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Comment Re:In Short (Score 3, Informative) 101

In U.S. law, "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and ...

In U.S. law, early amendments to the constitution can be overridden by later amendments. The 16th Amendment authorizes the federal government to collect income tax, and there is no way to do that without sticking its nose into every nook and cranny of everyone's financial affairs.

You may still have your 4th amendment rights in other areas, but not for anything to do with money. 99% of the people are okay with that. If you are not, then you can join the 1% that vote Libertarian. Good luck.

The 16th amendment simply provides for basic authorization of tax collection. The implementation is a long list of laws passed by congress collectively referred to as the tax code (including the law that creates the IRS itself). These laws, just like any other, must comply with all the other amendments - 4th included.

Comment Re:Tax assessment (Score 1) 54

Don't sell it. Give it to them. Make maintenance a tax assessment, just like sewage, roads, etc.

The summary mentions multiple times, including in the very first sentance, that this applies to a municipality providing internet service to people outside its city boundaries. We don't let politicians levy taxes on people outside their jurisdictions, you may have previously heard this referred to as "no taxation without representation". People tend to feel rather strongly about it.

Comment A swing and a miss (Score 1) 199

It seems that these researchers have a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying causes of this debate. ISP's want to sit in the middle between businesses and users and charge both sides as much as possible to talk to each other. They don't care what we want prioritized, they only care who will pay them to be prioritized.

They might as well have made an app that tells Donald Trump when people want him to shutup. He doesn't care, neither do the ISP's

Comment Re:Channel saturation (Score 4, Informative) 160

The caps are not put in place by ISPs to make people pay for TV as the summary claims. (Why would an ISP that has no video services at all have caps if that were truly the reason? What is T-Mobile's TV service?) They're put in place to keep people who think they ought to have 100% fulltime use of a shared resource from keeping other users from getting what they are paying for.

So this is just about network management?

Comcast VP: 300GB data cap is “business policy,” not technical necessity
http://arstechnica.com/busines...

Another Broadband CEO Admits: Data Caps Have Nothing To Do With Capacity
https://consumerist.com/2016/0...

Leaked Comcast memo reportedly admits data caps aren't about improving network performance
http://www.theverge.com/smart-...

Comcast Admits Broadband Usage Caps Are A Cash Grab, Not An Engineering Necessity
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Comment Re:Still not conviced (Score 1) 272

I'm still not convinced this isn't some sort of odd false flag operation.

Imagine you're the NSA and you've been unable to get inside of some other countries likely air gapped cyber security operation... putting some juicy tools out there they're likely to snatch up and play with at least get you to see who the players are and maybe these tools work maybe they blow up... As for the vulnerabilities, with so many people playing this game, any vulnerability not found by the NSA is likely to be found by some other organization.

Even the vulnerabilities could be snares... I'm suspect of all of this and think it's just part of a big ruse.

MEMO

To: Equation Group
From: General Keith B. Alexander
CC: Not China; Definitely not Russia
Subject: OPERATION INCOMPETANCE -- TOP SECRET

Since your nerdy version of what I'm pretty sure is some kind of witchcraft has failed to breach the enemy's 'cyber security operation', I've come up with a plan of my own. We simply need to make our entire agency look wildly inept with regard to what is supposed to be our core specialty by publicly posting years worth of your teams research to a public github account, claiming we hacked us. Next, we go through the motions of a public auction to ensure how bad we suck at our jobs stays on the front page of every newspaper for as long as possible. Once we have the enemy fooled, we'll send them the decryption key to the rest of your research (I mentioned that, right?) which contains a booby trap! No way they'll see that coming!

I'm pretty sure they will hook their 'air gapped cyber security operation' up to the internet for a minute to download what is advertised as NSA malware. It's not like they air gapped the place to keep out NSA malware, right?

END MEMO

Comment Re: Thats the usual problem with any radar system. (Score 1) 122

> I'm guessing the receivers were incredibly permissive in how they treat incoming signals.

