It is not true that "most Fortune 500 companies and government intelligence agencies rely on this private corporation to know what is going on in the world." Stratfor is a small company that does some private consulting, not some kind of global anti-CIA.
Stratfor will be prosecuted for corporate espionage when it commits corporate espionage. Stop trying to substitute drama for analysis.
I am the perfect target of Windows 8. I use a touchscreen laptop (Lenovo x220t) and I love it--I work with the pen as much as possible, even when typing would be more efficient, simply because I like it.
I and users like me have been complaining since Windows 8 released that it's simply not a good touch/pen interface. Windows 7 had an excellent pen input system. Microsoft scrapped it and replaced it with a much less useful and less practical input interface in Windows 8. It was a bafflingly stupid decision--they dumped the best interface in the industry for something that's barely functional.
Reviewers haven't paid much attention to this problem because, I think, relatively few people are using the pen as a significant input device. But Microsoft is trying to change that. If they want Windows 8 to succeed, or PCs to move towards a touch/pen interface generally, they need to ask some hard questions of whoever is currently in charge of those design decisions. (I'd recommend, "Can you name any single way in which the Windows 8 pen interface is superior to the Windows 7 interface?", "Then why did you change it?", and "Have you been drinking on the job?")
I believe their legal theory here is that it doesn't matter whether ID is a religious theory. They've taken the approach that it only matters whether the employer thought it was a religious theory. In other words, if the employer fired him because of what they thought were his religious beliefs, it committed unlawful discrimination whether or not those beliefs are actually religious. This theory has apparently survived motions to dismiss, which usually weed out crazy or obviously wrong legal theories.
Caveat emptor, I'm basing this on second-hand reports and haven't read the pleadings myself. My thoughts are worth exactly what you paid for them.
you wouldn't just give the cc's away and publish what you did if your main point was to acquire cc numbers for fraud.
Yes I would. I would do it for two reasons:
First, it would let me claim that I committed the crime for altruistic reasons, which would feed my ego and let me pretend to be a hero instead of a crook. Anonymous's fans don't seem to need or want a serious moral or ethical justification for the crime; they're happy with a paper-thin pretext. It helps if you keep referring to the company you hit as "the shadow CIA!!!!!!!", and don't say anything at all about the thousands of individual customers you victimized.
Second, by releasing the numbers publicly, it would result in a widely distributed bloom of fraudulent transactions that would make my own thieving harder to trace. I would have assumed, at least, that a global rush of hits on the stolen CC numbers would give the original hackers a lot of cover for their own fraudulent use of Stratfor's customers' cards.
why is fbi releasing this data now? to make hacktivism seem like stealing...
It's not "like" stealing, it is stealing. They stole CC numbers from innocent strangers, and used them to victimize charities and for-profit businesses. Releasing a mountain of innocuous emails doesn't make it "hacktivism."
in any case.. stratfor is actually responsible for the fraud committed, they kept a data cache they didn't have authority to keep...
No. The people who broke into the Stratfor system, stole that data, and used it to make fraudulent transactions are "responsible for the fraud committed." Because they committed the fraud. If Stratfor was violating the processors' TOS, then it's responsible for violating the TOS. It is not responsible for malicious thefts committed by anonymous strangers.
Their antics were harmless. Show me a victim and then maybe you'll have a point. No victim = no crime.
Just off the top of my head, all the Stratfor customers whose credit card numbers got published. Or the charities that received donations from those stolen CCs, and then had to pay chargeback fees. Or Stratfor itself. Or any owner of any of the systems they accessed without permission... you have a very limited definition of "victim."
