Money laundering outfits like this rarely take down just criminals. There are legitimate reasons for currency conversion, etc., that both companies and private individuals engage in. Money laundering works by throwing good money in with bad and obfusciating which is which;
Undoubtedly some innocents will be harmed by this draconian action. But don't let that scare you off getting righteous about the whole affair. In other news, your bank stole nearly killed the world economy, and cost trillions upon trillions in a global recession triggered by greed. But it's okay -- they bought the laws and legislators they later used to screw everyone over; This company's main problem is they didn't pay in enough in campaign contributions.
Oy, what did I tell you about telling on me in public? Not fair!
You checked the box at your last doctor's visit that allowed your clinic to share your personal, non-identifying information about your condition for research purposes. And since you have now publicly disclosed your medical condition, not me, we can now use your comment and likeness in a public awareness campaign we're launching in your area on male impotence.
I hear ya' Big Pharma. In order to acknowledge your potential ownership of this IP and the related virus I would like to hereby volunteer to force feed it to you with a rusty funnel until you successfully recall the "share and share alike" lesson you should have learned in pre-school.
I have a patent on that form of intra-oral medication delivery and since I haven't licensed it for commercial production, you'll owe me $150,000 per rusty funnel used so far by you, henceforce referred to as "John 'Rusty Funnel' Doe, Defendant", $15 million for the rights to use the rusty funnel -- a 1 year limited, non-exclusive license, treble the amount of any profits incurred through the use of the rusty funnel intra-oral delivery system, and $150 million in legal fees due to us being forced to defend our intellectual property.
Fine, you knuckleheads want to claim ownership? How about some wrongful death suits?
"You think that one of the biggest, most powerful companies in America is secretly a profiteer who spends his nights beating the tar out of citizens in court... and your plan... is to blackmail this company? Good luck." -- Morgan Freeman
I know Slashdot is a US centric site but please remember that there are many non-native-US-English speakers reading it as well.
There's a website for that problem. And just so we're clear; There's a lot of lingo us Americans don't understand. Calling gas "petrol", for example, or a semitruck a "lorry". Seems just a bit hinky, if you ask me. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to shove off and go do the needful somewhere.
You freeloaders should be ashamed. It takes a lot of money to do that kind of research, and all these poor, defenseless companies are doing is protecting their investment by patenting the genes they discovered so if and when they choose to further develop it, they will make a reasonable perfectly reasonable 3000% profit on every pill sold.
Not only that, but I think you're all forgetting a very important point here: This virus kills quickly, and any treatment would only last a few days. Where's the profit in that? Sure, it'll kill you, but you as a patient are worth far less than the guy with the limp dick and a few extra bucks to eat pills to make him hard again.
If you want the situation to change, you need to get sick with diseases that are treatable but long-term. We're simply not interested in short-term illness, regardless of whether it kills you or not. Any cures or treatments for a short-term illness are purely accidental and you should be thankful we even bothered to develop it and market it! Ungrateful poor people... jeez. Why can't you all just dry up and die?
Yours Truly,
Big Pharma
P.S. I know you're taking Ritalin your friend gave you to do better on the finals. Contact me privately and I can hook you up with a doctor of questionable repute who will give you your very own legal script. Remember: Unless it comes from Big Pharma, it's a Bad Drug(tm).
Maybe starwars nerds have no problem with the wide assortment of whimisically named technology in the movies, but engineering nerds like myself are somewhat annoyed by the totally counterintuitive and useless name of 's-foil', which only a starwars nerd would recognize. For the rest of the world, the engineering term wings are a better description. Of course, in about 30 seconds, my computer's going to catch fire and begin vomitting angry noises as it's assaulted by millions of angry Lucas-lovers beating their star wars technical manuals and screaming, but hey. My nerdiness is no less valid than theirs...
In short, this malware threat isnÃ(TM)t one that you will likely be hit with, but it is an interesting example of how Android malware is evolving.
For suitably uninteresting values of 'you', perhaps. But standing at a bus stop and spotting someone sharply-dressed, I could ask to use their phone to make a quick call for [insert excuse here], and in a few seconds, install similar malware.
A few weeks later, all your bank accounts zero. Do you remember me?
