This wasn't by accident. It didn't "briely pass over an aircraft."
If you actually watched the video, the laser was pointed directly at the helicopter over a series of minutes. Accidental pointing would have been unlikely for such a period of time, since you need to track the helicopter for that long.
>Have we slid so far down the slippery slope that something like this will become punishable?
Your argument is unreasonable and legitimizes the pointing of lasers at people who have lives in their hands.
>There's some really stupid shit that can get them in big trouble.
And you can't deliberately point a weapon at whim at a person and not get in big trouble.
Mens rea was demonstrated in the video. He got done and fairly so.
> My advice is that we find a technological solution.
There is no technological solution for dumbasses.
Tell me, how does the laser know if the person handling it is stupid or not? How would you prevent it from being pointed at an aircraft or someone's eyes?
> I don't like the idea of a technological future where only our betters (the cops) can get cool technology.
I said "a ban for unlicensed individuals" just like you can't buy a kilowatt radio transmitter without a license from any reputable radio shop (there are plenty of assholes who will sell linears to CB owners, though, and they should be shut down).
You need to prove you're not an idiot before you can use technology that can do damage to people at a distance. And yes, people who can prove that they are not idiots *are* better than idiots, like this guy in the video.
Perhaps a graduated licensing scheme should be in order. Beyond a certain power, only businesses, scientists, and engineers should be allowed to have them after demonstrating a legitimate need.
"sentenced to three years in jail for shining a high powered green laser at a helicopter "
Good. And since it's a federal crime, he gets to serve 85 percent of that.
I almost had someone arrested for shining a laser at my friggin' eyes across a bar. But since I knew the person and knew he wasn't "all there" I just confronted him.
But if it was anyone else, I would have pressed charges. Yes, it's assault.
There needs to be *at a minimum* public education on this issue, and if nobody is willing to do that, then handheld lasers need to be outright banned for unlicensed individuals. This opinion is unpopular for slashdot, but shit really has gotten out of hand.
... have declared war on the rest of us. They have declared war on modern society.
And no, there isn't any reasoning with these people, the Dominionists. They are stone cold nuts and they even use the vocabulary of war in their screeds. Any attempt to reason with them is assuming that they are capable of rational thought. They are not. Deep down, they actually and truly believe that science is *the* enemy. It is a position that is beyond the reach of any rational thought, so ridicule is the only tool left. If given half a chance, they would drag us back to pre-inudustrial society with just the Bible as the sole text.
He needs to be held up to ridicule from sea to shining sea.
Remote tools like this are used every day by remote sysadmins. The scam was to get you to install it yourself so they could connect from their end, take your banking information, and clean out your accounts. It looks like the reason why they picked Amyy was because the license fee for "unlimited simultaneous connections" is relatively cheap ($99 for top tier) compared to Teamviewer's rather expensive license for unlimited connections - $1499.
And then through the remote tool, they would make your machine unbootable when everything was done. There have been people who have let these guys run loose in a VM to find nothing, only to watch them start disabling services and delete system files.
Teamviewer, Amyy, other remote access/desktop sharing tools are third parties to all of this and aren't part of the scam.
In the late 70s I was doing yard work for an oceanographer and biologist down the road from me. We hopped in the truck one day because he had to go to the Graduate School of Oceanography in Saunderstown RI, which was literally a mile away, to get some stuff he was working on.
The URI GSO has a research reactor. We just walked in, he did his stuff, and we left. No guards, nothing. Not even a receptionist especially on a Saturday. ID? On a 13 year old kid? You kidding?
It wasn't the employees decision to get Elop. It was the board. The Nokia board has been exceptionally incompetent, and approving Elop was just another example of their ongoing incompetence.
Every Microsoft "Partner" thinks they are special. "It will never happen to us" they say. "Look at all this money we get from Microsoft!" They think they can beat the Devil with their own fiddle playing. Except this isn't a Charlie Daniels Band song.
