Corporations are already collective entities. Creating a union simply creates another one.
I am not a big fan of unions, or at least, how unions have been in the US, but let's not pretend that forming a union means that now the workers are the big bad wolf. They are simply evening the odds by forming their own organization that now has bargaining power because it controls a critical part of the corporation's production capacity: the workers.
Prions can come from eating meat for certain. That's the whole Mad Cow Disease thing.
However, it is not clear that this is the *only* way they can be introduced to the body. They could arise spontaneously because a prion is simply a "malignant" form of a protein that the body already produces normally.
So, it is possible that there could be genetic predisposition, or even environmental causes which introduce prion-forms to the body by re-folding an existing protein already in the body.
Yes, that money passed through the hands of the customers. The customers passed that money to the pharmaceutical company for a good (drugs) that they wanted. That money then entered the account of the company which funded the research. The consumers didn't choose that path for what used to be their money.
Now, if the consumers had a *choice*, that money could have been spent on research for prion-like diseases, but more likely, it would have been spent on a trip to the Bahamas, a new car, or even on talking to fake women on AshleyMadison.com.
Would the customers have chosen to fund this research with their money? Maybe... but they didn't. Here they spent the money on something that they needed for themselves. And honestly, 75% of them probably don't even know what a prion is, or they think it is a new model of hybrid car. Or they would have decided to fund something else, like cancer research, or possibly bogus pop-science.
The drug company took the money that they obtained for the sale of a drug that was created based on previous research and then rolled it back into R&D which supports the drug company's future profits: (ie. this research).
Should we give credit to the company for their charity in bringing these drugs to us? Hell, no. This is what those companies do. They are engines for producing drugs to bring in profit.
Still, there needs to be an understanding that profit motive is a big reason that research like this does get done. Comsumers are part of the economy, but they are a natural force like the wind or the sun beating down. Direction of money, time, resources and manpower is important and the consumers aren't doing that when it comes to certain things like R&D projects.
Well, as corporate officers, they'd have to fight the charges, or somehow deal with them, but this isn't about the new leaders, it is about the company. If you fire the CEO of a car company when it is found that their cars all explode into a giant fireball at 6,000 miles, the corporation is still responsible and the new CEO has to deal with leading the corporation through that. I don't think anyone blames the new CEO for the problem, though (unless he was a member of the executive team during past misdeeds).
It is hard to believe that someone like Jesus would have been worthy of much note in his own lifetime being executed as a not-very-dangerous rebel after a short ministry in a backwater province filled with itinerant prophets, rebels, and preachers, but it is similarly hard to believe that such a person could not have existed either.
And while there's no good reason to assume his existence also validates the claims made for him, it seems pretty clear to me that the only good reason to doubt his very existence is simply to make some sort of point, usually due to hostility or skepticism of the religion that he was the cause of. And that's just as much bias as you'd expect from the other direction as you'd get from a believer who was doing their own "history".
Even the earliest and most troublesome (for orthodox believers) manuscripts of the New Testament don't deviate in the slightest in accepting the existence of their subject, even if they have different things to say about what he did or what he *was*. And consider that in about AD 120 when the first collected books of the New Testament were almost certainly in existence, there were people around whose parents or grandparents likely were disciples of the man. You wouldn't be able to just make this guy up from whole cloth. And you wouldn't need to.
Very simply, the best evaluation of what evidence we have is that there was this guy named Joshua in first century Judea and Galilee. He preached and was likely executed as a political criminal by the Roman Imperial government. His followers believed he was the Son of God and founded a religion that became Christianity. And that is about as simple as a story as you can make it, which to me seems like the most likely history by far.
Eh, the Shroud of Turin probably has a more exciting history than just about any single piece of cloth that was ever produced by mankind. Not only was it moved from places unknown to Constantinople, where it was involved in a fire and a few sackings, it was then shipped out from there to Italy and that was all centuries before it stayed in one place. It was probably never the best item to use carbon dating on. Doubts will continue to linger on that one.
As for the Tomb of "Jesus", good grief.... A tomb for Joshua son of Joseph in Israel is like finding a headstone for John Smith. You'd actually have to be more uneducated than otherwise to actually let that one get by without an huge amount of skepticism.
