Well, that's sad. WoW under Wine used to be extremely stable and run at substantially higher FPS than it ran on Windows. This included high settings, far viewing distance, and raids. That was back during WotLK, though.
I haven't played much since then, much less participated in raids. Running poorly on Linux is a dealbreaker for me, if indeed things have declined substantially since I last logged-in. For a stale franchise that's well past its peak, it seems to me that improving Linux support might unlock some additional player base. If they did such a thing deliberately and well, I'd think about returning. But what do I know?
This homonym-misspelling was driving me crazy, too. It's only reason I cared to read the comments, in fact. It seems to be a really common error in the telecom industry, so common it's possibly becoming the next "I could care less", which also drives me crazy.
Whether it's morons endlessly repeating "socialism" when they are referring to "welfare state" policies, misused expressions, misused words, or fabricated definitions for existing terms, I've been feeling a lot like Inigo Montoya recently. It's almost like I'm speaking a different language.
While I must wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, the irony of referring to people who mix-up vaguely similar words as "illiterate loosers" is just too much to refrain from remarking on.
Scarcity only leads to slightly increased cost; however, with computer games, scarcity is rarely a factor except during the first couple weeks of release, and only with the physical store-bought copies of the game. There's essentially an infinite supply of digitally-delivered copies. Even in the first few months after release, the value is high due to the novelty and cutting-edge factor, but once the novelty and "prestige" of being one of the first to complete the game wears off, their prices tend to fall quickly because another game with better technology is going to be capturing everyone's attention.
In that regard, one could almost consider software to be consumable even if the license and media is transferable. If it's obsolete, it has negligible resale value when its owner upgrades.
This is even more true of Steam games. Since they are not transferable, they have no resale value even if not completely obsolete, and their retail value generally drops precipitously. The new releases may be at retail for a couple of months, then they drop off to the sub-$10 range by about the 1-year mark.
There's just no way to compare objects with some scarcity and high residual value (a used car's value or utility isn't diminished all that much by advances in technology and novelty) & one of the highest-scarcity commodities on the market (real property), to ephemeral, semi-tangible goods like computer games or software.
...considering it's coming from someone whose view of science is something that you believe on faith, ignore inconvenient research, and consider even the slightest doubt or margin of error that an opposing viewpoint has to completely debunk it. It's not science to believe that since you have 100% confidence in your faith-based theory that has no evidence, but you can imagine a miniscule source of error in an opposing theory, that the person with the fewest doubts "wins". But just try telling a "Creation Scientist" that...or someone who believes on faith that there is not any possibility that there is human-caused global climate changed. They hold their views on faith, their minds will not be changed no matter how much evidence they're presented with.
I don't think it's simply "over age 45", but rather the "have 1 (or 2, or 3) kid [from failed marriage(s)] who is the most important thing in my life!" that is typical of that age group that makes for invisibility.
At least that's my perspective. That describes what seems like a majority of the profiles I've seen in my half-assed online dating attempts over the years. I'm just not interested in chasing that situation, and am not terribly likely to respond even if a single mother initiated contact. I'm going to be judgmental when it comes to something like living my life, and most of the causes of single motherhood boil down to regrettable choices on her part.
"Ugly" is highly relative and in the eye of the beholder. Singles who don't go through the effort to look their best probably won't do so well, and posting rubbish photos taken on phones at parties or from webcams in poorly-lit bedrooms, or not posting a photo at all really isn't putting one's best foot forward. This applies to singles of both genders. Yes, someone who comes across as slovenly or lazy is going to be invisible to almost everyone.
You do realize, don't you, that there's more to life than staying on your pre-programmed biological rails and doing every last thing your 'nads tell you to?
I'd go so far as to say the human race would be better off with the offspring of those who are self-aware and self-deterministic enough to decline to procreate for whatever reason, because at least they put some thought into it and aren't subject to the base impulses that invariably bring out the worst humanity has to offer. There's nothing more pathetic than the fools who follow their programming to the letter while rationalizing and attempting to claim that they are thinking for themselves and fulfilling a higher purpose.
RMS is right, but he just expressed his opinion in the wrong way.
