So these agents, paid with my tax dollars, recruited, trained, encouraged, and entrapped a teenager in a make believe crime when he would have otherwise been studying for his midterms. It is so wonderful to see how my government is keeping me safe.
Yep, the very people that are supposed to be preventing this shit are actually the ones promoting it and facilitating it. The FBI agents should be on trial, in my opinion. This guy was a nobody who was essentially encouraged by the FBI into committing a criminal act.
If that's not entrapment, I'm not sure what is. It's certainly facilitating what the target thinks is a criminal act, even if it was all staged.
The bomb was fake, so obviously he didn't attempt to kill Americans.
Right, but he thought it was real. And that's what the law considers. In fact, you can go to prison for selling fake weed or pills, even if you know they're fake.
If I read the case right it appears that the the FBI pretty much pushed him into doing this (which never should have happened) but his intent was clearly there, despite being egged on by the very people who are supposed to be preventing this shit.
The FBI seems to have manufactured a criminal act=, and whether he would have done this on his own without them seems dubious at best. But he went along with it, and that's what the court is focusing on.
Nonsense. TFA doesn't refer to a single case of "counterfeiting".
Okay, now you're just being a dick. The article mentions "fakes" and counterfeiting 20 times from the headline to the last paragraph. For example,
"Always a problem, the counterfeiting issue has exploded this year, sellers say, following Amazon's effort to openly court Chinese manufacturers..."
"The designers described it as a game of whack-a-mole, where fakes pop up more quickly than they're taken down."
"To unsuspecting consumers, fake products can appear legitimate because of the Fulfillment by Amazon program..."
""Amazon is making money hand over fist from counterfeiters, and they've done about as little as possible for as long as possible to address the issue," said Chris Johnson, an attorney at Johnson & Pham LLP..."
""Word is out in the counterfeit community that it's open season on Amazon."
Seriously, did you even read the article? Because it sounds as though you didn't.
About 20 years ago(*) we were told that globalism would result in a higher standard of living for the US.
And overall that's been true, but there's no denying that it's been at the expense of lots and lots manufacturing jobs and the good salaries or hourly pay rates that went with them. We got cheap consumer gadgets and the price was lost jobs and wages.
It may have been a short-term gain, but long-term it's been harmful to the middle class (and probably even more so to the poorest Americans).
RTFA. Other than the headline, it is not about counterfeits.
Maybe YOU should RTFA....this is all about counterfeit products. It's about knockoffs and cheap copies of patented products that are produced illegally, undercutting the original product in pricing. The actual article mentions counterfeiting over a dozen times. How the hell is this not about counterfeiting??
"Her sheet fastener had been copied by a legion of mostly Chinese knockoffs..."
"Initially, knockoffs were using her patented shock cord functionality and ripping off her design, she said."
"In May, CNBC.com reported on a Facebook group, now consisting of over 600 people, whose members have seen their designs for t-shirts, coffee mugs and iPhone cases show up on Amazon at a fraction of the price of the originals."
"To unsuspecting consumers, fake products can appear legitimate..."
"...meaning that a counterfeit jacket could be sent to an Amazon facility by one merchant and actually sold by another"
...etc etc etc... This is about counterfeiting, despite your lack of reading comprehension.
Counterfeits are a huge problem everywhere and it'll only get worse. The lure of money and the ease of capitalizing on someone else's idea make it a market that will never go away, even for niche products.
For some things, however, there ought to be truly severe penalties, like for the people who counterfeited brake pads for the 747's, which turned out to be made of baked sawdust and black paint. They didn't make it into a real plane as far as I know, but the consequences if they had would be staggering.
If you counterfeit a handbag, no one dies, but certain mechanical items, medications, and other "life-dependent "products should have serious penalties, decades in jail in my opinion. Counterfeit meds are problem all over the world, but especially in SE Asia where 50% or more are fake.
Consumer Reports used to be an unimpeachable source of reliable information, but now they are, as you said, a borderline scam.
Their car-buying info service used to be great, but car manufacturers changed the rules so that Consumer Reports couldn't provide the same level of useful "inside" info. Rather than drop the service and admit defeat, Consumer Reports contracted with a crap-ass web company that *claims* to provide the same info but in fact is just a shill for local dealers.
It's called "TrueCar", and they're just another bunch of shitballs who want all your info so they can shop you to the car dealers in your area. (Consumer Reports gets paid for this by the dealers, of course.)
