I really don't think you'd see it that way in real life.
I'm not saying the intruders were doing anyone a favor. I'm saying that Sony is required by law to protect personal data, and they didn't even try to do so. Now they are saying they were subject to sophisticated attacks when any random script kiddie could have gotten through their security. They are trying to dodge liability for their lack of security by claiming they were attacked by unstoppable supercriminals.
From the sounds of it, the attack didn't need to be highly sophisticated. Sounds like Sony left the door open but posted a "please don't break in" sign out front.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters (read: the poor and middle class) discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.
Do you seriously believe it's the poor and middle class that are voting themselves largesse from the treasury? Have you look at where our money goes and who is controlling that?
Freedom includes the right to be an asshole. FORCING people to be charitable is the opposite of freedom - it's basically what plantation masters did to slaves (volunteer work picking cotton).
Being a part of a society entails voluntarily giving up some of your freedoms. The freedom to kill, for example, is necessarily sacrificed. Taxation is one of the prices you pay for being a part of the society. Being able to choose where you taxes go is not a freedom you get to exercise. We have elections for hiring the people who get to decide how much you pay and where the money goes. Neither restricting your freedom to kill nor forcing you to pay taxes is immoral or unethical.
If you can't abide with the freedoms you have given up, your easiest option is to leave and find a home where no society will impose restrictions on you. Until then, get used to forced taxation.
Social security is fine. Just get rid of the income cap and it's good for a century. Medicare does need fixing, but capping per person expenditures won't do it. Health care costs will still rise, they just won't be on your tax bill. Insurance companies will take the vouchers and provide nothing. There's only one way that will work to bring medical costs down and that is across the board single payer. Drug prices too high? Negotiate lower ones or choose a different medication. Unnecessary MRI? No reimbursement. Maybe if the Doctor isn't getting paid, he'll learn how to diagnose rather than throwing darts at the "which test next" dartboard. Provide and enforce a way for doctors to choose medications based on effectiveness rather than newness.
BTW, both 401ks and pension plans have both employee and employer contributions. If there's something legal that prevents employers from paying into 401ks as much as they paid into pension plans, we should fix that. But having the money in your name instead of your companies name (or worse yet, the government's name) while it grows can only be a good thing.
There's nothing about 401ks that requires employers to contribute. Mine does not. There's nothing about 401ks that prevents employers from specifying what you must invest in. In fact the design of 401ks required that the employer choose the investment manager or manage the 401ks themselves. Your employer can decide tomorrow that all 401ks need to be fully invested in the company stock. It's not really true that that money is in your own name. It's got your employer's name all over it, they can tell you how to invest it, and all it takes is another well bribed bankruptcy judge to decide that 401ks are company assets for it to disappear. The only thing you can do is quit and roll it over into an IRA before that happens. (Your IRA isn't owned by you, either. The bank or brokerage holds custody of it for you until you decide you want to pay taxes on it. So far the law doesn't allow them to take it from you, except through fees. But with this congress, who knows.)
The way defined contribution pensions used to work is the company or union set up a pension fund and kept it funded according to rules set up by the government. So long as those rules were enforced, it was great. You can lose everything in a 401k. Or you might do better than you would in a defined benefit plan. But now, the defined benefit plan can be taken away by the company, too. But as originally defined, you couldn't lose everything in a DBP except through hyperinflation.
So, someone breaks into my house, ties me up, and uses my computer to upload plans for a terrorist plot, then leaves. I go to jail for being a terrorist?
If not, what's the difference between that and someone breaking the Woefully-inadequate Encryption Protocol (WEP) on my wireless router?
Most routers have a "change MAC address" setting. A college near here asks students for their ethernet and wifi MAC addresses when giving them network access, and it only gives DHCP addresses to MAC addresses is recognizes. So every student living in the dorms knows how to spoof a MAC address with their router, ipad, phone, or any other device they want to put on the network. And this ain't MIT, it's a small liberal arts college. So I'd guess anyone young enough to be interested in pirating music, software, or movies would know how to spoof a MAC address. Most of them wouldn't bother for something as common as downloading music.
