Why wouldn't they take a fuzzy bunny seriously? People buy insurance from a talking gecko. Remember those old Wellbutrin commercials? I'm sure many thousands of people got their doctors to prescribe the medicine suggested by the happy bouncing bubble.
If I wanted technical advice and was using a virtual world, a detailed hand crafted avatar would scream knowledge to me more so than a generic pick one from the list suit and tie clone. Virtual worlds can be what we make them, it'd be such a shame if they ended up being identical to the real world. What would be the point?
Sixty slaves? Sounds like you've found a solution to our nation's unemployment crisis! I bet using people as energy sources would also help correct our obesity crisis, which would in turn lessen the effects of our current health care crisis. Returning people to work would help the financial crisis. These laborers wouldn't need much schooling, so there goes the education crisis. My goodness, it's brilliant!
Of course all these crisis could be the equivalent of the Y2k crisis.. much ado about nothing.
Remember his promise not to hire any lobbyists? One review I found shows that 30 out of 267 nominees or appointments had been lobbyists. If that's not a lie, I don't know what is.
He even came up with some sort of waiver policy because after he won the election, he suddenly decided that we just absolutely had to have lobbyists. Not to mention the need for tax cheats to run Treasury, a governor lax on border issues to run Homeland, an RIAA lawyer into justice, etc.
Also, if a swindle can be a lie.. let's not forget the most expensive lie in recent memory. "The stimulus will create jobs." Well, maybe. No one ever really explained how, especially when a lot of the money went to community groups and pork barrel spending (remember how he also said he'd refuse to sign bills with pork in them?). So then the official story became "the stimulus will create or retain jobs." That's not what we were sold, and it's impossible to measure.
For many of the speed bumps I encounter everyday, I see people brake hard just before them, then floor it on the other side. We'd save much more energy by just doing away with the speed bumps and using active enforcement to control speed instead.
Imagine if communities or businesses starting constructing speed bumps just to steal a little bit of energy?
That's not entirely accurate. There are probably very few programs exclusively for illegal aliens, but illegals do qualify for many other types of programs. Remember Obama's illegal immigrant aunt? She's living in a housing project in Boston, which is a service funded by the taxpayers. The housing authority is not allowed to ask about immigration status. This is a very common practice with handouts in MA.
It wouldn't shock me if there were services exclusively for illegals in either MA or CA. MA did hold meetings with illegals to learn how their status affects them. To me, that's a bit outrageous. ICE should have been invited.
Well that is fair and balanced, isn't it? Here's what the federal government is saying, downplaying it. Here's what's actually happening and what the victims think about it.
If they cut the story off right after the official statement it'd be a lot like a cover-up, wouldn't it? You get the official federal propaganda piece and that's it. That's actually what you want?
The punishment should fit the crime. These officers took photos that any journalist could have. Even a motorist could have stopped, gotten out, and taken the same pictures. The cops would shoo them away, but they wouldn't likely be able to confiscate the camera.
Knowing that, it seems to me a gross over reaction to say that these two officers should be destroyed for this. This didn't happen in a person's home or somewhere where there is an expectation of privacy. I might look at it differently then.
It seems to me that people are outraged over the fact these pictures were taken and distributed. Had it been anyone other than law enforcement or fire/rescue, there wouldn't be anything you could do about it. It seems like we're trying to take advantage of the fact that they were wearing a badge at the time.
They had a noble enough goal. They wanted to show the pictures to family and friends to convince them to drive safely. You would fire them and destroy their retirement for that? I don't think you're being rational. Yes, it may have been a mistake. They paid for it. I think even the suspension was even a bit harsh.
There is a strong knee-jerk phenomenon on this site. People here supposedly don't want their rights trampled on, but they're so eager to trample on other peoples' rights. These officers are doing the best they can, and had good intentions here, and you'd ruin them for that! Good grief.
What happened after the pictures got into the wild is reprehensible. What the officers did was innocent. What you're proposing is outrageous. The fact that you posted as a coward tells me you realize it too. Not willing to face some knee-jerking on your account?
