Their main legal mistake was that they were providing unregulated financial advise.
Other than that, their business wasn't all that different from most of the others. Pretty much everyone in the financial market, big bank or small trading company, is bordering on outright fraud. Yes, I have bit of insider knowledge, from long before the crash. This has been going on for quite a while.
You need a lot less Hollywood and a lot more real in your life.
More often than not, there are two bad guys. Or two good guys. Or it's all too complicated to really tell the difference, because everyone always thinks they are the good guys.
Can all those "customized" search results please fuck off and leave me alone?
I like getting results from outside my own bubble of reality, even from outside my comfort zone. It allows me to broaden my horizon and learn something new.
And when I'm in a bad mood, the last thing I need is more depressing stuff. Frankly, that alone is a sufficient reason to never, ever, ever even consider using any search engine that MS is running.
I feel sorry for the crowd here when someone as sleazy as Kim gets lauded as a hero. The guy is a known crook, despised by everyone with a clue, and he is absolutely not the kind of sleazebag you want to root for. Don't fall into that trap.
The problem is that in a sexually repressive society:
a) the parents will likely not tell their kids how sex works. They probably tell them where babies come from, but not how to actually do it.
b) the more repressed all the sex stuff is, the more interesting it is to teenagers.
These two acting in concert mean you have a lot of kids watching porn and nobody telling them the difference between that and actual sex. Since they don't have any other images, porn becomes their images of what sex ought to be like. It'll go away after some of their own experiences, but I still don't think it's a good situation.
Agreed, and I probably wouldn't waste my time on them, except for some ridicule. I do think that humour is the best weapon against religion, and we need to ridicule it at every opportunity.
That's the more difficult one. With the amount of anti-sex nonsense in America, accurate studies probably cannot easily be performed to begin with.
Especially on children. Then again, it also means there are no studies to confirm it. Though, honestly, I do think that porn does have a negative effect on children and teenagers. Not because of the sex, but because the porn sex isn't anything like actual sex. More sexual openness and a more realistic depiction of it would be a great help.
I put trust in me being quite convincing if I have the evidence to support my arguments. That trust isn't baseless, I've basically convinced people of my POV as a job for a couple of years. And one thing I learnt is that argument alone is very weak compared to being able to having something to show.
That's why newspapers print fancy statistics next to complicated things. Most readers will basically blank out after the second complicated word, but a graph going visible in a particular direction is incredibly convincing, no matter how made-up it is, or what it really means. Basically, you could write "quatloos" and "per square ostrich" on the axis and the result would be almost the same.
I'm not sure if that "showing" part works with porn, though. Never tried that one.
No, seriously. Reading about something like that is ultra-cool, especially since I now have something to point people towards who are trapped in the "computer games are evil and make you want to go out and shoot people" mindset - but only actually seing the thing with your own eyes is for real.
The recent rise in article retractions (calling it "fraud" is too general, but that's one of the reasons) is also caused by this change in attitude.
See, we don't expect interesting stuff from science anymore. We expect marketable results. Getting something else than you set out to find means that marketing, product management and everyone else down the line has to re-tool and, more importantly, re-think and we can't have that. We already printed the packaging and filmed the TV spots!
Sometimes, not having english as your first language makes things funnier. The first meaning of the word "survey" that came to my mind this morning was 1 b) - "to query (someone) in order to collect data for the analysis of some aspect of a group or area" and I was wondering if they had sent questionaires to all the planets on one of the Voyagers.:-)
Seriously? Asking for restraint? Tim, you are talking to corporations as if they were human beings. Now this might be news, but they aren't. A corporation does not have morals, values, ethics or anything like it. They sometimes fool us into believing they have, because we interact with them through humans (CEO, employees, etc.) or something made up to appear human (advertisement, PR spokesmen, marketing people in general), but the simple fact remains that they aren't.
A shark will always be a shark, and a rabbit can't help being a rabbit - and corporations are corporations. Don't confuse them for humans, don't treat them like humans, don't anthropomorphise them.
They just have to cause enough people who provide these services financial, legal and psychological hardship to deter them from even running such servers.
True, but then you forget that these are freedom-loving communist hippies. Chances are that you've just caused half a dozen people who were on the edge to start running a remailer.
