Are you asserting he logged in after he was fired? And changed passwords?
If so, you should probably be glad you're behind a pseudonym, because that's a pretty clear case of libel he's got against you.
But that's not what you mean, you're attempting to invent an action called 'password protecting' that is actually just 'doing nothing'. He didn't do anything at all with passwords after he was fired.
No, theft by conversion requires you to take something you were entrusted with and convert it, hence the name.
I.e., if you were lent a business laptop and sold it. Or I gave you some money to go buy us a pizza and you deposited it in the bank instead. Someone has been given possession of something, and turned it into something else.
A fundamental concept of theft by conversion is that you no longer have the original. You have converted it to some other use. (There's also 'theft by destruction' or 'theft by vandalism', where there's no profit from it, but it's still gone.)
If an ex-employee still has the keys, they clearly haven't 'converted' them to anything, even if they refuse to hand them back.
But if the police show up and party A has given something to party B, and party B is standing there and refuses to give it back, there is absolutely no charge of theft that can apply. It might be decided in court, or, if the police are physically able, they themselves might step in and take the property and give it to the owner...but there's no 'theft' going on in any manner.
And, as you point out, the relevance of all this to the actual case is minimal, except to demonstrate that people here are even stupider about legal matters than they first appeared. I made an analogy here to a loan gone bad, and they somehow think that yeah, that would be a good reason to arrest someone too!
You cannot have someone arrested over a loan disagreement or when they have to hand something back to you. Neither can you have someone arrested over a contract breach. That's what lawsuits are for.
But lawsuits are evil! Let's reinstate debtor's prisons!
Incidentally, that's the reason for the whole 'clean out your desk and get escorted from the building'. They let you pick up your stuff in exchange for leaving all their stuff and filling out paperwork.
It's a sorta formal hostage exchange. Because they've turned your visit on their property into an 'escorted' one, you cannot just run willy-nilly around with being a trespasser. You could 'leave' without permission, it's not trespassing if you're trying to leave, but you can't run back to your desk to get your stuff without trespassing.
Legally, though, you could walk straight out without turning in your badge and other property of theirs, and then you can sue them to get your stuff back. (Whereas they'd sue you back for their stuff, and a judge would end up pretty annoyed at this stupidity and have you both either return each other's stuff or end up in contempt of court.)
If you were in possession of those keys when fired, no, you would not, and could not, be arrested for anything. (If you get fired and pick them up as you're leaving, of course, that's another thing.)
They would have to get a court order demanding you give them back, at which point if you don't, then you'd be imprisoned until you did. And you still wouldn't be charged with any crime, you'd be held for contempt of court and released when you agreed to give them back.
Alternately, the police might just physically take it away from you, and they might turn it over to them, but they sure as hell won't be arresting people for theft.
You really cannot be arrested for theft if you were handed them something, aka, loaned something, and then they demand it back and you said 'No.'. Theft requires you to take possession of something you don't have permission to take.
And, yes, there are other forms of theft besides theft by taking, like theft by conversion or embezzlement...but all of them require the person to incorrectly 'use up' the stuff they were handed. Which you can't really do to keys, unless you went and melted them down or something.
Of course, none of this is a particularly good analogy to what happened here, where no one 'took' anything. It's more like 'I paid someone to write a song for me, and he apparently did so but won't tell me what it is. His lack of singing is akin to deafening me, which is assault.'
Although the rules aren't 'illusory, unwritten set of rules of decorum or behaviour'.
The IT industry, like many other industries, has actual codes of conduct that administrator and professional should agree with. People should have been taught these rules in school, and they should also be roughly close to company policy for that.
There are real codes of ethics that computer professionals need to follow. There isn't any professional organization like, for example, in medicine or law, so you can't be 'kicked out' of the industry, but there is still a default level of rules that people should follow on top of whatever their workplace says. (And, of course, their workplace should have those rules stated again.)
And none of that has a damn thing to do with the law, and none of that is a reason for anyone to spend any time in jail.
Knowingly and without permission disrupts or causes the disruption of computer services or denies or causes the denial of computer services to an authorized user of a computer, computer system, or computer network.
Are you asserting that he didn't have permission to password protect the network?
Please note that has nothing to do with section (h), which makes his behavior legal if it's normally part of his job even if he doesn't have permission. As he did have permission, that's rather moot.
His job was 'put passwords on the network'. Ergo, he did not 'without permission' do anything. At all. There is no action of his that he did not have permission for.
There is a lack of action, 'telling people the passwords', that he didn't 'have permission' not to do, but there's absolutely no law making that illegal.
You're trying to make his actions of not giving up the passwords into retroactively making his previous actions illegal under a various dubious reading of that law. There is no law against not giving up passwords, and there is no law against putting passwords on systems you're supposed, and were hired to, put passwords on, and there is no law that magically starts applying when those two intersect.
