As Ford told Woodward last year: "I think that Nixon felt I was about the only person he could really trust on the Hill." Said Ford: "I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma."
Woodward follows by noting that "that acknowledgment represents a significant shift from Ford's previous portrayals of the pardon that absolved Nixon of any Watergate-related crimes."
Except that it still doesn't address Al Haig's "conversation" with Ford. The fix was in and Nixon got off. Now presidential pardons are used to free co-conspirators; secret wars continue and the population of this Nation (all but the upper 5%) is screwed.
Ford will lie in state while Saddam swings. A major blowup in Iraq is anticipated - with good cause - and Bush's escalation of the Iraq war will seem only a response to increased sectarian violence.
All of this contempt for the Constitution can be traced to Nixon and his ability to avoid the legal consequences of his actions. We impeached Clinton for lying, under oath, about having sex with Monica. I supported that action and the outcome - we have to have our chief executives held to their oaths.
By that standard, "W" is long past due for impeachment. The problem is that the Republicans controlled both houses and were too busy robbing the country blind to give a tinker's damn about the sad state of the majority of taxpayers.
We paid dearly for Ronnie's deficit & GHWB's S&L scandal... we may never drag ourselves out from under the burden of the Bush tax cut and the Bush Wars - all thanks to Ford paving the way through that damned pardon of Nixon.
The cutoff age to join the US military is now 49 years - so, all of you/.'ers who think Bush is doing just fine - drop by the local recruiter's office and signup today. You can post from Iraq.
Poland had nothing to do with Iran-Contra. It was Lech Walesa at the Gdansk shipyards that made Poland stand out. There was nothing about Poland in the scandal.....
Indeed, the 1980 strikes at the Gdansk shipyards stand for exactly the opposite of both Socialism and Capitalism - human rights took center stage and Poland made massive changes because of Walesa.
We kill our social leaders (and, no - Squeeky Frome's assassination attempt doesn't count - why anybody would attempt to shoot Ford is beyond any reason - but she was a member of the Manson clan) e.g. MLK, Bobby Kennedy, JFK, Medgar Evers.
Not a one of these people made a mark on the Michigan congressman, Jerry Ford. A man who never sponsored meaningful (or, any) legislation in his position in the House. A man who was, by all accounts, a go-along, get-along member of the GOP who was selected to replace Spiro Agnew exactly because he was no threat to Nixon and was pliable as hell. At the time, Nixon says in his own memoir, he accepted Ford because, "there were no dead women or live boys" in his background.
A nice, pliable man who agreed to pardon a criminal President and had no interest in the 200,000 deaths in East Timor he tacitly authorized. A fine, shining example of the GOP's Real Politic....
Perhaps GWB is happy with the Johns Hopkins study that finds 640,000 excess civilian deaths in Iraq - making him three times the man Ford was.
Catholic nations are hardly "christian" for the Protestant US.
_____________
US Imperial power? See http://www.libsci.sc.edu/bob/class/clis734/webguid es/milbase.htm/ U.S. European Command, in Stuttgart-Vaihingen, Germany, is responsible for 13 million square miles in 89 countries and territories. This area of responsibility begins at the North Cape of Norway and extends through the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, through most of Europe and parts of the Middle East, to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. The Command's mission is to support and advance US interests and policies throughout the region and to provide combat ready land, maritime, and air forces to Allied Command Europe or to US Unified Commands.
Point out another country holding military bases covering 13 mega-miles in Europe, alone. You can't and there isn't any other country with the US power as demonstrated by our basing. Iraq has a base under construction that is larger than the Vatican - because we want control over Oil.... nothing else.
Sadam Hussein has less than 30 days to live - my question: does "W" have a fetish in the killing of people? Think back to the execution of Carla Fay Tucker - where "W" mocked her plea for mercy.
I think "W" is one sick puppy. Tell me you don't agree.
Congress makes the laws? OK - but Executive Orders are not made by Congress and we are all subject to massive "wiretap" thanks to an Executive Order.
President Reagan and his top aides ignored a 1982 law at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua. Ollie North & Admiral Poindexter were just the top of the "plausible deniability" pile of Executive Order weasels ignoring the Laws and Constitution by funding secret wars.
The war-making power is specifically vested with the Legislative Branch - unless the Executive chooses to ignore the Constitution. This seems to happen fairly often these days. That pack-o-lies UN WMD dog-and-pony show that executive branch bitch Colin Powell put on for "W" and Rummy only goes to show that the present Executive branch is too big for a Republic.
Where did any President after Nixon get the idea that the laws didn't apply to them? That Pardon Ford gave RMN. Then GHWB pardoned all the Iran-Contra figures.
Sorry, the center of the rot is in the Executive Office. Reality bites.
Nixon's pardon lead directly to George H.W. Bush as head of the CIA, laying the groundwork for the Iran-Contra war, Reagan's gross budget cuts leading to the second highest deficit in US history and a complete break with the social compact making the US a 1st world nation with a 3rd world population.
Close to 1/4 of the population of the US has no medical coverage. Chances are better than 50% that of those US Citizens who have medical coverage that a major illness or accident will still force them bankrupt due to "uncovered costs." The bankruptcy code has been changed to grossly favor creditors and a bankrupt individual will spend up to 5 years in a court-supervised plan to pay back creditors.
The Courts and laws of this nation have created a corporation-friendly / federalized system that grossly limits what we can do. The "class action fairness act" made it impossible for a national class action to rest where a person suffers a "small loss" - such as the telephone E-911 fee where MILLIONS of individuals lost about $112.00/yr to their telephone company. We recovered that one - but the laws now permit companies to steal hundreds of millions of dollars a nickel at a time and have almost no real concern for legal liability.
Big Military Contractors, Big Oil and Big Pharma are the top industrial moneymakers in the US (with financial "services" following close). By far the Military Contractors take more away from our economy than they inject and, at root, they will be our downfall.
The level of political sophistication of the general public has to be at the lowest level in our national history. There are no "civics" courses in high school and most citizens couldn't tell you what the tripartite government branches are, who is next in succession after the VP, the names of the Supreme Court Justices (and, who appointed them and how old they are - a hint - all of the younger ones are very, very far to the right).
We refight battles won in the Courts over and over again. The Scopes trial should have ended any of the Intelligent Design BS and that case was tried in 1925! ( see, http://tinyurl.com/u9d2q/ ) Two weeks ago the Supreme Court revisited affirmative action AGAIN. Twelve (12%) percent of the US population are direct descendants of slaves and, on the whole, Blacks die younger, have an 80% chance of spending time in prison, are paid less - usually much less - for the same work - and politicians still play the "race card" and IT STILL WORKS.
We are buried in two intractable wars with no real end in sight. We spend more on the military that all of the rest or the world does, combined. We are the world's largest weapons manufacturer and we sold the weapons to Iraq that are killing our troops today.
(**I'm so damn fed up with the press using the term "IED" - those "IEDs" are nothing but regular HE howitzer shells delivered to their targets without using the howitzer - we knew where ever single one was stored before we invaded - but we didn't do a damn thing to destroy the weapons caches and now we pay the price for the foolish decisions of the arrogant Bushies**)
Triangulation, single-issue voters and jingoism win elections at at time when vote-stealing is at at an all time high to boot. At least four governors have plead guilty to misdemeanors (that should have been charged as felonies and cost them their elected office); the 109th Congress will go down in history as one of the most corrupt since the Teapot Dome Scandal (and that was another Oil Industry scandal - 1922) under President Warren G. Harding.
The overall savings rate of US Citizens is NEGATIVE and we are ripe for a major economic downturn - possibly as bad as 1929 - perhaps worse. Take a look at the Katrina survivors and guess what plans are in place in the event of a major stock downturn: nothing.
The environment, the economy, our international standing, public health, political health and judicial health have all taken the back seat to the interests of the top 5% of the US population.
Thank you Mr. President Ford - the only unelected Executive in US history - you made all of this possible. Take your bow.
Imperialism. An interesting term. Can you name any other nation on the planet that has military bases within the borders of other sovereign nations? What do you call a nation that spends more money on its military than all other nations, combined? The US has the military might to invade almost any country on the planet - and we have used that power extensively.
What do you call our naval base on Cuba? The US is certainly not welcome there..... and you can find our bases spread across the planet - most arising from WWII, but the Philippines we conquered and "Christianized" at the turn of the last century (and, Puerto Rico, too). I'd call the US military presence across the planet an "imperial" act by an imperial government. If you have a better term for this I'd like to know what it is.
Tough decision to pardon Nixon? Hardly. The fix was in from the word go. If you read Ford's own memoir you can find a nice neat version of a conversation he had with general Alexander Haig about pardoning Nixon - well before the resignation. In the late 1970s, the Nation magazine published excerpts of Gerald Ford's memoirs in which he revealed that pardoning Richard Nixon was raised with him by Haig before Ford replaced Nixon in the White House. The Nation magazine faced a landmark lawsuit over copyright because it did not have the permission to print the early draft.
Turn to the staff and actions of Ford in office - and you will find Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Cheney & Wolfowitz - the roots of the "W" Presidency. Rummy just resigned in disgrace.
On December 6th, 1975 - Ford and Kissinger (then the US Secretary of State) met with President of Indonesia Suharto. The very next day, Suharto ordered the invasion of East Timor, a small country that had declared its independence from Portugal just days before the invasion. The Indonesian military occupation of East Timor has claimed the lives of at least 200,000 people, according to Amnesty International. That makes one third of the population -- the greatest genocide in per capita terms since the Holocaust.
FOIA requests have shown that Ford and Kissinger approved of the invasion and agreed to continue to supply arms to Suharto. On December 7, 1975 Ford made a speech condemning the Japanese for their attack on the US - and sent an "emergency" letter to Suharto by diplomatic pouch. At the time the Ford Administration represented that communiqué as a direct response to Suharto's invasion. FOIA responses show that the pouch held only golf balls. Google: National Security Archives and read it for yourself.