All that happens is the next jerk who wants to send threats uses another anonymous service, this time in a different country.
Not even that. He'll simply use a different chain of remailers. If he selected the chain randomly (which is recommended anyways), he won't even notice.
The server operator may be more more willing in the future to censor who uses his remailer for what purposes.
Except that he can't. It's an anonymous remailer, even to the operator. That's kind of the whole point.
Am I getting old when I look back and remember that there were times when people on/. generally knew what the heck they were talking about?
*I don't know if the operator of the remailer was making any money from it.
You could know if you'd know anything about remailing. The operator didn't make any money from it, because there is no way that you can. Since it is (I'm repeating myself here) an anonymous remailer, you simply wouldn't know where to send the bills. And since the mails are encrypted, you can't add any advertisement into them, either.
More importantly: Unless the server operator was a total dofus, this brings them exactly zero steps towards resolving their problem, because this is exactly the kind of attack that Mixmasters was designed to withstand.
Idiots. Is nobody teaching these fools basics about the stuff they encounter?
Showing up can also be shotgun blast to your own foot. It all depends.
I was sued in California in the DeCSS case. Fortunately, that generated enough headlines that the EFF became involved. I had a long and very revealing phone call with one of their lawyers. You see, I am from Germany and I've never been to California in my life, nor do I have any business there or any other interaction. Before calling the lawyer, I had wanted to write a polite letter to the court, explain that to them and tell them to tell the plaintiff to go fuck off and sue me in Germany.
The lawyer told me something I didn't know: That making an appearance in court automatically means you accept the court's jurisdiction. Unless you make something called a "special appearance to challenge personal jurisdiction" in which the only arguments you can make are those that, well, challenge the court's jurisdiction over you. Say one word regarding the facts of the case, and boom, you're in the jurisdiction.
Don't just show up. Don't not show up, either. Don't take advise from the Internet. Go and call a lawyer and ask him what your options are and what the consequences are.
No, thanks. I did that once and it's a big part of what made me be so disgusted about everyone who draws inspiration from such a bad, evil, fear-mongering, primitive, nebulous source.
Yet "body hostility" also exists in numerous other cultures, such as many of those in Asia, that weren't influenced by the Christian Right.
So? The fact that hacksaws can chop your arm off doesn't mean that everyone who has but one arm has lost the other one to a hacksaw.
In western culture, body hostility is predominantly caused by the abrahamic religions. You can check practically every western culture not dominated by one of them, whether it is ancient greek, rome, northern tribal cultures (vikings, germanic tribes, etc.) and you will find them to be a lot less hostile towards the human body, nudity, sexuality, etc.
The fact that the same phenomenon appears in other cultures for other reasons does not invalidate that one bit.
So, instead of repeating tired tropes about scapegoat groups, how about we place the blame where it really belongs: different people are different.
That's a sentence with no valuable content. That's handwaving, not searching for an answer.
Frankly, someone should go on Kickstarter and collect money for a sustained DDoS to keep it down. When all else fails, and permanent harm is immanent, something needs to be done and the fine details of legality sorted out afterwards.
No, it's proof that we understand what you write: It's a legalised racket - therefor, a lawsuit doesn't stand a chance. Changing the laws is the correct approach, but it takes too long and by then the damage is done (you don't think any TLD will ever be decomissioned, do you?).
Oh, btw. - can we please stop calling them gTLDs? They are anything but "generic". That exactly is the fundamental problem with them. They are in fundamental opposition to the very concept of the DNS, that it breaks down into ever more specific parts from highly generic ones. You can argue that.com and.org and.net have lost their original meanings, but they are still very generic and fit thousands upon thousands of domains. How many 2nd level names will we see within.citibank,.kfc and.disney?
Interesting. That puts the Sodom & Gomorrah story into a new light if its considered as an inter-cultural conflict instead of a story about deteriorating morals.
Why are we in America so terrified of the human body?
One word: Christian Right
body hostility is an old christian tradition. Not really sure where it came from, probably as a counterpoint to the much more relaxed romans and then it just stuck.
Slashdot Mirror
Their main legal mistake was that they were providing unregulated financial advise.
Other than that, their business wasn't all that different from most of the others. Pretty much everyone in the financial market, big bank or small trading company, is bordering on outright fraud. Yes, I have bit of insider knowledge, from long before the crash. This has been going on for quite a while.
