Quite interesting how US media differs from other parts of the world when telling this story - obviously it might look insulting to you guys, but isn't this the sort of shit you would like to know about?
Not according to the media sponsored or underwritten by corporations. Apparently we like to watch melodrama, sex, and violence instead of actual informative news.
"Avast, ye scurvy dog! Ye seem to be usin' a pirated copy of this here paid-fer software. Arrr, I likes the piratin' meself, but if ye continue to use this ye can walk the plank, or ye can pay up!"
It really does depend on the region, and whether you use data frequently. I get dead zones with Verizon sometimes, but other than that the 3G can be a lot better than my crummy WiFi (as in, it actually works).
But I've never, ever had a dropped call or poor reception on my Verizon phones, and yet there are people in my region with iPhones who curse AT&T on a regular basis because they can't seem to get a stable connection. *shrug*
Success in terms of profitability, which you're citing, often has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of customer service, which GP indicated is mediocre at best.
If the copy is from an ISO downloaded from TPB, then technically it's illegal-- the restrictions on copyrighted material isn't exclusively on distribution. (D/Ling a copy when your physical master is unreadable is a grey area, IMO, and should be considered as a legal equivalent to using a backup copy-- unfortunately I doubt the pro-corporate courts will rule in favor of that interpretation)
Now, Rosario has no way of knowing whether the defendant downloaded and burned the disc (unless he saw the entire process), nor does he make any assertion to that effect, so his testimony on that matter should have been treated as hearsay.
Not that it matters now, since the prosecution gave up to avoid getting a conviction by misconduct.
It may be more like $50, but that depends on the number of Comcast subscribers; and since class-actions don't have to be initiated by the DoJ or the FCC, it may be the best way to put a nice big dent in Comcast revenue as they spend millions on lawyers trying to make the pesky class-action suit go away, to say little of a judgment if it's awarded.
I'm not saying it's the best option on the table-- stronger watchdogs on business in both government (compromised) and media (compromised but for a couple of outlets) is obviously a better solution*. But absent those, a few bucks times a couple of million plus legal fees for 8 years' worth of litigation can add up to a lot.
Of course, they could take it to appeals and have the punishment thrown out as Microsoft did, or have the judgment amount reduced by a few orders of magnitude as Exxon Mobil did...
* I can hear it already: "no moar regulation!" As if regulation did anything to keep tabs on the idiots who scored junk mortgage bonds Aaa+, among other abuses by corporations...
I wouldn't give her ideas, since Xe (formerly Blackwater) is probably very aligned with her politically, and would probably go assassinate/abduct Assange for the right price.
It depends on how much control Assange has over the big decisions (like whether to dump State Dept. cables for all to see). If someone manages to get Assange to "disappear" then Wikileaks may be disrupted at least temporarily.
It'll also matter if Assange has any Wikileaks accounts in his name-- I remember one time when the DNS registration on my company's website (registered in a former co-worker's name) expired and EVERYONE lost access to email. (Yeah, I know, horrible idea to have a single point of failure... I managed to log into the server itself with the IP address and contact the company president.)
It's more defensible to claim that they did it in response to the defeat of Hillary Clinton, in belief that that defeat might provide an opening to pick up some disappointed Clinton supporters that really were focussed on seeing a woman on the ticket. (I'm not saying this is true, or that, if true, it was a reasonable expectation on their part -- but its an argument I've heard that is certainly more plausible than the explanation that the choice was made because they thought the Clinton campaign was still going strong and that that is who they would have to face in the general.)
It's the reason the McCain campaign was probably thinking, but sadly for them, they did not understand the women who supported Clinton. Had they understood, they wouldn't have pushed for the Alaskan governor without vetting her views first.
The moment the American populace found out that she was a woman being gussied up as the next Ronald Reagan, women went to the Obama camp in droves (I think it was something like a 6-to-4 margin). A few prominent, obnoxious women (Lynn Forester de Rothschild comes to mind) either stayed home or voted McCain because they thought Obama cheated in the primary.
I think every politico today will say without hesitation that picking Sarah Palin as his running mate was the political equivalent of pulling the pin from a handgrenade and throwing the pin, as hindsight is 20/20. One of the really brilliant things about the Democratic campaign in 2008 is that no one really needed to bring up Palin on that side-- she wreaked havoc on Republican credibility all by herself. I think the only time Obama ever responded to her in the campaign was during a rally when he asked "Socialist??? Really?"
