If the Chinese government is attempting this kind of extortion on a large scale, we have to assume that some of those attempts will be failures, and that some of those failures will be loud.
You are right, holding the family at home hostage is just stupid. On the other hand - giving them special treatment, like getting the kids into a better school, moving a sick relative up the line for organ transplant, that kind of stuff is easy to do hush-hush.
And, of course, that's not the only thing they do. They also play on feelings of nationalism. Just because a guy leaves his country of birth for better opportunities doesn't mean he thinks the country is shit, in fact he may even want to go back and if he can contribute to the economic development of the country that may even make it possible for him to go back and get the kind of job that didn't exist when he left.
because the FBI was also looking at him for terrorism, and they couldn't find anything on him either... which tells me he didn't do it, and was just not mentally developed in that area of his life that he saw nothing wrong in sleeping in the same bed as someone's kid.
I *really* doubt that bit about the terrorism, I mean really WTF?
But as for being immature, I think it was pretty obvious. The guy named his home "Neverland," as in the place in Peter Pan where boys never grow up. His father pushed the kids into showbiz since the practically the minute they were born and consequently stole their childhoods.
Instead of using facebook's privacy settings which they can arbitrarily ignore as they see fit at any point in the future, I say be proactive.
1) Create social-group specific facebook accounts - one for high-school, another for college, another for people you meet professionally, another for hook-ups, etc. 2) Use different browser profiles dedicated to each facebook account - see firefox's command line options " -no-remote -ProfileManager " 3) Add plugins to differentiate the profiles - "User Agent Switcher" to make each profile look like a different release of firefox, "BetterPrivacy" to block super-cookies that get shared across profiles in Flash and then all the basics like adblock, CookieSafe-Lite, noscript, ghostery, etc. This makes each profile look like a different user behind the same firewall 4) Never ever use those facebook-specific profiles for anything else, keep separate profiles for regular web browsing and any other specific tasks (banking, etc). 5) Use theming to make each profile look different on your screen so you don't accidentally use one profile for another task
While not foolproof, this approach puts all the control in YOUR hands rather than relying on websites to honor their promises - plus it isn't facebook-specific, you can use separate profiles to isolate websites you give personal information to from the rest of your web browsing and thus keep the behind the scenes 'leaking' to a minimum.
True hope is that those millions will turn to adults and vote for change. Reality is that as they turn to adults, they will have different issues than free music or movies.
Yep, that's the hope. But I share your doubt. Look at what happened with the baby boomers and drug laws - those guys grew up with a very relaxed attitude towards drugs yet once they got put in charge of things they went all draconian with drug laws. We may very well see a similar phenomenon with today's kids. I hope not.
Because of the large exemption, the IRS also has little incentive to even try to enforce the law unless you're an executive or something and they suspect you have a substantial salary.
Except for recent rules where expats are required to report any foreign bank account with more than $10K and failure to do so can result in serious penalties.
the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that taxes its overseas citizens, subjecting them to taxation in both their country of citizenship and country of residence.
All the DVD players I've encountered allow that, even the cheap crap ones.
Not 'even' - more like 'only' - the cheap ones don't pay MPEG-LA and 4C licensing fees - until recently the cost of patent licensing for a DVD player was roughly $30. The cheap guys figured if they aren't going to license the patents, then they don't need to be compliant with the licensing requirements (such non-skippable video).
The big name brand players like Sony and Toshiba and Panasonic usually require some sort of secret / diagnostic code to bypass the licensing requirements. Hell, some Sony players have no ability whatsoever to turn that stuff off short of a firmware reflash.
McKinnons case will be quietly shuffled off to some under secretary to "look into" and once the media have lost interest he'll be on a plane to Dulles.
I think he's got a good chance. Both guys ran on a platform of not being quite so much america's lap dog. McKinnon's case has had some serious publicity, killing his extradition would be a great symbolic gesture, enabling them to continue being america's lap dog where it really counts.
I'd welcome any other similar example too. Paying another country's taxes,
American expats are the only nationals in the world who have to pay income tax to their country of citizenship even when they have lived on foreign soil for decades.
The thing is that there are scales of exercise. For a morbidly obese person playing a wii game might be a good workout. For somebody who is already very fit it might be of no benefit at all.
