I think the results would be better if we could just have the social contract without all the mythological baggage that results in a ridiculous number of conflicting interpretations and the resultant antagonism over things that shouldn't matter because they're not real to begin with. Atheists get along fine and can live perfectly productive and morally good lives without religion. Believing in fiction is dangerous. If those suicide bombers didn't believe their mythology, would they be so eager to blow themselves to kingdom come? If Christians hadn't believed their mythology, would they have still believed it was ok to burn people at the stake?
I sincerely doubt that leprechauns and fairies exist, and in the absence of evidence for them (or indeed anything supernatural at all), it's logical to assume that they don't. At least Bigfoot isn't purported to be supernatural. I don't rule out the existence of a god or gods either in the prime mover/deistic sense. I just don't believe there is any evidence for the sort of interventionist god(s) that many religions would have us believe in.
You can always hope the current crop of Religious Neanderthals will be bred out as their namegivers had.
The true sign of intelligence is humility, being willing to accept that you may not be right, accepting new facts and new wisdom. This us versus them mentality you are perpetuating by calling "Religious Neanderthals" anyone who is not "Liberal, Atheist, and Sexually Exclusive" does not promote learning, reconciliation or understanding.
I've learned that most of the things people say are true. That means that when you immediately reject an opinion that comes from the other side of the fence, you are arbitrarily excluding a lot of truth from your world view.
Something to think about.
You don't have to be liberal to be atheist. I'm not sure what you mean by sexually exclusive or why it would be grouped with those other labels. There is no reconciling of religion with reason. They don't play by the same rules. Anything more specific than deism is basically just mythology that gets interpreted a million different ways and labeled as The Truth by the folks that believe in it. So we have a million different versions of The Truth out there, which also cannot be reconciled, even though they're often based on the exact same sources. This leads to people acting in accordance with their belief in a particular interpretation of a mythology that is often at odds with reason, such as voting to impose their interpretation of that mythology on others.
While there is certainly some truth in the sources they use, and often some wisdom as well, there is also much that is arbitrary, anachronistic, inconsistent, vague, subjective and just plain wrong that gets pulled along as part of the package. That's the real problem with worshiping a work of fiction. The mental gymnastics required to reconcile it with reality can be tortuous, both for the person who believes in it and for those who must live with the consequences of the decisions those people make based on those beliefs.
If this event just reflects a bug in Google's requirements analysis, you can't lay *fault* to DMCA or Congress. Congress is implicated in the event, sure, but you can't blame them for unreasonable responses to laws, even if those laws are otherwise unreasonable.
The deficiencies in the law passed by Congress certainly makes it their fault. You can't call it an overreaction by Google when they're being threatened with lawsuits for not removing content fast enough, thus necessitating an automatic system for doing so, even though such a system is bound to have a lot of false positive hits. There are far too many videos being posted every day for them to be hand-checked by Google for infringement. Congress created the legal climate for the legal threats against Google to be severe enough to warrant these actions.
I can think of some people I'd like to sell off as scrap. I'd start out with Massachusetts politicians who have the tax-and-spend-and-tax-some-more mentality. At least then the politicians would be worth their weight.;) Sadly, the iron content doesn't weigh all that much.
ANYWAY - a corporation is an entity which gives it a legal personality. This is so that a corporation can own, buy, borrow, sell, and get taxed, be taken to court, and so forth. Think of a corporation as a fictional person which can be represented in court, because that is exactly what it is. Legally a corporation is people.
Every one of those people in the corporation has free speech rights. They can speak all they want and donate to political campaigns. So why, exactly, does the corporation need free speech rights?
Many are, but there are numerous small hospitals that for one reason or another are left out. Perhaps 30-50% (number made up on the spot, likely to be fairly close). Why they can't work amongst themselves is another question, but it hasn't happened.
I'd like to know why that is. Seems like they should be working together at the very least to ensure that data could be exchanged in some openly defined formats.
Actually if you RTFA you get a pretty good idea of the big picture. I understand your reluctance in this issue, but trust me. The CIO of Denver Health is pretty sharp and actually Denver Health is one of the more functional entities in this game.
