Re:Lawyer? All you need is 12 people dumb enough..
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You Are Not a Lawyer
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What case was that? I suspect there's more to it than you're presenting here. Hans Reiser was convicted with no body, and everyone here was shrieking about how stupid the jury was. Then Hans led the police to the body.
I was merely responding to your point that there's no analogy in RL to a single key individual causing a ton of grief for a large institution. No, Enron wasn't good, but for proof that what happened to BoB was good in meta-game terms, read this subthread from a BoB member:
I am a member of Band of Brothers and the only thing this has caused is a renewed interest on the part of the Alliance.
If you believe him, this is a minor hiccup that's caused some need for a bit more active play on their parts while they re-establish their alliance-level infrastructure.
See? It's a big reversal that's made Eve exciting for everyone involved. Longstanding static lines have been thrown into chaos. A lot of Bob players think this is an exciting, active phase of the war with goonfleet.
The only thing this achieved was the removal of the alliance name, nothing more and nothing less.
That's all? You didn't lose your jump points and cyno-jammers? I thought that Delve was impregnable because of those alliance level infrastructure features--they kept cap ships out and allowed BoB to jump cap ships in easily.
I know BoB wasn't destroyed by this, but you're being a bit blasé about what you lost here, aren't you? You're going to have to fight to keep Delve now, especially if someone organizes a real assault on it.
On the contrary, the fact that coups like this *are* possible is exactly what attracts that level of meta-gamer who bothers to spend years of their life building a corp/alliance. If things like this weren't possible, large old alliances like BoB would be fixtures in the game, immovable and unconquerable.
As it was, BoB nearly was invincible due to the network of alliance level infrastructure they built up. The ongoing war between goonfleet and BoB had taken on the character of WWI: static lines that don't move much. That's boring. It's like you and your PvP opponent have both got your tier 8 gear and are no longer capable of killing each other, so you don't bother to fight anymore.
No infrastructure was destroyed; but by disbanding the alliance, they lost sovereignty; by losing sovereignty, they lost infrastructure features that require sovereignty. BoB's core territory in Delve is now conquerable. That doesn't mean conquered--see the post above from a BoB member who's excited about the impending action. What'll happen now is that BoB's core support will have to man the Delve systems continuously and defend them long enough for sovereignty to reassert (about three month). It'll be a long battle where they'll actually have to fight, rather than sit behind their cyno-jammers.
This isn't a glitch. This is exactly why those serious players play Eve, because stuff like this happens.
If you want a real-world analogy, don't think of gov't, think of Enron, where a few key executives were able to build a house of cards that almost overnight put 55,000 people out of work when it all collapsed. It's large-scale, player-driven reversals like this that make Eve interesting for those people.
Not to me, though:) After running some lvl 4 missions in my new Raven, I got bored, and didn't want to get into the politics of it.
For most members of BoB, the game isn't ruined. There's been a dramatic shift in the landscape, but it won't impact their daily lives unless they want it to (i.e., by going to Delve and fighting for it). For people who aren't in Bob or Goonswarm, there's virtually no change at all.
At the corporate politics level, this is a gigantic setback, but those people play the metagame, and just had the equivalent of their cherished Titan blown up. A big setback, but nothing game ending, and indeed, the fact that something like this can happen is exactly why those intense, high level metagamers play it.
Labour are historically the party for the working man, formed out of the unions, however, in recent years they have figured out that the working man is significantly less likely to invite you for a spin on their yacht, so have shifted their position a little.
And this is different from the Democrats how?
[The Torys] stand for strong family values, but are actually quite likely to be found having a three-way homosexual romp in a public toilet while their wife is at home taking care of the kids.
And this is different from the Republican party how?
1. You misread my admittedly complex grammar. I said that Java isn't a threat, as [it's] an independent technology.
2. Sun's process of open sourcing Java was exactly for the purpose of vetting all the code and ensuring that they had the licensing rights to open source it. The biggest holdup was the audio drivers, which had been licensed from a third party that didn't want to release them or sell them, so Sun had to do a clean implementation.
It's not just that MS might come after you. It's that Mono, being an OSS implementation of.NET, would appear to be uniquely vulnerable to being crushed by MS if the beast deems it to be too great a threat, in a way that Java isn't as an independent technology. One obvious argument MS could make is that there's.NET technology inside of Mono. Large companies avoid risks like this by very carefully vetting their engineers to be pure--to have had no contact with the competitor's technology. Mono isn't nearly organized enough for that as an OSS project.
