Actually, for some IT operations subjecting the individual platters of a hard drive after they're off the spindle to a blowtorch or welder's magnet isn't that far off base.
Lots of office supply companies sell paper shredders that are advertised to also shred CDs and DVDs. Even more list the feature right on the box.
I've seen companies that operate incinerators put their retired magnetic backup tapes into them to keep the data from being lifted. I've also seen the tapes pulled from the cartridges and spliced to run through a hand tool (think screwdriver) magnetizer/demagnetizer when the flying-head purpose-built tape demagnetizer (not tape head demagnetizer, and yes I know the difference) was in use by another team.
As I understood the story, this guy was the colo. The customers that got stuff seized were paying the fraudster to colocate their stuff. It wasn't just a bunch of people with equipment in the same room as his equipment. It was a bunch of people with equipment in a room he was leasing. Please clear up my misunderstanding if there is one.
The guy had possession of the equipment. He was the colocation provider. The customers put the equipment in his hands for safekeeping. He was an alleged fraudster. The facility's lease was allegedly unpaid. The circuits the customers were connected to were allegedly unpaid.
Why should the customers get service? Because they paid him? Right. And he should have been paying his bills. Then his customers could have maybe had service. As it was, his customers were getting scammed and so were his vendors (allegedly). If you're doing 911 service and credit card processing, you should know something about the place you put that server.
I understand not a lot of Slashdot readers have actually been in the ISP, web hosting, colocation, ASP, and similar businesses. I have. I was for years. You don't put mission-critical systems in a fly-by-night colocation facility and then bitch and moan because your cheap ass got burned. You do your due diligence about who has your servers, what their leasing and circuit agreements are like, what their insurance policies cover, how many and which of their employees will have access to your stuff, and how they limit other customers' access to the facility.
The problem was they seized computers and networking equipment at his address that he was being paid to hold for others. If you are under investigation and a warrant is issued for all computer equipment and networking gear at your address to be seized as evidence, that is likely what will happen no matter what agent of what agency is in charge of the investigation.
What would you have the FBI do? You want them to raid the guy's colo facility, take his stuff, and leave his customers' equipment running on unpaid circuits inside an unpaid leased room? You want them to tip off his customers to the raid before it is executed? There is no good solution here.
The best one could hope for is that the customers did a little more due diligence for mission-critical applications like 911 service and credit card processing about the kind of colocation service they were getting and the integrity of the business.
search.cpan.org states that there are 88,679 modules in 21,580 module distributions. It further says there have been 63,291 uploads by 8659 uploaders (authors). Perl also has over 600 modules in the core distribution (as of 5.12.2 anyway).
On CPAN, a "module" is a module, and that's what it sounds like. A module is a program library that can be used by an application programmer. A module distribution is several related modules in a package. Some packages contain dozens of modules. Some may also contain example applications or helper applications along with the modules. PyPi also has packages which can be collections of modules. I don't mess with Python enough to tell you if that's common.
So, RubyGems has over 18,00 "gems", but what does that mean?
On RubyGems, it seems a "gem" can be anything. There are libraries there, sure. There are also applications. One, for example, is "vmail", which is a hack to let you read your GMail account in vim (using lynx for HTML mail viewing). Another is "rake", which is a software build program. You do have big frameworks pushed out as gems like "rack". There are smaller library modules that look useful, too. Then there's some stuff with no docs, no home page, and no apparent use. I found one "gem" that claims to redefined '==' to be more useful than in the standard library, but was all of 4 lines with no documentation.
RubyGems seems to have no real organization other than new, recently updated, popular, and alphabetical. There is a search.
CPAN and PyPi both have hierarchies of topics through which one can drill down. They have search, too. PyPi has probably the best combination of search and drill-down features of the three.
CPAN has some things it's pretty clear RubyGems doesn't. It has an automated build and test system for modules. It has a ticketing system for the modules right there in the public repository. It has a rating system for the packages. It has 228 mirrors worldwide for downloading the packages, too.
What good will going to Europe do for ACTA, which is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an international treaty being negotiated by the European Union and Switzerland along with the US, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Japan, and the US?
