Anyone can make any sort of wild "forward looking statement". I may have designed a zero emissions perpetual motion power generator. If I can get enough hits to my site, and persuade enough investors, I'll make a fortune!
For example, there may come a day when airport security could demand you disclose your passwords when they find you are carrying storage with encrypted content...
There's an easy, and preferred solution to that. Don't carry your data with you. Use an encrypted channel, and send the data up to your secure points. Explained simpler, use a VPN to work on your VPN accessible server. All your laptop is at this point, is a dumb terminal.
Besides the OS, the only data that has been on my laptop are maybe photos taken during the trip. If they ever decided to scrutinize my data, they may find tourist snapshots. Obviously, they'd see the VPN connection software, but you're under no obligation to provide the credentials. Having a plan in place that simply states if someone should be held against their will by the government, their credentials should be considered compromised and must be changed immediately. At the outside, that could mean handling an interrogation (refusing to say anything) until the keys would have been changed. It would be simple enough to provide wrong credentials with an explanation "they revoked my credentials already." It could be overexplained that you must check in with your RSA SecurID which you do not have in your possession.
We had this plan in place at one shop I was at. And no, we didn't have any top secret data.:) If folks didn't check in at boarding time, or check in after they got out of the airport, their credentials were to be removed immediately. If this happened, they would be reinstated after verifying that they were no longer under duress. We never had to use it though. The only times it was invoked were when the person in question failed to call in or show up to work.:)
I still haven't seen the TSA nor any other law enforcement agency actually demand credentials for a computer, or a subset like an encrypted partition, unless they already had probable cause for that information. I, as a fine upstanding citizen, have been patted down, my luggage examined, stood in the "totally safe" backscatter X-ray machine, and my private parts touched for the sake of security. Sometimes on a long business trip, that makes up for it.:) I've only been told to turn on my laptop once, and when I told him the battery was dead, that was the end of the story. Is there a subset of Slashdot that has red flags coming out of their asses, or are there just a few too many conspiracy nuts around here, believing government thugs are hiding around every corner?
I consider every option. Only a fool looks at the bottom line and says "yes", without understanding everything that is involved. Would it be better to accept the money and hide in their country, or accept the money and be placed in the WITSEC, where I could live happily for the rest of my life? The options for any scenario are not limited to just the options presented to you.
I wasn't really commenting on myself. I was commenting on people in general. Myself, my price is impossibly high, and would likely involve a failure to deliver the information.
It's pretty easy to talk about what we'd do, when the situation is never presented to us.
I have been presented with the opportunity to do some "bad things" with large quantities of sensitive information, but never military grade information. I've always chosen the moral high ground, because I'm the one who has to live with my decisions. I've also never possessed such secrets, so the situation has never presented itself in reality to me. Knowing how many people are, they'd likely go for the cash, and not worry about the consequences.
In this situation, they were to be leaking sensitive information to Venezuela. Most people would see it and say "what harm could come of that?" They're not very likely to attack the United States with such a weapon. If such a weapon was used, it would no result in any sort of injury to anyone I know. I do believe that there are too many countries with nuclear capabilities or are seeking such capabilities. I'd prefer the number be much closer to zero.
You can believe in magical sky fairies. That doesn't mean that there aren't quite a few people who would sell out for the right price, nor does it mean there's a lack of people who would be more than happy to pay for it.
Sorry about that. It wasn't a mistake. I just didn't clarify that it was the border to the South. I don't hear a lot about people from central and south America sneaking across the Canadian border.:) I've crossed both borders several times. Crossing the Canadian border is a joke in comparison the Mexican border.
You're just wasting your breath. Well, wear and tear on your keyboard.:)
There are extremists on both sides of any argument. The right to bear arms is definitely one of those arguments. The extremists on both sides will come up with any wild assertion to support their side. Oh my god, people of Mexican descent shouldn't ever have guns. What I do find rather interesting is that the same people who vilify "Mexicans" don't understand that Mexico is the only land crossing into the United States. People from all over Central and South America come to the land of opportunity and prosperity.
The Muslim argument is that much worse. Would I trust a Muslim with a gun? Well, so far yes. No Muslim has ever threatened to shoot me. Oddly enough, the only threats of that sort have come from Americans, born and raised in the US with no discernible ties back to their ancestors countries.
Extremists will make it sound like foreign nationals come to the United States to buy guns, and then suicide with a suitcase nuke. Others are purchasing caches of weapons to sell in South America. They'll find the handful of transactions where those not currently allowed to possess firearms did in fact purchase one. They overlook the hundreds of thousands (or more) of other firearms sales that were completely legal, made by US citizens. There was a news story recently about firearms sales at gun shows, and how some sales were happening without the appropriate checks in place. The implication was that all those sales were to terrorists. In reality they weren't.
I am a gun owner. I do say that everyone should be trained for familiarity and proficiency with firearms. That training isn't only for defense, but to ensure that if they happen to find a firearm, they won't accidentally shoot themselves or an innocent bystander. There are people who don't want guns around for various reasons, and to them I respect their decision. Most of them have handled firearms in the past, recognize the threat they are, and also recognize that if they had access to a firearm, they may make an emotional and deadly decision. I respect their recognition of a potential problem.
The risk of getting caught far outweighs the potential reward;
There's a problem with your understanding of the crime. Us normal folks (those without DoD clearances, who'd never be offered millions for anything we know) only hear about the people who are caught.
Think of it as smaller crimes. Have you ever known someone who was a drug dealer or user? You don't have to answer that.:) Sure, we see the news where drug dealers and users are arrested, killed, etc, etc, etc. What you don't necessarily know about is that for every name or face that shows up in the news, there are thousands of people involved with that industry. The reason for the publicity of such events isn't to slow down those who are actively doing it, it's to persuade people who may get into that line of work that it's horribly dangerous.
By the sound of the story, they were framed. A retired couple, one who was laid off years ago. The other probably wasn't making great money. Between the two of them, they had sensitive information and knowledge. The FBI sting involved pretending to be a foreign national offering up almost 1 million dollars.
If you were an old retired couple, barely making ends meet with your pension, doesn't a million dollars in cash sound like a nice way to live the rest of your life? As it appears, they didn't actively pursue such a sale. The FBI staged the whole international secrets crime.
So, what comes of all of this? The couple may end up in prison for the rest of their lives. Other government workers will think twice about giving up any sort of information for any amount of cash. The smart ones (the ones who don't get caught) will still commit crimes such as this. The stupid ones (the ones who do get caught) will make headlines again when they work out a deal with the FBI to commit such a crime.
All the FBI managed to do was bust a couple who probably wouldn't have committed the crime in the first place. We all have our price, it just matters how gullible you are, and how much it would cost to buy you off. Would I accept $1 million? Probably not. $1 billion and guaranteed protection in another country? I'd have to think about it.
Sadly enough, we're arresting people now for actions that were encouraged of skilled people years before. The United States accumulated many great scientists and military experts. Surely many of them were bribed in one way or another. Much of that will never make it to the history books.