Anyway, none of that, nor this Koran copy point at anything other than their existence. It's not like they dated the Koran copy to be completely outside of Mohammed's lifetime. Since when does anyone who understands dating methods assume that the earliest date in the range proves anything?
There is really no reason for it to shake their faith.
The margin of error only starts before Mohammed was born, but his whole lifetime is comfortably within the margin of error. And while this is probably not the one he wrote or received, there were definitely early copies, of which there were probably many of by the time he died, considering his eventual position as ruler of a number of united tribes and prophet of an up and coming religion.
So, this is not news at all. It's like saying that Jesus was disproved by saying that the original Bible was written somewhere between 10 BC and 60 AD. Some people need to understand what a "margin of error" is.
They can probably still track the phone if the battery is in. There may even be a way for them to turn it on remotely to listen to you, but its unclear if that ability really exists or if it is quite what people believe it to be. I can totally believe that they could certainly track you while it is "off", but turning on your phone to listen to you seems like something that doesn't come built in, they probably need to get special software on the phone to do that.
Of course, the question is, "what does the Off switch really do?" If it cuts the power to all components, then yes, it is a brick and they can't track it unless it has a chip or something in it that they can bounce some active signal off of.
If the switch merely tells the software to "execute the lowest power mode", but the phone is still getting juice, then it is possible that the phone could receive a command to turn on, or that it could turn itself on periodically and report or accept remote commands. It's my understanding that most smart phones "off switches" are designed in this manner, not the previous manner. In that case, you need to remove the battery or let the battery run down completely and leave it that way for a few weeks, just to be sure.
Of course, if you don't want to be tracked by your cell phone, then don't take it with you everywhere. I still remember quite clearly when I didn't have a phone in my pocket every day.
To resemble East Germany, you don't simply need surveillance, you need a huge number of informants (something like 2-3% of the whole population) placed everywhere who are paid and willing to rat you out to the state.
The US isn't going to be approaching that ratio of informants to citizens any time soon, and until then, the US will not approach East Germany in the manner you suggest.
The US government can run wiretaps, and drones and directional mics all it wants, but we're not talking about even close to the amount of resources needed to make a real surveillance state. Someone having some data on what might be you isn't the same thing as a guy in your workplace who knows you and who knows when it is time to call in the Stasi to detain you because you slipped and said something in their presence or worse, trusted them for some reason.
The Feds watching Burning Man is pretty much chicken shit. They make sure that no one sets up a massive drug concession stand and no one is going to set off a bomb or something. BFD. Call me when they actually try and tell those people what to think or do while high and naked on the playa.
Well, you can't fight the system by being downtrodden and revolting. The system is excellent at overcoming people in that position, because that is how it maintains power day after day.
Real change starts in the places that the system is poorly designed to control, often from within. That's why real change is driven by the middle class and rich people. It does sometimes get out of control, like in the French Revolution. At that point, it becomes whoever can reassert order by force.
The only exception is when it is so bad that *everyone* revolts, but most people fear that scenario more than a police state because you don't really know where the battle lines are and so you and your family end up in a bloodbath that you aren't safe from anywhere.
You certainly could boot DOS, but then you were using DOS, not Win95. Win95 was not "running on top of DOS" in the same way that 3.1 was.
As others have said, it had its own memory manager and disk access, which is pretty much what DOS did (in a crappier way). So, if you booted DOS, you weren't booting the lower levels of Win95, you were booting DOS 7.0: another operating system entirely which Win95 just happened to be very backward compatible with, boot-loaded from and was used for 16-bit driver access.
As a person who was a Mac user at the time (actually working on Mac support at my college Helpdesk), I can tell you that Win95 had its issues, but it was an order of magnitude better than DOS. In short, it didn't quite catch up in terms of usability to a Mac, but it got to that level of "good enough" combined with the power ramp-up and commoditization of the Wintel hardware that allowed it to bury the old Macs.
Also, the advent of Linux gave the humble Wintel box a legitimately useful UNIX-like OS. So, between Win95 and Linux you had a cheap and potentially powerful platform with a choice of what you'd run.
The Mac was always more innovative, but it stalled and eventually coasted into near-oblivion until Jobs came back and they started working on OSX in earnest.