I'm sorry, if there was any content or information in your reply, you forgot to actually include it.
You need a lot less Hollywood and a lot more real in your life.
More often than not, there are two bad guys. Or two good guys. Or it's all too complicated to really tell the difference, because everyone always thinks they are the good guys.
Can all those "customized" search results please fuck off and leave me alone?
I like getting results from outside my own bubble of reality, even from outside my comfort zone. It allows me to broaden my horizon and learn something new.
And when I'm in a bad mood, the last thing I need is more depressing stuff. Frankly, that alone is a sufficient reason to never, ever, ever even consider using any search engine that MS is running.
I feel sorry for the crowd here when someone as sleazy as Kim gets lauded as a hero. The guy is a known crook, despised by everyone with a clue, and he is absolutely not the kind of sleazebag you want to root for. Don't fall into that trap.
The problem is that in a sexually repressive society:
a) the parents will likely not tell their kids how sex works. They probably tell them where babies come from, but not how to actually do it.
b) the more repressed all the sex stuff is, the more interesting it is to teenagers.
These two acting in concert mean you have a lot of kids watching porn and nobody telling them the difference between that and actual sex. Since they don't have any other images, porn becomes their images of what sex ought to be like. It'll go away after some of their own experiences, but I still don't think it's a good situation.
They're the hardest ones to convince.
Agreed, and I probably wouldn't waste my time on them, except for some ridicule. I do think that humour is the best weapon against religion, and we need to ridicule it at every opportunity.
That's the more difficult one. With the amount of anti-sex nonsense in America, accurate studies probably cannot easily be performed to begin with.
Especially on children. Then again, it also means there are no studies to confirm it. Though, honestly, I do think that porn does have a negative effect on children and teenagers. Not because of the sex, but because the porn sex isn't anything like actual sex. More sexual openness and a more realistic depiction of it would be a great help.
I put trust in me being quite convincing if I have the evidence to support my arguments. That trust isn't baseless, I've basically convinced people of my POV as a job for a couple of years. And one thing I learnt is that argument alone is very weak compared to being able to having something to show.
That's why newspapers print fancy statistics next to complicated things. Most readers will basically blank out after the second complicated word, but a graph going visible in a particular direction is incredibly convincing, no matter how made-up it is, or what it really means. Basically, you could write "quatloos" and "per square ostrich" on the axis and the result would be almost the same.
I'm not sure if that "showing" part works with porn, though. Never tried that one.
No, seriously. Reading about something like that is ultra-cool, especially since I now have something to point people towards who are trapped in the "computer games are evil and make you want to go out and shoot people" mindset - but only actually seing the thing with your own eyes is for real.
Not only we.
The recent rise in article retractions (calling it "fraud" is too general, but that's one of the reasons) is also caused by this change in attitude.
See, we don't expect interesting stuff from science anymore. We expect marketable results. Getting something else than you set out to find means that marketing, product management and everyone else down the line has to re-tool and, more importantly, re-think and we can't have that. We already printed the packaging and filmed the TV spots!
Sometimes, not having english as your first language makes things funnier. The first meaning of the word "survey" that came to my mind this morning was 1 b) - "to query (someone) in order to collect data for the analysis of some aspect of a group or area" and I was wondering if they had sent questionaires to all the planets on one of the Voyagers. :-)
Bwuahahaha...
Sorry... allow me... I'll just need a minute...
Seriously? Asking for restraint? Tim, you are talking to corporations as if they were human beings. Now this might be news, but they aren't. A corporation does not have morals, values, ethics or anything like it. They sometimes fool us into believing they have, because we interact with them through humans (CEO, employees, etc.) or something made up to appear human (advertisement, PR spokesmen, marketing people in general), but the simple fact remains that they aren't.
A shark will always be a shark, and a rabbit can't help being a rabbit - and corporations are corporations. Don't confuse them for humans, don't treat them like humans, don't anthropomorphise them.
They just have to cause enough people who provide these services financial, legal and psychological hardship to deter them from even running such servers.
True, but then you forget that these are freedom-loving communist hippies. Chances are that you've just caused half a dozen people who were on the edge to start running a remailer.
Not like it hasn't happened before...
That can happen at a physical layer too.
