Honestly, "cheats and fraudsters" means people that knowingly and willingly cheat the IRS. How many people here know the correct tax forms to fill out and the appropriate rules and regulations they'll have to follow when they sell a car? Most people have a hard time figuring out their tax return, much less the plethora of bonus taxes the IRS likes to levy.
Perhaps they should make the system simpler and people would have less excuse to not pay? I mean you could levy the death sentence and seizure of all family assets if you find someone 'cheating' the tax code but that won't make people more likely to wade through the whole damn fifty book set of tax books.
All of these are actually addressed in the letter of the law or certain rulings, at least, here in the United States.
Any pornography that includes someone under the age of 18 is illegal. This includes those pictures where baby is fully clothed and asleep in the same room in their crib while their parents take dirty pictures of their sexy time. So, pornography of someone 17 years and 364 days is child pornography. Note that there are additional penalties for possessing child pornography of someone especially young (like under ten), but that's up to the prosecutor. Believe me, they'll go for all they can get.
Images without known sources are generally shown to people specially trained in age recognition. There are, of course, false positives. Non-watermarked pictures from those websites that hire people that look young but are over 18 have gotten people tossed in jail before because the actors and actresses might have only been as developed as a young teenager for whatever reasons, and the experts identified them as children. Look at the recent fiasco involving a fan of Little Lupe. The FBI also has a database of known child pornography pictures that they can check against.
I don't know if it has changed, but pornography is anything designed to get someone sexually aroused. Suggestive poses, excessive display of the genitals, etc. That's why you can sometimes find photography books involving naked children that aren't illegal. However, all of this is subjective. Good luck arguing that those pictures you downloaded aren't pornography if there's even a hint of genital in the picture.
Trampling over people's rights is easy. As soon as someone speaks up in the defense of someone, simply accuse them of supporting child molestation and accuse them of being a pedophile. Hint that their public show of support might lead to an investigation and visit from social services to take their children away.
The whole system is held together by superglue and duct tape because no one wants to pay for a replacement part. This goes for both physical and software analogies.
Not only that but I would be fucking WORRIED about the education of the people that graduated under a full term of these changes.
Do we really want more people that are less educated and more deluded out there? It just seems like this is a big circlejerk among the Texas elite. Do other states have to recognize your high school diploma from TX when the curriculum is going to be so off-set from the rest of the country?
Suppose there are several companies. They can either price fix or not price fix. If they're price fixing, they can alert the authorities and keep their 'winnings' while the other price fixers lose a certain amount of money. Whether or not they price fix will be determined by the fine they receive. If extra revenue > fine, then price fix. If extra revenue fine, don't price fix.
But all of the price fixers should rat each other out. In theory, they'd all get to keep their profits. In practice, they'd end up disgusting the investigators and get bitchslapped with an even bigger fine. Kind of like how criminals are often tripping over each other to point fingers as soon as they're behind bars.
In some countries, crude drawings that can be interpreted as being under 18 are just as bad as full-on child pornography. So, it really doesn't matter if it was Little Lupe (the over-18 porn star), or a six year old, as far as politicians go.
All people in possession of one of these books should be jailed pursuant to the set of child pornography laws. Teaching pediatrics is only for filthy perverts who should be hung by the balls and shot! Anyone who has a child actually come out of their body should also be imprisoned for rape. Emergency room personnel who witness a child being treated should be jailed as well.
Isn't Argentina the place where you can go on vacation and come home to find that your house has been sold and the courts will tell you to fuck off because the new owners didn't do anything wrong and so shouldn't have to give you your house back? Where you have to spraypaint NOT FOR SALE on your house to keep people from selling it when you go out overnight?
It's not really the DC power system that's the issue.
The people are the issue.
