I've had two situations in which I had a legally-obtained older version of software for which the provider had dropped support, which included dropping support for the DRM built into the products.
In one case, you had to call in, give them your product ID and get a DRM key. I wanted to move the product from an older machine to a newer one. I called in and they told me they had dropped support, including handling the DRM keys, and to buy their new product. The old product served my needs, and the new one had improvements that were useless to me. Luckily, one tech support person was nice and told me where I could find the DRM key value in the old installation, that I hadn't yet deleted. Had I needed to reinstall for any reason, I would have been stuck.
In another case the DRM required either an internet connection or printer access during installation. This was not explained in the installation instructions. I was installing software on a new machine and hadn't yet set up either internet or printer. With that (early) DRM, if you didn't go through the procedure at installation time, there was no opportunity to do it later. The provider later came out with other versions and dropped support for this version. I moved on to using a FOSS product, so I never tried to resolve the issue, but I have a useless copy of that particular software. It didn't set me back any cost, because I had won a copy of the product in a drawing at a trade show booth for people who sat through a demo of something.
If DRM support is dropped for a version of a product, it should be treated as an abandoned product, even if the DRM is maintained for later versions.
Depends on what you mean by "tubes". For high power pulsed microwave systems (like radar) specialized vacuum tubes are often the most cost effective and most efficient source. At SLAC we use 250, 75 megawatt pulsed klystrons (tubes). There is no practical solid state replacement. Many TV stations use a type of radio-frequency called an IOTs. Microwave ovens use "tubes" (magetron). Low power / low noise is different: I don't know of modern applications for signal-level tubes, but there may still be some.
I was talking about the kinds of tubes that were used in radar receivers and related equipment. They may have been militarized versions, because the radars were originally World War II models converted for FAA use. They were the same kinds once used in radio receivers, TV sets, and other electronic equipment. They were replaced by discrete component transistorized circuits and later by integrated circuits. I would expect there to have been lots of 6SN7 dual triodes in ancillary equipment but not in the receivers (that would have used pentodes). That's the only number I can remember off the top of my head.
The FAA has been working on this for 30 years. I was involved in studying it back in the 1970's.
They have also been working on digital ground-air-ground communications since 1948 (I once had some reports on the subject that go back that far). AFAIK, they still don't have the digital ground-air-ground.
At one time the FAA radars were the last users of vacuum tubes, and the replacement parts were coming from factories that bought the original manufacturers equipment and were making it in who-knows-where. They didn't even replace the original manufacturer trademarks on the tubes. Quality control? Forget it.
Technology advances at the FAA very slooooowly.
This was proposed by IEEE-USA a few years ago
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Houses With Tails
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This is the same concept that was proposed in a white paper by IEEE-USA a few years ago. The idea is to get bi-directional gigabit speed broadband to the home. Any subscriber can become a content provider. The keynote speaker at a workshop on the topic was doing something like this in Canada.
The US now has legacy broadband and is falling behind places like Japan where they are providing multi-hundred-megabit Internet, plus telephone and cable TV for something like $50 per month total. When people come here from places like that they think they are coming to a third-world telecommunications country.
I have likened the impact on innovation to the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower was a fundamental constraint, innovators would try to figure out how to hook up two horses, feed them better, and do similar things. Once you have engine power, the range of innovation greatly expands.
Innovators in countries that have gigabit broadband can think of innovations that our innovators can't imagine because they can't think in really high speed broadband terms.
In one of his books, Lawrence Lessig discusses how manufacturers of furniture and other goods have been claiming copyright protection for their goods if they appear in movies. Moviemakers have been needing to go through an elaborate process of copyright clearance for objects that appear in their movie scenes. This has applied even if the movie scene is intended to be of someone's room as it is in real life.
This claim by Toyota is the same kind of thing. It looks like they are claiming copyright protection for the appearance of their cars if used in something that is reproduced. Presumably a police car chase or a major accident, if the car involved is a Toyota product, would require copyright clearance by Toyota to be shown on TV.
This is carrying the law to its ridiculous extreme.
I suppose you consider jury duty involuntary servitude. It, like the draft (and I still have my draft card somewhere), is a responsibility of citizenship.
One of the better arguments I've seen for fixing the current health care crisis can be seen here
What your linked reference is describing is buy-in to the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program by small businesses and individuals. (The FEHBP is what members of Congress get.) That is an element of Barack Obama's health proposal. He provides other options, but that one is in there. Look at the sixth bullet under "Make Health Insurance Work for People and Businesses" at http://www.barackobama.com/issues/healthcare/ That is essentially what the author of the reference is proposing.
Regarding the "socialism" arguments, when health insurance was first proposed in the 1930's it was attacked as socialism. Remember, at the time it was private health insurance, but was still attacked as socialism. When it started it was limited then to hospital insurance, because the American Medical Association was strenuously opposed. Eventually medical insurance was added and the hospital and medical providers (mostly the "blues") merged.
