> Perhaps it's time he considered the financially and health ramifications of two broads simultaneously.
If he's got 'em simultaneously, the broads obviously know each other and dig it.
Financially, that means it's cheaper - Broad #1 can take Broad #2 out for a date.
Health-wise, all that cardio-vascular stuff must be good for you. And you die with a shit-eating grin (and if you're real lucky, a shit-eating grin and one of the broads) on your face.
Finally, unlike one broad, there's no way you can have two broads while driving. Just not enough room in the front seat. So there's no privacy implication from the cameras in the FastTrak lane if you go speeding through and your mylared transceiver blocks it.
> This could lead to a whole new sport involving low flying jets. Image how the data would look after factoring in a
couple "cars" traveling upwards of 250 - 400mph.
That data would probably be thrown out as "impossible for cars to achieve".
It would, however, be pretty hilarious to cruise up and down a highway at 150-200 mph in a Cessna with a bag full of transcievers and Pringles cans (to improve the range).
I think you'd need to get the range up to over 500+ feet, as flying at treetop level over a highway is probably gonna land you in hot water with the FAA. (And to fly like that in the middle of the night, when the data trackers would be most likely to believe that a band of Ferrari-owning nuts is hauling ass up and down the highway, is even less safe.)
> It's a slippery slope. Next thing you know, they'll be enforcing all the laws on the books in an equitable, reliable manner, and all us decent folk will get sent upriver, too!
Given the number of laws on the books, and considering that well over 3000+ brand-new laws get added to those books every year, how much do you have to hide?
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said
Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that
it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power
and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick,
and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares
so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live
without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens'
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that
can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and
you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you
understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
> We had photo radar here in Ontario, Canada for a while. No one liked it. The majority of speeders wanted their day in court, instead of paying a fine. The courts became so backed up with photo radar cases that the government had to stop using photo radar.
Didn't it also take an election campaign and a victory by the opposition party to get photo radar repealed?
(Amazingly enough, not only did the opposition party win, it looks like they kept their promise by dumping photo radar immediately after the '95 election. A bit of googling reveals that even the losers of the election confirm it.)
Well, I've written a debugger and it suits me just fine
it'll chase away your problems, turn your water into wine
it's got so many features, in fact it's bloody clever
if it can't solve your problem then your problem probably never
can be solved
so you might as well pack it on in,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been.
It's got everything you wanted, everything you desire
it'll handle fancy structures, set your soul on fire
it'll indirect through pointers, and catch a falling star
and if you ask it nicely it'll pop off to the bar and tell your friends
how to solve the problems they're in,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been.
If you've got a nasty problem and your data structure's bent
and your pointer's in a tangle with your structure elements
if you're losing all your memory coz your allocator leaks
and your girl's getting nasty coz she's not seen you for weeks
then stoke up Mark's debugger you know it'll win,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been....
- Burt MC Weadon (Mark Wheadon), from MUSENET '92
(Ah, thank you Google, for the historical reference to first puclication!) UPS - The Song!"
Re:Not our job to protect you from your own stupid
on
WorldCom Fraud Doubles
·
· Score: 2
First off -- I'm in total agreement with you on your Subject: line.
It's nobody's job but mine to protect me from my own stupidity.
> The stock market can have higher returns than safer investments, but it can also go DOWN. The risk is the price you pay for a possibility of a higher return. The stock market is NOT significantly different than going to a casino and gambling!
But here, I'm gonna call "Bullshit" on ya.
For every casino game other than Blackjack, the math proves the House has an advantage. You will lose. (And if you play Blackjack well enough to guarantee a win, they'll spot it and kick you out for counting cards:-)
> Would you gamble your life savings in a casino?? No, I don't think you would! Then why are you doing it in the stock market? A 401k is NOT a retirement plan -- it is plain and simple GAMBLING! Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.
I am not betting my life savings in the stock market. I am betting portions of my life savings in companies. I am doing so because - unlike the casino - I believe those companies will be able to provide me with a return on my investment by providing goods and services to people at a profit.
You're right in that it's not risk-free. If I'm wrong - if I believe the wrong people (like the CEOs of Worldcom and Enron, or the analysts who claimed that the dot-coms were gonna continue to go through the roof) - I stand to lose.
I think you'd agree with me when I say it's not easy. If I can't trust what the analysts say (and I can't!), then I have to do my own research. That's non-trivial.
But how's that different from any other buying decision? Most of us spend hours reading about technology every day - so that when we wanna play UT2003 or Doom 3, we know what hardware to buy that'll give us the most bang for our buck?
