So what if I've got an old app that keeps its database in its own application directory?
That is not even remotely the problem. Try "an application" which insists on having write access to all of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive, screws around with DLLs in the "system32" directory or insists on registering a million idiotic system-wide DCOM objects, etc and so on. The list of truly inane Windows applications which assume that the entire system is their exclusive playground is endless, vast majority of which have no business whatsoever with any of the system-wide components and just do so because Microsoft technologies and "developer" community actively encouraged utter asshattness ever since the days of DOS 1.0.
The problem (supposedly) is malicious code that is creating program file directories in which it can hide.
See above. No, the problem is not some app-specific directory with write access, the problem is write access to system only functionality. In any other sane OS a malicious program must not only exploit a user application hole to get in, but then it must also gain root privileges, making the whole task much, much harder. Having mere user-level access prevents such program from hiding itself from the OS and its administrator as it has no access to low-level file-system operations.
Attempting to shoot any decent modern virus in the foot in this way will not only be futile, its also only stopping persistence of the virus, not the fact that malicious code is ALREADY running on your machine.
I am not sure what you are talking about. Nowhere in my post did I claim that multi-user, multi-tasking systems are any easier to recover once completely compromised then any other kind. Once "rooted", every kind of system becomes instantly highly suspect and the most reliable procedure involves booting from alternate media, backing up all of non-executables and recreating the file system and the OS from scratch and then restoring the backed up data.
What I am pointing out that "rooting" a reasonable OS and compromising a user account are two different things, and usually the root access is much harder to gain then user-level access. In Windows, thanks to the wide-spread drooling retardation amongst "application" writers, the two types of compromises are usually synonymous in practise, which I think is at the origin of your confusion.
Remember that in 99% of cases this won't matter because the stupid user will go back to MySpace the next day and get the virus started manually.;-)
And in a sane system that would only mess up his user account, thus allowing the OS itself to be preserved. Sure there is no true defence against stupidity as the idiot user can then force the virus to be installed with a root password, but such a design increases the odds of him waking up once the prompts asking "Are you sure you know what you are doing?" come up. Since in a well designed OS warning prompts of that nature occur only when modifications to vital system areas are about to be made, which in any self-respecting OS is rare, as people do not install system applications every second hour.
Oh yea, the Alberta Conservatives were, in their great, millions of years spanning foresight, entirely responsible for putting all that oil in all that sand in Alberta and then for driving global oil prices through the roof only so that they can rake in billions in royalties... no?
But then again this is, and has always been, on par for the so-called "Conservatives" world-wide: take with great fanfare all credit for things you had absolutely nothing to do with, while at the same time trying to project blame for everything you've fucked up onto others.
They simply didn't have a choice. You forget that until the Intel 286 CPU that x86 lacked hardware protection domains. That means that the OS was completely and totally incapable of enforcing any form of protection over hardware resources. That means that the developers had free reign over the system and there was nothing that could be done to prevent it. Linux, even if it could be adapted to that
hardware, couldn't prevent it either.
Untrue. Many early multi-user OSes run on hardware which did not have hardware-based memory and process separation. While in such cases the separation of processes cannot be hardware enforced, the discipline of re-entrant, multi-user code which takes care to maintain granularity can (and was) maintained.
DOS and early Windows had NO facilities whatsoever for even the simplest of process and resource management tasks. Hell, DOS was a single task "OS" (essentially a just a program loader - and with no support for dynamic libraries to boot) which required hacking to get a fake form multi-tasking to be semi-functional, involving essentially a bug which allowed some processes to "terminate" without freeing their memory.
This problem of imbecilic prompts is directly related to the entire inane history of DOS and then Windows, where all the lessons of multi-user systems learnt decades before were wilfully and sanctimoniously ignored by the resident Microsoft "geniuses". Thus application "developers" were allowed to, and soon came to depend on, access to what in nearly every other OS in existence are "root only" subsystems. Even in editions of Windows which were supposedly multi-user capable, the prevalent lazy practice of majority of "developers" was to depend on system-wide registry keys, administrative privilege level processes and what not to accomplish most mundane of tasks.
And so now the chickens are home to roost, with literally hundreds of thousands of apps written to kindergarten competence levels. And Microsoft is in a bind: secure the OS and either break these stupidly written apps altogether, inundate the user with prompts every time one of them tries something stupid, or give up.
They are scared to death of the implications of the first choice, tried the second, and now seem to be heading toward that last one.
And your attitude is precisely the reason the US is in (and will continue to slide deeper into) shit. Your Founding Fathers were violent revolutionaries who saw the principles they embedded into the Constitution as dearer then their own life. You see your "lifestyle" of credit-card funded mountains of Chinese plastic crap amassed near your huge ass TV from which an endless river of brainless "entertainment" spews forth, and from which you only drag your ass away in your SUV to the nearest McDonald's, far, far more important than anything else, particularly these "silly" rights and freedoms, and including things like hundreds of thousands of "furriners" being murdered and maimed in the name of the "superiority" of that "lifestyle" of yours.
To which I can only say that I hope you get what you truly deserve. Neither security, nor freedom. And a bankruptcy to boot. All of which are pretty much knocking on your doors already. Perhaps you should hide under your bed with your iPod and turn up the volume.
Do you even know what the word "drama" means? Get a dictionary.
You are apparently so used to "arguments" being presented in the most "politically correct", "inoffensive", spineless, gutless, craven way that you now consider basic truths to be "dramatic" and terribly frightening.
1. Grow/hunt/steal your own food.
2. Perform services for other people which can be exchanged (perhaps circuitously, using some medium of exchange like "money") for food.
Neither of which involves loss of freedom.
Having said that, we do give up some freedoms in order to partake in a society but those are only of a particular kind, all having to do with maintaining societal cohesion. All of which essentially adhere to the logic that "your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose". The extent and fairness of this exchange has been the very centre of a rather heated political discussion for a few millennia now.
The author of the article is not however referring to such a scenario, dealing with maintaining the very societal fabric, he is instead describing an attempt to lure him into a form of life-long servitude for no other reason than the avarice of his potential "employer".
If I get money by some means you consider honest, and then use that money to pay people to abduct children and sell them as sex slaves, then holy fuck: what I did with the money was quite a lot more important than how I got it. Actually, even if I gained it through very dishonest means, it would hold true.
True, I stand corrected. Both getting and spending money is theoretically prone to being evil in equal measures. But my original statement stems from the fact that in practical, empirical terms getting money in very large quantities essentially requires much evil to be visited on a lot of people, although in many cases it is in small amounts spread across very large populations. Is abusing 10 million people, each a little bit, better then raping two 3 year olds? You tell me.