Those are not 'arguments'. Those are statements, and the apparent unanimity you highlight emphasizes just how much they are NOT arguments at all, but blind, popular adoration on par with Bieber fever.
If all those awards were granted based on popularity, you might have a point. But these aren't just committees of private people, but governments offering things like honorary citizenship and awards that are only rarely handed out, and the people handing them out vet it carefully.
You're saying that entire branches of major world governments have "bieber fever". I'm sorry, but that's an incredibly stupid thing to say. I'm not even going to dignify the rest of your post with further commentary -- it's sufficient to point out that all you're doing is sticking your fingers in your ear and going "NYAAAAAAH!" without a lick of actual thought beforehand.
The fact that there was virtually no controversy over these events is not evidence that they didn't happen.
Everyone moderating me down on these later replies, because if there's one thing us Americans love more than sex, it's watching famous people get cut to pieces. But for your statements to be true, thousands of people who's credibility is at stake if they get it wrong vetted this person and found no problems. She didn't get a Nobel Peace Prize for eating babies and screaming "SATAN!"... she got it for improving the lives of millions.
Now you can pitch your conspiracy theory like everyone else here, and collect mod points from the "We Love Watching Bigger People Than Us Fall" crowd, or you can look at this objectively: There's no way so many people could look at her life and so few find a problem.
We laugh when people deny climate change here and call them retarded, but the moment someone says someone who was fiercely religious has done real and considerable good, it's grab the pitch forks and haraaaaaah...
But hey, on the bright side, I bet you've gotten fewer creepy marriage proposals through here than I have.
You're right. I just get creepy descriptions of lewd sexual acts and rape threats; Only a couple marriage proposals.
And there's always the mysterious anonymous butt pirate, but given the rate of such posts I'm starting to wonder if there's only one guy in the entire world who does that, sort of like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.
Oh we have that here. There used to be Thog, who always posted in all caps and pretended to be a caveman. He was the reason for the "lameness" filters you sometimes encounter when trying to post. Then there was the 'natalie portman' and 'hot grits' puberty that slashdot went through on its way to full fledged "ur gay" maturity...
Hey guys, Einstein just called me using GravePhone(tm) and he had the following to say:
"Okay, maybe God does play dice, but I still stand by the law of conservation. God doesn't just make shit up. Now if you'll excuse me, Aristotle wants some one on one on the basketball court."
There's a difference between "defending someone's right to say something" and arguing that they are a model human being.
Hey, I'm glad you figured that out man. But I'm not arguing she's a model human being... Those twenty-odd rewards, public opinion polls, and numerous committees and governments are arguing she's a model human being are.
Pointing out that some governments acted worse than Mother Teresa doesn't elevate Mother Teresa into a model human being. That's a cheap tactic, actually.
See, I'm a [wo]man of simple tastes. I like dynamite and gunpowder and gasoline. Do you know what all these things have in common? They're cheap.... And effective.
If I went and robbed my neighbor and people blamed me for doing it, it would be a poor arguing tactic to start pointing out other people (serial murderers, etc) who are worse than me that "everybody should be pointing the finger at".
Oh look, a strawman. Okay, let me point out the epic fail of you here:
Scenario A: A government neglects its citizens medical care and the citizens are too poor to afford it. Someone steps in to provide 'some' medical care.
Scenario B: You steal from some citizens. The government catches you. You point to serial murderers and say "Well, what about them?"
Can you spot the difference?
As to the rest, you're attacking her beliefs, and her inaction, against a backdrop of a great many people not acting as well -- and somehow trying to say that defeats or minimizes all the good she did. That is a perverse belief and behavior.
But, um, yeah, I honestly thought that post was a pretty direct cruising-for-a-bruising affair. Congrats on getting it modded up at all!
I've been irritated at the moderator/detractors lately: They love modding me 'overrated', or taking something that's funny and modding it flamebait/troll, knowing full well someone will come along and mark it funny again. They're trying to bleed me of karma because they can't attack what I'm saying, but they can make me suffer for it just the same. AH! There's a girl here! And she's being smart, and snarky, and... and... mod down! mod down! ABORT! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIIIeeeee..... *head asplodes* *shrugs* Just further proof that the hipsters have finally made landing here as well. Things that become popular invariably bring intolerance and bigotry with them... and our community is no exception.:(
Of all the things you say you can cite about this, you choose something with the words "futile democracy" and "the curse" in it? Do I even need to look at it to know it's biased?