>You are correct, but the government *does* have blame here.. deregulation
I agree. But the assertion is commonly that "the government made all these people do this, " as if the banking industry's arm was twisted by regulation into doing so, which is clearly not the case. Glass-Steagall removed the last barrier between Wall Street and the banking industry, but that was not intended to cause robosigning and loan application fraud and a willing blindness of fraud as the hot potato of a bad loan got passed around from broker to investor. And that's what I'm trying to address. A lot of people on the side of the Tea Party and Republicans in general emphasize Alice as the main problem and anti-redlining laws that were passed in the 70s. That is an oversimplification, and false.
Because if you listen to Fox News, somehow all this fraud began and ended with Alice or was the direct result of Barney Frank. But the repeal Glass-Steagall was a Republican machination, even though it was signed by Clinton. Without Clinton's signature, it was going to pass anyway because it was veto-proof (It was soundly rejected by the dems the first time around, then some horse trading was done, and the dems approved it too). Clinton only signed it because at was "bipartisan" to not embarass the Dems who sold out.
Fox can't tell its loyal viewers about how Glass-Steagall's repeal was the seed of all this, because it goes against the narrative of all regulation being bad. And Glass-Steagall was deregulation.
> Otherwise It is an accurate summary, and I am glad someone has encapsulated it here.
I've been following it since I recognized the housing bubble in 2006.
I wish I was as smart as Magnetar and able to make a buck off of the fraud by hedging against it.
>BOA
I hope so too. And it's not just BOA, which is the scary part.
Watch. Marc Dann has a brilliant speech on all this.
You're dodging Alice's personal responsibility with your list
And you're dodging what used to be done 20 years ago.
The banks themselves used to make the loans and hold them. That gave the motivation for "due diligence" to the loan officer at the bank to make sure that yes, you could pay back the loan.
Brokers do not have that motivation. They have the exact opposite motivation. Commission only. And since they are just literal paper pushers they were filing falsified paperwork and approving loans for people merely having a pulse.
>The break-down in the system is that, for some reason, we think as a society we should support people who make bad decisions rather than punishing them.
Yes, but you seem to be blaming only Alice, when the fraud goes way... way beyond Alice.
>Alice's responsibility
Joe Broker is supposed to be the expert on this. We rely on experts as sanity checks for our decisions. Joe Broker reassured Alice that she was making the right decision instead of refusing the loan, which is what would have happened 20 years ago in the old fashioned way.
There was far too much money to be made by people in the chain of operations that I listed above, and it's a direct result of deregulation.
>It's also the main reason why the banks have the whole world by the balls
If you think that the banks have the world by the balls in a mildly inflationary environment, then you have no idea how much the squeeze is felt in a deflationary time.
They are the biggest hoarders of all.
What you want is single-digit inflation that keeps pace with economic growth. This is actually healthy for an economy. The problem is that when bitcoin true believers like you talk about inflation, you're comparing all inflation to the 1930s German hyper-inflation, which isn't the same thing.
But whatever. The math spells it out and if even math is not going to convince you, then I guess there is no talking.
>When the bank gets permission from the federal government to give out loans to people that can clearly not afford to pay them back, and fails to disclose that to you.
That's not what happened here.
What happened was that we had people making loans that they could be sold to "greater fools," i.e., Wall Street.
-Joe Broker makes a loan to Alice - Banks don't make loans anymore, brokers do. -Alice can't pay it back, but Joe Broker says it's OK. -Broker doesn't give a shit because he gets a commission for each loan sold. Falsified paperwork EVERYWHERE. -Broker sends the paperwork to the bank. The bank doesn't give a shit because they can sell the loan to Wall Street. -Wall Street separates and chops up the mortgages and securitises them by creating securities with different levels (tranches) in the security. These are the "Mortgage Backed Securities." AAA on the top, junk on the bottom. -These are then sold as if they are all AAA to (see where this is going?) to retail and institutional investors. -They are considered *cash equivalent* by nearly everyone, except people at places like Magnetar. -The whole house of cards fell in 2007 and the people holding the bag were people like you and me and our retirement funds.
Meanwhile everyone in the entire system from the broker through Wall Street gets away with not even a slap on the wrist.
But that's not all!