Ford put George H.W. Bush in charge of the CIA.
This goes on, and on and on....
I stand by the proposition that the man lived the good life at the expense of hundreds of thousands of his fellow human's lives and laid the groundwork for the corrupt US Government that we face today.
Insofar as I am not a Christian I don't believe in Hell - however the sentiment is appropriate.
As much as I hated Tricky-Dick and Ford's Pardon (imagine the scope of that Presidential Pardon - all acts charged and uncharged - Ford cut off any investigation of Nixon, per se - but the Church Commission gave us some idea how out of hand the CIA was at THAT time) I know that Nixon was a very bright man. He argued and won a tough 1st Amendment case before the SCT and won. He was a sneaky son of a bitch given to using dirty tricks from the Helen Gahagan Douglas campaign forward. He opened the door to China and laid tens of thousands of servicemen in their graves with the campaign promise, "I have a secret plan to end the war" (at the time we joked that his plan was that he was going to vote for Humphrey).
Nixon: dishonest, dirty-trickster that he was - would not support GWB's imperialism. Nixon said: when the president does it it isn't against the law; W just does it and smirks. He knows we don't have enough votes to impeach him over the next two years.
And, yes, I agree with the poster that observed that we can thank Gerald Ford for the past 25 years of political connivance because Dick Nixon evaded justice. Impeaching a president and indicting him under the criminal statutes is a duty that every president undertakes when he takes the Oath of Office - too uphold, protect & defend the Constitution. Ford was selected because he would pardon Nixon and to hell with the Constitution.
GWB has certainly followed Ford's contempt for the Constitution - every day and in every way "W" finds new ways to destroy this nation - at home and abroad - and the direct line of responsibility runs right to Ford's pardon.
If I were a Christian, I'd agree that the SOB should rot in hell. As it stands, Ford lead the good life for nine decades because he was a pliable pol.
35897kb *.002$=$71.794 but morons that they be it should have been 35897kb*.00002$=$0.71794
0.002 and 0.00002 - Calling Prof. John Allen Paulos: the Verizon morons are Innumerate!
This use of Youtube is great!!!! Just give us the idiots' telephone numbers so that we can call them and tell them to please let us have $0.002 of every paycheck, please.
I buy the CD for anything I deem worth the best sound reproduction my system(s) can produce (I also buy Vinyl - with the MFSL Master of Madeleine Peyroux's Careless Love my most recent vinyl acquisition).
As it happened, I had never heard Peyroux (she is fantastic and appears to channel Billie Holiday on a couple of cuts) until she was showcased on Bill Shapiro's Cypress Avenue show on NPR. I bought the iTunes copy the same day.
After a week, I bought the CD.
Within a month I bought the MFSL Master on Vinyl.
I know what I like. I know what I can hear. Do you? Here is a test: audio geeks try this at home - lightly rub yout thumb and forefinger together - it makes a "whispery whisking" sound and is an effective test for high-end hearing loss. The trick is to have somebody do this from behind you -starting an inch or so behind an ear. You can't see - but if you hear then the test goes on - alternating ears and distance - you can have a pretty good approximation of your hearing acuity if you can hear the whisper 5 inches (12.5 cm) away from your ear(s).
If you can't hear it - forget about fidelity - you can't tell with your instruments (ears).
As for me - I'll give my stereos and speakers the best rating and for portable I think my 1st Gen iPod Shuffle (1Gig) with Apple Lossless encoding and Etymotic ER-6 or B&O Form 2 'phones come as close as any portable ever will (the ER-6's sound better than the B&O but they are a pain to properly seat; require frequent replacement of soiled components; and, are uncomfortable for long sessions - but the sound and isolation are worth the trouble).
We would rather kill our people than pay to precipitate Hg. Mercury enters the food chain by becoming methylated through the actions of anaerobic bacteria in stream/river/lake bottoms. Those bacteria feed single and multicellular organisms and up the chain we go to fish and from there to humans by direct consumption of the fish or indirectly by application of fishmeal as a nitrogen source in fertilizers applied to crops - and the crops are either directly consumed or are fed to livestock where further bioconcentration occurs.
Consider Spinach - it readily makes use of +1 & +2 metals - Ferro groups usually, but methylated HG is easily introduced into the plant's structure rather than Fe.
No technical error. NOx is a byproduct of Coal combustion and NOx isn't significant with simpler hydrocarbon fuels - remember, coal is a massive group of very long chain hydrocarbons such that it is a solid at room temp. The materials in "gasoline" are far shorther chain hydrocarbons and fairly uniform in composition. Control of combustion products is significantly easier to manage with simple fuels - as you point out.
Extracting H2 frm Coal is an energy-intensive process that, at present, cannot be accomplished without a net energy loss. Moreover, the Carbon will still be a byproduct of the reaction and, unless the process has some significant advances in sequestering Carbon, we are still screwed regarding the overall production of greenhouse gasses.
To name a few of the really, really serious biproducts of Coal usage. Hg precipitates out from exhaust at an alarming rate (*those states with coal-fired power plants all have massive Hg and CH2-Hg contamination: see, http://www.dnr.mo.gov/pubs/pub2100.pdf/ and, http://www.moenviron.org/airqualitymercury.asp/ for one central US state's Hg warnings). Sulphur fom coal burning is the primary source of H2SO4 in acid rain that has decimated the lakes in the Northeast US and etched limestone (Cleopatra's Needle http://members.aol.com/Sokamoto31/ny.htm/ has been in NYC since 1881 and the two sides facing the prevailing wind have been etched free of inscription (perfect on all four sides when it was put it into place) due to acid rain) building materials. Nitrates (NOx) are the secondary sources of acid (HNO3 Nitric Acid being the most common) and a product of incomplete combustion of coal. About 75% of the coal-fired power plants scrub NOx out of the exhaust - but there appear to be no small-scale scrubbers consistent with vehicle use.
Releasing more Carbon from the carbon sink is just one more addition to the ever-increasing load of greenhouse gasses on the planet.
Iron - in its various forms will "poison" any catalytic converter small enough to fit on a vehicle.
The cost of scrubbing or converting Coal into a cleaner-burning fuel is problematic and the energy used to scrub may well exceed the energy realized from the converted coal.
Or, perhaps Vista comes complete with a built-in Root Kit making any other malware unnecessary. It's a feature! Brought to you by Sony-Bertelsman and Microsoft . . .
Bill and his UCTIA/ UCC2B BS is *MORE* annoying than my constant crashes with Win-98.
I've long since gone all Mac OSX & *nix - just the one MS box left in the office.
Bill and Melinda found something that they are good at: giving away money.
I'm looking forward to being Microsoft-free in 2007.
I'm tempted to box up all of their software and original manuals that I have accumuated since 1982 and mail it back with a "shrink-wrap" license that I have returned all of my MS-licensed originals and request a formal waiver of liability from the unauthorized use of their licensed originals (just like the 'early" EULAs require).
I wonder if I can have a refund?
I think MS Bob was really the brains behind the company.....
"Genuine" my muscular buttocks - I have the original and receipt but I have the unauthorized nagware installed and nagging.
Bye, Bye Bill & Steve and Redmond. A long, misery-filled run (DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run...) is well past over...
If you have HP products and are on an automatic driver update list you can hit the "unsubscribe" in the last update email - and that will log you on associated with your product or products (making you a high-value feedback / validated customer) and then you can send "real" feedback through the Contact link. Select the CEO and select business suggestions from the pulldown menu (no - you can't give your own subject). If you don't have HP products you can send low-value feedback here http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/hurd/index .html/
I cancelled all of my subscriptions and in feedback said that the actions of the Chairwoman Patricia Dunn were inconsistent with the law and good business practice and that I was not going to purchase another HP product until there were significant changes in the board and HP's business practices. I also gave them my name, address, phone and fax of my law firm. I can be validated and want to be counted as one very outraged customer / shareholder.
I have divested myself of all HP stock (200 shares were given to me when I entered college 33 years ago) - but I also hold TIAA-CREF and other funds that do not allow me to elect the stock purchases / holdings. I have sent them letters asking that they express grave concern about HP's management.
Frankly, since the takeover I have been unhappy with the quality of the products and I have Laserjet 500s still doing solid work after nearly 20 years. The last HP printers I bought for the firm were 4100N's with the postscript option and three tray feeds. Nothing has been as solid as the older printers.
Send the company a major message that this kind of management stupidity will result in massive loss of business.
This is the time for the "Slashdot effect" to make a difference.
Well, we agree. You said hat ethics come from within - not from society.
In the US you are correct... In the Scandinavian countries I think that you will find that the social order is quite just and people like Jon Johannsen can, and do fit in. Marriage has declined.
You know far too little about the technology - Monitors and video cards could show far more detail than 256 colors to an 8 bit depth in 1993. Go lookup ATI's cards.... Then think about TIFF and JPEG - both in existance (along with GIF, PNG and dozens of others) - the image quality was just fine.
You have avoided dealing with the ethics of harm to many weighed against harm to a few. By any ethical system the harm to the greatest number should bring the strongest response. You simply dropped the ball on that one.
Answer the question: shouldn't economic criminals who harm milions suffer a vastly greater penalty than the criminal who harms only a few others?
Seattle is far, far from the nicest place I've lived. (And, you didn't mention I-5 - you must not attend UW or Pacific Lutheran - because you would be stuck in that traffic jam today.)
Anyplace that has weather reports that include "sunbreaks" leaves a bit to be desired, climate-wise.
Been to Toronto? Oslo? If clean streets are what you want then Singapore is your wet dream....but don't chew gum there.