But not in a shared server provided by the hosting company. ;-)
All that happens is the next jerk who wants to send threats uses another anonymous service, this time in a different country.
Not even that. He'll simply use a different chain of remailers. If he selected the chain randomly (which is recommended anyways), he won't even notice.
The server operator may be more more willing in the future to censor who uses his remailer for what purposes.
Except that he can't. It's an anonymous remailer, even to the operator. That's kind of the whole point.
Am I getting old when I look back and remember that there were times when people on /. generally knew what the heck they were talking about?
*I don't know if the operator of the remailer was making any money from it.
You could know if you'd know anything about remailing. The operator didn't make any money from it, because there is no way that you can. Since it is (I'm repeating myself here) an anonymous remailer, you simply wouldn't know where to send the bills. And since the mails are encrypted, you can't add any advertisement into them, either.
More importantly: Unless the server operator was a total dofus, this brings them exactly zero steps towards resolving their problem, because this is exactly the kind of attack that Mixmasters was designed to withstand.
Idiots. Is nobody teaching these fools basics about the stuff they encounter?
you should still show up to defend yourself
No, you should talk to a real lawyer.
Showing up can also be shotgun blast to your own foot. It all depends.
I was sued in California in the DeCSS case. Fortunately, that generated enough headlines that the EFF became involved. I had a long and very revealing phone call with one of their lawyers. You see, I am from Germany and I've never been to California in my life, nor do I have any business there or any other interaction.
Before calling the lawyer, I had wanted to write a polite letter to the court, explain that to them and tell them to tell the plaintiff to go fuck off and sue me in Germany.
The lawyer told me something I didn't know: That making an appearance in court automatically means you accept the court's jurisdiction. Unless you make something called a "special appearance to challenge personal jurisdiction" in which the only arguments you can make are those that, well, challenge the court's jurisdiction over you. Say one word regarding the facts of the case, and boom, you're in the jurisdiction.
Don't just show up. Don't not show up, either. Don't take advise from the Internet. Go and call a lawyer and ask him what your options are and what the consequences are.
Go read some of the Bible
No, thanks. I did that once and it's a big part of what made me be so disgusted about everyone who draws inspiration from such a bad, evil, fear-mongering, primitive, nebulous source.
Yet "body hostility" also exists in numerous other cultures, such as many of those in Asia, that weren't influenced by the Christian Right.
So? The fact that hacksaws can chop your arm off doesn't mean that everyone who has but one arm has lost the other one to a hacksaw.
In western culture, body hostility is predominantly caused by the abrahamic religions. You can check practically every western culture not dominated by one of them, whether it is ancient greek, rome, northern tribal cultures (vikings, germanic tribes, etc.) and you will find them to be a lot less hostile towards the human body, nudity, sexuality, etc.
The fact that the same phenomenon appears in other cultures for other reasons does not invalidate that one bit.
So, instead of repeating tired tropes about scapegoat groups, how about we place the blame where it really belongs: different people are different.
That's a sentence with no valuable content. That's handwaving, not searching for an answer.
Frankly, someone should go on Kickstarter and collect money for a sustained DDoS to keep it down. When all else fails, and permanent harm is immanent, something needs to be done and the fine details of legality sorted out afterwards.
No, it's proof that we understand what you write: It's a legalised racket - therefor, a lawsuit doesn't stand a chance. Changing the laws is the correct approach, but it takes too long and by then the damage is done (you don't think any TLD will ever be decomissioned, do you?).
Oh, btw. - can we please stop calling them gTLDs? They are anything but "generic". That exactly is the fundamental problem with them. They are in fundamental opposition to the very concept of the DNS, that it breaks down into ever more specific parts from highly generic ones. You can argue that .com and .org and .net have lost their original meanings, but they are still very generic and fit thousands upon thousands of domains. How many 2nd level names will we see within .citibank, .kfc and .disney?
Interesting. That puts the Sodom & Gomorrah story into a new light if its considered as an inter-cultural conflict instead of a story about deteriorating morals.
You missed the meta-level: That is actually just one word, because at least in america, the two are the same.
Why are we in America so terrified of the human body?
One word: Christian Right
body hostility is an old christian tradition. Not really sure where it came from, probably as a counterpoint to the much more relaxed romans and then it just stuck.