As I remember, Bush made millions from the sale of the Texas Rangers after managing it several years. I wouldn't exactly call that unsuccessful.
Bush was never really unsuccessful in business. Some of the companies he headed failed, but he always made out like a bandit. Of course with his father in the President's seat, and all his family ties in Washington, no SEC investigation ever got very far. He repeatedly sold shares of the companies he was heading before they released bad financial news to the public, without notifying the SEC. Same thing that Martha Stewart was in trouble for. Hard to prove under the best of circumstances, but even harder if you're investigating a Bush.
With Cell/Moble/Whatever you want to call it.. people can get a hold of you almost anytime and anywhere. So, unless you turn it off or leave it behind, you are always at someone beck and call.
Well, it's either part of your job, or it isn't. If it isn't, then don't talk work if you're not working. Tell them you're busy, or just don't answer it if you know it's a work call. If it is, then I hope you're being paid well enough.
disagree... I have no further desire to play Pong.
Roger that. The 2600 is the first console I really got to play, but I moved on to the C64 after that. Of course if you want to give up gaming, you could always get ahold of a 2600 and go back and play E.T. until you have no further desire to touch a gaming system. Should take about 10 minutes.:)
I believe in it because I have seen evidence for it, but I can't pen this evidence down in a way that anyone can run mathematical proofs through it or reproduce an effect off a set of conditions.
That's because it's not actually evidence. It's simply your beliefs.
That's not generally so. For a typical client-server type game (e.g. an FPS) the important thing is your bandwidth and latency to the server, not the other players. Players on a slow connection will just have artificially slowed reflexes and may "lag out" (temporaily get out of synch with the game, during which time their avatar won't be moving), making it easier to kill them.
Actually, if their latency is bad, but not bad enough to make them lag out, then they can be very difficult to kill. They will appear to skip around, often in unpredictable ways since there is no fluidity to their movements. It becomes tough to lead them when you're trying to aim. Your shots just don't seem to register on them. Seen it happen tons of times in the Unreal Tournament games, Counter-Strike and the Quake games. HPBs are annoying as hell and often get kicked and/or banned from the server.
What makes you think Diebold ATM units are secure? I had a friend who worked in bank software. He said if you knew half of went what on, you'd keep your money buried in jars.
And where does this friend of yours live? And how tough is the soil around there? We talking shovel or pickaxe?
90% of the shit happening in Iraq is in happening in Baghdad. Thats a VERY small part of the country. Occasionally things happen elsewhere. Lots of good things to report, power is on about 18 hours a day, fresh clean water is available, oil production is up, new businesses are opening, etc. But no one reports this! They only tell you XX people (civilians by the way) died from a car bomb in Baghdad.
Of course it is. That's where most of the forces are located. Sure, power in a bunch of smaller towns. Last I heard they were getting about 4 hours of power a day in Baghdad. I've heard all of this reported on NPR. They have lots of feel-good stories about how well things are going in some town or other. How the locals have come to trust the army unit there, etc. That doesn't mean all that much when the whole country is on the verge of a civil war that will start in Baghdad and spread. Some believe that that's pretty much what we're already seeing. Death squads going around killing people with impunity. At least several bombings a day. Many many civilians being killed or kidnapped every day. Whose is responsible for this? WE ARE! That's why it's news! Because for all the good things that are happening in outlying areas, the place that really matters is still a freaking warzone, and it's not getting any better.
Shinseki retired precisely when his term ended, not a moment before. Yes, there was a history of irritation between them, but do you think that's much different than ANY top corporate executive team?
Regardless of why he retired, he did tell Rumsfeld that we needed a lot more troops to hold the country. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz said that his estimates were "far off the mark", and proceeded with a much smaller force. They were wrong. He was right. He's the military officer and they are civilians. They should have listened to him.
Maybe, maybe not. Lets remember how many Democrats voted FOR the Iraq war, including Hillary Clinton. Lets also remember the un-needed military actions during the Clinton years.
Of course, when the Republicans were on a rampage and painting anyone that disagreed with them as being anti-American and practically a traitor.
To play devil's advocate here, if Clinton had went to war in Afganistan in 1999, captured and killed Bin Laden, lost 200 troops, but caused international outrage we would be saying the same thing, if not worse. The real problem with pre-emptive war, other than making people hate you is even if you are right, nobody will ever know it.