Want a little real world experience:
Here is part of what I"ve been working on today:
6. EMPLOYER employed CLAIMANT as an over-the-road driver wherein Employer directed CLAIMANT to present himself at point "A" to collect a vehicle subject to a contract made between EMPLOYER and the holder of the commercial vehicle - for delivery of same at point "B". 7. CLAIMANT was directed to pick up the commercial vehicle at a specific time and place, was directed by EMPLOYER to deliver the commercial Vehicle to point "B" by a date and time certain. 8. EMPLOYER required CLAIMANT to provide daily reports of the progress of the transport - at or before noon central time, and required CLAIMANT to use EMPLOYER's COMDATA fuel credit card to obtain diesel fuel and, where no vendor would accept the EMPLOYER's fuel card, the CLAIMANT was required to pay for the fuel out of his own pocket - for which he was not reimbursed. 10. EMPLOYER required CLAIMANT to abide by all DOT regulations and CLAIMANT did keep and has kept the DOT logbook of his driving time for the entire time that CLAIMANT has been employed by EMPLOYER. Those records are available through CLAIMANT's COUNSEL 11. EMPLOYER paid for and did provide individual common carrier insurance for CLAIMANT and did require CLAIMANT to provide EMPLOYER with his DOT license and periodical DOT Medical Evaluations which, in turn, EMPLOYER provided to the Insurance Carrier and affirmatively represented CLAIMANT as an EMPLOYEE of EMPLOYER to obtain insurance coverage. 12. EMPLOYER has never paid FICA/FUTA or state, federal or local payroll taxes on CLAIMANT and has provided CLAIMANT with 1099 MISC forms alleging that CLAIMANT has earned (in the year 2005) nearly Seventy-Thousand ($70,000.00) dollars in gross wages - but EMPLOYER imputes the cost of fuel to the CLAMIANT as income when it is instead an "ordinary business expense" of EMPLOYER.
This client - a man in his 40's who has an Associate's Degree and 20 years as a Navy Corpsman, spent the last four (4) years being used by a company. He isn't stupid - but he actually earned only $3,200.00/yr WORKING 90-hour weeks 52 weeks a year! No overtime is available thanks to the Motor Carrier's Exception to the Fair Labor Standards Act - enacted during WWII and still on the books. - But the employer created a falsehood: they told the drivers tahtt hey were "independent contractors" and then padded the 1099 to shelter $60k per driver per year from tax. Meanwhile, the employer took the deduction for the fuel card fuel as an ordinary business expense and then took the deduction a second time by wrapping it into the 1099 "rep
I have really, really bad news for you. There is no "ethics" system out there. There are laws. Sometimes the laws work!
My first computer was a PDP 11 - my (private) highschool had one. I learned to program long before the ALTAIR came out. I ran Batch Jobs on the IBM 360 (FORTRAN coded keypunch on Hollerith cards.... don't drop your deck!) in my freshman year in college. I had a TRS -80 in 1976 and switched to the Apple II in 1977. Bought (and still own) a LISA and a 128k Mac shortly thereafter. I also had a few dedicated word processors like the WANG - I bought the IBM PC-XT the week it was released. 1200 Baud Hayes Modem, 10 Meg drive and 640k or RAM.... Don't assume that I don't know about computing or networks.
OH, you live in Seattle. Nice place. I spent a summer on Vashon Island and taught computer law / complex federal litigation at the UW School of Law in the summer of 1999. I like Kings County - but the County Courthouse is the pits. As far as "different" in Seattle - you are wrong. Look around - there are many people who are quite poor - and they are NOT Bill's neighbors on Lake Washington. Nope, they are shuttled into skid row around the Space Needle and out into the edges of town. By the way - I-5 sucks. Damn shame that you let the Mariner's stadium get imploded - at taxpayer's expense.
You seem to think that my client and I have some duty to rehabilitate a couple of young jerks. We don't.
You will shortly find out how nasty the workplace can be - and you will find out what a strong lawyer can do to assist you in that workplace.
Something that you simply haven't grasped yet is that the law is not like coding or science. The Law depends upon so many factors - tangible and intangible as well as real and imagined. The law with regards to these kids was what was known as a "case of first impression" and their actions were not that swift - they simply got root on one Sun Sparc server: after that they simply telnetted in and created hidden directories. They installed a copy of "Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks" a/k/a SATAN and they were little more than script kiddies except for the fact that they were fetching large volumes of data from other servers using my client's frame relay (and, they were saturating 1/4 - 1/2 of the available bandwidth - one reason that they were quickly identified).
Now, when a Frame Relay - at the time T-3 and upwards bandwidth - cobbled together out of SAVVIS and SPRINT backbone access was saturated by these two kids and clients had their data stolen or overwritten and had their bandwidth choked due to the illegal access these two had - well, the lost revenue amounted to more than $75,000/day in 1993!
We attempted to work with the parents. I've said that more than once. If I had wanted to be a prick I could just have sued them for my client. Instead - the parents were jerks: Really hostile and nasty jerks. They didn't like lawyers and they didn't want to hear that little Cartman & Stan could be getting into real trouble.
That was more warning than most litigants ever get.
SO, if I'm a hard ass - you are about to experience a very different world when you get out of school. Trust me - I'm a sweetheart when it comes to bright kids.
Let me ask you a little question: My first job out of law school involved a criminal prosecution of an ATF violation. A 13 year-old young black boy was arrested while acting as a guard at a Crack House. He had a "Street Sweeper" as the weapon he was to use to "protect" the "product" and the "profits." A Street Sweeper is a machine-gun shotgun developed in South Africa for killing Black people. (I find this ironic as hell.) The ATF SWAT team had no prior training with that special weapon and so the team leader asked the kid, "How do you unload it?" To which the young boy responded, "Easy. Pull the trigger and wait."
What would you do where a 13-year old has a shotgun machinegun and is ready to use it against anybody he is told to
These were sub-16 year olds and they knew exactly what they were doing. They offered bandwidh (stolen) and offered WAREZ at GIGABYTE volume (13 years ago when a 200 meg drive was $7,000) in their application to join the IRC group in cleartext, completE with their full names, addresses....
Will they put their names out there? Well, they should have been in college by 1997 - at the latest (perhaps their parents' college fund went to their defense attorneys?) and most colleges require some variation on your name for the school email system. By 2001-2 they might have entered graduate school... Still no names....
BUT, until and unless they petition the Court for a modification of the injunction - sonething that they ought to try - they are still barred. Yes, they may be slipping through the cracks - or, they may be in Iraq - or dead after serving in Iraq - or dead from other reasons (like a car accident).
They were too young to attend college - so your "solution" does not apply.
You are anti-government. You are a self admitted thief - your MP3 collection.
Where I stand - you have exactly "ZERO" ethical standing and your arguments are grossly self-serving - you want a way out of being held liable for your acts.
If I had a client that had a problem with you I'd drag you into court and through "discovery" expose your strange and unethical view of the law and how it applies to you.
You should step back from the Regan world where Governments are viewed as bad and start thinking for yourself. Look around - this very medium exists because of Government. If Governments are all bad - go off line and join the people living off the grid and on the land. I reccomend Alaska. That state tolerates all sorts of people who want to rugged individualists. Good luck.
For the rest of us - the Government is US. We decide what laws get passed and who is elected. If you and your ilk support criminals because they are just kids experimenting - well, that is the road to anarchy.
Anarchy didn't create the Internet. Anarchy didn't cure Polio and turn AIDS into a chronic, but still deadly disease.
Neo-Cons have created a pattern of criminality that says the boys at the top pay for nothing and the rest of us must serve them....if you get caught stealing where the RIAA is involved - you are toast, but if you "win" a no-bid contract from the boys in charge - you will not have to complete the contract - just take the money and run.
The US is a disaster, in no small part because of your values. Some things are simple: don't take things that aren't yours.
If we do away with governments and Anarchy becomes the norm - I'd expect that sooner or later somebody will get mad at you and you won't have the Courts and Government to turn to to resolve your dispute.
FWIW - what was the first city in the US to institute Gun Control? Dodge City, Kansas - more than 100 years ago. Why? Because guys off of the cattle drives tended to shoot up the town. The rule was check your guns at the city limits. Now Kansas has passed concealed-carry as well as put Intelligent Design loonies on their state school board (the battle continues) - Anarchy is on the way.....
Finally - I was 13 in the 1960's and I was marching against the War in Viet Nam, supporting George McGovern for president through my membership in the Hudson Independent Democrats (Just received a box of books from my 80 year-old mother that shows I was a poll watcher in the '72 election). I didn't smoke pot - I did obtain a 1st Radiotelephone License and my General Ticket as an amateur radio operator by the age of 16. I also learned how to fly on the Cessna $25/lesson program out of Teaneck, NJ. I went on to pass the NY Regents exam and entered Columbia at 17. I hold three Baccalaureate degrees - Biology, Chemistry and Art History (triple major) completed by age 20. I don't think that I was the slightest bit "unethical" as a 13 year old.
I am the son of a physician and an attorney. You can be
"Ethics Training?" What do you do, live in Wonderland with Alice?
The President and FEMA - nearly a year ago to the day - let thousands of people die when they had five (5) days notice that Katrina was headed into the Gulf. We have Tom Delay and Duke Cunningham as sterling examples of thieves in government (with Duke in the Stir and The Hammer soon to follow)....
Tell me where those "ethics training" courses are held? And don't tell me "Church" because All OF THE TOP LEADERS of the US Government vigorously claim that they are "true believers." And I haven't noticed a waive of ethics washing over the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. (Go see this: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0121051judge1 .html/ or this: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0928051delay1 .html/ and tell me all about the "ethics" of our leaders.
You can't teach what you don't know.
Turning to the porn issue: yeah, I'd agree most people want to see images close to their ages - from about 16 - 28; but, after they get older and flabby most people are interested in pictures of the hard bodies of 18-28 year olds. BUT, that wasn't the case here - this was material that was ILLEGAL TO POSSESS and that was the lure. The porn was for trading for other goods.