Several hours of work (sometimes hundreds of hours, if you're a regular reader of hardware sites, or even Slashdot) for a $500-1000 purchase of hardware.
If you're going to invest in individual stocks (or even indirectly, through mutual funds), why not spend some time learning some accounting basics? Why not spend as much time taking care with your life's savings as you would with a new video card? (Or, depending on how much you've saved -- as much time as you'd spend researching a new car, or even a move to a new house?)
A balance sheet or earnings statement is like the specs on the side of a flashy retail box of hardware - it's a start, but it's not everything you need to know to make an informed purchase.
Just as any geek can learn enough to determine the front-runner in the never-ending race between Duron/Athlon/TBird/TBred/Palomino/Clawhammer/Sledg ehammer vs Celeron/Celeron2/P3/P4/P4-Northwood/Itanic - any geek can learn enough to determine whether a company's worth investing in.
> This seems ridiculously high to me. 5% of computers are unusable in the first month? No explanation is give of what constitutes "unusable". Does it mean the hard drive is physically crapped out or something like "the Internet is broken again"?
Actually, I'd believe it.
Consider a 5% DOA rate on CPUs/heatsinks/RAM jarred loose from shipping.
As a DIY d00d, the first thing I do when I get a new box is rip open the cover, unplug/remove everything, and reseat it. The first thing I do after anything that looks like a hardware failure is remove/reseat the suspect component. And if that fails, I then start swapping components to the extent possible - try another drive and see if BIOS detects it. Swap with known good RAM. Swap with slower CPU if I have a spare CPU handy. Etc.
Problem is, for someone who buys "a computer", and especially for someone who wants "support" or a "warranty", that's not within their skill/comfort range to do, and they often don't have spare parts to swap and isolate the problem.
So from their perspective, the "computer's" "completely unusable", and has to go back to the "store" - even if it's just a 5-minute fix.
(I feel sorry for retailers and Joe Sixpack alike. I love being able to call a (reputable) vendor and say "Sorry, motherboard's DOA, 'cuz the CPU, RAM, and drives are fine in my spare board. I can either send back the entire system, or just the mobo."
The best thing about dealing with screwdriver shops and small-but-reputable vendors is that you don't have to waste half an hour on hold and another 15 minutes walking through the "What version of Windows are you running?" (irrelevant, the box won't POST, goddamnit!) script to get to the issue.)
> You have to wonder what PR brainiac came up with the idea of censoring an interview like this.
Anything this guy had to say couldn't possibly look as bad as this does, unless it's on the lines of "we
kill puppies and cute little kittens to make mittens".
Maybe they just approved a "Method for decreasing thermal losses in human extremities through repurposing of epidermal infant canine and feline tissues"?;-)
> Nice to know that informing and educating people about a legal process can put you in danger of losing your job.
Well, we got one answer -- the one someone asked about US patent examiners, along the lines of: "How does it feel to work for people who have their heads jammed that far up their asses?"
Looks like the EU patent office prefers a close-up view of its own colon to reality, too.
The examiner's manager has done more damage to the EU patent office's reputation than any answer the examiner could have given.
> Corporate crime has stolen about twice that from you, and other investors and tax payers. You
are an invesor if you have a retirement plan. You are a taxpayer if you have a job. Even if you don't in either case, your sales taxes go to governments, and governments are effected by the stock market. The total monetary cost per year of street crime in the United States is well below the total amount of money lost due to white collar corporate crime. That is money you should have in your assets right now.
Funny. I was just thinking the same thing about a much larger class of thieves. You see, corporate criminals haven't stolen nearly as much from me as government con artists.
Funnier still, because I couldn't understand WCOM's books (nor the books of any other telco), I didn't buy their shares. I'm breaking even so far this year, after being up the past two years.
Yeah yeah, enough bragging. You see, the reason I was able to do this is because nobody put a gun to my head and forced me to by WCOM.
What went down at WCOM and ENE (Enron) sucked major ass. $10B frauds resulted into hundred-billion-dollar quantities of market-cap-ass being sucked. But Which is worse - Social Security or WorldCom? Social Security is a $13 trillion dollar black hole of unfunded liabilities. (That's accountant-speak for "debt that we've managed to hide from the balance sheet to the tune of about $45,000 for every man, woman, and child in the States".)
Unlike WCOM and ENE, if you don't pony up 6.5% of your salary every year into the scam (oh, and another 6.5% from your employer, for a total of 13% if you have the gall to work for yourself), people with guns will take it from you. Since when did Bernie Ebbers put a gun to your head and force you to buy his stock?
