If you want an amusing yet informative read on Prenda's exploits, Popehat [popehat.com] is the place to go
Best lines:
The judges were openly incredulous of this strategy. "You want us to send this back for criminal contempt proceedings?" asked Judge Tallman, with the air of a parent asking a toddler whether he really wants to hurl himself down the stairs. "Do you understand that the maximum penalty for contempt is life imprisonment?" I lost a little urine at this point.
...and...
Pregerson followed with perhaps the most devastating line I've ever heard used against a lawyer:
Pregerson: And you're a great lawyer.
Voelker: I appreciate you saying that, Your Honor.
Pregerson: I mean, it says so, right there on your web site.
He had the option to say nothing under the 5th amendment.
Well, yes there was that option. Unfortunately, due to the other provisions of his own law, that would leave him guilty of Structuring - making transactions in a pattern designed to avoid the federal reporting requirements. Either he was making those transactions the way he was to avoid reporting, and thus broke federal law, or he had to give them a good other reason he made them in the pattern he did. It appears Hastert chose to lie in hopes of getting out of the structuring charges.
Hiding large cash transactions was made illegal in the Bank Secrecy Act and has been illegal since 1970.
...which was then amended and strengthened by the Patriot Act. To quote the article I linked (which I'm guessing you followed the/. flow and didn't bother to read):
The indictment suggests that law enforcement officials relied on the Patriot Act’s expansion of bank reporting requirements to snare Hastert. As the IRS notes, “the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 increased the scope” of cash reporting laws “to help trace funds used for terrorism.” The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which was amended by the Patriot Act, had already required banks to report suspicious transactions.
So how did this law, whatever its merits, get passed?
On Oct. 24, 2001, then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) shepherded the Patriot Act through the House of Representatives. It passed 357 to 66, advancing to the Senate and then-President George W. Bush’s desk for signing.
Hastert took credit for House passage in a 2011 interview, claiming it “wasn’t popular, and there was a lot of fight in the Congress” over it.
Ironically, its a crime because he made it one. Hiding large bank transactions was made reportable to the FBI and lying to the FBI about them was made a crime both by the Patriot Act that was pushed for and voted for most vociferously by then House Speaker Dennis Hastert.
You're preaching to the choir a bit here. I'm a big fan myself. I've been a player since the 70's, and actually have two games (one indoor, one outdoor) scheduled tonight. Tottenham Hotspur supporter (COYS!), but I refuse to support an MLS team until Tulsa has one like we did in the early 80's.
You aren't wrong from a data perspective. In fact, if anything you are underplaying it. Soccer is huge in the immigrant community, and among the young it is actually more popular than Baseball now (and growing). This last World Cup is the first one where I heard some (not all) mainstream sportcasters start to seriously cover it without sneering, so some folks at least have noticed which way the wind is blowing.
However, immigrants and the young don't run the country. Those that do by and large still have a 1980's view of the American sports scene. What I was describing is their perspective. Since the issue in question was political, that's actually more important to the argument that what the actual truth of the situation is.
Personally, I think soccer (one trend now among the snobs is to call it futbol "fuut-bowl") is poised to become a dominant sport in the US. But right now its treated by the general public as if it were lacrosse. Its a leviathan, preparing to surface.
Wow, you are out of touch together with Nate Silver...
An argument last made famous by Mitt Romney supporters. Not that Nate doesn't get things wrong every now and then, but this kind of blindly dismissive argument against Nate's data-driven analysis has proven in the past to be a really great way to make yourself look foolish.
Speaking of which, guess what happened less than 2 hours after you posted this?:-)
I was talking about FIFA "waving enough money" under US Soccer's nose. In particular, there had been some noise last year about just giving the US Qatar's World Cup hosting gig, and lately FIFA has been practically begging the US to submit another bid for one of the later cups. Personally, I hope US Soccer sticks to their guns on this, and refuses without reform.
Its not like its really that much money by US standards anyway. The cities that get to host would be spread out all over North America, and the impact for each particular city wouldn't be much more than hosting a large convention, which most of them do all the time anyway. For instance, if Las Vegas was given the opportunity to host a group in the group stage, but they had to give up CES for the year, they'd probably decline.
FIFA really needs the US far more than the US needs FIFA.
Easy fix. Coke, McDonalds, VISA, Budweiser and every other US corporation can pull sponsorship, then see how it works out for them. I've also heard UEFA (European Football) is discussing separation from FIFA, so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to get the Japs and Koreans on-board, ask if Uncle Rupert wants to buy in, and start a whole new organisation. Screw the Russian and Arabs, we don't need their filthy money.