But in many less secular societies,
Where, exactly, are you going with this? So what if some people think that; It doesn't make it right. You even say so. So at best this is a populist argument.
Also, we do actually need the occasional contrarian. Our democracy is weak enough without further deference to the strong, wealthy and powerful! Also, to be a "troll", it's usually implicit that the argument itself is weak. I've not yet seen Hitchens lose a debate.
He lost to Death. I have yet to see anyone win that argument. And I get that you're some kind of Hitchens fan, but maybe he won every last debate he had... but he lost in the court of public opinion. Miserably. This woman won dozens of awards and was loved by millions. Hitchens was a social malcontent whose only claim to fame was being an irritating thorn in famous people's asses... and at that, only a mediocre fame.
And democracy will survive just fine on the facts; We don't need to carve out special groups to hold above criticism -- strong, weak, rich, poor, powerful, weak... what matters in a democracy is the truth, and having discourse. If you think it's gotten "weak", then you either need to re-examine what you consider democracy, consider that maybe democracy itself is fundamentally flawed, or that there is insufficient participation.
Mother Theresa would no doubt have printed a medical tool for removing IUDs.
Which would have been totally useless since most of the countries and places she setup shop didn't have access to birth control to begin with. It'd be like me building a car in the middle of a desert. Okay, now I have a car. Cool. Now, what about the roads? Or fuel? Bread, on the other hand, is universal: No matter what your situation, bread is useful. Bread is life. Especially in places where she worked... nevermind the religious connotations of giving bread to the poor.
But she did, in fact, preside over awful standards of care, people were denied access to medical treatment, and suffering was not alleviated, because it was considered "spiritually noble".
I have previously looked into those allegations. While she may have believed "suffering is good for the soul," it wasn't so much a denial of pain medication as a lack of access to them. Many of these clinics that were setup were in places where access to any medical care was absent.
MT also campaigned agains family planning and contraception.
Which, as someone who isn't a medical professional, I have no special problem with. I disagree with it philosophically, but I defend her right to say it.
...keeping people in poverty and away from real medical care.
You should point the finger at the governments that turned a blind eye to the suffering of their own people, not MT's attempts to provide the most basic of medical care to an otherwise totally neglected population.
Also, if you want to take issue with Hitchens,I don't really think you should imply that Henry Kissinger was among the better specimens of humanity!
I implied nothing, I simply pointed out that he has an appetite for famous people, the more famous the better.
our "exhilaration" quote is one example... I checked the context of this, and while I don't find it in good taste, it's not an uncommon description of how some people feel at the start of a war, even those on the good side.
Yes, but my point was this man has made a career out of being a malcontent, a contrarian, and going after celebrities and political positions because he can get a rise out of people. He's just coated this juvenile behavior in a veneer of intellectualism, but he is essentially a troll.
(You might consider imagining yourself as Churchill, at the moment when Hitler invaded Poland - a rather strange mix of gloom at the inevitable impending tragedy, combined with some excitement that, finally, because the evil thing has become so bad, that the world can delay acting no longer and that it will stand up and fight.)
Churchill would have been stomped out of existance if not for the attack on Pearl Harbor drawing the United States into the war. Without our support, Europe would have fallen, and there's nothing exhilerating about that possibility. Were in I in Churchill's position, yes, I would have made the same bold statements, but privately, I would have been shitting bricks.
Slashdot Mirror
So now they know how their victims feel?
Money laundering outfits like this rarely take down just criminals. There are legitimate reasons for currency conversion, etc., that both companies and private individuals engage in. Money laundering works by throwing good money in with bad and obfusciating which is which;
Undoubtedly some innocents will be harmed by this draconian action. But don't let that scare you off getting righteous about the whole affair. In other news, your bank stole nearly killed the world economy, and cost trillions upon trillions in a global recession triggered by greed. But it's okay -- they bought the laws and legislators they later used to screw everyone over; This company's main problem is they didn't pay in enough in campaign contributions.
I'm only half-joking. :/
Oy, what did I tell you about telling on me in public? Not fair!
