declaring all money that is used in a crime the equivalent of an impurity that taints anything it touches, forever and ever, but with ever-decreasing effects.
Think of it this way: If we were in the age of only gold coins and no paper money (and for the sake of simplicity, no silver or copper coins), it would be like if a particular coin was used in a crime, it would magically turn into base metal but nobody would know it for several hours after the crime occurred. If you put this coin in your purse, all coins in that purse would suddenly take on the average metal content of the entire purse. So, if you had 9 "clean" coins of equal value in your purse and dropped in one "base metal" coin of the same value into the purse, all of the coins would suddenly be 90% of the the value of a "clean" coin. Anyone who was holding any coin that had been "co-mingled" with the bad coin since the time of the crime would have partially-de-valued money, in a viral way.
Now, as I said above, since it's not feasible to know the complete history of a coin, such a system isn't practical, at least not right now.
... is for someone to figure out an efficient way of tracing the full transaction history of any given "coin." Yes, I know that "in theory" it's do-able but it's just plain not feasible right now.
Yes, I know BC "coins" as such don't have a history, but transactions do. If a coin is the "output" of a transaction then its "parent coins" are all the coins that went into the transaction, in proportion to each other. Yes, you can "launder money" but all that does is "spread the dirt around" resulting in "slightly dirty" BC that are considered only as fractionally valuable as their "clean" fraction.
For example, if a ransomware victim, in cooperation with the police, pays 40BC to crooks, the crooks will of course launder the money immediately, probably several times over. As soon as the keys are recovered and there is no more danger of the crooks "getting revenge," the police issue a notice that all BC whose "transaction history" included this transaction are "tainted by the dirty transaction."
At this point, reputable companies who trust that particular police authority will only accept "tainted money" based on the "clean" portion of its value. Those who happen to be stuck with the "dirty money" are pretty much out of luck, in much the same way that I am out of luck if a store clerk accepts a very good counterfeit $5 bill from a crook then later innocently hands it to me in change later that day.
Yes, this setup has many flaws, but it's better than the status quo. Some obvious flaws include: * it's currently not feasible * there are many police authorities, and people trust them to different degrees, so the BC in your wallet may have a different value depending on who you want to do business with. * Whoever has coins "descended" from tainted coins at the time they are announced as tainted will be stuck with the loss * There is no built-in appeal for a police authority declaring a particular transaction "illegal" and declaring the coins received in that transaction "tainted". The only deterrent is that if a given police authority gets too sloppy or too abusive, fewer and fewer people will honor its declarations. * There are no doubt other flaws, this is just the ones that came to mind immediately.
Of course, the real solution to ransomware is backups, backups, backups, but we all know that's not going to happen any time soon. Sigh.
Texas is not locked in-- as the boomers die, it's slowly shifting back to blue.
You are probably right, but it's not gonna shift enough this year to swing the Texas Electoral Votes unless the Republicans or their candidate really shoot themselves in the foot big-time, like Clayton Williams did with his "Mexican prostitution" remarks when he was running for governor back in the late '80s or early '90s.
There is a good chance there will be enough of a swing to put more Democrats in the State Legislature in 2020 or 2022, when voting districts are re-drawn. If the courts overthrow whatever districts are drawn in the early 2020s, the Legislature that draws new ones will probably be elected in 2024 or later, and will be more evenly balanced than the 2020 or 2022 legislature if not outright "blue." But that's a long way from now.
Oh, another demographic trend helping Democrats: American-born children of Latin-American immigrants (legal or otherwise) are entering adulthood (and have been for some time). Except on some moral issues like abortion and gay marriage where their Roman Catholic beliefs hold sway, they tend to favor Democratic-party ideals over Republican-party ideals.
Putting a lens on typical lasers that would make them lose their punch after a few hundred yards without making them useless for typical business-presentation uses would cut down on spur-of-the-moment "hey buddy, I'm bored, let's see if we can light up that plane with our laser pointer" scenarios.
Yes, you will always have people who will go to the effort to remove the lens or buy a laser that is designed for other purposes than being a "presentation-grade laser pointer" but most people won't have those just lying around the house and, thanks to the much-smaller-market for such things compared to "presentation-grade laser pointers," most office-supply stores and big-box retail stores won't carry them in-store.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, I just got egg on my face. That document is 20 years old. Please consult the current FCC Part 15 regulations, which should be widely available.
