This woman represented herself as a minor instead of an adult. She used the account to defraud, harass, and endanger a minor. I'm pretty sure that's more serious than saying she has a coincidental name overlap with someone famous.
That's not what the government is doing. The government is saying she was unauthorized in continuing to use the MySpace servers because she willingly violated the ToS which gave her authorization. They are further saying she did this in order to defraud someone and cause them harm, which was her purpose.
The case isn't at all about having a pseudonym on the public side of a site. It's partly about a ToS that requires real personal info on the back end or a truthful statement of your age (this was an adult impersonating a minor in order to contact a minor).
This woman didn't just use an alias, as so many are saying. She specifically led this girl to believe she was a 17-year-old boy who was romantically interested in her in order to get the girl to do something on that belief. What she convinced her to do was to kill herself. That's fraud.
That's, specifically, "accessing a computer without authorization" (because she violated the ToS) and "transmitting a program, information, code, or command" which "causes damage that results in:" "Physical injury to any person". That's a crime under the Act, even as strictly worded.
Also, since this woman and her daughter reportedly shared the account, they with an intent to defraud trafficked in a password through which the computer (MySpace's server) could be accessed without authorization.
I wouldn't want to be the prosecutor or member of the jury on that, but it seems they have a stronger case than "OMG, she called herself 'Jane Doe'!".
If they use the spaces they took natural gas and oil out of, they should be reasonably able to withstand the pressure. 1200 PSI really isn't that much pressure for a thick layer of rock.
How about if we start with deep mines and the refilled strip mines once they are done producing? That way, they're man-made holes to start with. Then we can move on to places where we took oil and gas out of the ground, perhaps, which according to traditional wisdom also won't have anything growing.
It's probably because this doesn't require us to burn more coal and separate out the carbon dioxide. This is meant to store excess energy so we can use less production capacity more efficiently, and it uses whole air.
Actually, hydroelectric as practiced by forming large lakes from rivers is entirely about using gravity for energy storage. The main difference with pumping the water back into the reservoir is that you have more control of how much you're storing. The reservoir itself is an energy store from the start. You're storing the energy that would have allowed that water to flow downstream by putting earth and concrete in its way.
It's a study from some folks at Stephen F. Austin University. They studied average time elapsed to find and process a particular piece of information on a screen rather than the strain it produced. Making information easier to see may clearly speed productivity, which is a good thing.
They also studied textured vs. plain backgrounds besides three different colors of background (gray, blue, yellow). The most important sentence in the synopsis would appear to be:
In general, the plain backgrounds led to faster search times than did the medium-textured backgrounds, and the blue backgrounds led to slower and more variable search times than the grey or yellow backgrounds.
Hopefully we don't find that the fastest color scheme is the worst on the eyes. Also, it's worth noting that they don't appear to change the foreground color, so these results may have to do with the combination of colors as much as the background colors by themselves.
Note: I'm not the AC that posted the URL. I'm just expanding on what was already there.
That's a stock one from vim.org, so most copies of vim will have it. I like it a lot, too. It's almost like torte but has a dark blue (go figure) background instead of black.
I'd never recommend just one option for something so subjective, but I use mostly torte and sometimes murphy or darkblue. I checked out zenburn from the descriptions above and I think I'll try that a day or two to see how I like it. It looks good so far.
Others I haven't really tried for very long at a time but which weren't bad at first include the stock "blue", "desert", "ron", and "elflord" (not making that up) themes and the "wombat" theme.
Be sure your syntax highlighting isn't doing strange things before you rule out a color scheme. Alternate syntax files for many languages are available.
If, and only if, the hacked firmware is based partly on Sony's original and not written from scratch for compatibility with it, then distributing it to third parties could be a breach of copyright.
Car companies do tend to void warranties if they have sufficient reason to believe you have been driving especially fast or have been racing in a street-legal general market car.
Other than those two particulars, I'd agree with your whole post.