Now, you talk about training prodigies - in the traditions and ethics of the technology professions???! What are you talking about? Wiretapping was invented as soon as Bell had a network up (and the telegraph was constantly intercepted from the day that lines were strung where access could be had without a witness).
Are you perhaps talking about the traditions of the munitions-makers? Alfred Nobel, the inventor of a stable nitroglycerine (Dynamite), donated a vast fortune made from the deaths of untold thousands - to create the Nobel Prize in the fervent hope that he could atone for the misery and suffering that his invention brought to the victims - while making him rich....HE COULD HAVE STOPPED PRODUCTION - but didn't. Was that the tradition that you refer to?
As for the skills these kids brought, hmm, is a willingness to invade the private data and personal financial records of as many people as they could a skill that transfers well to modern society? How about trafficking in WAREZ? And, trafficking in illicit pornography? Yep, regular little "G-Men" - ready and willing to set to work for the Homeland Security wiretapping party.
As for Mom and Pop - well, they had a polite call from a polite attorney and they were just to damn stupid to bother to go look at little Cartman's computer. I know that my clients and I cost them a small fortune in attorney's fees. Damn shame that they didn't get to have their parental rights terminated and thrown in the slammer for the rest of their reproductive years.
Where do you think the botnet creators came from but idiotic parents who didn't monitor their kids. I'm still running my Copernic Searches for their names..... If you are one of the two guys, speak up - I know a nice prison or two.... For the record, I had an ISDN line in my home in 1993. The Well had a substantial presence as did Byte Magazine through the (mostly UNIX command line) community BIX - and it was dumped in 1993 when McGraw Hill sold it off.... There was a heck of a lot out there in 1993 - try looking at the WAYBACK MACHINE..... Finally, when you have been screwed a few more times by nasty little shits - you will adopt my "take no prisoners" viewpoint. OR, tell me how you will solve the SPAM problem with peace, love and understanding? Ball's in your court....
You seemed to miss the fact that the 8th amendment dosn't apply in this case (civil - not criminal - you are punished in a criminal case - you pay damages and may have injunctive relief in a civil case) and your argument that it does is unsupported by case law.
The use of telephones has been barred by the courts where the defendant uses the telephone to harass or threaten people. That happens all of the time. People are barred from driving for life after the 2nd or 3rd DUI. People obtain ex parte restraining orders banning all contact with certain people - Margaret Mary Ray the David Letterman Stalker is a perfect example.
Where felons are barred from voting, owning a weapon, obtaining a bond, working in the federal sector and many private sector positions - for life - what makes you think that a federal judge wouldn't give an injunction barring the Title 18 civil defenant from the Internet and computer use?
I still haven't heard a good reason from you that argues for a lesser civil remedy. Your arguments that ancillary computer use (timeclocks, etc) would breach the ban are inopposite: they don't apply. What the ban means is that the individual(s) responsible don't have the "personal" right to own or use a computer with Internet access - for the rest of their worthless lives (and, yes I would agree that this should not apply to a minor under 16). That doesn't mean that they can't work at McDonald's where the dummies behind the counter punch pictures of the food on the "computerized" cash register...
As for the 1993 case: the kids hacked the major ISP for Kansas City, Missouri - got Root and were kind enough to use their own names, phone numbers and addresses applying for rights with warez traders on IRC. They also had a nice collection of kiddie porn (*consider that it is never legal to possess the stuff - I had to obtain a Court Order to copy and transfer the images to the defense counsel to avoid liability attaching to my client and to me for transferring the evidence!*) cracked programs and had created a Trojan help screen that shuttled some users off to a "ssl" encrypted credit card verification page - snatched from the client's own server(s). They were detected within 48 hrs - but they did cause quite a bit of harm.
We tried to tell the parents - the parents didn't listen. The parents and the kids were sued - and the parents were charged with providing the teens with a dangerous instrumentality - a computer and Internet access. They were served Christmas week. I liked that. I liked that a lot - because I personally called each of the kid's parents and they all denied that their kid could be involved - without so much as a: "would you mind giving me your number and I'll call you back once I've talked with little Cartman & Kyle" - nope, they just acted like idiots and for their stupidity they received a 60+ page federal complaint. I would not doubt that each family paid more than $50,000.00 in defense fees before we settled. Sweet. I hope that it cost all of little Kyle & Cartman's college fund. (NO their names are not South Park names)
Do they have myspace pages? I doubt it. Why? I keep a Copernic search looking for their names and have had it updating the search weekly ever since Copernic came out.
Why do I want them toasted if they ever violate the settlement? Because one of the repositories of their porn was in a hidden directory under an account of mine: It's personal. I'd just as soon have gone medieval on their a**es and send over a couple of guys to work on the boys and their parents with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.
If anything, we are way to passive whhen dealing with the people who are intent on destroying the Internet. The fun and financial benefit from misuse of the Internet must be eliminated or we will be gone. Look at/. - how many email address filters and other types of protective code run along with the slash code just to stop the malware / hacks / harvesters? What is the % of wasted p
F**K the 8th amendment argument. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that "actual innocence" is no bar to execution given a procedurally proper trial and appeal. Clemency is the only escape. If you can be killed while innocent and not offend the "cruel and unusual" 8th Amendment bar you can certainly have a lesser criminal penalty. However, we are not talking about Criminal Sanctions - we are talking about a Civil Remedy - an injunction issued by the Federal Judge that is reparative in nature.
Turning to lifetime ban on access to computers and the Internet - I think it is well past time that we started excluding the bad actors from this community. I accomplished the same in the first action I brought in 1993. Two teens are barred from the Internet for life and when and if it ever comes out that they have accessed the internet again, I'll file a contempt action and have their worthless butts locked up - where they can dance with a large man named Bubba.
Felons, and make no mistake about it - if the Title 18 action is picked up by the US Attorney, the holder of that stolen laptop will be a felon - lose the right to vote, own a weapon, be bonded, hold most government jobs and a ton of private sector jobs.
Where you have a civil violation of Title 18 - injunctive relief can include an Order barring computer use and Internet access. Why would you (or, anybody) argue for a lesser punishment? The individual has demonstrated their inability to conform to the most rudimentary social norm - don't take things that aren't yours - so why not exclude them forever?
You don't NEED a computer to make a living in the US. You don't NEED Internet Access in order to make a living in the US: Bar the sucker. If it happens that s/he is an IT professional - even better - let them move to Canada or India where the US bar won't apply.
As for the rest of the potential business world - my heart bleeds, positively bleeds that the holder of that stolen laptop might have to spend his/her life explaining to their employers that they can't touch a computer or else they risk civil or criminal contempt charges. I've looked carefully at the employees associated with trash-trucks, ditch-diggers, Salmon trawlers, cannery workers, migrant farm workers and the like and I've noticed that they really don't make any use of a computer when they pick up my bagged trash and sling it into the back of the garbage truck (etc.). It's not so bad a punishment - they can live and think about their bad acts every day they live the hard physical life.
Exactly why are you so concerned about the scope of the remedy? I'd love to hear some good reason NOT to make it far, far worse...
If my laptop were stolen (a mac G4 al Powerbook) the thief would have to get past the login (18 characters) and/or beat Filevault - but assuming that somebody did steal the laptop and managed to gain access to the data then hundreds of my clients' private information would be compromised; if they could break the Keychain password(s) then they could have access to my bank accounts, retirement funds and credit card accounts - as well as my federal court login ID and Passwords to several of the circuits and to PACER (pay-for-access to all federal court filings that are open for access). What would be a proper punishment for the individual who compromised that list of sensitive data? In a civil suit I'd ask for millions; in a criminal prosecution I'd hope for life without parole and 30 days in the electric chair.
Conversion is a start. 18 U.S.C. 2510 et seq., the Electronic Communication Privacy Act; 18 U.S.C. 1030 et seq., the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as amended by the Counterfeit Access Device and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, specifically including 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(5)(B) would be a far better choice for a causes of action.
You get attorney's fees, compensatory damages and, there is a collateral criminal charge available. Once your attorney has nailed the defendant the U.S Attorney's office will have some oung turk who will come in and pick up a slam dunk for a notch in his/her belt.
Conversion is a common law action and it is a reasonable cause - but Trover would be a better action as it reaches the cognizable personal property (data) as well as the machine.
This is not a difficult cause to pursue. I've done it several times myself. My first was in 1993 and last was 2002. This is neither rocket science nor high-dollar litigation.
Act fast before the thief kills the script.
OH, don't forget to ask for injunctive relief - like a LIFETIME BAN ON INTERNET ACCESS.
It won't take very many lifetime bans before the cost of a stolen laptop gets around....
This business has come up time and again where opposing sides in a case are required to submit files that can be edited (as opposed to.PDF) to the Court or to the opposing side for joint submission to the Court. Idiots that leae the versions intact have lost more than a few cases that way.
I even heard a U.S. Magistrate Judge explain that MS Word files ALWAYS carried the prior versions along with the final version. For this information I received several hours of Continuing Legal Education credit...
Never underestimate the ability of a person to accidently give away information.
Slashdot Mirror
FROM TPM:
/.'ers who think Bush is doing just fine - drop by the local recruiter's office and signup today. You can post from Iraq.
As Ford told Woodward last year: "I think that Nixon felt I was about the only person he could really trust on the Hill." Said Ford: "I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma."
Woodward follows by noting that "that acknowledgment represents a significant shift from Ford's previous portrayals of the pardon that absolved Nixon of any Watergate-related crimes."
Except that it still doesn't address Al Haig's "conversation" with Ford. The fix was in and Nixon got off. Now presidential pardons are used to free co-conspirators; secret wars continue and the population of this Nation (all but the upper 5%) is screwed.