Are they moving specifically to Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus, Liechtenstein, Norway, Monaco, San Marino, and Andorra? Pretty much every other European country is an EU member, a candidate EU member, or a "potential candidate member".
This was not recent. This was not a debt collection, either.
The guy's stuff wasn't grabbed by the FBI because he didn't pay his bills.
The guy's stuff was grabbed because he never intended to pay his bills himself, and he committed fraud in order to get the colocation space and bandwidth in the first place.
The guy got credit references from people who didn't exist. He forged receipts from other telecom companies. He altered documents to show he'd paid bills that other people had paid. He used a maze of twisty little business names, all different.
He did all of that to secure credit from these folks to allow him to start service with them without a hefty deposit. Then he ditched the bills like they would have expected he might had he not forged the credit-worthiness paperwork.
Fraud is not simple insolvency. It is a felony.
There was every reason for this to be investigated and prosecuted as a criminal offense.
There was also every reason for it to be newsworthy last year when it was news.
You miss the point about comparing it to mood-altering drugs. I mentioned mood-altering drugs because the list of side effects and warnings for any psychoactive drug is usually long. Ibuprofen's is longer than many of those.
1700mg? That's not twice what she had. That's a little more than twice what one tablet contained. She had 11.5 tablets. You don't need to send your kid to school with 23 times the maximum daily dose for the kid to make it through the day.
I'm not familiar with the particular district, but if the label had been on the bottle and it had said ibuprofen, then all the fuss might not have been caused. The reason the label is required to be there is to make it easier to identify the drugs. The school's staff probably couldn't be sure what the tablets were without the label listing the drug name and tablet description. They're not healthcare workers. Imagine if they had said she was free to roam the halls with the bottle of unidentified tablets and they turned out to be oxycodone or something.
The list of contraindications and possible side effects for prescription-strength ibuprofen is alarming. It is long and includes things to look for like "vomit that looks like coffee grounds". There are mood-altering substances with much shorter lists, like valium (diazepam).
Under the care of a physician, the maximum daily dose for an adult is 3.2 grams, and otherwise 1.2 grams. The maximum daily dosage for a 12-year-old is about 40 mg per kg of body mass.
There are a lot more serious drugs the kid could have been found to have, but there are laws about prescription medications. They are to be possessed and taken by the prescribed party and kept in a labelled container.
This should probably have resulted in a warning and in info packet being sent home, but schools have gone zero-tolerance crazy. The state does have a right to prosecute since this was technically illegal, but hopefully a good judge just sees that the lesson was learned.
How can a country have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people if the people are kept in the dark about everything? Of course those who wanted us to be informed citizens capable of electing our own representatives wanted us to be informed. It's a tautology.
Well, if he's smart enough he can admit only to instances that do, anyway. Even if a prosecutor can't make anything stick, though, he's opening himself up to investigation even with the claims he's made already.
Red and white wine, sherry, and bourbon are very common cooking ingredients. These people have now made it necessary to go to a liquor store to get cooking supplies. If their intention was to cut down on exposure to alcohol, they've not done it for anyone who is a serious hobby cook.
Anyone know if they exempted the "cooking wines" specifically salted to make them unpleasant to drink? In some states you don't even have to be legal drinking age to buy those.
If that's the case, they may be right or wrong. It'd be up to the court to decide, which means that the guy may have a case.
I'd expect a lot of invocations of the Fifth Amendment, though. It's kind of difficult to prove something's based on your life if you won't answer the questions about how it resembles your life. Then again, if he can get hooked for just a couple of small crimes then doing a couple of years for $250 million might be a deal for this guy.
You always sue, if you have a good case, for more than you actually think you'll get. You even put it at more than you deserve, if there is such a number (of course for wrongful death and such it's hard to say there's a fixed number, but for this there is). It's called negotiation. Suing for 25% leaves him room to settle at 5% with no actual trial if Rockstar and Take Two decide that's a better way to spend their money than on fighting the case.