If I promised never to play baseball again and was given an assload of money which I used to uplift poor nations in Africa and eradicate the AIDS pandemic, then the freedom I sacrificed was far less than what I did with the money.
That is a wrong question. The evil being done here is by the people who take that freedom from you, not you who would be a victim in this case. The same applies to the article author, he is not the villain in this, he is merely being conned by villains into becoming their slave. The correct analogy would be if you were to deprive a lot of people of some of their freedom, say an ability to talk to their children, and somehow that got you a truckload of money which you then spent on "charity" in Africa. Your actions there would not redeem your original villainy.
And if you can't see past your black-and-white "this one is Freedom, and therefore more important than anything ever; that one doesn't count as Freedom though", and continue to make absolute statements, then you are a drama queen.
Abdication of certain freedoms, by a sufficient number of society members, leads essentially to a societal collapse. No amount of silly whining about "drama" is going to change that, nor will it make sane people stop voicing opposition.
The real question is, what is *this* freedom worth. And what is *that* delta amount of money compared to the money you could get without the job, worth. If the rise in salary from whatever the fuck else you're doing is worth more (to yourself, to the world, whatever) than this freedom is, then make the goddamn exchange. It can be hard to decide.
See above. Some things are simply not for sale. Despite of what some insane maniacs try to insinuate, the Universe is not a gigantic "free market" where a
When you graduate, you'll find your radical Marxist rants don't impress your future slave-masters quite so much as they do the ladies in Soc 101.;-)
Right. I am semi-retired at this point and only work when it suits my fancy. You have your generations mixed up.
"Fair" in this case amounts to whatever the FP author considers fair. If he doesn't like the deal, he has the option to turn it down. Simple as that.
The term you are groping for is "moral relativism". And it still as bankrupt as it ever was.
... and if he didn't consider it at least fair enough to seriously consider the offer, he wouldn't have asked Slashdot for advice.
He is asking because charlatans of all stripes have managed to muddle what used to be crystal-clear distinctions into a pitiful cesspit of "pragmatic" choices, from which a whole plethora of societal woes springs forth, some of which are likely to bankrupt (literally!) the US of A.
Just a discussion of whether or not he considers it fair to trade something he enjoys for money.
Except, of course, life-long NDA's and "non compete" agreements go far, far beyond any of that.
You could reduce the discussion to any work, since getting up and going to work every day involves irrevocably giving up eight or nine hours of my life in service to my corporate masters.
Apples and oranges. The case would be comparable if you had signed a "contract" committing you to life-long work for some individual or company, with no option to get out of it, ever, irrespective of the actions of the "employer". At which point such an arrangement has a name: "indentured slavery". Any other form of employment is subject to termination by either of the parties should they change their mind and is not in perpetuity. In the example you provided you are merely exchanging a limited amount of your labour for a limited amount of money, which is simply one of the elemental forms of trade.
Someone wants to pay him because they see commercial value in his work, right? They presumably want to sell his work, and won't sell very much if he can just backport his work into the free version. Thus, they want him to promise not to work on the free version of the project anymore.
Their desire is inconsequential in light of what is needed to satisfy that desire. And in this case it is nothing short of life-long enslavement.
But if he chooses to accept their offer as it stands, what does he really have to lose?
Only his freedom, which is what all these other posters pointed out. How much is freedom worth? To some of us it is priceless, even to the point of our life being less dear.
... most importantly, the company doesn't actually get anything!
Actually they do. He is now forbidden to contribute to any project that even remotely competes with the original one. Also from ever talking about it. That is what the combo of NDA+"non compete" agreement does, both of which he has to sigh on day 1.
Again, spare me the drama. "Life-long comfort" for no longer donating his time to an open source project? Although we don't have all the details, what exactly do you do you think the guy has written, firmware to turn a $17 toaster into a dialysis machine?
This has nothing to do with "drama" or open source projects. It has to do with freedom. The argument would not be any different if the contract forbade him from tying his shoes in a certain way or prevented him from going fishing for the rest of his life.
"Practical" != "Greedy"...
You are greedy and not merely "practical". You crossed that line the moment you considered a trade of a life-long restriction for some few coins being even remotely "fair".
Like it or not, we live in a world that requires us to pay for our food, our shelter, our transportation, and just about any leisure activities we might enjoy.
Neither of which requires us to become slaves, which is what you are emphatically advocating.
Nothing "noble" about starving in the streets because of that. At the same time, what you and so many others seem to forget, we can do a hell of a lot more good with cash-in-hand, than by donating our time to some obscure open source project - Strangely enough, food-banks and shelters don't take code.
This is how slaves are made. The moment you decide that "cash in hand" is worth abandoning one's principles you cease to be a human being and become an object of trade. I do not discuss morality with merchandise such as you. Merchandise cannot grasp such ideas.
And y'know, "Profit" has more than four letters in it. What we choose to do with money makes it (and us) dirty; By itself, it just represents a tokenized form of our efforts that we can use for good or bad, for necessities or luxuries, for helping others or for hoarding.
Wrong. What one does with the money is far, far behind in importance in comparison to how one got the money in the first place. All the charity in the world will never redeem the Robber Barons, past or modern.
I read somewhere on the net that of even the worst performing group of mortgages, the "NINA" (no income, no assets) mortgages of 2006, over 80% were still performing - that is, still making their
payments, and not in default.
Except of course this is not what Paulson will be buying. Where the bank-sinking "asset deflation" occurred was in the "Credit Default Swap" market, an entirely imaginary "insurance" financial instruments which were, at their peak, valued at $45 trillion with... exactly ZERO real assets backing them. No hard working families here, no monthly payments, but instead simply 100% pure gambling debts of the "genius" Wall Street players.
This is where that $700 billion (and the $600 billion right before it) will be sunk into, making nary a dent, only to somewhat delay the inevitable (with the aim of making the shit hit the fan for real only after the change of the White House occupants).
I code for a living - I MAKE MONEY for selling the product of my skills. Welcome to the real world, folks.
So do I (amongst other things), but those posters are not by any means "drama queens". You on the other hand are just a typical greed monkey whose "brain" locks up as soon as some dollar bills are in view.
