4 years before we intervened on Egypt's behalf, we murdered a popular Iranian leader and helped the Shah regain power. That worked out really well in 1979, didn't it?
Here's a novel thought: leave Egypt alone. Let the people sort it out. If the US throws up its hands and walks away, there's no way the US can be blamed for good or ill.
What you don't seem to get is that if we "support the people" and the Muslim Brotherhood successfully takes control in place of Mubarak, we'll be blamed for that and that's not the sort of thing which will help the spread of representative government in that region or help our interests.
FTFA, all it sounds like is a workflow system for controlling what can be done through a company's official presence(s) on Facebook. For example, it allows managers to moderate both employees handling those presences and other Facebook users trying to post on their wall, etc.
How is that "big brother?" That's almost like calling Slashdot comment moderation a form of Stalinist repression (when we all know, that label rightly belongs to Digg)
What is there to stop them from applying this to the Wall Street Journal on RIM's new platform and/or Android?
Guys like Miller fail to see that while this may not recapture the glory days of newspaper publishing, it presents an advertising opportunity that is head and shoulders above running just a website.
If Murdoch were truly evil, what he'd do is turn it into a mini-ecommerce platform by allowing advertisers to directly link their ads to an affiliate program that pays News Corp so that readers could buy the advertised product in one click in the app.
It'll be the economy. The US is poised by end of year to have the same debt:GDP ratio that Greece had when catastrophe struck there. The US is teetering on the edge of another great depression because our debt levels have reached a point where they're choking both the public and private sectors.
Apple does not make products that will fare well in a very bad economy. The iPhone, for example, forces the user to pay a king's ransom for a new battery every two years or so or buy a new one. Apple doesn't make decent computers which can compete in the low end market (where many users will be forced to go by the economy); their idea of "low end" is a $900-$1000 laptop, not a $400-$600 laptop.
Apple won't be alone in this area. I think Oracle will end up getting hurt even worse as companies that used to throw expensive enterprise apps at every problem have to choose between payroll and expenses like using Oracle for a database that's barely more than a bit bucket. The US IT industry as a whole will get humbled.
If you want to create a real penalty for not being an educated voter, here's a simple trick:
1) Remove party affiliations from the ballot. 2) Remove any option to vote straight party. 3) Prohibit the dissemination of political materials from any political party within 1,000 feet of a polling station.
Of course, in the interim there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth as much of the electorate suddenly realized that it had to do research. People would complain that it's a form of "disenfranchisement."
I have to wonder how daft some of these commenters and commentators are if they believe this is new. If you're a 15 year old girl and your little brother reads your diary and notices that you confessed to filing false rape charges against your neighbor, his defense counsel could seize the diary as evidence if the brother told them about it. There is no "right to privacy" under the constitution in this respect. You have a right to not incriminate yourself. You have a right to not be subjected to overly broad or general searches and seizures. You have no right to a special place where you can say and do anything you want and it's all off limits to the courts.
I'm all in favor of making it tough for the police to get initial access to the data. I can't believe anyone would be worried that this would happen in the middle of a trial in front of a jury.
Just pay back to me what I put in adjusted for inflation, of course.
It doesn't work that way. This is a civil society. You pay for things from which you don't immediately benefit. I pay property taxes to support a public school system I neither support or want. Should I "get my money back" as well?
Of course not. Even though my leanings are distinctly conservative-libertarian on most issues, I recognize a higher duty to my society here to not exact my last pound of "what's owed to me."
Here's a simple fact. Your "entitlements" are not sustainable. They're just not. No right-thinking person who actually looks at the numbers believes they are. It sucks to know you paid into a system which needs to go away to save our economy and government. It sucks even worse being forced to pay in and become indebted for that system now that you know it is impossible for it to survive.
At 27, I'm a "millennial." My generation and Generation X are looking at a bleak future because of what is being done by the Boomers.
I have a simple solution: take away the Boomers' Social Security and Medicare. All of it. Keep the Boomers' parents on it. They paid in and didn't give us this situation. They passed on the baton of leadership to the Boomers around Bush Sr. and the Boomers hit prime time in the Clinton and Bush years.
