Not an RFID story, but in the spirit of privacy invasion when buying something.
A few months ago me and a drinking buddy dropped by a liqour store to pick up some nice anejo tequila ($50). He was all set to pay with his credit card and everything when the clerk carded him. He's mid-thirties, bearded, balding and got the start of a beer belly - not to mention paying with a platinum credit card in his name for a liquor that is relatively expensive and not in favor with the kids these days, but what the hell, no big deal maybe the store got busted and now they are ultra paranoid.
So he gives the clerk his driver's license, but instead of looking at it, the clerk turns around and gets ready to swipe it through some sort of mag-stripe reader. At which point both me and my buddy start to kick up a fuss.
End result was that the clerk would not sell the tequila without swiping the mag-stripe. He had no interest in looking at the card to verify age - the store was just doing a modern day radio-shack and building a mailing list with the names, license# and street addresses encoded in the mag-stripes under cover of the law's requirement to verify age.
So we got back in the car, drove down the road for another mile to the next liquor store, got the same bottle of tequila for $45 and weren't even carded. VISA knows he bought the bottle of tequila that day (and a six pack of underware at wal-mart the next) but the store doesn't really know who he is, where he lives or anything else beyond his VISA number (which can be used to find out that info and more, but is a long ways from getting that info for free).
Exactly. Having had some professional experience with systems like the NCIC, I can say that there are all kinds of information in these "criminal" databases on people that have never been convicted of a single misdemeanor. These people have commited no crime yet they are in the databases, sometimes with very prejudicial "half-truths" (e.g. records showing they were arrested for murder, but not showing they released the same day and never prosecuted because the real killer was caught).
An impact puch might serve (and I recommend every car carry one in its glove box)
Why? It just takes up space that could be used by more useful items. About six months ago, one of the columnists for Car & Driver Magazine did some testing. He went down to the local junk-yard with the biggest musclehead he could find and they tried breaking windows using one of those gadgets.
The result was, that no matter what, the writer was unable to even crack a window. The musclehead was able to gets some spiderweb cracks - but in order to do so, he had to be standing outside of the car so that he had clearance to swing as hard as he possibly could. Inside the car, neither of them were able to have any useful effect on the glass in the car.
You absolutely can combine it with BSD code, and code using a lot of other Open Source licenses as long as the result is licensed under the GPL. So, by your logic, you are tilting at windmills.
I have been doing the exact same thing for many years know and so far there have been four major incidents:
1) ABC Stores (familiar to locals and tourists in Hawaii) had their customer database stolen. Or at least that's what I think happened. I bought some mac nuts from them because they were the cheapest online place and I really had the cravings for da kine from back home. 6 months later, I started getting porno spam with my REAL name in it sent to the address I used with ABC. When I contacted them and spelled out all the details, they passed it on to their "IT department" who denied that anything had happened, instead tried to blame packet sniffers between their smtp server and my smtp server.
The fact that the spammers had my name meant they also probably had my credit card, address and phone and that of all of their other customers too. (I use one-time use credit card numbers online so I wasn't too worried). Consequently I will never do business with ABC stores again online or b&m (only tourists shop at the ABC b&m anyway). If they don't care about their customer's security, I sure as hell don't want to be their customer. Neither should you.
2) TigerDirect These guys are infamous. Once they get your email address you can not shake them. I bought one thing from them years ago, I must have "unsubscribed" via email and their website 10 times before giving up and shitcanning that address. But before I completely routed it to/dev/null, I discovered they were "renting" their spam list out to legit companies (in this case a bank) and claiming it was totally opt-in. Well, I took the opportunity to follow up with the bank that had spammed me using Tigerdirect's mailing list and actually talked to the VP in charge (which is how I found out that it was being misrepresented as opt-in) and based on my conversation with the VP, they immediately cancelled their contract with Tigerdirect. Score one for the little guy!
3) Inktomi Once upon a time I signed up for a contest to win an SUV. That was stupid because that address got passed around the spammers for years, all kinds of weird spam I got on it too, not the standard penis-enlarger low-grade stuff, but AARP solicitations, timeshare solicitations both domestic and foreign, etc. Finally, long after the dot-bomb after Y2K I got some marketing drivel from Inktomi (remember them? an early search engine) and I was in a bad mood that day. So I scoured their website for every single email address I could find, figured out their standard email addressing scheme (like firstname_lastname@inktomi.com) went to Edgar, got all their C* people's names, the BoD's names and spammed them back with a nasty old flame. One of them must have forwarded it to one of their engineers because all I got back was some guy congratulating me for tracing how they got ahold of that address and then bitching at me for giving them a taste of their own medicine. I told him to fuck off and die like the dirty spammer his company had turned into. I guess he did because shortly afterwards the company got bought for chicken-scratch (I think it was by yahoo), I figured their sinking to spammerhood was a sign the end times were near anyway.