Copyright violation isn't stealing. It isn't depriving anyone of any object, physical or informational, at all.
You're depriving them of reward for the hard work they put into creating the material. If someone spends a year writing a book, you think everyone just has an implicit right to possess it? Why?
Why do you get to choose what my world view should be? What you're implying is that you want to force content onto people that are otherwise uninterested. Spam it in their faces, knowing full well that it's not what they're looking for. That doesn't open someone's world view, that annoys them. That attitude alienates people even more.
School is slightly different in that their purpose is to educate. If someone is looking for books for entertainment, they should be able to filter in on things that they find entertaining. It's common sense. No one would suggest that Playboy run commercials on PBS to open that audience's world view. To me, that's the type of situation that Amazon was trying to fix (albeit in a rather poor way).
"We had to do it before someone else beat us to it" isn't much of a defense. You can justify anything that way, no matter how evil. I agree with a lot of the other posters, it was a dick move. Plain and simple. The fact that it was done by academics isn't a good excuse. You want to really impress us? Spend your time on something that we all benefit from, rather than something harmful.
This is a timely article. The state of NH is currently considering passing a law allowing cities to put up these cameras. As usual, we're a bit behind the times.
I bet playing outside would show a correlation with skin cancer, broken bones, lacerations, and abduction. Oh no. Better bring them all back inside right away! Oops.. asthma, obesity, smoking, and promiscuity. Quick kids, get on the porch. No one has studied the porch! Run kids! Run for your lives!
That's brilliant reasoning there. We don't want to grant a license because third party developers may not update with breaking changes such as track work.
But.. oh, by the way.. we can't do that with our system either.
So what's the problem? A third party developer might actually be able to fix that!
The real reason is probably that the government workers responsible for saying no don't want to lose out on a potentially lucrative new government project where they could hire all their buddies to come work (assuming Australia has the same problems we have here in the states).
Even if you go to WorstBuy and buy the physical media, you still have to sit and wait while it installs, then downloads and installs 20GB of patches. I often preorder games on Steam and it's there ready for me on the day of release, no waiting.
Even better, if I want to move everything to another PC, I can copy the Steam content folder. I don't want to have to go through all my games looking for the installation media (or worse, having to keep it around just to play the stinkin' game).
They're not all three letters plus W or K (or C for Canada). There's a WBZ-TV in Boston, probably others. I believe they were grandfathered in before the naming convention was finalized.
I know there was a case in NH recently, but my search abilities aren't up to the task either. A motorist had flipped off a cop. The judge said the man had a right to his opinion and that the whole thing was a waste of the court's time.
They already have a device for risky borrowers that disables the vehicle if they're late with the payment. It's scary to think what the future may hold.
I agree about McCain. But I would have still taken him over Obama. Romney was the only candidate I really liked. He was expected to win my state fairly easily too (NH). I have my own suspicion that independents, who often vote democrat, voted on the republican side during the primaries and picked McCain so they wouldn't have to face a strong candidate like Romney. It's the only thing I can figure, because McCain was completely off the radar by the time the primaries started. It irks me a bit too because I was a supporter of the independent's right to vote during the primary. The state legislature was considering abolishing that practice.
I'm sure he doesn't want to burn through all his change in his first term. He's probably starting slowly, pacing himself. I'm sure that's it.
Honestly, I lost all hope when he won the election. Now I'm laughing at all the drones here that fell for the Messiah's clever PR campaign. Here it comes geniuses, are you ready for it?
Hehehe. It's going to be a spectacular four years. I have no faith left at all, so it's all for entertainment value now.
I have Verizon DSL in un-Fairpoint's area. I'll be transitioned. Do I care? Not really. I never used Verizon's stupid portals either. Didn't use their email because it locks me in. So what changes am I going to see? From reading the brochure they sent, it looks like I won't see any difference.