I love my Kindle, and often find that critics of the device who claim that it has no benefit beyond a laptop or a paperback are simply not familiar enough with the device. Having said that, I'm not sure what the benefits of this thing (excuse me: tHIs THinG) are, over and above a separate netbook and e-reader. I can see some minor synergies, such as TFA's reference to sending search results to the e-ink half of the device, but is that really worth the extra weight and complexity? Of course, I don't think I can explain why the Courier needs two screens, either, but hot damn I want one anyway.
tHIs THinG may be perfect for a niche of readers, but I don't see this device going anywhere. That's too bad, because I want a much more diverse field of e-readers out there, in order to encourage publishers to settle on a uniform format. (Or, failing that, just to encourage Amazon to make the Kindle software platform hardware-independent.)
Actually, it's quite common - and quite Constitutional - for courts to maintain lists of vexatious litigants, and to restrict their filing in various ways.
It allowed you to see all the upcoming conflicts on one page, and to see multiple conflicts for each timeslot. You could see, for example, that six shows were competing for the 7-8 pm timeframe, and choose which one to record. (And whether it would be a one-time priority, or to bump it up on an ongoing basis.) You could also do this with a mouse, which I would love to do with the TiVo - their refusal to give us an online interface is baffling and irritating.
TiVo's system is smart enough to resolve most conflicts--smart enough that I don't normally need to resolve conflicts. But it would be nice to be able to see, once a week, what the upcoming conflicts are, and choose my own priorities for each one. Not a big deal, but it's the sort of thing TiVo should have implemented at some point in the last five or six years.
I'm a long-term TiVo user, but this story reminds me of my simmering frustration with TiVo. Years ago I used a Hauppauge card, and their interface had innovations that TiVo still hasn't picked up on, like a vastly superior conflicts-resolution system. Is there a decent alternative to TiVo, with a better interface? Cable-company solutions are generally poor, as I understand it, and I frankly don't have time to roll my own Myth system. (I would consider an out-of-the-box Myth product, though.) I'd appreciate informed recommendations.
Pedant, not pendant. A "pendant" is a piece of jewelry or some other hanging object. A "pedant" is the sort of person who corrects someone who mistakenly writes "pendant" when they mean "pedant."
This is wrong. Stare decisis flows from higher courts to lower courts, and sometimes works horizontally, but doesn't flow upwards. It does not mean that lower courts' rulings bind or are even strongly relevant to a higher court. Lower courts' decisions may be cited in higher courts, but they are not binding precedent, even if "there is no reason to contradict that precedent." Higher courts are not "bound by principle, ethics, and tradition" to address lower courts that disagree with a decision they reach, if for no other reason than that a significant decision by a court of appeals with a large jurisdiction - like a federal circuit or a supreme court - would require dozens or hundreds of pages to deal with all the contrary lower courts' opinions.
Nor do juries decide law, as you said in the GP post. Juries are factfinders. They do not establish legal precedent, they do not determine legal principle, and they do not create common law. They assess evidence to adjudicate disputed facts.
Actually, since Booker, the sentencing guidelines are no longer mandatory. I'm sure D.Minn. judges are still giving guidelines sentences, but they aren't strictly required to. The sentence just has to be "reasonable;" sounds like the reporter for this story picked up on the sentencing court giving its reasonableness analysis for the record.
That's a good point. I wasn't clear - it's not the clumsiness of iTunes' interface that turned me off of Apple, although I wouldn't know that iTunes was better on a Mac if I hadn't played with a mini. It's the serious bug that killed all my files that convinced me that switching was an unwarranted risk - it's a bug that's hit Mac users as well as Windows users, is undocumented by Apple, and has no easy fix. iTunes, regardless of the OS, won't load certain MP3s, won't preserve or back up metadata, won't transfer libraries smoothly, won't give useful error information... Its substantive flaws are version-independent.
I still use iTunes, and like it better than the alternatives. I trust it more than Windows Media Player, even after losing all those files. But I don't see any reason to switch based on the fact that Apple produces a least-bad alternative. Expose and Dashboard seem like products that are more innovative and not as problematic, although, as another poster mentioned, they'd be much harder to port.
