Spitzer, a former attorney general who prosecuted both clients and prostitutes to clean New York up, transferred money between banks in amounts that caused the bank to flag the IRS. That got law enforcement, whose job happens to be finding and prosecuting people who break the law, involved. The discovered the nature of the business and that it was against the law. This is less a story about political prosecution as it is a story about a hypocritical political figure doing stupid stuff to get himself noticed by law enforcement. And the US loves pointing out hypocrisy.
I'm on the fence. On one hand, sending them to your own account seems pretty stupid. One the other hand, if the software has been out there for a while I would think I would notice suddenly getting a bunch of usernames and passwords in my inbox. Perhaps it was a real "oh crap" moment and he figured that he could sneak the fix into a patch before someone else noticed what was going on. It doesn't look like the emails had to be read, incidentally, it looks like the username and password were on the subject line.
If he wanted to stamp out racism, he'd be better served leaning on his counterparts in California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. Or any of the other 22 states that ranked higher in race motivated hate crime offense per the FBI. Or at least he'd be better served if he thought he could regulate thought.
This is a pretty interesting take on it. I haven't done a lot of checking to see if the numbers in the article are accurate, but it does make logical sense. The long and the short of it is that children in the US are more likely to receive medical care when they're in dire circumstances compared to some other countries. Since those children have a very low long term survival rate, it skews our numbers because doctors try and fail. In other countries, they wouldn't bother trying and the children wouldn't live long enough to be counted toward infant mortality.
Don't forget about Rwanda and Kosovo. The negative effects of the US getting involved in Kosovo are starting to be felt. And a lot of people (ok, maybe just me) are still unhappy about the response to the genocide in Rwanda. There are plenty of things that stain the Clinton legacy. The party might do well to let them fade.
Just to clarify on The Simpsons game. It's not based on a movie, it's a game based on them getting trapped in game. A lot of humor is more like old school Simpsons humor, and it's likely (don't tell Congress this) that they get more leeway with the ESRB than they do for public airways.
Not all of the games up there suck... But it's certainly more like a list of games that had union writers than any list of good story lines in games.
The market for cheats and exploits is so large primarily because of the "make it a grind!" trap that most MMORPGs fall into. If you're into a MMORPG, and you "need" cash for a certain item, or to recoup your costs for the last big raid, or what have you, you seem to get one of two choices. You can grind away whatever playtime you have in order to get the cash legitimately, you can buy it from someone that is grinding away (or perhaps using exploits), or you can turn to exploits/hacks/whatever yourself.
I understand that some percentage of the playing population is going to cheat, hack, or use an exploit simply because they can. But if game design didn't make it so attractive to so many people to reap the rewards that go along with it, it would be a pretty minor problem. In my opinion, as soon as you're killing the 3,000th slightly different textured mob for his toe...or running a dungeon you could do in your sleep just to make sure a fellow guild members armor is a little bit different color so you have a shot at the next dungeon, MMORPGs start losing some of their fun. I don't know of too many people that really enjoy running things that are on "farm" status, but there's a necessity to grind it out built into the games.
I know it keeps people hooked longer, but it also keeps the temptation to play...creatively...in people's mind.
Don't get your hopes up. The title is sort of misleading. It's being developed by Microsoft employees for everybody. You can bet that it would likely sell.
But I like to believe that we might yet hold on to some Constitutional rights that would really put a damper on this thing.
You're absolutely right, we're in a lose/lose situation. The FCC might decide the whole thing is garbage, which it is, and threaten some action against Comcast. Congress, who coincidentally get a lot of money from the entertainment industry, might move to block them. The entertainment industry, who coincidentally believe they're losing a lot of money due to teh evilz of bit torrents, will be happy and might see if other carriers are willing to do the same thing.
The best hope to get this stopped early is for people with a large sustained user base to get the legitimate uses of bit torrent out in the open and in the public eye. Vuze, Blizzard, and Bit Torrent (obviously) have a pretty big stake in the whole thing.
I enjoyed the Resident Evil movies, but I've always been a bit of a zombie movie fan. So I was predisposed to like them. I think you're right, though. There are a lot of perfectly viable "universes" out there that have the potential to make a good movie. The one that comes to mind for me is Warhammer. I bet that, with decent writers, it'd be possible to crank out a movie in either the fantasy or 40k variant that would hook viewers that don't know anything about the back story.
