Arm chair generals. Although the information they stole is valuable they haven't stolen information that's going to have them building Raptors. China has been trying to copy SU-27 jets for about a decade now, they can't get the engines built right and are at the point of having to go back to a Russia that vowed never to sell to them again to beg them for rights to purchase more advanced systems.
Even though they have working Russian built engines to compare against they weren't able to duplicate the engines. Any Engineer can tell you why, even with detailed schematics, if you don't understand the design you don't know where the critical sections of the design are or what processes to use during assembly that prevent catastrophic failure later. Most of these highly advanced weapon systems have decades of incremental experience built into the design. Even small differences in manufacturing can render parts unusable and it's experience that teaches you that, not schematics and working samples. Though the design information and working samples accelerate learning they don't do away with it.
The problem with this position is that they have HAD a bad reputation for stealing IP for over 20 years now. And it hasn't changed anything.
Hasn't changed anything? Are you insane. One small example is Russia won't sell the Chinese ANY advanced weapons. After the Chinese copied some older model Soviet weapons the Russians refused to sell them ANY advanced weapon systems. This little detail has crippled Chinese weapon advancement for more than a decade, and only recently after realizing they can't create the same 50 years of Russian innovation on their own they are only now at the point of a new arms deal with the Russians with guarantees that the designs will not be copied. Even with firm contractual guarantees the Russians are still not sure they want to execute the contract because they don't trust them. I'd wager the contract is about 50/50 that it will ever happen.
Wholesale theft of IP has harmed China in almost as many ways as it has helped them and they have started to realize the damage they've done.
Testifying before Congress is sworn testimony on the record. The transcript of that testimony can be used in a criminal trial against you and frequently has been used to convict people in the past. Only morons would help a political prosecution by testifying to ANYTHING on the record where someone has a political motive to see you prosecuted. Any attorney worth anything will tell you in such a circumstance to testify to nothing (without an agreement for immunity) because even items you believe are inconsequential can later be used to convict you.
I might remind you that Congress was discussing who would be going to jail, this would be a politically motivated prosecution with the congresscritters looking for a scape goat to take the fall. Both Lerner and her lawyer would have been idiots to testify to anything regardless of guilt.
Windows 8 has some rather significant under the hood improvements. In particular the handling of SSD's is significantly improved as well as things like Task manager. It would be an outstanding improvement had they not tried to do this stupid forced metro BS.
Not free copies, a big discount on their network license. When ODF was being "looked at" in several European governments said governments got HUGE discounts on their license renewal. It's a great strategy to save money even if you have no intention of switching.
I use cookbooks for guidelines. I cook by touch, taste and consistency. I don't measure the flour going into the bread, I put flour into the wet ingredients till it hits the correct consistency. Yes you either need to use recipes or learn with an experienced cook before you can do so but give up your cook book and learn the basis and governing principles of the chemistry which governs the recipe and you will be far better off. Cooking is nothing more than very complicated chemistry.
The one caveat to what I just said is pastries, you need specific weights and measures to make them turn out right and even people that have years of experience making them have to carefully measure the ingredients cause small variations can completely change the end product.
Why do you think every publisher ran for the exits and settled with the Feds? This is a slam dunk case, they have the emails, the meeting notes, they know exactly what happened and it was industry collusion and price fixing under the federal laws. Apple was stupid or arrogant to take this to court. I personally hope the government takes them for several billion. I personally probably paid more than $100 extra because of this price fixing and I've wanted this prosecution from the day the price fixing was publicized.
As you said, you know the market is broken when the digital price is higher than the same thing printed on dead tree shipped to your door. I personally believe there should be people in jail for what happened here. This illegal price fixing cost the public Billions.
Bitcoin is and always will be just as anonymous as it was promised. No one EVER said exchanging Bitcoin for other currencies would be an identity protected venture. In fact it's always been assumed by anyone with any brains at all that Bitcoin is only anonymous as long as you keep it Bitcoin and don't trade it for any hard goods or currency.