A restriction on using something you bought has nothing in common with making a copy of something and redistributing it against the will of the author.
The people using the hacked firmware are just breaking a restriction on what they own. However, there's a case to be made that the people releasing hacked firmware are making unauthorized derivative works of Sony's firmware. Depending on how they developed their versions, that might even be true. However, reverse engineering and rewriting from scratch for sake of compatibility has been accepted as a valid, non-infringing activity by US courts and even by the DMCA.
Can a EULA you never signed, and for which you never received any consideration for accepting the terms, really preclude you from doing what is otherwise perfectly allowable? I guess we'll see if there's ever a solid court case that falls one way or another. So far, I think companies like Sony and Apple are content to call this phenomenon a nuisance.
Phoenix, AMD, and many other companies have made major businesses out of reverse-engineering products and offering alternative versions. The developers of StarOffice/Open Office, Pidgin, Samba, and Novell's Evolution reverse engineered data formats for other software, and nobodys sued them out of existence. They're not using code from those other products, but are largely (or in some cases completely) compatible with them.
Intel even offers its own version of extensions AMD made to Intel's CPU instruction set. There's probably no stronger support for the legitimacy of reverse engineering for the sake of compatibility than that, and you cna be pretty sure that Intel and AMD are both careful not to steal each other's actual designs and redistribute them. Who's to say these firmware writers are doing anything different without proof of their processes?
I was working 70-95 hours a week running the network, and I'm not an HVAC technician. Negotiating with the landlords about putting unusual equipment on the roof, locating the equipment, and getting it installed would have taken quite a bit of time away from running the network. It's a nice thought and all, but don't blame me for trying to keep our customers online since that was my job.
I used to work for an ISP which was contacted by the natural gas utility company about canceling service. The gas company decided it wasn't doing us as the customer nor them as the seller any good to keep billing us just for the pipe, as we used about 2 units of gas in the five years at our location. With four offices, a lobby, the call center, and the NOC, we were self-sustaining for heat. Cooling, on the other hand, cost us dearly.
Any decent electronics project book will verify that any copper or aluminum wire will gain resistance with increasing temperature.
If you want a quick link, though, how about this article at Dan's Data about power supplies which actually gives some basic theory? It's a little suspect in that it's a review of a particular brand of power supply, and Dan's Data isn't as widely known as Tom's Hardware or Anandtech. What do you want from the very first Google result for the search "warmer power supplies draw more current", though? It also happens that he's right (about the issue, anyway -- I've never reviewed or purchased Topower power supplies).
Even with a warrant, it's only legal if they told the judge the truth to get the warrant. There have been documented cases of agencies materially misrepresenting investigations in order to get warrants, too.
I think we're in agreement there, but most Americans don't realize how easy it is to be heard. There's so much "The People vs. The Man" BS floating around the culture that I think people don't try.
It's very easy to write a member of Congress and get a reasoned response, even if it's maybe from an aide. It's even easier by the representatives in the state legislatures. City board, county board, water district, school district, and other meetings are generally open to the public in person.
A letter-writing campaign of a good size is pretty easy to do these days, with the Internet acting as the backbone of organization and communications efforts. Real paper mail seems to be the best way to get the attention of many politicians, though, so perhaps the actual letters should be sent that way. There's probably something of a generation gap involved here, but the smarter candidates of older generations have teams that handle electronic communication for them if they don't want to bother learning it themselves.
Many city and county elections in my area have seats filled unopposed, and get very low voter turnout. Many things locally require a vote by the public, such as property taxes, sales taxes, and other things that have to do with people's daily lives. There's no reason if someone wants to be involved they can't at least read the issues on a local ballot and vote.
I'm pretty certain the culture in Switzerland is different from that of the US. Here, people can't agree whether to vote on American Idol or Nashville Star, but they are woefully inadequately prepared to vote on most real issues. That often includes the majority of those who are actually voting.