The oldest supported format is Word 6.0. Some businesses may require older versions. That's the crux of the argument, even their supported tools fail to open some of the much older formats. If Microsoft truly had all the old formats supported, as I stated earlier, they'd be able to really say there's no need.
If you really feel that Microsoft stands to lose so much from releasing specs so that people can potentially even work on their most recent formats, then surely you can appreciate that Microsoft has some responsibility to its customers to make sure they can access their data. Most companies would likely be completely happy with a reader or proprietary file converter that would let them open up older documents. You know...like we could essentially always do when a new version of Office rolled around.
All it would take is for Microsoft to release a fully compatible viewer/converter so that everybody can open the oldest of documents, and companies would likely cease to care.
I'd sit back and do nothing. I'd force Congress to take the heat for their own actions, and spend most of my presidency vetoing everything. The country seems to do a lot better when the President and Congress are opposed and neither can really get anything done. It's almost like the way it was likely intended to go when the whole concept of checks and balances was floated.
Having a Congress that votes for anything based on polls and knee-jerk reactions could be stopped by a President that vetoes their shenanigans. Having a Congress willing to stand up for what's right and not vote for whatever the President recommends because of polls or knee-jerk reactions prevents a President from running amok. And having a judicial branch ready to stop whatever happens to make it through helps out.
A lot of members of congress get heft campaign donations from the entertainment industry. Particularly members from California. Comcast's traffic shaping is supposed to help their campaign contributors. Is it any wonder they'd be against the FCC on this one?
It might be safer than a motorcycle in a crash, but loses some of the maneuverability that might help prevent an accident. It's likely got none of the safety features of a "real car," and none of the agility of a motorcycle. The worst of both worlds.
In the case of earthquakes, getting your data center on a ship is essentially like buying insurance. I would guess you'll pay more per year to keep it going, but the earthquake won't scrap your entire data center. You might lose communication for a while, but such is life.
But is it any more economical doing it that way versus buying some real estate in the middle of South Dakota to house your data center? Or some other centrally located hurricane and earthquake safe area. You'll spend more for data connections out there, but there's some new remote management stuff that'll make the maintenance less troublesome.
My guess is nerds brought up on Snow Crash will get nervous and start making sure there's no makeup covering up tattoos on the salespeople's forehead. But they might be nervous enough to buy into it. And they'd probably become more aware of their obligation to pizza delivery folks.
Sick of stable data centers inland, free from the excitement that comes from not knowing whether your data center will survive the latest hurricane or tropical storm? Tired of never meeting interesting longshoreman on your way to work? Try our new data center model!
They'd vote for Hillary, likely, because Bill is such a known quantity. I think there's this misguided hope that having her as President will get him out in the public eye more, and he's undoubtedly charismatic...whatever else one might think of him. And I've heard a fair number of people talking about voting for her strictly for the novelty of electing the first female President. No concerns for whether she might do a good job, or what she stands for. Just that they'll be breaking that barrier.
I think it's unfair to think that had something to do with the loss. He won in a state that's just a white. The key difference between this vote and the last one was we didn't have an emotional moment from Hillary taking up a significant portion of media time before the first election.
I'll be satisfied as long as some Bible (or other religious book of choice) Thumping lunatic doesn't win and try to control my private life even more.
So as long as the person that's elected and tries to control your life isn't a religious zealot, you're ok? It's only the non-secular control freaks that bother you?
You also have a right to invoke your Fifth Amendment rights against self incrimination, apparently. At least until the next President does away with those.
The bottom line from the story seems to be that the government is within their rights to giver a cursory examination to laptops and other electronic media. If you're dumb enough to put illegal files in a location that's quick and easy to get to, you're going to get busted. If you run an OS that the agents are familiar with, you're more likely to get busted. I'd bet your average customs/TSA agent that was faced with a Linux laptop would double click on a few things on the desktop and send you on your way.