There have always been regulatory requirements that make transaction tracking easy for government when you convert to currency or goods. And this has ALWAYS been BitCoins greatest weakness because at the end of the day the currency is only as valuable as it's ability to exchange it for goods. That exchange will never be anonymous.
2. The cost for the 12+ years they have registered the domain?
3. The cost of the 12+ years of domain registration and the cost of a building up a valuable website with large traffic?
4. The actual value of the domain on the open market?
Be careful what you choose. The operators were just asking for some minor reimbursement for all the time they've put into the site. It is my understanding that the site draws enough traffic to make the advertising quite valuable and Paul wanted them to just give it to him, AND he used the very organization he frequently rallies against.
There is a massive surplus of lawyers. Many can't find work as a lawyer even years after graduating.
The sociopaths in the group are moving out and working scams created by a legal system focused towards fairness that allows it to be gamed by those who know the in and outs of making litigation as expensive as possible.
The hope is that the actions by these sociopaths will get some small fixes applied to the system to get rid of these people.
All these exemptions to the constitution were instituted as exceptions to aid the war on drugs. The real enemy is the war on drugs and prohibition 2.0 should be abolished.
Unfortunately because communities have abused these programs a valuable tool is being lost. When FHWA instituted the red-light running campaign it was to reduce the number of fatalities due to running red lights. Red-light running is now the biggest generator of fatalities and it's an increasingly serious problem. I support the program because it's intent is to reduce accidents, but the problem is the states and companies involved have completely abused the intent.
Reducing yellow time is contrary to every design guideline there is. In fact I'd wager that were you in an accident as a result of reduced yellow times you could win substantial lawsuits against the city and company involved. In fact I'd actively encourage people to sue cities, counties, muni's and states that reduce yellow time to drive up revenue.
Unfortunately because the systems been so heavily abused I don't think cameras will be a useable tool in the future, which is unfortunate.
That all depends on the game. And he's right about the taste, commercial feed turns a lot of meat to shit. Though you can buy a lot of game meats these days the prices are just silly and the meat is often trash compared to animals living in their natural habitat.
Fish are terrible when farmed, fish that live in the wild and eat bugs taste far better than fish fed fish pellets. Fish are generally a great example of this because most lakes are stocked by fisheries and you can tell just by taste how long the fish has been in a lake.
A tried and true false equivalency argument. Afterall, if the world isn't perfect we can't think some things are bad and deserved to be punished. But why are you worried about those silly little Justice department issues when there are so many other important issues? See, false equivalency can get you too, until world peace exists and everyone lives in a mansion there are far bigger problems than tackling the real crime we can prosecute today.
Apple cost the American book buying public Billions in increased prices. They weren't trying to break an Amazon monopoly, they were trying to fix prices to make their own entry into the market more profitable. Everyone in this country and probably world that purchased an eBook after Apple entered the market paid almost double what they would have under market pricing. Those billions could have been put to charity and social welfare and instead they were put into the coffers of Apple. Apple's market manipulation very well could have cause starvation. See I can make false equivalency arguments just like you.
Apple and the publishers illegally colluded, unlike Apple the publishers were smart enough to see this was very illegal and immediately settled with the government and as a result got to keep most of their ill gotten gains. Apple will fight and lose, and hopefully it costs them much much more. Personally I think people should be in jail for what they did. You don't deserve a slap on the wrist when you steal billions through collusion.
Price fixing does not require a monopoly to be illegal. The FTC routinely targets price fixing in the DRAM market and there is no monopoly in that highly competitive market. In fact there have been at least 3 lawsuits by the FTC that I'm aware of that targeted price fixing in the DRAM market.