And it's not that MS would have be right, but there's just one strategy they could use to torpedo the whole OSS.NET stack with legal fees.
I don't think it's that great a risk, personally, but given MS's predatory behaviour in the past, it's not an unreasonable fear.
No, QT is a library. It provides (very good) APIs to C++ programmers to do most of the really onerous crap that C++ developers are tired of doing, and are doing in a hundred different ways already.
There was a famous story about Sun and IBM that got aired a lot during the MS antitrust trial. It goes like this:
One day, a bunch of IBM patent lawyers show up at Sun's headquarters, saying that Sun is infringing on patents A, B, C, etc. They demand a hefty license fee. Sun engineers (remember, it started as a company of engineers) sit down in a boardroom with the lawyers, look at the patents, and are surprised--they're for various obvious things like mathematically adding a variable stroke to a line, and such. The engineers walk the lawyers through their own patents, explaining how they're all obvious and wouldn't stand up in a court of law. The lawyers remain silent until they're done. Then the chief lawyer says "Perhaps you're right. But after one big court case dragging on for years, we'd just come back with another set of patents and repeat the whole process. Eventually we'd find something that you'd infringed on, and then you'd have to pay damages rather than a licensing fee."
Sun signs a cross-licensing agreement with IBM the next day.
That's the worry. It's not that Microsoft has patents that can allow it to launch SCO 2.0 with a better hope of success. It's the worry that, if they decide to snuff out Mono, they can launch a legal crusade to so encumber Mono in litigation and FUD that it dies an ignominious death. Then all that effort is wasted, OSS and Linux get a bad name in the process, and a lot of developers and customers are soured on Mono, Linux, and anything that doesn't come from a Fortune 500 company. This is why Novell signing a patent cross-licensing agreement caused such bad blood--it implies that MS does have patents that are or could be infringed. On the fateful day that MS decides to crush Mono, Novell's agreement strengthens MS's case, if only in PR terms.
You're kind of missing the point. If our hypothetical journalist is caught crossing a border, the guards won't pull the hard drive and check the make, and then hook it up to their own gear to see if it's encrypted or not. They'll point their AKs at the journo and make him turn his laptop on. If he refuses, they shoot him. If it prompts for a password and he refuses to enter it, they shoot him. If he claims he forgot the password, they'll toss him and his laptop into the back of the truck to send him to the capital to receive 'enhanced interrogation'. No encryption software will save his life. The guards probably won't know or care about encryption.
If I were that journo, I'd encrypt the files themselves and rename them crash.dump and put them in the Windows directory so I can turn it on, let them scan for jpegs and avis and find nothing, and be sent on my way.
Seriously, who the fuck is doing this? It was mildly funny when it was actually Kirk Johnson; now it's just a warmed over crust of a joke, like saying "this is excellent news! for (Hillary|McCain)!" was after about August.
Why would the U.S. care about getting revenge on him? The nation wasn't humiliated--certainly not the people with the power to get him extradited.
I mean, does the idea of getting revenge for humiliation really make sense, considering the costs? And doesn't going through a legal circus just increase the apparent humiliation?
If I break into your apartment by picking the locks, and then watch you sleep all night while masturbating into a tissue that I brought (and take with me), I guess I haven't done anything wrong since I harmed no one and stole nothing.
He's already signed an executive order closing the CIA's network of black prisons, and requiring them to not use "coercive interrogation methods" by adhering to the army field manual.
He also signed an executive order reversing an earlier Bush EO that withheld the release of material from the Reagan and HW Bush administrations, putting the White House back on the law Presidential Records Retention Act that requires everything to be saved for historians and made public.
OTOH, black voters went 90% for Clinton, Gore, and Kerry. Obama went into it knowing he had that much of the black vote locked up just for being a Democrat. If you're trying to imply that the black vote came out for one of their own, you're only 5% right, assuming that those 5% weren't also impressed with someone who can speak in full sentences after eight years of Chimpy.
It was NOT done by a thermite cutter charge. Thermite leaves a globby mess. A neat cut like that is done with a welding torch, which is obviously what was used in the non-cropped version of the photo, taken days after 9/11 at least. It was chopped off like that to remove a chunk for removal.
You may read quite a bit, but did you read the official report? Do you read the people debunking the conspiracy theorists? If all you read are the 9/11 truthers, then all you're getting is a lot of tinfoil hat nonsense that reinforces itself by referring to other 9/11 truthers.