How many times would, say, the boilerplate at the bottom of a lawyer/doctor/accountant's file systems appear verbatim in every single document filed in every single directory?
I won't argue about that. I'm still shocked to see the bad housekeeping practices on various servers I've worked on. No, really, you don't need site_old site_back, site_backup, site_backup_1988. and site_backup_y2k. Has anyone even considered getting rid of those? Nope. They're kept "just in case". What "just in case"? Just in case you want to roll back to a 20 year old copy of your data?
Wouldn't a compressed filesystem already do this? They don't just get the compression from nowhere. They eliminate duplicates blocks and empty space. You don't just get compression from nowhere.
Pick your platform. I know in both Linux and Windows, there have been compressed filesystems for quite some time.
It doesn't really negate the need for good housekeeping routines, nor good programming. Do you really want 100 copies of record X, or would one suffice? Sadly, people tend to think that they have unlimited space, until the time comes when they've run out of space. "Oh shit, what do we do now!" is way too common an occurrence.
It actually wouldn't be very hard to do it. A Faraday cage isn't so impossible to build.
There is paint available with a high metal content (hopefully not lead) which should do a pretty good job. Don't forget, the floor (if there's a floor under it), and the ceiling must be covered too. The windows would also need to be covered.
Alternatively (or in addition to), putting a fine wire mesh, with holes a fraction of the wavelength (come on Ham folks throw in the right numbers), were added to the walls, ceiling, and covering the windows, it would kill the connections.
If cheating on the class is such a big deal, they'll continue to find ways to subvert the schools control. If the worlds best Faraday cage was built in the room, with the most refined jammers, the students will just find another way to cheat. Since the exam has to be on knowledge they've accumulated during the course, they already know the materials that they need to sneak in. They may go back to the (oh my gosh) traditional writing the answers on their arms, shoes, or small notes. It's not the technology that needs to be fought, it's the fact that students will cheat.
Way back in high school, I was a teachers aide for a little while. I remember grading two girls tests, who sat beside each other. Every question on the test, right or wrong, was identical except for one. The girls threw a fit. I quietly mentioned to the teacher about the obvious cheating. I was given the tests back, and they were disputing the one that I thought they had marked differently. When it was given back to me, the question was now identical. Unfortunately for them, I had made an error, and the one I marked right was actually wrong. Oops, you both fail. There was no real action taken against them. The teacher knew exactly what happened, so the two girls were not to sit beside each other in that class for the remainder of the school year.
The question becomes, how do you catch cheating, and/or prevent it? That's up to the teacher and the school. Expulsion? Forced retaking of the semester/year? A smack on the knuckles with a wooden ruler (bring on the nuns!)
Thank you, that's exactly the point I was trying to make.:)
The greatest up and comer of today will rarely be the champion of the industry, and it's impossible to predict such things.
If you read the graph included with the story, it makes my statement very clear. They only reported Q2 2009 to Q2 2010. 1 year to make a 4 year estimate? They also only showed new phone purchases. It does not reflect people who kept their phone in service since before Q2 2009. This would taint their data. For example, Verizon Wireless offers a discount to trade your phone in after two years. I almost consider their data tainted, because they can't even label the graph correctly. Q? is a quarter year. The show 4 quarters, which is 12 months. The graph is labeled "... in the past 6 months." Or how about the green line showing "Palm OS, Symbian, Linux 6%", where Android is a Linux based platform.
But back to the argument at hand. Does an upward trend of 6 months indicate that the trend will continue for 4 years? No. Look at Q2 2009 to Q4 2009. The Apple iPhone increased from about 25% to 35%. At the same time, Android was lingering down below 10%. At the end of Q4 2009, the same analysis could have been made of the iPhone. Obviously that would have been wrong, even though they may have predicted the iPhone being the dominant phone on the market. Wrap those two lines together, and they would have had a very different report.
Just about everyone knows that "predictions" and "forward looking statements" aren't worth the time it takes to read them. 4 years from now? Android isn't even 2 years old yet. It may not have reached it's peak in popularity, but who knows what bigger, better, faster, toy there will be in the next 4 years. At very least, it's added another competitive element in the market place, but that can simply mean that it will push others (existing, or not yet on the market) to put out something better.
Hell, Google's Nexus One direct customer sales only survived from January to July 2010. It's a volatile market, and products come and go very quickly. Look at the Motorola Razr. Kids all thought it was the coolest thing ever. Plenty of them hit the market. They only survived from the end of 2004 to mid 2007.
I'm still looking forward to the collapse of all this noise towards the end of Q4 2012.
I'd suspect that they have found a very interesting financial method.
They can only fine so many cars for doing over the speed limit. Say they get 1 in 100 (a very high number in reality), and they may get fines of up to say $200. A percentage of those drivers will dispute the fine, win in court, and pay nothing to the state. So if 10 in 1000 drivers are ticketed, and 25% of them just pay rather than go to court, the income goes down to 7 in 1000, or $1.400. If they get all those drivers who want to drive fast to pay the $25 license, they now get $25,000 in income, and reduce their overhead. The majority of traffic stops are not honestly safety related. They are a revenue stream for the city or county.
It's easy to see, they could gain $1,400 per 1000 drivers ticketed, or $25,000 per 1000 drivers without the overhead of putting patrols on the road and ticketing. Hopefully it would mean that they can reassign those officers to important crimes where the citizens are really in danger.
I know, I know, the police are no longer "to protect and serve." They are in the business of being a revenue stream for the state.
I totally agree. I was cruising on I-10 in the middle of nowhere. I saw the occasional car in the right lane, spaced miles apart. My safe speed could have been well above the indicated speed (my car was designed to drive much faster than those pesky speed limit signs). I would have been safe doing 140 or so. I restricted myself to the god awful drive across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to something resembling the speed limit. I really wouldn't have minded cutting the drive time in half across the whole stretch of nowhere.
Likewise, there are speed limits which really mean you shouldn't go faster. I've cruised down residential streets at a whopping 15 to 20 mph, because there were kids playing in the front yard, and pedestrians who appeared they may just wander out in front of me. While my car will do insane maneuvers without losing control, and stop stop on a dime (verified on autocross courses), I'd rather just stop quick, and not risk someone's life. It's not always people. A cat decided to take a leisurely walk in front of my car. 20mph to a dead stop let the cat live.
I just posted a longer description of the way it could be proper. Certification of both the vehicle and driver.
A lot of people have no business driving cars even at the speed limit. I know there have been proposals to retest drivers over 65, to ensure that they are still safe to drive. So, when they were 16 to 18, they got their license. That means for almost 50 years, they've been allowed to continue driving without any sort of proof that they are safe drivers, except the possibility of a mandatory retest because they did something amazingly stupid. I've heard that there are the occasional circumstances of it, but I haven't known anyone who it's happened to.