All your other arguments are meaningless against that one simple fact. Price fixing in collusion with others to force set prices in a market is illegal and has been for a very long time. Stop being a bloody fanboi, Apple colluded with the publishers and as a result eBook prices went up significantly. It's Apple's collusion that caused eBook prices to rise above the pricing for dead tree versions. If you had purchased eBook's before Apple's illegal market manipulation you would know that you could routinely purchase eBooks for less than half the paper price and after the manipulation paper was often cheaper. That's the height of market manipulation, This market manipulation cost the American book purchasers Billions. Apple shouldn't just have to pay money, the people behind it should be given prison terms.
Up to the GWB administration wire tapping was a case by case basis, after 911 the Bush administration asked for direct links to all the telecom operators. ATT, Verizon and all the others provided direct fiber optic connections to their networks and funneled copies of everything going across their network directly to the government. This is the reason Congress was forced to give them immunity because if they didn't the class action suits would have sunk the phone companies. The need for immunity alone should point to just how serious of an expansion in wire taping occurred under the Bush administration.
In fact as the previous poster said, it was those very links that caused the creation of the Data Center in Utah. I live in Utah and I can tell you that Data Center was already planned and sited in 2008 when Obama took office. The formerly 2-lane highway leading up to Camp Williams (where the data center is) was upgraded in 2008 in anticipation, new power lines were installed at the same time (the data center uses more power than the entire salt lake city valley). Though Obama has done nothing to stop this massive expansion of federal power it most certainly did start under Bush. And though I agree that the government's been spying on people for a long time, the passive acceptance of full monitoring of every single communication didn't start till after 9/11/2001. You are arguing that tapping a few phones here and there is no different than recording every single phone call/text/internet traffic going across the network. And there is a very big difference.
Good comparison. That's like refusing to by insurance because it doesn't have asteroid coverage. International purchases are a miniscule portion of internet purchases. Your argument is a red herring, irrelevant to the discussion of businesses like Amazon that are using the non-collection of sales tax to put local competition out of business.
They are doing so on the backs of local communities that are laying off cops and firefighters because people aren't paying a legitimate tax. If you want lower sales tax, petition your government to reduce it, but expect to pay the same amount through a different channel (those states without sales tax tend to have HUGE property taxes to make up for it).
Don't bring up some silly argument about international sales that probably account for less than 0.5% of e-commerce. US businesses should be collecting and remitting sales tax from their customers. It's trivial to know and charge the correct sales tax these days unlike the catalog sales days when the intra-state exemption was enacted.
50 Years ago it would have happened, the only difference would have been the press would have willingly refused to report on it. There was no golden age in politics and only idiots think there ever was. Half the names we call dirty politicians are the names of former politicians from a hundred years ago that pioneered the dirty tactic named after him.
I get really tired of you kids believing that politics is any different than it has ever been.
Frankly sales tax is the one tax that everyone should pay without exception. There are very few states in the union where sales tax isn't directly funding your police, fire and local city directly. Most states pass that revenue on directly to your local cities. It's never been fair to ask local business to pay the tax and refuse to require it of internet businesses. In the days of the internet and software it's not at all difficult for these businesses to collect and remit the tax to the states.
This case was always a bad case because the farmer in question had an agreement with Monsanto. He was tainted by that agreement because it officially prohibited him from buying or growing RR-Soybeans without buying the from a Monsanto authorized seed elevator.
The point of Kagens statement at the end is to say that this case is a bad one to handle the "real" issues you claim it was about. Essentially saying what you think this case is about has no bearing on what law governs the case in front of them.
The real test of the Monsanto issue would be an organic grower that was contaminated by Monsanto Pollen and then was sued. I think you will find very few of these cases go very far because Monsanto doesn't want to test those waters.
All the data, even if acquired illegally is admissible in court as long as the IRS wasn't involved in the illegal action that collected the data. If a guy breaks into your house and steals your laptop and finds kiddy porn on it, he could turn you in and the prosecutor will give him amnesty and they will use the data to put you in prison. The data would only be inadmissible if the police had been involved in the theft, but if they're hands are clean and the illegal action was by another party they are free to use the information to prosecute you.