And unlike WCOM and ENE, who, when their frauds were exposed, were crushed - and their accomplices at Arthur Andersen in the process, SS is still in business.
Just like WCOM and ENE, Social Security is all about off-balance-sheet financing.
I'm not gonna pretend that a webzine like "capitalismmagazine" is unbiased (hell, they're a bunch of raving l00ny randroids, but some of their less-political articles, such as this one on Intel and this one on old-school investing are great) - but if you can dig through the rhetoric and politics, you might realize that if it's fraud and theft you wanna eliminate, we need to remove the two-by-four in Social Security's eye before we can see clearly enough to expose the grit in Worldcom's eye.
> And people don't seem very mad about this.
People are mad - and rightly so - about corporate fraud. And Congress is responding, because it's an election year.
I just wish people realized where the real fraud was being perpetrated, and force Congress to do something about that, too.
> Except then its not really immortality, is it? Your still fscking dead. Your brain is still toast - they just made a copy of you based on your DNA and your brain.
Star Trek Trivia Question: Does Captain Kirk die every time he steps into the transporter and gets rematerialized elsewhere?
UNIX Trivia Question: Does your program halt when it calls fork(), and you kill -9 the parent process, but not the child process?
I'd say "no" in both cases, as I believe that a copy of the data in my brain, running on a copy of my brain, is indistinguishable from me.
> Well, ontogeny may or may not recapitulate phylogeny -- but that first cup of coffee sure does.
Which reminds me of the other time I've seen someone use the issue of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny while trolling... baiting.org's wonderful troll of Darwinism and Broken Translators.
> Even not including many of the business-expenses, $90k isn't getting rich in many parts of the country. After taxes, it's like what, $55k? Nothing to sneeze at, but add in another $10k or so for business expenses and it starts looking less appealing.
Yeah, but looking at the prior convictions for fraud on many spammers' rap sheets...
> And anyone else vaguely unsettled by this "ointment for sexually disfunctional women?" I may be wrong, but to me it sounds like "you can't turn your woman on, and are too lazy to learn how, so you're buying her this so you can fsck here senseless and only bore her instead of maiming her".
The only thing worse than the thought of spammers having sex is the thought of their customers having sex.
Dude - thank you - I haven't read that story in well over a decade, and had forgotten the author. I also had no freaking idea it was from 1909 (largely because the description of the TV/computer was so good:).
(If the Machine were working, I'd send you a beer:)
> And what's best about it is the dystopia is the creation of the policies and politics you see around you every day.
I'll second that.
Agree or disagree with her philosophy as you wish, but I had a horrible sinking feeling of deja vu. The passages about postmodern academics (essentially, anyone who says that your right to choose $IDEA_FOO over $IDEA_BAR is inherently wrong because there are supposedly no standards of truth or falsehood)
mirror my experiences of university in the early '90s. I had to keep flipping back to make sure the copyright date was in the '40s rather than the '80s.
A fscking scary read, particularly as you hear all the talk about "fairness" on both sides of the aisle in Congress, and RIAA and MPAA are buying off legislators because it wouldn't be fair to allow new business models to drive them out of business.
If she'd stopped there - at the Star-Wars-esque insight that "the more you tighten your grip, regulator Tarkin, the more productivity slips through your fingers", it would have been merely frightening.
What made Atlas Shrugged truly dystopian is that (to extend the Star Wars analogy), Tarkin responds with a "So? To hell with the Empire, so long as we rule it as it falls", and Vader agrees.
> Do you assume that theft can only be of physical items? Therefore, if someone steals your credit card and charges up a long list of sales, that it is not theft simply because he only shifted numbers in your account?
The numbers representing my account's cash balance have a one-to-one relationship with "money", and "money" is the principal means by which I acquire property. When he decrements that number, he acquires property and deprives me of my ability to acquire property. Copying my CC# isn't theft, but use of my CC# to purchase things without authorization is.
> Or is it not theft because someone has taken your social security number to use it for himself. After all, he hasn't removed your ability to use your SS#, and he certainly never took it all for himself, you still have it. Therefore, by your definition, it's not theft, so it shouldn't be considered theft.
Wrong again. If he copies my SS#, there's no problem. If he assumes my identity and presents my SS# as his own while he goes on a spending spree, he deprives me of property because I'm the one who has to pay for lawyers to clear up the charges against me.
Actually, I take that back -- identity "theft" is a form of fraud, not theft per se. If he uses my SS#, it's fraud with an individual victim. If he uses my dead great-grandmother's SS# to obtain benefits or credit cards, it's fraud against the government, with costs passed to the taxpayers, or fraud against the credit card issuer, with costs passed on to other credit card holders.)
