breaking into people's homes so they can steal to feed their habit
They do that because drugs are artificially expensive due to the legal BS around them.
If the risk of jail was removed the cost of manufacturing, transporting, and distributing things like Cocaine would fall thru the floor. Only the most hopelessly strung out junkie would be unable to support their habit, if by no other means than panhandling.
It goes to pay the guy behind the counter, it goes to the power company to keep the lights on. It goes to local sales and property taxes, it goes an insurance company who has the policy on the store, etc. Does Game Stop get lots on Contribution margin in this case sure, but they have lots of fixed cost overhead.
They are preforming a service many find useful the offer a market place and facilitate it by functioning as a broker. If you want to keep more of the sale price for a game your selling there is ebay and Craig's list. Its going to be lots more work on your part though, and when the sale happens is when you find a buyer rather than anytime you are ready.
You *can* more or less do that just encipher everything you store on others peoples systems before you upload it. They don't need the keys. My friends and I use drop box a fair amount, to trade files asynchronously but we run all our files thru openssl first and the certificates have never been anywhere near dropbox.
Unless someone can break AES or gets the certs and the passwords protecting them via rubber-hose crypto analysis its safe and nobody will enable *recovery*.
This kid chose to reach out into a public place to harass and intimidate someone. If you allow people to be chased out of public light by intimidation and harassment then you wind up with less freedom, as your personal freedoms to pursue things like sports are hindered by those who would hide behind free speech.
I am sorry I can't agree. Being a public figure exposes you to a certain amount of comment. What you are really suggesting is that a right to be sheltered from the opinions of others exists. It can't. What if the Athletes mother had said this to him, should she be jailed? Personal I would be much more hurt to hear something like that come from my mom, who I love and respect, and would trust to judge the opinion of my Father much more than coming from some f**k head on Twitter!
What you are really suggesting is we should legislate speaking to one another. Its not practical. People need to learn the uniformed personal options of others about their worth don't matter. The correct response is for the Athlete to either do nothing, or to tweet back and say, "you don't my dad; and your a real jerk who will probably never get laid, have sucky life."
Think you can do carpentry without algebra with any efficiency? I don't. Suppose you have fifteen board feet of two by ten. How long a table top can you make if it's cut and joined and the width of the finished table top must fit a 3 foot space?
Algebra is a very very neccecary part of carpentry, and my little example is simplistic compared to what carpenters face every day.
Re:So what's the purpose of this story again?
on
The Fall of 38 Studios
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So you're saying it's the government's fault for making the money available, and the person who took the money has no responsibility?
-Yes and No- He has responsibility for the business failing yes. He has no responsibility to public for the loss of the 75 million, that is what a loan grantee does after all. I also really do think that when government intercedes in the market place and makes money overly cheap, either via loan grantees or direct lending, it does lead otherwise savvy business people to make poorer decisions. It also enables unproven decision makers like these folks access to capital that nobody would give them otherwise. The outcome seems to be often calamity.
This is an example of someone who had they been forced by nature to swim in a smaller pond for a time, might have learned, grown, and installed a team around him of proven people. What that 75Million loan did is effective let him skip from the high school team and jump directly to majors. Things might have gone better with some time in AAA
Re:So what's the purpose of this story again?
on
The Fall of 38 Studios
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
[Curt Schilling] is vehemently opposed to government financial bailouts and stimulus funds, yet didn't bother to eschew a tax-payer backed state loan
Which is why I don't blame Curt. Liberals love to jump on people like Schilling for being opposed subsidies and then taking advantage of the ones that exist. They are the first to say "we're all in this together" and suddenly forget that sentiment as soon as it applies to anyone who disagrees. Tough, we live in a society. That means people like Schilling, if they had their way would not get subsidies and neither would anyone else. They don't make the rules though and neither do I. I vote all the time to end this crap but It does not happen, in the mean time people like Schilling and I pay the same taxes to support it as everyone else; just be cause we don't think its a good idea does not mean we are any less entitled when society collectively decides to create an entitlement.
