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Comment chicken and egg problem (Score 1) 69

"Without any hardware to test on, developers are leery of committing to supporting new hardware features. Without software that takes advantage of new hardware capabilities, customers aren't willing to pay for new equipment."

Is it not the manufacturer's interest to provide initial software / libraries? At least version 1.0?

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 465

I said "may" age out, subject to official policy and budget constraints. Alternatively, emails related to assigned case files need to be saved, archived on CD, and/or printed out for the case file. Emails with general instructions such as "Ask for more information from 501(c)'s which have to following words in their name..." are considered internal, and not case related. The email servers are for work only, so most email is plaintext or attached PDFs / Word DOCs. The emails probably use less space compared to what you would see from private accounts.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 465

Do these people not run Exchange or some other centralized emailing system? When I used to work as a systems administrator, none of the companies I worked for stored emails on the client side. It was all done through Exchange, held on the company servers and backed up to tape. If a client crashed, at most they lost a few minutes of unsyncronized drafts.

Yes, the IRS runs Exchange. Yes, they have back-ups of the servers. However, back-ups from more than 2 years ago may age out. Thus, if you wait 2 years and dd if=/dev/[zero|urandom|random] the harddrive, you can make emails hard to recover.

Comment Cable company monopolies (Score 1) 210

They may not be de jure monopolies, but they are de facto monopolies. And it's for one simple reason: cable franchise fees. The county/parrish/city receives a percentage of the gross revenue collected within their borders. The more money people pay, the more revenue local government collects. An additional provider would only split the customer base, push prices lower, and lower total customer payments (at least in the eyes of government). There is no incentive for government to encourage another provider to enter the local market, and every incentive to discourage additional providers. And it doesn't matter if we consider this rational, it only matters if it's considered rational by local officials.

Comment Cable customers shafted by state government. (Score 2) 90

"Time Warner Cable operates in 29 states, but thanks to the old system of regional and municipal cable monopolies, Comcast and Time Warner Cable don't compete anywhere."

This is your state government(s) shafting you. The states created laws which allow cable monopolies. Local governments collect a franchise fee on the gross revenue of the cable companies operating within their boundaries. In the eyes of local government, less competition means higher prices which means more tax revenue (without voter feedback). Local government passively discourages competition through regulations, filings, public meetings, disclosures, insurance requirements, etc. Some local (and state) governments *actively* discourage competition.

Comment Re:I am torn! (Score 1) 455

refuse to accept it unless security is improved

Who would decide the point at which security had sufficiently improved, though? The chip-and-PIN system used in the civilized parts of the world is, of course, much better than magnetic swipe, and *should* become prevalent here in the states. Unfortunately, it would cost billions to upgrade the US's entire infrastructure to support it, and I honestly don't see anyone picking up the tab for any part of such an upgrade any time soon.

The chip-and-PIN system is used by processors to transfer fraud liability from the merchant to the user. EMV was written by committee, and it fails to provide the security it touts. Also, it is not a positive endorsement when "the civilized parts of the world" have a card system forced upon them by their governments.

Comment Re:The big picture (Score 1) 312

One could make a more practical argument too. For most cases MAD will be smaller than standard deviation. So reporting so many standard deviations of difference is often a way to overestimate your error bars. Or in other words to report a more conservative estimate. If MAD or SEM is the appropriate way to estimate errors - oh well, that just means your reported result (significant difference) is even stronger. Of course you will usually use a test and not rely on error bars to estimate significance but on a visual graph, when you plot huge error bars and your results are still worlds apart - it is a good way to be extra conservative.

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