In the chain of passing the buck, at each level, the transfers of these mortgages weren't (and still aren't) handled correctly. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of mortgages have been passed along without the required good paperwork making the servicers of the mortgages in these loans *not* valid mortgagees. And when the loan goes belly up, and a servicer forecloses, there is often either fraudulent paperwork or no paperwork at all and *no right to foreclose*. And in the confusion, there have been people making monthly payments to servicers that don't even have the right to take money for the mortgage at all! That's what the whole robosigner scandal is about, and robosigning is still going on.
And to make it even worse, people have been kicked out of their homes while not even *having* a mortgage to begin with!
It is fraud on a national scale, and it was *not* at the government's prodding. Regulation after regulation was ignored. Rampant fraud was committed by brokers, securitizers, banks, everyone who should have done due diligence.
And the dearth of people going to prison for this shit is why we have Occupy Wall Street.
You have oversimplifed it and you have blamed the wrong people.
Slashdot Mirror
So then there should be no laws ever?
What, sir, would fill the gap? Warlords? Do you fancy yourself as a warlord? Because that's what you'll have to be.
--
BMO
The funny thing is that you mentioned pepper spray.
Pepper spray is regulated.
You really /are/ an idiot.
--
BMO
"So you believe it would have been better if the person had pepper sprayed you, instead?"
Wow, the strawman nonsense really is coming out in this thread.
>but far more dangerous things are unrestricted
You can't buy a radio that transmits certain frequencies without a license.
Deal with it.
--
BMO
Birds do not demonstrate mens rea.
--
BMO
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/press_charges
English
Verb
to press charges
(intransitive, law) To formally accuse a person of a crime, especially by an ordinary person.
I'm pressing charges against you for assaulting me.
Synonyms
(formally accuse of a crime): complain, accuse, file a complaint
This wasn't by accident. It didn't "briely pass over an aircraft."
If you actually watched the video, the laser was pointed directly at the helicopter over a series of minutes. Accidental pointing would have been unlikely for such a period of time, since you need to track the helicopter for that long.
>Have we slid so far down the slippery slope that something like this will become punishable?
Your argument is unreasonable and legitimizes the pointing of lasers at people who have lives in their hands.
>There's some really stupid shit that can get them in big trouble.
And you can't deliberately point a weapon at whim at a person and not get in big trouble.
Mens rea was demonstrated in the video. He got done and fairly so.
--
BMO
> My advice is that we find a technological solution.
There is no technological solution for dumbasses.
Tell me, how does the laser know if the person handling it is stupid or not? How would you prevent it from being pointed at an aircraft or someone's eyes?
--
BMO
> I don't like the idea of a technological future where only our betters (the cops) can get cool technology.
I said "a ban for unlicensed individuals" just like you can't buy a kilowatt radio transmitter without a license from any reputable radio shop (there are plenty of assholes who will sell linears to CB owners, though, and they should be shut down).
You need to prove you're not an idiot before you can use technology that can do damage to people at a distance. And yes, people who can prove that they are not idiots *are* better than idiots, like this guy in the video.
Perhaps a graduated licensing scheme should be in order. Beyond a certain power, only businesses, scientists, and engineers should be allowed to have them after demonstrating a legitimate need.
--
BMO
Hey, nice stripping off the reasonable part of that sentence buddy.
Fuck you too.
Burning karma because you're an asshole.
--
BMO
"sentenced to three years in jail for shining a high powered green laser at a helicopter "
Good. And since it's a federal crime, he gets to serve 85 percent of that.
I almost had someone arrested for shining a laser at my friggin' eyes across a bar. But since I knew the person and knew he wasn't "all there" I just confronted him.
But if it was anyone else, I would have pressed charges. Yes, it's assault.
There needs to be *at a minimum* public education on this issue, and if nobody is willing to do that, then handheld lasers need to be outright banned for unlicensed individuals. This opinion is unpopular for slashdot, but shit really has gotten out of hand.
--
BMO
>It's an election year. Don't believe anything they say
He's running unopposed.
It's what he really thinks. He's not pandering.
--
BMO
... have declared war on the rest of us. They have declared war on modern society.
