Here's proof of how sleazy the credit card industry is: Universal Default.
Let us suppose that, due to some asshat in the accounting department fucking up your numbers, you are reported to a credit bureau as missing a house payment.
Naturally, you give them an earful and get them to fix it.
Meanwhile, all your other creditors jump on that foul up on your credit report and jack up your rates.
Even if you chew the mortage go back into nixing that error, nobody else has to lower their rates back down.
Using a credit card is like walking a bridge dangling over a river of lava. One slip up and you are toast as they slam you with a shitload of fees. And that universal default bit is like someone accidentally shaking the bridge. Even after it's stopped swaying you've already been tossed over.
Looking the other way all the time only allows it to get worse, since the bad guys, emboldened by their success, will only get greedier and greedier over time. Weeds are best pulled before they've had time to get firmly rooted.
That's the same sort of complacent attitude that allowed the Mafia to swallow sicily. 80 percent of sicilian businesses pay pizzo so that they don't get their windows broken in, or worse, get shot.
If you see something illegal happening, you need to report it. If going up the chain of command gets you canned, then blow the whistle.
Besides, failure to report illegality makes you an accomplice. That's the sort of burden that can easily be used as leverage against you if someone wants to twist your arm. "Do X or I'll make sure you get thrown to the wolves for hiding this"
Stealing is stealing, and being in a hard spot, though a profound test of character (esp if your SO is laying it on thick for you to nick some stuff), does not excuse theft. If it WERE ok then it would be called "forced charity". Call a spade a spade. Duress by circumstance might get you pity, but it doesn't get you a pass.
Worse yet, if you are caught stealing, that pretty much nixes any hope you have of collecting unemployment IIRC, since you'd be provoking your own dismissal with such a blatant violation . Not to mention that you'll probably not need it behind bars anyway.
And people who are without paychecks aren't buying anything.
I gotta ask though...
If everyone's so poor, where'd all the damn money go?
Where "ill" is defined as anything other than straight honest by the book dealing.
Those who fail to pay taxes are stealing because they are enjoying government services without paying for them, for example.
Those who infringe copyright are stealing because they are breaking the law to get their content, and thus deriving a benefit without paying for it. The attitude of indifference to the law is what makes it wrong.
This, incidentally, is one reason behind the equitable doctrine of tracing. If you steal a penny, and somehow manage to convert it into a million dollar mansion (read up on the paperclip barter-house for a real life version), the guy you stole it from gets your mansion, and not just the penny back. Why? Even though you caused them FAR less harm than what you actually had to give back, society doesn't look favorably on you reaping a fortune when you've sowed dirty.
Allowing you to profit even minimally from your ill-gotten seed money will reward you for a wrong action.
For me personally, it isn't so much getting paid a shitload as a bribe to do good for society, it's about keeping me afloat while I make sacrifices building a foundation for the future.
It's just like running a business. Wisely invested capital can make you a superstar, but unless you have short-term flotation you'll go under and your precious investment is either going to get nuked or raided at distress prices.
Bricking people's hardware in the process is NOT ok.
Of course, once XBL is required to even boot your xbox up, then the EULA for the xbox will probably have "we reserve the right to brick you if we feel like it"
The problem with class actions is that they are opt-in for restitution, but opt-out for forfeiture of private cause.
If a class action comes along and you don't get wind of it until it's settled, then you're out BOTH your share of the settlement AND the opportunity to pursue a private claim.
The sad part is that the bridge in question is likely to have been cheaped out on by the corporate bastards who built it in the first place....And who have laughed their way to the bank long before you ever set foot on it.
If you aren't a crook, you'll never get on the ballot to begin with.
Both candidates are cherry picked by the Old Guard in each party, which means that anyone who has even half a sense of decency will never make it past the corporate trough-feeders.
So your only choices each election have already been vetted by plenty of special interests.
He resigned because someone at the paper got nosey and traced him, and when his bosses found out that his hands were in the "using state computer for personal business" cookie jar, he carked and quit.
A few things
1) The newspaper site was entirely within its rights to check its logs and complain to whoever the IP belonged to. In effect, this is no different from tracing an obscene phone call.
2) The teacher was in fact abusing the school's resources by using them for personal reasons.
3) If the school had used monitoring software on its network it could have caught the guy simply VISITING a personal site on the government dime without the paper's help of tattling on him.