4) Viruses I've received a couple of viruses sent to vendor-specific addresses over the years and used that info tell the vendors that not only did they have a virus infection, but in most cases the specific machine they needed to start with. However, whenever this happens I make a note never to business with that vendor again (even when they've given me a special "discount" as a reward for alerting them to their problems) because if a virus can dig up my email address on their system that means there is a good chance that a virus could dig up more confidential details as well so it speaks to them having poor information security practices.
Most recently I've been mydoom bounces (and direct emails too) from the home computer of this little one-woman ditzhead li
All it takes is one guy in the parking-lot out back with a HERF gun pointed in the general direction of the computers and synths, and everyone will quickly realize the value of a human musician.
After reading your "note on methodology" it is pretty clear to me why your survey showed less desktop usage than a survey like IDC -- you claim to have measured "internet using" adults. You are welcome to provide more of the specifics on how your data was normalized, but I'm going to make some educated guesses about factors that are specifically relevant to linux and mac demographics that may not be so relevant for other topics.
1) Mostly American - seems your entire website is in English only and despite the FAQ stating that you have thousands of worldwide members, I bet the number of Americans is an order of magnitude larger than non-Americans.
2) Mostly Home (or non-workplace) Internet Users -- not many companies are going to be ok with people taking for-pay surveys on company time or equipment.
These biases help to explain some of the numbers in your survey related to Mac usage. First, you showed 6% regular or semi-regular mac usage, which is twice what surveys like IDC's show. Unless you happened to get an unexpected spike of people who use Mac's at work (like a bunch of marketing droids were pulled to make this survey pool), it is reasonable to expect that these Mac users are are either home or public-terminal (think public and school libaries)- they may only use windows, or think they do, at work (as indicated by the 98% number) but it suggests their access to your survey is through a Mac that is not at work.
Similarly, your "puzzling" result of high Mac usage and intent to use among employed minorities also suggests free public and school access systems. I am equating minority to "less better off" than the average white guy, but I also expect that employed minorities (versus unemployed minorities) are more likely to understand the value of a buck and make use of public-access systems like that at a school (continuing education, night classes, etc) or library.
Meanwhile, consider the kind of desktop usage that we see reported in the pro-linux press - point-of-sale and other task-specific uses sure seems to get mentioned most. These users may not even know they are using Linux. The more general use deployments, where Linux and apps are displacing both MS-Windows AND MS-Office seem to be in foreign, non-English speaking countries (Germany, China, Peru to name a couple off the top of my head). These users are probably under-represented in your survey population. If you had compensated for higher than "normal" foregin usage, I don't think your reported margin of error would be as small. Based on my assumption that your foreign pollees are significantly less than your domestic ones.
Marshall said the company and advertisers would not send messages to the e-mail addresses unless the user gave permission to do so during the registration process. However, the company is not promising not to send mail to the home addresses, he said.
There are a couple of old-as-the-routers methods to passively fight these intrusive registration system like, "Don't read their content" or "Make up a fake person" or "Use the google back-door." But the Washington Post is providing us with a great way to actively fight back here.
Everyone who registers for a pseudonymous account should be sure to use a zip code in the DC area and then pick a real home address in a more expensive part of town. But, make your pseudonym offensive.
Simply calling yourself firstname fuck lastname you probably won't work because that is easy to filter for. Instead, be creative with the spelling and the spacing for example, "C'King, AssFu" or "Suk-My Long-Dong." When they start using these addresses for their own promotion or selling them as a mailing-list, there are going to be some pissed-off, humorless rich white folk. All it will take is a lawsuit or two and the Post will see the error of their ways.
Of course they may consider canceling all free access, but that knife cuts both ways and they've got a lot of competitors who are happy enough that they don't feel the need to squeeze every last penny out of the system.
It is an RIAA conspiracy to blame the death of record stores on 12 year old girls and then to get the world court to try those 12 year olds as adults so that they can be sent to maximum security prison for their crimes - one year for every Brittany Spears song they copied.