I say "f#$%" them, as a generation. They want to be able to default $500k mortgages and enjoy generous pensions and Social Security when they won't even let my generation discharge a few 10s of thousands of dollars in student loans **in bankruptcy court**. They want to turn Generation X into beasts of burden to fund their benefits while my generation wallows in disproportionate unemployment?
Screw them. The revenues from taking them off the potential Social Security and Medicare rosters would more than pay off our debt in under a decade.
The dirty little secret of modern America is that a significant amount of the college graduates we have today would, in a saner economy, be the semi-skilled manufacturing labor force competing with third world labor. Most college graduates have actually fewer skills after 4-5 years of college than most high school graduates who do something more complicated than retail or food service.
The problem is that you can't say that mos college graduates should actually be working in a factory straight after high school because that implies the following:
1) You hate the poor (how liberals will see it) 2) You're an elitist (how many conservatives will see it) 3) You want to deny the American Dream(tm) to millions (how the non-ideological will see it) 4) You don't believe everyone's kid is above average. 5) You believe college should be the domain of the intelligent and elite, not the average man on the street.
Yet here's the thing. A key part of why we are so in debt is because every Tom, Dick and Harry believes that they are entitled to a standard that is "upper-middle class" by world standards... just for showing up on the job. Our national problems could be solved if we'd admit that a stratified society is not only natural, but healthy (which is not the same as saying that 1% should control 90% of the wealth, that's another argument).
The reason the standard of living for the common man rose so rapidly from the 19th century to later 20th century is that we had the gold standard, which secured the value of their labor on one end, and we didn't indulge in ridiculous social engineering to make everyone equal. Now, we have nearly $1T in non-dischargeable student loan debt and no future for many millions of Americans. Instead of more of the same, how about we repeal NAFTA and go back to a sound currency so we can rebuild our manufacturing base and stop forcing square pegs (the average worker) into a round hole (advanced education and the work that it should support).
What if the government actually didn't take on debt? What if the government actually had a policy of saving 25% of any budget surplus and returning the rest as a tax refund? What if the government actually had its own private cash reserves with which to do non-deficit spending and lower the need to have discretionary funds in the budget in any given year? What if those cash reserves were stored in local banks that gave out loans in good times? What if the government tried to actually cut out unnecessary spending?
If a private household did the equivalents of those things, it'd be quite well off within several years. After 30-40 years, the parents would have their home firmly paid off and would be able to fold their mortgage payment into their savings and retirement funds.
I'm only 27, but my grandmother remembers when the federal government actually used to be the one doing for the world what China does for us. How the mighty have fallen.
Because the Internet dispelled a number of myths I had about "how bad the Church was..."
1) Did you know that the Spanish Inquisition was run by the Spanish government after the King blackmailed the Pope by threatening to withdraw Spanish troops from Rome if he didn't get his way?
2) Did you know that the first Crusade was actually a response to 500 years of unrelenting Islamic aggression Christian states?
3) Have you ever read the tenants of the "church" that Hitler proposed as a replacement for the authentic Catholic and Lutheran religions?
3b) Did you know that Hitler actually practiced a modern form of German paganism and in private openly hated Christianity with a passion?
4) Did you know that Galileo was actually invited as an honored guest by the Pope and was actually imprisoned only after he behaved like a total douchebag toward the Pope (where similar behavior would have warranted execution if directed at a medieval king)?
The Bible, both sides, actually has the most copies in the original ancient languages of any book from that era. It is actually the most widely copied book from the ancient world we have. The variations of the original versions are insignificant. Furthermore, the Old Testament in particular has been very well-preserved. The Jews did an unbelievably good job there. We have copies of Genesis that go back over 3,000 years that are the same as copies from 1AD and the middle ages.
Most people who say "the Bible has been changed" are speaking out of ignorance. The Catholic church relied on the Vulgate which is a trashy translation into Latin. Protestants used to rely on the King James version which was "slightly less bad" but based on the Vuglate IIRC. Modern evangelicals actually use the New International Version in most cases, which is a direct translation from the ancient texts into modern English done by scholars of those language (who were substantially better than those that worked for King James).
The Bible sitting on my shelf is about as accurate of a translation as you can get from what Paul and Luke actually wrote in Koine Greek and Aramaic.
MasterCard has agreed to work with the **AA. Does that wrong justify some punk exploiting a security hole and downloading credit card account information for several hundred thousand MasterCard customers?
