etherealmachine

Linked from that really good Super Bowl article:

Consequential Damages: These are intended to reimburse the injured party for indirect damages other than contractual loss; for example, loss of business profits due to an undelivered machine. In order to recover, the injuries must "flow from the breach," i.e. be a direct result of the breach, and be reasonably foreseeable to both parties when they entered into the contract.

Your opinion sounds like it comes from experience, which is usually useful in legal matters. However, buying a new ticket at the inflated price seems very reasonable to foresee by both parties and the small-claims court judges I've known are usually no-nonsense. If this came up in my life I would personally buy the tickets and take the risk in small claims court 3 months later.

Curious - why do you think that? The seller obviously sold the tickets for a higher price, and can be forced to give the buyer the price difference, allowing the buyer to buy new tickets at the new price, fulfilling the purpose of the original contract. Why do you think a judge would disagree?

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to backdooring cryptography. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) You have to trust a government entity not to reveal the backdoor key

(x) The backdoor key holders are susceptible to a good beating with a rubber hose

(x) The backdoor key holders are susceptible to blackmail

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(x) Clones that refuse to honor the backdoor

(x) Jurisdictional problems

(x) Lack of incentives for consumers to adopt a crippled product

(x) Actual incentives for the terrorists not to adopt a backdoored product

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

(x) Any scheme based on opt-in is unworkable

( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?

(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses

(x) I don't want the government reading my email

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

With thanks to http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt. Please feel free to help me improve this list. Similar to spam prevention, I think we'll see a lot of broken proposals to this problem over the next few years.

I'm thinking not of industry, but of academia and research. It's not going to work to just give blanket subsidies (like say, 20k to all Postdoc researchers) - you need a system that allows in foreign researchers, and my point is it's hard to differentiate academic research from industry research. Also, everything discussed is "futzing" with the labor market - it's not like setting up a government run auction is some sort of pure free market.

Defining a sector is problematic. To narrow and you can just bid for jobs in the "systems administration" sector and then move them to software engineer after hire. To broad and we miss companies that produce non-monetary value like biotech or chemical research.

From the text of the TPP: "Party means any State or separate customs territory for which this Agreement is in force;"

So that would seem to not include citizens or corporations of the State itself.

Edit: This is a good general skill to remember in reading/drafting your own contracts. Capitalized terms usually have a definition in the contract that might be different from what you expect.

I've seen a lot of comments on this topic discussing the issues manufacturers might have with releasing their code as "open source". I say odd because it's orthogonal to the issue here. No one (not even the EFF) seems to want to force auto makers to open source their code - not even if you use a bastardized meaning of open source like Microsoft's "Shared Source". What most articles I've seen propose is instead that it not be a felony to copy, reverse engineer and then inspect the code. Some articles have mentioned letting regulators inspect code, but most stick to a simple request - remove the DMCA Anti-Circumvention protection for automobile software. It's disconcerting to see a relatively simple request be pushed into straw-man territory of requiring all code be open sourced.

Is Madoko a SAAS app? If so I'll note another problem - madoko.net is currently timing out when I go to access it; any data inside is stuck there for the duration.

On the Markdown+LaTeX note, I wrote my own Markdown parser (https://github.com/etherealmachine/markdown) to drive my github.io site (https://etherealmachine.github.io). Basically it's what you describe - easy mixing of Markdown+LaTeX to construct nice looking HTML.

I strongly object to Warcraft III being called "retro" - and an expansion no less. It makes me feel old.

SWE in MTV - I'm in at 9:00am, out at 4:00pm 3 days a week. 2 hours on the bus, I might get an hour of work done. Once a week I do 10:30am to 7:00pm (team meeting and game night - dinner on campus). About once a week I do 10:30am to 4:00pm. I agree with the post author - by 4pm I'm pretty fried and useless anyways.