That FAA policy you're citing has not been tested in court. These cases while they may not have set binding precedent, certainly provided useful legal reasoning for other judges to use.
Not having to do any work is a strong fiscal incentive to simply rubber stamp these requests. The judge's time, and possible earning power from books or consultations on cases not in their direct purview, are at risk if they make a fuss about these "routine" matters. Their staff can be cut, their offices can be switched to less luxurious quarters, and they're much less likely to get fiscal support for political office they may seek during or after their term. Favors to family members, access to the alls of power of security agencies who appreciate their cooperation, and even the memory cooperation with the security companies that design the equipment used for such surveillance are all possible and powerful incentives too cooperate. They involve time, privilege, power, and money, not necessarily in that order.
> but there's really is no financial incentive to them support the government.
The base salary is roughly $200,000/year. The benefits are very nice for a judge at this level, and it also means that they can do literally no work for these approvals, since they've apparently never bothered to reject a single one. The role also bolsters their resume for work in other government offices or the right private sector roles after their term. Those are _large_ financial incentives to make the plaintiffs with money and connections content with every ruling.
This article is a good example of the old rule on Slashdot and elsewhere, "when a title is a question, the answer is always ". And it is one of the very rare exceptions.
Lawsuits, and prosecutions, always start by default with the maximum possible penalty. It's similar to submitting a bid for contract work: you sibmit a bid for as much as the market will bear, to do the maximum possible amount of work with the least resources, and then negotiate. It's very rare for the dollar figure in a lawsuit to bear more than a passing resemblance to any damages awarded or any negotiated settlement.
As far as the law is concerned, this photographer has _excellent_ grounds for a very large lawsuit. The work was used in violation of the contract, it was used commercially, large scale abuse of the copyrighted material was involved, and the defendant has apparently admitted to some level of guilt. So of course the photographer should start with the maximum penalty in the lawsuit, so that they can reach a finding or a settlement that discourages similar abuses.
The best guess I've heard is that the FBI hired an Israeli security firm.The Israelis have strong reasons to want to hack personal phones, which are used both for terrorist communications and for control devices for emote detonators.
> Maybe people tend to become more moderate, with less "fire in the belly" as they get older.
Some of us have also seen a few cycles of boom-bust, war fever, and of having friends die wastefully. Others of us started out radical, and had society stream past us in the directions we were once proud leaders of, or we've actually had to bring home a paycheck and raise kids and learn to agree with our parents, about things we never could have imagined agreeing about. And some of have learned to _scheme_ at politics, to more subtly plan for the future with less noise about it.
> trying to hijack a meaningless award away from another small group of elitist pricks
It's not meaningless if you're a reader, a writer, an agent, or a publisher. For new writers especially, a Hugo award can help open a lot of doors to publishers who might not have time to sort through the slush pile on their desks.
> The only exceptions I can think of are when words from other languages are converted to English
So, you mean that most English's pronunciation has nothing to do with its spelling?
From James Nicholl, in a 1990 Usenet post which I heard about the next year.
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.
He also apparently misspelled "rifle" by accident.
> You need to report those companies for age discrimination.
I'd wish the anonymous coward good luck with that. This actually happened to me decades ago, when I was already the oldest person in the department at a long ago role. It's a nightmare to prove, and a competent bureaucratic manager has already assembled a paper trail to let you go with. The tendency of older IT personnel to do a good job of documentation and cross-training others, and of completing projects instead of leaving them half-manual, can make it easier for the remaining, younger staff to keep the budget reduced and development held back systems running until the next major market change and new projects.
Downsizing is also a good opportunity to let go the deadwood. Simply because someone is older and has done a lot of different work doesn't mean they're good at it: it's vital to check references.
> One of them has spent, literally, the last 14 months trying to decide what the right tool is for our department
>> , it may very well be fully worth taking two years to select something,
This is almost _never_ the case. It's usually a sign of extensively overdesigning the solution, insisting that the single tool solve _all_ the problems. I've seen it happen repeatedly, with email systems, QA tools, clustering projects, and even physical architectures. By the time the decision is made and implemented, the problem will have changed and it will no longer be the perfect solution. And the investment in hacks to work with the old infrastructure will be so large that it creates _another_ round of evaluation to move off the old systems, which have to be maintained in place during the switchover.
I've seen this type of over-extended planning, repeatedly, and it's painful.
> Actually, I STILL get headhunter calls every single week; but they are ALL horrible little short-term contract jobs halfway across the country, or more...
Publish open source. When you're the one who published the fix from 3 years ago on a business critical toolkit, they _do_ take your resume seriously.
> I know you prefer the 'obedience' of the h1b indentured servant worker.