Example: You're the lead technician for a new data center. You request backup power systems be written into the budget, and are granted your wish. You install the backup power systems and then ask to test them. Like a good manager, your boss asks you what that will involve. You say that it'll involve testing the components one by one, which he nods in agreement with. However, when you get to the 'throw the main breaker and see if it works' part and he realizes that this one test might make them less than 99.99999% reliable if it fails, he disagrees and won't approve the testing.
I can see where they're coming from here. They don't want downtime. They just aren't thinking far enough ahead. Ten minute test downtime or hours of unmitigated downtime. I abso-fucking-lutely guarantee you that the technicians will be blamed. Not management.
"OMG trading programs with your friends is illegal because all you bought was the license."
"Okay, well, my system crashed and I need to redownload."
"OMG you'll have to pay for the program because you're buying the physical program data and not the license."
"So it's okay if I copy it from my friends since I bought it legally?"
"OMG you'll have to pay for the program again because you're buying both the physical program data and the license and we're just going to say whatever will make us the most money."
This is why I have a hard time respecting EULA and software licenses. Some companies and programs (Steam, Blizzard, etc) are making headway in that you can download the game from them if you have your key tied to your account. I respect this in so far as this is how it SHOULD be if they're going to sell the 'license' and insist that we abide by the rules of the license.
The music industry has tried this logic over and over. For example they try to say it's illegal to rip your own CDs to your iPod because the license doesn't grant you control over the physical medium! It would be like your car dealer telling you that your car is only able to drive on Ford-owned roads, but when you explain that you have special tires that let you drive on all roads, they tell you that they're simply licensing you use of the car and they forbid it in the license!
Look forward to it being passed someday. The Selective Enforcement Act will allow companies to enforce their legal claims against some entities as they choose, but won't be penalized for not enforcing it against others. For example, they might say that YouTube is costing them revenue and issue take down notices for all of their content (and related and derivative works), but they might turn around and allow a site (we'll call it MediaLackey) to have them remain up. Of course the second site won't be officially affiliated with the media companies, but we'll know the truth.
Eventually everyone will start to migrate to MediaLackey by choice or by force (since the media companies will begin issuing take down notices to sites that contain two consecutive words that were also contained by a work of theirs), then the hammer will drop. "Looks like you want to watch some music videos. $9.99 gets you full access to this video clip!"
Someone will pay. Then the lawyers will go out, salivating and growling, and sue the person who was drunk enough to pay for $10 billion for copyright infringement. Then they'll go after everyone who has ever visited the website (remember how you had to login to see that rap music video (adult content)? Their business will become one of marketing and one of legal reprisal.
Rest assured that this was a planned and optimally timed move. They aren't going to fall on their swords over this and they aren't going to let every corporate IT department charge them the going rate for consulting fees plus lost productivity. Most likely they'll establish some reasonable number and say that it took an hour of work to fix it, and then offer each affected customer $20, or maybe some formula based on the amount of computers that one company had to fix the software on.
They'll point to their EULA and say, "We don't HAVE to do this, but we are. Read the EULA."
$1 small sized flash drives probably won't happen. It's a large economic step to make a flash drive of any size. It's a tiny economic step to go from 1GB drives to a 32GB drive.
It's things like bridge taps that cause destructive interference and mangle the DSL signal, grounding issues, cumulative interference, etc, that are the real problems with getting very high speed DSL out into the boonies. Even improper termination or a rusty nail rubbing against the line can cause enough interference to kill a DSL signal!
Let's just say that they aren't being imported because there's a high demand for foreign work. They don't have skills that American workers don't have.
Why are we importing them, then?
Because we can treat them like slaves because most of them are ignorant to the laws in the USA. They see it as a land of opportunity and are willing to work for less than decent wages to get their feet in the proverbial door. No one usually tells them that they'll have ever-increasing debt the likes of which we haven't seen since corporate script in miner towns was common, though.
We're importing them because someone's making money off it. The recruiting agencies, head hunters, human trafficking rings, etc. All of them get a cut of the already-low wages of the immigrant worker.