The deciding factor is what would the person be doing otherwise. If the choice is between DDR and world of warcraft, then even Lance Armstrong is going to benefit from choosing DDR.
In theory, as a non-profit charity dedicated to reducing the incidence and impact of heart disease, the AHA should be making its endorsements on the basis of some sort of measure of validity, not selling the rights to use the AHA logo as a purely commercial transaction.
Either way, its a still head and shoulders above a cancer charity endorsing buckets of fried chicken from KFC.
There is a guy who's in prison for life with his 3rd strike being a shoplifting charge.
Furthermore, it has the effect of making life more dangerous for cops and the law-abiding. It turns people who are at risk of being busted for a third strike into caged animals. Someone who has just commited shoplifting and sees the store security coming after him is a lot more likely to shot or knife them, or anyone nearby in order to make his get away. A 2-striker who gets pulled over with a joint or even just a crack-pipe in his car is now a lot more likely to pull an OJ and try to make a break for it, endangering everybody else on the road with him.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions and the guys driving the paver are blind lead-foots.
I don't think you understand. Your wife is a rarity.
Which is kinda the whole point. Most doctors - general practitioner types see the same thing day in and day out. 999 times out of a 1000 basic symptoms have basic causes. So when that 1 in 1000 comes through it is entirely too easy to miss it. Thus it is really the patient's job to double-check the doctor's diagnosis, after all it is the patient with the most to lose. Any doctor which does not accept and even encourage the patient to get independent confirmation is a bad doctor. Maybe they get it from a second opinion, maybe they get it from their own research. Either way, it's the patient's responsibility to follow-up and the doc's responsibility to take the results of those follow-ups seriously.
Sure there are plenty of dumbass hypochondriacs out there, but if you treat everyone as if they are a dumbass hypocondriac by default then eventually you are going to get someone killed.
No, you just implied it because I said it was wrong and you rebutted that. If you were actually agreeing with me, then I apologize for taking your rebuttal as a disagreement.
And if their sectors don't fall on a physical boundary, then you've just used 8KB on the physical drive.
100% false.
You still only use 4K on the physical drive. You just have to read & write 8K at a time because the misaligned 4K filesystem block straddles two physical blocks. But since filesystem blocks are packed sequentially there is no wasted space, they are just all misaligned by the same offset.
And to file repeatable bug reports, preferably detailed.
Very few people understand the importance of that until they've been on the receiving end and have had to try to fix a bug report themselves. Then they get a sort of "ahah!" moment. At least the ones with half a brain do. I've known professional software developers with 10+ years of experience who still couldn't file a bug report worth a damn.
When I was kid, about 6 or 7, I attended some sort of school function at night in a big auditorium. They were showing a movie and the projector's light attracted roaches. And I don't mean these little dinky things most people call roaches, I mean the big 2-3 inch long reddish brown ones with hooks like velcro on their legs. One of those landed on my head and got tangled up in my hair. I freaked out, as much about the roach getting in my hair as trying to get it out without squashing it and getting gallons of that white gooky stuff they use for guts all over my head.
Didn't give me any kind of phobia though, more just a story to gross out the girls with.
That's actually a pretty big difference. Movies are not seen based upon previews alone.
Yeah, they are mostly seen based on the headline actors and in some cases the director. That's why those actors get tons of money - because regardless of any other factors, a big name actor puts butts in seats. A movie's biggest take is on opening weekend when the opportunity for reviews, formal or informal, is at its least. Furthermore it's not only movies - people buy books based on their history with the author, especially sequels. People also buy magazine and cable channel subscriptions under similar time frames based on similar historical factors.
Don't make the mistake of assuming I'm saying the sales models are identical, I'm just saying they are a hell of a lot more similar than most people realize because people are designed to notice differences rather than similarities.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Chinese government is attempting this kind of extortion on a large scale, we have to assume that some of those attempts will be failures, and that some of those failures will be loud.
You are right, holding the family at home hostage is just stupid.
On the other hand - giving them special treatment, like getting the kids into a better school, moving a sick relative up the line for organ transplant, that kind of stuff is easy to do hush-hush.