Yeah, I read it. Seems to me that a lot of the hospitals and doctors that got started on this ahead of others will have the best shot at the earlier, larger amounts of money for compliance. I don't see a problem with that. The others have several years still to get their systems in place. I don't think we can expect the government to pick up the tab for all the work, and the ones that are implementing solutions later still benefit from the experience and work of the early movers. I think they would be wise to work together too.
Along comes Uncle Sugar dangling a carrot. A nice sweet carrot. But Uncle has lots of sticks, thorns, belts and various other nasty gizmos hidden under the blanket. And he moves the toys randomly. Your job is to get the carrot without getting the various shafts. That's hard because of many reasons. For one, they are pushing a very aggressive timeline. For another it's not really clear what the carrot actually consists of or how strong the string is.
That's an impressive way of not saying anything meaningful. Why is the timeline considered so aggressive? WTF does any of the rest of that even mean in reality? If some hospital systems are making it and others aren't, why is that? Why aren't smaller hospitals and hospital groups working together on this or working with bigger hospitals? This stuff has been coming for a long time now. What exactly is unclear about the incentives or penalties or the requirements for them? Who says nobody knows about this stuff?
Republicans haven't been fiscally conservative for decades now. In fact they've actually been worse than Democrats most of the time. Just look at government growth figures. Don't take that as some kind of endorsement of Democrats though, they're usually not fiscally responsible either. The problem is that most of the issues that the government deals with are a lot more complex than can be explained easily to the public. So you can't tell who's lying about any given subject unless you have a pretty intimate knowledge of it.
While one representative may be telling the truth about how some program is wasting money, he'll also turn around and funnel that money to different interests that support him and tell us how it's such a good thing to do, regardless of the reality of the situation. So we end up with wars of soundbites that one side or the other will win, and ultimately we just end up with a somewhat different mix of irresponsible assholes wasting our money.
Yeah, but it's not like people were going by pushing out digital television faster. There are already a substantial number of reports indicating drugs are being incorrectly dosed due to system errors related to EHRs.
It's not like we don't have tons of human error and problems with lost or incorrect paperwork anyway. Maybe we replace one set of problems with another, but the new tech has the ability to be improved upon constantly, which is how very complex systems tend to be done anyway.
That said, from what I've read about these EMR systems, they range from pretty horrible to decently good. They take years of work to get the most serious bugs out. How much they actually do to improve patient care varies dramatically from system to system though. I tend to believe the opinions that this stuff isn't going to be ready as soon as they'd like. That's par for the course with these types of systems. That doesn't mean we should have goals though. Without both carrots and sticks being used, the development could drag on forever. If we get to the point where the sticks come into play, they'll have to evaluate the situation again to determine whether the goals were realistic or not, of course.
Well, a lot fewer inmates in prison for stupid reasons would lead to a lot less need for guards. It would also hopefully lead to a dramatic reduction in money being funneled to those prison executives. We've got a lot of better uses for that money than putting potheads in jail.
1) Reduces prison population -> reduces Government budget/deficit
- Too bad that prison is an industry, decriminalizing pot would hurt that industry at an average of $25,000 a year per person.
Maybe they could get useful jobs that actually contribute something productive to society rather than the ridiculous make-work job they have now enforcing the detention of people put in prison for no good reason.
>>>Wow, insurance understanding fail. The entire freakin' point of insurance, and the way it works, is that enough people who don't need it buy it when they don't need it. If you want to wait until you're older when you will need it soon, while not paying into it your entire life, you are breaking the system.
>>>
Yeah.
Don't care.
I'll continue living without insurance until about age 60, when my health starts to decline, and then buy it. No sense buying ~$5000 worth of insurance when I'm perfectly healthy and only spend $2-300 per year. That's just money foolish..
