It depends on whether or not he knew he was being investigated at the time. I'm sure nearly everyone does something illegal from time to time that could be uncovered if one were able to see the person's full computerized history (browser sessions, e-mails, texts, etc). Furthermore, you sometimes don't know if something will become the subject of legal proceedings. Will the e-mail I just sent cause a conversation that will spiral out of control and result in a lawsuit? By deleting it am I obstructing justice?
If he knew he was being investigated and deleted evidence he knew was relevant, he can definitely be convicted of destruction of evidence. It's up to the prosecutor to prove this, though. My guess is that they're tossing a bunch of charges out so that they have more chance of one of them sticking.
Does Incognito Mode truly never store anything on the computer? Or does it store elements on the computer as it is building the page and then immediately delete them? It certainly builds an in-tab history since you can go back and forward within an Incognito tab - though this is destroyed once the tab is closed. If clearing your browser cache is really "destruction of evidence", then Incognito Mode might be this too.
As the parent of a child with autism, the "vaccines cause autism" crowd triply annoys me.
1. They take funding that should go to diagnosis/treatment and send it to Yet Another Study that will yet again show no link. (Or worse: Advocating "treatments" that are a baby step shy of torture.)
2. They fear monger autism such that you'd think your child would be better off dead than autistic. I know plenty of parents of kids on the spectrum. Some with pretty severe issues. None would rather their kids were dead.
3. They make it hard to support autism societies because you need to first weed out the ones dedicated to "proving" an autism-vaccine link.
The sooner these people accept that autism and vaccines have no link, the better for everyone.
the problem is no religion (except zen, afaik) provides a method to approach those questions, but random invented answers so you stop asking.
I think one of the issues is that - way back in the past - humans didn't have any effective way to explain why things happened. What was that loud booming noise that took place when the rain fell sometimes? Why were there flashes of light coming down from the sky? It was all very scary and we instinctively need to know WHY something is happening. At the time, nobody knew about charged particles, sonic booms, or the like so the explanation became angry gods stomping around and throwing lightning bolts at people.
We also needed a way to stay safe. We didn't really and truly know why BAD_STUFF happened, but it did and we needed to avoid it. So some rules were set up. Some might have been actually effective (eating some kinds of meat and not others which might have contained disease, quarantining sick people, etc) even if the reasons behind it weren't based on now-current science (that animal isn't fit to eat, those people might have sinned, etc.) Other rules had no basis in reality. (Dunk your baby in this magic pool water or the devil will grab its soul.) Confirmation bias, rumors/unconfirmed stories of rule-breakers getting punished, and fear of the unknown kept us following the rules. Eventually, inertia set in and the rules were followed because they were "always" followed.
The initial reason for religion wasn't too bad. Call it an alpha version of what eventually became science. It was an attempt to explain just why the world is the way it is. Unfortunately, humans not only have an instinctive drive to understand, but to control and "alpha science" turned into "Follow This Or Else You Die."
Not to mention keeping our airplanes safe from containers of liquid larger than 3.4 ounces. Who knows what a terrorist might do if he smuggled 4 ounces of shampoo aboard a plane!
In the case of that job interview, my previous employment had ended suddenly. We were the largest content provider and traffic producer for our company so (in hindsight, foolishly) believed we were untouchable. Then, our company announced that they were heading in another direction (republishing other people's content instead of producing their own) and that our jobs were gone effective immediately.
I had my wedding coming up in three months, so obviously there was enormous financial pressure to find another job. This does sort of explain my selling my salary requirements short. I was desperate to find a job - and one that didn't mind me almost immediately leaving on our already-booked honeymoon. This company didn't mind so I undercut my price rather than risk not getting the job.
Hindsight is 20/20 and I would have likely gotten much more had I asked for it. Even if I overstated my salary, they likely would have counter-offered a lower figure (but still higher than what I wound up asking for). Lesson learned for next time, though.
* That no matter how much you think you know, there is someone who knows more. That's called humility.