IANAL, this isn't legal advice, yadda yadda, consult an actual legal authority with specific knowledge of your case and the applicable laws, yadda yadda, I'm not responsible if you ignore this disclaimer, yadda blah blah, suing people is only supposed to make you whole and not to make you undeservedly rich, blabbity blabbity yabba dabba do.
Actually, later in the article it says they even went so far as to credit him along with a bunch of others as "talent". Yet they didn't pay him.
I'm guessing he recalls the meeting and fails to recall the waiver of likeness rights he signed during said meeting. That, or he signed something that flat-out said that they were doing research among multiple people, none of whom would be compensated beyond a credit, and that the result would take lifelike tidbits from multiple people to inspire one fictional character's traits.
The question of humanity by an individual's standards is the problem here. I think much of the ESC debate is centered around the idea that we've had a lot of disagreement in the past about who is human. Just a few generations ago, some people considered Africans subhuman. Some people considered the mildly retarded subhuman. Some considered Jews subhuman.
I think there's such a backlash against allowing arbitrary individual standards to be applied to what constitutes humanity that some of it spills over into at what point the reproductive process constitutes a person. This is, I think, not mutually exclusive with religious feelings on the issue but is separate and not nearly as widely talked about. I think it's taboo to say there's a possible link between medical science and eugenics. There has been before, though, and some of our current institutions even have some of their roots in those links.
If you really value ESCs, just saying that they aren't human isn't enough to quell this fear. You'd have to give your logical reasons why and an assurance that you're all for ethics restrictions on how the embryos are acquired (which right now are already in place in most first-world countries).
Are you under the impression that a ban on US federal funding determines the research agenda in Japan? Maybe your concern is that the Japanese researchers are so worried about getting US researchers who are federally funded to replicate their experiment that they are afraid to use embryonic stem cells?
Who started the suit doesn't much matter. Intel sued and won. That's why the Alpha is no longer its own line of chips. Any technology from the Alpha that Intel got in the settlement went into their chips. Any DEC got to keep went to Compaq then HP, and likely ended up in Itanium through them.
There's a thin line between today's smart phone and tomorrow's "feature phone", and which data plan is required by your provider is usually the line they draw in their advertisements.
Right now at this moment I can get a Pixi from Sprint for $30. I can get phones like the Samsung Reclaim that feature email through the web providers, email through Exchange or Notes, web, streaming video, GPS, streaming music, a family locator, and a memory card slot. It doesn't have an app store, but most "smart phones" from two years ago didn't either. I can also get the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 for $0.
U.S. Cellular has Android phones starting at $50 after rebate with a new plan (the Apex from LG). The Blackberry Curve 9330 is $30 after rebate. The Samsung Exec Windows phone is $29.99 with a new plan; no rebate is required.
Verizon has the Motorola Citrus with Android 2.1 for $50 with a new two-year contract (and you get a second one free if you get two contracts). They have the Pixi Plus for free. The HTC Ozone (Windows mobile 6.1) is free with a contract. The Blackberry Tour 9630 is $30 with a contract.. The Kin One is $20 with contract.
These are all online prices from the service providers' own web sites. They're not some local reseller with an in-store special. They might be location-sensitive, especially since Verizon asks for a ZIP code even to shop for phones. I doubt they'd get away with gouging certain parts of the country across the board on the equipment for very long, though.
You don't have to have an iPhone 4, a Galaxy S phone, a Droid 2 or Droid Pro, or a Windows 7 phone for it to be a smart phone. There are other options out there.
PacMan was more than the one game. There were later games with cartoon sequences in them. There was a TV series. There were 3-D games with 3-D PacMan and 3-D enemies. The character is pretty well developed, and there are many other characters to go with him.
I doubt just running around a maze with no character elements is infringing on all that character development, though. The inspired fan-game isn't using any of that extra info. The design of the mazes is probably the biggest copyright issue. Most clones don't use the same map layout as the original, and that may be a sufficiently protected part of the work.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying they'll be "Startin' Up a Posse" to come and look for him?
A drill press seems extreme?
Actually, for some IT operations subjecting the individual platters of a hard drive after they're off the spindle to a blowtorch or welder's magnet isn't that far off base.