Or you'll have a nasty accident or get sick from something you can't predict like say prostate cancer and you'll end up in the emergency room, where the cost of care is the absolute highest, and you'll have ridiculously huge bills you can't afford. Even if they manage to save you, you'll either be in debt the rest of your life, or more likely you'll declare bankruptcy and leave the hospitals hanging, which means that the taxpayers end up picking up the tab to a large extent. This is one of the big areas of waste that needs to be fixed, and the way to fix it is to make sure that emergency rooms are used for emergencies, not things that should be handled or prevented by regular care by a GP.
And even if this scenario doesn't happen to you, it'll happen to plenty of others out there that have the same screwed-up thinking as you, and we'll all end up paying for it.
>>>But the health insurance companies will be looking for any way they possibly can to deny you coverage when you come crawling to them at 60
Well if the Democrats are successful, they won't be able to deny me for pre-existing condtions, but even if they DO deny me, it's still not a tragedy. The $5000 saved over 60 years time, plus compounding interest == a heck of a lot of money. I'll simply pay out of my own pocket, and when I run-out of cash, then I'll die.
It's where we all end-up anyway... it makes little difference whether it happens at age 70, or 80, or 90.
The only way they're going to be able to prevent people from being rejected based on preexisting conditions is if we get universal coverage or at least something close to it. You have to spread the costs or you end up where we are now with insurance companies like Blue Cross and Humana jacking rates up by 20 to 40% because they don't have enough people in their system to cover the costs. Do you really think you're going to be able to afford health care in the future if we don't seriously overhaul the system? The way things are going now you'll be lucky if your savings will pay for aspirin, let alone in-patient care.
Bank does something inexplicable and/or dumb. Film at 11. They already unblocked the account and are doing a "review" of the site apparently. This will probably amount to nothing and they'll simply leave the account open. Wake me if something interesting happens.
IIRC, AIG paid bonuses to the peons of the company that performed adequately, rather than the executives themselves. But I could be mis-remembering the details. At a normal worker's level, the bonuses really do help morale extensively, especially if they weren't aware of what exactly they were doing. It's the execs' responsibility to lead the company effectively.
If they were actually giving themselves bonuses, then never mind anything I just said.
I wouldn't call them "peons", that's for sure. These people had to be pretty high up. Apparently only the top 60 execs didn't get bonuses, but that only amounts to the top 0.05% percent (note that that's 5 hundredths of a percent). People under them got anywhere from tens of thousands to millions in bonuses, even those in the parts of the company where things were most disastrous. Whether there was good reason for this is debatable, but I find it difficult to believe that there were people so critical to this organization that they should get up to 6 million as an annual bonus. I also would love to know why they committed to keeping 2008 retention bonuses the same as 2007 when they knew that 2008 was going to be a horrible year for them. It's not like there's a shortage of people looking for jobs in the financial industry. They should be paying the money back to us with significant interest at the very least. Hell, the banks are jacking people's rates up to 30% for any reason or no reason at all. That must be a fair rate, right?
You must be new here. Look at how most e-crimes have worked out. What seems sensible rarely ends up occurring.
Yeah, I'm new here;-P My thinking on this case is that they'll have to tread carefully if the public sees this guy as a hero for exposing corruption. To punish him too harshly could trigger bad things for the government. Even if the courts throw the book at him for some reason, there would likely be a lot of public pressure for a pardon.
There was no lying and no stealing from anyone. Get over it. People make lots of promises every day and they are effectively meaningless.
Seriously? You don't see telling the government that you will take pay cuts in exchange for financial assistance and then not doing it as lying? This isn't even at all like Gitmo. At least there they've been making significant efforts even though they didn't meet their goal. The bankers just flat out lied because there's no effort involved in taking a pay cut. Lying in order to get money is generally considered fraud, yes?
I don't know about Latvia, but around here vigilantism isn't looked on too kindly by most courts.
Depends on the circumstances I think. It's not like he stole the documents at gunpoint or something. This being a non-violent, non-destructive crime, I think they may be more lenient. That is, at least, if the courts aren't as corrupt as the banks.
If there's any indication that Neo has done anything bad (other than choosing a really pretentious and unoriginal alias) I don't see it in TFA.