I would not be at all surprised, as this technology is, or was until recently, in development.

First making it work and then hardening it is not a bad strategy, as long as you actually do the latter - and it is a good idea to think about how you would do it before you need to.

Does this really require hardening? For far less than $60 I could make a laser that permanently blinds human drivers. Should we require laser resistant windshields in all cars or maybe just arrest anyone stupid enough to aim a laser at traffic?

Comment Re:What else would the FBI (Score 1) 84

"one does assume that organized crime is also going to look at the chaos triggered by the hurricane in order to do more of whatever it is that they usually do. Therefore the FBI needs to be prepared."

I would argue that the MO of organized crime is not to try to identify where every federal and state emergency and law enforcement agency is flooding all of their resources and personnel and then join that party. Their intention is to make money, not be supervillans. They need things like funtional infrastructure (airports / shipping ports to import contraband, functional roads to move the contraband, working banks so locals have access to money, etc) which does not exist in these disaster zones. Please stop excusing the FBI's illegal behavior based on wild assumptions.

Comment Re:Fines should be like banks (Score 1) 144

That makes perfect sense. And by the same logic, if someone uploads or shares a movie that a distributor would have paid between $10-20 million for the rights to distribute, the fine should be about $50-150k.

It's important to remember that people aren't being sued for downloading, they're being sued for uploading. And distribution rights are expensive. Apple doesn't pay Warner Brothers $1, once, in exchange for being able to distribute some new song. AMC Theaters doesn't give New Line Cinemas a simple $14 for the rights to show Straight Outta Compton on a thousand screens for the next three months.

Remember back when Michael Jackson bought the distribution rights to the Beatles' catalog for several million? It worked out to around $20-30k per song... which happens to be right about the same amount Jammie Thomas and Joel Tenenbaum had to pay for their infringement.

I'm not sure if you don't understand the underlying economics of the movie industry, or if you don't understand how popcorn time works - or both. Companies don't pay a lump sum for "distribution rights". Using AMC Theatres as you did, the studio would be paid per ticket sold to see the show (basically the entire ticket price, with the venue making income on concession sales). So if a ticket is $8, and 10 people attend the movie, AMC pays New Line $80. If 1,000,000 people attend, AMC pays $8,000,000. Your theoretical example of a Hollywood studio only making $14 in theaters can and does happen. Here is a list of 11 movies that made less than $400 gross while they were in theaters - some staring actors you probably recognize: http://mentalfloss.com/article...

Popcorn time seeds the torrent while you are watching the movie. So if I watch a movie and "upload" 4% of it to 12 different people before it ends, I only "distributed" 48% of a single movie in total. Using our $8 ticket price, wouldn't I owe $3.80? I can't imagine it getting to $50,000 - $150,000 as you suggest. The only exception to this would be the one person who originally uploaded the movie to the internet... but that would be both off topic and contrary to your 'uploads' statement so I won't address it.

Comment Re:Great Economy? (Score 1, Insightful) 293

Well, how do you want to measure economic health?

GDP is up ~8.5% since 2008.

DJIA is up ~18.5% since 2008.

Unemployment is down ~2% across the board since 2008.

Average hourly wage is up ~4% (Although the MEDIAN seasonally adjusted wage is down slightly, perhaps indicating a widening gap in wages?)

Perhaps the reason tech related jobs are doing relatively poorly is because they are too easily outsourced. If it doesn't matter where you are physically when you do your job, then you are literally competing with the entire planet for that job. =Smidge=

I would start by not using the low point of the greatest recession in living memory as my reference point.

Comment Unlimited data? (Score 2) 129

I'm not sure why you are fretting about data use when there are plenty of unlimited plans available (You didn't say where you live, so I'm guessing US based on slashdot user base). Telecommunications companies have been making an effort to push us all into tiered / limited data plans mostly to boost their bottom lines. T-Mobile offers 2 lines with unlimited data for $100 a month - so why accept limited data from a-holes like ATT or Verizon? Show them what you think of their policies by giving your money to their competitors instead.

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