But neither of these things are like copyright infringment. With copyright infringement, each unauthorized download of copyrighted material constitutes an instance of copyright infringment, but economic harm is done to the copyright holder only when the downloader is copying items for which they would otherwise have paid the copyright holder money.
To summarize: Copyright infringement is not theft. Some instances of copyright infringement cause some economic harm to rightsholders. Some do not.
The current debate is that the law does not provide a way to treat those two types of infringement differently.
The fundamental problem is that the law may not be able to distinguish between the two types of infringement; whether economic harm has been done relies entirely on the mindset of the infringer. (Current law errs on the side of presuming guilt - a law giving carte blance to file sharers would err on the side of presuming innocence. Both laws would likely fail to capture the problem.)
> It was flying on its side > It was flying at an altitude of less than 200 feet > It was flying slower than any passenger jet I have seen before
I can't speak to what you saw - I wasn't there. But how did you know its altitude?
Suppose an aircraft is flying at 2000 feet and normal airspeed.
Suppose an observer estimates (for whatever reason) that it's flying at 200 feet, when it's really at, say, 2000 feet.
Such an aircraft will appear to be flying extremely slowly (and quietly) if you think it's at 200 feet when it's really at 2000.
Your description of "flying on its side" indicates it may have been at an odd attitude relative to you - consistent with a previous poster's hypothesis that it was a jet banking away from you.
The mind does funny things when given insufficient information. My funniest one was when I was driving to an air show, and I swore I'd seen a Rafale or Eurofighter, which made me wonder (a) what the hell it was doing here, 'cuz there was nothing like it on the list of planes scheduled to show up, and (b) why it was so quiet at that altitude, as a nearby propeller was able to drown it out.
As it turned and overflew us, I realized it was one of those funky "build-it-yourself" kit experimental planes with an impeller ("pusher") design and a funky delta-wing configuration, and that's where the prop sound was coming from. A very slick homebuilt/kit plane, to be sure, but no EF2000.:-)
> > "I think China is good place to be," Ralsky said. "You don't get the same kind of grief." > > > As well, Ralsky is right, you don't get the same kind of grief, you get worse. But, that's the attitude of a con artist, no true intelligence or consideration for anyone else. I say, send the spammers to China. Hell, I'll pay for their plane ticket even.
Well, if Ralsky physically moves to China (as opposed to merely spamming through Chinese ISPs), I'm all for it.
First - he'll have to spam through Chinese ISPs. Most of us have blocked China's netblocks at the router due to Chinese ISPs' unwillingness to terminate spammers.
Second - I won't pay for his plane ticket. But I will gladly pay Ralsky $5000 for a spam that says "Citizens of China! Bring freedom to Tibet, and bring freedom and prosperity to yourselves by overthrowing the Communist Party and restoring power to the rightful leaders of China, currently in exile in the independent nation of Taiwan!" (I'm sure the Falun Gong would pay Ralsky to spam on their behalf too.)
I'm equally sure that Ralsky, being such a smart entrepren00er and ethikul bidnizman, would take the money and spam from a Chinese ISP. (Ralsky's proved to himself that he's smarter than Verizon by leaving the country to escape judgement, so why should he fear a bunch of dumb Chinks? You hear that, Alan? You're smarter than a bunch of dumb Chinks, aren't you? You'll never get caught!)
30 seconds later, I'd be watching with glee as the aforementioned "dumb Chinks" he's underestimated broke through the door of his Beijing apartment and started beating the living hell out of him for his crimes against the State. Oops, guess it's not like America after all, and they're not as dumb as you thought. Aaw, poor Ralskyboy fall down go splat.
A couple of weeks later, an enterprising PLA soldier with a handycam would have a grainy videotape of Ralsky getting his just desserts - and Ralsky's relatives would be paying for the bullets.
Now, considering the fact he's brainless, spineless, heartless, lily-livered, and terminally short-sighted, I can't imagine any of his organs would be useful for transplantation.
(I mean, how many people need an asshole transplant? And even the most desperate colostomy patient probably wouldn't take Ralsky's asshole in a transplant. I mean, having to force your feces to slide through that for the rest of your life? Have a little respect for your own shit, man!)
But yeah. Go to China, Ralsky. Go there, piss off the wrong people, and get your just desserts.
(Any PLA d00dz out there wanna make a bundle? Lots of us, myself included, think government is wholly evil, but you could make up for a lot of that by webcasting Ralsky's arrest, trial, and execution. The number of Americans who'd pay good money to watch such a tape in the millions.)
