And I wouldn't be particularly worried about my kid getting sucked into Flash games and whatnot; they're hardly the timesinks that MMOG's are.
They aren't as nice to look at, and there are fewer of them, but there are flash and Java based MMOGs out there. Also, any of the larger universities likely have a LAN gaming center somewhere on campus where students can buy time to play most of the current games for console and PC for a few bucks an hour. The LAN gaming center and arcade at UCF were about the only 2 things I really liked about that campus.
As for the system specs, if you pick up a semi-decent graphics card for ~$150 you can probably run WoW just fine, even on older hardware. On the other hand, my workstation at work when I have all my IDEs up, Outlook (I hate it, but it's mandated), Pidgin (what they don't know won't hurt them, we're supposed to use this terrible client IBM makes that crashes constantly), and Firefox with a dozen tabs open, I easily eat between 1 and 2 gigs of RAM. And that's on XP, can't imagine what putting Vista on here would do to my productivity. The point is, for most games, the graphics card is the most critical piece of the system, get something decent enough, and you can scrap by with bare minimum hardware for everything else and still have a workable experience. For most serious apps, like having a few office applications, multimedia utilities, or any of the heavy weight IDEs running, and your CPU and RAM become critical. My home gaming system has half the processing power and RAM as my office work station, but a graphics card that's ten times as powerful, and both systems perform at about the same level at their given tasks.
Although, as someone else pointed out, if you don't have any specific software mandated, you can run Linux, with LaTeX, vi (or emacs you heretics), Firefox, Pidgin, and gcc or some such, and get by with very minimal hardware all around. Although if you're going to run the latest version of gnome, or KDE with all the bells and whistles and 3D desktops you'll need something beefier.
The blocking of port 80 they suggest really isn't about stopping the fast flux network, but it's an attempt to make it harder (marginally) to use the systems on that network for phishing attacks. As I understand it one of the uses these networks are being put to is to duplicate a phishing site on a couple hundred zombie systems, then rotate a single phishing URL through all of them making it harder to bring down the phishing site because you'd have to take down every one of the zombies, or find some way of nuking the DNS entry (which apparently the registrars are hesitant to do, even though some recent events seem to show that they'll do it quite happily if a big enough company or corporation asks them to). Personally I think blocking port 80 is a dumb idea and barely constitutes a speed bump for the kinds of people that run these things, but hey, that's never stopped a company from adopting a stupid idea, or marginal positive value and substantial negative (to the customer, if it hurts their bottom line forget it).
That is an incredibly scary movie for the simple fact it all rings so very true. Even before I saw that movie I more or less agreed with the opening to it, and think it applies not only to intelligence but to health as well. Our improved medical technology is providing a better life for most people, but over all reducing the genetic robustness of the human race. This is all of course totally off topic, but I felt it needed to be said.
I think maybe Microsoft is shooting for being the AOL of OSes. They'll be total crap, anyone even remotely computer literate will know it, but the unwashed masses will still pay for it because they really don't know any better. I'm still amazed every time I find someone who's actually paying to get AOL on top of a broadband connection. It's like buying a sports car then putting a trailer hitch and mobile home on the back of it.
Once again, I am happy that it was free for as long as it was.
Free to you maybe, but the internet radio stations have always payed a licensing fee. The big change here is that in the past internet radio had the same basic fee structure as a traditional broadcast radio station, in which the station paid a flat rate for a blanket license to play music from the RIAA's catalog (don't remember, but I think it may have been a small per song charge). The change is that they want to go to a payment system that charges not only per song, but per listener, which will grossly inflate the fees these stations will need to pay. Never mind the technical feasibility of tracking the number of unique listeners to any given station, but simply multiplying the.8 cent fee per song by even a thousand listeners brings the cost per song to 8 dollars, and there's no way these small broadcasters can recoup that cost in advertising fees. The RIAA actually knows this, but they don't care, they want control of the whole thing, so they've set it up where only a few companies can actually afford to provide internet radio, and they're just fine with that, less chance for anyone not already under the RIAA's thumb to get any sort of air time.