If they had at least had some good intelligence to back up their claims, I could probably be more supportive. But seeing all the crap they pulled to manufacture evidence, to cherry pick things that supported attacking Sadam while ignoring any evidence to the contrary, and attacking anyone who tried to speak up and point out how flimsy the evidence was, makes me believe that they had some other agenda that had nothing to do with any sort of military or terrorist threat from Iraq. I don't know what that agenda was, but the only other alternative I can see would be massive incompetence on a practically unbelievable scale. While I don't consider the Bush administration to be a bunch of geniuses, I find it hard to believe that they are all that incompetent too.
Everyone I have heard who has come back from Iraq says that things ARE improving, just not as fast as they wish. And the "normal" Iraqi's really appreciate the help. Unfortunately we don't hear about that, we hear about the soliders getting killed by the extremists but the real facts are that Iraqi civilian and security forces deaths from the "Holy Wars" outnumber ours 20 to 1.
That's kind of the thing. For a place that you say is getting better, it certainly seems to be getting closer and closer to all out civil war. I really don't think that's going to be an improvement. Already people are being killed by the dozens pretty much every day, and those casualty numbers are not getting better. About the only thing that was done well was the initial invasion, but since we had such a small force for that, we were completely screwed once we rolled over their army. They should have listened to the generals that were saying that we needed a lot more troops over there in order to occupy the country. But Rumsfeld was so stuck on his idea of a small force and a new way of fighting wars that he wouldn't listen to anyone unless they told him what he wanted to hear. It is most definitely his fault, and he should've resigned long ago.
No, what this is, is you saying this crap, with nothing to back you up, so that on the off chance that some of the people you want to elect in various offices don't get the job, you've got a convenient way to stop worrying about why you weren't able to be more persuasive on the merits in each race.
Since when do the merits of the race have anything to do with who wins? This is contemporary American politics. It's all about how much money you can spend to blanket all forms of media with your name and a catchy slogan. It's about finding nasty soundbites on your opponent and twisting them against him. It's about making sure that nothing of any substance is ever discussed publicly. Want a debate? We'll reduce it to an exchange of talking points. Want real info on what the candidate stands for? Well, have some talking points instead. And for some reason people still support the candidates. The hardest part of voting for me is finding someone on the ballot that I'm willing to vote for. In a lot of cases, there isn't anyone worth voting for.
OK. So he works for Diebold. Diebold has rolled out a bunch of machines in Ohio. Hence, if the president wins in Ohio, he gets the electoral votes. Diebold machines were used to record the votes that eventually gave the electoral votes to the president. So Diebold had a part in delivering the electoral votes to the president. Naturally everyone assumes evil undertones in the message.
I think it was just a case of sensationalist Democrats completely twisting the message since it could possibly be interpreted in a bad way. But that's just par for the course for them...
You're pathetic for two reasons. First and foremost, the sensationalism that you attribute to Democrats is just as easily applied to Republicans who also jump all over any little thing they can to bash the Democrats. That's precisely why the current state of party politics is so completely and utterly retarded and horrible for our country. Everyone refuses to apply the same standards to their favored party that they apply to the opposing party. They let anything their party does slide, while simultaneously going insane any time the opposing party does or says anything that they can find fault with. The fact that you can make such a claim about democrats without seeing that the same is true of republicans just shows that you've fallen prey to blind party politics.
Secondly, it's quite obviously a conflict of interest to have the CEO (or anyone really) from the company that builds the voting machines out campaigning and raising money for candidates. How he could possibly think that that was an OK thing to do, I have no idea. Especially given the fact that Diebold's machines have been demonstrated to be very susceptible to tampering on multiple occaisions. So now we have a CEO of a company who builds voting machines that are rather easy to rig promising to deliver votes to the President (which was Bush at that time, and given that he was raising funds for republicans, I don't think he was referring to the office of President). I'm sorry if it offends your blind loyalty to your party, but the guy has got to be a complete moron, even if he's not corrupt.
WTF? Why does it need all this crap? The only thing I know is that the machine sucked my ballot in, and then a few seconds later, the ballot count on the LCD display increased by one.
Usually to allow diagnostic equipment to be attached, but there are other uses for comm ports. I would simply hope that they are not normally accessible during voting periods.
Why does it have separate boxes? Also, what happens when 6 hours are up? I don't remember if my polling place had it plugged into the wall, but I do know the polls are open for 13 hours, which is well past the 6 hour estimate.