Then you must not have read this sentence, found in both TFA and TFS: "On the one hand of course he has stolen confidential data... and he actually has committed a crime."
Just because some of the information in some of the stolen documents should be made public doesn't change the fact that he stole the documents. Having a good reason to commit a crime doesn't make it not a crime. It might, in some circumstances, get you leniency in sentencing, but it's still a crime.
The fact that the crime was committed against those who were themselves engaged in criminal acts may cause the courts to consider it a justified act committed to prevent a much greater crime (i.e. the theft of large amounts of taxpayer money).
I think it's a good thing that he's doing this. Of course if he gets caught he'll face at least some sort of punishment. He's not being malicious or destructive, so I'd consider it a form of civil disobedience. What I'd like to hear is what kind of punishment the bankers are going to get for essentially lying and stealing from the taxpayers. I bet they get a slap on the wrist at best.
And your tactic is the scientific equivalent of Godwin's law. You say, "This is something creationists do" therefore implying that it must be wrong. In fact deniers use the same stupid tactic against warmers, of trying to compare them to creationists.
In his defense, the poster he was responding to had demanded to see proof of overlap between AGW deniers and creationists. I'd say he provided that quite clearly.
Well, if you believe that evolution is wrong, then at least some of the claims it makes must be wrong, right? So where's the evidence to falsify those claims?
The burden of proof lies on the person making the claims, and many of the claims made by evolution are unverifiable and unsubstantiated. Similarly if you claimed to believe in invisible pink elephants, my inability to falsify your unverifiable claim would have nothing to do with whether or not the claim was right or wrong.
A claim that invisible pink elephants exist is not falsifiable. Try again. They even give you a bunch of examples, man! All you have to do is come up with something that they claim isn't possible. Since you believe they're so obviously wrong, then these impossible things must be all over the place, right?
Slashdot Mirror
...my fingers don't even have to be cold and dead to pry my DNA out of them.
They would if you had a gun too! :)
I think the results would be better if we could just have the social contract without all the mythological baggage that results in a ridiculous number of conflicting interpretations and the resultant antagonism over things that shouldn't matter because they're not real to begin with. Atheists get along fine and can live perfectly productive and morally good lives without religion. Believing in fiction is dangerous. If those suicide bombers didn't believe their mythology, would they be so eager to blow themselves to kingdom come? If Christians hadn't believed their mythology, would they have still believed it was ok to burn people at the stake?
I sincerely doubt that leprechauns and fairies exist, and in the absence of evidence for them (or indeed anything supernatural at all), it's logical to assume that they don't. At least Bigfoot isn't purported to be supernatural. I don't rule out the existence of a god or gods either in the prime mover/deistic sense. I just don't believe there is any evidence for the sort of interventionist god(s) that many religions would have us believe in.
The true sign of intelligence is humility, being willing to accept that you may not be right, accepting new facts and new wisdom. This us versus them mentality you are perpetuating by calling "Religious Neanderthals" anyone who is not "Liberal, Atheist, and Sexually Exclusive" does not promote learning, reconciliation or understanding.
I've learned that most of the things people say are true. That means that when you immediately reject an opinion that comes from the other side of the fence, you are arbitrarily excluding a lot of truth from your world view.
Something to think about.
You don't have to be liberal to be atheist. I'm not sure what you mean by sexually exclusive or why it would be grouped with those other labels. There is no reconciling of religion with reason. They don't play by the same rules. Anything more specific than deism is basically just mythology that gets interpreted a million different ways and labeled as The Truth by the folks that believe in it. So we have a million different versions of The Truth out there, which also cannot be reconciled, even though they're often based on the exact same sources. This leads to people acting in accordance with their belief in a particular interpretation of a mythology that is often at odds with reason, such as voting to impose their interpretation of that mythology on others.
