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  1. Re:Stephen R. Donaldson of all people...OT on Microsoft Research Warn About VM-Based Rootkits · · Score: 1
    Angus did not have a 'zone implant'. Angus was a cyborg at that point.

    He did have something like a zone implant in his head, but it had been custom-tailored for his mind, to the point of more traditional mind-control.

  2. Re:What Rights? on Deleting Files is a Crime? · · Score: 1

    They have the right to, in theory, access your personal email if they are on a company laptop, but they certainly don't have the right to keep you from deleting them.

  3. Re:To be the Devil's Advocate here... on Deleting Files is a Crime? · · Score: 1

    If they thought there was sensitive data on the laptop, they should have gotten a court order to keep him from deleting it.

  4. Re:Two-way crime on Deleting Files is a Crime? · · Score: 1
    If they thought he was violating his non-compete, and there was evidence on his laptop, they could have grabbed him on the way into work and made him turn in his laptop, or filed a court order against him altering it.

    Yes, he resigned and then deleted his files, but your use of company resourses doesn't stop the exact moment you say 'I quit'. I mean, if you're eating a free bagel from the break room, and quit, and take another bite after that, did you just steal part of a bagel? If you're in a restricted area of the building, and you quit, are you instantly trespassing? If you stop to use the employee bathroom on the way out of the building, did you just misuse their resources?

    Anytime you 'end an association', there is a period where the two entities are expected to work together and turn over the stuff that belong to each other. You get personal stuff out of your desk without having to sue, they get their laptop back without having to sue. You are also excepted not to maliciously hurt each other's stuff, and a case could be made against him if he's deleted data the company had paid him for, but he had the only copy of, just like it's illegal for an electrictian to quit and rip the partially installed wires out of the wall. But that doesn't seem to be what's been claimed here.

    I agree that what he did, starting his own competing company using company resourses and data, was completely dishonest.(1) I just don't see what deleting stuff off the company laptop has to do with anything. The company policy is probably a fresh re-image on transfer of laptop anyway.

    And, yes for their court case, it may suck that he deleted the data, but tough. People are not required to keep nice fancy records of their crimes and then hand them over to the victims. If the lawsuit had already started before he handed his laptop back, they might have some legal recourse under 'deleting stuff you know will be evidence', but it didn't.

    1) I don't have a real problem with people using company computers for personal stuff, and I don't even really have one with them operating an unrelated business out of another business. If they can get away with that without using up company resources (You do not 'use up' computers and telephones.) and without their job suffering, more power to them. And taking 'clients' with you is always a gray area. Sometimes they really are 'your' clients, you went out and collected them, persuded them to buy, kept them happy. And sometimes they are just names you of the people who were connected to your telephone and you recorded the orders of.

    However, when the company is in the business of 'creating knowledge' (And I don't use that in any buzzword manner, but businesses that literally come up with information by shifting data and sell that.), it is completely unethical to resell that knowledge on the side, even if it was you yourself who figured it out, or collect it to resell later after you quit. Especially if you have a damn non-compete in place. I disapprove of those in general, but when employees have valuable specific knowledge, I don't have a problem. As opposed to the 'He knows how our business operates!' stupid horror that causes many current non-competes.

  5. Re:Deletion circumstantial evidence, still go to j on Deleting Files is a Crime? · · Score: 1
    Except the only 'crime' was violating his non-compete, which isn't illegal, and it's only destruction of evidence if it already been made evidence.

    If you kill someone, and chop their body into little piece, you haven't destroyed evidence. If you kill somone, bury their body out back, and when the police show up with a search warrant you manage to run around back and chop their body up, you have destroyed evidence.

    It's only 'evidence' once the police say it's evidence, or once the police 'control' it and logically are going to get around to saying it's evidence. Don't ever tamper with anything under police control, even if that includes yourself and things on your person. For example, delete numbers from your cellphone while standing there as they execute a warrant to search you and your premisses.

    And sometimes the police will let you have evidence back. Sometimes this is out of pity, sometimes it is because half the house is a murder scene and half isn't, and you live there, sometimes it is to see what you do with the evidence, a sort of trap. If the police say 'That's evidence', don't mess with it.