You checked the box at your last doctor's visit that allowed your clinic to share your personal, non-identifying information about your condition for research purposes. And since you have now publicly disclosed your medical condition, not me, we can now use your comment and likeness in a public awareness campaign we're launching in your area on male impotence.
Yours truly,
Big Pharma
I hear ya' Big Pharma. In order to acknowledge your potential ownership of this IP and the related virus I would like to hereby volunteer to force feed it to you with a rusty funnel until you successfully recall the "share and share alike" lesson you should have learned in pre-school.
I have a patent on that form of intra-oral medication delivery and since I haven't licensed it for commercial production, you'll owe me $150,000 per rusty funnel used so far by you, henceforce referred to as "John 'Rusty Funnel' Doe, Defendant", $15 million for the rights to use the rusty funnel -- a 1 year limited, non-exclusive license, treble the amount of any profits incurred through the use of the rusty funnel intra-oral delivery system, and $150 million in legal fees due to us being forced to defend our intellectual property.
Fine, you knuckleheads want to claim ownership? How about some wrongful death suits?
"You think that one of the biggest, most powerful companies in America is secretly a profiteer who spends his nights beating the tar out of citizens in court... and your plan... is to blackmail this company? Good luck." -- Morgan Freeman
I know Slashdot is a US centric site but please remember that there are many non-native-US-English speakers reading it as well.
There's a website for that problem. And just so we're clear; There's a lot of lingo us Americans don't understand. Calling gas "petrol", for example, or a semitruck a "lorry". Seems just a bit hinky, if you ask me. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to shove off and go do the needful somewhere.
You freeloaders should be ashamed. It takes a lot of money to do that kind of research, and all these poor, defenseless companies are doing is protecting their investment by patenting the genes they discovered so if and when they choose to further develop it, they will make a reasonable perfectly reasonable 3000% profit on every pill sold.
Not only that, but I think you're all forgetting a very important point here: This virus kills quickly, and any treatment would only last a few days. Where's the profit in that? Sure, it'll kill you, but you as a patient are worth far less than the guy with the limp dick and a few extra bucks to eat pills to make him hard again.
If you want the situation to change, you need to get sick with diseases that are treatable but long-term. We're simply not interested in short-term illness, regardless of whether it kills you or not. Any cures or treatments for a short-term illness are purely accidental and you should be thankful we even bothered to develop it and market it! Ungrateful poor people... jeez. Why can't you all just dry up and die?
Yours Truly,
Big Pharma
P.S. I know you're taking Ritalin your friend gave you to do better on the finals. Contact me privately and I can hook you up with a doctor of questionable repute who will give you your very own legal script. Remember: Unless it comes from Big Pharma, it's a Bad Drug(tm).
They would be wings if their purpose was the generation of lift. It's not, so they're not.
So during the Battle of Hoth when they were seen in atmospheric flight... they were purely ornamental?
Nerds call them S-foils.
Maybe starwars nerds have no problem with the wide assortment of whimisically named technology in the movies, but engineering nerds like myself are somewhat annoyed by the totally counterintuitive and useless name of 's-foil', which only a starwars nerd would recognize. For the rest of the world, the engineering term wings are a better description. Of course, in about 30 seconds, my computer's going to catch fire and begin vomitting angry noises as it's assaulted by millions of angry Lucas-lovers beating their star wars technical manuals and screaming, but hey. My nerdiness is no less valid than theirs...
And I say they're WINGS.
That Intelligent Designer is a crafty one! You'll never best his cockroaches!
I see your intelligently designed cockroaches, and raise you intelligently designed science.
nonsense. the force is holding this one together.
I see no duct tape in the pictures. I think you're mistaken.
I think you mean S-foils.You can turn in your nerd card at the door.
"S-foils, also known as Strike foils or Stability foils, and on occasion as X-foils,[1] were movable wings..."
You can turn in your engineering card at the door.
The wings don't lock into the attack position. My nerd rage knows no bounds.
In short, this malware threat isnÃ(TM)t one that you will likely be hit with, but it is an interesting example of how Android malware is evolving.
For suitably uninteresting values of 'you', perhaps. But standing at a bus stop and spotting someone sharply-dressed, I could ask to use their phone to make a quick call for [insert excuse here], and in a few seconds, install similar malware.