If you were not, you would have immediately realized that that potential "employers" of the submitter of the article are simply scam artists (probably with the same mindset as you). They demand that he signs an eternal set of NDAs and "non compete" contracts, while offering to pay him in a definitely time-limited fashion (i.e. until the project completion, whenever that will be, or until they change their minds, whenever that might be). In short they wish to enslave him by denying him the use of some of his abilities forever (or in practical terms until he dies) in exchange for what amounts to a set of glass beads. The only thing even remotely approaching "adequate" compensation for such a thing are perpetual payments from these "employers" or an up-front amount guaranteeing him life-long comfort, neither of which are being offered as far as it can be discerned from the article.
Well, this is splitting hair about the internal brain-workings of religious lunatics, but the main point remains that there is a good reason that with appropriate training... err brainwashing, such people have a good chance of achieving the mental state of if not "peace" at least of "indifference" sufficient enough to fool this stupid detector. Odds are much higher that a Joe Sixpack being pissed at his plane being late and his girlfriend giving him lip is "detected" then one of these highly motivated and trained terrorists.
I suggest, instead of calling your legislators to ask them for more laws and restrictions, I suggest that you use your freedom of choice, and stop doing business with PayPal.
Because the next time you ask a legislator to regulate something you don't like, they may end up regulating something you DO like.
The heavy hand of government should be the absolute last resort.
Absolutely! Because if those "heavy fingers" of gubmnt get involved, it will restrict brilliant innovation in financial business that you do like! Why, take for example the securities industry, where the removal of all that restrictive gubmnt meddling allowed our Wholly Unregulated Financial Geniuses of Freedom to bring about an explosive growth of creative, innovative financial instruments such as "Credit Default Swaps" and their derivatives, leading to astronomical increase in their "value"! It worked so great in fact that now this "value" exceeds the global supply of cash, in all currencies, by a factor of about 4! And where would all that "value" be now if those gubmnt bastards had put their fat fingers of their "heavy hand" into this...
Brilliant point. Particularly, a religious fanatic will be in a state of peace and righteousness-filled euphoria because he is finally "fulfilling his destiny" in life and just hours away from being rewarded by his God for being a faithful "Holy Warrior".
Well, the point I was making, which you appear to miss, is that even though SyncML is ostensibly "open" and ActiveSync proprietary, it seems that it is far easier to get ActiveSync running on a low-resource Linux server in a fully open implementation.
All the other "solutions", as far as I am concerned, simply aren't. Blackberry's method requires me to run Exchange or Lotus Notes, complete with a whole Windows Server infrastructure with proprietary BES software on top, which is a complete non starter. SyncML on Linux has no good light-weight open implementations. So essentially ActiveSync is it.
I made these observations not from a perspective of a 5000 employee enterprise, but as a Linux hacker who relies on Linux-only server infrastructure in my small operation.
Also, while it is true that other phones have ActiveSync support, as I pointed out the quality of the web browser on the iPhone allows for filling the essential functionality gap with wholly server-side apps, something which the other phones have hard times doing due to their inability to render complex web pages.
This does not mean that iPhone is somehow the best thing ever, but it simply means that it fulfills a particular role in my environment reasonably well.
9. Sync with other calendars using industry standard OMA DS / SyncML? Forget it unless you are willing to pay for a third party app which is buggy.
I have an iPhone (which I got essentially "free" from my Telco - which probably means that I spend way too much money on communications...) and while it is indeed DRM crippled to Hell and generally buggy, while fooling around with it I found out that it was much easier for me to deploy an ActiveSync emulation in PHP on Linux then one of the very, very few fully open SyncML Linux implementations, probably due to the insane and wholly unnecessary complexity of the SyncML protocol or crazy design choices of the implementors, such as using gargantuan Java frameworks to implement the server-side (my ActiveSync server is a 32MB RAM MIPS device btw). Which is a rather sad state of affairs.
I never tried to run a fake ActiveSync back-end before and so I was pleasantly surprised that the Z-Push implementation is very straightforwardly hackable to the point that within a day I got my Contacts and Calendar operating with a 100% PostgreSQL back end of my own design, tied directly into my time tracking and billing system. I use IMAP for email combined with SMS-based "push" for incoming email notifications, which works wonderfully with procmail and allows me to be notified only for emails I deem "important" enough, instead for all the crap that normally makes to people's inboxes.
So in the end I am somewhat pleased with the thing, and although it pains me to say so, unless something changes radically I think if I were to ditch the iPhone, my next phone will be an ActiveSync one, not SyncML.
Another side-effect of this is that I did not load any apps on the phone at all as with this kind of setup, combined with the above-average web browser quality on the iPhone, I am able to have everything wholly server-side, making the actual phone the least important element in the overall scheme of things.
On the contrary, your assumption that you know what I think has caused you to ignore my "terrible mistake" remark and stick your head not in the sand, but up your arse.
Nothing of the sort. True you said that the invasion was a "terrible mistake".. but you also said that 'I agree with the GP in that "the Surge and the Awakening DID save Iraqi lives"' and on top of that you also said "Once that terrible mistake was made they could not simply leave...".
Which only demonstrates that the apologists for the US, such as you, have now achieved the necessary mental state of Orwellian "double think" (or in this case possibly even "triple think"), i.e. maintaining in your mind two completely mutually exclusive positions and vehemently believing both of them at the same time!
And that is why my pointing out that using the words "saving lives" in the context of the "surge" is the very apex of hypocrisy went over you head so far that it might as well have been in orbit.
As to my "knowing what is in your head" I have only your posts to go by, posts formulated so that the only conclusion one can draw is that you insist that we join you in your illogical stance designed to assure that the war criminals and their armies can be vindicated and eventually absolved of their crimes.
... but I agree with the GP in that "the Surge and the Awakening DID save Iraqi lives", if you can't admit that truth then you are the one with their head in the sand. Peronally I didn't agree with the "surge" when it was proposed, but I cannot deny the GP's "truth" just because I have a different set of "truths".
No, it did not. You insist only on counting the decline in violent deaths as "saving", while at the same time demanding that the overall number due to the invasion be ignored. Its simple arithmetics really: the total deaths due to the unwarranted invasion over the period of the occupation less the deaths "saved" by the "surge" due to the process of pacification of the newest Imperial Province of Iraq are still far more then the value of zero which would be the case if the invasion did not occur. Besides, no one can actually tell you if any lives were actually "saved" due to the "surge" since we do not even know what the actual numbers without the "surge" would be, why, we do not even know if the "surge" is actually responsible rather then other factors such as the Al Sadr's "ceasefire" - all we know that the carnage is declining.
