Q: Why don't sharks eat lawyers?
A: Professional Courtesy
Q: What's the difference between a dead possum in the road and a dead lawyer in the road?
A: There are skid marks in front of the possum.
Q: What do you call 1,000 lawyers on a sinking ship?
A: A good start
Q: What's the other difference between a lawyer and a hooker?
A: There are some things a hooker won't do for money
What's the legal definition for [public nuisance]? "Anything we want when we feel like it"?
Got it in one. There are so many different, contridictory laws that a cop can arrest just about anyone if he feels like it. They have the power, you don't. Grovel like the peasant you are in their eyes, and they might not hurt you.
Why does the government keep giving them contracts when they suck?
Because the top management are all ex-government insiders and exceedingly well-connected.
Because they have a huge stable of people people with security clearances. Having a clearance is FAR more important in government work than, say, actual talent
Think they'd incorporate any easter eggs into this thing?
No, but if it's like other Leapfrog products, it will refuse to say "dirty" words. My son has an Alphabet Pal from leapfrog. When you have it in phoenetic mode, it will say "heeheehee, that tickles!" if you try and make it drop the F-bomb.
Heh. I'll wind up buying two... one for the kid to play with, and one for me to hack. My wife gets upset with me when I start disassembling the kids toys.
The best part about having kids is you get to buy toys... and play with them. I'm eagerly awaiting the day my boy graduates to "grown up" legos (duplo and megablocks just aren't the same).
The whole idea of LeapPad and similar educational toys is it makes learning fun.
My stepdaughter (7) is a television junkie (thanks to idiot father, who has primary custody), and LeapPad is great for her because it's about the only way she'll voluntarily read the written word. LeapPad gives instant feedback and immediate gratification, which is a big plus for a child who doesn't have a lot of confidence in her reading skills.
Fortunately, my son (Just turned 2) dosen't need any incentive to read -- he just grabs a book and sits down on my lap until I read it to him. Even still, we have numerous Leapfrog toys which he plays with constantly; one of his favorites is a set of talking alphabet refrigerator magnets, which undoubtably contributed to him knowing the entire alphabet before he was two. A fun toy which reinforces the lessons you teach your kids is fantastic for a parent. (The important word here is REINFORCE. Don't expect a learning toy to teach your child for you while you sit on your ass watching pro wrestling.)
Personally, I insure [that noone can read my emails after I die] by hosting my own email server for any address that I use for personal correspondence The only thing that sits on my ISP email server are garbage collecting accounts, like my slashdot addy. And yes, my personal server is as secure as I can make it, including auto-overwrite of sensitive files and logs if not disabled every insert time here.
Jeeze, you're paranoid. Actually, if anything, having practically ENSURES that your estate will have your emails after you die -- because you own the physical hardware on which the email resides, it's indisputably part of your estate, so your next-of-kin (or whoever is excutor of your estate) will have physical access to the box.
Even if you have a cron job set up to securely wipe sensitive filesystems & devices (say/home,/var, and possibly/tmp and swap) every N days unless you manually intervene, you can still be defeated by a power failure or by someone pulling the plug. Boot from a live cd or mount the hard drive in another system and your auto-wipe has been defeated. Hope those files are encrypted!
I know the Secret Service doesn't like to be confused with the Schutzstaffel, even though their initials and their past actions lend some credence to such a comparison.
WTF do they need the contents of his safe deposit box for?
It's his ESTATE. The executor of the estate has the LEGAL DUTY to wind up the affairs of the deceased. The email may contain important information vital to carry out this duty. (EG, electronic account statements from creditors)
There is a SHITLOAD of precedent regarding how the personal effects of a dead person should be handled. Estate law (under English Common Law, on which US estate law is based) has precedents going back to *at least* the Middle Ages.
IANAL, but I believe the answer is "yes". I believe that the executor of the estate has full power of attorney for the deceased; in the eyes of the law the executor *is* the dead person in many regards.
What happens to medical records and lawyer confidentiality after death?
They belong to the estate and the executor has (or can gain) access to them, at least in some circumstances. This is vital in, for example, the case where someone died of medical malpractice, or when a person died in the middle of an ongoing lawsuit.
I'd imagine that the sanctity of the confessional would still be honoured, but that's a different basket of fish.