The budget was never even really balanced, the social-security shell game was (and still is) a HUGE loop-hole that the politicians use - essentially all the money we pay into FICA gets spent immediately on other government programs and all the social security administration has to show for it is a big IOU note from the rest of the Federal Government. So, when calculating the deficit, the politicians consider that IOU as real cash, effectively double-counting the FICA tax revenues.
Oh yeah, that great en loco parentis crap. The school has all the rights of a parent to subject children in their care to whatever bullshit privacy invasions they want, with none of the responsibility for the results of those invasions.
Ordinary people ARE affected by cameras in schools because they train kids that cameras are OK. So a majority of those kids graduate with a predisposition towards accepting public surveilence and the next time some Ashcroftian power-hungry freak decides to push for cameras in the streets, these new adults will just meekly nod their heads in agreement and give up even more of their privacy to a controlling state.
The problem with the idea of everyone having an equal lack of privacy is that will never happen.
Corporations, governments and those who control them will continue to have as much, if not more, privacy than they do today. So, just as the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer in America today so too are the powerful getting more privacy and the rest of us are getting more public.
Attend a real university, not a vocational school pretending to be a university. Take a broad set of elective courses which challenge you, not just the easy 100 or 200 level courses to meet your elective requirements. It will better prepare you for the future. If it takes longer, then stay for another year. Don't be one of those techies, like so many in school when I was there, who only wanted to take the 'practical' courses in their particular major, and moaned about 'having' to take philosophy, history, literature. Don't be so focused on a set of skills that will be stagnant before you realize it. A broadly educated person, with good communication skills, exposed to a variety of subjects at more than the survey level, is better able to adapt when things change, like they are doing right now.
Amen to that. Not to mention that those people who want to be heads-down techies tend to be dullards and almost criminally ignorant of the society and culture in which they live.
Barrel, pincushion and any other non-linearities could be handled when generating the image that you are going to take a picture of - just pre-distort it before printing. Those other values in the EXIF will be harder to spoof though since they (ought) to be part of the data that is hashed.
You have not been reading the site. Remember back when SCO claimed they were DDOSed and nobody believed them because their website was down and they ftp site was up? Groklaw published opinions by respected professional network engineers that said, "Looks like SCO is lying."
But when CAIDA (a theoretically unbiased 3rd party) said that their logs showed indications that SCO was telling the truth, Groklaw included that information in an update to their first article - despite the fact that CAIDA did not release the actual details that lead them to that conclusion.
Just to ruin your lunch: pigs are smarter than dogs. Still want that BLT?;)
No, but you've me feel better about the black-dog I had for dinner last night.
PS - Anyone who has been around horses knows that most are dumb as rocks. I have eaten horse steak and it was damn good, better than almost every cut of beef that I've tried. But it was prepared in Italy where horse is considered good eatin.
> It's not like they are anywhere close to exstinction > > On the contrary, whale populations have been decimated in the last 150 years. > That's why the IWC moratorium on whaling came into force in the 1980s.
You have not refuted the original poster's point, you've just made a generalization. The actual FACTS are that Iceland hunts Minke whales. Minke whales are not only not endangered, but are considered abundant the world around (as oppossed to being abundant only in certain waters like Bryde's and fin whales). We are talking 43,000 Minke whales in just the waters around Iceland (another 100,000+ in the waters around Norway and hundreds of thousands more in the rest of the world) with a population growth rate of 2-3% per year. Iceland killed 38 Minke whales last year.
I don't want to give the impression that SOME great whales are in fact severely endangered, like the blue whale and bowhead. But even the 11 or so nations that do hunt whales specifically avoid the endangered species (I wouldn't be surprised if there was some poaching, just because that is human nature, but it is not sanctioned by the governments that do allow hunting of some whales).
What does the have to SCO? I think groklaw is SCO's Moby Dick.
The awkward thing is that one one of her friends, while helping her move in, took a swig from the 7-Up bottle in the fridge. Turns out that bottle of 7-Up was part of the dead former owner's last meal.
Slashdot Mirror
Not an RFID story, but in the spirit of privacy invasion when buying something.
A few months ago me and a drinking buddy dropped by a liqour store to pick up some nice anejo tequila ($50). He was all set to pay with his credit card and everything when the clerk carded him. He's mid-thirties, bearded, balding and got the start of a beer belly - not to mention paying with a platinum credit card in his name for a liquor that is relatively expensive and not in favor with the kids these days, but what the hell, no big deal maybe the store got busted and now they are ultra paranoid.
