Canada, or any other country that thinks email addresses aren't bait worth biting.
At that time, from that country's perspective, Eccleston may have been a US agent trying to get that country to engage in easily-traced espionage. If they made a deal and were provided a list of email addresses, they might also get a number of fake accounts that serve as honeypots. Any attack on those fake accounts is a clear connection to the country in question, and they can't effectively deny it.
When that accusation is presented as a particularly inopportune time, such as elections, political unrest, or during diplomatic negotiations, it may cost that country far more than the $19,000 Eccleston was seeking.
So in other words, it's exactly the same as what happens when a foreign intelligence agency wants to get information from an American.
Changing jobs might mean you're unhappy with your previous employer, and want to embarrass them. A stranger, press, authors, peace activist, historians, random charming foreigner, fake diplomat with heavy accent or just a "new" "friend" in the area might just be able to convince you that your government is the embodiment of Absolute Evil.
Holidays or travel really make for great opportunities to meet new people and pass on information with less chance of being watched by American agents.
When in another nation, that good-looking lady at the bar might be easily impressed by your high rank in the American government, and the power you hold. A few different teams will have that on record, and use it to convince you that you're so far down the hole already, the only way out is to keep giving them more information.
The main thrust of such efforts is to get your information, and ensure that you've cooperated willingly enough to not report it. Claiming to be merely "academics, authors or press looking for comment, background or context," and raising such noble banners as "freedom of the press and freedom of association," the foreign agents can convince you that the American people are gravely threatened by every action of their government, and that you, the grand gatekeeper of the next revolution, hold the keys to the freedom.
All you have to do is give a little bit of information...
As has been discussed every other time it comes up, yes, the FBI can do exactly that.
Law enforcement officers can lie to you, bribe you, and they can even break certain laws (with appropriate approvals) to get you do do something illegal. There is a single defense against this kind of tactic, and it doesn't require a lawyer or court fees: just don't do it.
That's it. If someone asks you to do something illegal, decline. If they offer to assist, or even provide support, decline anyway. The FBI or police cannot arrest you for following the law. They can arrest you for breaking the law, or even for thinking you're breaking the law and going ahead with it.
In this case, the accused showed he might be interested in breaking the law. The FBI then gave him the materials and incentive to do so, but he'd still be walking free if he had followed the law and reported the apparent criminal activity to the FBI or other law enforcement. Of course, he instead followed through with the plan, completing his actions that would have "damaged protected government computers".
Have a feedback option that doesn't involve email. Have somebody actually read what's submitted.
Fix the justoposition between "brevity is the soul of wit" and accepting Bennett Haselton's long-form rants. Either pick one approach, or devise a way to keep the concepts separate, like having a separate topic for essays.
Resist the temptation to add to a story. The story is not the place to discuss where the editor was when he heard about the Challenger desaster or what specs are appropriate for a $50 computer. Those belong in the discussion. Perhaps give editors the ability to reserve the frosty piss, but keep stories objective.
Keep the stories objective. If you're running a piece about one company, discuss the company's industry. If the story is about one product, discuss that product's contributions to the state of the art. If the story is about a person, describe the person's actions, but do not judge them.
Understand what you have. This is Slashdot. We want Natalie Portman naked and petrified, covered in hot grits. We don't want attachments to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, or Reddit, unless we've specifically opted in to those. We want things that are well-designed, not things from a designer. Announce your changes with a poll (perhaps restricted to positive-karma users?) and see if they're accepted by the community.
Stay involved. You're posting pretty often now, but what about next month? What about next year? You might browse stories now and then, but will a post calling your name be noticed? Are you Kibo?
Perennially, fix HTML and Unicode in posts. Lists that look like quotes and Unicode that looks like a simian's attempt at Shakespeare have been long-standing problems, and fixing them would go a long way toward establishing some trust with the users. Good luck with learning Perl for that.
In short, take care of us, and we're happy to have you here. Our corporate overlords are dead. I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords.