So what we really have here is a case where Government was gambling with public monies making loans. That is not the governments job, or it should not be. Capital risk belongs in the private market. There are two really important reasons for that. The first is that when things don't work out bankruptcy can destroy private debts, sovereign debts on the other hang around and drag on the economy forever. The second is that private financing means the people making the call and taking the risk have their own skin in the game. That tends to put the breaks on ideas where the risk is outsized compared to the potential reward; money gets allocated better.
People keep saying 38 Studios should have take a less aggressive path. They probably could not have raised 75M in the private markets and would have been forced to do just that. That would have put them on the path to grow by doing some number of less ambitious but likely more successful in ROI terms projects first. Who knows if government had not dumped a bunch of overly cheap money on them they might exist today.
You have proven his point. Historicly you need 35% percent support or so and some apathy elsewhere to pull off a bloody revolution. That might well be easier than 50% of the vote and then some to work around electoral districts etc
The best place to keep valuables when staying somewhere like that is locked in the trunk of your car. If you flew and then took cabs rather than get a rental car, your situation is pretty hopeless.
I think it's pathetic that it's the 21st century, and we've harnessed the power of the atom to boil water to make steam to make electricity.
I think its pathetic that in our supposedly educate 21st century; people think its pathetic to use an inexpensive safe medium like water vapor to turn a highly efficient turbine for power generation. Doubly so when they propose any alternatives let alone a better one. Or were you objecting to harnessing the atom?
People keep comparing the deaths per capita from nuclear to things like car and plane accidents and especially other methods of power generation. I would suggest its NOT A USEFUL METRIC.
Our society has the means to absorb the geographically dispersed individual and and handfuls of people lost in car wrecks each day all over the place. Even the the total number is large, its dilute and the long term loss of economic resources such as land is minimal. The odd air craft accident that claims a few hundred is more painful but still manageable.
The slow deaths from coal and such get spread out across decades of somewhat elevated medical expenses and environmental clean up projects. Even an major accident like a slag spill can be contained and cleaned up with conventional equipment and means.
A major Chernobyl or Fukushima like accident however rare stands to displace tens of thousands of people at once and render major economic assets and surrounding land unusable for decades, all at once! That is the sort of thing that derails entire economies.
Its the difference between being shot and say having HIV. Over the long haul HIV and sympathetic infections probably do more total harm, but its spread out you can live with it for a long time. The bullet on the other though it might kill few cells on initial impact, often does enough damage that its immediately catastrophic anyway.
Because we don't do sensible things like reprocess much spent fuel, even after these things shut down usually they have become some sort of simi-active nuclear grave yard for another 10-20 years before all the fuel is cool enough for transport to suitable longer term storage (which we don't have much of).
If you run these things out to 80 years, they will be 100 years old in many cases before operations really cease. Granted after the initial shutdown, risk drops off pretty fast, there is only so much that can go wrong with what amounts to a big swimming pool but still.
A true libertarian would be FOR environmental regs, because "your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins".
No. A True Libertarian would argue the government should NOT have environmental regs. It should have courts, where you can sue someone whose activities are having spill over effects harming your person or property. That court should either force them stop or fairly compensate you.
Agree fully. A decade ago I naively believed that we were capable of going into a place like Iraq and removing Saddam, or a place like Afghanistan and removing the Taliban. I though we could then maintain some minimally acceptable level of security, you know prevent looting and sectarian murders, long enough for the folks there to organize some form a popular government. I then thought we could leave.
Well turns out we are not capable of doing those things. Its not the military's fault. They did their part and broadly speaking did it well. Its the corrupt politicians, contractors, and other monied interests. Who see it as an opportunity to build roads and plants nobody needs. Insist on being so ignorant as to assume the folks who have been doing it there for 1000's of years no nothing about local agriculture, and completely screw up production and the economy by trying to do things designed for North America there. Then as you say to top it all off they bully the locals.
