In practical terms, buying things with cash is anonymous unless the transaction generates a paper trail or any recording isn't erased-over before someone looks at it or copies it.
Sure, currency usually has serial numbers and coins are relatively easy to lift fingerprints from, but I'm talking the practical, everyday world of buying groceries, etc. Yes, if the grocery store is robbed 10 minutes after you shop there, the police will probably see you on the security-camera playback. But in most cases, those recordings are erased without ever having been copied or seen after a few weeks or months.
In the world of photographic prints, a well-cared for negative can make many prints with little or no difference in the printed copy. But even a photo-negative made of typical plastic materials won't last forever, especially if the printing process causes it to heat up under the light.
If I introduce a non-public domain work into a court case, that does not make it public domain.
Granted, anyone who republishes it in the context of republishing court proceedings will have a credible claim to "fair use" but that's not a slam-dunk.
In this particular case though, it looks like Comcast hasn't even articulated a clear claim, so their cease-and-desist letter is at best meaningless and very likely constitutes harassment or is otherwise opening them up to be sued.
Suppose I'm a bookstore owner and I get a court order to tell the police about any future purchases of one of my customers.
Suppose I just decide to put a "we're closed" sign on the door and go on a long vacation.
Then the police charge me with contempt of court.
I counter with "I'm not in the military, I'm not a convicted criminal serving a sentence, I'm not under a labor or personal-services contract with the police, so you (the police) can't make me go to work, that would be involuntary servitude."
* Prosecute those who teach you to "beat lie detectors," giving a pass only to those who have a 100% success rate or who advertise a success rate lower than their actual success rate.
* Prosecute those who sell or market polygraphs as having a success rate higher than they actually do, those who materially misrepresent the tool's reliability in a given situation, or those who, by omission, imply it has a given reliability in situations where its reliability is lower.
Oh, and the article is not about arresting those who, in general, teach how to beat the system but about arresting those who knowingly teach people who have said "I need to lie in this specific situation and get away with it," or something close to that. It's the moral equivalent of prosecuting a pharmacist on conspiracy charges for selling a box of behind-the-counter cold medicine to someone who walks in and says "I need some pseudo ephedrine so I can make some meth."
None of the places that I've worked since 1998 will do anything more than say "Brian worked here from Date X to Date Y
I don't know about your former employers but many employers will give the dates of employment and whether the person is eligible for rehire.
Quitting without notice can turn "eligible for rehire" into "not eligible for rehire" pretty darn quick. That might not keep you from getting your next job if you already have an offer, but it CAN keep you from getting the job after that one.
But be financially prepared to be terminated immediately, especially if you had access to sensitive information.
Oh, and any medium-sized or large company laying off more than a small number of people will give plenty of notice or pay-in-lieu-of-notice, for legal reasons if nothing else.
1) Make it available for legal, affordable download from day one, and keep it available for as long as there is demand 2) Make sure it's REALLY available in a meaningful way. This means customers aren't impeded by poor network performance, political bickering between the ISP and the legal download site, country-specific barriers, the unwillingness to share unnecessary information with the content provider, etc. etc. 3) Make sure people who would otherwise seek the content through "other channels" know that #1 and #2 exist 4) For those who prefer physical media such as DVD, make that option available on a pre-order basis with shipping as soon as the TV show or movie premiers. For those who want BOTH online and physical media, the price should be the same or only slightly higher than* the physical media price.
*Delivering a 2-hour movie online is not a zero-cost operation for the content provider. Charging $X for a DVD and $X+the incremental cost to the provider for making the download available is not unreasonable. This incremental cost would probably be on the order $1 or less, probably much less. This is analogous in principle to charging a dime or two more for a "DVD+BD combo pack" vs. just the BluRay disk.
The other way to "win" is to move your company offshore - or start it offshore - and not sell your products or services to Americans, and hope the Americans get fed up enough to demand change.
Of course, that may just be trading one nosy government for another.
For governments, one way to "win" is to have a policy of creating direct bulk-data communications channels with other countries when possible, and use encrypted tunnels for all other communications so there is a "direct virtual connection" between the source and destination countries.* This will cost money and will have a performance penalty but it's worth it in both privacy and public relations terms.
*This is not a substitute for end-to-end encryption, but it will make country-in-the-middle snooping of otherwise-unencrypted or weakly-encrypted data that much harder, making wholesale snooping or keyword-triggered snooping by a country "in the middle" impractical.
Between the exercise of tearing the pages out and chewing them and the malnutrition from eating only processed dead trees, ink, and glue, you'll lose weight in no time.
Disclaimer: The Diet Book Diet can also significantly shorten life expectancy.
It's unclear if the "European leaders" refer to one of the Ceasars (there are so many to choose from), Napoleon, or one of many others of similar reputations.
Godwin's law is specific to a certain regime and its leadership.
How about everything else being equal, important items get fixed first. Easy items usually come next. Everything else gets fixed after that.
If I have an important item that will take 2 weeks and a team of 2 developers to fix, or 5 items that are only half as important but which take 1 developer 1 day to fix, well, you do the math.