For my part, I got to the point where I used Macs until just after I got out of college and between being forced to use a PC in the workplace (for Windows and Linux) and the relative lack of games and applications in general, I simply bought a PC after my PowerMac died. I knew enough about computers in general to overcome the rough edges of Windows so it was not a big deal. I really haven't looked back since. I think current Macs are good equipment with a good OS, but they just aren't worth the extra money and the inability to simply replace my own parts if they start acting up. I doubt I'll bother with them again in their current consumer toy incarnation.
I do enjoy my iPhone for what it is worth, though. After all, the iPhone feels like what Jobs was always trying to go for: a walled garden consumer appliance that just sort of worked, which I think they've succeeded at for the most part.
Sixty years is nothing. Just about anything can work for a handful of decades if there is enough will behind it. Ultimately you build up an unstable exclusionary area that keeps wages and value artificially high and something comes through and knocks it over, hard.
The reason that Japan and China are now competing with us is the fact that they have low priced labor that can do many things that workers in Western countries did do which is non-complex and required little skill, but still paid well. We attempted to keep our wages artificially high through regulations and contract negotiations. We see how that worked out.
Now, if you're talking about strategic regulation of certain resources, that is a different beast. You need to have locally grown food, so you ensure it is grown here. You want locally drilled oil, so you drill locally. But that's about maintaining a strategic reserve, not about maintaining high wages. You are willing to pay more for locally sourced goods and services, but there's a limit to what is needed for that and more importantly, what the market can bear. That's why you have migrant workers on our farms, we need to not import food, but US workers either don't want to do that work, or they don't want the crap pay that comes with it.
Sure, certain regulations might keep farms or *corporations* in the US, but they don't keep wages high. You can't make a competitive product with high wages unless those wages are borne out by the market.
As I said, anything can work for awhile, but ultimately protectionism either falls or your economy ceases to grow in those sectors. There's only so much of something that you can sell within your own borders at rates inflated by artificially high labor costs. Certainly, no one needs to put up with that with software, which is absurdly easy to import.
Protectionism is a short term solution at best. China is either betting that they are smarter than history, or they are betting they can quick start their economy before they have to deal with the fallout.
The state does have the right and the ability to level charges without the permission of the victims. There are numerous reasons for that.
While it does take the morality of the prosecution down a notch, legally there is nothing odd about prosecuting a crime that the charges are leveled by the state against the victim's request.
The state may well determine that allowing the crime to go unpunished hurts the ability for order to be maintained, and it may also determine that the victim has been forced to decide between their own hurt and some other issue (such as not wanting Assange to go to jail, or not wanting to become seen as the excuse for some sort of US action). None of these considerations should be allowed to prevent prosecution of a crime because they set up scenarios where perpetrators may create situations where victims become unable to request redress under the law.
For instance, Assange might carry out what is a rape under statute, but having assaulted women who believe heavily in what Wikileaks was trying to do, he has the ability to turn the prosecution of his actual crime into a political situation where the women might well feel that they should let him off for the greater good.
I'm not saying that is how it happened, but there have been criminals throughout history who have been adept at setting up situations where they can perpetuate crimes against their victims, but the victims will still stand up for the criminal if outsiders step in.
We dealt with that by leaving all the names alone. It is amusing living in close vicinity to Prince William and Prince George's counties within 20 miles of the capital of the United States.
It's definitely an inside job, and it certainly could be backup tapes, although I think it is just as likely that they stored all their backups on the same file server in the office as their desktop file shares and the hacker simply had a backdoor into the network and just went in and downloaded it all.
The level of security in the dumps that I have seen leads me to believe that they really didn't give two shits about security. Which is odd, given that they should have realized that they are Blackmail Central. Although I have met enough managers who think security is just overhead that I could believe that it kept being put off until "later" or that it was "too inconvenient".
I don't see the blackmail-type of hacker becoming an "outraged" type of hacker. Someone who blackmails a site like this doesn't care how they get their money, they just want a cut of it. It's a very pragmatic business. They're parasites, why would they kill a site that they know they could knock over every few months or years?
I think this was an inside job due to someone who sounds like they flew into a righteous rage about what ALM was and was not doing. Or not-so-righteous rage if ALM somehow failed to meet their personal expectations for some reason. The comments from ALM make me think it was some sort of contractor or consultant who was working with ALM on a technical or security level, but *something* soured the relationship and that contractor used his knowledge to perpetrate the hack. It makes it sound like he was working with the security director or knew of him and all the other execs were part of the problem. That screams "working relationship" with the company at the very least.
