They don't need to watch everyone. The cameras can just watch people who have suspicious brown colored skin. Or they can just choose a random 0.1%.
Normally, if someone wants to track you in public they need to actually follow you around. The person being followed is not likely to be happy about that. Why is it any better to do it via camera? Shop cameras are individual. The government needs to get subpoenas to look at each one (in theory). Government controlled traffic cameras are linked.
It might not be as bad if the cameras were open to everyone so that anyone could look through any camera. Then the average joe could track politicians and police officers. If politicians and police officers don't want to be tracked then they'd just have to get rid of the cameras. Power balances out when everyone has it.
I just keep thinking of V for Vendetta. What happens when something bad happens and an Adam Sutler is put in charge? Do you really want someone like that to have the one-sided ability to track people? Is the minimal (if any) added security really worth it?
It depends on the number of pounds in a ton, but if it's short tons then
165 short tons = 149,685,482 grams 1e15 / 149,685,482 = 6,680,674 bytes per gram
A quick check of amazon turns up a 1TB drive which weights 2.4 pounds. That's 1,089 grams which is 918,592,757 bytes per gram.
Unless I've messed up my math, it looks like hard drives store 137 times more information per gram. That's not as large a multiple as I had imagined though. The whole thing should still be between 1 and 2 tons when put on hard drives.
I don't know how to do the more complex calculation you mentioned, but if we assume a 5% failure rate and if we assume that every person with a failed box gets it replaced then the chance of getting 1 bad box is 5%, the chance of two bad boxes is 5% * 5% (0.05^2). The chance of 11 bad boxes for one person is 0.05^11. Apparently they'd need to ship 200 trillion boxes in order for this to happen.
Either the error rate is a lot higher (like 15% to 20% which is obviously not the case) or there are environmental factors here.
Obviously, there might be environmental factors combined with him being the statistically unlucky one. Perhaps he acted nasty to the ups guy one time. Perhaps his neighbor likes to experiment with tesla coils in the room next door. Perhaps the electricity in his neighborhood deviates too much from 110v on a regular basis.
(That last one happened to me once. The lights in my apartment dimmed and my receiver started clicking. I pulled out a multimeter and found that the wall sockets were putting out 60v. I just shut off the breakers for a few hours until the power company fixed whatever it was that was broken.)
Most of the totally curve-busting smart people that I have known (from top-tier research labs, grad schools, and from the very upper ranks of undergraduate populations at large universities) have also been quite socially adept or at least, no more than a bit shy and awkward. A number are also quite gifted artistically or athletically, too.
Odd. That's the opposite of my experience. Every "curve busting" person that I've ever known has also been socially awkward. I have never met a math or physics professor who was an outgoing social person. I've grown to associate social adeptness with lack of depth of skill. That's obviously not fair, but I can only evaluate people based on my experience and in my experience social skill and deep technical/scientific/mathematical skills are associated with lack of social skills.
That's sort of a separate aspect of what I was talking about, but really, isn't it amazing that after over 100 years of industrialization and automation, somehow unemployment stays fairly low? It's almost magic isn't it? If automation eliminated jobs permanently you'd think that we'd have 75% unemployment by now. Losing a job and then getting another one is hardly the worst thing that can happen to someone.
And to continue a point from another message, the entire point of cheap/free education is to make it possible for anyone from any background to enter into the intellectual elite. It's not a private club. Anyone can join if they put a little effort into it in school. Comments like yours seem to imply that poor people are stupid people. That's just ridiculous. The children of hard working poor people can become anything they want to become.
What will you say when automation renders YOUR occupation redundant?
As a software engineer, I live for the day when a robot renders my occupation redundant. Humanity will have been surpassed. Our petty desires and complaints will be as nothing compared to the almighty power of those exponentially increasing intellects. All hail the robotic software engineers! We'll still be fucking in our cottages while they're out colonizing remote galaxies.
Fantastic! I didn't know that. At least it's possible to get rid of a corrupt administration even if they never suffer any personal consequence besides losing their job a year or two early.
