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| A hair salon displays a window sticker declaring “We don’t discriminate. If you’re buying, we’re selling” on April 22 in Jackson, Miss.
A 600-word provision signed into law by Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant last month will soon prevent the state from ”substantially burden[ing]” people’s religious freedom unless there’s a “compelling justification.” The brief legislation mentions the ”framers of the Constitution” and decades-old court cases while remaining, at least on the surface, rather vague as to its purpose. The law doesn’t mention any specific religions or describe any burdens—as if Mississippi had just reminded everyone that the First Amendment was a pretty good idea.
But the new law, which takes effect in July, has ignited a political firestorm over the belief its broad wording allows businesses to turn away gay and lesbian customers. “The bill will ensure that Mississippi business owners, such as photographers and wedding cake bakers, can refuse to serve homosexuals if they feel that doing so would violate their religious beliefs and moral convictions,” explained the John Birch Society’s New American in an article applauding the law.
The legislation was introduced by Philip Gandy, a Republican state senator who is also a Baptist preacher, and found support from the Christian Action Commission, the Family Research Center, and the state’s division of the United Pentecostal Church. Before passage, a second Baptist pastor who serves in the state legislature, Republican Representative Andy Gibson, told the Jackson Free Press that the measure was designed to “protect Christians in the state from discrimination.”
In response, some Mississippi business owners have launched an opposition campaign under the slogan, “If You’re Buying, We’re Selling.” The campaign has already sold over 3,000 “We don’t discriminate” stickers that shop owners can place in their windows, and the stickers have spread as far Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas. In New York, chefs are even protesting an upcoming Mississippi-themed catfish event in Central Park.
“We’ve struck a nerve nationwide,” says the campaign’s co-founder, Joce Pritchett, 46, who owns a civil engineering firm in Jackson and is “not in the closet, but I play by the rules.” “There are a lot of these religious freedom bills going around in the country right now, but this one actually got passed here. And it turns out that even in Mississippi, a lot of business owners are angry about it.”
Mississippi’s law—along with its scrapped predecessor in Arizona—are state versions of the federal law that’s currently at the center of Hobby Lobby’s Supreme Court case. The $3.3 billion craft-store chain owned by a family of Evangelical Christians argues that the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) exempts it from having to cover all types of birth control under the Affordable Care Act. The Obama administration contends that corporations do not qualify for protection under the RFRA. The Supreme Court is expected to release its decision in July, around the time Mississippi’s law will go into effect.
Taken together, the cases mark the start of an unexpected and almost unprecedented legal battle. “Most of the past RFRA cases involve obscure laws and very minor religions,” says Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia law professor who has written letters in support of the Mississippi law and filed a brief on behalf of several Christian organizations in the Hobby Lobby case. The questions in front of the Supreme Court and now raised again in Mississippi are big: What are the limits of religious freedom? Do those limits change for corporations? And why has it taken Americans so long to figure this out?
For a long time, courts generally believed that the government couldn’t interfere with someone’s religious practice unless it served a “compelling interest,” which essentially means that the harm caused by the religious practice—say, killing people for human sacrifice—outweighed the need for freedom of religion. When that line was crossed, the government could stop the practice.
But then came the 1990 court case Employment Division v. Smith. It involved American Indians in Oregon who were fired from their jobs and denied unemployment benefits because they had smoked peyote during a religious ritual. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided against the Indians. Surprisingly, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion that a compelling state interest was a “luxury” that the government didn’t necessarily have to meet.
In a “Wait, what? That’s not what we meant at all!” moment, Congress passed the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act that explicitly required the compelling interest. The act passed so overwhelmingly—97 to 3 in the Senate—that when President Bill Clinton signed it into law, he marveled that “the power of God is such that even in the legislative process, miracles can happen.” The law has remained more or less unchanged, aside from a 1997 Supreme Court decision that it applied only to federal laws. When that happened, a number of states passed similarly worded state laws. Everything was more or less legally settled. Until now.
RFRA cases almost always involve individual citizens or religious institutions. But corporations are arguing that in the eyes of the law they are people, too. The RFA doesn’t explicitly agree that they are—but it doesn’t say they aren’t. Lawmakers even argued about this oversight in the 1990s but never resolved it. And for a long time, it wasn’t a problem because few for-profit corporations have concrete religious beliefs.