It's much better to quantify and qualify what makes something wrong. If the only justification against something like homosexuality is "because the Good Book (tm) said it is!", then more research ought to be done. Note that I didn't say "pedophilia" as the example there, because the Good Book (tm) doesn't really have a problem with that. Wrong is not wrong just because it's wrong or because someone says it is. There needs to be evidence collected to back-up the assumption and do more to hammer out the nuance.
The more of the world I see happening around me, the more I think this notion of "informed consent" is concocted nonsense. How many grown adults of the legal age are informed enough to make good decisions regarding sex, money, or much of anything else?
It's easy enough to look additional details up when you want to. A good music player plays the music in the background, and provides very basic information if you want it. It's hard to say what exactly is wrong with the current Amarok package in the Kubuntu repository, but it can't even do that. The entire UI is taken-up with its failure to retrieve the Wikipedia article on the song or album, the lyrics, and album covers (which I didn't want anyway), but an even more fundamental failure to correctly populate the metadata provided by streams such as those from Soma FM. It also lost the ability to display Cyrillic characters correctly since version 2 came out. Just when I've come to terms with my disappointments and am getting along with whatever I can't do with it anymore, Amarok somehow manages to surprise me with an all new disappointment.
I might give it a try, I liked 1.4...the 2.* versions have sucked powerfully. A music player that can't play CDs? Seriously?
I really hate to criticize things people are making for the common good, but Amarok is pretty bad. It's super-bloated, but with basic functionality lacking or broken. It seems that as versions advance, more and more is broken. The interface becomes more and more cluttered and less and less usable, and the display elements that they ostensibly changed the whole thing over so they'd work in KDE 4 have been perpetually screwed-up too. The most used part of a media player, the controls, almost seem like an afterthought.
Sometimes, the time comes in a product's development cycle where maybe the folks working on it should just realize it took a very wrong turn and scrap it.
If there is a compelling reason to run the light, talk your way out of it in court. If you have a tailgater, the camera will catch them in-frame too. A properly-configured red light camera won't catch people by surprise (short yellow, instantaneous-tripping when someone enters the intersection as the light turns red), it'll only light-up on those who deliberately are running red lights after they've had ample opportunity to behave and really have no excuse for breaking the law.
The net of it is, people should be aware of stale green lights and be prepared to stop or accelerate slightly to get through the intersection before the signal changes. They should be driving for the conditions, too. Mistakes happen, but when the camera issues the ticket, it's not that costly of a lesson to learn. The problem I have with some red light cameras are those cities that use them solely to drum-up revenue, shortening the yellow phase to the bare minimum. That is unsafe and encourages drivers to slam on their brakes and otherwise do risky things.
As I babble about in my comment farther down, I think properly-implemented red light cameras are great. I'll freely admit that I push things a bit when I'm driving-- I frequently drive about 5-10mph over the posted limit (except in construction and school zones) and I don't stop for yellow lights if I think I can get into the intersection in time. But I've only been lit-up by a red light camera once, and I really would've deserved the ticket and knew it, since it was me just being impatient and exercising really poor judgement...but the ticket never came, I guess because I had the temp tag inside the tinted rear window and the camera just couldn't see it clearly enough for anyone to make out. That's one offense out of thousands of times driving through camera-enforced intersections with my driving habits.
...but driving quite a bit nearby in Boulder, CO, I LOVE the red light cameras. They're one of the only things the traffic engineers and enforcement folks have done right.
The yellow lights are as long as they've ever been as far as I can tell, but there were a few problem intersections in town where 4-5 cars per lane would continue on through after the light had turned red. It was really out of control, frequently making folks who were turning left at a green arrow signal miss their opportunity to turn. The problem has been almost nonexistent since those cameras were put in around those intersections. They are very conspicuous and there are plenty of big signs warning drivers of the red light camera ahead, and they also don't trip unless someone enters the intersection a couple seconds after the light turns red, making it pretty obvious the city isn't out just to surprise motorists & drum-up revenue with tickets, but want to make sure that people just start heeding the signals. I can't even remember the last time I saw someone trigger one.
If they were evaluating the efficacy of the cameras here, I'd be attending the meetings and voicing my support. It's the way this sort of enforcement should be done, it targets only those scofflaws who misbehave because they think their hurry is more important than everyone else driving the roads and it's okay to break the law when they don't think there's a cop watching. Has it made the intersections safer? Almost certainly. Does it keep traffic flowing more smoothly? You bet. Does it reduce road rage? I'd wager it does.