This is actually not too far off from what I've heard talked about. Nearly all the sponsors are US-based, and probably don't want their brands associated with corruption. "Have a Coke, and a dead Qatari migrant worker" doesn't quite have the right ring to it.
Also, Nate Silver did an analysis on UEFA's threat to leave FIFA. While the "western" rule-of-law countries have almost no voting power in FIFA, they have nearly all of the paying viewers. If they left together, UEFA (- Russia) and a few other countries (USA, Japan, S. Korea, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil and Argentina for bonus points), could easily break FIFA. That group there would take about 70% of FIFA's income with them, and 70% of its last round of 16 teams as well.
The US is far from impartial. They lost of a bid for the world cup which would have been a massive
US Soccer lost a bid. The US at large doesn't give a shit, and would on the balance prefer to not have their regular traffic/TV coverage messed with over a niche sport only played in the suburbs by children. I'm perhaps exaggerating, but not by much. US Soccer has less political pull in the USA than the Muslim Anti-Defamation league.
To top it off, US Soccer doesn't really care any more either. Yes, they were really sore about losing a bid. But they've lost every bid they made since 1994 (as have nearly all other bidders). There's nothing special about that. The last one was special just because the "winner" made all sorts of "investments" in countries that voted for them, and they happen to be a country that is physically incapable of hosting a World Cup. This is so cartoonishly corrupt, that its clear there's no point bothering to bid if you aren't going to cheat. So US Soccer has essentially washed its hands of FIFA Cup bids. They released a statement over 4 years ago saying US Soccer will no longer be making and Cup hosting bids until the process has been cleaned up.
Now lots of folks internationally are skeptical of this. Surely if you wave enough money under their nose, they will bite, right? That's certainly the theory the rest of FIFA seems to operate under. So far US Soccer has held though. I hope they continue to do so.
That's true: An actual physicist would have stated the motion as relative to another object. There's no such thing as absolute motion, unless you still believe in the aether.
So they'd need to carry hydrogen and split off its electrons or something to neutralize the charge.
Or they could just periodically zap the crap out of nearby objects with all their pent-up charge. It would probably temporarily stop the ship, but every design has its flaws. If we could dig up the Yamamoto and stick one of these engine/gun thingys in it, this could really help save the human race from those pesky Gamelons
Personally, I think many women are put off by the limited social interaction involved in the job, or at least that's my theory
That turns out to be a myth. Personality test results show women just as likely to score as introverts as men. In fact, in most axis' they are nearly identical. Where they are different (at least on the Meyers-Briggs terminology) is in preference for Thinking vs. Feeling. That's obviously applicable to Engineering.
However, the effect isn't huge. Nowhere is it even 2:1. This is nothing at all like what you'd need to explain the kind of sexual disparity one actually sees in the industry.
No you couldn't, because that is not the kind of "power" they are talking about. They are talking about power over the story itself.
Katherine focused on seven different criteria, and ranked each on a scale from one to five. Was a woman on the cover? How did the female characters look? Did women in the comic book talk to each other about important issues? Was the storyline about a woman? Were women in positions of power? Did they make their own decisions? Did they have jobs?
If you did the exact same study with Superman, you'd certainly not find his "story power" has been increasing. In the early comics he was the sole hero, so he'd be getting perfect scores for all those.
TFA is talking about power in the story itself (as in the Bechdel test), not the badassness of their superpowers.
Katherine focused on seven different criteria, and ranked each on a scale from one to five. Was a woman on the cover? How did the female characters look? Did women in the comic book talk to each other about important issues? Was the storyline about a woman? Were women in positions of power? Did they make their own decisions? Did they have jobs?
Not that what you are talking about wouldn't be a legitimate and interesting study topic as well. It just isn't what was being studied here.
The thing that's important about a car isn't the in car entertainment system. It's the wheels and the engine and the bits in between that let me get to where I need to go. I need that to last a decade or more.
Then you don't matter. Not to the automakers. You'll buy a car (probably not even new from the dealer) about 4 times in your lifetime, if you chose wisely and don't get in wrecks.The automakers will make almost no money off of you. I'm the same way. Mostly I only buy late-model used cars, and try to drive them until everything starts to fall apart at once like the Bluesmobile.
The people who matter are people like my dad, who has bought or leased a new car every 2 years or less as far back as I can remember. The first thing he asks me about any car I buy, going back to he 80's, is how good the stereo is. So yeah, the "car entertainment system" sells cars.
