The mule has to send the dough somewhere... and the trail picks up from there. Not saying it's always guaranteed an ultimate end, but money laundering always gets to the point of diminishing returns for the scammer after x number of middlemen, so the money trail usually isn't too gawdawful long or convoluted. Otherwise the scammer would be making less than a half-penny on the dollar (or Euro, or...?)
The rest just depends on how badly the law agency in question wants to track down the ultimate destination of said money.
Like I said - not perfect, but more often than not, it's pretty easy to pick up the scammer, or at least find out who he/she is. The only real variable is how much time the scammer has to get enough returns to make it profitable, then bug the hell out before the law catches up to him/her.
Not 100% sure... In theory you;re correct (that is, no OS is 100% safe from such a thing), but in practice, it would be almost trivial to defend against. It wouldn't take much to rig a partition full of vital stuff as read-only, then carefully going over any data you want backed up to it once a week or so (remount it read-write for long enough to do the backup, then remount it back to read-only. No sweat. You still have that window of opportunity, but you'll likely find out that your non-protected data got horked long before you open your archives to back things up to 'em).
Also, this is one of the benefits of a journaling filesystem (or in OSX, "Time Machine"), among other things. Roll it back, and *poof* - no more encrypted files.
Seriously - any business worth a damn is going to have backups (the ones that don't? they kinda deserve it IMHO...)
Home users have CD/DVD-R's, external disk backups, stuff stashed across multiple machines, System Restore, Time Machine (wait... OSX isn't affected by this, ne'ermind), things of that nature.
I suspect the script kiddies know this as well, since only someone who would fall for such a scheme would not have their vital files backed-up somewhere... even if it's stashed on another box somewhere in the house.
At peak, Microsoft held $64,000,000,000 in LIQUID CASH ASSETS. Think about that. (source)
At the time of that article, they hold $28,900,000,000 in cash reserves.
So please point out where I allegedly said anything about the contents of MSFT's bank account. Paris Hilton has a massive bank account, but that doesn't mean she has the ability to dictate or control the tech industry either.;)
Here, let me spell this out for you. In MSFT's heyday, it could dictate terms to the vast, vast majority of OEM's, App/Software vendors, and ultimately, users. Bill Gates' word was once treated as Gospel. You as a consumer could not buy a Dell or HP (or Compaq) without paying the Microsoft Tax. Microsoft could do whatever they wanted to with Visual Basic, and could do so with impunity. They didn't have to document their API set properly, and didn't have to care. They could literally determine what was going to happen in a given year to vast swaths of the entire Computing Industry. It had no real competition - Apple was still struggling mightily to keep what little marketshare they had, and Linux was still a mostly hobbyist OS.
Today? MSFT has been forced to extend XP (and likely will again come June) because OEM's are dictating to Redmond that they refuse to stop selling it in favor of the bloat-fest called Vista. What was once a 95% stranglehold on all desktops is now shrinking at a near-logarithmic rate, losing to Apple, Linux, Google, Nintendo, Firefox/Mozilla, etc etc. MSFT has been reduced to massive channel-stuffing and fire-sales of unsold stock (e.g. Zune) just to claim the sales numbers that they do in most of the markets they play in nowadays. Meanwhile, MSFT can't so much as put a new toilet paper roll in any of their campus bathrooms without compliance-checking by either US or EU government inspectors. Where MSFT once dictated standards, nowadays they can just barely buy one, but find the purchase to be empty. Where companies once evaporated in a fiscal belch into MSFT's maw? Now we see corporations (e.g. Yahoo!) openly telling MSFT to piss off... and mostly winning.
A once focused board is now scattered to the four winds, casting furiously about for new sources of income, but finding little-to-none outside of an increasingly directionless set of core products. Where there was once massive public enthusiasm for new products from MSFT, we now see customers going after new MSFT products with all the eagerness that one would with have when facing a catbox-cleaning chore.
Microsoft is still a powerhouse, and they're quite unconcerned that you think they aren't.
My paycheck doesn't rely on MSFT, so to be quite frank about it, whether they are "concerned" or not about my view is irrelevant. Now considering that the corp I work for (buried cozily in the Fortune 100) deciding to skip Vista entirely and hang around for Windows 7 (and not being anywhere near alone in doing so)? That may change things a bit. There is also the fact that MSFT is no longer the powerhouse it once was, and yes, it is demonstrably losing its grasp.