While the penitent/confessor relationship is recognized as a priviliged communication and therefore protected against compulsory disclosure in a Court of law, AFIK there is no *secular* injunction against a Priest disclosing what the deceased said in the confessional. The primary protection of the Confessional is ecclesiastical, not secular. A Catholic Priest who violated the confessional would be defrocked (and probably excommunicated) by the Church; I assume an (Russian|Greek|Eastern) Orthodox priest would face a similar punishment. I am not aware of any Protestant sect which practices Confession, so the issue wouldn't arise for them.
Parents have no rights to my privacy unless willed to them after I'm 18.
Wrong. If you die intestate (without a will), your estate automatically goes to your closest surviving relative(s) by default.
The exact order of inheritence (spouse, children, parents, siblings, etc) varies from state to state, but it's pretty safe to say that if you're an only child and don't have a spouse or children, your parents will have the legal right to take control of your possessions after you die unless you've explicitly willed it to someone else.
If you don't want any of your relatives to inherit your estate, you MUST have a will, and even then they can constest it. Blood relations count for A LOT in estate cases
By establishing a service like this (storage of your email) as a property, we're creating a decidedly difficult legal knot.
How so? How is email locked away on a server any different than physical letters locked away in a safety deposit box? A person's estate indisputably has access to the latter, and I see no reason why the same principle wouldn't apply to the former.
As far as I can tell here, the issue is whether or not the clause in Yahoo's TOS agreement which terminates the account on the death of the subscriber is legal or not. Just because you put something in a contract doesn't automatically make it legal or enforcable.
Someone at Yahoo is just being a dick, IMHO. Not giving a greiving parent access to their dead child's email is just bloody insensitive.
Emails are frequently subpoenaed in divorce cases, which is unsuprising since many divorces are initiated because of infidelity and email often has evidence of this.
(Face it, since [the SS agent] didn't encrypt the documents and passed them over a monitorable network he's partially responsible.)
I'd say the agent is entirely responsible. Even if the system hadn't been hacked, the email was still going through networks servers not controlled by the SS. The administrators of those systems can legitimately monitor anything that happens on them.
[He] even knew the agency was monitoring his own Microsoft ICQ chat account
Come on, how frelling stupid can you be? You've got hard intel that the opposition is on to you and you don't shut down your operation? At the very least you crank up your operational security a notch or ten in that situation.
The guy crossed the line when he went to sell personal information to identity theives. Looking at famous people's candid photos is pretty harmless (as long as he's not selling them to some tabloid or spreading them around). Reading the SS's email is the ultimate in poetic justice; they should be more aware of just how insecure email is than just about anyone. It's inexcuable for the frelling SS to have been sending sensitive documents around in unencrypted emails.
In the end, it sounds like the guy got caught because of his own hubris. Which, when you think about it, is typical... criminals get busted not because the cops are spectacuarly competant, but because they run their mouths off.
Print the serial number of the device on the case of the box, use it as the default password
Uh huh. Can you say "tech support nightmare"? Not only that, it would mean you'd have to create one-off firmware for each and every unit. Every router I've ever used has a factory default password which gets used when you do a hardware reset, and for good reason: the drool monkeys who can't set the clock on their VCR are buying network gear and trying to make it work. The clueless tier 1 tech support goobers need to have a SIMPLE idiot-proof script they can read to the drool monkeys to get them back up and running when they inevitably dork things up.
Remember we're talking about the kind of end-users who set their password to their kids birthday and STILL manage to forget it. Actually expecting them to accurately transcribe a 20 digit alphanumeric string off the box (which they probably threw away immediately, along with the manual) is asking a bit much, and getting them to read the RIGHT number off a sticker on the unit (which likely has a half-dozen different numbers on it)
But I doubt your typical video shop was ever renting more than a few porn films a week compared to dozens of copies of Rocky, Terminator, Tron, The Breakfast Club, Wierd Science, Top Gun, etc, etc
After the big chains (Blockbuster, Hollywood) gobbled up most of the independent video rental places, the few surviving independents were hard-pressed to survive. The only way for them to do that is to offer stuff Blockbuster doesn't carry, and for the most part that is Porn.
According to a former girlfriend, who worked for an independent video store, porn accounted for over 50% of their rentals. The other half was mostly niche/non-mainstream stuff which Blockbuster didn't have a good selection of -- anime, arthouse stuff, and foreign films.
Before Blockbuster opened, people would come in and get a "regular" movie or two, and maybe a porno. After Blockbuster opened, the customres would just get the porn, because they were getting the new releases at Blockbuster (and blockbuster doesn't rent porn).