That's a good idea, although it really makes me wonder. As I understand it, Kevlar actually cuts very easily (they specifically warn that a Kevlar vest will not stop a knife), but the tight fiber groupings allow it to distribute blunt force impacts very effectively. This makes me wonder if when you put it in the blender it will shred, or will all the fibers get bound up in the blades and drive shaft and burn the motor out?
I guess I'm not hip, but what exactly is the difference between a QoS attack and a DoS attack? I mean severly degrading the quality of the service potentially up to the point of denying it *is* a DoS attack.
A DoS attack is an extreme form of QoS. If you perform a QoS attack on someone their performance is reduced, but the system is still usable, where as in a DoS the goal is to make the system totally unusable. In some ways a QoS is even more effective than a DoS because it's more subtle and causes more frustration. If for instance a website gets DoSed the owner is upset and will try to get someone to investigate and shutdown if possible whoever is DoSing them, and the users simply cannot connect to the service and go somewhere else. If, on the other hand you QoS attack a server, the owner will be frustrated because performance is poor, but they will have to spend a good bit of time trying to track down WHY exactly the performance is poor, but, more importantly the users connecting to the service will have a very poor experience, and that hurts the servers owner. A user is willing to cut someone slack if the server goes down, but they're much less forgiving when the servers performance is just poor.
I think a mistake you are making a mistake in understanding, the process isn't invisible or even hard to spot, but rather the resources being used are, a simple ps would still show the process.
The process is not invisible, you are correct, but it is hard to spot. If the malicious program is named something innocuous such as srvchost.exe (check your process list in Windows, there's a ton of the suckers), or maybe httpd in linux, and the user attempts to figure out what's causing slow downs on their system, they will be looking at anywhere but these processes because they will be showing 0% CPU utilization. Also, as I said, this is only part of a proper attack, this combined with some other exploit that hides the presence of the process will be even more confusing to the user because this attack actually re-allocates the used timeslices for the process to other random processes, so to the user it looks like the entire system is just using way more CPU time than normal. Of course, if you have a root kit you can perform this re-allocation at the kernel level, but part of the point of this exploit is that it's 100% userland so has a much smaller barrier to entry.
If you just want to DoS the box as a local user (which is all this lets you do, from a security standpoint), then there are much easier ways of doing this on OS X via the VM subsystem.
You're missing the point here. Because the CPU accounting is off it's possible to do a QoS attack on a box rather than a DoS, that's virtually impossible to detect as the end user. From his or her standpoint, the system will be sluggish, but because of the way the attack works various random processes will seem to be taking up all that extra slack so that most likely no one process will appear to be hogging the CPU.
There's also the possibility when combined with a worm or rootkit, as well as a bot net to setup a difficult to detect distributed computing environment to perform massive computations in short amounts of time.
Like any concealment based vulnerability this is just a tool to be combined with others for a complete attack, but a serious issue nonetheless.
...(as in, is there a difference between ripping a movie yourself and downloading a copy of it?)
Both are illegal in the US.
There is a popular myth on slashdot that you have a legal right to rip music or movies that you've bought. There is no such right.
You are wrong. The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992* allows for analog and digital copying of copyrighted audio works for home use without any copyright protection. It is perfectly legal to make a copy of a copyrighted audio (or software) work for personal use, and no amount of FUD by the MPAA or RIAA will change that fact (although they may have some success simply changing the law, if we let them). The right to backup and/or change the medium of a copyrighted work is protected under fair use, and various legal amendments to copyright. Go pedal your FUD elsewhere.
According to one of the comments on the gamepolitics thread the earlier psychological test that Thompson took was for a possible obsession with sex. I've not heard that before and the commenter doesn't provide any source so who knows how true it is.
The previous test was stemming from his harassment of Janet Reno who he was accusing of being a lesbian.