If I have a defect that's affecting 100M customers of an end-of-life, low-revenue product only used by relatively-unimportant customers but it's hurting them in a pretty bad way and a defect that's affecting 50M end users and 80% of those are in relatively-important customers but it's impacting them less severely, well, that's not going to be easy to prioritize.
The real judgement call here is deciding how "important" important really is.
If you are implying that I am an NSA employee who has made a mistake that resulted in the wrong guy being raided and suffering a heart attack as a result, well, I can neither confirm nor deny such speculation.
Encrypt at home or at work... then the end points are in better control.
Of course. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. But if I'm in Italy doing business with Canadian Big Bank, and Canadian Big Bank's key that protects https: traffic is ultimately signed by an American top-level signing authority, AND the traffic goes over US soil, can I really trust that the American Government won't be able to figure out that I'm talking to Canadian Big Bank and use their "pull" with the top-level signing authority to decrypt my communication?
Add some country-to-country encryption on top of this and they'll never even realize I'm talking to Canadian Big Bank, only that someone in Italy is talking to someone in Canada. They will also know the IP addresses of where the traffic got encrypted in Italy and where it will be decrypted in Canada.
encrypted messages won't get very far if the packets are blocked as being non-readable by whatever censorship authority runs the firewall/choke-point/etc
I probably should've quoted that section in my reply. Sorry for any confusion.
Considering that a LOT of the "tea party" candidates (the one from my area included) voted against defunding the NSA, I'm gonna have to call BS on that statement.
Are you sure they are "tea party" at heart or are they just adopting the label because they think it will help them get re-elected?
A "tea party republican" is basically a staunch libertarian except when it comes to imposing his own right-wing moral values on everyone else, in which case he's just a conservative right-wing Republican.
Slashdot Mirror
In practical terms, buying things with cash is anonymous unless the transaction generates a paper trail or any recording isn't erased-over before someone looks at it or copies it.
Sure, currency usually has serial numbers and coins are relatively easy to lift fingerprints from, but I'm talking the practical, everyday world of buying groceries, etc. Yes, if the grocery store is robbed 10 minutes after you shop there, the police will probably see you on the security-camera playback. But in most cases, those recordings are erased without ever having been copied or seen after a few weeks or months.
In the world of photographic prints, a well-cared for negative can make many prints with little or no difference in the printed copy. But even a photo-negative made of typical plastic materials won't last forever, especially if the printing process causes it to heat up under the light.
... or insightful, depending on just how expensive it is to make these 3D prints.
Oh, and good inkjet ink at retail really does cost more than gold by the gram.
If I introduce a non-public domain work into a court case, that does not make it public domain.
Granted, anyone who republishes it in the context of republishing court proceedings will have a credible claim to "fair use" but that's not a slam-dunk.
In this particular case though, it looks like Comcast hasn't even articulated a clear claim, so their cease-and-desist letter is at best meaningless and very likely constitutes harassment or is otherwise opening them up to be sued.
Suppose I'm a bookstore owner and I get a court order to tell the police about any future purchases of one of my customers.
Suppose I just decide to put a "we're closed" sign on the door and go on a long vacation.
Then the police charge me with contempt of court.
I counter with "I'm not in the military, I'm not a convicted criminal serving a sentence, I'm not under a labor or personal-services contract with the police, so you (the police) can't make me go to work, that would be involuntary servitude."
I see something similar here.
* Prosecute those who teach you to "beat lie detectors," giving a pass only to those who have a 100% success rate or who advertise a success rate lower than their actual success rate.
* Prosecute those who sell or market polygraphs as having a success rate higher than they actually do, those who materially misrepresent the tool's reliability in a given situation, or those who, by omission, imply it has a given reliability in situations where its reliability is lower.
Oh, and the article is not about arresting those who, in general, teach how to beat the system but about arresting those who knowingly teach people who have said "I need to lie in this specific situation and get away with it," or something close to that. It's the moral equivalent of prosecuting a pharmacist on conspiracy charges for selling a box of behind-the-counter cold medicine to someone who walks in and says "I need some pseudo ephedrine so I can make some meth."
None of the places that I've worked since 1998 will do anything more than say "Brian worked here from Date X to Date Y
I don't know about your former employers but many employers will give the dates of employment and whether the person is eligible for rehire.
Quitting without notice can turn "eligible for rehire" into "not eligible for rehire" pretty darn quick. That might not keep you from getting your next job if you already have an offer, but it CAN keep you from getting the job after that one.
But be financially prepared to be terminated immediately, especially if you had access to sensitive information.
Oh, and any medium-sized or large company laying off more than a small number of people will give plenty of notice or pay-in-lieu-of-notice, for legal reasons if nothing else.
If this registry were Microsoft
... then every time a horse on the registry got a virus, the registry would become corrupted.
