As I read all the comments on this topic I have to wonder,"Who cares about privacy in an economic environment?" We all want the best prices so, arguably, it's in our best interest to give up privacy so that the corporate entities can anticipate our demands an meet them in a timely and cost effective manner.
I'm going to start this thought train with two basic points: > Privacy is a real concept and it is important. > Nobody has anything to hide.
The first point is necessary for any of this to be relevant at all. If privacy wasn't a real concept or wasn't important then it wouldn't be an issue. The second point is necessary to keep the thought train on a logical course. We can debate all day long who wants to be shy, or modest, or keep the ball gag in the closet. We can debate all day long about people hiding from ex-fiancees, or ex-lovers, or even family members. We can debate all day people who are paranoid and hiding from stalkers. We can debate all day about people who watch their neighbors like potential felons, just waiting for them to make a mistake. So let's just say that we live in a perfect little white-picket fence society with a 1.5 car garage and 2.4 children per household.
Why is privacy important?
Humans, just like any other highly evolved animal and probably even plants, set themselves up into social tiers. There is a pecking order to human society. Society is embodied by the constant struggle of those who wish to advance vs. those who wish to have cheap servants. In this struggle it is necessary to always stay one step ahead of the competition.
Modern day society is no different. There are the multibillionaires who make up 10% of the population and they, directly or indirectly, control the flow of greater than 90% of the finances. If those with the most power and control get together and decide that the general public needs to be pacified, Enron and Xerox get tanked. If they decide that Martha Stewart has stood on her podium long enough then she ends up in jail. If they decide that the trailer parks are becoming restless they'll allow Kid Rock and Eminem to achieve stardom.
Forget the stories. Don't believe the hype. Quit taking television and newspapers as gospel, innocent truth. There is always an ulterior motive and that motive is money.
Once again, then, why is privacy important? Privacy is important because by giving up our privacy we are _NOT_ gaining the best prices. We are _NOT_ gaining better service. What we are gaining is the _ILLUSION_ of better prices and services.
Take the often debated (and really quite silly) grocery store discount cards. My cashier regularly tells me that "You could've saved $1.35 today", or "that would've been an extra $0.75 off" if I would sign up for the card. Why should I be bothered that much by that little bit of money? This isn't about privacy. This is about total cost of services. How much more are prices going to go up to implement the database and tracking systems? How much are my taxes going up because the legislators needed another 6 secretaries to handle the paperwork for writing the laws to govern the privacy of these discount cards? How much are my car, home, health, and life insurance premiums going up because some attorneys got together and decided to use the laws, written by the overpaid politicians with 6 new secretaries, to sue some poor Joe's Fine Food's store for sharing his customer list with Mike's Hardware?
When I talk of conserving privacy it's not really about the privacy at all. It's about the lie that comes with the illusion that giving up privacy guarantees me a better life. It doesn't. Giving up privacy only gives other systems the excuse to charge more.
----- because consumers don't care ----- Consumers care about privacy but what can they do? This isn't a game of choosing a different local supermarket because all of the shippers and distributors are tied to the same company. This isn't a game of choosing a different banking institution because they're all tied to the same insurance companies and stock traders. This isn't a game of choosing a different credit card provider because they're all tied to the same three credit reporting agencies.
----- And consumers don't care because they expect the government to protect them from everything ----- I agree with this marginally. There is an overwhelming vocal minority, who also happen to be extraordinarily wealthy, who will browbeat the remaining population with "think of the children", or "what if your neighbor is a stalker", or "we need to keep track of you for your own protection". Half the voting is indirectly rigged by the enormous influence of purchasing power in media time so the vocal, powerful minority can easily skirt their issues into office. The rest of us can do approximately what about this?
----- If people wake up, realize that they need to make decisions rather than legislating everything and criticizing "evil big business" ----- The overwhelming vocal, powerful minority which controls the politics also controls the largest business transactions. Once again, the rest of us can do approximately what about this? Consumers are kept in a bondage, of sorts, by a tax rate which ensures that the largest percentage of the population is just barely making their bill payments each month with only a trifle left for a paltry savings.
----- maybe businesses would actually have an opportunity to improve the bottom line by improving privacy standards ----- Maybe, or maybe not. Businesses are, for the most part, immune from any real impact of wrongdoing. Certainly, now and again, there's a token poster child who gets a large privacy settlement. Once in a while there's a token scapegoat company which gets ransacked. These are little more than a gambling casino methodology. The goal of the overwhelming, vocal, powerful controlling minority is to hand out just enough to keep most of the public pacified and keep the debt strings wrapped tightly around the necks of the remainder.
Slavery is alive and well. It's not that we don't care, it's because we would drive ourselves crazy if we did care because there's nothing we can do about it. Year after year the political dog and pony show goes on and the consumers are always the paying loser.
From what I've seen ownership never becomes a problem until large amounts of money become involved or until one group attempts to sandbag another group based upon their ownership. Since this is the open source community, most commonly under the GPL license, there is no worry about this sandbagging unless someone attempts to take a fork and make it commercial.
Is this where the need for a paper trail comes in? Suppose someone takes the kernel and starts their own independent development on it. Hypothetically, in five years, they could rewrite or replace over 50% of the kernel with their own code. From what I understand the GPL license requires that any code that it becomes part of must also be GPL. If the total code package is several million lines, however, who is going to pay to subpoena the source code for a commerical product to prove that it was indeed started from a GPL/open source project? Who will pay to have the code audited and what prevents a potentially unscrupulous commerical entity from playing mix and match with subroutines so carefully that the resulting audit would take more time to arrange properly that to actually audit the lines one by one?
I suppose, in this case, the paper trail wouldn't make a darn bit of difference. The paper trail isn't going to make it any easier to subpoena source code from a commercial entity if they're stonewalling.
Enter my tin-foil argument that Windows9x/2x is nothing more than badly mangled Linux and a customized window manager built with a crytpically designed compiler--but no one ever gets to see the source code so they'll never be able to prove it.
Writing random passwords has always been my personal policy. The password must be a mix of upper and lower case letters with at least 2 numeric digits and a length of at least 6. I try never to have the numbers next to each other but this happens on occasion.
The trick is then to remember the passwords. My own personal systems at home have root and at least two users with login, ftp, and samba passwords for each. There are also e-mail passwords,/. password, various internet service passwords, and passwords for websites. At work I have at least five passwords directly related to work and another dozen or so which log on to websites for work-specific information. With so many alphanumeric passwords the memory task is a large load for even someone with a super-human memory.