Wow... that's some serious America-bashing mojo you've got going there.;)
In all seriousness though - I think Bill got all he can get out of MSFT... the company is far from dead, but it ain't exactly the powerhouse it once was, when OEMs and most software devs trembled at the sound of the phrase: "Microsoft has announced that..."
The best time to leave is when your baby is still (in)famous, and strong enough to almost do whatever it pleases. Besides, once the public at large realizes that MSFT is indeed sliding downhill, they'll more easily blame Ballmer for it than they would even think to blame Bill, which leaves Bill's legacy intact.
From here on out, any further news will be tacked onto Ballmer's reputation, both inside and outside the tech community (even though most of us in the tech community already know who to blame/praise --depending on your viewpoint).
1) IE came out at a time when Netscape threatened to make Windows irrelevant for Internet use (Yes, there's more to the Internet than the WWW, but Netscape already had USENET, and email covered too, which MSFT countered with Outlook(and Express), though no newsreader that I can remember offhand). Safari came out at a time when Microsoft (via IE) threatened to make Macs irrelevant by dint of having no real useable browser.
2) A combination of momentum (already got it may as well keep it) and control (control the standards implementation, and you control the market, which in turn controls much, much more). Throw in a dash of the future (in which all OSes will become mere commodities) and you can see why the likes of MSFT and Apple go out of their way to make sure that their web browser is the one that people use. The funny thing is, Firefox may well threaten to obliterate both of 'em.
Overall, I think that if Firefox does indeed end up taking the majority (it looks poised to in Europe, if it hasn't already, and has a VERY strong showing in the US - on both Windows and Mac systems)? Then Windows ends up not being very relevant anymore for the majority of what people do with their computers. Macs would face a lot of the same problems. Sure, apps are still a strong factor, but most major apps have versions for both OSes.
Heh - I remember when Micropolis (yeah, I'm old, deal with it) sold 9 Gigabyte HDD's that were twice as tall to (IIRC) hold one hell of a tall stack of platters in it. It ran somewhat warm-ish if you really beat the crap out of it, but otherwise it wasn't much noisier or hotter than the 360MB (not "G", "M") disks that were out around the same time. The only real PITA was getting it to play nice with the other hardware.
I remember my long-former managers happily paying nearly $10k each, for the damned things...
I'm not naysaying anything... just curious as to why they should bother, since they already have something almost as small (well, thin), and at the same time quite powerful by comparison. I suppose they can make some bank off of it, but outside of geekdom, where's the market? I'm not debating, I just want to see who all is buying these things.
Just IMHO, I can carry a manila envelope-sized thing around just as easily as a VCR tape-sized thing... no makey.
Err, while it's got a lot of X-Y surface area, but the MacBook Air already have all of these beat in (IIRC) weight and (definitely) thickness. The only diff is the Air's 13" screen versus a 7" (or so) one, and the real (as in, full-on) Core2 Duo versus the others' Atoms and similar.
I suppose they could make a smaller Air, but, err, why? IMHO, they did a pretty good job with low-weight and small size, while still giving you a very comfortable amount of desktop real-estate.
I'm really surprised, however, that nobody has criticized the fact that all these machines use legacy VGA. I mean, is it really too much to ask for them to use DVI?
Because the vast majority of business projectors use VGA as its source input. Not too many (yet) take DVI. DVI connectors are also larger, and (IMHO) look a bit more fragile pin-wise for constant on-the-road use.
...and if the militants demand a restriction and/or loss of freedom at large? Or perhaps a titanic sum of money? Or what if they demanded a large parcel of land (e.g. Sri Lanka) to be immediately separated off into its own nation, which means a loss of sovereignty over that particular parcel and a lot of people who are suddenly at risk of theft, injury, and/or death by the new order?
Sometimes, to 'give in' isn't a simple matter of giving some ideology a voice in government...
So... how long until we see MediaDefender's board get perp-walked? (too much to hope for seeing the RIAA board getting arrested, but hey...)
*sigh*... I know, I know. MediaDefender will likely claim that some poor (scapegoated) bastard employee of theirs did it without authorization, yadda yadda... then said poor bastard will get to watch in horror as his entire life goes down the toilet.
Then again, if it does go down like that, it would stand as a prime example of how one should always give priority to personal ethics before accepting a job offer...