Anyone doing something really illegal would probably have found out about how to misdirect the police from the other criminals they associate with. I'm surprised that kiddie porn freaks would ever get caught by an IP address trace.
Yeah. I think we could catch lots of criminals by searching every house and apartment without a warrant. Let's start with yours. We wouldn't want those living turds to get away.
It's not like there are penalties for bribery anymore. It's free speech, dontcha know. Give his wife a job. Add a private jet flight to the conservative strategy session in Maui. Use of a private condo there. Add in a few meals and hookers, and you're done.
The appeals court will decide that we all get a static IP which will be tatooed to each person's forehead. Then an IP address will uniquely identify a person. Unfortunately it will be an IPv6 address so you won't be able to do anything with it.
And you know that Fox News has shown Orly Taitz's fake kenyan birth certificates many many times. It no less a lie when you say "Attorney Orly Taitz has produced what she claims is Barak Obama's birth certificate." It's not like Dan Rather or CBS news produced the document that was found to be fake. They merely reported on it.
You think that Obama's birth certificates are fake? That's so 7th grade. You're believing the lies that you are being fed by your choice of "news." I don't know if you're being facetious or entirely missing the point that reality based news is something that we should prefer.
Just to be accurate, the Z8000 did have a segmented architecture. But it was a logical segmented architecture with segment number being the upper bits of the address, rather than the weird segment arithmetic chosen by intel. You could actually use the segment number as the input to an external MMU.
The Commodore and Zilog lines never went higher than 16 bit.
There was the Zilog Z8000 which was as 32bit as the Motorola 68000. It had a 16-bit ALU with ability to merge adjacent registers into 32bit or 64bit values. The Z80000 (aka Z320) was a true 32-bit processor. The Motorola 68000 had 32 bit registers, but a 16-bit ALU.
Assigning the 6502 to Commodore is a misnomer. The original 6502 was made by MOS Technology and licensed to Rockwell and Synertek. MOS Technologies was later purchased by Commodore. The 65C02, 65C802 and the 65C816 were designed by Western Digital, and second sourced by many companies. I don't think Commodore produced either. But you are correct that no 32bit version exists in silicon.
The proper use, of the comma, had not, been defined, in 1788. Writers, tended to put, them where a short pause, or breath, might take place, rather than, in places necessary, to make meaning, more plain.
The problem is that when Dan Rather reports something that he believed was a valid document, but wasn't, he gets disciplined (i.e. fired in this case) even though the underlying story was essentially unchanged without that document (Bush was AWOL, never completed his National Guard service, and wasn't punished because of who his dad was). And the network retracted the story the way responsible news organizations are supposed to. When someone on Fox News does that the network pretends the lies/forgeries never happened. Any equivalence between the two is false. Real news admits when it makes mistakes.
In the end, do I really care who listens to my conversations? No, they can listen to all the phone sex if they want.
They aren't listening to your conversations. They are listening to your voicemail if you send it to them. And if someone were to have phone sex with my voicemail, whether I sent it to them would depend upon who was calling.
Defined benefit pension plans just need to be outlawed - nothing good can come from that practice.
Apart from people actually having pensions which is a good thing that comes from that practice. Have you checked what the average 401k balance is? To which you'll probably respond "That's not my fault." To which I respond in advance, "It's not the pensioners fault that their employers don't fund their defined benefit plans, either, and it's only congress's fault that pension assets can be liquidated in bankruptcy. When you're working for $9/hr it's tough to keep that 401k fully funded."
Regarding the gold futures markets: Gold clearing houses don't need to be in possession of gold they write contracts for, and most contracts are never exercised through to delivery. It's a big weakness in most commodities markets that encourages speculation, like the type that is happening in the oil market now. Most people buying oil futures wouldn't be doing so if there was a chance that they would have to take delivery. The actual numbers I saw in a article about the University of Texas taking delivery of a billion dollars of gold and how the clearing house had some difficulty doing so. That house estimated they could come up with about 5% of the gold needed to make delivery on all of their contracts. I did some Googling and found the 1/5 elsewhere.