My personal system has been to give in to the necessity of writing all of the passwords down. Cleartext passwords would defeat the purpose of the complex passwords so I keep an encryption algorithm in my head. I have four or five encryption algorithms in my head that I use. Which algorithm is used for any particular password is usually noted using a cryptic set of symbols next to the u/p combination on the paper. Thinking ahead reveals that a dedicated stalker might be able to cross reference the encryption algorithms as they're noted on the paper (much like cross-referencing databases of cookies which "do not store personally identifiable information") so I also have a store of null symbols which I scatter over the pages. I have also briefly experimented with letting the meaning of the symbols change relative to their page position but this has caused a fault more than once.
Needless to say such a complicated system is not foolproof. At least a dozen times I've found that the encryption algorithm in my head doesn't correctly translate the information on the page. Usually I find that I'm "one-off" in either the translation or the algorithm used. Fortunately I have never permanently locked myself out of an account. It usually takes a day or two of trying different combinations before I get the "eureka!" and enter the correct combination.
The tin-foil in my hat still nags me that all of this effort is wasted, though, since the NSA has secretly contracted with all manufacturers to install hardware keyloggers on every keyboard manufactured since 1995. They access the 1mb keyboard cache using backdoors, built into all computer BIOS chips since 1995, similar to the superuser backdoors built into Cisco equipment.
----- It is a last ditched defense when all other treatments have failed and only used to prevent someone from killing themselves ----- It's a discipline mechanism. Nothing more. The goal is to discipline the recipient with "don't even think about trying that."
----- Many cures are worse than the disease but "general feeling of dizziness, disorientation, and haziness" are better then death at your own hand due to a chemical imbalance ----- A critical eye will show that doctors will always find what they're looking for. Women involved with abusive husbands have "chemical imbalance." Children in abusive homes have "chemical imbalance." Rather than recommending a theoretical electrical discipline perhaps the suicide rate is a wake-up call to look at the environment that's causing the problem a little bit deeper than,"We asked the husband and he claimed that everything was perfect at home except for his wife's paranoia and depression."
----- It is also on the verge of being replaved by transcranial magnetic induction, a far more percises treatment ----- They sure can come up with just about anything nowadays, can't they? We have, at best, vague theories about which part of the brain contribute to behaviors and most of those theories involve delicately slicing away and ignoring the influence of the other neurological systems and how they interact with signals from the rest of the body and here you are already promoting a more precise treatment.
----- Remeber ECT is like unpluging the power supply or casuing a cold short on the BIOS ----- This might be true if human beings had a default POST state. Human beings don't, though. The human brain and body are more like a computer which has been running, never turned off, reset, or rebooted, for the last $AGE years. ECT is more like moving/bin to/usr/sbin,/var/log to/etc/sysconfig,/etc/rc.d/init.d to/etc/rc1.d,/root/bin to/sbin,/usr/src to/usr/local/share/doc, and then hoping that the brain can go back and figure out if it can find what it needs.
----- ot at all. I simply abhor any form of extremist thinking. ----- Yet you will defend psychologists, who will say things similar to "The proof that he was lying is evidenced by his insistence that he's telling the truth."
It's easy to talk about the frog as having felt no pain because it was sedated but pain is a lot more than the instantaneous effect. Just as with any surgery the pain persists long after the administration. There is cellular damage which results in tissue atrophy, muscle cramping, and a generalized secondary immune response to clean up the resulting mess. There is also the lingering headaches due to neurochemical imbalance and the general feeling of dizziness, disorientation, and haziness which comes after the procedure and can linger on for weeks.
Of course you would believe they feel no pain because they're sedated. You want to believe in a magical high-voltage cureall.
But many people find it to be a good treatment for depression
That's my point. The patients that agree do so out of fear of readministration. The doctors that agree do so because they believe their patients or they don't dare discredit their own work. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, or a self-perpetuating lie... however you like to view it.
Your posted links are dubious at best. A link to "freeessays.cc"? How about a link to "healthyplace.com", where the linked article is in a depression community? Of course there's an underlying motive to promote positive results. no one's going to antagonize the depressed community by discrediting a potential treatment. And lastly a link to the Royal College of Psychiatrists which shows a press release of all things. No organization in their right mind would publish anything bad about themselves.
Enough with the one-sided links. Do you have anything objective to justify your superiority?
----- you sound EXACTLY like a Scientologist ----- The fact that you associate a comment which I made based upon a real news article opens up some interesting considerations about the state of your mind. Do you actively hate scientologists? Are they your personal scapegoat? Do you find that you make jokes or remarks about scientologists more than twice a week? Have you lost contact with someone whom you loved after they became involved with scientologists?
BTW, I think scientologists are just as extreme as psychologists and psychiatrists. Both groups think they're always right, both groups will continually mind-fsck you until you conform, and both groups wear blinders to shield themselves from other possibilities. The only difference is that one group is subsidized with taxpayer money, is publicly recognized, is a formal profession, and publishes international journals.
----- What really pisses people off though is that electroshock therapy is the best last defense against suicidal depression. ----- It's a manifestation of a statistical correlation. Most people who are considering suicide will talk about it especially if they're in a hospitalized setting where they're being constantly interviewed and watched. In this setting they're also more likely to receive electroshock therapy. After electroshock therapy the patient is essentially of the mindset,"Holy F^#$ that HURT! I'd better not think like that again, act like that, or at least not talk about it again." Electroshock therapy doesn't cure the source of the depression (being locked up and watched like a caged animal in some psych ward or being taunted mercilessly by family members), it only encourages a behavioral change.
There are two types of discipline: violent and nonviolent. Electroshock therapy is a violent form.
----- He thinks "crazy russion software developers" are trying to kill him ----- He's exaggerating to emphasize his current position you insensitive clod.
----- When I ask him how this is all possible he either has no answer or an absolutly jaw-dropping response ----- Most common users can't tell you which worm or virus it is that's causing their IE to segfault every 10 minutes. Does this mean that anti-virus authors (producing the jaw-dropping bare kernel level code explanations) are paranoid schizoids?
----- "Dude, get back on your medication". ----- You don't understand your friend and so you use the "medication" route to assert your superiority.
----- Any ideas? ----- Quit feeling as if you have the authority to run your friend's life?
Be careful about reading the books that the parent suggested. If you become obsessed with helping your sister then you may only serve to feed the environmental problems which are causing her frustration.
Psychologists suck as evidenced by quotes from this article in The Sun (Baltimore, Maryland, page 7A) (21-May-2004)
HELD 6 YEARS WITHOUT CHARGES
"Nobody told us", official says.