From the wikipedia page (which also sites the source as an article in Insight):
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Florida Supreme Court to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed, and since then has stated on more than one occasion that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida."
He's actually been ordered to take Psych test before and he managed to pass them. The guy is a moron, but unfortunatly he's not clinically insane. What will happen this time is probably the same thing that happened last time. He'll go do the test, pass it (although probably give the psychologist giving the test some interesting data to work on), and then make a huge PR event out of the fact that he's legally sane. He's got a few screws loose, but he's not missing any of them so they can't actually diagnose him with anything. They need to just disbar the guy and have done with it.
Maybe for you, but my phone company charges me 10 cents every time I send or receive SMS. Well, technically since they would have rioting if they charged it when you receive it, they don't actually charge you till you read the message, but it more or less amounts to the same thing.
My bank sends a OTP (one-time PIN) by SMS to my cellphone when I try to login
Oh yes, because I so want to pay 10 cents to my cell phone provider every time I want to log into my banks website.
Also, tying a bank account to a cell phone seems like a bad idea, then all someone has to do is lift your phone and they have access to your bank account. And you just know that they'd put a link on the banks website that sends not only your OTP but also your username to the phone for all those people that forget their logins.
I thought he said there would be something to click on to make it collapse.
i cant even find the option in preferences. anyone?
Initially this confused me as well, but the way to get a comment to collapse and expand is to click its name (thought he said about quotes, but not seeing that behavior). It used to be this linked to just that comment, but with this new system you can browse at a higher level and selectively check individual comments pretty easy. On the other hand, if an entire thread is collapsed and you want to read all of it you need to individually click each header.
These are all excellent ideas. I'd also like to suggest maybe some sort of karma system for stories in general. It seems there are a few regular posters that people always complain about for either blatantly plugging their blogs, or for posting psuedo-science with a terrible summary that makes it sound like an actual scientific breakthrough but after RTFA is just garbage. As it is now, the tagging system has been partially corrupted for this purpose which is unfortunate and shows that there are needs that the current system is not addressing.
You seem to have your forums confused, that's probably more of a 4chan thing. Over here the better response might be either "You must be new here", or "RTFM".
UGH! WHY DOES THE SIGNATURE THING MAKE PEOPLE FEEL SAFER!?!?
Because most people don't understand that the signature is not a form of identity verification, but to ensure that the receipt holds up as a legal contract in court. It also doesn't help that not long ago the credit card companies were all lauding how great their new security feature that prevents the name from being erased is at stopping credit card fraud.
Also, I've noticed that a lot of retailers aren't even requiring a signature for transactions under $25. All of this will contribute to more identity theft and make it harder to find these criminals.
I guess it all comes down to convenience vs. security. I personally would rather sign for my $10 charge and have the extra protection and paper trail it provides.
And how does having a signature on paper provide any more protection then not? The reason they require you to sign for purchases is because that receipt is treated as a legal contract between you and the merchant agreeing to pay for that merchandise. In the event of identity theft that document is worthless so having a signed receipt means exactly nothing. The reason they don't require a signature on purchases under $25 is because the cost of prosecuting the theft is more than the theft itself, so not worth their time, they'll just blacklist you instead and refuse you further business and leave the courts out of it.
Also, consider this: if she had carried a gun, she could have saved herself a 45-minute chase.
And in so doing converted herself from victim to attempted murderer, or at the very least assault with a deadly weapon. It's only legal to shoot someone in self defense, if the person hadn't pulled a gun (or in some cases a knife) on her, then she can't legally shoot them. Also, in some cases it's permissible if threatened with physical violence, but that's much tougher case to argue. In any event, shooting a fleeing person in the back almost always ends up in a slam dunk for the prosecution.
I'm really curious as to why there aren't huge crackdowns and law enforcement efforts to catch these thieves. I mean, government is in the pocket of big business, banks are the biggest of businesses...