I just renewed my license. I've been driving for about 20 years. They gave me a "retest", which was simply sitting down at a computer in the DMV office, and I was shown a series of street signs, and it was a multiple-choice test. I was thinking that there were trick questions, but they were all blatantly obvious. After I took the test, I asked how many I missed. I knew I hadn't missed any, but it was to see if any were trick questions. I got them all right. The clerk told me that quite a few people fail. So, these people could have been driving for 20 years, and sometime in that period, they forgot what the signs meant? No wonder I've seen people drive as if the signs aren't even there. Nope, that stop sign really means stop. Yield means you have to yield to traffic, not that they are going to yield to you. {sigh}
Drivers really should be recertified at regular intervals. It should probably be yearly for normal drivers licenses, but people issued special licenses that allow speeding should have mandatory recertification to prove that they have a clue how to drive fast without killing themselves or someone else.
Driving fast means you give lots of extra room. You pay attention to clues. A car swerving a little may be checking his blind spots before changing lanes, and they didn't bother to signal. (that's another thing that pisses me off). Some people just shouldn't be driving. I watched a guy a couple weeks ago, in the left lane, with his left turn signal on, cut across two other lanes of traffic to make a right turn. There was no question that he wanted to turn left. He almost it two cars in his stupid move. And these idiotic maneuvers were done at low speeds (about 45mph).
I had thought about a proper implementation of this a long time ago. Unfortunately, it'll never happen. And as you said, his implementation is half assed.
My idea for an implementation went something like this.
Vehicles would have various speed classes where they are allowed to operate in. Obviously, they are allowed to operate as a lower class vehicle, but never higher until certified safe.
Drivers would be certified for their various speed classes.
Every vehicle would be inspected, and certified for speed ranges. We already have this to some degree. Mopeds aren't allowed on Interstates. Some states have different speed limits on highways and interstates for trucks and vehicles with trailers, versus passenger vehicles.
We'll use my car as an example. It was speed limited from the factory to 165mph (W). That's because the tires they sold with it were only rated to 168mph. The car itself is safe and capable of higher speeds with the proper tires. I generally use 186mph (Y) tires, not because of their top speed, but they are only about $10 more and have better wet and dry road traction.
Vehicles in lower speed classes would have yearly mandatory safety inspections. That's something that simply doesn't get done these days, and it's assumed the owner or driver will take care of it. It's scary how many cars I've worked on, that had seriously worn or broken parts, and the owners didn't know or care. How often do you verify your vehicle is safe? Many shops look for easy money, and will tell you things are worn or broken, without noticing serious problems. I was working on a minivan that had a list of problems from a professional shop. I went through their quote as a checklist, and found none of the problems to exist. They had completely failed to notice that the steering was so worn that the front left wheel was no longer attached to the steering, and the rear brakes were leaking fluid profusely. (hint, those are reasons to take a car off the road until its repaired).
Vehicles in higher speed classes would have quarterly mandatory safety inspections, or lose their high speed certification. For example, if a car was certified for up to 165mph, but failed to recertify, it would drop to a lower class, such as max speed of 55mph.
Drivers would likewise be certified. It's not the nonsense that we have now, where once you have a license, you have a license for life as long as you continue to renew it. I haven't taken a driving test for the state ever. I took drivers ed in high school (around 1989), and being that I passed the class, I had proven proficiency. Who's to say that I haven't forgotten some basic rules of the road, or adopted bad and/or illegal habits, sometime in the last 21 years?
I'll use myself as an example. I have, by my own choice, continued driver training. Some of those were for employment, and others were with various racing groups driving well beyond the expectation of normal highway driving. Just about anyone can make a car go straight on a dry road. Not everyone can recover from a 45mph rear wheel lockup on a wet road while turning. That was just an example of one the things that was mandatory in one training. It was on a closed track. The track was wet, and we took our class cars (Caprice Classic's and Crown Victoria's) up to 45mph, and set the parking brake while turning, and you cannot release the parking brake until you complete the exercise. That's a great way to spin a car. It's also a bastard to recover from. Further and advanced training is very useful in real world situations. You may have learned to recover from a slide on the track, but it can prove useful when there is water on the road and an unexpected slide happens.
To gain a higher certification, drivers would be required to prove proficiency through serious tests, and frequent re-certifications (such as quarte
I totally agree, but there are some other bits to include. You probably already knew them, but they're worth mentioning. At one point, I had a decade of mail stored. It was broken up by year and month. Year folders, month subfolders. It made it just a bit more manageable to read through. That's just a personal decision though. Some people like sorting by the sender, or what they were involved in. You can subscribe or unsubscribe folders too, so it's not necessary to download the headers for 10 years of mail just to set up on a new computer.
Right now, there are two common storage formats, mbox and maildir. mbox is a single file, that can get huge. maildir is a single file for each message. For either of these, there are a plethora of server softwares to use with them.
The server software make a big difference. Some are a bastard to set up and use. Some install easily and just work. Some are quick, and some are pathetically slow. I'm fond of dovecot. Who knows what will be available in 10 years though. If you stay with good standard format (like maildir), it will be easier to survive future migrations. I changed imap software several times, and the users never knew. A few times, I've helped people migrate from non-standard formats like Exchange and Zimbra. In both of those cases, it required acquiring or changing their passwords, and then downloading their mail to the new server. It's not all that bad once you script it, but can still take a long time, depending on how much crap people have kept laying around.
If you keep it in a VM as you suggested, it's important to keep backups outside of the VM. I lost one of my VM's a couple weeks ago. It was just on my desktop, and the drive started to fail, and it lost a few clusters that the VM resided in, so the whole file became corrupt. It wasn't important though. I keep a whole bunch of VM's to test backward compatibility in. It's nice to have a few dozen VM's, rather than a few dozen machines running outdated OS's.
demand the driver's full attention because there's almost always a car nearby that is going much faster or much slower than you are
You described driving on any road. You should always give your full attention to driving. Cars can be anywhere from stopped to the speed limit, or even well over the speed limit. Just because we have a speed limit doesn't mean people follow it. If they were, then no one would ever get a speeding ticket.
What you described (stopped to 100km/h or 62mph, applies to roads all over America, and is within the speed limit.
Unfortunately, it's the same way with so many "illegal" industries. Prostitutes can go to work, get the crap beat out of them, robbed, etc, etc, and can't report it to the police to investigate. Soft drug dealers are in the same situation. Imagine the phone call "I was delivering a bag of pot, and got robbed at gunpoint." You'd go to jail just for admitting that you had possession with intent to distribute. Replace "bag of pot" with "pizza", and the police would handle it like a real crime.
Criminalization of things that really shouldn't be criminalized only serves to put those who participate in those activities in danger.
Marijuana has only been a crime in the US for less than a century.
Prostitution became illegal in the US for just about a century, depending on which state you are in.
There are exceptions to both, depending on where you live, and how the laws are enforced. Some jurisdictions overlook either (or both) activities, because locally they are considered acceptable. In cases where the crime itself is overlooked, I'm sure if an offense like I mentioned in the first paragraph was committed, the victim would be encouraged to rephrase their statement to eliminate the illegal activity which they were committing when it happened.