On the flip side, too much of this can result in Impostor Syndrome where you ignore all of your talents/achievements and feel that someone is going to discover you don't know anything after all. (Because compared to SOMEONE_YOU_FOLLOW_ONLINE, you are a newbie in one area despite having worked in this field your whole life.)
The best parable I've heard came from a rabbi years back explaining why the Torah says man was both created in god's image and was created from dirt. The rabbi said that a man should walk around with a pouch on either side of his belt. In one, it should say "The world was created for me." The other should say "I'm nothing but dirt." Keeping both pouches should keep you balanced.
Take ownership of your education....learn new skills before you need them and make yourself invaluable to the company.
Related to this: Never be comfortable. Comfort tells you that you don't NEED to learn new technologies because the ones you know are good enough. And then comfort vanishes leaving you hopelessly behind the curve.
For the longest time, I was comfortable with my development procedures/languages/etc. Then we had some mergers and things changed. I'm lucky that I pick up new technologies quickly and was able to get back up to speed, but I could have easily been left behind.
I learned this lesson from my father. He would work from 7am to 5pm, come home with a stack of work, and work until 10pm. He would also do nearly a full day's work on Saturday and Sunday. There was no overtime pay involved at all. When I asked why he worked like this, his reply was that his boss expected this level of work from him. I pointed out that his boss only expected it because he was providing this level of work output.
When I started working, I made sure my bosses knew that my work ended when I left the office. I'm fine with "on call" and helping out if an emergency happens, but I'm not going to take a project home and code it during my nights/weekends just because they want me to give them 80 hours of work per week while paying me for 40 hours.
(I do tend to work late, but that's doing freelance work on the side which earns me extra money.)
I could have used this knowledge not just on my first job but when I was interviewing for my current job 14 years ago. The interviewer asked me what salary I was seeking which was, in hindsight, an obvious trap. If I gave too low a figure, they'd "grant" me that instead of the higher figure they were thinking of. I had a figure in mind but got nervous that I wouldn't get the job if I went too high. I wound up taking about five thousand off my "figure in my mind" - and was promptly awarded that. I'll never know if I would have gotten more money had I gone higher, but that moment of insecurity still bothers me to this day.
If there was no copyright, someone could release a sing and have it immediately appropriated by some politician/organization who they completely disagree with for no compensation. The artist could also wind up competing to sell his works against others selling his works.
The problem is that copyright has been extended to ridiculous lengths. Drop copyright down to shorter lengths (14 years plus a one time 14 year extension) and many of the copyright problems would vanish.
“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”
This sounds pretty standard. To go through it word by word:
"a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license"
perpetual: So you can't say "Oops, the license expired. Now you own me $750,000 for hosting my photos." irrevocable: So you can't suddenly decide that Google isn't ALLOWED to have the photos you submitted to them. worldwide: So Google can't be sued by a user in Country A if their photo is stored on a server in Country B. royalty-free: Google is hosting this for you for free, why do you think they would pay you royalties for hosting your photos?!!! non-exclusive: This one protects the customer, not Google. This means Google is given a license but you can still give/sell a license to someone else.
"reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content"
reproduce: So Google can copy the photo files without infringing on the owner's copyright. adapt/modify: Google will sometimes apply various kinds of "photo magic" to your photos. This allows them to change your photos for these features. Also can apply to resizing your photos for display or rotating them so the top is up. publish: If you share your photo with other people, Google is actually publishing them. So they need to make sure they have the right to do so. publicly perform: In case you share your video with the general public. publicly display: Same as previous, but for photos. distribute: Again, displaying photos to other people can be seen as distributing and Google wants to make sure they won't be sued by people for "copyright infringement" when they do just what their users asked them to do to the photos that the users submitted.
The alternative, that those are real people expressing their actual opinions, is too horrifying to contemplate.
The first rule of Fight Club might be "Don't Talk About Fight Club", but the first rule of The Internet is "Don't Read The Comments Section." There are very few exceptions to this rule, but most times reading the comments section on an article is an invitation for the worst of humanity's opinions to invade your brain via your eyeballs.