You'll lose the bet. The IRS is on a tear right now to crack down on Tax Evasion. in fact they're offering a partial amnesty for coming forward voluntarily (normal penalties for offshore tax evasion is an immediate forfeiture of 50% of the balance, and then you owe the taxes you should have paid, depending on the situation you could end up owing more than the entire account is worth) where they are dramatically reducing the penalties and close to 5000 people have come forward.
This is partially due to the prosecutions and other actions the IRS is taking against the banks hiding the money. The IRS has already put one of the oldest Swiss banks out of business and they are working on the others, they are generally offering significantly reduced fines to the banks if they provide the data to go after the evaders. It's open season on evaders right now and the IRS has had more traction in getting the banks to reveal the evaders in the last 3 years than they've had in more than 50 years.
The IRS loves whistle-blowers and others that have handed over data. They've offered amnesty to hackers and whistle-blowers in the past that provided bank records that reveal tax evaders. Tax evasion is IRS priority number one for the last several years. Lots of people are coming forward out of fear because it's not just the money, you can actually end up in jail for it as well. All they need is the proof you've done it and not declared the assets and you are toast.
Gentoo is a great OS for learning how crap works. For a day to day system it's a friggen pain in the ass. I discovered rather by accident that if you don't update for a long enough period that the packages you have installed are no longer referenced in Portage anymore the system is completely unable to determine how to upgrade and the emerge tool is completely unable to perform any future software upgrades.
After trying to manually force new package installations I finally just blew the system away and installed Debian stable. I can't be recompiling the entire OS every month to stay up to date enough to warrant using Gentoo.
The best forums I ever encountered were the Gentoo forums. The OS is a pain in the ass if you don't want to update every couple weeks but the amount of help, howto's and other stuff available on the Gentoo forums frankly blows away every other forum I've ever encountered. And though Gentoo has a bad reputation for RTFM in fact I found their forums to be beyond helpful to total newbies (though I wasn't a newbie).
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Massive stock holdings. He's IIRC the second largest stock holder in Microsoft.
Arm chair generals. Although the information they stole is valuable they haven't stolen information that's going to have them building Raptors. China has been trying to copy SU-27 jets for about a decade now, they can't get the engines built right and are at the point of having to go back to a Russia that vowed never to sell to them again to beg them for rights to purchase more advanced systems.
Even though they have working Russian built engines to compare against they weren't able to duplicate the engines. Any Engineer can tell you why, even with detailed schematics, if you don't understand the design you don't know where the critical sections of the design are or what processes to use during assembly that prevent catastrophic failure later. Most of these highly advanced weapon systems have decades of incremental experience built into the design. Even small differences in manufacturing can render parts unusable and it's experience that teaches you that, not schematics and working samples. Though the design information and working samples accelerate learning they don't do away with it.
Hasn't changed anything? Are you insane. One small example is Russia won't sell the Chinese ANY advanced weapons. After the Chinese copied some older model Soviet weapons the Russians refused to sell them ANY advanced weapon systems. This little detail has crippled Chinese weapon advancement for more than a decade, and only recently after realizing they can't create the same 50 years of Russian innovation on their own they are only now at the point of a new arms deal with the Russians with guarantees that the designs will not be copied. Even with firm contractual guarantees the Russians are still not sure they want to execute the contract because they don't trust them. I'd wager the contract is about 50/50 that it will ever happen.
Wholesale theft of IP has harmed China in almost as many ways as it has helped them and they have started to realize the damage they've done.
Testifying before Congress is sworn testimony on the record. The transcript of that testimony can be used in a criminal trial against you and frequently has been used to convict people in the past. Only morons would help a political prosecution by testifying to ANYTHING on the record where someone has a political motive to see you prosecuted. Any attorney worth anything will tell you in such a circumstance to testify to nothing (without an agreement for immunity) because even items you believe are inconsequential can later be used to convict you.