They both breathed air and occasionally took dumps too. However, the statement of fact that started this thread is horribly, irredeemably wrong. The only POTUS' to have actually been impeached were Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.
I think older music (including classical) benefits from a survivor bias: the bad stuff has been forgotten, leaving only the good stuff.
Any time you hear someone wax nostalgic for 70's or early 80's music, I guarantee you that's the case. I was listening then, and you have simply no concept of how much crap I had to sit through in order to hear the occasional great Led Zeppelin or Rush song. There was a time when I was literally (and I do mean literally) getting rickrolled daily. That was an actual chart-topping song in the 80's. Think for a second about what that says about its competition.
Open source as a development model promotes a universal access via a free license to a product's design or blueprint
The term Open Source was invented to describe software licenses in the face of copyright law. Hardware in general is "protected" by patents, not by copyright. Those are two completely different mechanisms, and talking about them like they are somehow the same makes no sense at all.
There's a really annoying trend lately of people completely misusing the term "Open Source". By definition, for something to be "Open Source", there must be some source code somewhere in it (and term only applies to that part). Calling a pure hardware system "open source" makes no sense whatsoever.
The word "open" works just fine there all by itself. There is no need to embellish it with the nonsensical "source".
Probably the case. But as I told another poster, it would be even smarter to keep the math career as active as possible in the meantime, as that gets the first few years of lowest pay and prestige out of the way, and gives him that extra 3-5 years at the high-paying end of the career as gravy.
You are missing (or conveniently ignoring) the part where I said he'd be lucky to keep at it that long. In point of fact, the *average* NFL career is a smidge over 3 years. A bit more for players who are good enough to make active rosters, less for players who aren't kickers or QB's. There are a lot of variables. As there are with salary.
The point here is that NFL careers aren't that long, and the pay for people who aren't superstars only makes up for that if the alternative is something like a service/menial job. If the alternative is getting a jump of that many years on the ground floor of a high-paying career, in many situations it would be way smarter to take the longer career. Particularly if it is something you love doing (which seems the case here). If he's going to try to be a mathematician after sports "retirement" anyway, the sensible thing is to keep that career as serious as possible in the meantime.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people are still wondering why none of this pattern of deceit, lying and abuse of the court system has not resulted in anything more serious
Remember, Judges and prosecutors are lawyers too, and lawyers protect their own.
Actually, if you read the court proceedings in question, the judges threatened Prenda principles with life in prison.
If you want an amusing yet informative read on Prenda's exploits, Popehat [popehat.com] is the place to go
Best lines:
The judges were openly incredulous of this strategy. "You want us to send this back for criminal contempt proceedings?" asked Judge Tallman, with the air of a parent asking a toddler whether he really wants to hurl himself down the stairs. "Do you understand that the maximum penalty for contempt is life imprisonment?" I lost a little urine at this point.
...and...
Pregerson followed with perhaps the most devastating line I've ever heard used against a lawyer:
Pregerson: And you're a great lawyer.
Voelker: I appreciate you saying that, Your Honor.
Pregerson: I mean, it says so, right there on your web site.
He had the option to say nothing under the 5th amendment.
Well, yes there was that option. Unfortunately, due to the other provisions of his own law, that would leave him guilty of Structuring - making transactions in a pattern designed to avoid the federal reporting requirements. Either he was making those transactions the way he was to avoid reporting, and thus broke federal law, or he had to give them a good other reason he made them in the pattern he did. It appears Hastert chose to lie in hopes of getting out of the structuring charges.
Hiding large cash transactions was made illegal in the Bank Secrecy Act and has been illegal since 1970.
...which was then amended and strengthened by the Patriot Act. To quote the article I linked (which I'm guessing you followed the /. flow and didn't bother to read):
The indictment suggests that law enforcement officials relied on the Patriot Act’s expansion of bank reporting requirements to snare Hastert. As the IRS notes, “the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 increased the scope” of cash reporting laws “to help trace funds used for terrorism.” The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which was amended by the Patriot Act, had already required banks to report suspicious transactions.
So how did this law, whatever its merits, get passed?
On Oct. 24, 2001, then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) shepherded the Patriot Act through the House of Representatives. It passed 357 to 66, advancing to the Senate and then-President George W. Bush’s desk for signing.
Hastert took credit for House passage in a 2011 interview, claiming it “wasn’t popular, and there was a lot of fight in the Congress” over it.
Excuse me, Mr. Hastert: Is this your petard?