Gitmo never should have existed in the first place.
By all rights their due process and right to a fair trial has been severely compromised. That is: irreparable harm, prejudicial, and every other legal term you can come up with. It's time to bite the bullet and let them go. Any US citizen in their shoes would have had their ass habeas corpus'ed out of there a long time ago.
Yes, even though some of them might really be terrorists that is no excuse to run roughshod over their rights. Though I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the supremes if it ever went to SCOTUS.
The government fucked up and it's time to let them out. If they're really security risks then put some damned surveillance on them. It's not like we're short of manpower.
If the government wants to charge these assholes and get them locked up/executed it needs to do it by the book. ANY compromise...yes, even in the name of national security...is a violation of our constitutional principles.
Since nobody ever bothered to try them, double jeopardy sure as hell isn't going to stop the feds from doing their job, getting their evidence, and THEN pinching them.
Of course, if the feds don't want to admit to that, they could at least save some face and consider them POWs...and follow geneva conventions.
Where exactly did the feds capture the gitmo prisoners at anyway?
As long as they don't deliberately oversell their network.
I think that they should be required to keep a minimum of 20 percent of their capacity as spare AT ALL TIMES, that way they don't have a de-facto cap purely by operation of their congested network.
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Don't excuse the sharks.
Here's proof of how sleazy the credit card industry is: Universal Default.
Let us suppose that, due to some asshat in the accounting department fucking up your numbers, you are reported to a credit bureau as missing a house payment.
Naturally, you give them an earful and get them to fix it.
Meanwhile, all your other creditors jump on that foul up on your credit report and jack up your rates.
Even if you chew the mortage go back into nixing that error, nobody else has to lower their rates back down.
Using a credit card is like walking a bridge dangling over a river of lava. One slip up and you are toast as they slam you with a shitload of fees. And that universal default bit is like someone accidentally shaking the bridge. Even after it's stopped swaying you've already been tossed over.
We already do that. It's called "war"
Looking the other way all the time only allows it to get worse, since the bad guys, emboldened by their success, will only get greedier and greedier over time. Weeds are best pulled before they've had time to get firmly rooted.
That's the same sort of complacent attitude that allowed the Mafia to swallow sicily. 80 percent of sicilian businesses pay pizzo so that they don't get their windows broken in, or worse, get shot.
If you see something illegal happening, you need to report it. If going up the chain of command gets you canned, then blow the whistle.
Besides, failure to report illegality makes you an accomplice. That's the sort of burden that can easily be used as leverage against you if someone wants to twist your arm. "Do X or I'll make sure you get thrown to the wolves for hiding this"
Stealing is stealing, and being in a hard spot, though a profound test of character (esp if your SO is laying it on thick for you to nick some stuff), does not excuse theft. If it WERE ok then it would be called "forced charity". Call a spade a spade. Duress by circumstance might get you pity, but it doesn't get you a pass.
Worse yet, if you are caught stealing, that pretty much nixes any hope you have of collecting unemployment IIRC, since you'd be provoking your own dismissal with such a blatant violation . Not to mention that you'll probably not need it behind bars anyway.
And people who are without paychecks aren't buying anything.
I gotta ask though...
If everyone's so poor, where'd all the damn money go?
I think stealing in the moral sense is...
"Ill gotten gain"
Where "ill" is defined as anything other than straight honest by the book dealing.
Those who fail to pay taxes are stealing because they are enjoying government services without paying for them, for example.
Those who infringe copyright are stealing because they are breaking the law to get their content, and thus deriving a benefit without paying for it. The attitude of indifference to the law is what makes it wrong.
This, incidentally, is one reason behind the equitable doctrine of tracing. If you steal a penny, and somehow manage to convert it into a million dollar mansion (read up on the paperclip barter-house for a real life version), the guy you stole it from gets your mansion, and not just the penny back. Why? Even though you caused them FAR less harm than what you actually had to give back, society doesn't look favorably on you reaping a fortune when you've sowed dirty.
Allowing you to profit even minimally from your ill-gotten seed money will reward you for a wrong action.
For me personally, it isn't so much getting paid a shitload as a bribe to do good for society, it's about keeping me afloat while I make sacrifices building a foundation for the future.