The picture is a cropped photo of the clean up crews at the site, showing a steel beam that looks like it was cut by a welding torch. This is unsurprising. The clean up crews had to remove vast amounts of debris, and used welding torches to cut beams into manageable chunks. The larger, uncropped photo shows firemen without protective gear on--this dates the photo to at least several days after the towers fell, because in the immediate aftermath the wreckage was too hot for guys in t-shirts to walk on it.
The beam is obviously not melted by thermite because it's a relatively clean cut. Thermite makes a big, globby mess. And even talking about thermite or demo charges or anything else put in place to bring down the towers begs a huge question: How did crews manage to wire the building for demo in the days before 9/11 without anyone who worked there noticing a lot of guys in coveralls, and wires running everywhere? That's a huge job. 50,000 people worked in the towers every day and night. It's crazy to think that it was even possible to discretely plant demo charges without anyone noticing either the work or the modifications and wires.
As I mention below, CBS duplicated Oswald's shooting with multiple shooters using the same rifle, and all hit with at least two shots. This was broadcast on national TV with a young Dan Rather next to the guys on the tower.
But let's walk through it a bit. 5-8 seconds for three shots, meaning shot 1 is at time 0, shot 2 is at 2.5-4 seconds, and shot 3 is 5-8 seconds. The Carcano rifle takes about a second to cycle the bolt (the 2.3 seconds bit is horseshit repeated by conspiracy theorists--Marina Oswald testified that Lee spent months practicing working the bolt in their living room); so that leaves 1.5-3 seconds to aim and pull the trigger. It's easy to get off three shots in 5-8 seconds with reasonable accuracy at a nearby target, especially since the Carcano Oswald used had iron sights on it.
I'll repeat that CBS news reproduced Oswald's shooting easily with multiple shooters using the same rifle, all of whom hit the target with at least two shots, and did it all on TV. The range was trivial for anyone with military training in basic marksmanship--it was less than a hundred yards, the range at which they start training you.
There seems to be a basic problem here: You're very familiar with conspiracy theorists picking apart the official story. How much do you read the people debunking them, and then compare it and judge for yourself?
Maybe you didn't check out what his policies are, but I did, and so did everyone else I know. I saw lots of good debate on his policy papers. If what you're complaining about is that he was elected by a bunch of people who don't know what his policies are, I challenge you to point to any other president not similarly elected.
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What case was that? I suspect there's more to it than you're presenting here. Hans Reiser was convicted with no body, and everyone here was shrieking about how stupid the jury was. Then Hans led the police to the body.
I was merely responding to your point that there's no analogy in RL to a single key individual causing a ton of grief for a large institution. No, Enron wasn't good, but for proof that what happened to BoB was good in meta-game terms, read this subthread from a BoB member:
If you believe him, this is a minor hiccup that's caused some need for a bit more active play on their parts while they re-establish their alliance-level infrastructure.
See? It's a big reversal that's made Eve exciting for everyone involved. Longstanding static lines have been thrown into chaos. A lot of Bob players think this is an exciting, active phase of the war with goonfleet.
That's all? You didn't lose your jump points and cyno-jammers? I thought that Delve was impregnable because of those alliance level infrastructure features--they kept cap ships out and allowed BoB to jump cap ships in easily.
I know BoB wasn't destroyed by this, but you're being a bit blasé about what you lost here, aren't you? You're going to have to fight to keep Delve now, especially if someone organizes a real assault on it.
On the contrary, the fact that coups like this *are* possible is exactly what attracts that level of meta-gamer who bothers to spend years of their life building a corp/alliance. If things like this weren't possible, large old alliances like BoB would be fixtures in the game, immovable and unconquerable.
As it was, BoB nearly was invincible due to the network of alliance level infrastructure they built up. The ongoing war between goonfleet and BoB had taken on the character of WWI: static lines that don't move much. That's boring. It's like you and your PvP opponent have both got your tier 8 gear and are no longer capable of killing each other, so you don't bother to fight anymore.
No infrastructure was destroyed; but by disbanding the alliance, they lost sovereignty; by losing sovereignty, they lost infrastructure features that require sovereignty. BoB's core territory in Delve is now conquerable. That doesn't mean conquered--see the post above from a BoB member who's excited about the impending action. What'll happen now is that BoB's core support will have to man the Delve systems continuously and defend them long enough for sovereignty to reassert (about three month). It'll be a long battle where they'll actually have to fight, rather than sit behind their cyno-jammers.
This isn't a glitch. This is exactly why those serious players play Eve, because stuff like this happens.