It's a nice idea, but the law doesn't agree with your simple assumption. Rather, according to existing law, the tractor hardware and the licenses to use the software have been sold, but not the rights to copy, modify, or disassemble the software. The tractor store probably didn't own those in the first place, so how could they sell them?
That's silly. When I use a gun, I point it, pull the trigger, and boom, a paper target gets a hole in it. Why would I want something to die? That wouldn't be very nice.
Claiming that "the power of life or death" is a fetish is ridiculous. Every driver on the road has that power. Every plumber, electrician, and Boy Scout has that power. Every airplane pilot has a lot of that power. The simple truth is that humans are fragile creatures, and the simple safety measures we follow daily can easily be bypassed if one has the motivation to do so. The realization of how close one comes to death every day is terrifying.
That's what scares people, not a magic boom-stick.
What distinguishes firearms, though, is that they are themselves an easy target. Politicians, pundits, and concerned citizens can reassign their fear, allowing themselves to think of cars as "safe", because the really scary thing is a tube that makes loud noises. By concentrating all of the fear into one scapegoat, the rest of society seems perfectly livable.
Morally, justifying something by putting the good of mankind over an individual leads to all kinds of truly ugly nastiness.
Bullshit. As a society, we routinely engage in self-sacrificing activities for "the good of mankind". We donate our time to charities. We donate money. We even donate our very blood, which can have some serious (though rare) consequences.
It's a matter of risk perception. Donating time or money are perceived as being no risk, even though charities are very often the target of homocides and other violent attacks, and monetary donations have an obvious economic detriment for the donor. Blood drives make a big show of their safety procedures, and continuously promote the benefits that are enabled by such donations. There are no advertising campaigns for clinical trials, though.
Stories like this play on fear, promoting the idea that pharmaceutical companies are careless and cavalier about running harmful clinical trials, when the reality is that of the tens of thousands of drug trials run every year, this one is notable specifically because it had a bad outcome.
And medical testing in particular preys on those who are desperate, or financially in need already. They may not have a gun to your head, but in most cases its not like they'd be taking the drugs if they had better choices.
Also bullshit. Medical testing "preys" on mostly-healthy individuals who meet a particular set of criteria and, most importantly, can be found. That last part is often the most difficult. VERY few people go to their doctors and ask what they can do to help others, except for folks who are looking for unconventional ways to make money. Pharmaceutical researchers usually go to hospital networks and run queries against the hospital databases. Those databases are huge, and not tuned for such queries, so the queries take several months. Ultimately, there are very few qualified candidates returned, and they can be approached and asked to participate.
Unfortunately, most patients, unless they actually need a treatment, will not join a trial. They're under the impression that trials are unnecessarily risky, and usually won't try to understand the risk analysis before rejecting it. Out of a few hundred candidate subjects in the US, only a few dozen will actually participate. Those who are "desperate, or financially in need" are the ones who have enough incentive to overcome the prejudice and consider the actual risks.
Is this the new troll line now? No more "you fail it" or "moo"? I've seen comments about "corporations are people" on a few recent articles, and it never quite seems to fit...
On another note, yes, this is part of why the notion of corporate personhood exists. Corporations are able to enter into contracts as legal entities separate from the individual people involved, so the individual's circumstances do not affect the contract's legality. That also means corporations need a measure of free expression, so they can choose to do business with whom they want. They also then must have an ability to contribute financially to politics, because to curb that would interfere with the aforementioned free expression.
The problem is that not all jurisdictions allow corporate personhood, and it is still legal to discriminate against corporate entities. If a registrar does not want to enter into a business agreement with a corporation simply because they're not a human person, the registrar has the right (per free expression as noted above) to reject the business. Per the registrar's contract with ICANN, they may actually be required to deal only with individuals.
... I immediately think that what is being sacrificed is transaction integrity and multi-user contested performance/scaleability, but that's just me.