The problem is that prosecuting these cases would cost the credit companies more than letting them drop. The reason for this is that the credit companies don't take the hit for CC fraud, the retailers and the victim do. Essentially when a credit company gets notified that some charges are fraudulent they just cancel the payments to the retailer, and the retailer is stuck with the losses. Now, if credit card fraud was less common, and checking fraud or maybe some other form of fraud was more common in identity theft cases, then you'd see the banks sitting up and taking notice.
This is total rubbish, never heard anything so ridiculous in my whole life.
Now if you'll excuse me, my Paladin is just about to hit level 42, and I've got a 16 hour raid I simply must attend tonight. Oh, and tomorrow as well. Actually, this week isn't good, maybe we can work something out next week.
Because of gaps between federal and Virginia state laws, the state did not report Cho's legal status to the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Yes, you're completely right, and your system seems to be working quite well.
That's not a failing of the design of the system, but a failing of the implementation. Somebody screwed up, people are human, mistakes happen. As Cho is concerned this doesn't appear to be the only screwup around his mental health either. From what others have said he was ordered by a judge to seek psychiatric treatment, but he never did, and no one ever followed up with him to make sure he was following the judges orders.
The point is, Cho was a fluke, a complete screw up start to finish of many different systems, individuals, and agencies. Changing gun laws would not have prevented this, although it may have changed the outcome for worse or better. Some have pointed out that without access to firearms, he probably would have resorted to explosives or setting fires, who knows. Also, making something illegal does not cut off access to it, it merely provides incentive for organized crime to become involved with it, and sets up higher profit margins within a black market.
That is all completely bullshit, when somebody snaps and goes on a rampage, over in the USA they can reach for a gun, if they don't own one they can go and buy one without any problems. Over here the chances of them having a gun in the first place is low, and to get a gun you need to go through a months long process, by that time it would be obvious they're not mentally stable enough to own a gun.
You're a complete moron who is talking out of his ass. Over here in the USA you can not just go out and buy a gun like you would a 6 pack of beer. There's a bunch of forms you need to fill out, which get sent off to the FBI and god knows who else, they do a background check, they run your records through the court system to see if you've been arrested for anything, and they check your medical background looking for mental problems. Only after all that goes through and you get the all clear from uncle sam can you then purchase that gun, and guess what, the whole process, takes about a month. It's the exact same situation over here as you describe wherever that is you're at. Also, you may "know" that nobody around you is carrying any guns, but that just proves you're ignoring reality. I'd be willing to bet you're walked past people carrying guns before and didn't even know it, it's not like they have to carry big neon signs with them, and from the ton of your comment I'm assuming it's illegal to do so there, so even less likely they'd do anything to attract attention. Also, even though you need a background check to even purchase a gun over here, to actually carry that weapon concealed on your person or in a vehicle you need a separate carry license which is a whole other set of paperwork and tests and such.
Slashdot Mirror
Just check to see if the Google van has gone by their house recently, no need to even leave your desk.
They aren't as nice to look at, and there are fewer of them, but there are flash and Java based MMOGs out there. Also, any of the larger universities likely have a LAN gaming center somewhere on campus where students can buy time to play most of the current games for console and PC for a few bucks an hour. The LAN gaming center and arcade at UCF were about the only 2 things I really liked about that campus.
As for the system specs, if you pick up a semi-decent graphics card for ~$150 you can probably run WoW just fine, even on older hardware. On the other hand, my workstation at work when I have all my IDEs up, Outlook (I hate it, but it's mandated), Pidgin (what they don't know won't hurt them, we're supposed to use this terrible client IBM makes that crashes constantly), and Firefox with a dozen tabs open, I easily eat between 1 and 2 gigs of RAM. And that's on XP, can't imagine what putting Vista on here would do to my productivity. The point is, for most games, the graphics card is the most critical piece of the system, get something decent enough, and you can scrap by with bare minimum hardware for everything else and still have a workable experience. For most serious apps, like having a few office applications, multimedia utilities, or any of the heavy weight IDEs running, and your CPU and RAM become critical. My home gaming system has half the processing power and RAM as my office work station, but a graphics card that's ten times as powerful, and both systems perform at about the same level at their given tasks.