Don't forget that the president can pardon people before they're convicted. (ala. Nixon's pardon even though he was never convicted of anything)
If impeachment started, all that would happen is that Bush would pardon Cheney before anything was handed down. He might even try to pardon himself although the consitutional basis for that is uncertain. If Bush was ever convicted then Cheney would pardon him.
If the supreme court actually prevented Bush from pardoning himself then it might be possible to get rid of Bush. But, I don't see how it'd be possible to get rid of Cheney before or after getting rid of Bush.
Honestly, the whole presidential pardon thing is an absolute crock. We really need to amend the constitution to get rid of it. The president should never be able to pardon himself or anyone he knows personally, but sadly he can just hand out the pardons without consequence.
You're essentially right, but all sources of energy will impact the world negatively in some way. And although fission has fallen out of favor in the US, it'll eventually come back again if energy prices keep going up. Hits to the pocketbook have a way of dulling opposition to that sort of thing.
In any case, even if you don't think that moving the energy production out of the cars is a net win for the environment then there's still the important point of oil independence. The sooner we can all stop depending on the middle east for our fuel needs the better off we'll all be.
Yes, and the response to your response is always that this approach provides flexibility. Sure, coal makes more pollution, but it doesn't always need to be coal in the future. There's no chance that cars will ever be powered by nuclear or fusion or hydro. And solar cars are unlikely to get widespread adoption.
Your points are mostly right except for #2. The cheapest hddvd player is about $250 while the cheapest bluray player is about $500.
I suppose $250 could be considered sort of expensive, but when I think expensive I think of $3000 tv sets. The tvs are the expensive part anyway.
On another note, I recently bought an hddvd player because I finally saw a movie that I wanted to see in hd (V for Vendetta) and when I checked the player prices I decided that $250 was an acceptable price for a player. My tv only displays 1080i, but that's fine with me.
No, the equivalent of crimeschene photographs would be to copy their hard drives. What we're talking about here is the equivalent of requiring that they install a video camera at the location where the alleged crime occurred in the hopes that future crimes will be recorded.
Ah yes, that's what this reminded me of. I was thinking it was one of the stories in Analog, but you're right. This is from Vinge's latest book.
For those who don't read Vinge, one part of the story involves an impatient company using destructive scanning methods to scan books electronically. They were essentially putting the books through a high tech wood chipper which scanned each shredded piece of paper, reoriented it to match it back to its original page, and then reconstructed the book from that. Apparently that was far faster than using hardware that flipped pages and scanned one page at a time.
Some people were outraged by this because they really liked physical books. Besides which, if the machines made a mistake, the information was lost forever. Others didn't see what the big deal was because they thought having physical books was an anachronism in any case.
It was a good book although I still enjoyed Deepness in the Sky the most.
You're right, but I don't think it's amusing. It's true about any person or group that gains too much power. The freedom fighters of today might become the oppressive totalitarian government of tomorrow. The political activist who fights for our rights today might become the hidden government puppetmaster of tomorrow.
There's nothing contradictory about liking Microsoft years ago and hating them now. Or in hating IBM years ago and liking them now. Or liking google today and hating them tomorrow.
Yahoo was once a good company, but today they turn over chinese activists to let them die at the hands of the government.
The only thing that can be done is to switch allegiances at the first sign of corruption.
Do you know that this is the very first time that I've ever smiled at a fucking Beowulf joke?
Up until now I would have liked to add a comment filter that hides any message with the word Beowulf in it, but then I would have missed this one and I would have been poorer for it.
I'd consider even 4 minutes at a trial to be too excessive for this. Who in their right mind thought this was something that should even be prosecuted?
The moral of the story: never ever do anything of any kind anywhere near children that are not yours. And, walk on eggshells around your own kids. Never become a teacher for people under 18 because you can end up in jail for doing nothing wrong. Never work at a day care center. Never talk to kids on the street even to ask them the time. You are putting your freedom in another person's hands when doing so.