Hobby Lobby isn’t run like other companies, as Bloomberg Businessweek’s Susan Berfield pointed out in her magazine story in April, which is why its case is so controversial. “You didn’t see a lot of companies coming out in in support of Hobby Lobby,” says Laycock. “Most businesses just want to make money.”
Last year, as the Hobby Lobby fight was gaining steam, several state courts decided in favor of same-sex couples that were denied wedding services. New Mexico, one of the few states that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, found that a wedding photographer violated state law when she refused to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony. Colorado ruled that a bakery couldn’t turn away same-sex customers who order wedding cakes. Alarmed conservatives in such states asKansas and Tennessee began to push for bills that explicitly protected businesses from serving gay and lesbian customers. None of those bills passed.
Arizona tried a different approach with a bill didn’t mention sexual orientation or wedding services, but it was so sweeping in its language that opponents feared it would achieve such things as allow Muslim cabdrivers to refuse service to women traveling alone. Both Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and Mitt Romney spoke out against it, and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer ultimately vetoed it in February. So far, Mississippi’s bill is the only one that has passed. It, too, is pretty broad.
“It’s a bad business model to say, ‘We’ll only serve these people or those people,” says Pritchett, the business owner and activist fighting the new law. “I’m worried that it could open Mississippi up to discrimination against anyone,” says Eddie Outlaw, a hair salon owner in Jackson who is also fighting the law. “It’s not good for state business. We don’t have a great track record down here.”
Because Pritchett’s engineering firm deals with state transportation projects, she doesn’t know what will happen to her if persons in the government decide they don’t like that she’s gay. “I’m just waiting for someone to call the transportation commissioner and close me down,” she says, half-jokingly.
So Pritchett, Outlaw, and several other Mississippi business owners have started the website, IfYoureBuying.com, and are in the process of launching a national campaign for business owners who want to assure customers that they won’t be turned away. “I honestly didn’t think a movement like this would happen here—I didn’t know so many of us existed,” says Pritchett.
Mississippi hasn’t had much in the way of a gay-rights movement until now; the Human Rights Campaign is launching an $8.5 million civil rights campaign in the Deep South to address this disparity. A 2013 Public Policy poll found that 69 percent of Mississippi residents were against same-sex marriage, a much higher proportion than in than the rest of the country. Perhaps surprisingly, however, almost the same number (66 percent) agreed it was a wrong to let businesses discriminate against people based on sexual orientation.
There’s still a chance Mississippi activists can turn the broad new religious freedom law to their own ends. “I’ve heard that there are couples waiting to file lawsuits the day the bill becomes law, saying it’s against their religion not to be able to get married,” says Pritchett. “This could work against [the bill’s supporters] in a really big way.”
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Friday, May 23, 2014
Can Small Businesses Start a Gay Rights Movement in Mississippi? (BusinessWeek)
Thursday, May 22, 2014
China Bans Windows 8 on Government PCs (PCMagazine)
Until further notice, all desktops, laptops, and tablets put to use by central state agencies cannot run Windows 8.
Microsoft is facing another hurdle in its bid to encourage adoption of Windows 8: China has reportedly banned Redmond's latest OS on government computers.
As reported by the official Xinhua news agency, all desktops, laptops, and tablets used by central state agencies must run on an OS other than Windows 8, according to China's Central Government Procurement Center.
"All computer products are not allowed to install [the] Windows 8 operating system," says a translated post on the center's website.
The center did not specify why it was banning Windows 8, but Xinhua said the country wants to avoid losing support for an operating system like it did recently with Windows XP. Last month, Redmond stopped providing support for the aging operating system, despite the fact that many public and private users were still using it.
The ban applies only to government offices; the personal computer market remains unaffected.
"We were surprised to learn about the reference to Windows 8" a Microsoft spokesman told PCMag in an email. "Microsoft has been working proactively with the Central Government Procurement Center and other government agencies through the evaluation process to ensure that our products and services meet all government procurement requirements."
In the wake of the XP support shutdown, some local industry leaders are making a push for a new home-cooked OS, likely based on Linux, Xinhua said. So far, the few Linux-based operating systems already in place in China, including KylinOS and StartOS, have not made much of an impact.
