Below are the definitions (after the reference). Note that because this is federal, there is a qualification that it "affects interstate or foreign commerce". However, the courts have generally interpreted that phrase so broadly that it's inclusion here is effectively meaningless. Facebook definitely falls under the definition.
Also, note that the exclusions -- "wire and oral communication", "tone-only paging device", etc. -- are only excluded because they are handled in other legislation. Similar rules regarding what does/doesn't require a court-approved warrant exist under those separate laws.
“electronic communication service” means any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications;
“electronic communication” means any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photooptical system that affects interstate or foreign commerce, but does not include— (A) any wire or oral communication; (B) any communication made through a tone-only paging device; (C) any communication from a tracking device (as defined in section 3117 of this title); or (D) electronic funds transfer information stored by a financial institution in a communications system used for the electronic storage and transfer of funds;
First of all, considering Walmart runs the whole business on just a few percentage points of margin, and does billions of dollars a year in its stores, I dont' think it's a stretch to think that they pay 1% or maybe even less on credit card charges.
Second, I think you're missing a bunch of other costs someone like Walmart would have if they had to handle significantly more cash. In addition to personnel directly handling the cash, there might have to be additional supervisory personnel (or additional time spent by existing supervisors). You might need bigger sorting rooms, bigger safes, etc. (all of which would incur additional rent and additional construction costs and/or take space away from other parts of the store). Cashiers would have to clear out their drawers more often during shifts, taking them off the floor for various periods of time (or requiring additional personnel). You might need additional armored car runs. The banks definitely like electronic deposits better than cash, so your banking costs might change if the mix changes. You'd have to assume a certain "leakage" associated with cash -- stealing, miscounts, wrong change, etc.
And, finally, a topic I neglected to bring up before, but that makes a big difference for large retailers. Credit card companies provide a lot of information to the retailer about their shoppers. That information may be unavailable if shoppers use cash (this is why so many have those frequent shopper cards).
Small retailers prefer cash. Big retailers prefer credit.
The difference is administrative costs. In a small business, the cash is largely handled post-transaction by one of a few people. It can be counted quickly and dropped off at the bank on the way home. This becomes quickly inefficient for a very large business.
Small business example: Used book store with a couple employees. Even if all of the transactions are cash, it's at most a couple thousand a day that needs to be counted and deposited. The owner spends so little time every day on that process, that he doesn't even allocate a cost to it in his mind. Basically, it costs him $0 to process the cash, but 3% to process credit cards. (This is an actual real-world example, btw.)
Large business example: A large Walmart SuperStore can do $80 million of sales in a year. That's over $200,000 a day. Imagine the cost of counting, securing and transporting that amount of cash every day. Esepcially since most of the people who would do that would be on hourly pay. So Walmart could pretty much exactly determine what most of those steps would cost. PLUS, Walmart gets a much better deal from the credit card company. Probably closer to 1%. So let's say Walmart could get rid of most of the cost of moving around $200,000 a day, and it only costs them something like $2,000. Quickly starts to make a whole lot of sense.
"(2) A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall disclose to a governmental entity the—
(A) name; (B) address; (C) local and long distance telephone connection records, or records of session times and durations; (D) length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized; (E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and (F) means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number),
of a subscriber to or customer of such service when the governmental entity uses an administrative subpoena authorized by a Federal or State statute or a Federal or State grand jury or trial subpoena or any means available under paragraph (1)."
Paragraph (1) provides for broader disclosure under certain circumstances (but still requires a real warrant for disclosure of contents of communications). This is the same statute that lets the cops get access to your phone records without a warrant. An "administrative subpoena", does not require judicial review. Processes vary, but basically it amounts to getting a superior to sign off that you have a legitimate law enforcement reason to get the info (helps keep people from searching their spouses phone records, but does nothing to keep the cops from looking in anyone's records if they are in any way suspected of a crime).
You're not on the most secure legal footing if you say to law enforcement: "I know you don't need a warrant to demand this information from me, but I'm going to ask for one anyway."
And just to be clear, they don't need a warrant to demand that information from Facebook.
I agree. Engineers need to design with the real world in mind, including any current practices that assembly and maintenance workers might have learned.
Another example is the DC-10 engine falling off (271 people died on an American Airlines flight). American Airlines used a procedure when disassembling the engine housing that damaged the pylon of the DC-10's engine. However, the same procedure did not damage pylons of other airframe designs. It is a little less straightforward than that sounds, though, because American's procedure was relatively new, so McDonnell Douglas engineers should not have necessarily designed with the procedure in mind. McDonnell Douglas also warned American against the procedure. However, other airframes did not experience problems with the procedure, so the findings did place some blame on MD for having designed a (relatively) fragile pylon system. NTSB spread the blame around pretty widely in it's findings: American, MD and FAA all get some criticism.