Seriously. Please explain the exact point he broke the law. Either you're arguing that it happened when he password protected systems he was supposed to password protect (In which case you've argued that all sysadmin are criminals when they're told to 'secure something' and do so.) or it's when he didn't turn over the passwords, which, as I pointed out, cannot possibly be criminal because it's not an action at all.
(Yes, yes, refusing to turn over passwords when so demanded by a court would be contempt of court, so 'lack of an action' could be 'criminal', but that's not what happened here, and people in contempt of court are not charged with and imprisoned for felonies...they're just held until they're no longer in contempt.)
And, of course, YOU CAN'T BE ARRESTED FOR VIOLATING A CONTRACT, so all that's a bit moot.
Jesus Christ, people, what country do you think we live in? I I sign a non-compete, and then go and compete, do you think they can have me arrested?
The question isn't what Childs was 'obligated' or 'required' to do. For all I care, he was required to put on a one-person touring musical review for six months.
The problem is that this breach of contract has mysteriously turned criminal. That he was arrested for failing to do something. Probably because he breached a contract with a city government who managed to rig things and get him charged with an absurdly incorrect charge.
His job was 'denying access'. That's what network administrators do, they deny access to people. That is not criminal when he does it as a sysadmin.
His job was also to allow access to specific parties, which he did not do. This makes him a poor employees and he should be fired. It does not retroactively make him doing his job of denying access into a criminal act.
I mean, what's next, charging a prison warden who quits with kidnapping under the logic that some people were supposed to be released that day?
It is not illegal to not do your job. It is not illegal to not follow your contractual obligations.
It's one thing to argue what he should or shouldn't do.
But you do realize that if you had the key to a building, and were fired, and refused to hand those keys over, you wouldn't be going to prison, right?
Hell, you wouldn't be going to prison if failed to turn over actual valuable stuff. If the company says 'You must return our laptop', and you say 'No, I mustn't, our agreement says otherwise.', you don't end up in prison, you end up in court where you can debate it.
You'll get sued, and you might even spend a day or two in jail for contempt of court after a court ordered you to turn something over and you refused to do so. Which would be at the end of a long civil lawsuit, and isn't vaguely what happened here, and the courts wouldn't keep you after you turned them over.
And you would not be charged with a crime and convicted of it!
It's one thing to say 'He shouldn't do X', it's another thing to assert it's an actual criminal act.
Same with whether or not he had a 'contract'. In this country, if I have a contract that says I will turn over passwords, and I don't do so, I have not broken any laws. I'm in breach of contract, and could possibly be sued, but have not broken any laws. I don't know where the fuck you people live, but here in the US we don't throw people in prison for contractual breaches. Even contractual breaches with government agencies.
As opposed to older airships, where actually wrestling them to the ground, and tying them off, was lots of fun. It's even got hovercraft tech to make the landing soft enough.
At no point is this vehicle supposed to be 'lighter than air' in the technical sense of the entire vehicle. It's supposed to use light than air gas to make an incredibly lightweight, but still heaver than air, craft.
That means it will quite calmly sit on the ground, no crew needed. Obviously, in a strong enough wind, it might blow over, because it's designed to be lighter than a normal aircraft...but so are small aircraft, and they don't need to be crewed all the time.
Which makes me wonder if, technically, it is an 'airship'. Airships you drive like ships, or even better like submarines...you have to force them to go forward, and otherwise they just sit there. Airplanes, OTOH, are like motocycles...you can't really just sit there or you'll fall, you have to move forward at all time.
I can't tell what happens if you cut the power to this thing. Does it fall out of the sky like an airplane, or does it fall out of the sky like a slightly-deflated balloon? And, if the latter, can you use the 'vectored thrust' they talk to about to keep it up, but not moving forward, with no lift at all, making it sorta akin to a working da Vince flying machine?
They do talk about using hovercraft tech to land the thing, but I don't know if they mean VTL landing, or they're just using that instead of landing gear and land like normal airplanes.
Or, in an obvious combination of two things, a shuttle to a cruise ship.
A cruise line starts a airship in, say, Boston, it zigzags down the east coast picking passengers, it takes about 24 hours, and when it gets to Miami or wherever, it lands on the cruise ship, everyone gets off, all their luggage gets moved, everyone who was on the cruise ship who wants a ride back gets on the airship, and the airship leaves and the cruise starts. You can do the airship ride for just a nominal increase to the cruise cost, and it's a hell of a lot better than driving or flying. (Especially with flying severely restricting the amount of luggage nowadays.)
I suspect various port authorities and border control might have issue with people literally moving from the airship to an international cruise ship without checking in first (Even if all the people are from America in the first place.), but that's a solvable problem.