What this means is that they have your number before you even get started, which puts you at a huge disadvantage. The moment you give a dealer your phone number they look in the TrueCar database for the bullshit prices you've been quoted and you lose most of your bargaining advantage right there. You're screwed before you start.
You don't need their lame service and you can do just as well on your own by following a few simple rules:
Find the MSRP and use that as a starting point. You may even be able to bargain below MSRP if you know what you're doing.
Call dealers and get quotes, don't ever waste your time going to them in person and letting them ratfuck you for hours. You have better things to do, right? Instead, make the dealers fight each other and go with the one that gives you the best quote. Get quotes, call them all back with the lowest quote, and let them try to beat that. Lather, rinse, repeat until you've hit rock bottom.
Always ask for the "out the door" price, i.e. the car plus taxes, license, etc etc. This is what you care about, the final *real* price.
Never EVER bargain for a lower payment, bargain for a lower price on the car. A lot of people fall for this one.
Be aware of holdbacks, dealer fees, dealer incentives, advertising fees, and the add-on crap dealers will always try to stick you with. For example, $545 for a "Lexus Dealer Advertising" fee? Fuck no, make them take it off. Why should YOU pay for dealer advertising, that's part of their business expense. $350 for floormats? Fuck no, take them out. Undercoating? No. Anti-chip coating? No. Pay for 2 years of oil changes up front? No no NO.
$150 for a "Document fee"? Fuck no, that's just them filling out the paperwork, WHICH IS PART OF THEIR FUCKING JOB, HELLO? They have to fill out the paperwork to sell you a car, so why in the world would YOU pay for THEM to do this?
And so on. I saved ~$3800 buying my wife's car recently just by pitting the dealers against each other and striking off these bogus charges. You can too.
How many do and how many don't? I'm interested in the sample size you've used to calculate "most".
How many? Practically every single one I've ever heard opposes all taxes, all licenses, and almost any kind of regulation.
By now that number is in the multiple hundreds, which includes the Libertarian presidential candidates. (Those guys are hilariously cracked, they all sound like they just escaped from a mental hospital for the Criminally Ridiculous.)
Tell me, where do property rights come from in Libertarian Land?
When I tried it, it crashed half the time I tried to visit slashdot and would politely inform me that it had "stopped working", then try and reload the page. And then it would crash again, and again, and again. After several iterations of that crap I'd close it and use Firefox.
And it wasn't just slashdot, it was a slew of sites that caused it to barf and reload, barf and reload, barf and reload, barf and reload....it couldn't even render Yahoo's front page without falling on its face. The Daily Mail, the BBC home page, Kitco, Neatorama, it couldn't/wouldn't load any of those sites half of the time.
Thanks Microsoft, but I'll stick with Win 7 when I need a Windows machine and use Linux Mint for everything else.
Most libertarians believe in liability and rule of law.
No, most of them do not appear to believe in most laws nor do most of them appear to believe in any regulation, or at least any that might interfere with their pie-in-the-sky notions of "liberty" or "freedom", which they can't define except in the most nebulous ways. Most libertarians don't even like the idea of driver's licenses, which seems like a common sense measure. But "common sense" and libertarianism often seem to be mutually exclusive.
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So in a libertarian utopia, it is not just the free market that punishes a wrong doer.
Oh, yes, the magical libertarian utopia, which never existed and never will. Libertarianism always, ALWAYS breaks down when you try to dig down and find out little details like where property rights come from and how disputes are settled. Libertarianism is bullshit for people who can't think clearly and who don't want to contribute to society in any meaningful way. "What?? ME help pay for roads? YOU'RE OPPRESSING MUH FREEDOMS OMG!!!
Do you think they will get hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue from mining your instant messages, compared with what they already get mining your profile, news feed, likes, etc.?
I think it's all part of the big picture, and if they can make an extra nickel by sending you messages about things relevant to your personal conversations, you bet I think they would.
A better question is this: if they think they could make money by mining you your instant messages, why wouldn't they?
No one held these people down and shot them full of heroin to make them an addict, no one shoved cocaine up their nose, no one jammed some unknown pill down their throat. These people chose to use drugs.
That's correct, but I also think it's safe to say that almost none of them realized the actual consequences of their actions.
Damn few people start using heroin knowing that they're going to become irreversibly addicted and that it will destroy their lives, and probably many of their friend's and family's lives as well. I don't think anyone starts smoking meth with the idea that, "Oh well, I'll just shit my entire life and future down the drain and end up dead or in prison."