And then, several years later, they get to hire me and my crew to clean up the resulting unscalable mess. But that's an exciting new "project", or "new initiative". We do a lot of cleanup work from shortsighted, poorly managed outsourcing.
May I assume that was your _late_ 20's? Many of my colleagues, and generations I've mentored siince then, tended not to be settled with spouses or kids until at least 5 years, usually 10, after they left school.
Whatever your age at the time, I applaud your willingness at the time to help your kids and wife, perhaps at considerable cost to your income and your career. That can lead to very difficult decisions. I do wish at times that my colleagues and mentors of the time had had a bit more experience, to provide better advice. I'd not necessarily have taken their advice, but I might have been better prepared for some of the surprises.
I'm personally quite gray, thank you, and still good. But I'm working in an environment where experience with the internal components of technologies is invaluable. It's extremely useful when confronted with exciting new technologies to realize "we tried that 20 years ago, this was why it failed then and how we had to hack around it, and this is what will happen if you don't do it right from the beginning".
And it's unfortunate that as I've aged, I can't switch focus as quickly, I require more rest and food breaks, my medical expenses have risen drastically, I'm much more likely to have family or friends need me for medical support, I'm also much less willing to move, and I'm less likely to be versed in the latest technologies taught in school because I've focused on the longer lived, familiar tools which I'm paid to support. My chances of dying or being incapacitated for medical reasons has also gone up profoundly: all of those are understandable, though not legally defensible, reasons to prefer a younger employee
I'm also far less willing to be misled by management promises, to buy into management promises of "this is a contract to permanent role" position, to let a manager lie to a customer about our products, or to fail to create a paper trail if someone if someone is cooking the books. And I've enough of a name in my chosen technology fields to be taken seriously and "call shenanigans" on personally profitable but fundamentally foolish technology decisions. Some managers really do not appreciate technology personnel with enough experience to question their particular "big picture".
Conversely, younger workers are more likely to melt down or switch career paths unexpectedly, especially if they marry. It's illegal in many states to take the possibility of pregnancy into account for hiring, but it's a constant factor for employing young women. And younger technology workers are usually on the upward path of their career, likely to seek more income and more responsibility. They're also more likely to be caught up with the latest exciting technology fad. My personal list of once exciting but now discarded technologies includes Rust, SysV UNIX, BeOS, R, DOS, and Usenet.
> SERIOUSLY??? It is more profitable to use slave labor than pay your workers,
It's not normally more profitable and has not been since improvements in mechanical devices made animals and machines far less expensive than slave laberl. A very famous case of this is the horse collar, which made horses much more efficient for farm labor by allowing them to pull a plow or heavy load with their shoulders, rather than a collar directly on their neck. And slaves are notoriously less productive than paid labor, especially skilled labor.
Have you visited any coastal cities lately, including those in Amsterdam, Florida, Japan, or the Caribbean Islands? Or taken a good look at the satellite photos of Greenland? It's not the massive refugee migration from the newspaper article formerly at the website mentioned in Spiegel, but it's proven very real.
He's actually quite good. He presents as much data as he has, and as his current audience can handle, in clear language and good logic. It's difficult to get every scientific detail explained in full in a public forum of any sort, but he does and has done clear scientific analysis for decades now, and he does his research to be prepared for the presentations.
He's done public debates with science denying fools before: there was an infamous debate with a creationist leader, at:
This does make me wonder if the CDC and the FDA will review the ban on DDT. Some of the original research causing its ban has been called into question, and it remains used very effectively to control malaria in many parts of the world.
Some of us are old enough. And Zippy is still in print in some newspapers, though not that many of us pick up real newspapers anymore. For anyone using Emacs, there is still an "Esc-x psychoanalyze-pinhead" command to crossconnect a Zippy quote generator to the old Eliza chatbot.
Because we do not trust the FBI or our other federal investigatory agencies to operate transparently. Nor should we: they've a long history of relying on untrustworthy informants, and of pursuing ridiculous charges for criminal activity. Look up the David LaMacchia case for a prime example of stupidly handled criminal charges, and the Kevin Mitnick case for how badly the FBI handles hacker informants. Most of their limited number of successful investigations and prosecutions for computer crime do not actually involve investigation by the FBI, the data is handed to them by the victims or by outraged private citizens as the only agency empowered to investigate crimes that cross state lines. And they normally say "no", because the crimes do not reach the fiscal threshold to justify assigning any manpower to the case.
The result is that the FBI is a passive roadblock to investigation and prosecution of the massive amounts of computer cracking and computer based fraud that flood many networks.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you look again.
http://www.cnet.com/news/judge...
And there was also this case, of people at a Senator's pigeon shoot. There was apparently no prosecution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That FAA policy you're citing has not been tested in court. These cases while they may not have set binding precedent, certainly provided useful legal reasoning for other judges to use.