Why? Simple -- it gives corporate decision makers, i.e. the real, flesh and blood people actually responsible for these types of problems, an easy-out of the mess they created. The corporate death penalty is, it seems to me, just a giant grant of absolution for corporate officers who are, in many cases, committing out-and-crimes.
I'm not so sure that would be the case - the board members/decision-makers are still liable (both civilly and criminally), just that there's the added bonus of the corporation forcibly going under entirely as well. Nobody escapes justice if they have it coming.
Think about it; did Enron's corporate charter, i.e. the legal fiction we once collectively called Enron the company, commit massive financial fraud? No.
I'm pretty sure that Jeffrey Dahmer's birth certificate said nothing about his propensity to torture, kill, and eat people, either... I'm not seeing the connection between the charter and what the corp does in later actions.
Does revoking the corporate charter affect Enron's decision makers in any way, forcing them to accept responsibility for their actions? No.
It also wouldn't let the likes of Ken Lay off the hook personally either. As an accessory/accomplice to the crime, he would still get shoved into the docket. In Enron's case, the criminal activity was systemic across a huge chunk of the board.
Yeah, and all those thousands and thousands of employees that had nothing to do with the problem are all out of a job and living on my tax dollars.
That's not quite how it works... odds are very good that the assets (up to and including whole corporate divisions, if not the whole corp) can be sold off whole or in bits to the highest bidder, then run by the buyer(s).
Let's say the DOJ gets a nasty case of Clue-itis one fine day and orders Microsoft to be dissolved. Odds are excellent that the Windows division would be bought by IBM, Sun, Novell, Intel, AMD, Apple, or, I dunno... Google. Office and Apps would suffer the same fate. Xbox and Zune divisions, same thing. The rest of the game is run just like a typical merger. Then again, the assets could simply get absorbed and locked into a cabinet somewhere (buy competitor's assets at fire-sale prices, bury it as deeply as possible, "profit!"... But then, you know? It would be hella funny to see a consortium of MSFT's competitors get together, buy Windows, and simply open-source the thing. The ensuing chaos would be magnificent).
Err, you do know that unless someone, somewhere can prove an intent to kill, the worst you can do (if it were in the US) is charge the local plant managers (or whoever made the wrong decisions) with negligent homicide (similar to what someone would get if they accidentally hit a pedestrian and killed him/her).
Also, Bhopal is in India - their country, their laws. Not ours. Nothing to do with class warfare and the perceptions of material possession; just (unfortunately) the way it is.
If a corporate charter gets revoked, the government doesn't suddenly own it (unless there's some extreme circumstance, they can't). What would be more likely to happen is that the condemned corp gets split into divisions, its assets may be sold off to the highest bidders (or given as compensation to a plaintiff), shut down and dissolved, or any combination of the three (e.g. dissolve parts of a corp while selling off the rest, etc).
Also, whatever happens to the corps, the board members get to eat the penalties (e.g. Enron's board members being held criminally liable in proportion to involvement, etc).
I rather like the idea of the Corporate Death Penalty... sell off|dissolve|split the creature, and hold each individual board member civilly and/or criminally liable. If a CEO knows that no golden parachute will save his ass from being forcibly separated from his personal possessions and money, maybe he'll think a little before deciding to perpetrate fraud, monopolistic predations, and etc.
Why? Because the tech required to colonize another planet is simply not there, and I could bet it won't be within our lifetimes.
I'm willing to wager that in 1911, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who could publicly say that man would walk on the moon within the lifetimes of most infants born that year - at least not without getting labeled a crackpot. The tech simply wasn't there (as you've pointed out about today's tech).
Politicians are actually rather short sighted, particularly the more selfish breed who wants their power for control instead of serving the people.
This is different from politics all the way back to the dawn of civilization... how?
Funny thing is, humans living off-Earth permanently? It may happen sooner than most folks realize. Also, like most other major discoveries, probably won't be done by government effort. I give it about 50 years or so before a serious effort occurs - sooner if the gov't gets in on some of it.
Sure, the first "colonies" won't be much to look at, and they initially won't be permanent. But then, in-flight movies and phones weren't really available on the 1903 Wright Flyer, either.
"The foreign aid donated towards Africa is a boondoggle. We'd benefit much more from using that money towards domestic health care research, and at only 10% of the cost. Since we don't have any real benefit out of Africa anymore (the USSR is dead, no massive natural resources to speak of, Israel and Egypt aren't fighting anymore, etc), we don't need the prestige associated with it either."