Biderman was a founder of AshleyMadison.com. You can be sure he's already been paid. Unless he's been squandering his money on hookers and blow (which admittedly is something he might do), he's not going to lose his shirt.
Any lawsuits that breach the corporate barrier may be an issue, though.
He quit because that is what a CEO does who has presided over such a disastrous set of events. At least in this case, he was the man in power during all of those actions, so he did richly deserve it. He's not just the scapegoat/sacrifice.
I sincerely doubt it would legally be a fraud, I imagine they had those bases covered with ToS language. I agree that it was certainly misleading given the fact that they apparently had bots pretending to be females.
There were definitely women who used the service, however. Both the credit card records and some reports of females who had used it make that pretty clear.
There's also the fact that once a female made a response in that sort of environment, you'd probably have a date and be able to take it off the site, whereas males would spend more effort and money because they'd usually end up pursuing many more "non-productive" leads on the site (and therefore being forced to use the site for all contacts).
As you pointed out, the numbers of women actually participating were overwhelmingly dwarfed by number of males, just as they are on most dating sites. Most of the money in those sites is getting males to stay interested enough to keep shelling out money. It's like ladies night at the bars.
They can't take his stock away from him, at least not the stock he owns already. That belongs to him personally like his house does.
Obviously, he might lose options or stock grants that he hasn't received yet as part of his compensation package, but not necessarily. It depends on the contract.
Of course, stock is pretty much moot at this point, although it may be interesting to see if ALM can dig out of this.
I wouldn't be surprised if they do, cockroaches are good at surviving things that would have killed any other organism.
I'd step away from that partisan comment. If the President was a Republican, then liberals would be complaining.
The problem isn't with liberals going after conservatives or vice versa. The problem is that there exists a power which allows whoever is in charge to go after those they don't like. If the Republicans are in power, they'd use it as much as the Obama Administration does.
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Corporations are already collective entities. Creating a union simply creates another one.
I am not a big fan of unions, or at least, how unions have been in the US, but let's not pretend that forming a union means that now the workers are the big bad wolf. They are simply evening the odds by forming their own organization that now has bargaining power because it controls a critical part of the corporation's production capacity: the workers.
Prions can come from eating meat for certain. That's the whole Mad Cow Disease thing.
However, it is not clear that this is the *only* way they can be introduced to the body. They could arise spontaneously because a prion is simply a "malignant" form of a protein that the body already produces normally.
So, it is possible that there could be genetic predisposition, or even environmental causes which introduce prion-forms to the body by re-folding an existing protein already in the body.
You're missing the point, though.
Yes, that money passed through the hands of the customers. The customers passed that money to the pharmaceutical company for a good (drugs) that they wanted. That money then entered the account of the company which funded the research. The consumers didn't choose that path for what used to be their money.
Now, if the consumers had a *choice*, that money could have been spent on research for prion-like diseases, but more likely, it would have been spent on a trip to the Bahamas, a new car, or even on talking to fake women on AshleyMadison.com.
Would the customers have chosen to fund this research with their money? Maybe... but they didn't. Here they spent the money on something that they needed for themselves. And honestly, 75% of them probably don't even know what a prion is, or they think it is a new model of hybrid car. Or they would have decided to fund something else, like cancer research, or possibly bogus pop-science.
The drug company took the money that they obtained for the sale of a drug that was created based on previous research and then rolled it back into R&D which supports the drug company's future profits: (ie. this research).
Should we give credit to the company for their charity in bringing these drugs to us? Hell, no. This is what those companies do. They are engines for producing drugs to bring in profit.
Still, there needs to be an understanding that profit motive is a big reason that research like this does get done. Comsumers are part of the economy, but they are a natural force like the wind or the sun beating down. Direction of money, time, resources and manpower is important and the consumers aren't doing that when it comes to certain things like R&D projects.
Well, as corporate officers, they'd have to fight the charges, or somehow deal with them, but this isn't about the new leaders, it is about the company. If you fire the CEO of a car company when it is found that their cars all explode into a giant fireball at 6,000 miles, the corporation is still responsible and the new CEO has to deal with leading the corporation through that. I don't think anyone blames the new CEO for the problem, though (unless he was a member of the executive team during past misdeeds).