My Google-fu is obviously not working well today.
If you are relying on Part 15 FCC regulations, be sure to read them first. Using a device in a way not contemplated by the manufacturer can turn your "approved" device into a "home-built transmitter [that is] not for sale" which puts the onus entirely on you to comply with the rules.
Having said that, if nobody complains, then you almost certainly won't be hearing from the FCC, and even if you were to use a device "as intended" and it caused harmful interference, you are still required to cease using it.
https://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/En... has an interesting item on page 7:
With the exception of intermittent and periodic transmissions, and biomedical telemetry devices, Part 15 transmitters are not permitted to operate in the TV broadcast bands.
I guess that means if you are only going to transmit "intermittently" or "periodically" then this is fine, but it's probably not okay to use this for your home-security system that runs 24/7.
Channel 3 is in the 54-70MHz band, which is okay but only at very low power, 100 microvolts/m measured at 3 m away ("quasi-peak").
It is almost certainly legally safe to use this over low-VHF channels over coax rather than "over the airwaves," and you'll probably get a stronger signal to boot. But it won't be as much fun.
There may be some opportunity to use this under other parts of the FCC rules, such as part 18 (industrial, scientific, and medical) and, on applicable frequencies, part 97 (amateur radio license-holders only, and only in ham bands, and even then NTSC is not an acceptable "mode" in many bands).
... rather than summarily discontinuing it.
Or, rather, they should publicly "float the idea" of spinning it off and see if anyone - including hobbyists - bite.
Obviously, there are exceptions. For example, if the tech is still legally encumbered or would require publishing still-valuable trade secrets you may not want to spin it off. Ditto if you are killing it because of liability concerns (e.g. your company had a side-business in tobacco in the 1980s or early 1990s) and you know that even if you spin it off, your country's legal system will still stick you with more liability for future users if you spin it off than if you kill it outright.
But for things like old Polaroid film tech, there's no reason not to see if anyone wants to buy your tech and maybe even buy the manufacturing facility (or if you need the facility for other products, they might want to lease time on it so they can do occasional production runs).
For computers that can be re-purposed or re-sold, the actual residual value after 3 years (or whatever your "time to fully depreciated" is) significantly greater than zero.
For "locked down" computers, the actual residual value becomes a cost - the cost of having it hauled off as e-waste.
In cases where computers must be locked-down (e.g. due to a grant requirement), the "true cost" should be the buy-in cost + the ongoing maintenance cost - the residual cost (or ... + the disposal cost).
By explicitly calling this out in your requisition process, it will make people think twice before applying for grants that require locked-down computers.
"Be it resolved that computers ... purchased by the department which boot using the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) have the ability to disable the Secure Boot features for both local hard drive and network booting."
I would also explicitly exclude "special purpose" computers that your department may purchase for other purposes (e.g. computers that run security cameras, which you may WANT to be locked-down), provided the individual purchase is approved by a review board. I would also allow the same "escape clause" for equipment purchased by your department using outside, restricted funds where the funding restriction contradicts the policy. Such specific exemptions may already be implicit in your organization's structure. If they are, then you do not need to spell them out explicitly.
2025, boardroom of a start-up company looking on where to invest, where to find customers, and where to set up offices:
Chris: Hey Jo, I've been looking at our European customer base. We haven't really been targeting them but there seems to be a lot of interest. You think we should look into setting up offices there?
Jo: It's worth a look, but we need to play this conservative. Remember how France and the UK squeezed huge tax settlements out of Google and other tech companies back when we were in high school?
Chris: Yeah, we'll have to go really slow on this and hire a tax advisor before we ever set foot in Europe. In the meantime, let's not target European customers and make sure that if we allow any third-party advertisements on our products that they are clearly NOT aimed at European customers.
Jo: *sigh* Well, hopefully we can work out something with the governments over there so we know ahead of time what the tax bill will be. We should pay our fair share of taxes, but there's no way we should set ourselves up for being blind-sided.
Chris: Well, you know, the nominal tax rate over there is pretty high. If we can't get some kind of up-front discount, we may just have to forgo that market entirely.
Jo: Agreed.