The point? Sometimes it ain't about the immediate scientific benefits. Sometimes it's about the long-term. We (the US) screwed ourselves royally in the 1970's literally throwing out a shitload of research and knowledge (e.g. Saturn V propulsion, etc) - all in the name of politics. We really need to stop doing that if we are to have any hope of eventually getting a sizeable portion of mankind off of this one fragile pandemic-and-asteroid-prone rock.
Never mind the fact that she is doing her best to tear apart the Democratic party, and never mind the fact that she's essentially self-destructed over the last several months showing herself as a bitter, small woman hell bent on power and will do whatever she can to get it.
I'm thinking that maybe she's waiting around just to be the "I told you so" candidate... if Obama loses in November, she can basically own/pwn the Democrat Party right there, and be perfectly set for 2012. Reagan did something similar in the 1976 elections IIRC, though he was a lot subtler about it, challenging Ford within the party instead of openly after the primaries were done.
Then again, who knows? Maybe Hillary will pull a Theodore Roosevelt on the DNC - that is, get all pissy and form her own splinter party (a'la The Bull Moose Party). TR decided in 1912(?) that if the GOP wanted Taft that bad, he --and a LOT of voters-- would just go form their own party. Of course, it resulted in a huge win for the Democrats, but...
Slashdot Mirror
The rest just depends on how badly the law agency in question wants to track down the ultimate destination of said money.
Like I said - not perfect, but more often than not, it's pretty easy to pick up the scammer, or at least find out who he/she is. The only real variable is how much time the scammer has to get enough returns to make it profitable, then bug the hell out before the law catches up to him/her.
Also, this is one of the benefits of a journaling filesystem (or in OSX, "Time Machine"), among other things. Roll it back, and *poof* - no more encrypted files.
Home users have CD/DVD-R's, external disk backups, stuff stashed across multiple machines, System Restore, Time Machine (wait... OSX isn't affected by this, ne'ermind), things of that nature.
I suspect the script kiddies know this as well, since only someone who would fall for such a scheme would not have their vital files backed-up somewhere... even if it's stashed on another box somewhere in the house.
At the time of that article, they hold $28,900,000,000 in cash reserves.
So please point out where I allegedly said anything about the contents of MSFT's bank account. Paris Hilton has a massive bank account, but that doesn't mean she has the ability to dictate or control the tech industry either.
Here, let me spell this out for you. In MSFT's heyday, it could dictate terms to the vast, vast majority of OEM's, App/Software vendors, and ultimately, users. Bill Gates' word was once treated as Gospel. You as a consumer could not buy a Dell or HP (or Compaq) without paying the Microsoft Tax. Microsoft could do whatever they wanted to with Visual Basic, and could do so with impunity. They didn't have to document their API set properly, and didn't have to care. They could literally determine what was going to happen in a given year to vast swaths of the entire Computing Industry. It had no real competition - Apple was still struggling mightily to keep what little marketshare they had, and Linux was still a mostly hobbyist OS.
Today? MSFT has been forced to extend XP (and likely will again come June) because OEM's are dictating to Redmond that they refuse to stop selling it in favor of the bloat-fest called Vista. What was once a 95% stranglehold on all desktops is now shrinking at a near-logarithmic rate, losing to Apple, Linux, Google, Nintendo, Firefox/Mozilla, etc etc. MSFT has been reduced to massive channel-stuffing and fire-sales of unsold stock (e.g. Zune) just to claim the sales numbers that they do in most of the markets they play in nowadays. Meanwhile, MSFT can't so much as put a new toilet paper roll in any of their campus bathrooms without compliance-checking by either US or EU government inspectors. Where MSFT once dictated standards, nowadays they can just barely buy one, but find the purchase to be empty. Where companies once evaporated in a fiscal belch into MSFT's maw? Now we see corporations (e.g. Yahoo!) openly telling MSFT to piss off... and mostly winning.
Microsoft is still a powerhouse, and they're quite unconcerned that you think they aren't.A once focused board is now scattered to the four winds, casting furiously about for new sources of income, but finding little-to-none outside of an increasingly directionless set of core products. Where there was once massive public enthusiasm for new products from MSFT, we now see customers going after new MSFT products with all the eagerness that one would with have when facing a catbox-cleaning chore.