I was very surprised when I was in the Toronto area a few years ago, and found that prostitution was perfectly accepted. As I understood it, they didn't want "street walkers", but any activity that happened in the privacy of your own bedroom between two consenting adults was accepted. Way to go! that attitude made me consider wanting to live there, but the LCBO seemed very wrong. I wasn't interested in seeing escorts up there, but I did like to drink in my free time, and didn't feel comfortable going to the state run liquor stores.
You, and many others answering here, have a seriously rosy view of the world.
Oh, my view of the world is anything but rosy. You've heard all those unemployment numbers that may have been mentioned lately? I was out of work for a year.
I think you see the various versions of prostitution being more glamorous than others. The girl on the street corner, versus the girl with an escort ad is only a difference in their advertising medium.
Over the last year, I didn't hold a "Will work for food" sign on a street corner, but I did do anything that friends, family, and friends of theirs needed, just so I didn't go hungry. Maybe my version was more glamorous because I still have my car, and I still have a cell phone. Both were subsidized with favors. I'm still in survival mode, doing what anyone needs so I can survive. It'll be a while before I truly have an income and a place to call "home". We're all whores. We do something for someone in exchange for something. Their work is sex. My work is anything physical or intellectual that would cost more to get done by someone else. Remember that next time you go to work, and smile as the boss tells you to do something you really don't want to do, just so you can get paid. Don't try to hold yourself on higher moral ground, just because your job doesn't involve sex.
You know, despite the contrary responses, you are right. A kid is a kid, and should be given kid appropriate toys. A kid at 18 months doesn't know the difference between a Frisbee and an iPad, except the iPad probably makes more interesting smashey noises when they're done with it.
My daughter is about 3.5 years old now. Sure, I have a plenty of computer gear for her to play with. I've given her pretty much anything she is interested in. Folks have given her all kinds of presents. For Christmas, she was more interested in playing with the boxes, and coloring on them, than the actual contents. Really, despite the cool packaging, most of the toys sucked.
Right now, her favorite toys, in order of interest, are....
Crayons or markers and blank paper. She can do a pretty decent job of basic shapes (lines, circles, triangles, and squares).
Coloring books, until she gets bored with the actual pictures, and draws what she wants over them. She's fascinated by car washes ("car showers" in her terms), even though she's afraid of them. That's one of the things she draws frequently. That and "daddy's car". It's not a technically accurate depiction, but it does have wheels and something resembling a body over it.
Digital cameras. She loves taking pictures, and being able to see the picture right away. She likes *her* picture taken more though, so she'll make me take the picture and show her what it is.
She's interested in computers, but only as far as seeing daddy type 100wpm, so she bangs on old keyboards to type along.
She loves her etch-a-sketch. She can draw, and make it go away so she can start over. She likes to see me draw and write, so when I write things on it, I spell it out, and say the word.
And I made the tragic mistake of showing her http://icanhascheezburger.com/. She wants to see the kitties doing silly things. It's not just seeing them, she has a commentary about each one. It's nice hearing what she sees in the picture, rather than what us adults have learned to see in them.
She has a few shows that she likes on TV, and is amazed that I can show her the same ones on the computer. It just sucks to have a kid take away *MY* toy.:)
On, and on the car, she loves telling me how to drive. "Green light daddy!", even if it's red. She's not confused about the colors, she just likes me to drive fast. For the sake of safety, I just stay in a lower gear so she can hear the engine roar. "Fast" to her is where the engine is running faster, not how fast we're actually driving.:)
Then there's balls, blocks, and other assorted kids toys.
Her grandmother got her a Disney toy that hooks to the TV. She lost interest in that in less than 5 minutes. She likes to dance on it though, even though she's not playing the game right. Hey, whatever, she's having fun, and I didn't waste the money on it.:) It doesn't even need to be hooked up to the TV for her to enjoy herself.:)
She likes to be read to also. She talks about the pictures in the book more than trying to comprehend the reading.
So, for any kid, give them the opportunity to do anything they want (that they can do safely), and you'll appreciate them more.
Have you talked to many escorts to come to this conclusion? It really doesn't sound like it.
Have you talked to your average worker in a fast food restaurant or big box store? Unless they're just out of high school, they're miserable.
Stop forcing YOUR morality on others. It's a choice, both by the service provider, and by the customer. One way or another, we're all in the same business. We want something, and we give something for it. So your morality may say that you need to spend money on fancy dinners and expensive trinkets, coming to a climax where a lavish party is thrown because you put a multi-carat diamond on some poor girls finger. It's all down hill from there. Will you cheat on her? Will she divorce you and take half of what you have?
Prostitution, under it's various names, is far more honest. You negotiate the fee for services rendered, and then you each get what you wanted. Simple. The same concerns apply in the interaction with her, or a girl you met elsewhere. Wear a condom, and keep track of your wallet.
They made the choice to go into the industry. Their customers made the choice to get services from the industry. It's simple. I've known a few women who work in the industry, and they refuse the option of taking a "normal" job, for a fraction of the pay and losing flexibility with their life. Those of us who work in an office don't get the choice of saying "I have a headache, I don't want to work today", or "I have other things to do, pay me for Saturday night instead." None of them were forced to do it. Very few look back at a "regular" job with any sort of passion for it.
I won't say that there aren't bad elements in the industry, but if you look at how many corporations work you'll see worse behavior. You have overworked, underpaid disgruntled people wondering if they have a job tomorrow. Will I get fired? Will the company be downsizing? Will the company fold? I've seen a lot of good hard working 9 to 5 people suddenly find themselves without an income, because they came into work, just to find that they didn't have a job any more. Maybe you're independently wealthy, and don't have to worry about such things, but for the rest of the world, we have bills to pay.
Because of people like you, who have forced your morality on others, it's put these working women in danger. Legalization and acceptance of the industry is the only way to remove the bad elements of the industry.
Where I've been, they have to be delivered by USPS certified, or a process server.
If a certified letter comes to an office, it's very likely that it would be signed for. Someone realized it wasn't really for them, and probably shitcanned it. End of story.
I've seen my share of C&D's flow by. They're frequently to the wrong party, but the lawyers don't know any better.
For those who haven't been through it, first you get a C&D. It's the polite-ish legal letter saying "If you don't Cease and Desist from [said action], we will file a lawsuit against your company. The right thing to do is read it, do as they say, and then you're done with it. If it was a misdelivery, I've always tried to provide corrected information to them, so we wouldn't be on the ugly end of a lawsuit.
What happened on the parts of both publications was fine. The wrong party got notified. It got shitcanned because it didn't relate to them. The real party didn't even know it was happening, so they couldn't take any action.
It'll come out in the appeal. It won't look good for the plaintiff though. Now they have two defendants, and two sets of court proceedings to go through, and will owe the incorrectly identified party a lot, including legal fees.
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Ditto.
Anyone can make any sort of wild "forward looking statement". I may have designed a zero emissions perpetual motion power generator. If I can get enough hits to my site, and persuade enough investors, I'll make a fortune!
Come visit my site today! We'll all be rich!