I might remind you that Congress was discussing who would be going to jail, this would be a politically motivated prosecution with the congresscritters looking for a scape goat to take the fall. Both Lerner and her lawyer would have been idiots to testify to anything regardless of guilt.
Windows 8 has some rather significant under the hood improvements. In particular the handling of SSD's is significantly improved as well as things like Task manager. It would be an outstanding improvement had they not tried to do this stupid forced metro BS.
Not free copies, a big discount on their network license. When ODF was being "looked at" in several European governments said governments got HUGE discounts on their license renewal. It's a great strategy to save money even if you have no intention of switching.
I use cookbooks for guidelines. I cook by touch, taste and consistency. I don't measure the flour going into the bread, I put flour into the wet ingredients till it hits the correct consistency. Yes you either need to use recipes or learn with an experienced cook before you can do so but give up your cook book and learn the basis and governing principles of the chemistry which governs the recipe and you will be far better off. Cooking is nothing more than very complicated chemistry.
The one caveat to what I just said is pastries, you need specific weights and measures to make them turn out right and even people that have years of experience making them have to carefully measure the ingredients cause small variations can completely change the end product.
Why do you think every publisher ran for the exits and settled with the Feds? This is a slam dunk case, they have the emails, the meeting notes, they know exactly what happened and it was industry collusion and price fixing under the federal laws. Apple was stupid or arrogant to take this to court. I personally hope the government takes them for several billion. I personally probably paid more than $100 extra because of this price fixing and I've wanted this prosecution from the day the price fixing was publicized.
As you said, you know the market is broken when the digital price is higher than the same thing printed on dead tree shipped to your door. I personally believe there should be people in jail for what happened here. This illegal price fixing cost the public Billions.
Bitcoin is and always will be just as anonymous as it was promised. No one EVER said exchanging Bitcoin for other currencies would be an identity protected venture. In fact it's always been assumed by anyone with any brains at all that Bitcoin is only anonymous as long as you keep it Bitcoin and don't trade it for any hard goods or currency.
There have always been regulatory requirements that make transaction tracking easy for government when you convert to currency or goods. And this has ALWAYS been BitCoins greatest weakness because at the end of the day the currency is only as valuable as it's ability to exchange it for goods. That exchange will never be anonymous.
So what exactly is fair?
1. The cost for the remaining registered years?
2. The cost for the 12+ years they have registered the domain?
3. The cost of the 12+ years of domain registration and the cost of a building up a valuable website with large traffic?
4. The actual value of the domain on the open market?
Be careful what you choose. The operators were just asking for some minor reimbursement for all the time they've put into the site. It is my understanding that the site draws enough traffic to make the advertising quite valuable and Paul wanted them to just give it to him, AND he used the very organization he frequently rallies against.
There is a massive surplus of lawyers. Many can't find work as a lawyer even years after graduating.
The sociopaths in the group are moving out and working scams created by a legal system focused towards fairness that allows it to be gamed by those who know the in and outs of making litigation as expensive as possible.
The hope is that the actions by these sociopaths will get some small fixes applied to the system to get rid of these people.
All these exemptions to the constitution were instituted as exceptions to aid the war on drugs. The real enemy is the war on drugs and prohibition 2.0 should be abolished.
Unfortunately because communities have abused these programs a valuable tool is being lost. When FHWA instituted the red-light running campaign it was to reduce the number of fatalities due to running red lights. Red-light running is now the biggest generator of fatalities and it's an increasingly serious problem. I support the program because it's intent is to reduce accidents, but the problem is the states and companies involved have completely abused the intent.
Reducing yellow time is contrary to every design guideline there is. In fact I'd wager that were you in an accident as a result of reduced yellow times you could win substantial lawsuits against the city and company involved. In fact I'd actively encourage people to sue cities, counties, muni's and states that reduce yellow time to drive up revenue.
Unfortunately because the systems been so heavily abused I don't think cameras will be a useable tool in the future, which is unfortunate.