But Redmond will continue to provide Windows 7 to the Chinese government, while the company is also "working on the Windows 8 evaluation with relevant government agencies," the spokesman said.
For more, see PCMag's review of Microsoft Windows 8.1 Update and the slideshow above. Also check out 8 Things You Need to Know About Windows 8.1 Update.
Editor's Note: This story was updated Wednesday with comment from Microsoft.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Hackers Devise Wireless Methods for Stealing ATM Users' PINs (BusinessWeek)
Pilfering the personal identification numbers of financial accounts, a potential jackpot for hackers, is tougher to pull off thanks to data encryption and other security technologies. Yet the arms race continues: Hackers are devising more creative methods to intercept PINs at ATMs, the clearest path to instant cash. “It just blows you away how sophisticated these folks are in thinking this stuff up,” says Bryan Sartin, director of the team at Verizon Communications (VZ) that investigates data breaches.
Schemes to steal PINs from ATMs and similar machines now include Hollywood-style corporate espionage, Sartin says. Crooks have long fitted ATMs and gas pumps with phony number pads and card readers to retrieve debit card PIN data. That was a risky approach, because they had to set up the equipment and then come back to remove it without getting caught. Now, with banks using wireless Internet connections to monitor ATM cash flow and update software, hackers can filch PINs remotely, according to a Verizon report. Fraudsters are also taking an Ocean’s Eleven approach—getting jobs with technical-support companies that give them access to ATMs, then installing malware that can transmit PIN data to an e-mail address or a phone.
Regulators at the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council warned in April that the ATMs of small and midsize banks are preferred targets for criminals who hack bank Web pages to boost ATM withdrawal limits and then clean out people’s accounts. Remote hacks of Web-connected ATMs are a fast-growing problem, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at researcher Gartner. In March, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced charges against 17 people in an alleged skimming scheme that the FBI says stretched from Bulgaria to Chicago.
The memory chips and transmitters that enable PIN hacking are also getting thin and light enough to avoid setting off security equipment that card companies have installed at retail stores in the past few years, says David Robertson, publisher of the Nilson Report, a newsletter focused on the payment industry. Often, the hackers’ gear can’t be detected by the software that remotely monitors the weight of point-of-sale terminals, Robertson says: “They’ve done it in a way that suggests a very serious effort to try to crack this industry.”
Although it’s tough to estimate the total lost to these attacks, the U.S. Secret Service estimated annual losses from ATM skimming at more than $1 billion in 2008, its most recent published figure. Sartin says U.S. companies were frequently the targets of the 130 skimming breaches his team studied from last year for its report.
In part, Robertson says, that’s because U.S. consumers carry antiquated magnetic-stripe cards that are more vulnerable to PIN capture than cards with RFID chips, which verify that the original card is present for every transaction. “There’s nothing about PINs in 2014 that’s different than PINs in 1994,” he says. “ATMs are in need of even more defense.”
The bottom line: Hackers are taking advantage of wirelessly connected ATMs and other card readers to pull off smoother PIN data thefts.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Fast, Furious & Safe? Porsches and Other Elite Cars Don't Get Crash-Testing (BusinessWeek)
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| First responders gather evidence near the wreckage of the crash involving Paul Walker, Roger Rodas, and a Porsche Carrera GT on Nov. 30, 2013
The death of Fast and Furious film star Paul Walker has veered into the courts. The widow of the driver in the incident sued Volkswagen’s Porsche division on Monday claiming design flaws in the 2005 Carrera GT caused the fatal November accident.
The civil lawsuit filed by Kristine Rodas, the wife of driver Roger Rodas, makes nine claims against the automaker, including false advertising and wrongful death. Rodas alleges that the suspension system failed before it careened off the road and argues that the Carrera GT lacks a proper crash cage and a fuel tank designed to contain spills.
Her lawsuit also disputes an investigation by police agencies and Porsche that found the car was going at least 80 miles per hour when it crashed. “Speed and speed alone” was the problem, according to the report. Rodas contends it was going far slower. Porsche did not immediately respond to questions about the lawsuit on Tuesday.