I'm still waiting for flying cars, obediant robots to clean the house, distant places to live or visit, green energy, world peace, and a few other things. World of tomorrow my ass. When I was a kid, they kept telling us about how by the year 2000 everything would be so different. Ya. I have gray hair, no flying car, and moon weekend home. Tell your grandchildren that all the lies of things coming in the year 2100 are lies! Lies! The cake is a lie!
({snicker})
There's an easy, and preferred solution to that. Don't carry your data with you. Use an encrypted channel, and send the data up to your secure points. Explained simpler, use a VPN to work on your VPN accessible server. All your laptop is at this point, is a dumb terminal.
Besides the OS, the only data that has been on my laptop are maybe photos taken during the trip. If they ever decided to scrutinize my data, they may find tourist snapshots. Obviously, they'd see the VPN connection software, but you're under no obligation to provide the credentials. Having a plan in place that simply states if someone should be held against their will by the government, their credentials should be considered compromised and must be changed immediately. At the outside, that could mean handling an interrogation (refusing to say anything) until the keys would have been changed. It would be simple enough to provide wrong credentials with an explanation "they revoked my credentials already." It could be overexplained that you must check in with your RSA SecurID which you do not have in your possession.
We had this plan in place at one shop I was at. And no, we didn't have any top secret data. :) If folks didn't check in at boarding time, or check in after they got out of the airport, their credentials were to be removed immediately. If this happened, they would be reinstated after verifying that they were no longer under duress. We never had to use it though. The only times it was invoked were when the person in question failed to call in or show up to work. :)
I still haven't seen the TSA nor any other law enforcement agency actually demand credentials for a computer, or a subset like an encrypted partition, unless they already had probable cause for that information. I, as a fine upstanding citizen, have been patted down, my luggage examined, stood in the "totally safe" backscatter X-ray machine, and my private parts touched for the sake of security. Sometimes on a long business trip, that makes up for it. :) I've only been told to turn on my laptop once, and when I told him the battery was dead, that was the end of the story. Is there a subset of Slashdot that has red flags coming out of their asses, or are there just a few too many conspiracy nuts around here, believing government thugs are hiding around every corner?
I consider every option. Only a fool looks at the bottom line and says "yes", without understanding everything that is involved. Would it be better to accept the money and hide in their country, or accept the money and be placed in the WITSEC, where I could live happily for the rest of my life? The options for any scenario are not limited to just the options presented to you.
I wasn't really commenting on myself. I was commenting on people in general. Myself, my price is impossibly high, and would likely involve a failure to deliver the information.
It's pretty easy to talk about what we'd do, when the situation is never presented to us.
I have been presented with the opportunity to do some "bad things" with large quantities of sensitive information, but never military grade information. I've always chosen the moral high ground, because I'm the one who has to live with my decisions. I've also never possessed such secrets, so the situation has never presented itself in reality to me. Knowing how many people are, they'd likely go for the cash, and not worry about the consequences.
In this situation, they were to be leaking sensitive information to Venezuela. Most people would see it and say "what harm could come of that?" They're not very likely to attack the United States with such a weapon. If such a weapon was used, it would no result in any sort of injury to anyone I know. I do believe that there are too many countries with nuclear capabilities or are seeking such capabilities. I'd prefer the number be much closer to zero.
You can believe in magical sky fairies. That doesn't mean that there aren't quite a few people who would sell out for the right price, nor does it mean there's a lack of people who would be more than happy to pay for it.
Sorry about that. It wasn't a mistake. I just didn't clarify that it was the border to the South. I don't hear a lot about people from central and south America sneaking across the Canadian border. :) I've crossed both borders several times. Crossing the Canadian border is a joke in comparison the Mexican border.
You're just wasting your breath. Well, wear and tear on your keyboard. :)
There are extremists on both sides of any argument. The right to bear arms is definitely one of those arguments. The extremists on both sides will come up with any wild assertion to support their side. Oh my god, people of Mexican descent shouldn't ever have guns. What I do find rather interesting is that the same people who vilify "Mexicans" don't understand that Mexico is the only land crossing into the United States. People from all over Central and South America come to the land of opportunity and prosperity.
The Muslim argument is that much worse. Would I trust a Muslim with a gun? Well, so far yes. No Muslim has ever threatened to shoot me. Oddly enough, the only threats of that sort have come from Americans, born and raised in the US with no discernible ties back to their ancestors countries.
Extremists will make it sound like foreign nationals come to the United States to buy guns, and then suicide with a suitcase nuke. Others are purchasing caches of weapons to sell in South America. They'll find the handful of transactions where those not currently allowed to possess firearms did in fact purchase one. They overlook the hundreds of thousands (or more) of other firearms sales that were completely legal, made by US citizens. There was a news story recently about firearms sales at gun shows, and how some sales were happening without the appropriate checks in place. The implication was that all those sales were to terrorists. In reality they weren't.
I am a gun owner. I do say that everyone should be trained for familiarity and proficiency with firearms. That training isn't only for defense, but to ensure that if they happen to find a firearm, they won't accidentally shoot themselves or an innocent bystander. There are people who don't want guns around for various reasons, and to them I respect their decision. Most of them have handled firearms in the past, recognize the threat they are, and also recognize that if they had access to a firearm, they may make an emotional and deadly decision. I respect their recognition of a potential problem.
There's a problem with your understanding of the crime. Us normal folks (those without DoD clearances, who'd never be offered millions for anything we know) only hear about the people who are caught.
Think of it as smaller crimes. Have you ever known someone who was a drug dealer or user? You don't have to answer that. :) Sure, we see the news where drug dealers and users are arrested, killed, etc, etc, etc. What you don't necessarily know about is that for every name or face that shows up in the news, there are thousands of people involved with that industry. The reason for the publicity of such events isn't to slow down those who are actively doing it, it's to persuade people who may get into that line of work that it's horribly dangerous.
By the sound of the story, they were framed. A retired couple, one who was laid off years ago. The other probably wasn't making great money. Between the two of them, they had sensitive information and knowledge. The FBI sting involved pretending to be a foreign national offering up almost 1 million dollars.
If you were an old retired couple, barely making ends meet with your pension, doesn't a million dollars in cash sound like a nice way to live the rest of your life? As it appears, they didn't actively pursue such a sale. The FBI staged the whole international secrets crime.
So, what comes of all of this? The couple may end up in prison for the rest of their lives. Other government workers will think twice about giving up any sort of information for any amount of cash. The smart ones (the ones who don't get caught) will still commit crimes such as this. The stupid ones (the ones who do get caught) will make headlines again when they work out a deal with the FBI to commit such a crime.
All the FBI managed to do was bust a couple who probably wouldn't have committed the crime in the first place. We all have our price, it just matters how gullible you are, and how much it would cost to buy you off. Would I accept $1 million? Probably not. $1 billion and guaranteed protection in another country? I'd have to think about it.
Sadly enough, we're arresting people now for actions that were encouraged of skilled people years before. The United States accumulated many great scientists and military experts. Surely many of them were bribed in one way or another. Much of that will never make it to the history books.