Well, the American government has always set a low bar for disappointment; now they're getting the American people to follow them in a race to the bottom. That's leadership for ya.
Seems to me that we need some sort of transformation in the populace, but I can't think of one that isn't destructive...
Bingo! The sooner conservatives and libertarians realize this and abandon the GOP, the better.
The problem is, many big conservative or libertarian groups (American Enterprise Institute? Cato? Newscorp?) are enriched by Republican-backed financiers or policies. It's really hard to abandon a party that promises to make you stinking, filthy rich.
I suspect this list would also be used be used by various agencies to flag people who are engaged in "undesireable" activity. "Only those with something to hide will be using the Do Not Track" feature.
If that were true, they would be doing it already with the Do Not Call registry. Besides, government agencies like the FBI will use loopholes like tapping at the switchroom rather than at your land line.
Personally, I wish he had really gone after Defense, Justice, CIA, and big corporations before leaking State cables, but I'll take the good with the bad (at least Turkey's taking the leak in stride).
Perhaps he wanted to show the world what he and a determined Internet are capable of before he gets even more of a bounty on his head.
Being a staunch believer in Hanlon's Law, I'm guessing that investigating human trafficking is far more costly than whatever it is they generally do (probably smuggling and drug arrests). Once in a while they'll get a high-profile target, which Julian Assange is very quickly becoming.
Yes, well, that's the thing-- if Iran can continue its propaganda to keep its biases intact, so will those who defend corporations. You will see every pro-business politician and pundit howl that Wikileaks is the bane of all business and civilization itself and must be eliminated, again and again on CNBC, the WSJ, Forbes, and every other financial publication you can imagine. Next the so-called "liberal media" will follow suit because they love melodrama in real life.
And thus the average American will continue to believe that it is liberals and government who are the scourge of society.
This definitely isn't for Google, because Google couldn't possibly care less about what Microsoft has to say about any of Google's plans for the enterprise.
This is more for the IT execs and managers of big corporations who couldn't tell a server from a doorstop: "Don't buy Google! They're unreliable! They're unsafe! They're full of FAIL!"
It's called Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, and they're masters at using it on stupid executives.
If anything, my reaction is akin to that of the "Bull in a China Shop" experiment on MythBusters. You hear that Wikileaks announces a big leak, they hype it up, you get all this anticipation, and when the actual results come out, they're... amusing, fascinating, but not "OMG national security crisis!!1!" (the smashing ceramics) material. The worst we've seen in the cables is that the US spies on the UN and other countries via diplomats, but that's hardly surprising given that they had no compunction against spying against its own citizens for about a decade now-- heck, I'm sure the CIA spied on everyone ever since they were created.
If the intended aim of the leak was to shame governments into greater transparency and openness, I have to say that this leak is doomed to failure. Nearly all diplomats are part negotiator, part politician-- and all politicians never liked to be embarrassed in public. What it will very likely do instead is really mess with relations that have been slowly rebuilt in recent years-- China and Russia come to mind, and don't get me started on how much this sets back the 6-party talks now that the DPRK is warming up their artillery. Now that the Arabs' desire to end Iran's nuclear ambitions is out in the open, I doubt they'll be as forthcoming as they were when the toner cartridge bomb plot was brought to our attention. The great irony of these is that it is not that the content of the leaks themselves were a national security risk if kept secret, but that in leaking the material and messing up trust relationships with countries we'd rather not turn into radioactive glass (MAD), the leaking can easily make endeavors toward peace an order of magnitude more difficult. Now North Korea and Iran can say, "How can we trust you, when you're going to let confidential deals out into the open?"
What's more, this leak tells governments not that they should open up and avoid criticism and ridicule, but that they should keep even more from the public in order to avoid pissing off allies and potential allies.
Assange should never have targeted the State Department-- if he wanted real dirt, he should have kept the focus on the CIA, and Justice and Defense Departments.
An argument can be made that Manning should have been denied security clearance for being unstable, but what does that have to do with DADT?
I can probably find a few thousand violent, unstable men who are just as unworthy of security clearance and yet quite straight. I can probably find a few thousand homosexuals with whom you could trust the secrets of every nation on this planet.
My point being, you're injecting DADT in an argument where it does not belong, without sufficient proof to show that "gays are unstable, hence that's another point against Manning having security clearance". Also known as a non sequitur fallacy.
Windows Mobile 7, in development for several years, strips the mobile telephone down to its fundamental essence: futility, annoyance, malfunction, inconvenience and a socially unacceptable odour. Confounding analyst expectations, the turd is in fact shined.