And no, there isn't any reasoning with these people, the Dominionists. They are stone cold nuts and they even use the vocabulary of war in their screeds. Any attempt to reason with them is assuming that they are capable of rational thought. They are not. Deep down, they actually and truly believe that science is *the* enemy. It is a position that is beyond the reach of any rational thought, so ridicule is the only tool left. If given half a chance, they would drag us back to pre-inudustrial society with just the Bible as the sole text.
He needs to be held up to ridicule from sea to shining sea.
Give him a piece of your mind https://www.facebook.com/brounforcongress
--
BMO
That's legitimate software, as is Teamviewer, a related remote access and desktop sharing tool.
http://www.teamviewer.com/en/index.aspx
Remote tools like this are used every day by remote sysadmins. The scam was to get you to install it yourself so they could connect from their end, take your banking information, and clean out your accounts. It looks like the reason why they picked Amyy was because the license fee for "unlimited simultaneous connections" is relatively cheap ($99 for top tier) compared to Teamviewer's rather expensive license for unlimited connections - $1499.
And then through the remote tool, they would make your machine unbootable when everything was done. There have been people who have let these guys run loose in a VM to find nothing, only to watch them start disabling services and delete system files.
Teamviewer, Amyy, other remote access/desktop sharing tools are third parties to all of this and aren't part of the scam.
--
BMO
In the late 70s I was doing yard work for an oceanographer and biologist down the road from me. We hopped in the truck one day because he had to go to the Graduate School of Oceanography in Saunderstown RI, which was literally a mile away, to get some stuff he was working on.
The URI GSO has a research reactor. We just walked in, he did his stuff, and we left. No guards, nothing. Not even a receptionist especially on a Saturday. ID? On a 13 year old kid? You kidding?
--
BMO
It wasn't the employees decision to get Elop. It was the board. The Nokia board has been exceptionally incompetent, and approving Elop was just another example of their ongoing incompetence.
They have their golden parachutes.
The employees do not.
It's disgusting.
--
BMO
Citrix is special. They do not compete directly with Microsoft and their tech sells Microsoft products.
They may as well be a part of Microsoft.
--
BMO
>I never saw that coming...
Every Microsoft "Partner" thinks they are special. "It will never happen to us" they say. "Look at all this money we get from Microsoft!" They think they can beat the Devil with their own fiddle playing. Except this isn't a Charlie Daniels Band song.
--
BMO
>Who is going to want a ZunePhone?
Obviously people who want to squirt you.
>They might want to first get some penetration
Doesn't everybody?
--
BMO
>But at least Windows allows you to switch back to the old style interface..
Until you hit the Windows key, then Metro slaps your face like a turgid cock in a bad gay porn film.
--
BMO
>You are correct, but the government *does* have blame here.. deregulation
I agree. But the assertion is commonly that "the government made all these people do this, " as if the banking industry's arm was twisted by regulation into doing so, which is clearly not the case. Glass-Steagall removed the last barrier between Wall Street and the banking industry, but that was not intended to cause robosigning and loan application fraud and a willing blindness of fraud as the hot potato of a bad loan got passed around from broker to investor. And that's what I'm trying to address. A lot of people on the side of the Tea Party and Republicans in general emphasize Alice as the main problem and anti-redlining laws that were passed in the 70s. That is an oversimplification, and false.
Because if you listen to Fox News, somehow all this fraud began and ended with Alice or was the direct result of Barney Frank. But the repeal Glass-Steagall was a Republican machination, even though it was signed by Clinton. Without Clinton's signature, it was going to pass anyway because it was veto-proof (It was soundly rejected by the dems the first time around, then some horse trading was done, and the dems approved it too). Clinton only signed it because at was "bipartisan" to not embarass the Dems who sold out.
Fox can't tell its loyal viewers about how Glass-Steagall's repeal was the seed of all this, because it goes against the narrative of all regulation being bad. And Glass-Steagall was deregulation.
> Otherwise It is an accurate summary, and I am glad someone has encapsulated it here.
I've been following it since I recognized the housing bubble in 2006.
I wish I was as smart as Magnetar and able to make a buck off of the fraud by hedging against it.