Most people in the US see an evening news program, skim the headlines in a paper, or catch some news on the radio as they drive home. Many people no longer get any of that, since there are so many all-music radio stations, PMPs, specialty TV stations with no news broadcasts, and papers are dying out. Many of the people who turn to the 'Net for news are only reading the headlines.
Some people in the US are really on top of events and care how things are handled, but most are too busy with their daily lives to even take notice.
If that's the same way Switzerland is, and the people decide everything as a whole, then I'm really surprised anything works out for them. My guess is that they're far more involved in current events and think far more about public policy if they're able to make any relevant decisions, let alone good decisions.
Perhaps more involvement would breed more interest, but that's something we couldn't be sure about without trying.
"At point blank range" you turn the handgun. A large portion of US police officers who are shot on duty are shot during struggles with their own service weapons.
Most triggers take between 4 and 12 pounds of pressure. If you're using a firearm with a few-gram trigger then it's no wonder you're killing people right and left. That's an accidental discharge waiting to happen.
The force transferred to a target by a knife is typically much more than transferred by a small firearm round. Knives can penetrate much of the bullet-resistant armor people wear when they are entering a dangerous situation, in fact. The entry wound is what kills someone with a knife, not an exit wound.
There was a guy several years ago who killed someone with a frozen salmon. Banning weapons might make a few people not commit a murder, but everything down to and including bare hands have been used to kill. The place to battle crime is at the causes, not the weapons.
I was talking about US military personnel in the first sentence, which does afford them a different set of rights than those of civilian citizens or non-citizens. That's part of their service, and the stricter code of laws and separate courts is part of their effective service to the country.
The accused/alleged terrorists (since that's all they are right now) have the same rights under criminal accusation as a US civilian, which in some ways is more than US soldiers. However, if they are convicted in court of being actual terrorists, they'll have far fewer rights than US soldiers.
I was thinking mostly from the initial claim, with the person described looking forward. Receiving news from the media outlets is more about interpretation than prediction.
Also, as I answered our anonymous friend in #23783647, I think I'm taking perhaps more liberty with the terms for the sake of the discussion. It's not a strict continuum with those labels in their strictest senses, but if you prod the words into loose connotations they work in the context of reacting to a claim of making an (engineering/political/scientific/economic) feat work.
The optimist will believe a positive prediction until given reason to believe otherwise. The pessimist will anticipate failure until given reason to believe there has been success. A skeptic will wait and see. All three will usually hope for the best (from their point of view), but their expectations are different. Again, the true believers are on either end, possibly the ones past pessimists being "true unbelievers". For the sake of balance, perhaps we remove "cynic" altogether.
That's a true distinction in the strictest sense. I don't think the language has the exact terms, as nouns, for the divisions I wanted to make, though. Not being "quite right" is close enough to get my point across, I think.
A skeptic may not be a cynic and a cynic may not be a skeptic, but if you apply skepticism or pessimism to the behavior and motives of others, you get cynicism. Thinking in purely social terms, the two aren't that far apart. In an empirical science, cynicism and skepticism are clearly more separate, as you'd be skeptical of the work but cynical about the person.
Anyway, perhaps I should have used a numbered scale or used "more" and "less" instead of disparate terms, but I think the conclusion survives the choice of words.
I can show you plenty of politicians who clearly and logically show their points. The problem is I can't show you any like that who are likely to be now, or ever, in office. Perhaps there are some at local levels of government, but in larger offices the method of electioneering is one of marketing and not of philosophy or explanation. It's an endemic problem in American politics, and it won't change easily.
Being answerable for any crimes and balanced by the other branches is good. Being beholden to a public which does not have their full time and attention nor all the facts about difficult situations is bad. Sure, it's good to keep the people happy. It's more necessary to keep the Constitution in place and to protect the common good, though. Where duty and popularity part ways, the President should feel bound to duty.