Well, yeah... the statement that "you can't polish a turd" was busted a few years ago. Evidently Microsoft decided that the dorodango method would apply to mobile devices as well.
In this sense, developers are a lot like users-- they don't know how to interpret the gobbledygook that is a stack trace or memory dump unless they know to some degree of precision how the program got there, and if the problem is predictable and/or repeatable. Unless the dump matches a previous case perfectly, a null pointer (for example) can be due to any reference to memory.
Long story short, tell the devs as much as you can if you really want the bug fixed.
The thing about corporate malfeasance of this magnitude, is that it's extremely difficult to nail an individual within the company unless there's evidence specifically fingering him-- which was why Enron was shredding documents against explicit orders from federal investigators not to do so. It's a bit like how high-ranking government officials get nailed-- Nixon would have surely been impeached for at least conspiracy and obstruction of justice because of the tapes he took of his office (the irony of his paranoia is enough to fill several volumes); contrast this to Bush and Cheney, who have gone out of their way to avoid letting their secret deliberations go recorded and have no doubt instructed all of the staff to never remember anything important that could implicate someone in the administration. In the latter case, AG Gonzales looked like a total idiot, but he played his part perfectly.
You can bet that email is being overwritten with multiple layers of digital gibberish, paper documents are getting "lost or misplaced", and management/workers are being drilled or intimidated into not implicating anyone important to the company. You can also bet that other big multinationals will be looking at BP's actions and government response closely to see what, in the future, they can get away with.
No, they're shareholder whores-- they'll do anything to present as rosy an earnings report to maximize short-term gains, even if it ends up costing billions for the company in the long haul. I'm sure BP's management all the way up to the directors have been this way for decades, all the while figuring they'd be relaxing in retirement in Aruba by the time something massively disastrous like an oil rig explosion hits. And even then, they figure that by the time the dust settles they can whittle down civil judgments in appeals court like Exxon Mobil did.
This is the corporate executive version of Russian roulette, really, except that instead of a gun, they're using an IED in a crowded place.
But, she blamed the principal when he threatened police action (I never knew you could be charged with this!)
Unless I'm mistaken, truancy is an arrestable offense in many jurisdictions. I'm sure the principal can convince a DA to throw the book at the parent as well, because not making sure your kids get educated K-12 may be interpreted as negligence.
Funny thing is, it's only a couple of generations ago that parents generally knew when their kids are lying and/or that their kids aren't the perfect angels that so many of today's parents believe. I wonder if in our haste to prevent suicide and depression we effectively told today's parents that kids should never be disciplined?
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Not according to the media sponsored or underwritten by corporations. Apparently we like to watch melodrama, sex, and violence instead of actual informative news.
Did their warning come in pirate-speak?
"Avast, ye scurvy dog! Ye seem to be usin' a pirated copy of this here paid-fer software. Arrr, I likes the piratin' meself, but if ye continue to use this ye can walk the plank, or ye can pay up!"
It really does depend on the region, and whether you use data frequently. I get dead zones with Verizon sometimes, but other than that the 3G can be a lot better than my crummy WiFi (as in, it actually works).
But I've never, ever had a dropped call or poor reception on my Verizon phones, and yet there are people in my region with iPhones who curse AT&T on a regular basis because they can't seem to get a stable connection. *shrug*
It's called "poisoning the well", and corporations like AT&T use it on a regular basis to fight bad PR.
Success in terms of profitability, which you're citing, often has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of customer service, which GP indicated is mediocre at best.
If the copy is from an ISO downloaded from TPB, then technically it's illegal-- the restrictions on copyrighted material isn't exclusively on distribution. (D/Ling a copy when your physical master is unreadable is a grey area, IMO, and should be considered as a legal equivalent to using a backup copy-- unfortunately I doubt the pro-corporate courts will rule in favor of that interpretation)
Now, Rosario has no way of knowing whether the defendant downloaded and burned the disc (unless he saw the entire process), nor does he make any assertion to that effect, so his testimony on that matter should have been treated as hearsay.
Not that it matters now, since the prosecution gave up to avoid getting a conviction by misconduct.
It may be more like $50, but that depends on the number of Comcast subscribers; and since class-actions don't have to be initiated by the DoJ or the FCC, it may be the best way to put a nice big dent in Comcast revenue as they spend millions on lawyers trying to make the pesky class-action suit go away, to say little of a judgment if it's awarded.