Health insurance as a job benefit didn't happen until World War II, when employers were prevented from raising wages and were looking for things they could add to attract employees. HMO's started about then with Henry Kaiser, who had to attract employees to build Liberty and Victory ships that carried supplies during the war. The HMO's significantly expanded in the 1970's. That was when the insurance companies other than the original "blues" got involved. The HMO's started out as non-profit or university-based systems and the for-profit insurance industry moved in.
Haven't you ever heard of the "negative income tax"? It was an idea advanced by Milton Friedman, an icon of conservative economics, who influenced Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
It is a rebate to people who otherwise wouldn't pay income taxes. And yes, he proposed it to replace the welfare system. The "earned income tax credit" that we have had for years is a variant.
Social Security has always had an element of progressivity, primarily in the benefits.
Taxes are what we pay for civilization. They are a responsibility of citizenship.
Or if i'm wrong, please provide source material that proves your claim.
Cyrus Gordon's analysis of both the Vinland Map and the Paraiba Inscription are in his book Riddles in History. I don't have my own copy, so I am working from memory on this.
Part of the evidence he presents is that the encypherment scheme was not known until it was archaeologically found in Turkey a few years before he wrote the book.
The Paraiba Inscription translation he presents in the book is not exactly the same as the one provided at your link. He states the encyphered message in the Paraiba Inscription is "We have been saved from death. Trust only in YH." This runs counter to some of the text of the inscription, so the author did not want it publicly stated.
I forget the translation of the encyphered message in the Vinland Map, but it was the more usual author's identity and religious message.
BTW, while many who study this kind of document regard spelling errors as evidence of a hoax, Gordon regarded it as possible evidence of a poorly encyphered message with some letter(s) being forced into place.
I know of at least two documents, the Vinland Map and the Paraiba Inscription, that were declared "hoaxes" by experts but were later found to be authentic.
In both cases the documents contained messages encyphered in a manner common for many years. Cyrus Gordon discussed both in his book Riddles in History. Gordon was an expert in ancient languages who also had worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, giving him a knowledge of encryption.
The encypherment was what Gordon called "acrostic/telestic". The first and last letters of a line are treated as a count into the line and the appropriate letters marked. Then the pairs of letters are rearranged according to a pattern. The usual message was the name of the author (by the rearranged front count letters) and a religious message (by the back count letters). An example of this encypherment was found in a scribe's practice attempts in Turkey.
One item of hoax "evidence" was a spelling error in the Vinland Map. It turned out that the author had forced a letter into place, which resulted in the apparent error.
Do you really think its ethical to charge people for this, when it isn't a viable, effective form of treatment?
The issue is that although the medicine is fake the treatment is viable and effective. They only use this treatment for certain kinds of psychologically based conditions
It was most effective when prescriptions didn't state what the medicine was. Putting the identity of the medicine on the container has only been done for about 30 or 40 years.
My cousin was a pharmacist, and he had to be careful to charge the patient an amount that would be appropriate for a non-placebo prescription.
Placebos did the job. Some people expect to be given medication for ailments that aren't curable by medication. However, the placebo effect can apparently be powerful.
Most of the risk models are based on the Black-Scholes theory of options pricing. The assumptions of the model are basically small, normally-distributed perturbations. The "unseen hand" is guiding things.
What it can't model is boom-and-bust situations. The mathematics of boom-and-bust ran CRT-type TV sets for years. The horizontal sweep in a TV set is a sawtooth oscillator that builds up linearly and then collapses and starts over again. The math is non-linear, and has been studied.
But the "unseen hand" doesn't do booms and busts. It efficiently self-corrects. Real markets sometimes boom and bust. What got in the way of proper modeling was probably a combination of ideology and the common tendency to leave out of models the things that are not easily tractable.
I agree with raising margin requirements. The Fed has the power to do it for some securities and should have done it years ago, instead of just complaining about "irrational exuberance". The only problem is with commodities futures purchased by users of the commodities (e.g., wheat futures purchased by a bakery). Requiring them to pay high margins (in their case, actually down payments) would be burdensome. Speculators should not have the same benefits given real producers and users.
I strongly disagree with the "Fair Tax" proposal. I believe it is extremely regressive and profoundly Unfair. It eliminates progressive taxation, i.e, charging higher taxes to those more able to afford them. It extracts higher portions of available income from the poorest, who need to consume the basic necessities of life. The principle of taxing on the basis of ability to pay is actually stated in the Federalist Papers that advocated for adoption of the Constitution.
The Federal income tax system can not be significantly simplified. The problem is that it taxes net income and not gross receipts. Most of the gazillion pages of tax provisions are devoted to defining net income, i.e., what are the allowable deductions from gross receipts to arrive at net income. For example, the seller of goods is allowed to deduct the cost of the goods, and there are all kinds of rules devoted to defining how to calculate the cost of goods. The average person sees almost none of that, unless you run a business or engage in business-type transactions (e.g., buying and selling stock). Even with the most "simplified" income taxation proposal, businesses would be faced with the same complexity as now.
The Europeans use a "value added tax" and I will bet that there are some kinds of complex rules and resulting tax avoidance games that apply even to that.
The first mess was the stock market crash of 1987. They came up with something called "portfolio insurance". They combined program trading, futures, and options into an incomprehensible stew that was supposed to allow a mutual fund to buy highly profitable, highly risky stocks but insulate itself from their risk. It went haywire and the market crashed.