I've been using KDE for years, while it took me a while to adopt KDE 4 because it was shaky and 3.5 was nice and mature, I guess I do like where the KDE 4 line is now. Almost everything else is cartoonish, clumsy, locked-down, or crude by comparison. I can see KDE rising to more dominance on real computers as all the other distros, and Microsoft, and Apple all fight over tablet UIs.
But where's Konqui been lately? He's been kind of scarce over the past few years.
Yeah, I think you're spot-on in your assessment, and I really like the "middle age" term here. It really applies. Just like the middle-aged guy who shows up to work to collect a paycheck, they're not climbing the ladder anymore, but they've built enough of a stable niche that they don't have to worry about being out on the street next week unless they really screw something up.
I don't think he does, he says stupid things fairly often. His mouth is like a font, with stupidity gushing forth. Given the dismal track record of previous Microsoft products that attempted to go up against the iPod (Zune), iTunes (MSN Music Store), and iPhone (Kin), their new offering will have an extreme uphill battle, and probably be abandoned just like its predecessors.
That'll be one major factor contributing to the new Windows phone's failure, it's hard to trust that Microsoft will stick with something when the going gets a little tough, and most people actually do learn when they've been burned by a vendor who sells them a bum product and then drops all support for it within months. Clearly, as CEO, he hasn't learned any lessons from previous dismal failures, either.
The real problem is that while this would really help fight spam, there's collateral damage. Just like the judicial systems in civilized countries tend to operate on the principle that it's better to set 100 guilty people free rather than imprison 1 innocent person, most people who receive email would rather receive and delete 100 spam messages than miss one legit email inquiry from a potential customer or long-lost friend.
Sender Policy Framework seems even better than simple reverse DNS in theory, but it doesn't seem to get much traction because it causes more serious problems than spam in general causes. Until a critical mass of sysadmins basically tell the domain owners who are too stupid or lazy to add the appropriate DNS records to fuck off, lazy and stupid sysadmins will continue to not add those records. But until then, customers will cry and rebel if any of the good sysadmins who host them try to apply a passive spam filter that relies on such records. That's just how it goes, it's a Catch-22 which is preventing widespread adoption. The only potential solution would be to stage an SPF or rDNS record adoption day, get some big names on board, and hope for the best.
Indeed, I'm sure corruption and incompetence are the cause of ridiculous disposal regulations...but man, a little common sense with a little oversight would go a long way.
Can the government ever abandon something in that manner?
To say the lunar lander was "abandoned" probably isn't as accurate as saying it was "scuttled". Most government-owned stuff, such as shipwrecks, munitions on practice ranges, land & structures, and surplus property is never abandoned until it goes through a disposition process. I have a feeling that's even how the remains of soldiers (even on foreign soil) are regarded and why nations are entitled to recover the remains of their fallen soldiers.
I've also dealt with the disposition process firsthand, as a military and government surplus buyer of much stuff over the years. Pretty much everything that isn't low-grade trash (paper, disposable packaging, etc.) or food waste has to be disposed of through a process that seem to often last several months. Some of the things I've seen them trying to sell have negligible to anyone (and I'm very good at finding value in just about anything):
Broken household electronics
Broken particleboard furniture
Bald tires
Broken glass and plexiglass
Rotten rubber sheeting
Tattered rags
Expired medical supplies
Some of those things might be able to be recycled (tires can be retreaded and all), but even that would likely be at a cost rather than for a profit. Only after they give the public a chance to buy this crap, can they just throw it in the huge roll-off dumpsters where it belongs. It's a massive waste of money and government employees' time to process all the forms and handle the rubbish so many times, but that seems to be the only way the government can actually surrender ownership of stuff that was purchased with taxpayer money.
It would set a very bad precedent if they allowed a US employee to violate the rules. I doubt the camera weighed all that much, but I'll go with the same argument that holds that it's unethical to take anything from a site, "What if everyone took a (rock, artifact, fossil, etc.)?", which my folks rightly used early and often. In this case, astronauts looting things isn't likely going to deprive science or other sightseers of knowledge or the experience, but NASA has very strict rules for very good reasons.