Furthermore, considering how often aerial refueling is successfully completed in the Air Force (probably thousands of times a year, in total), and how rare this type of problem is, I think the current solution has proven to work pretty well. Even where the current solution failed, it did not fail catastrophically (only failed expensively).
In hindsight, a more expensive venting solution, if rolled out across the entire Air Force fleet, would almost certainly have cost more than the $ cost of this misshap, and no lives would have been saved. Hopefully, the lessons-learned here will continue to keep the lives lost at zero, and the $ cost minimal.
I don't think that's what they're saying. I think they're saying "it would cost $25 million to fly again, but it's useful life will be degraded, so we're better off scrapping the airplane and pulling a spare off the line". I think someone else's comment is correct, that the $250 million price tag is not really what's being lost, because much of that is equipment that could be moved to another airframe.
The article claims Google's notification system is particularly egregious.
Also, Apple's system should be differentiated at least to some degree. Android gives developers more opportunity to utilize the network in the background. Apple's APIs give developers much less leeway in that regard.
Maybe not even deep down inside. Possibly right up at the surface. Totally within their rights under copyright law to select who may or may not public perform their song based on politics.
In other words, they have every right to say to Gingrich "Because I disagree with your politics, please do not use the result of my hard work to further your political career."
And how many Saturn Vs will it take to get enough equipment to the moon to make those solar panels? It's much more efficient to make the solar panels on Earth and launch them with Deltas and Atlases than it could ever be to put a solar panel manufacturing station on the moon, and then launch satellites from there back to Earth orbit.
BTW, the men didn't make it all the way back from the moon with the little rocket they had at the surface. There was a big command module rocket to help them along the way.
Yes. But everyone (users and network providers alike) would rather that users' data usage focus on data the user actually wants, and less on "checking in" with various servers. I would think users would be just as annoyed to find out that Android handsets are really using 10x the bandwidth on idle tasks as other handsets (assuming it is true, that is).
I live in NYC and rarely have any problems getting a signal on AT&T. Actually getting any data or calls to my phone over that signal, however, is a distinct challenge.;-)
I often experience dropped calls and slow data rates while my phone happily shows "5 bars" of signal.
You're still talking pretty small amounts of minerals. And, anyway, that's very different than claims of water intoxication. Eat an extra banana a week and you'll make up much more than all the minerals that deionized water would pull out of your body.
Regular drinking water has such a small amount of dissolved minerals in it that, from a physiological perspective, it's effectively pure. If 10 gallons of tap water would give you water intoxication, then 9.99 gallons of pure distilled water would have the same effect. That's probably well within the error range of measuring the effect of the intoxication in the first place.
You won't get water intoxication merely by drinking pure water. Regular drinking water contains such low proportions of minerals that, from a physiological perspective, drinking water is effectively pure water. The main problem with pure water is that it doesn't taste "right". If you've ever tried drinking distilled water... yuck.
On a Segway, you lean forward to accelerate and backwards to brake. The computer senses which way you are leaning and moves the wheels accordingly. For this vehicle, the computer has to control the center of mass, shifting it foward while accelerating and backwards while decelerating (or going in reverse). For an emergency brake, it just shifts the center of gravity really far back. Anit-lock sensors will keep the wheels from locking (which you really, REALLY wouldn't want to have happen in this thing). So I don't think emergency stops are a problem.
Having said all of that, the thing's basically a death trap. The problem is not braking, or even emergency braking. The problem is that if you do actually contact anything, you're screwed.
In a car, most accidents result in the car being accelerated in some manner along the two-dimensional plane along the ground. So everything sort of happens front/back/side/side. The car usually ends up coming to a stop on all four wheels -- banged up, but rightside-up. It's actually pretty rare that cars flip. You need a lot of energy or going down an embankment in order to flip a car.
This thing, on the other hand, is going to fall over, and even potentially do cartwheels, without much energy being required. In a crash, it is always going to come to rest at an angle that would be problematic for inhabitants (unless very well restrained). If you go the equivalent of t-boned in this thing, you'd be doing cartwheels onto the sidewalk. Just thinking about it makes me cringe.
Slashdot Mirror
OMG, I HOPE this post is a joke. Please tell me it's a joke.
iPhone is not LTE, but it is compatible with what AT&T is calling just plain 4G.
I don't know the right terms for the underlying technologies, but AT&T refers to "4G" as 4x the speed of 3G and "4GLTE" as 12x the speed of 3G.
Below are the definitions (after the reference). Note that because this is federal, there is a qualification that it "affects interstate or foreign commerce". However, the courts have generally interpreted that phrase so broadly that it's inclusion here is effectively meaningless. Facebook definitely falls under the definition.