    If the police do not control it, or have not decided it is evidence, it is legal to mess with it all you want. (At least, as far as 'tampering with evidence' goes. Attempting to cover up crimes can be illegal in other ways.)

  6. Re:Stephen R. Donaldson of all people. on Microsoft Research Warn About VM-Based Rootkits · · Score: 1
    Stargate certainly borrows 'standard' scifi plots, however, the only 'virus' the SGC's been infected with has been a sentient one, and not anything to do with extortion. In fact, it was mostly by accident.

    The stargates themselves have also been infected with a virus, (Actually, the DHDs were.) but that was just to break them all, no extortion.

    They could have had a catch-22 similiar to this problem by having that virus also disable the positional update (They dial each other occasionally to make sure they can still locate each other's stars, which is how the virus spread.), but that wouldn't have had a fix without going to each planet and fixing them manually, which the writers obviously didn't want to have to do. And there was no extortion here either, Baal just thought his position would be better off if no one could use the stargates for a short time. (Sadly, he failed to realize that Earth didn't use a DHD to dial.)

  7. Re:Stephen R. Donaldson of all people...OT on Microsoft Research Warn About VM-Based Rootkits · · Score: 2, Informative
    And the zone implant was a realistic mind control device. It wasn't 'Push this button to make the person walk X steps forward', which obviously would be impossible to make a generic device considering how different people's minds are. It, instead, could make you fearless, or give you extreme pleasure, or make you submission, or fall instantly asleep, by changing the electrical activity in different areas of the brain, hence a 'zone' implant. It wasn't so much 'mind control' as 'complete emotional control'.

    To control someone, all you needed was, IIRC, a combination of making them submissive and pleasure, and just the tiniest bit of pain, and they'd follow you around like a puppy, hoping for another burst of pleasure.

    Donaldson really thought out all the tech aspects of those books.

  8. Re:Those oh so competent Eurpeans on Why Terror Financing is So Tough to Track Down · · Score: 1
    The government does not have the manpower to to check every house and forcibly drag them out before a hurricane hits.

    Uh, no, but it does, indeed, have the manpower to drive down the street with loudspeakers, or just show up where the people forced out of their house by rising water have started to gather.

    Like I said, no one's would have the slightest problem if a few people chose to stay behind and died. However, that's rewriting history in a fairly serious way, that is not what happened at all.

    In fact, it doesn't even make any sense. The people who 'chose' to stay, who could have left before but didn't, did leave right after Katrina hit and before the flooding started. The problem wasn't people dying suddenly, it was people stranded without food or water, as the city slowly filled up with water. In theory, there might have been some idiots who couldn't leave because their car ended up underwater, or the roads were covered, but, really. Anyone that unaware of their surroundings deserves to be slowly drowned.

    Whereas, in a heat wave, the problem is elderly living alone (And, yes, left behind while everyone else went on vacation in France.) just being too feeble to do anything about their situtation. And, of course, the power failures because the power grid wasn't designed to handle everyone running their AC continually. That actually would have required going into every house, or at least every house where someone didn't answer the door, to find old people too exhausted to walk to the door.

  9. Re:Those oh so competent Eurpeans on Why Terror Financing is So Tough to Track Down · · Score: 1
    Well, 700 died in a heatwave in Chicago in 1995. Out of a population of 2.5 million. That's 28 out of 100,000.

    35,000 died in a heatwave in Europe in 2003. Out of a population of 222 million in the six countries affected. That's 15 out of 100,000.

    Well, damn. We win. Almost twice over.

    Of course, this is slightly bogus as the heatwave didn't affect the entire area of those countries (Parts of the northern UK especially were not affected, and you'd have to heat the Alps pretty damn hot to kill anyone.), and it did cover all of Chicago, but the deaths were certainly within one order of magnitude of each other.

    And, of course, we learned from that heat wave. The 1999 one in Chicago killed barely 100 people. Hopefully the next one in Europe will be proportionally less.

    Incidentally, as you appear confused, Georgia is not in Europe. I am from the state of Georgia, in the North America, part of the USA. There is another Georgia, a country, that is in Asia. It's right at the bordary, and is arguably in Europe, but they say it's Asia, and we really should respect their defination.