I'm not saying it's the best option on the table-- stronger watchdogs on business in both government (compromised) and media (compromised but for a couple of outlets) is obviously a better solution*. But absent those, a few bucks times a couple of million plus legal fees for 8 years' worth of litigation can add up to a lot.
Of course, they could take it to appeals and have the punishment thrown out as Microsoft did, or have the judgment amount reduced by a few orders of magnitude as Exxon Mobil did...
* I can hear it already: "no moar regulation!" As if regulation did anything to keep tabs on the idiots who scored junk mortgage bonds Aaa+, among other abuses by corporations...
Fortunately, a great deal of criminals are as stupid (or as brazen) as this guy.
I wouldn't give her ideas, since Xe (formerly Blackwater) is probably very aligned with her politically, and would probably go assassinate/abduct Assange for the right price.
It depends on how much control Assange has over the big decisions (like whether to dump State Dept. cables for all to see). If someone manages to get Assange to "disappear" then Wikileaks may be disrupted at least temporarily.
It'll also matter if Assange has any Wikileaks accounts in his name-- I remember one time when the DNS registration on my company's website (registered in a former co-worker's name) expired and EVERYONE lost access to email. (Yeah, I know, horrible idea to have a single point of failure... I managed to log into the server itself with the IP address and contact the company president.)
It's the reason the McCain campaign was probably thinking, but sadly for them, they did not understand the women who supported Clinton. Had they understood, they wouldn't have pushed for the Alaskan governor without vetting her views first.
The moment the American populace found out that she was a woman being gussied up as the next Ronald Reagan, women went to the Obama camp in droves (I think it was something like a 6-to-4 margin). A few prominent, obnoxious women (Lynn Forester de Rothschild comes to mind) either stayed home or voted McCain because they thought Obama cheated in the primary.
I think every politico today will say without hesitation that picking Sarah Palin as his running mate was the political equivalent of pulling the pin from a handgrenade and throwing the pin, as hindsight is 20/20. One of the really brilliant things about the Democratic campaign in 2008 is that no one really needed to bring up Palin on that side-- she wreaked havoc on Republican credibility all by herself. I think the only time Obama ever responded to her in the campaign was during a rally when he asked "Socialist??? Really?"
Well, the American government has always set a low bar for disappointment; now they're getting the American people to follow them in a race to the bottom. That's leadership for ya.
Seems to me that we need some sort of transformation in the populace, but I can't think of one that isn't destructive...
Bingo! The sooner conservatives and libertarians realize this and abandon the GOP, the better.
The problem is, many big conservative or libertarian groups (American Enterprise Institute? Cato? Newscorp?) are enriched by Republican-backed financiers or policies. It's really hard to abandon a party that promises to make you stinking, filthy rich.
If that were true, they would be doing it already with the Do Not Call registry. Besides, government agencies like the FBI will use loopholes like tapping at the switchroom rather than at your land line.
Personally, I wish he had really gone after Defense, Justice, CIA, and big corporations before leaking State cables, but I'll take the good with the bad (at least Turkey's taking the leak in stride).
Perhaps he wanted to show the world what he and a determined Internet are capable of before he gets even more of a bounty on his head.
Being a staunch believer in Hanlon's Law, I'm guessing that investigating human trafficking is far more costly than whatever it is they generally do (probably smuggling and drug arrests). Once in a while they'll get a high-profile target, which Julian Assange is very quickly becoming.
Yes, well, that's the thing-- if Iran can continue its propaganda to keep its biases intact, so will those who defend corporations. You will see every pro-business politician and pundit howl that Wikileaks is the bane of all business and civilization itself and must be eliminated, again and again on CNBC, the WSJ, Forbes, and every other financial publication you can imagine. Next the so-called "liberal media" will follow suit because they love melodrama in real life.
And thus the average American will continue to believe that it is liberals and government who are the scourge of society.
This definitely isn't for Google, because Google couldn't possibly care less about what Microsoft has to say about any of Google's plans for the enterprise.
This is more for the IT execs and managers of big corporations who couldn't tell a server from a doorstop: "Don't buy Google! They're unreliable! They're unsafe! They're full of FAIL!"
It's called Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, and they're masters at using it on stupid executives.