One box for regular ballots, and another for ballots with write-ins, which must always be tallied by hand. After 6 hours, I would assume that the machine shuts down as it has no more power. The 6 hours is for battery supply only though, which should only come into play if the power goes out at the voting location (which happened in several cases from what I heard on the news, more dirty pool I suspect).
What I can imagine is them going on TV and trying to justify molesting children by describing attempts to stop them or treat them as oppression against a sexual identity.
That's just retarded. While there used to be attempts made to justify rape by claiming that the victim brought it on herself, such claims won't fly in the case of children. Even attempting to make such a justification would infuriate people. So, I think you're being ridiculous. These people should definitely get help before they harm a child. Otherwise, we end up waiting until they do that harm before we can really do anything about it. I'd rather they have the opportunity to get help. If they give in to their urges anyway, or simply don't seek help and commit a crime, then they should be punished.
It's not just that Bush had Enron blow up in his face almost immediately after his inauguration, and then was pilloried by the Democrats for not doing anything sooner about corporate greed, when Clinton's crew had eight years to do something about it and did zip.
It's one thing to say that Bush wasn't to blame for the scandals; that much I can go with. It's quite another thing to then turn and blame Clinton for them. It was no more his fault than Bush's. He didn't act for the same reason that Bush didn't act before the scandals broke. Neither of them knew that there was any real problem, and so neither had a reason to act before the information became public and suddenly there was good reason to start investigating. And if you want to get right down to it, the policies that allowed such fraud to go on for so long without being detected were put in place long before Clinton was in office too. So no, I don't think you can blame either one of them for not detecting the problem before anyone else did.
Remember the way Kerry hammered him for all the jobs lost in the recession? A recession that started under Clinton? Now that the recovery is well under way and more than 6 million jobs have been gained thanks to Bush policies (especially on taxes), the media circus has moved on and it's no longer news.
Come on. We all know that politics are ugly. The Republicans use the exact same tactics, so it's not like they have some moral high ground here. Both sides always try to blame the other for damn near everything. Both sides lie, cheat and steal. If you believe otherwise, you're just deluding yourself.
That's the real problem with politics today. Everyone seems so eager to latch onto one side or the other and try to defend their side regardless of what they do. They delude themselves into believing that their side is somehow morally superior despite all of the hypocrisy and screwups. Want to know what pisses me off? People who won't face reality and realize that there are stupid, greedy, corrupt, immoral assholes on both sides of the aisle.
Look here, dingleberry, Enron DID commit its crimes while Clinton was in office, same as Worldcom, same as Tyco, etc. That was my point. Don't forget that Bush didn't take office until January 2001, by which time Enron had been a criminal enterprise for five full years.
So what? If their crimes hadn't come to light, then how was anyone supposed to do anything? Bush didn't do a damn thing to speed up the process of Enron's downfall. If anything, Lay's friends in his administration may have helped them to get away with it longer. None of that is proveable, but the point is that you act like Bush swept into office and started enacting reforms that took down Enron. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Bush and the DOJ reacted AFTER Enron imploded. He didn't do a damn thing until then, so quit implying that he's somehow the good guy and Clinton is the bad guy. Neither one would have done anything if the scandals hadn't collapsed of their own accord. If so many people's financial lives hadn't been destroyed by these scandals, then we probably wouldn't have seen much reaction at all.
Historically, White Collar Crime has been given less severe punishments because violence isn't involved. Violent and direct acts are usually more severely punished than non-violent and indirect ones.
I understand that. But when we start discussing crimes of theft of identity or fraud on a large scale, you have to also consider the impact it has on others. Looking at Enron, the fraud that they perpetrated caused financial ruin for a lot of their employees and others as well. That deserves a MUCH greater punishment than simply stealing some petty cash.
Then, as I said earlier, there's the logic that they're using to severely punish filesharers. They want the punishment to be enough of a deterrent to make people unwilling to take the chance of committing the crime, even though there's a pretty low chance of getting caught. Whether you agree with it or not, at least some consistency is nice.
That may have been true during good-time Billy's eight-year frat party, but since the adults took over in 2001, plenty of crooked executives have been put in prison by the Bush Administration. That's right, rich white con men are now serving hard time, thanks to George Bush's Justice Department.