This behavior is unacceptable from companies that have offices in America. That might be how people do business in other places, but they need to leave that shit at the door. Perhaps someday we'll realize this has been going on in Chinese restaurants and massage parlors for 50 years and do something about those too?
It's more about switching tasks than it is doing tasks at once. Imagine a normal person having to stack their working papers neatly, put them in a drawer with a file, and then close the drawer, every time they wanted to think about something not directly related to the task they're doing. For ADD people, they can actually just throw the papers on the desk or still hold them while answering the phone.
Studies show that it takes about 5-10 minutes of work to get back into the flow of things and work at peak efficiency. A noisy phone ringing or baby crying will start this timer over again. ADD people can pick it up within a minute or a few seconds, but they have trouble doing one simple task all day.
I sent a message using Netware to a friend of mine in another room, thinking it would pop up on his screen like it did to the people in my room. It should have, but nope, it crashed the misconfigured network in the other room, causing their 1 minute typing tests to all abort. I get to explain to the principal for 3 hours what happened and why it happened before they got the IT guy in the room who laughed and thanked me for pointing out that a certain room had a bad router.
They were ready to kick me out of school and F out all my grades and rape my family and kill my cat because how dare a student expect the system to do something that it had been setup to do. They reinstated my computer rights after several of my teachers complained that it takes IT way too long to respond to their problems when I can just fix it right there in class in about two minutes.
Just remember. Schools are used to being all powerful. They don't like it when someone knows more about something than they do. It's a direct threat to their power/manhood/gumption/etc.
The reasoning is that if you take this payout, you're basically telling the legal system that this payout has righted the wrongs that Comcast made, and that you have no further claim to the wrongs. Same reason insurance companies will offer some seemingly high but lowball amount settlement really quick hoping you'll accept so that youcan't go after them when it turns out you can no longer lift anything over ten pounds. They turn a $100k settlement into a $5k settlement and gain protection from the court.
Same thing Comcast is doing here. They should be on the hook a lot MORE for being little fucking script kiddies to drive their costs down.
Pretty much true. I'm surprised any lawyers even took this case. Injuries sustained from being in a store or other public place are very likely to pay out at least a settlement if not an outright guilty verdict. You'd think the lawyers would do their homework in this case and realize that its absurd.
Case-in-point: A gas station was sued because the 'strong smell of gasoline' triggered an asthma attack which led to hospitalization of a customer. The gas station was found not guilty because you can reasonably expect that a gas station might smell like gasoline and that the smell isn't known to cause asthma attacks. The court's reasoning was that the gas station wasn't responsible for covering every possible safety issue anyone on Earth could have with it.
This case is similar. You can reasonably expect there to be laser..wait..LED..scanners at supermarkets. Those scanners have been tested time and time again to be reasonably safe. The manufacturer or store won't be held responsible for a one in a billion case when they've taken proper safety measures in the first place!
Hopefully the lawyers representing them get investigated to see if they actually have brains.
You raise interesting points, because if you have physical access to a computer, that's half the battle. In theory, they COULD lock down a computer so it can't be opened or tampered with, but that would just make everything a pain in the ass for IT to work on. Though, I'm sure the unions at those particular government facilities would love that.
Malware is illegal. Anyone who partners up with and promotes malware can be held accountable for damages stemming from the drive-by download and permissionless install of said malware.
Because there's SO much to do in South Korea at night. This isn't about blocking MMOs, it's about trying to make sure that the kids have nothing better to do than go to sleep and get ready for school the next day. An appreciable number of young South Koreans play 10+ hours a day of MMOs and it will affect the next generations of the country.
However, this is the wrong way to go about fixing the problem. Perhaps they should make more things for young people to do at night, other than play MMOs?
Great idea. Give the police incentive to pull over any attractive female that's on the phone and take her cell phone away so that they can look through her phone and possibly find naked pictures, to distribute to their other friends.