If anything, my reaction is akin to that of the "Bull in a China Shop" experiment on MythBusters. You hear that Wikileaks announces a big leak, they hype it up, you get all this anticipation, and when the actual results come out, they're... amusing, fascinating, but not "OMG national security crisis!!1!" (the smashing ceramics) material. The worst we've seen in the cables is that the US spies on the UN and other countries via diplomats, but that's hardly surprising given that they had no compunction against spying against its own citizens for about a decade now-- heck, I'm sure the CIA spied on everyone ever since they were created.
If the intended aim of the leak was to shame governments into greater transparency and openness, I have to say that this leak is doomed to failure. Nearly all diplomats are part negotiator, part politician-- and all politicians never liked to be embarrassed in public. What it will very likely do instead is really mess with relations that have been slowly rebuilt in recent years-- China and Russia come to mind, and don't get me started on how much this sets back the 6-party talks now that the DPRK is warming up their artillery. Now that the Arabs' desire to end Iran's nuclear ambitions is out in the open, I doubt they'll be as forthcoming as they were when the toner cartridge bomb plot was brought to our attention. The great irony of these is that it is not that the content of the leaks themselves were a national security risk if kept secret, but that in leaking the material and messing up trust relationships with countries we'd rather not turn into radioactive glass (MAD), the leaking can easily make endeavors toward peace an order of magnitude more difficult. Now North Korea and Iran can say, "How can we trust you, when you're going to let confidential deals out into the open?"
What's more, this leak tells governments not that they should open up and avoid criticism and ridicule, but that they should keep even more from the public in order to avoid pissing off allies and potential allies.
Assange should never have targeted the State Department-- if he wanted real dirt, he should have kept the focus on the CIA, and Justice and Defense Departments.
An argument can be made that Manning should have been denied security clearance for being unstable, but what does that have to do with DADT?
I can probably find a few thousand violent, unstable men who are just as unworthy of security clearance and yet quite straight. I can probably find a few thousand homosexuals with whom you could trust the secrets of every nation on this planet.
My point being, you're injecting DADT in an argument where it does not belong, without sufficient proof to show that "gays are unstable, hence that's another point against Manning having security clearance". Also known as a non sequitur fallacy.
Well, yeah... the statement that "you can't polish a turd" was busted a few years ago. Evidently Microsoft decided that the dorodango method would apply to mobile devices as well.
In this sense, developers are a lot like users-- they don't know how to interpret the gobbledygook that is a stack trace or memory dump unless they know to some degree of precision how the program got there, and if the problem is predictable and/or repeatable. Unless the dump matches a previous case perfectly, a null pointer (for example) can be due to any reference to memory.
Long story short, tell the devs as much as you can if you really want the bug fixed.
The thing about corporate malfeasance of this magnitude, is that it's extremely difficult to nail an individual within the company unless there's evidence specifically fingering him-- which was why Enron was shredding documents against explicit orders from federal investigators not to do so. It's a bit like how high-ranking government officials get nailed-- Nixon would have surely been impeached for at least conspiracy and obstruction of justice because of the tapes he took of his office (the irony of his paranoia is enough to fill several volumes); contrast this to Bush and Cheney, who have gone out of their way to avoid letting their secret deliberations go recorded and have no doubt instructed all of the staff to never remember anything important that could implicate someone in the administration. In the latter case, AG Gonzales looked like a total idiot, but he played his part perfectly.
You can bet that email is being overwritten with multiple layers of digital gibberish, paper documents are getting "lost or misplaced", and management/workers are being drilled or intimidated into not implicating anyone important to the company. You can also bet that other big multinationals will be looking at BP's actions and government response closely to see what, in the future, they can get away with.
No, they're shareholder whores-- they'll do anything to present as rosy an earnings report to maximize short-term gains, even if it ends up costing billions for the company in the long haul. I'm sure BP's management all the way up to the directors have been this way for decades, all the while figuring they'd be relaxing in retirement in Aruba by the time something massively disastrous like an oil rig explosion hits. And even then, they figure that by the time the dust settles they can whittle down civil judgments in appeals court like Exxon Mobil did.
This is the corporate executive version of Russian roulette, really, except that instead of a gun, they're using an IED in a crowded place.
Unless I'm mistaken, truancy is an arrestable offense in many jurisdictions. I'm sure the principal can convince a DA to throw the book at the parent as well, because not making sure your kids get educated K-12 may be interpreted as negligence.
Funny thing is, it's only a couple of generations ago that parents generally knew when their kids are lying and/or that their kids aren't the perfect angels that so many of today's parents believe. I wonder if in our haste to prevent suicide and depression we effectively told today's parents that kids should never be disciplined?