While there is certainly some truth in the sources they use, and often some wisdom as well, there is also much that is arbitrary, anachronistic, inconsistent, vague, subjective and just plain wrong that gets pulled along as part of the package. That's the real problem with worshiping a work of fiction. The mental gymnastics required to reconcile it with reality can be tortuous, both for the person who believes in it and for those who must live with the consequences of the decisions those people make based on those beliefs.
If this event just reflects a bug in Google's requirements analysis, you can't lay *fault* to DMCA or Congress. Congress is implicated in the event, sure, but you can't blame them for unreasonable responses to laws, even if those laws are otherwise unreasonable.
The deficiencies in the law passed by Congress certainly makes it their fault. You can't call it an overreaction by Google when they're being threatened with lawsuits for not removing content fast enough, thus necessitating an automatic system for doing so, even though such a system is bound to have a lot of false positive hits. There are far too many videos being posted every day for them to be hand-checked by Google for infringement. Congress created the legal climate for the legal threats against Google to be severe enough to warrant these actions.
I can think of some people I'd like to sell off as scrap. I'd start out with Massachusetts politicians who have the tax-and-spend-and-tax-some-more mentality. At least then the politicians would be worth their weight. ;) Sadly, the iron content doesn't weigh all that much.
ANYWAY - a corporation is an entity which gives it a legal personality. This is so that a corporation can own, buy, borrow, sell, and get taxed, be taken to court, and so forth. Think of a corporation as a fictional person which can be represented in court, because that is exactly what it is. Legally a corporation is people.
Every one of those people in the corporation has free speech rights. They can speak all they want and donate to political campaigns. So why, exactly, does the corporation need free speech rights?
Many are, but there are numerous small hospitals that for one reason or another are left out. Perhaps 30-50% (number made up on the spot, likely to be fairly close). Why they can't work amongst themselves is another question, but it hasn't happened.
I'd like to know why that is. Seems like they should be working together at the very least to ensure that data could be exchanged in some openly defined formats.
Actually if you RTFA you get a pretty good idea of the big picture. I understand your reluctance in this issue, but trust me. The CIO of Denver Health is pretty sharp and actually Denver Health is one of the more functional entities in this game.
Yeah, I read it. Seems to me that a lot of the hospitals and doctors that got started on this ahead of others will have the best shot at the earlier, larger amounts of money for compliance. I don't see a problem with that. The others have several years still to get their systems in place. I don't think we can expect the government to pick up the tab for all the work, and the ones that are implementing solutions later still benefit from the experience and work of the early movers. I think they would be wise to work together too.
Along comes Uncle Sugar dangling a carrot. A nice sweet carrot. But Uncle has lots of sticks, thorns, belts and various other nasty gizmos hidden under the blanket. And he moves the toys randomly. Your job is to get the carrot without getting the various shafts. That's hard because of many reasons. For one, they are pushing a very aggressive timeline. For another it's not really clear what the carrot actually consists of or how strong the string is.
That's an impressive way of not saying anything meaningful. Why is the timeline considered so aggressive? WTF does any of the rest of that even mean in reality? If some hospital systems are making it and others aren't, why is that? Why aren't smaller hospitals and hospital groups working together on this or working with bigger hospitals? This stuff has been coming for a long time now. What exactly is unclear about the incentives or penalties or the requirements for them? Who says nobody knows about this stuff?
Republicans haven't been fiscally conservative for decades now. In fact they've actually been worse than Democrats most of the time. Just look at government growth figures. Don't take that as some kind of endorsement of Democrats though, they're usually not fiscally responsible either. The problem is that most of the issues that the government deals with are a lot more complex than can be explained easily to the public. So you can't tell who's lying about any given subject unless you have a pretty intimate knowledge of it.
While one representative may be telling the truth about how some program is wasting money, he'll also turn around and funnel that money to different interests that support him and tell us how it's such a good thing to do, regardless of the reality of the situation. So we end up with wars of soundbites that one side or the other will win, and ultimately we just end up with a somewhat different mix of irresponsible assholes wasting our money.
That last bullet point was a widely misquoted joke, as plenty of people who were on the call in question have confirmed.
Only in the "it's funny because it's true" sense.