Free clue to ICANN: When even spamming, fake-renewal-notice-spewing, domain-slamming scumbag registrars like Verislime aren't afraid to write the Commerce Department and call you scum, you've got problems.;-)
> Astroturf isn't nearly so offensive when they're admitting to it up front. In fact, it's more like the Turing Test - can you tell the real technophile barfly from the fake one? Of course, I think the odds of running into two women playing wireless Battleship in a bar are pretty low, so the test would be biased in favor of 'shill' - but for other tests it would be kinda fun.
Great. Now when we go to DEFCON we're gonna be surrounded by lamers with T-shirts saying "I spotted the Sony/Ericsson Shill!".
(Or worse, if you're female and attend DEFCON with another female and just wanna play one lousy game of Corewars on your cellphones, your table will be covered in dozens of T-shirts saying "I am the Sony/Ericsson Shill!":)
>.. before the pick-pocket crowd notice these shills... With their neverending supply of cameras provided by the company... Being paid to hand them over to other people they don't know... cameras that are new and thus expensive and in high demand...
Screw pickpockets. Enterprising Slashdotters.
"Hi, glad you made it out here tonight. Ya look great. OK, here's the deal. The guy at headquarters says I'm supposed to pretend to steal the camera from you - you run after me for about half a block. Then when you're convincingly out of breath, you can tell everyone who's followed you or gathered around you what a wonderful brand-new camera you just had stolen from you..."
> And it actually didn't hurt to get some data on how old people react to space flight.
There is nothing that says that all space travellers will forever be 30-something athletes.
Oh yeah? Whaddya think NASA's dedicated to ensuring?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
If he's got 'em simultaneously, the broads obviously know each other and dig it.
Financially, that means it's cheaper - Broad #1 can take Broad #2 out for a date.
Health-wise, all that cardio-vascular stuff must be good for you. And you die with a shit-eating grin (and if you're real lucky, a shit-eating grin and one of the broads) on your face.
Finally, unlike one broad, there's no way you can have two broads while driving. Just not enough room in the front seat. So there's no privacy implication from the cameras in the FastTrak lane if you go speeding through and your mylared transceiver blocks it.
Where's the drawback again?
That data would probably be thrown out as "impossible for cars to achieve".
It would, however, be pretty hilarious to cruise up and down a highway at 150-200 mph in a Cessna with a bag full of transcievers and Pringles cans (to improve the range).
I think you'd need to get the range up to over 500+ feet, as flying at treetop level over a highway is probably gonna land you in hot water with the FAA. (And to fly like that in the middle of the night, when the data trackers would be most likely to believe that a band of Ferrari-owning nuts is hauling ass up and down the highway, is even less safe.)
But it'd sure be a funny hack :)
Given the number of laws on the books, and considering that well over 3000+ brand-new laws get added to those books every year, how much do you have to hide?
p.411, Ayn Rand, ATLAS SHRUGGED, Signet Books, NY, 1957Didn't it also take an election campaign and a victory by the opposition party to get photo radar repealed?
(Amazingly enough, not only did the opposition party win, it looks like they kept their promise by dumping photo radar immediately after the '95 election. A bit of googling reveals that even the losers of the election confirm it.)
The UPS Debugger Song: "Just One More Hack (and then I'll put it on the 'net)
(Ah, thank you Google, for the historical reference to first puclication!) UPS - The Song!"
It's nobody's job but mine to protect me from my own stupidity.
> The stock market can have higher returns than safer investments, but it can also go DOWN. The risk is the price you pay for a possibility of a higher return. The stock market is NOT significantly different than going to a casino and gambling!
But here, I'm gonna call "Bullshit" on ya.
For every casino game other than Blackjack, the math proves the House has an advantage. You will lose. (And if you play Blackjack well enough to guarantee a win, they'll spot it and kick you out for counting cards :-)
> Would you gamble your life savings in a casino?? No, I don't think you would! Then why are you doing it in the stock market? A 401k is NOT a retirement plan -- it is plain and simple GAMBLING! Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.
I am not betting my life savings in the stock market. I am betting portions of my life savings in companies. I am doing so because - unlike the casino - I believe those companies will be able to provide me with a return on my investment by providing goods and services to people at a profit.
You're right in that it's not risk-free. If I'm wrong - if I believe the wrong people (like the CEOs of Worldcom and Enron, or the analysts who claimed that the dot-coms were gonna continue to go through the roof) - I stand to lose.
I think you'd agree with me when I say it's not easy. If I can't trust what the analysts say (and I can't!), then I have to do my own research. That's non-trivial.