Whenever I read something similar to this as related to a database I immediately think that what is being sacrificed is not necessarily important to absolutely all applications, but that's just me.
I have worked on a system where the customer wanted some laptops running a portable instance of custom software. That software required an Oracle-based backend, so the customer wanted us to install the full Oracle Database Enterprise package, rather than fix the software.
We built the monstrosity, as requested, and demonstrated how bad it was. It took a good half-hour to fully initialize. The customer then ordered a few hundred of them, built to match the demo they saw.
That's really only half true... The value of the shares is tied to the company's value. The price of the share is separately tracked for public (or private, but that's more irregular) trade.
It seems MLG was privately held, so we only really care about what the shareholders can get from a buyback, not public sale. That puts the shareholders' investments at greater risk, based on what happens to the company's value. They have a piece of paper saying they own a certain percentage of the company, but the company itself had an awful lot of debt. Any cash or assets they may have been entitled to are instead being used to cancel out those debts, effectively making their shares worth far less.
A more profitable scenario for the shareholders would be for Activision to keep the company functioning as a separate entity, debt and all. Then the company, under new management and with more professional connections, could turn a profit, pay off those debts, and still have enough value in reserve to make the shares of stock worth something. Of course, that depends on MLG being a viable business, which may not be the case.
The most vocal opponents of systemd tend to be unprofessional system administrators and architects from an unrelated field, with decades of experience on unrelated systems.
Many of them have been responsible for configuring hundreds of thousands of systems in a non-systemd manner. The biggest variation in their system experience is usually whether they use pacman, apt, or yum. They've only dealt with one, or maybe two init systems.
These decades of experience have made them unable to consider anything different. They've come to reject anything that doesn't fit squarely in their particular interpretation of the Unix Philosophy.
Well, it turns out that it's extremely easy to mischaracterize systemd. Its architecture rejects the knee-jerk assumptions that we've used for so long. Rather than a "simple" storage backend, logs are viewed with a tool that filters down to relevant information. Systemd presents minimal interfaces to everything, intending them to be overridden with the usual system tools. It emphasizes the "do one thing and do it well" concept, where the "one thing" is "integrate programs into a coherent system". Systemd has different answers to the underlying question of "how do we turn a kernel into a productive system", that require sysadmins to work from a different perspective.
It's no wonder we see Linux distribution mailing lists and bug trackers filled with so many reports of problems caused by ignorant sysadmins. As a different approach to bringing up a system's components, when sysadmins blindly try to use their irrelevant experience and poor guesses to configure the system, things don't work.
Those poor sysadmin habits have caused a lot of inexcusable problems for a lot of their victims. We're talking about things as serious as Linux installations that don't boot properly. That's one of the worst things that can happen to a Linux installation; it renders it unusable!
Instead of taking the professional approach of understanding the new system prior to judging it, these sysadmins have blamed systemd. Many of them have, or are in the process of, spreading blatant lies and myths about systemd to distort public opinion. They just can't bring themselves to accept that a new perspective might ultimately serve their needs just as well, if not better.
Yes, bfpierce could feed a lot of donkeys for that price, and so could you or I. However, for that price, we cannot easily keep a small number of highly-trained donkeys on the other side of the planet well-fed and well-rested and capable of reliably hauling the necessary loads in a battlefield environment and operating to military standards.
Tattoos or implants cannot be denied. That is an important distinction.
The protected right to anonymity is actually an anonymous use of the First Amendment's right to free expression. Per the SCOTUS, "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority...It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation—and their ideas from suppression—at the hand of an intolerant society".
Anonymity as an independent right has never been legally protected. There is no protection against someone trying to discern your identity, no protection against being recognized, and no protection against being asked to provide an identity. For all of those, though, it is legal to take reasonable steps to remain anonymous. You can conceal your trails, disguise yourself, and you can decline to provide your identity, all under the banner of ensuring you aren't persecuted for your opinions.
