that if you receive any letters from any lawyers you will answer them truthfully. So if you get accused of illegal downloads, you would truthfully reply that you didn't do it, but your roommate.
We're not talking about a morally upstanding individual here. The torrenting roommate will just attempt to drag the other one down with him.
I would go my separate ways from a roommate that was carelessly putting me in danger of losing all my computer equipment and paying tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees or worse in fines.
I'm not sure where you get your legal information from, but it doesn't jibe with my own experiences and observations. At a minimum, their computer equipment will disappear and be treated with a great deal of ungentleness. Even if the Internet doesn't get cut off, good luck using it while your computer equipment is in evidence for a year.
This kind of legal action happens all the time in all sorts of similar contexts. It's extraordinarily rare that any sort of harassment countersuit is made to stick from the deep pockets pursuing its "legal interests" a bit overzealously. Even if you can get the legal attack declared groundless or harassment, it involves the expenditure of a great deal of legal defense resources with a great deal of risk that those resources will never be recovered. Certainly, your time is gone forever.
This isn't like a drive-by misuse of the connection, though. The roommate is building up a lot of evidence that illegal filesharing was the norm with that line to the Internet.
When shit goes wrong, don't be surprised when the roommate who never wants to pay for any media brings everyone down with him by claiming that everyone knew about the way the connection was used.
Our insurance companies aren't exactly the problem. It's the companies that the insurance companies pay. They're robbing us all blind.
The problem is that there are several middle men, no transparency in who's paying for what, no ability/expectation for insurance holders to control hidden costs, and complicated layers of laws designed to hold the whole scam together.
If medical insurance were treated like car insurance where it was not connected to your job and you only used it in an emergency -- but paid out of pocket for most routine needs, everything would be different.
Not true at all. The first bullet point that explains the reasoning for the downgrade in the article is this:
The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.
The debt is the most important issue.
The fact that they don't trust us to be able to solve the debt problem is the part you quoted. There's nothing in the text that would indicate that that's the more important factor. If we didn't have our huge debt, then the bullet point you quoted would be a non-issue.
So your reaction to the destruction of the US's good credit rating and all the devastation that's going to cause to the value of what generations have built in this country is to rail against the one group of people who are trying to get us to spend tax dollars responsibly? The Tea Party?
That makes no sense at all.
When you find yourself trapped at the bottom of a deep hole, stop digging!
Just look at your rhetoric, "Trying to take things away from you". That sense of entitlement is exactly the problem that got us into this mess.
Social Security has a pretty decent store of financial instruments that they can liquidate to keep making payments for months in the event of a government shutdown.
Besides that, though, servicing of the debt is around $30B per month, and the Treasury takes in revenues of over $170B per month. There's more than enough there to fund servicing of the debt, social security, medicare, paying military personnel, and a slew of other government functions.
Default on August 2nd was never even close to the problem. Our rating was cut because the fear is that our debt will be $25 trillion in ten years and is spiraling out of our control. Unlike Greece, no one will be big enough to bail us out. We will take the entire global economy with us.
We had a chance to show the world markets that we could make real cuts to our budget and deficit. Forces of the State didn't like that and instead chose to pass huge amounts of debt and looming disaster on to our descendants.
There was never a danger of default. The US tax revenue every month is much greater than the debt servicing payments.
The only thing we were in danger of was a government shutdown. The "default" talk was all theater designed to scare voters.
The reason we were downgraded is because the "debt deal" was pretty close to useless. More theater.
The real problem (as the article mentions) is that we have such a huge debt in the first place. The Tea Party folks were vindicated by this slashing of our rating. They knew all along that it was about the debt. They tried to do something about it. The leaders of the Republican and Democrat parties should be tarred and feathered on their way out of office.
A company I joined as employee #3 in the early 2000's tried to pull the same stunt. I caught it and raised holy hell to have it removed from the stock agreement.
If only there was a way to have credit card owners approve each charge through the entering of some kind of a pin.
If only credit card numbers weren't special since what really mattered was signed transactions.