I think you'd find that very many people prefer 15 hours of comfort to 7.5 hours of cramped hell followed by 7.5 hours of recovery.
It essentially works out to the same amount of time if you can sleep on the flight. (A lot of us couldn't possibly sleep on airplanes, but probably could with twice or three times the space.)
If the price were equal, or close, I'd choose the airship if I were on vacation.
The prices should logically be a lot cheaper. Sure, you have to pay the crew twice as much, but crew costs are negligible. It cuts fuel use down hugely, and the largest model supposedly has the capacity of 10 times a 747.
No one's going to use them for business trips, but I can see families renting sleeper compartments, like trains used to have, for vacations.
And not only across the ocean, either. Imagine an Ohio to Disneyworld shuttle or something, where for an extra $100, a family package can include a airtrip from some nearby place, and a trip back at the end.
It really does sorta turn into a cheaper, much-faster, and over-land cruise ship when you look at it sideways. You can be moved around in luxury for less than airplanes, as long as you're willing to spend more time. No one takes a cruise ship from the US to Europe (And they don't even run them, because there's no interest.), but this hits a middle ground that works.
And let's not forget longer flights. I don't know how far these airships can go without refueling, but even if they can't go farther, they're big enough, and don't need airports, so you can just have a refueling depot somewhere, and they land, refuel, and take off an hour later with all the passengers not even moving, instead of them having to transfer planes.
Also you can probably bring as much weight and size in luggage as you want, at least until the things get so popular they're crowded. (And, hell, you can travel by airplane and ship luggage by these to catch up later.)
The amazing thing is how little airships we use right now, actually.
If you look at the advantages and disadvantages honestly, LTA should be doing a lot more work.
I mean, there are entire communities in Alaska where the only way in and out is air travel...which means they're flying in all their food and goods via airplane! Yeah, that makes sense. Load a blimp up with three tractor-trailers worth of goods and have it fly to a dozen of those communities in a big circle every month, and just use airplanes for time-sensitive things and people.
Likewise, we're driving houses, mobile and otherwise, up and down roads....wouldn't it be easier to just lift them places? (Use hot air and hydrogen for that one, as you'd have to inflate on site.) Same with new cars.
Heck, reduce the number of trucks and wear and tear and gas on our roads, and run airship 'shuttles' from railroad terminals to unloading docks, using airships designed to hook to and carry one standard-sized trailer/railway car. (Whatever that standard is.) I'm sure we could invent some sort of 'automatic loading dock landing' system using cables to pull them into place easily.
And military UAVs are spectacularly absurd. Tiny remote controlled airplanes. Really? As opposed to just sticking cameras and fans on balloons? I mean, you could build and operate one of those for a hundred dollars, making them essentially disposable. Add a parachute and you can just fly them near you and deflate them midair to get them back, instead of having to land them. (Be sure to encrypt the entire control system so that no one take one and use it against you.) You can generate the hydrogen easily for lift. They'd probably work better, too, because they can actually hold a position instead of having to fly around in circles.
Our world has, because of a few bad experiences that got blow why out of proportion, (1) has, for the past 60 years, totally ignored airships. There's a reason they're often used as a signifier, in fiction, that we're in another dimension...because they aren't some 'futuristic' or 'implausible' form of transport, there's really no good reason that we aren't using them here and now, and it's pretty easy to see a universe where we did.
1) 63% of Hindenburg passengers survived. Almost all of them would have lived with modern escape systems, even assuming an identical design. How many survive plane crashes? We don't even need to build 'safe' helium ships, hydrogen ships are safer than airplanes! We just need to keep any possible fire from reaching the passengers and the ship can slowly, and much safer than an airplane, crash to the ground.
Someone needs to look up the concept of 'stealth'.
Hint #1: Do not put large flashing lights on stealth vessels.
Hint #2: Do not fly them around in view of other people.
While there do appear to be triangular probably-military airships flying around, they don't appear to be 'secret' ships as much as 'obvious but unacknowledged' ships.
Same here. Civ 4, biggest sized maps, often run it 6+ hours. On 2gig 32bit Vista.
I've had it crash once or twice, but never with it claiming it was running out of memory. I think all crashes have been me trying to Alt-Tab out and back in, in fact.
Jesus Christ you're a liar. There was no 'nodding' and 'agreement'.
The only thing that could be constructed as 'agreement' is a 'that's right', which was in response to the very start of her story, when she explained how he was being racist towards her.
That's right, if your 'agreement' theory holds water, the NAACP is racist...because they agree with how the white farmer acted! That's the only 'agreement' that is even possibly there. More likely, the guy meant 'Yeah, I've seen that sort of smug superiority! You tell the truth!'.
No one, at any point at all, 'nodded' their head. There's some head rolling while laughing, but no one at all 'nods'.
No agreement. No nodding. Watch the fucking video with your actual eyes.