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Honestly, "cheats and fraudsters" means people that knowingly and willingly cheat the IRS. How many people here know the correct tax forms to fill out and the appropriate rules and regulations they'll have to follow when they sell a car? Most people have a hard time figuring out their tax return, much less the plethora of bonus taxes the IRS likes to levy.
Perhaps they should make the system simpler and people would have less excuse to not pay? I mean you could levy the death sentence and seizure of all family assets if you find someone 'cheating' the tax code but that won't make people more likely to wade through the whole damn fifty book set of tax books.
All of these are actually addressed in the letter of the law or certain rulings, at least, here in the United States.
Any pornography that includes someone under the age of 18 is illegal. This includes those pictures where baby is fully clothed and asleep in the same room in their crib while their parents take dirty pictures of their sexy time. So, pornography of someone 17 years and 364 days is child pornography. Note that there are additional penalties for possessing child pornography of someone especially young (like under ten), but that's up to the prosecutor. Believe me, they'll go for all they can get.
Images without known sources are generally shown to people specially trained in age recognition. There are, of course, false positives. Non-watermarked pictures from those websites that hire people that look young but are over 18 have gotten people tossed in jail before because the actors and actresses might have only been as developed as a young teenager for whatever reasons, and the experts identified them as children. Look at the recent fiasco involving a fan of Little Lupe. The FBI also has a database of known child pornography pictures that they can check against.
I don't know if it has changed, but pornography is anything designed to get someone sexually aroused. Suggestive poses, excessive display of the genitals, etc. That's why you can sometimes find photography books involving naked children that aren't illegal. However, all of this is subjective. Good luck arguing that those pictures you downloaded aren't pornography if there's even a hint of genital in the picture.
Trampling over people's rights is easy. As soon as someone speaks up in the defense of someone, simply accuse them of supporting child molestation and accuse them of being a pedophile. Hint that their public show of support might lead to an investigation and visit from social services to take their children away.
The whole system is held together by superglue and duct tape because no one wants to pay for a replacement part. This goes for both physical and software analogies.
Not only that but I would be fucking WORRIED about the education of the people that graduated under a full term of these changes.
Do we really want more people that are less educated and more deluded out there? It just seems like this is a big circlejerk among the Texas elite. Do other states have to recognize your high school diploma from TX when the curriculum is going to be so off-set from the rest of the country?
Kind of like game theory.
Suppose there are several companies. They can either price fix or not price fix. If they're price fixing, they can alert the authorities and keep their 'winnings' while the other price fixers lose a certain amount of money. Whether or not they price fix will be determined by the fine they receive. If extra revenue > fine, then price fix. If extra revenue fine, don't price fix.
But all of the price fixers should rat each other out. In theory, they'd all get to keep their profits. In practice, they'd end up disgusting the investigators and get bitchslapped with an even bigger fine. Kind of like how criminals are often tripping over each other to point fingers as soon as they're behind bars.
In some countries, crude drawings that can be interpreted as being under 18 are just as bad as full-on child pornography. So, it really doesn't matter if it was Little Lupe (the over-18 porn star), or a six year old, as far as politicians go.
All people in possession of one of these books should be jailed pursuant to the set of child pornography laws. Teaching pediatrics is only for filthy perverts who should be hung by the balls and shot! Anyone who has a child actually come out of their body should also be imprisoned for rape. Emergency room personnel who witness a child being treated should be jailed as well.
Isn't Argentina the place where you can go on vacation and come home to find that your house has been sold and the courts will tell you to fuck off because the new owners didn't do anything wrong and so shouldn't have to give you your house back? Where you have to spraypaint NOT FOR SALE on your house to keep people from selling it when you go out overnight?
It's not really the DC power system that's the issue.
The people are the issue.
Example: You're the lead technician for a new data center. You request backup power systems be written into the budget, and are granted your wish. You install the backup power systems and then ask to test them. Like a good manager, your boss asks you what that will involve. You say that it'll involve testing the components one by one, which he nods in agreement with. However, when you get to the 'throw the main breaker and see if it works' part and he realizes that this one test might make them less than 99.99999% reliable if it fails, he disagrees and won't approve the testing.