>BOA
I hope so too. And it's not just BOA, which is the scary part.
Watch. Marc Dann has a brilliant speech on all this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfqSmuNyTyY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcEU692-a98
--
BMO
You're dodging Alice's personal responsibility with your list
And you're dodging what used to be done 20 years ago.
The banks themselves used to make the loans and hold them. That gave the motivation for "due diligence" to the loan officer at the bank to make sure that yes, you could pay back the loan.
Brokers do not have that motivation. They have the exact opposite motivation. Commission only. And since they are just literal paper pushers they were filing falsified paperwork and approving loans for people merely having a pulse.
>The break-down in the system is that, for some reason, we think as a society we should support people who make bad decisions rather than punishing them.
Yes, but you seem to be blaming only Alice, when the fraud goes way... way beyond Alice.
>Alice's responsibility
Joe Broker is supposed to be the expert on this. We rely on experts as sanity checks for our decisions. Joe Broker reassured Alice that she was making the right decision instead of refusing the loan, which is what would have happened 20 years ago in the old fashioned way.
There was far too much money to be made by people in the chain of operations that I listed above, and it's a direct result of deregulation.
--
BMO
You know, I would agree with you except that you are wrong.
--
BMO
Divisibility means squat.
>It's also the main reason why the banks have the whole world by the balls
If you think that the banks have the world by the balls in a mildly inflationary environment, then you have no idea how much the squeeze is felt in a deflationary time.
They are the biggest hoarders of all.
What you want is single-digit inflation that keeps pace with economic growth. This is actually healthy for an economy. The problem is that when bitcoin true believers like you talk about inflation, you're comparing all inflation to the 1930s German hyper-inflation, which isn't the same thing.
But whatever. The math spells it out and if even math is not going to convince you, then I guess there is no talking.
--
BMO
>When the bank gets permission from the federal government to give out loans to people that can clearly not afford to pay them back, and fails to disclose that to you.
That's not what happened here.
What happened was that we had people making loans that they could be sold to "greater fools," i.e., Wall Street.
-Joe Broker makes a loan to Alice - Banks don't make loans anymore, brokers do.
-Alice can't pay it back, but Joe Broker says it's OK.
-Broker doesn't give a shit because he gets a commission for each loan sold. Falsified paperwork EVERYWHERE.
-Broker sends the paperwork to the bank. The bank doesn't give a shit because they can sell the loan to Wall Street.
-Wall Street separates and chops up the mortgages and securitises them by creating securities with different levels (tranches) in the security. These are the "Mortgage Backed Securities." AAA on the top, junk on the bottom.
-These are then sold as if they are all AAA to (see where this is going?) to retail and institutional investors.
-They are considered *cash equivalent* by nearly everyone, except people at places like Magnetar.
-The whole house of cards fell in 2007 and the people holding the bag were people like you and me and our retirement funds.
Meanwhile everyone in the entire system from the broker through Wall Street gets away with not even a slap on the wrist.
But that's not all!
In the chain of passing the buck, at each level, the transfers of these mortgages weren't (and still aren't) handled correctly. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of mortgages have been passed along without the required good paperwork making the servicers of the mortgages in these loans *not* valid mortgagees. And when the loan goes belly up, and a servicer forecloses, there is often either fraudulent paperwork or no paperwork at all and *no right to foreclose*. And in the confusion, there have been people making monthly payments to servicers that don't even have the right to take money for the mortgage at all! That's what the whole robosigner scandal is about, and robosigning is still going on.
And to make it even worse, people have been kicked out of their homes while not even *having* a mortgage to begin with!
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/realestate/bank-of-america-forecloses-on-house-that-couple-had-paid-cash-for/1072632
It is fraud on a national scale, and it was *not* at the government's prodding. Regulation after regulation was ignored. Rampant fraud was committed by brokers, securitizers, banks, everyone who should have done due diligence.
And the dearth of people going to prison for this shit is why we have Occupy Wall Street.
You have oversimplifed it and you have blamed the wrong people.
--
BMO
I actually meant to quote this line:
> Any deflation that occurs can be handled well into the future.
Don't know what the fuck I was doing.
--
BMO