Yes. I have lots of relatives and even a few friends that are Tea Partiers. The ones who complained about having to send their children to a private school because of the Mexicans. The same Mexicans who wrecked their church. The same ones that don't mind using the N-word in their facebook posts. Beyond racism, their main concern is money, and how baby killers and black people are getting all their tax money. And how they pay so much in taxes that it's tough to afford a second house (because they didn't want to sell the first one when they moved) and $22k/year in private school tuition. Or $35k/year a year in Private College tuition. Of course they can't send their kids to a public college, because budgets have been cut so much that their kids can't get in. (When I went to a public college, it promised admission to the top 50% of high school grads. Now it's got a top 5% guarantee, because nobody wanted to pay for building new campuses.
I unfortunately own some property with one of these jerks, who bitches about property taxes and never pays on time and wants to split the penalties. He just turned 56, so he's all for Ryan's medicare destruction. And they all want capital gains taxes eliminated.
Of course, these are all people who went to public schools when they were kids, and went to public colleges. One set's father was a public school math teacher. If he was still alive, they'd cut his pension. The rest have parents are on social security and medicare. All these people took what they wanted from the system and don't want to give anything back. They want a flat tax, which they are wrongly convinced would lower their taxes. I try to convince them that you'd only pay less if you're in the top 2%, but they don't want to hear it. Stop telling me my taxes are lower than they've ever been, I want the lower.
Anyway, your strawmen don't work either. I might be a bit more knowledgeable than you thik. I don't support corporate welfare either as subsidies or tax breaks. I would support a flat tax for corporations lower than 35%, assuming it would be on income where earned. In other words no shuffling profits to the caymans while lobbying congress for a tax holiday so you can repatriate them.
I know that failure to raise the debt ceiling doesn't necessarily mean default. The practical effects on the country and the markets are the same and it's going force default anyway. I know you think there's tons of unnecessary spending in the budget there really isn't. What, are you suggesting preserve defense and social security and get rid of everything else? Who needs the FAA anyway! Or VA hospitals! Or Healthcare for seniors. It would usher in libertarian utopia. For a few seconds, at least, followed by 30% unemployment, and hyperinflation. You may find that desirable. I do not.
It's not like you get a choice in the matter. Not too long ago pensions weren't dependent upon a company's survival. Pensions needed to be prefunded, and were not considered a part of the company's assets during bankruptcy. A (Republican) judge changed that during one of GM's bankruptcies. So, of course, GM threw it's pensioners onto the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp., a government run fund that guarantees pensions. So the billions that GM owed pensioners became billions that the government owes pensioners.
Since then, companies treat their pension trust funds like a slush fund. They underfund them, despite laws that a supposed to require full funding. And once bankruptcy comes around they grab the money and put it on the taxpayer's credit card. Not that the Congress has done anything to prevent this theft of public money.
So, if you're one of the few people left that actually gets a pension, hope you're in an industry where the union runs the pensions. Otherwise, never look at your pension benefit statement because it won't be there for you. Fully fund your 401k, and hope that your employer doesn't force 100% to be invested in company stock. The instant you smell trouble, jump ship and roll over your 401k into an IRA. Even then don't be surprised if you lose it all. There's no such thing as a safe asset. Even gold isn't safe, unless you're holding it in your hands. Futures for about 5 times more gold than exists have been sold. If everyone wants delivery, there will be another crisis as all the houses that sold gold futures collapse. Investors who shorted gold won't be able to cover. People who thought they owned gold won't actually have any. Not pretty.
How does that kool-aid taste? Restore sanity to the dollar and sanity to fiscal matters? All I see from the tea party are demands to do the opposite. And they tie their insane fiscal policies with insane social ones. "Give the rich a break. Tax them cheapskate poor people, and make sure they can't get news from anyone but Fox. I know that 85% of welfare goes to white women, but its 'the blacks' that are the problem. And I'm not racist because I have lots of black friends. Look at this picture I drew of Obama throwing spears. But don't you dare cut Defense. Old people aren't going to need health care 10 years from now anyway."
We'll see how well your investments do after the Republicans force default on the debt in another attempt to defund Planned Parenthood.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't think you'd see it that way in real life.