If they did lie, someone would figure it out eventually and it would be devastating in terms of PR.
You mean just like all the other times that Facebook has been caught lying and was exposed, and basically nothing happened? Because they've weathered PR storms that would wash away some of the smaller continents, and yet they're still around.
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It's not worth it for them. Just like researchers have torn apart iMessage and know exactly how it works, the same will happen to this.
Oh, trust me, hundreds of million of dollars in ad revenue is "worth it" for them. It's been worth it for them in the past. They'll just chalk it up to some sort of "technical glitch" or "misconfiguration" or some other such bullshit (just like they always do) and nothing will happen. A week later no one will even remember anything happened because OH MY GOD, A NEW AVENGERS MOVIE!! KIM KARDASHIAN HAS A NEW BRA!! THE NEW IPHONE HAS A NEW COLOR!!
Carry lots of cash, and I can be mugged, it can be lost, etc.
Are you saying that $100 is "lots of cash"? I don't know of a single zip code in the entire US where $100 is considered "lots of cash".
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Now if somebody steals my card or it is lost, I can cancel it. I can charge back any false charges, including in cases where the product wasn't as it should be.
Did you even read what I wrote? If you did, could you please tell me what kind of head injury you have? Because here's what I wrote:
Cars, boats, homes, and anything over $100, sure, I'll use a credit or debit card. Under $100 it's going to be plain ol' cash.
What part of "I'll use a credit or debit card" sounded like "I won't use a credit or debit card"?
I have a windows 8 laptop around. Although I have refused to upgrade so far, I am tempted to upgrade before July 29. Is there any catch that I am not aware of ?
The catch is that you'll be upgraded to Windows 10.
Slashdot Mirror
So these agents, paid with my tax dollars, recruited, trained, encouraged, and entrapped a teenager in a make believe crime when he would have otherwise been studying for his midterms. It is so wonderful to see how my government is keeping me safe.
Yep, the very people that are supposed to be preventing this shit are actually the ones promoting it and facilitating it. The FBI agents should be on trial, in my opinion. This guy was a nobody who was essentially encouraged by the FBI into committing a criminal act.
If that's not entrapment, I'm not sure what is. It's certainly facilitating what the target thinks is a criminal act, even if it was all staged.
The bomb was fake, so obviously he didn't attempt to kill Americans.
Right, but he thought it was real. And that's what the law considers. In fact, you can go to prison for selling fake weed or pills, even if you know they're fake.
If I read the case right it appears that the the FBI pretty much pushed him into doing this (which never should have happened) but his intent was clearly there, despite being egged on by the very people who are supposed to be preventing this shit.
The FBI seems to have manufactured a criminal act=, and whether he would have done this on his own without them seems dubious at best. But he went along with it, and that's what the court is focusing on.
I'm a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment but even I think this is foolhardy at best and insanely stupid at worst.
And trying to board a plane with it these days seems like a terrifically stupid thing to do, despite the fact that it's not actually a firearm.
Nonsense. TFA doesn't refer to a single case of "counterfeiting".
Okay, now you're just being a dick. The article mentions "fakes" and counterfeiting 20 times from the headline to the last paragraph. For example,
"Always a problem, the counterfeiting issue has exploded this year, sellers say, following Amazon's effort to openly court Chinese manufacturers..."
"The designers described it as a game of whack-a-mole, where fakes pop up more quickly than they're taken down."
"To unsuspecting consumers, fake products can appear legitimate because of the Fulfillment by Amazon program..."
""Amazon is making money hand over fist from counterfeiters, and they've done about as little as possible for as long as possible to address the issue," said Chris Johnson, an attorney at Johnson & Pham LLP..."
""Word is out in the counterfeit community that it's open season on Amazon."
Seriously, did you even read the article? Because it sounds as though you didn't.
About 20 years ago(*) we were told that globalism would result in a higher standard of living for the US.
And overall that's been true, but there's no denying that it's been at the expense of lots and lots manufacturing jobs and the good salaries or hourly pay rates that went with them. We got cheap consumer gadgets and the price was lost jobs and wages.
It may have been a short-term gain, but long-term it's been harmful to the middle class (and probably even more so to the poorest Americans).
RTFA. Other than the headline, it is not about counterfeits.
Maybe YOU should RTFA....this is all about counterfeit products. It's about knockoffs and cheap copies of patented products that are produced illegally, undercutting the original product in pricing. The actual article mentions counterfeiting over a dozen times. How the hell is this not about counterfeiting??