    In the USA Georgia, we don't have heat waves, the heat is more-or-less all summer, we instead have cold snaps where old ladies can't pay their heating bills and freeze to death. I don't know what kind of weather they have in the Asian Georgia.

  10. Re:There are other reasons too... on Why Terror Financing is So Tough to Track Down · · Score: 1
    The shooting is a complete and total myth. There is one recorded instance of gunfire, to attact attention from rescue choppers. There are no instances of anyone shooting at any rescue workers.

    As is, although you didn't mention it, the crime inside the Superdome and the Convention Center. Two people were arrested for attempted sexual assault, and of the six people that died, four were natural causes (They should have had medical attention.), and one suicide jumped off a railing. And one possible murder.

    The stealing TVs was mostly a myth, but more to the point, the people who died were not the same people stealing TVs. The people stealing TVs were safe. You don't steal TV when your house is underwater. The people stealing stuff were not the people you saw wading through water with stuff, (In what universe do you loot electronics from houses underwater?) and in fact some of that 'looting' was done under the authority of the police, to get food and water.

    The 'general lawlessness', however, is a great lie to explain the incredibly poor response and deaths due to it. Hey, look at them stupid-ass poor people causing themselves to not get rescued! Um, no.

    Now, failing to convince them to leave would be a valid reason that some people were left behind to start with, except, um, a lot of people never had the chance to leave. The fact that a tiny amount might have decided to stay doesn't change the fact that most people who stayed couldn't leave. If a few stupid people had chosen to stay and drown, no one would be complaining.

    In fact, if you locate people who died and had the means and opportunity to leave, I'm perfectly willing to remove them from the 'people the government let die' list. There might be 10 of them, or even 30! Of course, with a correct response, they would be the only people left when the flooding starting, and getting them out would be trivial. (Or, hey, letting them drown.)

    And the 'finding people trapped in attics' happened way late in the game. No one blames anyone for not locating everyone fast enough at that point. It was letting it get to that point, and remain there for days, that was the one of the many problems.

    And, no, I'm not placing this all at Bush's feet. He is, however, the one who was continually yammering about how he made us safer, while at the same time screwing up FEMA so much they can't response to a disaster that's been predicted for years and known will happen at least three days in advance.

    Some of the stuff coming out of Mike Brown these days is very interesting. He, apparently, realized this was going to be a disaster the second he knew it was going to happen, and couldn't get anyone else to do anything about it. Although some of the blame there is his own management, at least you have to give him points for actually realizing the wings were on fire thanks to his and other's errors and they were about to slam into the ground, and trying and failing to convince the Administration of that.

  11. Re:Those oh so competent Eurpeans on Why Terror Financing is So Tough to Track Down · · Score: 1
    And there was the summer a couple of years ago when the weather got about as warm in France as it does in Dallas 40 weeks out of every year, and hundreds died.

    You dumbass. You don't have death-causing heat waves where it's hot. (Even if you had deaths from heat, they would be spread out over the year and no one would notice them.)

    You have them when it's not hot and people don't have AC. Like France.

    And, yes, we fucking get them in American too. Like, um, Chicago. And New York. Where people have no means of fighting off 95+ degree temps.

    You don't get them in Southwest, you don't get them in the South, you don't get them in California. You get them where 80 degrees is considered a very hot day, and then the temperature spikes to 100 for one week every ten years.

    Here in Georiga, where we hit 95 degree about three times a year, we have no problem with heat waves. OTOH, we grind to a halt when we get two inches of snow, which is about every two years and people do freeze to death while the outside temperature is 29 degrees, causing people in North Dakota to stare at us in amazement.

  12. Re:There are other reasons too... on Why Terror Financing is So Tough to Track Down · · Score: 1
    That's a stupid comparison.

    To save people during Katrina, we had to...move them. Failing that, we had to...move them later. Failing that, we had to get food and water to them.

    We didn't manage any of that in a timely manner.

    And this was one city with a population of about 1.2 million, most of whom left on their own.

    In Europe they had to...providing cooling for several dozens of millions of people for a month. And they had as much flooding as Katrina caused, on top of that, thanks to melting mountains. (Although, luckily, very few people were affected by that.)