Also, note that the exclusions -- "wire and oral communication", "tone-only paging device", etc. -- are only excluded because they are handled in other legislation. Similar rules regarding what does/doesn't require a court-approved warrant exist under those separate laws.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2510
“electronic communication service” means any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications;
“electronic communication” means any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photooptical system that affects interstate or foreign commerce, but does not include—
(A) any wire or oral communication;
(B) any communication made through a tone-only paging device;
(C) any communication from a tracking device (as defined in section 3117 of this title); or
(D) electronic funds transfer information stored by a financial institution in a communications system used for the electronic storage and transfer of funds;
First of all, considering Walmart runs the whole business on just a few percentage points of margin, and does billions of dollars a year in its stores, I dont' think it's a stretch to think that they pay 1% or maybe even less on credit card charges.
Second, I think you're missing a bunch of other costs someone like Walmart would have if they had to handle significantly more cash. In addition to personnel directly handling the cash, there might have to be additional supervisory personnel (or additional time spent by existing supervisors). You might need bigger sorting rooms, bigger safes, etc. (all of which would incur additional rent and additional construction costs and/or take space away from other parts of the store). Cashiers would have to clear out their drawers more often during shifts, taking them off the floor for various periods of time (or requiring additional personnel). You might need additional armored car runs. The banks definitely like electronic deposits better than cash, so your banking costs might change if the mix changes. You'd have to assume a certain "leakage" associated with cash -- stealing, miscounts, wrong change, etc.
And, finally, a topic I neglected to bring up before, but that makes a big difference for large retailers. Credit card companies provide a lot of information to the retailer about their shoppers. That information may be unavailable if shoppers use cash (this is why so many have those frequent shopper cards).
Small retailers prefer cash. Big retailers prefer credit.
The difference is administrative costs. In a small business, the cash is largely handled post-transaction by one of a few people. It can be counted quickly and dropped off at the bank on the way home. This becomes quickly inefficient for a very large business.
Small business example: Used book store with a couple employees. Even if all of the transactions are cash, it's at most a couple thousand a day that needs to be counted and deposited. The owner spends so little time every day on that process, that he doesn't even allocate a cost to it in his mind. Basically, it costs him $0 to process the cash, but 3% to process credit cards. (This is an actual real-world example, btw.)
Large business example: A large Walmart SuperStore can do $80 million of sales in a year. That's over $200,000 a day. Imagine the cost of counting, securing and transporting that amount of cash every day. Esepcially since most of the people who would do that would be on hourly pay. So Walmart could pretty much exactly determine what most of those steps would cost. PLUS, Walmart gets a much better deal from the credit card company. Probably closer to 1%. So let's say Walmart could get rid of most of the cost of moving around $200,000 a day, and it only costs them something like $2,000. Quickly starts to make a whole lot of sense.
Paragraph (c)(2) at the following link:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2703
"(2) A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall disclose to a governmental entity the—
(A) name;
(B) address;
(C) local and long distance telephone connection records, or records of session times and durations;
(D) length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized;
(E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and
(F) means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number),
of a subscriber to or customer of such service when the governmental entity uses an administrative subpoena authorized by a Federal or State statute or a Federal or State grand jury or trial subpoena or any means available under paragraph (1)."
Paragraph (1) provides for broader disclosure under certain circumstances (but still requires a real warrant for disclosure of contents of communications). This is the same statute that lets the cops get access to your phone records without a warrant. An "administrative subpoena", does not require judicial review. Processes vary, but basically it amounts to getting a superior to sign off that you have a legitimate law enforcement reason to get the info (helps keep people from searching their spouses phone records, but does nothing to keep the cops from looking in anyone's records if they are in any way suspected of a crime).
You're not on the most secure legal footing if you say to law enforcement: "I know you don't need a warrant to demand this information from me, but I'm going to ask for one anyway."
And just to be clear, they don't need a warrant to demand that information from Facebook.
I agree. Engineers need to design with the real world in mind, including any current practices that assembly and maintenance workers might have learned.
Another example is the DC-10 engine falling off (271 people died on an American Airlines flight). American Airlines used a procedure when disassembling the engine housing that damaged the pylon of the DC-10's engine. However, the same procedure did not damage pylons of other airframe designs. It is a little less straightforward than that sounds, though, because American's procedure was relatively new, so McDonnell Douglas engineers should not have necessarily designed with the procedure in mind. McDonnell Douglas also warned American against the procedure. However, other airframes did not experience problems with the procedure, so the findings did place some blame on MD for having designed a (relatively) fragile pylon system. NTSB spread the blame around pretty widely in it's findings: American, MD and FAA all get some criticism.