"Her sheet fastener had been copied by a legion of mostly Chinese knockoffs..."
"Initially, knockoffs were using her patented shock cord functionality and ripping off her design, she said."
"In May, CNBC.com reported on a Facebook group, now consisting of over 600 people, whose members have seen their designs for t-shirts, coffee mugs and iPhone cases show up on Amazon at a fraction of the price of the originals."
"To unsuspecting consumers, fake products can appear legitimate..."
"...meaning that a counterfeit jacket could be sent to an Amazon facility by one merchant and actually sold by another"
seller of counterfeit meds should be force fed the counterfeit product until dead, or same number of doses sold consumed, whichever occurs first.
I like this idea. I like it a lot.
Counterfeits are a huge problem everywhere and it'll only get worse. The lure of money and the ease of capitalizing on someone else's idea make it a market that will never go away, even for niche products.
For some things, however, there ought to be truly severe penalties, like for the people who counterfeited brake pads for the 747's, which turned out to be made of baked sawdust and black paint. They didn't make it into a real plane as far as I know, but the consequences if they had would be staggering.
If you counterfeit a handbag, no one dies, but certain mechanical items, medications, and other "life-dependent "products should have serious penalties, decades in jail in my opinion. Counterfeit meds are problem all over the world, but especially in SE Asia where 50% or more are fake.
""By default, Redis has no authentication or security mechanism enabled..."
Why? Why in the world would you make this the default?
"Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom Thinks Websites Should Be Rated Like Films"
Translation:
"Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom Is A Gormless Wanker"
An infidelity site is run by lying and cheating scumbags? Who could have predicted that?
I can't believe someone would lie on the internet, especially about sex and double-especially if it involved money.
Consumer Reports AFAIAC is a borderline scam.
Consumer Reports used to be an unimpeachable source of reliable information, but now they are, as you said, a borderline scam.
Their car-buying info service used to be great, but car manufacturers changed the rules so that Consumer Reports couldn't provide the same level of useful "inside" info. Rather than drop the service and admit defeat, Consumer Reports contracted with a crap-ass web company that *claims* to provide the same info but in fact is just a shill for local dealers.
It's called "TrueCar", and they're just another bunch of shitballs who want all your info so they can shop you to the car dealers in your area. (Consumer Reports gets paid for this by the dealers, of course.)
What this means is that they have your number before you even get started, which puts you at a huge disadvantage. The moment you give a dealer your phone number they look in the TrueCar database for the bullshit prices you've been quoted and you lose most of your bargaining advantage right there. You're screwed before you start.
You don't need their lame service and you can do just as well on your own by following a few simple rules:
Find the MSRP and use that as a starting point. You may even be able to bargain below MSRP if you know what you're doing.
Call dealers and get quotes, don't ever waste your time going to them in person and letting them ratfuck you for hours. You have better things to do, right? Instead, make the dealers fight each other and go with the one that gives you the best quote. Get quotes, call them all back with the lowest quote, and let them try to beat that. Lather, rinse, repeat until you've hit rock bottom.
Always ask for the "out the door" price, i.e. the car plus taxes, license, etc etc. This is what you care about, the final *real* price.
Never EVER bargain for a lower payment, bargain for a lower price on the car. A lot of people fall for this one.
Be aware of holdbacks, dealer fees, dealer incentives, advertising fees, and the add-on crap dealers will always try to stick you with. For example, $545 for a "Lexus Dealer Advertising" fee? Fuck no, make them take it off. Why should YOU pay for dealer advertising, that's part of their business expense. $350 for floormats? Fuck no, take them out. Undercoating? No. Anti-chip coating? No. Pay for 2 years of oil changes up front? No no NO.
$150 for a "Document fee"? Fuck no, that's just them filling out the paperwork, WHICH IS PART OF THEIR FUCKING JOB, HELLO? They have to fill out the paperwork to sell you a car, so why in the world would YOU pay for THEM to do this?
And so on. I saved ~$3800 buying my wife's car recently just by pitting the dealers against each other and striking off these bogus charges. You can too.
...is if a few of these ransomware authors/operators started turning up dead.
I've been pushing for this solution for some time now.
Did you happen to find a sale on asterisks or something?
I like this idea, as it seems practical and fairly hard to fool.
How many do and how many don't? I'm interested in the sample size you've used to calculate "most".
How many? Practically every single one I've ever heard opposes all taxes, all licenses, and almost any kind of regulation.