Astronauts are apparently allowed a small box for mementos to take into space and return with (I learned this on Pawn Stars when someone brought in a moon mission patch, photo, and autograph display). Nothing more without authorization. What if all the other members of the moon landing crew also decided to smuggle crap, and the module wound up being overweight? That could've endangered the lives of the crew. Why should Edgar's alleged bad behavior allow him to benefit in such a way that all the other moon astronauts didn't, because they behaved themselves?
I don't think jurisdiction of the crime matters. The Dred Scott case could apply here, which decided that ownership of property isn't conditional based on location or interruption of some conditions of ownership. In this case, US property was taken to the moon, where it was allegedly stolen and returned to Earth. I would think its condition of being on Earth and in the USA causes it to revert to being US property.
As stated in the article, astronauts had to receive explicit permission for what they were bringing back. That permission is apparently documented for all the other moonwalkers, who pulled-off pieces of their discarded suits as mementos, and also for small boxes of crap they were authorized to bring along (such as pennants and patches). Why should the rules that applied to all the others not apply to him, simply because he decided not to obey them?
I'm also curious to know if such a request would've been honored. How many moonwalkers were permitted to keep more than just pieces of their suits, were others allowed to scavenge instrumentation or maybe the lunar rover's gearshift knob? Or were they pretty much limited to salvaging tiny mementos from their own personal equipment?
Frankly, if he smuggled the camera back without permission, it's not his and he needs to give it back and ask for forgiveness. It was unprofessional and unethical and unfair to the others who risked their lives and didn't come back with extra souvenirs they could try to sell tens of thousands of dollars because they played by the rules.
The statute of limitations doesn't apply. They're not prosecuting him for a crime.
They're attempting to recover stolen property. Just because you stole something a really long time ago doesn't make it yours, free and clear. That's why the government can repossess moon rocks, no matter whose hands they passed through over the years. The odds of most stolen property after years and passing through many hands is remote, most people don't care enough to pursue their stuff that long...but if someone shows up one day, claiming to possess something he stole and using the people he stole it from as being the provenance that gives it all its value (the camera would be worth what, $100 tops as an obsolete scientific curiosity had it not gone to the moon?), I think the US Government is well within its rights to demand return of its property.
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Well, that's sad. WoW under Wine used to be extremely stable and run at substantially higher FPS than it ran on Windows. This included high settings, far viewing distance, and raids. That was back during WotLK, though.
I haven't played much since then, much less participated in raids. Running poorly on Linux is a dealbreaker for me, if indeed things have declined substantially since I last logged-in. For a stale franchise that's well past its peak, it seems to me that improving Linux support might unlock some additional player base. If they did such a thing deliberately and well, I'd think about returning. But what do I know?
This homonym-misspelling was driving me crazy, too. It's only reason I cared to read the comments, in fact. It seems to be a really common error in the telecom industry, so common it's possibly becoming the next "I could care less", which also drives me crazy.
Whether it's morons endlessly repeating "socialism" when they are referring to "welfare state" policies, misused expressions, misused words, or fabricated definitions for existing terms, I've been feeling a lot like Inigo Montoya recently. It's almost like I'm speaking a different language.
While I must wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, the irony of referring to people who mix-up vaguely similar words as "illiterate loosers" is just too much to refrain from remarking on.
Scarcity only leads to slightly increased cost; however, with computer games, scarcity is rarely a factor except during the first couple weeks of release, and only with the physical store-bought copies of the game. There's essentially an infinite supply of digitally-delivered copies. Even in the first few months after release, the value is high due to the novelty and cutting-edge factor, but once the novelty and "prestige" of being one of the first to complete the game wears off, their prices tend to fall quickly because another game with better technology is going to be capturing everyone's attention.
In that regard, one could almost consider software to be consumable even if the license and media is transferable. If it's obsolete, it has negligible resale value when its owner upgrades.
This is even more true of Steam games. Since they are not transferable, they have no resale value even if not completely obsolete, and their retail value generally drops precipitously. The new releases may be at retail for a couple of months, then they drop off to the sub-$10 range by about the 1-year mark.
There's just no way to compare objects with some scarcity and high residual value (a used car's value or utility isn't diminished all that much by advances in technology and novelty) & one of the highest-scarcity commodities on the market (real property), to ephemeral, semi-tangible goods like computer games or software.