To be sure, the car in question is a powerful machine—that’s its raison d’etre. Its 10 cylinders generate 605 horsepower and can propel the vehicle at 205 miles per hour. The deceased likely appreciated the performance, no matter what speed they were traveling at the time of the crash. Walker and Mr. Rodas were partners on a car-racing team and, according to the complaint, Mr. Rodas owned 5 to 10 Porsches at any given time.
The equation for a sports car is not complicated: engine – weight = speed. Safety features often fall into the weight category. Airbags, for instance, typically weigh between 5 and 8 pounds—tiny numbers that add up quickly if the units are going in dashboards, roof pillars, and door panels. Reinforcing steel is even heavier. What’s more, aggressive drivers often customize cars, stripping out certain features after purchase.
The crashed Carrera GT did, in fact, have dual front airbags and supplemental safety bars, offset by Porsche engineers with that powerful alloy engine block and a hair-trigger ceramic composite clutch. The car’s carbon-threaded chassis weighed only 220 pounds. Was it a safe car? Not really if compared with a Volvo wagon. But it wasn’t particularly reckless compared to other road rockets costing more than $300,000.
Whether the Carrera GT carrying Walker and Rodas malfunctioned is a different question. Ultimately, the people who buy Porsches and other high-end vehicles have to take the manufacturer’s word on questions of safety. These vehicles usually don’t have an accepted measure of crash safety. The two U.S. groups that carry out extensive crash-testing—the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety—rate only vehicles that sell in relatively high volumes, and the European New Car Assessment Programme doesn’t crunch Porsches either.
Cost is a major factor. The Euro NCAP pays for some of the cars it tests and allows manufacturers to “sponsor” certain other models. NHTSA and IIHS, meanwhile, make a point of buying every car they test, which makes the return on a Porsche review pretty crummy considering the limited number of buyers. Ironically, the driving masses who can’t afford such an opulent ride have far more assurances about the safety of their more mundane vehicles.
Now that Porsche is gaining a bit of momentum with mainstream consumers thanks to two models starting around $50,000—the Boxster and the tiny Macan SUV— Volkswagen’s blue-chip brand may make it onto the crash-test list before too long.
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Monday, May 12, 2014
With Big Obstacles Ahead, Tesla Still Isn't Checking Its Rear View (BusinessWeek)
Tesla (TSLA) has a number of fairly huge challenges ahead. It has to build out a worldwide network of charging stations, entirely change the way cars are sold, produce a crossover SUV from scratch, and build a giant factory to crank out batteries that are 30 percent more efficient than anything else on the market.
One thing, however, the company doesn’t appear to be the slightest bit concerned about: Whether people will stop buying its cars.
That’s typically what keeps most car executives up at night. All the other stuff—the cost of building materials, dealership infrastructure, exchange rates—falls a little further down the list of worries.
But Elon Musk argues that traditional supply/demand forces don’t apply to his baby car company. On a conference call yesterday, Musk spent more time talking about door gaskets on Tesla’s coming Model X than he did about any threat from BMW (BMW:GY) or Cadillac (GM), or the possibility that the vector for Tesla fever would narrow.
Here’s the guiding principle of Teslanomics as explained by Musk: “Deliveries and demand are not the same thing for Tesla. They are for other car companies, but not for Tesla.”
Translation: Tesla will keep selling cars as fast as it can make them. The sky’s the limit, particularly in China, where Musk says people are waiting up to five months for delivery of their sleek sedans.
Most notably, Musk didn’t mention BMW’s i8, a carbon-fiber spaceship that runs on both a battery and a tiny, 3-cylinder combustion engine. When it tears out of dealerships next month, the i8 is expected to get as much as 135 miles per gallon. Anyone who spends $136,000 on a such a machine likely won’t mind that a trip from Boston to Washington, D.C., will cost about $13 more than it would in a Tesla.
There was also no discussion of the Mercedes (DAI:GR) B-class Electric Drive, which journalists in California got to drive for the first time last week. Its range is less than half of Tesla’s, and it doesn’t look nearly as sexy, but with a starting sticker price of $41,450, it’s also almost half the cost.
We get it. Musk is right, nothing is really like a Tesla: a long-range, all-electric luxury vehicle at a price comparable to gas-powered counterparts. But by the time Musk builds his giant battery factory and rolls out its next model—by the time Tesla plans to be cruising, finally, into the black—something may be pretty close.