The situation is analogous to someone sabotaging some railway tracks thus causing a passenger train to derail, following which he "magnanimously" decides not to club to death the victims of the crash crawling from the wreckage, but only if they swear their life-long obedience to him. And so because by your calculation such action "saved" the lives of the remaining crash victims, who were indeed "spared", you insist that we praise the blood-covered murderous villain for his "change of policy".
Regardless of the geopolitical and economic motives that spawned the Iraq war, getting rid of Saddam was a great idea for saving lives. However the US botched the operation badly by using an axe rather than a scapal. Once that terrible mistake was made they could not simply leave without creating a huge power vacum that would in my opinion have seen a lot more lives lost in a bloody civil war.
Of course you do realize that this is the very same excuse used by every empire since such things were recorded in history, do you not? Let me quote you a bit of history of the British Empire, in the era before the nascent American Empire took its place:
From a speech by John Morley (1823 -1923), British Member of Parliament on England's imperialism:
"First you push into territories where you have no business to be, and where you had promised not to go; secondly, your intrusion provokes resentment and, in these countries, resentment means resistance; thirdly, you instantly cry out that the people are rebellious and that their act is rebellion (this in spite of your own assurance that you have no intention of setting up a permanent sovereignty over them); fourthly, you send a force to stamp out the rebellion; and fifthly, having spread bloodshed, confusion and anarchy, you declare, with hands uplifted to the heavens, that moral reasons force you to stay, for if you were to leave, this territory would be left in a condition which no civilized power could contemplate with equanimity or with composure."
Does it perhaps sound a bit familiar?
.... The only tactical mistake I see them making now is demonizing Iran, and that is not coming from the Pentagon, it's coming from the remnants of the neo-con movement and their lame duck president.
... and Russia and Venezuela and... anyone who does not subscribe to the neo-feudal, pan-national, corporate empire of the New Aristocracy, presently head quartered in the US with the US army as its muscle. The problem is far, far, far deeper then mere "US foreign policy". That policy is a symptom of the disease, not the cause of it. The world is being re-shaped as we speak to be ushered into a new era of
Truth hurts, doesn't it? I know that you would rather keep your head in the sand and encourage everyone else to do the same, but that will not change reality even one tiny bit.
Or perhaps you would challenge the truth of anything I said? Perhaps you would demonstrate what "appeal" process do the Iraqi or Afghani kids have available to them if some drone operator decides to blow them up on suspicion of being "insurgents"? (just two weeks back 90 women and kids were blown up by a drone in Afghanistan) Should I link to gun-sight videos of farmers being gunned down in their fields from Apache helicopters because they were behaving "suspiciously"?
What I was talking about is the fact that the Surge and the Awakening DID safe Iraqi lives.
So did Hitler's pacification of Poland. Once the Polish army was defeated, the only violence was reserved for Jews and Poles who refused to accept the new order. Just like in Iraq, given time, Poland would have "quieted down" after all these "terrorists" in the hills were exterminated and the Poles accepted their new role as slaves worth less then the dirt on the German boots.
This is what is happening in Iraq!
Does this penetrate your thick skull? Let me tell you precisely what is going on here: the US army and its contractors can kill anyone for reasons real or imagined, anytime, anywhere with no warning, no justification, no trial, no evidence of any kind. The price of this "saving of lives" is an acknowlegment by all Iraqis that they are worthless, mere dirt on US army boots, and have no rights whatsoever. The only "people" in Iraq are Americans. Everyone else is either dirt or foreign contractors. Those who refuse to be dirt, die, Americans simply kill them with impunity. Everyone in Iraq must now "live" with the acceptance of the fact that they are a walking target practice for American drones at at any time some cappuccino-sipping jerk in the US can click his mouse to remove you, your spouse and your children from existence. And that no one who cares about will be able to do anything about it.
It is that simple!
This is what this new "Pax Americana" means. Yes, it is "peace", but does anyone but some pig-headed US fascists want to actually live in such new "world order"? I certainly don't.
Are you seriously saying that's a bad thing? An absolute reduction in death is a bad thing?
Actually, yes. You see there are some things more dear then life. Perhaps you've heard of this thing called "liberty"? If the price of "saving lives" is abject slavery, then such "life" is too expensive.
Until then I'll be here in the REAL WORLD where Iraqis are dying TODAY, and I'll call every step that saves an Iraqi life a blessing and not *polish on a turd*. Thank you.
You gotta be kidding. In this REAL WORLD the most effective step was to leave (and spare me all the bullshit about al-Queda taking over) and let the Iraqis to sort their own troubles out, which is guaranteed to be less bloody (again spare me the chicken-hawks squawking) then what the US has wrought over there.
The point was however not to "stop Iraqis from dying" but to dominate them. And that is why the US would not leave, no matter how many lives it would cost Iraqis.
Hm. The Administration has said almost from the beginning that this would take years. If this was actually their strategy all along, it was a criminal act of mass murder to perpetrate it.
Of course it was. This has been the foundation of any Imperial Conquest since times immemorial, and Iraq is no different. Slaughter must continue until a puppet regime is firmly entrenched, following which the exploitation of the new "satellite state" (or in the old book an "Imperial Province") can begin in earnest.
Yeah. Iraq is not a turd. Iraq is full of real people dying every day because of our war. Characterizing a policy that saves a lot of their lives as "polishing a turd" is so fucking wrong I don't even
have the words to describe it.
Of course the ultimate policy "that saves lives of Iraqis" was... not to fucking invade in the first place. Hence the "turd".
What is happening now is not to "save a lot of their lives" but to "ensure US dominance" and to demonstrate to any future malcontents in future invasions that "resistance to your new Lords And Masters is futile". Yes, the end result is that the subjugated people stop dying from the US missiles (mostly) after they prostrate themselves and start sucking US dick as instructed. But it is still a major difference from mere "saving lives".
In other words it is to ensure that not only the con artists are rewarded fully (i.e. assuring a full government-guaranteed profit on the con) but that the (brainless, I admit, but that is a precondition of all scams) victims of the scam are made to pay the thieves, albeit now in more "affordable" installments, while the "value" of the "property" they pay for goes into the dump, leaving them with huge losses! I am so glad that we have brainiacs such as you to explain to us the necessity of such a "solution"! Are you an investment croo... I mean banker, by any chance?
How about the old-fashioned man-hunt complete with dragging these "investors" and their front-men, i.e. the "investor bankers" in chains to serve 20 years of heavy labor as an example to what happens to those who ruin millions of American families to satisfy their own cosmic greed?