...considering it's coming from someone whose view of science is something that you believe on faith, ignore inconvenient research, and consider even the slightest doubt or margin of error that an opposing viewpoint has to completely debunk it. It's not science to believe that since you have 100% confidence in your faith-based theory that has no evidence, but you can imagine a miniscule source of error in an opposing theory, that the person with the fewest doubts "wins". But just try telling a "Creation Scientist" that...or someone who believes on faith that there is not any possibility that there is human-caused global climate changed. They hold their views on faith, their minds will not be changed no matter how much evidence they're presented with.
I don't think it's simply "over age 45", but rather the "have 1 (or 2, or 3) kid [from failed marriage(s)] who is the most important thing in my life!" that is typical of that age group that makes for invisibility.
At least that's my perspective. That describes what seems like a majority of the profiles I've seen in my half-assed online dating attempts over the years. I'm just not interested in chasing that situation, and am not terribly likely to respond even if a single mother initiated contact. I'm going to be judgmental when it comes to something like living my life, and most of the causes of single motherhood boil down to regrettable choices on her part.
"Ugly" is highly relative and in the eye of the beholder. Singles who don't go through the effort to look their best probably won't do so well, and posting rubbish photos taken on phones at parties or from webcams in poorly-lit bedrooms, or not posting a photo at all really isn't putting one's best foot forward. This applies to singles of both genders. Yes, someone who comes across as slovenly or lazy is going to be invisible to almost everyone.
You do realize, don't you, that there's more to life than staying on your pre-programmed biological rails and doing every last thing your 'nads tell you to?
I'd go so far as to say the human race would be better off with the offspring of those who are self-aware and self-deterministic enough to decline to procreate for whatever reason, because at least they put some thought into it and aren't subject to the base impulses that invariably bring out the worst humanity has to offer. There's nothing more pathetic than the fools who follow their programming to the letter while rationalizing and attempting to claim that they are thinking for themselves and fulfilling a higher purpose.
RMS is right, but he just expressed his opinion in the wrong way.
It's much better to quantify and qualify what makes something wrong. If the only justification against something like homosexuality is "because the Good Book (tm) said it is!", then more research ought to be done. Note that I didn't say "pedophilia" as the example there, because the Good Book (tm) doesn't really have a problem with that. Wrong is not wrong just because it's wrong or because someone says it is. There needs to be evidence collected to back-up the assumption and do more to hammer out the nuance.
The more of the world I see happening around me, the more I think this notion of "informed consent" is concocted nonsense. How many grown adults of the legal age are informed enough to make good decisions regarding sex, money, or much of anything else?
Exactly.
It's easy enough to look additional details up when you want to. A good music player plays the music in the background, and provides very basic information if you want it. It's hard to say what exactly is wrong with the current Amarok package in the Kubuntu repository, but it can't even do that. The entire UI is taken-up with its failure to retrieve the Wikipedia article on the song or album, the lyrics, and album covers (which I didn't want anyway), but an even more fundamental failure to correctly populate the metadata provided by streams such as those from Soma FM. It also lost the ability to display Cyrillic characters correctly since version 2 came out. Just when I've come to terms with my disappointments and am getting along with whatever I can't do with it anymore, Amarok somehow manages to surprise me with an all new disappointment.
Song: Streaming Data. Artist: Streaming Data. Album: Streaming Data.
Amarok: Broken. :-(
I might give it a try, I liked 1.4...the 2.* versions have sucked powerfully. A music player that can't play CDs? Seriously?
I really hate to criticize things people are making for the common good, but Amarok is pretty bad. It's super-bloated, but with basic functionality lacking or broken. It seems that as versions advance, more and more is broken. The interface becomes more and more cluttered and less and less usable, and the display elements that they ostensibly changed the whole thing over so they'd work in KDE 4 have been perpetually screwed-up too. The most used part of a media player, the controls, almost seem like an afterthought.
Sometimes, the time comes in a product's development cycle where maybe the folks working on it should just realize it took a very wrong turn and scrap it.
If there is a compelling reason to run the light, talk your way out of it in court. If you have a tailgater, the camera will catch them in-frame too. A properly-configured red light camera won't catch people by surprise (short yellow, instantaneous-tripping when someone enters the intersection as the light turns red), it'll only light-up on those who deliberately are running red lights after they've had ample opportunity to behave and really have no excuse for breaking the law.