Once you have no reasonable risk of persecution, however, your right to anonymity ends. You do not have the right to travel widely anonymously, or to engage in business anonymously, simply for the sake of being anonymous. It would be legal for any private business (and most government offices) to require ID for service, so long as what they do with that identification is not discriminatory.
The only solution, then, that permits one to be anonymous as needed, yet authenticated as needed, is an authentication token that can be provided or not at the user's discretion.
And like every other religious person that objects to America's laws, they have the right to sue, and if it is determined that their rights are being impacted, a suitable arrangement can be made. It's happened before (notably, with the Mennonites and Social Security) and it will surely happen again. It's not really a big deal.
From a computer science standpoint, modern algorithms that rely on single-thread speeds are obsolete and should be avoided for new development. From a sysadmin perspective, CPU speed is the least important metric compared to the rest of the system components. For project management, the system management toolset and feature support should be the prime concern.
Amazon's never really tried to hide the fact that their hardware is dissimilar behind the scenes. That will impact your computation speed, naturally.
The folks who get large mortgages also tend to get credit cards with high limits, and buy big TVs to put in their new big homes.
My point is that a thief is usually looking for an easy mark. They don't care whether you can easily afford the things they take, or what balance of disposable to non-disposable income you have. They only care about whether you have something they can steal.
Compared to the plethora of easy indicators already present, a drone registration database is practically useless to thieves. Drones are still rare enough that an hour-long database search might turn up a dozen marks in a city, but a drive through a rich neighborhood will give just as good results. Looking for open garages also requires almost no further recon, because the perfect time for a heist is right then.
Crime is usually perpetrated against the low-hanging fruit. There seems to be the common misconception on this thread that a thief is going to actively seek out one particular person to rob. That's just not usually how it works in the real world.
An easy payout over $50 is to watch for a moving truck, then peek inside while going past. You get to see everything they have that was worth moving, and it'll be slow to start any investigation, because for the first few days, there's always some confusion as to exactly what was put where.
Looking for a target in a database is a lot of planning, with no real benefit over more useful indicators like moving trucks, unattended open garages, or seeing a family get into a car and leave. If a criminal really wants to feel high-tech and use databases, a public records search for real estate prices will say a lot more about your disposable income than if you own a drone.
If you did what Apple does, you'd be paying a few hundred thousand dollars annually to manage the holding companies, trusts, and other legal entities involved, along with a team of accountants and lawyers to actually pay the taxes owed in the various locations in which you owe said taxes. Of course, it's only cost-effective if doing that kind of paperwork can save you more than a few hundred thousand dollars in taxes. That implies that you'd need to be paying the US about a million dollars in taxes already, implying an income of a few million dollars. I do know a few people who can afford to do such avoidance, but for the average middle-class American, there is not enough profit to justify such an effort.
That balance leads to some very interesting phenomena. For instance, by lowering the statutory corporate tax rate, we can lower the cost of bringing profits into the US, making it more likely that the US will receive taxes on that profit, rather than a foreign tax shelter. The exact numbers were never of interest to me, but there's a point where the US becomes a more attractive place to keep money than other countries, and that's when all of the corporate tax avoidance disappears.
There are longer-reaching effects to be considered as well. Currently, overseas profits can fund overseas expenses, never touching US financial entities and never paying US taxes. That becomes an incentive to keep expenses (such as manufacturing, labor, and assembly) overseas with the profit, contributing to the outsourcing of labor. Once an American company starts operating internationally, there's a financial benefit to moving further out of the country.
Big corporations aren't inherently evil. They just get to play by the whole world's rules, rather than just American.
I've probably spent more time in training and education than the average lawyer, yet I earn 1/10th what they do.
A quick check shows that lawyers near you average C$71,777 annually, and that's after two to four years of postgraduate study in a specialized field, with ongoing continuing education.
In comparison, the median salary for your profession in your area is C$63,154, with no postgraduate studies or CE requirements.