Lots of office supply companies sell paper shredders that are advertised to also shred CDs and DVDs. Even more list the feature right on the box.
I've seen companies that operate incinerators put their retired magnetic backup tapes into them to keep the data from being lifted. I've also seen the tapes pulled from the cartridges and spliced to run through a hand tool (think screwdriver) magnetizer/demagnetizer when the flying-head purpose-built tape demagnetizer (not tape head demagnetizer, and yes I know the difference) was in use by another team.
"I iz in ur green zone, gassing ur puppit gubbmint ofishuls"?
Man, you have some sick lolcats there.
Fraud and forgery are both felonies.
As I understood the story, this guy was the colo. The customers that got stuff seized were paying the fraudster to colocate their stuff. It wasn't just a bunch of people with equipment in the same room as his equipment. It was a bunch of people with equipment in a room he was leasing. Please clear up my misunderstanding if there is one.
The guy had possession of the equipment. He was the colocation provider. The customers put the equipment in his hands for safekeeping. He was an alleged fraudster. The facility's lease was allegedly unpaid. The circuits the customers were connected to were allegedly unpaid.
Why should the customers get service? Because they paid him? Right. And he should have been paying his bills. Then his customers could have maybe had service. As it was, his customers were getting scammed and so were his vendors (allegedly). If you're doing 911 service and credit card processing, you should know something about the place you put that server.
I understand not a lot of Slashdot readers have actually been in the ISP, web hosting, colocation, ASP, and similar businesses. I have. I was for years. You don't put mission-critical systems in a fly-by-night colocation facility and then bitch and moan because your cheap ass got burned. You do your due diligence about who has your servers, what their leasing and circuit agreements are like, what their insurance policies cover, how many and which of their employees will have access to your stuff, and how they limit other customers' access to the facility.
The problem was they seized computers and networking equipment at his address that he was being paid to hold for others. If you are under investigation and a warrant is issued for all computer equipment and networking gear at your address to be seized as evidence, that is likely what will happen no matter what agent of what agency is in charge of the investigation.
What would you have the FBI do? You want them to raid the guy's colo facility, take his stuff, and leave his customers' equipment running on unpaid circuits inside an unpaid leased room? You want them to tip off his customers to the raid before it is executed? There is no good solution here.
The best one could hope for is that the customers did a little more due diligence for mission-critical applications like 911 service and credit card processing about the kind of colocation service they were getting and the integrity of the business.
search.cpan.org states that there are 88,679 modules in 21,580 module distributions. It further says there have been 63,291 uploads by 8659 uploaders (authors).
Perl also has over 600 modules in the core distribution (as of 5.12.2 anyway).
On CPAN, a "module" is a module, and that's what it sounds like. A module is a program library that can be used by an application programmer. A module distribution is several related modules in a package. Some packages contain dozens of modules. Some may also contain example applications or helper applications along with the modules. PyPi also has packages which can be collections of modules. I don't mess with Python enough to tell you if that's common.
So, RubyGems has over 18,00 "gems", but what does that mean?
On RubyGems, it seems a "gem" can be anything. There are libraries there, sure. There are also applications. One, for example, is "vmail", which is a hack to let you read your GMail account in vim (using lynx for HTML mail viewing). Another is "rake", which is a software build program. You do have big frameworks pushed out as gems like "rack". There are smaller library modules that look useful, too. Then there's some stuff with no docs, no home page, and no apparent use. I found one "gem" that claims to redefined '==' to be more useful than in the standard library, but was all of 4 lines with no documentation.
RubyGems seems to have no real organization other than new, recently updated, popular, and alphabetical. There is a search.
CPAN and PyPi both have hierarchies of topics through which one can drill down. They have search, too. PyPi has probably the best combination of search and drill-down features of the three.
CPAN has some things it's pretty clear RubyGems doesn't. It has an automated build and test system for modules. It has a ticketing system for the modules right there in the public repository. It has a rating system for the packages. It has 228 mirrors worldwide for downloading the packages, too.
What good will going to Europe do for ACTA, which is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an international treaty being negotiated by the European Union and Switzerland along with the US, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Japan, and the US?