A few weeks later, all your bank accounts zero. Do you remember me?
...and now I'm wondering how old a thread has to be before people with mod points leave it for dead.
You and me both. You want my advice? Milk it for everything it's worth. You'll be able to coast on that karma for months. :D
Nobody's asked the tortoises how they feel about it."
I imagine they're feeling rather flat. How does Google take these 'street view' pics again?
Those are not 'arguments'. Those are statements, and the apparent unanimity you highlight emphasizes just how much they are NOT arguments at all, but blind, popular adoration on par with Bieber fever.
If all those awards were granted based on popularity, you might have a point. But these aren't just committees of private people, but governments offering things like honorary citizenship and awards that are only rarely handed out, and the people handing them out vet it carefully.
You're saying that entire branches of major world governments have "bieber fever". I'm sorry, but that's an incredibly stupid thing to say. I'm not even going to dignify the rest of your post with further commentary -- it's sufficient to point out that all you're doing is sticking your fingers in your ear and going "NYAAAAAAH!" without a lick of actual thought beforehand.
More to the point, however, they would still be much better basketball players.
You guys really over-thought this. I picked Aristotle because he's a famous scientist. No other reason.
The fact that there was virtually no controversy over these events is not evidence that they didn't happen.
Everyone moderating me down on these later replies, because if there's one thing us Americans love more than sex, it's watching famous people get cut to pieces. But for your statements to be true, thousands of people who's credibility is at stake if they get it wrong vetted this person and found no problems. She didn't get a Nobel Peace Prize for eating babies and screaming "SATAN!" ... she got it for improving the lives of millions.
Now you can pitch your conspiracy theory like everyone else here, and collect mod points from the "We Love Watching Bigger People Than Us Fall" crowd, or you can look at this objectively: There's no way so many people could look at her life and so few find a problem.
We laugh when people deny climate change here and call them retarded, but the moment someone says someone who was fiercely religious has done real and considerable good, it's grab the pitch forks and haraaaaaah...
Who's wearing the tinfoil hats now, mmm?
But hey, on the bright side, I bet you've gotten fewer creepy marriage proposals through here than I have.
You're right. I just get creepy descriptions of lewd sexual acts and rape threats; Only a couple marriage proposals.
And there's always the mysterious anonymous butt pirate, but given the rate of such posts I'm starting to wonder if there's only one guy in the entire world who does that, sort of like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.
Oh we have that here. There used to be Thog, who always posted in all caps and pretended to be a caveman. He was the reason for the "lameness" filters you sometimes encounter when trying to post. Then there was the 'natalie portman' and 'hot grits' puberty that slashdot went through on its way to full fledged "ur gay" maturity...
Hey guys, Einstein just called me using GravePhone(tm) and he had the following to say:
"Okay, maybe God does play dice, but I still stand by the law of conservation. God doesn't just make shit up. Now if you'll excuse me, Aristotle wants some one on one on the basketball court."
There's a difference between "defending someone's right to say something" and arguing that they are a model human being.
Hey, I'm glad you figured that out man. But I'm not arguing she's a model human being... Those twenty-odd rewards, public opinion polls, and numerous committees and governments are arguing she's a model human being are.
Pointing out that some governments acted worse than Mother Teresa doesn't elevate Mother Teresa into a model human being. That's a cheap tactic, actually.
See, I'm a [wo]man of simple tastes. I like dynamite and gunpowder and gasoline. Do you know what all these things have in common? They're cheap. ... And effective.
If I went and robbed my neighbor and people blamed me for doing it, it would be a poor arguing tactic to start pointing out other people (serial murderers, etc) who are worse than me that "everybody should be pointing the finger at".
Oh look, a strawman. Okay, let me point out the epic fail of you here:
Scenario A: A government neglects its citizens medical care and the citizens are too poor to afford it. Someone steps in to provide 'some' medical care.
Scenario B: You steal from some citizens. The government catches you. You point to serial murderers and say "Well, what about them?"
Can you spot the difference?
As to the rest, you're attacking her beliefs, and her inaction, against a backdrop of a great many people not acting as well -- and somehow trying to say that defeats or minimizes all the good she did. That is a perverse belief and behavior.