It would be easy to stuff some humans into a mineshaft and they might survive, but:
1) Would they be able to survive in the world post-asteroid strike? If most of the plant life was dead/dying and almost all larger animals were dead, what would the surviving humans eat? Would the water be drinkable? Would the air be breathable? We might save a group of humans only to have them choke to death, starve to death, or die of dehydration.
2) Even if they could find food/water/shelter, how many humans would survive? If you kept 100 humans alive in the mineshaft, you might quickly wind up with inbreeding and the human race could die out before it gets another foothold.
Is there a reason why all the obstacles are flat, low and pink?
That's because the obstacles are meant to represent people gunned down by the robotic cheetah. Robot Cheetah will need to leap over them to gun down more people. Otherwise, we could just send wave after wave of men at the robot cheetahs until they are blocked in by corpses.
a survey found that 16 percent of people who bought the latest iPhones previously owned Android devices
So 16% of iPhone purchases were made by people who previously owned Android phones. (I'm going to assume here that "owned Android devices" doesn't mean you owned a Nexus tablet and now are buying an iPhone.) This statistic is useless, though, unless you also find out how many people buying Android phones previously owned iPhones. If there's an equivalent amount of people getting Android phones to replace their iPhones, then the "16%" isn't really a loss for Android. It's just normal churn. Presenting the 16% figure on its own is misleading as it makes it seem like people are fleeing Android and nobody ever leaves Apple.
You fly that tube at (say) 0.75c. Inside the tube, you fly down its length at 0.75c and before you know it - you're going faster than light.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works. You can't just add up the tube's velocity (0.75c) and your velocity (0.75c) and get 1.5c. To put it another way, if you somehow got a spaceship to move at the speed of light (c) and then turned on the ship's headlights, the light coming out of them wouldn't be travelling at 2c, it would be travelling at c.
the FBI is unable to name a single terror case in which the snooping provisions were of much help
"There was that one case... and the other one... then there was that case with the thing... and the person with the other thing... Yeah, we need to keep this running."
The problem with this program (from an FBI-perspective, not a privacy one) is that it floods them with too much data. There's a false notion that since data is good that more data is always good. Not all data is good data. You need to go through it and find the useful parts. As you get more and more data, you eventually become unable to weed through the data to extract the good parts. You either wind up ignoring it entirely (and thus missing good data coming in) or you grab hold of any data point you can find without properly vetting it (due to no manpower for that step) and wind up chasing down phantom leads.
That's why a properly limited (warrant-based) system would not only be better for privacy, but would actually be better for national security.
In reality, it's even worse, as requiring the telecoms to keep this data guarantees that the telecoms will use that data -- so the end result is an expansion of the the amount of spying that is being inflicted on us.
Exactly this. Government spying on its citizens is bad, don't get me wrong. However, there are remedies for this. It isn't easy, but you CAN vote out the current government and vote in people who will end the spying. Again, it's not easy and it might take time, but it's doable.
Suppose AT&T and Verizon have this big database that they are required to maintain, however, and the government just "checks in" and searches it now and then. They need to maintain the database so (they figure), why not also profit off of it? What's to keep them from running some searches to find ways of extracting more money out of people when the (stated) purpose of the database was national security? And how do we keep them from abusing a database that they maintain in-house? By switching carriers to another carrier required to keep the same database and likely doing the same thing?
It would be better to keep this program in government hands but with some very strict checks and balances in place. Even better would be to shut it down, but if it needs to be kept - which I highly doubt, mind you - I'd prefer it government-run than corporate-run.
There is a difference between Campaign Politician and Elected Politician. Campaign Politician seeks to get as many people to vote for him/her as possible and so is willing to promise nearly anything. If Campaign Politician thought it would win them votes, they would pledge to have the federal government give everyone a free cute puppy.
When Campaign Politician transitions to Elected Politician, however, many (if not all) of those promises get forgotten. Instead Elected Politician will do whatever he/she can to increase his/her political power. This can mean listening to lobbyists, enacting laws to protect businesses that donate to Elected Politician, and working with other Elected Politicians to keep other Elected Politicians down. Sometimes, Elected Politician will actually abide by a few campaign promises, but this is more because Elected Politician knows that eventually he/she will need to become Campaign Politician again and these followed promises will help.