A 45-year-old man remains locked up in a state hospital even though the charges against him were dropped six years ago. When [he] protested and insisted that he should be released from his locked ward because the charges no longer existed, state mental health officials concluded he was delusional. The proof of his insanity, they said, was his repeated insistence that the charges had been dropped. [Attorneys] with the Disability Law Center said they discovered [the man's] plight when they were doing a review of other cases. Noting that he had been confined for a long period, they began to look into the details of his case. "When I heard about it, I though well, I'll just go and check it out," [the attorney] said, but when she got to the facility a cocial worker called her aside and offered a friendly warning. "You shouldn't listen to him," the social worker told [the attorney]. "He's delusional." In fact, [the attorney] said, every single thing that [the man] told her turned out to be true. "He was telling the truth the whole time," said [the attorney],"But no one believed him." Though he has slurred speech because of [previous head injuries], [the attorney] said [the man] was "perfectly lucid."
-----
Just goes to show. Once the head-shrinks get their hands on you, for any reason, claiming to be normal is proof of your insanity and reason for them to hang on.
Hmmmm... good point. ISPs could offer the "unlimited e-mail" account but that wouldn't stop spam. All of the spammers would sign up for the unlimited e-mail accounts.
If the feds really wanted to stop spam they'd have three agents ordering products identified from spam and tracking down the company through the credit card billing or the shipping trail. Order the stuff overnight from FedEx and then backtrack it to the original warehouse. Once at the warehouse serve a subpoena to find who the stocker/provider was. Anything short of this approach (including the CANSPAM Act) is just a dog and pony show.
----- If it got rid of spam, I wouldn't be opposed to paying $0.01 or even $0.001 per email. ----- Ideally I agree.
Practically we know that, once the door is opened to charging for e-mail, it'll only be a matter of time before we're paying $0.10/ea, or $0.40/ea. Once the system is in place to charge for something then the people who profit will ratchet up the price as far as possible.
Consider that most people send far less than 10 e-mails/day, as you pointed out. Let's take a theoretical number, probably still a high estimate, of one hundred e-mails per month. If the charge were five cents each most people would see an increase of $5.00/month to their cable bill. That's less than the tax amount. Most people wouldn't even blink an eye. Next year it's $7.00, the year after it's $10.00, and people still aren't batting an eye. After a few years the system becomes like telephone lines used to be: plans are offered which give X e-mails per month with a charge of Y for each e-mail afterwards.
It'd be a twenty year cycle before we got back to the point where we are today: a plan with unlimited e-mail figured in to the overall cost of the service. By that time, the cost of the service will have doubled past what it really needs to be. No one would know any better, though, because 20 years is long enough for a new generating to be cycling through school.
----- The house of cards that is big business finance is starting to topple (e.g. Enron, WorldCom) ----- Don't get your hopes up. A few sacrificial lambs have been killed on the alter of justice but, for the greatest part, the corporate executives and money managers are still very much in control.
Let's look at my most recent favorite example: The oil industry. The oil industry is not directly representative of everything else but an industry which has trillions of dollars of multinational interest ever year has got to be at least a decent benchmark. Look at the price of oil. The price of oil, per barrel, today is about the same as what it was back in '91. CNN-HN, a few nights ago, ran a blurb that said that it's just now starting to approach the '91 levels.
Now certainly the price of a barrel of oil isn't directly related to bread, or milk, or donuts, or televisions, or even gas, but it's a multinational industry with trillions of dollars coming and go through it every year. If there's any real economic trend anywhere it should at least show up in the price of oil.
So what am I trying to say? The biggest players working in the largest industries have been paying LESS (per barrel) for their biggest investments like every poor schmoe like you and I has been nailed with 6-8% inflation on our biggest investments per year since '91.
Think, the bare cost of living doesn't rise nearly as quickly as income. Toilet paper costs the same, dishes cost (over a 20 year lifespan) about the same, water, electricity, sandwich bags, cheese... they all cost about the same if you're making $50k or $50mil. What differs is that the people making $50mil can take the extra cash and invest in something like a barrel of oil, which they're paying the same for today as they were 12 years ago. They can then trade that one barrel of oil for some product which has been increasing in price at a rate of 6%/year over the last 12 years. The hitch is in having enough extra cash lying around to be able to afford enough barrels of oil that you can barter them for suitable items of increasing profit.
So don't think the big business finance house of cards is anywhere near tumbling. They've been milking us for twelve years while their greatest source of inccome has actually been cheaper.
The clued users who know what they're doing are okay. The clueless users will have a vanilla system which may get infected but are, generally, okay. The half-clue users who think they have a full clue are certainly obnoxios and dangerous.
There's another class of users that I've come across lately: former Mac users. In the sense of their general ability to use a computer they can be like the clued users (pretty savvy) or the clueless users (don't know, don't care, can do enough to get the job done). In the sense of their ability to _maintain_ a computer and choose proper software, however, these people are as bad as the half-clue users.
Take my new manager. He's a former Mac user. He's accustomed to having the Mac world spoonfeed him with everything that he needs. He's accustomed to the operating system taking care of all management tasks for him. He doesn't know the different between good software and bad software with an important sounding name. Whenever we need a piece of software for a task he'll go back to some old pedant and get a suggestion for a piece of software written by a virtuoso on some estate in the middle of a Californian vinyard. Ihe Mac world this was okay. The Mac world was full of snobby virtuoso's living in vinyards and they generally did have the best handle on which software to use with their Mac. I feel like knocking his head in and saying,"Hello, Dr. Self-Important Ex-Mac user... WE'RE NOT IN THE MAC WORLD ANYMORE!" Generally, following the Mac trend for choosing Windows software ends up with several hundred installed pieces of crippleware, a mangled registry, and lots of broken apps that aren't maintained with the regularity that's necessary to keep up-to-date on the Windows platform.
Essentially, having an ex-Mac user as a manager is forcing me, a clued user, to function like a half-clue user. I end up being told to install every nifty little app because "that's what we need to do the job." If I ever suggest a different app, perhaps one that's better maintained or better focused, he immediately runs back to his private group of ex-Mac using Ph.D.s to use their collective opinion to override anything that I may have to say about functionality.
Me: "We really don't want to use that software. The functions are clumsy, it has a poor layout, and it won't integrate well with the other systems that we're trying to put into place." Dr. Mgr: "Well, I talked with Dr. So-and-so, and so-and-so, who's an expert with 15 years of experience, and so-and-so that teaches at such-and-such University, and Dr. So-and-so who works at Such-and-such, Inc. and has been doing this kind of work for 30 years, and they all agreed that _MY_ choice is a good tool."
----- a) a way to generate an updater CD to re-apply all windows update patches currently installed on your PC (for when you wipe) ----- Three reasons why this won't happen: 1>There'd be no reason to sell expensive drive imaging software. 2>The people who make drive imaging software would sue them for infrignement of patents. 3>I think Windows is far too entangled with itself to be able to circumvent the imaging route by generating a differential CD.