Now if they blocked access to URLs such as mail.yahoo.com or my.yahoo.com or what-have-you, that would be something to get upset over. I don't see anything in what they sent that says that's what they're planning. They're changing how the bundled portal options work, that's it. That's not even an Internet service IMO, that's an add-on. They can do whatever they want with it.
My only other ISP option is Comcrap which is even worse. Or a competing DSL ISP which doesn't work in this area, that's what I had before. It's a service nightmare.
$50k is a lot to you or me, but sadly it's not enough to interest the authorities. I've been there. We knew the street corners in various cities where these guys operated, times of day, we could even detect when they were active. Occasionally the FBI would take our info but we never heard that anything ever came of it.
I can understand it. Nothing tangible was stolen. The business is in one location, the crime can be geographically far away. Why does NYC care about some small company in some town they've never heard of? Even if they caught the guys, it's going to be a difficult case to prove. You'd have to catch them with their lists or catch them selling to an informant. Even then, could you tie them to other thefts on different days? I don't know.
Are they going to be able to recover anything? Probably not. I'd bet these guys are working for someone else. The best you can do is lock them up, and the someone else will simply hire someone else.
Finally, the losers in these cases are somewhat to blame. The company in this story didn't secure their phone system. They didn't monitor it either. It's one thing to ask why the telco wasn't watching for fraud, but why wasn't this company either? Why didn't their switch throw up a red flag?
In cases I've dealt with, we sold prepaid minutes online. It was too easy. Enter a credit card and we give you a PIN. Hello fraud opportunity. Doesn't surprise me at all that they didn't want to help find people taking advantage of our poorly thought out business plan. We did get rather good at detecting these situations real time though, both at time of sale and at time of use. They were clever, it was almost like reading the "Cukoo's Egg". They'd find a way around almost every roadblock we put up, eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
Why wouldn't they take a fuzzy bunny seriously? People buy insurance from a talking gecko. Remember those old Wellbutrin commercials? I'm sure many thousands of people got their doctors to prescribe the medicine suggested by the happy bouncing bubble.
If I wanted technical advice and was using a virtual world, a detailed hand crafted avatar would scream knowledge to me more so than a generic pick one from the list suit and tie clone. Virtual worlds can be what we make them, it'd be such a shame if they ended up being identical to the real world. What would be the point?
Sixty slaves? Sounds like you've found a solution to our nation's unemployment crisis! I bet using people as energy sources would also help correct our obesity crisis, which would in turn lessen the effects of our current health care crisis. Returning people to work would help the financial crisis. These laborers wouldn't need much schooling, so there goes the education crisis. My goodness, it's brilliant!
Of course all these crisis could be the equivalent of the Y2k crisis.. much ado about nothing.
Remember his promise not to hire any lobbyists? One review I found shows that 30 out of 267 nominees or appointments had been lobbyists. If that's not a lie, I don't know what is.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/sl_20090321_4967.php
He even came up with some sort of waiver policy because after he won the election, he suddenly decided that we just absolutely had to have lobbyists. Not to mention the need for tax cheats to run Treasury, a governor lax on border issues to run Homeland, an RIAA lawyer into justice, etc.
Also, if a swindle can be a lie.. let's not forget the most expensive lie in recent memory. "The stimulus will create jobs." Well, maybe. No one ever really explained how, especially when a lot of the money went to community groups and pork barrel spending (remember how he also said he'd refuse to sign bills with pork in them?). So then the official story became "the stimulus will create or retain jobs." That's not what we were sold, and it's impossible to measure.
For many of the speed bumps I encounter everyday, I see people brake hard just before them, then floor it on the other side. We'd save much more energy by just doing away with the speed bumps and using active enforcement to control speed instead.
Imagine if communities or businesses starting constructing speed bumps just to steal a little bit of energy?
That's not entirely accurate. There are probably very few programs exclusively for illegal aliens, but illegals do qualify for many other types of programs. Remember Obama's illegal immigrant aunt? She's living in a housing project in Boston, which is a service funded by the taxpayers. The housing authority is not allowed to ask about immigration status. This is a very common practice with handouts in MA.
