... is "the maintaining of prices at a certain level by agreement between competing sellers". Switch sellers to employers and prices to wages, and you've got what this agreement is, and it should be just as illegal.
They can give them to organizations that accept bitcoins as donations. I don't think that they will pick Wikileaks, the Pirate Party, or even free software with focus in privacy, but i.e. Khan Academy or Sugar Labs are good neutral enough candidates that even they can agree that could give a good use to that donation..
Unless Congress does it, that's called a "gift of public funds" and is, for obvious reasons, illegal.
This statement may be an oversimplification, but "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". The application in this case would be, why didn't they have enough workers on the project to begin with?
A more interesting question is why many of the major beltway tech companies one would expect to find attached to a huge government tech project aren't present. My suspicion is that when they saw the specs (or maybe the lack or vagueness of them) and the due date, they declined to participate.
Personally, I'm not that bothered by teething problems. Plenty of sites have experienced them. Yes, there are many ways they could have been avoided, but they weren't, and they will undoubtedl be fixed.
Even assuming that to be true, fixed by when? The law has hard-coded dates in it, and insurers have vast sums at stake predicated on the numbers and types of people signing up, the premiums they'll get, and the subsidies they'll receive. If things slip, lawsuits will fly and it's logical to assume that taxpayers will be on the hook for damages. Not to mention the people who are losing their coverage at work who were expecting to be able to sign up via the exchanges. This disaster has knock-on effects that will resonate thru all sectors of the economy and society, and to call them 'teething problems' is far too dismissive.
.... that this kind of dependence on government funding means that government will increasingly assert control over where and how research will be conducted in the future, and how (or whether) results will be reported? If your project's existence depends on a particular paymaster, are you really going to jeopardize it by angering him? Maybe you're okay with the present party in power, but if you give government this kind of control over your funding, sooner or later people with opposing ideas are going to be in charge and will use those same levers in ways you won't be happy with.
Which chapters have the embedded NSA trapdoors?
I asked it, "What color is your dog?" and it responded, "That would depend, as a dog can be many colours." Looks like the Turing Test passage is a ways off.
If you want an example of how getting a reputation for even the potential of embedded backdoors in your products can bite you, recall the ban imposed on Huawei network products by the US and Australia's National Broadcast Network. These revelations about the NSA's activities and US companies who roll over for them will definitely hurt sales of US products. I'll bet there are some marketing campaigns already being mulled over that would say, "Unlike our US competition, we aren't subject to demands from the NSA, and if they ever approach us, we'll tell them where to stick it." At least, that's what I'd be considering if I were a foreign telecom manufacturer.
With each new story on this or that problem with implementing some part of the Affordable Care Act, and given how the various parts of it interlocked to keep it from breaking down, I just get the impression that there's going to be chaos when it really gets going. Assuming that it's allowed to. At some point maybe everyone agrees that it's not implementable in its present form, like one of those gigantic software projects that crashes to the ground because it was ill-conceived to begin with and nobody can figure out how to make it work.
However, public broadcaster SWF quoted unnamed sources as saying that the two were studying aeronautics in Stuttgart and were suspected of trying to develop techniques for remotely piloting model planes using GPS technology.
What, they couldn't find DIY Drones?
This is how bureaucrats try to connote that a report is riddled with errors, falsehoods, and bad conclusions, without actually saying that. They can't say it because it isn't true, so they have to tap dance around that inconvenient fact by saying a report is 'inaccurate'. 'Inaccuracy' could easily refer to misspellings of people's names, dates off by a day, typos, etc. Unless he says exactly what he's talking about, it's reasonable to assume he's just trying to obfuscate.
... I think it's time to bring back the concepts of privateer, and letters of marque and reprisal.
... costs a lot less than $280k. It barely costs 1/5th of that, and schools tend to treat PhD students as if they have all the time in the world. This company needs a better pitch line than telling us that it saves a grad student two years of work.
How about this for a pitch: "You're welcome to build your own damned robot if you don't want to pay our price."
It's my data, and I should be able to keep it private if I want, even if you think that's silly, immaterial, paranoid, or whatever.
Taking bets on when 3d printers and other 'manufacturing devices' get on the board to be regulated somehow...
Are you suggesting that wouldn't happen if not for the gun printing efforts? Power lies with the means of production. Democratizing the means of production undermines those who hold power and there will thus always be efforts to resist--in this case to regulate--such democratization.
It will happen no matter what, but they need an excuse and this is a great one. If you notice how our privacy has been eroded, it generally comes in jumps after big some traumatic event hits the news. Kind of the same way a boa constrictor suffocates you, by tightening each time you exhale. Getting people in a lather about printed firearms being smuggled aboard aircraft or into secure areas would be the opportunity to tighten.
The only thing cheaper than hardware is talk.