It's hard for an independent to compete on new releases, when BB is getting 50+ copies of every movie [at a hefty discount] and the independent can afford maybe 5 copies [at full price].
but I cannot find a good excuse for recompiling (for production machines) anyway
I've got two:
Because you have hardware which isn't supported by the stock kernel.
Performance.
The SATA controller in one of my boxes flat out refuses to work with the stock RedHat kernel; the ONLY way I can get it to work is to compile a custom kernel. I'm sure this isn't a unique situation. The distros try to support the broadest range of hardware that they can, but sometimes you get in the situation where an option that's either needed or harmless on 99% of the machines out there breaks the other 1%.
The second reason to compile a custom kernel is for performance. A stock distro kernel is designed to support the widest range of hardware possible, so it makes a lot of compromises which might not be optimal for your environment. When you compile a custom kernel, you only need to compile in support for your actual hardware and only the features you actually use. Also, you can use a more aggressive set of compiler optimizations than the stock kernel uses.
Sorry you haven't had the opportunity (yet) to raise children, and watch them blossom with positive role models of father and mother
I am a parent; my wife and I are raising an active, intelligent, and well adjusted son.
I also get to see first-hand the detrimental effect my wife's (extremely negative, hate-filled, misogynistic) ex-husband has had on my stepdaughter while she has been in his custody.
But, by definition, a homosexual cannot "marry" a same-sex partner, any more than a bicycle can defecate.
Apples and oranges. "Marriage" describes several different legal and religious institutions; "Bicycle" refers to a specific class of mechanical contrivance.
One valid definition is "The Christian sacrement of Marriage". You are correct that a person cannot perform the Christian sacrement of Marriage with a person of the same gender, at least in mainstream Christian churches. What happens inside a church is none of the government's business.
However, another entirely valid definition of marriage is "The secular recognition that an enduring relationship exists between two or more people, which is granted certian special protections under the law". This kind of "marriage" is completely independent of Christian "marriage", and it is this definition of marriage which is at issue here.
If I name my cat "bicycle", then I can say in all truthfulness that "a bicycle can deficate". Likewise, a significantly skilled engineer could design a bicycle which expelled fecal matter occasionally.
One need not be a "homophobe" to have serious reservations about the ethics of homosexual practice
There's nothing unethical about two or more adults falling in love with each other and deciding to spend the rest of their lives together in a committed relationship. There is nothing unethical about two or more consenting adults satisfying one another's sexual desires.
It's none of your business what other people do in the privacy of their bedrooms, nor do you have the right to dictate whom they chose to love or live with. It is unethical to force other people to stop doing something which does not harm anyone merely because it goes against your superstitions.
One need not be a "homophobe" to feel that marriage is an institution designed to provide for the having and rearing of children.
Marriage is about more than raising children. It's about people loving each other and taking care of each other. It's also a legal institution that conveys significant financial benefits. Finally, it *can* also be a religious sacriment.
Many hetrosexual married couples chose not to have kids. Are they "violating the sanctity of marriage"? (They are, after all, disobeying God's commandment to "be fruitful and multiply"). Is a civil marriage ceremony performed by a justice of the peace, which does not once mention the word "God" any less valid than a traditional Church wedding?
Many committed homosexual couples chose to raise children, via adoption, surrogates, or artificial means. Who the FUCK are you to say they aren't good parents, or to say that they can't love one another and enjoy the same legal protections as every other family?
A two-parent, heterosexaul household provides children with the best opportunity of developing positive relationships with men AND women
Bullshit. Heterosexuality does not somehow magically make you a good parent or give you the ability to have positive relationships with people. There are plenty of heterosexual couples who have hate-filled, abusive relationships; this kind of home environment is (provably) FAR worse for a kid than a loving, nurturing environment where both parents happen to be of the same gender.
You also seem to forget that monogamy is NOT the only historical and traditional form of marriage. Multiple-partner marriages have existed since the dawn of time in innumerable forms and are still recognized by many religions and legal systems.
There are other legitimate forms of marrige besides the one defined in Christian Bible. Stop trying to force others to adopt your religion. If your God actually exists and he doesn't approve, then it's HIS business to punish those involved, not YOURS. Let me quote your own Bible to you, because you seem to have forgotten the words of your diety: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" and "Judge not lest ye be judged".
Are you seriously under the delusion that the status of homosexuality as a civil rights issue rather than a moral issue is settled?
"Morality", as you define it, is a religious issue. The fundimentalist Christian definition of morality is "anything that doesn't exactly fit MY narrow-minded interpretation of the Bible is immoral", and it is in this sense you appear to be using the word.