It is hard to believe that someone like Jesus would have been worthy of much note in his own lifetime being executed as a not-very-dangerous rebel after a short ministry in a backwater province filled with itinerant prophets, rebels, and preachers, but it is similarly hard to believe that such a person could not have existed either.
And while there's no good reason to assume his existence also validates the claims made for him, it seems pretty clear to me that the only good reason to doubt his very existence is simply to make some sort of point, usually due to hostility or skepticism of the religion that he was the cause of. And that's just as much bias as you'd expect from the other direction as you'd get from a believer who was doing their own "history".
Even the earliest and most troublesome (for orthodox believers) manuscripts of the New Testament don't deviate in the slightest in accepting the existence of their subject, even if they have different things to say about what he did or what he *was*. And consider that in about AD 120 when the first collected books of the New Testament were almost certainly in existence, there were people around whose parents or grandparents likely were disciples of the man. You wouldn't be able to just make this guy up from whole cloth. And you wouldn't need to.
Very simply, the best evaluation of what evidence we have is that there was this guy named Joshua in first century Judea and Galilee. He preached and was likely executed as a political criminal by the Roman Imperial government. His followers believed he was the Son of God and founded a religion that became Christianity. And that is about as simple as a story as you can make it, which to me seems like the most likely history by far.
Eh, the Shroud of Turin probably has a more exciting history than just about any single piece of cloth that was ever produced by mankind. Not only was it moved from places unknown to Constantinople, where it was involved in a fire and a few sackings, it was then shipped out from there to Italy and that was all centuries before it stayed in one place. It was probably never the best item to use carbon dating on. Doubts will continue to linger on that one.
As for the Tomb of "Jesus", good grief.... A tomb for Joshua son of Joseph in Israel is like finding a headstone for John Smith. You'd actually have to be more uneducated than otherwise to actually let that one get by without an huge amount of skepticism.
Anyway, none of that, nor this Koran copy point at anything other than their existence. It's not like they dated the Koran copy to be completely outside of Mohammed's lifetime. Since when does anyone who understands dating methods assume that the earliest date in the range proves anything?
There is really no reason for it to shake their faith.
The margin of error only starts before Mohammed was born, but his whole lifetime is comfortably within the margin of error. And while this is probably not the one he wrote or received, there were definitely early copies, of which there were probably many of by the time he died, considering his eventual position as ruler of a number of united tribes and prophet of an up and coming religion.
So, this is not news at all. It's like saying that Jesus was disproved by saying that the original Bible was written somewhere between 10 BC and 60 AD. Some people need to understand what a "margin of error" is.
They can probably still track the phone if the battery is in. There may even be a way for them to turn it on remotely to listen to you, but its unclear if that ability really exists or if it is quite what people believe it to be. I can totally believe that they could certainly track you while it is "off", but turning on your phone to listen to you seems like something that doesn't come built in, they probably need to get special software on the phone to do that.
Of course, the question is, "what does the Off switch really do?" If it cuts the power to all components, then yes, it is a brick and they can't track it unless it has a chip or something in it that they can bounce some active signal off of.
If the switch merely tells the software to "execute the lowest power mode", but the phone is still getting juice, then it is possible that the phone could receive a command to turn on, or that it could turn itself on periodically and report or accept remote commands. It's my understanding that most smart phones "off switches" are designed in this manner, not the previous manner. In that case, you need to remove the battery or let the battery run down completely and leave it that way for a few weeks, just to be sure.
Of course, if you don't want to be tracked by your cell phone, then don't take it with you everywhere. I still remember quite clearly when I didn't have a phone in my pocket every day.
To resemble East Germany, you don't simply need surveillance, you need a huge number of informants (something like 2-3% of the whole population) placed everywhere who are paid and willing to rat you out to the state.
The US isn't going to be approaching that ratio of informants to citizens any time soon, and until then, the US will not approach East Germany in the manner you suggest.
The US government can run wiretaps, and drones and directional mics all it wants, but we're not talking about even close to the amount of resources needed to make a real surveillance state. Someone having some data on what might be you isn't the same thing as a guy in your workplace who knows you and who knows when it is time to call in the Stasi to detain you because you slipped and said something in their presence or worse, trusted them for some reason.