It wouldn't shock me if there were services exclusively for illegals in either MA or CA. MA did hold meetings with illegals to learn how their status affects them. To me, that's a bit outrageous. ICE should have been invited.
I try to think of Slashdot as a humor site. It helps.
Well that is fair and balanced, isn't it? Here's what the federal government is saying, downplaying it. Here's what's actually happening and what the victims think about it.
If they cut the story off right after the official statement it'd be a lot like a cover-up, wouldn't it? You get the official federal propaganda piece and that's it. That's actually what you want?
The punishment should fit the crime. These officers took photos that any journalist could have. Even a motorist could have stopped, gotten out, and taken the same pictures. The cops would shoo them away, but they wouldn't likely be able to confiscate the camera.
Knowing that, it seems to me a gross over reaction to say that these two officers should be destroyed for this. This didn't happen in a person's home or somewhere where there is an expectation of privacy. I might look at it differently then.
It seems to me that people are outraged over the fact these pictures were taken and distributed. Had it been anyone other than law enforcement or fire/rescue, there wouldn't be anything you could do about it. It seems like we're trying to take advantage of the fact that they were wearing a badge at the time.
They had a noble enough goal. They wanted to show the pictures to family and friends to convince them to drive safely. You would fire them and destroy their retirement for that? I don't think you're being rational. Yes, it may have been a mistake. They paid for it. I think even the suspension was even a bit harsh.
There is a strong knee-jerk phenomenon on this site. People here supposedly don't want their rights trampled on, but they're so eager to trample on other peoples' rights. These officers are doing the best they can, and had good intentions here, and you'd ruin them for that! Good grief.
What happened after the pictures got into the wild is reprehensible. What the officers did was innocent. What you're proposing is outrageous. The fact that you posted as a coward tells me you realize it too. Not willing to face some knee-jerking on your account?
Copyright violation isn't stealing. It isn't depriving anyone of any object, physical or informational, at all.
You're depriving them of reward for the hard work they put into creating the material. If someone spends a year writing a book, you think everyone just has an implicit right to possess it? Why?
Why do you get to choose what my world view should be? What you're implying is that you want to force content onto people that are otherwise uninterested. Spam it in their faces, knowing full well that it's not what they're looking for. That doesn't open someone's world view, that annoys them. That attitude alienates people even more.
School is slightly different in that their purpose is to educate. If someone is looking for books for entertainment, they should be able to filter in on things that they find entertaining. It's common sense. No one would suggest that Playboy run commercials on PBS to open that audience's world view. To me, that's the type of situation that Amazon was trying to fix (albeit in a rather poor way).
"We had to do it before someone else beat us to it" isn't much of a defense. You can justify anything that way, no matter how evil. I agree with a lot of the other posters, it was a dick move. Plain and simple. The fact that it was done by academics isn't a good excuse. You want to really impress us? Spend your time on something that we all benefit from, rather than something harmful.
This is a timely article. The state of NH is currently considering passing a law allowing cities to put up these cameras. As usual, we're a bit behind the times.
SB 113:
http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/legislation/2009/SB0113.html
I bet playing outside would show a correlation with skin cancer, broken bones, lacerations, and abduction. Oh no. Better bring them all back inside right away! Oops.. asthma, obesity, smoking, and promiscuity. Quick kids, get on the porch. No one has studied the porch! Run kids! Run for your lives!
That's brilliant reasoning there. We don't want to grant a license because third party developers may not update with breaking changes such as track work.
But.. oh, by the way.. we can't do that with our system either.
So what's the problem? A third party developer might actually be able to fix that!
The real reason is probably that the government workers responsible for saying no don't want to lose out on a potentially lucrative new government project where they could hire all their buddies to come work (assuming Australia has the same problems we have here in the states).