So he gives the clerk his driver's license, but instead of looking at it, the clerk turns around and gets ready to swipe it through some sort of mag-stripe reader. At which point both me and my buddy start to kick up a fuss.
End result was that the clerk would not sell the tequila without swiping the mag-stripe. He had no interest in looking at the card to verify age - the store was just doing a modern day radio-shack and building a mailing list with the names, license# and street addresses encoded in the mag-stripes under cover of the law's requirement to verify age.
So we got back in the car, drove down the road for another mile to the next liquor store, got the same bottle of tequila for $45 and weren't even carded. VISA knows he bought the bottle of tequila that day (and a six pack of underware at wal-mart the next) but the store doesn't really know who he is, where he lives or anything else beyond his VISA number (which can be used to find out that info and more, but is a long ways from getting that info for free).
Exactly. Having had some professional experience with systems like the NCIC, I can say that there are all kinds of information in these "criminal" databases on people that have never been convicted of a single misdemeanor. These people have commited no crime yet they are in the databases, sometimes with very prejudicial "half-truths" (e.g. records showing they were arrested for murder, but not showing they released the same day and never prosecuted because the real killer was caught).
An impact puch might serve (and I recommend every car carry one in its glove box)
Why? It just takes up space that could be used by more useful items. About six months ago, one of the columnists for Car & Driver Magazine did some testing. He went down to the local junk-yard with the biggest musclehead he could find and they tried breaking windows using one of those gadgets.
The result was, that no matter what, the writer was unable to even crack a window. The musclehead was able to gets some spiderweb cracks - but in order to do so, he had to be standing outside of the car so that he had clearance to swing as hard as he possibly could. Inside the car, neither of them were able to have any useful effect on the glass in the car.
Then they were ripped off.
Damn!! I knew I should have checked to see if another member of the slashdot hive-mind had already said what I wanted to say.
But at least the rutabagas were original.
You absolutely can combine it with BSD code, and code using a lot of other Open Source licenses as long as the result is licensed under the GPL. So, by your logic, you are tilting at windmills.
The album has rights? That's interesting. Do you think rocks and lamps have rights as well?
Shit, if a corporation can have rights, why not rocks and lamps, even freaking rutabagas ought to have rights.
I have been doing the exact same thing for many years know and so far there have been four major incidents:
/dev/null, I discovered they were "renting" their spam list out to legit companies (in this case a bank) and claiming it was totally opt-in. Well, I took the opportunity to follow up with the bank that had spammed me using Tigerdirect's mailing list and actually talked to the VP in charge (which is how I found out that it was being misrepresented as opt-in) and based on my conversation with the VP, they immediately cancelled their contract with Tigerdirect. Score one for the little guy!
1) ABC Stores (familiar to locals and tourists in Hawaii) had their customer database stolen. Or at least that's what I think happened. I bought some mac nuts from them because they were the cheapest online place and I really had the cravings for da kine from back home. 6 months later, I started getting porno spam with my REAL name in it sent to the address I used with ABC. When I contacted them and spelled out all the details, they passed it on to their "IT department" who denied that anything had happened, instead tried to blame packet sniffers between their smtp server and my smtp server.
The fact that the spammers had my name meant they also probably had my credit card, address and phone and that of all of their other customers too. (I use one-time use credit card numbers online so I wasn't too worried). Consequently I will never do business with ABC stores again online or b&m (only tourists shop at the ABC b&m anyway). If they don't care about their customer's security, I sure as hell don't want to be their customer. Neither should you.
2) TigerDirect These guys are infamous. Once they get your email address you can not shake them. I bought one thing from them years ago, I must have "unsubscribed" via email and their website 10 times before giving up and shitcanning that address. But before I completely routed it to
3) Inktomi Once upon a time I signed up for a contest to win an SUV. That was stupid because that address got passed around the spammers for years, all kinds of weird spam I got on it too, not the standard penis-enlarger low-grade stuff, but AARP solicitations, timeshare solicitations both domestic and foreign, etc. Finally, long after the dot-bomb after Y2K I got some marketing drivel from Inktomi (remember them? an early search engine) and I was in a bad mood that day. So I scoured their website for every single email address I could find, figured out their standard email addressing scheme (like firstname_lastname@inktomi.com) went to Edgar, got all their C* people's names, the BoD's names and spammed them back with a nasty old flame. One of them must have forwarded it to one of their engineers because all I got back was some guy congratulating me for tracing how they got ahold of that address and then bitching at me for giving them a taste of their own medicine. I told him to fuck off and die like the dirty spammer his company had turned into. I guess he did because shortly afterwards the company got bought for chicken-scratch (I think it was by yahoo), I figured their sinking to spammerhood was a sign the end times were near anyway.