If you could save the security update patches to a separate folder at download time this may be possible. I've noticed this is becoming more and more difficult to do. It's almost like they're DRM'ing their update patches. Under Win98 I can still save mediaplayer and iexplore install.zips as I download them but there's no such option left on the Win2k/Me machines that I've used. Even going to the Windows website many of the click-links no longer offer to download a file but rather go straight to a download and install requester.
----- For years now they have been haranging anyone who listen that JBOSS is the best Application Server in the known universe, this despite substantial evidence that some of their critical systems were well below standard. ----- This approach has worked for other companies.
Can you think of any in particular?
The truth is irrelevant. Marketing is all that matters.
The author of the article is a troll. He actually owns a ranch house on a 10 acre plot in some sheltered subdivision. He doesn't even have neighbors within broadcast distance of his WiFi AP. Wardrivers would be lucky to get in the front get of his community and even luckier if they could get a signal from the curb. The author of the article is sitting back in his perfect little world and just waiting to see some poor backwoods hick and 16-year old get propped up on the news trying to use this defense to cover for file sharing in court.
I can't say that I advocate what this guy's doing. I honestly hope that every single ISP in his area blacklists him just for being a dumba__. However, I really don't see that this will be a problem for him. Unlike many of the reactionary personalities on internet message boards I don't look at every one of my neighbors as potential child molesters, credit card thieves, spammers, stalkers, or virus writers. I don't ph33r the bumper sticker laden VW crusing down the block with an antenna. To sum it all up: I don't buy the hype.
Still, though, the author (Micah Joel) is just a flaming dumbass. Next you'll see him writing articles about how he walks around town buck-naked because he's so "secure".
----- Looking further, OS/2 was the only viable alternative ----- Except that MS pushed the release date of Win95 forward by 6 months and shipped a buggy beta release to the public specifically to beat the next release of OS/2 to market. MS correctly knew that once people had spent $100 on a graphical OS for their computer, no matter how buggy it was, they weren't going to shell out another $150 to try something else, even if it was better. It was cold economic sabotage. Due to the EULA MS had no responsibility to ensure that its product was fit for distribution. As long as it was stable for at least 30 mins. and could play a few video games it would be good enough for the public.
Was it a genius marketing effort to put together the hardware vendors, the software makers, and the distributors to get everything out the door, into the stores, and on the shelves ahead of OS/2? Yes. It was also irresponsible as anything else I've ever seen to get the public hooked on such a flawed product. The responsibility part is neither here nor there: the bottom line is MS made the move to ensure their monopoly and now they're rich and OS/2 is a footnote.
----- get 1 out of 500,000 ----- I do not believe in the statistical sales fallacy. The numbers look plausible on paper. In practice I do not believe that it actually works. Even if it were true, the $4.5k/mo. doesn't account for production or operating cost. What does it cost to run the equipment necessary to produce 450 bottles of pills per month? Shouldn't it be easy enough to track the spammers by going to the source of the product? Shouldn't the product be regulated by the FDA or at least tracked through DOT mandated shipping manifests? I can't even order a box of castille bath soap without having a DOT shipping manifest taped to the side.
----- I somehow think that the few 'spam kings' are just also involved in other shady business ----- I feel that the other shady business has to do with the process of setting up the business and then crashing it, getting the taxpayer backed small business loan on the front end, collecting what little profit there is on the way, the business insurance on the way out, and the tax writeoff at the end of the year.
Not so different from the way many.coms came and went.
----- At any rate, it is still no reason for believing the majority of cases is fraudulant. ----- I think there's every reason to believe that the majority of cases were and are fraudulant. Enron wasn't a special case. Enron was an example of the trend. The only reason why Enron, Xerox, and Tyco saw the courtroom is because they were the first sacrificial lambs to be caught and offered up to appease a public which had lost their life savings. There were enormous legal teams that were put together to try and get those cases straightened out. This is also why the majority of companies in the aftermath were allowed to restate earnings. The governmental legal systems knew that there was no way that they could afford to mount any sort of offensive against the industry which, as a whole, had been running a money scam from the word "Go". It was all swept under the rug with restated earnings and a few corporate mergers which allowed the largest corporations to rewrite the books and shred the old ones.
And I still believe that spam houses run on the same business model. They're set up to give the illusion of doing something legitimate long enough to cook the books, harvest the cash, leave the employees in the dirt and move on to the next scam.
If anyone could do it I think it would be all too incriminating to draw a map of investment brokers, loan sharks, venture capitalists, and major shareholders who invested in.coms (and spam outlets) over and over again. I believe that one could find that the same people ran the same scam with slightly different sales lines over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again as long as they could find a new set of grass roots investors who would be taken in by the pitch.
I dunno. So not only do spammers have routers and servers and high tech network setups, but they also have hot plastic injection molding equipment in their basement?
How many different manufacturers of plastic pill bottles can there be? Don't any of them own patents on the plastic pill bottle manufacturing process? Shouldn't it be easy enough to track down the spammers based upon the product that they're selling?
This is the same reason why I don't believe in all the newspaper stories which say "Rural farmer caught making 30 kilos of XTC in his basement!" Sure, it's easy enough to get hands on the base chemicals necessary, but suddenly Joe Farmer is a compounding chemist and has the technical knowledge and equipment necessary to extract and purify 30 kilos of XTC and compound it into the pill and tablet form? Sure... sometimes XTC and/or crystal meth may be sold in powder bags like cocaine, but back to spam pills...
Are they selling this stuff in powder baggies? How tough would it be for the Feds to order a bottle of pills and bust the operation within a week? The shipping manifests are traceable. If the shipping manifests aren't proper then the spammer is in for big trouble with the DOT as well.
----- but here if there is some serious reason to believe thigns are fraudulant ----- This is where the MBAs come in. They wrote the business proposal on the up and up. The company functioned on the up and up for so many years. Sales/output wasn't as expected on the up and up, and the company goes bankrupt on the up and up. There's no reason to suspect anything fraudulent. Even if there were all the paperwork is filled out on the up and up. It'd be nearly impossible to prove anything in court. The former employees are too busy finding new jobs. The major shareholders are happy with the insurance settlement. The minor shareholders are typically distanced from the company by two or three layers of investment brokers and can't afford to mount any cohesive legal investigation.
Of all the companies which artificially inflated accounting ledgers through the 90s how many have seen a courtroom? Enron? Xerox? Tyco? A dozen other did nothing more than restate earnings and they're in the clear.
Sure the laws are written to be ideal but, in reality, nobody cares. The paperwork flows, the orders come down from the top, the top gets rich, and the rest of us look for jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
As I read all the comments on this topic I have to wonder,"Who cares about privacy in an economic environment?" We all want the best prices so, arguably, it's in our best interest to give up privacy so that the corporate entities can anticipate our demands an meet them in a timely and cost effective manner.