While you can't deny that there haven't been any 9/11 style attacks in the US, I'm still really ambivalent about the methods being used.
Well as long as we are trying to be objective about things. What was the economic value of the World Trade Center and the lost productive capacity of the people who died their to our society? How does that compare to what has been spent on the "War on Terror"?
Answering those two questions requires considering lots of issues I and I expect most others would feel icky even exploring but they exist none the less. How much more wealth generating capacity in terms of spill over to other citizens did the typical WTO worker have than the typical soldier we have lost have for example? Nasty to even think about lives in such terms yet if we are truly concerned about the "general welfare" we must consider if the cost of mitigating such attacks is actually justified at all given the rate at which they occur and the price tag of rebuilding when they do.
I don't know the answer and I lack the resources to calculate it, but our dear old Uncle Sam already has most of that data. The public should demand a real accounting rather than settling for this emotional goal of total safety.
it's a Wall Street Conspiracy to condition kids to work for points instead of money.
Given you sig I'd expect you to realize sillness of that statement. Wall Street pulled that one off along time ago with the creation of the "Federal Reserve Note" We have all been just working for "points" for 100 years now. Many people don't have any 'money' and I expect some have never even handled any.
Either Hubris or Greed seems to be the undoing of almost every high tech criminal that is actually caught. You'd think some of them would learn that lesson.
Really guys let me help you with this.
1. Hack site 2. Use stolen identities to flush corresponding bank accounts 3. SHUT THE *#*$(@) UP ABOUT IT 4. Profit
Notice there is no ??? step there. Everything after step 2 is simple really. The trick is take enough in step 2 that you don't need to repeat steps one and two again, and don't blab. If you complete one and two, and stop there you'll either be caught right away or very likely never caught at all.
Why store the data in only one format? Why not put one copy on USB Flash, one copy on DVD-R and possibly one copy on some other flash with a different interface like SD?
Unless its allot of data this should be fairly cheap and odds are good that at least one of the three mediums will survive and you will have tools to read it easily. Watch your file formats too, i'd stick with lowest common denominator very standard stuff like jpg images, mpeg2video (main mode) with either ac3 or mp2 audio for videos, and mp3 for just audio.
Yes we are reading the same news. Obama has 'improved the economy with the credit card', the huge national debt increase has bought some nice things. The friendly policy toward the Fed Chairman and his idiocy with QE has made the stock market numbers look nice. In the mean time my grocery, water, sewer, electric, and gas bills keep going up on a per unit basis, but its okay because they tell me there is not inflation. That might even be technically true, wages are not rising and housing is flat, falling, or barely growing depending on where you live.
Obama has done nothing for the real underlying health of the economy. Its an elaborate shell game of debt, and some day the bill will come due. Just look at the municipal pension situation and all of California's bankruptcies in the past few months.
I expect I could go take at a loan run up the credit cards too, this would put a new car in the drive way, a coat of paint on the house and some fancy new electronics in the house and on my person. Still I don't think anyone would argue this was a real improvement to my personal fiscal situation. Its not different for our nation.
I am not for telling anyone what they can or cannot drive but we need to start treating SUVs like "light trucks" where taxes and emissions are concerned because they share all the negative aspects of light trucks compared to cars.
you could track someone from the moment they left their house in the morning until they moment they arrived home at night
Which government could do before if they were interested enough to pay a cop to follow you.
The real issue here is now they can track *everyone* from the moment they left their house in the morning until they moment they arrived home at night. Suddenly there is no variable cost associate with tracking everyone. The result no incentive to not track everyone. They question is do we want to live in a society where, we track everyone. I really think the answer to that is "no" and its going to happen if we don't do something.
No it most certainly does not have the power to do that. Not by any sane reading of the 4th, 9th, and 10th amendments it does not. Don't even suggest those guys have that kind of power, because that just makes them think they do, and we have a lousy SCOTUS bench right now that will knuckle under and go along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
breaking into people's homes so they can steal to feed their habit
They do that because drugs are artificially expensive due to the legal BS around them.