I won't argue about that. I'm still shocked to see the bad housekeeping practices on various servers I've worked on. No, really, you don't need site_old site_back, site_backup, site_backup_1988. and site_backup_y2k. Has anyone even considered getting rid of those? Nope. They're kept "just in case". What "just in case"? Just in case you want to roll back to a 20 year old copy of your data?
Wouldn't a compressed filesystem already do this? They don't just get the compression from nowhere. They eliminate duplicates blocks and empty space. You don't just get compression from nowhere.
Pick your platform. I know in both Linux and Windows, there have been compressed filesystems for quite some time.
It doesn't really negate the need for good housekeeping routines, nor good programming. Do you really want 100 copies of record X, or would one suffice? Sadly, people tend to think that they have unlimited space, until the time comes when they've run out of space. "Oh shit, what do we do now!" is way too common an occurrence.
You get a calculator? All I've had on my desk for many years has been the calc program on my computer.
Come around here and say that. I'll shoot your second amendment hating, America hating, commie, hippie ass before you get to the door.
[Note: Sarcasm. Most Americans are at least somewhat civilized. They may just shank you.]
It actually wouldn't be very hard to do it. A Faraday cage isn't so impossible to build.
There is paint available with a high metal content (hopefully not lead) which should do a pretty good job. Don't forget, the floor (if there's a floor under it), and the ceiling must be covered too. The windows would also need to be covered.
Alternatively (or in addition to), putting a fine wire mesh, with holes a fraction of the wavelength (come on Ham folks throw in the right numbers), were added to the walls, ceiling, and covering the windows, it would kill the connections.
If cheating on the class is such a big deal, they'll continue to find ways to subvert the schools control. If the worlds best Faraday cage was built in the room, with the most refined jammers, the students will just find another way to cheat. Since the exam has to be on knowledge they've accumulated during the course, they already know the materials that they need to sneak in. They may go back to the (oh my gosh) traditional writing the answers on their arms, shoes, or small notes. It's not the technology that needs to be fought, it's the fact that students will cheat.
Way back in high school, I was a teachers aide for a little while. I remember grading two girls tests, who sat beside each other. Every question on the test, right or wrong, was identical except for one. The girls threw a fit. I quietly mentioned to the teacher about the obvious cheating. I was given the tests back, and they were disputing the one that I thought they had marked differently. When it was given back to me, the question was now identical. Unfortunately for them, I had made an error, and the one I marked right was actually wrong. Oops, you both fail. There was no real action taken against them. The teacher knew exactly what happened, so the two girls were not to sit beside each other in that class for the remainder of the school year.
The question becomes, how do you catch cheating, and/or prevent it? That's up to the teacher and the school. Expulsion? Forced retaking of the semester/year? A smack on the knuckles with a wooden ruler (bring on the nuns!)
Thank you, that's exactly the point I was trying to make. :)
The greatest up and comer of today will rarely be the champion of the industry, and it's impossible to predict such things.
If you read the graph included with the story, it makes my statement very clear. They only reported Q2 2009 to Q2 2010. 1 year to make a 4 year estimate? They also only showed new phone purchases. It does not reflect people who kept their phone in service since before Q2 2009. This would taint their data. For example, Verizon Wireless offers a discount to trade your phone in after two years. I almost consider their data tainted, because they can't even label the graph correctly. Q? is a quarter year. The show 4 quarters, which is 12 months. The graph is labeled "... in the past 6 months." Or how about the green line showing "Palm OS, Symbian, Linux 6%", where Android is a Linux based platform.
But back to the argument at hand. Does an upward trend of 6 months indicate that the trend will continue for 4 years? No. Look at Q2 2009 to Q4 2009. The Apple iPhone increased from about 25% to 35%. At the same time, Android was lingering down below 10%. At the end of Q4 2009, the same analysis could have been made of the iPhone. Obviously that would have been wrong, even though they may have predicted the iPhone being the dominant phone on the market. Wrap those two lines together, and they would have had a very different report.
Q2 2009 - 16%
Q3 2009 - 20%
Q4 2009 - 16%
Q1 2010 - 24%
Q2 2010 - 33%
There's no way to predict the future. If we could predict sales with any sort of accuracy, we'd all be rich.
There are other considerations that aren't covered either. What promotions were being done? What distribution agreements were in place? etc, etc, etc.
No shit. :)
Just about everyone knows that "predictions" and "forward looking statements" aren't worth the time it takes to read them. 4 years from now? Android isn't even 2 years old yet. It may not have reached it's peak in popularity, but who knows what bigger, better, faster, toy there will be in the next 4 years. At very least, it's added another competitive element in the market place, but that can simply mean that it will push others (existing, or not yet on the market) to put out something better.
Hell, Google's Nexus One direct customer sales only survived from January to July 2010. It's a volatile market, and products come and go very quickly. Look at the Motorola Razr. Kids all thought it was the coolest thing ever. Plenty of them hit the market. They only survived from the end of 2004 to mid 2007.
I'm still looking forward to the collapse of all this noise towards the end of Q4 2012.
I'd suspect that they have found a very interesting financial method.
They can only fine so many cars for doing over the speed limit. Say they get 1 in 100 (a very high number in reality), and they may get fines of up to say $200. A percentage of those drivers will dispute the fine, win in court, and pay nothing to the state. So if 10 in 1000 drivers are ticketed, and 25% of them just pay rather than go to court, the income goes down to 7 in 1000, or $1.400. If they get all those drivers who want to drive fast to pay the $25 license, they now get $25,000 in income, and reduce their overhead. The majority of traffic stops are not honestly safety related. They are a revenue stream for the city or county.
It's easy to see, they could gain $1,400 per 1000 drivers ticketed, or $25,000 per 1000 drivers without the overhead of putting patrols on the road and ticketing. Hopefully it would mean that they can reassign those officers to important crimes where the citizens are really in danger.
I know, I know, the police are no longer "to protect and serve." They are in the business of being a revenue stream for the state.
I totally agree. I was cruising on I-10 in the middle of nowhere. I saw the occasional car in the right lane, spaced miles apart. My safe speed could have been well above the indicated speed (my car was designed to drive much faster than those pesky speed limit signs). I would have been safe doing 140 or so. I restricted myself to the god awful drive across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to something resembling the speed limit. I really wouldn't have minded cutting the drive time in half across the whole stretch of nowhere.
Likewise, there are speed limits which really mean you shouldn't go faster. I've cruised down residential streets at a whopping 15 to 20 mph, because there were kids playing in the front yard, and pedestrians who appeared they may just wander out in front of me. While my car will do insane maneuvers without losing control, and stop stop on a dime (verified on autocross courses), I'd rather just stop quick, and not risk someone's life. It's not always people. A cat decided to take a leisurely walk in front of my car. 20mph to a dead stop let the cat live.
That's my biggest complaint about the proposal.
I just posted a longer description of the way it could be proper. Certification of both the vehicle and driver.