The Feds watching Burning Man is pretty much chicken shit. They make sure that no one sets up a massive drug concession stand and no one is going to set off a bomb or something. BFD. Call me when they actually try and tell those people what to think or do while high and naked on the playa.
Well, you can't fight the system by being downtrodden and revolting. The system is excellent at overcoming people in that position, because that is how it maintains power day after day.
Real change starts in the places that the system is poorly designed to control, often from within. That's why real change is driven by the middle class and rich people. It does sometimes get out of control, like in the French Revolution. At that point, it becomes whoever can reassert order by force.
The only exception is when it is so bad that *everyone* revolts, but most people fear that scenario more than a police state because you don't really know where the battle lines are and so you and your family end up in a bloodbath that you aren't safe from anywhere.
You certainly could boot DOS, but then you were using DOS, not Win95. Win95 was not "running on top of DOS" in the same way that 3.1 was.
As others have said, it had its own memory manager and disk access, which is pretty much what DOS did (in a crappier way). So, if you booted DOS, you weren't booting the lower levels of Win95, you were booting DOS 7.0: another operating system entirely which Win95 just happened to be very backward compatible with, boot-loaded from and was used for 16-bit driver access.
Some details:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnew...
As a person who was a Mac user at the time (actually working on Mac support at my college Helpdesk), I can tell you that Win95 had its issues, but it was an order of magnitude better than DOS. In short, it didn't quite catch up in terms of usability to a Mac, but it got to that level of "good enough" combined with the power ramp-up and commoditization of the Wintel hardware that allowed it to bury the old Macs.
Also, the advent of Linux gave the humble Wintel box a legitimately useful UNIX-like OS. So, between Win95 and Linux you had a cheap and potentially powerful platform with a choice of what you'd run.
The Mac was always more innovative, but it stalled and eventually coasted into near-oblivion until Jobs came back and they started working on OSX in earnest.
For my part, I got to the point where I used Macs until just after I got out of college and between being forced to use a PC in the workplace (for Windows and Linux) and the relative lack of games and applications in general, I simply bought a PC after my PowerMac died. I knew enough about computers in general to overcome the rough edges of Windows so it was not a big deal. I really haven't looked back since. I think current Macs are good equipment with a good OS, but they just aren't worth the extra money and the inability to simply replace my own parts if they start acting up. I doubt I'll bother with them again in their current consumer toy incarnation.
I do enjoy my iPhone for what it is worth, though. After all, the iPhone feels like what Jobs was always trying to go for: a walled garden consumer appliance that just sort of worked, which I think they've succeeded at for the most part.
Sixty years is nothing. Just about anything can work for a handful of decades if there is enough will behind it. Ultimately you build up an unstable exclusionary area that keeps wages and value artificially high and something comes through and knocks it over, hard.
The reason that Japan and China are now competing with us is the fact that they have low priced labor that can do many things that workers in Western countries did do which is non-complex and required little skill, but still paid well. We attempted to keep our wages artificially high through regulations and contract negotiations. We see how that worked out.
Now, if you're talking about strategic regulation of certain resources, that is a different beast. You need to have locally grown food, so you ensure it is grown here. You want locally drilled oil, so you drill locally. But that's about maintaining a strategic reserve, not about maintaining high wages. You are willing to pay more for locally sourced goods and services, but there's a limit to what is needed for that and more importantly, what the market can bear. That's why you have migrant workers on our farms, we need to not import food, but US workers either don't want to do that work, or they don't want the crap pay that comes with it.
Sure, certain regulations might keep farms or *corporations* in the US, but they don't keep wages high. You can't make a competitive product with high wages unless those wages are borne out by the market.
As I said, anything can work for awhile, but ultimately protectionism either falls or your economy ceases to grow in those sectors. There's only so much of something that you can sell within your own borders at rates inflated by artificially high labor costs. Certainly, no one needs to put up with that with software, which is absurdly easy to import.
Protectionism is a short term solution at best. China is either betting that they are smarter than history, or they are betting they can quick start their economy before they have to deal with the fallout.
The state does have the right and the ability to level charges without the permission of the victims. There are numerous reasons for that.
While it does take the morality of the prosecution down a notch, legally there is nothing odd about prosecuting a crime that the charges are leveled by the state against the victim's request.