An interesting question that comes out of all this regards passwords and encryption keys. If your right to not disclose encryption keys is upheld, I would think you'd have a right to not disclose a password to log-in to your box under the same Fifth Amendment arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
Spitzer, a former attorney general who prosecuted both clients and prostitutes to clean New York up, transferred money between banks in amounts that caused the bank to flag the IRS. That got law enforcement, whose job happens to be finding and prosecuting people who break the law, involved. The discovered the nature of the business and that it was against the law. This is less a story about political prosecution as it is a story about a hypocritical political figure doing stupid stuff to get himself noticed by law enforcement. And the US loves pointing out hypocrisy.
I'm on the fence. On one hand, sending them to your own account seems pretty stupid. One the other hand, if the software has been out there for a while I would think I would notice suddenly getting a bunch of usernames and passwords in my inbox. Perhaps it was a real "oh crap" moment and he figured that he could sneak the fix into a patch before someone else noticed what was going on. It doesn't look like the emails had to be read, incidentally, it looks like the username and password were on the subject line.
If he wanted to stamp out racism, he'd be better served leaning on his counterparts in California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. Or any of the other 22 states that ranked higher in race motivated hate crime offense per the FBI. Or at least he'd be better served if he thought he could regulate thought.
This is a pretty interesting take on it. I haven't done a lot of checking to see if the numbers in the article are accurate, but it does make logical sense. The long and the short of it is that children in the US are more likely to receive medical care when they're in dire circumstances compared to some other countries. Since those children have a very low long term survival rate, it skews our numbers because doctors try and fail. In other countries, they wouldn't bother trying and the children wouldn't live long enough to be counted toward infant mortality.
Don't forget about Rwanda and Kosovo. The negative effects of the US getting involved in Kosovo are starting to be felt. And a lot of people (ok, maybe just me) are still unhappy about the response to the genocide in Rwanda. There are plenty of things that stain the Clinton legacy. The party might do well to let them fade.
Do they speak English in Iarge?
Just to clarify on The Simpsons game. It's not based on a movie, it's a game based on them getting trapped in game. A lot of humor is more like old school Simpsons humor, and it's likely (don't tell Congress this) that they get more leeway with the ESRB than they do for public airways.
Not all of the games up there suck... But it's certainly more like a list of games that had union writers than any list of good story lines in games.
The market for cheats and exploits is so large primarily because of the "make it a grind!" trap that most MMORPGs fall into. If you're into a MMORPG, and you "need" cash for a certain item, or to recoup your costs for the last big raid, or what have you, you seem to get one of two choices. You can grind away whatever playtime you have in order to get the cash legitimately, you can buy it from someone that is grinding away (or perhaps using exploits), or you can turn to exploits/hacks/whatever yourself.
I understand that some percentage of the playing population is going to cheat, hack, or use an exploit simply because they can. But if game design didn't make it so attractive to so many people to reap the rewards that go along with it, it would be a pretty minor problem. In my opinion, as soon as you're killing the 3,000th slightly different textured mob for his toe...or running a dungeon you could do in your sleep just to make sure a fellow guild members armor is a little bit different color so you have a shot at the next dungeon, MMORPGs start losing some of their fun. I don't know of too many people that really enjoy running things that are on "farm" status, but there's a necessity to grind it out built into the games.
I know it keeps people hooked longer, but it also keeps the temptation to play...creatively...in people's mind.
Don't get your hopes up. The title is sort of misleading. It's being developed by Microsoft employees for everybody. You can bet that it would likely sell.
But I like to believe that we might yet hold on to some Constitutional rights that would really put a damper on this thing.
You're absolutely right, we're in a lose/lose situation. The FCC might decide the whole thing is garbage, which it is, and threaten some action against Comcast. Congress, who coincidentally get a lot of money from the entertainment industry, might move to block them. The entertainment industry, who coincidentally believe they're losing a lot of money due to teh evilz of bit torrents, will be happy and might see if other carriers are willing to do the same thing.
The best hope to get this stopped early is for people with a large sustained user base to get the legitimate uses of bit torrent out in the open and in the public eye. Vuze, Blizzard, and Bit Torrent (obviously) have a pretty big stake in the whole thing.
I enjoyed the Resident Evil movies, but I've always been a bit of a zombie movie fan. So I was predisposed to like them. I think you're right, though. There are a lot of perfectly viable "universes" out there that have the potential to make a good movie. The one that comes to mind for me is Warhammer. I bet that, with decent writers, it'd be possible to crank out a movie in either the fantasy or 40k variant that would hook viewers that don't know anything about the back story.