My paycheck doesn't rely on MSFT, so to be quite frank about it, whether they are "concerned" or not about my view is irrelevant. Now considering that the corp I work for (buried cozily in the Fortune 100) deciding to skip Vista entirely and hang around for Windows 7 (and not being anywhere near alone in doing so)? That may change things a bit. There is also the fact that MSFT is no longer the powerhouse it once was, and yes, it is demonstrably losing its grasp.
(and many, many more... none of which were in your post. Sorry.)
In all seriousness though - I think Bill got all he can get out of MSFT... the company is far from dead, but it ain't exactly the powerhouse it once was, when OEMs and most software devs trembled at the sound of the phrase: "Microsoft has announced that..."
The best time to leave is when your baby is still (in)famous, and strong enough to almost do whatever it pleases. Besides, once the public at large realizes that MSFT is indeed sliding downhill, they'll more easily blame Ballmer for it than they would even think to blame Bill, which leaves Bill's legacy intact.
From here on out, any further news will be tacked onto Ballmer's reputation, both inside and outside the tech community (even though most of us in the tech community already know who to blame/praise --depending on your viewpoint).
1) IE came out at a time when Netscape threatened to make Windows irrelevant for Internet use (Yes, there's more to the Internet than the WWW, but Netscape already had USENET, and email covered too, which MSFT countered with Outlook(and Express), though no newsreader that I can remember offhand). Safari came out at a time when Microsoft (via IE) threatened to make Macs irrelevant by dint of having no real useable browser.
2) A combination of momentum (already got it may as well keep it) and control (control the standards implementation, and you control the market, which in turn controls much, much more). Throw in a dash of the future (in which all OSes will become mere commodities) and you can see why the likes of MSFT and Apple go out of their way to make sure that their web browser is the one that people use. The funny thing is, Firefox may well threaten to obliterate both of 'em.
Overall, I think that if Firefox does indeed end up taking the majority (it looks poised to in Europe, if it hasn't already, and has a VERY strong showing in the US - on both Windows and Mac systems)? Then Windows ends up not being very relevant anymore for the majority of what people do with their computers. Macs would face a lot of the same problems. Sure, apps are still a strong factor, but most major apps have versions for both OSes.
I remember my long-former managers happily paying nearly $10k each, for the damned things...
I'm not naysaying anything... just curious as to why they should bother, since they already have something almost as small (well, thin), and at the same time quite powerful by comparison. I suppose they can make some bank off of it, but outside of geekdom, where's the market? I'm not debating, I just want to see who all is buying these things.
Just IMHO, I can carry a manila envelope-sized thing around just as easily as a VCR tape-sized thing... no makey.
(damnit! it's been years since I actually went and imagined the damned thing whenever I saw this old saw posted! You bastard!)
I suppose they could make a smaller Air, but, err, why? IMHO, they did a pretty good job with low-weight and small size, while still giving you a very comfortable amount of desktop real-estate.
Because the vast majority of business projectors use VGA as its source input. Not too many (yet) take DVI. DVI connectors are also larger, and (IMHO) look a bit more fragile pin-wise for constant on-the-road use.
Sometimes, to 'give in' isn't a simple matter of giving some ideology a voice in government...
signed,
The Rest Of The Planet
So... how long until we see MediaDefender's board get perp-walked? (too much to hope for seeing the RIAA board getting arrested, but hey...)
*sigh*... I know, I know. MediaDefender will likely claim that some poor (scapegoated) bastard employee of theirs did it without authorization, yadda yadda... then said poor bastard will get to watch in horror as his entire life goes down the toilet.
Then again, if it does go down like that, it would stand as a prime example of how one should always give priority to personal ethics before accepting a job offer...
Why? Simple -- it gives corporate decision makers, i.e. the real, flesh and blood people actually responsible for these types of problems, an easy-out of the mess they created. The corporate death penalty is, it seems to me, just a giant grant of absolution for corporate officers who are, in many cases, committing out-and-crimes.
Think about it; did Enron's corporate charter, i.e. the legal fiction we once collectively called Enron the company, commit massive financial fraud? No.I'm not so sure that would be the case - the board members/decision-makers are still liable (both civilly and criminally), just that there's the added bonus of the corporation forcibly going under entirely as well. Nobody escapes justice if they have it coming.