I can see where they're coming from here. They don't want downtime. They just aren't thinking far enough ahead. Ten minute test downtime or hours of unmitigated downtime. I abso-fucking-lutely guarantee you that the technicians will be blamed. Not management.
This is where software breaks down.
"OMG trading programs with your friends is illegal because all you bought was the license."
"Okay, well, my system crashed and I need to redownload."
"OMG you'll have to pay for the program because you're buying the physical program data and not the license."
"So it's okay if I copy it from my friends since I bought it legally?"
"OMG you'll have to pay for the program again because you're buying both the physical program data and the license and we're just going to say whatever will make us the most money."
This is why I have a hard time respecting EULA and software licenses. Some companies and programs (Steam, Blizzard, etc) are making headway in that you can download the game from them if you have your key tied to your account. I respect this in so far as this is how it SHOULD be if they're going to sell the 'license' and insist that we abide by the rules of the license.
The music industry has tried this logic over and over. For example they try to say it's illegal to rip your own CDs to your iPod because the license doesn't grant you control over the physical medium! It would be like your car dealer telling you that your car is only able to drive on Ford-owned roads, but when you explain that you have special tires that let you drive on all roads, they tell you that they're simply licensing you use of the car and they forbid it in the license!
That sounds like terrorist talk to me. Congratulations for making it onto a no fly list!
Look forward to it being passed someday. The Selective Enforcement Act will allow companies to enforce their legal claims against some entities as they choose, but won't be penalized for not enforcing it against others. For example, they might say that YouTube is costing them revenue and issue take down notices for all of their content (and related and derivative works), but they might turn around and allow a site (we'll call it MediaLackey) to have them remain up. Of course the second site won't be officially affiliated with the media companies, but we'll know the truth.
Eventually everyone will start to migrate to MediaLackey by choice or by force (since the media companies will begin issuing take down notices to sites that contain two consecutive words that were also contained by a work of theirs), then the hammer will drop. "Looks like you want to watch some music videos. $9.99 gets you full access to this video clip!"
Someone will pay. Then the lawyers will go out, salivating and growling, and sue the person who was drunk enough to pay for $10 billion for copyright infringement. Then they'll go after everyone who has ever visited the website (remember how you had to login to see that rap music video (adult content)? Their business will become one of marketing and one of legal reprisal.
Rest assured that this was a planned and optimally timed move. They aren't going to fall on their swords over this and they aren't going to let every corporate IT department charge them the going rate for consulting fees plus lost productivity. Most likely they'll establish some reasonable number and say that it took an hour of work to fix it, and then offer each affected customer $20, or maybe some formula based on the amount of computers that one company had to fix the software on.
They'll point to their EULA and say, "We don't HAVE to do this, but we are. Read the EULA."
$1 small sized flash drives probably won't happen. It's a large economic step to make a flash drive of any size. It's a tiny economic step to go from 1GB drives to a 32GB drive.
The issue isn't just distance.
It's things like bridge taps that cause destructive interference and mangle the DSL signal, grounding issues, cumulative interference, etc, that are the real problems with getting very high speed DSL out into the boonies. Even improper termination or a rusty nail rubbing against the line can cause enough interference to kill a DSL signal!
Let's just say that they aren't being imported because there's a high demand for foreign work. They don't have skills that American workers don't have.
Why are we importing them, then?
Because we can treat them like slaves because most of them are ignorant to the laws in the USA. They see it as a land of opportunity and are willing to work for less than decent wages to get their feet in the proverbial door. No one usually tells them that they'll have ever-increasing debt the likes of which we haven't seen since corporate script in miner towns was common, though.
We're importing them because someone's making money off it. The recruiting agencies, head hunters, human trafficking rings, etc. All of them get a cut of the already-low wages of the immigrant worker.