Although, as someone else pointed out, if you don't have any specific software mandated, you can run Linux, with LaTeX, vi (or emacs you heretics), Firefox, Pidgin, and gcc or some such, and get by with very minimal hardware all around. Although if you're going to run the latest version of gnome, or KDE with all the bells and whistles and 3D desktops you'll need something beefier.
The blocking of port 80 they suggest really isn't about stopping the fast flux network, but it's an attempt to make it harder (marginally) to use the systems on that network for phishing attacks. As I understand it one of the uses these networks are being put to is to duplicate a phishing site on a couple hundred zombie systems, then rotate a single phishing URL through all of them making it harder to bring down the phishing site because you'd have to take down every one of the zombies, or find some way of nuking the DNS entry (which apparently the registrars are hesitant to do, even though some recent events seem to show that they'll do it quite happily if a big enough company or corporation asks them to). Personally I think blocking port 80 is a dumb idea and barely constitutes a speed bump for the kinds of people that run these things, but hey, that's never stopped a company from adopting a stupid idea, or marginal positive value and substantial negative (to the customer, if it hurts their bottom line forget it).
That is an incredibly scary movie for the simple fact it all rings so very true. Even before I saw that movie I more or less agreed with the opening to it, and think it applies not only to intelligence but to health as well. Our improved medical technology is providing a better life for most people, but over all reducing the genetic robustness of the human race. This is all of course totally off topic, but I felt it needed to be said.
I think maybe Microsoft is shooting for being the AOL of OSes. They'll be total crap, anyone even remotely computer literate will know it, but the unwashed masses will still pay for it because they really don't know any better. I'm still amazed every time I find someone who's actually paying to get AOL on top of a broadband connection. It's like buying a sports car then putting a trailer hitch and mobile home on the back of it.
Free to you maybe, but the internet radio stations have always payed a licensing fee. The big change here is that in the past internet radio had the same basic fee structure as a traditional broadcast radio station, in which the station paid a flat rate for a blanket license to play music from the RIAA's catalog (don't remember, but I think it may have been a small per song charge). The change is that they want to go to a payment system that charges not only per song, but per listener, which will grossly inflate the fees these stations will need to pay. Never mind the technical feasibility of tracking the number of unique listeners to any given station, but simply multiplying the .8 cent fee per song by even a thousand listeners brings the cost per song to 8 dollars, and there's no way these small broadcasters can recoup that cost in advertising fees. The RIAA actually knows this, but they don't care, they want control of the whole thing, so they've set it up where only a few companies can actually afford to provide internet radio, and they're just fine with that, less chance for anyone not already under the RIAA's thumb to get any sort of air time.
That's a good idea, although it really makes me wonder. As I understand it, Kevlar actually cuts very easily (they specifically warn that a Kevlar vest will not stop a knife), but the tight fiber groupings allow it to distribute blunt force impacts very effectively. This makes me wonder if when you put it in the blender it will shred, or will all the fibers get bound up in the blades and drive shaft and burn the motor out?
A DoS attack is an extreme form of QoS. If you perform a QoS attack on someone their performance is reduced, but the system is still usable, where as in a DoS the goal is to make the system totally unusable. In some ways a QoS is even more effective than a DoS because it's more subtle and causes more frustration. If for instance a website gets DoSed the owner is upset and will try to get someone to investigate and shutdown if possible whoever is DoSing them, and the users simply cannot connect to the service and go somewhere else. If, on the other hand you QoS attack a server, the owner will be frustrated because performance is poor, but they will have to spend a good bit of time trying to track down WHY exactly the performance is poor, but, more importantly the users connecting to the service will have a very poor experience, and that hurts the servers owner. A user is willing to cut someone slack if the server goes down, but they're much less forgiving when the servers performance is just poor.