Does revoking the corporate charter affect Enron's decision makers in any way, forcing them to accept responsibility for their actions? No.I'm pretty sure that Jeffrey Dahmer's birth certificate said nothing about his propensity to torture, kill, and eat people, either... I'm not seeing the connection between the charter and what the corp does in later actions.
It also wouldn't let the likes of Ken Lay off the hook personally either. As an accessory/accomplice to the crime, he would still get shoved into the docket. In Enron's case, the criminal activity was systemic across a huge chunk of the board.
Therein lies the rub - you went a bit beyond those bounds, to wit:
"That's right, those were rich important men, and rich important men don't go to jail! Don't you wish you were rich and important?"
Seriously... if'n that ain't flirting with class warfare (if not sexing it outright), then what is?
That's not quite how it works... odds are very good that the assets (up to and including whole corporate divisions, if not the whole corp) can be sold off whole or in bits to the highest bidder, then run by the buyer(s).
Let's say the DOJ gets a nasty case of Clue-itis one fine day and orders Microsoft to be dissolved. Odds are excellent that the Windows division would be bought by IBM, Sun, Novell, Intel, AMD, Apple, or, I dunno... Google. Office and Apps would suffer the same fate. Xbox and Zune divisions, same thing. The rest of the game is run just like a typical merger. Then again, the assets could simply get absorbed and locked into a cabinet somewhere (buy competitor's assets at fire-sale prices, bury it as deeply as possible, "profit!"... But then, you know? It would be hella funny to see a consortium of MSFT's competitors get together, buy Windows, and simply open-source the thing. The ensuing chaos would be magnificent).
Also, Bhopal is in India - their country, their laws. Not ours. Nothing to do with class warfare and the perceptions of material possession; just (unfortunately) the way it is.
Also, whatever happens to the corps, the board members get to eat the penalties (e.g. Enron's board members being held criminally liable in proportion to involvement, etc).
I rather like the idea of the Corporate Death Penalty... sell off|dissolve|split the creature, and hold each individual board member civilly and/or criminally liable. If a CEO knows that no golden parachute will save his ass from being forcibly separated from his personal possessions and money, maybe he'll think a little before deciding to perpetrate fraud, monopolistic predations, and etc.
I'm willing to wager that in 1911, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who could publicly say that man would walk on the moon within the lifetimes of most infants born that year - at least not without getting labeled a crackpot. The tech simply wasn't there (as you've pointed out about today's tech).
Politicians are actually rather short sighted, particularly the more selfish breed who wants their power for control instead of serving the people.This is different from politics all the way back to the dawn of civilization... how?
Funny thing is, humans living off-Earth permanently? It may happen sooner than most folks realize. Also, like most other major discoveries, probably won't be done by government effort. I give it about 50 years or so before a serious effort occurs - sooner if the gov't gets in on some of it.
Sure, the first "colonies" won't be much to look at, and they initially won't be permanent. But then, in-flight movies and phones weren't really available on the 1903 Wright Flyer, either.
"The foreign aid donated towards Africa is a boondoggle. We'd benefit much more from using that money towards domestic health care research, and at only 10% of the cost. Since we don't have any real benefit out of Africa anymore (the USSR is dead, no massive natural resources to speak of, Israel and Egypt aren't fighting anymore, etc), we don't need the prestige associated with it either."
The point? Sometimes it ain't about the immediate scientific benefits. Sometimes it's about the long-term. We (the US) screwed ourselves royally in the 1970's literally throwing out a shitload of research and knowledge (e.g. Saturn V propulsion, etc) - all in the name of politics. We really need to stop doing that if we are to have any hope of eventually getting a sizeable portion of mankind off of this one fragile pandemic-and-asteroid-prone rock.
I'm thinking that maybe she's waiting around just to be the "I told you so" candidate... if Obama loses in November, she can basically own/pwn the Democrat Party right there, and be perfectly set for 2012. Reagan did something similar in the 1976 elections IIRC, though he was a lot subtler about it, challenging Ford within the party instead of openly after the primaries were done.
Then again, who knows? Maybe Hillary will pull a Theodore Roosevelt on the DNC - that is, get all pissy and form her own splinter party (a'la The Bull Moose Party). TR decided in 1912(?) that if the GOP wanted Taft that bad, he --and a LOT of voters-- would just go form their own party. Of course, it resulted in a huge win for the Democrats, but...