Ford will lie in state while Saddam swings. A major blowup in Iraq is anticipated - with good cause - and Bush's escalation of the Iraq war will seem only a response to increased sectarian violence.
All of this contempt for the Constitution can be traced to Nixon and his ability to avoid the legal consequences of his actions. We impeached Clinton for lying, under oath, about having sex with Monica. I supported that action and the outcome - we have to have our chief executives held to their oaths.
By that standard, "W" is long past due for impeachment. The problem is that the Republicans controlled both houses and were too busy robbing the country blind to give a tinker's damn about the sad state of the majority of taxpayers.
We paid dearly for Ronnie's deficit & GHWB's S&L scandal... we may never drag ourselves out from under the burden of the Bush tax cut and the Bush Wars - all thanks to Ford paving the way through that damned pardon of Nixon.
The cutoff age to join the US military is now 49 years - so, all of you
say, what?
Poland had nothing to do with Iran-Contra. It was Lech Walesa at the Gdansk shipyards that made Poland stand out. There was nothing about Poland in the scandal.....
Indeed, the 1980 strikes at the Gdansk shipyards stand for exactly the opposite of both Socialism and Capitalism - human rights took center stage and Poland made massive changes because of Walesa.
We kill our social leaders (and, no - Squeeky Frome's assassination attempt doesn't count - why anybody would attempt to shoot Ford is beyond any reason - but she was a member of the Manson clan) e.g. MLK, Bobby Kennedy, JFK, Medgar Evers.
Not a one of these people made a mark on the Michigan congressman, Jerry Ford. A man who never sponsored meaningful (or, any) legislation in his position in the House. A man who was, by all accounts, a go-along, get-along member of the GOP who was selected to replace Spiro Agnew exactly because he was no threat to Nixon and was pliable as hell. At the time, Nixon says in his own memoir, he accepted Ford because, "there were no dead women or live boys" in his background.
A nice, pliable man who agreed to pardon a criminal President and had no interest in the 200,000 deaths in East Timor he tacitly authorized. A fine, shining example of the GOP's Real Politic....
Perhaps GWB is happy with the Johns Hopkins study that finds 640,000 excess civilian deaths in Iraq - making him three times the man Ford was.
Well, the US Public was sold the war on those terms and, as I said before, Protestants don't consider Catholics "Christian".
Some later historians, such as Howard Zinn, cite the Philippine-American War as an example of American imperialism.W ar/ ... Philippine military deaths are estimated at 20,000 with 16,000 actually counted, while civilian deaths numbered between 250,000 and 1,000,000 Filipinos.m l/s _4_51/ai_56640457/
i sbn=0521864038/
d es/milbase.htm/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine-American_
During the war 4,324 American soldiers died, only 1,000-1,500 of which were due to actual combat; the remainder died of disease. 2,818 were wounded.
http://www.historyguy.com/PhilipineAmericanwar.ht
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/i
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Russia? Central Asia? Pardon Moi, but the remainders of Russian Hegemony are not asian, they are central european see,
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?
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Catholic nations are hardly "christian" for the Protestant US.
_____________
US Imperial power? See http://www.libsci.sc.edu/bob/class/clis734/webgui
U.S. European Command, in Stuttgart-Vaihingen, Germany, is responsible for 13 million square miles in 89 countries and territories. This area of responsibility begins at the North Cape of Norway and extends through the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, through most of Europe and parts of the Middle East, to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. The Command's mission is to support and advance US interests and policies throughout the region and to provide combat ready land, maritime, and air forces to Allied Command Europe or to US Unified Commands.
Point out another country holding military bases covering 13 mega-miles in Europe, alone. You can't and there isn't any other country with the US power as demonstrated by our basing. Iraq has a base under construction that is larger than the Vatican - because we want control over Oil.... nothing else.
Sadam Hussein has less than 30 days to live - my question: does "W" have a fetish in the killing of people? Think back to the execution of Carla Fay Tucker - where "W" mocked her plea for mercy.
I think "W" is one sick puppy. Tell me you don't agree.
Congress makes the laws? OK - but Executive Orders are not made by Congress and we are all subject to massive "wiretap" thanks to an Executive Order.
President Reagan and his top aides ignored a 1982 law at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua. Ollie North & Admiral Poindexter were just the top of the "plausible deniability" pile of Executive Order weasels ignoring the Laws and Constitution by funding secret wars.
The war-making power is specifically vested with the Legislative Branch - unless the Executive chooses to ignore the Constitution. This seems to happen fairly often these days. That pack-o-lies UN WMD dog-and-pony show that executive branch bitch Colin Powell put on for "W" and Rummy only goes to show that the present Executive branch is too big for a Republic.
Where did any President after Nixon get the idea that the laws didn't apply to them? That Pardon Ford gave RMN. Then GHWB pardoned all the Iran-Contra figures.
Sorry, the center of the rot is in the Executive Office. Reality bites.
Nixon's pardon lead directly to George H.W. Bush as head of the CIA, laying the groundwork for the Iran-Contra war, Reagan's gross budget cuts leading to the second highest deficit in US history and a complete break with the social compact making the US a 1st world nation with a 3rd world population.
Close to 1/4 of the population of the US has no medical coverage. Chances are better than 50% that of those US Citizens who have medical coverage that a major illness or accident will still force them bankrupt due to "uncovered costs."
The bankruptcy code has been changed to grossly favor creditors and a bankrupt individual will spend up to 5 years in a court-supervised plan to pay back creditors.
The Courts and laws of this nation have created a corporation-friendly / federalized system that grossly limits what we can do. The "class action fairness act" made it impossible for a national class action to rest where a person suffers a "small loss" - such as the telephone E-911 fee where MILLIONS of individuals lost about $112.00/yr to their telephone company. We recovered that one - but the laws now permit companies to steal hundreds of millions of dollars a nickel at a time and have almost no real concern for legal liability.
Big Military Contractors, Big Oil and Big Pharma are the top industrial moneymakers in the US (with financial "services" following close). By far the Military Contractors take more away from our economy than they inject and, at root, they will be our downfall.
The level of political sophistication of the general public has to be at the lowest level in our national history. There are no "civics" courses in high school and most citizens couldn't tell you what the tripartite government branches are, who is next in succession after the VP, the names of the Supreme Court Justices (and, who appointed them and how old they are - a hint - all of the younger ones are very, very far to the right).
We refight battles won in the Courts over and over again. The Scopes trial should have ended any of the Intelligent Design BS and that case was tried in 1925! ( see, http://tinyurl.com/u9d2q/ ) Two weeks ago the Supreme Court revisited affirmative action AGAIN. Twelve (12%) percent of the US population are direct descendants of slaves and, on the whole, Blacks die younger, have an 80% chance of spending time in prison, are paid less - usually much less - for the same work - and politicians still play the "race card" and IT STILL WORKS.
We are buried in two intractable wars with no real end in sight. We spend more on the military that all of the rest or the world does, combined. We are the world's largest weapons manufacturer and we sold the weapons to Iraq that are killing our troops today.
(**I'm so damn fed up with the press using the term "IED" - those "IEDs" are nothing but regular HE howitzer shells delivered to their targets without using the howitzer - we knew where ever single one was stored before we invaded - but we didn't do a damn thing to destroy the weapons caches and now we pay the price for the foolish decisions of the arrogant Bushies**)
Triangulation, single-issue voters and jingoism win elections at at time when vote-stealing is at at an all time high to boot. At least four governors have plead guilty to misdemeanors (that should have been charged as felonies and cost them their elected office); the 109th Congress will go down in history as one of the most corrupt since the Teapot Dome Scandal (and that was another Oil Industry scandal - 1922) under President Warren G. Harding.
The overall savings rate of US Citizens is NEGATIVE and we are ripe for a major economic downturn - possibly as bad as 1929 - perhaps worse. Take a look at the Katrina survivors and guess what plans are in place in the event of a major stock downturn: nothing.
The environment, the economy, our international standing, public health, political health and judicial health have all taken the back seat to the interests of the top 5% of the US population.
Thank you Mr. President Ford - the only unelected Executive in US history - you made all of this possible. Take your bow.
Imperialism. An interesting term. Can you name any other nation on the planet that has military bases within the borders of other sovereign nations? What do you call a nation that spends more money on its military than all other nations, combined? The US has the military might to invade almost any country on the planet - and we have used that power extensively.
What do you call our naval base on Cuba? The US is certainly not welcome there..... and you can find our bases spread across the planet - most arising from WWII, but the Philippines we conquered and "Christianized" at the turn of the last century (and, Puerto Rico, too). I'd call the US military presence across the planet an "imperial" act by an imperial government. If you have a better term for this I'd like to know what it is.
Tough decision to pardon Nixon? Hardly. The fix was in from the word go. If you read Ford's own memoir you can find a nice neat version of a conversation he had with general Alexander Haig about pardoning Nixon - well before the resignation. In the late 1970s, the Nation magazine published excerpts of Gerald Ford's memoirs in which he revealed that pardoning Richard Nixon was raised with him by Haig before Ford replaced Nixon in the White House. The Nation magazine faced a landmark lawsuit over copyright because it did not have the permission to print the early draft.
Turn to the staff and actions of Ford in office - and you will find Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Cheney & Wolfowitz - the roots of the "W" Presidency. Rummy just resigned in disgrace.
On December 6th, 1975 - Ford and Kissinger (then the US Secretary of State) met with President of Indonesia Suharto. The very next day, Suharto ordered the invasion of East Timor, a small country that had declared its independence from Portugal just days before the invasion. The Indonesian military occupation of East Timor has claimed the lives of at least 200,000 people, according to Amnesty International. That makes one third of the population -- the greatest genocide in per capita terms since the Holocaust.