Are they moving specifically to Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus, Liechtenstein, Norway, Monaco, San Marino, and Andorra? Pretty much every other European country is an EU member, a candidate EU member, or a "potential candidate member".
This was not recent. This was not a debt collection, either.
The guy's stuff wasn't grabbed by the FBI because he didn't pay his bills.
The guy's stuff was grabbed because he never intended to pay his bills himself, and he committed fraud in order to get the colocation space and bandwidth in the first place.
The guy got credit references from people who didn't exist. He forged receipts from other telecom companies. He altered documents to show he'd paid bills that other people had paid. He used a maze of twisty little business names, all different.
He did all of that to secure credit from these folks to allow him to start service with them without a hefty deposit. Then he ditched the bills like they would have expected he might had he not forged the credit-worthiness paperwork.
Fraud is not simple insolvency. It is a felony.
There was every reason for this to be investigated and prosecuted as a criminal offense.
There was also every reason for it to be newsworthy last year when it was news.
Small correction: His name is Eric Raymond, and he usually goes by Eric S. Raymond professionally.
The book can be found at isbn.nu or elsewhere, including from O'Reilly in case you're partial to them (since they don't show up in isbn.nu's list).
ESR's home page is a great resource unto itself.
You miss the point about comparing it to mood-altering drugs. I mentioned mood-altering drugs because the list of side effects and warnings for any psychoactive drug is usually long. Ibuprofen's is longer than many of those.
1700mg? That's not twice what she had. That's a little more than twice what one tablet contained. She had 11.5 tablets. You don't need to send your kid to school with 23 times the maximum daily dose for the kid to make it through the day.
I'm not familiar with the particular district, but if the label had been on the bottle and it had said ibuprofen, then all the fuss might not have been caused. The reason the label is required to be there is to make it easier to identify the drugs. The school's staff probably couldn't be sure what the tablets were without the label listing the drug name and tablet description. They're not healthcare workers. Imagine if they had said she was free to roam the halls with the bottle of unidentified tablets and they turned out to be oxycodone or something.
The list of contraindications and possible side effects for prescription-strength ibuprofen is alarming. It is long and includes things to look for like "vomit that looks like coffee grounds". There are mood-altering substances with much shorter lists, like valium (diazepam).
Under the care of a physician, the maximum daily dose for an adult is 3.2 grams, and otherwise 1.2 grams. The maximum daily dosage for a 12-year-old is about 40 mg per kg of body mass.
There are a lot more serious drugs the kid could have been found to have, but there are laws about prescription medications. They are to be possessed and taken by the prescribed party and kept in a labelled container.
This should probably have resulted in a warning and in info packet being sent home, but schools have gone zero-tolerance crazy. The state does have a right to prosecute since this was technically illegal, but hopefully a good judge just sees that the lesson was learned.
How can a country have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people if the people are kept in the dark about everything? Of course those who wanted us to be informed citizens capable of electing our own representatives wanted us to be informed. It's a tautology.
Well, if he's smart enough he can admit only to instances that do, anyway. Even if a prosecutor can't make anything stick, though, he's opening himself up to investigation even with the claims he's made already.
Red and white wine, sherry, and bourbon are very common cooking ingredients. These people have now made it necessary to go to a liquor store to get cooking supplies. If their intention was to cut down on exposure to alcohol, they've not done it for anyone who is a serious hobby cook.
Anyone know if they exempted the "cooking wines" specifically salted to make them unpleasant to drink? In some states you don't even have to be legal drinking age to buy those.
If that's the case, they may be right or wrong. It'd be up to the court to decide, which means that the guy may have a case.
I'd expect a lot of invocations of the Fifth Amendment, though. It's kind of difficult to prove something's based on your life if you won't answer the questions about how it resembles your life. Then again, if he can get hooked for just a couple of small crimes then doing a couple of years for $250 million might be a deal for this guy.
You always sue, if you have a good case, for more than you actually think you'll get. You even put it at more than you deserve, if there is such a number (of course for wrongful death and such it's hard to say there's a fixed number, but for this there is). It's called negotiation. Suing for 25% leaves him room to settle at 5% with no actual trial if Rockstar and Take Two decide that's a better way to spend their money than on fighting the case.