Well, I can agree that Ford pardoning Nixon and Carter trying to wean us off of foreign oil were good things. I've not read much on Ford's presidency other than that it was mostly uneventful and I'm too young to remember it. I vaguely remember Carter's, and have read more about it.
Carter's leadership in the office seems to be a counterexample to the rest of his tenure. Double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, and letting your hostages rot overseas are not ways to serve and inspire your people. Surely this was not all his fault, but he wasn't able to overcome these issues.
Clinton did do one great and wonderful thing, in that he balanced the budget. However, this was done at the expense of lowering SEC investigative budgets (Enron, Worldcom), cutting our overseas intelligence gathering (embassy bombing in Somalia, USS Cole, 9/11, first WTC bombing), letting our military bases crumble, pulling out after one embarrassment in Mogadishu, rocketing a Chinese embassy because we couldn't double-check addresses, and similar issues.
Clinton probably shares some fault in our current shaky economy and the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. According to many, Reagan and the first Bush share claim to 9/11 for training then losing track of the mujahadin. I'm not sure I'd care to contest that.
Every president has had good and bad things come from their terms. For one, no president has sufficient power nor responsibility for every detail of everything. They are not kings, thankfully. For another, even what is in their power must be moderated and subject to compromise between interests. The President must also compromise with what the Congress is willing to do.
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Presidents Roosevelt, and Eisenhower are the safe bets as real leaders in American history. Nixon realized we needed to recognize the PRC, which some say likely kept us from a devastating war. Reagan outspent the Soviets, showing the strength of an open economy (and lots of borrowing). Kennedy inspired support for the space program, which helped not only against the Soviets but which has given us satellite TV, GPS, weather satellites, and all sorts of other military and civilian advances. He also kept the missiles out of Cuba.
It's a hard job, and nobody's perfect. Some are more suited to it than others, though, and sometimes we are lucky or blessed or through karma or necessity get someone who can make difficult and sometimes unpopular decisions which turn out to be right. Some of them are still unpopular after making the right decisions -- enough to not be reelected or even to be shot.
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This woman represented herself as a minor instead of an adult. She used the account to defraud, harass, and endanger a minor. I'm pretty sure that's more serious than saying she has a coincidental name overlap with someone famous.
That's not what the government is doing. The government is saying she was unauthorized in continuing to use the MySpace servers because she willingly violated the ToS which gave her authorization. They are further saying she did this in order to defraud someone and cause them harm, which was her purpose.
The case isn't at all about having a pseudonym on the public side of a site. It's partly about a ToS that requires real personal info on the back end or a truthful statement of your age (this was an adult impersonating a minor in order to contact a minor).
Let's look at the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
This woman didn't just use an alias, as so many are saying. She specifically led this girl to believe she was a 17-year-old boy who was romantically interested in her in order to get the girl to do something on that belief. What she convinced her to do was to kill herself. That's fraud.
That's, specifically, "accessing a computer without authorization" (because she violated the ToS) and "transmitting a program, information, code, or command" which "causes damage that results in:" "Physical injury to any person". That's a crime under the Act, even as strictly worded.
Also, since this woman and her daughter reportedly shared the account, they with an intent to defraud trafficked in a password through which the computer (MySpace's server) could be accessed without authorization.
I wouldn't want to be the prosecutor or member of the jury on that, but it seems they have a stronger case than "OMG, she called herself 'Jane Doe'!".
If they use the spaces they took natural gas and oil out of, they should be reasonably able to withstand the pressure. 1200 PSI really isn't that much pressure for a thick layer of rock.
How about if we start with deep mines and the refilled strip mines once they are done producing? That way, they're man-made holes to start with. Then we can move on to places where we took oil and gas out of the ground, perhaps, which according to traditional wisdom also won't have anything growing.
It's probably because this doesn't require us to burn more coal and separate out the carbon dioxide. This is meant to store excess energy so we can use less production capacity more efficiently, and it uses whole air.