Not having to do any work is a strong fiscal incentive to simply rubber stamp these requests. The judge's time, and possible earning power from books or consultations on cases not in their direct purview, are at risk if they make a fuss about these "routine" matters. Their staff can be cut, their offices can be switched to less luxurious quarters, and they're much less likely to get fiscal support for political office they may seek during or after their term. Favors to family members, access to the alls of power of security agencies who appreciate their cooperation, and even the memory cooperation with the security companies that design the equipment used for such surveillance are all possible and powerful incentives too cooperate. They involve time, privilege, power, and money, not necessarily in that order.
Or the "Pocket Fisherman" line of small fishing rods.
http://www.amazon.com/Pocket-F...
Suitable for downing drones at surprising ranges, with far more range than a garden hose and much more safely than a firearm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
> but there's really is no financial incentive to them support the government.
The base salary is roughly $200,000/year. The benefits are very nice for a judge at this level, and it also means that they can do literally no work for these approvals, since they've apparently never bothered to reject a single one. The role also bolsters their resume for work in other government offices or the right private sector roles after their term. Those are _large_ financial incentives to make the plaintiffs with money and connections content with every ruling.
This article is a good example of the old rule on Slashdot and elsewhere, "when a title is a question, the answer is always ". And it is one of the very rare exceptions.
Lawsuits, and prosecutions, always start by default with the maximum possible penalty. It's similar to submitting a bid for contract work: you sibmit a bid for as much as the market will bear, to do the maximum possible amount of work with the least resources, and then negotiate. It's very rare for the dollar figure in a lawsuit to bear more than a passing resemblance to any damages awarded or any negotiated settlement.
As far as the law is concerned, this photographer has _excellent_ grounds for a very large lawsuit. The work was used in violation of the contract, it was used commercially, large scale abuse of the copyrighted material was involved, and the defendant has apparently admitted to some level of guilt. So of course the photographer should start with the maximum penalty in the lawsuit, so that they can reach a finding or a settlement that discourages similar abuses.
The best guess I've heard is that the FBI hired an Israeli security firm.The Israelis have strong reasons to want to hack personal phones, which are used both for terrorist communications and for control devices for emote detonators.
> Maybe people tend to become more moderate, with less "fire in the belly" as they get older.
Some of us have also seen a few cycles of boom-bust, war fever, and of having friends die wastefully. Others of us started out radical, and had society stream past us in the directions we were once proud leaders of, or we've actually had to bring home a paycheck and raise kids and learn to agree with our parents, about things we never could have imagined agreeing about. And some of have learned to _scheme_ at politics, to more subtly plan for the future with less noise about it.
> trying to hijack a meaningless award away from another small group of elitist pricks
It's not meaningless if you're a reader, a writer, an agent, or a publisher. For new writers especially, a Hugo award can help open a lot of doors to publishers who might not have time to sort through the slush pile on their desks.
> The only exceptions I can think of are when words from other languages are converted to English
So, you mean that most English's pronunciation has nothing to do with its spelling?
From James Nicholl, in a 1990 Usenet post which I heard about the next year.
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.
He also apparently misspelled "rifle" by accident.
> You need to report those companies for age discrimination.
I'd wish the anonymous coward good luck with that. This actually happened to me decades ago, when I was already the oldest person in the department at a long ago role. It's a nightmare to prove, and a competent bureaucratic manager has already assembled a paper trail to let you go with. The tendency of older IT personnel to do a good job of documentation and cross-training others, and of completing projects instead of leaving them half-manual, can make it easier for the remaining, younger staff to keep the budget reduced and development held back systems running until the next major market change and new projects.
Downsizing is also a good opportunity to let go the deadwood. Simply because someone is older and has done a lot of different work doesn't mean they're good at it: it's vital to check references.
> One of them has spent, literally, the last 14 months trying to decide what the right tool is for our department
>> , it may very well be fully worth taking two years to select something,
This is almost _never_ the case. It's usually a sign of extensively overdesigning the solution, insisting that the single tool solve _all_ the problems. I've seen it happen repeatedly, with email systems, QA tools, clustering projects, and even physical architectures. By the time the decision is made and implemented, the problem will have changed and it will no longer be the perfect solution. And the investment in hacks to work with the old infrastructure will be so large that it creates _another_ round of evaluation to move off the old systems, which have to be maintained in place during the switchover.
I've seen this type of over-extended planning, repeatedly, and it's painful.
True friends help you move books.
> Actually, I STILL get headhunter calls every single week; but they are ALL horrible little short-term contract jobs halfway across the country, or more...
Publish open source. When you're the one who published the fix from 3 years ago on a business critical toolkit, they _do_ take your resume seriously.
> I know you prefer the 'obedience' of the h1b indentured servant worker.