FOIA requests have shown that Ford and Kissinger approved of the invasion and agreed to continue to supply arms to Suharto. On December 7, 1975 Ford made a speech condemning the Japanese for their attack on the US - and sent an "emergency" letter to Suharto by diplomatic pouch. At the time the Ford Administration represented that communiqué as a direct response to Suharto's invasion. FOIA responses show that the pouch held only golf balls. Google: National Security Archives and read it for yourself.
Ford put George H.W. Bush in charge of the CIA.
This goes on, and on and on....
I stand by the proposition that the man lived the good life at the expense of hundreds of thousands of his fellow human's lives and laid the groundwork for the corrupt US Government that we face today.
Insofar as I am not a Christian I don't believe in Hell - however the sentiment is appropriate.
As much as I hated Tricky-Dick and Ford's Pardon (imagine the scope of that Presidential Pardon - all acts charged and uncharged - Ford cut off any investigation of Nixon, per se - but the Church Commission gave us some idea how out of hand the CIA was at THAT time) I know that Nixon was a very bright man. He argued and won a tough 1st Amendment case before the SCT and won. He was a sneaky son of a bitch given to using dirty tricks from the Helen Gahagan Douglas campaign forward. He opened the door to China and laid tens of thousands of servicemen in their graves with the campaign promise, "I have a secret plan to end the war" (at the time we joked that his plan was that he was going to vote for Humphrey).
Nixon: dishonest, dirty-trickster that he was - would not support GWB's imperialism. Nixon said: when the president does it it isn't against the law; W just does it and smirks. He knows we don't have enough votes to impeach him over the next two years.
And, yes, I agree with the poster that observed that we can thank Gerald Ford for the past 25 years of political connivance because Dick Nixon evaded justice. Impeaching a president and indicting him under the criminal statutes is a duty that every president undertakes when he takes the Oath of Office - too uphold, protect & defend the Constitution. Ford was selected because he would pardon Nixon and to hell with the Constitution.
GWB has certainly followed Ford's contempt for the Constitution - every day and in every way "W" finds new ways to destroy this nation - at home and abroad - and the direct line of responsibility runs right to Ford's pardon.
If I were a Christian, I'd agree that the SOB should rot in hell. As it stands, Ford lead the good life for nine decades because he was a pliable pol.
35897kb *.002$=$71.794 but morons that they be it should have been 35897kb*.00002$=$0.71794
0.002 and 0.00002 - Calling Prof. John Allen Paulos: the Verizon morons are Innumerate!
This use of Youtube is great!!!! Just give us the idiots' telephone numbers so that we can call them and tell them to please let us have $0.002 of every paycheck, please.
I buy the CD for anything I deem worth the best sound reproduction my system(s) can produce (I also buy Vinyl - with the MFSL Master of Madeleine Peyroux's Careless Love my most recent vinyl acquisition).
e rtest.htm/
As it happened, I had never heard Peyroux (she is fantastic and appears to channel Billie Holiday on a couple of cuts) until she was showcased on Bill Shapiro's Cypress Avenue show on NPR. I bought the iTunes copy the same day.
After a week, I bought the CD.
Within a month I bought the MFSL Master on Vinyl.
I know what I like. I know what I can hear. Do you? Here is a test: audio geeks try this at home - lightly rub yout thumb and forefinger together - it makes a "whispery whisking" sound and is an effective test for high-end hearing loss. The trick is to have somebody do this from behind you -starting an inch or so behind an ear. You can't see - but if you hear then the test goes on - alternating ears and distance - you can have a pretty good approximation of your hearing acuity if you can hear the whisper 5 inches (12.5 cm) away from your ear(s).
If you can't hear it - forget about fidelity - you can't tell with your instruments (ears).
As for me - I'll give my stereos and speakers the best rating and for portable I think my 1st Gen iPod Shuffle (1Gig) with Apple Lossless encoding and Etymotic ER-6 or B&O Form 2 'phones come as close as any portable ever will (the ER-6's sound better than the B&O but they are a pain to properly seat; require frequent replacement of soiled components; and, are uncomfortable for long sessions - but the sound and isolation are worth the trouble).
Why the shuffle? Better fidelity - http://home.comcast.net/~machrone/playertest/play
I have a 5.5 gen 80 Gig and the Shuffle still sounds better.
A builder has no copyright - but the designer/engineer/architect who created that set of stairs has a copyright under US Copyright law.
We would rather kill our people than pay to precipitate Hg. Mercury enters the food chain by becoming methylated through the actions of anaerobic bacteria in stream/river/lake bottoms. Those bacteria feed single and multicellular organisms and up the chain we go to fish and from there to humans by direct consumption of the fish or indirectly by application of fishmeal as a nitrogen source in fertilizers applied to crops - and the crops are either directly consumed or are fed to livestock where further bioconcentration occurs.
Consider Spinach - it readily makes use of +1 & +2 metals - Ferro groups usually, but methylated HG is easily introduced into the plant's structure rather than Fe.
No technical error. NOx is a byproduct of Coal combustion and NOx isn't significant with simpler hydrocarbon fuels - remember, coal is a massive group of very long chain hydrocarbons such that it is a solid at room temp. The materials in "gasoline" are far shorther chain hydrocarbons and fairly uniform in composition. Control of combustion products is significantly easier to manage with simple fuels - as you point out.
Extracting H2 frm Coal is an energy-intensive process that, at present, cannot be accomplished without a net energy loss. Moreover, the Carbon will still be a byproduct of the reaction and, unless the process has some significant advances in sequestering Carbon, we are still screwed regarding the overall production of greenhouse gasses.
To name a few of the really, really serious biproducts of Coal usage. Hg precipitates out from exhaust at an alarming rate (*those states with coal-fired power plants all have massive Hg and CH2-Hg contamination: see, http://www.dnr.mo.gov/pubs/pub2100.pdf/ and, http://www.moenviron.org/airqualitymercury.asp/ for one central US state's Hg warnings). Sulphur fom coal burning is the primary source of H2SO4 in acid rain that has decimated the lakes in the Northeast US and etched limestone (Cleopatra's Needle http://members.aol.com/Sokamoto31/ny.htm/ has been in NYC since 1881 and the two sides facing the prevailing wind have been etched free of inscription (perfect on all four sides when it was put it into place) due to acid rain) building materials. Nitrates (NOx) are the secondary sources of acid (HNO3 Nitric Acid being the most common) and a product of incomplete combustion of coal. About 75% of the coal-fired power plants scrub NOx out of the exhaust - but there appear to be no small-scale scrubbers consistent with vehicle use.
Releasing more Carbon from the carbon sink is just one more addition to the ever-increasing load of greenhouse gasses on the planet.
Iron - in its various forms will "poison" any catalytic converter small enough to fit on a vehicle.
The cost of scrubbing or converting Coal into a cleaner-burning fuel is problematic and the energy used to scrub may well exceed the energy realized from the converted coal.
To quote the Capitol Steps.
Or, perhaps Vista comes complete with a built-in Root Kit making any other malware unnecessary. It's a feature!
Brought to you by Sony-Bertelsman and Microsoft . . .
box.
Bill and his UCTIA/ UCC2B BS is *MORE* annoying than my constant crashes with Win-98.
I've long since gone all Mac OSX & *nix - just the one MS box left in the office.
Bill and Melinda found something that they are good at: giving away money.
I'm looking forward to being Microsoft-free in 2007.
I'm tempted to box up all of their software and original manuals that I have accumuated since 1982 and mail it back with a "shrink-wrap" license that I have returned all of my MS-licensed originals and request a formal waiver of liability from the unauthorized use of their licensed originals (just like the 'early" EULAs require).
I wonder if I can have a refund?
I think MS Bob was really the brains behind the company.....
"Genuine" my muscular buttocks - I have the original and receipt but I have the unauthorized nagware installed and nagging.
Bye, Bye Bill & Steve and Redmond. A long, misery-filled run (DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run...) is well past over...
BSD for me.
If you have HP products and are on an automatic driver update list you can hit the "unsubscribe" in the last update email - and that will log you on associated with your product or products (making you a high-value feedback / validated customer) and then you can send "real" feedback through the Contact link. Select the CEO and select business suggestions from the pulldown menu (no - you can't give your own subject). If you don't have HP products you can send low-value feedback here http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/hurd/index .html/
I cancelled all of my subscriptions and in feedback said that the actions of the Chairwoman Patricia Dunn were inconsistent with the law and good business practice and that I was not going to purchase another HP product until there were significant changes in the board and HP's business practices. I also gave them my name, address, phone and fax of my law firm. I can be validated and want to be counted as one very outraged customer / shareholder.
I have divested myself of all HP stock (200 shares were given to me when I entered college 33 years ago) - but I also hold TIAA-CREF and other funds that do not allow me to elect the stock purchases / holdings. I have sent them letters asking that they express grave concern about HP's management.
Frankly, since the takeover I have been unhappy with the quality of the products and I have Laserjet 500s still doing solid work after nearly 20 years. The last HP printers I bought for the firm were 4100N's with the postscript option and three tray feeds. Nothing has been as solid as the older printers.
Send the company a major message that this kind of management stupidity will result in massive loss of business.
This is the time for the "Slashdot effect" to make a difference.
Well, we agree. You said hat ethics come from within - not from society.
In the US you are correct... In the Scandinavian countries I think that you will find that the social order is quite just and people like Jon Johannsen can, and do fit in. Marriage has declined.
You know far too little about the technology - Monitors and video cards could show far more detail than 256 colors to an 8 bit depth in 1993. Go lookup ATI's cards.... Then think about TIFF and JPEG - both in existance (along with GIF, PNG and dozens of others) - the image quality was just fine.
You have avoided dealing with the ethics of harm to many weighed against harm to a few. By any ethical system the harm to the greatest number should bring the strongest response. You simply dropped the ball on that one.
Answer the question: shouldn't economic criminals who harm milions suffer a vastly greater penalty than the criminal who harms only a few others?