If the risk of jail was removed the cost of manufacturing, transporting, and distributing things like Cocaine would fall thru the floor. Only the most hopelessly strung out junkie would be unable to support their habit, if by no other means than panhandling.
Hardly.
It goes to pay the guy behind the counter, it goes to the power company to keep the lights on. It goes to local sales and property taxes, it goes an insurance company who has the policy on the store, etc. Does Game Stop get lots on Contribution margin in this case sure, but they have lots of fixed cost overhead.
They are preforming a service many find useful the offer a market place and facilitate it by functioning as a broker. If you want to keep more of the sale price for a game your selling there is ebay and Craig's list. Its going to be lots more work on your part though, and when the sale happens is when you find a buyer rather than anytime you are ready.
You *can* more or less do that just encipher everything you store on others peoples systems before you upload it. They don't need the keys. My friends and I use drop box a fair amount, to trade files asynchronously but we run all our files thru openssl first and the certificates have never been anywhere near dropbox.
Unless someone can break AES or gets the certs and the passwords protecting them via rubber-hose crypto analysis its safe and nobody will enable *recovery*.
This kid chose to reach out into a public place to harass and intimidate someone. If you allow people to be chased out of public light by intimidation and harassment then you wind up with less freedom, as your personal freedoms to pursue things like sports are hindered by those who would hide behind free speech.
I am sorry I can't agree. Being a public figure exposes you to a certain amount of comment. What you are really suggesting is that a right to be sheltered from the opinions of others exists. It can't. What if the Athletes mother had said this to him, should she be jailed? Personal I would be much more hurt to hear something like that come from my mom, who I love and respect, and would trust to judge the opinion of my Father much more than coming from some f**k head on Twitter!
What you are really suggesting is we should legislate speaking to one another. Its not practical. People need to learn the uniformed personal options of others about their worth don't matter. The correct response is for the Athlete to either do nothing, or to tweet back and say, "you don't my dad; and your a real jerk who will probably never get laid, have sucky life."
Think you can do carpentry without algebra with any efficiency? I don't. Suppose you have fifteen board feet of two by ten. How long a table top can you make if it's cut and joined and the width of the finished table top must fit a 3 foot space?
Algebra is a very very neccecary part of carpentry, and my little example is simplistic compared to what carpenters face every day.
So you're saying it's the government's fault for making the money available, and the person who took the money has no responsibility?
-Yes and No-
He has responsibility for the business failing yes. He has no responsibility to public for the loss of the 75 million, that is what a loan grantee does after all. I also really do think that when government intercedes in the market place and makes money overly cheap, either via loan grantees or direct lending, it does lead otherwise savvy business people to make poorer decisions. It also enables unproven decision makers like these folks access to capital that nobody would give them otherwise. The outcome seems to be often calamity.
This is an example of someone who had they been forced by nature to swim in a smaller pond for a time, might have learned, grown, and installed a team around him of proven people. What that 75Million loan did is effective let him skip from the high school team and jump directly to majors. Things might have gone better with some time in AAA
[Curt Schilling] is vehemently opposed to government financial bailouts and stimulus funds, yet didn't bother to eschew a tax-payer backed state loan
Which is why I don't blame Curt. Liberals love to jump on people like Schilling for being opposed subsidies and then taking advantage of the ones that exist. They are the first to say "we're all in this together" and suddenly forget that sentiment as soon as it applies to anyone who disagrees. Tough, we live in a society. That means people like Schilling, if they had their way would not get subsidies and neither would anyone else. They don't make the rules though and neither do I. I vote all the time to end this crap but It does not happen, in the mean time people like Schilling and I pay the same taxes to support it as everyone else; just be cause we don't think its a good idea does not mean we are any less entitled when society collectively decides to create an entitlement.