    The US could have solved its problem in a day by throwing some manpower at it. If reporters can get in, so can food and water.

    Europe couldn't magically make air conditioners appear out of nowhere, nor could it airlift its entire population farther north. And comparing a disaster to affected half of Europe to one that affected one city is a bit misleading. (Well, the disaster affected more than that, but that's where your numbers came from.)

    Incidentally, a Chicago heat wave in 1995 killed over 700 people. The population of Chicago is 3 million, so that's .02%. The population of Europe is about 700 million, so that's .005% of the population. This is, of course, completely stupid, as the heat wave didn't hit 'Europe', but parts of it, but they are the same order of magnitude.

    Heat waves are serious things that no one has any idea how to cope with when they suddenly hit, except for everoyne having AC. (This is why disasterous heat waves rarely hit in the south...we all have ACs.) Hurricanes are something do know how to handle, as is flooding, especially slow flooding.

  13. Re:But at the same time... on Why Terror Financing is So Tough to Track Down · · Score: 2, Informative
    According to Him, he was the the Son of God. He wasn't a "nice" moral teacher. He was either the Son of God or a crazy person, there is no middle ground here.

    Sure there is: People came along after and 'promoted' him. Trivial to do 50 years later.

    But I'd love to see a quote where he says he's divine, and we're not, in anywhere but the book of John or secondhand from Paul. (Who never even met Jesus.) None of the other three gospels make this claim. None of the Old Testament texts about the Messiah mention that, oh, BTW, he's also God.

    And, interestingly, only Matthew and Luke talk about the virgin birth. John says he's always existed, and Paul seems to think he's the son of Joseph. (As does, confusingly, Matthew.) Mark doesn't care about his origins at all. The whole 'virgin birth' probably came about due to a mistranslation of the original greek of Isaiah, which merely said he's be born to a young woman, not a virgin, but was mistranslationed and thus Jesus' history was revised to fit these facts.

    This is, incidentally, a traditional way of catching people lying when you cannot know the truth...you present to them a fake fact and see if they revise accordingly. Matthew and Luke were presented with incorrect information that Jesus had to be born to a virgin, and, poof, he was born to a virgin, despite the verses not actually saying that, and despite the fact this screws up the 'decended from the House of David' prophesy that really does exist, and raises questions as to why that verse didn't actually say 'virgin'.

    As that part of his history has, pretty clearly, been revised, everything else recorded is suspect, even claims he made.

    I love how many Christians have absolutely no idea how their faith came about. And, incidentally, 'Christian' means 'Follower of Christ', not 'Believer in a certain aspect of Christ'. The Nicaea Creed does not define Christianity.

  14. Re:perhaps not on Why Terror Financing is So Tough to Track Down · · Score: 1
    The war was illegal in a much more obvious way...it was a violation of international law, especially as the justification has changed from 'Destroy WMDs' to 'Regime change'.

    The 'WMD' at least had the excuse it was continuing to enforce a UN mandate, even if that wasn't actually true. The US doesn't just randomly get to decide what UN resolutions mean, nor does it have the right to 'continue' a war at the behalf of the UN to remove Iraq from Kuwait long after Iraq left. The WMD restrictions were punishments, not the reason for the original war, and thus even if Iraq had been violating them, that does not resume the war, anymore than if Japan starts raisaing an army in violation of WWII peace terms does it mean WWII has started again. It merely allows the UN to do things in response, which might mean starting a new war. If Iraq invaded Kuwait again, that might be a different matter, but they didn't.

    But invasion for the purpose of regime change is a flat-out violation of international law. There are only two legal reasons to invade somewhere...they attacked you, or the UN voted to do so. 'They attacked you' is a fairly vague rule, and arguably the US would have been legally okay in attacking Afghanistan even if the UN hadn't authorized it (But they did, so it's moot.), but by no logical means was Iraq threatening us. Misparsing the UN WMD rules gave us the later excuse, but only until it became obvious we were delibrately misinterpeting WMD intelligence, at which point that logic went away, and, as of right now, we have no legal justification for invading Iraq.