This sort of prosecution is the exact opposite of helping children. By making teaching a risky job, you're going to drive even more people away from the profession. No sane person would ever become a teacher to kids. The money is low. The aggravation is high. The legal risk is high. You have to really love being around kids to work under those conditions. Heck, one day maybe the only people who would willingly be teachers are pedophiles who can't help themselves. It's the catholic priest principle. (priests aren't allowed to have sex, so only sexually repressed people become priests, and sexually repressed people will sometimes lose control in the worst possible way)
The more we try to protect the children, the worse we make the world for those children.
Can someone give me a comparison between emacs and a modern ide like Eclipse? I'm one of those people who tried emacs once years ago (about 10 years ago), but couldn't figure out how to do anything or even how to exit it, so I switched to another terminal and killed it.
People always talk about vi/vim vs emacs, but it has never been clear to me if we're just talking about a text editor or if people actually use vi/vim and emacs as full IDEs.
Do they do things that modern IDEs do like: - let you ctrl-click on a class name to jump to the class - compile and highlight errors as you type - respond with method names when you hit ctrl-space after a variable name - show the parameters of a method as you fill them in - show method documentation when you hover over a method name
Or, are they mostly intended to be for ultra quick lightweight text editing?
I use vim for editing config files when connected to *nix machines over ssh connections. But, locally, I can't imagine using vim for real work. I'm just wondering if there are aspects of these tools which are far more advanced than I'm aware of. People seem to get so excited about the whole vi/emacs thing that I just wonder what it is that I'm missing.
He and his colleagues knowingly stole vital DNA X-ray diffraction data from Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling without their knowledge and consent (indeed, Franklin had even refused to share it), which tarnishes their acheivements.
Did they steal it or copy it? How was it "vital"? If it's scientific data then shouldn't it just all be public anyway? (I'm not flaming. I really want to know the answers.)
It wasn't a truce unless a truce can occur when one side is utterly powerless. The machines simply kept up their side of the bargain when Neo helped them out. They didn't need to. Once Smith was gone, there wasn't any danger to the machines left. They could have then just wiped out the rebellious humans and there would not have been any negative consequences for them.
It's the humans that are genocidal. All the machines ever wanted is to live in peace, but will defend themselves and negotiate if possible. It's genius, and relevant, and classic.
The humans have been imprisoned by the machines for use as power generators. The machines kill or try to kill any human that exists outside their control.
Yes, the backstory for the series involves the humans being pricks toward he machines. But for everything that actually occurs in the movies, it's the machines that are doing everything bad.
Of course, genocide of the machines isn't exactly a nice thing either.
In any case, I liked the series except for the ending. In my ending the humans utterly destroy the machines. I might be happy with some other ending too, but I just really did not like the boring way that it ended. It was not imaginative. Neo basically just pulled a thorn from the lion's paw in the hopes that the lion would be nice afterward. In fact, it wasn't even that. I just didn't buy how he won against Smith. It made no sense to me that Smith could be infected by absorbing Neo. If it was possible to do that then the machines could have simply infected any other person in the matrix and waited for Smith to get around to them.
For me, the biggest problem is that they got the ending wrong. (SPOILER) It basically turned into a boring Superman-like fight where it was one-on-one and they just kept coming back for more until Neo just got tired (pretended to be tired?) and let Smith absorb him so that somehow that infected Smith.
I ended up just doing my best to pretend that it really ended the way I wanted it to. I wanted Neo to discover Smith's trick. Instead of a one-on-one, Neo would start absorbing Smiths right and left. The camera would jump from fight to fight, showing a 3 second snippet of a fight where Smith successfully absorbed a Neo (by getting a hand to his chest) and then jumping to another shot where Smith cratered into the ground or smashed through a building and then got absorbed as Neo got a hand on Smith's chest.
I imagine a wonderful frenetic sequence where you zoom in and out, sometimes seeing a one-on-one battle, sometimes seeing multiple on multiple, sometimes dozens against one, sometimes seeing a high level ants-from-the-sky view where colors blended back and forth. The battle would eventually end as we see Smith being overwhelmed more quickly than he can handle.
