Posts by Terry Cloth 294 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Feb 2011
@Version 1.0: ``[...]but they are going to cost you more. It's your choice so quit complaining.''
Unfortunately, there are many examples of technologies that humanity's survival depends on costing more. We can no longer allow people to build cars the cheapest way---we require them to have expensive catalytic converters. Most of us are realizing that we can't afford the cheapest way to generate electricity (though as a result, we're developing new methods that cost less). The Internet is opening our eyes to the fact that, for society's own good, we can't afford to let people sell the cheapest software.
IANAA(ccountant); however, I read a book once. ``Goodwill'' is a way to account for the difference between the objective value of a company (buildings, equipment, contracted-for income, stuff that you can reasonably assign a value to) and what a buyer pays for it (covering reputation, the value of not having to start a business from scratch, employee knowledge and experience, whatnot).
Now comes the hand-waving: maybe Westinghouse thought CB&IS&W was worth a billion, of which some tens of millions was goodwill. Then, when it starts to shake out, they discover that the actual value is negative billions, and assign the difference to goodwill.
</ unfounded speculation>
The answer is obvious: don't charge sales tax. Set that tax rate to zero, and adjust the income tax to make up the shortfall, with the emphasis on those having the free cash available.
Aside from killing one of the most regressive taxes known, it would save major bucks for businesses and state government. No sales tax means no insane forms to decide which items are taxable: take-out sandwiches? eat-in dinners? groceries? medical supplies? porn? I once had a tax number so I could charge tax on my services, but every month I'd get a paper (it was a while ago) about changes to the list of taxable items. I'd wonder how much it cost retailers of assorted goods to track it and get the word out to the cashiers (it was a long while ago). Imagine how much companies could save by not bothering. We could get rid of a large state bureau tracking the stuff, saving the state a bit of expense. What's not to like?
It is unknown how such laws could impact authors of legitimate hacking tools, although the bill states wares must be deliberately built for offensive hacking.At least the Russkis admit a distinction between ``legitimate'' testing tools and ``offensive'' warez. They're ahead of the U.S. there.
Yes, the NSA gave us Dual EC-DRBG, a definite clinker, but they also (may have) contributed the S-box changes in DES, which improved it significantly. Of course, thanks to them, the key length was shortened to 56 bits (they tried to downgrade it 48 bits, but couldn't swing that), which lowered the price of brute-forcing DES. As a result, the EFF showed in 1998 that anyone with a quarter-million dollars to rub together (and a few clues) could crack DES in around a day.
So, the NSA's involvement can be useful, but all their gift horses' mouths must be inspected closely.
I get really tired of these ``regulators'' extracting unbacked promises. If you have to change your ways to get the merger, you should put up something of value. Sign a contract so you're bound forever to being unbad, your heirs & assigns ATIMA, and make the penalty something that really hurts---say, 33% of your profits from the time of merger until the breach.
What I usually see is their promise is limited to 3 years or such. You're gonna tell me MS, Google, Oracle, or whomever, aren't willing to just put it on the back burner until time's up, so they can resume their piratical ways. If so, I've got a bridge you might be interested in.
Trade deals are about clearing away what can be decades of old rules and ad hoc agreements between a multitude of different countries in order to arrive at a much cleaner slate of rules, vastly simplifying commerce for all involved.Too bad the rest of the article flies in the face of that assertion.
The trouble is that the TPP brings in new rules and ad-hoc agreements between a multitude of different countries.
There's no justification for a trade deal consisting of an enormous dung ball of intricate mechanisms. If you want to make Imaginary Property rules neater and more uniform, then negotiate the Trans-Pacific IP Agreement---nothing else in it. That would allow normal people (the horror!) to judge whether it's an improvement for their country, or not. Ditto the TPEPA (environmental protection), the TPTA (tariffs), and so forth.
Unfortunately(?), this approach leaves no scope for raw horse-trading (I'll take a hit on pharma, if you'll take a hit on lumber, and we'll call it a deal). Gee, I guess we'd just have to make that one agreement balance out between parties; but it's how things used to be handled (e.g.: the Berne Convention on copyright), and could be again.
Suppose we break up the TPP into its component parts, and vote on each. If no go, renegotiate only that part, in secrecy if need be, and present it again, with enough time for interested parties to understand it before making a decision. Maybe we could even predict what the results would be. It would be fascinating to see how much made it through such a process, and in what form.
Can I haz my Nobel Prize in economics now?
It's long been my opinion that there must be some lash in the geartrain or it'll simply seize up. Overly fine-grained control kills throughput. When their economy slows down five to seven years from now (isn't it showing symptoms of slowdown even now?), will they recognize that more freedom is the answer? If not, they're headed back to third-world status.
A warning message about security risks could suffice as a cheaper and less effective fix.How can a general warning help if the reroute happens in the background and the user never sees what's happening? Quit using a cellphone?
Or are you suggesting that a warning be generated only when a reroute actually occurs? False positives much?
All I want is DEC's diff---the one that would not only show insertions and deletions, but also figure out (correctly, so far as I ever found) sections that had moved within the file. I can't tell you how taken aback I was when I moved to Unix, and found it didn't have that facility.
I haven't encountered it in the decades since. Does it exist now somewhere I haven't run into since those halcyon diffing days? The world wonders.
The headline makes it sound as if someone (Prof. William Eskridge?) can actually tell ICANN what to do. Is this possible? Otherwise you should just write a generic News Byte with content
Another person tells ICANN it's wrong. ICANN ignores missive.and refer to it as necessary.
Here on the U.S., I can get a service (don't know how effective) to block spam from VoIP phones (free) and cell phones ($5/month). Liking my landline (and not understanding why people would pay for dropped calls, unintelligible transmissions, etc.; oh, yeah, get off my lawn), I'd like some parity on spam-stopping.