These are the problems that most union opponents have with them:
1) Unions protect mediocre employees. 2) Unions frequently demand pay and benefits which are not appropriate for the job; the average senior UAW member makes substantially more money than most senior software engineers I know. 3) Unions won't back down in the name of the common good when everyone is suffering. Government employee unions are particularly bad for this. 4) Many of us believe that you shouldn't have to be a member of a union to have a job in any company or field.
the fact that the gov mismanages our funds has nothing to do with the fact that the funds are NEEDED to 'run society'.
You're wrong on two counts:
1) It distorts the calculations on what is actually needed for the common good. That has everything to do with what we really need.
2) It undermines the sense of duty people have to obey the law and contribute.
The government is supposed to obey the law and serve the common good. When it doesn't and gets away with it, people feel like chumps for going along with it in the best of cases. In the worst cases, they feel like the rule of law is meaningless.
This is, after all, the same Gabrielle Giffords who had a brick thrown through her office window after the health care vote. I bet violent rhetoric was responsible for that one.
Someone actually shot at Eric Cantor's office at the same time. It was a very heated issue, but we have to face up to the fact that it was the issue itself, not the rhetoric, that was to blame. Obamacare is precisely the kind of legislation that our founders did not want passed at the federal level because it would bring about a sharp conflict between the states.
We ought to consider ourselves fortunate that a few shots and bricks were all that came of it. Just look at the violent protests in Britain over tuition cuts, to say nothing of what frequently happens in France when the unions want something.
One of his two favorite authors was Nietzsche. His friends described him as a thoroughly nihilistic individual. Seems Nietzsche, not video games, had a truly profound impact on him.
Yet just the other day, I had a liberal coworker stridently tell me it was that eeeeeeevil Sarah Palin that made him do it. When I pointed out the Nietzsche issue, and the fact that he didn't listen to any right wing rhetoric, didn't matter. Heck, she didn't even know who Nietzsche was... but that didn't stop her, like a lot of liberals, from blaming this on Sarah Palin and some cliche political map.
Bernie Madoff scammed $50B. Under a punitive restitution system, he and his conspirators would be looking at $350B in damages.
Obviously, they could never pay that much off. That's part of the point. He and his family will be left utterly ruined for the rest of their lives for such a great financial harm.
Instead of locking the punks up, make them pay the victim 7 times the value of the damaged property. Deny them welfare until they've paid it back. If they commit another felony while they're still paying it off, double the sentence for that felony.
On the surface, it may sound harsh, but if they do $1000 of damage to their neighbor and the court makes them pay back $7,000 as restitution and punishment instead of booking them in the pokey for two years, which is less disruptive? Having to pay back $7,000 with no interest at 1-2x minimum wage or doing prison time and then trying to find a job?
1) If a court of law determines that a piece of information was properly classified as Secret or Top Secret...
2) for Secret you face life in prison.
3) for Top Secret, you face execution.
4) upon proper conviction, the federal government confiscates all of your earnings from the crime if they exist or confiscates an amount from your estate equal to what is confirmed was promised you by a foreign government.
5) Your spouse and children, by law, cannot receive any government services except public education for at least five years.
Before anyone accuses me of being vindictive with #5, allow me to explain...
Every so often we find citizens of Chinese extraction who have been violating the law for YEARS in Secret positions. It's always some low to mid level guy at Boeing or Lockheed who has been handing over schematics and other data for years. Native US citizens usually do it for money, hence #4. Naturalized US citizens usually do it out of lingering loyalties to their old culture (which often happens to be a much more family-oriented culture too). That is why the federal government has to target them with a culturally sensitive move by targeting their family. The federal government needs to target each type of threat at the place where their incentives are.
First off the Nintendo WII has torn the Xbox and the PS3 a new one.
That's funny. Nintendo certainly sold a lot of units, but it's struggled to get most of its users who are typically casual gamers to buy a lot of games. Microsoft hasn't had that problem. Microsoft isn't that interested in the casual market. Its goal is to defeat Sony first and then take on Nintendo.
Third, you haven't a freakin' clue why iOS is sucessful. iOS is not the same as OS X. The unified product base is why the Windows tablet does not work. You need a specialized OS to run a tablet. Microsoft Windows 7 is not that.