A rational, non-theological definition of "morality" is that "anything that inflicts unnecessary harm on another person is immoral". Two gay people getting married does not harm anyone, and therefore cannot be "immoral" by any rational standard.
"Morality", specifially the right to follow a moral (IE religious) system which YOU find appropriate, is indisputably a civil rights issue:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the pr
Slashdot Mirror
Q: Why don't sharks eat lawyers?
A: Professional Courtesy
Q: What's the difference between a dead possum in the road and a dead lawyer in the road?
A: There are skid marks in front of the possum.
Q: What do you call 1,000 lawyers on a sinking ship?
A: A good start Q: What's the other difference between a lawyer and a hooker?
A: There are some things a hooker won't do for money
It's not the spamming domain which is not registered, it is the spamvertized domain which is unregistred at send time.
The best part about having kids is you get to buy toys... and play with them. I'm eagerly awaiting the day my boy graduates to "grown up" legos (duplo and megablocks just aren't the same).
My stepdaughter (7) is a television junkie (thanks to idiot father, who has primary custody), and LeapPad is great for her because it's about the only way she'll voluntarily read the written word. LeapPad gives instant feedback and immediate gratification, which is a big plus for a child who doesn't have a lot of confidence in her reading skills.
Fortunately, my son (Just turned 2) dosen't need any incentive to read -- he just grabs a book and sits down on my lap until I read it to him. Even still, we have numerous Leapfrog toys which he plays with constantly; one of his favorites is a set of talking alphabet refrigerator magnets, which undoubtably contributed to him knowing the entire alphabet before he was two. A fun toy which reinforces the lessons you teach your kids is fantastic for a parent. (The important word here is REINFORCE. Don't expect a learning toy to teach your child for you while you sit on your ass watching pro wrestling.)
Even if you have a cron job set up to securely wipe sensitive filesystems & devices (say /home, /var, and possibly /tmp and swap) every N days unless you manually intervene, you can still be defeated by a power failure or by someone pulling the plug. Boot from a live cd or mount the hard drive in another system and your auto-wipe has been defeated. Hope those files are encrypted!
It's his ESTATE. The executor of the estate has the LEGAL DUTY to wind up the affairs of the deceased. The email may contain important information vital to carry out this duty. (EG, electronic account statements from creditors)
There is a SHITLOAD of precedent regarding how the personal effects of a dead person should be handled. Estate law (under English Common Law, on which US estate law is based) has precedents going back to *at least* the Middle Ages.
The exact order of inheritence (spouse, children, parents, siblings, etc) varies from state to state, but it's pretty safe to say that if you're an only child and don't have a spouse or children, your parents will have the legal right to take control of your possessions after you die unless you've explicitly willed it to someone else.
If you don't want any of your relatives to inherit your estate, you MUST have a will, and even then they can constest it. Blood relations count for A LOT in estate cases
As far as I can tell here, the issue is whether or not the clause in Yahoo's TOS agreement which terminates the account on the death of the subscriber is legal or not. Just because you put something in a contract doesn't automatically make it legal or enforcable.
Someone at Yahoo is just being a dick, IMHO. Not giving a greiving parent access to their dead child's email is just bloody insensitive.
Emails are frequently subpoenaed in divorce cases, which is unsuprising since many divorces are initiated because of infidelity and email often has evidence of this.
The guy crossed the line when he went to sell personal information to identity theives. Looking at famous people's candid photos is pretty harmless (as long as he's not selling them to some tabloid or spreading them around). Reading the SS's email is the ultimate in poetic justice; they should be more aware of just how insecure email is than just about anyone. It's inexcuable for the frelling SS to have been sending sensitive documents around in unencrypted emails.
In the end, it sounds like the guy got caught because of his own hubris. Which, when you think about it, is typical... criminals get busted not because the cops are spectacuarly competant, but because they run their mouths off.
Remember we're talking about the kind of end-users who set their password to their kids birthday and STILL manage to forget it. Actually expecting them to accurately transcribe a 20 digit alphanumeric string off the box (which they probably threw away immediately, along with the manual) is asking a bit much, and getting them to read the RIGHT number off a sticker on the unit (which likely has a half-dozen different numbers on it)
If by "Biotechnology" you mean "having to drive around in a horse-drawn buggy because all the oil is gone" then you're right on the money.
The Amish are going to have the last laugh.