    Granted, 'international law' is enforced entirely by the country with the most guns, and everyone can technically do whatever they want...but, OTOH, all law is, and everyone can technically do whatever they want. This is something that all people seem to be missing when they talk about how 'international law' isn't 'real law'. Laws are just conventions that people agree to follow that are backed up by the threat of force for violations. The fact that there are some countries that are so strong force doesn't appear to be an option against them in no way makes them fake, just like laws against murder wouldn't be fake if Superman ran around killing people and no one could stop him. Those entities would just be criminals.

  15. Re:Don't they remember the 12 netwriking truths? on Investor Money Goes To Magic Lag Reducing Tech · · Score: 1
    What the hell are you talking about? In what universe do cell phones not lag?

    Of course, how you could detect lag 500 miles away is an interesting question. If you want to detect lag, the correct way to do it is to call yourself on the phone.

  16. Re:The "gold cables" of gaming? on Investor Money Goes To Magic Lag Reducing Tech · · Score: 1
    Yes, what equipment you hook to the cable, and how it gets the timing, can certainly effect things.

    However, the point was, what cable you're using doesn't. Either it's working, or it's not. Cables cannot slow signals down, unless one end is moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light relative to the other end. ;)

    And, as the other guy pointed out, digital surround is not 'timed' anyway, you can't go off what the other end thinks is the right timing, you have to buffer and play it back. It's not 'Here's a 16 bit value, here's a 16 bit value, here's a 16 bit value' and you pump those to the speakers, you don't have a pre-defined amount of data for each amount of time.

    Of course, you could run out of data if the other guy isn't making it fast enough, but whatever. No way to fix that via the cable or receiving device.

  17. Re:How a secure AP would work on Neighborhood WiFi Security · · Score: 1
    Exactly. Although I'd have an executable in there instead of just Javascript, which gives you the added ability to stick it on a floppy or shared (wired) network drive and run it elsewhere.

    This executable communicates with the router and gets the keys, only while you're holding down the button. Once it gets the keys, it has a nice dumbed-down control interface.

    To help secure things, there can be a five minute long 'lock' by the application. It generates a public/private key pair, and sends the public key to the router, and reporting it has done so. The router then encrypts the key and sends it back when the button is pushed. The lock and encryption keeps another person from sitting there and waiting until you send a request, then sending another one before you push the button and/or just stealing the response.

    And you can even include the app on a driver CD.

    Of course, there should be an option in the real router config to disable all this.

  18. Re:RTFM on Neighborhood WiFi Security · · Score: 1
    MACs don't leave the local network anyway.

    If the Feds are at the point of sniffing the air to see who is sending, then it's trivial for them to see if it is you or not, because spoofing a MAC when that MAC already exists on the network produces all sorts of weird internal messages.

    And if that computer isn't currently on the network, they will notice it when they raid the place.

    Spoofing a MAC address is useful to get on networks when routers filter by them. It's not really that useful for pretending to be someone else.

  19. Re:"Arbitrary"? on Skype 5-way Calling Limit Cracked · · Score: 1
    Does it not give you the ability to copy the converstation to more than ten people at once?

    And does Skype not use encryption to keep others from listening in, and incidentally keeping you from merely reeflecting the network stream to other Skype users, because they don't have the keys you used to set up the session?

    And it doesn't quanlity under 'interoperability' because...it's all Skype products.

    It looks exactly like a DMCA violation to me. The only cavat is it's your copyright. However, legally, that hasn't matter that much...there were people who produced CSS-protected content and said they had no problem with DeCSS, and the people doing the suing were not holding any copyrights, yet look at how that turned out.

    By making technical restrictions enforcable as law, the political community inexplicably refused to realize that the people making the restrictions and that copyright holders are not always the same people, and inexpliciably failed to put any sort of exception in there for them. It could, indeed, be illegal to hack Skype in such a way as to cause it to copy your speech to more people under the DMCA.

  20. Re:should teach intel a lesson on Skype 5-way Calling Limit Cracked · · Score: 1
    More importantly, the ability of a frickin business to even exist at all isn't a right.

    A business is the ability to restrict legal and financial liablity to yourself. We only let that exist within a stricter legal framework than people would otherwise be held to.