Yeah, but it's not like people were going by pushing out digital television faster. There are already a substantial number of reports indicating drugs are being incorrectly dosed due to system errors related to EHRs.
It's not like we don't have tons of human error and problems with lost or incorrect paperwork anyway. Maybe we replace one set of problems with another, but the new tech has the ability to be improved upon constantly, which is how very complex systems tend to be done anyway.
That said, from what I've read about these EMR systems, they range from pretty horrible to decently good. They take years of work to get the most serious bugs out. How much they actually do to improve patient care varies dramatically from system to system though. I tend to believe the opinions that this stuff isn't going to be ready as soon as they'd like. That's par for the course with these types of systems. That doesn't mean we should have goals though. Without both carrots and sticks being used, the development could drag on forever. If we get to the point where the sticks come into play, they'll have to evaluate the situation again to determine whether the goals were realistic or not, of course.
Well, a lot fewer inmates in prison for stupid reasons would lead to a lot less need for guards. It would also hopefully lead to a dramatic reduction in money being funneled to those prison executives. We've got a lot of better uses for that money than putting potheads in jail.
1) Reduces prison population -> reduces Government budget/deficit - Too bad that prison is an industry, decriminalizing pot would hurt that industry at an average of $25,000 a year per person.
Maybe they could get useful jobs that actually contribute something productive to society rather than the ridiculous make-work job they have now enforcing the detention of people put in prison for no good reason.
Why do you think the birth record issue is BS?
Because it is.
>>>Wow, insurance understanding fail. The entire freakin' point of insurance, and the way it works, is that enough people who don't need it buy it when they don't need it. If you want to wait until you're older when you will need it soon, while not paying into it your entire life, you are breaking the system. >>>
Yeah.
Don't care.
I'll continue living without insurance until about age 60, when my health starts to decline, and then buy it. No sense buying ~$5000 worth of insurance when I'm perfectly healthy and only spend $2-300 per year. That's just money foolish. .
Or you'll have a nasty accident or get sick from something you can't predict like say prostate cancer and you'll end up in the emergency room, where the cost of care is the absolute highest, and you'll have ridiculously huge bills you can't afford. Even if they manage to save you, you'll either be in debt the rest of your life, or more likely you'll declare bankruptcy and leave the hospitals hanging, which means that the taxpayers end up picking up the tab to a large extent. This is one of the big areas of waste that needs to be fixed, and the way to fix it is to make sure that emergency rooms are used for emergencies, not things that should be handled or prevented by regular care by a GP.
And even if this scenario doesn't happen to you, it'll happen to plenty of others out there that have the same screwed-up thinking as you, and we'll all end up paying for it.
>>>But the health insurance companies will be looking for any way they possibly can to deny you coverage when you come crawling to them at 60
Well if the Democrats are successful, they won't be able to deny me for pre-existing condtions, but even if they DO deny me, it's still not a tragedy. The $5000 saved over 60 years time, plus compounding interest == a heck of a lot of money. I'll simply pay out of my own pocket, and when I run-out of cash, then I'll die.
It's where we all end-up anyway... it makes little difference whether it happens at age 70, or 80, or 90.
The only way they're going to be able to prevent people from being rejected based on preexisting conditions is if we get universal coverage or at least something close to it. You have to spread the costs or you end up where we are now with insurance companies like Blue Cross and Humana jacking rates up by 20 to 40% because they don't have enough people in their system to cover the costs. Do you really think you're going to be able to afford health care in the future if we don't seriously overhaul the system? The way things are going now you'll be lucky if your savings will pay for aspirin, let alone in-patient care.
Bank does something inexplicable and/or dumb. Film at 11. They already unblocked the account and are doing a "review" of the site apparently. This will probably amount to nothing and they'll simply leave the account open. Wake me if something interesting happens.
IIRC, AIG paid bonuses to the peons of the company that performed adequately, rather than the executives themselves. But I could be mis-remembering the details. At a normal worker's level, the bonuses really do help morale extensively, especially if they weren't aware of what exactly they were doing. It's the execs' responsibility to lead the company effectively. If they were actually giving themselves bonuses, then never mind anything I just said.