However, lawyers get to write the laws, so a whole bunch of otherwise simple matters require a lawyer to write the above mentioned letters, because the law says they have to. It's a racket.
Yes. IT admins also get to build computers, so that's why our jobs are so easy, right?
If you actually want to learn how law really works, I strongly suggest reading The Illustrated Guide to Law, which presents a good summarized history of the (US-centric) legal principles in use today. It touches on the mistakes made in the past, and how they've been corrected to produce a more just (though more nuanced) modern legal system.
Slashdot Mirror
So, to avoid a hardware attack on the TouchID system, Apple should require using the passcode system that is vulnerable to shoulder-surfing attacks.
Excellent plan, AC!
Canada, or any other country that thinks email addresses aren't bait worth biting.
At that time, from that country's perspective, Eccleston may have been a US agent trying to get that country to engage in easily-traced espionage. If they made a deal and were provided a list of email addresses, they might also get a number of fake accounts that serve as honeypots. Any attack on those fake accounts is a clear connection to the country in question, and they can't effectively deny it.
When that accusation is presented as a particularly inopportune time, such as elections, political unrest, or during diplomatic negotiations, it may cost that country far more than the $19,000 Eccleston was seeking.
So in other words, it's exactly the same as what happens when a foreign intelligence agency wants to get information from an American.
Changing jobs might mean you're unhappy with your previous employer, and want to embarrass them. A stranger, press, authors, peace activist, historians, random charming foreigner, fake diplomat with heavy accent or just a "new" "friend" in the area might just be able to convince you that your government is the embodiment of Absolute Evil.
Holidays or travel really make for great opportunities to meet new people and pass on information with less chance of being watched by American agents.
When in another nation, that good-looking lady at the bar might be easily impressed by your high rank in the American government, and the power you hold. A few different teams will have that on record, and use it to convince you that you're so far down the hole already, the only way out is to keep giving them more information.
The main thrust of such efforts is to get your information, and ensure that you've cooperated willingly enough to not report it. Claiming to be merely "academics, authors or press looking for comment, background or context," and raising such noble banners as "freedom of the press and freedom of association," the foreign agents can convince you that the American people are gravely threatened by every action of their government, and that you, the grand gatekeeper of the next revolution, hold the keys to the freedom.
All you have to do is give a little bit of information...
As has been discussed every other time it comes up, yes, the FBI can do exactly that.
Law enforcement officers can lie to you, bribe you, and they can even break certain laws (with appropriate approvals) to get you do do something illegal. There is a single defense against this kind of tactic, and it doesn't require a lawyer or court fees: just don't do it.
That's it. If someone asks you to do something illegal, decline. If they offer to assist, or even provide support, decline anyway. The FBI or police cannot arrest you for following the law. They can arrest you for breaking the law, or even for thinking you're breaking the law and going ahead with it.
In this case, the accused showed he might be interested in breaking the law. The FBI then gave him the materials and incentive to do so, but he'd still be walking free if he had followed the law and reported the apparent criminal activity to the FBI or other law enforcement. Of course, he instead followed through with the plan, completing his actions that would have "damaged protected government computers".
Some ads don't hide, and I find it quite interesting how often I have to re-check the box.
Where's the suggestion box?
I have a few items:
In short, take care of us, and we're happy to have you here. Our corporate overlords are dead. I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords.
How about getting rid of non-functioning "Disable Advertising" buttons?
[citation needed]
It's a nice idea, but the law doesn't agree with your simple assumption. Rather, according to existing law, the tractor hardware and the licenses to use the software have been sold, but not the rights to copy, modify, or disassemble the software. The tractor store probably didn't own those in the first place, so how could they sell them?
...So you've never seen an ad boasting about how this particular vehicle's safety features will protect your children from the bad things on the road?
That's silly. When I use a gun, I point it, pull the trigger, and boom, a paper target gets a hole in it. Why would I want something to die? That wouldn't be very nice.