I'm not saying the intruders were doing anyone a favor. I'm saying that Sony is required by law to protect personal data, and they didn't even try to do so. Now they are saying they were subject to sophisticated attacks when any random script kiddie could have gotten through their security. They are trying to dodge liability for their lack of security by claiming they were attacked by unstoppable supercriminals.
From the sounds of it, the attack didn't need to be highly sophisticated. Sounds like Sony left the door open but posted a "please don't break in" sign out front.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters (read: the poor and middle class) discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.
Do you seriously believe it's the poor and middle class that are voting themselves largesse from the treasury? Have you look at where our money goes and who is controlling that?
Freedom includes the right to be an asshole. FORCING people to be charitable is the opposite of freedom - it's basically what plantation masters did to slaves (volunteer work picking cotton).
Being a part of a society entails voluntarily giving up some of your freedoms. The freedom to kill, for example, is necessarily sacrificed. Taxation is one of the prices you pay for being a part of the society. Being able to choose where you taxes go is not a freedom you get to exercise. We have elections for hiring the people who get to decide how much you pay and where the money goes. Neither restricting your freedom to kill nor forcing you to pay taxes is immoral or unethical.
If you can't abide with the freedoms you have given up, your easiest option is to leave and find a home where no society will impose restrictions on you. Until then, get used to forced taxation.
Social security is fine. Just get rid of the income cap and it's good for a century. Medicare does need fixing, but capping per person expenditures won't do it. Health care costs will still rise, they just won't be on your tax bill. Insurance companies will take the vouchers and provide nothing. There's only one way that will work to bring medical costs down and that is across the board single payer. Drug prices too high? Negotiate lower ones or choose a different medication. Unnecessary MRI? No reimbursement. Maybe if the Doctor isn't getting paid, he'll learn how to diagnose rather than throwing darts at the "which test next" dartboard. Provide and enforce a way for doctors to choose medications based on effectiveness rather than newness.
BTW, both 401ks and pension plans have both employee and employer contributions. If there's something legal that prevents employers from paying into 401ks as much as they paid into pension plans, we should fix that. But having the money in your name instead of your companies name (or worse yet, the government's name) while it grows can only be a good thing.
There's nothing about 401ks that requires employers to contribute. Mine does not. There's nothing about 401ks that prevents employers from specifying what you must invest in. In fact the design of 401ks required that the employer choose the investment manager or manage the 401ks themselves. Your employer can decide tomorrow that all 401ks need to be fully invested in the company stock. It's not really true that that money is in your own name. It's got your employer's name all over it, they can tell you how to invest it, and all it takes is another well bribed bankruptcy judge to decide that 401ks are company assets for it to disappear. The only thing you can do is quit and roll it over into an IRA before that happens. (Your IRA isn't owned by you, either. The bank or brokerage holds custody of it for you until you decide you want to pay taxes on it. So far the law doesn't allow them to take it from you, except through fees. But with this congress, who knows.)
The way defined contribution pensions used to work is the company or union set up a pension fund and kept it funded according to rules set up by the government. So long as those rules were enforced, it was great. You can lose everything in a 401k. Or you might do better than you would in a defined benefit plan. But now, the defined benefit plan can be taken away by the company, too. But as originally defined, you couldn't lose everything in a DBP except through hyperinflation.
So, someone breaks into my house, ties me up, and uses my computer to upload plans for a terrorist plot, then leaves. I go to jail for being a terrorist?
If not, what's the difference between that and someone breaking the Woefully-inadequate Encryption Protocol (WEP) on my wireless router?
Most routers have a "change MAC address" setting. A college near here asks students for their ethernet and wifi MAC addresses when giving them network access, and it only gives DHCP addresses to MAC addresses is recognizes. So every student living in the dorms knows how to spoof a MAC address with their router, ipad, phone, or any other device they want to put on the network. And this ain't MIT, it's a small liberal arts college. So I'd guess anyone young enough to be interested in pirating music, software, or movies would know how to spoof a MAC address. Most of them wouldn't bother for something as common as downloading music.
Anyone doing something really illegal would probably have found out about how to misdirect the police from the other criminals they associate with. I'm surprised that kiddie porn freaks would ever get caught by an IP address trace.