I wouldn't call them "peons", that's for sure. These people had to be pretty high up. Apparently only the top 60 execs didn't get bonuses, but that only amounts to the top 0.05% percent (note that that's 5 hundredths of a percent). People under them got anywhere from tens of thousands to millions in bonuses, even those in the parts of the company where things were most disastrous. Whether there was good reason for this is debatable, but I find it difficult to believe that there were people so critical to this organization that they should get up to 6 million as an annual bonus. I also would love to know why they committed to keeping 2008 retention bonuses the same as 2007 when they knew that 2008 was going to be a horrible year for them. It's not like there's a shortage of people looking for jobs in the financial industry. They should be paying the money back to us with significant interest at the very least. Hell, the banks are jacking people's rates up to 30% for any reason or no reason at all. That must be a fair rate, right?
You must be new here. Look at how most e-crimes have worked out. What seems sensible rarely ends up occurring.
Yeah, I'm new here ;-P My thinking on this case is that they'll have to tread carefully if the public sees this guy as a hero for exposing corruption. To punish him too harshly could trigger bad things for the government. Even if the courts throw the book at him for some reason, there would likely be a lot of public pressure for a pardon.
There was no lying and no stealing from anyone. Get over it. People make lots of promises every day and they are effectively meaningless.
Seriously? You don't see telling the government that you will take pay cuts in exchange for financial assistance and then not doing it as lying? This isn't even at all like Gitmo. At least there they've been making significant efforts even though they didn't meet their goal. The bankers just flat out lied because there's no effort involved in taking a pay cut. Lying in order to get money is generally considered fraud, yes?
I don't know about Latvia, but around here vigilantism isn't looked on too kindly by most courts.
Depends on the circumstances I think. It's not like he stole the documents at gunpoint or something. This being a non-violent, non-destructive crime, I think they may be more lenient. That is, at least, if the courts aren't as corrupt as the banks.
If there's any indication that Neo has done anything bad (other than choosing a really pretentious and unoriginal alias) I don't see it in TFA.
Then you must not have read this sentence, found in both TFA and TFS: "On the one hand of course he has stolen confidential data... and he actually has committed a crime."
Just because some of the information in some of the stolen documents should be made public doesn't change the fact that he stole the documents. Having a good reason to commit a crime doesn't make it not a crime. It might, in some circumstances, get you leniency in sentencing, but it's still a crime.
The fact that the crime was committed against those who were themselves engaged in criminal acts may cause the courts to consider it a justified act committed to prevent a much greater crime (i.e. the theft of large amounts of taxpayer money).
I think it's a good thing that he's doing this. Of course if he gets caught he'll face at least some sort of punishment. He's not being malicious or destructive, so I'd consider it a form of civil disobedience. What I'd like to hear is what kind of punishment the bankers are going to get for essentially lying and stealing from the taxpayers. I bet they get a slap on the wrist at best.
And your tactic is the scientific equivalent of Godwin's law. You say, "This is something creationists do" therefore implying that it must be wrong. In fact deniers use the same stupid tactic against warmers, of trying to compare them to creationists.
In his defense, the poster he was responding to had demanded to see proof of overlap between AGW deniers and creationists. I'd say he provided that quite clearly.
Well, if you believe that evolution is wrong, then at least some of the claims it makes must be wrong, right? So where's the evidence to falsify those claims?
The burden of proof lies on the person making the claims, and many of the claims made by evolution are unverifiable and unsubstantiated. Similarly if you claimed to believe in invisible pink elephants, my inability to falsify your unverifiable claim would have nothing to do with whether or not the claim was right or wrong.
A claim that invisible pink elephants exist is not falsifiable. Try again. They even give you a bunch of examples, man! All you have to do is come up with something that they claim isn't possible. Since you believe they're so obviously wrong, then these impossible things must be all over the place, right?
Anyway, I think we're done here.
Well at least I agree with you on that.