If only every consumer had a personal device capable of signing transactions in his pocket at almost all times.
Call me a dreamer, but someday in the next hundred years, I think that all those "huge" technological problems could be solved and we could end this problem of having our credit card and social security numbers being exposed.
It's nice to know that Ben Franklin was so incredibly right:
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
We've done this to ourselves. We've given these goons so much money and power to make us all safe from terrrrusts, and now our liberty and our safety are greatly diminished.
I wasn't aware of the hacking accusation for Zuckerberg (if it wasn't in the Social Network, I haven't really paid attention) - but those things only look similar on a technical level.
"The Palin Hacker" was hacking in the cause of subverting an election. As a society, we take messing with the election process a lot more seriously than we do messing with random web sites of would-be college entrepreneurs.
Exactly right. A settlement is in no way, shape, or form an admission of guilt or even an acknowledgement that the suit had merit. It's just handing someone some money so they'll shut up and you can continue to run your business.
But she's not in office now. The level of zeal in pursuing an out-of-office governor turned vice presidential candidate fits in perfectly with my observations that the mainstream media in this country is biased against those to the right of the US political spectrum.
No kidding. Joe Biden would be this decade's Dan Quayle if he were a Republican. They'd be showing the bit where he asked the guy in the wheelchair to stand up over and over on the Daily Show. You'd see constant mention of his quote that "J-O-B-S, JOBS!" is a three letter word.
It's funny how the press seems to give him a pass. Such a mystery of the universe.
Global Warming/Climate Change is not about the Earth being at all time record temps and therefore when it cools all is okay. Call it Global Heat Redistribution because all the Climate Patterns are changing. It's the Change that is screwing with the Earth's general climate patterns. Sudden drops in electromagnetic energy from the Sun will provide a rapid shift in those Climate Patterns, once again, and during the change the Earth will take a beating. Repeat and rinse. Our increasing of pollution that weakens our Atmosphere makes the impact of such drastic shifts more of a reality, not less.
CO2 elevations raise the heat retention of the atmosphere. They don't "weaken" the atmosphere. If the solar cycle decreases the amount of energy stored in the atmosphere and that's offset by the CO2 retention, it could be beneficial to life on Earth.
Please stick to logic and science. Don't use climate change as the bogeyman that's out to get us no matter what we do, like some kind of Jason from Friday the 13th.
Because the police have an extraordinarily strong lobby and our elected representatives aren't interested in protecting our individual liberties.
A video recording is different because it completely shatters the long-held power that the police had of being believed. I'll never forget learning that simple truth in college when a police officer wrongly accused a friend of mine and I of doing something completely fabricated. We had our description of the actual events, the cop had some made-up story. Guess who the judge believed?
Cops have had the protection of belief for way too long. They've abused that power and even with pervasive video, they will continue to abuse that power.
Fortunately, for cases when it is available, video is the great equalizer. Cops don't like to have equal footing with citizens. They want to be right. They want to be believed. They want to have all the power.
Question: where speeding is (in most cases) not criminal, and the purported goal of speed traps is for safety, not revenue collection, drivers flashing their headlamps achieves the oft-stated goal: getting drivers to slow down. Why should they care if people slow down a couple thousand feet before the speed trap? You would think that if the real purpose of speed traps is to increase safety (study after study after study have consistently demonstrated that speeding in and of itself is not dangerous) then they would encourage ANY means to get drivers to slow down. Calling it obstruction of justice is idiotic because it shows that all they care about is revenue.
By that logic, wouldn't it be okay for me to warn a drug dealer that a cop was coming up the street in the interest of getting him to stop selling drugs?
I could see where the police would argue that getting a ticket is a much greater deterrent against future speeding than just having headlights flashed at you.
Slashdot Mirror
that if you receive any letters from any lawyers you will answer them truthfully. So if you get accused of illegal downloads, you would truthfully reply that you didn't do it, but your roommate.
We're not talking about a morally upstanding individual here. The torrenting roommate will just attempt to drag the other one down with him.