If you want a real-world analogy, don't think of gov't, think of Enron, where a few key executives were able to build a house of cards that almost overnight put 55,000 people out of work when it all collapsed. It's large-scale, player-driven reversals like this that make Eve interesting for those people.
Not to me, though :) After running some lvl 4 missions in my new Raven, I got bored, and didn't want to get into the politics of it.
For most members of BoB, the game isn't ruined. There's been a dramatic shift in the landscape, but it won't impact their daily lives unless they want it to (i.e., by going to Delve and fighting for it). For people who aren't in Bob or Goonswarm, there's virtually no change at all.
At the corporate politics level, this is a gigantic setback, but those people play the metagame, and just had the equivalent of their cherished Titan blown up. A big setback, but nothing game ending, and indeed, the fact that something like this can happen is exactly why those intense, high level metagamers play it.
If BoB makes it back from this, it will be a truly impressive feat. I'm highly sceptical, but it would be amazing. Good luck.
And this is different from the Democrats how?
And this is different from the Republican party how?
1. You misread my admittedly complex grammar. I said that Java isn't a threat, as [it's] an independent technology.
2. Sun's process of open sourcing Java was exactly for the purpose of vetting all the code and ensuring that they had the licensing rights to open source it. The biggest holdup was the audio drivers, which had been licensed from a third party that didn't want to release them or sell them, so Sun had to do a clean implementation.
It's not just that MS might come after you. It's that Mono, being an OSS implementation of .NET, would appear to be uniquely vulnerable to being crushed by MS if the beast deems it to be too great a threat, in a way that Java isn't as an independent technology. One obvious argument MS could make is that there's .NET technology inside of Mono. Large companies avoid risks like this by very carefully vetting their engineers to be pure--to have had no contact with the competitor's technology. Mono isn't nearly organized enough for that as an OSS project.
And it's not that MS would have be right, but there's just one strategy they could use to torpedo the whole OSS .NET stack with legal fees.
I don't think it's that great a risk, personally, but given MS's predatory behaviour in the past, it's not an unreasonable fear.
No, QT is a library. It provides (very good) APIs to C++ programmers to do most of the really onerous crap that C++ developers are tired of doing, and are doing in a hundred different ways already.
There was a famous story about Sun and IBM that got aired a lot during the MS antitrust trial. It goes like this:
One day, a bunch of IBM patent lawyers show up at Sun's headquarters, saying that Sun is infringing on patents A, B, C, etc. They demand a hefty license fee. Sun engineers (remember, it started as a company of engineers) sit down in a boardroom with the lawyers, look at the patents, and are surprised--they're for various obvious things like mathematically adding a variable stroke to a line, and such. The engineers walk the lawyers through their own patents, explaining how they're all obvious and wouldn't stand up in a court of law. The lawyers remain silent until they're done. Then the chief lawyer says "Perhaps you're right. But after one big court case dragging on for years, we'd just come back with another set of patents and repeat the whole process. Eventually we'd find something that you'd infringed on, and then you'd have to pay damages rather than a licensing fee."
Sun signs a cross-licensing agreement with IBM the next day.
That's the worry. It's not that Microsoft has patents that can allow it to launch SCO 2.0 with a better hope of success. It's the worry that, if they decide to snuff out Mono, they can launch a legal crusade to so encumber Mono in litigation and FUD that it dies an ignominious death. Then all that effort is wasted, OSS and Linux get a bad name in the process, and a lot of developers and customers are soured on Mono, Linux, and anything that doesn't come from a Fortune 500 company. This is why Novell signing a patent cross-licensing agreement caused such bad blood--it implies that MS does have patents that are or could be infringed. On the fateful day that MS decides to crush Mono, Novell's agreement strengthens MS's case, if only in PR terms.
You can pay $25,000 to have Will Wright pee on you: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/5/27/
You're kind of missing the point. If our hypothetical journalist is caught crossing a border, the guards won't pull the hard drive and check the make, and then hook it up to their own gear to see if it's encrypted or not. They'll point their AKs at the journo and make him turn his laptop on. If he refuses, they shoot him. If it prompts for a password and he refuses to enter it, they shoot him. If he claims he forgot the password, they'll toss him and his laptop into the back of the truck to send him to the capital to receive 'enhanced interrogation'. No encryption software will save his life. The guards probably won't know or care about encryption.
If I were that journo, I'd encrypt the files themselves and rename them crash.dump and put them in the Windows directory so I can turn it on, let them scan for jpegs and avis and find nothing, and be sent on my way.