For Japan it's just one more way to bypass the banking system.
To be a good substitute for a bank deposit, something must be liquid and it must have either no loss of value or an acceptable upper limit on the loss of value compared to putting money in the bank.
Bitcoin is just too volatile. If I put 10,000 Yen in the bank now then withdraw it in 6 months, how much is it going to be worth? Almost certainly at least 9,900 Yen. If I buy 10,000 Yen worth of Bitcoin, how much will it be worth 6 months from now? Maybe 20,000 Yen, maybe 5,000 Yen, who knows?
the only thing owners can do is disable the remote-control feature completely.
In other news, thieves discovered a way to break into garages using drive-by attacks (this happened in the 1980s or 1990s). The only thing owners could do was to disable the remote-control feature completely (or replace it with a different one).
Yes, there are a few environments where you need to be able to turn the heat or AC on before you get into the car. Alaska and Phoenix, Arizona, I'm looking at you. But for everyone else, the risk (upper bound on the probability of a high-cost hack is still too high) outweighs the convenience.
It's not cheap. A very small negative interest rate is still less costly than renting a safe place to store cash and insuring it against loss, particularly for large amounts.
If I were in Japan and I had lots of cash, I would be looking at "investing" money I didn't need in the next 2-3 months in a "market basket" of Japan's equivalent of money-market accounts, commercial paper, short-term high-quality bonds, and in market-baskets of currencies of other countries, in the hopes that the ups and downs of these investments would even out to something slightly higher than inflation.
By the way, for many years or decades, US banks and money-market accounts have paid effective negative interest rates after you factor in inflation, and that's before factoring in taxation on the nominal interest. There's not much before-taxes practical difference between a 5% inflation rate and a slightly-less-than-5% interest rate and a 0.01% inflation rate and a slightly-less-than-0% interest rate. Psychological difference, yes. Taxation difference, yes (sub-0% interest is actually better in most cases), but practical difference, no.
Bitcoin should not be anonymous. All bitcoin exchanges should be like banks, or part of existing banks, and tracked like every other financial transaction
When I walk into my neighborhood bank and ask for change for a $100, they don't ask for ID.
If I go to the effort to put on a good disguise first, as long as I look like I'm not wearing a disguise they don't blink an eye.
Now if only I could figure out a way to fool the heatmap-reading cameras into thinking I'm someone else....
By the way, until the terrorism-inspired (well, that's what THEY say) "know your customer" laws, American banks were a lot more lax about requiring ID on passbook savings accounts. Now if you want to do anything other than make change or buy a one-time-use/disposable low-denomination "Christmas gift" debit cards like the ones you can buy in grocery stores, you have to provide your thumbprint and at least one (or two?) government IDs.
Thank you Mr. Terrorist. I feel a lot safer now that I have to put my $100 bills under the mattress and face the increased risk being burgled or robbed. *sarcasm*
the whole point of bitcoin was to be able to process transactions without the need for trusted intermediaries. Government's role (or lack therof) didn't enter into it.
We aren't talking about Japan backing BC, we are talking about how the government of Japan will treat BC transactions for taxation and other regulatory purposes.
If they treat it as a commodity, it may be subject to tariffs, sales and other goods-and-services-transaction taxes, and the like. If they treat it like a currency, then it may be subject to currency-transaction-reporting laws and the like.
If I buy $10,000 worth of candy and sell it the next day for $10,100, that's typically going to result in sales tax, or it would in most states in the United States at least.
If I buy $10,000 worth of candy and export it to another country, I have to deal with both the export laws of my country and the import laws of the other country as they relate to candy, foods, and the like.
If I buy $10,000 of Euro and sell it the next day for $10,100, there is no sales tax (well, I don't think there is anyway). If I export that Euro to another country by wire or by suitcase, it's treated much differently than if I was exporting candy or some other physical commodity (Euro banknotes are not a "commodity" for this purpose).
Does Japan want to treat BC like it was candy or like it was the Euro for regulatory purposes? That is the question.
It has high transaction costs due to the need to check against fraud.
Google tells me that, right now, "1 Bitcoin equals 424.75 US Dollar".
So, arguably, Bitcoin is an equally terrible currency as gold.
Checking BC for fraud has little or no additional transaction costs beyond the transaction itself.