That all depends on the game. And he's right about the taste, commercial feed turns a lot of meat to shit. Though you can buy a lot of game meats these days the prices are just silly and the meat is often trash compared to animals living in their natural habitat.
Fish are terrible when farmed, fish that live in the wild and eat bugs taste far better than fish fed fish pellets. Fish are generally a great example of this because most lakes are stocked by fisheries and you can tell just by taste how long the fish has been in a lake.
A tried and true false equivalency argument. Afterall, if the world isn't perfect we can't think some things are bad and deserved to be punished. But why are you worried about those silly little Justice department issues when there are so many other important issues? See, false equivalency can get you too, until world peace exists and everyone lives in a mansion there are far bigger problems than tackling the real crime we can prosecute today.
Apple cost the American book buying public Billions in increased prices. They weren't trying to break an Amazon monopoly, they were trying to fix prices to make their own entry into the market more profitable. Everyone in this country and probably world that purchased an eBook after Apple entered the market paid almost double what they would have under market pricing. Those billions could have been put to charity and social welfare and instead they were put into the coffers of Apple. Apple's market manipulation very well could have cause starvation. See I can make false equivalency arguments just like you.
Apple and the publishers illegally colluded, unlike Apple the publishers were smart enough to see this was very illegal and immediately settled with the government and as a result got to keep most of their ill gotten gains. Apple will fight and lose, and hopefully it costs them much much more. Personally I think people should be in jail for what they did. You don't deserve a slap on the wrist when you steal billions through collusion.
Price fixing does not require a monopoly to be illegal. The FTC routinely targets price fixing in the DRAM market and there is no monopoly in that highly competitive market. In fact there have been at least 3 lawsuits by the FTC that I'm aware of that targeted price fixing in the DRAM market.
All your other arguments are meaningless against that one simple fact. Price fixing in collusion with others to force set prices in a market is illegal and has been for a very long time. Stop being a bloody fanboi, Apple colluded with the publishers and as a result eBook prices went up significantly. It's Apple's collusion that caused eBook prices to rise above the pricing for dead tree versions. If you had purchased eBook's before Apple's illegal market manipulation you would know that you could routinely purchase eBooks for less than half the paper price and after the manipulation paper was often cheaper. That's the height of market manipulation, This market manipulation cost the American book purchasers Billions. Apple shouldn't just have to pay money, the people behind it should be given prison terms.
Up to the GWB administration wire tapping was a case by case basis, after 911 the Bush administration asked for direct links to all the telecom operators. ATT, Verizon and all the others provided direct fiber optic connections to their networks and funneled copies of everything going across their network directly to the government. This is the reason Congress was forced to give them immunity because if they didn't the class action suits would have sunk the phone companies. The need for immunity alone should point to just how serious of an expansion in wire taping occurred under the Bush administration.
In fact as the previous poster said, it was those very links that caused the creation of the Data Center in Utah. I live in Utah and I can tell you that Data Center was already planned and sited in 2008 when Obama took office. The formerly 2-lane highway leading up to Camp Williams (where the data center is) was upgraded in 2008 in anticipation, new power lines were installed at the same time (the data center uses more power than the entire salt lake city valley). Though Obama has done nothing to stop this massive expansion of federal power it most certainly did start under Bush. And though I agree that the government's been spying on people for a long time, the passive acceptance of full monitoring of every single communication didn't start till after 9/11/2001. You are arguing that tapping a few phones here and there is no different than recording every single phone call/text/internet traffic going across the network. And there is a very big difference.
Good comparison. That's like refusing to by insurance because it doesn't have asteroid coverage. International purchases are a miniscule portion of internet purchases. Your argument is a red herring, irrelevant to the discussion of businesses like Amazon that are using the non-collection of sales tax to put local competition out of business.
They are doing so on the backs of local communities that are laying off cops and firefighters because people aren't paying a legitimate tax. If you want lower sales tax, petition your government to reduce it, but expect to pay the same amount through a different channel (those states without sales tax tend to have HUGE property taxes to make up for it).