Eventually we end with a quiet scene much like the initial scene where we see multitudes of Smiths. Except, this time they are all Neos.
At this point, Neo simply kills himself. Every single Neo kills himself. Millions upon millions of simultaneous suicides result in every single person tied to the matrix being dead. The machines would suddenly be deprived of power. The humans in the real world would just have to hold out until the machines all just stopped moving. (The entire premise of the series is that the humans are needed for power, so being deprived of the humans means that they have no power.)
To me, that is an incredibly satisfying ending to the series. It doesn't depend on the machines just agreeing to be nice.
I agree with you except for the line "he should be used as an example". I don't believe that anyone should ever be punished more in order to send a signal to others. Punish people for what they do.
In fact, with the exception of the criminally insane (eg. serial killers), I'm not sure if it's ever a good idea to put someone in jail for more than 30 years. It doesn't matter what the crime is. You're basically just punishing a different person after all that time. People are never the same as they were 30 years ago. Keeping people in jail for more than 30 years is just a waste of money.
Your skepticism is good, but no one here can offer anything beyond anecdotal evidence. In any case, this really does seem real to me. I have accounts at several brokers/banks. I have never had a problem with spam with the other ones. I get fake email that pretends to be from citibank, but it never arrives at the email address I gave to citibank.
I used a unique address at ameritrade and it was fine for quite a while (years?). I started receiving pump and dump email at the address (perhaps a couple years ago, maybe a little more recent). I was annoyed, but shrugged it off. It happens sometimes when a company sells email addresses to third parties who eventually sell the addresses to disreputable people. I went and changed my address at ameritrade and, amazingly, it only took a couple of weeks before I started receiving two of the same pump and dump messages (one at each ameritrade address).
I emailed them and got back a form letter. I haven't withdrawn my stocks from ameritrade, but I have also not used them to invest in anything new since this happened. I also haven't changed my address again since it would just mean that I'd get another copy of the same scam at a new address.
To be fair, the pump and dump messages don't arrive very often. I'd have to check, but I'll bet they don't arrive more than once or twice a month, so I'm not really upset about the spam itself. I'm primarily upset about having information like this leaked from a financial institution that should have a tremendous motivation to ensure that their customers feel that their money is safe with them.
I can hear cheap CRTs and TVs. But, years ago when I bought a 36" Sony Wega TV (this was long before I knew that Sony was a company that I should not be supporting) and found that I couldn't hear it whining when it was turned on. I was extremely happy about that because I could hear the whining of my 19" TV loud and clear from another room. I eventually tossed the 19".
The bigger problem for me is the whine from the two main CPU fans in my home PC. The bigger fans aren't a problem, but the CPU fans are really fast and loud and high pitched I normally just wear ear plugs while using that computer.
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They don't need to watch everyone. The cameras can just watch people who have suspicious brown colored skin. Or they can just choose a random 0.1%.
Normally, if someone wants to track you in public they need to actually follow you around. The person being followed is not likely to be happy about that. Why is it any better to do it via camera? Shop cameras are individual. The government needs to get subpoenas to look at each one (in theory). Government controlled traffic cameras are linked.
It might not be as bad if the cameras were open to everyone so that anyone could look through any camera. Then the average joe could track politicians and police officers. If politicians and police officers don't want to be tracked then they'd just have to get rid of the cameras. Power balances out when everyone has it.
I just keep thinking of V for Vendetta. What happens when something bad happens and an Adam Sutler is put in charge? Do you really want someone like that to have the one-sided ability to track people? Is the minimal (if any) added security really worth it?
How do you know it's a spiral if you can't tell the direction of the arms? Couldn't it just be an elliptical?
It depends on the number of pounds in a ton, but if it's short tons then
165 short tons = 149,685,482 grams
1e15 / 149,685,482 = 6,680,674 bytes per gram
A quick check of amazon turns up a 1TB drive which weights 2.4 pounds.