4) Viruses I've received a couple of viruses sent to vendor-specific addresses over the years and used that info tell the vendors that not only did they have a virus infection, but in most cases the specific machine they needed to start with. However, whenever this happens I make a note never to business with that vendor again (even when they've given me a special "discount" as a reward for alerting them to their problems) because if a virus can dig up my email address on their system that means there is a good chance that a virus could dig up more confidential details as well so it speaks to them having poor information security practices.
Most recently I've been mydoom bounces (and direct emails too) from the home computer of this little one-woman ditzhead li
All it takes is one guy in the parking-lot out back with a HERF gun pointed in the general direction of the computers and synths, and everyone will quickly realize the value of a human musician.
After reading your "note on methodology" it is pretty clear to me why your survey showed less desktop usage than a survey like IDC -- you claim to have measured "internet using" adults. You are welcome to provide more of the specifics on how your data was normalized, but I'm going to make some educated guesses about factors that are specifically relevant to linux and mac demographics that may not be so relevant for other topics.
1) Mostly American - seems your entire website is in English only and despite the FAQ stating that you have thousands of worldwide members, I bet the number of Americans is an order of magnitude larger than non-Americans.
2) Mostly Home (or non-workplace) Internet Users -- not many companies are going to be ok with people taking for-pay surveys on company time or equipment.
These biases help to explain some of the numbers in your survey related to Mac usage. First, you showed 6% regular or semi-regular mac usage, which is twice what surveys like IDC's show. Unless you happened to get an unexpected spike of people who use Mac's at work (like a bunch of marketing droids were pulled to make this survey pool), it is reasonable to expect that these Mac users are are either home or public-terminal (think public and school libaries)- they may only use windows, or think they do, at work (as indicated by the 98% number) but it suggests their access to your survey is through a Mac that is not at work.
Similarly, your "puzzling" result of high Mac usage and intent to use among employed minorities also suggests free public and school access systems. I am equating minority to "less better off" than the average white guy, but I also expect that employed minorities (versus unemployed minorities) are more likely to understand the value of a buck and make use of public-access systems like that at a school (continuing education, night classes, etc) or library.
Meanwhile, consider the kind of desktop usage that we see reported in the pro-linux press - point-of-sale and other task-specific uses sure seems to get mentioned most. These users may not even know they are using Linux. The more general use deployments, where Linux and apps are displacing both MS-Windows AND MS-Office seem to be in foreign, non-English speaking countries (Germany, China, Peru to name a couple off the top of my head). These users are probably under-represented in your survey population. If you had compensated for higher than "normal" foregin usage, I don't think your reported margin of error would be as small. Based on my assumption that your foreign pollees are significantly less than your domestic ones.
Yes they did. See here for one citation:
In 1998, the Copyright Term Extension Act [CTEA] removed several million works from the Public Domain.
I don't imagine they will be able to recall public domain items back into copyright
Why not? They did exactly that here in the USA, stole about 10 year's worth of stuff from the public domain and put it back under copyright.
Fuckers.
Marshall said the company and advertisers would not send messages to the e-mail addresses unless the user gave permission to do so during the registration process. However, the company is not promising not to send mail to the home addresses, he said.
There are a couple of old-as-the-routers methods to passively fight these intrusive registration system like, "Don't read their content" or "Make up a fake person" or "Use the google back-door." But the Washington Post is providing us with a great way to actively fight back here.
Everyone who registers for a pseudonymous account should be sure to use a zip code in the DC area and then pick a real home address in a more expensive part of town. But, make your pseudonym offensive.
Simply calling yourself firstname fuck lastname you probably won't work because that is easy to filter for. Instead, be creative with the spelling and the spacing for example, "C'King, AssFu" or "Suk-My Long-Dong." When they start using these addresses for their own promotion or selling them as a mailing-list, there are going to be some pissed-off, humorless rich white folk. All it will take is a lawsuit or two and the Post will see the error of their ways.
Of course they may consider canceling all free access, but that knife cuts both ways and they've got a lot of competitors who are happy enough that they don't feel the need to squeeze every last penny out of the system.