But, um, yeah, I honestly thought that post was a pretty direct cruising-for-a-bruising affair. Congrats on getting it modded up at all!
I've been irritated at the moderator/detractors lately: They love modding me 'overrated', or taking something that's funny and modding it flamebait/troll, knowing full well someone will come along and mark it funny again. They're trying to bleed me of karma because they can't attack what I'm saying, but they can make me suffer for it just the same. AH! There's a girl here! And she's being smart, and snarky, and... and... mod down! mod down! ABORT! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIIIeeeee..... *head asplodes* *shrugs* Just further proof that the hipsters have finally made landing here as well. Things that become popular invariably bring intolerance and bigotry with them... and our community is no exception. :(
Another example: http://futiledemocracy.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/the-curse-of-mother-theresa/
Of all the things you say you can cite about this, you choose something with the words "futile democracy" and "the curse" in it? Do I even need to look at it to know it's biased?
But in many less secular societies,
Where, exactly, are you going with this? So what if some people think that; It doesn't make it right. You even say so. So at best this is a populist argument.
Also, we do actually need the occasional contrarian. Our democracy is weak enough without further deference to the strong, wealthy and powerful! Also, to be a "troll", it's usually implicit that the argument itself is weak. I've not yet seen Hitchens lose a debate.
He lost to Death. I have yet to see anyone win that argument. And I get that you're some kind of Hitchens fan, but maybe he won every last debate he had... but he lost in the court of public opinion. Miserably. This woman won dozens of awards and was loved by millions. Hitchens was a social malcontent whose only claim to fame was being an irritating thorn in famous people's asses... and at that, only a mediocre fame.
And democracy will survive just fine on the facts; We don't need to carve out special groups to hold above criticism -- strong, weak, rich, poor, powerful, weak... what matters in a democracy is the truth, and having discourse. If you think it's gotten "weak", then you either need to re-examine what you consider democracy, consider that maybe democracy itself is fundamentally flawed, or that there is insufficient participation.
Mother Theresa would no doubt have printed a medical tool for removing IUDs.
Which would have been totally useless since most of the countries and places she setup shop didn't have access to birth control to begin with. It'd be like me building a car in the middle of a desert. Okay, now I have a car. Cool. Now, what about the roads? Or fuel? Bread, on the other hand, is universal: No matter what your situation, bread is useful. Bread is life. Especially in places where she worked... nevermind the religious connotations of giving bread to the poor.
But she did, in fact, preside over awful standards of care, people were denied access to medical treatment, and suffering was not alleviated, because it was considered "spiritually noble".
I have previously looked into those allegations. While she may have believed "suffering is good for the soul," it wasn't so much a denial of pain medication as a lack of access to them. Many of these clinics that were setup were in places where access to any medical care was absent.
MT also campaigned agains family planning and contraception.
Which, as someone who isn't a medical professional, I have no special problem with. I disagree with it philosophically, but I defend her right to say it.
...keeping people in poverty and away from real medical care.
You should point the finger at the governments that turned a blind eye to the suffering of their own people, not MT's attempts to provide the most basic of medical care to an otherwise totally neglected population.
Also, if you want to take issue with Hitchens,I don't really think you should imply that Henry Kissinger was among the better specimens of humanity!
I implied nothing, I simply pointed out that he has an appetite for famous people, the more famous the better.
our "exhilaration" quote is one example... I checked the context of this, and while I don't find it in good taste, it's not an uncommon description of how some people feel at the start of a war, even those on the good side.
Yes, but my point was this man has made a career out of being a malcontent, a contrarian, and going after celebrities and political positions because he can get a rise out of people. He's just coated this juvenile behavior in a veneer of intellectualism, but he is essentially a troll.
(You might consider imagining yourself as Churchill, at the moment when Hitler invaded Poland - a rather strange mix of gloom at the inevitable impending tragedy, combined with some excitement that, finally, because the evil thing has become so bad, that the world can delay acting no longer and that it will stand up and fight.)
Churchill would have been stomped out of existance if not for the attack on Pearl Harbor drawing the United States into the war. Without our support, Europe would have fallen, and there's nothing exhilerating about that possibility. Were in I in Churchill's position, yes, I would have made the same bold statements, but privately, I would have been shitting bricks.