Either the transaction will go through and the block-chain will not sense a conflict, which is the typical case, OR
The transaction will not go through, which is the typical case of fraud or double-spending, OR
very rarely,
The transaction will appear to go through but within minutes a problem will be detected and the transaction (and possibly other transactions that took place around the same time) is rolled back, in which case the two parties of the transaction will have to work out how to resolved the issue.
It's hypothetically possible for fraud to happen in a way that "forks" the block-chain in a way that has to be manually reconciled, but when that happens the entire BC ecosystem breaks down until the situation is restored. I've only heard of the block-chain being in this situation one time, and it was because of a software or code-implementation issue, not fraud.
What you can't easily tell is if a BC has been stolen. There may be theoretical ways to "flag" stolen BC if it's never been spent, but once it's been spent it's pretty much "sorry you got robbed" for the victim and "oh joy, I got away with theft, woot!" for the thief. But physical gold and paper money also share this property (let's assume there is no physical evidence that can be used to catch the thief, and that for currency, the serial numbers are not recorded anywhere so it is not traceable).
Actually, it's both currency (sort of) and money. Currency typically means paper money (or any "hard, tangible" money other than coinage - some currencies are made of cloth or plastic). As opposed to coinage, bank accounts, negotiable-as-cash instruments (think "checks," especially in the old days when 3rd-party and "4th/5th/etc-party" checks were common).
BC is both money and a currency. An individual "amount" of BitCoin is currency in that you can store it in a wallet or print it out on paper, it's "non-currency" money in that it can be deposited in a "bank account" and co-mingled with other "amounts" of bitcoin in the same wallet or bank account in such a way that when you "withdraw" it, it's no longer the same "individual amount."
One difference between BC and ordinary currency is that ordinary currency TYPICALLY is re-used over and over again (banks typically trade worn-out currency for fresh currency as needed, but that's after many, many transactions). As a currency, BC "units" typically have a short life, they are, in effect, being destroyed and re-created any time they are co-mingled or split into smaller units. However, you can "print out" BC and trade them like WWII soldiers used unopened packs of cigarettes as currency. It's not all that practical but it has been done as a proof-of-concept.
Sure, they are physical objects, but so are pieces of paper (er, cloth in some countries) and shiny base-metal coins.
If you are going to treat BC like currency, then treat "commodity" metal like currency and, for that matter, allow anyone who can guarantee the safety of their safe and insure it against theft or destruction the option of "printing" paper- or electronic-currency that is denominated in physical quantities of gold or silver (e.g. a "pre-mined" e-currency controlled by a bank or other institution, with the smallest fractional unit equal to 1 microgram of gold, or paper "gold certificates" backed by the bank or other institution that holds them that were valued in grams-of-gold).
Leaving routers wide-open to attack AND MARKETING THEM AS SUCH is not.
If Asus had marketed these as "here's a router, here's how you can hack it, here's how to plug the holes, and please don't do anything stupid like put it on a public network without fixing the holes and changing the passwords first"
and sold it to hobbyists rather than regular consumers, then there wouldn't (or rather, shouldn't) be any reason to drag the FTC into the matter.
I sort of fell asleep half way through
Good, at least you made it to the end the first bold paragraph. The rest was for the people who read past the most important parts.
I hope you enjoyed resting your eyes.
It's not that it takes orders of magnitude less power, it's that they move the power-consuming-part to a device that isn't relying on a battery.
Here's a comparison:
Back in my grandfather's day, two kids who live on adjacent farms might use flashlights to "talk" to each other at night using Morse Code over distances of several hundred meters. But the flashlight batteries only had so much juice. But what if, instead of using flashlights, they used lenses and mirrors so they light source was a lamp that was plugged into the electrical outlet? They could talk all night and not use up any batteries at all.
Well, that's the gist of these devices. The "low power battery-operated devices" still need batteries to do the equivalent of "manipulating the lenses and mirrors" and operating an RF receiver, as well as whatever other task they are supposed to be doing (say, monitoring for pollution, or whatever).
They key is that they don't need to waste energy operating an RF transmitter - that work is done by a nearby device that has a reliable energy source.
That, and several "low power" devices can "share" the same transmitter.
Something not noted in the summary: Depending on the scenario, this may result in a net increase in power consumption if the "shared transmitter" is in a naive, "always on" mode compared to a conventional system where the transmitter(s) would only be on when needed. I'm not saying you can't design such a system that isn't "naive," just that if you do, your total power usage may be higher than a conventional system. But since you are "plugged in" and not on battery, it the "cost" may be negligible.
Bottom line: It's a neat and useful trick and if "mains power" is "many times cheaper than battery power" for your application, this is a big win. On the other hand, if "overall power used" is the controlling factor, it's not such a big win and if you aren't careful, it could be a big loss.
In the "new/reimagined/rebooted" Battlestar Galactica TV series, Commander Adama kept key computers on the ship isolated from each other to make it that much harder for the Cylons to take over the ship. As a result, they computers were a lot less useful than on most ships, where the computers worked together. But they were much safer from attack.
It's far past time for the world to adopt this "don't connect key networks to other networks" philosophy for industrial-control computers and other computers where "what could possibly go wrong" includes people dying or significant property damage as a direct result of a computer gone haywire.
This will mean some inconvenience and some major expenses.
For example:
For things like the electrical grid, traffic-control systems, and the like, it means replacing remote-controlled systems with systems that are controlled "on-site" when practical and using dedicated communications channels separate from the Internet and public-switched-telephone-network for remote-control systems when those aren't practical. You will still need to provide backup control facilities and all control channels will need to be encrypted and the physical wires or fiber-optic cables monitored to make attacks even more difficult to pull off and to make it possible to detect when a cable has been physically tampered with. This will be costly but less costly than having the grid go down or all traffic lights in a city go down because of a crook demanding ransom, a terrorist out to cause harm, or a "joker" (as in Batman) out for a laugh at everyone else's expense.
Another more "everyday" example:
The building supervisors in my office will have to turn off the "if you are working late, just dial this extension or go to this internal web site and tell the computer to keep the air conditioning on another 4 hours" feature.
It will have to either replace this with motion sensors or with some physical button I can press that is NOT connected to any network other than the isolated HVAC network.
Either that, or they will need put a very simple "one way firewall" between the phone or computer network and the HVAC network so if I go to a web site and say "I'm working late" the web site takes some physical action - like pushing a physical button or, more likely, turning on an LED or transmitting a specific RF signal - that the HVAC network detects and keeps the air conditioning on for me, just as if I had pushed a button on a wall.
Since the communication is one-way, and since there are no thermostats in the building attached to any network other than the isolated HVAC network, any "outside" attacker (one too far away to aim a heat sensor at the building) would have no way of knowing if his actions had any effect or not (he might ASSUME they worked as advertised, but he wouldn't know for sure). "Blinding the attacker" in this way makes it much more difficult for the attacker to discover bugs in the system, such as:
* Due to a bug that management forgot about long ago, the humidifiers don't work at all during non-business hours, if a bad guy working for the competition can hack into the corporate LAN and use that as a springboard to tell the heating system to keep the heat on throughout the long, cold Thanksgiving weekend, the air will become very dry and the resulting dry air will cause some of the experiments in the science lab to go into safety mode and shut down, which will mean your client will be able to get the big government contract instead of the company that occupies this building.
It's also far past time to make sure key equipment has hardware-based fail-safes that cannot be overwritten or over-ridden by software. We already do this to some degree today (think electrical fuses and circuit breakers) but it should be a key guiding engineering principle for any equipment that could hurt or kill someone or cause significant direct property damage if the software was compromised or for that matter had a non-malicious-but-still-destructive bug in it.
Or WSEVENTH or WEIGHTH or WSOMESUCH.
intelligent, contextually aware and lightweight experiences natively into the mobile operating system.
Countries whose constitutions prohibit complying with these provisions will have no choice but to violate them or change their constitutions. In some countries, the latter is extremely difficult and not likely to happen.
Anyone know if this treaty has a clause that addresses such conflicts? If not, those countries might find themselves subject to the treaty's sanctions for non-compliance, being kicked out of the treaty altogether, or (and I state this as a purely theoretical matter since it's not gonna happen), another country becoming so offended that they declare war on the non-complying country and bomb them off the map.