A lot of people have no business driving cars even at the speed limit. I know there have been proposals to retest drivers over 65, to ensure that they are still safe to drive. So, when they were 16 to 18, they got their license. That means for almost 50 years, they've been allowed to continue driving without any sort of proof that they are safe drivers, except the possibility of a mandatory retest because they did something amazingly stupid. I've heard that there are the occasional circumstances of it, but I haven't known anyone who it's happened to.
I just renewed my license. I've been driving for about 20 years. They gave me a "retest", which was simply sitting down at a computer in the DMV office, and I was shown a series of street signs, and it was a multiple-choice test. I was thinking that there were trick questions, but they were all blatantly obvious. After I took the test, I asked how many I missed. I knew I hadn't missed any, but it was to see if any were trick questions. I got them all right. The clerk told me that quite a few people fail. So, these people could have been driving for 20 years, and sometime in that period, they forgot what the signs meant? No wonder I've seen people drive as if the signs aren't even there. Nope, that stop sign really means stop. Yield means you have to yield to traffic, not that they are going to yield to you. {sigh}
Drivers really should be recertified at regular intervals. It should probably be yearly for normal drivers licenses, but people issued special licenses that allow speeding should have mandatory recertification to prove that they have a clue how to drive fast without killing themselves or someone else.
Driving fast means you give lots of extra room. You pay attention to clues. A car swerving a little may be checking his blind spots before changing lanes, and they didn't bother to signal. (that's another thing that pisses me off). Some people just shouldn't be driving. I watched a guy a couple weeks ago, in the left lane, with his left turn signal on, cut across two other lanes of traffic to make a right turn. There was no question that he wanted to turn left. He almost it two cars in his stupid move. And these idiotic maneuvers were done at low speeds (about 45mph).
I had thought about a proper implementation of this a long time ago. Unfortunately, it'll never happen. And as you said, his implementation is half assed.
My idea for an implementation went something like this.
Vehicles would have various speed classes where they are allowed to operate in. Obviously, they are allowed to operate as a lower class vehicle, but never higher until certified safe.
Drivers would be certified for their various speed classes.
Every vehicle would be inspected, and certified for speed ranges. We already have this to some degree. Mopeds aren't allowed on Interstates. Some states have different speed limits on highways and interstates for trucks and vehicles with trailers, versus passenger vehicles.
We'll use my car as an example. It was speed limited from the factory to 165mph (W). That's because the tires they sold with it were only rated to 168mph. The car itself is safe and capable of higher speeds with the proper tires. I generally use 186mph (Y) tires, not because of their top speed, but they are only about $10 more and have better wet and dry road traction.
Vehicles in lower speed classes would have yearly mandatory safety inspections. That's something that simply doesn't get done these days, and it's assumed the owner or driver will take care of it. It's scary how many cars I've worked on, that had seriously worn or broken parts, and the owners didn't know or care. How often do you verify your vehicle is safe? Many shops look for easy money, and will tell you things are worn or broken, without noticing serious problems. I was working on a minivan that had a list of problems from a professional shop. I went through their quote as a checklist, and found none of the problems to exist. They had completely failed to notice that the steering was so worn that the front left wheel was no longer attached to the steering, and the rear brakes were leaking fluid profusely. (hint, those are reasons to take a car off the road until its repaired).
Vehicles in higher speed classes would have quarterly mandatory safety inspections, or lose their high speed certification. For example, if a car was certified for up to 165mph, but failed to recertify, it would drop to a lower class, such as max speed of 55mph.
Drivers would likewise be certified. It's not the nonsense that we have now, where once you have a license, you have a license for life as long as you continue to renew it. I haven't taken a driving test for the state ever. I took drivers ed in high school (around 1989), and being that I passed the class, I had proven proficiency. Who's to say that I haven't forgotten some basic rules of the road, or adopted bad and/or illegal habits, sometime in the last 21 years?
I'll use myself as an example. I have, by my own choice, continued driver training. Some of those were for employment, and others were with various racing groups driving well beyond the expectation of normal highway driving. Just about anyone can make a car go straight on a dry road. Not everyone can recover from a 45mph rear wheel lockup on a wet road while turning. That was just an example of one the things that was mandatory in one training. It was on a closed track. The track was wet, and we took our class cars (Caprice Classic's and Crown Victoria's) up to 45mph, and set the parking brake while turning, and you cannot release the parking brake until you complete the exercise. That's a great way to spin a car. It's also a bastard to recover from. Further and advanced training is very useful in real world situations. You may have learned to recover from a slide on the track, but it can prove useful when there is water on the road and an unexpected slide happens.
To gain a higher certification, drivers would be required to prove proficiency through serious tests, and frequent re-certifications (such as quarte
I totally agree, but there are some other bits to include. You probably already knew them, but they're worth mentioning. At one point, I had a decade of mail stored. It was broken up by year and month. Year folders, month subfolders. It made it just a bit more manageable to read through. That's just a personal decision though. Some people like sorting by the sender, or what they were involved in. You can subscribe or unsubscribe folders too, so it's not necessary to download the headers for 10 years of mail just to set up on a new computer.
Right now, there are two common storage formats, mbox and maildir. mbox is a single file, that can get huge. maildir is a single file for each message. For either of these, there are a plethora of server softwares to use with them.
The server software make a big difference. Some are a bastard to set up and use. Some install easily and just work. Some are quick, and some are pathetically slow. I'm fond of dovecot. Who knows what will be available in 10 years though. If you stay with good standard format (like maildir), it will be easier to survive future migrations. I changed imap software several times, and the users never knew. A few times, I've helped people migrate from non-standard formats like Exchange and Zimbra. In both of those cases, it required acquiring or changing their passwords, and then downloading their mail to the new server. It's not all that bad once you script it, but can still take a long time, depending on how much crap people have kept laying around.
If you keep it in a VM as you suggested, it's important to keep backups outside of the VM. I lost one of my VM's a couple weeks ago. It was just on my desktop, and the drive started to fail, and it lost a few clusters that the VM resided in, so the whole file became corrupt. It wasn't important though. I keep a whole bunch of VM's to test backward compatibility in. It's nice to have a few dozen VM's, rather than a few dozen machines running outdated OS's.
You described driving on any road. You should always give your full attention to driving. Cars can be anywhere from stopped to the speed limit, or even well over the speed limit. Just because we have a speed limit doesn't mean people follow it. If they were, then no one would ever get a speeding ticket.
What you described (stopped to 100km/h or 62mph, applies to roads all over America, and is within the speed limit.
Unfortunately, it's the same way with so many "illegal" industries. Prostitutes can go to work, get the crap beat out of them, robbed, etc, etc, and can't report it to the police to investigate. Soft drug dealers are in the same situation. Imagine the phone call "I was delivering a bag of pot, and got robbed at gunpoint." You'd go to jail just for admitting that you had possession with intent to distribute. Replace "bag of pot" with "pizza", and the police would handle it like a real crime.
Criminalization of things that really shouldn't be criminalized only serves to put those who participate in those activities in danger.
Marijuana has only been a crime in the US for less than a century.
Prostitution became illegal in the US for just about a century, depending on which state you are in.
