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Comment Re:Patriot Act? (Score 1) 63

Nope, its true. I used to work for a US owned company in Australia - because of US law, we had to do everything in accordance with Sarbanes–Oxley. It was a royal pain in the ass - 100% pure bureaucracy - and just about doubled the work required to do most of our tasks.

I'm current working for a US company in Australia, and I never have to think about SOX. We automated all of the SOX stuff into the background, so day to day I work oblivious to these things.

Didn't you have automation and process improvement to do the same?

Comment Re:Philips (Score 1) 743

Funny how they advertise 20 years but promise only 3.

At a $60 price tag, that doesn't boost my confidence in their product. If they are going to claim 20 years, they should have a warranty of at least between 10 and 15 years.

In many jurisdictions, you will find that statuary warranty laws mean that a lamp failing after just 3-4 years can be replaced free regardless of manufacturer warranty.

In my jurisdiction (AU) as well as others (eg EU), law mandates that a device should last as long as is reasonably expected and advertised. If they advertise it as lasting 20y but it fails after 5, they're going to find consumer agencies breathing down their backs to replace, no matter what the official warranty is.

Comment Re:Good, Because Certs Are Worthless (Score 4, Interesting) 267

There are really own two certs I respect: Cisco's CCIE and Oracle's OCM. Both require hands-on lab demonstrations of skill.

As someone who has interviewed over a hundred network engineers for a major tech company, let me just say that experienced candidates with CCIEs and experienced candidates without CCIEs have about the same success rate of passing a technical interview. The only difference seems to be that those without lean towards practical real world experience, and those without lean towards book knowledge.

Canada

Copyright Lobby Wants Canada Out of TPP Until Stronger Copyright Laws Passed 164

An anonymous reader writes "'The U.S. government just concluded a consultation on whether it should support Canada's entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations.' The TPP raises significant concerns about extension of copyright and digital locks, so that might be a good thing. However, Michael Geist reports that the IIPA, which represents the major movie, music, and software lobby associations, sees this as an opportunity to force Canada to enact a Canadian DMCA and to implement ACTA."

Comment Pin spacing? (Score 1) 144

Does this have proper 2.5mm pin spacing throughout?

The most annoying thing about the regular arduino is the fact that you can't use standard protoboard for home made shields.

Please tell me they have fixed this problem.

Comment Pakistan is NOT benning encryption (Score 4, Informative) 351

This is a complete misread of telecoms terminology, they are not banning user encryption.

The actual regulation only mentions encryption ONCE, and that is in regard to signalling information.

Signalling information is not the data. I repeat, signaling information is NOT the data.

For phone calls, signalling is the bits that tell the system where the call is go to, and who from, and other "meta" information about the call. For data, signalling is the outer part of the IP packet that carries destination information.

The encrypted part of data is in the PAYLOAD. And they don't require the payload to be decrypted. It's also the same section that requires the
info to not be compressed. Are they really going to decompress all files before sending them off? No way.

All they are requiring is that the phone call source/destination info, and Ip traffic packets are not encrypted *further* by the ISP. Customer
VPN data will continue to flow as normal.

IAANE (I am a network engineer) and I have had to deploy a government spying^Hlegal intercept platform before, and this is pretty much just
bog standard like many other countries do.

Bottom line: A non story. Pakistan wants ISPs to implement legal intercept. Big whoop, most countries have already done this.

Comment Re:Unlocked HTC phones are (Score 1) 145

Unlocking does NOT void a phone's warranty, as much as the manufacturers would like you to believe.

Under the relevant jurisdictions of much of /. readership, it is illegal for a manufacturer to deny a warranty claim, *unless* they can show that the modification was a factor in the fault (in this case, the third party firmware such as cyanogen).

This is what prevents car manufacturers denying warranty claims on, say a gearbox, just because you replaced the radio. Same goes for your phone, if the camera CCD starts playing up, they cannot blame the firmware and deny coverage.

My Nexus S is rather well behaved in this regard. "fastboot oem unlock" says that it *may* affect the warranty, but does not state that it is outright void.

For the US, read up on the Magnnuson Moss Warranty Act.

Comment Re:how about ipv6 multicast? (Score 3, Interesting) 60

The multicast address space in IPv4 is woefully small just a few /8's (each provider generally only gets an allocation of a /24 or /23). Multicast on v4 is just not feasible at internet scales.

IPv6 is much more promising however, given the vast improvement in address space. The only problem with multicast in general, is that content providers dont like the lack of control (anyone can join a multicast stream WITHOUT the provider knowing about it). Providers want total control over every client (somewhat of a common theme with modern media delivery mechanisms).
Perhaps the solution, is some kind of crypto on the streams that clients must negotiate the key for via unicast before getting the stream. But then its scarily close to drm.

Either way, I'm quite excited about the possibility of v6 multicast taking off once v6 is the norm (probably not long after duke nukem forever is released).

Comment Re:Voiding the warranty (Score 1) 248

For the same reason that any warranty-covered device loses the protection of the warranty if you change something on it - you can't guarantee that you didn't break it yourself.

Read up on the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act. This is an American law but most modern countries have laws with the same principles.

Essentially, warranties cannot be voided by modification unless the manufacturer can prove that the modification caused the fault. This is the reason why
you can install after market wiper blades and other accessories on your car without voiding the warranty. It would be outrageous for a car manufacturer
otherwise. They can only deny warranty repairs when your replacing of a component specifically contributed to that fault.

The same goes for phones - a manufacturer cannot deny a warranty repair on something like a loose screen or faulty button because you installed
an alternative OS on it. Of course, if you install something that lets you overstress a component (eg root the phone to drive an LED flash brighter than the stock OS), then they can deny the warranty on that component. But still would have to repair a loose screen, etc.

My Nexus S phone addresses this somewhat better than most. When you go through the legitimate unlock procedure, it warns that it "might" void some warranty, rather than stating that it "will".

So yeah, please stop spreading the FUD that jailbreaking/etc will void your warranty. It will NOT automatically void your warranty, and you can legitimately
argue with the manufacturer that many warranty claims are still valid.

Comment My own calculation (Score 1) 981

I came up with a different answer, based on the summary's wording.

Firstly, the sex of the second child is not determined by the first. Whatever one child is, the other will always be 50% chance of being either.

What we can deduce from the wording is that his other child is not a son born on a tuesday.

We draw a two column, 7 row matrix. The rows are days of the week, and the columns are boy/girl. Write a tick in each cell if that is a valid sex and day for the child. We are left with 14 possibilities. 7 of those are girls (a girl can be born on any day), but only 6 are boys (as according to the wording, only ONE is a son born on tuesday...if the other is a son, it cannot be a tuesday, so we are left with 6 days if it's a boy. We give that probability to the girl column.

Thus we are left with 8 out of 14 chances being a girl, and 6 out of 14 being a boy. In decimal:

Girl: 0.57
Boy: 0.43

QED.

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