Yeah, it's a troll, but it's a decent troll, so I'm gonna respond anyway. Aside from the fact that using the term "frat party" in association with Clinton rather than Bush is the height of irony, you also act like it was actually something that Bush just did all on his own. Sorry, but that's just stupid. If something like Enron had happened when Clinton was in office, he and the Congress would have had to take action as well. It simply wasn't something that could be ignored. We could debate all day whether they would have done more or less than Bush, or whether their solutions would have been better or worse, but that's just speculation. When corruption gets that blatant and causes so much financial ruin, and makes headlines for months, the politicians have to get off their asses and do something if they don't want to go down too. That's all that happened. Nothing unusual. Nothing special. Nothing worthy of praise. Just a lot of ass-covering. The usual.
Oh, look! I said something that is totally honest but the mods don't like that I correctly identified the Slashdot group-think towards Diebold! Time to censor^H^H^H^H^H^Hmod down the AC!
Actually you said something rather juvenile and insipid. It doesn't really matter whether the machines are being used to favor democrats or republicans. I'm sure they get messed with by whomever happens to be running things in a particular district. The point is that they are bad for democracy. The implementations are extremely shoddy and provide no way to verify the actual vote that doesn't depend upon the machines that are already in question. Until such time as a sound, verifiable method of operation is implemented, these machines should not be used. Simple as that. And regardless of whatever bias you perceive, Slashdot has all sorts of people, and all sorts of opinions get aired here. If we all thought the same, we wouldn't have so many huge argument threads all the time.
The company needed money to continue in business. Whether it was to pay salaries or to finance acquisitions, the money was earmarked for business purposes, not a 5 month vacation in the Bahamas for the CEO.
He isn't the one that gets to make such calls. He deserves no leniency for his actions. If he had actually made the company successful, it still wouldn't excuse him. If he had a good idea, then he should have been able to get money to finance it. If he couldn't convince people that his ideas were solid and that they would get a return on their money, then he didn't deserve to be running the company. He's like every other schmuck out there that can't launch whatever idea he has. It doesn't give anyone the right, the obligation, or the duty to commit crimes in order to finance their business.
If anything, crimes like these need to have more severe penalties. There's far too much identity theft going on. Anyone caught doing it should be severely punished. White-collar crime in general should be punished much more severely than it is now, if only because it's so hard to build the cases in the first place. It's the same logic they're using for giving out harsh penalties for file-sharers. If the chances of getting caught are low, then the punishment must be more severe to have the desired deterrent effect.
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Bush was never really unsuccessful in business. Some of the companies he headed failed, but he always made out like a bandit. Of course with his father in the President's seat, and all his family ties in Washington, no SEC investigation ever got very far. He repeatedly sold shares of the companies he was heading before they released bad financial news to the public, without notifying the SEC. Same thing that Martha Stewart was in trouble for. Hard to prove under the best of circumstances, but even harder if you're investigating a Bush.
Well, it's either part of your job, or it isn't. If it isn't, then don't talk work if you're not working. Tell them you're busy, or just don't answer it if you know it's a work call. If it is, then I hope you're being paid well enough.
Roger that. The 2600 is the first console I really got to play, but I moved on to the C64 after that. Of course if you want to give up gaming, you could always get ahold of a 2600 and go back and play E.T. until you have no further desire to touch a gaming system. Should take about 10 minutes.
That's because it's not actually evidence. It's simply your beliefs.
He's saying that they feel that it's a good thing to believe in God, whether they actually believe or not.
In 2004, he would have been the lesser evil. Probably good that he waited til 2008 to run.
Actually, if their latency is bad, but not bad enough to make them lag out, then they can be very difficult to kill. They will appear to skip around, often in unpredictable ways since there is no fluidity to their movements. It becomes tough to lead them when you're trying to aim. Your shots just don't seem to register on them. Seen it happen tons of times in the Unreal Tournament games, Counter-Strike and the Quake games. HPBs are annoying as hell and often get kicked and/or banned from the server.
And where does this friend of yours live? And how tough is the soil around there? We talking shovel or pickaxe?
You've answered your own question. Oh well, a fool and his money....
Of course it is. That's where most of the forces are located. Sure, power in a bunch of smaller towns. Last I heard they were getting about 4 hours of power a day in Baghdad. I've heard all of this reported on NPR. They have lots of feel-good stories about how well things are going in some town or other. How the locals have come to trust the army unit there, etc. That doesn't mean all that much when the whole country is on the verge of a civil war that will start in Baghdad and spread. Some believe that that's pretty much what we're already seeing. Death squads going around killing people with impunity. At least several bombings a day. Many many civilians being killed or kidnapped every day. Whose is responsible for this? WE ARE! That's why it's news! Because for all the good things that are happening in outlying areas, the place that really matters is still a freaking warzone, and it's not getting any better.