Furthermore, considering how often aerial refueling is successfully completed in the Air Force (probably thousands of times a year, in total), and how rare this type of problem is, I think the current solution has proven to work pretty well. Even where the current solution failed, it did not fail catastrophically (only failed expensively).
In hindsight, a more expensive venting solution, if rolled out across the entire Air Force fleet, would almost certainly have cost more than the $ cost of this misshap, and no lives would have been saved. Hopefully, the lessons-learned here will continue to keep the lives lost at zero, and the $ cost minimal.
I don't think that's what they're saying. I think they're saying "it would cost $25 million to fly again, but it's useful life will be degraded, so we're better off scrapping the airplane and pulling a spare off the line". I think someone else's comment is correct, that the $250 million price tag is not really what's being lost, because much of that is equipment that could be moved to another airframe.
You really expect an on-line petition is the right way to manage law enforcement decisions?
Besides, at this point they haven't said that they are choosing not to enforce. They've only said they won't comment.
Yes, but you don't expect them to selectively enforce the law based on petition, do you?
Or to comment publicly about potential ongoing investigations?
The article claims Google's notification system is particularly egregious.
Also, Apple's system should be differentiated at least to some degree. Android gives developers more opportunity to utilize the network in the background. Apple's APIs give developers much less leeway in that regard.
Maybe not even deep down inside. Possibly right up at the surface. Totally within their rights under copyright law to select who may or may not public perform their song based on politics.
In other words, they have every right to say to Gingrich "Because I disagree with your politics, please do not use the result of my hard work to further your political career."
And how many Saturn Vs will it take to get enough equipment to the moon to make those solar panels? It's much more efficient to make the solar panels on Earth and launch them with Deltas and Atlases than it could ever be to put a solar panel manufacturing station on the moon, and then launch satellites from there back to Earth orbit.
BTW, the men didn't make it all the way back from the moon with the little rocket they had at the surface. There was a big command module rocket to help them along the way.
Tragedy
Yes. But everyone (users and network providers alike) would rather that users' data usage focus on data the user actually wants, and less on "checking in" with various servers. I would think users would be just as annoyed to find out that Android handsets are really using 10x the bandwidth on idle tasks as other handsets (assuming it is true, that is).
I live in NYC and rarely have any problems getting a signal on AT&T. Actually getting any data or calls to my phone over that signal, however, is a distinct challenge. ;-)
I often experience dropped calls and slow data rates while my phone happily shows "5 bars" of signal.
In my last comment, I meant "ultrapure water", not just merely deionized water.
You're still talking pretty small amounts of minerals. And, anyway, that's very different than claims of water intoxication. Eat an extra banana a week and you'll make up much more than all the minerals that deionized water would pull out of your body.
I call BS. I challenge you to experimentally show anything you've claimed.
Regular drinking water has such a small amount of dissolved minerals in it that, from a physiological perspective, it's effectively pure. If 10 gallons of tap water would give you water intoxication, then 9.99 gallons of pure distilled water would have the same effect. That's probably well within the error range of measuring the effect of the intoxication in the first place.
You won't get water intoxication merely by drinking pure water. Regular drinking water contains such low proportions of minerals that, from a physiological perspective, drinking water is effectively pure water. The main problem with pure water is that it doesn't taste "right". If you've ever tried drinking distilled water... yuck.
On a Segway, you lean forward to accelerate and backwards to brake. The computer senses which way you are leaning and moves the wheels accordingly. For this vehicle, the computer has to control the center of mass, shifting it foward while accelerating and backwards while decelerating (or going in reverse). For an emergency brake, it just shifts the center of gravity really far back. Anit-lock sensors will keep the wheels from locking (which you really, REALLY wouldn't want to have happen in this thing). So I don't think emergency stops are a problem.
Having said all of that, the thing's basically a death trap. The problem is not braking, or even emergency braking. The problem is that if you do actually contact anything, you're screwed.
In a car, most accidents result in the car being accelerated in some manner along the two-dimensional plane along the ground. So everything sort of happens front/back/side/side. The car usually ends up coming to a stop on all four wheels -- banged up, but rightside-up. It's actually pretty rare that cars flip. You need a lot of energy or going down an embankment in order to flip a car.
This thing, on the other hand, is going to fall over, and even potentially do cartwheels, without much energy being required. In a crash, it is always going to come to rest at an angle that would be problematic for inhabitants (unless very well restrained). If you go the equivalent of t-boned in this thing, you'd be doing cartwheels onto the sidewalk. Just thinking about it makes me cringe.
The spectrum was already pretty quiet and, according to FCC rules, expected to stay that way.
That last bit is the most important part. GPS manufacturers had no reason to ever expect that there would be interference of this magnitude nearby.
Furthermore, it's unlikely it is simply a lazy/cost issue, considering that many of the high-end receivers experienced interference.