But how's that different from any other buying decision? Most of us spend hours reading about technology every day - so that when we wanna play UT2003 or Doom 3, we know what hardware to buy that'll give us the most bang for our buck? Several hours of work (sometimes hundreds of hours, if you're a regular reader of hardware sites, or even Slashdot) for a $500-1000 purchase of hardware.
If you're going to invest in individual stocks (or even indirectly, through mutual funds), why not spend some time learning some accounting basics? Why not spend as much time taking care with your life's savings as you would with a new video card? (Or, depending on how much you've saved -- as much time as you'd spend researching a new car, or even a move to a new house?)
A balance sheet or earnings statement is like the specs on the side of a flashy retail box of hardware - it's a start, but it's not everything you need to know to make an informed purchase.
Just as any geek can learn enough to determine the front-runner in the never-ending race between Duron/Athlon/TBird/TBred/Palomino/Clawhammer/Sledg ehammer vs Celeron/Celeron2/P3/P4/P4-Northwood/Itanic - any geek can learn enough to determine whether a company's worth investing in.
Yeah, don't get me wrong - I'd like to see them breaking rocks too. They earned it.
Actually, I'd believe it.
Consider a 5% DOA rate on CPUs/heatsinks/RAM jarred loose from shipping.
As a DIY d00d, the first thing I do when I get a new box is rip open the cover, unplug/remove everything, and reseat it. The first thing I do after anything that looks like a hardware failure is remove/reseat the suspect component. And if that fails, I then start swapping components to the extent possible - try another drive and see if BIOS detects it. Swap with known good RAM. Swap with slower CPU if I have a spare CPU handy. Etc.
Problem is, for someone who buys "a computer", and especially for someone who wants "support" or a "warranty", that's not within their skill/comfort range to do, and they often don't have spare parts to swap and isolate the problem.
So from their perspective, the "computer's" "completely unusable", and has to go back to the "store" - even if it's just a 5-minute fix.
(I feel sorry for retailers and Joe Sixpack alike. I love being able to call a (reputable) vendor and say "Sorry, motherboard's DOA, 'cuz the CPU, RAM, and drives are fine in my spare board. I can either send back the entire system, or just the mobo."
The best thing about dealing with screwdriver shops and small-but-reputable vendors is that you don't have to waste half an hour on hold and another 15 minutes walking through the "What version of Windows are you running?" (irrelevant, the box won't POST, goddamnit!) script to get to the issue.)
Maybe they just approved a "Method for decreasing thermal losses in human extremities through repurposing of epidermal infant canine and feline tissues"? ;-)
Well, we got one answer -- the one someone asked about US patent examiners, along the lines of: "How does it feel to work for people who have their heads jammed that far up their asses?"
Looks like the EU patent office prefers a close-up view of its own colon to reality, too.
The examiner's manager has done more damage to the EU patent office's reputation than any answer the examiner could have given.
Funny. I was just thinking the same thing about a much larger class of thieves. You see, corporate criminals haven't stolen nearly as much from me as government con artists.
Funnier still, because I couldn't understand WCOM's books (nor the books of any other telco), I didn't buy their shares. I'm breaking even so far this year, after being up the past two years.
Yeah yeah, enough bragging. You see, the reason I was able to do this is because nobody put a gun to my head and forced me to by WCOM.
What went down at WCOM and ENE (Enron) sucked major ass. $10B frauds resulted into hundred-billion-dollar quantities of market-cap-ass being sucked. But Which is worse - Social Security or WorldCom? Social Security is a $13 trillion dollar black hole of unfunded liabilities. (That's accountant-speak for "debt that we've managed to hide from the balance sheet to the tune of about $45,000 for every man, woman, and child in the States".)
Unlike WCOM and ENE, if you don't pony up 6.5% of your salary every year into the scam (oh, and another 6.5% from your employer, for a total of 13% if you have the gall to work for yourself), people with guns will take it from you. Since when did Bernie Ebbers put a gun to your head and force you to buy his stock?
And unlike WCOM and ENE, who, when their frauds were exposed, were crushed - and their accomplices at Arthur Andersen in the process, SS is still in business.
Just like WCOM and ENE, Social Security is all about off-balance-sheet financing.
I'm not gonna pretend that a webzine like "capitalismmagazine" is unbiased (hell, they're a bunch of raving l00ny randroids, but some of their less-political articles, such as this one on Intel and this one on old-school investing are great) - but if you can dig through the rhetoric and politics, you might realize that if it's fraud and theft you wanna eliminate, we need to remove the two-by-four in Social Security's eye before we can see clearly enough to expose the grit in Worldcom's eye.