Regardless of why he retired, he did tell Rumsfeld that we needed a lot more troops to hold the country. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz said that his estimates were "far off the mark", and proceeded with a much smaller force. They were wrong. He was right. He's the military officer and they are civilians. They should have listened to him.
Of course, when the Republicans were on a rampage and painting anyone that disagreed with them as being anti-American and practically a traitor.
If they had at least had some good intelligence to back up their claims, I could probably be more supportive. But seeing all the crap they pulled to manufacture evidence, to cherry pick things that supported attacking Sadam while ignoring any evidence to the contrary, and attacking anyone who tried to speak up and point out how flimsy the evidence was, makes me believe that they had some other agenda that had nothing to do with any sort of military or terrorist threat from Iraq. I don't know what that agenda was, but the only other alternative I can see would be massive incompetence on a practically unbelievable scale. While I don't consider the Bush administration to be a bunch of geniuses, I find it hard to believe that they are all that incompetent too.
That's kind of the thing. For a place that you say is getting better, it certainly seems to be getting closer and closer to all out civil war. I really don't think that's going to be an improvement. Already people are being killed by the dozens pretty much every day, and those casualty numbers are not getting better. About the only thing that was done well was the initial invasion, but since we had such a small force for that, we were completely screwed once we rolled over their army. They should have listened to the generals that were saying that we needed a lot more troops over there in order to occupy the country. But Rumsfeld was so stuck on his idea of a small force and a new way of fighting wars that he wouldn't listen to anyone unless they told him what he wanted to hear. It is most definitely his fault, and he should've resigned long ago.
Since when do the merits of the race have anything to do with who wins? This is contemporary American politics. It's all about how much money you can spend to blanket all forms of media with your name and a catchy slogan. It's about finding nasty soundbites on your opponent and twisting them against him. It's about making sure that nothing of any substance is ever discussed publicly. Want a debate? We'll reduce it to an exchange of talking points. Want real info on what the candidate stands for? Well, have some talking points instead. And for some reason people still support the candidates. The hardest part of voting for me is finding someone on the ballot that I'm willing to vote for. In a lot of cases, there isn't anyone worth voting for.
You're pathetic for two reasons. First and foremost, the sensationalism that you attribute to Democrats is just as easily applied to Republicans who also jump all over any little thing they can to bash the Democrats. That's precisely why the current state of party politics is so completely and utterly retarded and horrible for our country. Everyone refuses to apply the same standards to their favored party that they apply to the opposing party. They let anything their party does slide, while simultaneously going insane any time the opposing party does or says anything that they can find fault with. The fact that you can make such a claim about democrats without seeing that the same is true of republicans just shows that you've fallen prey to blind party politics.
Secondly, it's quite obviously a conflict of interest to have the CEO (or anyone really) from the company that builds the voting machines out campaigning and raising money for candidates. How he could possibly think that that was an OK thing to do, I have no idea. Especially given the fact that Diebold's machines have been demonstrated to be very susceptible to tampering on multiple occaisions. So now we have a CEO of a company who builds voting machines that are rather easy to rig promising to deliver votes to the President (which was Bush at that time, and given that he was raising funds for republicans, I don't think he was referring to the office of President). I'm sorry if it offends your blind loyalty to your party, but the guy has got to be a complete moron, even if he's not corrupt.
Usually to allow diagnostic equipment to be attached, but there are other uses for comm ports. I would simply hope that they are not normally accessible during voting periods.
One box for regular ballots, and another for ballots with write-ins, which must always be tallied by hand. After 6 hours, I would assume that the machine shuts down as it has no more power. The 6 hours is for battery supply only though, which should only come into play if the power goes out at the voting location (which happened in several cases from what I heard on the news, more dirty pool I suspect).
I'm wondering exactly what you find wrong with the statement...
Do those industries even have equivalent legislation to the telecomm common-carrier rules? I've never heard of such a thing.
That's just retarded. While there used to be attempts made to justify rape by claiming that the victim brought it on herself, such claims won't fly in the case of children. Even attempting to make such a justification would infuriate people. So, I think you're being ridiculous. These people should definitely get help before they harm a child. Otherwise, we end up waiting until they do that harm before we can really do anything about it. I'd rather they have the opportunity to get help. If they give in to their urges anyway, or simply don't seek help and commit a crime, then they should be punished.