According to a former girlfriend, who worked for an independent video store, porn accounted for over 50% of their rentals. The other half was mostly niche/non-mainstream stuff which Blockbuster didn't have a good selection of -- anime, arthouse stuff, and foreign films.
Before Blockbuster opened, people would come in and get a "regular" movie or two, and maybe a porno. After Blockbuster opened, the customres would just get the porn, because they were getting the new releases at Blockbuster (and blockbuster doesn't rent porn).
It's hard for an independent to compete on new releases, when BB is getting 50+ copies of every movie [at a hefty discount] and the independent can afford maybe 5 copies [at full price].
- Because you have hardware which isn't supported by the stock kernel.
- Performance.
The SATA controller in one of my boxes flat out refuses to work with the stock RedHat kernel; the ONLY way I can get it to work is to compile a custom kernel. I'm sure this isn't a unique situation. The distros try to support the broadest range of hardware that they can, but sometimes you get in the situation where an option that's either needed or harmless on 99% of the machines out there breaks the other 1%.The second reason to compile a custom kernel is for performance. A stock distro kernel is designed to support the widest range of hardware possible, so it makes a lot of compromises which might not be optimal for your environment. When you compile a custom kernel, you only need to compile in support for your actual hardware and only the features you actually use. Also, you can use a more aggressive set of compiler optimizations than the stock kernel uses.
I also get to see first-hand the detrimental effect my wife's (extremely negative, hate-filled, misogynistic) ex-husband has had on my stepdaughter while she has been in his custody.
One valid definition is "The Christian sacrement of Marriage". You are correct that a person cannot perform the Christian sacrement of Marriage with a person of the same gender, at least in mainstream Christian churches. What happens inside a church is none of the government's business.
However, another entirely valid definition of marriage is "The secular recognition that an enduring relationship exists between two or more people, which is granted certian special protections under the law". This kind of "marriage" is completely independent of Christian "marriage", and it is this definition of marriage which is at issue here.
If I name my cat "bicycle", then I can say in all truthfulness that "a bicycle can deficate". Likewise, a significantly skilled engineer could design a bicycle which expelled fecal matter occasionally.
There's nothing unethical about two or more adults falling in love with each other and deciding to spend the rest of their lives together in a committed relationship. There is nothing unethical about two or more consenting adults satisfying one another's sexual desires.
It's none of your business what other people do in the privacy of their bedrooms, nor do you have the right to dictate whom they chose to love or live with. It is unethical to force other people to stop doing something which does not harm anyone merely because it goes against your superstitions.
Marriage is about more than raising children. It's about people loving each other and taking care of each other. It's also a legal institution that conveys significant financial benefits. Finally, it *can* also be a religious sacriment.
Many hetrosexual married couples chose not to have kids. Are they "violating the sanctity of marriage"? (They are, after all, disobeying God's commandment to "be fruitful and multiply"). Is a civil marriage ceremony performed by a justice of the peace, which does not once mention the word "God" any less valid than a traditional Church wedding?
Many committed homosexual couples chose to raise children, via adoption, surrogates, or artificial means. Who the FUCK are you to say they aren't good parents, or to say that they can't love one another and enjoy the same legal protections as every other family?
Bullshit. Heterosexuality does not somehow magically make you a good parent or give you the ability to have positive relationships with people. There are plenty of heterosexual couples who have hate-filled, abusive relationships; this kind of home environment is (provably) FAR worse for a kid than a loving, nurturing environment where both parents happen to be of the same gender.
You also seem to forget that monogamy is NOT the only historical and traditional form of marriage. Multiple-partner marriages have existed since the dawn of time in innumerable forms and are still recognized by many religions and legal systems.
There are other legitimate forms of marrige besides the one defined in Christian Bible. Stop trying to force others to adopt your religion. If your God actually exists and he doesn't approve, then it's HIS business to punish those involved, not YOURS. Let me quote your own Bible to you, because you seem to have forgotten the words of your diety: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" and "Judge not lest ye be judged".
"Morality", as you define it, is a religious issue. The fundimentalist Christian definition of morality is "anything that doesn't exactly fit MY narrow-minded interpretation of the Bible is immoral", and it is in this sense you appear to be using the word.
A rational, non-theological definition of "morality" is that "anything that inflicts unnecessary harm on another person is immoral". Two gay people getting married does not harm anyone, and therefore cannot be "immoral" by any rational standard.
"Morality", specifially the right to follow a moral (IE religious) system which YOU find appropriate, is indisputably a civil rights issue: