So a corporation should be able to declare me guilty to another corporation, but I shouldn't worry because they'd be gracious enough to give me a chance to prove my innocence?
How the hell did the bank even have standing to sue anybody? What wrong was done by anybody but them? How do you file, much less win, a lawsuit seeking to punish somebody who did nothing but receive an email you should never have been sending in the first place? How is it this man's legal responsibility to help them clean up their own fuck up, and how is it Google's legal responsibility to help the bank do so? What statute gives this judge the authority to destroy a third-party-to-a-fuck-up's email account because he didn't see fit to respond to an email he may not have even thought was legitimate? That's exactly what this ruling is saying; that this man somehow did something wrong by not helping the bank and he deserves to have his email account and potentially years of historical contacts lost.
If I were this guy, I'd sue this bank for damages (and unfortunately, since I'm not even a party to the fucking lawsuit that unfairly harmed me I'd have to sue Google for an injunction against complying with the previous order). Big time. It's this kind of thing that makes me wish we could directly sue a judge for the idiocy of his decisions. Their total lack of accountability is reprehensible.
The two really aren't the same thing, they only seem that way because you've erroneously over-simplified his position to "listen to the users."
User experience testing is essentially about usability. If you put some dude who has never seen your software in front of it, can he use it to get his work done? Is there anything seriously impeding his ability to 1) learn or 2) use the software?
What you're referencing is that something changed and people don't like the change. For starters, most people don't like change even if it is ultimately change for the better. More to the point though, it has nothing to do with learning or using a piece of software. They simply preferred one behavior to another for a set of reasons that may or may not address any of the reasons the change was ultimately made. A user below suggested that the previous situation (apparently, an icon in the dock for updates) was terribly ineffective but that the new system now achieves much higher update rates. In a situation like that, where some users are annoyed by a behavior but there is a demonstrable and measurable net positive to the change, reverting it is probably the wrong answer even if his motto was "listen to the users."
For what it's worth, as somebody who has no vested interest in the change either way I think his response was perfectly reasonable.
but it was still a WONTFIX in the face of overwhelming public opinion to the contrary.
Was it overwhelming public opinion? Sorry if I'm wrong in my assumptions, but I smell some bias in your post. It seems to me like you were one of the ones who want the change reverted. There's nothing wrong with that, but combine selection bias with the general megaphone that negative reactions get compared to positive ones (far more people hop on to review something they hated than loved) and I don't know it's as clear-cut as you suggest. Plus, this is a bugtracker. For all the increased likelihood of bad comments to good in general, most people wouldn't even think to log onto a bug tracker if they liked or accepted the new behavior. And why should they?
It's also worth mentioning that "listen to your users" wouldn't necessarily equate with "give your users everything they want" as well.
If you're not using an iPod or an iPhone, you don't have to use iTunes to control your music library do you?
No. But if you are using it, perhaps because you want to use the iTunes store for some legally-purchased music or you (or somebody in your family) also has an iPod or similar device--why should you be forced to switch and re-create everything related to your library in a second program because Apple doesn't want to play with others?
What you and others seem to be missing is that in between Apple and Palm in this petty battle are people and customers of one company or the other. Yes, spoofing a vendor ID is bad. So is locking your software to not work with anything not produced by you (and it's anti-competitive to boot).
They're both wrong. Of the two, I'd take the one trying to free up my choices, even if they're doing it for completely self-serving reasons. The ideal solution is Apple knocks the nonsense off, by choice (hopefully!) or by mandate, and then nobody has to act like a douchebag.
So, he serves essentially a life sentence as he will not be released until he shows where he stashed the money.
No. You gave away the ending in your opening: "Judge offers leniency if money is returned." Not returning it doesn't turn it into a life sentence, it means you won't get any leniency.
More generically, there's not going to be a contempt situation where you can go to jail indefinitely if the contempt isn't material to the case. IE, whether you return the money or not has no bearing on whether or not you stole it, nor any bearing on whether or not the prosecution can prove you've stolen it. You may lose some sort of "sweetened offer" they're giving you, but that's about it.
There's still a valid point to be made about proving a negative in some cases, but that certainly wasn't it. To my mind, it's solvable enough by simply limiting those sort of contempt sentences to the maximum duration of the charges. That said, I also agree with the person who says it should be challengable in front of a jury, though probably with a lesser burden than "beyond a reasonable doubt."
would come together and agree that things like THIS are un-American...
What? Jumping to conclusions? It seems perfectly American to me.
Look, we don't know what's going on. Maybe it's a corrupt cop crying that people aren't respecting his authorati. Maybe he has a legitimate beef, but should just ignore it and be more thick-skinned. Maybe it's truly heinous, unprotected, libelous speech. The summary is so ridiculously slanted that it's obvious they already made up their mind without the bother of pesky facts, and frankly it sounds like you have as well.
Slashdot is the perfect example of both the values and the costs of anonymous speech; anybody here who doesn't believe it can be abused to spread horrible lies is delusional. So why are we so quick to jump on "corrupt cop versus anonymous defenders of civil liberties?" Why can't it be "douchebag cop-hater fucks hiding behind the veil of anonymity to libel?" Both seem perfectly likely to me.
It's reminds me of a saying that I can't find the exact wording for, but goes essentially like this: Nobody believes the official statement but everybody believes the anonymous source.
The point here is that the Government previously said it was legal.
Maybe, if you're talking about some hypothetical conversation between the NSA and the telecom people before they agreed to do what the government wanted. It sucks for the telecoms, and it may even get them at least partially off the hook come trial time, but then again that's why these massive corporations have general counsels. Chances are what they really did was to weigh the illegality of the actions against the potential monetary harm that might come their way from pissing off the government and decided they didn't care all that much about the law.
That said, in public "the Government" has done no such thing. In fact exactly the opposite; a grant of immunity is the legal of equivalent of "okay, so there's a pretty good chance the courts will bitchslap you for this, but we're not going to let that happen." If the actions were clearly legal, immunity wouldn't have been necessary. You don't need protection from prosecution for something that's not illegal.
In any event, as I'm sure you've often seen quoted, "ignorance of the law is no excuse." If I tell you murder is perfectly legal and you go and murder somebody, it doesn't get the off the hook. If the government tells the telecoms that what they're asking is perfectly legal and they do it, it doesn't get them off the hook. It was illegal or not regardless of who said what. All that matters is what laws were on the books when it happened.
To quote a certain ex-Vice President, no controlling legal authority has ruled what they did was illegal.
That ex-Vice President is also what I like to call a "jackass," since he and his buddies in Congress specifically forbid courts to hear cases involving these activities. That's what this whole damn article and its discussion is about. To bring that up as if it's anything other than political half-truths is disingenuous at best.
That said, if he doesn't consider a federal judge to be a controlling legal authority, he's playing even more with the words to allow him to say whatever he wants without actually saying anything at all. It's a common trick of politics.
Repealing that immunity then would be criminalizing behavoir that was legal.
Huh? No. The very fact that immunity came into play means the action was not legal, or at least had a significant chance of being ruled illegal when they got themselves sued into the dirt.
Let's be clear. "The behavior" was what the telecommunications companies did; ie, help the government spy on its citizens a couple years ago. Nothing about that behavior has changed. In fact, nothing about that behavior can change unless somebody has invented a time machine I'm unaware of.
Ex post facto prevents Congress from making the behavior illegal now and then charging the telecom companies for having broken a law that didn't exist when the behavior occurred. That's not the case. Their were laws on the books at the time that seem to say it was illegal. Immunity has nothing to do with the legality of the behavior, it has to do with whether or not it can be prosecuted (or, in this case, litigated).
Maybe, if such a case gets to trial, a judge will decide that what the telecommunications companies did was not illegal. Cool for them, but whether or not they were ever granted immunity for it will never enter into the decision.
And TOTALLY irrelevant once immunity was granted.
Why? Because it sounds good in Anonymous Coward land?
Immunity is simply a legal decree stating there won't be a prosecution/litigation. Other than being (in this case) nationwide and binding, it's little different than a prosecutor saying "I've declined to file charges." It does nothing to alter the legality of the behavior at the time it was conducted. Repealing immunity is a kind of shitty thing to do, even if it never should have been granted in the first place, but doing so simply removes that decree; it's as if it never took place. Now the case can be taken up by the legal system to decide what happened and what the appropriate action should be.
Once again, whether or not something is legal or illegal is an entirely different concept from whether or not you will be taken to court for it. What they did was either legal or illegal; that is for a court to decide. Whether or not a court is permitted to decide is immunity; currently not, in the future possibly.
But frankly, all of this is moot. I think "immunity" is a poor term being used here. We're talking about civil action, which means that what Congress did specifically is to remove the jurisdiction of any court from hearing cases in the specific matter. When you think of it that way, it's easy to see why they can simply re-instate such jurisdiction.
d) The hospital for not only allowing internet access from a computer with personally identifiable information, but for also allowing the spyware to get installed.
Bingo. They failed to take steps a reasonably prudent person would have taken to protect patient confidentiality under Federal law.
Consultant goes to see hospital directors, stamps feet, and IT get overridden.
You make a compelling argument for not firing the IT guy for what happens which, let's face it, is probably what will happen after they scapegoat him if anything bad happens to the hospital.
However, "they" in the GP's post referred to "the hospital." In that sense it doesn't really matter if it's an incompetent IT staffer, a cranky doctor or poor executive management. Something that needed to be done under the law wasn't done, and the result was the leaking of confidential medical information. The hospital still deserves both blame and punishment for that.
Since when has committing a crime unintentionally ever been a defense?
Sometimes, but more importantly it is pretty much always a mitigating factor. Your hypothetical person would be charged with reckless homicide, not capital murder (DUI = felony, murder = felony, having a gun during commission of a felony = felony). It sounds like he killed enough people in the anecdote for the differences to be semantic, but it's not nonexistent.
Intent does matter. In this case, you can be pretty sure that's the reason the charge is only intercepting or conspiring to intercept electronic communications. They could easily have tacked on any number of unauthorized access/"hacking" charges.
1. It's criminal trespassing to access a computer without permission. Which he did by sending the spyware to someone with the intent to observe them.
Yeah, and? You said it yourself: criminal trespass. It's a government charge. The "victim" doesn't get the money. If they want to recover whatever it cost them to clean the systems and do whatever else it is they've done as a result of this, they can recover that via a civil action. And in any event, he wasn't charged with illegally accessing a computer system, he was charged with illegally intercepting electronic communication.
To the degree that the government is handing over the money, the question remains. I don't know if it's an unrelated out-of-court agreement with the hospital to avoid litigation, however. The wording in the article wasn't clear.
2. The hospital didn't hand out the data. It was stolen. It's still theft even if I leave the door wide open. It wasn't his. He has it, as a result of his actions.
True. The question is what exactly the software did and how it works. A hospital employee shouldn't be able to install software on a department's computers at all. So what happened? Is it just really good spyware, able to avoid all the protections they had in place? Or is it that they didn't have any protections in place at all? Did the employee specifically download and run the attachment, regardless of what she thought it was? Or was it something that simply installed itself?
The answers to those questions don't matter in terms of what the man did, but they do matter. There are extremely strict laws on the books about protecting patient data. If this is a symptom of their failure to do so, they could easily end up on the wrong side of legal action by either the government or the patients whose data was disseminated. I've no doubt that's what the OP was referring to when he said they should be paying, not getting paid. We don't have all the facts by any means, but it sounds like their security on systems capable of accessing patient records was spotty at best. That shouldn't be any more acceptable than what the man did.
The opinion of someone who is woefully ignorant of the law, the intent of the law, common law, and basic morality, but yet somehow is an expert on constitutional law.
Basic morality? Really? What he did was undoubtedly wrong, and he should be punished. But do you really think it's a felony? Should he really be locked up for five years because of it, in addition to a $33,000 fine? For the average American, $33,000 is essentially a year's worth of labor for free. That's a pretty hefty punishment all by itself. Five years? That's the sort of sentence we hand out for burglary or aggravated assault. This is not a man who is a danger to society. At this point we're left simply to hope that the judge is reasonable and there is sufficient leeway in the federal sentencing guidelines that this doesn't turn into a total miscarriage of justice. Surely justice counts among the intent of the law and basically morality, doesn't it?
Maybe I'm one of these left-wing softy types, but what this guy needs more
Actually, Juries CAN decide the matters of law, it is just frowned upon. It is called Jury Nullification, where a jury, despite of the facts, simply ignores the law.
Ehh, sorta. From what research I've done, "jury nullification" is more a byproduct of the fact that "no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States" (7th Amendment) and the protection against being tried again for the same crime once you're found innocent (5th Amendment).
In other words, once a jury finds a person innocent it doesn't matter at all why they did it. Hell, they could all have been bribed and their decision would still stand (though they and the people who paid them may all be subject to prosecution themselves). In that sense, yes, "I don't approve of the law" is going to hold up.
The most recent court decisions on the matter basically go like this: Yes, you can do it, because we can't stop you. But yes, if anybody tells you that you can do it the judge can declare a mistrial. And yes, if the judge believes you're going to do it he can throw you off the jury pre-emptively (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification#United_States). Presumably, if you brought it up in the jury room and the judge found out he could also declare a mistrial at that point, though I've not seen any specific evidence for or against that assumption.
So, yeah, it exists, but I wouldn't agree with those who call it a right. It's a byproduct of our system that the courts really don't want you to have or to exercise, they just can't really stop you.
especially ones that know the defendant or the victim
Uh, good? Far better to try to ensure the impartiality of the jury than to take somebody's word for it that they can be impartial despite knowing the people involved (positively or negatively). That's not to say that they always achieve a truly impartial jury, nor to say that it's possible to achieve a truly impartial jury in all cases, but it's certainly worth a try. "Yeah, the defendant is my best friend" certainly seems like a good reason to look for a replacement to me.
they do extremely unethical things like introducing the testimony of career criminals who have been given incentives to [testify]
Yeah, I agree, I don't like this one. It's clearly self-serving.
That said, if I were on a jury in a situation like this I would be very careful in believing what it is such a person tells me--but if it corroborates what other, more believable and impartial people are saying it's still not useless testimony. I simply wouldn't believe what was said in absence of other information. I'd basically consider the testimony circumstantial.
and to keep information about the victim/plaintiff's behavior from the jury's ears lest the jury come to the conclusion that their behavior was so irresponsible that it mitigates the severity of what the defendant did.
Good again. It's not unethical for either lawyer to do their best to present their own clients in the best possible light, so long as they're not being untruthful while they do so. That said, in every one of those cases one lawyer should be trying to keep it out, one lawyer should be trying to get it in, and it should end up in the judge's hands. Deciding what is and isn't admissible is the judge's job. That's where it belongs.
And hey, if it makes a big difference in the trial and the defense thinks it was improperly decided, that's what the appeals process is for.
Let's pretend his story is true, and that he got less than 9.1 cents for some ridiculous-but-conceivable reason. In other words, take that inconsistency off the table.
If he's receiving a check for two cents, nobody is buying his fucking music. Why is it that he seems to believe he should be making "a bunch of money?" Would this horrible insult to his right to be rich for no reason be somehow mitigated if he had received a check for 50 cents from his one sale instead?
I found your post somewhat insightful upon first reading, though I didn't necessarily agree with all of it. But as I re-read it, something started to bother me.
How am I supposed to enjoy end-game content [. ..] that is just unachievable if you have any physical social interaction in evenings / weekends at all.
If you don't have the time to run many heroics or raids to get your gear up, why do you expect to have time to run the end-game content? It's certainly not going to be any shorter. If you DO have time to do it, just not as much as the hardcore types, you can still experience it; it's just going to take longer.
For those who literally don't have the time to get to any piece of content while there are still players interested in doing it, I don't think the solution is to dumb the content down*, at least not while such content is still the highest tier of content available. I think those players are just out of luck. If that ruins their enjoyment of the game, well, there are a lot of games out there. They should find one that is less grindy so having less time for the game isn't as big of a penalty.
For what it's worth, I don't get as worked up about "ZOMG they hand out epics!" as others do. I measure my enjoyment of the game by, well, my enjoyment of the game. I just want to make forward progress, and that's independent of whether or not you or $HARDCORE_GAMER_X has made more or less progress than me.
* I do sort of like the 10 normal/10 hard mode/25 normal/25 hard mode distinctions. It seems like a relatively good compromise.
Have you never stopped to wonder how stupidly ridiculous it is to ask a child to use heart monitors while performing basic physical activities?
Depends on the use. If the goal (on that day or in general) is an aerobic exercise, getting your heart rate into a certain threshold is important. It also wouldn't be a bad thing for the PE teacher to keep an eye on, from both a safety and an effort standpoint. (I'm not a huge fan of mandatory PE in high school, but if we're going to have it we should fairly evaluate the effort that students are putting in.)
I recall back in my high school days, once in a while--say, once or twice a month--we'd go downstairs into what was essentially a workout room, with a bunch of treadmills and stationary bikes and such. I was on a treadmill at the time, and once the teacher just walked by and turn the speed up, apparently assuming I was slacking. I didn't even realize that I had my hands resting on the heart rate monitor until I happened to glance at the display and see it was at 204. Now, I realize that 220 - current age is a really crude measure of "maximum heart rate," but given that I was 17-18 years old at the time (I don't remember which year it was, but it was in the campus where only juniors and seniors were in my school) I was near--or over!--100%. There's nothing good about that from any perspective. And it also showed that my "slacking" actually would have had me in in the right zone for an aerobic exercise.
I think buying dedicated equipment like the school in the summary seems to be doing is on the expensive and silly side, given that almost all schools could use more money just about everywhere. But they're not bad things if they've already spent the money.
Use gnash and multiple tabs [. . . f]ast flip is firmly aimed at people with browsers that suck. Google would do better to encourage people to leave the Windows world.
Hmm? The only browser of any consequence in the "Windows world" that doesn't have tabs is IE6, and even that's found mostly in corporate environments these days. IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, Chrome... they all have tabs.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ah. Now I get the point of your post. And why it takes an insightful mod to get your posts scored back up to zero.
I noticed exactly this, but I've seen both numbers.
My observation/hypothesis is this: When the upgrade they were offering was to 3.0, a major revision, the price they asked was $9.99 USD. Personally I didn't upgrade at that time, because I didn't feel the features were compelling enough to pay $10. A month or so later (from my perspective; I've only had my Touch for about that long) the upgrade is now actually to 3.1.1, and the price was $4.99 USD. Of course in either event you're upgraded all the way to the latest version. So in essence, I got the full upgrade path for $5 instead of $15 if I had been an early adopter.
Worked out well for me, but I don't think I would appreciate it if I was one of those people who upgrade as soon as I can.
$60 a year gives me a physical number people can call in from a normal phone.
Perhaps the best part is that it's a number people cna call in from a normal phone with charges relative to the number they're calling.
Or put more clearly: Do you have friends or business contacts in England? Australia? China? Any country supported by SkypeIn? You can buy a number there and they can call you as if they were calling inside their own country. For a relatively cheap price, that has the potential to be extremely valuable.
It's almost certain their software is doing something that benefits themselves at your expense.
With all due respect, that's really a load of crap. It's the same "you can't prove it's not true so it is!" crap people always use to push a particular agenda when they have nothing to back it up.
You like open-source software? Great, so do I. That doesn't mean it's "almost certain their software is doing something that benefits themselves at your expense" if they choose not to release the source code. There are plenty of reasons to not release source code that don't include malice as a cornerstone.
You know what I think makes one unfit to be a parent? Commenting on hypothetical parents with hypothetical children using absolute statements that attempt to assert some sort of moral superiority for letting kids do anything they want.
Contrary to what you think, there isn't a right or wrong answer; it's specific to the parents and the child. Some may consider it a good opportunity to let their children go wherever they want on the Internet and then talk about whatever they see as it comes up. That's perfectly healthy. So is wanting to make sure your child is mentally and/or emotionally prepared for such discussion. I don't personally have a problem with sex or relatively small children seeing it, but I certainly wouldn't want to be explaining bestiality or why that man has that woman tied to the ceiling and is hurting her to a six year old. It's also worth throwing in at this point that parental controls are about more than content blocking.
Some people are control freaks, some people are fools, some people will take things farther than they need to go. But thinking differently than you does not instantly make somebody stupid or an unfit parent. It does not make their decisions some disease to avoid passing on at all costs.
Personally, I'd be more concerned about passing on your grammar than a parent deciding porn sites aren't appropriate for a six year old.
My experience was similar, but somewhat different. I actually really enjoyed the first three or four books, but after that it just started to drag. He'd introduce new character after new character and then spend hundreds of pages trying (and usually failing) to make me give a damn about them. Then, from that point on, you'd have yet another interruption to the main story line to deal with before you ever got back to it.
I quit somewhere around book six. It just got to be too much. The fact that there has since been *five* more books and they're still not done, with these last three still on the ledger, convinces me I was right to do that. In fact, the fact that Sanderson couldn't even wrap up all these damn sub-characters' plots in one book is telling enough that Jordan never stopped that nonsense and got to the point.
Still, I dragged myself through at least one book or so before I just couldn't take it anymore, and you're right about the reason: When books weigh in at 700-1000 pages and you're already 4-5 deep, there's a powerful incentive to keep plodding along to the end.
On a semi-related note, Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy I found to be very good. They picked a good author to continue the work, and if not for all this Wheel of Time stuff I probably wouldn't have found him. So I guess some good came of it at least.
One of the great ironies of life: Every generation thinks it's the perfect generation. Their parents are too old and reserved, their children too wild and unruly.
They're right, in that sense. They just don't realize that they're the children now and the parents later.
I'm not sure I understand the article's contention that Exchange support frees Apple users from Microsoft.
It doesn't free Mac users from Microsoft; it frees potential Mac users from Microsoft. Most people don't particularly care about whether something is capital-F Free and so they don't really care if they depend on Microsoft. Hell, by buying a Mac they're largely dependent on Apple. Chances are the average user has a handful of apps that make them dependent on a handful of other companies. And for the most part, most users are okay with that.
To whatever extent poor Exchange support on Mac would stop somebody from switching from Windows to Mac--say, for a laptop that they use at work and need to have integrated into the system--better exchange support frees them from that burden. It allows them to choose based on merits rather than "I can't switch because..." Maybe they decide to switch, maybe they decide to stay; I'm not trying to get into a Windows-Mac fanboi war at the moment. But it helps to free them to actually make the decision a decision.
As long as this is the case, Microsoft is free to change the Exchange protocol to freeze out third party clients.
Technically true. From what others have said, it appears Apple's support is built on an open set of protocols that Microsoft's own client uses, so it's probably safe for now. There's also been a commitment demonstrated from Apple to maintain said support, at least in my mind. They advertised it like a pretty big deal and they no doubt put a lot of time and money into it. I doubt they would do that if they had no intention of keeping it functional.
That's not to say it's completely or permanently safe, but it is reasonably so at least for now. If nothing else it shifts the reliance from 100% on Microsoft to, say, 75% Apple 25% Microsoft. The merits of that can be debated by others.
I'm not trying to dismiss your point out of hand; indeed, in many cases it is well taken.
That said, I think the most sad part of the whole process is that education has become nothing more than some sort of cursory elimination scheme for business use to to avoid spending time and effort in actually knowing anything much about their potential job applicants. Other than the giggle factor, why should I particularly care that Marvin the cat has gotten a degree?
I know your point was intended to be on the humorous extreme; that Marvin the cat getting a degree isn't actually the problem, it's Ralph getting a degree that Bob earned for him. But again, it's something that only matters if people put blind faith in a piece of paper. Some of the smartest, most capable people in the world have no degrees at all, and some of the worst have degrees from prestigious schools. Even if we're to degrade humanity such as to think of them as only workers, the same remains true. A college degree is worth very little these days. Far less than it is weighted.
If that perception changes, if college degrees mean something and aren't simply used as a quick way for an HR rep to throw an application in the trash, people being issued degrees they didn't earn doesn't mean anything. There's no incentive to do so, so who cares if somebody actually spent the time--or more likely, money--to scam the system?
It will never happen, of course, but it seemed like a good time for this rant. Some of the other 16-ish replies thus far have already mentioned some fine ideas for how to make things work better in the meantime. I think the value to society of making education and learning cheaper and more accessible far outweighs whatever risks there may be. How you get buy-in for that I don't know. I do know it's sad that it's something that has to be sold.
Slashdot Mirror
So a corporation should be able to declare me guilty to another corporation, but I shouldn't worry because they'd be gracious enough to give me a chance to prove my innocence?
The better question is this:
How the hell did the bank even have standing to sue anybody? What wrong was done by anybody but them? How do you file, much less win, a lawsuit seeking to punish somebody who did nothing but receive an email you should never have been sending in the first place? How is it this man's legal responsibility to help them clean up their own fuck up, and how is it Google's legal responsibility to help the bank do so? What statute gives this judge the authority to destroy a third-party-to-a-fuck-up's email account because he didn't see fit to respond to an email he may not have even thought was legitimate? That's exactly what this ruling is saying; that this man somehow did something wrong by not helping the bank and he deserves to have his email account and potentially years of historical contacts lost.
If I were this guy, I'd sue this bank for damages (and unfortunately, since I'm not even a party to the fucking lawsuit that unfairly harmed me I'd have to sue Google for an injunction against complying with the previous order). Big time. It's this kind of thing that makes me wish we could directly sue a judge for the idiocy of his decisions. Their total lack of accountability is reprehensible.
The two really aren't the same thing, they only seem that way because you've erroneously over-simplified his position to "listen to the users."
User experience testing is essentially about usability. If you put some dude who has never seen your software in front of it, can he use it to get his work done? Is there anything seriously impeding his ability to 1) learn or 2) use the software?
What you're referencing is that something changed and people don't like the change. For starters, most people don't like change even if it is ultimately change for the better. More to the point though, it has nothing to do with learning or using a piece of software. They simply preferred one behavior to another for a set of reasons that may or may not address any of the reasons the change was ultimately made. A user below suggested that the previous situation (apparently, an icon in the dock for updates) was terribly ineffective but that the new system now achieves much higher update rates. In a situation like that, where some users are annoyed by a behavior but there is a demonstrable and measurable net positive to the change, reverting it is probably the wrong answer even if his motto was "listen to the users."
For what it's worth, as somebody who has no vested interest in the change either way I think his response was perfectly reasonable.
Was it overwhelming public opinion? Sorry if I'm wrong in my assumptions, but I smell some bias in your post. It seems to me like you were one of the ones who want the change reverted. There's nothing wrong with that, but combine selection bias with the general megaphone that negative reactions get compared to positive ones (far more people hop on to review something they hated than loved) and I don't know it's as clear-cut as you suggest. Plus, this is a bugtracker. For all the increased likelihood of bad comments to good in general, most people wouldn't even think to log onto a bug tracker if they liked or accepted the new behavior. And why should they?
It's also worth mentioning that "listen to your users" wouldn't necessarily equate with "give your users everything they want" as well.
No. But if you are using it, perhaps because you want to use the iTunes store for some legally-purchased music or you (or somebody in your family) also has an iPod or similar device--why should you be forced to switch and re-create everything related to your library in a second program because Apple doesn't want to play with others?
What you and others seem to be missing is that in between Apple and Palm in this petty battle are people and customers of one company or the other. Yes, spoofing a vendor ID is bad. So is locking your software to not work with anything not produced by you (and it's anti-competitive to boot).
They're both wrong. Of the two, I'd take the one trying to free up my choices, even if they're doing it for completely self-serving reasons. The ideal solution is Apple knocks the nonsense off, by choice (hopefully!) or by mandate, and then nobody has to act like a douchebag.
No. You gave away the ending in your opening: "Judge offers leniency if money is returned." Not returning it doesn't turn it into a life sentence, it means you won't get any leniency.
More generically, there's not going to be a contempt situation where you can go to jail indefinitely if the contempt isn't material to the case. IE, whether you return the money or not has no bearing on whether or not you stole it, nor any bearing on whether or not the prosecution can prove you've stolen it. You may lose some sort of "sweetened offer" they're giving you, but that's about it.
There's still a valid point to be made about proving a negative in some cases, but that certainly wasn't it. To my mind, it's solvable enough by simply limiting those sort of contempt sentences to the maximum duration of the charges. That said, I also agree with the person who says it should be challengable in front of a jury, though probably with a lesser burden than "beyond a reasonable doubt."
What? Jumping to conclusions? It seems perfectly American to me.
Look, we don't know what's going on. Maybe it's a corrupt cop crying that people aren't respecting his authorati. Maybe he has a legitimate beef, but should just ignore it and be more thick-skinned. Maybe it's truly heinous, unprotected, libelous speech. The summary is so ridiculously slanted that it's obvious they already made up their mind without the bother of pesky facts, and frankly it sounds like you have as well.
Slashdot is the perfect example of both the values and the costs of anonymous speech; anybody here who doesn't believe it can be abused to spread horrible lies is delusional. So why are we so quick to jump on "corrupt cop versus anonymous defenders of civil liberties?" Why can't it be "douchebag cop-hater fucks hiding behind the veil of anonymity to libel?" Both seem perfectly likely to me.
It's reminds me of a saying that I can't find the exact wording for, but goes essentially like this: Nobody believes the official statement but everybody believes the anonymous source.
Maybe, if you're talking about some hypothetical conversation between the NSA and the telecom people before they agreed to do what the government wanted. It sucks for the telecoms, and it may even get them at least partially off the hook come trial time, but then again that's why these massive corporations have general counsels. Chances are what they really did was to weigh the illegality of the actions against the potential monetary harm that might come their way from pissing off the government and decided they didn't care all that much about the law.
That said, in public "the Government" has done no such thing. In fact exactly the opposite; a grant of immunity is the legal of equivalent of "okay, so there's a pretty good chance the courts will bitchslap you for this, but we're not going to let that happen." If the actions were clearly legal, immunity wouldn't have been necessary. You don't need protection from prosecution for something that's not illegal.
In any event, as I'm sure you've often seen quoted, "ignorance of the law is no excuse." If I tell you murder is perfectly legal and you go and murder somebody, it doesn't get the off the hook. If the government tells the telecoms that what they're asking is perfectly legal and they do it, it doesn't get them off the hook. It was illegal or not regardless of who said what. All that matters is what laws were on the books when it happened.
That ex-Vice President is also what I like to call a "jackass," since he and his buddies in Congress specifically forbid courts to hear cases involving these activities. That's what this whole damn article and its discussion is about. To bring that up as if it's anything other than political half-truths is disingenuous at best.
That said, if he doesn't consider a federal judge to be a controlling legal authority, he's playing even more with the words to allow him to say whatever he wants without actually saying anything at all. It's a common trick of politics.
Huh? No. The very fact that immunity came into play means the action was not legal, or at least had a significant chance of being ruled illegal when they got themselves sued into the dirt.
Let's be clear. "The behavior" was what the telecommunications companies did; ie, help the government spy on its citizens a couple years ago. Nothing about that behavior has changed. In fact, nothing about that behavior can change unless somebody has invented a time machine I'm unaware of.
Ex post facto prevents Congress from making the behavior illegal now and then charging the telecom companies for having broken a law that didn't exist when the behavior occurred. That's not the case. Their were laws on the books at the time that seem to say it was illegal. Immunity has nothing to do with the legality of the behavior, it has to do with whether or not it can be prosecuted (or, in this case, litigated).
Maybe, if such a case gets to trial, a judge will decide that what the telecommunications companies did was not illegal. Cool for them, but whether or not they were ever granted immunity for it will never enter into the decision.
Why? Because it sounds good in Anonymous Coward land?
Immunity is simply a legal decree stating there won't be a prosecution/litigation. Other than being (in this case) nationwide and binding, it's little different than a prosecutor saying "I've declined to file charges." It does nothing to alter the legality of the behavior at the time it was conducted. Repealing immunity is a kind of shitty thing to do, even if it never should have been granted in the first place, but doing so simply removes that decree; it's as if it never took place. Now the case can be taken up by the legal system to decide what happened and what the appropriate action should be.
Once again, whether or not something is legal or illegal is an entirely different concept from whether or not you will be taken to court for it. What they did was either legal or illegal; that is for a court to decide. Whether or not a court is permitted to decide is immunity; currently not, in the future possibly.
But frankly, all of this is moot. I think "immunity" is a poor term being used here. We're talking about civil action, which means that what Congress did specifically is to remove the jurisdiction of any court from hearing cases in the specific matter. When you think of it that way, it's easy to see why they can simply re-instate such jurisdiction.
You make a compelling argument for not firing the IT guy for what happens which, let's face it, is probably what will happen after they scapegoat him if anything bad happens to the hospital.
However, "they" in the GP's post referred to "the hospital." In that sense it doesn't really matter if it's an incompetent IT staffer, a cranky doctor or poor executive management. Something that needed to be done under the law wasn't done, and the result was the leaking of confidential medical information. The hospital still deserves both blame and punishment for that.
Sometimes, but more importantly it is pretty much always a mitigating factor. Your hypothetical person would be charged with reckless homicide, not capital murder (DUI = felony, murder = felony, having a gun during commission of a felony = felony). It sounds like he killed enough people in the anecdote for the differences to be semantic, but it's not nonexistent.
Intent does matter. In this case, you can be pretty sure that's the reason the charge is only intercepting or conspiring to intercept electronic communications. They could easily have tacked on any number of unauthorized access/"hacking" charges.
Yeah, and? You said it yourself: criminal trespass. It's a government charge. The "victim" doesn't get the money. If they want to recover whatever it cost them to clean the systems and do whatever else it is they've done as a result of this, they can recover that via a civil action. And in any event, he wasn't charged with illegally accessing a computer system, he was charged with illegally intercepting electronic communication.
To the degree that the government is handing over the money, the question remains. I don't know if it's an unrelated out-of-court agreement with the hospital to avoid litigation, however. The wording in the article wasn't clear.
True. The question is what exactly the software did and how it works. A hospital employee shouldn't be able to install software on a department's computers at all. So what happened? Is it just really good spyware, able to avoid all the protections they had in place? Or is it that they didn't have any protections in place at all? Did the employee specifically download and run the attachment, regardless of what she thought it was? Or was it something that simply installed itself?
The answers to those questions don't matter in terms of what the man did, but they do matter. There are extremely strict laws on the books about protecting patient data. If this is a symptom of their failure to do so, they could easily end up on the wrong side of legal action by either the government or the patients whose data was disseminated. I've no doubt that's what the OP was referring to when he said they should be paying, not getting paid. We don't have all the facts by any means, but it sounds like their security on systems capable of accessing patient records was spotty at best. That shouldn't be any more acceptable than what the man did.