I think a mistake you are making a mistake in understanding, the process isn't invisible or even hard to spot, but rather the resources being used are, a simple ps would still show the process.The process is not invisible, you are correct, but it is hard to spot. If the malicious program is named something innocuous such as srvchost.exe (check your process list in Windows, there's a ton of the suckers), or maybe httpd in linux, and the user attempts to figure out what's causing slow downs on their system, they will be looking at anywhere but these processes because they will be showing 0% CPU utilization. Also, as I said, this is only part of a proper attack, this combined with some other exploit that hides the presence of the process will be even more confusing to the user because this attack actually re-allocates the used timeslices for the process to other random processes, so to the user it looks like the entire system is just using way more CPU time than normal. Of course, if you have a root kit you can perform this re-allocation at the kernel level, but part of the point of this exploit is that it's 100% userland so has a much smaller barrier to entry.
You're missing the point here. Because the CPU accounting is off it's possible to do a QoS attack on a box rather than a DoS, that's virtually impossible to detect as the end user. From his or her standpoint, the system will be sluggish, but because of the way the attack works various random processes will seem to be taking up all that extra slack so that most likely no one process will appear to be hogging the CPU.
There's also the possibility when combined with a worm or rootkit, as well as a bot net to setup a difficult to detect distributed computing environment to perform massive computations in short amounts of time.
Like any concealment based vulnerability this is just a tool to be combined with others for a complete attack, but a serious issue nonetheless.
...(as in, is there a difference between ripping a movie yourself and downloading a copy of it?)Both are illegal in the US.
There is a popular myth on slashdot that you have a legal right to rip music or movies that you've bought. There is no such right.
You are wrong. The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992* allows for analog and digital copying of copyrighted audio works for home use without any copyright protection. It is perfectly legal to make a copy of a copyrighted audio (or software) work for personal use, and no amount of FUD by the MPAA or RIAA will change that fact (although they may have some success simply changing the law, if we let them). The right to backup and/or change the medium of a copyrighted work is protected under fair use, and various legal amendments to copyright. Go pedal your FUD elsewhere.
*: 17 USC 1008
The previous test was stemming from his harassment of Janet Reno who he was accusing of being a lesbian.
From the wikipedia page (which also sites the source as an article in Insight):
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Florida Supreme Court to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed, and since then has stated on more than one occasion that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida."And the url for the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_%28atto rney%29#Campaign_against_Janet_Reno
He's actually been ordered to take Psych test before and he managed to pass them. The guy is a moron, but unfortunatly he's not clinically insane. What will happen this time is probably the same thing that happened last time. He'll go do the test, pass it (although probably give the psychologist giving the test some interesting data to work on), and then make a huge PR event out of the fact that he's legally sane. He's got a few screws loose, but he's not missing any of them so they can't actually diagnose him with anything. They need to just disbar the guy and have done with it.
Maybe for you, but my phone company charges me 10 cents every time I send or receive SMS. Well, technically since they would have rioting if they charged it when you receive it, they don't actually charge you till you read the message, but it more or less amounts to the same thing.
Oh yes, because I so want to pay 10 cents to my cell phone provider every time I want to log into my banks website.
Also, tying a bank account to a cell phone seems like a bad idea, then all someone has to do is lift your phone and they have access to your bank account. And you just know that they'd put a link on the banks website that sends not only your OTP but also your username to the phone for all those people that forget their logins.
More importantly does it run VMS?
Initially this confused me as well, but the way to get a comment to collapse and expand is to click its name (thought he said about quotes, but not seeing that behavior). It used to be this linked to just that comment, but with this new system you can browse at a higher level and selectively check individual comments pretty easy. On the other hand, if an entire thread is collapsed and you want to read all of it you need to individually click each header.
These are all excellent ideas. I'd also like to suggest maybe some sort of karma system for stories in general. It seems there are a few regular posters that people always complain about for either blatantly plugging their blogs, or for posting psuedo-science with a terrible summary that makes it sound like an actual scientific breakthrough but after RTFA is just garbage. As it is now, the tagging system has been partially corrupted for this purpose which is unfortunate and shows that there are needs that the current system is not addressing.