IANAL, this isn't legal advice, yadda yadda, consult an actual legal authority with specific knowledge of your case and the applicable laws, yadda yadda, I'm not responsible if you ignore this disclaimer, yadda blah blah, suing people is only supposed to make you whole and not to make you undeservedly rich, blabbity blabbity yabba dabba do.
Actually, later in the article it says they even went so far as to credit him along with a bunch of others as "talent". Yet they didn't pay him.
I'm guessing he recalls the meeting and fails to recall the waiver of likeness rights he signed during said meeting. That, or he signed something that flat-out said that they were doing research among multiple people, none of whom would be compensated beyond a credit, and that the result would take lifelike tidbits from multiple people to inspire one fictional character's traits.
The question of humanity by an individual's standards is the problem here. I think much of the ESC debate is centered around the idea that we've had a lot of disagreement in the past about who is human. Just a few generations ago, some people considered Africans subhuman. Some people considered the mildly retarded subhuman. Some considered Jews subhuman.
I think there's such a backlash against allowing arbitrary individual standards to be applied to what constitutes humanity that some of it spills over into at what point the reproductive process constitutes a person. This is, I think, not mutually exclusive with religious feelings on the issue but is separate and not nearly as widely talked about. I think it's taboo to say there's a possible link between medical science and eugenics. There has been before, though, and some of our current institutions even have some of their roots in those links.
If you really value ESCs, just saying that they aren't human isn't enough to quell this fear. You'd have to give your logical reasons why and an assurance that you're all for ethics restrictions on how the embryos are acquired (which right now are already in place in most first-world countries).
Are you under the impression that a ban on US federal funding determines the research agenda in Japan? Maybe your concern is that the Japanese researchers are so worried about getting US researchers who are federally funded to replicate their experiment that they are afraid to use embryonic stem cells?
Who started the suit doesn't much matter. Intel sued and won. That's why the Alpha is no longer its own line of chips. Any technology from the Alpha that Intel got in the settlement went into their chips. Any DEC got to keep went to Compaq then HP, and likely ended up in Itanium through them.
There's a thin line between today's smart phone and tomorrow's "feature phone", and which data plan is required by your provider is usually the line they draw in their advertisements.
Right now at this moment I can get a Pixi from Sprint for $30. I can get phones like the Samsung Reclaim that feature email through the web providers, email through Exchange or Notes, web, streaming video, GPS, streaming music, a family locator, and a memory card slot. It doesn't have an app store, but most "smart phones" from two years ago didn't either. I can also get the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 for $0.
U.S. Cellular has Android phones starting at $50 after rebate with a new plan (the Apex from LG). The Blackberry Curve 9330 is $30 after rebate. The Samsung Exec Windows phone is $29.99 with a new plan; no rebate is required.
Verizon has the Motorola Citrus with Android 2.1 for $50 with a new two-year contract (and you get a second one free if you get two contracts). They have the Pixi Plus for free. The HTC Ozone (Windows mobile 6.1) is free with a contract. The Blackberry Tour 9630 is $30 with a contract.. The Kin One is $20 with contract.
These are all online prices from the service providers' own web sites. They're not some local reseller with an in-store special. They might be location-sensitive, especially since Verizon asks for a ZIP code even to shop for phones. I doubt they'd get away with gouging certain parts of the country across the board on the equipment for very long, though.
You don't have to have an iPhone 4, a Galaxy S phone, a Droid 2 or Droid Pro, or a Windows 7 phone for it to be a smart phone. There are other options out there.
PacMan was more than the one game. There were later games with cartoon sequences in them. There was a TV series. There were 3-D games with 3-D PacMan and 3-D enemies. The character is pretty well developed, and there are many other characters to go with him.
I doubt just running around a maze with no character elements is infringing on all that character development, though. The inspired fan-game isn't using any of that extra info. The design of the mazes is probably the biggest copyright issue. Most clones don't use the same map layout as the original, and that may be a sufficiently protected part of the work.
Because Intel sued them over patents and buried the tech?