The state may well determine that allowing the crime to go unpunished hurts the ability for order to be maintained, and it may also determine that the victim has been forced to decide between their own hurt and some other issue (such as not wanting Assange to go to jail, or not wanting to become seen as the excuse for some sort of US action). None of these considerations should be allowed to prevent prosecution of a crime because they set up scenarios where perpetrators may create situations where victims become unable to request redress under the law.
For instance, Assange might carry out what is a rape under statute, but having assaulted women who believe heavily in what Wikileaks was trying to do, he has the ability to turn the prosecution of his actual crime into a political situation where the women might well feel that they should let him off for the greater good.
I'm not saying that is how it happened, but there have been criminals throughout history who have been adept at setting up situations where they can perpetuate crimes against their victims, but the victims will still stand up for the criminal if outsiders step in.
So we can replace it with the actual Electoral College, the two parties.
We dealt with that by leaving all the names alone. It is amusing living in close vicinity to Prince William and Prince George's counties within 20 miles of the capital of the United States.
It *is* a planet. It's just a dwarf planet.
Of course, the correct terminology is now "Little Planets".
Not precisely what I was getting at with that comment.
It's definitely an inside job, and it certainly could be backup tapes, although I think it is just as likely that they stored all their backups on the same file server in the office as their desktop file shares and the hacker simply had a backdoor into the network and just went in and downloaded it all.
The level of security in the dumps that I have seen leads me to believe that they really didn't give two shits about security. Which is odd, given that they should have realized that they are Blackmail Central. Although I have met enough managers who think security is just overhead that I could believe that it kept being put off until "later" or that it was "too inconvenient".
I don't see the blackmail-type of hacker becoming an "outraged" type of hacker. Someone who blackmails a site like this doesn't care how they get their money, they just want a cut of it. It's a very pragmatic business. They're parasites, why would they kill a site that they know they could knock over every few months or years?
I think this was an inside job due to someone who sounds like they flew into a righteous rage about what ALM was and was not doing. Or not-so-righteous rage if ALM somehow failed to meet their personal expectations for some reason. The comments from ALM make me think it was some sort of contractor or consultant who was working with ALM on a technical or security level, but *something* soured the relationship and that contractor used his knowledge to perpetrate the hack.
It makes it sound like he was working with the security director or knew of him and all the other execs were part of the problem. That screams "working relationship" with the company at the very least.
Biderman was a founder of AshleyMadison.com. You can be sure he's already been paid. Unless he's been squandering his money on hookers and blow (which admittedly is something he might do), he's not going to lose his shirt.
Any lawsuits that breach the corporate barrier may be an issue, though.
He quit because that is what a CEO does who has presided over such a disastrous set of events. At least in this case, he was the man in power during all of those actions, so he did richly deserve it. He's not just the scapegoat/sacrifice.
I sincerely doubt it would legally be a fraud, I imagine they had those bases covered with ToS language. I agree that it was certainly misleading given the fact that they apparently had bots pretending to be females.
There were definitely women who used the service, however. Both the credit card records and some reports of females who had used it make that pretty clear.
There's also the fact that once a female made a response in that sort of environment, you'd probably have a date and be able to take it off the site, whereas males would spend more effort and money because they'd usually end up pursuing many more "non-productive" leads on the site (and therefore being forced to use the site for all contacts).
As you pointed out, the numbers of women actually participating were overwhelmingly dwarfed by number of males, just as they are on most dating sites. Most of the money in those sites is getting males to stay interested enough to keep shelling out money. It's like ladies night at the bars.
They can't take his stock away from him, at least not the stock he owns already. That belongs to him personally like his house does.
Obviously, he might lose options or stock grants that he hasn't received yet as part of his compensation package, but not necessarily. It depends on the contract.
Of course, stock is pretty much moot at this point, although it may be interesting to see if ALM can dig out of this.
I wouldn't be surprised if they do, cockroaches are good at surviving things that would have killed any other organism.
I'd step away from that partisan comment. If the President was a Republican, then liberals would be complaining.
The problem isn't with liberals going after conservatives or vice versa. The problem is that there exists a power which allows whoever is in charge to go after those they don't like. If the Republicans are in power, they'd use it as much as the Obama Administration does.