Actually, hydroelectric as practiced by forming large lakes from rivers is entirely about using gravity for energy storage. The main difference with pumping the water back into the reservoir is that you have more control of how much you're storing. The reservoir itself is an energy store from the start. You're storing the energy that would have allowed that water to flow downstream by putting earth and concrete in its way.
...and as a link http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/Oxford.html...
It's a study from some folks at Stephen F. Austin University. They studied average time elapsed to find and process a particular piece of information on a screen rather than the strain it produced. Making information easier to see may clearly speed productivity, which is a good thing.
They also studied textured vs. plain backgrounds besides three different colors of background (gray, blue, yellow). The most important sentence in the synopsis would appear to be:
Hopefully we don't find that the fastest color scheme is the worst on the eyes. Also, it's worth noting that they don't appear to change the foreground color, so these results may have to do with the combination of colors as much as the background colors by themselves.
Note: I'm not the AC that posted the URL. I'm just expanding on what was already there.
That's a stock one from vim.org, so most copies of vim will have it. I like it a lot, too. It's almost like torte but has a dark blue (go figure) background instead of black.
I'd never recommend just one option for something so subjective, but I use mostly torte and sometimes murphy or darkblue. I checked out zenburn from the descriptions above and I think I'll try that a day or two to see how I like it. It looks good so far.
Others I haven't really tried for very long at a time but which weren't bad at first include the stock "blue", "desert", "ron", and "elflord" (not making that up) themes and the "wombat" theme.
Be sure your syntax highlighting isn't doing strange things before you rule out a color scheme. Alternate syntax files for many languages are available.
If, and only if, the hacked firmware is based partly on Sony's original and not written from scratch for compatibility with it, then distributing it to third parties could be a breach of copyright.
Car companies do tend to void warranties if they have sufficient reason to believe you have been driving especially fast or have been racing in a street-legal general market car.
Other than those two particulars, I'd agree with your whole post.
A restriction on using something you bought has nothing in common with making a copy of something and redistributing it against the will of the author.
The people using the hacked firmware are just breaking a restriction on what they own. However, there's a case to be made that the people releasing hacked firmware are making unauthorized derivative works of Sony's firmware. Depending on how they developed their versions, that might even be true. However, reverse engineering and rewriting from scratch for sake of compatibility has been accepted as a valid, non-infringing activity by US courts and even by the DMCA.
Can a EULA you never signed, and for which you never received any consideration for accepting the terms, really preclude you from doing what is otherwise perfectly allowable? I guess we'll see if there's ever a solid court case that falls one way or another. So far, I think companies like Sony and Apple are content to call this phenomenon a nuisance.
Phoenix, AMD, and many other companies have made major businesses out of reverse-engineering products and offering alternative versions. The developers of StarOffice/Open Office, Pidgin, Samba, and Novell's Evolution reverse engineered data formats for other software, and nobodys sued them out of existence. They're not using code from those other products, but are largely (or in some cases completely) compatible with them.
Intel even offers its own version of extensions AMD made to Intel's CPU instruction set. There's probably no stronger support for the legitimacy of reverse engineering for the sake of compatibility than that, and you cna be pretty sure that Intel and AMD are both careful not to steal each other's actual designs and redistribute them. Who's to say these firmware writers are doing anything different without proof of their processes?
I was working 70-95 hours a week running the network, and I'm not an HVAC technician. Negotiating with the landlords about putting unusual equipment on the roof, locating the equipment, and getting it installed would have taken quite a bit of time away from running the network. It's a nice thought and all, but don't blame me for trying to keep our customers online since that was my job.
The way I read the article is that with any decent power supply you buy it's not a problem. "Decent" is a key word there.
I used to work for an ISP which was contacted by the natural gas utility company about canceling service. The gas company decided it wasn't doing us as the customer nor them as the seller any good to keep billing us just for the pipe, as we used about 2 units of gas in the five years at our location. With four offices, a lobby, the call center, and the NOC, we were self-sustaining for heat. Cooling, on the other hand, cost us dearly.