Seriously, who the fuck is doing this? It was mildly funny when it was actually Kirk Johnson; now it's just a warmed over crust of a joke, like saying "this is excellent news! for (Hillary|McCain)!" was after about August.
Why would the UK sign an extradition treaty that only goes one way? That seems dumb.
Why would the U.S. care about getting revenge on him? The nation wasn't humiliated--certainly not the people with the power to get him extradited.
I mean, does the idea of getting revenge for humiliation really make sense, considering the costs? And doesn't going through a legal circus just increase the apparent humiliation?
If I break into your apartment by picking the locks, and then watch you sleep all night while masturbating into a tissue that I brought (and take with me), I guess I haven't done anything wrong since I harmed no one and stole nothing.
Yes, someone who stood in the way of President Palin should definitely be classed an "unlawful combatant".
He's already signed an executive order closing the CIA's network of black prisons, and requiring them to not use "coercive interrogation methods" by adhering to the army field manual.
He also signed an executive order reversing an earlier Bush EO that withheld the release of material from the Reagan and HW Bush administrations, putting the White House back on the law Presidential Records Retention Act that requires everything to be saved for historians and made public.
That's change we can believe in.
Who ever said race wasn't a factor?
OTOH, black voters went 90% for Clinton, Gore, and Kerry. Obama went into it knowing he had that much of the black vote locked up just for being a Democrat. If you're trying to imply that the black vote came out for one of their own, you're only 5% right, assuming that those 5% weren't also impressed with someone who can speak in full sentences after eight years of Chimpy.
It was NOT done by a thermite cutter charge. Thermite leaves a globby mess. A neat cut like that is done with a welding torch, which is obviously what was used in the non-cropped version of the photo, taken days after 9/11 at least. It was chopped off like that to remove a chunk for removal.
You may read quite a bit, but did you read the official report? Do you read the people debunking the conspiracy theorists? If all you read are the 9/11 truthers, then all you're getting is a lot of tinfoil hat nonsense that reinforces itself by referring to other 9/11 truthers.
The picture is a cropped photo of the clean up crews at the site, showing a steel beam that looks like it was cut by a welding torch. This is unsurprising. The clean up crews had to remove vast amounts of debris, and used welding torches to cut beams into manageable chunks. The larger, uncropped photo shows firemen without protective gear on--this dates the photo to at least several days after the towers fell, because in the immediate aftermath the wreckage was too hot for guys in t-shirts to walk on it.
The beam is obviously not melted by thermite because it's a relatively clean cut. Thermite makes a big, globby mess. And even talking about thermite or demo charges or anything else put in place to bring down the towers begs a huge question: How did crews manage to wire the building for demo in the days before 9/11 without anyone who worked there noticing a lot of guys in coveralls, and wires running everywhere? That's a huge job. 50,000 people worked in the towers every day and night. It's crazy to think that it was even possible to discretely plant demo charges without anyone noticing either the work or the modifications and wires.
As I mention below, CBS duplicated Oswald's shooting with multiple shooters using the same rifle, and all hit with at least two shots. This was broadcast on national TV with a young Dan Rather next to the guys on the tower.
But let's walk through it a bit. 5-8 seconds for three shots, meaning shot 1 is at time 0, shot 2 is at 2.5-4 seconds, and shot 3 is 5-8 seconds. The Carcano rifle takes about a second to cycle the bolt (the 2.3 seconds bit is horseshit repeated by conspiracy theorists--Marina Oswald testified that Lee spent months practicing working the bolt in their living room); so that leaves 1.5-3 seconds to aim and pull the trigger. It's easy to get off three shots in 5-8 seconds with reasonable accuracy at a nearby target, especially since the Carcano Oswald used had iron sights on it.
I'm not even going to touch your 9/11 delusions.
I'll repeat that CBS news reproduced Oswald's shooting easily with multiple shooters using the same rifle, all of whom hit the target with at least two shots, and did it all on TV. The range was trivial for anyone with military training in basic marksmanship--it was less than a hundred yards, the range at which they start training you.
There seems to be a basic problem here: You're very familiar with conspiracy theorists picking apart the official story. How much do you read the people debunking them, and then compare it and judge for yourself?
Maybe you didn't check out what his policies are, but I did, and so did everyone else I know. I saw lots of good debate on his policy papers. If what you're complaining about is that he was elected by a bunch of people who don't know what his policies are, I challenge you to point to any other president not similarly elected.