I would go my separate ways from a roommate that was carelessly putting me in danger of losing all my computer equipment and paying tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees or worse in fines.
I'm not sure where you get your legal information from, but it doesn't jibe with my own experiences and observations. At a minimum, their computer equipment will disappear and be treated with a great deal of ungentleness. Even if the Internet doesn't get cut off, good luck using it while your computer equipment is in evidence for a year.
This kind of legal action happens all the time in all sorts of similar contexts. It's extraordinarily rare that any sort of harassment countersuit is made to stick from the deep pockets pursuing its "legal interests" a bit overzealously. Even if you can get the legal attack declared groundless or harassment, it involves the expenditure of a great deal of legal defense resources with a great deal of risk that those resources will never be recovered. Certainly, your time is gone forever.
This isn't like a drive-by misuse of the connection, though. The roommate is building up a lot of evidence that illegal filesharing was the norm with that line to the Internet.
When shit goes wrong, don't be surprised when the roommate who never wants to pay for any media brings everyone down with him by claiming that everyone knew about the way the connection was used.
Our insurance companies aren't exactly the problem. It's the companies that the insurance companies pay. They're robbing us all blind.
The problem is that there are several middle men, no transparency in who's paying for what, no ability/expectation for insurance holders to control hidden costs, and complicated layers of laws designed to hold the whole scam together.
If medical insurance were treated like car insurance where it was not connected to your job and you only used it in an emergency -- but paid out of pocket for most routine needs, everything would be different.
And we should all speak Esperanto.
Not true at all. The first bullet point that explains the reasoning for the downgrade in the article is this:
The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.
The debt is the most important issue.
The fact that they don't trust us to be able to solve the debt problem is the part you quoted. There's nothing in the text that would indicate that that's the more important factor. If we didn't have our huge debt, then the bullet point you quoted would be a non-issue.
So your reaction to the destruction of the US's good credit rating and all the devastation that's going to cause to the value of what generations have built in this country is to rail against the one group of people who are trying to get us to spend tax dollars responsibly? The Tea Party?
That makes no sense at all.
When you find yourself trapped at the bottom of a deep hole, stop digging!
Just look at your rhetoric, "Trying to take things away from you". That sense of entitlement is exactly the problem that got us into this mess.
I agree with cutting the military, and I agree with the fact that we shouldn't be the world's policeman.
The main thing that the US government *should* do, is to defend our citizens from foreign and domestic threats.
Social Security has a pretty decent store of financial instruments that they can liquidate to keep making payments for months in the event of a government shutdown.
Besides that, though, servicing of the debt is around $30B per month, and the Treasury takes in revenues of over $170B per month. There's more than enough there to fund servicing of the debt, social security, medicare, paying military personnel, and a slew of other government functions.
Default on August 2nd was never even close to the problem. Our rating was cut because the fear is that our debt will be $25 trillion in ten years and is spiraling out of our control. Unlike Greece, no one will be big enough to bail us out. We will take the entire global economy with us.
We had a chance to show the world markets that we could make real cuts to our budget and deficit. Forces of the State didn't like that and instead chose to pass huge amounts of debt and looming disaster on to our descendants.
There was never a danger of default. The US tax revenue every month is much greater than the debt servicing payments.
The only thing we were in danger of was a government shutdown. The "default" talk was all theater designed to scare voters.
The reason we were downgraded is because the "debt deal" was pretty close to useless. More theater.
The real problem (as the article mentions) is that we have such a huge debt in the first place. The Tea Party folks were vindicated by this slashing of our rating. They knew all along that it was about the debt. They tried to do something about it. The leaders of the Republican and Democrat parties should be tarred and feathered on their way out of office.
Cop Block is a brilliant resource for those wanting information on abusive state practices.
As always, government needs to be on a short leash. Give these folks too much power and they'll abuse it time and time again.
Please raise my taxes to pay for more of this shit.
A company I joined as employee #3 in the early 2000's tried to pull the same stunt. I caught it and raised holy hell to have it removed from the stock agreement.
If only there was a way to have credit card owners approve each charge through the entering of some kind of a pin.