Now, there were laughs as she was telling an actually funny story. It was funny due to a concept called 'irony', which you probably think has to do with those things that flatten clothes, but is actually a concept where the exact opposite of what 'should happen' happens.
In this case, it was dramatic irony, where someone who is a jerk has to come to someone they were a jerk to to ask for help.
Yeah, let's all pretend the only reason that might be funny is racism. No sitcom has ever had a plot where the characters are a jerk to some random person, and then it turns out that person is a government bureaucrat or doctor or whatever who they need the help of. Why, that very concept isn't funny at all!
But, anyway, all that was before what she said she did. No one before that point could possibly be 'agreeing' with what she (supposedly) did, as they didn't know. That laughter is she ended up in the position to help or not help a guy who was rude to her, which is, as I said, an example of dramatic irony and, duh, funny. They couldn't be laughing at what she did, they didn't know it yet.
So let's look at where she actually said 'So...I didn't give him the full force of what I could do.' 1:06 of the video and onward.
Utter SILENCE from the audience. In fact, from that point, the entire audience is somber and sort of shifting in their seat, as if they're not entirely sure where this is going, normal sort of behavior people get when the audience isn't entirely sure if they've started telling a racist story.
Seriously, people, watch this video. See if you can see any racism on the part of the NAACP or them encouraging her supposed 'discriminate against white people' behavior.
The NAACP passed a resolution to "condemn racist elements in the Tea Party."
Because the NAACP condemning racist elements in things is craaaazy.
It is an accusation that the group is grounded on racist ideals.
Just making up stuff doesn't make it true.
The NAACP condemning racist elements, and asking the Tea Party leaders to condemn them, is not saying 'the group is grounded on racist ideals'.
Although, technically, the NAACP hasn't done any of that, as they haven't even passed the resolution yet, nor do we know the actual text of what they voted on to pass to the national delegation.
The resolution that started this, submitted by the Kansas chapter, said that people at Tea Party protests 'displayed signs and posters intended to degrade people of color generally and President Barack Obama specifically' and asked Tea Party leaders condemn them.
Do you disagree with what the NAACP said was true?
Do you agree it's true, but think the Tea party leaders shouldn't condemn those people?
Do you think those people have already been condemned enough?
I think it might be interesting to hear your exact point of disagreement with what the NAACP said. Either you don't think racist things are happening at Tea Party events, you don't think it's reasonable for civil rights groups to ask those things to be condemned, or you think the level of condemnation is enough. Pick one of the three.
really couldn't give a shit about killing several million people
Just saying things does not make them true. As the parent pointed out, Iran hasn't attacked any other country in modern history.
Compared to the US, which has attacked, to pick a random example out of history, Spain. And Cambodia. And probably other countries closer to Iran that I can't think of right now.
No, reporting on the long term fallout has been suspiciously absent from the US media.
As has any reporting on how the rest of the world has started viewing the US: A dangerously out-of-control country that believes anything is legal if it does it.
Well, no, I suspect most people think a video card has some sort of mechanism to keep them from melting. CPUs have had a temperature sensor for quite some time, either to throttle them, or, cheapest and worst case, just shut down. It's somewhat absurd that video cards don't have that.
And, yeah, a large part of the problem is that manufacturers use cheap-ass fans, which are noisy, and they decide rig the fan to run as little as possible. If they'd just spend $15 more on quieter fans, that can run more often, things would be a lot better. (At least for people who spent a small amount of thought on airflow and keeping their case clean. Other people probably can't be helped.)
Please go look up the specs for the Kindle on Amazon's site. Please notice all have web browsing listed for wifi.
Please notice that web access over 3G is either listed as an experimentation or not listed at all.
Please notice that their unlocking of browser access has existed for less than two months.
The magical forever web browsing you apparently think Amazon is selling does not exist. Right now they let you do that, but could stop it at any time, as it is not actually a listed feature of the device. (And they're very careful that it isn't.)
Granted, you're right that, recently, Amazon has unlocked it, which I wasn't aware of, but they're purposefully not creating any obligation for that to be unlocked in the future, because, like I said, they're going to have to stop that the second people start abusing it via rooting.
Of course, a cynic would insist that they're only doing it so people will 'learn' that Kindles have free forever 3G browsing, without them actually saying it and thus having any obligation to continue it.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you asserting he logged in after he was fired? And changed passwords?
If so, you should probably be glad you're behind a pseudonym, because that's a pretty clear case of libel he's got against you.
But that's not what you mean, you're attempting to invent an action called 'password protecting' that is actually just 'doing nothing'. He didn't do anything at all with passwords after he was fired.
No, theft by conversion requires you to take something you were entrusted with and convert it, hence the name.
