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Comment Re:If the FCC actually did its job (Score 1) 67

You seem to be suggesting a solution in which someone will both cooperatively pass laws spanning multiple nations,

Actually.. I guess I would rather not. Another alternative that would not require it would be to require providers impose a $1 to $5 per call termination fee for any oversea telemarketing call, regardless of whether a product successfully sold or not, and at least 25% of any extra fee collected needs to be paid to the person who was called.

I would like to add a "Telemarketing call reporting" function, where the person who receives the call will enter a code such as "#", during the call, then if the other parties disconnects the call within 5 seconds, or the person presses "#" two more times; the call will automatically be reported as a telemarketing call requiring charging for the service.

In this case, no extra international cooperation is required, since the person making the call terminates the call in the country they are calling, they are automatically subject to any and all fees which may be imposed for the call, and, there are already laws that will cause the originating telecom provider to pay for any and all fees that are due and not paid by the caller.

Comment Re:If the FCC actually did its job (Score 1) 67

Telemarketers targeting the US will have their operations calling from Canada or elsewhere, and in Canada they'll be calling from the US or elsewhere.

What we need is a law prohibiting telemarketing from an overseas operation to be passed in both countries, and a cooperative agreement to enforce the other country's law locally.

And a regulation that companies which provide termination for overseas calls either refuse any call, or ensure through their contractual agreements and technology on their network that caller id will always be present and reflects a valid telephone number for the actual country of origin unique and persistent to the calling party.

Comment Re:Think of the job market! (Score 1) 203

I'm only half-kidding. over the past year or two, there's been a nifty cottage industry of small storefronts that perform screen replacements on cell phones. If that number gets cut in half, things are going to get interesting for these store owners.

Firstly; I think the old phones will still be widely used for a few more years, as long as the price of a screen replacement is low comparable to the cost of a new phone, I think they will be okay for at least another year, they were always a market of limited duration meeting a temporary need.

Otterbox and other impact resistant cases. Not only would this impact Otter Products, but also many retailers, since cases tend to be a high-margin upsell, so their profits would slip.

I suspect their margin may need to become thinner, but this is less likely. It's easy to see how fewer broken screens will affect sales of screen replacement service, however, the sales of impact-resistant cases are going to be primarily linked to customer perception of risk. The new screens don't make the phone waterproof, and then there are is that iPhone 6+ bending issue, which may very well have increased sales of cases.

Next, people view their cases or phone skins as a fashion statement, and I don't see that going away .

Finally, there are people who buy the cases because they need or want a blackberry-style holster, and again, even with impact-resistant glass, the concern of damage to the phone, scratching, or wear from routine daily use remains, and there will be many people who won't perceive the improved glass as a subsitute for a ogod case.

Comment Re:So is it two or ten times tougher? (Score 1) 203

It depends on whether you consider the gorilla glass version previously used by iPhones as a competitor or not. Generally the reading "competitive cover glass now in the market" would be a comparison against only glass made by OTHER COMPANIES', not previous versions of your own product which are now deprecated.

Comment Re: Not resigning from Debian (Score 1) 550

It is all in the design and implementation. Binary formats and protocols generally have field and record delimiters, as well as error detection and correcting features like checksums.

In my experience, bespoke file formats do not have any of these things, or they are not reliable at all. Of course Mission-critical filesystems such as Ext4, and Enterprise-application DBMs such as PostgreSQL, Oracle, or even MySQL (as long as you use InnoDB and not MyISAM) have many hundreds of thousands of man-hours in developing their binary file formats and tools to help repair them.

But systemd is new. The new logging format has none of that level of engineering and effort behind it, therefore; there is absolutely no reason to believe that systemd's journal is meeting a level of real-world production-usable robustness comparable to the Ext filesystem or comparable to PostgreSQL, which have been used by hundreds of thousands of large enterprises over 15 years of production experience.

There is no "mostly ACID"--a database is or isn't, and the human-readability of a file has no bearing on how corruptable it is. Things like underlying file system and implementation have more to do with it.

Incorrect. Corruption can occur on both binary and human-readable files. The impact of corruption on a binary file is much more severe. The corruption of a human-readable file can generally be resolved by humans. Humans can't read the binary file in the first place, and in general, the computer can't resolve the binary file corruption, and generally, the only way it can be resolved is for the programmer who designed the proprietary binary file format to analyze the file, or for specialized tools such as E2fsck to be developed which discard rather than attempting to recover bits from apparently corrupted data.

The point is the term "ACID" is not really applicable to a text-based log in the first place; it's an inappropriate use of the term. ACID refers to a standard of transactional integrity of a relational database. Text-base syslog files never update a previous entry, and every record only has one column, so it DOESNT MAKE SENSE to speak of the relational integrity of a text syslog file. You could say the text logfile is fully ACID compliant, except, in some cases, the Log rotation operation is often not ACID compliant, since it may be performed by a script without the proper care.