Seattle is far, far from the nicest place I've lived. (And, you didn't mention I-5 - you must not attend UW or Pacific Lutheran - because you would be stuck in that traffic jam today.)
Anyplace that has weather reports that include "sunbreaks" leaves a bit to be desired, climate-wise.
Been to Toronto? Oslo? If clean streets are what you want then Singapore is your wet dream....but don't chew gum there.
Want a little real world experience:
Here is part of what I"ve been working on today:
6. EMPLOYER employed CLAIMANT as an over-the-road driver wherein Employer directed CLAIMANT to present himself at point "A" to collect a vehicle subject to a contract made between EMPLOYER and the holder of the commercial vehicle - for delivery of same at point "B".
7. CLAIMANT was directed to pick up the commercial vehicle at a specific time and place, was directed by EMPLOYER to deliver the commercial Vehicle to point "B" by a date and time certain.
8. EMPLOYER required CLAIMANT to provide daily reports of the progress of the transport - at or before noon central time, and required CLAIMANT to use EMPLOYER's COMDATA fuel credit card to obtain diesel fuel and, where no vendor would accept the EMPLOYER's fuel card, the CLAIMANT was required to pay for the fuel out of his own pocket - for which he was not reimbursed.
10. EMPLOYER required CLAIMANT to abide by all DOT regulations and CLAIMANT did keep and has kept the DOT logbook of his driving time for the entire time that CLAIMANT has been employed by EMPLOYER. Those records are available through CLAIMANT's COUNSEL
11. EMPLOYER paid for and did provide individual common carrier insurance for CLAIMANT and did require CLAIMANT to provide EMPLOYER with his DOT license and periodical DOT Medical Evaluations which, in turn, EMPLOYER provided to the Insurance Carrier and affirmatively represented CLAIMANT as an EMPLOYEE of EMPLOYER to obtain insurance coverage.
12. EMPLOYER has never paid FICA/FUTA or state, federal or local payroll taxes on CLAIMANT and has provided CLAIMANT with 1099 MISC forms alleging that CLAIMANT has earned (in the year 2005) nearly Seventy-Thousand ($70,000.00) dollars in gross wages - but EMPLOYER imputes the cost of fuel to the CLAMIANT as income when it is instead an "ordinary business expense" of EMPLOYER.
This client - a man in his 40's who has an Associate's Degree and 20 years as a Navy Corpsman, spent the last four (4) years being used by a company. He isn't stupid - but he actually earned only $3,200.00/yr WORKING 90-hour weeks 52 weeks a year! No overtime is available thanks to the Motor Carrier's Exception to the Fair Labor Standards Act - enacted during WWII and still on the books. - But the employer created a falsehood: they told the drivers tahtt hey were "independent contractors" and then padded the 1099 to shelter $60k per driver per year from tax. Meanwhile, the employer took the deduction for the fuel card fuel as an ordinary business expense and then took the deduction a second time by wrapping it into the 1099 "rep
I have really, really bad news for you. There is no "ethics" system out there. There are laws. Sometimes the laws work!
My first computer was a PDP 11 - my (private) highschool had one. I learned to program long before the ALTAIR came out. I ran Batch Jobs on the IBM 360 (FORTRAN coded keypunch on Hollerith cards.... don't drop your deck!) in my freshman year in college. I had a TRS -80 in 1976 and switched to the Apple II in 1977. Bought (and still own) a LISA and a 128k Mac shortly thereafter. I also had a few dedicated word processors like the WANG - I bought the IBM PC-XT the week it was released. 1200 Baud Hayes Modem, 10 Meg drive and 640k or RAM.... Don't assume that I don't know about computing or networks.
OH, you live in Seattle. Nice place. I spent a summer on Vashon Island and taught computer law / complex federal litigation at the UW School of Law in the summer of 1999. I like Kings County - but the County Courthouse is the pits. As far as "different" in Seattle - you are wrong. Look around - there are many people who are quite poor - and they are NOT Bill's neighbors on Lake Washington. Nope, they are shuttled into skid row around the Space Needle and out into the edges of town. By the way - I-5 sucks. Damn shame that you let the Mariner's stadium get imploded - at taxpayer's expense.
You seem to think that my client and I have some duty to rehabilitate a couple of young jerks. We don't.
You will shortly find out how nasty the workplace can be - and you will find out what a strong lawyer can do to assist you in that workplace.
Something that you simply haven't grasped yet is that the law is not like coding or science. The Law depends upon so many factors - tangible and intangible as well as real and imagined. The law with regards to these kids was what was known as a "case of first impression" and their actions were not that swift - they simply got root on one Sun Sparc server: after that they simply telnetted in and created hidden directories. They installed a copy of "Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks" a/k/a SATAN and they were little more than script kiddies except for the fact that they were fetching large volumes of data from other servers using my client's frame relay (and, they were saturating 1/4 - 1/2 of the available bandwidth - one reason that they were quickly identified).
Now, when a Frame Relay - at the time T-3 and upwards bandwidth - cobbled together out of SAVVIS and SPRINT backbone access was saturated by these two kids and clients had their data stolen or overwritten and had their bandwidth choked due to the illegal access these two had - well, the lost revenue amounted to more than $75,000/day in 1993!
We attempted to work with the parents. I've said that more than once. If I had wanted to be a prick I could just have sued them for my client. Instead - the parents were jerks: Really hostile and nasty jerks. They didn't like lawyers and they didn't want to hear that little Cartman & Stan could be getting into real trouble.
That was more warning than most litigants ever get.
SO, if I'm a hard ass - you are about to experience a very different world when you get out of school. Trust me - I'm a sweetheart when it comes to bright kids.
Let me ask you a little question: My first job out of law school involved a criminal prosecution of an ATF violation. A 13 year-old young black boy was arrested while acting as a guard at a Crack House. He had a "Street Sweeper" as the weapon he was to use to "protect" the "product" and the "profits." A Street Sweeper is a machine-gun shotgun developed in South Africa for killing Black people. (I find this ironic as hell.) The ATF SWAT team had no prior training with that special weapon and so the team leader asked the kid, "How do you unload it?" To which the young boy responded, "Easy. Pull the trigger and wait."
What would you do where a 13-year old has a shotgun machinegun and is ready to use it against anybody he is told to
These were sub-16 year olds and they knew exactly what they were doing. They offered bandwidh (stolen) and offered WAREZ at GIGABYTE volume (13 years ago when a 200 meg drive was $7,000) in their application to join the IRC group in cleartext, completE with their full names, addresses....
Will they put their names out there? Well, they should have been in college by 1997 - at the latest (perhaps their parents' college fund went to their defense attorneys?) and most colleges require some variation on your name for the school email system. By 2001-2 they might have entered graduate school... Still no names....
BUT, until and unless they petition the Court for a modification of the injunction - sonething that they ought to try - they are still barred. Yes, they may be slipping through the cracks - or, they may be in Iraq - or dead after serving in Iraq - or dead from other reasons (like a car accident).
They were too young to attend college - so your "solution" does not apply.
You are anti-government. You are a self admitted thief - your MP3 collection.
Where I stand - you have exactly "ZERO" ethical standing and your arguments are grossly self-serving - you want a way out of being held liable for your acts.
If I had a client that had a problem with you I'd drag you into court and through "discovery" expose your strange and unethical view of the law and how it applies to you.
You should step back from the Regan world where Governments are viewed as bad and start thinking for yourself. Look around - this very medium exists because of Government. If Governments are all bad - go off line and join the people living off the grid and on the land. I reccomend Alaska. That state tolerates all sorts of people who want to rugged individualists. Good luck.
For the rest of us - the Government is US. We decide what laws get passed and who is elected. If you and your ilk support criminals because they are just kids experimenting - well, that is the road to anarchy.
Anarchy didn't create the Internet. Anarchy didn't cure Polio and turn AIDS into a chronic, but still deadly disease.
Neo-Cons have created a pattern of criminality that says the boys at the top pay for nothing and the rest of us must serve them....if you get caught stealing where the RIAA is involved - you are toast, but if you "win" a no-bid contract from the boys in charge - you will not have to complete the contract - just take the money and run.
The US is a disaster, in no small part because of your values. Some things are simple: don't take things that aren't yours.
If we do away with governments and Anarchy becomes the norm - I'd expect that sooner or later somebody will get mad at you and you won't have the Courts and Government to turn to to resolve your dispute.
FWIW - what was the first city in the US to institute Gun Control? Dodge City, Kansas - more than 100 years ago. Why? Because guys off of the cattle drives tended to shoot up the town. The rule was check your guns at the city limits. Now Kansas has passed concealed-carry as well as put Intelligent Design loonies on their state school board (the battle continues) - Anarchy is on the way.....
Finally - I was 13 in the 1960's and I was marching against the War in Viet Nam, supporting George McGovern for president through my membership in the Hudson Independent Democrats (Just received a box of books from my 80 year-old mother that shows I was a poll watcher in the '72 election). I didn't smoke pot - I did obtain a 1st Radiotelephone License and my General Ticket as an amateur radio operator by the age of 16. I also learned how to fly on the Cessna $25/lesson program out of Teaneck, NJ. I went on to pass the NY Regents exam and entered Columbia at 17. I hold three Baccalaureate degrees - Biology, Chemistry and Art History (triple major) completed by age 20. I don't think that I was the slightest bit "unethical" as a 13 year old.
I am the son of a physician and an attorney. You can be
"Ethics Training?" What do you do, live in Wonderland with Alice?
1 .html/ or this: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0928051delay1 .html/ and tell me all about the "ethics" of our leaders.
The President and FEMA - nearly a year ago to the day - let thousands of people die when they had five (5) days notice that Katrina was headed into the Gulf. We have Tom Delay and Duke Cunningham as sterling examples of thieves in government (with Duke in the Stir and The Hammer soon to follow)....