You dumbass, I was referring to the fact that iOS and OS X are the same core OS forked into separate directions. iOS is a direct fork of the core of OS X, WinCE is not. I don't know how much similarity exists between Windows Phone OS 7 or whatever it's called and Windows 7, but it's likely not anywhere near as much between iOS and OS X.
Microsoft's stock is trading around $30/share. Apple's stock is trading over $300/share. 7 years ago Apple's stock was trading at $7/share. Microsoft's stock was roughly the same price today.
Yeah, because...
1) Apple's market capitalization is sooooo relevant to a Google versus Microsoft argument...
2) Market capitalization determines the real capabilities in the market of a company...
Microsoft is notorious for working hard until they get it right and then steadily eating into their competition. They've practically torn Sony limb-from-limb in the video game market, something which would have been unthinkable in the early millennium when Sony was an unstoppable juggernaut that was able to destroy Sega just on "sheer perceived awesomeness" alone. From the initial reports about Windows 8, it sounds like they've fully grasped the OS X/iOS lesson and are moving toward a similar unified Windows product base.
It's really amusing to me whenever I see people dismiss Microsoft as a dinosaur that is thrashing in a tar pit. They act like its collapse is "inevitable" like Microsoft is some sort of corporate Soviet Union. In the late 90s/early millennium, everyone was saying that Linux or this or that would kill them. Guess what? Windows 7 probably put the nail in the coffin for desktop Linux among mainstream users in the US and much of Europe.
People mistake the fact that the market is competitive with Microsoft dying. It's more realistic to say that Microsoft is being forced to adapt and compete. If Windows 7 is their first real volley in that respect, I'd be cautious if I were one of their main competitors because it's obvious that Microsoft is taking these threats very seriously now.
but he can pretty much expect to have to live in solitary confinement if he wants to survive in prison. People who are perceived as traitors are right up there with child molesters to many convicts. The fact that he is a homosexual and it's come out that he was motivated to leak the data by DADT will only make it worse for him.
If I were his attorney, plan A would be some form of insanity defense based on his mental state over DADT and plan B would be violation of civil liberties for imprisoning him so long in such harsh conditions without a trial.
So poking fun at Peter King for hypocrisy may be fun and all, but it's not a great argument.
This isn't about poking fun at him for being a hypocrite. King is one of, it not the most active Republican out there right now trying to get Assange taken out.
The fact that King is so pro-IRA and has helped them puts him in a far worse position. Huckabee, Palin, etc. can at least say with a straight face that they've never helped a terrorist group.
Slashdot Mirror
4 years before we intervened on Egypt's behalf, we murdered a popular Iranian leader and helped the Shah regain power. That worked out really well in 1979, didn't it?
Here's a novel thought: leave Egypt alone. Let the people sort it out. If the US throws up its hands and walks away, there's no way the US can be blamed for good or ill.
What you don't seem to get is that if we "support the people" and the Muslim Brotherhood successfully takes control in place of Mubarak, we'll be blamed for that and that's not the sort of thing which will help the spread of representative government in that region or help our interests.
FTFA, all it sounds like is a workflow system for controlling what can be done through a company's official presence(s) on Facebook. For example, it allows managers to moderate both employees handling those presences and other Facebook users trying to post on their wall, etc.
How is that "big brother?" That's almost like calling Slashdot comment moderation a form of Stalinist repression (when we all know, that label rightly belongs to Digg)
What is there to stop them from applying this to the Wall Street Journal on RIM's new platform and/or Android?
Guys like Miller fail to see that while this may not recapture the glory days of newspaper publishing, it presents an advertising opportunity that is head and shoulders above running just a website.
If Murdoch were truly evil, what he'd do is turn it into a mini-ecommerce platform by allowing advertisers to directly link their ads to an affiliate program that pays News Corp so that readers could buy the advertised product in one click in the app.
It'll be the economy. The US is poised by end of year to have the same debt:GDP ratio that Greece had when catastrophe struck there. The US is teetering on the edge of another great depression because our debt levels have reached a point where they're choking both the public and private sectors.
Apple does not make products that will fare well in a very bad economy. The iPhone, for example, forces the user to pay a king's ransom for a new battery every two years or so or buy a new one. Apple doesn't make decent computers which can compete in the low end market (where many users will be forced to go by the economy); their idea of "low end" is a $900-$1000 laptop, not a $400-$600 laptop.