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Microsoft abrirá el centro más grande de EE.UU en Miami (Mercado de Dinero)
Lunes, Mayo 5 2014 11:44 | Escrito por Carolina Vélez
El ‘gran’ Microsoft se prepara para abrir un centro de innovación de última generación en la ciudad de Miami, siendo esta la primera instalación de este tipo en los Estados Unidos.
El anuncio de este nuevo centro de innovación, fue hecho durante la conferencia eMerge America Techweek.
La empresa trabaja en conjunto con autoridades de la ciudad y del condado para que el proyecto inicie a mediados de año.
El centro se ubicará en el Downtown de la ciudad, en el instituto para empresas Venture Hive y ofrecerá servicios relacionados con tecnología para nuevas empresas locales, gobiernos, estudiantes y profesores.
El anuncio fue hecho durante la conferencia eMerge America Techweek, con el fin que inversionistas, empresas tecnológicas y compañías globales se unan a este esfuerzo por promover la tecnología y la innovación en la región.
Microsoft cuenta con unos 100 centros de innovación distribuidos en 80 países alrededor del mundo
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Monday, May 5, 2014
Japan Prepares to Enter the Arms Market (BusinessWeek)
Keenly aware of the trouble that came with ambitious generals and an expanding munitions industry, the Japanese government has long banned most weapons exports. That policy helped buttress Japan’s pacifism, but it also hindered the growth of the country’s defense industry. Because it couldn’t sell parts overseas, Japanese defense companies missed out on chances to develop tanks, fighter jets, and other weaponry with the U.S. The ban “has resulted in an isolated Japanese defense industry that produces very small quantities at very high cost,” says Lance Gatling, president of Nexial Research, a defense consulting company in Tokyo.
Japan’s Asian neighbors have taken advantage of its absence from the export scene. South Korea exported $3.4 billion worth of arms in 2013, up from $1.2 billion in 2010. China last year passed France and Britain to become the world’s fourth-largest arms exporter, behind only the U.S., Russia, and Germany, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
In April, the government of Japan’s conservative prime minister, Shinzo Abe, lifted a ban from the 1970s that restricted arms exports. The country’s contentious relations with China, which claims Japanese-controlled islands in the East China Sea, made getting rid of the ban politically much easier for Abe, even though a recent poll suggests most Japanese citizens don’t support loosening export restrictions. The old policy “was too strict,” says Tsuneo Watanabe, director of policy research and senior fellow at the Tokyo Foundation. “The voice of pacifism is getting lower because of tensions with China.”
Abe’s policy change is part of a larger strategic shift. Since 1945, the Japanese have focused on the defense of their home islands. The task of policing the rest of Asia fell to the U.S. Now, Japan sees itself as an active participant in the region’s effort to thwart China’s expansion. It considers the Southeast Asian states as potential partners in this stand-off with China, and it wants to be able to sell arms to those countries, too.
The opportunities for Japan to grab market share won’t be in building entire weapons systems such as jet fighters or aircraft carriers. Japanese companies have a competitive edge in building high-end components, particularly electronics. “You may have fighter jets and warships from different manufacturers, but the electronics inside those ships and planes have to be able to communicate and share data with each other,” says Robbin Laird, a defense industry consultant with International Communications & Strategic Assessments in Arlington, Va. “What you really care about are the electronics inside, and that’s what Japan does best.”
One of the most important tests of Japan’s new role will be the F-35 program, the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project ever. The country is buying 42 ofLockheed Martin’s (LMT) joint strike fighters. Almost all will be assembled at aMitsubishi Heavy Industries (7011:JP) plant being finished in Nagoya. Japan now has the chance to make components for the F-35 that other countries may be able to use.
One interesting opportunity for Japanese arms exports is India, now the biggest foreign buyer of U.S. arms and possibly the world’s largest market for weapons over the next 20 years. The country has had bad experiences buying Russian and French weapons. The Japanese could compete, especially if they do better by the Indians, says Dean Cheng, an East Asian military analyst for the Heritage Foundation. “It sounds funny, but customer service matters just as much when you’re buying weapons as it does when you’re buying a car.”
The bottom line: Japan plans to be a competitor in the crowded global arms industry, but China and Korea have a big head start.
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