While I love the iTunes Music Store service, the iTunes software is a dog. It's slow, choppy, resource-intensive, and rarely loads the iPod on the first try. (I'm happy to give Vista a portion of the blame, but only so much.) Even worse, when I transferred my library across computers I had to edit the XML file myself to preserve my ratings and playcounts, and an undocumented change in the way iTunes handles certain older MP3s meant that nearly 500 files were lost. Because iTunes didn't report the error, it took me days just to figure out which files were missing from the library, and I had to re-encode them because iTunes will neither load them or report any error with the files. I still don't know what the problem was, and Apple's help desk was no help at all. I wouldn't accept such poor performance and nonexistent error-reporting from shareware, much less a flagship product that's intended to sell me on their systems.
I used to be on the bubble about switching; iTunes pushed me away from Apple instead of encouraging me to make the leap. I still use it, because the Music Store itself is perfect for my needs, but I'm not surprised to hear that Safari is a poor effort.
If Apple wants to encourage people to switch, perhaps it should make some its better applications available, at least in a limited form. I love Dashboard and Expose (I think those are the right names), and simple commercial versions of those for the Windows environment might convince people to try an OS with better, smoother versions of those features built in.
But "Solderier's" is the sort of mistake that professionals just shouldn't make. If you can't tell the difference between a plural and a possessive, you need to hire someone else to do the writing for you.
Thanks for the advice. You're correct that I, at least, don't have the equipment for uncompressed PCM; I'm not sure I have the ears for it, either. I'm relatively insensitive to sound quality, as long as it's coming from more than one direction.
Do you know whether the 360 upscales DVDs when outputting component video?
Interesting. You've just about convinced me to try some Monster cables (I can always return them if I can't see the difference, after all), but I need to do some research and see if the 360 will upscale DVDs across a component out. I've heard conflicting things in that regard. Yes, I do have an extra HDMI port, but it's sounding as if the existing 360 models just aren't equipped for digital output. Shame.
I have a decent TV - 40something inch DLP - hooked up via VGA, as I'd heard it was a crisper image. Is the difference between that and component (or between component and Monster component) really visible? I'm mostly interested in HDMI because I could free up an optical port on my receiver by routing audio through the TV.
Thanks for the advice re: HDCP. I share your skepticism, but I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of DRM in this context because I don't use the 360 for anything but games and HD-DVDs. I doubt the 360 is intentionally downgrading the component out, as it's competing too fiercely with the PS3 in the graphics department.
Does anyone know whether this means that there will be an HDMI cable released for the existing models? I've poked around the news releases, but haven't seen any mention of it.
Yes, that would be sufficient to meet the legal elements of the claim. Most attorneys in that position wouldn't settle for the minimum necessity, however - Take Two's incentive is now to argue that their damages are as large as can be reasonably argued.
There are some counter-incentives, I suppose - they don't want to encourage Thompson or copycat Thompsons by making them think that the frivolous suits have a serious impact. But I don't think that Take Two is very worried about that; Thompson himself is already as worked up as he's going to get, and there don't seem any other copycat litigants waiting in the wings.
This is all supposition, of course, but I'd bet Take Two is going to argue halfheartedly that their sales were impacted. It's worth making the claim, but not worth going to the time and trouble of attempting to prove the impact (which would be very difficult anyway.)
From the summary, it sounds as if Take Two will have to provide some sort of evidence that he does affect their sales (or in some other way impacts their bottom line) to prevail. They need to show that his suits damaged them, and it doesn't look like they'll be relying on the expense of defending themselves against the suits as the sole damages. In fact, their incentive now is to pad the impact he's had on their sales, in order to cast his actions in the worst light and (depending on the details, of which I'm unaware) possibly inflate the damages they'll request.
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It is not true that "most Fortune 500 companies and government intelligence agencies rely on this private corporation to know what is going on in the world." Stratfor is a small company that does some private consulting, not some kind of global anti-CIA.
Stratfor will be prosecuted for corporate espionage when it commits corporate espionage. Stop trying to substitute drama for analysis.