And then, several years later, they get to hire me and my crew to clean up the resulting unscalable mess. But that's an exciting new "project", or "new initiative". We do a lot of cleanup work from shortsighted, poorly managed outsourcing.
May I assume that was your _late_ 20's? Many of my colleagues, and generations I've mentored siince then, tended not to be settled with spouses or kids until at least 5 years, usually 10, after they left school.
Whatever your age at the time, I applaud your willingness at the time to help your kids and wife, perhaps at considerable cost to your income and your career. That can lead to very difficult decisions. I do wish at times that my colleagues and mentors of the time had had a bit more experience, to provide better advice. I'd not necessarily have taken their advice, but I might have been better prepared for some of the surprises.
> My problem now is most of the network of people I have worked with, those who I have impressed over the years, have retired or clocked out.
That started happening to me 20 years ago.
I'm personally quite gray, thank you, and still good. But I'm working in an environment where experience with the internal components of technologies is invaluable. It's extremely useful when confronted with exciting new technologies to realize "we tried that 20 years ago, this was why it failed then and how we had to hack around it, and this is what will happen if you don't do it right from the beginning".
And it's unfortunate that as I've aged, I can't switch focus as quickly, I require more rest and food breaks, my medical expenses have risen drastically, I'm much more likely to have family or friends need me for medical support, I'm also much less willing to move, and I'm less likely to be versed in the latest technologies taught in school because I've focused on the longer lived, familiar tools which I'm paid to support. My chances of dying or being incapacitated for medical reasons has also gone up profoundly: all of those are understandable, though not legally defensible, reasons to prefer a younger employee
I'm also far less willing to be misled by management promises, to buy into management promises of "this is a contract to permanent role" position, to let a manager lie to a customer about our products, or to fail to create a paper trail if someone if someone is cooking the books. And I've enough of a name in my chosen technology fields to be taken seriously and "call shenanigans" on personally profitable but fundamentally foolish technology decisions. Some managers really do not appreciate technology personnel with enough experience to question their particular "big picture".
Conversely, younger workers are more likely to melt down or switch career paths unexpectedly, especially if they marry. It's illegal in many states to take the possibility of pregnancy into account for hiring, but it's a constant factor for employing young women. And younger technology workers are usually on the upward path of their career, likely to seek more income and more responsibility. They're also more likely to be caught up with the latest exciting technology fad. My personal list of once exciting but now discarded technologies includes Rust, SysV UNIX, BeOS, R, DOS, and Usenet.
> SERIOUSLY??? It is more profitable to use slave labor than pay your workers,
It's not normally more profitable and has not been since improvements in mechanical devices made animals and machines far less expensive than slave laberl. A very famous case of this is the horse collar, which made horses much more efficient for farm labor by allowing them to pull a plow or heavy load with their shoulders, rather than a collar directly on their neck. And slaves are notoriously less productive than paid labor, especially skilled labor.
Have you visited any coastal cities lately, including those in Amsterdam, Florida, Japan, or the Caribbean Islands? Or taken a good look at the satellite photos of Greenland? It's not the massive refugee migration from the newspaper article formerly at the website mentioned in Spiegel, but it's proven very real.
It can be difficult to sell, especially to export. Encryption has long been treated as a munition, a material of war.
He's actually quite good. He presents as much data as he has, and as his current audience can handle, in clear language and good logic. It's difficult to get every scientific detail explained in full in a public forum of any sort, but he does and has done clear scientific analysis for decades now, and he does his research to be prepared for the presentations.
He's done public debates with science denying fools before: there was an infamous debate with a creationist leader, at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This does make me wonder if the CDC and the FDA will review the ban on DDT. Some of the original research causing its ban has been called into question, and it remains used very effectively to control malaria in many parts of the world.
Some of us are old enough. And Zippy is still in print in some newspapers, though not that many of us pick up real newspapers anymore. For anyone using Emacs, there is still an "Esc-x psychoanalyze-pinhead" command to crossconnect a Zippy quote generator to the old Eliza chatbot.
Because we do not trust the FBI or our other federal investigatory agencies to operate transparently. Nor should we: they've a long history of relying on untrustworthy informants, and of pursuing ridiculous charges for criminal activity. Look up the David LaMacchia case for a prime example of stupidly handled criminal charges, and the Kevin Mitnick case for how badly the FBI handles hacker informants. Most of their limited number of successful investigations and prosecutions for computer crime do not actually involve investigation by the FBI, the data is handed to them by the victims or by outraged private citizens as the only agency empowered to investigate crimes that cross state lines. And they normally say "no", because the crimes do not reach the fiscal threshold to justify assigning any manpower to the case.
The result is that the FBI is a passive roadblock to investigation and prosecution of the massive amounts of computer cracking and computer based fraud that flood many networks.