I.e., if you were lent a business laptop and sold it. Or I gave you some money to go buy us a pizza and you deposited it in the bank instead. Someone has been given possession of something, and turned it into something else.
A fundamental concept of theft by conversion is that you no longer have the original. You have converted it to some other use. (There's also 'theft by destruction' or 'theft by vandalism', where there's no profit from it, but it's still gone.)
If an ex-employee still has the keys, they clearly haven't 'converted' them to anything, even if they refuse to hand them back.
But if the police show up and party A has given something to party B, and party B is standing there and refuses to give it back, there is absolutely no charge of theft that can apply. It might be decided in court, or, if the police are physically able, they themselves might step in and take the property and give it to the owner...but there's no 'theft' going on in any manner.
And, as you point out, the relevance of all this to the actual case is minimal, except to demonstrate that people here are even stupider about legal matters than they first appeared. I made an analogy here to a loan gone bad, and they somehow think that yeah, that would be a good reason to arrest someone too!
You cannot have someone arrested over a loan disagreement or when they have to hand something back to you. Neither can you have someone arrested over a contract breach. That's what lawsuits are for.
But lawsuits are evil! Let's reinstate debtor's prisons!
And what did he do after he was fired?
(I must point out preemptively I asked what he did, not what he didn't do.)
Incidentally, that's the reason for the whole 'clean out your desk and get escorted from the building'. They let you pick up your stuff in exchange for leaving all their stuff and filling out paperwork.
It's a sorta formal hostage exchange. Because they've turned your visit on their property into an 'escorted' one, you cannot just run willy-nilly around with being a trespasser. You could 'leave' without permission, it's not trespassing if you're trying to leave, but you can't run back to your desk to get your stuff without trespassing.
Legally, though, you could walk straight out without turning in your badge and other property of theirs, and then you can sue them to get your stuff back. (Whereas they'd sue you back for their stuff, and a judge would end up pretty annoyed at this stupidity and have you both either return each other's stuff or end up in contempt of court.)
And, of course, he got arrested and charged with contempt of court after a judge ruled he had to turn over the password.
Oh, wait, that's not anything like what happened at all, where he got arrested and charged with a bogus 'denial of service' claim.
If you were in possession of those keys when fired, no, you would not, and could not, be arrested for anything. (If you get fired and pick them up as you're leaving, of course, that's another thing.)
They would have to get a court order demanding you give them back, at which point if you don't, then you'd be imprisoned until you did. And you still wouldn't be charged with any crime, you'd be held for contempt of court and released when you agreed to give them back.
Alternately, the police might just physically take it away from you, and they might turn it over to them, but they sure as hell won't be arresting people for theft.
You really cannot be arrested for theft if you were handed them something, aka, loaned something, and then they demand it back and you said 'No.'. Theft requires you to take possession of something you don't have permission to take.
And, yes, there are other forms of theft besides theft by taking, like theft by conversion or embezzlement...but all of them require the person to incorrectly 'use up' the stuff they were handed. Which you can't really do to keys, unless you went and melted them down or something.
Of course, none of this is a particularly good analogy to what happened here, where no one 'took' anything. It's more like 'I paid someone to write a song for me, and he apparently did so but won't tell me what it is. His lack of singing is akin to deafening me, which is assault.'
Indeed.
Although the rules aren't 'illusory, unwritten set of rules of decorum or behaviour'.
The IT industry, like many other industries, has actual codes of conduct that administrator and professional should agree with. People should have been taught these rules in school, and they should also be roughly close to company policy for that.
The ACM has one, as do other organizations.
There are real codes of ethics that computer professionals need to follow. There isn't any professional organization like, for example, in medicine or law, so you can't be 'kicked out' of the industry, but there is still a default level of rules that people should follow on top of whatever their workplace says. (And, of course, their workplace should have those rules stated again.)
And none of that has a damn thing to do with the law, and none of that is a reason for anyone to spend any time in jail.
Knowingly and without permission disrupts or causes the disruption of computer services or denies or causes the denial of computer services to an authorized user of a computer, computer system, or computer network.
Are you asserting that he didn't have permission to password protect the network?
Please note that has nothing to do with section (h), which makes his behavior legal if it's normally part of his job even if he doesn't have permission. As he did have permission, that's rather moot.
His job was 'put passwords on the network'. Ergo, he did not 'without permission' do anything. At all. There is no action of his that he did not have permission for.
There is a lack of action, 'telling people the passwords', that he didn't 'have permission' not to do, but there's absolutely no law making that illegal.
You're trying to make his actions of not giving up the passwords into retroactively making his previous actions illegal under a various dubious reading of that law. There is no law against not giving up passwords, and there is no law against putting passwords on systems you're supposed, and were hired to, put passwords on, and there is no law that magically starts applying when those two intersect.