It's the moral equivalent of declaring all money that is used in a crime the equivalent of an impurity that taints anything it touches, forever and ever, but with ever-decreasing effects.
Think of it this way: If we were in the age of only gold coins and no paper money (and for the sake of simplicity, no silver or copper coins), it would be like if a particular coin was used in a crime, it would magically turn into base metal but nobody would know it for several hours after the crime occurred. If you put this coin in your purse, all coins in that purse would suddenly take on the average metal content of the entire purse. So, if you had 9 "clean" coins of equal value in your purse and dropped in one "base metal" coin of the same value into the purse, all of the coins would suddenly be 90% of the the value of a "clean" coin. Anyone who was holding any coin that had been "co-mingled" with the bad coin since the time of the crime would have partially-de-valued money, in a viral way.
Now, as I said above, since it's not feasible to know the complete history of a coin, such a system isn't practical, at least not right now.
... is for someone to figure out an efficient way of tracing the full transaction history of any given "coin." Yes, I know that "in theory" it's do-able but it's just plain not feasible right now.
Yes, I know BC "coins" as such don't have a history, but transactions do. If a coin is the "output" of a transaction then its "parent coins" are all the coins that went into the transaction, in proportion to each other. Yes, you can "launder money" but all that does is "spread the dirt around" resulting in "slightly dirty" BC that are considered only as fractionally valuable as their "clean" fraction.
For example, if a ransomware victim, in cooperation with the police, pays 40BC to crooks, the crooks will of course launder the money immediately, probably several times over. As soon as the keys are recovered and there is no more danger of the crooks "getting revenge," the police issue a notice that all BC whose "transaction history" included this transaction are "tainted by the dirty transaction."
At this point, reputable companies who trust that particular police authority will only accept "tainted money" based on the "clean" portion of its value. Those who happen to be stuck with the "dirty money" are pretty much out of luck, in much the same way that I am out of luck if a store clerk accepts a very good counterfeit $5 bill from a crook then later innocently hands it to me in change later that day.
Yes, this setup has many flaws, but it's better than the status quo. Some obvious flaws include:
* it's currently not feasible
* there are many police authorities, and people trust them to different degrees, so the BC in your wallet may have a different value depending on who you want to do business with.
* Whoever has coins "descended" from tainted coins at the time they are announced as tainted will be stuck with the loss
* There is no built-in appeal for a police authority declaring a particular transaction "illegal" and declaring the coins received in that transaction "tainted". The only deterrent is that if a given police authority gets too sloppy or too abusive, fewer and fewer people will honor its declarations.
* There are no doubt other flaws, this is just the ones that came to mind immediately.
Of course, the real solution to ransomware is backups, backups, backups, but we all know that's not going to happen any time soon. Sigh.
Texas is not locked in-- as the boomers die, it's slowly shifting back to blue.
You are probably right, but it's not gonna shift enough this year to swing the Texas Electoral Votes unless the Republicans or their candidate really shoot themselves in the foot big-time, like Clayton Williams did with his "Mexican prostitution" remarks when he was running for governor back in the late '80s or early '90s.
There is a good chance there will be enough of a swing to put more Democrats in the State Legislature in 2020 or 2022, when voting districts are re-drawn. If the courts overthrow whatever districts are drawn in the early 2020s, the Legislature that draws new ones will probably be elected in 2024 or later, and will be more evenly balanced than the 2020 or 2022 legislature if not outright "blue." But that's a long way from now.
Oh, another demographic trend helping Democrats: American-born children of Latin-American immigrants (legal or otherwise) are entering adulthood (and have been for some time). Except on some moral issues like abortion and gay marriage where their Roman Catholic beliefs hold sway, they tend to favor Democratic-party ideals over Republican-party ideals.
Putting a lens on typical lasers that would make them lose their punch after a few hundred yards without making them useless for typical business-presentation uses would cut down on spur-of-the-moment "hey buddy, I'm bored, let's see if we can light up that plane with our laser pointer" scenarios.
Yes, you will always have people who will go to the effort to remove the lens or buy a laser that is designed for other purposes than being a "presentation-grade laser pointer" but most people won't have those just lying around the house and, thanks to the much-smaller-market for such things compared to "presentation-grade laser pointers," most office-supply stores and big-box retail stores won't carry them in-store.