The second time was Long Term Capital Management in the mid-to-late 1990's. It isn't clear what they were doing, but it almost caused a worldwide financial collapse and required government intervention.
This time it was financial deregulation, predatory mortgage lending, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps. None of this stuff was understandable, including the mortgages and all the derivatives. Many mortgages violated Truth in Lending laws. They misled the prospective homeowners about the terms, and put them in fine print that an average person couldn't understand.
The underlying problems are these:
1. Financial derivatives. They take stocks, mortgages, and bonds and bundle them into other financial instruments, such as index instruments, and mortgage bundles. They do other things like splitting the interest from the principal and putting them into separate instruments. They then create futures, options, and options on futures for the bundled instruments. Options on stocks and bonds are reasonable and understandable. Futures on real commodities are understandable and valuable to producers and users of the real commodities. The rest of the derivatives add more and more complexity.
2. Allowing derivatives to settle in cash. This turns the derivatives into side bets on the real financial instruments. This is how 4 trillion dollars in mortgage and other bonds turned into 62 trillion in credit default swaps. A speculator doesn't have to hold the bond to buy "insurance" that the bond will pay off. A speculator doesn't have to hold a stock or borrow and short it (creating an obligation to buy it to close the loan) to place a bet on its price.
3. Arbitrage trading strategies that connect the derivatives side bets to the real market. The side bets don't remain side bets. The trading strategies do things like enabling speculators to drive down the prices of stocks while bypassing the discipline of the short sale procedures (which were also relaxed due to financial deregulation). These procedures include requirements for the stock price to go up on the transaction preceding the short sale (the "uptick" rule), and requiring the short seller to actually borrow the stock before selling it.
4. Financial deregulation that allowed all of the above problems to fester, and in some cases explicitly placed some of the financial instruments outside the scope of regulation. We can thank Phil Gramm, John McCain's best economic buddy, for this part of the problem.
5. Allowing some derivatives to be traded in unregulated markets and concealed in financial reports. The scope of the problem was allowed to be invisible.
6. Faulty models of the derivatives markets. The quants' algorithms were based on faulty models. Based on an op-ed in the Washington Post, the models appear to assume simple linear market behavior and normal random variability. They are most likely based on faulty economics like the "efficient market hypothesis" that is a fundamental principal of "free market conservative" economics. Markets simply are often not efficient. Charles Mackay (author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) is every bit as good a describer of markets as Adam Smith. Since the derivatives and quants became more central in the markets, we have had more Mackay markets than Smith markets.
My suggested solution is to require any derivatives to settle in the underlying financial instruments or commodities. No purely cash settlements would be allowed. As a transitional provision, I would suggest immediately imposing a stiff tax on any derivative settlements that are made stric
I once visited the aquarium in Monterey, California. The main fish tank is open to the air and has the same kinds of fish that inhabit Monterey Bay.
I happened to be there when the fish were being fed. I was treated to the sight of birds flying around in the tank and challenging the fish for the food. I mentioned it to a colleague at work and he said that he skin dives and sees that all the time. I have visited other aquariums and have never seen anything like that anywhere else
It sounds like if the image is included in the encrypted message and you have a copy of the unencrypted image, it may be possible to break the entire message. That is what is known as a "known plaintext attack." It isn't exactly a new idea, although its application to files/messages with embedded images might be.
There was an article in last Sunday's Washington Post that described one house on the market after a foreclosure. The article was very instructive about what was really going on. The entire financial mess is a result of the gambling casino mentality of the derivatives market moving over into housing and mortgages. The mentality of the derivatives market was allowed to exist and continue as a result of financial market deregulation.
Many financial experts, most notably Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, have for years warned that there are derivatives nobody understands and that they will cause trouble. Based on the article, it is clear that we now have mortgages nobody understands and derivatives on those mortgages that nobody understands, either. Derivatives in the form of "portfolio insurance" caused the stock market crash of 1987. Since then there have been several occasions (such as Long Term Capital Management) in which derivatives threatened to collapse the world financial system. Well, they've done it again.
The article http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/27/AR2008092702587.html describes how the homeowner was solicited to refinance her home and took the bait. The interest rate was a teaser. Over a year into the mortgage she discovered that it was a "negative amortization loan" where the principal increases every month. The transaction probably came nowhere near compliance with Truth in Lending laws. It is shocking that such a piece of financial garbage exists. However, Wall Street wanted mortgages to feed the highly profitable derivatives market and there was a lot of pressure to produce the mortgages, no matter how.
The article doesn't cover what happened next, but the mortgage was likely bundled into a collateralized mortgage obligation that likely had credit default swaps written on it. Here are some relevant Wikipedia links:
It turns out that many of the derivatives are really side bets on prices of financial securities, and that the total outstanding value of the derivatives often exceeds by huge factors the total outstanding value of the securities. Furthermore, the derivatives are highly leveraged.
According to a recent program on NPR's This American Life there are about 4 Trillion in bonds and about 60 Trillion in derivatives betting on whether the bonds will pay off.