This behavior is unacceptable from companies that have offices in America. That might be how people do business in other places, but they need to leave that shit at the door. Perhaps someday we'll realize this has been going on in Chinese restaurants and massage parlors for 50 years and do something about those too?
It's more about switching tasks than it is doing tasks at once. Imagine a normal person having to stack their working papers neatly, put them in a drawer with a file, and then close the drawer, every time they wanted to think about something not directly related to the task they're doing. For ADD people, they can actually just throw the papers on the desk or still hold them while answering the phone.
Studies show that it takes about 5-10 minutes of work to get back into the flow of things and work at peak efficiency. A noisy phone ringing or baby crying will start this timer over again. ADD people can pick it up within a minute or a few seconds, but they have trouble doing one simple task all day.
I sent a message using Netware to a friend of mine in another room, thinking it would pop up on his screen like it did to the people in my room. It should have, but nope, it crashed the misconfigured network in the other room, causing their 1 minute typing tests to all abort. I get to explain to the principal for 3 hours what happened and why it happened before they got the IT guy in the room who laughed and thanked me for pointing out that a certain room had a bad router.
They were ready to kick me out of school and F out all my grades and rape my family and kill my cat because how dare a student expect the system to do something that it had been setup to do. They reinstated my computer rights after several of my teachers complained that it takes IT way too long to respond to their problems when I can just fix it right there in class in about two minutes.
Just remember. Schools are used to being all powerful. They don't like it when someone knows more about something than they do. It's a direct threat to their power/manhood/gumption/etc.
The reasoning is that if you take this payout, you're basically telling the legal system that this payout has righted the wrongs that Comcast made, and that you have no further claim to the wrongs. Same reason insurance companies will offer some seemingly high but lowball amount settlement really quick hoping you'll accept so that youcan't go after them when it turns out you can no longer lift anything over ten pounds. They turn a $100k settlement into a $5k settlement and gain protection from the court.
Same thing Comcast is doing here. They should be on the hook a lot MORE for being little fucking script kiddies to drive their costs down.
Pretty much true. I'm surprised any lawyers even took this case. Injuries sustained from being in a store or other public place are very likely to pay out at least a settlement if not an outright guilty verdict. You'd think the lawyers would do their homework in this case and realize that its absurd.
Case-in-point: A gas station was sued because the 'strong smell of gasoline' triggered an asthma attack which led to hospitalization of a customer. The gas station was found not guilty because you can reasonably expect that a gas station might smell like gasoline and that the smell isn't known to cause asthma attacks. The court's reasoning was that the gas station wasn't responsible for covering every possible safety issue anyone on Earth could have with it.
This case is similar. You can reasonably expect there to be laser..wait..LED..scanners at supermarkets. Those scanners have been tested time and time again to be reasonably safe. The manufacturer or store won't be held responsible for a one in a billion case when they've taken proper safety measures in the first place!
Hopefully the lawyers representing them get investigated to see if they actually have brains.
You raise interesting points, because if you have physical access to a computer, that's half the battle. In theory, they COULD lock down a computer so it can't be opened or tampered with, but that would just make everything a pain in the ass for IT to work on. Though, I'm sure the unions at those particular government facilities would love that.
Malware is illegal. Anyone who partners up with and promotes malware can be held accountable for damages stemming from the drive-by download and permissionless install of said malware.
Because there's SO much to do in South Korea at night. This isn't about blocking MMOs, it's about trying to make sure that the kids have nothing better to do than go to sleep and get ready for school the next day. An appreciable number of young South Koreans play 10+ hours a day of MMOs and it will affect the next generations of the country.
However, this is the wrong way to go about fixing the problem. Perhaps they should make more things for young people to do at night, other than play MMOs?
Great idea. Give the police incentive to pull over any attractive female that's on the phone and take her cell phone away so that they can look through her phone and possibly find naked pictures, to distribute to their other friends.