That's 1,089 grams which is 918,592,757 bytes per gram.
Unless I've messed up my math, it looks like hard drives store 137 times more information per gram. That's not as large a multiple as I had imagined though. The whole thing should still be between 1 and 2 tons when put on hard drives.
I don't know how to do the more complex calculation you mentioned, but if we assume a 5% failure rate and if we assume that every person with a failed box gets it replaced then the chance of getting 1 bad box is 5%, the chance of two bad boxes is 5% * 5% (0.05^2). The chance of 11 bad boxes for one person is 0.05^11. Apparently they'd need to ship 200 trillion boxes in order for this to happen.
Either the error rate is a lot higher (like 15% to 20% which is obviously not the case) or there are environmental factors here.
Obviously, there might be environmental factors combined with him being the statistically unlucky one. Perhaps he acted nasty to the ups guy one time. Perhaps his neighbor likes to experiment with tesla coils in the room next door. Perhaps the electricity in his neighborhood deviates too much from 110v on a regular basis.
(That last one happened to me once. The lights in my apartment dimmed and my receiver started clicking. I pulled out a multimeter and found that the wall sockets were putting out 60v. I just shut off the breakers for a few hours until the power company fixed whatever it was that was broken.)
That's sort of a separate aspect of what I was talking about, but really, isn't it amazing that after over 100 years of industrialization and automation, somehow unemployment stays fairly low? It's almost magic isn't it? If automation eliminated jobs permanently you'd think that we'd have 75% unemployment by now. Losing a job and then getting another one is hardly the worst thing that can happen to someone.
And to continue a point from another message, the entire point of cheap/free education is to make it possible for anyone from any background to enter into the intellectual elite. It's not a private club. Anyone can join if they put a little effort into it in school. Comments like yours seem to imply that poor people are stupid people. That's just ridiculous. The children of hard working poor people can become anything they want to become.
Fantastic! I didn't know that. At least it's possible to get rid of a corrupt administration even if they never suffer any personal consequence besides losing their job a year or two early.
Don't forget that the president can pardon people before they're convicted. (ala. Nixon's pardon even though he was never convicted of anything)
If impeachment started, all that would happen is that Bush would pardon Cheney before anything was handed down. He might even try to pardon himself although the consitutional basis for that is uncertain. If Bush was ever convicted then Cheney would pardon him.
If the supreme court actually prevented Bush from pardoning himself then it might be possible to get rid of Bush. But, I don't see how it'd be possible to get rid of Cheney before or after getting rid of Bush.
Honestly, the whole presidential pardon thing is an absolute crock. We really need to amend the constitution to get rid of it. The president should never be able to pardon himself or anyone he knows personally, but sadly he can just hand out the pardons without consequence.
It's possible that the real reason he uses cash is because he doesn't like being tracked.
You're essentially right, but all sources of energy will impact the world negatively in some way. And although fission has fallen out of favor in the US, it'll eventually come back again if energy prices keep going up. Hits to the pocketbook have a way of dulling opposition to that sort of thing.
In any case, even if you don't think that moving the energy production out of the cars is a net win for the environment then there's still the important point of oil independence. The sooner we can all stop depending on the middle east for our fuel needs the better off we'll all be.
Yes, and the response to your response is always that this approach provides flexibility. Sure, coal makes more pollution, but it doesn't always need to be coal in the future. There's no chance that cars will ever be powered by nuclear or fusion or hydro. And solar cars are unlikely to get widespread adoption.
Your points are mostly right except for #2. The cheapest hddvd player is about $250 while the cheapest bluray player is about $500.
I suppose $250 could be considered sort of expensive, but when I think expensive I think of $3000 tv sets. The tvs are the expensive part anyway.
On another note, I recently bought an hddvd player because I finally saw a movie that I wanted to see in hd (V for Vendetta) and when I checked the player prices I decided that $250 was an acceptable price for a player. My tv only displays 1080i, but that's fine with me.