I'm going to start this thought train with two basic points:
> Privacy is a real concept and it is important.
> Nobody has anything to hide.
The first point is necessary for any of this to be relevant at all. If privacy wasn't a real concept or wasn't important then it wouldn't be an issue. The second point is necessary to keep the thought train on a logical course. We can debate all day long who wants to be shy, or modest, or keep the ball gag in the closet. We can debate all day long about people hiding from ex-fiancees, or ex-lovers, or even family members. We can debate all day people who are paranoid and hiding from stalkers. We can debate all day about people who watch their neighbors like potential felons, just waiting for them to make a mistake. So let's just say that we live in a perfect little white-picket fence society with a 1.5 car garage and 2.4 children per household.
Why is privacy important?
Humans, just like any other highly evolved animal and probably even plants, set themselves up into social tiers. There is a pecking order to human society. Society is embodied by the constant struggle of those who wish to advance vs. those who wish to have cheap servants. In this struggle it is necessary to always stay one step ahead of the competition.
Modern day society is no different. There are the multibillionaires who make up 10% of the population and they, directly or indirectly, control the flow of greater than 90% of the finances. If those with the most power and control get together and decide that the general public needs to be pacified, Enron and Xerox get tanked. If they decide that Martha Stewart has stood on her podium long enough then she ends up in jail. If they decide that the trailer parks are becoming restless they'll allow Kid Rock and Eminem to achieve stardom.
Forget the stories. Don't believe the hype. Quit taking television and newspapers as gospel, innocent truth. There is always an ulterior motive and that motive is money.
Once again, then, why is privacy important? Privacy is important because by giving up our privacy we are _NOT_ gaining the best prices. We are _NOT_ gaining better service. What we are gaining is the _ILLUSION_ of better prices and services.
Take the often debated (and really quite silly) grocery store discount cards. My cashier regularly tells me that "You could've saved $1.35 today", or "that would've been an extra $0.75 off" if I would sign up for the card. Why should I be bothered that much by that little bit of money? This isn't about privacy. This is about total cost of services. How much more are prices going to go up to implement the database and tracking systems? How much are my taxes going up because the legislators needed another 6 secretaries to handle the paperwork for writing the laws to govern the privacy of these discount cards? How much are my car, home, health, and life insurance premiums going up because some attorneys got together and decided to use the laws, written by the overpaid politicians with 6 new secretaries, to sue some poor Joe's Fine Food's store for sharing his customer list with Mike's Hardware?
When I talk of conserving privacy it's not really about the privacy at all. It's about the lie that comes with the illusion that giving up privacy guarantees me a better life. It doesn't. Giving up privacy only gives other systems the excuse to charge more.
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because consumers don't care
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Consumers care about privacy but what can they do? This isn't a game of choosing a different local supermarket because all of the shippers and distributors are tied to the same company. This isn't a game of choosing a different banking institution because they're all tied to the same insurance companies and stock traders. This isn't a game of choosing a different credit card provider because they're all tied to the same three credit reporting agencies.
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And consumers don't care because they expect the government to protect them from everything
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I agree with this marginally. There is an overwhelming vocal minority, who also happen to be extraordinarily wealthy, who will browbeat the remaining population with "think of the children", or "what if your neighbor is a stalker", or "we need to keep track of you for your own protection". Half the voting is indirectly rigged by the enormous influence of purchasing power in media time so the vocal, powerful minority can easily skirt their issues into office. The rest of us can do approximately what about this?
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If people wake up, realize that they need to make decisions rather than legislating everything and criticizing "evil big business"
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The overwhelming vocal, powerful minority which controls the politics also controls the largest business transactions. Once again, the rest of us can do approximately what about this? Consumers are kept in a bondage, of sorts, by a tax rate which ensures that the largest percentage of the population is just barely making their bill payments each month with only a trifle left for a paltry savings.
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maybe businesses would actually have an opportunity to improve the bottom line by improving privacy standards
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Maybe, or maybe not. Businesses are, for the most part, immune from any real impact of wrongdoing. Certainly, now and again, there's a token poster child who gets a large privacy settlement. Once in a while there's a token scapegoat company which gets ransacked. These are little more than a gambling casino methodology. The goal of the overwhelming, vocal, powerful controlling minority is to hand out just enough to keep most of the public pacified and keep the debt strings wrapped tightly around the necks of the remainder.
Slavery is alive and well. It's not that we don't care, it's because we would drive ourselves crazy if we did care because there's nothing we can do about it. Year after year the political dog and pony show goes on and the consumers are always the paying loser.
From what I've seen ownership never becomes a problem until large amounts of money become involved or until one group attempts to sandbag another group based upon their ownership. Since this is the open source community, most commonly under the GPL license, there is no worry about this sandbagging unless someone attempts to take a fork and make it commercial.
Is this where the need for a paper trail comes in? Suppose someone takes the kernel and starts their own independent development on it. Hypothetically, in five years, they could rewrite or replace over 50% of the kernel with their own code. From what I understand the GPL license requires that any code that it becomes part of must also be GPL. If the total code package is several million lines, however, who is going to pay to subpoena the source code for a commerical product to prove that it was indeed started from a GPL/open source project? Who will pay to have the code audited and what prevents a potentially unscrupulous commerical entity from playing mix and match with subroutines so carefully that the resulting audit would take more time to arrange properly that to actually audit the lines one by one?
I suppose, in this case, the paper trail wouldn't make a darn bit of difference. The paper trail isn't going to make it any easier to subpoena source code from a commercial entity if they're stonewalling.
Enter my tin-foil argument that Windows9x/2x is nothing more than badly mangled Linux and a customized window manager built with a crytpically designed compiler--but no one ever gets to see the source code so they'll never be able to prove it.
My default is to give you the benefit of the doubt. My better judgement is to think,"liar."
consider the following four passwords
gHi6uq2
b89soViK
p7cHt2mVg
its8pq2bN
Try to come up with four mnemonics that will accomodate all of these including capitalization.
No chance.
Eventually, in the future, password crackers will learn to write algorithms which can check mnemonics almost as easily as checking the dictionary.
Writing random passwords has always been my personal policy. The password must be a mix of upper and lower case letters with at least 2 numeric digits and a length of at least 6. I try never to have the numbers next to each other but this happens on occasion.
/. password, various internet service passwords, and passwords for websites. At work I have at least five passwords directly related to work and another dozen or so which log on to websites for work-specific information. With so many alphanumeric passwords the memory task is a large load for even someone with a super-human memory.