And, of course, that's not the only thing they do. They also play on feelings of nationalism. Just because a guy leaves his country of birth for better opportunities doesn't mean he thinks the country is shit, in fact he may even want to go back and if he can contribute to the economic development of the country that may even make it possible for him to go back and get the kind of job that didn't exist when he left.
because the FBI was also looking at him for terrorism, and they couldn't find anything on him either... which tells me he didn't do it, and was just not mentally developed in that area of his life that he saw nothing wrong in sleeping in the same bed as someone's kid.
I *really* doubt that bit about the terrorism, I mean really WTF?
But as for being immature, I think it was pretty obvious. The guy named his home "Neverland," as in the place in Peter Pan where boys never grow up.
His father pushed the kids into showbiz since the practically the minute they were born and consequently stole their childhoods.
Of course they don't give a damn about the serial numbers that each copier embeds in every page they print.
Instead of using facebook's privacy settings which they can arbitrarily ignore as they see fit at any point in the future, I say be proactive.
1) Create social-group specific facebook accounts - one for high-school, another for college, another for people you meet professionally, another for hook-ups, etc.
2) Use different browser profiles dedicated to each facebook account - see firefox's command line options " -no-remote -ProfileManager "
3) Add plugins to differentiate the profiles - "User Agent Switcher" to make each profile look like a different release of firefox, "BetterPrivacy" to block super-cookies that get shared across profiles in Flash and then all the basics like adblock, CookieSafe-Lite, noscript, ghostery, etc. This makes each profile look like a different user behind the same firewall
4) Never ever use those facebook-specific profiles for anything else, keep separate profiles for regular web browsing and any other specific tasks (banking, etc).
5) Use theming to make each profile look different on your screen so you don't accidentally use one profile for another task
While not foolproof, this approach puts all the control in YOUR hands rather than relying on websites to honor their promises - plus it isn't facebook-specific, you can use separate profiles to isolate websites you give personal information to from the rest of your web browsing and thus keep the behind the scenes 'leaking' to a minimum.
True hope is that those millions will turn to adults and vote for change. Reality is that as they turn to adults, they will have different issues than free music or movies.
Yep, that's the hope. But I share your doubt. Look at what happened with the baby boomers and drug laws - those guys grew up with a very relaxed attitude towards drugs yet once they got put in charge of things they went all draconian with drug laws. We may very well see a similar phenomenon with today's kids. I hope not.
remember obama's campaign and how he floated on $5 donations as opposed to clinton and won.
Not so much:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/apr/22/barack-obama/obama-campaign-financed-large-donors-too/
You think that the fact that you have no desire to work there means it's ok to act unprofessionally?
There are miles between 'unprofessional' and 'mindless brown-nosing drone.' Although most of the drones can't tell the difference.
Because of the large exemption, the IRS also has little incentive to even try to enforce the law unless you're an executive or something and they suspect you have a substantial salary.
Except for recent rules where expats are required to report any foreign bank account with more than $10K and failure to do so can result in serious penalties.
Cite?
Time says otherwise:
the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that taxes its overseas citizens, subjecting them to taxation in both their country of citizenship and country of residence.
All the DVD players I've encountered allow that, even the cheap crap ones.
Not 'even' - more like 'only' - the cheap ones don't pay MPEG-LA and 4C licensing fees - until recently the cost of patent licensing for a DVD player was roughly $30. The cheap guys figured if they aren't going to license the patents, then they don't need to be compliant with the licensing requirements (such non-skippable video).
The big name brand players like Sony and Toshiba and Panasonic usually require some sort of secret / diagnostic code to bypass the licensing requirements. Hell, some Sony players have no ability whatsoever to turn that stuff off short of a firmware reflash.
What's your definition of "one's country"?
Apparently its different from that of all the other countries except the USA.
McKinnons case will be quietly shuffled off to some under secretary to "look into" and once the media have lost interest he'll be on a plane to Dulles.
I think he's got a good chance. Both guys ran on a platform of not being quite so much america's lap dog. McKinnon's case has had some serious publicity, killing his extradition would be a great symbolic gesture, enabling them to continue being america's lap dog where it really counts.
I'd welcome any other similar example too. Paying another country's taxes,
American expats are the only nationals in the world who have to pay income tax to their country of citizenship even when they have lived on foreign soil for decades.