No, the equivalent of crimeschene photographs would be to copy their hard drives. What we're talking about here is the equivalent of requiring that they install a video camera at the location where the alleged crime occurred in the hopes that future crimes will be recorded.
Ah yes, that's what this reminded me of. I was thinking it was one of the stories in Analog, but you're right. This is from Vinge's latest book.
For those who don't read Vinge, one part of the story involves an impatient company using destructive scanning methods to scan books electronically. They were essentially putting the books through a high tech wood chipper which scanned each shredded piece of paper, reoriented it to match it back to its original page, and then reconstructed the book from that. Apparently that was far faster than using hardware that flipped pages and scanned one page at a time.
Some people were outraged by this because they really liked physical books. Besides which, if the machines made a mistake, the information was lost forever. Others didn't see what the big deal was because they thought having physical books was an anachronism in any case.
It was a good book although I still enjoyed Deepness in the Sky the most.
You're right, but I don't think it's amusing. It's true about any person or group that gains too much power. The freedom fighters of today might become the oppressive totalitarian government of tomorrow. The political activist who fights for our rights today might become the hidden government puppetmaster of tomorrow.
There's nothing contradictory about liking Microsoft years ago and hating them now. Or in hating IBM years ago and liking them now. Or liking google today and hating them tomorrow.
Yahoo was once a good company, but today they turn over chinese activists to let them die at the hands of the government.
The only thing that can be done is to switch allegiances at the first sign of corruption.
Do you know that this is the very first time that I've ever smiled at a fucking Beowulf joke?
Up until now I would have liked to add a comment filter that hides any message with the word Beowulf in it, but then I would have missed this one and I would have been poorer for it.
I'd consider even 4 minutes at a trial to be too excessive for this. Who in their right mind thought this was something that should even be prosecuted?
The moral of the story: never ever do anything of any kind anywhere near children that are not yours. And, walk on eggshells around your own kids. Never become a teacher for people under 18 because you can end up in jail for doing nothing wrong. Never work at a day care center. Never talk to kids on the street even to ask them the time. You are putting your freedom in another person's hands when doing so.
This sort of prosecution is the exact opposite of helping children. By making teaching a risky job, you're going to drive even more people away from the profession. No sane person would ever become a teacher to kids. The money is low. The aggravation is high. The legal risk is high. You have to really love being around kids to work under those conditions. Heck, one day maybe the only people who would willingly be teachers are pedophiles who can't help themselves. It's the catholic priest principle. (priests aren't allowed to have sex, so only sexually repressed people become priests, and sexually repressed people will sometimes lose control in the worst possible way)
The more we try to protect the children, the worse we make the world for those children.
Can someone give me a comparison between emacs and a modern ide like Eclipse? I'm one of those people who tried emacs once years ago (about 10 years ago), but couldn't figure out how to do anything or even how to exit it, so I switched to another terminal and killed it.
People always talk about vi/vim vs emacs, but it has never been clear to me if we're just talking about a text editor or if people actually use vi/vim and emacs as full IDEs.
Do they do things that modern IDEs do like:
- let you ctrl-click on a class name to jump to the class
- compile and highlight errors as you type
- respond with method names when you hit ctrl-space after a variable name
- show the parameters of a method as you fill them in
- show method documentation when you hover over a method name
Or, are they mostly intended to be for ultra quick lightweight text editing?
I use vim for editing config files when connected to *nix machines over ssh connections. But, locally, I can't imagine using vim for real work. I'm just wondering if there are aspects of these tools which are far more advanced than I'm aware of. People seem to get so excited about the whole vi/emacs thing that I just wonder what it is that I'm missing.
Yes, the backstory for the series involves the humans being pricks toward he machines. But for everything that actually occurs in the movies, it's the machines that are doing everything bad.
Of course, genocide of the machines isn't exactly a nice thing either.
In any case, I liked the series except for the ending. In my ending the humans utterly destroy the machines. I might be happy with some other ending too, but I just really did not like the boring way that it ended. It was not imaginative. Neo basically just pulled a thorn from the lion's paw in the hopes that the lion would be nice afterward. In fact, it wasn't even that. I just didn't buy how he won against Smith. It made no sense to me that Smith could be infected by absorbing Neo. If it was possible to do that then the machines could have simply infected any other person in the matrix and waited for Smith to get around to them.