Any decent electronics project book will verify that any copper or aluminum wire will gain resistance with increasing temperature.
If you want a quick link, though, how about this article at Dan's Data about power supplies which actually gives some basic theory? It's a little suspect in that it's a review of a particular brand of power supply, and Dan's Data isn't as widely known as Tom's Hardware or Anandtech. What do you want from the very first Google result for the search "warmer power supplies draw more current", though? It also happens that he's right (about the issue, anyway -- I've never reviewed or purchased Topower power supplies).
Even with a warrant, it's only legal if they told the judge the truth to get the warrant. There have been documented cases of agencies materially misrepresenting investigations in order to get warrants, too.
I think we're in agreement there, but most Americans don't realize how easy it is to be heard. There's so much "The People vs. The Man" BS floating around the culture that I think people don't try.
It's very easy to write a member of Congress and get a reasoned response, even if it's maybe from an aide. It's even easier by the representatives in the state legislatures. City board, county board, water district, school district, and other meetings are generally open to the public in person.
A letter-writing campaign of a good size is pretty easy to do these days, with the Internet acting as the backbone of organization and communications efforts. Real paper mail seems to be the best way to get the attention of many politicians, though, so perhaps the actual letters should be sent that way. There's probably something of a generation gap involved here, but the smarter candidates of older generations have teams that handle electronic communication for them if they don't want to bother learning it themselves.
Many city and county elections in my area have seats filled unopposed, and get very low voter turnout. Many things locally require a vote by the public, such as property taxes, sales taxes, and other things that have to do with people's daily lives. There's no reason if someone wants to be involved they can't at least read the issues on a local ballot and vote.
I'm pretty certain the culture in Switzerland is different from that of the US. Here, people can't agree whether to vote on American Idol or Nashville Star, but they are woefully inadequately prepared to vote on most real issues. That often includes the majority of those who are actually voting.
Most people in the US see an evening news program, skim the headlines in a paper, or catch some news on the radio as they drive home. Many people no longer get any of that, since there are so many all-music radio stations, PMPs, specialty TV stations with no news broadcasts, and papers are dying out. Many of the people who turn to the 'Net for news are only reading the headlines.
Some people in the US are really on top of events and care how things are handled, but most are too busy with their daily lives to even take notice.
If that's the same way Switzerland is, and the people decide everything as a whole, then I'm really surprised anything works out for them. My guess is that they're far more involved in current events and think far more about public policy if they're able to make any relevant decisions, let alone good decisions.
Perhaps more involvement would breed more interest, but that's something we couldn't be sure about without trying.
"At point blank range" you turn the handgun. A large portion of US police officers who are shot on duty are shot during struggles with their own service weapons.
Most triggers take between 4 and 12 pounds of pressure. If you're using a firearm with a few-gram trigger then it's no wonder you're killing people right and left. That's an accidental discharge waiting to happen.
The force transferred to a target by a knife is typically much more than transferred by a small firearm round. Knives can penetrate much of the bullet-resistant armor people wear when they are entering a dangerous situation, in fact. The entry wound is what kills someone with a knife, not an exit wound.
There was a guy several years ago who killed someone with a frozen salmon. Banning weapons might make a few people not commit a murder, but everything down to and including bare hands have been used to kill. The place to battle crime is at the causes, not the weapons.
I was talking about US military personnel in the first sentence, which does afford them a different set of rights than those of civilian citizens or non-citizens. That's part of their service, and the stricter code of laws and separate courts is part of their effective service to the country.
The accused/alleged terrorists (since that's all they are right now) have the same rights under criminal accusation as a US civilian, which in some ways is more than US soldiers. However, if they are convicted in court of being actual terrorists, they'll have far fewer rights than US soldiers.
I was thinking mostly from the initial claim, with the person described looking forward. Receiving news from the media outlets is more about interpretation than prediction.