It's one thing to say that Bush wasn't to blame for the scandals; that much I can go with. It's quite another thing to then turn and blame Clinton for them. It was no more his fault than Bush's. He didn't act for the same reason that Bush didn't act before the scandals broke. Neither of them knew that there was any real problem, and so neither had a reason to act before the information became public and suddenly there was good reason to start investigating. And if you want to get right down to it, the policies that allowed such fraud to go on for so long without being detected were put in place long before Clinton was in office too. So no, I don't think you can blame either one of them for not detecting the problem before anyone else did.
Come on. We all know that politics are ugly. The Republicans use the exact same tactics, so it's not like they have some moral high ground here. Both sides always try to blame the other for damn near everything. Both sides lie, cheat and steal. If you believe otherwise, you're just deluding yourself.
That's the real problem with politics today. Everyone seems so eager to latch onto one side or the other and try to defend their side regardless of what they do. They delude themselves into believing that their side is somehow morally superior despite all of the hypocrisy and screwups. Want to know what pisses me off? People who won't face reality and realize that there are stupid, greedy, corrupt, immoral assholes on both sides of the aisle.
So what? If their crimes hadn't come to light, then how was anyone supposed to do anything? Bush didn't do a damn thing to speed up the process of Enron's downfall. If anything, Lay's friends in his administration may have helped them to get away with it longer. None of that is proveable, but the point is that you act like Bush swept into office and started enacting reforms that took down Enron. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Bush and the DOJ reacted AFTER Enron imploded. He didn't do a damn thing until then, so quit implying that he's somehow the good guy and Clinton is the bad guy. Neither one would have done anything if the scandals hadn't collapsed of their own accord. If so many people's financial lives hadn't been destroyed by these scandals, then we probably wouldn't have seen much reaction at all.
I understand that. But when we start discussing crimes of theft of identity or fraud on a large scale, you have to also consider the impact it has on others. Looking at Enron, the fraud that they perpetrated caused financial ruin for a lot of their employees and others as well. That deserves a MUCH greater punishment than simply stealing some petty cash.
Then, as I said earlier, there's the logic that they're using to severely punish filesharers. They want the punishment to be enough of a deterrent to make people unwilling to take the chance of committing the crime, even though there's a pretty low chance of getting caught. Whether you agree with it or not, at least some consistency is nice.
Yeah, it's a troll, but it's a decent troll, so I'm gonna respond anyway. Aside from the fact that using the term "frat party" in association with Clinton rather than Bush is the height of irony, you also act like it was actually something that Bush just did all on his own. Sorry, but that's just stupid. If something like Enron had happened when Clinton was in office, he and the Congress would have had to take action as well. It simply wasn't something that could be ignored. We could debate all day whether they would have done more or less than Bush, or whether their solutions would have been better or worse, but that's just speculation. When corruption gets that blatant and causes so much financial ruin, and makes headlines for months, the politicians have to get off their asses and do something if they don't want to go down too. That's all that happened. Nothing unusual. Nothing special. Nothing worthy of praise. Just a lot of ass-covering. The usual.
Actually you said something rather juvenile and insipid. It doesn't really matter whether the machines are being used to favor democrats or republicans. I'm sure they get messed with by whomever happens to be running things in a particular district. The point is that they are bad for democracy. The implementations are extremely shoddy and provide no way to verify the actual vote that doesn't depend upon the machines that are already in question. Until such time as a sound, verifiable method of operation is implemented, these machines should not be used. Simple as that. And regardless of whatever bias you perceive, Slashdot has all sorts of people, and all sorts of opinions get aired here. If we all thought the same, we wouldn't have so many huge argument threads all the time.
He isn't the one that gets to make such calls. He deserves no leniency for his actions. If he had actually made the company successful, it still wouldn't excuse him. If he had a good idea, then he should have been able to get money to finance it. If he couldn't convince people that his ideas were solid and that they would get a return on their money, then he didn't deserve to be running the company. He's like every other schmuck out there that can't launch whatever idea he has. It doesn't give anyone the right, the obligation, or the duty to commit crimes in order to finance their business.
If anything, crimes like these need to have more severe penalties. There's far too much identity theft going on. Anyone caught doing it should be severely punished. White-collar crime in general should be punished much more severely than it is now, if only because it's so hard to build the cases in the first place. It's the same logic they're using for giving out harsh penalties for file-sharers. If the chances of getting caught are low, then the punishment must be more severe to have the desired deterrent effect.