> And people don't seem very mad about this.
People are mad - and rightly so - about corporate fraud. And Congress is responding, because it's an election year.
I just wish people realized where the real fraud was being perpetrated, and force Congress to do something about that, too.
Star Trek Trivia Question: Does Captain Kirk die every time he steps into the transporter and gets rematerialized elsewhere?
UNIX Trivia Question: Does your program halt when it calls fork(), and you kill -9 the parent process, but not the child process?
I'd say "no" in both cases, as I believe that a copy of the data in my brain, running on a copy of my brain, is indistinguishable from me.
Which reminds me of the other time I've seen someone use the issue of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny while trolling... baiting.org's wonderful troll of Darwinism and Broken Translators.
Yeah, but looking at the prior convictions for fraud on many spammers' rap sheets...
- Thomas Cowles - Burglary, fraud, theft
- Thomas Cowles - passing bad checks
Spamhaus.org is slashdotted at the moment, but you can also find prior convictions for Alan Ralsky. According to this Detroit News article, he has a felony conviction involving fraud and the loss of his insurances licenses in Michigan and IllinoisIf I were an IRS auditor, I'd consider spammers as prime candidates for shakedown.
But I'm not an IRS auditor. Does anyone reading this know any IRS auditors?
The only thing worse than the thought of spammers having sex is the thought of their customers having sex.
We've got to stop them from breeding.
Why stop at the voodoo doll?
Dude - thank you - I haven't read that story in well over a decade, and had forgotten the author. I also had no freaking idea it was from 1909 (largely because the description of the TV/computer was so good :).
(If the Machine were working, I'd send you a beer :)
I'll second that.
Agree or disagree with her philosophy as you wish, but I had a horrible sinking feeling of deja vu. The passages about postmodern academics (essentially, anyone who says that your right to choose $IDEA_FOO over $IDEA_BAR is inherently wrong because there are supposedly no standards of truth or falsehood) mirror my experiences of university in the early '90s. I had to keep flipping back to make sure the copyright date was in the '40s rather than the '80s.
A fscking scary read, particularly as you hear all the talk about "fairness" on both sides of the aisle in Congress, and RIAA and MPAA are buying off legislators because it wouldn't be fair to allow new business models to drive them out of business.
If she'd stopped there - at the Star-Wars-esque insight that "the more you tighten your grip, regulator Tarkin, the more productivity slips through your fingers", it would have been merely frightening.
What made Atlas Shrugged truly dystopian is that (to extend the Star Wars analogy), Tarkin responds with a "So? To hell with the Empire, so long as we rule it as it falls", and Vader agrees.
The numbers representing my account's cash balance have a one-to-one relationship with "money", and "money" is the principal means by which I acquire property. When he decrements that number, he acquires property and deprives me of my ability to acquire property. Copying my CC# isn't theft, but use of my CC# to purchase things without authorization is.
> Or is it not theft because someone has taken your social security number to use it for himself. After all, he hasn't removed your ability to use your SS#, and he certainly never took it all for himself, you still have it. Therefore, by your definition, it's not theft, so it shouldn't be considered theft.
Wrong again. If he copies my SS#, there's no problem. If he assumes my identity and presents my SS# as his own while he goes on a spending spree, he deprives me of property because I'm the one who has to pay for lawyers to clear up the charges against me.
Actually, I take that back -- identity "theft" is a form of fraud, not theft per se. If he uses my SS#, it's fraud with an individual victim. If he uses my dead great-grandmother's SS# to obtain benefits or credit cards, it's fraud against the government, with costs passed to the taxpayers, or fraud against the credit card issuer, with costs passed on to other credit card holders.)
But neither of these things are like copyright infringment. With copyright infringement, each unauthorized download of copyrighted material constitutes an instance of copyright infringment, but economic harm is done to the copyright holder only when the downloader is copying items for which they would otherwise have paid the copyright holder money.
To summarize: Copyright infringement is not theft. Some instances of copyright infringement cause some economic harm to rightsholders. Some do not.
The current debate is that the law does not provide a way to treat those two types of infringement differently.
The fundamental problem is that the law may not be able to distinguish between the two types of infringement; whether economic harm has been done relies entirely on the mindset of the infringer. (Current law errs on the side of presuming guilt - a law giving carte blance to file sharers would err on the side of presuming innocence. Both laws would likely fail to capture the problem.)
> It was flying at an altitude of less than 200 feet
> It was flying slower than any passenger jet I have seen before
I can't speak to what you saw - I wasn't there. But how did you know its altitude?