In the absence of strict regulation, the "free market" becomes the Fraud Market. This mess can be laid squarely at the feet of financial deregulation and Fraud Market Conservatism. Adam Smith's "unseen hand" doesn't work. The financial markets are much more in keeping with Charles MacKay's book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". This has been proven over and over, and is now being proven once again.
One part of the eventual cleanup will need to be a shutdown of the derivatives casino. Some of these financial instruments are valuable to producers and users of real commodities, but most of them need to be eliminated. Whatever remain need to be understandable and should not be side bets. Eventually, the tails will stop wagging the dogs.
It probably doesn't make the machines look any better than the report on Sequoia machines done by the California Secretary of State (http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vsr.htm) or the recent followup done by UCSB, including a video showing how even a paper trail version can be compromised (http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab/projects/voting/).
We know these machines are garbage, are easily manipulated, compromise the determination of the "consent of the governed", and thereby are threats to our democracy.
It will probably take many years to discover the scope of Republican election fraud. Eventually, history will record that banking deregulation, unaffordable tax cuts for the wealthy, failure to pursue alternative energy development (as a favor to the oil and gas industry), and many other of our nation's problems had their roots in voting machine manipulation.
Yes, it is entirely possible for static electricity to cause problems in direct recording electronic voting machines. It depends on the relative humidity on election day and on other factors such as the floor covering in the polling place.
According to the Electrostatic Discharge Association (http://www.esda.org/) the typical static voltage generated by someone walking across a rug on a dry day is 35000 volts. The voting machines are tested to only 15000 volts. The internal circuitry of the voting machines is designed to work at around 3 volts and the chips may be internally protected to about 100 volts. A human can't feel the discharge if it is below about 3000 volts.
ESD can cause latent failures in the chips. The protection gets punched through and something later triggers the actual failure.
Touch screens are vulnerable to ESD, and the cheaper the screen the more vulnerable. In some touch screens, the discharge goes around the edge of the screen and into the electronics.
The memory modules are also vulnerable. However, even though the machines are opened as part of the polling place opening and closing, the machines are not tested open, and the individual components are not tested.
Have you read the license? I see nothing in it that would not be enforceable under UCC provided that the university agreed to it and I doubt that they could convincingly claim they didn't even in a UCC state. GMU isn't some clueless consumer clicking "Agree" after being confused by the legalese.
UCITA replaces UCC on matters involving "computer information" (software and computer services). I haven't read the license, but in reading it you need to read it in the light of UCITA and not UCC. Some provisions of UCITA are "default" provisions that are there even if they don't appear in the license, and one of the major criticisms of UCITA was that provisions are surprising compared to expectations of someone familiar with UCC.
Virginia was one of the two states that stupidly enacted the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA). Maryland was the other. Maryland made a few significant changes; Virginia changed very little.
UCITA allows nasty provisions to be inserted in EULA's and is tilted to favor the large, downstream licensor (such as Reuters). IIRC, the version of UCITA enacted in Virginia doesn't even guarantee the licensee access to a copy of the license after the licensee clicks "I Accept" and allows EULA provisions under which the licensor can post revisions to the license on a web page at any time with the licensee being bound to the revised license without any other notice.
With Virginia being a UCITA state, I wouldn't make any assumption about the strength of Reuters' case or what seems reasonable in a proper system of law. UCITA could let Reuters get away with things that would shock the conscience of anyone with a sense of fairness.
It might have been on Slashdot, but I heard that Pacific Gas and Electric is taking batteries that are no longer usable in hybrid cars and applying them as backups in office buildings. The batteries might have had physical damage or some other condition that prevents their use in cars but allows their use in fixed locations.
Also, not all the batteries are NiMH. I think the Chevy Volt will have a Lithium Ion battery, the kind that has caused problems in laptops. I've heard they are working on reliability and safety issues with the batteries.
IEEE addresses some of the issues raised here
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IEEE is a major professional society for electrical engineers and computer professionals. It has a unit called IEEE-USA that lobbies on issues such as H1B visas, pension plans and intellectual property employee agreements, and provides career advice to its members.
One possible solution to the issues raised here would be for IT people to join and strengthen IEEE and IEEE-USA.
I think there might be a place for unionization in IT, but it would have to be a different kind of union that had a completely different culture from what the labor movement has had up to now. Many of the complaints that techies have voiced about unions derive from hard-fought issues, such as restrictive work rules, that started in the late 1800's and became part of the union culture as we know it. An IT union would have to develop a different culture. I'm not sure what such a culture would look like.
As long as there is strong competition for workers, the threat of a worker picking up and leaving a job provides a strong incentive for an employer to offer good benefits and working conditions. As the work becomes more routine and the competition decreases, workers lose their leverage and employer abuses start. We may be nearing that point.
However, until someone figures out what the culture of a high tech union should look like, I think our best solution is to depend on existing professional organizations such as IEEE and IEEE-USA.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had two situations in which I had a legally-obtained older version of software for which the provider had dropped support, which included dropping support for the DRM built into the products.