Claiming that "the power of life or death" is a fetish is ridiculous. Every driver on the road has that power. Every plumber, electrician, and Boy Scout has that power. Every airplane pilot has a lot of that power. The simple truth is that humans are fragile creatures, and the simple safety measures we follow daily can easily be bypassed if one has the motivation to do so. The realization of how close one comes to death every day is terrifying.
That's what scares people, not a magic boom-stick.
What distinguishes firearms, though, is that they are themselves an easy target. Politicians, pundits, and concerned citizens can reassign their fear, allowing themselves to think of cars as "safe", because the really scary thing is a tube that makes loud noises. By concentrating all of the fear into one scapegoat, the rest of society seems perfectly livable.
Morally, justifying something by putting the good of mankind over an individual leads to all kinds of truly ugly nastiness.
Bullshit. As a society, we routinely engage in self-sacrificing activities for "the good of mankind". We donate our time to charities. We donate money. We even donate our very blood, which can have some serious (though rare) consequences.
It's a matter of risk perception. Donating time or money are perceived as being no risk, even though charities are very often the target of homocides and other violent attacks, and monetary donations have an obvious economic detriment for the donor. Blood drives make a big show of their safety procedures, and continuously promote the benefits that are enabled by such donations. There are no advertising campaigns for clinical trials, though.
Stories like this play on fear, promoting the idea that pharmaceutical companies are careless and cavalier about running harmful clinical trials, when the reality is that of the tens of thousands of drug trials run every year, this one is notable specifically because it had a bad outcome.
And medical testing in particular preys on those who are desperate, or financially in need already. They may not have a gun to your head, but in most cases its not like they'd be taking the drugs if they had better choices.
Also bullshit. Medical testing "preys" on mostly-healthy individuals who meet a particular set of criteria and, most importantly, can be found. That last part is often the most difficult. VERY few people go to their doctors and ask what they can do to help others, except for folks who are looking for unconventional ways to make money. Pharmaceutical researchers usually go to hospital networks and run queries against the hospital databases. Those databases are huge, and not tuned for such queries, so the queries take several months. Ultimately, there are very few qualified candidates returned, and they can be approached and asked to participate.
Unfortunately, most patients, unless they actually need a treatment, will not join a trial. They're under the impression that trials are unnecessarily risky, and usually won't try to understand the risk analysis before rejecting it. Out of a few hundred candidate subjects in the US, only a few dozen will actually participate. Those who are "desperate, or financially in need" are the ones who have enough incentive to overcome the prejudice and consider the actual risks.
Is this the new troll line now? No more "you fail it" or "moo"? I've seen comments about "corporations are people" on a few recent articles, and it never quite seems to fit...
On another note, yes, this is part of why the notion of corporate personhood exists. Corporations are able to enter into contracts as legal entities separate from the individual people involved, so the individual's circumstances do not affect the contract's legality. That also means corporations need a measure of free expression, so they can choose to do business with whom they want. They also then must have an ability to contribute financially to politics, because to curb that would interfere with the aforementioned free expression.
The problem is that not all jurisdictions allow corporate personhood, and it is still legal to discriminate against corporate entities. If a registrar does not want to enter into a business agreement with a corporation simply because they're not a human person, the registrar has the right (per free expression as noted above) to reject the business. Per the registrar's contract with ICANN, they may actually be required to deal only with individuals.
... I immediately think that what is being sacrificed is transaction integrity and multi-user contested performance/scaleability, but that's just me.
Whenever I read something similar to this as related to a database I immediately think that what is being sacrificed is not necessarily important to absolutely all applications, but that's just me.
I have worked on a system where the customer wanted some laptops running a portable instance of custom software. That software required an Oracle-based backend, so the customer wanted us to install the full Oracle Database Enterprise package, rather than fix the software.
We built the monstrosity, as requested, and demonstrated how bad it was. It took a good half-hour to fully initialize. The customer then ordered a few hundred of them, built to match the demo they saw.