It's just like running a business. Wisely invested capital can make you a superstar, but unless you have short-term flotation you'll go under and your precious investment is either going to get nuked or raided at distress prices.
There's always this thing called a "filter"
Not really...rumors have it that the xbox was partially bricked even for offline purposes.
I'd very much like to see Apple's jail-breaker-bricker update gone over with a fine toothed comb.
If Apple deliberately bricked jail-broken phones then they need to face HEAVY punitive damages.
"completely unenforced"
Probably a baited trap that later gives them an excuse to fire anyone they please.
Kinda like how China makes it impossible to obey every law at the same time, so that your fate is determined by the whims of the bureaucrats.
Bricking people's hardware in the process is NOT ok.
Of course, once XBL is required to even boot your xbox up, then the EULA for the xbox will probably have "we reserve the right to brick you if we feel like it"
The problem with class actions is that they are opt-in for restitution, but opt-out for forfeiture of private cause.
If a class action comes along and you don't get wind of it until it's settled, then you're out BOTH your share of the settlement AND the opportunity to pursue a private claim.
The sad part is that the bridge in question is likely to have been cheaped out on by the corporate bastards who built it in the first place. ...And who have laughed their way to the bank long before you ever set foot on it.
Believe it or not the EPA tried to put a stop to cigarettes.
That's right, the fracking E P A !
Regulating cigarette smoke as a Class A carcinogen.
I commend them for their cleverness, but corruption doth reach even into our own judiciary, which slapped the EPA down in a hurry.
And now their budget is going to get a metric FUCKLOAD worse thanks to all those lawsuits.
Sadly, there are many who already paid the ultimate price for their "stupidity".
I think New Orleans would be Noah's version of Sodom and Gomorrah. Maybe, I dunno.
More to the point though, that area should by all rights be a permanent disaster area.
Why the hell are the feds OR the state allowing settlement there?
Nope, he'll just get taken by the thought police and made to vanish.
Make that "thin rope that will explode sometimes if you break it" and I'll buy it.
I will never forget Tiananmen Square.
Sounds almost exactly how the mafia operates.
If you aren't a crook, you'll never get on the ballot to begin with.
Both candidates are cherry picked by the Old Guard in each party, which means that anyone who has even half a sense of decency will never make it past the corporate trough-feeders.
So your only choices each election have already been vetted by plenty of special interests.
He didn't get fired, he resigned.
He resigned because someone at the paper got nosey and traced him, and when his bosses found out that his hands were in the "using state computer for personal business" cookie jar, he carked and quit.
A few things
1) The newspaper site was entirely within its rights to check its logs and complain to whoever the IP belonged to. In effect, this is no different from tracing an obscene phone call.
2) The teacher was in fact abusing the school's resources by using them for personal reasons.
3) If the school had used monitoring software on its network it could have caught the guy simply VISITING a personal site on the government dime without the paper's help of tattling on him.
Gitmo never should have existed in the first place.
By all rights their due process and right to a fair trial has been severely compromised. That is: irreparable harm, prejudicial, and every other legal term you can come up with. It's time to bite the bullet and let them go. Any US citizen in their shoes would have had their ass habeas corpus'ed out of there a long time ago.
Yes, even though some of them might really be terrorists that is no excuse to run roughshod over their rights. Though I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the supremes if it ever went to SCOTUS.
The government fucked up and it's time to let them out. If they're really security risks then put some damned surveillance on them. It's not like we're short of manpower.
If the government wants to charge these assholes and get them locked up/executed it needs to do it by the book. ANY compromise...yes, even in the name of national security...is a violation of our constitutional principles.
Since nobody ever bothered to try them, double jeopardy sure as hell isn't going to stop the feds from doing their job, getting their evidence, and THEN pinching them.
Of course, if the feds don't want to admit to that, they could at least save some face and consider them POWs...and follow geneva conventions.
Where exactly did the feds capture the gitmo prisoners at anyway?
Seventh Day Adventist ...
Mormon
Latter Day Saint
Baptist
Protestant
As long as they don't deliberately oversell their network.
I think that they should be required to keep a minimum of 20 percent of their capacity as spare AT ALL TIMES, that way they don't have a de-facto cap purely by operation of their congested network.
Good God...NO NO NO!
DRM is bad enough in media. We do NOT need it in our DNA!!!