You seem to have your forums confused, that's probably more of a 4chan thing. Over here the better response might be either "You must be new here", or "RTFM".
Because most people don't understand that the signature is not a form of identity verification, but to ensure that the receipt holds up as a legal contract in court. It also doesn't help that not long ago the credit card companies were all lauding how great their new security feature that prevents the name from being erased is at stopping credit card fraud.
I guess it all comes down to convenience vs. security. I personally would rather sign for my $10 charge and have the extra protection and paper trail it provides.
And how does having a signature on paper provide any more protection then not? The reason they require you to sign for purchases is because that receipt is treated as a legal contract between you and the merchant agreeing to pay for that merchandise. In the event of identity theft that document is worthless so having a signed receipt means exactly nothing. The reason they don't require a signature on purchases under $25 is because the cost of prosecuting the theft is more than the theft itself, so not worth their time, they'll just blacklist you instead and refuse you further business and leave the courts out of it.
And in so doing converted herself from victim to attempted murderer, or at the very least assault with a deadly weapon. It's only legal to shoot someone in self defense, if the person hadn't pulled a gun (or in some cases a knife) on her, then she can't legally shoot them. Also, in some cases it's permissible if threatened with physical violence, but that's much tougher case to argue. In any event, shooting a fleeing person in the back almost always ends up in a slam dunk for the prosecution.
The problem is that prosecuting these cases would cost the credit companies more than letting them drop. The reason for this is that the credit companies don't take the hit for CC fraud, the retailers and the victim do. Essentially when a credit company gets notified that some charges are fraudulent they just cancel the payments to the retailer, and the retailer is stuck with the losses. Now, if credit card fraud was less common, and checking fraud or maybe some other form of fraud was more common in identity theft cases, then you'd see the banks sitting up and taking notice.
Doesn't matter, I was shooting for a funny mod, but clearly that was lost on some people.
This is total rubbish, never heard anything so ridiculous in my whole life.
Now if you'll excuse me, my Paladin is just about to hit level 42, and I've got a 16 hour raid I simply must attend tonight. Oh, and tomorrow as well. Actually, this week isn't good, maybe we can work something out next week.
That's not a failing of the design of the system, but a failing of the implementation. Somebody screwed up, people are human, mistakes happen. As Cho is concerned this doesn't appear to be the only screwup around his mental health either. From what others have said he was ordered by a judge to seek psychiatric treatment, but he never did, and no one ever followed up with him to make sure he was following the judges orders.
The point is, Cho was a fluke, a complete screw up start to finish of many different systems, individuals, and agencies. Changing gun laws would not have prevented this, although it may have changed the outcome for worse or better. Some have pointed out that without access to firearms, he probably would have resorted to explosives or setting fires, who knows. Also, making something illegal does not cut off access to it, it merely provides incentive for organized crime to become involved with it, and sets up higher profit margins within a black market.
You're a complete moron who is talking out of his ass. Over here in the USA you can not just go out and buy a gun like you would a 6 pack of beer. There's a bunch of forms you need to fill out, which get sent off to the FBI and god knows who else, they do a background check, they run your records through the court system to see if you've been arrested for anything, and they check your medical background looking for mental problems. Only after all that goes through and you get the all clear from uncle sam can you then purchase that gun, and guess what, the whole process, takes about a month. It's the exact same situation over here as you describe wherever that is you're at. Also, you may "know" that nobody around you is carrying any guns, but that just proves you're ignoring reality. I'd be willing to bet you're walked past people carrying guns before and didn't even know it, it's not like they have to carry big neon signs with them, and from the ton of your comment I'm assuming it's illegal to do so there, so even less likely they'd do anything to attract attention. Also, even though you need a background check to even purchase a gun over here, to actually carry that weapon concealed on your person or in a vehicle you need a separate carry license which is a whole other set of paperwork and tests and such.