Yeah. I think we could catch lots of criminals by searching every house and apartment without a warrant. Let's start with yours. We wouldn't want those living turds to get away.
It's not like there are penalties for bribery anymore. It's free speech, dontcha know. Give his wife a job. Add a private jet flight to the conservative strategy session in Maui. Use of a private condo there. Add in a few meals and hookers, and you're done.
Those circuits (both state and federal) are very popular for corporations of all sorts. The federal is the 5th Circuit.
The appeals court will decide that we all get a static IP which will be tatooed to each person's forehead. Then an IP address will uniquely identify a person. Unfortunately it will be an IPv6 address so you won't be able to do anything with it.
And you know that Fox News has shown Orly Taitz's fake kenyan birth certificates many many times. It no less a lie when you say "Attorney Orly Taitz has produced what she claims is Barak Obama's birth certificate." It's not like Dan Rather or CBS news produced the document that was found to be fake. They merely reported on it.
You think that Obama's birth certificates are fake? That's so 7th grade. You're believing the lies that you are being fed by your choice of "news." I don't know if you're being facetious or entirely missing the point that reality based news is something that we should prefer.
They still have newspapers? I still see the boxes on the corner, but they're always empty.
Mostek was very much a different company than the one that built the 6502. MOS Technologies built the 6502.
Just to be accurate, the Z8000 did have a segmented architecture. But it was a logical segmented architecture with segment number being the upper bits of the address, rather than the weird segment arithmetic chosen by intel. You could actually use the segment number as the input to an external MMU.
The Commodore and Zilog lines never went higher than 16 bit.
There was the Zilog Z8000 which was as 32bit as the Motorola 68000. It had a 16-bit ALU with ability to merge adjacent registers into 32bit or 64bit values. The Z80000 (aka Z320) was a true 32-bit processor. The Motorola 68000 had 32 bit registers, but a 16-bit ALU.
Assigning the 6502 to Commodore is a misnomer. The original 6502 was made by MOS Technology and licensed to Rockwell and Synertek. MOS Technologies was later purchased by Commodore. The 65C02, 65C802 and the 65C816 were designed by Western Digital, and second sourced by many companies. I don't think Commodore produced either. But you are correct that no 32bit version exists in silicon.
The proper use, of the comma, had not, been defined, in 1788. Writers, tended to put, them where a short pause, or breath, might take place, rather than, in places necessary, to make meaning, more plain.
The problem is that when Dan Rather reports something that he believed was a valid document, but wasn't, he gets disciplined (i.e. fired in this case) even though the underlying story was essentially unchanged without that document (Bush was AWOL, never completed his National Guard service, and wasn't punished because of who his dad was). And the network retracted the story the way responsible news organizations are supposed to. When someone on Fox News does that the network pretends the lies/forgeries never happened. Any equivalence between the two is false. Real news admits when it makes mistakes.
In the end, do I really care who listens to my conversations? No, they can listen to all the phone sex if they want.
They aren't listening to your conversations. They are listening to your voicemail if you send it to them. And if someone were to have phone sex with my voicemail, whether I sent it to them would depend upon who was calling.
Defined benefit pension plans just need to be outlawed - nothing good can come from that practice.
Apart from people actually having pensions which is a good thing that comes from that practice. Have you checked what the average 401k balance is? To which you'll probably respond "That's not my fault." To which I respond in advance, "It's not the pensioners fault that their employers don't fund their defined benefit plans, either, and it's only congress's fault that pension assets can be liquidated in bankruptcy. When you're working for $9/hr it's tough to keep that 401k fully funded."
Regarding the gold futures markets: Gold clearing houses don't need to be in possession of gold they write contracts for, and most contracts are never exercised through to delivery. It's a big weakness in most commodities markets that encourages speculation, like the type that is happening in the oil market now. Most people buying oil futures wouldn't be doing so if there was a chance that they would have to take delivery. The actual numbers I saw in a article about the University of Texas taking delivery of a billion dollars of gold and how the clearing house had some difficulty doing so. That house estimated they could come up with about 5% of the gold needed to make delivery on all of their contracts. I did some Googling and found the 1/5 elsewhere.