Occasionally, Campaign Politician will make a promise that Elected Politician will realize is impossible to enact, but this is more of a failing of Campaign Politician to keep from making unrealistic promises than anything else. See the "free puppies" example above. It sounds nice until you get to the real world and figure out costs, logistics, other politicians with alternative plans - free kittens - and groups for whom free puppies wouldn't be a good thing (e.g. people with allergies).
That's what we did when my identity was stolen. My name, address, SSN, and DOB were used to open a card in my name. I was lucky and the credit card company sent it to me (due to the thieves paying for rush delivery) instead of processing the address change and sending it to the thieves. It's a pain when I want to use my credit (refinance mortgage, buy a car, etc), but most days I don't need to touch my credit and don't want anyone else touching it either.
Of course, the credit agencies don't like when you freeze your credit. Frozen credit files are less profitable (can't sell them to credit card companies hawking even more lines of credit) and so they like pushing "fraud alerts" instead. These expire every 90 days unless you renew them and are voluntary. If I were a credit card company opening a line of credit on someone, it's recommended that I check the fraud alert, but I could just ignore it, open the credit line, and suffer no consequences.
To credit agencies and credit card companies, identity theft is an inconvenience that you just write off. No big deal. To the victim, though, it's a horrible experience. I felt completely violated knowing that someone was walking around with my private information, pretending to be me, and doing their best to run up a huge tab to send my way.
I've done some research on the topic, being a victim of identity theft myself. From what I understand, the person who steals the identity rarely uses the stolen identity. Instead, they sell it to someone else who then uses it. This way, the real thief gets some quick cash with less risk of getting caught - especially if it's an inside job. (e.g. Someone in HR at your company downloads your company's employee records to a USB drive and decides to make a little money on the side.) Meanwhile, the people using the stolen identities can run up a big tab on the stolen credit lines without needing to do any messy hacking of computer systems. It's a win-win for the criminals - and a lose-lose for the person whose identity was stolen.
Even though I'm opposed to this merger, I'd be afraid that a summary rejection would result in some sort of lawsuit and overturned. Better to let it go through the process and THEN kill it.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on whether or not he knew he was being investigated at the time. I'm sure nearly everyone does something illegal from time to time that could be uncovered if one were able to see the person's full computerized history (browser sessions, e-mails, texts, etc). Furthermore, you sometimes don't know if something will become the subject of legal proceedings. Will the e-mail I just sent cause a conversation that will spiral out of control and result in a lawsuit? By deleting it am I obstructing justice?
If he knew he was being investigated and deleted evidence he knew was relevant, he can definitely be convicted of destruction of evidence. It's up to the prosecutor to prove this, though. My guess is that they're tossing a bunch of charges out so that they have more chance of one of them sticking.
Does Incognito Mode truly never store anything on the computer? Or does it store elements on the computer as it is building the page and then immediately delete them? It certainly builds an in-tab history since you can go back and forward within an Incognito tab - though this is destroyed once the tab is closed. If clearing your browser cache is really "destruction of evidence", then Incognito Mode might be this too.
As the parent of a child with autism, the "vaccines cause autism" crowd triply annoys me.
1. They take funding that should go to diagnosis/treatment and send it to Yet Another Study that will yet again show no link. (Or worse: Advocating "treatments" that are a baby step shy of torture.)
2. They fear monger autism such that you'd think your child would be better off dead than autistic. I know plenty of parents of kids on the spectrum. Some with pretty severe issues. None would rather their kids were dead.
3. They make it hard to support autism societies because you need to first weed out the ones dedicated to "proving" an autism-vaccine link.
The sooner these people accept that autism and vaccines have no link, the better for everyone.