I am the perfect target of Windows 8. I use a touchscreen laptop (Lenovo x220t) and I love it--I work with the pen as much as possible, even when typing would be more efficient, simply because I like it.
I and users like me have been complaining since Windows 8 released that it's simply not a good touch/pen interface. Windows 7 had an excellent pen input system. Microsoft scrapped it and replaced it with a much less useful and less practical input interface in Windows 8. It was a bafflingly stupid decision--they dumped the best interface in the industry for something that's barely functional.
Reviewers haven't paid much attention to this problem because, I think, relatively few people are using the pen as a significant input device. But Microsoft is trying to change that. If they want Windows 8 to succeed, or PCs to move towards a touch/pen interface generally, they need to ask some hard questions of whoever is currently in charge of those design decisions. (I'd recommend, "Can you name any single way in which the Windows 8 pen interface is superior to the Windows 7 interface?", "Then why did you change it?", and "Have you been drinking on the job?")
I believe their legal theory here is that it doesn't matter whether ID is a religious theory. They've taken the approach that it only matters whether the employer thought it was a religious theory. In other words, if the employer fired him because of what they thought were his religious beliefs, it committed unlawful discrimination whether or not those beliefs are actually religious. This theory has apparently survived motions to dismiss, which usually weed out crazy or obviously wrong legal theories.
Caveat emptor, I'm basing this on second-hand reports and haven't read the pleadings myself. My thoughts are worth exactly what you paid for them.
you wouldn't just give the cc's away and publish what you did if your main point was to acquire cc numbers for fraud.
Yes I would. I would do it for two reasons:
First, it would let me claim that I committed the crime for altruistic reasons, which would feed my ego and let me pretend to be a hero instead of a crook. Anonymous's fans don't seem to need or want a serious moral or ethical justification for the crime; they're happy with a paper-thin pretext. It helps if you keep referring to the company you hit as "the shadow CIA!!!!!!!", and don't say anything at all about the thousands of individual customers you victimized.
Second, by releasing the numbers publicly, it would result in a widely distributed bloom of fraudulent transactions that would make my own thieving harder to trace. I would have assumed, at least, that a global rush of hits on the stolen CC numbers would give the original hackers a lot of cover for their own fraudulent use of Stratfor's customers' cards.
why is fbi releasing this data now? to make hacktivism seem like stealing...
It's not "like" stealing, it is stealing. They stole CC numbers from innocent strangers, and used them to victimize charities and for-profit businesses. Releasing a mountain of innocuous emails doesn't make it "hacktivism."
in any case.. stratfor is actually responsible for the fraud committed, they kept a data cache they didn't have authority to keep...
No. The people who broke into the Stratfor system, stole that data, and used it to make fraudulent transactions are "responsible for the fraud committed." Because they committed the fraud. If Stratfor was violating the processors' TOS, then it's responsible for violating the TOS. It is not responsible for malicious thefts committed by anonymous strangers.
Their antics were harmless. Show me a victim and then maybe you'll have a point. No victim = no crime.
Just off the top of my head, all the Stratfor customers whose credit card numbers got published. Or the charities that received donations from those stolen CCs, and then had to pay chargeback fees. Or Stratfor itself. Or any owner of any of the systems they accessed without permission... you have a very limited definition of "victim."
I love my Kindle, and often find that critics of the device who claim that it has no benefit beyond a laptop or a paperback are simply not familiar enough with the device. Having said that, I'm not sure what the benefits of this thing (excuse me: tHIs THinG) are, over and above a separate netbook and e-reader. I can see some minor synergies, such as TFA's reference to sending search results to the e-ink half of the device, but is that really worth the extra weight and complexity? Of course, I don't think I can explain why the Courier needs two screens, either, but hot damn I want one anyway.
tHIs THinG may be perfect for a niche of readers, but I don't see this device going anywhere. That's too bad, because I want a much more diverse field of e-readers out there, in order to encourage publishers to settle on a uniform format. (Or, failing that, just to encourage Amazon to make the Kindle software platform hardware-independent.)