If only credit card numbers weren't special since what really mattered was signed transactions.
If only every consumer had a personal device capable of signing transactions in his pocket at almost all times.
Call me a dreamer, but someday in the next hundred years, I think that all those "huge" technological problems could be solved and we could end this problem of having our credit card and social security numbers being exposed.
It's nice to know that Ben Franklin was so incredibly right:
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
We've done this to ourselves. We've given these goons so much money and power to make us all safe from terrrrusts, and now our liberty and our safety are greatly diminished.
You were really in the right place at the right time... for the cop.
The Palin Hacker did far less than this, yet he's facing hard time in the federal pen;
I wasn't aware of the hacking accusation for Zuckerberg (if it wasn't in the Social Network, I haven't really paid attention) - but those things only look similar on a technical level.
"The Palin Hacker" was hacking in the cause of subverting an election. As a society, we take messing with the election process a lot more seriously than we do messing with random web sites of would-be college entrepreneurs.
Exactly right. A settlement is in no way, shape, or form an admission of guilt or even an acknowledgement that the suit had merit. It's just handing someone some money so they'll shut up and you can continue to run your business.
But she's not in office now. The level of zeal in pursuing an out-of-office governor turned vice presidential candidate fits in perfectly with my observations that the mainstream media in this country is biased against those to the right of the US political spectrum.
No kidding. Joe Biden would be this decade's Dan Quayle if he were a Republican. They'd be showing the bit where he asked the guy in the wheelchair to stand up over and over on the Daily Show. You'd see constant mention of his quote that "J-O-B-S, JOBS!" is a three letter word.
It's funny how the press seems to give him a pass. Such a mystery of the universe.
Global Warming/Climate Change is not about the Earth being at all time record temps and therefore when it cools all is okay. Call it Global Heat Redistribution because all the Climate Patterns are changing. It's the Change that is screwing with the Earth's general climate patterns. Sudden drops in electromagnetic energy from the Sun will provide a rapid shift in those Climate Patterns, once again, and during the change the Earth will take a beating. Repeat and rinse. Our increasing of pollution that weakens our Atmosphere makes the impact of such drastic shifts more of a reality, not less.
CO2 elevations raise the heat retention of the atmosphere. They don't "weaken" the atmosphere. If the solar cycle decreases the amount of energy stored in the atmosphere and that's offset by the CO2 retention, it could be beneficial to life on Earth.
Please stick to logic and science. Don't use climate change as the bogeyman that's out to get us no matter what we do, like some kind of Jason from Friday the 13th.
Because the police have an extraordinarily strong lobby and our elected representatives aren't interested in protecting our individual liberties.
A video recording is different because it completely shatters the long-held power that the police had of being believed. I'll never forget learning that simple truth in college when a police officer wrongly accused a friend of mine and I of doing something completely fabricated. We had our description of the actual events, the cop had some made-up story. Guess who the judge believed?
Cops have had the protection of belief for way too long. They've abused that power and even with pervasive video, they will continue to abuse that power.
Fortunately, for cases when it is available, video is the great equalizer. Cops don't like to have equal footing with citizens. They want to be right. They want to be believed. They want to have all the power.
Well, lawyers commonly charge their clients per printed page, faxes sent, etc. They make lots of money off doing things archaically.
Question: where speeding is (in most cases) not criminal, and the purported goal of speed traps is for safety, not revenue collection, drivers flashing their headlamps achieves the oft-stated goal: getting drivers to slow down. Why should they care if people slow down a couple thousand feet before the speed trap? You would think that if the real purpose of speed traps is to increase safety (study after study after study have consistently demonstrated that speeding in and of itself is not dangerous) then they would encourage ANY means to get drivers to slow down. Calling it obstruction of justice is idiotic because it shows that all they care about is revenue.
By that logic, wouldn't it be okay for me to warn a drug dealer that a cop was coming up the street in the interest of getting him to stop selling drugs?
I could see where the police would argue that getting a ticket is a much greater deterrent against future speeding than just having headlights flashed at you.
RTFA?