But damnit, sometimes, you gotta compromise your ideals... otherwise you're just cutting off your nose to spite your face. And right now, the only logical thing to do, like it or not, is to protect
those investors.
Except of course this action does nothing whatsoever for the economy. Spouting such meaningless platitudes is a hallmark of an economic demagogue.
So let me break it down, so that the emptiness of all that rhetoric of yours can be exposed to some daylight.
You have a group of individuals "HO", in the market for some already overpriced piles of sticks which provide them with protection from rain and snow, but come with a host of obligations and costs which make them only moderately economically viable in relation to the typical income of that HO group.
Enter group "IB" who seeks to steal everybody's money. They normally attempt to use moneys of another group "I" who is essentially a multi-billionaire club with a large number of some goofy "wannabes" attached who are allowed to lose all their money in the effort to "belong", to which silly belief they are encouraged by the multi-billionaires who seek to fleece them out of what miserable funds these goofuses still possess. Of course 99% of the assets in that club already belongs to the 1% who are the billionaires and the tens of thousands of idiots (i.e. the remaining 99%) who think themselves to be in the group have the remaining 1% amongst themselves. Which of course does not stop them from thinking themselves as being "I" and braying loudly about it, followed by doing everything in their power to protect the billionaires because they feel themselves always "on the cusp" of becoming such themselves. Any minute now.
The "IB" thieves come up with a giant con: to get the "HO" turkeys to start fighting amongst themselves over "purchasing" the piles of sticks, thus increasing the "value" (snicker) of these worthless things and then to use this "increased" value as a "collateral" for further "loans" to be used to increase the tempo of the "HO" squabble, all the way skimming a percentage of the monetary value of all these "transactions" off the top. They enlist the help of the billionaires to get the thing started.
And it works beautifully: the "HO" squabble causing the "value" of the piles of sticks to skyrocket, that "value" is then used as "collateral" to issue further "loans" and the cycle repeats itself.
Of course at certain point the "HO" idiots run out of their real (as opposed to "invested" in the piles of sticks) money. So they attempt to sell these "valuable" possessions. At which point they discover that if enough of them do so, the whole charade collapses. Which makes a guy named Ponzi laugh out of his grave.
Things start to look grim. The "IB" crooks already got their money (which they've been stashing abroad knowing all the way that the whole thing was a con). The "I" crooks too never stood to lose anything as their real money was only used to get the thing going and constituted a tiny fraction of the "value" of the con at its peak and was long since withdrawn (they of course were also in on the con) and whatever could be managed to be siphoned out was pure gain. The "HO" marks stand to lose everything as the lion share of the "value" of their "assets" is pure fantasy and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Enter the Knight on the White Horse, the Government of Dunces. The trumpets blare and the pages wave colorful standards. The rescue is here! And so the Knight takes the gold of the "HO" turkeys he collected over the years from them as well as that of many, many others who were previously not involved in this fiasco and gives that to.... the "IB" thieves. Who naturally split the loot with their billionaire "I" partners and roll laughing all the way to their bank in Dubai.
And what is the final tally? The "HO" idiots are still screwed. The value of their "assets" will still fall l
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That is not even remotely the problem. Try "an application" which insists on having write access to all of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive, screws around with DLLs in the "system32" directory or insists on registering a million idiotic system-wide DCOM objects, etc and so on. The list of truly inane Windows applications which assume that the entire system is their exclusive playground is endless, vast majority of which have no business whatsoever with any of the system-wide components and just do so because Microsoft technologies and "developer" community actively encouraged utter asshattness ever since the days of DOS 1.0.
See above. No, the problem is not some app-specific directory with write access, the problem is write access to system only functionality. In any other sane OS a malicious program must not only exploit a user application hole to get in, but then it must also gain root privileges, making the whole task much, much harder. Having mere user-level access prevents such program from hiding itself from the OS and its administrator as it has no access to low-level file-system operations.
I am not sure what you are talking about. Nowhere in my post did I claim that multi-user, multi-tasking systems are any easier to recover once completely compromised then any other kind. Once "rooted", every kind of system becomes instantly highly suspect and the most reliable procedure involves booting from alternate media, backing up all of non-executables and recreating the file system and the OS from scratch and then restoring the backed up data.
What I am pointing out that "rooting" a reasonable OS and compromising a user account are two different things, and usually the root access is much harder to gain then user-level access. In Windows, thanks to the wide-spread drooling retardation amongst "application" writers, the two types of compromises are usually synonymous in practise, which I think is at the origin of your confusion.
And in a sane system that would only mess up his user account, thus allowing the OS itself to be preserved. Sure there is no true defence against stupidity as the idiot user can then force the virus to be installed with a root password, but such a design increases the odds of him waking up once the prompts asking "Are you sure you know what you are doing?" come up. Since in a well designed OS warning prompts of that nature occur only when modifications to vital system areas are about to be made, which in any self-respecting OS is rare, as people do not install system applications every second hour.
Oh yea, the Alberta Conservatives were, in their great, millions of years spanning foresight, entirely responsible for putting all that oil in all that sand in Alberta and then for driving global oil prices through the roof only so that they can rake in billions in royalties ... no?
But then again this is, and has always been, on par for the so-called "Conservatives" world-wide: take with great fanfare all credit for things you had absolutely nothing to do with, while at the same time trying to project blame for everything you've fucked up onto others.
Untrue. Many early multi-user OSes run on hardware which did not have hardware-based memory and process separation. While in such cases the separation of processes cannot be hardware enforced, the discipline of re-entrant, multi-user code which takes care to maintain granularity can (and was) maintained.
DOS and early Windows had NO facilities whatsoever for even the simplest of process and resource management tasks. Hell, DOS was a single task "OS" (essentially a just a program loader - and with no support for dynamic libraries to boot) which required hacking to get a fake form multi-tasking to be semi-functional, involving essentially a bug which allowed some processes to "terminate" without freeing their memory.
So your apologetics fall quite flat here.
This problem of imbecilic prompts is directly related to the entire inane history of DOS and then Windows, where all the lessons of multi-user systems learnt decades before were wilfully and sanctimoniously ignored by the resident Microsoft "geniuses". Thus application "developers" were allowed to, and soon came to depend on, access to what in nearly every other OS in existence are "root only" subsystems. Even in editions of Windows which were supposedly multi-user capable, the prevalent lazy practice of majority of "developers" was to depend on system-wide registry keys, administrative privilege level processes and what not to accomplish most mundane of tasks.