In one case, you had to call in, give them your product ID and get a DRM key. I wanted to move the product from an older machine to a newer one. I called in and they told me they had dropped support, including handling the DRM keys, and to buy their new product. The old product served my needs, and the new one had improvements that were useless to me. Luckily, one tech support person was nice and told me where I could find the DRM key value in the old installation, that I hadn't yet deleted. Had I needed to reinstall for any reason, I would have been stuck.
In another case the DRM required either an internet connection or printer access during installation. This was not explained in the installation instructions. I was installing software on a new machine and hadn't yet set up either internet or printer. With that (early) DRM, if you didn't go through the procedure at installation time, there was no opportunity to do it later. The provider later came out with other versions and dropped support for this version. I moved on to using a FOSS product, so I never tried to resolve the issue, but I have a useless copy of that particular software. It didn't set me back any cost, because I had won a copy of the product in a drawing at a trade show booth for people who sat through a demo of something.
If DRM support is dropped for a version of a product, it should be treated as an abandoned product, even if the DRM is maintained for later versions.
Depends on what you mean by "tubes". For high power pulsed microwave systems (like radar) specialized vacuum tubes are often the most cost effective and most efficient source. At SLAC we use 250, 75 megawatt pulsed klystrons (tubes). There is no practical solid state replacement. Many TV stations use a type of radio-frequency called an IOTs. Microwave ovens use "tubes" (magetron). Low power / low noise is different: I don't know of modern applications for signal-level tubes, but there may still be some.
I was talking about the kinds of tubes that were used in radar receivers and related equipment. They may have been militarized versions, because the radars were originally World War II models converted for FAA use. They were the same kinds once used in radio receivers, TV sets, and other electronic equipment. They were replaced by discrete component transistorized circuits and later by integrated circuits. I would expect there to have been lots of 6SN7 dual triodes in ancillary equipment but not in the receivers (that would have used pentodes). That's the only number I can remember off the top of my head.
The FAA has been working on this for 30 years. I was involved in studying it back in the 1970's.
They have also been working on digital ground-air-ground communications since 1948 (I once had some reports on the subject that go back that far). AFAIK, they still don't have the digital ground-air-ground.
At one time the FAA radars were the last users of vacuum tubes, and the replacement parts were coming from factories that bought the original manufacturers equipment and were making it in who-knows-where. They didn't even replace the original manufacturer trademarks on the tubes. Quality control? Forget it.
Technology advances at the FAA very slooooowly.
This is the same concept that was proposed in a white paper by IEEE-USA a few years ago. The idea is to get bi-directional gigabit speed broadband to the home. Any subscriber can become a content provider. The keynote speaker at a workshop on the topic was doing something like this in Canada.
The US now has legacy broadband and is falling behind places like Japan where they are providing multi-hundred-megabit Internet, plus telephone and cable TV for something like $50 per month total. When people come here from places like that they think they are coming to a third-world telecommunications country.
I have likened the impact on innovation to the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower was a fundamental constraint, innovators would try to figure out how to hook up two horses, feed them better, and do similar things. Once you have engine power, the range of innovation greatly expands.
Innovators in countries that have gigabit broadband can think of innovations that our innovators can't imagine because they can't think in really high speed broadband terms.
In one of his books, Lawrence Lessig discusses how manufacturers of furniture and other goods have been claiming copyright protection for their goods if they appear in movies. Moviemakers have been needing to go through an elaborate process of copyright clearance for objects that appear in their movie scenes. This has applied even if the movie scene is intended to be of someone's room as it is in real life.
This claim by Toyota is the same kind of thing. It looks like they are claiming copyright protection for the appearance of their cars if used in something that is reproduced. Presumably a police car chase or a major accident, if the car involved is a Toyota product, would require copyright clearance by Toyota to be shown on TV.
This is carrying the law to its ridiculous extreme.
I suppose you consider jury duty involuntary servitude. It, like the draft (and I still have my draft card somewhere), is a responsibility of citizenship.
About the same amount of community service is required in Maryland for high school graduation.
One of the better arguments I've seen for fixing the current health care crisis can be seen here
What your linked reference is describing is buy-in to the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program by small businesses and individuals. (The FEHBP is what members of Congress get.) That is an element of Barack Obama's health proposal. He provides other options, but that one is in there. Look at the sixth bullet under "Make Health Insurance Work for People and Businesses" at http://www.barackobama.com/issues/healthcare/ That is essentially what the author of the reference is proposing.
Regarding the "socialism" arguments, when health insurance was first proposed in the 1930's it was attacked as socialism. Remember, at the time it was private health insurance, but was still attacked as socialism. When it started it was limited then to hospital insurance, because the American Medical Association was strenuously opposed. Eventually medical insurance was added and the hospital and medical providers (mostly the "blues") merged.
Health insurance as a job benefit didn't happen until World War II, when employers were prevented from raising wages and were looking for things they could add to attract employees. HMO's started about then with Henry Kaiser, who had to attract employees to build Liberty and Victory ships that carried supplies during the war. The HMO's significantly expanded in the 1970's. That was when the insurance companies other than the original "blues" got involved. The HMO's started out as non-profit or university-based systems and the for-profit insurance industry moved in.