The thing is that there are scales of exercise. For a morbidly obese person playing a wii game might be a good workout. For somebody who is already very fit it might be of no benefit at all.
The deciding factor is what would the person be doing otherwise. If the choice is between DDR and world of warcraft, then even Lance Armstrong is going to benefit from choosing DDR.
In theory, as a non-profit charity dedicated to reducing the incidence and impact of heart disease, the AHA should be making its endorsements on the basis of some sort of measure of validity, not selling the rights to use the AHA logo as a purely commercial transaction.
Either way, its a still head and shoulders above a cancer charity endorsing buckets of fried chicken from KFC.
There is a guy who's in prison for life with his 3rd strike being a shoplifting charge.
Furthermore, it has the effect of making life more dangerous for cops and the law-abiding. It turns people who are at risk of being busted for a third strike into caged animals. Someone who has just commited shoplifting and sees the store security coming after him is a lot more likely to shot or knife them, or anyone nearby in order to make his get away. A 2-striker who gets pulled over with a joint or even just a crack-pipe in his car is now a lot more likely to pull an OJ and try to make a break for it, endangering everybody else on the road with him.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions and the guys driving the paver are blind lead-foots.
I don't think you understand. Your wife is a rarity.
Which is kinda the whole point. Most doctors - general practitioner types see the same thing day in and day out. 999 times out of a 1000 basic symptoms have basic causes. So when that 1 in 1000 comes through it is entirely too easy to miss it. Thus it is really the patient's job to double-check the doctor's diagnosis, after all it is the patient with the most to lose. Any doctor which does not accept and even encourage the patient to get independent confirmation is a bad doctor. Maybe they get it from a second opinion, maybe they get it from their own research. Either way, it's the patient's responsibility to follow-up and the doc's responsibility to take the results of those follow-ups seriously.
Sure there are plenty of dumbass hypochondriacs out there, but if you treat everyone as if they are a dumbass hypocondriac by default then eventually you are going to get someone killed.
I didn't say anyone was right,
No, you just implied it because I said it was wrong and you rebutted that. If you were actually agreeing with me, then I apologize for taking your rebuttal as a disagreement.
And if their sectors don't fall on a physical boundary, then you've just used 8KB on the physical drive.
100% false.
You still only use 4K on the physical drive. You just have to read & write 8K at a time because the misaligned 4K filesystem block straddles two physical blocks. But since filesystem blocks are packed sequentially there is no wasted space, they are just all misaligned by the same offset.
And to file repeatable bug reports, preferably detailed.
Very few people understand the importance of that until they've been on the receiving end and have had to try to fix a bug report themselves. Then they get a sort of "ahah!" moment. At least the ones with half a brain do. I've known professional software developers with 10+ years of experience who still couldn't file a bug report worth a damn.
When I was kid, about 6 or 7, I attended some sort of school function at night in a big auditorium. They were showing a movie and the projector's light attracted roaches. And I don't mean these little dinky things most people call roaches, I mean the big 2-3 inch long reddish brown ones with hooks like velcro on their legs. One of those landed on my head and got tangled up in my hair. I freaked out, as much about the roach getting in my hair as trying to get it out without squashing it and getting gallons of that white gooky stuff they use for guts all over my head.
Didn't give me any kind of phobia though, more just a story to gross out the girls with.
So, I have to ask if this augmented reality system might work for other fears such as this?
Yes. The military has been using something much like a first person shooter to treat soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Or are you going to say that humans shields (using civilians to protect against fire) are not valid and become regrettable collateral damage?
Nope. I am going to say that two wrongs do not make a right.
We should call BP big polluter now!
Spill! Baby, Spill!
That's actually a pretty big difference. Movies are not seen based upon previews alone.
Yeah, they are mostly seen based on the headline actors and in some cases the director. That's why those actors get tons of money - because regardless of any other factors, a big name actor puts butts in seats. A movie's biggest take is on opening weekend when the opportunity for reviews, formal or informal, is at its least. Furthermore it's not only movies - people buy books based on their history with the author, especially sequels. People also buy magazine and cable channel subscriptions under similar time frames based on similar historical factors.
Don't make the mistake of assuming I'm saying the sales models are identical, I'm just saying they are a hell of a lot more similar than most people realize because people are designed to notice differences rather than similarities.