Seriously. Please explain the exact point he broke the law. Either you're arguing that it happened when he password protected systems he was supposed to password protect (In which case you've argued that all sysadmin are criminals when they're told to 'secure something' and do so.) or it's when he didn't turn over the passwords, which, as I pointed out, cannot possibly be criminal because it's not an action at all.
(Yes, yes, refusing to turn over passwords when so demanded by a court would be contempt of court, so 'lack of an action' could be 'criminal', but that's not what happened here, and people in contempt of court are not charged with and imprisoned for felonies...they're just held until they're no longer in contempt.)
Childs locked down systems without documenting the changes.
What law is this illegal under?
He did not take any steps to ensure continuous service in his absence.
What law is this illegal under?
He put extra effort towards implementing systems that others couldn't access.
What law is this illegal under?
And, before you answer, I don't mean what company policy was he in violation of, or what the best practices are.
What LAW?
And, of course, YOU CAN'T BE ARRESTED FOR VIOLATING A CONTRACT, so all that's a bit moot.
Jesus Christ, people, what country do you think we live in? I I sign a non-compete, and then go and compete, do you think they can have me arrested?
The question isn't what Childs was 'obligated' or 'required' to do. For all I care, he was required to put on a one-person touring musical review for six months.
The problem is that this breach of contract has mysteriously turned criminal. That he was arrested for failing to do something. Probably because he breached a contract with a city government who managed to rig things and get him charged with an absurdly incorrect charge.
His job was 'denying access'. That's what network administrators do, they deny access to people. That is not criminal when he does it as a sysadmin.
His job was also to allow access to specific parties, which he did not do. This makes him a poor employees and he should be fired. It does not retroactively make him doing his job of denying access into a criminal act.
I mean, what's next, charging a prison warden who quits with kidnapping under the logic that some people were supposed to be released that day?
It is not illegal to not do your job. It is not illegal to not follow your contractual obligations.
All you people are insane.
It's one thing to argue what he should or shouldn't do.
But you do realize that if you had the key to a building, and were fired, and refused to hand those keys over, you wouldn't be going to prison, right?
Hell, you wouldn't be going to prison if failed to turn over actual valuable stuff. If the company says 'You must return our laptop', and you say 'No, I mustn't, our agreement says otherwise.', you don't end up in prison, you end up in court where you can debate it.
You'll get sued, and you might even spend a day or two in jail for contempt of court after a court ordered you to turn something over and you refused to do so. Which would be at the end of a long civil lawsuit, and isn't vaguely what happened here, and the courts wouldn't keep you after you turned them over.
And you would not be charged with a crime and convicted of it!
It's one thing to say 'He shouldn't do X', it's another thing to assert it's an actual criminal act.
Same with whether or not he had a 'contract'. In this country, if I have a contract that says I will turn over passwords, and I don't do so, I have not broken any laws. I'm in breach of contract, and could possibly be sued, but have not broken any laws. I don't know where the fuck you people live, but here in the US we don't throw people in prison for contractual breaches. Even contractual breaches with government agencies.
Ah, yes, but those airship can actually land.
As opposed to older airships, where actually wrestling them to the ground, and tying them off, was lots of fun. It's even got hovercraft tech to make the landing soft enough.
At no point is this vehicle supposed to be 'lighter than air' in the technical sense of the entire vehicle. It's supposed to use light than air gas to make an incredibly lightweight, but still heaver than air, craft.
That means it will quite calmly sit on the ground, no crew needed. Obviously, in a strong enough wind, it might blow over, because it's designed to be lighter than a normal aircraft...but so are small aircraft, and they don't need to be crewed all the time.
Which makes me wonder if, technically, it is an 'airship'. Airships you drive like ships, or even better like submarines...you have to force them to go forward, and otherwise they just sit there. Airplanes, OTOH, are like motocycles...you can't really just sit there or you'll fall, you have to move forward at all time.
I can't tell what happens if you cut the power to this thing. Does it fall out of the sky like an airplane, or does it fall out of the sky like a slightly-deflated balloon? And, if the latter, can you use the 'vectored thrust' they talk to about to keep it up, but not moving forward, with no lift at all, making it sorta akin to a working da Vince flying machine?
They do talk about using hovercraft tech to land the thing, but I don't know if they mean VTL landing, or they're just using that instead of landing gear and land like normal airplanes.
Or, in an obvious combination of two things, a shuttle to a cruise ship.
A cruise line starts a airship in, say, Boston, it zigzags down the east coast picking passengers, it takes about 24 hours, and when it gets to Miami or wherever, it lands on the cruise ship, everyone gets off, all their luggage gets moved, everyone who was on the cruise ship who wants a ride back gets on the airship, and the airship leaves and the cruise starts. You can do the airship ride for just a nominal increase to the cruise cost, and it's a hell of a lot better than driving or flying. (Especially with flying severely restricting the amount of luggage nowadays.)