    If you don't wish to play within antitrust law, feel free to buy, sell, and manufacture assets yourself instead of incorporating.

    But no whining when someone sues you instead of your company.

  21. Re:Watch out! on Skype 5-way Calling Limit Cracked · · Score: 1
    Democan. Gore was the Republicrat.

    I think.

  22. Re:Just because you agree with him on Diebold Whistle-Blower Charged With Felony Access · · Score: 1
    Oh, he was working for the law firm? Yeah, nevermind then. I thought he was working as a temp at Diabold.

    But, yes, anyway, a conspiracy to break that law does override that priviledge.

  23. Re:Not really on 'Infectious' Open Source Software? · · Score: 1
    Me, sacarstically: You can legally punch people in the face all you want
    You: If you pay, sure.

    No. If you offer to pay, you might be given the right to do it. However, there is no requirement that when I offer to give someone money to punch them in the face, or distribute their software, that they will agree to it.

    OTOH, if you mean by 'pay' you means 'sued in court afterward and paying damages', I have to point out losing in court pretty much demonstrates you didn't do it 'legally'.

  24. Re:ummm...no on Minnesota GOP's CD Raises Privacy Concerns · · Score: 1
    Heh.

    The anti-circus protests are another example of this.

    Most circus animals are happy. They live in nice circumstances, everyone ones in a while they get to parade around and show off, they get food with no effort, they retire to zoos, everything is fine.

    Tigers actually are an exception to this. A lot of them have to forced to behave themselves. However, unlike PETA, I think they should be turned over to zoos.

    If we were to release any circus animals into the wild...they'd almost immediately die.

    This is what PETA wants to happen. They don't pick abuse cases because they are outraged about abuse, they pick abuse cases because that outrages others and gives them support. They, hwoever, are outraged at the mere use of animals, not the abuse.

    There's a sort of weird analogy here with slavery. Most people 150 years ago, even ones who agreed with slavery, agreed slaves (animals) should be treated nicely, and not, for example, beaten for no reason, and even arguing that there should be legal rules about keeping families together. Whereas PETA are abolishonists, wanting to free them all, immediately. Every time they talk about 'animal rights', that's what they mean.

    Which seems sane...until you realize that animals raised in captivity can't go and get jobs. That is...unless working for a human that feeds them is a job. Which is exactly what we have now! Some of them literally have been selectively breed until they cannot survive outside of people, like cows. (And we can't delibrately breed cows back into their origianl species, as that species is extinct.) They'll all just die.

  25. Re:Recommended Daily Allowance of FUD on 'Infectious' Open Source Software? · · Score: 1
    Where the FUCK did I even vaguely imply that programs would magically stop working? I explicitly said 'if you don't upgrade anything, every piece of old software will keep working'.

    I thought this was a serious discussion, but you're just a troll.

    And, incidentally, if you just developed an app in VB 6, you're not only a troll, you're a moron. You should have used VB.NET, as it is looking unlikely that you will be able to program in VB for Vista. (That is, you will probably be able to run VB programs, but not edit and compile them.)

    If one of my mission critical apps goes belly up, and the manufacturer is all gone, and I have the choice of hiring some random person at $150/hour to fix it, or just buying new software, I'm going to buy the new software every single time.

    You don't know what the hell 'mission critical' means, do you?

    Just for future reference, any company that hangs around waiting for mission cricial apps to die, and them scambles to replace them, is dead. Mission critical means 'At failure, we can switch it over to an entirely new system in two minutes' or 'You're fired'.

    Hwoever, it's entirely possible to have multiple servers, have one die, and try to replace it, only to discover that it requires Windows NT 4.0, which won't run on a lot of modern hardware. And the apps won't run on Windows 2003 Server or anything else.

    So what do you do? Well, if it's closed source, you try to transition to a company that can support you. This will, in and of itself, require quite a lot of money, like, duh, purchasing the software, which could cost thousands of dollars, along with a hell of a lot of work switching your infrastructure over.

    Or, if it's open source, you try to track down patches to modernize it, or, failing that, you hire someone to write them. Which will, indeed, cost 150 an hour.