So what we really have here is a case where Government was gambling with public monies making loans. That is not the governments job, or it should not be. Capital risk belongs in the private market. There are two really important reasons for that. The first is that when things don't work out bankruptcy can destroy private debts, sovereign debts on the other hang around and drag on the economy forever. The second is that private financing means the people making the call and taking the risk have their own skin in the game. That tends to put the breaks on ideas where the risk is outsized compared to the potential reward; money gets allocated better.
People keep saying 38 Studios should have take a less aggressive path. They probably could not have raised 75M in the private markets and would have been forced to do just that. That would have put them on the path to grow by doing some number of less ambitious but likely more successful in ROI terms projects first. Who knows if government had not dumped a bunch of overly cheap money on them they might exist today.
It would have to be fought not with the gun but with the truck bomb and assassinations.
You have proven his point. Historicly you need 35% percent support or so and some apathy elsewhere to pull off a bloody revolution. That might well be easier than 50% of the vote and then some to work around electoral districts etc
Gnome 1.4 was pretty good.
The best place to keep valuables when staying somewhere like that is locked in the trunk of your car. If you flew and then took cabs rather than get a rental car, your situation is pretty hopeless.
I think it's pathetic that it's the 21st century, and we've harnessed the power of the atom to boil water to make steam to make electricity.
I think its pathetic that in our supposedly educate 21st century; people think its pathetic to use an inexpensive safe medium like water vapor to turn a highly efficient turbine for power generation. Doubly so when they propose any alternatives let alone a better one. Or were you objecting to harnessing the atom?
People keep comparing the deaths per capita from nuclear to things like car and plane accidents and especially other methods of power generation. I would suggest its NOT A USEFUL METRIC.
Our society has the means to absorb the geographically dispersed individual and and handfuls of people lost in car wrecks each day all over the place. Even the the total number is large, its dilute and the long term loss of economic resources such as land is minimal. The odd air craft accident that claims a few hundred is more painful but still manageable.
The slow deaths from coal and such get spread out across decades of somewhat elevated medical expenses and environmental clean up projects. Even an major accident like a slag spill can be contained and cleaned up with conventional equipment and means.
A major Chernobyl or Fukushima like accident however rare stands to displace tens of thousands of people at once and render major economic assets and surrounding land unusable for decades, all at once! That is the sort of thing that derails entire economies.
Its the difference between being shot and say having HIV. Over the long haul HIV and sympathetic infections probably do more total harm, but its spread out you can live with it for a long time. The bullet on the other though it might kill few cells on initial impact, often does enough damage that its immediately catastrophic anyway.
Because we don't do sensible things like reprocess much spent fuel, even after these things shut down usually they have become some sort of simi-active nuclear grave yard for another 10-20 years before all the fuel is cool enough for transport to suitable longer term storage (which we don't have much of).
If you run these things out to 80 years, they will be 100 years old in many cases before operations really cease. Granted after the initial shutdown, risk drops off pretty fast, there is only so much that can go wrong with what amounts to a big swimming pool but still.
A true libertarian would be FOR environmental regs, because "your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins".
No. A True Libertarian would argue the government should NOT have environmental regs. It should have courts, where you can sue someone whose activities are having spill over effects harming your person or property. That court should either force them stop or fairly compensate you.
Tell them that even if it was only once, unlikely as that may be, even once is one time to many!
Agree fully. A decade ago I naively believed that we were capable of going into a place like Iraq and removing Saddam, or a place like Afghanistan and removing the Taliban. I though we could then maintain some minimally acceptable level of security, you know prevent looting and sectarian murders, long enough for the folks there to organize some form a popular government. I then thought we could leave.
Well turns out we are not capable of doing those things. Its not the military's fault. They did their part and broadly speaking did it well. Its the corrupt politicians, contractors, and other monied interests. Who see it as an opportunity to build roads and plants nobody needs. Insist on being so ignorant as to assume the folks who have been doing it there for 1000's of years no nothing about local agriculture, and completely screw up production and the economy by trying to do things designed for North America there. Then as you say to top it all off they bully the locals.