I think one of the issues is that - way back in the past - humans didn't have any effective way to explain why things happened. What was that loud booming noise that took place when the rain fell sometimes? Why were there flashes of light coming down from the sky? It was all very scary and we instinctively need to know WHY something is happening. At the time, nobody knew about charged particles, sonic booms, or the like so the explanation became angry gods stomping around and throwing lightning bolts at people.
We also needed a way to stay safe. We didn't really and truly know why BAD_STUFF happened, but it did and we needed to avoid it. So some rules were set up. Some might have been actually effective (eating some kinds of meat and not others which might have contained disease, quarantining sick people, etc) even if the reasons behind it weren't based on now-current science (that animal isn't fit to eat, those people might have sinned, etc.) Other rules had no basis in reality. (Dunk your baby in this magic pool water or the devil will grab its soul.) Confirmation bias, rumors/unconfirmed stories of rule-breakers getting punished, and fear of the unknown kept us following the rules. Eventually, inertia set in and the rules were followed because they were "always" followed.
The initial reason for religion wasn't too bad. Call it an alpha version of what eventually became science. It was an attempt to explain just why the world is the way it is. Unfortunately, humans not only have an instinctive drive to understand, but to control and "alpha science" turned into "Follow This Or Else You Die."
Not to mention keeping our airplanes safe from containers of liquid larger than 3.4 ounces. Who knows what a terrorist might do if he smuggled 4 ounces of shampoo aboard a plane!
In the case of that job interview, my previous employment had ended suddenly. We were the largest content provider and traffic producer for our company so (in hindsight, foolishly) believed we were untouchable. Then, our company announced that they were heading in another direction (republishing other people's content instead of producing their own) and that our jobs were gone effective immediately.
I had my wedding coming up in three months, so obviously there was enormous financial pressure to find another job. This does sort of explain my selling my salary requirements short. I was desperate to find a job - and one that didn't mind me almost immediately leaving on our already-booked honeymoon. This company didn't mind so I undercut my price rather than risk not getting the job.
Hindsight is 20/20 and I would have likely gotten much more had I asked for it. Even if I overstated my salary, they likely would have counter-offered a lower figure (but still higher than what I wound up asking for). Lesson learned for next time, though.
On the flip side, too much of this can result in Impostor Syndrome where you ignore all of your talents/achievements and feel that someone is going to discover you don't know anything after all. (Because compared to SOMEONE_YOU_FOLLOW_ONLINE, you are a newbie in one area despite having worked in this field your whole life.)
The best parable I've heard came from a rabbi years back explaining why the Torah says man was both created in god's image and was created from dirt. The rabbi said that a man should walk around with a pouch on either side of his belt. In one, it should say "The world was created for me." The other should say "I'm nothing but dirt." Keeping both pouches should keep you balanced.
Related to this: Never be comfortable. Comfort tells you that you don't NEED to learn new technologies because the ones you know are good enough. And then comfort vanishes leaving you hopelessly behind the curve.
For the longest time, I was comfortable with my development procedures/languages/etc. Then we had some mergers and things changed. I'm lucky that I pick up new technologies quickly and was able to get back up to speed, but I could have easily been left behind.
I learned this lesson from my father. He would work from 7am to 5pm, come home with a stack of work, and work until 10pm. He would also do nearly a full day's work on Saturday and Sunday. There was no overtime pay involved at all. When I asked why he worked like this, his reply was that his boss expected this level of work from him. I pointed out that his boss only expected it because he was providing this level of work output.
When I started working, I made sure my bosses knew that my work ended when I left the office. I'm fine with "on call" and helping out if an emergency happens, but I'm not going to take a project home and code it during my nights/weekends just because they want me to give them 80 hours of work per week while paying me for 40 hours.
(I do tend to work late, but that's doing freelance work on the side which earns me extra money.)
I could have used this knowledge not just on my first job but when I was interviewing for my current job 14 years ago. The interviewer asked me what salary I was seeking which was, in hindsight, an obvious trap. If I gave too low a figure, they'd "grant" me that instead of the higher figure they were thinking of. I had a figure in mind but got nervous that I wouldn't get the job if I went too high. I wound up taking about five thousand off my "figure in my mind" - and was promptly awarded that. I'll never know if I would have gotten more money had I gone higher, but that moment of insecurity still bothers me to this day.