Basic morality? Really? What he did was undoubtedly wrong, and he should be punished. But do you really think it's a felony? Should he really be locked up for five years because of it, in addition to a $33,000 fine? For the average American, $33,000 is essentially a year's worth of labor for free. That's a pretty hefty punishment all by itself. Five years? That's the sort of sentence we hand out for burglary or aggravated assault. This is not a man who is a danger to society. At this point we're left simply to hope that the judge is reasonable and there is sufficient leeway in the federal sentencing guidelines that this doesn't turn into a total miscarriage of justice. Surely justice counts among the intent of the law and basically morality, doesn't it?
Maybe I'm one of these left-wing softy types, but what this guy needs more
Ehh, sorta. From what research I've done, "jury nullification" is more a byproduct of the fact that "no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States" (7th Amendment) and the protection against being tried again for the same crime once you're found innocent (5th Amendment).
In other words, once a jury finds a person innocent it doesn't matter at all why they did it. Hell, they could all have been bribed and their decision would still stand (though they and the people who paid them may all be subject to prosecution themselves). In that sense, yes, "I don't approve of the law" is going to hold up.
The most recent court decisions on the matter basically go like this: Yes, you can do it, because we can't stop you. But yes, if anybody tells you that you can do it the judge can declare a mistrial. And yes, if the judge believes you're going to do it he can throw you off the jury pre-emptively (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification#United_States). Presumably, if you brought it up in the jury room and the judge found out he could also declare a mistrial at that point, though I've not seen any specific evidence for or against that assumption.
So, yeah, it exists, but I wouldn't agree with those who call it a right. It's a byproduct of our system that the courts really don't want you to have or to exercise, they just can't really stop you.
Uh, good? Far better to try to ensure the impartiality of the jury than to take somebody's word for it that they can be impartial despite knowing the people involved (positively or negatively). That's not to say that they always achieve a truly impartial jury, nor to say that it's possible to achieve a truly impartial jury in all cases, but it's certainly worth a try. "Yeah, the defendant is my best friend" certainly seems like a good reason to look for a replacement to me.
Yeah, I agree, I don't like this one. It's clearly self-serving.
That said, if I were on a jury in a situation like this I would be very careful in believing what it is such a person tells me--but if it corroborates what other, more believable and impartial people are saying it's still not useless testimony. I simply wouldn't believe what was said in absence of other information. I'd basically consider the testimony circumstantial.
Good again. It's not unethical for either lawyer to do their best to present their own clients in the best possible light, so long as they're not being untruthful while they do so. That said, in every one of those cases one lawyer should be trying to keep it out, one lawyer should be trying to get it in, and it should end up in the judge's hands. Deciding what is and isn't admissible is the judge's job. That's where it belongs.
And hey, if it makes a big difference in the trial and the defense thinks it was improperly decided, that's what the appeals process is for.
Let's pretend his story is true, and that he got less than 9.1 cents for some ridiculous-but-conceivable reason. In other words, take that inconsistency off the table.
If he's receiving a check for two cents, nobody is buying his fucking music. Why is it that he seems to believe he should be making "a bunch of money?" Would this horrible insult to his right to be rich for no reason be somehow mitigated if he had received a check for 50 cents from his one sale instead?
I found your post somewhat insightful upon first reading, though I didn't necessarily agree with all of it. But as I re-read it, something started to bother me.
If you don't have the time to run many heroics or raids to get your gear up, why do you expect to have time to run the end-game content? It's certainly not going to be any shorter. If you DO have time to do it, just not as much as the hardcore types, you can still experience it; it's just going to take longer.
For those who literally don't have the time to get to any piece of content while there are still players interested in doing it, I don't think the solution is to dumb the content down*, at least not while such content is still the highest tier of content available. I think those players are just out of luck. If that ruins their enjoyment of the game, well, there are a lot of games out there. They should find one that is less grindy so having less time for the game isn't as big of a penalty.
For what it's worth, I don't get as worked up about "ZOMG they hand out epics!" as others do. I measure my enjoyment of the game by, well, my enjoyment of the game. I just want to make forward progress, and that's independent of whether or not you or $HARDCORE_GAMER_X has made more or less progress than me.
* I do sort of like the 10 normal/10 hard mode/25 normal/25 hard mode distinctions. It seems like a relatively good compromise.
Depends on the use. If the goal (on that day or in general) is an aerobic exercise, getting your heart rate into a certain threshold is important. It also wouldn't be a bad thing for the PE teacher to keep an eye on, from both a safety and an effort standpoint. (I'm not a huge fan of mandatory PE in high school, but if we're going to have it we should fairly evaluate the effort that students are putting in.)
I recall back in my high school days, once in a while--say, once or twice a month--we'd go downstairs into what was essentially a workout room, with a bunch of treadmills and stationary bikes and such. I was on a treadmill at the time, and once the teacher just walked by and turn the speed up, apparently assuming I was slacking. I didn't even realize that I had my hands resting on the heart rate monitor until I happened to glance at the display and see it was at 204. Now, I realize that 220 - current age is a really crude measure of "maximum heart rate," but given that I was 17-18 years old at the time (I don't remember which year it was, but it was in the campus where only juniors and seniors were in my school) I was near--or over!--100%. There's nothing good about that from any perspective. And it also showed that my "slacking" actually would have had me in in the right zone for an aerobic exercise.
I think buying dedicated equipment like the school in the summary seems to be doing is on the expensive and silly side, given that almost all schools could use more money just about everywhere. But they're not bad things if they've already spent the money.
Hmm? The only browser of any consequence in the "Windows world" that doesn't have tabs is IE6, and even that's found mostly in corporate environments these days. IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, Chrome... they all have tabs.
Ah. Now I get the point of your post. And why it takes an insightful mod to get your posts scored back up to zero.
FKUBG... hmmm. Fuck You Bill Gates?
I noticed exactly this, but I've seen both numbers.