Apple won't be alone in this area. I think Oracle will end up getting hurt even worse as companies that used to throw expensive enterprise apps at every problem have to choose between payroll and expenses like using Oracle for a database that's barely more than a bit bucket. The US IT industry as a whole will get humbled.
If you want to create a real penalty for not being an educated voter, here's a simple trick:
1) Remove party affiliations from the ballot.
2) Remove any option to vote straight party.
3) Prohibit the dissemination of political materials from any political party within 1,000 feet of a polling station.
Of course, in the interim there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth as much of the electorate suddenly realized that it had to do research. People would complain that it's a form of "disenfranchisement."
I have to wonder how daft some of these commenters and commentators are if they believe this is new. If you're a 15 year old girl and your little brother reads your diary and notices that you confessed to filing false rape charges against your neighbor, his defense counsel could seize the diary as evidence if the brother told them about it. There is no "right to privacy" under the constitution in this respect. You have a right to not incriminate yourself. You have a right to not be subjected to overly broad or general searches and seizures. You have no right to a special place where you can say and do anything you want and it's all off limits to the courts.
I'm all in favor of making it tough for the police to get initial access to the data. I can't believe anyone would be worried that this would happen in the middle of a trial in front of a jury.
It doesn't work that way. This is a civil society. You pay for things from which you don't immediately benefit. I pay property taxes to support a public school system I neither support or want. Should I "get my money back" as well?
Of course not. Even though my leanings are distinctly conservative-libertarian on most issues, I recognize a higher duty to my society here to not exact my last pound of "what's owed to me."
Here's a simple fact. Your "entitlements" are not sustainable. They're just not. No right-thinking person who actually looks at the numbers believes they are. It sucks to know you paid into a system which needs to go away to save our economy and government. It sucks even worse being forced to pay in and become indebted for that system now that you know it is impossible for it to survive.
At 27, I'm a "millennial." My generation and Generation X are looking at a bleak future because of what is being done by the Boomers.
I have a simple solution: take away the Boomers' Social Security and Medicare. All of it. Keep the Boomers' parents on it. They paid in and didn't give us this situation. They passed on the baton of leadership to the Boomers around Bush Sr. and the Boomers hit prime time in the Clinton and Bush years.
I say "f#$%" them, as a generation. They want to be able to default $500k mortgages and enjoy generous pensions and Social Security when they won't even let my generation discharge a few 10s of thousands of dollars in student loans **in bankruptcy court**. They want to turn Generation X into beasts of burden to fund their benefits while my generation wallows in disproportionate unemployment?
Screw them. The revenues from taking them off the potential Social Security and Medicare rosters would more than pay off our debt in under a decade.
The dirty little secret of modern America is that a significant amount of the college graduates we have today would, in a saner economy, be the semi-skilled manufacturing labor force competing with third world labor. Most college graduates have actually fewer skills after 4-5 years of college than most high school graduates who do something more complicated than retail or food service.
The problem is that you can't say that mos college graduates should actually be working in a factory straight after high school because that implies the following:
1) You hate the poor (how liberals will see it)
2) You're an elitist (how many conservatives will see it)
3) You want to deny the American Dream(tm) to millions (how the non-ideological will see it)
4) You don't believe everyone's kid is above average.
5) You believe college should be the domain of the intelligent and elite, not the average man on the street.
Yet here's the thing. A key part of why we are so in debt is because every Tom, Dick and Harry believes that they are entitled to a standard that is "upper-middle class" by world standards... just for showing up on the job. Our national problems could be solved if we'd admit that a stratified society is not only natural, but healthy (which is not the same as saying that 1% should control 90% of the wealth, that's another argument).
The reason the standard of living for the common man rose so rapidly from the 19th century to later 20th century is that we had the gold standard, which secured the value of their labor on one end, and we didn't indulge in ridiculous social engineering to make everyone equal. Now, we have nearly $1T in non-dischargeable student loan debt and no future for many millions of Americans. Instead of more of the same, how about we repeal NAFTA and go back to a sound currency so we can rebuild our manufacturing base and stop forcing square pegs (the average worker) into a round hole (advanced education and the work that it should support).