Suppose an aircraft is flying at 2000 feet and normal airspeed.
Suppose an observer estimates (for whatever reason) that it's flying at 200 feet, when it's really at, say, 2000 feet.
Such an aircraft will appear to be flying extremely slowly (and quietly) if you think it's at 200 feet when it's really at 2000.
Your description of "flying on its side" indicates it may have been at an odd attitude relative to you - consistent with a previous poster's hypothesis that it was a jet banking away from you.
The mind does funny things when given insufficient information. My funniest one was when I was driving to an air show, and I swore I'd seen a Rafale or Eurofighter, which made me wonder (a) what the hell it was doing here, 'cuz there was nothing like it on the list of planes scheduled to show up, and (b) why it was so quiet at that altitude, as a nearby propeller was able to drown it out.
As it turned and overflew us, I realized it was one of those funky "build-it-yourself" kit experimental planes with an impeller ("pusher") design and a funky delta-wing configuration, and that's where the prop sound was coming from. A very slick homebuilt/kit plane, to be sure, but no EF2000. :-)
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>
> As well, Ralsky is right, you don't get the same kind of grief, you get worse. But, that's the attitude of a con artist, no true intelligence or consideration for anyone else. I say, send the spammers to China. Hell, I'll pay for their plane ticket even.
Well, if Ralsky physically moves to China (as opposed to merely spamming through Chinese ISPs), I'm all for it.
First - he'll have to spam through Chinese ISPs. Most of us have blocked China's netblocks at the router due to Chinese ISPs' unwillingness to terminate spammers.
Second - I won't pay for his plane ticket. But I will gladly pay Ralsky $5000 for a spam that says "Citizens of China! Bring freedom to Tibet, and bring freedom and prosperity to yourselves by overthrowing the Communist Party and restoring power to the rightful leaders of China, currently in exile in the independent nation of Taiwan!" (I'm sure the Falun Gong would pay Ralsky to spam on their behalf too.)
I'm equally sure that Ralsky, being such a smart entrepren00er and ethikul bidnizman, would take the money and spam from a Chinese ISP. (Ralsky's proved to himself that he's smarter than Verizon by leaving the country to escape judgement, so why should he fear a bunch of dumb Chinks? You hear that, Alan? You're smarter than a bunch of dumb Chinks, aren't you? You'll never get caught!)
30 seconds later, I'd be watching with glee as the aforementioned "dumb Chinks" he's underestimated broke through the door of his Beijing apartment and started beating the living hell out of him for his crimes against the State. Oops, guess it's not like America after all, and they're not as dumb as you thought. Aaw, poor Ralskyboy fall down go splat.
A couple of weeks later, an enterprising PLA soldier with a handycam would have a grainy videotape of Ralsky getting his just desserts - and Ralsky's relatives would be paying for the bullets.
Now, considering the fact he's brainless, spineless, heartless, lily-livered, and terminally short-sighted, I can't imagine any of his organs would be useful for transplantation. (I mean, how many people need an asshole transplant? And even the most desperate colostomy patient probably wouldn't take Ralsky's asshole in a transplant. I mean, having to force your feces to slide through that for the rest of your life? Have a little respect for your own shit, man!)
But yeah. Go to China, Ralsky. Go there, piss off the wrong people, and get your just desserts.
(Any PLA d00dz out there wanna make a bundle? Lots of us, myself included, think government is wholly evil, but you could make up for a lot of that by webcasting Ralsky's arrest, trial, and execution. The number of Americans who'd pay good money to watch such a tape in the millions.)
Free clue to ICANN: When even spamming, fake-renewal-notice-spewing, domain-slamming scumbag registrars like Verislime aren't afraid to write the Commerce Department and call you scum, you've got problems. ;-)
Great. Now when we go to DEFCON we're gonna be surrounded by lamers with T-shirts saying "I spotted the Sony/Ericsson Shill!".
(Or worse, if you're female and attend DEFCON with another female and just wanna play one lousy game of Corewars on your cellphones, your table will be covered in dozens of T-shirts saying "I am the Sony/Ericsson Shill!" :)
Screw pickpockets. Enterprising Slashdotters.
"Hi, glad you made it out here tonight. Ya look great. OK, here's the deal. The guy at headquarters says I'm supposed to pretend to steal the camera from you - you run after me for about half a block. Then when you're convincingly out of breath, you can tell everyone who's followed you or gathered around you what a wonderful brand-new camera you just had stolen from you..."
Oh yeah? Whaddya think NASA's dedicated to ensuring? ;-)