Ironically, its a crime because he made it one. Hiding large bank transactions was made reportable to the FBI and lying to the FBI about them was made a crime both by the Patriot Act that was pushed for and voted for most vociferously by then House Speaker Dennis Hastert.
You're preaching to the choir a bit here. I'm a big fan myself. I've been a player since the 70's, and actually have two games (one indoor, one outdoor) scheduled tonight. Tottenham Hotspur supporter (COYS!), but I refuse to support an MLS team until Tulsa has one like we did in the early 80's.
You aren't wrong from a data perspective. In fact, if anything you are underplaying it. Soccer is huge in the immigrant community, and among the young it is actually more popular than Baseball now (and growing). This last World Cup is the first one where I heard some (not all) mainstream sportcasters start to seriously cover it without sneering, so some folks at least have noticed which way the wind is blowing.
However, immigrants and the young don't run the country. Those that do by and large still have a 1980's view of the American sports scene. What I was describing is their perspective. Since the issue in question was political, that's actually more important to the argument that what the actual truth of the situation is.
Personally, I think soccer (one trend now among the snobs is to call it futbol "fuut-bowl") is poised to become a dominant sport in the US. But right now its treated by the general public as if it were lacrosse. Its a leviathan, preparing to surface.
Wow, you are out of touch together with Nate Silver...
An argument last made famous by Mitt Romney supporters. Not that Nate doesn't get things wrong every now and then, but this kind of blindly dismissive argument against Nate's data-driven analysis has proven in the past to be a really great way to make yourself look foolish.
Speaking of which, guess what happened less than 2 hours after you posted this? :-)
Right. In that case a technical person could consider "absolute motion" to be motion relative to the aether.
I was talking about FIFA "waving enough money" under US Soccer's nose. In particular, there had been some noise last year about just giving the US Qatar's World Cup hosting gig, and lately FIFA has been practically begging the US to submit another bid for one of the later cups. Personally, I hope US Soccer sticks to their guns on this, and refuses without reform.
Its not like its really that much money by US standards anyway. The cities that get to host would be spread out all over North America, and the impact for each particular city wouldn't be much more than hosting a large convention, which most of them do all the time anyway. For instance, if Las Vegas was given the opportunity to host a group in the group stage, but they had to give up CES for the year, they'd probably decline.
FIFA really needs the US far more than the US needs FIFA.
Easy fix. Coke, McDonalds, VISA, Budweiser and every other US corporation can pull sponsorship, then see how it works out for them. I've also heard UEFA (European Football) is discussing separation from FIFA, so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to get the Japs and Koreans on-board, ask if Uncle Rupert wants to buy in, and start a whole new organisation. Screw the Russian and Arabs, we don't need their filthy money.
This is actually not too far off from what I've heard talked about. Nearly all the sponsors are US-based, and probably don't want their brands associated with corruption. "Have a Coke, and a dead Qatari migrant worker" doesn't quite have the right ring to it.
Also, Nate Silver did an analysis on UEFA's threat to leave FIFA. While the "western" rule-of-law countries have almost no voting power in FIFA, they have nearly all of the paying viewers. If they left together, UEFA (- Russia) and a few other countries (USA, Japan, S. Korea, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil and Argentina for bonus points), could easily break FIFA. That group there would take about 70% of FIFA's income with them, and 70% of its last round of 16 teams as well.
The US is far from impartial. They lost of a bid for the world cup which would have been a massive
US Soccer lost a bid. The US at large doesn't give a shit, and would on the balance prefer to not have their regular traffic/TV coverage messed with over a niche sport only played in the suburbs by children. I'm perhaps exaggerating, but not by much. US Soccer has less political pull in the USA than the Muslim Anti-Defamation league.
To top it off, US Soccer doesn't really care any more either. Yes, they were really sore about losing a bid. But they've lost every bid they made since 1994 (as have nearly all other bidders). There's nothing special about that. The last one was special just because the "winner" made all sorts of "investments" in countries that voted for them, and they happen to be a country that is physically incapable of hosting a World Cup. This is so cartoonishly corrupt, that its clear there's no point bothering to bid if you aren't going to cheat. So US Soccer has essentially washed its hands of FIFA Cup bids. They released a statement over 4 years ago saying US Soccer will no longer be making and Cup hosting bids until the process has been cleaned up.
Now lots of folks internationally are skeptical of this. Surely if you wave enough money under their nose, they will bite, right? That's certainly the theory the rest of FIFA seems to operate under. So far US Soccer has held though. I hope they continue to do so.
That's true: An actual physicist would have stated the motion as relative to another object. There's no such thing as absolute motion, unless you still believe in the aether.