While you can't deny that there haven't been any 9/11 style attacks in the US, I'm still really ambivalent about the methods being used.
Well as long as we are trying to be objective about things. What was the economic value of the World Trade Center and the lost productive capacity of the people who died their to our society? How does that compare to what has been spent on the "War on Terror"?
Answering those two questions requires considering lots of issues I and I expect most others would feel icky even exploring but they exist none the less. How much more wealth generating capacity in terms of spill over to other citizens did the typical WTO worker have than the typical soldier we have lost have for example? Nasty to even think about lives in such terms yet if we are truly concerned about the "general welfare" we must consider if the cost of mitigating such attacks is actually justified at all given the rate at which they occur and the price tag of rebuilding when they do.
I don't know the answer and I lack the resources to calculate it, but our dear old Uncle Sam already has most of that data. The public should demand a real accounting rather than settling for this emotional goal of total safety.
it's a Wall Street Conspiracy to condition kids to work for points instead of money.
Given you sig I'd expect you to realize sillness of that statement. Wall Street pulled that one off along time ago with the creation of the "Federal Reserve Note" We have all been just working for "points" for 100 years now. Many people don't have any 'money' and I expect some have never even handled any.
Either Hubris or Greed seems to be the undoing of almost every high tech criminal that is actually caught. You'd think some of them would learn that lesson.
Really guys let me help you with this.
1. Hack site
2. Use stolen identities to flush corresponding bank accounts
3. SHUT THE *#*$(@) UP ABOUT IT
4. Profit
Notice there is no ??? step there. Everything after step 2 is simple really. The trick is take enough in step 2 that you don't need to repeat steps one and two again, and don't blab. If you complete one and two, and stop there you'll either be caught right away or very likely never caught at all.
Why store the data in only one format? Why not put one copy on USB Flash, one copy on DVD-R and possibly one copy on some other flash with a different interface like SD?
Unless its allot of data this should be fairly cheap and odds are good that at least one of the three mediums will survive and you will have tools to read it easily. Watch your file formats too, i'd stick with lowest common denominator very standard stuff like jpg images, mpeg2video (main mode) with either ac3 or mp2 audio for videos, and mp3 for just audio.
Yes we are reading the same news. Obama has 'improved the economy with the credit card', the huge national debt increase has bought some nice things. The friendly policy toward the Fed Chairman and his idiocy with QE has made the stock market numbers look nice. In the mean time my grocery, water, sewer, electric, and gas bills keep going up on a per unit basis, but its okay because they tell me there is not inflation. That might even be technically true, wages are not rising and housing is flat, falling, or barely growing depending on where you live.
Obama has done nothing for the real underlying health of the economy. Its an elaborate shell game of debt, and some day the bill will come due. Just look at the municipal pension situation and all of California's bankruptcies in the past few months.
I expect I could go take at a loan run up the credit cards too, this would put a new car in the drive way, a coat of paint on the house and some fancy new electronics in the house and on my person. Still I don't think anyone would argue this was a real improvement to my personal fiscal situation. Its not different for our nation.
I am not for telling anyone what they can or cannot drive but we need to start treating SUVs like "light trucks" where taxes and emissions are concerned because they share all the negative aspects of light trucks compared to cars.
you could track someone from the moment they left their house in the morning until they moment they arrived home at night
Which government could do before if they were interested enough to pay a cop to follow you.
The real issue here is now they can track *everyone* from the moment they left their house in the morning until they moment they arrived home at night. Suddenly there is no variable cost associate with tracking everyone. The result no incentive to not track everyone. They question is do we want to live in a society where, we track everyone. I really think the answer to that is "no" and its going to happen if we don't do something.
Congress has the power to GIVE cops that right
No it most certainly does not have the power to do that. Not by any sane reading of the 4th, 9th, and 10th amendments it does not. Don't even suggest those guys have that kind of power, because that just makes them think they do, and we have a lousy SCOTUS bench right now that will knuckle under and go along with it.