Even if you go to WorstBuy and buy the physical media, you still have to sit and wait while it installs, then downloads and installs 20GB of patches. I often preorder games on Steam and it's there ready for me on the day of release, no waiting.
Even better, if I want to move everything to another PC, I can copy the Steam content folder. I don't want to have to go through all my games looking for the installation media (or worse, having to keep it around just to play the stinkin' game).
Commercial airline pilots do, it's part of their continuous training. Aviation students do as well.
Sounds great to me, when is a mail order pharmacy going to open up in one of these countries?
They're not all three letters plus W or K (or C for Canada). There's a WBZ-TV in Boston, probably others. I believe they were grandfathered in before the naming convention was finalized.
-TV is so yesteryear. It's all about the -DT now.
I know there was a case in NH recently, but my search abilities aren't up to the task either. A motorist had flipped off a cop. The judge said the man had a right to his opinion and that the whole thing was a waste of the court's time.
They already have a device for risky borrowers that disables the vehicle if they're late with the payment. It's scary to think what the future may hold.
I agree about McCain. But I would have still taken him over Obama. Romney was the only candidate I really liked. He was expected to win my state fairly easily too (NH). I have my own suspicion that independents, who often vote democrat, voted on the republican side during the primaries and picked McCain so they wouldn't have to face a strong candidate like Romney. It's the only thing I can figure, because McCain was completely off the radar by the time the primaries started. It irks me a bit too because I was a supporter of the independent's right to vote during the primary. The state legislature was considering abolishing that practice.
I'm sure he doesn't want to burn through all his change in his first term. He's probably starting slowly, pacing himself. I'm sure that's it.
Honestly, I lost all hope when he won the election. Now I'm laughing at all the drones here that fell for the Messiah's clever PR campaign. Here it comes geniuses, are you ready for it?
Hehehe. It's going to be a spectacular four years. I have no faith left at all, so it's all for entertainment value now.
I have Verizon DSL in un-Fairpoint's area. I'll be transitioned. Do I care? Not really. I never used Verizon's stupid portals either. Didn't use their email because it locks me in. So what changes am I going to see? From reading the brochure they sent, it looks like I won't see any difference.
Now if they blocked access to URLs such as mail.yahoo.com or my.yahoo.com or what-have-you, that would be something to get upset over. I don't see anything in what they sent that says that's what they're planning. They're changing how the bundled portal options work, that's it. That's not even an Internet service IMO, that's an add-on. They can do whatever they want with it.
My only other ISP option is Comcrap which is even worse. Or a competing DSL ISP which doesn't work in this area, that's what I had before. It's a service nightmare.
$50k is a lot to you or me, but sadly it's not enough to interest the authorities. I've been there. We knew the street corners in various cities where these guys operated, times of day, we could even detect when they were active. Occasionally the FBI would take our info but we never heard that anything ever came of it.
I can understand it. Nothing tangible was stolen. The business is in one location, the crime can be geographically far away. Why does NYC care about some small company in some town they've never heard of? Even if they caught the guys, it's going to be a difficult case to prove. You'd have to catch them with their lists or catch them selling to an informant. Even then, could you tie them to other thefts on different days? I don't know.
Are they going to be able to recover anything? Probably not. I'd bet these guys are working for someone else. The best you can do is lock them up, and the someone else will simply hire someone else.
Finally, the losers in these cases are somewhat to blame. The company in this story didn't secure their phone system. They didn't monitor it either. It's one thing to ask why the telco wasn't watching for fraud, but why wasn't this company either? Why didn't their switch throw up a red flag?
In cases I've dealt with, we sold prepaid minutes online. It was too easy. Enter a credit card and we give you a PIN. Hello fraud opportunity. Doesn't surprise me at all that they didn't want to help find people taking advantage of our poorly thought out business plan. We did get rather good at detecting these situations real time though, both at time of sale and at time of use. They were clever, it was almost like reading the "Cukoo's Egg". They'd find a way around almost every roadblock we put up, eventually.