Yes. I have lots of relatives and even a few friends that are Tea Partiers. The ones who complained about having to send their children to a private school because of the Mexicans. The same Mexicans who wrecked their church. The same ones that don't mind using the N-word in their facebook posts. Beyond racism, their main concern is money, and how baby killers and black people are getting all their tax money. And how they pay so much in taxes that it's tough to afford a second house (because they didn't want to sell the first one when they moved) and $22k/year in private school tuition. Or $35k/year a year in Private College tuition. Of course they can't send their kids to a public college, because budgets have been cut so much that their kids can't get in. (When I went to a public college, it promised admission to the top 50% of high school grads. Now it's got a top 5% guarantee, because nobody wanted to pay for building new campuses.
I unfortunately own some property with one of these jerks, who bitches about property taxes and never pays on time and wants to split the penalties. He just turned 56, so he's all for Ryan's medicare destruction. And they all want capital gains taxes eliminated.
Of course, these are all people who went to public schools when they were kids, and went to public colleges. One set's father was a public school math teacher. If he was still alive, they'd cut his pension. The rest have parents are on social security and medicare. All these people took what they wanted from the system and don't want to give anything back. They want a flat tax, which they are wrongly convinced would lower their taxes. I try to convince them that you'd only pay less if you're in the top 2%, but they don't want to hear it. Stop telling me my taxes are lower than they've ever been, I want the lower.
Anyway, your strawmen don't work either. I might be a bit more knowledgeable than you thik. I don't support corporate welfare either as subsidies or tax breaks. I would support a flat tax for corporations lower than 35%, assuming it would be on income where earned. In other words no shuffling profits to the caymans while lobbying congress for a tax holiday so you can repatriate them.
I know that failure to raise the debt ceiling doesn't necessarily mean default. The practical effects on the country and the markets are the same and it's going force default anyway. I know you think there's tons of unnecessary spending in the budget there really isn't. What, are you suggesting preserve defense and social security and get rid of everything else? Who needs the FAA anyway! Or VA hospitals! Or Healthcare for seniors. It would usher in libertarian utopia. For a few seconds, at least, followed by 30% unemployment, and hyperinflation. You may find that desirable. I do not.
It's not like you get a choice in the matter. Not too long ago pensions weren't dependent upon a company's survival. Pensions needed to be prefunded, and were not considered a part of the company's assets during bankruptcy. A (Republican) judge changed that during one of GM's bankruptcies. So, of course, GM threw it's pensioners onto the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp., a government run fund that guarantees pensions. So the billions that GM owed pensioners became billions that the government owes pensioners.
Since then, companies treat their pension trust funds like a slush fund. They underfund them, despite laws that a supposed to require full funding. And once bankruptcy comes around they grab the money and put it on the taxpayer's credit card. Not that the Congress has done anything to prevent this theft of public money.
So, if you're one of the few people left that actually gets a pension, hope you're in an industry where the union runs the pensions. Otherwise, never look at your pension benefit statement because it won't be there for you. Fully fund your 401k, and hope that your employer doesn't force 100% to be invested in company stock. The instant you smell trouble, jump ship and roll over your 401k into an IRA. Even then don't be surprised if you lose it all. There's no such thing as a safe asset. Even gold isn't safe, unless you're holding it in your hands. Futures for about 5 times more gold than exists have been sold. If everyone wants delivery, there will be another crisis as all the houses that sold gold futures collapse. Investors who shorted gold won't be able to cover. People who thought they owned gold won't actually have any. Not pretty.
How does that kool-aid taste? Restore sanity to the dollar and sanity to fiscal matters? All I see from the tea party are demands to do the opposite. And they tie their insane fiscal policies with insane social ones. "Give the rich a break. Tax them cheapskate poor people, and make sure they can't get news from anyone but Fox. I know that 85% of welfare goes to white women, but its 'the blacks' that are the problem. And I'm not racist because I have lots of black friends. Look at this picture I drew of Obama throwing spears. But don't you dare cut Defense. Old people aren't going to need health care 10 years from now anyway."
We'll see how well your investments do after the Republicans force default on the debt in another attempt to defund Planned Parenthood.