That's really only half true... The value of the shares is tied to the company's value. The price of the share is separately tracked for public (or private, but that's more irregular) trade.
It seems MLG was privately held, so we only really care about what the shareholders can get from a buyback, not public sale. That puts the shareholders' investments at greater risk, based on what happens to the company's value. They have a piece of paper saying they own a certain percentage of the company, but the company itself had an awful lot of debt. Any cash or assets they may have been entitled to are instead being used to cancel out those debts, effectively making their shares worth far less.
A more profitable scenario for the shareholders would be for Activision to keep the company functioning as a separate entity, debt and all. Then the company, under new management and with more professional connections, could turn a profit, pay off those debts, and still have enough value in reserve to make the shares of stock worth something. Of course, that depends on MLG being a viable business, which may not be the case.
The most vocal opponents of systemd tend to be unprofessional system administrators and architects from an unrelated field, with decades of experience on unrelated systems.
Many of them have been responsible for configuring hundreds of thousands of systems in a non-systemd manner. The biggest variation in their system experience is usually whether they use pacman, apt, or yum. They've only dealt with one, or maybe two init systems.
These decades of experience have made them unable to consider anything different. They've come to reject anything that doesn't fit squarely in their particular interpretation of the Unix Philosophy.
Well, it turns out that it's extremely easy to mischaracterize systemd. Its architecture rejects the knee-jerk assumptions that we've used for so long. Rather than a "simple" storage backend, logs are viewed with a tool that filters down to relevant information. Systemd presents minimal interfaces to everything, intending them to be overridden with the usual system tools. It emphasizes the "do one thing and do it well" concept, where the "one thing" is "integrate programs into a coherent system". Systemd has different answers to the underlying question of "how do we turn a kernel into a productive system", that require sysadmins to work from a different perspective.
It's no wonder we see Linux distribution mailing lists and bug trackers filled with so many reports of problems caused by ignorant sysadmins. As a different approach to bringing up a system's components, when sysadmins blindly try to use their irrelevant experience and poor guesses to configure the system, things don't work.
Those poor sysadmin habits have caused a lot of inexcusable problems for a lot of their victims. We're talking about things as serious as Linux installations that don't boot properly. That's one of the worst things that can happen to a Linux installation; it renders it unusable!
Instead of taking the professional approach of understanding the new system prior to judging it, these sysadmins have blamed systemd. Many of them have, or are in the process of, spreading blatant lies and myths about systemd to distort public opinion. They just can't bring themselves to accept that a new perspective might ultimately serve their needs just as well, if not better.
Yes, bfpierce could feed a lot of donkeys for that price, and so could you or I. However, for that price, we cannot easily keep a small number of highly-trained donkeys on the other side of the planet well-fed and well-rested and capable of reliably hauling the necessary loads in a battlefield environment and operating to military standards.
Tattoos or implants cannot be denied. That is an important distinction.
The protected right to anonymity is actually an anonymous use of the First Amendment's right to free expression. Per the SCOTUS, "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority...It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation—and their ideas from suppression—at the hand of an intolerant society".
Anonymity as an independent right has never been legally protected. There is no protection against someone trying to discern your identity, no protection against being recognized, and no protection against being asked to provide an identity. For all of those, though, it is legal to take reasonable steps to remain anonymous. You can conceal your trails, disguise yourself, and you can decline to provide your identity, all under the banner of ensuring you aren't persecuted for your opinions.
Once you have no reasonable risk of persecution, however, your right to anonymity ends. You do not have the right to travel widely anonymously, or to engage in business anonymously, simply for the sake of being anonymous. It would be legal for any private business (and most government offices) to require ID for service, so long as what they do with that identification is not discriminatory.
The only solution, then, that permits one to be anonymous as needed, yet authenticated as needed, is an authentication token that can be provided or not at the user's discretion.
And like every other religious person that objects to America's laws, they have the right to sue, and if it is determined that their rights are being impacted, a suitable arrangement can be made. It's happened before (notably, with the Mennonites and Social Security) and it will surely happen again. It's not really a big deal.