And so now the chickens are home to roost, with literally hundreds of thousands of apps written to kindergarten competence levels. And Microsoft is in a bind: secure the OS and either break these stupidly written apps altogether, inundate the user with prompts every time one of them tries something stupid, or give up.
They are scared to death of the implications of the first choice, tried the second, and now seem to be heading toward that last one.
And your attitude is precisely the reason the US is in (and will continue to slide deeper into) shit. Your Founding Fathers were violent revolutionaries who saw the principles they embedded into the Constitution as dearer then their own life. You see your "lifestyle" of credit-card funded mountains of Chinese plastic crap amassed near your huge ass TV from which an endless river of brainless "entertainment" spews forth, and from which you only drag your ass away in your SUV to the nearest McDonald's, far, far more important than anything else, particularly these "silly" rights and freedoms, and including things like hundreds of thousands of "furriners" being murdered and maimed in the name of the "superiority" of that "lifestyle" of yours.
To which I can only say that I hope you get what you truly deserve. Neither security, nor freedom. And a bankruptcy to boot. All of which are pretty much knocking on your doors already. Perhaps you should hide under your bed with your iPod and turn up the volume.
Do you even know what the word "drama" means? Get a dictionary.
You are apparently so used to "arguments" being presented in the most "politically correct", "inoffensive", spineless, gutless, craven way that you now consider basic truths to be "dramatic" and terribly frightening.
Neither of which involves loss of freedom.
Having said that, we do give up some freedoms in order to partake in a society but those are only of a particular kind, all having to do with maintaining societal cohesion. All of which essentially adhere to the logic that "your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose". The extent and fairness of this exchange has been the very centre of a rather heated political discussion for a few millennia now.
The author of the article is not however referring to such a scenario, dealing with maintaining the very societal fabric, he is instead describing an attempt to lure him into a form of life-long servitude for no other reason than the avarice of his potential "employer".
True, I stand corrected. Both getting and spending money is theoretically prone to being evil in equal measures. But my original statement stems from the fact that in practical, empirical terms getting money in very large quantities essentially requires much evil to be visited on a lot of people, although in many cases it is in small amounts spread across very large populations. Is abusing 10 million people, each a little bit, better then raping two 3 year olds? You tell me.
That is a wrong question. The evil being done here is by the people who take that freedom from you, not you who would be a victim in this case. The same applies to the article author, he is not the villain in this, he is merely being conned by villains into becoming their slave. The correct analogy would be if you were to deprive a lot of people of some of their freedom, say an ability to talk to their children, and somehow that got you a truckload of money which you then spent on "charity" in Africa. Your actions there would not redeem your original villainy.
Abdication of certain freedoms, by a sufficient number of society members, leads essentially to a societal collapse. No amount of silly whining about "drama" is going to change that, nor will it make sane people stop voicing opposition.
See above. Some things are simply not for sale. Despite of what some insane maniacs try to insinuate, the Universe is not a gigantic "free market" where a
Right. I am semi-retired at this point and only work when it suits my fancy. You have your generations mixed up.
The term you are groping for is "moral relativism". And it still as bankrupt as it ever was.
He is asking because charlatans of all stripes have managed to muddle what used to be crystal-clear distinctions into a pitiful cesspit of "pragmatic" choices, from which a whole plethora of societal woes springs forth, some of which are likely to bankrupt (literally!) the US of A.
Except, of course, life-long NDA's and "non compete" agreements go far, far beyond any of that.
Apples and oranges. The case would be comparable if you had signed a "contract" committing you to life-long work for some individual or company, with no option to get out of it, ever, irrespective of the actions of the "employer". At which point such an arrangement has a name: "indentured slavery". Any other form of employment is subject to termination by either of the parties should they change their mind and is not in perpetuity. In the example you provided you are merely exchanging a limited amount of your labour for a limited amount of money, which is simply one of the elemental forms of trade.
Their desire is inconsequential in light of what is needed to satisfy that desire. And in this case it is nothing short of life-long enslavement.
Only his freedom, which is what all these other posters pointed out. How much is freedom worth? To some of us it is priceless, even to the point of our life being less dear.
Actually they do. He is now forbidden to contribute to any project that even remotely competes with the original one. Also from ever talking about it. That is what the combo of NDA+"non compete" agreement does, both of which he has to sigh on day 1.
This has nothing to do with "drama" or open source projects. It has to do with freedom. The argument would not be any different if the contract forbade him from tying his shoes in a certain way or prevented him from going fishing for the rest of his life.
You are greedy and not merely "practical". You crossed that line the moment you considered a trade of a life-long restriction for some few coins being even remotely "fair".
Neither of which requires us to become slaves, which is what you are emphatically advocating.
This is how slaves are made. The moment you decide that "cash in hand" is worth abandoning one's principles you cease to be a human being and become an object of trade. I do not discuss morality with merchandise such as you. Merchandise cannot grasp such ideas.
Wrong. What one does with the money is far, far behind in importance in comparison to how one got the money in the first place. All the charity in the world will never redeem the Robber Barons, past or modern.
Hahahaha! Of course! The "thing" would have been much, much "easier" only if thanks to Gramm-Leach-Biley all the banks merged into ONE BIG BANK, no?
Because that is the only logical outcome of all this crap you know.
Hurray for "competition"! Hurray for "free markets"!
Fascists thinly disguised as "capitalists" so crack me up.
Except of course this is not what Paulson will be buying. Where the bank-sinking "asset deflation" occurred was in the "Credit Default Swap" market, an entirely imaginary "insurance" financial instruments which were, at their peak, valued at $45 trillion with ... exactly ZERO real assets backing them. No hard working families here, no monthly payments, but instead simply 100% pure gambling debts of the "genius" Wall Street players.
This is where that $700 billion (and the $600 billion right before it) will be sunk into, making nary a dent, only to somewhat delay the inevitable (with the aim of making the shit hit the fan for real only after the change of the White House occupants).
So do I (amongst other things), but those posters are not by any means "drama queens". You on the other hand are just a typical greed monkey whose "brain" locks up as soon as some dollar bills are in view.
If you were not, you would have immediately realized that that potential "employers" of the submitter of the article are simply scam artists (probably with the same mindset as you). They demand that he signs an eternal set of NDAs and "non compete" contracts, while offering to pay him in a definitely time-limited fashion (i.e. until the project completion, whenever that will be, or until they change their minds, whenever that might be). In short they wish to enslave him by denying him the use of some of his abilities forever (or in practical terms until he dies) in exchange for what amounts to a set of glass beads. The only thing even remotely approaching "adequate" compensation for such a thing are perpetual payments from these "employers" or an up-front amount guaranteeing him life-long comfort, neither of which are being offered as far as it can be discerned from the article.