The oldest supported format is Word 6.0. Some businesses may require older versions. That's the crux of the argument, even their supported tools fail to open some of the much older formats. If Microsoft truly had all the old formats supported, as I stated earlier, they'd be able to really say there's no need.
If you really feel that Microsoft stands to lose so much from releasing specs so that people can potentially even work on their most recent formats, then surely you can appreciate that Microsoft has some responsibility to its customers to make sure they can access their data. Most companies would likely be completely happy with a reader or proprietary file converter that would let them open up older documents. You know...like we could essentially always do when a new version of Office rolled around.
All it would take is for Microsoft to release a fully compatible viewer/converter so that everybody can open the oldest of documents, and companies would likely cease to care.
I'd sit back and do nothing. I'd force Congress to take the heat for their own actions, and spend most of my presidency vetoing everything. The country seems to do a lot better when the President and Congress are opposed and neither can really get anything done. It's almost like the way it was likely intended to go when the whole concept of checks and balances was floated.
Having a Congress that votes for anything based on polls and knee-jerk reactions could be stopped by a President that vetoes their shenanigans. Having a Congress willing to stand up for what's right and not vote for whatever the President recommends because of polls or knee-jerk reactions prevents a President from running amok. And having a judicial branch ready to stop whatever happens to make it through helps out.
Because the outcome isn't important, it's how you get there?
A lot of members of congress get heft campaign donations from the entertainment industry. Particularly members from California. Comcast's traffic shaping is supposed to help their campaign contributors. Is it any wonder they'd be against the FCC on this one?
It might be safer than a motorcycle in a crash, but loses some of the maneuverability that might help prevent an accident. It's likely got none of the safety features of a "real car," and none of the agility of a motorcycle. The worst of both worlds.
In the case of earthquakes, getting your data center on a ship is essentially like buying insurance. I would guess you'll pay more per year to keep it going, but the earthquake won't scrap your entire data center. You might lose communication for a while, but such is life.
But is it any more economical doing it that way versus buying some real estate in the middle of South Dakota to house your data center? Or some other centrally located hurricane and earthquake safe area. You'll spend more for data connections out there, but there's some new remote management stuff that'll make the maintenance less troublesome.
My guess is nerds brought up on Snow Crash will get nervous and start making sure there's no makeup covering up tattoos on the salespeople's forehead. But they might be nervous enough to buy into it. And they'd probably become more aware of their obligation to pizza delivery folks.
Sick of stable data centers inland, free from the excitement that comes from not knowing whether your data center will survive the latest hurricane or tropical storm? Tired of never meeting interesting longshoreman on your way to work? Try our new data center model!
They'd vote for Hillary, likely, because Bill is such a known quantity. I think there's this misguided hope that having her as President will get him out in the public eye more, and he's undoubtedly charismatic...whatever else one might think of him. And I've heard a fair number of people talking about voting for her strictly for the novelty of electing the first female President. No concerns for whether she might do a good job, or what she stands for. Just that they'll be breaking that barrier.
I think it's unfair to think that had something to do with the loss. He won in a state that's just a white. The key difference between this vote and the last one was we didn't have an emotional moment from Hillary taking up a significant portion of media time before the first election.
I'll be satisfied as long as some Bible (or other religious book of choice) Thumping lunatic doesn't win and try to control my private life even more.
So as long as the person that's elected and tries to control your life isn't a religious zealot, you're ok? It's only the non-secular control freaks that bother you?
You also have a right to invoke your Fifth Amendment rights against self incrimination, apparently. At least until the next President does away with those.
The bottom line from the story seems to be that the government is within their rights to giver a cursory examination to laptops and other electronic media. If you're dumb enough to put illegal files in a location that's quick and easy to get to, you're going to get busted. If you run an OS that the agents are familiar with, you're more likely to get busted. I'd bet your average customs/TSA agent that was faced with a Linux laptop would double click on a few things on the desktop and send you on your way.
An interesting question that comes out of all this regards passwords and encryption keys. If your right to not disclose encryption keys is upheld, I would think you'd have a right to not disclose a password to log-in to your box under the same Fifth Amendment arguments.