I suspect various port authorities and border control might have issue with people literally moving from the airship to an international cruise ship without checking in first (Even if all the people are from America in the first place.), but that's a solvable problem.
I think you'd find that very many people prefer 15 hours of comfort to 7.5 hours of cramped hell followed by 7.5 hours of recovery.
It essentially works out to the same amount of time if you can sleep on the flight. (A lot of us couldn't possibly sleep on airplanes, but probably could with twice or three times the space.)
If the price were equal, or close, I'd choose the airship if I were on vacation.
The prices should logically be a lot cheaper. Sure, you have to pay the crew twice as much, but crew costs are negligible. It cuts fuel use down hugely, and the largest model supposedly has the capacity of 10 times a 747.
No one's going to use them for business trips, but I can see families renting sleeper compartments, like trains used to have, for vacations.
And not only across the ocean, either. Imagine an Ohio to Disneyworld shuttle or something, where for an extra $100, a family package can include a airtrip from some nearby place, and a trip back at the end.
It really does sorta turn into a cheaper, much-faster, and over-land cruise ship when you look at it sideways. You can be moved around in luxury for less than airplanes, as long as you're willing to spend more time. No one takes a cruise ship from the US to Europe (And they don't even run them, because there's no interest.), but this hits a middle ground that works.
And let's not forget longer flights. I don't know how far these airships can go without refueling, but even if they can't go farther, they're big enough, and don't need airports, so you can just have a refueling depot somewhere, and they land, refuel, and take off an hour later with all the passengers not even moving, instead of them having to transfer planes.
Also you can probably bring as much weight and size in luggage as you want, at least until the things get so popular they're crowded. (And, hell, you can travel by airplane and ship luggage by these to catch up later.)
The amazing thing is how little airships we use right now, actually.
If you look at the advantages and disadvantages honestly, LTA should be doing a lot more work.
I mean, there are entire communities in Alaska where the only way in and out is air travel...which means they're flying in all their food and goods via airplane! Yeah, that makes sense. Load a blimp up with three tractor-trailers worth of goods and have it fly to a dozen of those communities in a big circle every month, and just use airplanes for time-sensitive things and people.
Likewise, we're driving houses, mobile and otherwise, up and down roads....wouldn't it be easier to just lift them places? (Use hot air and hydrogen for that one, as you'd have to inflate on site.) Same with new cars.
Heck, reduce the number of trucks and wear and tear and gas on our roads, and run airship 'shuttles' from railroad terminals to unloading docks, using airships designed to hook to and carry one standard-sized trailer/railway car. (Whatever that standard is.) I'm sure we could invent some sort of 'automatic loading dock landing' system using cables to pull them into place easily.
And military UAVs are spectacularly absurd. Tiny remote controlled airplanes. Really? As opposed to just sticking cameras and fans on balloons? I mean, you could build and operate one of those for a hundred dollars, making them essentially disposable. Add a parachute and you can just fly them near you and deflate them midair to get them back, instead of having to land them. (Be sure to encrypt the entire control system so that no one take one and use it against you.) You can generate the hydrogen easily for lift. They'd probably work better, too, because they can actually hold a position instead of having to fly around in circles.
Our world has, because of a few bad experiences that got blow why out of proportion, (1) has, for the past 60 years, totally ignored airships. There's a reason they're often used as a signifier, in fiction, that we're in another dimension...because they aren't some 'futuristic' or 'implausible' form of transport, there's really no good reason that we aren't using them here and now, and it's pretty easy to see a universe where we did.
1) 63% of Hindenburg passengers survived. Almost all of them would have lived with modern escape systems, even assuming an identical design. How many survive plane crashes? We don't even need to build 'safe' helium ships, hydrogen ships are safer than airplanes! We just need to keep any possible fire from reaching the passengers and the ship can slowly, and much safer than an airplane, crash to the ground.
Someone needs to look up the concept of 'stealth'.
Hint #1: Do not put large flashing lights on stealth vessels.
Hint #2: Do not fly them around in view of other people.
While there do appear to be triangular probably-military airships flying around, they don't appear to be 'secret' ships as much as 'obvious but unacknowledged' ships.
Same here. Civ 4, biggest sized maps, often run it 6+ hours. On 2gig 32bit Vista.
I've had it crash once or twice, but never with it claiming it was running out of memory. I think all crashes have been me trying to Alt-Tab out and back in, in fact.
Jesus Christ you're a liar. There was no 'nodding' and 'agreement'.
The only thing that could be constructed as 'agreement' is a 'that's right', which was in response to the very start of her story, when she explained how he was being racist towards her.
That's right, if your 'agreement' theory holds water, the NAACP is racist...because they agree with how the white farmer acted! That's the only 'agreement' that is even possibly there. More likely, the guy meant 'Yeah, I've seen that sort of smug superiority! You tell the truth!'.