Actually, it's quite common - and quite Constitutional - for courts to maintain lists of vexatious litigants, and to restrict their filing in various ways.
It allowed you to see all the upcoming conflicts on one page, and to see multiple conflicts for each timeslot. You could see, for example, that six shows were competing for the 7-8 pm timeframe, and choose which one to record. (And whether it would be a one-time priority, or to bump it up on an ongoing basis.) You could also do this with a mouse, which I would love to do with the TiVo - their refusal to give us an online interface is baffling and irritating.
TiVo's system is smart enough to resolve most conflicts--smart enough that I don't normally need to resolve conflicts. But it would be nice to be able to see, once a week, what the upcoming conflicts are, and choose my own priorities for each one. Not a big deal, but it's the sort of thing TiVo should have implemented at some point in the last five or six years.
I'm a long-term TiVo user, but this story reminds me of my simmering frustration with TiVo. Years ago I used a Hauppauge card, and their interface had innovations that TiVo still hasn't picked up on, like a vastly superior conflicts-resolution system. Is there a decent alternative to TiVo, with a better interface? Cable-company solutions are generally poor, as I understand it, and I frankly don't have time to roll my own Myth system. (I would consider an out-of-the-box Myth product, though.) I'd appreciate informed recommendations.
Pedant, not pendant. A "pendant" is a piece of jewelry or some other hanging object. A "pedant" is the sort of person who corrects someone who mistakenly writes "pendant" when they mean "pedant."
This is wrong. Stare decisis flows from higher courts to lower courts, and sometimes works horizontally, but doesn't flow upwards. It does not mean that lower courts' rulings bind or are even strongly relevant to a higher court. Lower courts' decisions may be cited in higher courts, but they are not binding precedent, even if "there is no reason to contradict that precedent." Higher courts are not "bound by principle, ethics, and tradition" to address lower courts that disagree with a decision they reach, if for no other reason than that a significant decision by a court of appeals with a large jurisdiction - like a federal circuit or a supreme court - would require dozens or hundreds of pages to deal with all the contrary lower courts' opinions.
Nor do juries decide law, as you said in the GP post. Juries are factfinders. They do not establish legal precedent, they do not determine legal principle, and they do not create common law. They assess evidence to adjudicate disputed facts.
Fool. The NSA's software catches and archives every post that mentions their name. Calling them silly was a dangerous move.
You just signed yourself up for a slow-pitch to the head. Followed by pizza and ice cream for the whole team.
Actually, since Booker, the sentencing guidelines are no longer mandatory. I'm sure D.Minn. judges are still giving guidelines sentences, but they aren't strictly required to. The sentence just has to be "reasonable;" sounds like the reporter for this story picked up on the sentencing court giving its reasonableness analysis for the record.
That's a good point. I wasn't clear - it's not the clumsiness of iTunes' interface that turned me off of Apple, although I wouldn't know that iTunes was better on a Mac if I hadn't played with a mini. It's the serious bug that killed all my files that convinced me that switching was an unwarranted risk - it's a bug that's hit Mac users as well as Windows users, is undocumented by Apple, and has no easy fix. iTunes, regardless of the OS, won't load certain MP3s, won't preserve or back up metadata, won't transfer libraries smoothly, won't give useful error information... Its substantive flaws are version-independent.
I still use iTunes, and like it better than the alternatives. I trust it more than Windows Media Player, even after losing all those files. But I don't see any reason to switch based on the fact that Apple produces a least-bad alternative. Expose and Dashboard seem like products that are more innovative and not as problematic, although, as another poster mentioned, they'd be much harder to port.