That would be the first big step to securing our nation's software. The questions are a) what are this guy's views on fixing all discovered bugs, even if discovered by a TLA, and b) does he come equipped with enough clout to convince the powers that be that this is a Good Thing?
I'm not holding my breath.
Fairphone is available, and they're solid enough to be on their second model. It's modular, handles dual SIMs, but also tries to improve the lives of its manufacturing employees, avoid conflict metals, and it comes ``jailbroken'', except there's no jail. They invite you to change the OS to Cyanogen Mod, and they're working on porting Sailfish OS over to it.
Drawbacks? It's expensive (€530), and only available in the EU. (I suspect it would work in the U.S. of A, given the standardization of comm protocols; you just need a friend with an EU address to be a straw purchaser.)
That's very unfair to the IANA staff who do a great job day in and day out.Am I wrong that IANA's still independent of ICANN?
This is an example of why the U.S. gov't shouldn't turn IANA over to ICANN—it would be only the work of a week for ICANN to ditch the good folks at IANA, and turn it into another corrupt arm of ICANN. So far as I can see, ICANN is the organizational equivalent of Donald Trump.
Io cools down from a balmy -235 °F (-148°C) to a frigid -270°F (-168°C)
According° to Wikipedia, SO2 boils at 14 °F (-10 °C) and freezes at -98 °F (-72 °C), in which case, at Io's referenced temperatures, it should be lying around on the ground all day. Is the difference due to the pressure, or is there an error in values, conversions, or am I missing something here?
One of the petitions [...] argues that the FCC is misusing decades-old rules intended to apply to the early days of radio and television.``The [Open Internet] Order subjects broadband for the first time to a regulatory paradigm adopted 80 years ago for telephone monopolies, modeled on a regime first created for railroads,'' the petition reads.
o Worked for the railroads
o Worked for radio
o Worked for television
o Worked for the telephone
o Looks like it'll work for packets
Maybe they got it right over a century ago?
Those with money (typically corporations) can shut down some little guy they don't like simply by bringing a suit that the little guy can't afford (monetarily) to defend, much less bring a countersuit for SLAPP or vexatious litigation. The suit needn't have any merit. That's too true in much of our U.S. legal system. (Look at copyright and patent giants, e.g.) This sounds like it restores some balance: ask the judge up front to look at the basis of the suit, rather than having to file a countersuit or an appeal. Sounds good to me. (IANAL, and I haven't read the text of the bill, so I may be full of it.)
unless it can vacuum and do windows (not the computing type).
[See The Door Into Summer, by Robert Heinlein.]
This is well-settled copyright law. So, you could write a book called Harry Potter and the Whosis, but I suspect `Harry Potter' is trademarked, which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
The one bright spot is the bright line the law draws between decisions of fact and decisions of law. The jury has judged that APIs are subject to fair use, and that's the law in this case. All the fighting henceforth will be about whether the trial was run properly. Only if Oracle's lawyers can persuade an appellate court that there was an error in applying the law could we see a retrial, and somehow I don't think that'll happen.
That's one thing the bastards haven't managed to break (choose your favorite bastards). The jury has the last word, and what they say goes. That's why we have the jury system---if the law is wrong, the people get to say so. It's called ``jury nullification'', and it's what puts the people above the Congress. (You'll note that the judge, in his charge to the jury, in the second paragraph of page 1, says
You must follow the law as I give it to you whether you agree with it or not.Judges hate it when juries realize they [the jury] are the supreme law of the land.)
A year or so ago, when the NWS asked for suggestions on how to improve its web site, my top suggestion was to ditch all caps. I was so disappointed when they ignored it, but now the eyestrain ends on 11 May. Now if they'd only pay attention to the other one. They should collapse this:
Hazardous weather warning for Northern Fairfield, Northern New Haven, Northern Middlesex, Southern Fairfield, Southern New Haven, Southern Middlesex
into
Hazardous weather warning for Fairfield, New Haven, Middlesex
You can't believe how painful it is to listen to the zombie voice reading all that---and it frequently runs into over a dozen areas that could be collapsed into five or six. (They split some counties into three or four subdivisions.) You listening, NOAA?
Maybe I should just send the Python code to do it for them.
...but just enough. Our experience here on the other coast has been mixed. When they took over a couple of years ago, they cut off landline service to an 87-yo friend. When called on it, they said they'd be happy to reinstate it with a new number. It took some days to get that straightened out; our landline had a few glitches, they tried to raise the rate for us, &c. The blogosphere shows we were not alone in tribulations. It was so bad that we bought a share of their stock solely so we could go to the shareholders' meeting and complain personally. Since they took over, I've been getting a lot more dropped HTML connections, but they always clear up on retry so I haven't been stoked enough to call about it. But, the change was coincident with their takeover, to the day.
That said, things have stabilized in the last year or so, and I've got my fingers crossed.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, stock markets are undamped systems, with all the dangers that follow from that. They need damping, in the form of a delay before execution of a trade. I think a few minutes would work (at least five, better fifteen), so that computers will have a harder time gaming the system.
I can hear the shouts now---``You're interfering with the free market!'' Not really; it's just a mechanism to ameliorate the effects of flash crowds (and cut down on the profits of weasels). Remember, the stock markets are (supposedly) dealing with long-term securities, and instant trading destabilizes it. (Maybe a day's delay?) You can still make your money, just wait a bit.
Oh, yeah. And change the (U.S.) law so that to get long-term capital-gains treatment, you hafta hold the stock for five (5) years, like it used to be. That might counter the ``gotta make the next quarter's numbers'' mindset. Or so I can dream.
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