This is exactly the problem, and solution.
From a computer science standpoint, modern algorithms that rely on single-thread speeds are obsolete and should be avoided for new development. From a sysadmin perspective, CPU speed is the least important metric compared to the rest of the system components. For project management, the system management toolset and feature support should be the prime concern.
Amazon's never really tried to hide the fact that their hardware is dissimilar behind the scenes. That will impact your computation speed, naturally.
The folks who get large mortgages also tend to get credit cards with high limits, and buy big TVs to put in their new big homes.
My point is that a thief is usually looking for an easy mark. They don't care whether you can easily afford the things they take, or what balance of disposable to non-disposable income you have. They only care about whether you have something they can steal.
Compared to the plethora of easy indicators already present, a drone registration database is practically useless to thieves. Drones are still rare enough that an hour-long database search might turn up a dozen marks in a city, but a drive through a rich neighborhood will give just as good results. Looking for open garages also requires almost no further recon, because the perfect time for a heist is right then.
Crime is usually perpetrated against the low-hanging fruit. There seems to be the common misconception on this thread that a thief is going to actively seek out one particular person to rob. That's just not usually how it works in the real world.
An easy payout over $50 is to watch for a moving truck, then peek inside while going past. You get to see everything they have that was worth moving, and it'll be slow to start any investigation, because for the first few days, there's always some confusion as to exactly what was put where.
Looking for a target in a database is a lot of planning, with no real benefit over more useful indicators like moving trucks, unattended open garages, or seeing a family get into a car and leave. If a criminal really wants to feel high-tech and use databases, a public records search for real estate prices will say a lot more about your disposable income than if you own a drone.
That's an awful lot of work to find a target of opportunity.
If you did what Apple does, you'd be paying a few hundred thousand dollars annually to manage the holding companies, trusts, and other legal entities involved, along with a team of accountants and lawyers to actually pay the taxes owed in the various locations in which you owe said taxes. Of course, it's only cost-effective if doing that kind of paperwork can save you more than a few hundred thousand dollars in taxes. That implies that you'd need to be paying the US about a million dollars in taxes already, implying an income of a few million dollars. I do know a few people who can afford to do such avoidance, but for the average middle-class American, there is not enough profit to justify such an effort.
That balance leads to some very interesting phenomena. For instance, by lowering the statutory corporate tax rate, we can lower the cost of bringing profits into the US, making it more likely that the US will receive taxes on that profit, rather than a foreign tax shelter. The exact numbers were never of interest to me, but there's a point where the US becomes a more attractive place to keep money than other countries, and that's when all of the corporate tax avoidance disappears.
There are longer-reaching effects to be considered as well. Currently, overseas profits can fund overseas expenses, never touching US financial entities and never paying US taxes. That becomes an incentive to keep expenses (such as manufacturing, labor, and assembly) overseas with the profit, contributing to the outsourcing of labor. Once an American company starts operating internationally, there's a financial benefit to moving further out of the country.
Big corporations aren't inherently evil. They just get to play by the whole world's rules, rather than just American.
I've probably spent more time in training and education than the average lawyer, yet I earn 1/10th what they do.
A quick check shows that lawyers near you average C$71,777 annually, and that's after two to four years of postgraduate study in a specialized field, with ongoing continuing education.
In comparison, the median salary for your profession in your area is C$63,154, with no postgraduate studies or CE requirements.
However, lawyers get to write the laws, so a whole bunch of otherwise simple matters require a lawyer to write the above mentioned letters, because the law says they have to. It's a racket.
Yes. IT admins also get to build computers, so that's why our jobs are so easy, right?
If you actually want to learn how law really works, I strongly suggest reading The Illustrated Guide to Law, which presents a good summarized history of the (US-centric) legal principles in use today. It touches on the mistakes made in the past, and how they've been corrected to produce a more just (though more nuanced) modern legal system.