So they'd need to carry hydrogen and split off its electrons or something to neutralize the charge.
Or they could just periodically zap the crap out of nearby objects with all their pent-up charge. It would probably temporarily stop the ship, but every design has its flaws. If we could dig up the Yamamoto and stick one of these engine/gun thingys in it, this could really help save the human race from those pesky Gamelons
Personally, I think many women are put off by the limited social interaction involved in the job, or at least that's my theory
That turns out to be a myth. Personality test results show women just as likely to score as introverts as men. In fact, in most axis' they are nearly identical. Where they are different (at least on the Meyers-Briggs terminology) is in preference for Thinking vs. Feeling. That's obviously applicable to Engineering.
However, the effect isn't huge. Nowhere is it even 2:1. This is nothing at all like what you'd need to explain the kind of sexual disparity one actually sees in the industry.
Not RTFA is one thing, but not reading my quotation of it in my post is a whole new level of Slashdot. I am truly impressed.
Katherine focused on seven different criteria, and ranked each on a scale from one to five. Was a woman on the cover? How did the female characters look? Did women in the comic book talk to each other about important issues? Was the storyline about a woman? Were women in positions of power? Did they make their own decisions? Did they have jobs?
If you did the exact same study with Superman, you'd certainly not find his "story power" has been increasing. In the early comics he was the sole hero, so he'd be getting perfect scores for all those.
Katherine focused on seven different criteria, and ranked each on a scale from one to five. Was a woman on the cover? How did the female characters look? Did women in the comic book talk to each other about important issues? Was the storyline about a woman? Were women in positions of power? Did they make their own decisions? Did they have jobs?
Not that what you are talking about wouldn't be a legitimate and interesting study topic as well. It just isn't what was being studied here.
The thing that's important about a car isn't the in car entertainment system. It's the wheels and the engine and the bits in between that let me get to where I need to go. I need that to last a decade or more.
Then you don't matter. Not to the automakers. You'll buy a car (probably not even new from the dealer) about 4 times in your lifetime, if you chose wisely and don't get in wrecks.The automakers will make almost no money off of you. I'm the same way. Mostly I only buy late-model used cars, and try to drive them until everything starts to fall apart at once like the Bluesmobile.
The people who matter are people like my dad, who has bought or leased a new car every 2 years or less as far back as I can remember. The first thing he asks me about any car I buy, going back to he 80's, is how good the stereo is. So yeah, the "car entertainment system" sells cars.
They both breathed air and occasionally took dumps too. However, the statement of fact that started this thread is horribly, irredeemably wrong. The only POTUS' to have actually been impeached were Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.
I think older music (including classical) benefits from a survivor bias: the bad stuff has been forgotten, leaving only the good stuff.
Any time you hear someone wax nostalgic for 70's or early 80's music, I guarantee you that's the case. I was listening then, and you have simply no concept of how much crap I had to sit through in order to hear the occasional great Led Zeppelin or Rush song. There was a time when I was literally (and I do mean literally) getting rickrolled daily. That was an actual chart-topping song in the 80's. Think for a second about what that says about its competition.
You can accomplish nearly the same thing quicker and cheaper with car exhaust, rubbing alcohol, and that ranting homeless guy who lives in the park.
Open source as a development model promotes a universal access via a free license to a product's design or blueprint
The term Open Source was invented to describe software licenses in the face of copyright law. Hardware in general is "protected" by patents, not by copyright. Those are two completely different mechanisms, and talking about them like they are somehow the same makes no sense at all.
The word "open" works just fine there all by itself. There is no need to embellish it with the nonsensical "source".
Probably the case. But as I told another poster, it would be even smarter to keep the math career as active as possible in the meantime, as that gets the first few years of lowest pay and prestige out of the way, and gives him that extra 3-5 years at the high-paying end of the career as gravy.
You are missing (or conveniently ignoring) the part where I said he'd be lucky to keep at it that long. In point of fact, the *average* NFL career is a smidge over 3 years. A bit more for players who are good enough to make active rosters, less for players who aren't kickers or QB's. There are a lot of variables. As there are with salary.
The point here is that NFL careers aren't that long, and the pay for people who aren't superstars only makes up for that if the alternative is something like a service/menial job. If the alternative is getting a jump of that many years on the ground floor of a high-paying career, in many situations it would be way smarter to take the longer career. Particularly if it is something you love doing (which seems the case here). If he's going to try to be a mathematician after sports "retirement" anyway, the sensible thing is to keep that career as serious as possible in the meantime.