Well, this is splitting hair about the internal brain-workings of religious lunatics, but the main point remains that there is a good reason that with appropriate training ... err brainwashing, such people have a good chance of achieving the mental state of if not "peace" at least of "indifference" sufficient enough to fool this stupid detector. Odds are much higher that a Joe Sixpack being pissed at his plane being late and his girlfriend giving him lip is "detected" then one of these highly motivated and trained terrorists.
Absolutely! Because if those "heavy fingers" of gubmnt get involved, it will restrict brilliant innovation in financial business that you do like! Why, take for example the securities industry, where the removal of all that restrictive gubmnt meddling allowed our Wholly Unregulated Financial Geniuses of Freedom to bring about an explosive growth of creative, innovative financial instruments such as "Credit Default Swaps" and their derivatives, leading to astronomical increase in their "value"! It worked so great in fact that now this "value" exceeds the global supply of cash, in all currencies, by a factor of about 4! And where would all that "value" be now if those gubmnt bastards had put their fat fingers of their "heavy hand" into this ...
Oh wait...
Brilliant point. Particularly, a religious fanatic will be in a state of peace and righteousness-filled euphoria because he is finally "fulfilling his destiny" in life and just hours away from being rewarded by his God for being a faithful "Holy Warrior".
Well, the point I was making, which you appear to miss, is that even though SyncML is ostensibly "open" and ActiveSync proprietary, it seems that it is far easier to get ActiveSync running on a low-resource Linux server in a fully open implementation.
All the other "solutions", as far as I am concerned, simply aren't. Blackberry's method requires me to run Exchange or Lotus Notes, complete with a whole Windows Server infrastructure with proprietary BES software on top, which is a complete non starter. SyncML on Linux has no good light-weight open implementations. So essentially ActiveSync is it.
I made these observations not from a perspective of a 5000 employee enterprise, but as a Linux hacker who relies on Linux-only server infrastructure in my small operation.
Also, while it is true that other phones have ActiveSync support, as I pointed out the quality of the web browser on the iPhone allows for filling the essential functionality gap with wholly server-side apps, something which the other phones have hard times doing due to their inability to render complex web pages.
This does not mean that iPhone is somehow the best thing ever, but it simply means that it fulfills a particular role in my environment reasonably well.
I have an iPhone (which I got essentially "free" from my Telco - which probably means that I spend way too much money on communications ...) and while it is indeed DRM crippled to Hell and generally buggy, while fooling around with it I found out that it was much easier for me to deploy an ActiveSync emulation in PHP on Linux then one of the very, very few fully open SyncML Linux implementations, probably due to the insane and wholly unnecessary complexity of the SyncML protocol or crazy design choices of the implementors, such as using gargantuan Java frameworks to implement the server-side (my ActiveSync server is a 32MB RAM MIPS device btw). Which is a rather sad state of affairs.
I never tried to run a fake ActiveSync back-end before and so I was pleasantly surprised that the Z-Push implementation is very straightforwardly hackable to the point that within a day I got my Contacts and Calendar operating with a 100% PostgreSQL back end of my own design, tied directly into my time tracking and billing system. I use IMAP for email combined with SMS-based "push" for incoming email notifications, which works wonderfully with procmail and allows me to be notified only for emails I deem "important" enough, instead for all the crap that normally makes to people's inboxes.
So in the end I am somewhat pleased with the thing, and although it pains me to say so, unless something changes radically I think if I were to ditch the iPhone, my next phone will be an ActiveSync one, not SyncML.
Another side-effect of this is that I did not load any apps on the phone at all as with this kind of setup, combined with the above-average web browser quality on the iPhone, I am able to have everything wholly server-side, making the actual phone the least important element in the overall scheme of things.
Nothing of the sort. True you said that the invasion was a "terrible mistake" .. but you also said that 'I agree with the GP in that "the Surge and the Awakening DID save Iraqi lives"' and on top of that you also said "Once that terrible mistake was made they could not simply leave ...".
Which only demonstrates that the apologists for the US, such as you, have now achieved the necessary mental state of Orwellian "double think" (or in this case possibly even "triple think"), i.e. maintaining in your mind two completely mutually exclusive positions and vehemently believing both of them at the same time!
And that is why my pointing out that using the words "saving lives" in the context of the "surge" is the very apex of hypocrisy went over you head so far that it might as well have been in orbit.
As to my "knowing what is in your head" I have only your posts to go by, posts formulated so that the only conclusion one can draw is that you insist that we join you in your illogical stance designed to assure that the war criminals and their armies can be vindicated and eventually absolved of their crimes.
No, it did not. You insist only on counting the decline in violent deaths as "saving", while at the same time demanding that the overall number due to the invasion be ignored. Its simple arithmetics really: the total deaths due to the unwarranted invasion over the period of the occupation less the deaths "saved" by the "surge" due to the process of pacification of the newest Imperial Province of Iraq are still far more then the value of zero which would be the case if the invasion did not occur. Besides, no one can actually tell you if any lives were actually "saved" due to the "surge" since we do not even know what the actual numbers without the "surge" would be, why, we do not even know if the "surge" is actually responsible rather then other factors such as the Al Sadr's "ceasefire" - all we know that the carnage is declining.
The situation is analogous to someone sabotaging some railway tracks thus causing a passenger train to derail, following which he "magnanimously" decides not to club to death the victims of the crash crawling from the wreckage, but only if they swear their life-long obedience to him. And so because by your calculation such action "saved" the lives of the remaining crash victims, who were indeed "spared", you insist that we praise the blood-covered murderous villain for his "change of policy".
Of course you do realize that this is the very same excuse used by every empire since such things were recorded in history, do you not? Let me quote you a bit of history of the British Empire, in the era before the nascent American Empire took its place:
Does it perhaps sound a bit familiar?
... and Russia and Venezuela and ... anyone who does not subscribe to the neo-feudal, pan-national, corporate empire of the New Aristocracy, presently head quartered in the US with the US army as its muscle. The problem is far, far, far deeper then mere "US foreign policy". That policy is a symptom of the disease, not the cause of it. The world is being re-shaped as we speak to be ushered into a new era of
Truth hurts, doesn't it? I know that you would rather keep your head in the sand and encourage everyone else to do the same, but that will not change reality even one tiny bit.