Also, as I answered our anonymous friend in #23783647, I think I'm taking perhaps more liberty with the terms for the sake of the discussion. It's not a strict continuum with those labels in their strictest senses, but if you prod the words into loose connotations they work in the context of reacting to a claim of making an (engineering/political/scientific/economic) feat work.
The optimist will believe a positive prediction until given reason to believe otherwise. The pessimist will anticipate failure until given reason to believe there has been success. A skeptic will wait and see. All three will usually hope for the best (from their point of view), but their expectations are different. Again, the true believers are on either end, possibly the ones past pessimists being "true unbelievers". For the sake of balance, perhaps we remove "cynic" altogether.
That's a true distinction in the strictest sense. I don't think the language has the exact terms, as nouns, for the divisions I wanted to make, though. Not being "quite right" is close enough to get my point across, I think.
A skeptic may not be a cynic and a cynic may not be a skeptic, but if you apply skepticism or pessimism to the behavior and motives of others, you get cynicism. Thinking in purely social terms, the two aren't that far apart. In an empirical science, cynicism and skepticism are clearly more separate, as you'd be skeptical of the work but cynical about the person.
Anyway, perhaps I should have used a numbered scale or used "more" and "less" instead of disparate terms, but I think the conclusion survives the choice of words.
I can show you plenty of politicians who clearly and logically show their points. The problem is I can't show you any like that who are likely to be now, or ever, in office. Perhaps there are some at local levels of government, but in larger offices the method of electioneering is one of marketing and not of philosophy or explanation. It's an endemic problem in American politics, and it won't change easily.
Being answerable for any crimes and balanced by the other branches is good. Being beholden to a public which does not have their full time and attention nor all the facts about difficult situations is bad. Sure, it's good to keep the people happy. It's more necessary to keep the Constitution in place and to protect the common good, though. Where duty and popularity part ways, the President should feel bound to duty.
Well, I can agree that Ford pardoning Nixon and Carter trying to wean us off of foreign oil were good things. I've not read much on Ford's presidency other than that it was mostly uneventful and I'm too young to remember it. I vaguely remember Carter's, and have read more about it.
Carter's leadership in the office seems to be a counterexample to the rest of his tenure. Double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, and letting your hostages rot overseas are not ways to serve and inspire your people. Surely this was not all his fault, but he wasn't able to overcome these issues.
Clinton did do one great and wonderful thing, in that he balanced the budget. However, this was done at the expense of lowering SEC investigative budgets (Enron, Worldcom), cutting our overseas intelligence gathering (embassy bombing in Somalia, USS Cole, 9/11, first WTC bombing), letting our military bases crumble, pulling out after one embarrassment in Mogadishu, rocketing a Chinese embassy because we couldn't double-check addresses, and similar issues.
Clinton probably shares some fault in our current shaky economy and the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. According to many, Reagan and the first Bush share claim to 9/11 for training then losing track of the mujahadin. I'm not sure I'd care to contest that.
Every president has had good and bad things come from their terms. For one, no president has sufficient power nor responsibility for every detail of everything. They are not kings, thankfully. For another, even what is in their power must be moderated and subject to compromise between interests. The President must also compromise with what the Congress is willing to do.
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Presidents Roosevelt, and Eisenhower are the safe bets as real leaders in American history. Nixon realized we needed to recognize the PRC, which some say likely kept us from a devastating war. Reagan outspent the Soviets, showing the strength of an open economy (and lots of borrowing). Kennedy inspired support for the space program, which helped not only against the Soviets but which has given us satellite TV, GPS, weather satellites, and all sorts of other military and civilian advances. He also kept the missiles out of Cuba.
It's a hard job, and nobody's perfect. Some are more suited to it than others, though, and sometimes we are lucky or blessed or through karma or necessity get someone who can make difficult and sometimes unpopular decisions which turn out to be right. Some of them are still unpopular after making the right decisions -- enough to not be reelected or even to be shot.