The net of it is, people should be aware of stale green lights and be prepared to stop or accelerate slightly to get through the intersection before the signal changes. They should be driving for the conditions, too. Mistakes happen, but when the camera issues the ticket, it's not that costly of a lesson to learn. The problem I have with some red light cameras are those cities that use them solely to drum-up revenue, shortening the yellow phase to the bare minimum. That is unsafe and encourages drivers to slam on their brakes and otherwise do risky things.
As I babble about in my comment farther down, I think properly-implemented red light cameras are great. I'll freely admit that I push things a bit when I'm driving-- I frequently drive about 5-10mph over the posted limit (except in construction and school zones) and I don't stop for yellow lights if I think I can get into the intersection in time. But I've only been lit-up by a red light camera once, and I really would've deserved the ticket and knew it, since it was me just being impatient and exercising really poor judgement...but the ticket never came, I guess because I had the temp tag inside the tinted rear window and the camera just couldn't see it clearly enough for anyone to make out. That's one offense out of thousands of times driving through camera-enforced intersections with my driving habits.
...but driving quite a bit nearby in Boulder, CO, I LOVE the red light cameras. They're one of the only things the traffic engineers and enforcement folks have done right.
The yellow lights are as long as they've ever been as far as I can tell, but there were a few problem intersections in town where 4-5 cars per lane would continue on through after the light had turned red. It was really out of control, frequently making folks who were turning left at a green arrow signal miss their opportunity to turn. The problem has been almost nonexistent since those cameras were put in around those intersections. They are very conspicuous and there are plenty of big signs warning drivers of the red light camera ahead, and they also don't trip unless someone enters the intersection a couple seconds after the light turns red, making it pretty obvious the city isn't out just to surprise motorists & drum-up revenue with tickets, but want to make sure that people just start heeding the signals. I can't even remember the last time I saw someone trigger one.
If they were evaluating the efficacy of the cameras here, I'd be attending the meetings and voicing my support. It's the way this sort of enforcement should be done, it targets only those scofflaws who misbehave because they think their hurry is more important than everyone else driving the roads and it's okay to break the law when they don't think there's a cop watching. Has it made the intersections safer? Almost certainly. Does it keep traffic flowing more smoothly? You bet. Does it reduce road rage? I'd wager it does.
I've been using KDE for years, while it took me a while to adopt KDE 4 because it was shaky and 3.5 was nice and mature, I guess I do like where the KDE 4 line is now. Almost everything else is cartoonish, clumsy, locked-down, or crude by comparison. I can see KDE rising to more dominance on real computers as all the other distros, and Microsoft, and Apple all fight over tablet UIs.
But where's Konqui been lately? He's been kind of scarce over the past few years.
Actually, one could pretty much call what they're doing "pandaring".
Yeah, I think you're spot-on in your assessment, and I really like the "middle age" term here. It really applies. Just like the middle-aged guy who shows up to work to collect a paycheck, they're not climbing the ladder anymore, but they've built enough of a stable niche that they don't have to worry about being out on the street next week unless they really screw something up.
I don't think he does, he says stupid things fairly often. His mouth is like a font, with stupidity gushing forth. Given the dismal track record of previous Microsoft products that attempted to go up against the iPod (Zune), iTunes (MSN Music Store), and iPhone (Kin), their new offering will have an extreme uphill battle, and probably be abandoned just like its predecessors.
That'll be one major factor contributing to the new Windows phone's failure, it's hard to trust that Microsoft will stick with something when the going gets a little tough, and most people actually do learn when they've been burned by a vendor who sells them a bum product and then drops all support for it within months. Clearly, as CEO, he hasn't learned any lessons from previous dismal failures, either.
So, it'll basically be an iPhone, only without the market traction that Apple has gained? I see another dismal phone failure in Microsoft's future.
The real problem is that while this would really help fight spam, there's collateral damage. Just like the judicial systems in civilized countries tend to operate on the principle that it's better to set 100 guilty people free rather than imprison 1 innocent person, most people who receive email would rather receive and delete 100 spam messages than miss one legit email inquiry from a potential customer or long-lost friend.