By now that number is in the multiple hundreds, which includes the Libertarian presidential candidates. (Those guys are hilariously cracked, they all sound like they just escaped from a mental hospital for the Criminally Ridiculous.)
Tell me, where do property rights come from in Libertarian Land?
Lol, "Edge", the little browser that couldn't.
When I tried it, it crashed half the time I tried to visit slashdot and would politely inform me that it had "stopped working", then try and reload the page. And then it would crash again, and again, and again. After several iterations of that crap I'd close it and use Firefox.
And it wasn't just slashdot, it was a slew of sites that caused it to barf and reload, barf and reload, barf and reload, barf and reload....it couldn't even render Yahoo's front page without falling on its face. The Daily Mail, the BBC home page, Kitco, Neatorama, it couldn't/wouldn't load any of those sites half of the time.
Thanks Microsoft, but I'll stick with Win 7 when I need a Windows machine and use Linux Mint for everything else.
Most libertarians believe in liability and rule of law.
No, most of them do not appear to believe in most laws nor do most of them appear to believe in any regulation, or at least any that might interfere with their pie-in-the-sky notions of "liberty" or "freedom", which they can't define except in the most nebulous ways. Most libertarians don't even like the idea of driver's licenses, which seems like a common sense measure. But "common sense" and libertarianism often seem to be mutually exclusive.
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So in a libertarian utopia, it is not just the free market that punishes a wrong doer.
Oh, yes, the magical libertarian utopia, which never existed and never will. Libertarianism always, ALWAYS breaks down when you try to dig down and find out little details like where property rights come from and how disputes are settled. Libertarianism is bullshit for people who can't think clearly and who don't want to contribute to society in any meaningful way. "What?? ME help pay for roads? YOU'RE OPPRESSING MUH FREEDOMS OMG!!!
But don't tell me that addicts are equivalent to cancer patients.
I never said that, so please stop putting words in my mouth.
Do you think they will get hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue from mining your instant messages, compared with what they already get mining your profile, news feed, likes, etc.?
I think it's all part of the big picture, and if they can make an extra nickel by sending you messages about things relevant to your personal conversations, you bet I think they would.
A better question is this: if they think they could make money by mining you your instant messages, why wouldn't they?
I always thought "DARE" stood for "Drugs Are Really Excellent".
No one held these people down and shot them full of heroin to make them an addict, no one shoved cocaine up their nose, no one jammed some unknown pill down their throat. These people chose to use drugs.
That's correct, but I also think it's safe to say that almost none of them realized the actual consequences of their actions.
Damn few people start using heroin knowing that they're going to become irreversibly addicted and that it will destroy their lives, and probably many of their friend's and family's lives as well. I don't think anyone starts smoking meth with the idea that, "Oh well, I'll just shit my entire life and future down the drain and end up dead or in prison."
If they did lie, someone would figure it out eventually and it would be devastating in terms of PR.
You mean just like all the other times that Facebook has been caught lying and was exposed, and basically nothing happened? Because they've weathered PR storms that would wash away some of the smaller continents, and yet they're still around.
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It's not worth it for them. Just like researchers have torn apart iMessage and know exactly how it works, the same will happen to this.
Oh, trust me, hundreds of million of dollars in ad revenue is "worth it" for them. It's been worth it for them in the past. They'll just chalk it up to some sort of "technical glitch" or "misconfiguration" or some other such bullshit (just like they always do) and nothing will happen. A week later no one will even remember anything happened because OH MY GOD, A NEW AVENGERS MOVIE!! KIM KARDASHIAN HAS A NEW BRA!! THE NEW IPHONE HAS A NEW COLOR!!
Carry lots of cash, and I can be mugged, it can be lost, etc.
Are you saying that $100 is "lots of cash"? I don't know of a single zip code in the entire US where $100 is considered "lots of cash".
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Now if somebody steals my card or it is lost, I can cancel it. I can charge back any false charges, including in cases where the product wasn't as it should be.
Did you even read what I wrote? If you did, could you please tell me what kind of head injury you have? Because here's what I wrote:
Cars, boats, homes, and anything over $100, sure, I'll use a credit or debit card. Under $100 it's going to be plain ol' cash.
What part of "I'll use a credit or debit card" sounded like "I won't use a credit or debit card"?
I have a windows 8 laptop around. Although I have refused to upgrade so far, I am tempted to upgrade before July 29. Is there any catch that I am not aware of ?
The catch is that you'll be upgraded to Windows 10.