Tell me where those "ethics training" courses are held? And don't tell me "Church" because All OF THE TOP LEADERS of the US Government vigorously claim that they are "true believers." And I haven't noticed a waive of ethics washing over the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. (Go see this: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0121051judge
You can't teach what you don't know.
Turning to the porn issue: yeah, I'd agree most people want to see images close to their ages - from about 16 - 28; but, after they get older and flabby most people are interested in pictures of the hard bodies of 18-28 year olds. BUT, that wasn't the case here - this was material that was ILLEGAL TO POSSESS and that was the lure. The porn was for trading for other goods.
Now, you talk about training prodigies - in the traditions and ethics of the technology professions???! What are you talking about? Wiretapping was invented as soon as Bell had a network up (and the telegraph was constantly intercepted from the day that lines were strung where access could be had without a witness).
Are you perhaps talking about the traditions of the munitions-makers? Alfred Nobel, the inventor of a stable nitroglycerine (Dynamite), donated a vast fortune made from the deaths of untold thousands - to create the Nobel Prize in the fervent hope that he could atone for the misery and suffering that his invention brought to the victims - while making him rich....HE COULD HAVE STOPPED PRODUCTION - but didn't. Was that the tradition that you refer to?
How about the Physicians in the US who left untreated Syphilis in black males from 1932 through 1972! See, http://www.cdc.gov/nchstp/od/tuskegee/time.htm/
As for the skills these kids brought, hmm, is a willingness to invade the private data and personal financial records of as many people as they could a skill that transfers well to modern society? How about trafficking in WAREZ? And, trafficking in illicit pornography? Yep, regular little "G-Men" - ready and willing to set to work for the Homeland Security wiretapping party.
As for Mom and Pop - well, they had a polite call from a polite attorney and they were just to damn stupid to bother to go look at little Cartman's computer. I know that my clients and I cost them a small fortune in attorney's fees. Damn shame that they didn't get to have their parental rights terminated and thrown in the slammer for the rest of their reproductive years.
Where do you think the botnet creators came from but idiotic parents who didn't monitor their kids.
I'm still running my Copernic Searches for their names..... If you are one of the two guys, speak up - I know a nice prison or two....
For the record, I had an ISDN line in my home in 1993. The Well had a substantial presence as did Byte Magazine through the (mostly UNIX command line) community BIX - and it was dumped in 1993 when McGraw Hill sold it off.... There was a heck of a lot out there in 1993 - try looking at the WAYBACK MACHINE.....
Finally, when you have been screwed a few more times by nasty little shits - you will adopt my "take no prisoners" viewpoint. OR, tell me how you will solve the SPAM problem with peace, love and understanding? Ball's in your court....
You seemed to miss the fact that the 8th amendment dosn't apply in this case (civil - not criminal - you are punished in a criminal case - you pay damages and may have injunctive relief in a civil case) and your argument that it does is unsupported by case law.
/. - how many email address filters and other types of protective code run along with the slash code just to stop the malware / hacks / harvesters? What is the % of wasted p
The use of telephones has been barred by the courts where the defendant uses the telephone to harass or threaten people. That happens all of the time. People are barred from driving for life after the 2nd or 3rd DUI. People obtain ex parte restraining orders banning all contact with certain people - Margaret Mary Ray the David Letterman Stalker is a perfect example.
Where felons are barred from voting, owning a weapon, obtaining a bond, working in the federal sector and many private sector positions - for life - what makes you think that a federal judge wouldn't give an injunction barring the Title 18 civil defenant from the Internet and computer use?
I still haven't heard a good reason from you that argues for a lesser civil remedy. Your arguments that ancillary computer use (timeclocks, etc) would breach the ban are inopposite: they don't apply. What the ban means is that the individual(s) responsible don't have the "personal" right to own or use a computer with Internet access - for the rest of their worthless lives (and, yes I would agree that this should not apply to a minor under 16). That doesn't mean that they can't work at McDonald's where the dummies behind the counter punch pictures of the food on the "computerized" cash register...
As for the 1993 case: the kids hacked the major ISP for Kansas City, Missouri - got Root and were kind enough to use their own names, phone numbers and addresses applying for rights with warez traders on IRC. They also had a nice collection of kiddie porn (*consider that it is never legal to possess the stuff - I had to obtain a Court Order to copy and transfer the images to the defense counsel to avoid liability attaching to my client and to me for transferring the evidence!*) cracked programs and had created a Trojan help screen that shuttled some users off to a "ssl" encrypted credit card verification page - snatched from the client's own server(s). They were detected within 48 hrs - but they did cause quite a bit of harm.
We tried to tell the parents - the parents didn't listen. The parents and the kids were sued - and the parents were charged with providing the teens with a dangerous instrumentality - a computer and Internet access. They were served Christmas week. I liked that. I liked that a lot - because I personally called each of the kid's parents and they all denied that their kid could be involved - without so much as a: "would you mind giving me your number and I'll call you back once I've talked with little Cartman & Kyle" - nope, they just acted like idiots and for their stupidity they received a 60+ page federal complaint. I would not doubt that each family paid more than $50,000.00 in defense fees before we settled. Sweet. I hope that it cost all of little Kyle & Cartman's college fund. (NO their names are not South Park names)
Do they have myspace pages? I doubt it. Why?
I keep a Copernic search looking for their names and have had it updating the search weekly ever since Copernic came out.
Why do I want them toasted if they ever violate the settlement? Because one of the repositories of their porn was in a hidden directory under an account of mine: It's personal. I'd just as soon have gone medieval on their a**es and send over a couple of guys to work on the boys and their parents with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.
If anything, we are way to passive whhen dealing with the people who are intent on destroying the Internet. The fun and financial benefit from misuse of the Internet must be eliminated or we will be gone. Look at
F**K the 8th amendment argument. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that "actual innocence" is no bar to execution given a procedurally proper trial and appeal. Clemency is the only escape. If you can be killed while innocent and not offend the "cruel and unusual" 8th Amendment bar you can certainly have a lesser criminal penalty. However, we are not talking about Criminal Sanctions - we are talking about a Civil Remedy - an injunction issued by the Federal Judge that is reparative in nature.
/or beat Filevault - but assuming that somebody did steal the laptop and managed to gain access to the data then hundreds of my clients' private information would be compromised; if they could break the Keychain password(s) then they could have access to my bank accounts, retirement funds and credit card accounts - as well as my federal court login ID and Passwords to several of the circuits and to PACER (pay-for-access to all federal court filings that are open for access). What would be a proper punishment for the individual who compromised that list of sensitive data? In a civil suit I'd ask for millions; in a criminal prosecution I'd hope for life without parole and 30 days in the electric chair.
Turning to lifetime ban on access to computers and the Internet - I think it is well past time that we started excluding the bad actors from this community. I accomplished the same in the first action I brought in 1993. Two teens are barred from the Internet for life and when and if it ever comes out that they have accessed the internet again, I'll file a contempt action and have their worthless butts locked up - where they can dance with a large man named Bubba.
Felons, and make no mistake about it - if the Title 18 action is picked up by the US Attorney, the holder of that stolen laptop will be a felon - lose the right to vote, own a weapon, be bonded, hold most government jobs and a ton of private sector jobs.
Where you have a civil violation of Title 18 - injunctive relief can include an Order barring computer use and Internet access. Why would you (or, anybody) argue for a lesser punishment? The individual has demonstrated their inability to conform to the most rudimentary social norm - don't take things that aren't yours - so why not exclude them forever?
You don't NEED a computer to make a living in the US. You don't NEED Internet Access in order to make a living in the US: Bar the sucker. If it happens that s/he is an IT professional - even better - let them move to Canada or India where the US bar won't apply.
As for the rest of the potential business world - my heart bleeds, positively bleeds that the holder of that stolen laptop might have to spend his/her life explaining to their employers that they can't touch a computer or else they risk civil or criminal contempt charges. I've looked carefully at the employees associated with trash-trucks, ditch-diggers, Salmon trawlers, cannery workers, migrant farm workers and the like and I've noticed that they really don't make any use of a computer when they pick up my bagged trash and sling it into the back of the garbage truck (etc.). It's not so bad a punishment - they can live and think about their bad acts every day they live the hard physical life.
Exactly why are you so concerned about the scope of the remedy? I'd love to hear some good reason NOT to make it far, far worse...
If my laptop were stolen (a mac G4 al Powerbook) the thief would have to get past the login (18 characters) and
Conversion is a start. 18 U.S.C. 2510 et seq., the Electronic Communication Privacy
Act; 18 U.S.C. 1030 et seq., the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as amended
by the Counterfeit Access Device and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984,
specifically including 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(5)(B) would be a far better choice for a causes of action.
You get attorney's fees, compensatory damages and, there is a collateral criminal charge available. Once your attorney has nailed the defendant the U.S Attorney's office will have some oung turk who will come in and pick up a slam dunk for a notch in his/her belt.
Conversion is a common law action and it is a reasonable cause - but Trover would be a better action as it reaches the cognizable personal property (data) as well as the machine.
This is not a difficult cause to pursue. I've done it several times myself. My first was in 1993 and last was 2002. This is neither rocket science nor high-dollar litigation.
Act fast before the thief kills the script.
OH, don't forget to ask for injunctive relief - like a LIFETIME BAN ON INTERNET ACCESS.
It won't take very many lifetime bans before the cost of a stolen laptop gets around....
This business has come up time and again where opposing sides in a case are required to submit files that can be edited (as opposed to .PDF) to the Court or to the opposing side for joint submission to the Court. Idiots that leae the versions intact have lost more than a few cases that way.
I even heard a U.S. Magistrate Judge explain that MS Word files ALWAYS carried the prior versions along with the final version. For this information I received several hours of Continuing Legal Education credit...
Never underestimate the ability of a person to accidently give away information.