The trick is then to remember the passwords. My own personal systems at home have root and at least two users with login, ftp, and samba passwords for each. There are also e-mail passwords,
My personal system has been to give in to the necessity of writing all of the passwords down. Cleartext passwords would defeat the purpose of the complex passwords so I keep an encryption algorithm in my head. I have four or five encryption algorithms in my head that I use. Which algorithm is used for any particular password is usually noted using a cryptic set of symbols next to the u/p combination on the paper. Thinking ahead reveals that a dedicated stalker might be able to cross reference the encryption algorithms as they're noted on the paper (much like cross-referencing databases of cookies which "do not store personally identifiable information") so I also have a store of null symbols which I scatter over the pages. I have also briefly experimented with letting the meaning of the symbols change relative to their page position but this has caused a fault more than once.
Needless to say such a complicated system is not foolproof. At least a dozen times I've found that the encryption algorithm in my head doesn't correctly translate the information on the page. Usually I find that I'm "one-off" in either the translation or the algorithm used. Fortunately I have never permanently locked myself out of an account. It usually takes a day or two of trying different combinations before I get the "eureka!" and enter the correct combination.
The tin-foil in my hat still nags me that all of this effort is wasted, though, since the NSA has secretly contracted with all manufacturers to install hardware keyloggers on every keyboard manufactured since 1995. They access the 1mb keyboard cache using backdoors, built into all computer BIOS chips since 1995, similar to the superuser backdoors built into Cisco equipment.
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/bin to /usr/sbin, /var/log to /etc/sysconfig, /etc/rc.d/init.d to /etc/rc1.d, /root/bin to /sbin, /usr/src to /usr/local/share/doc, and then hoping that the brain can go back and figure out if it can find what it needs.
It is a last ditched defense when all other treatments have failed and only used to prevent someone from killing themselves
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It's a discipline mechanism. Nothing more. The goal is to discipline the recipient with "don't even think about trying that."
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Many cures are worse than the disease but "general feeling of dizziness, disorientation, and haziness" are better then death at your own hand due to a chemical imbalance
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A critical eye will show that doctors will always find what they're looking for. Women involved with abusive husbands have "chemical imbalance." Children in abusive homes have "chemical imbalance." Rather than recommending a theoretical electrical discipline perhaps the suicide rate is a wake-up call to look at the environment that's causing the problem a little bit deeper than,"We asked the husband and he claimed that everything was perfect at home except for his wife's paranoia and depression."
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It is also on the verge of being replaved by transcranial magnetic induction, a far more percises treatment
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They sure can come up with just about anything nowadays, can't they? We have, at best, vague theories about which part of the brain contribute to behaviors and most of those theories involve delicately slicing away and ignoring the influence of the other neurological systems and how they interact with signals from the rest of the body and here you are already promoting a more precise treatment.
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Remeber ECT is like unpluging the power supply or casuing a cold short on the BIOS
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This might be true if human beings had a default POST state. Human beings don't, though. The human brain and body are more like a computer which has been running, never turned off, reset, or rebooted, for the last $AGE years. ECT is more like moving
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ot at all. I simply abhor any form of extremist thinking.
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Yet you will defend psychologists, who will say things similar to "The proof that he was lying is evidenced by his insistence that he's telling the truth."
I can see _I'M_ the crazy one here.
I don't think you've ever been through it.
It's easy to talk about the frog as having felt no pain because it was sedated but pain is a lot more than the instantaneous effect. Just as with any surgery the pain persists long after the administration. There is cellular damage which results in tissue atrophy, muscle cramping, and a generalized secondary immune response to clean up the resulting mess. There is also the lingering headaches due to neurochemical imbalance and the general feeling of dizziness, disorientation, and haziness which comes after the procedure and can linger on for weeks.
Of course you would believe they feel no pain because they're sedated. You want to believe in a magical high-voltage cureall.
But many people find it to be a good treatment for depression
That's my point. The patients that agree do so out of fear of readministration. The doctors that agree do so because they believe their patients or they don't dare discredit their own work. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, or a self-perpetuating lie... however you like to view it.
Your posted links are dubious at best. A link to "freeessays.cc"? How about a link to "healthyplace.com", where the linked article is in a depression community? Of course there's an underlying motive to promote positive results. no one's going to antagonize the depressed community by discrediting a potential treatment. And lastly a link to the Royal College of Psychiatrists which shows a press release of all things. No organization in their right mind would publish anything bad about themselves.
Enough with the one-sided links. Do you have anything objective to justify your superiority?
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you sound EXACTLY like a Scientologist
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The fact that you associate a comment which I made based upon a real news article opens up some interesting considerations about the state of your mind. Do you actively hate scientologists? Are they your personal scapegoat? Do you find that you make jokes or remarks about scientologists more than twice a week? Have you lost contact with someone whom you loved after they became involved with scientologists?
BTW, I think scientologists are just as extreme as psychologists and psychiatrists. Both groups think they're always right, both groups will continually mind-fsck you until you conform, and both groups wear blinders to shield themselves from other possibilities. The only difference is that one group is subsidized with taxpayer money, is publicly recognized, is a formal profession, and publishes international journals.
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What really pisses people off though is that electroshock therapy is the best last defense against suicidal depression.
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It's a manifestation of a statistical correlation. Most people who are considering suicide will talk about it especially if they're in a hospitalized setting where they're being constantly interviewed and watched. In this setting they're also more likely to receive electroshock therapy. After electroshock therapy the patient is essentially of the mindset,"Holy F^#$ that HURT! I'd better not think like that again, act like that, or at least not talk about it again." Electroshock therapy doesn't cure the source of the depression (being locked up and watched like a caged animal in some psych ward or being taunted mercilessly by family members), it only encourages a behavioral change.
There are two types of discipline: violent and nonviolent. Electroshock therapy is a violent form.
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He thinks "crazy russion software developers" are trying to kill him
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He's exaggerating to emphasize his current position you insensitive clod.
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When I ask him how this is all possible he either has no answer or an absolutly jaw-dropping response
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Most common users can't tell you which worm or virus it is that's causing their IE to segfault every 10 minutes. Does this mean that anti-virus authors (producing the jaw-dropping bare kernel level code explanations) are paranoid schizoids?
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"Dude, get back on your medication".
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You don't understand your friend and so you use the "medication" route to assert your superiority.
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Any ideas?
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Quit feeling as if you have the authority to run your friend's life?
Be careful about reading the books that the parent suggested. If you become obsessed with helping your sister then you may only serve to feed the environmental problems which are causing her frustration.
Psychologists suck as evidenced by quotes from this article in The Sun (Baltimore, Maryland, page 7A) (21-May-2004)
HELD 6 YEARS WITHOUT CHARGES
"Nobody told us", official says.
A 45-year-old man remains locked up in a state hospital even though the charges against him were dropped six years ago.