If there was no copyright, someone could release a sing and have it immediately appropriated by some politician/organization who they completely disagree with for no compensation. The artist could also wind up competing to sell his works against others selling his works.
The problem is that copyright has been extended to ridiculous lengths. Drop copyright down to shorter lengths (14 years plus a one time 14 year extension) and many of the copyright problems would vanish.
This sounds pretty standard. To go through it word by word:
"a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license"
perpetual: So you can't say "Oops, the license expired. Now you own me $750,000 for hosting my photos."
irrevocable: So you can't suddenly decide that Google isn't ALLOWED to have the photos you submitted to them.
worldwide: So Google can't be sued by a user in Country A if their photo is stored on a server in Country B.
royalty-free: Google is hosting this for you for free, why do you think they would pay you royalties for hosting your photos?!!!
non-exclusive: This one protects the customer, not Google. This means Google is given a license but you can still give/sell a license to someone else.
"reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content"
reproduce: So Google can copy the photo files without infringing on the owner's copyright.
adapt/modify: Google will sometimes apply various kinds of "photo magic" to your photos. This allows them to change your photos for these features. Also can apply to resizing your photos for display or rotating them so the top is up.
publish: If you share your photo with other people, Google is actually publishing them. So they need to make sure they have the right to do so.
publicly perform: In case you share your video with the general public.
publicly display: Same as previous, but for photos.
distribute: Again, displaying photos to other people can be seen as distributing and Google wants to make sure they won't be sued by people for "copyright infringement" when they do just what their users asked them to do to the photos that the users submitted.
The first rule of Fight Club might be "Don't Talk About Fight Club", but the first rule of The Internet is "Don't Read The Comments Section." There are very few exceptions to this rule, but most times reading the comments section on an article is an invitation for the worst of humanity's opinions to invade your brain via your eyeballs.
It would be easy to stuff some humans into a mineshaft and they might survive, but:
1) Would they be able to survive in the world post-asteroid strike? If most of the plant life was dead/dying and almost all larger animals were dead, what would the surviving humans eat? Would the water be drinkable? Would the air be breathable? We might save a group of humans only to have them choke to death, starve to death, or die of dehydration.
2) Even if they could find food/water/shelter, how many humans would survive? If you kept 100 humans alive in the mineshaft, you might quickly wind up with inbreeding and the human race could die out before it gets another foothold.
That's because the obstacles are meant to represent people gunned down by the robotic cheetah. Robot Cheetah will need to leap over them to gun down more people. Otherwise, we could just send wave after wave of men at the robot cheetahs until they are blocked in by corpses.
It's a robotic cheetah. It won't be running and jumping FOR you, It'll be running and jumping TO HUNT you!
So 16% of iPhone purchases were made by people who previously owned Android phones. (I'm going to assume here that "owned Android devices" doesn't mean you owned a Nexus tablet and now are buying an iPhone.) This statistic is useless, though, unless you also find out how many people buying Android phones previously owned iPhones. If there's an equivalent amount of people getting Android phones to replace their iPhones, then the "16%" isn't really a loss for Android. It's just normal churn. Presenting the 16% figure on its own is misleading as it makes it seem like people are fleeing Android and nobody ever leaves Apple.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works. You can't just add up the tube's velocity (0.75c) and your velocity (0.75c) and get 1.5c. To put it another way, if you somehow got a spaceship to move at the speed of light (c) and then turned on the ship's headlights, the light coming out of them wouldn't be travelling at 2c, it would be travelling at c.
This means we've already got a plentiful source of fuel to go faster than light: Politicians! I *knew* there had to be some reason we have them.
"There was that one case... and the other one... then there was that case with the thing... and the person with the other thing... Yeah, we need to keep this running."