Or perhaps you would challenge the truth of anything I said? Perhaps you would demonstrate what "appeal" process do the Iraqi or Afghani kids have available to them if some drone operator decides to blow them up on suspicion of being "insurgents"? (just two weeks back 90 women and kids were blown up by a drone in Afghanistan) Should I link to gun-sight videos of farmers being gunned down in their fields from Apache helicopters because they were behaving "suspiciously"?
So did Hitler's pacification of Poland. Once the Polish army was defeated, the only violence was reserved for Jews and Poles who refused to accept the new order. Just like in Iraq, given time, Poland would have "quieted down" after all these "terrorists" in the hills were exterminated and the Poles accepted their new role as slaves worth less then the dirt on the German boots.
This is what is happening in Iraq!
Does this penetrate your thick skull? Let me tell you precisely what is going on here: the US army and its contractors can kill anyone for reasons real or imagined, anytime, anywhere with no warning, no justification, no trial, no evidence of any kind. The price of this "saving of lives" is an acknowlegment by all Iraqis that they are worthless, mere dirt on US army boots, and have no rights whatsoever. The only "people" in Iraq are Americans. Everyone else is either dirt or foreign contractors. Those who refuse to be dirt, die, Americans simply kill them with impunity. Everyone in Iraq must now "live" with the acceptance of the fact that they are a walking target practice for American drones at at any time some cappuccino-sipping jerk in the US can click his mouse to remove you, your spouse and your children from existence. And that no one who cares about will be able to do anything about it.
It is that simple!
This is what this new "Pax Americana" means. Yes, it is "peace", but does anyone but some pig-headed US fascists want to actually live in such new "world order"? I certainly don't.
Actually, yes. You see there are some things more dear then life. Perhaps you've heard of this thing called "liberty"? If the price of "saving lives" is abject slavery, then such "life" is too expensive.
You gotta be kidding. In this REAL WORLD the most effective step was to leave (and spare me all the bullshit about al-Queda taking over) and let the Iraqis to sort their own troubles out, which is guaranteed to be less bloody (again spare me the chicken-hawks squawking) then what the US has wrought over there.
The point was however not to "stop Iraqis from dying" but to dominate them. And that is why the US would not leave, no matter how many lives it would cost Iraqis.
Of course it was. This has been the foundation of any Imperial Conquest since times immemorial, and Iraq is no different. Slaughter must continue until a puppet regime is firmly entrenched, following which the exploitation of the new "satellite state" (or in the old book an "Imperial Province") can begin in earnest.
Of course the ultimate policy "that saves lives of Iraqis" was ... not to fucking invade in the first place. Hence the "turd".
What is happening now is not to "save a lot of their lives" but to "ensure US dominance" and to demonstrate to any future malcontents in future invasions that "resistance to your new Lords And Masters is futile". Yes, the end result is that the subjugated people stop dying from the US missiles (mostly) after they prostrate themselves and start sucking US dick as instructed. But it is still a major difference from mere "saving lives".
In other words it is to ensure that not only the con artists are rewarded fully (i.e. assuring a full government-guaranteed profit on the con) but that the (brainless, I admit, but that is a precondition of all scams) victims of the scam are made to pay the thieves, albeit now in more "affordable" installments, while the "value" of the "property" they pay for goes into the dump, leaving them with huge losses! I am so glad that we have brainiacs such as you to explain to us the necessity of such a "solution"! Are you an investment croo ... I mean banker, by any chance?
How about the old-fashioned man-hunt complete with dragging these "investors" and their front-men, i.e. the "investor bankers" in chains to serve 20 years of heavy labor as an example to what happens to those who ruin millions of American families to satisfy their own cosmic greed?
Except of course this action does nothing whatsoever for the economy. Spouting such meaningless platitudes is a hallmark of an economic demagogue.
So let me break it down, so that the emptiness of all that rhetoric of yours can be exposed to some daylight.
You have a group of individuals "HO", in the market for some already overpriced piles of sticks which provide them with protection from rain and snow, but come with a host of obligations and costs which make them only moderately economically viable in relation to the typical income of that HO group.
Enter group "IB" who seeks to steal everybody's money. They normally attempt to use moneys of another group "I" who is essentially a multi-billionaire club with a large number of some goofy "wannabes" attached who are allowed to lose all their money in the effort to "belong", to which silly belief they are encouraged by the multi-billionaires who seek to fleece them out of what miserable funds these goofuses still possess. Of course 99% of the assets in that club already belongs to the 1% who are the billionaires and the tens of thousands of idiots (i.e. the remaining 99%) who think themselves to be in the group have the remaining 1% amongst themselves. Which of course does not stop them from thinking themselves as being "I" and braying loudly about it, followed by doing everything in their power to protect the billionaires because they feel themselves always "on the cusp" of becoming such themselves. Any minute now.
The "IB" thieves come up with a giant con: to get the "HO" turkeys to start fighting amongst themselves over "purchasing" the piles of sticks, thus increasing the "value" (snicker) of these worthless things and then to use this "increased" value as a "collateral" for further "loans" to be used to increase the tempo of the "HO" squabble, all the way skimming a percentage of the monetary value of all these "transactions" off the top. They enlist the help of the billionaires to get the thing started.
And it works beautifully: the "HO" squabble causing the "value" of the piles of sticks to skyrocket, that "value" is then used as "collateral" to issue further "loans" and the cycle repeats itself.
Of course at certain point the "HO" idiots run out of their real (as opposed to "invested" in the piles of sticks) money. So they attempt to sell these "valuable" possessions. At which point they discover that if enough of them do so, the whole charade collapses. Which makes a guy named Ponzi laugh out of his grave.
Things start to look grim. The "IB" crooks already got their money (which they've been stashing abroad knowing all the way that the whole thing was a con). The "I" crooks too never stood to lose anything as their real money was only used to get the thing going and constituted a tiny fraction of the "value" of the con at its peak and was long since withdrawn (they of course were also in on the con) and whatever could be managed to be siphoned out was pure gain. The "HO" marks stand to lose everything as the lion share of the "value" of their "assets" is pure fantasy and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Enter the Knight on the White Horse, the Government of Dunces. The trumpets blare and the pages wave colorful standards. The rescue is here! And so the Knight takes the gold of the "HO" turkeys he collected over the years from them as well as that of many, many others who were previously not involved in this fiasco and gives that to .... the "IB" thieves. Who naturally split the loot with their billionaire "I" partners and roll laughing all the way to their bank in Dubai.
And what is the final tally? The "HO" idiots are still screwed. The value of their "assets" will still fall l