Haven't you ever heard of the "negative income tax"? It was an idea advanced by Milton Friedman, an icon of conservative economics, who influenced Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
It is a rebate to people who otherwise wouldn't pay income taxes. And yes, he proposed it to replace the welfare system. The "earned income tax credit" that we have had for years is a variant.
Social Security has always had an element of progressivity, primarily in the benefits.
Taxes are what we pay for civilization. They are a responsibility of citizenship.
Or if i'm wrong, please provide source material that proves your claim.
Cyrus Gordon's analysis of both the Vinland Map and the Paraiba Inscription are in his book Riddles in History. I don't have my own copy, so I am working from memory on this.
Part of the evidence he presents is that the encypherment scheme was not known until it was archaeologically found in Turkey a few years before he wrote the book.
The Paraiba Inscription translation he presents in the book is not exactly the same as the one provided at your link. He states the encyphered message in the Paraiba Inscription is "We have been saved from death. Trust only in YH." This runs counter to some of the text of the inscription, so the author did not want it publicly stated.
I forget the translation of the encyphered message in the Vinland Map, but it was the more usual author's identity and religious message.
BTW, while many who study this kind of document regard spelling errors as evidence of a hoax, Gordon regarded it as possible evidence of a poorly encyphered message with some letter(s) being forced into place.
I know of at least two documents, the Vinland Map and the Paraiba Inscription, that were declared "hoaxes" by experts but were later found to be authentic.
In both cases the documents contained messages encyphered in a manner common for many years. Cyrus Gordon discussed both in his book Riddles in History. Gordon was an expert in ancient languages who also had worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, giving him a knowledge of encryption.
The encypherment was what Gordon called "acrostic/telestic". The first and last letters of a line are treated as a count into the line and the appropriate letters marked. Then the pairs of letters are rearranged according to a pattern. The usual message was the name of the author (by the rearranged front count letters) and a religious message (by the back count letters). An example of this encypherment was found in a scribe's practice attempts in Turkey.
One item of hoax "evidence" was a spelling error in the Vinland Map. It turned out that the author had forced a letter into place, which resulted in the apparent error.
Do you really think its ethical to charge people for this, when it isn't a viable, effective form of treatment?
The issue is that although the medicine is fake the treatment is viable and effective. They only use this treatment for certain kinds of psychologically based conditions
It was most effective when prescriptions didn't state what the medicine was. Putting the identity of the medicine on the container has only been done for about 30 or 40 years.
My cousin was a pharmacist, and he had to be careful to charge the patient an amount that would be appropriate for a non-placebo prescription.
Placebos did the job. Some people expect to be given medication for ailments that aren't curable by medication. However, the placebo effect can apparently be powerful.
Most of the risk models are based on the Black-Scholes theory of options pricing. The assumptions of the model are basically small, normally-distributed perturbations. The "unseen hand" is guiding things.
What it can't model is boom-and-bust situations. The mathematics of boom-and-bust ran CRT-type TV sets for years. The horizontal sweep in a TV set is a sawtooth oscillator that builds up linearly and then collapses and starts over again. The math is non-linear, and has been studied.
But the "unseen hand" doesn't do booms and busts. It efficiently self-corrects. Real markets sometimes boom and bust. What got in the way of proper modeling was probably a combination of ideology and the common tendency to leave out of models the things that are not easily tractable.
I agree with raising margin requirements. The Fed has the power to do it for some securities and should have done it years ago, instead of just complaining about "irrational exuberance". The only problem is with commodities futures purchased by users of the commodities (e.g., wheat futures purchased by a bakery). Requiring them to pay high margins (in their case, actually down payments) would be burdensome. Speculators should not have the same benefits given real producers and users.
I strongly disagree with the "Fair Tax" proposal. I believe it is extremely regressive and profoundly Unfair. It eliminates progressive taxation, i.e, charging higher taxes to those more able to afford them. It extracts higher portions of available income from the poorest, who need to consume the basic necessities of life. The principle of taxing on the basis of ability to pay is actually stated in the Federalist Papers that advocated for adoption of the Constitution.
The Federal income tax system can not be significantly simplified. The problem is that it taxes net income and not gross receipts. Most of the gazillion pages of tax provisions are devoted to defining net income, i.e., what are the allowable deductions from gross receipts to arrive at net income. For example, the seller of goods is allowed to deduct the cost of the goods, and there are all kinds of rules devoted to defining how to calculate the cost of goods. The average person sees almost none of that, unless you run a business or engage in business-type transactions (e.g., buying and selling stock). Even with the most "simplified" income taxation proposal, businesses would be faced with the same complexity as now.
The Europeans use a "value added tax" and I will bet that there are some kinds of complex rules and resulting tax avoidance games that apply even to that.
The first mess was the stock market crash of 1987. They came up with something called "portfolio insurance". They combined program trading, futures, and options into an incomprehensible stew that was supposed to allow a mutual fund to buy highly profitable, highly risky stocks but insulate itself from their risk. It went haywire and the market crashed.
The second time was Long Term Capital Management in the mid-to-late 1990's. It isn't clear what they were doing, but it almost caused a worldwide financial collapse and required government intervention.