The problem with this program (from an FBI-perspective, not a privacy one) is that it floods them with too much data. There's a false notion that since data is good that more data is always good. Not all data is good data. You need to go through it and find the useful parts. As you get more and more data, you eventually become unable to weed through the data to extract the good parts. You either wind up ignoring it entirely (and thus missing good data coming in) or you grab hold of any data point you can find without properly vetting it (due to no manpower for that step) and wind up chasing down phantom leads.
That's why a properly limited (warrant-based) system would not only be better for privacy, but would actually be better for national security.
Exactly this. Government spying on its citizens is bad, don't get me wrong. However, there are remedies for this. It isn't easy, but you CAN vote out the current government and vote in people who will end the spying. Again, it's not easy and it might take time, but it's doable.
Suppose AT&T and Verizon have this big database that they are required to maintain, however, and the government just "checks in" and searches it now and then. They need to maintain the database so (they figure), why not also profit off of it? What's to keep them from running some searches to find ways of extracting more money out of people when the (stated) purpose of the database was national security? And how do we keep them from abusing a database that they maintain in-house? By switching carriers to another carrier required to keep the same database and likely doing the same thing?
It would be better to keep this program in government hands but with some very strict checks and balances in place. Even better would be to shut it down, but if it needs to be kept - which I highly doubt, mind you - I'd prefer it government-run than corporate-run.
There is a difference between Campaign Politician and Elected Politician. Campaign Politician seeks to get as many people to vote for him/her as possible and so is willing to promise nearly anything. If Campaign Politician thought it would win them votes, they would pledge to have the federal government give everyone a free cute puppy.
When Campaign Politician transitions to Elected Politician, however, many (if not all) of those promises get forgotten. Instead Elected Politician will do whatever he/she can to increase his/her political power. This can mean listening to lobbyists, enacting laws to protect businesses that donate to Elected Politician, and working with other Elected Politicians to keep other Elected Politicians down. Sometimes, Elected Politician will actually abide by a few campaign promises, but this is more because Elected Politician knows that eventually he/she will need to become Campaign Politician again and these followed promises will help.
Occasionally, Campaign Politician will make a promise that Elected Politician will realize is impossible to enact, but this is more of a failing of Campaign Politician to keep from making unrealistic promises than anything else. See the "free puppies" example above. It sounds nice until you get to the real world and figure out costs, logistics, other politicians with alternative plans - free kittens - and groups for whom free puppies wouldn't be a good thing (e.g. people with allergies).
That's what we did when my identity was stolen. My name, address, SSN, and DOB were used to open a card in my name. I was lucky and the credit card company sent it to me (due to the thieves paying for rush delivery) instead of processing the address change and sending it to the thieves. It's a pain when I want to use my credit (refinance mortgage, buy a car, etc), but most days I don't need to touch my credit and don't want anyone else touching it either.
Of course, the credit agencies don't like when you freeze your credit. Frozen credit files are less profitable (can't sell them to credit card companies hawking even more lines of credit) and so they like pushing "fraud alerts" instead. These expire every 90 days unless you renew them and are voluntary. If I were a credit card company opening a line of credit on someone, it's recommended that I check the fraud alert, but I could just ignore it, open the credit line, and suffer no consequences.
To credit agencies and credit card companies, identity theft is an inconvenience that you just write off. No big deal. To the victim, though, it's a horrible experience. I felt completely violated knowing that someone was walking around with my private information, pretending to be me, and doing their best to run up a huge tab to send my way.
I've done some research on the topic, being a victim of identity theft myself. From what I understand, the person who steals the identity rarely uses the stolen identity. Instead, they sell it to someone else who then uses it. This way, the real thief gets some quick cash with less risk of getting caught - especially if it's an inside job. (e.g. Someone in HR at your company downloads your company's employee records to a USB drive and decides to make a little money on the side.) Meanwhile, the people using the stolen identities can run up a big tab on the stolen credit lines without needing to do any messy hacking of computer systems. It's a win-win for the criminals - and a lose-lose for the person whose identity was stolen.
Even though I'm opposed to this merger, I'd be afraid that a summary rejection would result in some sort of lawsuit and overturned. Better to let it go through the process and THEN kill it.