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Fired AOL Engineer gets 15 Months
n3hat writes "A former America Online software engineer was sentenced to 15 months in prison for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers who sent out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mail messages, according to this A.P. story in the Baltimore Sun."
screw that, they should all be executed. and I don't mean the long expensive process of death row... just a bullet to the head on the spot.
Asshole. I totally had that written and formatted and copied and ready to paste as soon as the story went live, but then I got pre-occupied with.... uh.... something.
Shit.
I spent a lot of time, money, and effort so I can legally call myself an "engineer". Don't let some VB script "software programmer" use that title. It's offensive.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Nice whoring, whore
Not really, this is a common concept in economics. Certain industries don't cover the carrying costs of their own activities.
Example - Dow Chemical (not picking on Dow, they just come to mind) makes Paint-X. Paint-X's manufacturing process requires chemicals X,Y, and Z which Dow pays for, as well as a chemical process V.
Dow sells Paint-X for V+X+Y+Z+W(profit for Dow).
Now, Paint-X has other costs too, because process V produces waste U which Dow dumps into a river. It floats down stream and contaminates an underground aquifer, causing evironmental damage to some farmers crops further down stream.
Clearly, the cost of cleaning up that aquifer and the cost of the farmers crops that were destroyed are both costs associated with the production of Paint-X, but those costs are not included in the price of Paint-X and they aren't sholdered by Dow.
That's an example of this concept. It's not circular reasoning, it's the law of unintended consequences applied to economics.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
It's pathetic that this got modded as Troll. Sure, it's not the groupthink that we often bandy about here on Slashdot, and the guy is, if not a spammer, an accomplice to spammers, so I can understand the desire to dash his brains out with a large rock.
That said, he's a human being. He was fined a huge amount of money and he was getting 28k from AOL to work as a software engineer. That's highway robbery. Why he took the job is beyond me, but 28k doesn't cover a software engineer here in south-western Virginia where I live (low cost of living). Isn't AOL based in DC or thereabouts?
AOL screwed this guy in my estimation. What he did was illegal, wrong, and deplorable, but he did it for a reason.
There's another side to this coin. Not everything is black and white, 1 and 0. Give that some thought. What makes a person do this, particularly someone like us in IT who knows what a pain in the ass that can be?
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.