While I love the iTunes Music Store service, the iTunes software is a dog. It's slow, choppy, resource-intensive, and rarely loads the iPod on the first try. (I'm happy to give Vista a portion of the blame, but only so much.) Even worse, when I transferred my library across computers I had to edit the XML file myself to preserve my ratings and playcounts, and an undocumented change in the way iTunes handles certain older MP3s meant that nearly 500 files were lost. Because iTunes didn't report the error, it took me days just to figure out which files were missing from the library, and I had to re-encode them because iTunes will neither load them or report any error with the files. I still don't know what the problem was, and Apple's help desk was no help at all. I wouldn't accept such poor performance and nonexistent error-reporting from shareware, much less a flagship product that's intended to sell me on their systems.
I used to be on the bubble about switching; iTunes pushed me away from Apple instead of encouraging me to make the leap. I still use it, because the Music Store itself is perfect for my needs, but I'm not surprised to hear that Safari is a poor effort.
If Apple wants to encourage people to switch, perhaps it should make some its better applications available, at least in a limited form. I love Dashboard and Expose (I think those are the right names), and simple commercial versions of those for the Windows environment might convince people to try an OS with better, smoother versions of those features built in.
God damn it. "Soldier's."
Fine, I'll go hire someone to write for me.
But "Solderier's" is the sort of mistake that professionals just shouldn't make. If you can't tell the difference between a plural and a possessive, you need to hire someone else to do the writing for you.
Thanks for the advice. You're correct that I, at least, don't have the equipment for uncompressed PCM; I'm not sure I have the ears for it, either. I'm relatively insensitive to sound quality, as long as it's coming from more than one direction.
Do you know whether the 360 upscales DVDs when outputting component video?
Interesting. You've just about convinced me to try some Monster cables (I can always return them if I can't see the difference, after all), but I need to do some research and see if the 360 will upscale DVDs across a component out. I've heard conflicting things in that regard. Yes, I do have an extra HDMI port, but it's sounding as if the existing 360 models just aren't equipped for digital output. Shame.
I have a decent TV - 40something inch DLP - hooked up via VGA, as I'd heard it was a crisper image. Is the difference between that and component (or between component and Monster component) really visible? I'm mostly interested in HDMI because I could free up an optical port on my receiver by routing audio through the TV.
Thanks for the advice re: HDCP. I share your skepticism, but I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of DRM in this context because I don't use the 360 for anything but games and HD-DVDs. I doubt the 360 is intentionally downgrading the component out, as it's competing too fiercely with the PS3 in the graphics department.
Does anyone know whether this means that there will be an HDMI cable released for the existing models? I've poked around the news releases, but haven't seen any mention of it.
Yes, that would be sufficient to meet the legal elements of the claim. Most attorneys in that position wouldn't settle for the minimum necessity, however - Take Two's incentive is now to argue that their damages are as large as can be reasonably argued.
There are some counter-incentives, I suppose - they don't want to encourage Thompson or copycat Thompsons by making them think that the frivolous suits have a serious impact. But I don't think that Take Two is very worried about that; Thompson himself is already as worked up as he's going to get, and there don't seem any other copycat litigants waiting in the wings.
This is all supposition, of course, but I'd bet Take Two is going to argue halfheartedly that their sales were impacted. It's worth making the claim, but not worth going to the time and trouble of attempting to prove the impact (which would be very difficult anyway.)
He has had zero effect on the sales of the games
From the summary, it sounds as if Take Two will have to provide some sort of evidence that he does affect their sales (or in some other way impacts their bottom line) to prevail. They need to show that his suits damaged them, and it doesn't look like they'll be relying on the expense of defending themselves against the suits as the sole damages. In fact, their incentive now is to pad the impact he's had on their sales, in order to cast his actions in the worst light and (depending on the details, of which I'm unaware) possibly inflate the damages they'll request.
...that's where you use the Force to cram Captain Antilles under the wheel of your boat trailer to keep it from rolling, right?
Well, he is a Wedge.
Yes, people who have Corey Hart songs on their iPod should get two tickets.
To paradise?