This time it was financial deregulation, predatory mortgage lending, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps. None of this stuff was understandable, including the mortgages and all the derivatives. Many mortgages violated Truth in Lending laws. They misled the prospective homeowners about the terms, and put them in fine print that an average person couldn't understand.
The underlying problems are these:
1. Financial derivatives. They take stocks, mortgages, and bonds and bundle them into other financial instruments, such as index instruments, and mortgage bundles. They do other things like splitting the interest from the principal and putting them into separate instruments. They then create futures, options, and options on futures for the bundled instruments. Options on stocks and bonds are reasonable and understandable. Futures on real commodities are understandable and valuable to producers and users of the real commodities. The rest of the derivatives add more and more complexity.
2. Allowing derivatives to settle in cash. This turns the derivatives into side bets on the real financial instruments. This is how 4 trillion dollars in mortgage and other bonds turned into 62 trillion in credit default swaps. A speculator doesn't have to hold the bond to buy "insurance" that the bond will pay off. A speculator doesn't have to hold a stock or borrow and short it (creating an obligation to buy it to close the loan) to place a bet on its price.
3. Arbitrage trading strategies that connect the derivatives side bets to the real market. The side bets don't remain side bets. The trading strategies do things like enabling speculators to drive down the prices of stocks while bypassing the discipline of the short sale procedures (which were also relaxed due to financial deregulation). These procedures include requirements for the stock price to go up on the transaction preceding the short sale (the "uptick" rule), and requiring the short seller to actually borrow the stock before selling it.
4. Financial deregulation that allowed all of the above problems to fester, and in some cases explicitly placed some of the financial instruments outside the scope of regulation. We can thank Phil Gramm, John McCain's best economic buddy, for this part of the problem.
5. Allowing some derivatives to be traded in unregulated markets and concealed in financial reports. The scope of the problem was allowed to be invisible.
6. Faulty models of the derivatives markets. The quants' algorithms were based on faulty models. Based on an op-ed in the Washington Post, the models appear to assume simple linear market behavior and normal random variability. They are most likely based on faulty economics like the "efficient market hypothesis" that is a fundamental principal of "free market conservative" economics. Markets simply are often not efficient. Charles Mackay (author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) is every bit as good a describer of markets as Adam Smith. Since the derivatives and quants became more central in the markets, we have had more Mackay markets than Smith markets.
My suggested solution is to require any derivatives to settle in the underlying financial instruments or commodities. No purely cash settlements would be allowed. As a transitional provision, I would suggest immediately imposing a stiff tax on any derivative settlements that are made stric
I once visited the aquarium in Monterey, California. The main fish tank is open to the air and has the same kinds of fish that inhabit Monterey Bay.
I happened to be there when the fish were being fed. I was treated to the sight of birds flying around in the tank and challenging the fish for the food. I mentioned it to a colleague at work and he said that he skin dives and sees that all the time. I have visited other aquariums and have never seen anything like that anywhere else
If birds can fly underwater, why not airplanes?
It sounds like if the image is included in the encrypted message and you have a copy of the unencrypted image, it may be possible to break the entire message. That is what is known as a "known plaintext attack." It isn't exactly a new idea, although its application to files/messages with embedded images might be.
There was an article in last Sunday's Washington Post that described one house on the market after a foreclosure. The article was very instructive about what was really going on. The entire financial mess is a result of the gambling casino mentality of the derivatives market moving over into housing and mortgages. The mentality of the derivatives market was allowed to exist and continue as a result of financial market deregulation.
Many financial experts, most notably Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, have for years warned that there are derivatives nobody understands and that they will cause trouble. Based on the article, it is clear that we now have mortgages nobody understands and derivatives on those mortgages that nobody understands, either. Derivatives in the form of "portfolio insurance" caused the stock market crash of 1987. Since then there have been several occasions (such as Long Term Capital Management) in which derivatives threatened to collapse the world financial system. Well, they've done it again.
The article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/27/AR2008092702587.html
describes how the homeowner was solicited to refinance her home and took the bait. The interest rate was a teaser. Over a year into the
mortgage she discovered that it was a "negative amortization loan" where the principal increases every month. The transaction probably came nowhere near compliance with Truth in Lending laws. It is shocking that such a piece of financial garbage exists. However, Wall Street wanted mortgages to feed the highly profitable derivatives market and there was a lot of pressure to produce the mortgages, no matter how.
The article doesn't cover what happened next, but the mortgage was likely bundled into a collateralized mortgage obligation that likely had
credit default swaps written on it. Here are some relevant Wikipedia links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateralized_mortgage_obligation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_default_swap
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_amortization
It turns out that many of the derivatives are really side bets on prices of financial securities, and that the total outstanding value of the derivatives often exceeds by huge factors the total outstanding value of the securities. Furthermore, the derivatives are highly leveraged.
According to a recent program on NPR's This American Life there are about 4 Trillion in bonds and about 60 Trillion in derivatives betting on whether the bonds will pay off.