No one, at any point at all, 'nodded' their head. There's some head rolling while laughing, but no one at all 'nods'.
No agreement. No nodding. Watch the fucking video with your actual eyes.
Now, there were laughs as she was telling an actually funny story. It was funny due to a concept called 'irony', which you probably think has to do with those things that flatten clothes, but is actually a concept where the exact opposite of what 'should happen' happens.
In this case, it was dramatic irony, where someone who is a jerk has to come to someone they were a jerk to to ask for help.
Yeah, let's all pretend the only reason that might be funny is racism. No sitcom has ever had a plot where the characters are a jerk to some random person, and then it turns out that person is a government bureaucrat or doctor or whatever who they need the help of. Why, that very concept isn't funny at all!
But, anyway, all that was before what she said she did. No one before that point could possibly be 'agreeing' with what she (supposedly) did, as they didn't know. That laughter is she ended up in the position to help or not help a guy who was rude to her, which is, as I said, an example of dramatic irony and, duh, funny. They couldn't be laughing at what she did, they didn't know it yet.
So let's look at where she actually said 'So...I didn't give him the full force of what I could do.' 1:06 of the video and onward.
Utter SILENCE from the audience. In fact, from that point, the entire audience is somber and sort of shifting in their seat, as if they're not entirely sure where this is going, normal sort of behavior people get when the audience isn't entirely sure if they've started telling a racist story.
Seriously, people, watch this video. See if you can see any racism on the part of the NAACP or them encouraging her supposed 'discriminate against white people' behavior.
The NAACP passed a resolution to "condemn racist elements in the Tea Party."
Because the NAACP condemning racist elements in things is craaaazy.
It is an accusation that the group is grounded on racist ideals.
Just making up stuff doesn't make it true.
The NAACP condemning racist elements, and asking the Tea Party leaders to condemn them, is not saying 'the group is grounded on racist ideals'.
Although, technically, the NAACP hasn't done any of that, as they haven't even passed the resolution yet, nor do we know the actual text of what they voted on to pass to the national delegation.
The resolution that started this, submitted by the Kansas chapter, said that people at Tea Party protests 'displayed signs and posters intended to degrade people of color generally and President Barack Obama specifically' and asked Tea Party leaders condemn them.
Do you disagree with what the NAACP said was true?
Do you agree it's true, but think the Tea party leaders shouldn't condemn those people?
Do you think those people have already been condemned enough?
I think it might be interesting to hear your exact point of disagreement with what the NAACP said. Either you don't think racist things are happening at Tea Party events, you don't think it's reasonable for civil rights groups to ask those things to be condemned, or you think the level of condemnation is enough. Pick one of the three.
really couldn't give a shit about killing several million people
Just saying things does not make them true. As the parent pointed out, Iran hasn't attacked any other country in modern history.
Compared to the US, which has attacked, to pick a random example out of history, Spain. And Cambodia. And probably other countries closer to Iran that I can't think of right now.
As far as we know none of them published it, though.
Um, yeah, one of them clearly did.
No, reporting on the long term fallout has been suspiciously absent from the US media.
As has any reporting on how the rest of the world has started viewing the US: A dangerously out-of-control country that believes anything is legal if it does it.
Are you asserting that US military policy and behavior, if known, is formenting terrorism?
Did you just accuse the US military of formenting terrorism?
Well, no, I suspect most people think a video card has some sort of mechanism to keep them from melting. CPUs have had a temperature sensor for quite some time, either to throttle them, or, cheapest and worst case, just shut down. It's somewhat absurd that video cards don't have that.
And, yeah, a large part of the problem is that manufacturers use cheap-ass fans, which are noisy, and they decide rig the fan to run as little as possible. If they'd just spend $15 more on quieter fans, that can run more often, things would be a lot better. (At least for people who spent a small amount of thought on airflow and keeping their case clean. Other people probably can't be helped.)
Please go look up the specs for the Kindle on Amazon's site. Please notice all have web browsing listed for wifi.
Please notice that web access over 3G is either listed as an experimentation or not listed at all.
Please notice that their unlocking of browser access has existed for less than two months.
The magical forever web browsing you apparently think Amazon is selling does not exist. Right now they let you do that, but could stop it at any time, as it is not actually a listed feature of the device. (And they're very careful that it isn't.)
Granted, you're right that, recently, Amazon has unlocked it, which I wasn't aware of, but they're purposefully not creating any obligation for that to be unlocked in the future, because, like I said, they're going to have to stop that the second people start abusing it via rooting.
Of course, a cynic would insist that they're only doing it so people will 'learn' that Kindles have free forever 3G browsing, without them actually saying it and thus having any obligation to continue it.