When [he] protested and insisted that he should be released from his locked ward because the charges no longer existed, state mental health officials concluded he was delusional. The proof of his insanity, they said, was his repeated insistence that the charges had been dropped.
[Attorneys] with the Disability Law Center said they discovered [the man's] plight when they were doing a review of other cases. Noting that he had been confined for a long period, they began to look into the details of his case.
"When I heard about it, I though well, I'll just go and check it out," [the attorney] said, but when she got to the facility a cocial worker called her aside and offered a friendly warning.
"You shouldn't listen to him," the social worker told [the attorney]. "He's delusional."
In fact, [the attorney] said, every single thing that [the man] told her turned out to be true.
"He was telling the truth the whole time," said [the attorney],"But no one believed him." Though he has slurred speech because of [previous head injuries], [the attorney] said [the man] was "perfectly lucid."
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Just goes to show. Once the head-shrinks get their hands on you, for any reason, claiming to be normal is proof of your insanity and reason for them to hang on.
Hmmmm... good point. ISPs could offer the "unlimited e-mail" account but that wouldn't stop spam. All of the spammers would sign up for the unlimited e-mail accounts.
If the feds really wanted to stop spam they'd have three agents ordering products identified from spam and tracking down the company through the credit card billing or the shipping trail. Order the stuff overnight from FedEx and then backtrack it to the original warehouse. Once at the warehouse serve a subpoena to find who the stocker/provider was. Anything short of this approach (including the CANSPAM Act) is just a dog and pony show.
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If it got rid of spam, I wouldn't be opposed to paying $0.01 or even $0.001 per email.
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Ideally I agree.
Practically we know that, once the door is opened to charging for e-mail, it'll only be a matter of time before we're paying $0.10/ea, or $0.40/ea. Once the system is in place to charge for something then the people who profit will ratchet up the price as far as possible.
Consider that most people send far less than 10 e-mails/day, as you pointed out. Let's take a theoretical number, probably still a high estimate, of one hundred e-mails per month. If the charge were five cents each most people would see an increase of $5.00/month to their cable bill. That's less than the tax amount. Most people wouldn't even blink an eye. Next year it's $7.00, the year after it's $10.00, and people still aren't batting an eye. After a few years the system becomes like telephone lines used to be: plans are offered which give X e-mails per month with a charge of Y for each e-mail afterwards.
It'd be a twenty year cycle before we got back to the point where we are today: a plan with unlimited e-mail figured in to the overall cost of the service. By that time, the cost of the service will have doubled past what it really needs to be. No one would know any better, though, because 20 years is long enough for a new generating to be cycling through school.
Just like telephone service.
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The house of cards that is big business finance is starting to topple (e.g. Enron, WorldCom)
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Don't get your hopes up. A few sacrificial lambs have been killed on the alter of justice but, for the greatest part, the corporate executives and money managers are still very much in control.
Let's look at my most recent favorite example: The oil industry. The oil industry is not directly representative of everything else but an industry which has trillions of dollars of multinational interest ever year has got to be at least a decent benchmark. Look at the price of oil. The price of oil, per barrel, today is about the same as what it was back in '91. CNN-HN, a few nights ago, ran a blurb that said that it's just now starting to approach the '91 levels.
Now certainly the price of a barrel of oil isn't directly related to bread, or milk, or donuts, or televisions, or even gas, but it's a multinational industry with trillions of dollars coming and go through it every year. If there's any real economic trend anywhere it should at least show up in the price of oil.
So what am I trying to say? The biggest players working in the largest industries have been paying LESS (per barrel) for their biggest investments like every poor schmoe like you and I has been nailed with 6-8% inflation on our biggest investments per year since '91.
Think, the bare cost of living doesn't rise nearly as quickly as income. Toilet paper costs the same, dishes cost (over a 20 year lifespan) about the same, water, electricity, sandwich bags, cheese... they all cost about the same if you're making $50k or $50mil. What differs is that the people making $50mil can take the extra cash and invest in something like a barrel of oil, which they're paying the same for today as they were 12 years ago. They can then trade that one barrel of oil for some product which has been increasing in price at a rate of 6%/year over the last 12 years. The hitch is in having enough extra cash lying around to be able to afford enough barrels of oil that you can barter them for suitable items of increasing profit.
So don't think the big business finance house of cards is anywhere near tumbling. They've been milking us for twelve years while their greatest source of inccome has actually been cheaper.
The clued users who know what they're doing are okay.
The clueless users will have a vanilla system which may get infected but are, generally, okay.
The half-clue users who think they have a full clue are certainly obnoxios and dangerous.
There's another class of users that I've come across lately: former Mac users. In the sense of their general ability to use a computer they can be like the clued users (pretty savvy) or the clueless users (don't know, don't care, can do enough to get the job done). In the sense of their ability to _maintain_ a computer and choose proper software, however, these people are as bad as the half-clue users.
Take my new manager. He's a former Mac user. He's accustomed to having the Mac world spoonfeed him with everything that he needs. He's accustomed to the operating system taking care of all management tasks for him. He doesn't know the different between good software and bad software with an important sounding name. Whenever we need a piece of software for a task he'll go back to some old pedant and get a suggestion for a piece of software written by a virtuoso on some estate in the middle of a Californian vinyard. Ihe Mac world this was okay. The Mac world was full of snobby virtuoso's living in vinyards and they generally did have the best handle on which software to use with their Mac. I feel like knocking his head in and saying,"Hello, Dr. Self-Important Ex-Mac user... WE'RE NOT IN THE MAC WORLD ANYMORE!" Generally, following the Mac trend for choosing Windows software ends up with several hundred installed pieces of crippleware, a mangled registry, and lots of broken apps that aren't maintained with the regularity that's necessary to keep up-to-date on the Windows platform.
Essentially, having an ex-Mac user as a manager is forcing me, a clued user, to function like a half-clue user. I end up being told to install every nifty little app because "that's what we need to do the job." If I ever suggest a different app, perhaps one that's better maintained or better focused, he immediately runs back to his private group of ex-Mac using Ph.D.s to use their collective opinion to override anything that I may have to say about functionality.
Me: "We really don't want to use that software. The functions are clumsy, it has a poor layout, and it won't integrate well with the other systems that we're trying to put into place."
Dr. Mgr: "Well, I talked with Dr. So-and-so, and so-and-so, who's an expert with 15 years of experience, and so-and-so that teaches at such-and-such University, and Dr. So-and-so who works at Such-and-such, Inc. and has been doing this kind of work for 30 years, and they all agreed that _MY_ choice is a good tool."
I could strangle his ex-Mac using neck.
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.zips as I download them but there's no such option left on the Win2k/Me machines that I've used. Even going to the Windows website many of the click-links no longer offer to download a file but rather go straight to a download and install requester.
a) a way to generate an updater CD to re-apply all windows update patches currently installed on your PC (for when you wipe)
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Three reasons why this won't happen:
1>There'd be no reason to sell expensive drive imaging software.