Sender Policy Framework seems even better than simple reverse DNS in theory, but it doesn't seem to get much traction because it causes more serious problems than spam in general causes. Until a critical mass of sysadmins basically tell the domain owners who are too stupid or lazy to add the appropriate DNS records to fuck off, lazy and stupid sysadmins will continue to not add those records. But until then, customers will cry and rebel if any of the good sysadmins who host them try to apply a passive spam filter that relies on such records. That's just how it goes, it's a Catch-22 which is preventing widespread adoption. The only potential solution would be to stage an SPF or rDNS record adoption day, get some big names on board, and hope for the best.
Indeed, I'm sure corruption and incompetence are the cause of ridiculous disposal regulations...but man, a little common sense with a little oversight would go a long way.
Can the government ever abandon something in that manner?
To say the lunar lander was "abandoned" probably isn't as accurate as saying it was "scuttled". Most government-owned stuff, such as shipwrecks, munitions on practice ranges, land & structures, and surplus property is never abandoned until it goes through a disposition process. I have a feeling that's even how the remains of soldiers (even on foreign soil) are regarded and why nations are entitled to recover the remains of their fallen soldiers.
I've also dealt with the disposition process firsthand, as a military and government surplus buyer of much stuff over the years. Pretty much everything that isn't low-grade trash (paper, disposable packaging, etc.) or food waste has to be disposed of through a process that seem to often last several months. Some of the things I've seen them trying to sell have negligible to anyone (and I'm very good at finding value in just about anything):
Some of those things might be able to be recycled (tires can be retreaded and all), but even that would likely be at a cost rather than for a profit. Only after they give the public a chance to buy this crap, can they just throw it in the huge roll-off dumpsters where it belongs. It's a massive waste of money and government employees' time to process all the forms and handle the rubbish so many times, but that seems to be the only way the government can actually surrender ownership of stuff that was purchased with taxpayer money.
It would set a very bad precedent if they allowed a US employee to violate the rules. I doubt the camera weighed all that much, but I'll go with the same argument that holds that it's unethical to take anything from a site, "What if everyone took a (rock, artifact, fossil, etc.)?", which my folks rightly used early and often. In this case, astronauts looting things isn't likely going to deprive science or other sightseers of knowledge or the experience, but NASA has very strict rules for very good reasons.
Astronauts are apparently allowed a small box for mementos to take into space and return with (I learned this on Pawn Stars when someone brought in a moon mission patch, photo, and autograph display). Nothing more without authorization. What if all the other members of the moon landing crew also decided to smuggle crap, and the module wound up being overweight? That could've endangered the lives of the crew. Why should Edgar's alleged bad behavior allow him to benefit in such a way that all the other moon astronauts didn't, because they behaved themselves?
I don't think jurisdiction of the crime matters. The Dred Scott case could apply here, which decided that ownership of property isn't conditional based on location or interruption of some conditions of ownership. In this case, US property was taken to the moon, where it was allegedly stolen and returned to Earth. I would think its condition of being on Earth and in the USA causes it to revert to being US property.
As stated in the article, astronauts had to receive explicit permission for what they were bringing back. That permission is apparently documented for all the other moonwalkers, who pulled-off pieces of their discarded suits as mementos, and also for small boxes of crap they were authorized to bring along (such as pennants and patches). Why should the rules that applied to all the others not apply to him, simply because he decided not to obey them?
I'm also curious to know if such a request would've been honored. How many moonwalkers were permitted to keep more than just pieces of their suits, were others allowed to scavenge instrumentation or maybe the lunar rover's gearshift knob? Or were they pretty much limited to salvaging tiny mementos from their own personal equipment?
Frankly, if he smuggled the camera back without permission, it's not his and he needs to give it back and ask for forgiveness. It was unprofessional and unethical and unfair to the others who risked their lives and didn't come back with extra souvenirs they could try to sell tens of thousands of dollars because they played by the rules.
The statute of limitations doesn't apply. They're not prosecuting him for a crime.
They're attempting to recover stolen property. Just because you stole something a really long time ago doesn't make it yours, free and clear. That's why the government can repossess moon rocks, no matter whose hands they passed through over the years. The odds of most stolen property after years and passing through many hands is remote, most people don't care enough to pursue their stuff that long...but if someone shows up one day, claiming to possess something he stole and using the people he stole it from as being the provenance that gives it all its value (the camera would be worth what, $100 tops as an obsolete scientific curiosity had it not gone to the moon?), I think the US Government is well within its rights to demand return of its property.