My observation/hypothesis is this: When the upgrade they were offering was to 3.0, a major revision, the price they asked was $9.99 USD. Personally I didn't upgrade at that time, because I didn't feel the features were compelling enough to pay $10. A month or so later (from my perspective; I've only had my Touch for about that long) the upgrade is now actually to 3.1.1, and the price was $4.99 USD. Of course in either event you're upgraded all the way to the latest version. So in essence, I got the full upgrade path for $5 instead of $15 if I had been an early adopter.
Worked out well for me, but I don't think I would appreciate it if I was one of those people who upgrade as soon as I can.
Perhaps the best part is that it's a number people cna call in from a normal phone with charges relative to the number they're calling.
Or put more clearly: Do you have friends or business contacts in England? Australia? China? Any country supported by SkypeIn? You can buy a number there and they can call you as if they were calling inside their own country. For a relatively cheap price, that has the potential to be extremely valuable.
With all due respect, that's really a load of crap. It's the same "you can't prove it's not true so it is!" crap people always use to push a particular agenda when they have nothing to back it up.
You like open-source software? Great, so do I. That doesn't mean it's "almost certain their software is doing something that benefits themselves at your expense" if they choose not to release the source code. There are plenty of reasons to not release source code that don't include malice as a cornerstone.
You know what I think makes one unfit to be a parent? Commenting on hypothetical parents with hypothetical children using absolute statements that attempt to assert some sort of moral superiority for letting kids do anything they want.
Contrary to what you think, there isn't a right or wrong answer; it's specific to the parents and the child. Some may consider it a good opportunity to let their children go wherever they want on the Internet and then talk about whatever they see as it comes up. That's perfectly healthy. So is wanting to make sure your child is mentally and/or emotionally prepared for such discussion. I don't personally have a problem with sex or relatively small children seeing it, but I certainly wouldn't want to be explaining bestiality or why that man has that woman tied to the ceiling and is hurting her to a six year old. It's also worth throwing in at this point that parental controls are about more than content blocking.
Some people are control freaks, some people are fools, some people will take things farther than they need to go. But thinking differently than you does not instantly make somebody stupid or an unfit parent. It does not make their decisions some disease to avoid passing on at all costs.
Personally, I'd be more concerned about passing on your grammar than a parent deciding porn sites aren't appropriate for a six year old.
My experience was similar, but somewhat different. I actually really enjoyed the first three or four books, but after that it just started to drag. He'd introduce new character after new character and then spend hundreds of pages trying (and usually failing) to make me give a damn about them. Then, from that point on, you'd have yet another interruption to the main story line to deal with before you ever got back to it.
I quit somewhere around book six. It just got to be too much. The fact that there has since been *five* more books and they're still not done, with these last three still on the ledger, convinces me I was right to do that. In fact, the fact that Sanderson couldn't even wrap up all these damn sub-characters' plots in one book is telling enough that Jordan never stopped that nonsense and got to the point.
Still, I dragged myself through at least one book or so before I just couldn't take it anymore, and you're right about the reason: When books weigh in at 700-1000 pages and you're already 4-5 deep, there's a powerful incentive to keep plodding along to the end.
On a semi-related note, Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy I found to be very good. They picked a good author to continue the work, and if not for all this Wheel of Time stuff I probably wouldn't have found him. So I guess some good came of it at least.
One of the great ironies of life: Every generation thinks it's the perfect generation. Their parents are too old and reserved, their children too wild and unruly.
They're right, in that sense. They just don't realize that they're the children now and the parents later.
It doesn't free Mac users from Microsoft; it frees potential Mac users from Microsoft. Most people don't particularly care about whether something is capital-F Free and so they don't really care if they depend on Microsoft. Hell, by buying a Mac they're largely dependent on Apple. Chances are the average user has a handful of apps that make them dependent on a handful of other companies. And for the most part, most users are okay with that.
To whatever extent poor Exchange support on Mac would stop somebody from switching from Windows to Mac--say, for a laptop that they use at work and need to have integrated into the system--better exchange support frees them from that burden. It allows them to choose based on merits rather than "I can't switch because..." Maybe they decide to switch, maybe they decide to stay; I'm not trying to get into a Windows-Mac fanboi war at the moment. But it helps to free them to actually make the decision a decision.
Technically true. From what others have said, it appears Apple's support is built on an open set of protocols that Microsoft's own client uses, so it's probably safe for now. There's also been a commitment demonstrated from Apple to maintain said support, at least in my mind. They advertised it like a pretty big deal and they no doubt put a lot of time and money into it. I doubt they would do that if they had no intention of keeping it functional.
That's not to say it's completely or permanently safe, but it is reasonably so at least for now. If nothing else it shifts the reliance from 100% on Microsoft to, say, 75% Apple 25% Microsoft. The merits of that can be debated by others.
I'm not trying to dismiss your point out of hand; indeed, in many cases it is well taken.
That said, I think the most sad part of the whole process is that education has become nothing more than some sort of cursory elimination scheme for business use to to avoid spending time and effort in actually knowing anything much about their potential job applicants. Other than the giggle factor, why should I particularly care that Marvin the cat has gotten a degree?
I know your point was intended to be on the humorous extreme; that Marvin the cat getting a degree isn't actually the problem, it's Ralph getting a degree that Bob earned for him. But again, it's something that only matters if people put blind faith in a piece of paper. Some of the smartest, most capable people in the world have no degrees at all, and some of the worst have degrees from prestigious schools. Even if we're to degrade humanity such as to think of them as only workers, the same remains true. A college degree is worth very little these days. Far less than it is weighted.
If that perception changes, if college degrees mean something and aren't simply used as a quick way for an HR rep to throw an application in the trash, people being issued degrees they didn't earn doesn't mean anything. There's no incentive to do so, so who cares if somebody actually spent the time--or more likely, money--to scam the system?
It will never happen, of course, but it seemed like a good time for this rant. Some of the other 16-ish replies thus far have already mentioned some fine ideas for how to make things work better in the meantime. I think the value to society of making education and learning cheaper and more accessible far outweighs whatever risks there may be. How you get buy-in for that I don't know. I do know it's sad that it's something that has to be sold.