2>The people who make drive imaging software would sue them for infrignement of patents.
3>I think Windows is far too entangled with itself to be able to circumvent the imaging route by generating a differential CD.
If you could save the security update patches to a separate folder at download time this may be possible. I've noticed this is becoming more and more difficult to do. It's almost like they're DRM'ing their update patches. Under Win98 I can still save mediaplayer and iexplore install
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For years now they have been haranging anyone who listen that JBOSS is the best Application Server in the known universe, this despite substantial evidence that some of their critical systems were well below standard.
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This approach has worked for other companies.
Can you think of any in particular?
The truth is irrelevant. Marketing is all that matters.
The author of the article is a troll. He actually owns a ranch house on a 10 acre plot in some sheltered subdivision. He doesn't even have neighbors within broadcast distance of his WiFi AP. Wardrivers would be lucky to get in the front get of his community and even luckier if they could get a signal from the curb. The author of the article is sitting back in his perfect little world and just waiting to see some poor backwoods hick and 16-year old get propped up on the news trying to use this defense to cover for file sharing in court.
I can't say that I advocate what this guy's doing. I honestly hope that every single ISP in his area blacklists him just for being a dumba__. However, I really don't see that this will be a problem for him. Unlike many of the reactionary personalities on internet message boards I don't look at every one of my neighbors as potential child molesters, credit card thieves, spammers, stalkers, or virus writers. I don't ph33r the bumper sticker laden VW crusing down the block with an antenna. To sum it all up: I don't buy the hype.
Still, though, the author (Micah Joel) is just a flaming dumbass. Next you'll see him writing articles about how he walks around town buck-naked because he's so "secure".
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Looking further, OS/2 was the only viable alternative
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Except that MS pushed the release date of Win95 forward by 6 months and shipped a buggy beta release to the public specifically to beat the next release of OS/2 to market. MS correctly knew that once people had spent $100 on a graphical OS for their computer, no matter how buggy it was, they weren't going to shell out another $150 to try something else, even if it was better. It was cold economic sabotage. Due to the EULA MS had no responsibility to ensure that its product was fit for distribution. As long as it was stable for at least 30 mins. and could play a few video games it would be good enough for the public.
Was it a genius marketing effort to put together the hardware vendors, the software makers, and the distributors to get everything out the door, into the stores, and on the shelves ahead of OS/2? Yes. It was also irresponsible as anything else I've ever seen to get the public hooked on such a flawed product. The responsibility part is neither here nor there: the bottom line is MS made the move to ensure their monopoly and now they're rich and OS/2 is a footnote.
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.coms came and went.
get 1 out of 500,000
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I do not believe in the statistical sales fallacy. The numbers look plausible on paper. In practice I do not believe that it actually works. Even if it were true, the $4.5k/mo. doesn't account for production or operating cost. What does it cost to run the equipment necessary to produce 450 bottles of pills per month? Shouldn't it be easy enough to track the spammers by going to the source of the product? Shouldn't the product be regulated by the FDA or at least tracked through DOT mandated shipping manifests? I can't even order a box of castille bath soap without having a DOT shipping manifest taped to the side.
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I somehow think that the few 'spam kings' are just also involved in other shady business
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I feel that the other shady business has to do with the process of setting up the business and then crashing it, getting the taxpayer backed small business loan on the front end, collecting what little profit there is on the way, the business insurance on the way out, and the tax writeoff at the end of the year.
Not so different from the way many
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.coms (and spam outlets) over and over again. I believe that one could find that the same people ran the same scam with slightly different sales lines over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again as long as they could find a new set of grass roots investors who would be taken in by the pitch.
At any rate, it is still no reason for believing the majority of cases is fraudulant.
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I think there's every reason to believe that the majority of cases were and are fraudulant. Enron wasn't a special case. Enron was an example of the trend. The only reason why Enron, Xerox, and Tyco saw the courtroom is because they were the first sacrificial lambs to be caught and offered up to appease a public which had lost their life savings. There were enormous legal teams that were put together to try and get those cases straightened out. This is also why the majority of companies in the aftermath were allowed to restate earnings. The governmental legal systems knew that there was no way that they could afford to mount any sort of offensive against the industry which, as a whole, had been running a money scam from the word "Go". It was all swept under the rug with restated earnings and a few corporate mergers which allowed the largest corporations to rewrite the books and shred the old ones.
And I still believe that spam houses run on the same business model. They're set up to give the illusion of doing something legitimate long enough to cook the books, harvest the cash, leave the employees in the dirt and move on to the next scam.
If anyone could do it I think it would be all too incriminating to draw a map of investment brokers, loan sharks, venture capitalists, and major shareholders who invested in
I dunno. So not only do spammers have routers and servers and high tech network setups, but they also have hot plastic injection molding equipment in their basement?
How many different manufacturers of plastic pill bottles can there be? Don't any of them own patents on the plastic pill bottle manufacturing process? Shouldn't it be easy enough to track down the spammers based upon the product that they're selling?
This is the same reason why I don't believe in all the newspaper stories which say "Rural farmer caught making 30 kilos of XTC in his basement!" Sure, it's easy enough to get hands on the base chemicals necessary, but suddenly Joe Farmer is a compounding chemist and has the technical knowledge and equipment necessary to extract and purify 30 kilos of XTC and compound it into the pill and tablet form? Sure... sometimes XTC and/or crystal meth may be sold in powder bags like cocaine, but back to spam pills...
Are they selling this stuff in powder baggies? How tough would it be for the Feds to order a bottle of pills and bust the operation within a week? The shipping manifests are traceable. If the shipping manifests aren't proper then the spammer is in for big trouble with the DOT as well.
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but here if there is some serious reason to believe thigns are fraudulant
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This is where the MBAs come in. They wrote the business proposal on the up and up. The company functioned on the up and up for so many years. Sales/output wasn't as expected on the up and up, and the company goes bankrupt on the up and up. There's no reason to suspect anything fraudulent. Even if there were all the paperwork is filled out on the up and up. It'd be nearly impossible to prove anything in court. The former employees are too busy finding new jobs. The major shareholders are happy with the insurance settlement. The minor shareholders are typically distanced from the company by two or three layers of investment brokers and can't afford to mount any cohesive legal investigation.
Of all the companies which artificially inflated accounting ledgers through the 90s how many have seen a courtroom? Enron? Xerox? Tyco? A dozen other did nothing more than restate earnings and they're in the clear.
Sure the laws are written to be ideal but, in reality, nobody cares. The paperwork flows, the orders come down from the top, the top gets rich, and the rest of us look for jobs.