Failed transactions roll back cleanly and single byte errors most certainly do NOT render all data theteafter inaccessible! Despite that you have binary formatted data, even if it is all VARCHAR fields.

In my experience... PostgreSQL will shutdown and refuse to start back up. You will then be in for a lengthy restore from backup followed by point in time recovery efforts by replaying transaction logs, or a very lengthy repair process. MySQL has similar issues.

I'm not saying this is bad for pgSQL or MySQL, as there are definitely efficiency requirements that drive the design, but the fact is that they cannot cope with corruption so well; they can do fairly well with some common problems, such as a pull of the plug, that is: assuming the SYNC command really does guarantee written data is committed to stable media before returning execution.

Comment Re:innovation thwarted (Score 1) 137

Apply what ever laws for DSL to have dry loop DSL to Coax so that you have dry loop COAX.

The problem with this idea is that a Dry Loop is an actual thing; it's a physical connection, and it's a good match for the technology. Your dry loop is a dedicated electrical circuit.

A cable distribution network works differently. There is no dedicated circuit from the cable company to each customer; everything connects back to a headend..

And it's a ginormous broadcast network.

There's no cable running back to the cable company labelled "John Doe's line"

Customers don't have dedicated wiring back to the headend, therefore; it is impossible to create a dedicated electrical circuit.

Furthermore..... spectrum on the cable lines are limited and have to be shared with video. The cable company has to choose how they want to carve up their spectrum and ultimately which frequency ranges their headend will allow for broadband channels.

Finally, all the bandwidth on the headend is shared among customers in a neighborhood or general area, and this is one of the bottlenecks that prevents "unlimited" service.

It's essentially as if there is an Ethernet network with all customers plugged into the same switch, and some additional security measures on the endpoint devices to prevent sniffing.

However, it's kind of like an old style thicknet, in that there is not a dedicated homerun for each customer back to the central point.

It is inherently shared; every device transmitting inherently consumes the cable company's property, so there's really no room for a true "Dry Loop".

Comment Re:innovation thwarted (Score 1) 137

Well; providing just one of the services may be more complicated, as they need to install additional hardware to block the TV services they aren't providing, but possibly that will create additional costs when they want to move towards an all digital network and reclaim TV frequencies to be used for service A.

In other words.... blocking Service B and maintaining the block creates additional costs

Comment Re:Not the holder's money (Score 1) 98

The fines that UNSW are levying are for breaches in the terms (or rules) by which students access the institution's network services.

However, in this case, it means that the university is benefitting from the copyright infringement being conducted on their network, since they are collecting a 'fine', or a 'fee'.

I don't know about NSW, but in other jurisdictions if you knowingly profit from the infringement (charging a fee to the infringer), and you facilitate the infringement (by providing the computer network), then you become liable for the infringement as well, or you may be a contributory infringer.
It's no different from others such as Mega being held to answer from infringement on their public website since they receive Ad money.

Comment Re:wont last (Score 1) 287

Is this really a loophole? What happens if I go to amazon.com and find one of these $100 playstations, and quickly buy it, then insist they honor the contract?

Should they fail.... bring it to court, suing them for the difference between the price agreed and the best available offer. Subpoena walmart for records of the price match as proof that the $100 listing for sale was known and intended.

Comment Wider perimeter (Score 1) 213

A moat is excessively expensive, really unnecessary, an eyesore, and is still not going to really stop or hinder a marine who is determined. Furthermore, the White House is supposed to be a place where people from the public can indeed come; it's not supposed to be a castle or an ivory tower. It should only be fort knox during those times when the president is home.

As for ensuring the president's security; I suggest an additional wider perimeter with a triple-layer fence, with all vehicles and persons required to be searched/checked for weapons etc, and restrict access to all nearby buildings as well.

There should be multiple 24x7 "spotters" high up when the president is in the vicinity, and video analytics, scoping the entire grounds outside for potential intruders and sounding an alarm.

There should be additional locks on the doors and teargas traps which can be activated remotely during an attempted breakin.

Comment Re:Go back in time 5 years (Score 1) 581

Apparently any Debian developer can now chose to make their package only work with Systemd

I'm working on submitting patches to Vi, Emacs, Bash, Dash, Tcsh, Zsh, Ksh, Ash, and Sh to add systemd as a dependency.

They'll also have a simple line of code to check if the systemd binary is present, and if it's missing, not running as PID #1, or doesn't pass some rudimentary fingerprint tests, exit silently.

(By the way, I'm just kidding)

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