It is an RIAA conspiracy to blame the death of record stores on 12 year old girls and then to get the world court to try those 12 year olds as adults so that they can be sent to maximum security prison for their crimes - one year for every Brittany Spears song they copied.
The budget was never even really balanced, the social-security shell game was (and still is) a HUGE loop-hole that the politicians use - essentially all the money we pay into FICA gets spent immediately on other government programs and all the social security administration has to show for it is a big IOU note from the rest of the Federal Government. So, when calculating the deficit, the politicians consider that IOU as real cash, effectively double-counting the FICA tax revenues.
Oh yeah, that great en loco parentis crap. The school has all the rights of a parent to subject children in their care to whatever bullshit privacy invasions they want, with none of the responsibility for the results of those invasions.
Ordinary people ARE affected by cameras in schools because they train kids that cameras are OK. So a majority of those kids graduate with a predisposition towards accepting public surveilence and the next time some Ashcroftian power-hungry freak decides to push for cameras in the streets, these new adults will just meekly nod their heads in agreement and give up even more of their privacy to a controlling state.
The problem with the idea of everyone having an equal lack of privacy is that will never happen.
Corporations, governments and those who control them will continue to have as much, if not more, privacy than they do today. So, just as the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer in America today so too are the powerful getting more privacy and the rest of us are getting more public.
Attend a real university, not a vocational school pretending to be a university. Take a broad set of elective courses which challenge you, not just the easy 100 or 200 level courses to meet your elective requirements. It will better prepare you for the future. If it takes longer, then stay for another year. Don't be one of those techies, like so many in school when I was there, who only wanted to take the 'practical' courses in their particular major, and moaned about 'having' to take philosophy, history, literature. Don't be so focused on a set of skills that will be stagnant before you realize it. A broadly educated person, with good communication skills, exposed to a variety of subjects at more than the survey level, is better able to adapt when things change, like they are doing right now.
Amen to that. Not to mention that those people who want to be heads-down techies tend to be dullards and almost criminally ignorant of the society and culture in which they live.
What the hell is PCR?
Barrel, pincushion and any other non-linearities could be handled when generating the image that you are going to take a picture of - just pre-distort it before printing. Those other values in the EXIF will be harder to spoof though since they (ought) to be part of the data that is hashed.
Not to mention abuse of the DMCA, and any other law they can find.
You misspelled "fund."
You have not been reading the site. Remember back when SCO claimed they were DDOSed and nobody believed them because their website was down and they ftp site was up? Groklaw published opinions by respected professional network engineers that said, "Looks like SCO is lying."
But when CAIDA (a theoretically unbiased 3rd party) said that their logs showed indications that SCO was telling the truth, Groklaw included that information in an update to their first article - despite the fact that CAIDA did not release the actual details that lead them to that conclusion.
Security Experts Doubt SCO Was Attacked as Claimed -- Groklaw
If Groklaw was all about presenting a one-sided view, they wouldn't have bothered to mention CAIDA at all.
Just to ruin your lunch: pigs are smarter than dogs. Still want that BLT? ;)
No, but you've me feel better about the black-dog I had for dinner last night.
PS - Anyone who has been around horses knows that most are dumb as rocks. I have eaten horse steak and it was damn good, better than almost every cut of beef that I've tried. But it was prepared in Italy where horse is considered good eatin.
> It's not like they are anywhere close to exstinction
>
> On the contrary, whale populations have been decimated in the last 150 years.
> That's why the IWC moratorium on whaling came into force in the 1980s.
You have not refuted the original poster's point, you've just made a generalization. The actual FACTS are that Iceland hunts Minke whales. Minke whales are not only not endangered, but are considered abundant the world around (as oppossed to being abundant only in certain waters like Bryde's and fin whales). We are talking 43,000 Minke whales in just the waters around Iceland (another 100,000+ in the waters around Norway and hundreds of thousands more in the rest of the world) with a population growth rate of 2-3% per year. Iceland killed 38 Minke whales last year.
I don't want to give the impression that SOME great whales are in fact severely endangered, like the blue whale and bowhead. But even the 11 or so nations that do hunt whales specifically avoid the endangered species (I wouldn't be surprised if there was some poaching, just because that is human nature, but it is not sanctioned by the governments that do allow hunting of some whales).
What does the have to SCO? I think groklaw is SCO's Moby Dick.
The awkward thing is that one one of her friends, while helping her move in, took a swig from the 7-Up bottle in the fridge. Turns out that bottle of 7-Up was part of the dead former owner's last meal.
So, her friend mooches dead people?