What if the government actually didn't take on debt? What if the government actually had a policy of saving 25% of any budget surplus and returning the rest as a tax refund? What if the government actually had its own private cash reserves with which to do non-deficit spending and lower the need to have discretionary funds in the budget in any given year? What if those cash reserves were stored in local banks that gave out loans in good times? What if the government tried to actually cut out unnecessary spending?
If a private household did the equivalents of those things, it'd be quite well off within several years. After 30-40 years, the parents would have their home firmly paid off and would be able to fold their mortgage payment into their savings and retirement funds.
I'm only 27, but my grandmother remembers when the federal government actually used to be the one doing for the world what China does for us. How the mighty have fallen.
Because the Internet dispelled a number of myths I had about "how bad the Church was..."
1) Did you know that the Spanish Inquisition was run by the Spanish government after the King blackmailed the Pope by threatening to withdraw Spanish troops from Rome if he didn't get his way?
2) Did you know that the first Crusade was actually a response to 500 years of unrelenting Islamic aggression Christian states?
3) Have you ever read the tenants of the "church" that Hitler proposed as a replacement for the authentic Catholic and Lutheran religions?
3b) Did you know that Hitler actually practiced a modern form of German paganism and in private openly hated Christianity with a passion?
4) Did you know that Galileo was actually invited as an honored guest by the Pope and was actually imprisoned only after he behaved like a total douchebag toward the Pope (where similar behavior would have warranted execution if directed at a medieval king)?
The Bible, both sides, actually has the most copies in the original ancient languages of any book from that era. It is actually the most widely copied book from the ancient world we have. The variations of the original versions are insignificant. Furthermore, the Old Testament in particular has been very well-preserved. The Jews did an unbelievably good job there. We have copies of Genesis that go back over 3,000 years that are the same as copies from 1AD and the middle ages.
Most people who say "the Bible has been changed" are speaking out of ignorance. The Catholic church relied on the Vulgate which is a trashy translation into Latin. Protestants used to rely on the King James version which was "slightly less bad" but based on the Vuglate IIRC. Modern evangelicals actually use the New International Version in most cases, which is a direct translation from the ancient texts into modern English done by scholars of those language (who were substantially better than those that worked for King James).
The Bible sitting on my shelf is about as accurate of a translation as you can get from what Paul and Luke actually wrote in Koine Greek and Aramaic.
MasterCard has agreed to work with the **AA. Does that wrong justify some punk exploiting a security hole and downloading credit card account information for several hundred thousand MasterCard customers?
Of course not.
These are the problems that most union opponents have with them:
1) Unions protect mediocre employees.
2) Unions frequently demand pay and benefits which are not appropriate for the job; the average senior UAW member makes substantially more money than most senior software engineers I know.
3) Unions won't back down in the name of the common good when everyone is suffering. Government employee unions are particularly bad for this.
4) Many of us believe that you shouldn't have to be a member of a union to have a job in any company or field.
You're wrong on two counts:
1) It distorts the calculations on what is actually needed for the common good. That has everything to do with what we really need.
2) It undermines the sense of duty people have to obey the law and contribute.
The government is supposed to obey the law and serve the common good. When it doesn't and gets away with it, people feel like chumps for going along with it in the best of cases. In the worst cases, they feel like the rule of law is meaningless.
Someone actually shot at Eric Cantor's office at the same time. It was a very heated issue, but we have to face up to the fact that it was the issue itself, not the rhetoric, that was to blame. Obamacare is precisely the kind of legislation that our founders did not want passed at the federal level because it would bring about a sharp conflict between the states.
We ought to consider ourselves fortunate that a few shots and bricks were all that came of it. Just look at the violent protests in Britain over tuition cuts, to say nothing of what frequently happens in France when the unions want something.
One of his two favorite authors was Nietzsche. His friends described him as a thoroughly nihilistic individual. Seems Nietzsche, not video games, had a truly profound impact on him.
Yet just the other day, I had a liberal coworker stridently tell me it was that eeeeeeevil Sarah Palin that made him do it. When I pointed out the Nietzsche issue, and the fact that he didn't listen to any right wing rhetoric, didn't matter. Heck, she didn't even know who Nietzsche was... but that didn't stop her, like a lot of liberals, from blaming this on Sarah Palin and some cliche political map.