In the absence of strict regulation, the "free market" becomes the Fraud Market. This mess can be laid squarely at the feet of financial deregulation and Fraud Market Conservatism. Adam Smith's "unseen hand" doesn't work. The financial markets are much more in keeping with Charles MacKay's book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". This has been proven over and over, and is now being proven once again.
One part of the eventual cleanup will need to be a shutdown of the derivatives casino. Some of these financial instruments are valuable to
producers and users of real commodities, but most of them need to be eliminated. Whatever remain need to be understandable and should not be
side bets. Eventually, the tails will stop wagging the dogs.
It probably doesn't make the machines look any better than the report on Sequoia machines done by the California Secretary of State (http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vsr.htm) or the recent followup done by UCSB, including a video showing how even a paper trail version can be compromised (http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab/projects/voting/).
We know these machines are garbage, are easily manipulated, compromise the determination of the "consent of the governed", and thereby are threats to our democracy.
Tampering with voting machines and voting result reporting has been the basis of George Bush's presidency and has led to Republican victories in senate and governorship elections. For example, look at
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Republican_IT_consultant_subpoenaed_in_case_0929.html
and
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2008/Documents_reveal_Georgia_was_warned_of_0730.html
and
http://web6.duc.auburn.edu/~gundljh/Baldwin.pdf
It will probably take many years to discover the scope of Republican election fraud. Eventually, history will record that banking deregulation, unaffordable tax cuts for the wealthy, failure to pursue alternative energy development (as a favor to the oil and gas industry), and many other of our nation's problems had their roots in voting machine manipulation.
Yes, it is entirely possible for static electricity to cause problems in direct recording electronic voting machines. It depends on the relative humidity on election day and on other factors such as the floor covering in the polling place.
According to the Electrostatic Discharge Association (http://www.esda.org/) the typical static voltage generated by someone walking across a rug on a dry day is 35000 volts. The voting machines are tested to only 15000 volts. The internal circuitry of the voting machines is designed to work at around 3 volts and the chips may be internally protected to about 100 volts. A human can't feel the discharge if it is below about 3000 volts.
ESD can cause latent failures in the chips. The protection gets punched through and something later triggers the actual failure.
Touch screens are vulnerable to ESD, and the cheaper the screen the more vulnerable. In some touch screens, the discharge goes around the edge of the screen and into the electronics.
The memory modules are also vulnerable. However, even though the machines are opened as part of the polling place opening and closing, the machines are not tested open, and the individual components are not tested.
Have you read the license? I see nothing in it that would not be enforceable under UCC provided that the university agreed to it and I doubt that they could convincingly claim they didn't even in a UCC state. GMU isn't some clueless consumer clicking "Agree" after being confused by the legalese.
UCITA replaces UCC on matters involving "computer information" (software and computer services). I haven't read the license, but in reading it you need to read it in the light of UCITA and not UCC. Some provisions of UCITA are "default" provisions that are there even if they don't appear in the license, and one of the major criticisms of UCITA was that provisions are surprising compared to expectations of someone familiar with UCC.
Virginia was one of the two states that stupidly enacted the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA). Maryland was the other. Maryland made a few significant changes; Virginia changed very little.
UCITA allows nasty provisions to be inserted in EULA's and is tilted to favor the large, downstream licensor (such as Reuters). IIRC, the version of UCITA enacted in Virginia doesn't even guarantee the licensee access to a copy of the license after the licensee clicks "I Accept" and allows EULA provisions under which the licensor can post revisions to the license on a web page at any time with the licensee being bound to the revised license without any other notice.
With Virginia being a UCITA state, I wouldn't make any assumption about the strength of Reuters' case or what seems reasonable in a proper system of law. UCITA could let Reuters get away with things that would shock the conscience of anyone with a sense of fairness.
It might have been on Slashdot, but I heard that Pacific Gas and Electric is taking batteries that are no longer usable in hybrid cars and applying them as backups in office buildings. The batteries might have had physical damage or some other condition that prevents their use in cars but allows their use in fixed locations.
Also, not all the batteries are NiMH. I think the Chevy Volt will have a Lithium Ion battery, the kind that has caused problems in laptops. I've heard they are working on reliability and safety issues with the batteries.
IEEE is a major professional society for electrical engineers and computer professionals. It has a unit called IEEE-USA that lobbies on issues such as H1B visas, pension plans and intellectual property employee agreements, and provides career advice to its members.
One possible solution to the issues raised here would be for IT people to join and strengthen IEEE and IEEE-USA.
I think there might be a place for unionization in IT, but it would have to be a different kind of union that had a completely different culture from what the labor movement has had up to now. Many of the complaints that techies have voiced about unions derive from hard-fought issues, such as restrictive work rules, that started in the late 1800's and became part of the union culture as we know it. An IT union would have to develop a different culture. I'm not sure what such a culture would look like.
As long as there is strong competition for workers, the threat of a worker picking up and leaving a job provides a strong incentive for an employer to offer good benefits and working conditions. As the work becomes more routine and the competition decreases, workers lose their leverage and employer abuses start. We may be nearing that point.
However, until someone figures out what the culture of a high tech union should look like, I think our best solution is to depend on existing professional organizations such as IEEE and IEEE-USA.