For me, the biggest problem is that they got the ending wrong. (SPOILER) It basically turned into a boring Superman-like fight where it was one-on-one and they just kept coming back for more until Neo just got tired (pretended to be tired?) and let Smith absorb him so that somehow that infected Smith.
I ended up just doing my best to pretend that it really ended the way I wanted it to. I wanted Neo to discover Smith's trick. Instead of a one-on-one, Neo would start absorbing Smiths right and left. The camera would jump from fight to fight, showing a 3 second snippet of a fight where Smith successfully absorbed a Neo (by getting a hand to his chest) and then jumping to another shot where Smith cratered into the ground or smashed through a building and then got absorbed as Neo got a hand on Smith's chest.
I imagine a wonderful frenetic sequence where you zoom in and out, sometimes seeing a one-on-one battle, sometimes seeing multiple on multiple, sometimes dozens against one, sometimes seeing a high level ants-from-the-sky view where colors blended back and forth. The battle would eventually end as we see Smith being overwhelmed more quickly than he can handle.
Eventually we end with a quiet scene much like the initial scene where we see multitudes of Smiths. Except, this time they are all Neos.
At this point, Neo simply kills himself. Every single Neo kills himself. Millions upon millions of simultaneous suicides result in every single person tied to the matrix being dead. The machines would suddenly be deprived of power. The humans in the real world would just have to hold out until the machines all just stopped moving. (The entire premise of the series is that the humans are needed for power, so being deprived of the humans means that they have no power.)
To me, that is an incredibly satisfying ending to the series. It doesn't depend on the machines just agreeing to be nice.
I agree with you except for the line "he should be used as an example". I don't believe that anyone should ever be punished more in order to send a signal to others. Punish people for what they do.
In fact, with the exception of the criminally insane (eg. serial killers), I'm not sure if it's ever a good idea to put someone in jail for more than 30 years. It doesn't matter what the crime is. You're basically just punishing a different person after all that time. People are never the same as they were 30 years ago. Keeping people in jail for more than 30 years is just a waste of money.
Your skepticism is good, but no one here can offer anything beyond anecdotal evidence. In any case, this really does seem real to me. I have accounts at several brokers/banks. I have never had a problem with spam with the other ones. I get fake email that pretends to be from citibank, but it never arrives at the email address I gave to citibank.
I used a unique address at ameritrade and it was fine for quite a while (years?). I started receiving pump and dump email at the address (perhaps a couple years ago, maybe a little more recent). I was annoyed, but shrugged it off. It happens sometimes when a company sells email addresses to third parties who eventually sell the addresses to disreputable people. I went and changed my address at ameritrade and, amazingly, it only took a couple of weeks before I started receiving two of the same pump and dump messages (one at each ameritrade address).
I emailed them and got back a form letter. I haven't withdrawn my stocks from ameritrade, but I have also not used them to invest in anything new since this happened. I also haven't changed my address again since it would just mean that I'd get another copy of the same scam at a new address.
To be fair, the pump and dump messages don't arrive very often. I'd have to check, but I'll bet they don't arrive more than once or twice a month, so I'm not really upset about the spam itself. I'm primarily upset about having information like this leaked from a financial institution that should have a tremendous motivation to ensure that their customers feel that their money is safe with them.
I can hear cheap CRTs and TVs. But, years ago when I bought a 36" Sony Wega TV (this was long before I knew that Sony was a company that I should not be supporting) and found that I couldn't hear it whining when it was turned on. I was extremely happy about that because I could hear the whining of my 19" TV loud and clear from another room. I eventually tossed the 19".
The bigger problem for me is the whine from the two main CPU fans in my home PC. The bigger fans aren't a problem, but the CPU fans are really fast and loud and high pitched I normally just wear ear plugs while using that computer.