Bernie Madoff scammed $50B. Under a punitive restitution system, he and his conspirators would be looking at $350B in damages.
Obviously, they could never pay that much off. That's part of the point. He and his family will be left utterly ruined for the rest of their lives for such a great financial harm.
Instead of locking the punks up, make them pay the victim 7 times the value of the damaged property. Deny them welfare until they've paid it back. If they commit another felony while they're still paying it off, double the sentence for that felony.
On the surface, it may sound harsh, but if they do $1000 of damage to their neighbor and the court makes them pay back $7,000 as restitution and punishment instead of booking them in the pokey for two years, which is less disruptive? Having to pay back $7,000 with no interest at 1-2x minimum wage or doing prison time and then trying to find a job?
It would only take a few pages....
1) If a court of law determines that a piece of information was properly classified as Secret or Top Secret...
2) for Secret you face life in prison.
3) for Top Secret, you face execution.
4) upon proper conviction, the federal government confiscates all of your earnings from the crime if they exist or confiscates an amount from your estate equal to what is confirmed was promised you by a foreign government.
5) Your spouse and children, by law, cannot receive any government services except public education for at least five years.
Before anyone accuses me of being vindictive with #5, allow me to explain...
Every so often we find citizens of Chinese extraction who have been violating the law for YEARS in Secret positions. It's always some low to mid level guy at Boeing or Lockheed who has been handing over schematics and other data for years. Native US citizens usually do it for money, hence #4. Naturalized US citizens usually do it out of lingering loyalties to their old culture (which often happens to be a much more family-oriented culture too). That is why the federal government has to target them with a culturally sensitive move by targeting their family. The federal government needs to target each type of threat at the place where their incentives are.
That's funny. Nintendo certainly sold a lot of units, but it's struggled to get most of its users who are typically casual gamers to buy a lot of games. Microsoft hasn't had that problem. Microsoft isn't that interested in the casual market. Its goal is to defeat Sony first and then take on Nintendo.
You dumbass, I was referring to the fact that iOS and OS X are the same core OS forked into separate directions. iOS is a direct fork of the core of OS X, WinCE is not. I don't know how much similarity exists between Windows Phone OS 7 or whatever it's called and Windows 7, but it's likely not anywhere near as much between iOS and OS X.
Yeah, because...
1) Apple's market capitalization is sooooo relevant to a Google versus Microsoft argument...
2) Market capitalization determines the real capabilities in the market of a company...
Microsoft is notorious for working hard until they get it right and then steadily eating into their competition. They've practically torn Sony limb-from-limb in the video game market, something which would have been unthinkable in the early millennium when Sony was an unstoppable juggernaut that was able to destroy Sega just on "sheer perceived awesomeness" alone. From the initial reports about Windows 8, it sounds like they've fully grasped the OS X/iOS lesson and are moving toward a similar unified Windows product base.
It's really amusing to me whenever I see people dismiss Microsoft as a dinosaur that is thrashing in a tar pit. They act like its collapse is "inevitable" like Microsoft is some sort of corporate Soviet Union. In the late 90s/early millennium, everyone was saying that Linux or this or that would kill them. Guess what? Windows 7 probably put the nail in the coffin for desktop Linux among mainstream users in the US and much of Europe.
People mistake the fact that the market is competitive with Microsoft dying. It's more realistic to say that Microsoft is being forced to adapt and compete. If Windows 7 is their first real volley in that respect, I'd be cautious if I were one of their main competitors because it's obvious that Microsoft is taking these threats very seriously now.
but he can pretty much expect to have to live in solitary confinement if he wants to survive in prison. People who are perceived as traitors are right up there with child molesters to many convicts. The fact that he is a homosexual and it's come out that he was motivated to leak the data by DADT will only make it worse for him.
If I were his attorney, plan A would be some form of insanity defense based on his mental state over DADT and plan B would be violation of civil liberties for imprisoning him so long in such harsh conditions without a trial.
So Jimmy Johnson is now creating a line of Extendz-branded Android phones?
This isn't about poking fun at him for being a hypocrite. King is one of, it not the most active Republican out there right now trying to get Assange taken out.
The fact that King is so pro-IRA and has helped them puts him in a far worse position. Huckabee, Palin, etc. can at least say with a straight face that they've never helped a terrorist group.