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Comment: These stories make me feel sick to my stomach (Score 2) 462

by Tanman (#47884853) Attached to: CBC Warns Canadians of "US Law Enforcement Money Extortion Program"

I hate stuff like this. I hate it because it is crooked and evil. I hate it because there is very little recourse for the average citizen to make against an attack like this.

Contact your congress reps, local and federal. Try to get them to change the law. What is happening in these stories should be illegal.

Comment: Won't win this fight with philosophical arguments (Score 1) 248

by Tanman (#46836649) Attached to: New White House Petition For Net Neutrality

As bad-taste as it is to post another submitted story in a front-page story, here is another petition story that addresses net neutrality from an angle that is actually winnable:

That links to this:

In order to win this fight, we need to make people understand that net neutrality is a services-paid-for issue. They paid for something, but they are being robbed out of getting what they purchased. To win net neutrality, you MUST sell that point to people.

+ - Net Neutrality Petition->

Submitted by Tanman
Tanman (90298) writes "There is a new petition that addresses net neutrality from a different angle than covered by most of the media — it portrays the charging of content providers as a protection racket and seeks to outlaw the practice based on contractual obligations to the customer. Please take a look!

make it illegal for ISPs to lower customers' data rates below the advertised amount based on the content being accessed.

Internet service providers (ISPs) currently engage in the practice of charging customers different rates for different levels of internet access. For example, a provider may have 5mb/s, 25mb/s, and 50mb/s plans. If a customer has a contract with their ISP for access at a premium speed, then the ISP should not be allowed to reduce the customer's internet speed based on what content is being accessed. Doing so amounts to a breach of the good-faith agreement between the ISP and the customer. The ISPs practice this policy to engage in a protection racket in which they charge content providers additional fees to ensure that the content will reach the customers at the speeds expected by those customers. There is a huge incentive for content providers to pay up to avoid losing customers."

Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:One of life's great mysteries (Score 1) 251

by Tanman (#46241085) Attached to: 'CandySwipe' Crushed: When Game Development Turns Nasty

When comparing how much people give for charity, percentage is all that matters. If someone makes $50k/yr and gives $5k/yr to charity, and someone else makes $5,000,000/yr and gives $20k to charity, do you really consider them to be more generous since they gave FOUR TIMES the amount? No, they are less generous. They would be giving 0.4% of their salary vs. 10.0%. The impact on their lives would be non-existent. The point of charitable giving is that you are giving up something for other people -- you are saying "my life will be harder so that other people's lives can be easier."

But yeah, I guess you could say they gave quadruple the amount to charity, if you wanted to be disingenuous.

Comment: One of life's great mysteries (Score 4, Interesting) 251

by Tanman (#46240103) Attached to: 'CandySwipe' Crushed: When Game Development Turns Nasty



Comment: "unlikely you'll be the one responsible?" (Score 1) 501

by Tanman (#45124399) Attached to: Lessons From the Fiasco



This farce is wholly, completely, and unarguably inexcusable.

Comment: What is the public's recourse? (Score 5, Insightful) 524

I just want to make sure I have the right series of events here, from the public perspective:

1. A previous elected official and congress enact some overreaching laws in response to a terrorist attack
2. A politician who makes a bunch of promises against these programs is elected the new President
3. The now-elected politician strengthens and enforces those programs rather than shuttering them
4. There is some kind of a court decision but it is sealed/secret. FOIA requests are made by EFF.
5. A whistle blower comes forward and exposes the illegal activities to the public because his bosses and the elected official have continued said operations. Since his bosses are the Executive Branch and responsible for enforcing the law, he has nobody to report his findings to other than the public.
6. The elected official and members of congress declare said whistle blower a traitor for exposing their methods.
7. It is revealed that the court had previously, as in years ago, ruled that the activities reported on by the whistle blower are illegal. Meaning the whistle blower is not just reporting the activities, but he is reporting that the President of the United States, the heads of major departments, the Attorney General, and a bunch of other People In Power have been knowingly breaking the law to empower the government. Not only, in fact, are they doing something that the court already ruled is illegal, but they sealed the court's decision so that the public would not know about it.

Did I miss anything?

Oh yeah,

8. Snowden is probably still fucked.

Comment: This is NOT low-cost (Score 1) 103

by Tanman (#43758857) Attached to: Cell Phones As a Dirty Bomb Detection Network

If they are talking about enough users having this running to be effective, then they are talking about a tremendous number of users basically setting their phones to drain their batteries out as-fast-as-possible. What are the electricity costs of such an endeavor? Significant, I'd wager.

And the number of false-positives that would be generated would be huge, I'd imagine.

Comment: Apple can spend their "locked up" foreign money (Score 1) 245

by Tanman (#43423187) Attached to: Where Will Apple Get Flash Memory Now?

I don't understand why Apple doesn't just spend all their $billions locked up overseas to build an overseas manufacturing facility. They have plenty. Probably plenty to do it multiple times. Then, they get the best of multiple worlds: 1) they are not as reliant on Samsung, 2) they get to use that money tax-free, 3) they can have some meaningful diversification

And if the thing goes belly-up? Then they "buy" the whole thing from their foreign subsidiary with US cash and get a tax rebate on the business expense in addition to never having paid taxes on it in the first place.

Comment: Re:Samsung wasn't the beligerant party (Score 1) 111

by Tanman (#42762443) Attached to: Judge Koh Rules: Samsung Did Not Willfully Infringe

Allow me to rephrase:

I don't work for samsung, I'm a definitely-not-Samsung-person, buuuuut . . .

The monolithic competitors to the small, agile little tech/phone startup company, Samsung, want to squash it with legal action because they have no prayer of defeating the high-value, unmatched technological innovations Samsung is or will be offering shortly! Samsung's victory is inevitable! ALL HAIL SAMSUNG!

I say again, I am not a Samsung employee. However, as an insightful, intelligent employee, I am looking at employment there in the coming years (and maybe you should too, fellow insightful employees of Samsung's doomed-to-be-destroyed competitors!).