Don't bring up some silly argument about international sales that probably account for less than 0.5% of e-commerce. US businesses should be collecting and remitting sales tax from their customers. It's trivial to know and charge the correct sales tax these days unlike the catalog sales days when the intra-state exemption was enacted.
50 Years ago it would have happened, the only difference would have been the press would have willingly refused to report on it. There was no golden age in politics and only idiots think there ever was. Half the names we call dirty politicians are the names of former politicians from a hundred years ago that pioneered the dirty tactic named after him.
I get really tired of you kids believing that politics is any different than it has ever been.
Frankly sales tax is the one tax that everyone should pay without exception. There are very few states in the union where sales tax isn't directly funding your police, fire and local city directly. Most states pass that revenue on directly to your local cities. It's never been fair to ask local business to pay the tax and refuse to require it of internet businesses. In the days of the internet and software it's not at all difficult for these businesses to collect and remit the tax to the states.
This case was always a bad case because the farmer in question had an agreement with Monsanto. He was tainted by that agreement because it officially prohibited him from buying or growing RR-Soybeans without buying the from a Monsanto authorized seed elevator.
The point of Kagens statement at the end is to say that this case is a bad one to handle the "real" issues you claim it was about. Essentially saying what you think this case is about has no bearing on what law governs the case in front of them.
The real test of the Monsanto issue would be an organic grower that was contaminated by Monsanto Pollen and then was sued. I think you will find very few of these cases go very far because Monsanto doesn't want to test those waters.
All the data, even if acquired illegally is admissible in court as long as the IRS wasn't involved in the illegal action that collected the data. If a guy breaks into your house and steals your laptop and finds kiddy porn on it, he could turn you in and the prosecutor will give him amnesty and they will use the data to put you in prison. The data would only be inadmissible if the police had been involved in the theft, but if they're hands are clean and the illegal action was by another party they are free to use the information to prosecute you.
You'll lose the bet. The IRS is on a tear right now to crack down on Tax Evasion. in fact they're offering a partial amnesty for coming forward voluntarily (normal penalties for offshore tax evasion is an immediate forfeiture of 50% of the balance, and then you owe the taxes you should have paid, depending on the situation you could end up owing more than the entire account is worth) where they are dramatically reducing the penalties and close to 5000 people have come forward.
This is partially due to the prosecutions and other actions the IRS is taking against the banks hiding the money. The IRS has already put one of the oldest Swiss banks out of business and they are working on the others, they are generally offering significantly reduced fines to the banks if they provide the data to go after the evaders. It's open season on evaders right now and the IRS has had more traction in getting the banks to reveal the evaders in the last 3 years than they've had in more than 50 years.
The IRS loves whistle-blowers and others that have handed over data. They've offered amnesty to hackers and whistle-blowers in the past that provided bank records that reveal tax evaders. Tax evasion is IRS priority number one for the last several years. Lots of people are coming forward out of fear because it's not just the money, you can actually end up in jail for it as well. All they need is the proof you've done it and not declared the assets and you are toast.
Gentoo is a great OS for learning how crap works. For a day to day system it's a friggen pain in the ass. I discovered rather by accident that if you don't update for a long enough period that the packages you have installed are no longer referenced in Portage anymore the system is completely unable to determine how to upgrade and the emerge tool is completely unable to perform any future software upgrades.
After trying to manually force new package installations I finally just blew the system away and installed Debian stable. I can't be recompiling the entire OS every month to stay up to date enough to warrant using Gentoo.
They killed my parents. It was one of those hit and run trees too!
The best forums I ever encountered were the Gentoo forums. The OS is a pain in the ass if you don't want to update every couple weeks but the amount of help, howto's and other stuff available on the Gentoo forums frankly blows away every other forum I've ever encountered. And though Gentoo has a bad reputation for RTFM in fact I found their forums to be beyond helpful to total newbies (though I wasn't a newbie).