There are exceptions to both, depending on where you live, and how the laws are enforced. Some jurisdictions overlook either (or both) activities, because locally they are considered acceptable. In cases where the crime itself is overlooked, I'm sure if an offense like I mentioned in the first paragraph was committed, the victim would be encouraged to rephrase their statement to eliminate the illegal activity which they were committing when it happened.
I was very surprised when I was in the Toronto area a few years ago, and found that prostitution was perfectly accepted. As I understood it, they didn't want "street walkers", but any activity that happened in the privacy of your own bedroom between two consenting adults was accepted. Way to go! that attitude made me consider wanting to live there, but the LCBO seemed very wrong. I wasn't interested in seeing escorts up there, but I did like to drink in my free time, and didn't feel comfortable going to the state run liquor stores.
Oh, my view of the world is anything but rosy. You've heard all those unemployment numbers that may have been mentioned lately? I was out of work for a year.
I think you see the various versions of prostitution being more glamorous than others. The girl on the street corner, versus the girl with an escort ad is only a difference in their advertising medium.
Over the last year, I didn't hold a "Will work for food" sign on a street corner, but I did do anything that friends, family, and friends of theirs needed, just so I didn't go hungry. Maybe my version was more glamorous because I still have my car, and I still have a cell phone. Both were subsidized with favors. I'm still in survival mode, doing what anyone needs so I can survive. It'll be a while before I truly have an income and a place to call "home". We're all whores. We do something for someone in exchange for something. Their work is sex. My work is anything physical or intellectual that would cost more to get done by someone else. Remember that next time you go to work, and smile as the boss tells you to do something you really don't want to do, just so you can get paid. Don't try to hold yourself on higher moral ground, just because your job doesn't involve sex.
You know, despite the contrary responses, you are right. A kid is a kid, and should be given kid appropriate toys. A kid at 18 months doesn't know the difference between a Frisbee and an iPad, except the iPad probably makes more interesting smashey noises when they're done with it.
My daughter is about 3.5 years old now. Sure, I have a plenty of computer gear for her to play with. I've given her pretty much anything she is interested in. Folks have given her all kinds of presents. For Christmas, she was more interested in playing with the boxes, and coloring on them, than the actual contents. Really, despite the cool packaging, most of the toys sucked.
Right now, her favorite toys, in order of interest, are....
Crayons or markers and blank paper. She can do a pretty decent job of basic shapes (lines, circles, triangles, and squares).
Coloring books, until she gets bored with the actual pictures, and draws what she wants over them. She's fascinated by car washes ("car showers" in her terms), even though she's afraid of them. That's one of the things she draws frequently. That and "daddy's car". It's not a technically accurate depiction, but it does have wheels and something resembling a body over it.
Digital cameras. She loves taking pictures, and being able to see the picture right away. She likes *her* picture taken more though, so she'll make me take the picture and show her what it is.
She's interested in computers, but only as far as seeing daddy type 100wpm, so she bangs on old keyboards to type along.
She loves her etch-a-sketch. She can draw, and make it go away so she can start over. She likes to see me draw and write, so when I write things on it, I spell it out, and say the word.
And I made the tragic mistake of showing her http://icanhascheezburger.com/. She wants to see the kitties doing silly things. It's not just seeing them, she has a commentary about each one. It's nice hearing what she sees in the picture, rather than what us adults have learned to see in them.
She has a few shows that she likes on TV, and is amazed that I can show her the same ones on the computer. It just sucks to have a kid take away *MY* toy. :)
On, and on the car, she loves telling me how to drive. "Green light daddy!", even if it's red. She's not confused about the colors, she just likes me to drive fast. For the sake of safety, I just stay in a lower gear so she can hear the engine roar. "Fast" to her is where the engine is running faster, not how fast we're actually driving. :)
Then there's balls, blocks, and other assorted kids toys.
Her grandmother got her a Disney toy that hooks to the TV. She lost interest in that in less than 5 minutes. She likes to dance on it though, even though she's not playing the game right. Hey, whatever, she's having fun, and I didn't waste the money on it.:) It doesn't even need to be hooked up to the TV for her to enjoy herself. :)
She likes to be read to also. She talks about the pictures in the book more than trying to comprehend the reading.
So, for any kid, give them the opportunity to do anything they want (that they can do safely), and you'll appreciate them more.
Have you talked to many escorts to come to this conclusion? It really doesn't sound like it.
Have you talked to your average worker in a fast food restaurant or big box store? Unless they're just out of high school, they're miserable.
Stop forcing YOUR morality on others. It's a choice, both by the service provider, and by the customer. One way or another, we're all in the same business. We want something, and we give something for it. So your morality may say that you need to spend money on fancy dinners and expensive trinkets, coming to a climax where a lavish party is thrown because you put a multi-carat diamond on some poor girls finger. It's all down hill from there. Will you cheat on her? Will she divorce you and take half of what you have?
Prostitution, under it's various names, is far more honest. You negotiate the fee for services rendered, and then you each get what you wanted. Simple. The same concerns apply in the interaction with her, or a girl you met elsewhere. Wear a condom, and keep track of your wallet.
They made the choice to go into the industry. Their customers made the choice to get services from the industry. It's simple. I've known a few women who work in the industry, and they refuse the option of taking a "normal" job, for a fraction of the pay and losing flexibility with their life. Those of us who work in an office don't get the choice of saying "I have a headache, I don't want to work today", or "I have other things to do, pay me for Saturday night instead." None of them were forced to do it. Very few look back at a "regular" job with any sort of passion for it.
I won't say that there aren't bad elements in the industry, but if you look at how many corporations work you'll see worse behavior. You have overworked, underpaid disgruntled people wondering if they have a job tomorrow. Will I get fired? Will the company be downsizing? Will the company fold? I've seen a lot of good hard working 9 to 5 people suddenly find themselves without an income, because they came into work, just to find that they didn't have a job any more. Maybe you're independently wealthy, and don't have to worry about such things, but for the rest of the world, we have bills to pay.
Because of people like you, who have forced your morality on others, it's put these working women in danger. Legalization and acceptance of the industry is the only way to remove the bad elements of the industry.
Where I've been, they have to be delivered by USPS certified, or a process server.
If a certified letter comes to an office, it's very likely that it would be signed for. Someone realized it wasn't really for them, and probably shitcanned it. End of story.
I've seen my share of C&D's flow by. They're frequently to the wrong party, but the lawyers don't know any better.
For those who haven't been through it, first you get a C&D. It's the polite-ish legal letter saying "If you don't Cease and Desist from [said action], we will file a lawsuit against your company. The right thing to do is read it, do as they say, and then you're done with it. If it was a misdelivery, I've always tried to provide corrected information to them, so we wouldn't be on the ugly end of a lawsuit.
What happened on the parts of both publications was fine. The wrong party got notified. It got shitcanned because it didn't relate to them. The real party didn't even know it was happening, so they couldn't take any action.
It'll come out in the appeal. It won't look good for the plaintiff though. Now they have two defendants, and two sets of court proceedings to go through, and will owe the incorrectly identified party a lot, including legal fees.