1) Make it available for legal, affordable download from day one, and keep it available for as long as there is demand
2) Make sure it's REALLY available in a meaningful way. This means customers aren't impeded by poor network performance, political bickering between the ISP and the legal download site, country-specific barriers, the unwillingness to share unnecessary information with the content provider, etc. etc.
3) Make sure people who would otherwise seek the content through "other channels" know that #1 and #2 exist
4) For those who prefer physical media such as DVD, make that option available on a pre-order basis with shipping as soon as the TV show or movie premiers. For those who want BOTH online and physical media, the price should be the same or only slightly higher than* the physical media price.
*Delivering a 2-hour movie online is not a zero-cost operation for the content provider. Charging $X for a DVD and $X+the incremental cost to the provider for making the download available is not unreasonable. This incremental cost would probably be on the order $1 or less, probably much less. This is analogous in principle to charging a dime or two more for a "DVD+BD combo pack" vs. just the BluRay disk.
End-users who don't like Mozilla's decision are free to use a different browser.
Bruce Scheier has been found to have committed suicide in a public park in DC in the middle of the night.
Or so they say.
Meanwhile, Mr. Schneier remains alive and well living under a secret, undisclosed false identity.
The other way to "win" is to move your company offshore - or start it offshore - and not sell your products or services to Americans, and hope the Americans get fed up enough to demand change.
Of course, that may just be trading one nosy government for another.
For governments, one way to "win" is to have a policy of creating direct bulk-data communications channels with other countries when possible, and use encrypted tunnels for all other communications so there is a "direct virtual connection" between the source and destination countries.* This will cost money and will have a performance penalty but it's worth it in both privacy and public relations terms.
*This is not a substitute for end-to-end encryption, but it will make country-in-the-middle snooping of otherwise-unencrypted or weakly-encrypted data that much harder, making wholesale snooping or keyword-triggered snooping by a country "in the middle" impractical.
Between the exercise of tearing the pages out and chewing them and the malnutrition from eating only processed dead trees, ink, and glue, you'll lose weight in no time.
Disclaimer: The Diet Book Diet can also significantly shorten life expectancy.
It's unclear if the "European leaders" refer to one of the Ceasars (there are so many to choose from), Napoleon, or one of many others of similar reputations.
Godwin's law is specific to a certain regime and its leadership.
How about everything else being equal, important items get fixed first. Easy items usually come next. Everything else gets fixed after that.
If I have an important item that will take 2 weeks and a team of 2 developers to fix, or 5 items that are only half as important but which take 1 developer 1 day to fix, well, you do the math.
If I have a defect that's affecting 100M customers of an end-of-life, low-revenue product only used by relatively-unimportant customers but it's hurting them in a pretty bad way and a defect that's affecting 50M end users and 80% of those are in relatively-important customers but it's impacting them less severely, well, that's not going to be easy to prioritize.
The real judgement call here is deciding how "important" important really is.
I'd consider paying $115 for a 750GB 5400 with an 80GB SSD cache.
More if it were from a reputable company with a good warranty and the ability to tweak the caching algorithm from any OS using open-source drivers.*
*Note: I would require a "no drivers? no problem" fallback to block-level caching, or I wouldn't buy it at all.
.
For a second I thought the title read, "NSA Data Suggests Solar Magnetic Field About To Flip"
And thought, man they really are spying on everything.
You probably aren't wrong.
Coronal Shark Ejection!
If this is happening in 3-4 months, how many of those days will we get "documentaries" on how this might spell our doom?
Dang, if only this happened last December, at the end/beginning of the Mayan Calendar cycle. The media would've had an even bigger field day.
For those of you too young to remember, it happened before and it will happen again.
Sounds like you've done this before.
If you are implying that I am an NSA employee who has made a mistake that resulted in the wrong guy being raided and suffering a heart attack as a result, well, I can neither confirm nor deny such speculation.
Encrypt at home or at work ... then the end points are in better control.
Of course. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. But if I'm in Italy doing business with Canadian Big Bank, and Canadian Big Bank's key that protects https: traffic is ultimately signed by an American top-level signing authority, AND the traffic goes over US soil, can I really trust that the American Government won't be able to figure out that I'm talking to Canadian Big Bank and use their "pull" with the top-level signing authority to decrypt my communication?
Add some country-to-country encryption on top of this and they'll never even realize I'm talking to Canadian Big Bank, only that someone in Italy is talking to someone in Canada. They will also know the IP addresses of where the traffic got encrypted in Italy and where it will be decrypted in Canada.
And why do you think your files wouldn't go through?
Because the comment I was replying to said
encrypted messages won't get very far if the packets are blocked as being non-readable by whatever censorship authority runs the firewall/choke-point/etc
I probably should've quoted that section in my reply. Sorry for any confusion.
Considering that a LOT of the "tea party" candidates (the one from my area included) voted against defunding the NSA, I'm gonna have to call BS on that statement.
Are you sure they are "tea party" at heart or are they just adopting the label because they think it will help them get re-elected?
A "tea party republican" is basically a staunch libertarian except when it comes to imposing his own right-wing moral values on everyone else, in which case he's just a conservative right-wing Republican.